ip eg:

# ip a
# ip a a 192.168.1.99/24 dev enp160

The first incantation - ip address (you can abbreviate whilst it is unambiguous) gets you a quick report of interfaces, MAC, IPs and so on. The second command assigns another IP address to an interface. Handy for setting up devices which don’t do DHCP out of the box or already have an IP and need a good talking to.

Oh and you can completely set up your IP stack, interfaces and routing etc with it. Throw in nft or iptables (old school these days - sigh!) for filtering and other network packet mangling shenanigans.

I’ll drop this: https://www.techradar.com/best/best-linux-distros It’s written by an actual journo and not a bunch of nerds in nerdville!

Getting into Linux is a bit like Windows back in the day - interesting and a lot of fun … and rather nerdy. My first Windows version was 1.0 and my last was 7. Mind you I do run a MS Silver Partner and worry about a lot of Windows servers and desktops but my daily driver is Linux.

Mint is a great choice, even though it isn’t mentioned in the article I linked because you get a great community, which is pretty important. Its basically Ubuntu and therefore Debian too, so a lot of howtos will work.

I personally rock Kubuntu but I have a requirement for enterprisey stuff - ESET and Veeam and AD integration and all that. I also get Secure Boot out of the box and not all Linux distros work with that.

Your smart new laptop will have Secure Boot enabled so you will have to deal with that if you deploy a distro that doesn’t. So with say Arch, you will need to turn it off or learn how to sign your kernels etc and that is not a beginner topic! I suggest you turn off Secure Boot if your chosen distro doesn’t support it, rather than insisting on it. Its a nice to have but not the most important security feature ever.

You might want to show a bit of ankle and try out a few to start with. Most distros have a live CD that you can boot and try out first. I suggest trying out Mint, Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That gets you three modern interfaces to play with.

If you are into gaming then it kooks like Pop!OS would be a good place to start instead.

There is no real best option - it’s what suits you and you have choice.

If you’re expecting the same type of reliably you’ve from VMware on Proxmox you’re going to have a very hard time soon.

Try upgrading a v6.0 or even 6.5 ESXi from the command line. If there is no “enterprise” iLO or iDRAC or whatever with media redirection then you’ll be jumping in the car. Or what about if, back in the day, you went ESX instead of ESXi? lol!

How often do you find yourself repairing a vCentre? Oh dear the SSL certs are fucked again, despite being fixed a few years back. Yes I can bring the bloody things back but I’ve also got longer Linux experience than VMware. Those 14 virty discs were a daft idea and let’s dump the logs to all sorts of random areas and then stir them around every few versions. … and its 400GB in size - even thin provisioned they are still huge for what they do.

How about when the Dell customised .iso was the only way to install on Rx10 hardware and then made the box unupgradable years later? or when the Intel NIC drivers got a bit confused - yay - PSoD?

Reliability: don’t make me laugh!

It’s always good to have choice.

I’m not sure what better MS compatibility really means. I’ve been using MS software since before Excel, Word etc even existed and taught a lot of people how spreadsheets, word processors, databases, DTP and the rest work in a former life (do you know what a decimal tab stop is, or how to control leading and kerning?)

I generate, by far, the most complicated documents within my company and I have been using LO since way before before it forked from OO. All software has bugs and peccadilloes.

As I said: it’s good to have choice.

I don’t understand what you mean by “epic pile of hacks”. Proxmox is just a Linux distribution, with a particular focus. All the software is the usual stuff with integration scripts and binaries and a webby front end. They start off with stock Debian and work up from there which is the way many distros work.

I’m not sure what Proxmox switching to Incus would really mean. They are both Linux distributions that focus on providing a VM and container wrangling system.

I happen to be porting rather a lot of VMware to Proxmox. My little company has a lot of VMware customers and I am rather busy moving them over. I picked Proxmox (Hyper-V? No thanks) about 18 months ago when the Broadcom thing came about and did my own home system first and then rather a lot of testing. I then sold the idea to the rest of my company and we made some plans and are now carrying those plan out.

Now, if Proxmox becomes toxic, I still have projects like Incus to fall back on. I … WE … have choice, and that is important. You can be sure that if Proxmox drops the ball, Veeam will suddenly support Incus or whatever the world decides is the next best thing in Linux VMs and container land.

I was a VMware consultant for 25 odd years. No longer (well I am still but only under mild protest!) I also have to wrangle a few Hyper-V clusters too. All of these bloody monolithic monstrosities work at the whim of massive corporations who really don’t have your best interests at heart. They bleed you dry.

I like to have choice. Proxmox and Incus are both examples of choice. You start off with "I’d like to run VMs and containers on my hardware with software that is “open” and you have more than one option. You do not start off with: “I’d like a HyperV or VMware”, nail your colours to the mast and live in a rather rubbish monoculture.

Sorry, I seem to have gone on a bit 8)

Add the Collabra online built in CODE server and Nextcloud Office apps. Link them up and you have Libre Office in your browser on your Nextcloud. You can get more complicated: https://collabora-online-for-nextcloud.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install/

https://github.com/Stirling-Tools/Stirling-PDF

I put one in at work. It sat idle for a while until a member of my admin staff asked me how to do a job involving pay slips. We discovered the pipeline tool in Stirling. It is now a permanent system with an SLA!

Each tool has a nice big icon or you can create desktop or browser shortcuts to the ones of interest - ideal for keeping it simple.

KDE since I hand compiled a 2.0 beta.

about 10 q5vyrs ago

Have you been distracted and typed a password/PSK in the wrong field 8)

rsync was written by one of the original Samba developers. I wonder if Tridge and co have any idea about how to shuffle data from A to B safely?

CIFS/SMB will only indicate received and not received and written. This is unlikely to be an issue.

I would start by proving that my network works properly, especially that dodgy cable with only wires 1,2,3,7 connected - because that’s all 100Mb/s needs, or the solid core cable that runs for 150m with plugs at each end instead of sockets and drop leads.

“Is this a common issue with samba” - no.

Samba shuffles rather a lot of data, quite happily. You have not given us an exhaustive description of the shoddy wiring, dodgy switches and wonky configuration that makes up your network. If it was perfect, you would not be posting here.

There is one snag with CIFS (Samba follows MS’s standards and ironically, I think that CIFS is now renamed back to SMB) that I am aware of, so SMB … snag: SMB will indicate that a chunk of data has been received successfully but not that it has been written to disc successfully. NFS will notify that a chunk of data has been written to disc.

The difference is subtle but if there is not a battery backed RAID involved then SMB/CIFS can lose data if the system restarts part way through a write.

Your issue is probably hardware related. Test your network with say iperf3. Have a look at network stats. Don’t rely on cargo cult bollocks - do some investigations. Nowadays we have nearly all the tools as open source to do the entire job - we did not have that 30 years ago. Grab wireshark, nmap, mtr and the rest and get nerdy (or hire me to do it - don’t do that please!)

If I give you a free beer, you have one beer. If I give you the recipe, you can make your own beer. You do have to make your own open source beer or you can hire someone to do it for you or perhaps take you through the steps a few times until you’ve got it. With luck there will be a community of open source beer brewers with whom you can interact and improve those recipes.

Free software is free until it isn’t! The illicit drugs industry works in a similar way (the first hit is for free).

You have loads of options but you need to also start from … “what if”. Work out how important your data really is. Take another look and ask the kids and others if they give a toss. You might find that no one cares about your photo collection in which case if your phone dies … who cares? If you do care then sync them to a PC or laptop.

Perhaps take a look at this - https://www.veeam.com/products/free/linux.html its free for a few systems.

My family tree (bush, thicket) is the ongoing effort of my uncle, started roughly 30 years ago. There are nearly 130,000 individuals in it.

We are migrating his data from The Master Genealogist (TMG) to Geneweb. That is quite a long story 8)

You might like to look into Webtrees.

What are they?

I ditched Windows roughly 15 years ago and I run a MS Silver partner shop.

I daily drive Kubuntu (was Arch but I need to tick boxes). I used to teach DTP, WP, spreadsheets etc and Libre Office is fine as a replacement for MSO. Email - Exchange and Evolution EWS. I create the most complicated docs in my firm and MSO works with them OK.

I 3D print stuff and use LibreCAD and OpenSCAD. All good. Also note that there are lots of other CAD apps on Linux for free/libre and of course we have

As far as I am aware, games is the only area that Linux might fail and that issue is shrinking rapidly.

I doubt it. They make a hell of a noise and print at a rate of characters per second not pages per second. The ribbons suffered from similar issues as cassette tapes (the other ribbons that we had to deal with). The ribbon would dry out if not used for a few days and you’d waste paper and a lot of time.

DM printers were ideal in the guise of “line printers” - the big old IBM jobbies that munched through A3 landscape fan fold at ridiculous speeds. Home printers like the Epson FX80 or RX80 were at least affordable. I still remember the manual of our RX80 congratulating us on buying it and exhorting me to hug the printer on unpacking it. I suspect the Japanese to English translation might not have been the best.

We had to get a Centronics interface board stuffed into our C64 and get it working (sacrifice a chicken on a waxing gibbous moon night, etc)

It worked better on my 80286 box, some years later. I had to set it up in each application - Harvard Graphics, Word Perfect, Super Calc.

In around 1991 I was able to buy a 80486 based beastie, thanks to gift from granddad. In around 1993 I was given a HP LJ 4P so I could print out proofs for a Plymouth (Devon) tourist tat thing.

Nowadays I have a fairly elderly HPE MFP five toner humming away at home. Its on a VLAN that doesn’t get to see the internet. It just works. I won’t be “upgrading” it for the foreseeable future.

My Epson RX80’s ribbon is somewhere in landfill. The Commodore 64 however is all good and now sports a USB interface with more storage than the poor thing can possibly ever use. The Quickshot II joystick still works too.

1984ish was when the C64 was bought by my dad, from the NAAFI in Rheindahlen (West Germany, as was).

Picture the scene:

Me and brother fly home from UK to probably Dusseldorf at the end of the winter term. Its December in the mid '80s. Every now and then, Russia sends a Tupolev Bear or Badger to chug along overhead. The US sends a YR-71 over the USSR at multiples of the speed of sound. The Cold War was quite unpleasant to live through. Its quite chilly, snow tyres on the car, chains in the boot. The autobahn has the usual psychotic bunch of lane two and three drivers. Lane one generally runs at around 90mph (yes, even back in the '80s)

We get to home at the time (we move every two years or so - it is the way of things). Dad shows off the new gadget. He plugs the power lead into the video port.

Some weeks after we have gone back to school for the spring term, the C64 is returned from the menders. We get to use it in the Easter hols. It travelled to the UK and back to DE several times and also to Cyprus (WSBA). The QS II took a serious battering thanks to Daley Thompson’s decathalon.

I got it re-capped in 2019, which was all that needed doing. They were rather well made …

My phone is on 23. Nextcloud is on 27.

I’m Arch and so is my wife (actually) and it doesn’t have a version. We just roll … and today my dongled, wireless mouse has stopped moving. The buttons still work and my laptop touchpad works fine.

wtf!

I’ve spent over 25 years with Linux. With multiple distros and a lot of that with Gentoo and Arch. At work I specify Ubuntu or Debian, for simplicity and stability. I always used to use the minimal Ubuntu, because it was tiny with no frills. For quite a few years I managed a fleet of Gentoo systems across multiple customers - with Puppet. Those have quietly gone away. I’ve dallied with SuSE (all varieties), Mandrake, Mandriva, RedHat, Slackware, Yggdrassil and more.

Arch is surprisingly stable and being a rolling job there are no big jumps. When I replace one of our laptops, I simply clone the old one to it and crack on. I used to do the same with Gentoo - my Gentoo laptops went from an OpenRC job with dual Nokia N95 ppp connections around 2007 to through to around 2018 with systemd and decent wifi when I switched to Arch to allow the burns on my lap to heal. I still have a Gentoo VM running (amongst friends) on the esxi in my attic.

It was installed in 2006 according to some of the kernel config files. I left it for way too long and had to use git to make Portage advance forwards in time and fix around a decade of neglect. It would have been too easy to wipe and start again. It took about a fortnight to sort out. At one point I even fixed an issue following a forum post I made myself years ago.

Anyway, Arch is pretty stable.

My wife uses Arch (actually). She calls it the internet, when she really means Facebook. She knows it isn’t Apple but it gets a bit vague after that!

The last time I had to fire up the Mesh Central client to sort something out on her desktop from work was around three months ago. Every couple of weeks I ssh into it, update it and schedule a reboot for 03:00.