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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Jajcus@kbin.socialtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldIntroducing Raspberry Pi 5
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    9 months ago

    Doesn’t sound like the ‘cheap small computer you can run your hobby electronics project on’ that the original Pi used to be. It is not as cheap and a power hungry beast, still small, though. More and more like a PC and less and less a small cheap embedded platform. For some people it is a plus (I guess for most people here), for some not so much.

    I tend to build my projects on Raspberry Pi Pico now, but sometimes I would need something more powerful and Raspberry Pi 5 will be too much.


  • The idea is you package the software once and it works forever, because all dependencies for it are provided in the exact right version. And the dependencies may include things that would not be included in the base system (like super new versions of some important libraries).

    That is true, but that is also the problem: both the package and all its dependencies may be left never updated.

    In traditional Linux distribution, like Debian, every package must be compiled within the same system, which usually means specific version of all key libraries. And when the key libraries are upgraded some packages compiled for older versions won’t work, the package might not even compile with newer version of the libraries. And it is often not possible/practical to provide multiple different version of libraries (or other shared system components). The result is distribution developers have a lot of hard work updating all the packages. When there is no one to fix a package for the next version of the package, the package will be removed from the distribution. That happens when package is not maintained upstream and/or no one cares enough to maintain it in the distribution. In that case – is it worth to keep it?

    Snap makes packaging applications much easier, and more decoupled from the operating system ‘core’. Less maintenance is needed… but that also means less maintenance will be done, which is not necessarily good.

    On the other hand, Snap allows application to be maintained more rapidly than the distro core – in that case it can make things safer – fix in applications and their dependencies can be fixed that it could be done in the normal Debian release process. But that depends on maintainers of the specific snap and its dependencies.




  • Differences between 2.4 and 2.6 were quite big, I don’t think there was another such big change in kernel releases any time later. But that was also the time when Linux was transitioning from being a hobby project (already useful for serious stuff) to being a serious professional operating system – the last moment for major refactoring.

    Linux kernel is still changing and being constantly refactored, but now the changes tend to be more gradual and version numbers matter much less.





  • Every major distro uses systemd, because before that it was nearly impossible to properly implement things that distros have to provide.
    Most startup scripts were incredible set of hacks to make services behave. Those were very inefficient (they could not be efficient being shell scripts calling other commands for various simple repetitive tasks) and would often break when circumstances were different from ideal.

    Systemd just makes building Linux distribution much easier, and the resulting system is more reliable, more consistent and more flexible. Why would distro developers chose anything else?


  • Kopia or Restic. Both do incremental, deduplicated backups and support many storage services.

    Kopia provides UI for end user and has integrated scheduling. Restic is a powerfull cli tool thatlyou build your backup system on, but usually one does not need more than a cron job for that. I use a set of custom systems jobs and generators for my restic backups.

    Keep in mind, than backups on local, constantly connected storage is hardly a backup. When the machine fails hard, backups are lost ,together with the original backup. So timeshift alone is not really a solution. Also: test your backups.






  • Raspberry Pi is based on smart phone chips, very specific chips from one manufacturer. Raspberry Pi Foundation is not the main customer for this manufacturer and chips used for Raspberry Pi are not their only product – and now, during the big ‘chip shortages’ and supply chain problems other customers and other chips are given priority. There are no (or not enough) new chips for Raspberry Pis so there are no new Raspberries, so availability is dropping and prices are soaring.

    I guess the same is true for most other SBCs.

    For my hobby projects I switched to Raspberry Pi Pico. It is not a SBC, you won’t run Linux on that, but it is a very capable microcontroller board which is enough for my needs. It is way cheaper much more available. And I won’t look back – it occurred to me that things are much simpler when there is no whole OS on my devices and everything the device does is in my own code.

    There are no problems with Pico availability, as it is based on a simpler, custom chip, designed by Raspberry Pi Foundation and manufactured for Raspberry Pi Foundation – they are no longer dependent on a single supplier.