Why?

Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don’t know how to partition a disk. I’d want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.

If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what’s working/broken go for the triple boot.

Docker could be worth a shot. You can ‘docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever’ and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn’t too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.

I’d put the 1gb ram laptops to server/kodi/retroarch/something mode and focus on the three decent machines for anything that requires a modern web browser, or add some ram. Porteus might be worth a shot if you’ve not tried it and want to push the Firefox on a potato idea.

I don’t think this is a one OS fits all situation, unless maybe Gentoo.

How bad is really bad?

AntiX is a good choice. Other option is a usb3 drive for each family member so everyone has their own portable AntiX on a stick.

MX is the related project with a more standard install and could be worth a look, the Fluxbox option should be quite light.

Each user could have a personal AntiX system on persistent usb3 and each system could have a bare metal MX Linux install. Just see what wins out via natural selection over time.

LXQT is another option for a full desktop environment that will run on a potato. If family members are mainly just users and you are admin, the base OS may not matter much. They could switch between a potato running Alpine and a good system running Fedora and if they are just logging into LXQT to launch browser, office, email etc the internal system plumbing is not gonna concern them.

imv looks good, thanks for the link

I’m a bit confused, I left Reddit to escape emacs users…should I be on kbin instead?

Thanks, will give dwl a spin as I’ve been quite comfortable on dwm.

Void is my plan. I went with Fedora last time as I couldn’t be bothered setting up Void properly and Fedora was the only distro with a generic kernel that seemed old mac trackapd/keyboard friendly at time. I’ve not tried Puppy for a long time, I tend to opt for AntiX or Porteus in that kinda area.

Thanks, I have i3 & kitty atm so not a huge leap.

May give KDE another spin someday when I have a machine better suited but not for this potato.

Cheers, will give it a look

deleted by creator

Thanks, looks cool.

I find i3 & dwm a bit much out of the box and need to remove titles, borders & hide the status bar. Hyprland had a lot going on, will check out Vivarium.

Cheers, looks interesting but don’t think it can cover my daily drivers needs.

Tailscale just so everything works out and about with minimal effort.

I have Navidrome on my pi4 streaming/transcoding to my Android with Symfonium.

Slskd runs on my pi and can be access via my phone browser.

Makes it simple to acress slsk anywhere, download flac and stream it right back as mp3.

Took me a while but I’m happy with navidrome/symfonium/slskd/tailscale in place of spotify.

Found a forum post that explains how to add and follow other libraries, which is nice. The libraries I’d been trying to follow don’t seem to have public share links displayed, the ones in the example work.

Appreciating the sharing side of FunkWhale. There’s a lot of potential and some good sounding pods out there. It has the basics. It works as a personal or social music pod, pods can interact, subsonic & maybe other activity pub stuff too. Most importantly it has content, lots of it.

Currently listening to another pod directly from my home pod for the first time, which is nice.

Been looking at it a little more over the past month or two.

There’s a lot of interesting music out there and nice to be able to wander around people’s music collections.

I’m not sure on how one should navigate Funkwhale land. I have an account on a pod but don’t know how I’m supposed to follow or interact with other pods I have bookmarked, it seems to only mention channels which are a bit useless.

Perhaps I have just misunderstood Funkwhale but it seems like it could be an amazing federated community for music. As it is I think I need an account for each pod or to just use listen not logged in. It seems more like a replacement for jellyfin/navidrome and the like with some fediverse functionality as opposed to a world on federated instances sharing and collaborating.

I think we may agree that a lot of the ecosystem is dependent on Red Hat, if they close stuff even more stuff tomorrow someone else will need to step up and put in an awful lot of hours quickly. Suse are stepping up with a 10 million dollar claim in response to the current situation and Rocky and Oracle are exploring the legalities of the GPL which is entertaining.

Forking the kernel is non-trivial, a far bigger undertaking than a casual 10 million dollars from Suse. It’s well over 30 million lines of code over decades with billions invested in it.

Again from Ted: * IBM hosted that meeting, but ultimately, never did contribute any developers to the btrfs effort. That’s because IBM had a fairly cold, hard examination of what their enterprise customers really wanted, and would be willing to pay $$$, and the decision was made at a corporate level (higher up than the Linux Technology Center, although I participated in the company-wide investigation) that none of OS’s that IBM supported (AIX, zOS, Linux, etc.) needed ZFS-like features,because IBM’s customers didn’t need them.*

I’m not a position to outcode IBM but I am very grateful there are distros out there that do ensure things largely work without them.

Yeah, I was using Alpine for a long time on my pi2 or 3, and an old htpc filling in as server but I’ve stumbled upon a few small issues with musl compatibility and feel glibc just makes life a little easier. I recall ‘testing’ it out using an ancient 2gb usb2 stick, it ended up running 24/7 for about 18 months just fine before I replaced the old box with new pi. With flatpak and all the other new and shiny things it makes a decent desktop/laptop OS too. They didn’t seem happy at all with upstream openrc a year or two ago and think they were looking to integrate s6 instead but haven’t kept an eye on the development and think skarnet is still working away on his frontend.

It’s entirely possible. They could have gotten Jeff or anyone else who didn’t agree with Red Hat on the show, there is not a shortage of people in the community that disagree as you say. They could have done another show to cover what ‘the entire linux community’ thinks about this.

For whatever reason they choose to invite on a Red Hat employee, not ask any difficult questions and generally just agree with everything he says. I don’t know the Red Hat dev or the people doing the podcast but if the ‘entire linux community’ are not happy it’s not great journalism.

“Now we’ve heard Red Hat’s version of events, for some balance we will interview the devs of Rocky & Alma and next week we have editor of The Register on”

I’ve not looked at the podcast, maybe they have done this sort of thing…but if their only contribution is to get on a Red Hat employee and agree with him, I’m confortable dismissing them.

If I was IBM and my employee was going on a podcast for damage limitation, I’d want assurances those hosting would be doing exactly what they did, agreeing with company policy.

I rely on Linux, not Red Hat. In my time on linux, a decade or so, Linus has been consistently awesome and Red Hat have consistently been dicks.

If Linus starts ranting about freeloaders I will listen, but freeloader chat from IBM is less compelling.

Good bot