Not really.

I listen to tool, I’ve seen star wars, I don’t really have any interest in dune.

I’m probably broken though.

I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

Yep, I’m sure they do.

Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?

Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.

I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.

Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.

I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.

I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.

I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.

So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.

This is completely valid. I didn’t want to get into the economics of short term vs long term gains, etc.

There’s a paradox in environmental activism, like with many other things. Basically, if you do everything in your power to avoid an environmental catastrophe, and that catastrophe does not happen, then, did it simply not happen because it never would have happened? Or did your impact avoid the issue?

There’s no way to know.

You know what you can tell really quickly? This quarters profits… Something that seems to be a focus of every capitalist ever.

Drive the earth into becoming an unlivable hellscape, but for a short time, create a lot of value for the shareholders.

Oh yeah, I’m not saying it’s good, just less bad.

Now instead of being crammed into a single option, you get the “choice” of several (probably equally bad) options.

Honestly, everything should just conform to standards, and it’s up to the browser to support those standards. If your browser doesn’t support it, well, good luck.

Not this bullshit of “your browser isn’t compatible with this website”. Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.

It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.

With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.

MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.

However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.

Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.

Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.

There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.

Good luck.

It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.

If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.

I just want to say, this is less bad than websites requiring that you use internet explorer.

Those were dark days.

From my experience capitalism and climate activism are incompatible ideologies. Capitalism is entirely, without a doubt, entirely focused on the bottom line. If it doesn’t make them more money and/or costs them more money, they’re against it. That’s why something as universally bad as smoking took so long to be essentially outed as a problem, and something people should actively avoid. Just watch “thank you for smoking” for more detail on that one.

Cleaning up factory emissions and by-products/waste, doesn’t earn companies any money. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s far easier and cheaper to simply dump the raw waste into the environment. Whether thats chemical runoff, or toxic fumes, or carbon emissions, etc. To safely collect and dispose of the by-products is an expensive process.

Any efforts from companies that are “green” is either that they can offer you a marginally less-bad (environmentally) product at a reduced cost to them. Whether that is because they passed those costs onto the consumer, or because the “green” alternative is actually cheaper, is the only question. As soon as the “green” alternative costs them more and they can’t justify an increase in product cost for being “green”, they simply won’t do it. Anything outside of this scope is simply a PR stunt to try to gain favor with the more environmentally conscious consumers to try to pull them away from their current brand loyalties, over to your brand.

Pretty much all pr stunts of this sort are one-offs, to give the illusion of making an effort, while doing essentially nothing actually helpful.

Unless they can somehow make a profit from “saving the planet” then they won’t do it. It’s against their very nature.

Hello friend.

You can get 2.5gbps MoCA now. You may want to consider upgrading.

Nice username btw

Depending on where you live and what your power circuits look like (not the outlets, the circuits that power them), you may have a great, or very poor experience.

I’d need to know what country you live in to know more, since power wiring standards vary from country to country. In the USA and Canada (I’m in Canada and the USA is the same), we use split phase and crossing the split phase will severely hinder the ability for powerline to perform.

It’s a viable option, not my favorite option, I’d recommend MoCA (coax) over powerline, but it’s ultimately up to you.

IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.

I have three suggestions for you.

Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.

Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.

Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.

I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.

I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).

Good luck.

I do this.

I used to work in grocery, and I know how to do the job quite well, even after being out of the industry for a long time. When I come up to a shelf that I know the workers have recently done up to look proper, I will take what I need, then fix the shelf so it looks the same when I leave.

If I spot a box of product behind the box I just took the last product out of, I’ll toss the empty in behind and bring the full one forward, because I’m not a neanderthal.

Grocery workers aren’t paid enough as is and they have enough work without me adding to their workload. I loathe anyone who picks up products, then leaves them elsewhere in the store, especially if it’s something perishable like meat, dairy, or frozen goods. Fuck those people. Is it really so hard to either take it back to where you found it, or at least find an employee and ask them to return it so it doesn’t spoil? Don’t be a lazy fuck. You have to go talk to the cashier when you check out, so give it to them. If they let it spoil, that’s not your fault nor your problem, just try. FFS.

Kinda makes me want to get one of those wire hotdog rollers that you see in convenience stores and just set it up in my back seat whenever I’m going somewhere and will be leaving my car in the sun for a few hours. Just load it up with hotdogs, turn on the thing to make it spin (no heater required), go about my day and when I get back to my car, lunch is ready.

… But then, I think of the smell.

I would think that’s it’s more hard than anything, but sure.

I could not possibly give less fucks if someone steals from a name brand store. Little mom a pop shops, I might care a little bit, but any nationwide chain? Fuck them.

If I see someone stealing from someone else, I will definitely have fucks to give. But I’m not going to shed any tears if someone walks out of a Walmart with shit they didn’t pay for.

These fucks gouge us every chance they get. They raise prices mere days before a “sale” so they can slap a x% off sticker on something and sell it for full fucking price. I do not have any sympathy for them at all.