Crass Spektakel

At least on Debian/Ubuntu I can use tasksel to select a useful preset of packages right while installing. Base is just a text mode shell with minimal command line tools, Server has some Network Stuff, LXQT, Gnome and so on… for the total N00b it is fine to default to KDE or Gnome, I prefer LXQT though. And tbh, I think Firefox, Libreoffice and VLC are useful preinstall in nearly every use case while the usual stuff on Windows is pretty useless (Another Antivirus? Really? A trial version of a paint programm inferior to Gimp 1.0? Office 365?)

Good Luck. I haven’t seen those drive ANYWHERE outside Amazon and Microsoft backend Systems. Technically speaking they weren’t even from “Servers” but from “SAN” systems.

Beware: Those MTD-Stuff does NOT work with consumer stuff. Highend-MTD is practically not existing for consumers because Windows doesn’t support them anyway.

If you check the Linux Kernel Frontend you’ll find a section about “MTD devices”. There are some userspace programs listed for managing the kernel components. Those tools are somewhat good for Host Based SMR hard drives but you might need tools to unlock the drives which I didn’t need because they got unlocked at work. Those HDs are only sold to data centers. The two I have at home are from work and it is a miracle they let me have them at all.

Flash based MTD though is sometimes available but not in normal computing. Because SATA, NVMe, eMMC are actually “to advanced” for that stuff. MTD is VERY Low-Level. The driver does everything, buffering, moving from MLC to QLC, refreshing cells and so on. For me it is a PCIE-Card with absolutely no intelligence but a very fat driver. But you might also find it in old Linux/Android-Based phones, Netbooks and Tablets though current smart phones use “smarter” storage like eMMC. Iphones have MTD but you can not get Linux to run on them.

I am using a Netbook from 2009, Atom N570 1666Mhz, 2Gbyte RAM, 120GByte SSD. It is 550 gramm light, is so small it fits into the interior pocket of my jacket, runs eight hours on battery. And everything runs okeyish on it except maybe Youtube-Videos inside Firefox. So I set Firefox to start Youtube-Videos in VLC. Now I can even watch Youtube on my rusty old Netbook.

Worst problem: 32Bit support is running thin nowadays. It could run 64Bit but on that old system that actually costs quite some performance.

I once needed the driver to use “Floppy Streamers” under Linux. That is plain impossible with Windows. For Linux it just meant to recompile the kernel-module each time you updated the kernel which basically was “make && make install”. Then at accessing /dev/qic-nst0 I had a Floppy Streamer.

Yes, sometimes you need drivers under Linux. But it is VERY rare.

On one side it is a rare sight to need to install a driver for Linux. I had an Star NL24-10 printer with an IEEE-488 connector for the C64.

INSANE! Linux natively supports C64 peripherals.

I build a simple adaptor from Parallel to IEEE-488-Serial and when I told CUPS the printer was on /dev/ieee488 it immediately found it. Insane. Oh, the Floppy was also available, at least at sector Level though there actually is no C1541 Filesystem so I had to open it in Starcommander, some sort of Norton/Midnite-Commander, which officially supports those images.

The amount of supported hardware is INSANE. You will get stuff working which works nowhere else.

The coolest shit are Host-Based Storage Systems, with the most known group as Memory-Technology-Devices. For example there are SMR-Harddisks where I can change the SMR-Layout from my computer. I can say “50% capacity CMR, 50% SMR”. Or Host-Based-QLC-Drives where you can select for each MinWriteCell how to use it: As ultra-Fast SLC/MLC, as the middle TLC or as the superslow QLC. Sure, it costs Capacity. But the choice ist yours. I bought a Data-Center-Intel-QLC-Drive and converted it to 50% MLC at 3.5GByte/s sustained and 50% QLC with 0.5Gbyte/s. Sure, it reduced the capacity of the 4TByte Drive to 3TByte. But who cares if it is so fast it blows anything away. On Windows you can not even detect those drives.

But: If you have a really bad case of “unsupported hardware” then things get complicated fast.

When I last installed Windows I had to google where do download Libreoffice, Firefox, Steam, Audacity, VLC, Gimp and a lot more software.

On Linux most came preinstalled, the rest was one click in the Repository (“Store” for Generation Smartphone)

Now I know why my girl friend and I both love Hitachi…

I brought my mother once to hospital with a bad stomach. Slipped a punch line from scrubs. The female doctor countered it within the same second perfectly from the show, a assistant behind us added the next line and I finished the roundabout. My mother looked around us, understood the joke but not where it came from - she hated Scrubs deeply from her heart - and we all told it Scrubs was just the thing.