No.

The local machine boots using PXE. Clonezilla itself is transferred from a TFTP server as a squashfs and loaded into memory. When that OS boots, it mounts a network share using CIFS that contains the image to be installed. All of the local SATA disks are named sda, sdb, etc. A script determines which SATA disk is the correct one (must be non-rotational, must be a specific size and type), deletes every SCSI device (which includes ATA devices too), then mounts only the chosen disk to make sure it’s named sda.

Clonezilla will not allow an image cloned from a device named sda to be written to a device with a different name – this is why I had to make sure that sda is always the correct SSD.

There was no need to physically disconnect anything. We didn’t actually use any SCSI devices, but Linux (and in turn, the Debian-based Clonezilla) uses the SCSI kernel driver for all ATA devices, so SATA SSDs also appeared as SCSI hosts and could be handled as such. If I had to manually unplug and reconnect hundreds of physical cables, I’d send my resignation directly to my boss’ printer.

I presume you have had to run on RAM, considering you removed all drives

Yes. Mass deployment using Clonezilla in an extremely heterogenous environment. I had to make sure the OS got installed on the correct SSD, and that it was always named sda, otherwise Clonezilla would shit itself. The solution is a hack held together by spit and my own stubbornness, but it works.

Only if you’re working with SCSI hardware. On Linux, SATA (and probably PATA) devices use the same kernel driver as SCSI, and appear on the system as SCSI hosts. You can find them in /sys/class/scsi_disk or by running lsblk -o NAME,HCTL.

Broke: /dev/sd*
Woke: /dev/disk/by-id/*
Bespoke: finding the correct device’s SCSI host, detaching everything, then reattaching only the one host to make sure it’s always /dev/sda. (edit) In software. SATA devices also show up as SCSI hosts because they use the same kernel driver.

I’ve had to use all three methods. Fucking around in /sys feels like I’m wielding a power stolen from the gods.

Wasted Rick Roll opportunity.

are rolling release distros stable enough

I’ve been using Arch (or some flavor of it) for several years, and I’ve never had any serious issues that I didn’t cause myself. The thing that might catch you with your pants down is if a dependency introduces a change that breaks another application, but catastrophic failures are fairly rare, as long as you’re willing to learn how to maintain your system.

is it possible/easy to roll back to a previous version

Yes. The application is called Timeshift, and it’s specifically designed to back up the system files to a separate partition. If your root filesystem is btrfs, it can also manage filesystem-level snapshots that you can roll back if you bugger the system.

I just want to point out the dependencies of Konsole (arguably a small and simple application in concept): glibc gcc-libs icu kbookmarks kcolorscheme kconfig kconfigwidgets kcoreaddons kcrash kdbusaddons kglobalaccel kguiaddons ki18n kiconthemes kio knewstuff knotifications knotifyconfig kparts kpty kservice ktextwidgets kwidgetsaddons kwindowsystem kxmlgui qt6-5compat qt6-base qt6-multimedia sh.

Stop worrying about the country of origin. It’s a FOSS project. The vast majority of Pop’s components are developed independently of the company, and by citizens of various nations. Applying the “USA bad, so product bad” rhetoric is a seriously shortsighted approach. Consider instead the amount of influence exerted by the company. Does Ubuntu still seem like the better choice just because the company is headquartered in the UK?

Besides, if you really want to cut American software out of your life, start with Linux and GNU. Torvalds was born in Finland, but he is a naturalized US citizen, and Linux is developed on American infrastructure and includes significant amount of work from American developers.

I’d like to preemptively direct prospective commenters’ attention to rule 6 about public figures.

Math - not even once.

That first data point is simply invalid. Ignore it. Monitoring software usually report some kind of statistic (mean, median, min/max, etc) taken from measurements over a period of time instead of the instantaneous value when the report is updated. But they can’t do that for the first data point when the application is launched because there’s no time period over which to measure it.

I’ve never used the AIO image. I’ve heard it’s weird. This is my compose file for the community image:

volumes:
  db:

services:
  db:
    image: mariadb:10.6
    restart: always
    command: --transaction-isolation=READ-COMMITTED --log-bin=binlog --binlog-format=ROW
    volumes:
      - db:/var/lib/mysql
    secrets:
      - mysql_root_password
      - mysql_nextcloud_password
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/mysql_root_password
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/mysql_nextcloud_password
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud

  nextcloud:
    image: nextcloud
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 8080:80
    depends_on:
      - db
    links:
      - db
    volumes:
      - /var/www/html:/var/www/html
      - /srv/data:/srv/data
    secrets:
      - mysql_nextcloud_password
    environment:
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD_FILE=/run/secrets/mysql_nextcloud_password
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_USER=nextcloud
      - MYSQL_HOST=db

secrets:
  mysql_root_password:
    file: ./secrets/mysql_root_password.txt
  mysql_nextcloud_password:
    file: ./secrets/mysql_nextcloud_password.txt

You can access it on port 8080 and perform the initial setup manually. For the database server address, use the db hostname. You’ll have to use a reverse proxy for HTTPS.

You could also try OpenCloud, which is a Go rewrite of ownCloud.

Flatpak is not just an alternative packaging format. One of the key advantages is that it provides a predictable runtime environment that is independent from the rest of the system. Sometimes an application needs a particular version of a dependency (called dependency pinning, very common practice in development) and can’t rely on the system having the correct files. It also isolates the application from issues stemming from environment variables and the “global” filesystem.

It also gives developers greater control over packaging. Because of this isolation, they don’t have to rely on downstream packagers to manually adapt the software to the distro’s available packages (potentially introducing bugs).

One infamous example is Bottles. The project is officially distributed as flatpak, but OpenSUSE wanted to distribute it as native binaries. They had to use an outdated, broken version and caused a flood of user reports for issues that were not Bottles’ fault. More in this thread and open letter: https://github.com/bottlesdevs/Bottles/pull/3583

It’s for gen-alpha computers. Makes sure all them files are yeeted, no cap.

Haskell is where hope and sanity go to die.