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A Collection of Recent Distributions and Operating Systems Coverage at Valnet
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GNU/Linux
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Make Use Of ☛ I tried replacing my laptop with Samsung DeX and it was a disaster
Samsung DeX promises the ability to replace your laptop: plug in a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and your phone instantly becomes a full desktop computer. On paper, it sounds perfect. Modern smartphones are incredibly powerful, so why shouldn’t they be able to double as laptops? That’s exactly what I was curious about when I switched from an iPhone to a Samsung phone.
While I was able to work entirely from my phone using Samsung Dex (in fact, I wrote this entirely on my phone), the constant hurdles quickly wore me down and left me so frustrated that I ended up switching back to my MacBook.
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DeX doesn’t support multiple monitors, and there’s no way to create virtual desktops either. The result is that everything has to be crammed onto a single screen, which makes working across multiple apps frustrating and messy.
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HowTo Geek ☛ 4 Things Linux Has Taught Me About Open Source
When you think of open-source software, you probably think of the cost (free), but that's not the full story. There's an entire ecosystem of both selflessness, selfishness, and moral ideals that make it up. I've outlined four things that using Linux has taught me about free and open-source software.
Open-Source Software Takes Many Forms
People often view open-source software as both free of cost and having accessible source code; however, they often don't consider that software licenses may have political motivations too. The term "open source" does not adequately describe all of these aspects. To demystify these issues, there are several key factors to understand.
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Server
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HowTo Geek ☛ Self-Hosting Isn’t Free: The Hidden Costs Nobody Talks About
I love my homelab, but it actually cost me a lot more than I ever thought. No, I didn’t go on buying sprees and buy high-end servers with petabytes of storage. Self-hosting is great, and I love my homelab, but there are definitely hidden costs that I wish I would have known before diving in.
Where I live in Tennessee, the electricity is relatively affordable. On average, I pay around $0.11 per kWh. Across all of America, the average kWh cost is $0.1747, a good 50% higher than what I pay personally.
One of my rack-mount servers, which is pretty cheap to pick up second-hand, uses around 250W of power. This meant it cost me about $20 to run, but the average rate of electricity for the US would put me over $30 per month. That’s $30 per month (or $360 per year) to run a single server. Now, multiply that by three (how many servers are sitting next to me), and that cost stacks up to over $1,000 per year—just to run a few servers.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have a rack-mount server in your homelab. I had three, and recently downsized to just one. But, electricity cost is something I didn’t really think about until my bill skyrocketed when I added two more servers.
My current homelab consists of a 48-port PoE switch, a Wi-Fi router, my fiber modem, a Raspberry Pi, an i9-13900K desktop, and a Lenovo RD440 rack-mount server. That’s just my homelab, not including the other computers in the house. The homelab, however, currently uses around 375W of electricity. That means I have an annual operating cost of $360 per year, and the average American would be spending $574 annually.
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HowTo Geek ☛ From Plex to Pi-hole: The Software That Made My Homelab Feel Complete
I’ve been building out my homelab for nearly half a decade. It's involved many iterations; from hardware to software the makeup of my homelab has all changed many times over the years.
However, I’ve finally come to a point where I feel things are stable enough to call it “finished”—for now. While I’m sure the software I run and the hardware it runs on will ebb and flow over time, this is where my homelab is right now, and I am very happy with it.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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XDA ☛ Immutable operating systems are a blessing and a curse
The sheer diversity in Linux distributions is the reason many computing enthusiasts (including yours truly) dive into the distro-hopping rabbit hole. The best part? As you continue to dig deeper into the Linux ecosystems, you start to encounter distros that vary from really fun to use distros to absolute nightmare fuel (and sometimes, even both). However, many of these seemingly obscure distributions have started to become popular lately, with immutable operating systems being a prime example.
SteamOS, for instance, has made immutable distros a lot more accessible to the general audience. But having spent hundreds of hours tinkering with NixOS, VanillaOS, and Fedora Silverblue, I must admit that these seemingly game-changing distros have their own perks and quirks.
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HowTo Geek ☛ I Went Back and Booted the First Linux Distro I Ever Tried
Nearly every Linux user seems to remember their first encounter with the OS. I decided to try booting up the first distro I ever tried, Knoppix, to see how well it held up since I first tried it over 20 years ago.
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