What online print service would you recommend?
Günther Unlustig 🍄 @ Guenther_Amanita @slrpnk.net Posts 11Comments 156Joined 1 yr. ago
Günther Unlustig 🍄 @ Guenther_Amanita @slrpnk.net
Posts
11
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156
Joined
1 yr. ago
I will give the font a try!
I'm not dyslexic, but I think legibility is super important and underrated on most distros. This one looks both aesthetic and very readable.
Do you know if it is already in the Fedora repos? If not, how can I install it?
Thanks for the notice! It's now changed in the title.
I'm no native speaker and thought it was a synonym to "From time to time, when you feel the need to".
I never had an IT background and also "just tried" Linux a few years ago.
Now, I'm still not an Linux expert, but relatively proficient with it.
I tried reading "How Linux works" (free e-book), but didn't have a great time with it.
It's just too detailed for someone who just wants to use Linux. It might be an absolutely great resource if you plan to work in IT, but other than that, just it's too much wasted time.
What helped me a lot was to use Linux as an OS for my homeserver.
You don't need anything fancy for it. Just use an old spare laptop or something similar you have laying around, or buy an used small form factor PC, like those Mini-PCs many businesses use. Those often cost less than 50 bucks and would otherwise land on the trash.
Then, install your server OS of choice. The most popular one is just plain ol' Debian, and it's what I used. It's a great choice!
Servers run without a display or GUI (DE/ WM). You set it up once, and then connect to it remotely via SSH.
With that, you can either install a web interface like CasaOS or Cockpit, or just use the CLI for everything.
For the start, you can choose just Nextcloud AIO and call it a day. It comes with all things needed for a functioning webserver. But, things said, the learning experience ends here pretty quickly. It's made to be easy and painless.
If you want to learn more, then consider setting up the stuff for yourself. It's also really not hard (coming from someone who doesn't IT stuff professionally!), but takes a bit more time, because you have a lot of choices.
For that, you might consider checking out c/Selfhosted and awesome-selfhosted on GitHub.
Theres a lot of really cool things you can discover!
The main reason I recommend that, and not just "Try LFS, Arch, Void, Gentoo, or whatever" is because I find it pretty much useless. Sure, you learn how it works, but for what price?
When you set up your own homelab, then you have actual useful things running, you also learn a lot, and maybe you can add it to your CV when applying for jobs.
I for example work in the chemistry sector, where IT stuff like this is pretty useless on the first glance, but I often got invited for a job interview exactly because of that. It's just a nice skill to have!
For checking out great CLI tools, check out the according video from TheLinuxExperiment or other YouTube/ PeerTube videos.
Try to learn the basic commands, like cd, ls or cat, then look up for more advanced/ alternative tools, like tree (instead of ls), bat (instead of cat), and so on, and then try to learn shell scripting.
I really like using fish instead of bash, because it's a very friendly and interactive shell ;)
I hope that my comment was helpful! :)
Each to their own. Linux is, in my opinion, about choice. If one prefers everything to be ultra minimalist, native and lightweight, then that's fine.
I personally just find to be Linux' most overlooked strength is containerization. It's one of the main reasons why most servers run Linux, because of things like Docker. On the desktop, containers are way underutilized, but that's now slowly changing with things like Flatpak or Distrobox.
A distrobox container is technically more bloated than a native install, sure, that's correct.
But, in my opinion, it's like saying "Drawers and closets are bloat for my apartment. I throw everything on the floor." Yeah, now you have less things in your room, but it looks like shit, you can't find anything and you fall over your tubberware that's mixed with your underwear and shampoo.
Having everything collected in a container only costs me a few hundred MBs and a small amount of RAM if needed. But, literally every PC has more than 50 GB hard drive space and 8 GB RAM. If your system slows down because of one container, then your PC is the problem, not distrobox.
That absolutely doesn't mean we should stop optimizing software of efficiency. But it can help us to spend our time on more important stuff, like fixing bugs or adding new cool features.
I really love Flatpak because of that. Sure, it has some drawbacks, but as soon as more devs support Flatpak officially, and iron out some issues we currently have, like misconfigured permissions, they're (imo) the best package format. Why should a distro maintainer have to apply every software change to their package format? That's needlessly duplicated work.
Just a small (or maybe big?) tip for you 🙂
If it's for Linux, there's a 50% chance there are no releases and 2 lines of commands showing how to build it (which doesn't work on your distro), but don't worry because your distro has it prepackaged 1 version out of date
There's a tool called Distrobox.
You can install it (via CLI I think?), and then manage it the easiest graphically way via BoxBuddy (available in your Software Center), or just the terminal if you prefer it.
With it, you can screw all those "Doesn't work on my distro" moments.
You're on Linux Mint? No problems, here's the AUR for you!
✨✨✨ BONUS: Your OS won't break anymore randomly due to some AUR incompatibility, because everything is containerized! ✨✨✨
Even if you run Arch, use it to install AUR stuff. Or Debian/ Ubuntu, add PPAs only via Distrobox.
It's absolutely no virtual machine. It basically only creates a small, lightweight container with all dependencies, but it runs on your host. Similar to Flatpaks.
You can also export the software, and then it's just like you would have installed it natively!
Your distro choice doesn't matter anymore. You now can run any software written only for Suse, an abandoned Debian version 10 years ago, Arch, Fedora, Void, whatever. It's all the same.
I hope that was helpful :)
If you want to use this laptop with Linux and not spend time fixing hardware compatibility issues, then I definitely would not recommend this laptop. Definitely get a Dell XPS for a Linux laptop that Just Works.
Have you tried the -framework images from uBlue?
Maybe Logseq? It also has a whiteboard function for drawing diagrams and stuff.
The last time I tried it, it wasn't Logseqs' flag ship feature for sure, but as an addition to an already great note taking software, it was good.
Then you can always rollback in case you don't have a working image.
I had to do that once. On a non-atomic install, this would have meant a completely broken system. In my case, this was one reboot away and it worked again.
And in case you don't like the direction of your image project going, you can also always rebase to another one in less than 5 minutes, download time and reboot included.
uBlue for example starts with a very basic Fedora Silverblue image, which you can fork easily yourself. I have zero experience in coding or other stuff, and even I managed to get my own custom image working.
There are already a couple of people around who started with Aurora, Secureblue or Bazzite, but then found them too opinionated, and went back to Vanilla Kinoite for example.
It's extremely simple to switch out the base OS to something almost completely different.
And, you don't loose any customisability. You can still do everything you want, take a look at Bazzite or Secureblue. Completely different kernel, additional modifications and packages, and much much more. Feels completely different than Vanilla Kinoite for example.
Image based distros are only complicated if you come from traditional distros, because they're different.
If you come from Windows or another OS, then having "The whole OS is one thing" instead of "A huge collection of packages and directories" makes everything simpler to understand, because you don't mess with anything except /home/. You don't have to care about anything else.
And if you want to do something more fancy, like using a CLI tool, then having to enter a Distrobox container isn't complicated.
For casual use, like gaming, browsing or image editing, everything is just as usual. Nobody, except us Linux nerds, actually cares about the underlying system. Casual users just want the OS to be a tool for their programs they use, and for that, it's ideal, because it just works and doesn't bork itself.
A small form factor PC. Think of a Mac Mini. Small, often not-high-performance, low-powered PCs that are often used in business environments.
I use one as my home server.
I don't even mean performance in terms of computing power.
RPIs are, imo, not meant as a server. It might (and will) work fine, but one of the main problems I have is the power supply. As soon as I send a more advanced print job to my RPI, it crashes. Even though I have the official power cord.
If it works for you - fine! I don't want to tell badly about them. They are great.
It's just that they are very inflexible.
I don't see any reason to use a Raspi instead of an used thin client for selfhosting.
They use about the same energy, but the Mini-PC has x86, which has better software support, has more ports, and runs more stable.
I have a RPI for my 3D-printer (Octoprint), and I will soon replace it with a "proper" PC, because it always crashes.
Raspberry Pis are good for very small appliances, but for anything more, they suck imo
While your blogpost isn't completely right, it's also not completely wrong.
You can absolutely customize image based distros, just as much as package manager based ones. You just need to do it from upstream, to modify the image itself, not from bottom-up like usually.
uBlue is the best example. There are already hundreds of available customized images around, including for Hyprland, Deepin, and much more.
That's why immutable is often considered the wrong term for it. Image based, or atomic, is way better fitting.
One of the biggest pros, apart from the lack of maintenance needed (updating, etc.) is the reproducibility.
It's very similar to Android, where every phone is the same.
Therefore, every bug is the same too, which is why the devs can roll out patches that fix everyone's install at once.
Also, every update is basically a "reinstall lite", so no package drift occours.
This makes them way less buggy in my experience.
I used the normal Fedora KDE spin for example, and after a few months there often came weird bugs that only affected my install.
Since the time I use Atomic, none of those problems came back.
Even if you decide to utilize BTRFS-snapper, which you suggested, the underlying system drifts apart from the original install.
Also, instead of Kubuntu, I would recommend the Fedora KDE spin or just Debian with KDE, if you really want to use something traditional.
I just don't see any reason to not run Kinoite compared to a non-atomic distro, and it will only get better in the future.
Just FYI: While Arch isn't "For experienced users only", it still might require some more work after your install.
It usually comes pretty minimal by default, and then you might wonder why printing doesn't work out of the box for example.
It also makes the inexperienced user very easy to bork the system, and then you have to fix it.
I often hear from other users, that sometimes, this just happens out of the blue too.
If Arch works perfectly for you, then congratulations! Keep using it.
But if you notice, that you have to fight against the OS too often, consider a different distro that is supposed to just work.
One of those might be Bazzite (if you game) or Aurora. Both are almost the same, but Bazzite is more for gaming, while Aurora is more for general, non-gaming use. But you can use them interchangeably.
They belong to the uBlue project, which is a customized Fedora Atomic.
They are already set up for you with everything you want and need, are zero-maintenence and basically indestructible.
So, if you're done with Arch, consider them.
Thing is, uCore has some very neat things I want, and FIOT doesn't provide me such a great OOTB experience compared to the uBlue variant.
I'm also not sure if I even should decide for Fedora Atomic as a server host OS.
I really love Atomic as desktop distro, because it is pretty close to upstream, while still being stable (as in how often things change).
For a desktop workstation, that's great, because DEs for example get only better with each update, and I want to be as close to upstream as possible, without sacrificing reliability.
The two major releases each year cycle is great for that.
But for a server, even with the more stable kernel, I think that's maybe too unstable? I think Debian is less maintenance, because it doesn't change as often, and also doesn't require rebooting as often.
What's your experience with it?
How did you set up the intial system?
From what I've seen, FCOS needs an ignition file and has no Anaconda installer. I would like to set it up soon too, but it looked like a huge hazzle...
Dumb cloud-only stuff. Good that I use Onshape, where stuff like that could never happen!
...wait a minute, shit. It absolutely could and probably will. The owners certainly could restrict the free tier or ban my account if they want, and then everything is gone.
I absolutely hate that. I really like Onshape, because it works great, but we NEED an, at least decent, FOSS option. I don't necessarily need stuff like flow simulations, just good modeling, like in F360 or Onshape.
FreeCAD didn't work too for me. The UI was horrible, the workflow very unintuitive and wonky, and it crashed a lot, while not supporting basic functions.
There were a few alternatives around too, but they were in the very alpha stage and didn't work yet at the time I researched.
I really wish someone would create something from scratch, or fork something that already works, like Blender, and turns it into a CAD.
It's just sad to know all my hundreds of models in Onshape will get useless some time in the future.
I think you shouldn't forget that we're here at c/3dprinting, where only enthusiasts join together. Of course everyone here is a huge fan of 3D printers, those who got frustrated and sold their device aren't here anymore.
First of all, I'm very happy about having a printer, but more onto that later.
I had two ones yet, and both sucked.
The first was older, shitty and way too big. I wasted many weekends tinkering with that crap, until I accidentally destroyed it and sold it. My second one is the one I still use. It's a device from China, and the company doesn't exist anymore. So, if I want to buy replacement parts, I can just pray generic ones fit. And the customer support has always been shit, and the whole company and products seem very wonky in hindsight.
If I would have to buy another printer, it would definitely be something popular, like a Prusa one. It should be very small, silent and easily repairable. I don't care anymore about fancy features (maybe except auto leveling), it should just not annoy me.
Having a printer is like having a drill or soldering iron. You don't need it daily, but you're glad that you have it when you need it. And my friends are too! I'm printing more for my family, neighbours and friends than for myself.
Having a printer without CAD skills is nonsense. But once you can create your own stuff, you have endless capabilities.
I couldn't live without one by now.
You can maybe post something on local marketplaces. Something like Kleinanzeigen (Germany), Facebook Marketplace (US I think) or something similar. Or local groups.
There are a lot of hobbyists who have a printer that stands still for 99% of the time, who can print it for cheap.
Or, as someone else already has suggested, your local library.