Kinda, yeah.
It's an open source but commercial product. The stable releases are paid, the beta is free. I've only been running a three machine cluster for a few months now, but it's been absolutely solid despite power outages, internet outages, a hard drive going pop...
Fun fact: one of the symptoms I get of migraine is the inability to ignore smells.
At all.
Cat owners? Your house smells like ammonia.
Cologne wearers? You still stink underneath the cloying odor.
Cleaning products? Smell forever.
I get to choose between smelling my own halitosis or the unbearable mint odor for hours on end.
Hisense makes these e-ink phones that run Android. They're fiddly to get a working app store on, but once you do, you can pick your reading app. I run a Hisense A7CC with Kobo, Kindle, Aldiko, Perfect Viewer, and, well, this app! That is, if you want a very small screen. Boox makes a few 6-8" e-ink Android readers. I do like being able to sideload in whichever reading app I want. The colour ones are overpriced though.
I second the proxmox nomination! I use a fair amount of Ubuntu and Fedora, and with Proxmox, you just spin up whatever you want, whenever you want it. I currently have a machine with a few % of your machine's specs, and I'm running WordPress, jellyfin, pihole, LMDE, and a couple Ubuntu desktops (Mate and Gnome) on different VMs, all at once, like they're running on bare metal.
I've been running Mint XFCE this way for years! Mostly as a stupid computer trick, but it's occasionally super helpful, especially where someone just needs that one doc off a non-booting windows.
That's a dang good question... Any of my machines are dual-booted, so it's never been an issue for me to pop into Windows, install the BS, and pop out. I know there's, like, freedos live disks and stuff like that. Maybe that's a way to go?
Or, if you make a Windows install ISO, add the firmware exe files to that, start up the installer, drop to terminal and install from there?
Any smarter people want to weigh in? I'm curious myself, now.
MSI WE63 8SJ i7-8750H, 32GB DDR4, 4GB Nvidia Quadro P200
Cost me 380$ Canadian. That's, like, 14$ US...
Okay, I just googled, it was 280$ USD.
Used, good condition, I was assuming I'd need to upgrade something on it, like HDD or replace fans or something, but nope! Works great.
Specs are tricky with laptops. I have two laptops with very similar specs. Same CPU, same RAM, etc. The Dell... sucks. It just runs like a slug who is drunk and disinterested.
The MSI goes like a cheetah on speed.
Possibly dumb question, but... can Windows pipe things? Like, can I pipe a grep to a text file, or send stdout to a text? Or, like, tee a command onto the end of a config? I don't use this a lot in Linux, but I have never done in Windows and literally don't know if it can be.
Ironically, I actually got better performance in Fedora than Win11, same machine, playing Monster Hunter World. I think in my case it was because of the background stuff running in Windows. I run Linux pretty bare.
I think it's definitely more niche. I don't know though, it's not a bad thing. On Reddit, I always felt that, by the time I saw a post, it was too late to weigh in. On Lemmy, I am a lot less inhibited about randomly commenting.
There's this server software called Proxmox, and this distributed storage software for it called Ceph, and I moved my first servers from running on bare metal to running in Proxmox on Ceph. Many people have done it before, but I just feel so nerdy and proud having it run that way. I had trouble re-assigning some disks from LVM to the Ceph.
Kinda, yeah. It's an open source but commercial product. The stable releases are paid, the beta is free. I've only been running a three machine cluster for a few months now, but it's been absolutely solid despite power outages, internet outages, a hard drive going pop...