There’s still things like that on my workplace today. I think there’s some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that’s cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there’s some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.

And, as far as I’ve told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It’s always the whole assembly line or whatever they’re connected to. There’s not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.

Delete windows partition with your preferred tool and update-grub should remove the item from boot menu. Then, depending on your partitioning schema, you can either create a new partition in the empty space and mount it however you like or expand your existing linux partition, but options there depend on how your partitioning has been originally built and if you can leverage things like LVM or ZFS when expanding the usable storage.

And, while pretty obvious, make sure to only delete the correct partition and all data stored on that will be lost, so make sure you don’t have anything important on windows side of things.

Anyone who has used intranet search engines at large companies

Sharepoint search functionality comes to mind. Our team commonly refers it as write-once storage as once you throw something in there you’ll never find it again. And yes, we stole the term from somewhere.

Majority of the data (video) is already compressed as MPEG-2 so I’d think it doesn’t compress very well. But if you don’t have enough storage it’s always an option to re-encode video with something more modern and achieve smaller file sizes from that. But that also removes at least DVD menu and other ‘format dependent’ options.

That would get you an exact copy of the disk with everything on it. And also, while 200 DVDs sounded a lot, it’s “only” 860GB (assuming 4,3GB/disk which I think is the most common for movies), so it’s not stupidly expensive either. Obviously you’ll want a RAID setup and most likely backups for that, so it’s more than just a single 1TB drive, but still quite manageable.

Ah, you’re correct. I somehow misunderstood the assignment, OEM installation is a bit different and I don’t think there’s a Debian version of that readily available. You could of course write scripts to manage that, but that’s a quite a bit more difficult than just set up preseed for the installer. Or you could just include instructions on how to set up your accounts afterwards, but that’s not the same either.

Debian (and I suppose a lot of derivatives) can use preseeding. That gives you pretty much full control to the whole installer where you can just start the installer and it does everything for you, including users, partitioning, installed software and so on.

I’ve been using refurbished thinkpads for at least a decade and in my experience they have pretty decent value for money. I’m using local shop (taitonetti.fi, I don’t think they currently ship outside Finland) which ships their machines mostly with OEM windows, but that’s not a big deal for me.

I’m not too familiar on how well the x64 - ARM conversion works, but in general gaming tends to be more dependent on single core performance and I’d assume that emulating single core functionality with multiple cores doesn’t really work, or at least with performance you’d need.

it’s just practicality.

I have “enough” years under my belt with Linux and I still prefer Mint on majority of my “daily driver” type machines. I already spend my working hours messing around with all kinds of different systems, figuring out problems, installing new ones and so on and I’m old enough that tweaking system just for the sake of it isn’t really what I’m after anymore. I just want something which doesn’t crap the bed, stays out of the way and lets me run whatever software I happen to need. At least for me Mint checks most of the boxes and the ones it lacks it’s pretty trivial to beat it back into submission.

This is the one I’m waiting the most from the LLM hype. It would be a massive benefit for companies around the world (mine included) if they could just dump their documentation in all shapes and flavours into a model and have it parse standardized documents for you.

But the generic OpenAI/Copilot models aren’t reliable enough just yet, hallucinations and made up data just doesn’t go with that. I’m not even sure if those models are ever capable on such task alone, maybe it needs additional component which checks the facts from originals or something to make it actually useful.

I can place a pretty hefty bet that this thought has not visited Elmos head.

I don’t think there’s one at least in official repositories. But if you’re missing libc6 one might argue that your system is not in any functional state anyways.

I have absolutely zero experience on pacman, but I could argue the very same with dpkg/apt with the same arguments. The Debian kind, not the abomination Ubuntu ships with today.

as far as i know apt and dnf have no equivalent easy redo all

It’s similarily possible (dpkg --get-selections, some sed/cut/awk wizardry to cut unnecessary stuff from the output, xargs to apt install --reinstall on that and you should be good to go, maybe there’s even a simpler way to achieve that) with Debian.

But that’s just me. I’ve been with Debian for quite a while. Potato was released 2000, but I think I got my hands on it 2001/2002 and I’ve been a happy user since. And even if I’ve worked with pretty much any major distribution (RHEL, CentOS, SuSe, Ubuntu and even Slackware back in the day) around I still prefer Debian because that’s what I know and learned over the years on how to fix things if something goes sideways.

I’ve been writing a small powershell script at work lately and as vscode now offers their AI bundled in I just tried it out of curiosity. It does a half decent job. Nothing I couldn’t write on my own, but on a simple script it saved some time as I’m a long term linux guy and just getting my toes wet with powershell so I need to dig up proper functions and syntax pretty often.

But it also created a script which would have broken syntax and errors in it, so it still needed manual tweaking, but as long as you know what you’re doing it can be useful. And also potentially dump your company data to some learning database.

Is my current set up secure, assuming strong passwords were used for everything?

Network security is a complicated beast to manage. If general public can access your services over the internet, that’s a threat you need to mitigate. Strong passwords is a good start on that, but it doesn’t take into account if there’s a flaw or bug on the service you’re running. Also if you have external users, they might reuse their passwords and leak for those might cause a threat too, specially if there’s privilege escalation bugs on the software you’re running.

And so on, it’s a too wide field to cover in a short comment here, but when you’re building your stuff, and what is maybe the most disticntive feature on a good professional between a not so good one, is to think ahead and prepare for every imaginable scenario where something goes wrong. Every time you add a way to access your network, no matter how minuscle, think what happens if that way gets compromised and what it might mean on the very worst case.

Maybe you want to add another access point to your network since your terrace isn’t properly covered. That’s nice to have, but now everyone around 100 meters around your house/apartment might have access to your stuff if they can break your wifi security. Maybe you set up a reverse proxy or tailscale on the stack. Now the whole internet can at least probe your stuff and try to find vulnerabilities, try to use stolen credentials and even try to social engineer their way into your stuff. Or maybe you made an mistake and left something open that shouldn’t be.

I’m not trying to scare you off out of anything. Go ahead and play with your stuff, break things, learn how to fix them, have fun while doing it. Just remember to think ahead about worst case scenarios, weigh their risks, think ahead and then go on. Learn about DNAT, reverse proxies, VPN and network layers and whatever you come across on your adventure but keep in mind that shit will hit the fan at some point. And learn to accept that, learn from your mistakes and do better next time.

In case you’re not aware: Back in the day Ubuntu took off because Debian was maybe a bit too strict on their approach on being stable and rock solid for quite a few of different architectures. There was a time when you could just edit few files and migrate a running system from Debian to Ubuntu, just with way more up-to-date software packages and that’s about the time frame I moved from Debian to Ubuntu too. For quite a few years it was pretty smooth, updates just worked, software versions were up to date and the general experience was more polished than what you could get from Debian at the time.

But that ship has sailed. Ubuntu changes stuff so frequently that the package maintainers can just barely keep up, snapcraft is a steaming pile of shit in my opinion and the stability is faint ghost on what it used to be. Maybe becuse it’s not that compatible with Debian anymore and thus can’t benefit from the original source, maybe for some other reason.

Whatever the case might be, running ubuntu gives you an ubuntu experience, which is very much not the same than debian experience. If you want more streamlined distribution I’d recommend Mint (Debian edition), if you want the rock solid system but with less refined experience where you might need to tweak thing or two manually then go with Debian.

And, mostly for the nitpicking commenters, I know, I grossly simplified things around and cut some corners. I know it’s not as black and white comparison. This is just my generic experience over quite a few years with Linux on Desktop.

The option to run one cable to the monitor, or reversely charge your laptop with one docking cable.

USB-C docks can already do this. Obviously with less power and it’s not perfect by any means, but we don’t need another technology for this. And sure, it’s two cables, one from wall outlet to integrated dock/monitor and usb-c from dock to laptop, but no matter the technology you still need something to plug in to wall outlet.

Hetzner provides managed web hosting too. For emails I think you need to look for some other provider.

Without any expertise, I’m going to say that minuscule amounts of radioactive nickel from your CR2032 replacements compared to wasted lithium on pretty much every battery your all current devices have plus single use LiIon-cells on e-cigs, single use toys and whatever is a pretty good improvement. In 100 years or so all that nickel is converted to copper with small amounts of radiation and heat as byproducts, in today’s technology, is pretty good.

And the radiation is beta-negative. I’m not an nuclear physicist, but if I’m not mistaken your common 3032 cell has enough metal to shield pretty much all of the radiation. Just don’t eat them and maybe stick with li-ion on your wrist watch.