I bought a new T series Thinkpad last year. As long as you’re not using it as a hammer or a jack stand, it will hold up pretty well. Supports Linux well. Good build quality.
If you do need that level of build quality I would look at the Panasonic Toughbooks. Just don’t drop one one the floor. It may break. The floor, not the laptop. The laptop will be fine.
How much free time do you people have? At that point I’d just use AI
Free time? What’s that? /s, kinda
Most of that time is spent uploading the tag info up to MusicBrainz. If the band/artist or album isn’t already there, It can indeed take that long. Their web interface is a confusing mess, at least for me. I don’t usually have more than 1 album at a time to deal with manually though, and that not very often.
As for using an LLM (I refuse to call them AI. They ain’t there yet.), if it works, cool! More than likely though, they would try pulling from MusicBrainz, fail to find a match and give up, same as Picard has for OP. An LLM agent harness might be able to more quickly upload album tags where the artist or album doesn’t yet exist in the database though. Hadn’t thought of that before and may give it a try next time the issue crops up. Thanks!
I have Lidarr setup to track album and singles releases from a handful of artists and bands that I am really, really into so I don’t miss something. Mostly, though, I acquire new music the same way I always have, something catches my ear somewhere and I go looking for it.
Discovery is kinda all over the place, but lately Youtube has been pretty good at suggesting new artists and tracks to listen to, though, it is occasionally hard to actually acquire said track or album. Other places have movie and tv show soundtracks, ListenBrainz recommendations and occasionally an actual radio station…
For the most part, I’ve moved away from pirating music and audiobooks as it’s generally pretty easy to find an above-board source that is either DRM free or can be cracked easily. When I do pirate something for whatever reason, I’ll usually go back later and purchase a copy. I would rather support the artists since I usually have the means at present and most of the artists I’m into aren’t really all that big. I really wish that ebooks, tv shows and movies would get the damned hint and do the same…
My routine for that is about what you would expect, Coffee, listen to the track, Research it, Manually fill out as much of the tag as I can, upload to MusicBrainz, Repeat.
Each album takes an hour or two. Faster if I can find a page somewhere with the whole album listing, preferably including the names of everyone involved with the album.
There isn’t an easier way that I’ve found.
Every few days I’ll have Picard rescan the collection in the unlikely event someone else has also worked on some of the tracks I’m working on. It does happen, not very often, but it does happen.
Picard can help you sort through most of it. It can identify most things even without tags. Just be careful and check everything it wants to do before letting it do its thing.
It’s more an organization thing.
The desktops themselves persist however I have it set to reset to empty desktops on boot. There is an option in KDE settings to automatically restore previously open applications when you boot up, but my workflow is never the same from project to project.
I’m not sure anymore which is the default behavior. I think I remember having to change the setting at some point and that’s how I know it exists.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a clean install, but I think the only thing I do to KDE is install Yakuake and set up 4 virtual desktops. Very handy when I’m working on my more involved projects.
For the average home desktop/laptop user, you probably don’t need it. It won’t hurt, but unless you’re really downloading and executing random files off the internet, it won’t do much.
If you run a server that is publicly available on the internet that allows folks to upload files to it, then you will almost certainly want it.
Streaming is awesome, but I’ve stopped paying for streaming in most cases. Everything has gotten too expensive. When I run out of storage, I’ll start culling.
I haven’t backed up or collected movies or tv shows in a long while. Not much they’ve put out in the last ten years has been interesting to me. Music on the other hand… Lot good music has been put out recently and I’ll either buy the CD or if I have to, purchase a download. Either way, it’s going to be streaming from my server.
Degradation of privacy and security are not on or off switches, but rather a sliding scale dependent on your actions and choices.
What are you trying to protect and from whom?
What are the probable attack vectors?
What conveniences are you will to give up?
To prevent online services ( like google and facebook) from knowing who you are you have to completely disconnect from them and their networks.
Tails when used in combination with a VPN is secure, but only until the service you are trying to protect your privacy from put together that you are using them (usually by you logging into an account with them ).
When I was younger, privacy was something we were less concerned about. We were more concerned with preventing our systems from being hacked. Folks liked to say that the only secure computer was one that was locked in a solid concrete bunker on the dark side of the moon, with no data connection to the rest of the universe, and even then there would be some fool out there with a space suit and a jack hammer trying to get into it.
About the only upside to this that I can think of is that maybe, just maybe, programmers will start being more frugal with their memory usage. Everything else just sucks.
Meh.
Their soapbox, their rules. You don’t like their rules, self host and make your own.
When I first discovered Linux 20 years ago, I was trying to get a computer up and running for my sister to use to write her homework on. The first distro I tried that mostly worked on that ancient Athlon proc was Ubuntu.
I wound up switching to Ubuntu from Windows XP on my personal computer because I liked that it didn’t try to hide anything from me. I could (and did, often resulting in me needing to reinstall) twist all of the knobs and dials of the OS. The entire world of software that was entirely free to use, that I wasn’t blocked from using because I was poor…was the icing on the cake.
About 5 years ago, I was gifted a new PC with Windows 10 preinstalled.and I decided to give it a try for a while and as long as I was only playing games, working on a text document, or watching Youtube, it was fine. But as soon as I tried to actually do something either sysadmin related or creative, it felt like the OS constantly fighting me.
WSL helped with the sysadmin stuff (mostly, but not with anything related to Windows itself) but if I was working on music, forget it. It was like working covered wet cement. I was always fighting the OS to do whatever it was I was trying to do.
I wound up wiping it and installing Linux on it after about a year of fighting Windows. First NixOS (which I liked) before going back to the distro I know best. Ubuntu.
For me, now, computers are not the toy they were in my youth. They’re a tool. The best tool for a particular job is usually the tool you already know how to use. I know Linux, I can’t say the same for Windows.
I’ve gotten old enough that I no longer have the time to study and really learn how everything in a new OS, or even new piece of software works. So, I stick with what I know until I run into a job that requires me to learn a new tool. Doesn’t happen often anymore.
Generally, it’s as simple as just deleting the Windows NTFS partition. I would leave the others for now. Depending on how you installed your distro they may be related to your Linux installation. Deleting them could prevent you from booting into your Linux installation.
I’m not as familiar with UEFI as BIOS, but I believe UEFI uses a FAT formatted partition for booting into the OS proper.
You may need to adjust the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS afterwards to get it to boot back to Linux afterwards, but that is fairly uncommon in my experience.
The most likely issue you might run into is accidentally wiping your active Linux partition instead of the Windows one.
I would make backups and have your distros install disk handy before you wipe the partitions.
Afterwards, you can resize your linux root to include the now free space or move your home directory to the new partition after formatting it. Your call.
:-D
I’m in no position to toss to much shade at the data hoarder community. I’m personally sitting on close to 64TB of media I’ve collected over the years. In my case, most of it legitimately acquired, either by myself or by family, but still. It adds up and most of it hasn’t been accessed more than once or twice.
So long as you don’t need to stockpile old shows you never watch, you can get by on an old laptop and possibly an external drive.
My homelab started out on a Raspberry Pi 2b. Most of the hardware Ive brought online were dumpster specials someone else didn’t want. It can be done on the cheap. Won’t necessarily be reliable, but it can be done cheap.
I’ve had mixed success with the open source drivers for printing. Sometimes they work, sometimes not. Just depends on the individual printer model. Newer models seem to just work.
Attached scanners though always seem to need their proprietary drivers to function.
Up side, Brother doesn’t seem to pack in any useless software with their Linux drivers.
Brother Printers have a well deserved reputation. They work. You will probably need their proprietary drivers (which you can get from their website), but after that they just work.
I know they make a .deb available, but I think there’s also a .rpm if you’re repping Redhat land.
With the caveat that I last played with Gentoo 20 years ago… I am almost certainly a bit out of date.
If I remember correctly it, it explicitly recommended that you use at least the minimal gentoo live disk to get your system into a running state. You’d be working from the live cd for the first couple of sections before booting into a very basic install on your hard disk. From there you would compile the rest of your system.
Even the minimal disk provides all of the tools that you need to bootstrap the system. Sources for everything else are downloaded as they are needed. Come to think of it, I think the full desktop live dvd was fairly new at that time, in it’s first or second release.
Even at that time the Gentoo manual was incredibly well written and is in my opinion the gold standard for how user documentation should be written. I had been toying with linux for about 3 months at that point and was able to get a working desktop system up and running in about a month , mostly just waiting for things to compile on the slow processors we had back then. I would run a few commands and then go off and do something else for a few hours. rinse and repeat.
Other than needing more RAM, I think it will last a while. The 16GB I got was as much as I could afford.