Files are files and filesystems are filesystems. You keep your files on filesystems.
NTFS and ext4 are non convertible - you cannot turn one into the other directly, in place. However you can take files from one and put them on another.
Yes, moving TBs does take time, sorry it is unbearable.
"I understand that Canonical has every right to make the decision about their product."
That seems fair. There are loads of distros available so why not try something else if you don't like Ubuntu?
Linux and other mainstream Unices such as FreeBSD or OpenBSD int al (that's not something I ever thought I'd be able to say a few decades back) are not Windows or Apples or whatevs. You do you and not them!
If Ubuntu fails to scratch your itch then move on. Debian is the upstream for Ubuntu so you'll probably be fine with that instead. There is loads of documentation for Debian via the wiki etc and of course most Ubuntu docs will apply as well.
I do IT security for a living. It is quite complicated but not unrealistic for you to DIY.
Do a risk assessment first off - how important is your data to you and a hostile someone else? Outputs from the risk assessment might be fixing up backups first. Think about which data might be attractive to someone else and what you do not want to lose. Your photos are probably irreplaceable and your password spreadsheet should probably be a Keepass database. This is personal stuff, work out what is important.
After you've thought about what is important, then you start to look at technologies.
Decide how you need to access your data, when off site. I'll give you a clue: VPN always until you feel proficient to expose your services directly on the internet. IPSEC or OpenVPN or whatevs.
After sorting all that out, why not look into monitoring?
I think we might be writing at cross purposes. The system you had for your mum obviously worked effectively for you and that is the important thing.
POTS provide(s|d) a fixed point of reference - your address is registered against the number for 999 etc; it provides power for a handset or device; Its been like that for a lot of decades! These are cast iron guarantees. A POTS line has guarantees, enshrined in UK law, that mobile etc does not have. POTS is circuit switched (well it was) which means there is a physical path between the ends for the duration of the conversation.
So, by old school, I mean that you currently have important guarantees about telephony in the UK that will evaporate in future. In 2025 or so, we in the UK will have finished migrating from our old school POTS copper lines and will enjoy our smart new SoGEA lines instead. Single Order Generic Ethernet Access. Instead of an emulated circuit switched line we will use VoIP across the entire country. Nothing wrong with that but it probably won't have the guarantees that POTS had.
Red Care is no more - BT have dropped it on the floor as of Feb this year which may indicate that things are not well with our future comms promises. The general system that Red Care was one product of is still available.
This is the important point: Promises (in law) that we used to be able to rely on for comms may (will) be binned.
In the UK at least, the POTS (Plain Old ...) copper phone lines carry an electrical current as well as signals and can power the handset. There are certain guarantees about this so that in an emergency your phone will still work so you can dial 999 (our original emergency number) or 112. Our fire regulations require something like 30 minutes before things should start failing. In the real world, you get out immediately and use your mobile.
We have an emergency alarm monitoring system used by businesses. Its generally known as "Red Care" which was a brand run by BT (British Telecom). You have a small device connected to a phone line (and powered by it) and it will monitor your fire detectors and building access control systems and a 24 hour manned monitoring centre will notify you in the event of an emergency. Nowadays, these devices will use your wifi and internet connection. Sometimes: old school is best.
Errm, Wireshark. Please bear with me.
Wireshark is a shining example of an open source project completely and utterly crapping on the closed source competition. As a result we all benefit. I recall spending a lot of someone else's money on buying a sort of ruggedized laptop with two ethernet ports to do the job back in the day.
Nowdays, I can run up a tcpdump session on a firewall remotely with some carefully chosen timings and filters and download it to my PC and analyse it with Wireshark.
OK, all so convenient but is it any use?
Say you have a VoIP issue of some sort. The PCAP from tcpdump that you pass to Wireshark can analyse it to the nth degree. Wireshark knows all about SIP and RTP (and IAX) and you can even play back the voice streams or have them graphed so you can see what is wrong or whatever. That's just VoIP, it has loads of other dissectors and decorators built in.
So what?
The UK (for example) will be dispensing with boring old, but reliable, POTS (Plain Old Telephony System) by 2025. Our entire copper telephony and things like RedCare (defunct soon) will go away.
We are swapping out circuit switching for packet switching. To be fair, a lot of the backend is already TCP/UDP/IP that is shielded away from us proles. When SoGEA (Single Order Generic Ethernet Access) really kicks in then the old school electric end to end connection will be lost in favour of packet switching, which never fails (honest guv).
If you are an IT bod of any sort, you really should be conversant with Wireshark.
Start off with Gentoo to get the hang of the basics. Switch to Arch because compile times and heat burns. Try Linux from Scratch for a laugh, giggle and move on, but with a new found respect for distro maintainers.
What's your use case? If it involves AAA games then that will narrow things a bit but if you simply want a bit of docs n that and, internet browsing and a spot of email and realtime sound and CAD then we'll need a broader chat.
Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, Mint - those would be my starters for 10 in no particular order. Pick yours and your hip angle. I personally run Arch (actually) and Gentoo. I don't recommend them as a dip your toe in the water job 8)
Feel free to dive in, the water is lovely.
Did anyone really think that making UEFI systems the equivalent of a mini OS was a good idea
UEFI and Secure Boot were pushed forcibly by MS. That's why FAT32 is the ESP filesystem.
If I had to guess, a brief was drafted at MS to improve on BIOS, which is pretty shit, it has to be said. It was probably engineering led and not an embrace, extinguish thing. A budget and dev team and a crack team of lawyers would have been whistled up and given a couple of years to deliver. The other usual suspects (Intel and co) would be strong armed in to take whatever was produced and off we trot. No doubt the best and brightest would have been employed but they only had a couple of years and they were only a few people.
UEFI and its flaws are testament to the sheer arrogance of a huge company that thinks it can put a man on the moon with a Clapham omnibus style budget and approach. Management identify a snag and say "fiat" (let it be). Well it was and is and it has a few problems.
The fundamental problem with UEFI is it was largely designed by one team. The wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI is hilarious in describing it as open. Yes it is open ... per se ... provided you decide that FAT32 (patent encumbered) is a suitable file system for the foundations of an open standard.
I love open, me.
Employer here (UK)! I'm probably not normal being the MD and running Arch (actually) on my gear. I had to switch from Gentoo because I kept on burning myself.
For me, something like the LFCSA is something I respect because it is practical. Back in the day I did something similar (Novell I think). I've also grabbed a VMware ... whatever ... and that was a memory test and a waste of money. Who cares if you can quote the maximums?
When I'm hiring, I want to see application and knowledge and not a plethora of industry "quali-wankery"! You can always search for facts but knowing how to apply them is what I want to see.
Be flexible but do try to develop what sort of direction you want to take. What floats your boat out of dev ops, sysadmin etc?
You could also consider self employment/consultancy. I sort of fell into it 23 years ago ...
A discarded Windows laptop is ideal for use with Linux. That's what this Managing Director of an IT company has been doing for over a decade. My desktop PC is a customer cast off from a good five years ago. I slapped in an ageing Nvidia el cheapo card to get two monitors running. My laptop is a cast off from one of my employees - I simply opened it up and moved my M.2 card into it.
I do run ESET on my Linux gear to show solidarity and to show that Linux really is rather more resource friendly than Windows. I login to AD and I use Evolution with Kerb to access Exchange for email. I have the same "drive mappings" to the same file servers too and so on and so forth.
I used to teach word processing, spreadsheeting and databases n that for UK govt funded courses, I've written a Finite Capacity planner for a factory in Excel (note the lack of In-). I still find people who have no idea how decimal tab stops work or how to efficiently use styles. I can confidently inform you that Libre Office is just as good as MSO. They both have their ... issues but both work pretty well.
Kids are easy. Adults are a pain! KDE has a lot of educational games ready to go out of the box.
No. Those tools are tried and well tested. Yes there may still be bugs lurking but simply rewriting in Rust does not guarantee safety. I do hope that this: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch19-01-unsafe-rust.html doesn't get used in that repo.
That said, I'll take a look in say five years and see how they are getting on.
So you "make config" once and then you just tweak it from time to time! I used to run make config until I discovered xconfig (when X was xfree86) and settled on menuconfig.
I was still using menuconfig on Gentoo until around five years ago. OK I still have one or two Larry's lying around doing useful stuff but generally I just copy the old kernel config to the new one and compile away with genkernel.
make config did take a while back in the day. You literally run through the entire kernel's options one by one: y/n/m for drivers. I haven't done that since 2.0.x days. Then you forget to sort out lilo and reach for the boot floppy. No I don't miss those days.
On a desktop/laptop system you soon notice when things like your touchpad loses multi touch support and USB sticks no longer work because your kernel mods no longer match the "old" kernel!
needrestart and co are really handy. When lsof first came out, I remember finding a recipe similar to the one posted and "mind blown"!
Never used Flatpak or Snap in nearly 30 years of using Linux. I might one day but not yet.
I don't use Fedora these days but your package manager will probably have some hooks. Add one to update your Flatpaks when it has finished its main job.
Did anyone actually read the article:
"The ban - which covers all spaces in North Somerset open to the public".
I live in South Somerset (Yeovil) but since the county went even more bizarre and decided to amalgamate into some mad centralised Somerset County thingie instead of the old Somerset regions. who knows what this ruling even means?
@mex@feddit.co.uk - fix the title to note coverage only applies to North Somerset (whatever that is). It's shitty to imply something that doesn't apply to the vast majority of a county, let alone the country.
I once named a load of servers for a helicopter company in the UK with elements. The cluster nodes were copper, silicon, etc. The cluster itself was called iron. The volumes were labelled fe_function.
It worked - it was easy to read and the bits that implied "cluster" were grouped appropriately. All the other servers had random elemental names unless they were associated in some way, in which case the group would be used. The engineers (real engineers with oil or distressingly nasty lubricants in their veins) loved it - it made sense, without being too quirky. It was very legible.
When those systems were hoicked out and replaced, the usual nonsense was applied: 2 char country code + 2 char site code etc etc ad nauseam. Followed by my absolute pet hate: 01. Oh so you might need 99 domain controllers? Yes you might, but not on one site.
Let's face it, it is mostly AD admins who don't get hostnames. I blame MS - their docs and blogs strive to be ... authoritative or at least look so. An entire generation (possibly two) of sysadmins have been sold up the river by MS and their wankery.
I tend to use other people's cast-offs at work. Win 10 slow? JG gets an upgrade! I whip the SSD or M.2 or whatever I'm using out of the old one and pop it in the "new" one.
Great job. The Arch layer is missing the word "actually" 😜
Bizarre article: "Recently, Linux-based firmware has emerged as a powerful alternative"
I have a stack of Dell OS9 switches in my computer room - they boot BSD. I have sold and set up Dell OS10 switches - they boot Debian ... on the control plane. To be fair they can run quite a few OS's on the control plane. On both, you can switch to a shell (BASH) and fiddle with Ansible and the like or you stick with the usual interface.
They are not glorified PCs! Frames and packets pass through some very fancy electronics and some very specialized memory (CAM - Content Addressable Memory) is employed for certain tasks. The manuals for these beasts run to 1500 pages.
I also have a large fleet of pfSense and VyOS routers and a Mikrotik or two and a slack handful of Fortiwotsits, oh and a Cisco thing or two and some others. pfSense is BSD and the rest are Linux. The Fortis are a bit more like modern switches with their own rather odd and twitchy way of doing things, backed up with some fancy and not so fancy hardware.
I have also played with all of the distros mentioned: Tomatoe/DD-WRT/OpenWRT and they are great for cheekying up a rather rubbish ISP provided router. They are also great for running on budget gear. They are basically superb for budget conscious consumers that are capable of reading some very decent docs. Prosumer is the term, I think.
Anyway, this article is rather odd and is basically filler. The section titled: "Case Studies and Real-World Examples" is a contender for fluff of the month.