One nit to pick for anyone who reads this later.

/srv is probably a more appropriate location than /mnt. /srv is for local data services are going to serve.

It’s not so much about a second package manager as it is about having a base system and separating extra software from the base system.

Moving extra packages out of the base system allows the extra packages to be updated quicker. Fewer things get frozen when the stable point in time distro release is tagged. This also helps the base as it can move without having to worry about every piece of software in the repos being compatible with the changes.

The concept exists as 3rd party repos. However, most aren’t setup to be as cleanly separated as ports are.

There are none. Linux is a baseless system, which is its power and frustration.

You could install Debian or Alma Linux and run pkgsrc on it to approximate a base and extra packages setup like the BSDs.

There are parts of a tightly coupled userland forming, like iptools and systemd, but there are many things missing at the moment.

Yeah. These problems are why I left Ubuntu for Fedora.

Because I have to admin Windows boxes and M365. There are PS modules for lots of different MS things.

And here it is.

Small VMs, like everything else.

https://github.com/apple/containerization

Cool. Podman Desktop should be easier after this. Presumably, it’s still a Linux VM driven by something written by Apple instead of qemu.

No macOS containers though. Being able to spin up macOS containers would have been nice for builds and isolating things like pkgsrc.

As a Fedora user, I would go with Fedora. 😄

OpenSuse Tumbleweed is good, but I find Yast to be kind of overkill. I’m sure it’s great when people figure it out, but there are too many options before then.

Fedora is much simpler, which is weird to say.

Not necessarily. Rsync deltas are very efficient, and not everything supports deltas.

It may very well be the correct tool for the job.

Anyway, problem fit wasn’t part of the question.

The daemon tracks file state, so the transfers start quicker because rsync doesn’t have to scan the filesystem.

MZLA is a different subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation.

It was community maintained, then MZLA Corp was formed under the Mozilla Foundation. Deals to house Thunderbird under other foundations fell through, which is why it’s still under the Mozilla Foundation.

Project 1: Install Gentoo on it. 🙂 Project 2: Keep Gentoo installed on it.

Mozilla is going to surveil their users and feed the data to their AI/Ads systems. They needed people to opt-in, so they created a EULA.

How hard is clevis to setup?

I’ve seen it referenced for encrypted servers, but I haven’t tried setting it up.

Unencrypted boot is unfortunate. What are PCR registers?

I do encrypt my drives, and it’s not as transparent in Linux as it is in the others. I’m sure I could get a TPM setup for seamless boots, but I haven’t done that yet.

For mobile drivers, I still encrypt, but that locks them to one OS since LUKS isn’t cross platform. There is VeraCrypt for cross-platform encryption, but that’s one more thing to manage and install.

Linux, and macOS, enables write caching by default and Windows does not. This is what you’re seeing.

Mounting the drive with “noatime,flush” (preferred) would adjust the write caching and mounting with “sync,dirsync” would turn off write caching.

Random peripherals get tested against windows a lot more than Linux, and there are quirks which get worked around.

I would suggest an external SSD for any drive over 32GB. Flash drives are kind of junk in general, and the external SSDs have better controllers and thermals.

Out of curiosity, was the drive reformatted between runs, and was a Linux native FS tried on the flash drive?

The Linux native FS doesn’t help migrate the files between Windows and Linux, but it would be interesting to see exFAT or NTFS vs XFS/ext4/F2FS.

Did the USB drive get excessively warm during this because it looks like the drive is throttling?

Incidentally, this is why I switched to using external SSDs. A group of 128GB flash drives I had would slowly fall over when I would write 100GB off files to it.

I need to run immutable distros more, and I need to figure out how to roll my own images.

Desktop side, I need certain things in the base image rather than adding more layers or using a container. Things like rsync, nvim, git, curl, lynx, etc.

Would immutable distros help reach more desktop audiences? Perhaps. It’s more about applications though. The biggest help has been electron apps and the migration to web apps. The Steam Deck is successful because it has applications people want.

Server side, they look really promising for bare metal servers. Provided, there is an easy way to compile custom images. Being able to easily rollback to a known good image is very enticing, as you point out.