So recently it was brought to my attention about a new(ish) filesystem being created. BcacheFS has some really cool features, some for example are

Copy on write (COW) - like zfs or btrfs
Full data and metadata checksumming
Multiple devices
Replication
Erasure coding (not stable)
Caching, data placement
Compression
Encryption
Snapshots
Nocow mode
Reflink
Extended attributes, ACLs, quotas
Scalable - has been tested to 100+ TB, expected to scale far higher 
High performance, low tail latency
Already working and stable, with a small community of users

I learned about BcacheFS as i am currently going through an Gentoo install and wanted to try out a new filesystem. i originally went for ZFS until i learned there is no active maintainer for OpenZFS on Gentoo as of now. and looked at Btrfs and eventually found BcacheFS. The features look very amazing, however i couldnt find many people daily driving it? i saw a few posts on Arch wiki about trying to get it to work. and i try installing it, as my main FileSystem, but ran into trouble when trying to install grub. its exact complaints was something along the lines of "cant install grub on /dev/sdc3 /dev/sdd ". i was trying to make staggered storage with a 500gb SSD and a 2TB HDD. But eventually gave up after watching a few videos of immolo which he eventually got it working but only thought Unified grub with Systemd. which for my Gentoo systems i really prefer openRC. But enough about me, do any of you fellow linux users use BcacheFS? if so whats your setup and experiences?

also if you have recently looked at lore.kernel.org Mr.Torvald says he regrets merging it into the mainline kernel because of bug fixes. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wj1Oo9-g-yuwWuHQZU8v=VAsBceWCRLhWxy7_-QnSa1Ng@mail.gmail.com/ which i thought rather interesting

For about 4-5 years, I have been off the deep end of Gnu/Linux operating systems. During this time period, many things in my life have changed, new social groups, and friends. After the social rebirth and exodus from high school, a few friends stuck around. Granted, this group is smaller than usual but is more closely intertwined. And yes, I know that's already off-topic for a Linux-based community. But when I like to tell a story, I like to paint a full picture. However, I will try to cut out the fluff, but I digress.

So, like many others on this community of Unix-like operating system enthusiasts, I began the plunge from Windows to Linux. First, I originally started with Manjaro because I learned about it from my very first Linux install on a Raspberry Pi model B+. I used that for a few months and eventually used the "AUR". Much like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, and my naivety of dependencies and the underlying parts of the OS reared its ugly head. To which, my system became irrecoverably broken, and after much mental berating, I switched to Kubuntu for a year, then back to Arch. Then, my home was Nixos and Gentoo on all my machines, using Gentoo has taught me a lot about Linux as a whole.

Now, to the meat and potatoes: myself and two other individuals have done various things to fill our free time. It originally started with heading over to Friend A's house to play on his Xbox. Which became tiresome quickly, as many people know Xbox series S games are expensive, along with the "fast" NVMe-based storage stick for "internal only games". Friend B saved up for a laptop and bought an MSI Cyborg 15, and I cobbled together a LAN rig from Facebook Marketplace. Lovingly named the Ybox, as a joke of not being an Xbox and running Baztite Linux with Steam Big Picture, we had such a great time playing couch co-op games on the Ybox featuring Ultimate Chicken Horse, Unrailed, and speedrunners. But eventually, everybody in the group grew tired of couch co-op as although quite delightful became limiting in screen real estate and three-player genres. So, we started doing LAN parties like many gamers before have done in the days of Pepsi Free and parachute pants. We played many games locally and online together, and it has been great with fairly minor issues involving Steam and spotty internet.

So over this time period, I have been taking online computer classes specifically a Google IT class which is grossly outdated and feels very cobbled together as it was originally released in 2015. But it has still been useful in basic computer concepts like DNS, TCP/IP, and various Windows and Linux utilities. So, we all have played Minecraft since early days and have all played vanilla. So I said, "Screw it," and looked at some guides. Installed it on a spare laptop and recently switched it to run as a Docker container to run on my NAS and looked for help on port forwarding on Lemmy, to which the very kind people of C/Selfhosted pointed out Tailscale and Wireguard. Which has been rock-solid and much better solution got my friends all wired up to my tailnet, and it has been smooth since!

So we are now at the present where the previous night I was on call with Friend A, and he was honestly confused when there was a GUI installer and buttons. He was used to watching me use SwayWM and Kitty on the Ybox. I guess he thought Linux is for hackers and command-line only. The install went without a hitch; he booted into KDE and felt instantly at home! I showed him how to use the KDE store, in his words, "it's like the Microsoft Store?" and the touchscreen worked out of the box, and man it was PURE BLISS.

Honestly, shoutout to this great community and the very talented people behind Linux and its many, many distributions.

So i recently learned about a distro that has popped up called venom linux. It's a sourced based distro using the package manager called "scratch"

I am very familiar with gentoo linux and this seems like it has heavy inspiration from the gentoo project. Its very cool to see another source based distro come into the picture. The unique part is it has 2 init systems currently, which are neither systemd or openrc?!?!

They are S6 and sysv Which i have never heard of until now. The install looks via similar to gentoo/classic distro install. Which consists of creating partition schemes and filesystems then extracting a archive of the base file.

Some of the main taking points are

"Minimal as possible

Customizable

No systemd (elogind or any part from it)

Centered Around smaller software

That means the lack of huge software like Gnome"

I thought this was a pretty neat project and wonder what other gentoo users think aswell as binary distro users

So i've been hosting a modded Minecraft server for my friends and me on weekends. While it's been a blast, I've noticed that our current setup using LAN has its limitations. My friends have been eagerly waiting for their next "fix" (i.e., when they can get back online), and I've been replying with a consistent answer: this Friday.

However, exploring cloud providers to spin up a replica of my beloved "Dog Town" Server was a costly endeavor, at least for a setup that's close to my current configuration. As a result, I've turned my attention to self-hosting a Minecraft server on my local network and configuring port forwarding.

To harden my server, I've implemented the following measures:

1. Added ufw (Uncomplicated Firewall) for enhanced security.
2. Blocked all SSH connections except for the IP addresses of my main PC and LAN rig.
3. Enabled SSH public key authentication only.
4. Rebuilt all packages using a hardened GCC compiler.
5. Disabled root access via /etc/passwd.
6. Created two users: one with sudo privileges, allowing full access; the other with limited permissions to run a specific script (./run.sh) for starting the server.

Additionally, I've set up a fcron job (a job scheduler) as disabled root, which synchronizes my Minecraft server with four folders at the following intervals: 1 hour, 30 minutes, 10 minutes, and 1 day. This ensures that any mods we use are properly synced in case of issues.

any suggestions of making the computer any more secure, aswell as backup solutions? thanks!

--added note, what hostnames do you guys call your servers? I used my favorite band albums and singles for hostnames.

So over the weekend me and the lads decided to play Mindustry (i think im addicted). Ive never been a fan of RTS games but Honestly been loads of fun. I usually play on the Ybox which is what i called by LAN rig. but sadly the motherboard kicked the bucket (it was a xeon 2697v3 14 core and a X99 machinist motherboard which ran gentoo). so i dug around in the closet to hopefully salvage game night and found 'yeee old reliable', so the cool part is mindustry has really low system requirements

Linux Minimum: Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Anything with OpenGL 2.0 Support Storage: 200 MB available space

So me and the Bois played just like normal, except i was running 10+ year old hardware and you really couldnt tell the difference the system specs for the "shitboxPro" as named

Intel core 2 duo E7500 AMD RX 570 2Gb of ddr2 RAM Running Debian 12 with the Mate Desktop (i was originally going to install Gentoo on it but didn't want to spend 3 weeks compiling LMAO)

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone). I also want to express my gratitude Towards Debian and Linux as a whole, this computer cannot run windows 10. I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth. also shout out to the Dev for a great game that's insanely optimized!

I would love to hear about other experiences you have had with legacy hardware and use cases!

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

--added note, my apologize for the bad punctuation and such i never was good at english in primary LMAO

So over the weekend me and the lads decided to play Mindustry (i think im addicted). Ive never been a fan of RTS games but Honestly been loads of fun. I usually play on the Ybox which is what i called by LAN rig. but sadly the motherboard kicked the bucket (it was a xeon 2697v3 14 core and a X99 machinist motherboard which ran gentoo). so i dug around in the closet to hopefully salvage game night and found 'yeee old reliable', so the cool part is mindustry has really low system requirements

Linux Minimum: Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Anything with OpenGL 2.0 Support Storage: 200 MB available space

So me and the Bois played just like normal, except i was running 10+ year old hardware and you really couldnt tell the difference the system specs for the "shitboxPro" as named

Intel core 2 duo E7500 AMD RX 570 2Gb of ddr2 RAM Running Debian 12 with the Mate Desktop (i was originally going to install Gentoo on it but didn't want to spend 3 weeks compiling LMAO)

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone). I also want to express my gratitude Towards Debian and Linux as a whole, this computer cannot run windows 10. I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth. also shout out to the Dev for a great game that's insanely optimized!

I would love to hear about other experiences you have had with legacy hardware and use cases!

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

--added note, my apologize for the bad punctuation and such i never was good at english in primary LMAO

As a advid user of lightburn for my business, this truely saddens me.

I loved being able to have the freedom to run linux and have 1st class support.

Lightburn states in this post, about how linux is less than 1℅ of there users. They also state it costs lots of money and time to develop for each distribution. To which i gotta ask WHY not just make a flatpak or distribute source to let the community package it. Like its kinda dumb to kill it off ive been using zoronOS for 3 years running my laser cutter! And it works bloody great!!!! The last version for linux will be 1.7 which will continue to work forever with a valid liscence. I do not plan to switch back to ~~windows~~ spyware or ~~MAC~~ overpriced Unix. I hope the people at lightburn reconsider in the future, There software is the best software for laser cutters period. And when buying my laser cutter (60watt omtech) i went out of my way to buy one with a rudia controller as it is compatible with lightburn.

--edit just got the email this is what they sent

"To our valued Linux users:

After a great deal of internal discussion, we have made the difficult decision to sunset Linux support following the upcoming release of LightBurn 1.7.00.

Many of us at LightBurn are Linux users ourselves, and this decision was made reluctantly, after careful investigation of all possible avenues for continuing Linux support.

The unfortunate reality is that Linux users make up only 1% of our overall user base, but providing and supporting Linux-compatible builds takes up as much or more time as does providing them for Windows and Mac OS.

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we've had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

Finally, we will soon begin building LightBurn on a new framework that will require our development team to write custom libraries for each platform we support. This will be a significant undertaking and, regrettably, it is simply not tenable to invest our team's time into an effort that will impact such a small portion of our user base. Such challenges will only continue to arise as we work to expand LightBurn's capabilities going forward.

We understand that our Linux users will be disappointed by this decision. We appreciate all of our users, and assure you that your existing license will still work with any version of LightBurn for which your license term is valid, up until LightBurn version 1.7.00, forever. Prior releases will always be made available for download. Finally, your license will continue to be valid for future Windows and Mac OS releases covered by your license term.

If you are a Linux-only user who has recently purchased a license or renewal that is valid for a release of LightBurn after v1.7.00, please contact us for a refund.

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

Sincerely,

The LightBurn Software Team

Copyright © 2024 LightBurn Software. All rights reserved. "

I appreciate that there willing to refund recently bought liscences and all versions up to 1.7 forever instead of DRM bullshit (you gotta buy the newest subscription service) {insert cable guys from southpark} But if your rewriting the framework then why kill off linux??? They said there working on a native arm build for MacOS which knowing apple your gonna half to buy the new macbook cause the old one is old and apple needs your money. So its not anymore of a reason to kill linux

TLDR: there killing linux support because its less than 1% of there userbase and they spend more money and time maintaining the lightburn build.

I recently spent some time browsing my favorite website, Distrowatch.com, where they provide weekly news updates on the latest developments in the world of Linux distributions. This week, I noticed that a new distro had been added to their list: SDesk. Given its intriguing name, I decided to take a closer look and discovered that it utilizes a programming language called 'Blue'.

What caught my attention was that to use this Blue programming language, one must pay $131! As someone who values open-source principles, I found this surprising, especially since many Linux distributions are built on the idea of free and open collaboration.

Other websites also features links to a previous GitHub page for Blue, which was removed. Without knowing the original license used by that project, it's unclear whether using paid-for programming language in an open-source operating system would be legally acceptable. As I'm not a lawyer nor an expert online, I'd love to hear from anyone who might have insight into this matter.

To me, it seems counterintuitive for a Linux distro to incorporate proprietary programming tools that require payment to edit or modify code. This goes against the fundamental nature of open-source collaboration, where code is freely shared and repurposed. It's an interesting development, to say the least what are your thoughts?

dead-github link https://github.com/SteveStudios/Blue

--edit also when finding the link duck duck go said it was GPL V3

but stackoverflow how i fixy the brokey!

swap feels like cheating