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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Thanks for trying it out on your own system!

    In my case, the problem was that the disk never showed up in the Fedora installer. I’ve quickly reproduced the issue in a VM (but I originally noticed it on bare metal):

    Installation Destination

    As you can see in fdisk, the disk (/dev/sda) has been recognized correctly by the kernel and works as expected. But somehow the installer only shows the “internal” /dev/vda.

    After some further investigation, this seems to be related to the specific USB drives. I tried three different ones. It failed on a USB stick and the original external NVME enclosure. However, it did accept my USB to SATA adapter. So I guess I could install Fedora on my 10-year old HDD… 😐



  • Ah, that would put a bit of complication into things. If you want to actually accomplish this though, you should largely start with the same steps as a standard system install, using a second USB flash drive to write the distro onto the external SSD, leaving enough space to build the rest of the partitions you need.

    I’ve actually tried to install Fedora on an USB SSD to play around with it. But somehow the installer just refused to select the second USB drive as an installation target. I looked for quite some time but couldn’t find a way to do it. I ended up trying to install it manually like Arch (for fun), but never got a bootable system 😅 I was able to install Arch and NixOS on the same drive without issue.

    I’m actually not sure how OP could achieve something close to what they’re looking for… A regular installation certainly seems like the right choice, but that may require using an internal drive.








  • Nah, it’s been upstream since RHEL locked down. Rocky’s been doing some funky stuff though.

    AlmaLinux mostly ships packages that are maintained by Red Hat for RHEL, which is why I called it effectively a downstream. But maybe we can just agree that they’re related and it’s complicated 😅

    Good thing there’s flatpak, snap, appimage, nix, guix, distrobox, etc. to keep you up to date. The question is then: do you mind if your DE and drivers don’t change for years. And that’s perfectly fine for a lot of people.

    Yes, the situation has certainly improved, especially for GUI applications. But there’s always some trade-offs involved with those alternative packaging options. The nice thing is that you can freely choose if you want such a very-LTS option, or something fresher :)


  • AlmaLinux is effectively a downstream of RHEL, so it inherits a lot of RHEL’s pros and cons. I think, from a technical perspective, it makes a lot of sense for professional applications. It has a rock solid base OS that only changes rarely, which has lead to widespread support among professional (commercial) software. On top of that you get more regular updates to hardware support and (some) applications. You also get very long support times, which can make sense for some use cases.

    On the hand, this model certainly also has its downsides. Towards the end of the life cycle, the packages get very old, especially the base OS (e.g. RHEL 7, which goes EOL this year, ships with gcc version 4.8). If you care about having the latest and greatest packages, this is not a distro for you. It’s also not clear if Red Hat will try to further crack down on their downstream distros…

    Overall, I think it’s a good choice for a professional environment, where you don’t need bleeding edge packages. Some commercial software also doesn’t give you a lot of other options. For personal use, I’d probably look for another distro, unless you’re looking for a very slow update cycle.




  • The GPL (and AGPL) do place some restrictions on how you can integrate it into another application but this doesn’t have anything to do with commercial use.

    Basically, if you create a derivative work and publish/sell it, you also need to license it under the AGPL. In case of the AGPL it also applied if you use it to offer a service. But if you only use the unmodified version (same source code) and the intended application interfaces, this does not apply.

    Running the application on Windows is clearly allowed. The second case also sounds ok (allowing this is kinda the point of FOSS). However, if you create an improved version of PDFCreater, then you’ll need to publish it under the same AGPL license.


  • I’m not a legal expert, but the AGPL seems to be quite clear on this point:

    1. Basic Permissions.

    All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met. This License explicitly affirms your unlimited permission to run the unmodified Program. […]

    You may make, run and propagate covered works that you do not convey, without conditions so long as your license otherwise remains in force. […]

    However, depending on the exact thing that they said, they may be in violation of the AGPL. Once they have given you (conveyed) a copy of the program, they cannot impose a license fee for the use of the software.

    1. Automatic Licensing of Downstream Recipients.

    Each time you convey a covered work, the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensors, to run, modify and propagate that work, subject to this License. […]

    You may not impose any further restrictions on the exercise of the rights granted or affirmed under this License. For example, you may not impose a license fee, royalty, or other charge for exercise of rights granted under this License, and you may not initiate litigation […]


  • I agree that the Tuxedo Nano Pro is very expensive, but the Mac Mini is much more expensive. When you look at the comparable, German prices, it looks like this:

    • 8GB/512GB: 849€ vs 929€
    • 16GB/1TB: 924€ vs 1389€
    • 32GB/2TB: 1044€ vs 2079€ (24 GB only)

    The minimum config prices from Apple look quite good, but they fleece you for the RAM and SSD capacity. And of course you can’t upgrade them on your own. And of course the Mac Mini doesn’t support Linux (maybe Asahi Linux will get there in a few years, but Apple certainly isn’t helping).