Yes, use whatever you got laying around that is great but Storage_guy talked about if he would buy a new one, sorry if that did not come across.
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I find openSUSE a better distro since it is a more professional orientated one. Ubuntu for sure is great for first timers and ordinary users.
Just my preference. And choosing the tumbleweed weed version means it is on continuous update without need to upgrade between versions. All updates are stable ones (can choose beta ones if your daring)
I guess its closer to Unix that I started using when it got to Australia in about 1976
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Everyone knows you are using the the Red Star OS and think it is the best thing since the wheel was invented but it just aint right. 
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I’d say linux is the least shitty mainstream operating system out there. Windows and mac are a pain in the ass once you need to dive deeper into the os to get something done that can’t be done with a few clicks.
I miss the solaris days. An os that is flexible as a brick but easy enough to navigate because -everything- is well documented.
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For professional use suse enterprise is a gift from god. Yast is so nicely integrated and just gets stuff done without having to study the syntax of the configfile of some weird wrapper around a decade old forgotten piece of s**t software.
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I don’t know but I doubt it it’s worth it. I don’t have a Pi5 so haven’t tested. I know that a Pi4 can run 40 nodes comfortably and I think it could run 50 or even 60. But I can’t sensibly run more than 40 on my 80/20 ADSL line so I can’t find out. It’s looking like it is sensible to allow 100MB per safenode in case of peaks and so there is enough in a 8GB Pi4 for 100 nodes but by then I think the CPU will be struggling. With the 16GB in that RPi5 I think you’d be able to run 200 nodes but it will definitely require active cooling whereas if you put the Rpi4 in a passive case it stays cool enough and is quiet and there is no fan to go wrong. By the time you have a Pi5 running the CPU pretty hard with a fan on all the time in a case big enough for it and to dissipate the heat I think there will be better options.
If you want to stick with Pi I’d use the Pi5 money to buy 2 x RPi4 with nice passive cases. Then you have spread the risk around a little and can do maintenance periods for upgrades etc. without a total outage.
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I guess I’m a masochist 
. You do have to make an initial investment, but once you get used to it, there’s no going back from Arch. It’s just so nice to have a setup where you have only what you need. Even something like Ubuntu is bloated compared to Arch.
However, I do also like to have a Windows PC around, for the ‘it just works’ effect. Trying to setup my HP printer on Arch? Now there’s an act of masochism 
.
Windows would be my second choice, though I don’t like 11 as much as 10. With WSL and stuff, it’s a very decent development experience.
With respect to mac, I appreciate the hardward is good, but I absolutely cannot stand the operating system. Using that thing is masochistic to me. I hate the keyboard layout, the distro of Linux/Unix, the restrictions, and the GUI look and feel.
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While bloated Ubuntu works with my Canon printer without any setup. 
I’ve tried WSL on Windows 10 and it is surprisingly good. I suspect a plot to reduce the incentive to migrate 
But Windows itself is awful now. I hated the shifts after Windows 7 and each time I touch it, it’s worse. Now it is going fully enshitified with surveillance and ads, which affect performance as well as state of mind 
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I just meant it was bloated relative to Arch. It’s still a nice OS though and is not bloated in comparison to Windows/macOS. I’ll bear that in mind actually. If I could get my printer to work on an Ubuntu setup, it may negate the need for me to have Windows anywhere.
Yeah, I wasn’t a fan of 11 in this respect.
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Arch is for masochists, at least it was 15yrs or so back when I lost an entire weekend trying to install it and do the absolute basics, browse, run LibreOffice (or was it Star Office back then) and print.
Even then Ubuntu 8.04 recognised my HP Laserjet and it Just Worked - much faffing to get my inkjet/scanner to work though but CUPS was mostly crap then.
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The 5600G I plan yo use is 12x stronger cpu than a Pi4b, so that could then give around 400-500 nodes if put 32Gb ram in it and my daily main rig 5700g could then add alot also without breaking a sweat.
That is alot more than I expected if that is the case, f’ck I need more bandwidth with ISP and VPN hosts.
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I think something like this one will give a pi5 a good passive cooling, that was one of my thoughts.
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Everytime time using Wibdows 10 it makes me happy with a smile on my face, if it wasn’t for the potential feeling of it being a spyware and security flaws then there would be almost no reason to switch to something else.
I rather pay for an OS and it stays away from being a potential spyware OS.
But Ubuntu is also good as a complement for regular use and to use for coding.
My setup with Arch is basically just:
- Sway window manager
- Wired network config
- A terminal with Fish shell
- Firefox
- Nautilus
- LibreOffice for spreadsheets
- mpv
- qimgv
- GIMP
- Audacity
And that’s it. I don’t even bother having a login manager. It’s just so blazing fast. Boot up and login takes like 5 seconds.
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I avoid that problem by leaving my machine on 24/7
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Easy as pie with openSUSE and it can be lean & mean if you want. But yes arch wins out on the lean n mean front.
Unix was a good version back when it came out in 75/76 in Australia. Bell put it on DecSystems PDP 11 machines in those days. Could make it talk to DecSystems printers and teletypes real easy, just worked! Yea I know the interfaces were much more straight forward. Even interfacing devices I invented way back then to it worked a treat. DecSystems was bought out by HP long before HP was bought out and no longer the great company Hewitt and Packard made it into.
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who doesn’t miss hp-ux barf
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Do miss the HP 41C
People proved you could drop them from a 3 or more story building and just pop the case back together as if there wasn’t anything wrong with it, I didn’t do that to mine lol. Their gear was very well built back then when the pair owned/ran the company. I can remember working on a restricted export super computer back a few decades running Unix or was it Linux (over a billion c code lines per second) and it was for me to develop with, for a clustered set of them. Vaxes had nothing on these.
Me - I made good money out of that cos everybody else (on site) was scared of it since the Senior Geek had left.
I bullshitted them that I knew allll about it and it was just AIX in disguise. This may or may not have had any truth attached to it but it was similar enough that I could maintain and extend the backup scripts that the long-departed Senior Geek had written. Luckily anything else truly important like process control and payroll was run on SuSE boxes that were looked after by other competent people who lacked my bullshit skills.
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Arch itself is for masochists, but some Arch based distros are fine. I use Manjaro and it is so far the most troublefree Linux I have tried.
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