I’ve been using the ‘Open With’ extension on Firefox to play video through mpv with a click

Why?

Triple booting is a pita, moreso if you don’t know how to partition a disk. I’d want any laptop encrypted, which adds further complexity to the triple boot.

If you wanna browse, research, watch videos and tinker just install a distro. If you wanna spend time switching your system off and on again over and over and over again to find out what’s working/broken go for the triple boot.

Docker could be worth a shot. You can ‘docker pull fedora/arch/debina/whatever’ and can play around with the base systems. Alpine takes up about 6mib so isn’t too resource intensive if you need to nuke it a few hundred times to get up and running.

I’d put the 1gb ram laptops to server/kodi/retroarch/something mode and focus on the three decent machines for anything that requires a modern web browser, or add some ram. Porteus might be worth a shot if you’ve not tried it and want to push the Firefox on a potato idea.

I don’t think this is a one OS fits all situation, unless maybe Gentoo.

How bad is really bad?

AntiX is a good choice. Other option is a usb3 drive for each family member so everyone has their own portable AntiX on a stick.

MX is the related project with a more standard install and could be worth a look, the Fluxbox option should be quite light.

Each user could have a personal AntiX system on persistent usb3 and each system could have a bare metal MX Linux install. Just see what wins out via natural selection over time.

LXQT is another option for a full desktop environment that will run on a potato. If family members are mainly just users and you are admin, the base OS may not matter much. They could switch between a potato running Alpine and a good system running Fedora and if they are just logging into LXQT to launch browser, office, email etc the internal system plumbing is not gonna concern them.

thx

Thank you.

I think I will aim for =>8

so any nuc with a number 7 or more would do the job?

It seems unreasonable with the hardware, even with nice things.

I run Gentoo, with lots of binaries, on my 2011 iMac just fine but encoding HD video on it feels like abuse.

I’m using a 2011 imac & 2010 macbook pro as my main devices. I have an rpi4 as a little media center & personal server.

2160p x265 looks great on the pi, 2160p x264 is grim. Encoding 2160p on any of my systems is pain.

Ongoing it would be nice to be able to re-encode the occasional 2160p video faster than a tenth of real time or feeling like I’m overly stressing very old hardware.

Think I may keep an eye out for a 2nd hand nuc, I like small & quiet and I didn’t realize until posting this thread that cpu encoding is preferred to gpu. A nuc would also be nice for some better retro game action than the pi4.

I don’t have anything that can play 4k h264 aside from my phone.

My Rpi4 plays 4k h265 beautifully, so I like h265. Space efficient is just a bonus.

mpv & ffmpeg have been my go to’s for a decade or so…but mpv on the Rpi4 can’t yet manage 4k 2160p afaik, so Kodi it is at the moment.

Thanks

What is resizable BAR?

https://youtu.be/HkOguZfNJUo

My only issue with kids on a flight is if I’m responsible for them. If they are someone else’s problem, all is well.

Likely Mastodon.

Similar too Twitter/Bluesky and able to follow Lemmy, Kbin and lots of other areas of the Fediverse.

Secundinus the Shitter

https://www.heritagedaily.com/2022/06/ancient-graffiti-insulting-secundinus-the-shitter-discovered-at-roman-vindolanda/143777

Was worried for a minute I might not even be running linux, but neofetch has saved the day.

Shit, you’ve just reminded me I’ve been running this install for months now and I don’t even have neofetch installed.

Sorting immediately, not sure how I’ve managed these last few month.

imv looks good, thanks for the link

I’m a bit confused, I left Reddit to escape emacs users…should I be on kbin instead?

Thanks, will give dwl a spin as I’ve been quite comfortable on dwm.

Void is my plan. I went with Fedora last time as I couldn’t be bothered setting up Void properly and Fedora was the only distro with a generic kernel that seemed old mac trackapd/keyboard friendly at time. I’ve not tried Puppy for a long time, I tend to opt for AntiX or Porteus in that kinda area.

Thanks, I have i3 & kitty atm so not a huge leap.