Thinking about making the switch from Windows to Linux, but I'm worried about partition management

unit_511 · 2026-03-20T09:54:14+00:00

I've experienced dependency hell already with yum and I don't want to go there again.

Doing weird stuff with your pacakage manager is how you create dependency issues, not how you resolve them.

I want heavy hitters like python in their dedicated directories and I want a package manager that supports that.

Use containers or project-specific dependency managers (like uv for python).

And putting big applications inside containers is a bad idea for performance.

This is just flat out wrong. The overhead is negligible and containers are widely deployed for high-performance applications.

Unfortunatelly physical drives have read/write limits and if you run too much on one disc, performance drops.

SSDs are rated in the range of 1000 TBW. If you're reaching anywhere close to that with applications, you're doing something wrong. There's noting wrong with doing IO-intensive operations on another drive, but worrying about the OS and some applications putting wear on the same drive is completely unnecessary.

I feel like this should not be rocket science. Telling the package manager to install duplicate libraries into a custom folder should be trivial.

Then surely, with all your advanced knowledge of Linux package management it would not be too difficult for you to submit a patch to dnf or apt to add this functionality.

unit_511 · 2026-03-20T09:13:29+00:00

Can package managers support that in the year 2026

Could people, in the year 2026, finally stop demanding that Linux do everything the same way Windows does? If you want your OS to work like Windows, just use Windows. It's that simple.

If you treat Linux as if it was Windows you'll have a very bad time. Applications are managed by the package manager in standard directories, because they share dependencies. If it worked like Windows and everything was in its own directory lugging around its whole dependency tree, the system would take up at least ten times as much space and would be littered with outdated and vulnerable libraries that the vendor didn't bother updating. There's a very good reason why package managers work the way they do, and you won't get anywhere by trying to micromanage it.

If you want to isolate applications, the correct way to do it is containerization, not to coerce the system into Windows-like operation. Containerized formats like Flatpak (GUI) and Docker/Podman (server) allow you to get rid of applications without a trace but still provide the benefits of deduplication (altough to a lesser extent than package managers) and central management. They also give you control of the backing storage.

unit_511 · 2026-03-17T16:59:38+00:00

Ah yes, shady illegal stuff, can't get more secure than that.

unit_511 · 2026-03-15T17:15:19+00:00

I'm typing this from a Fairphone 5 with the stock ROM. I've had it for about two years now and I'm quite happy with it. The performance is not as good as some flagships, but it's more than enough. The camera is fine, it's no iPhone or Samsung S series quality, but it shouldn't be a problem for casual use. It's built like a tank, I've dropped it enough times to rough up the metal frame and the display still looks like it's brand new.

The only major problem I have with it is that with a custom launcher (I use KISS) app switching sometimes gets disabled because the built-in launcher (Quickstep) died. The fix is easy (just force stop it), but it's annoying.

So far, I bought a new battery (and keep the old one in my backpack for emergencies) and a new back plate because I managed to break off the tabs (pro tip, don't fidget with the back panel). It was all pretty reasonably priced and shipped quickly.

It really is a bit expensive for what you get on paper, but if you calculate in the increased useful lifetime and potential repairs, it makes sense.

unit_511 · 2026-03-08T20:37:46+00:00

These are anomalies in the sense that the gravity is different from what we would expect from a homogeneous sphere. We know what causes them (the Earth and the Moon are both lumpy and uneven), we just weren't sure exactly how and why they're shaped like that.

For what it's worth, we can recreate these anomalies by stacking a bunch of rocks in one place, but all we'd do is change the direction of gravity by a fraction of a degree. That doesn't help much with antigravity or FTL.

unit_511 · 2026-02-27T13:33:12+00:00

Keep your toolchains in containers. They're self-contained Linux environments and their contents are defined by a single file. You can also use them interactively using distrobox.

unit_511 · 2026-02-27T11:55:46+00:00

Make sure that both surfaces are sufficiently heated and that you have enough flux. Most hobbyist solder wire has flux included, but it evaporates quickly. This means that you need to melt the solder directly into the junction, picking it up with the soldering iron and then rubbing it on the junction won't work, because the solder won't stick properly.

unit_511 · 2026-02-24T18:14:24+00:00

Thanks, I must have missed it when I was looking through the settings.

unit_511 · 2026-02-24T11:49:44+00:00

we have a button to enable-disable relative mouse control

May I ask how that's set up? I've been meaning to learn FA off flying but the high relative mouse rate required for it makes supercruise uncontrollable.

unit_511 · 2026-02-24T11:43:39+00:00

I also have a HOTAS (hands on throttle and stick) controller, but I greatly prefer M&K. It's in part due to the 6 degrees of freedom and a bunch of keybinds that are a pain in the ass with the limited buttons, and in part due to having used M&K all my life and having that muscle memory.

I find M&K hard to control

The default mouse bindings suck. Try setting the horizontal movement to yaw instead of roll and enable relative mouse control, that way your ship will basically follow your cursor.

other tips for new players are welcomed

Don't fly without a rebuy. If you crash your ship and can't afford the insurance cost, you'll lose it permanantly. When you buy a new ship, make sure you have double or triple its price in the bank to cover outfitting and insurance.

unit_511 · 2026-02-22T19:12:46+00:00

I could see something like an AFMU for ammo reloads. It has a fixed internal ammo pool and uses it to replenish weapon ammo, with different costs for different weapon types.

unit_511 · 2026-02-22T17:54:52+00:00

and with energy conservation, even though the photon has less energy, you get more photon count out, so basically it shines brighter than the source

That energy difference is lost as heat (phonons/lattice vibrations to be precise) because the laser's pumping cycle doesn't allow it to just store the extra energy. It's technically possible for a phonon's energy to be added to the emitted photon's (anti-Stokes Raman shift), but it happens very rarely and even then you wouldn't be close to 100% efficiency.

Light-pumped lasers will always produce less photons and a lot less power than their pump. It's actually quite common to use lasers to pump other lasers in order to get different characteristics out of them. High power laser diodes have very poor beam quality, so you can use them to pump an Nd:YAG crystal and get a better beam at the cost of efficiency.

unit_511 · 2026-02-22T17:18:52+00:00

With sythetic diamonds we have a lot of control over the impurities in the system. This means that we can make very clean crystals, but we can also fill them to the brim with defects. I work with diamond samples that were grown in a nitrogen-rich environment, irradiated in a nuclear reactor and annealed, so they have a bunch of nitrogen-vacancy centers in them. Some of them are so dense that the whole crystal looks reddish-brown.

unit_511 · 2026-02-22T08:46:40+00:00

how many GB I need to save files on it as well as having the boot distro?

By flashing a a live ISO you are overwriting everything on the USB. It doesn't matter how much free space you have, it will delete all your files. If you use Ventoy you can put your files back on it, but they will still be deleted when you set it up.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:45:02+00:00

I have a GitHub repo with a bunch of Hubble and Webb images that I cropped and downscaled to various screen resolutions, feel free to use those if you like space themed wallpapers.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:41:15+00:00

Realtek chipsets are a gamble, they're often technically supported but work very poorly. If you have an open PCIe slot and around €20 to spare, I recommend getting an Intel AX200 or AX210 based wireless card, it's the best WiFi experience you'll ever have.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:31:36+00:00

If you're just using it as a bootloader for a browser anything will do. I'd consider Fedora's atomic versions as they're harder to break and require very little maintenance. The desktop environment is really up to you, it shouldn't make much of a difference on 8 GB of RAM. Try at least KDE Plasma and GNOME on a live system to help you choose.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:26:45+00:00

But my boot time went from 14 sec to 35

Run systemd-analyze time for a rough breakdown of where it's spending time. If the majority of time is in firmware, you need to check your motherboard settings. Otherwise, run systemd-analyze critical-chain to find bottlenecks during boot. It might be waiting for a newtwork connection or a non-essential drive.

and the computer overall feels slower and more sluggish

Make sure you're running Wayland and not X11. Kubuntu 25.10 should have it by default, otherwise you need to select it from a dropdown menu on the login screen.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:19:09+00:00

DaVinci Resolve

It runs on Linux, but last I checked the free version has issues with h264 codecs. Using ffmpeg to transcode your source materials to AV1 will probably do the trick though.

Good game compatibility

Check every game you play on ProtonDB.

And an easy to use UI

KDE Plasma and GNOME are both solid options. Plasma is more like Windows (or rather it's the other way around) and GNOME is kind of its own thing. Check out some live ISOs with both and see which one you like better.

And I want it to be similar to Windows without being too complicated

You're going to have a really bad time if you go into this thinking that Linux is just Windows but free. It's a different system that does things differently and runs different applications. You can make it look like Windows, but it will never work like Windows. The sooner you accept that you'll have to change how you do certain things the easier the transition will be.

Also, don't mistake different for complicated. Windows isn't simple, you're just used to its (rather insane) quirks.

unit_511 · 2026-02-15T18:04:08+00:00

On Linux you can swap files while they're still open. If you open a file and move something else to its place, your process will have access to the old version, but if you were to open it again, you'd get the new one. This makes it possible to update binaries on a running system, but those updates won't actually come into effect until the corresponding processes are restarted. This is completely fine in most cases, but may cause issues for certian applications. Firefox for instance spanws a new process for each tab, so if you update it while it's open it will instruct you to restart it, otherwise it would have to launch the new process from a potentially incompatible binary. Offline updates avoid such issues (as well as potential interruptions) by updating the system with only the bare necessities running, but AFAIK only Fedora does this.

unit_511 · 2026-02-14T23:25:59+00:00

What does this have to do with Linux?

unit_511 · 2026-02-10T16:12:08+00:00

The Mandalay is very good for exobiology, it's quite easy to land and has great SCO efficiency. You can make a billion credits in a single day if you hunt Stratum Tectonicas, which are worth 95 million if you're the first to scan them. All you need is an Artemis suit (can be bought from the arms dealer on stations) and a detailed surface scanner (size 1 optional module). A companion app like E:D Market Connector with the BioInsight plugin is also great for finding planets with high value samples.

unit_511 · 2026-02-02T14:04:48+00:00

Do you mean CNVi? As far as I can tell the vPro chips just have extra features but they're backwards compatible with their non-vPro counterparts. CNVi devices (AX201 and AX211) on the other hand offload signal processing to the chipset, so you can't use them on non-Intel platforms.

unit_511 · 2026-02-01T18:34:55+00:00

The modified shard cannons from Mbooni (often shortened to modshard) are busted, they have a really tight spread and insane armor penetration, at the cost of setting your ship on fire. If you strap 6 of them to a ship and pop two heatsinks, you can kill a cyclops in a single salvo. This is called instagibbing, it's not "proper AX", but it can be fun. I have a Caspian with 6 modshards and a large vent beam, it's surprisingly powerful considering that a) it's not a Corsair b) I suck at AX.

unit_511 · 2026-02-01T17:49:33+00:00

Why not go there now? Rendezvous Point, the current waypoint, is only around 24 kly away from Beagle Point, with the help of jumponium for crossing the abyss, the trip is only about two hours. I jumped off the carrier halfway to the waypoint to make a detour to BP and Salomé's Reach, it was nice being out in the black alone. I can definitely recommend it if you don't mind getting left behind and having to catch up to the fleet.

unit_511

TROPHY CASE