• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 2 months ago
cake
Cake day: February 10th, 2025

help-circle










  • Timeshift is a good piece of software doing a tired trick.

    The new hotness is copy on write file systems and snapshots. I can snapshot, instantly, then do a system update and revert to the previous snapshot also instantly.

    Instead of using symlinks files, like Timeshift, the filesystem is keeping track of things at the block level.

    If you update a block it writes a new copy of the block (copy on write). The old copy is still there and will be overwritten unless it is part of a snapshot. Since the block is already written, snapshots don’t require any data to be copied so they’re instant.

    Once you finish the system update, all of the overwritten blocks are still there (part of the snapshot) and reverting is also just a filesystem operation, theres no mass data to be copied and so it is also instant.

    It does use disk space, as allocated blocks AND snapshotted blocks are stored. It uses less than Timeshift though, since Timeshift copies the entire file when it changes

    ZFS and btrfs are the ones to use.


  • As an example, I used an old PC and purchased a PCI-E card with a bunch of SATA connections. So the cost was about $30 for the SATA card. The biggest cost was the drives, about $90 per 4TB (x5 because I’m using a ZFS raid setup).

    I’m buying 10 more 12TB drives (and 2x 2TB NVME drives) for a future expansion which is when I’ll retire my current gaming PC to be the NAS and donate the current server to whoever needs it. If you buy a dedicated device it’ll be more expensive but you won’t need to install Linux on it or configure it, they’ll usually have easy to use software accessible via a web interface. If you’re comfortable with Linux you can use just about any hardware to get you started.

    Like Xanza said, I don’t consider it part of my media server. It’s generic storage that I use for everything. Security system recordings, backups, AI models, self-hosted cloud services like NextCloud, storage for my various syncthing clients, etc.






  • It doesn’t stop cheating, it just makes cheating require spending a few hundred dollars and dealing with complex hardware setups. This means that relatively few people try.

    Non-kernel anti-cheat can be bypassed by software. So it’s cheap and easily available.

    That’s the only difference. Kernel anti-cheat doesn’t prevent cheating, it just makes it more expensive.


  • Developers who use kernel anti-cheat don’t support Linux because userspace anti-cheat is largely pointless. It doesn’t matter if you personally don’t care, the companies that want anti-cheat do care.

    The workaround for kernel anti-cheat requires hundreds of USD in hardware. The workaround for userspace anti-cheat is entirely software.

    Because of this, you will have less cheaters if cheating has a $500 price tag. That’s why kernel anti-cheat is effective, there’s no way for that to be solved with a WINE patch.