[Sasha]

So many parts have already shipped! This is quickly becoming reality !!

[Robbie Ferguson]

For the "pizzaz" effect Sasha's looking for, I first thought of Debian Stretch with the Cinnamon UI??  That seemed pretty snazzy to me, and something I've been wanting to load up myself.  

I personally love Debian, but I'm a bit of a hardcore Linux user. My concern with Debian mostly surrounds 1) Video driver complexity and 2) Steam. For these two reasons, I wonder if leaning more toward a flavor of Ubuntu would be better. Thoughts? Especially with them going back to Gnome... it's appealing. It'd be nice to hear from some die-hard Steam users as to what works best. I'm also not a gamer.

I'm not a gamer, per se, so I can't speak to those needs, but with that 4K TV sitting there I can't imagine hi-def movies won't be in the mix.  Depending on what other home theater peripherals live in her living room, I'd say some method to play blu-ray/4K/HDR media is a must!!  There's some streaming content available, but I think optical media is still the most solid choice.

I tend to disagree... I figure they'll play Bluray disks with their Bluray player. No point in adding expense to the PC build for a redundant component. To me, the only valid reason to have an optical drive up until a few years ago was to be able to burn disks. Since you can buy CD's in MP3/AAC form, movies and TV shows are online, games and other software are now distributed pretty much exclusively online, and Linux is installed from USB sticks, I can't think of a valid use for them... unless burning something for some reason, which these days is unwise since, for example, burning a home movie to DVD would significantly reduce its quality. Will have to see what Sasha thinks?

On the subject of storage, I was wondering if some sort of NAS might be worth considering??  Maybe this is Phase 2, but I was thinking about something inexpensive for storage and backup like a Raspberry Pi running (maybe) OpenMediaVault??  I'm interested to know if anyone has experience with that distro??

Yes on both points: yes a NAS unit would be awesome - not so much for storage (they're not networking after all... it's just one computer), but more for a backup solution. That said, we have plans in the works already (I was speaking with Jeff about this after the show Wednesday) to do a show on OpenMediaVault on a Pi. Sounds like we've got a winner on our hands!  

[Sasha]

We play movies mostly through our PS4 ... So if theres is any worries about compatibilty on that front- we have it covered!

[yourpalfranc]

Forgive my ignorance of SteamOS??  I had to look it up as I wasn't at all familiar.  If you'd done a show on it, it was before my time.  I concurr on the optical drive, and especially since Sasha has posted that they use the PS4 Blu-ray for movies.  If disc burning ever becomes a necessity, USB drives are dirt cheap.  No need for that expense now.  I can't wait for the show on OpenMediaVault!!  My application will be for backup, as well.  I'm thinking it'll be a great solution to combine with your rdiff backup strategy, with the added benefit of being able to air gap/remove USB drives, and then plug them in at backup time.  That sort of removes the convenience of scheduled backups, but I'll sacrifice that for the security of air gapped data.  ONWARD!!!

[Sasha]

That one was really good looking... I ought to go back and re watch the episode to see which wad my favorite. Although I seem to remember liking them all!

[Robbie Ferguson]

That one was really good looking... I ought to go back and re watch the episode to see which wad my favorite. Although I seem to remember liking them all!

Are you referring to rdiff-backup?  

[Sasha]

I really dont understand how these posts work, clearly Im talking about cinnamon on stretch

[Robbie Ferguson]

Okay... so now that the hardware is here, we need to start planning the software. I wonder if Sasha really understands how much work and time this will take :p

I'm still undecided about OS. Debian would be good for rock solid performance and customizability, but Ubuntu would be good for community support.

Here's what I know we need:
- Linux base, gotta be lovely to look at and impressive
- Proprietary nVidia Drivers
- Steam
- PlayOnLinux
- Stage 9 - haha! Because you know I want to try it on this rig! Star Trek special, anyone? Sasha - crack out your uniform!

I'm thinking the main OS will go on the m.2 in a single partition (to avoid Sasha filling up her /boot partition or /var by accident... she just wouldn't know to check), with the SSD mounted on /home. I'll move /tmp into tmpfs (ramdisk).

Thoughts?

[Garbee]

Ubuntu MATE would be the only Ubuntu distro I look at currently for this kind of thing. It isn't having a massive UX flux and we know the sound at least mostly works with it simply enough (I'm glaring at KDE here in condescension.) If MATE runs into problems, then going pure Debian is the best fallback.

Moving `/tmp` to tmpfs is a bit premature IMO. It isn't like the SSD is going to be worn out any time soon with their workloads. +1 to single partition on the root drive, that's all I do.

On my `/home` SSD I still have a small 4 or 8 GB swap partition *just in case*. So that may be something to have on that as well. Even though it should never get touched much, worth having as a fail-safe in case crazy memory starts getting used. Until another stick of RAM can be put in to resolve the problem.

[Robbie Ferguson]

I've found Ubuntu MATE to be a pretty good distro for me or other experienced users, but it's too unstable. Too many anomalous issues to recommend to someone like Sasha. So I won't even consider Ubuntu MATE for this build. I actually kinda get annoyed with this distro on my personal laptop and will likely switch to Debian.

Will continue to lean slightly toward Debian 9 :)

I'd always move /tmp to tmpfs when the amount of system RAM allows it. Always. Why bother putting something temporary on the drive when you absolutely do not have to? I can think of no reason at all to leave /tmp on the drive.

Yeah, good idea re. swap partition. I should probably set it up on the SSD since it's a 960 GB drive and can spare the space a bit more than the 240 GB m.2.

Cheers!