This is literally amazing. Loving the automation, because I cant Prox for shit.

https://tteck.github.io/Proxmox/

The older I get, the less I want to have to interact with things. I mean, people, work, friends, lovers, computers, and operating systems. Basically, all the things.

I’ve been trying to find an operating system to use ‘most of the time’ other than windows. I really want to use Linux, but damn man, it’s a pain.

I’d love to use an immutable OS. It just sounds so cool, and easy. BlendOS is immutable and gives you the choice of all the other base systems in one. Great. Alma gives you the option of all of the above, and a double-boot partition so that if an update doesnt work okay, then it reverts. Even better.

The problem is that these OS’s dont seem to be able to get the fundamentals right. I mean, I love Gnome, right? There’s other people out there who do too, I’m sure. But there’s always an issue: i.e. samba doesnt work right, graphics drivers dont work right, samba doesnt work right… and over and over and over. I appreciate that I’m probably a ‘power user’ as much as I hate the term, but I think after 40 years of *nix that they should have the basic shit down. Alas, it doesnt seem to be the case.

Linux just isnt ready for mainstream. Its awful, Debian, Manjaro, Ubuntu, they just arent ready for the mainstream at all. Dear lord people get the linux shit sorted out. All I want is parity with Windows – I want to be able to put in a USB stick, and deal with it, I want to be able to map a network share, and deal with it, I want to get able to ‘game’ (quotes even if through steam which is the best case scenario without getting experimental) and not have to deal with shit.

Sigh. Its all just shit.

As such Im now back to PopOS which at least seems to have SMB down from the first try, better than Ubuntu (which it’s based on) at least… and yeah, you’re going to wax lyrical about ways that it would work (if anyone actually viewed this site) but as a whole I have to say the ease of use for the common everyday folk is rubbish. This is not news, I understand that, but this is the illustration of my frustration.

Blep.

I’ve been Proxmox-ing and it’s pretty cool. One of those things that I’ve started a few times but never followed through with, I’ve a HP Elitedesk G3 Mini, actually I’ve two, and a larger G3 that I’ve been playing with. One has Batocera on it and is working great up till, like, Dreamcast, and the Proxmox server is working great hosting an Xpenology server – 2TB of storage on NVME, 8GB of RAM (will be upgraded to 32GB tomorrow when my Crucial RAM arrives!) and it’s working great tbh. I’ve set up a load of Windows VMs as you can see, Win11 still wont boot but I’ll find out why when I get more time.

A nice little tech excursion and very nerdy, ‘it just works’.

I’ve been having issues with my NVME drives on my main gaming PC. I don’t use it a lot, but I have two NVME drives in the machine:

1. WD Blue SN500 (PCIE gen 3)
2. Sabrent 1tb Rocket (PCIE gen 4)

The WD has been solid, it’s great, it’s just slower and doesn’t have a lot of space. The Sabrent is obviously bigger and faster, but I’ve been really using it more as a ‘games drive’ as it’s basically just a secondary drive on my machine. Windows 11 (or whichever OS I’m using at the time) on the 500, installs on the 1tb.

Over the past couple of years I’ve had these drives, it’s bugged me a little that I was using the slower drive for the OS, so I decided to move from Windows 10 to Windows 11, swap my OS onto the 1tb drive and hoped that I would be happy…

Hoped…

Within a couple of days of using the Sabrent Rocket I started getting sudden power-offs on the PC. It would just be ‘pop’ and the machine was suddenly without power. I can remember from when I first started using the Sabrent that something similar may have happened, hence using it as a backup drive, but I didn’t want to rule out power supply/ram, all the usual issues.

After more playing about (I have an X570 Aorus Pro, 5700G – I know but there was a valid reason for it – 32GB ram) I am sure that it is the drive, I’ve been using the WD drive in the other slot, as the Pro has 2 NVME gen 4 slots, and the slot seems fine, the drive seems fine in there and there’s no issues.

As such I’ve removed the SN500 and I’ve got a little USB-C caddy coming for it today, it can just be a mass storage USB device for moving files around.

Today I’ve ordered a Crucial P3 Plus 2tb drive which is going to hopefully become my main drive (it’s gen 4) and should be nice and quick, I just thought it would be fun to post a break down and a Crystal Diskmark screenshot of the speeds. I don’t have the new drive yet, but this is the Sabrent score – bare in mind it’s just gen 3. Will update again over the next couple of days when I can install the new drive!

Loving the Steam Deck – this is the base version, updated the SSD to a 256 from the base 64. Had it for a little while, this is the dock and the keyboard/mouse setup. The keyboard is a Logitech K295, silent touch, it’s really quiet and came with the wireless mouse. Had these for a few months also and haven’t had to change the batteries, which is a plus!

All the usual Steam Deck fun, mostly I play this for emulation, seems to be very much more geared towards a console experience, rather than play something that needs a mouse and keyboard. The mouse and keyboard I usually just use for desktop mode, I don’t have this hooked to a display, I tend to just sit in a comfortable chair laid back and playing old games and occasionally something new – mostly RPGs and the like. The USB-C dock is fine, just use it as shown with the receiver for the mouse and keyboard. It has HDMI out, some USBs and SD Card ports but Ive never used them with the Steam Deck.

All in all very much appreciating the time off work, although it looms all too quickly round the corner of the weekend – I truly hope that this coming year is better than the last… actually the last dozen years or so, hopes are not altogether high.