Youtube comments of (@VeronicaExplains).
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Not that you should just take my word for it, because I'm just a lady with a YouTube channel. But, my advice to newcomers is not to buy a Chromebook just for this project, and that's because it's harder than traditional Linux. You'll run into driver issues or mismatches like I outlined- it's "hard mode" and probably not for beginner players. If you already have one kicking up dust on a shelf, it can be a fun project, but there's hurdles- don't let it define your Linux experience.
Now, if you want to do the work of installing a Linux on a new computer from Best Buy, go ahead, but it can also be painful (although less so than a Chromebook). For the most part, big box laptops will work just fine, but newer hardware runs some risks- particularly that driver support can lag behind what's shipped on launch. As time goes on those drivers get added to Linux, and the problem goes away, but I always advise to expect some bugs with brand new commodity laptops.
If I were making a recommendation to someone who wanted a project laptop, I'd suggest a used business-grade PC laptop (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) that's 2-5 years old. Probably going to have the best time driver-wise and it'll still be new enough to manage most tasks well. Upgrade-ability is typically easier there too, and they can be had for free/cheap if you know folks in the enterprise space. I've spent plenty of time repairing/refurbing laptops in this way and it's usually a pretty good experience.
Your best bet if you want the best Linux experience on a laptop is one produced by a vendor which supports Linux, not just tolerates it. In the states, I've used System76 (not sponsored), but there are others and I mentioned them in the video briefly.
Again, don't take my word for it. I'm a stranger on the internet. Do your own research and buy wisely.
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To put it simply, it has less to do with migrating the program to a new language, and more to do with migrating everything else outside of the language.
A COBOL application is often rock solid, but feels "archaic" to some, often relying on keyboard-driven interfaces instead of something more modern looking. (We can debate if "modern looking" means better, but some members of the c-suite hate anything that isn't immediately in a browser.)
Updating a COBOL application often involves retraining staff who've learned "the old way" to do their jobs. Not to mention rebuilding infrastructure around making "the new way" interface. Everything from APIs to personnel changes need to be taken into account, and for many organizations, that's just not optimal.
This of course ignores some of the weedy stuff- physical hardware differences, arithmetic accuracy, licensing costs, that sort of thing. COBOL is an entire ecosystem which can be very expensive to replace.
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Yup, this is an old video and I didn't take it down even though the title proved inaccurate.
I've mentioned it elsewhere but I read Michael Murphy's comments at the time on Reddit as a "we're skipping this one, only, for now" as they didn't mention a commitment longer than the one skipped release. In hindsight I should have titled the video differently, but I did my best at the time.
Here's a Reddit post/thread where Michael Murphy denied they were sticking with LTS only: https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/xifwt6/comment/ip3xwl1/
System76 at the time wasn't saying "we're sticking with LTS for this cycle", they said only "we're skipping 22.10". Again, in hindsight I probably should have titled the video differently because they hadn't announced yearly releases, but at this point if I changed it folks would be upset with me. Oh well- we're all imperfect.
I've left the video up because the general idea still applies- Pop!_OS is fine if it works for you. They ship select newer packages on top of Ubuntu LTS, and between the newer kernel and PipeWire stuff, Flatpak, and even Nix, it's still a reasonable distro for a lot of folks.
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To be clear, I do like Pop!_OS, and I've made videos talking about how much I like their product. I still use my System76 laptop almost daily, and it's mostly ran Pop!_OS since I picked it up. My concern about System76 isn't about them now*, it's about what *might happen after some boardroom shenanigans in the event that they no longer are an independent company. That's very much a maybe and not a *definitely*, and I sincerely hope System76 stays as awesome as they are for years to come.
As far as Fedora is concerned, it's a great distro. But I mean, so is Red Hat- I genuinely enjoyed working with it when I did this work. It's just hard to recommend Red Hat itself to developers or companies looking to build infrastructure or code around a platform, knowing that there's been some corporate instability there. Fedora is, and remains, a solid desktop option in my opinion and experience, but I think it's OK to be concerned that Red Hat's influence could have a negative consequence in the future. Of course, I could be wrong and Red Hat might be making all the right moves here. Only time will tell!
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A. As a musician, I would imagine you could get the software working just fine. In the past, I've used midi utilities in a VM and it works pretty well! Of course, for live recording, I would be concerned about latency between the audio and video. I could imagine that becoming too much to overcome for something like comping. If your interface is USB, it might be a non-issue though, as you can pass the USB directly to the VM and let the VM do all the work. Same with PCI-E interfaces, albeit with some more work needed.
B. As far as external SSDs and booting KVM, it might work! Considering you can boot an actual live USB into a VM, I'd imagine you could play with the settings to get it just right. However, I don't think this would be a great experience with modern Windows. Not only do things get trickier in general because it's Windows, but you also have to contend with licensing. I've seen a few metal-to-VM conversions trigger an activation/licensing error- that might be your biggest hangup. This might be an interesting topic for a future video, though!
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Great question! I find that QEMU/KVM is generally smoother than VirtualBox, and has better performance for most typical tasks. About a year ago, I did an informal comparison between the two, and I found my boot times were about twice as fast on KVM. Your mileage may vary, of course.
As far as a quad core processor is concerned, depending on what your server VM is doing, it might be OK. If I were building a new rig for virtualization, I'd certainly shoot for something with more cores. But, four might be do-able if the host isn't doing much else, and you're only doing light VM work on occasion. I learned KVM on an old AMD box, and I think it only had four cores. Granted that was a while ago, and only an educational environment for me!
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I did watch his video. I referenced it in the description as well (hadn't watched it in its entirety as of filming but have now watched it).
Not defending anyone, but one person's experience, while illuminating, isn't enough to get me to make decisions.
The fact that development at GrapheneOS is undergoing changes, including a leadership transition (which I didn't know about during filming), is enough to give me pause on making any sudden decisions, but I certainly am keeping an eye out. Things could get better, get worse, or stay the same, and as I mentioned in the video, if I swap over it I'll let folks know.
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Hi there! Pop!_OS and Linux Mint both do a great job of drawing tablets in my experience. I've used a few Wacom models with both, as well as a number of cheaper options, and for the most part I haven't had issues with it.
Right now, today, early 2024, my advice would tend toward Mint, but only because I suspect Pop!_OS will be releasing a new version of their COSMIC desktop environment sometime this year, and I could imagine some kinks will need to be worked out with peripherals. Particularly when it comes to Wayland support, which could be really important for your drawing tablet. If this were a year ago or a year from now, my advice would look different.
If you're using the Nvidia GPU, you might have better luck with the Ubuntu version of Linux Mint- that's one case where you might benefit from some of the Ubuntu-specific guides out there. That said- my experience and preference is with AMD GPUs, which are much more straightforward to work with. As always, look at your preferred software and what they recommend before making hardware choices, and always check out the live CD before nuking an install. Good luck!
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Thank you for the kind words! In my case, Patreon and Ko-Fi are huge factors. It's not enough to live off of entirely yet, but my goal is one day, it is.
YouTube revenue for plays are abysmal, and only seem to be getting worse. But membership is growing for a lot of channels, and I think that's a huge part of it.
To say nothing of sponsorships, but I'm not going there at this point.
Now, as far as COBOL is concerned, lots of financial/accounting/inventory software is still running on COBOL. In my experience over the years, it's either running on modern big iron (IBM), on-prem x86 servers (that's what I worked with), or hybrid-cloud environments.
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I went back through my video notes, and I found this Reddit thread which System76 employees participated in at the time. This influenced my assumption about yearly releases, an assumption I no longer hold based on more recent events. If I were publishing the video today, I would use completely different language.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/xsekwh/pop_releases_now_yearly_how_will_backporting_work/
One of my criticisms of System76 in this regard, and I still feel this way despite my appreciation for their distro, is that they seem to avoid publicly stating much of anything about distro development beyond commits and social media posts. I touch on this in the video, but I don't think Reddit threads are a great way to communicate with paying customers about what's going to happen with the distro shipped on their hardware. Recently they've implemented a mailing list, which is helpful and appreciated. I wish the updates in that list were more frequent, but that's OK.
At the end of the day, System76 is a company selling commercial products. They get to decide what to ship, what not to ship, and how they want to communicate about it. If Linux users want a more publicly developed, community-driven distro, there are luckily plenty of options. I still like and use Pop!_OS because so much "just works", especially on System76's hardware.
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 @deepspaceship I think you're accepting at face value Red Hat's argument that downstream distros don't contribute back upstream. That bug-for-bug rebuilds somehow "take" without giving back. What I'm telling you is that I think that premise is fundamentally incorrect.
Rocky, for instance, gives back to RHEL in bug hunting, reporting, documentation, and most importantly for IBM, a pipeline. I personally oversaw many a conversion from so-called "freeloader" to "paid customer" when corporations needed support (first with CentOS then with Rocky).
You're saying Rocky is "greedy" for using something that's open source. That isn't greed- it's collaboration. I'm saying Red Hat is greedy by restricting what you can do with that source. That may just be capitalism, but I don't care- I'm calling it greed. You're free to disagree, but I'm quite confident in my position, even after some time has passed. Trust me, I considered both sides. I've been using Red Hat products for decades, and I wish them well, but I think they've strayed from their original mission enough to where I'm not going to recommend them anymore. That's my right as a consumer, after all! You're free to disagree and that's OK.
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Still, a strange thing to say to a stranger on the internet. First off, saying "she" instead of "you" as if I'm not reading these comments. Second, "making sure every word is spelled out slowly and loudly" is a pretty good thing to do for the widest possible audience... Take into consideration that not everyone speaks the same language as you, nor understands words at the same cadence. I'm actually a trained public speaker, and honed my skills as a dev instructor for a number of years (working with youths and adults).
I'm just out here trying to spread info about the Commodore 64 to a wider audience, particularly younger folks who never experienced this, while also bringing some nostalgia to the table. The channel is called "Veronica Explains" because I'm trying to, well, explain it. I don't mean to single you out, and most comments I've received are great, but so many weird comments about how my face moves, or how I'm speaking (some say too fast, some say too slow), just makes me want to reconsider making more videos. If that's not your intention, perhaps think about your comments next time you see someone out here making free videos?
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Debian can do just about anything that TrueNAS can do nowadays. At home I run a Debian server with Samba and ZFS and it's robust, if not a bit more complicated than with TrueNAS Scale's GUI. 45 Drive's Houston modules can also run OK on Debian, I've tried it and it was a pretty good experience (although not as good as their dedicated hardware I'd assume). Cockpit also works on Debian and is a reasonable option if you're interested in a GUI-based way to do things. I tend to be old school and just set it up in the terminal over SSH.
My general recommendation is that if you're starting out with homelabbing in 2024, TrueNAS Scale is a really good fit, but if you want to learn "the Linux way" to do file servers, it's hard to go wrong with Debian at this point. OpenSUSE has awesome utilities as well, but they're very SUSE-specific and won't help as much if you want to learn the ecosystem as a whole. Ubuntu's also a great choice but is increasingly moving toward Snaps as a means to distribute software, which is not as portable to other platforms if you're trying to learn. And at the end of the day, if you plan to work with Linux, you're probably going to run into Red Hat's ecosystem sooner or later, so it doesn't hurt to learn to replicate your setup on Rocky, Alma, or Fedora. Good luck!
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It depends on the infrastructure. I've seen networks where each terminal was connected directly via serial to a central computer, and others where the terminals "dialed in" (modem->telephone system->modem->server). Later on I believe there were even PCI add-on cards to provide serial multiplexing to devices throughout a building. On the latter note, I've pulled a few of these devices out of old server rooms, although I'm missing the ISA or PCI card which would let me do a video: https://ia902205.us.archive.org/7/items/generalmanual_000017688/generalmanual_000017688.pdf
In my experience working with offices that used terminals and minicomputers, there was a heaping amount of serial cables strewn up in the ceiling directly connecting the terminals to the mini, ostensibly with an add-on that provided a "whole heapin' helping of serial ports". :) My guess is these were set up in a way that assumed a terminal was on the other end, but I haven't actually used one in person- something like a fully working TI-990 is a museum piece, now!
Null modem cables/adapters crosslink lines so that two devices that normally don't talk to each other (for example, two PCs) can talk to each other directly. A server (or a modem) is typically designed in a way that assumes it's always talking to one of those devices, thus a null modem cable wouldn't be necessary. It's needed here on the Pi only because the Pi doesn't know if it's a server or a client- using a null modem cable lets the two client devices talk to each other directly. I could (with a little elbow grease) have used a standard serial cable plugged into the GPIO pins, a video I might do in the future.
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Thank you! I love Proxmox myself- I use it in production in a few environments and it's very simple to operate from the web. LXC is also really easy to deploy on Proxmox. I find KVM to be easier to fine-tune from a terminal, and it's easier to use KVM on a box that'll do more than just run VMs- Proxmox locks the entire device up as a hypervisor, and it's harder to fine-tune the Linux under the hood. In contrast, KVM is KVM on Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, Fedora, RHEL, Alma, Rocky, Arch, etc.
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I personally use a RetroTink 5x, as it also works with my NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Amiga, and any other SCART, S-Video, component, or composite input. It's certainly pricey, but it works exceptionally well and handles just about everything (I'd rather spend more money on one box than slightly less money on lots of boxes). They also have a few less expensive options which omit some of the SCART features (might be better if you're just working with a C64 and no other devices).
In any case, any S-Video to HDMI adapter will work, albeit with some lag on the cheaper models. Fast-paced games will benefit from a more advanced piece of hardware like the RetroTink I mentioned above, as lag will be greatly reduced. You'll also want to make sure you put your LCD TV on "Game Mode" or something similar - many of the HDMI inputs apply color and frame rate processing by default, which adds a ton of lag to games. Most newer TVs will have a "game mode" which bypasses that.
For the C64, you'll also need a C64 video out to S-Video or composite cable. You can make one, but unless you have compatible DINs lying around, it might make more sense to buy one. I get mine from 8-Bit Classics (just make sure you get the right one for your series of C64). I also recommend upgrading to the version of the cable with a resistor in the line to line up with what a typical S-Video input is looking for.
Good luck! I know of the noise you are speaking of- I used to hear it but lately, not so much! :P
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Good question. It's not "preloaded". This can be a challenging concept if you're coming from Windows, where you have a lot of control over 3rd party software (for better or worse).
tldr: Linux used to be really complicated in this way but lately new tools have come in to make it easier.
Debian (and most Linux distros) provide a repository full of software, both first and third party. With most Linux distributions, you're stuck on what's provided in that repository. That can be a good thing, as the software often works just fine, albeit it could be a version or several behind if the process of testing and rebuilding it for the distro hasn't occurred yet. And while you can install a 1st party package directly from the vendor (just like an .exe on Windows), that can destabilize the system if dependencies aren't met or other install conditions bork something (just like an .exe on Windows, although admittedly Windows has gotten friendlier about that over the years).
Here's the thing though- this whole issue is quickly becoming less of a limitation thanks to tools like Flatpak, which allow you to get a much newer version of the software in a way that's distro-agnostic. If I want the latest, I can typically just download it from Flatpak and forget about it. And if I switch distros down the road, I just enable Flatpak and redownload the newest versions of my software. It's really helping out.
To put it another way, think of an app store on a mobile device- each distro has their own. Flatpak upends this by creating essentially an "agnostic app store" for all of Linux. (And there's others like Snap, but Flatpak seems to be winning the hearts/minds.) Windows doesn't have an "app store" per se (I'm ignoring the Microsoft Store because most folks still just download .exe files AFAIK), but Linux really relies on this model for efficiency and integration. I just set up a new laptop and it's two scripts to customize everything exactly as I want it- that's harder to do on Windows without just letting Microsoft handle it for you (not impossible).
Hope this answers the question!
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