If you don’t want to reinstall the OS, you can probably use Clonezilla: https://clonezilla.org/show-live-doc-content.php?topic=clonezilla-live/doc/03_Disk_to_disk_clone

Maybe you need to update the drive ids for your bootloader (grub) afterwards, not sure about that.

Edit: Maybe the advanced “-g auto” option does that for you.

It seems that 18.04 was the last release for 32-bit x86 (i386): https://askubuntu.com/questions/1376090/latest-version-of-ubuntu-for-i386-architecture-32-bit

But you could just go for Debian which still supports it.

It’s an Apple Silicon Mac Mini. Do you have a particular reason to think the new one is less efficient?

I do think it can achieve that while waiting for network packets (see e.g. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested).

But in terms of money savings it would rarely make sense, as you need to make it back during the time you run the system. If we assume 6 years lifetime then it would only make sense to pay $120 more. But yes, I’d also go for a system that runs regular Linux :)

I don’t have one (and I don’t want one), but Anandtech measured the M1 version at 4.2W in idle. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-tested I think you can also get that from other Mini PCs (e.g. NUCs).

I would disagree with idle power not being important for a home server. Most of the time, your system will be doing very little and wait for something to happen. I also don’t think a typical server has a display attached. Wolfang explains this quite well: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM?t=94&si=zyjEKNX8yA51uNSf

I don’t have a Mac Mini, but for always-on systems, the idle power consumption can become quite significant.

• Gaming PCs can consume up to 100W (876 kWh / year).
• My AMD B650 NAS consumes about 17W in idle (150 kWh / year).
• A NUC / Mac Mini can idle as low as 5W (44 kWh / year).

If you pay 0.30$/kWh, running your old 100W gaming PC all the time would cost you 263$ per year. My NAS is 45$ per year…

It also depends on what you need/want from the machine. The Mac Mini doesn’t have any HDDs and can’t run a regular Linux distro, for example.

This seems very one-sided. Sure, the disclosure was not handled perfectly. However, this post completely ignores the terrible response by the CUPS team.

The point on NAT is certainly fair and prevented this from being a much bigger issue. Still, many affected systems were reachable from the internet.

Lastly, the author tries to downplay the impact of an arbitrary execution vulnerabilty because app armour might prevent it from fully compromising the system. Sure, so I guess we don’t need to fix any of those vulnerabilities /s.

This article is conflating terms that I need help distinguishing between. The other commenter mentioned that Ubuntu is a type of Debian but this article lists Debian and Ubuntu as distributions.

I’d say that the article is correct in calling them separate distributions.They are certainly related (both part of the Debian family), but I think most people would consider them to be separate distributions. Software built for Ubuntu 24.04 may work on Debian 12, but it might also not. For a beginner, I think it’s most useful to consider them to be separate things.

No, they’re almost entirely unrelated. Almost all CPUs will idle close to 0 W (with correctly working drivers). The main idle power contribution comes from the mainboard and other devices (e.g. disks). The Mini PCs you mentioned should have a very low total idle power, probably below 10W.

Check out Wolfgang on YouTube, he has some great videos on the topic: https://youtu.be/Ppo6C_JhDHM

I’ve also recently built my own NAS and I’ve gone through similar considerations. One of my mayor decisions was not to use btrfs because it’s not recommended for Raid Z1/Raid 5. With that, I landed on ZFS and TrueNAS Scale. Note that RAID expansion should be landing in both very soon.

Things with TrueNAS were pretty easy, very quick, and everything worked nicely. However, I noticed that it was constantly accessing the disks and preventing them from spinning down. I really wanted to keep the power consumption low (<20 W idle), so I eventually decided to just go with Vanilla Debian + ZFS. I can recommend that if you want to tinker with things yourself. Otherwise, I’d recommend TrueNAS Scale.

As for migration, you might be able to create a degraded pool initially, copy over the data, and add the parity disk last. Raid expansion would ofc also help there…

What kind of junk energy is there to harvest from a car (in meaningful amounts)? I guess breaking is the obvious answer, but that’s already covered by regenerative breaking. Most car-based energy harvesting systems seem to employ speedbumps that clearly take useful (kinetic) energy away from the car (probably at a very poor efficiency).

How would a turbine that takes energy from the air current generated by a passing car decrease the energy of the car?

Not sure where you got that idea from, but how would that generate a meaningful amount of energy? It seems very unlikely that such a system would ever recover the energy spent on its construction.

Sure, but those are completely different approaches. Dams have the advantage that they have a much larger capture area for water and that they can accelerate the water beyond the 10 m/s terminal velocity of raindrops.

Raindrop energy harvesting is a rubbish idea. The raindrops simply don’t have a meaningful amount of energy to begin with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36907674

Did you perform a full shutdown of Windows (Windows doesn’t fully release the partition on a normal shutdown)?

Edit: adding some context. I am planning to setup a dev machine that I will connect to remotely and would like to babysit very little while having stable and fresh packages. In the Ubuntu world we would go to an LTS release but on the RPM/Dnf world is there any other distro apart from CentOS Stream? And also is CentOS Stream comparable to an LTS release at all considering that they do not have release number?

Wanting both stable and fresh packages is unfortunately somewhat difficult in my experience. I think the primary choice within the Fedora ecosystem is if you want to have fresh packages (Fedora) or if you prefer a slower update cycle and more stable packages (RHEL/Alma/Rocky). In the second case you can also choose if you wish to pay Red Hat for support (RHEL) or not (Alma or Rocky).

One thing that’s quite different in RHEL vs Ubuntu/Debian ist that it gets minor releases that include substantial new features. For example you’ll get new compilers, python versions, drivers, … CentOS Stream gets those slightly ahead of RHEL/Alma/Rocky (a cynical person might say that CentOS Stream is a rolling beta for RHEL). But, IMHO that’s not really a strong reason to use CentOS Stream.

If you’d go with an Ubuntu LTS release, then I’d look into RHEL/Alma/Rocky.

The driver should already be installed but there seems to be an issue with brltty registering the corresponding USB ID when they shouldn’t. You can probably fix it by following this guide: https://koen.vervloesem.eu/blog/how-to-stop-brltty-from-claiming-your-usb-uart-interface-on-linux/ (or this one: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/670637)

Edit: Perhaps this has since been fixed in Mint 21 / Ubuntu 22.04.

You can make this work using ext and Timeshift rsync. I have also opted to exclude /var/lib/flatpak/ because it’s quite large. With that, my 5 snapshots currently take up about 34 GB.

However, I would recommend backing up your deb applications/packages (typically installed under/usr), as those can be critical for your system.

This “new law” was passed more than a year ago… But, it’s still a step in the right direction.