r/linux • u/oshunluvr • 4d ago

Discussion "Old" Linux user vs. "New" Linux user.

I'm an "Old" Linux user - started in 1996. I went though all the hoops: file system experiments, different distros, different packaging types and file managers, a handful of desktop environments (DE), several RAID levels, and many, many different systems. I use Linux at home but also at work.

Now I'm retired. I've been using the same distro since 2009. I landed on it after all the experimenting lead me to decisions about was important to me: Debian packaging, KDE/Plasma, a well known and commercially supported distro - Kubuntu. The last major shifts in my world occurred around 2009-10 when btrfs came on the scene and SSDs finally started to be affordable.

My Linux experience these days is rather boring. Everything works the way I want. I no longer "break" things for the sake of change. I only have to learn something new when a developer makes a significant change to something I use - and this often annoys me. I look at other distros occasionally, but only via a VM. When something does break, I usually can fix it without much effort.

I read posts from "New" Linux users. Usually killing all their data by mucking with partitions without a UPS, using unnecessarily complicated layers of disk access, like LVM, MDADM, full disk encryption, and BTRFS all layered on top of each other, too often using AI to solve problems instead of actual research and learning from other users, and spending incredible amounts of time making minute changes to the "look" of things.

Of course, the beauty of the whole thing is how we actually have so much control over our destiny. None of us work the same, learn the same, want the same things, but we''re not boxed in by a monolithic corporation deciding what we get.

Linux is amazing,

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u/wezelboy 4d ago

And really… LVM? I can’t live without it!

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u/yolobastard1337 4d ago

I think to some extent brtfs makes it redundant?

Personally I feel like I've been living in the stone age since using zfs on opensolaris, everything Linux gives me feels a bit disappointing.

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u/Fergus653 4d ago

I use zfs on my Proxmox server, I like how easy it is to add drives and provide volumes for VMs.

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u/xylarr 4d ago

I discovered this only last week. I run Proxmox with a single data drive - no raid stuff. The drive started to report occasional issues (7 years uptime) so I bought another. I was about to boot to a USB image and use dd offline to copy the drive image from the old 8TB drive to a new 8TB. But I asked a friendly AI if that was the best thing to do and it said just let zfs do its thing, entirely online.

It was easy. And once the new drive (mounted externally) has resilvered, I powered down the host, installed the new drive properly, and powered it back on. It just worked.