As I have mentioned in Jacob's Jacobless Jacobing, I recently bought another micro PC for the purposes of installing Raspberry Pi OS (in this case Raspberry Pi Desktop.) The more I learn about smart devices, the more I want to return to monke build a proper standalone adblock/anti-tracking machine. Seriously. We live in a schizophrenic's nightmare. That 4K LG TV is like the offspring of the Five Eyes and Mark Zuckerberg. Your "Internet of Things" refrigerator is phoning home to China. A Russian has hacked into your washing machine.

My solution to this Orwellian hellscape is try out a Pihole. Raspberry Pis, as devices, have become so cartoonishly expensive that it's actually a better economic decision to buy a low end micro PC (see above.) This thread will primarily serve as "lol, Knuckles thinks he's a linux geek" but will hopefully include at least a little useful info.

The new micro PC, a Beelink SER, arrived today. I learned that the other low power micro PC I bought in 2022, a Minisforum UM350, is significantly more powerful than the Beelink. The former has a Ryzen 3 3550H (4 cores, 8 threads, better per-core performance, Vega 8 graphics) and the latter has a Ryzen 3200U (2 cores, 4 threads, Vega 3 graphics.) This is actually a good thing as the UM350 can pull up to 35W (I think mine is rated at 20W, but it's been ages since I looked that up.) The 3200U pulls 15W. Obviously, I will be running the Pihole 24/7 once it's fully set up. Also, I don't exactly need 3D graphic performance of any kind with it.

The biggest surprise thus far is that I bought a unit that was not supposed to come with an OS and surprise, SUCKER! It's got Window 11 pre-installed. That OS is like a goddamn venereal disease.

This evening I downloaded the Pi Desktop OS image. It's a svelte 3.4GB. I'm not sure I have the energy at this hour to format a bootable thumb drive and begin the OS installation process.

Update 1 (of many): I successfully made install media on a thumb drive and was able to install Debian PiOS on the Beelink. The install process was mostly painless. There were a few points where I had to select something non-obvious to continue. Linux is FLOSSy and it never fails to show off that fact.

That's about the extent of the good news. Debian ships with Chromium. For the last half hour, I have been trying to install Firefox and ...completely fucking failing. I can download the tar.gz file sure. I can extract it. I have tried a number of directories. The extractor defaults to /tmp. I cannot drag the firefox directory out of /tmp and place it elsewhere. I made $HOME/Applications. I extracted FFX there. I found what I think is the executable. It will not run. I have done like 17 searches using DDG and the Goog on how to install FFX on Linux. The answers are remarkably unhelpful. I'm breaking for lunch.

Also, at the risk of accusations of preaching to the choir: Every experience with I have with Windows and now Linux is an argument for The Mac Tax. W11 is horrible in the most dystopian, Orwellian way imaginable. Linux is not horrible, but it is endlessly, relentlessly opaque an unhelpful. Linux assumes one's day job is linux and has no interest in any other possibility. Also, 10.6 Snow Leopard was the best version of MacOS, I will die on that hill.

5 minutes ago, Knuckledragger said:

Every experience with I have with Windows and now Linux is an argument for The Mac Tax FreeBSD.

FTFY

pkg install firefox

So apparently Pi Desktop is based on Debian Bullseye, which went EOL in August. That explains the 404s I've been getting trying to update it. The repositories are gone. My next step is to install Debian, probably with GNOME. The Linux Nightmare continues.