RAMΞNJVNKIΞ🍜 2025-01-15 08:17:51
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Technology
Windows 10 End of Life
Ramen Junkie 
I got a notice today on my secondary Desktop about Windows 10 going out of support later this year. Microsoft really wants people to upgrade to Windows 11.
Like, a lot.
I mean, I get it, and I have no problem with updating. I use Windows 11 at work, I use it on my main desktop. Aside from the annoyance that the Task Bar can’t be docked on the side or top, I don’t really notice.
But I can’t, not on this PC, due to…. Reasons…? Windows 11 is essentially just, Windows 10 under the hood, it seems really weird that I can’t update this machine. Its most likely due to age. But this kind of leads me to another point.
This PC works just fine.
Its just my previous desktop, off to the side. It does everything I need it to do, just fine. It could even do more than I need it to do, just fine. I mostly use it to run Docker Containers and to host files. I occasionally use it to run a second Fortnite instance to play Bot Matches. It has gobs of memory for doing whatever task I throw at it, I have considered getting a better GPU for it to do AI stuff with it (it already has a very nice GPU, just not, AI nice).
Probably, at some point, I will just blow it out and load Ubuntu on it. I will lose my Fortnite ability probably, but I am kind of done with that anyway. I have already been slowly winding down my use needs that are Windows dependant there. I need to figure out the process of transferring my Docker containers over first. I may test things out using my Laptop first, which already runs Linux.
Which is another set of contention here. I went ahead and just replaced Windows 10 on my 10 year old Laptop. It still, ran just fine. I primarily use it for writing and coding, but I do play some games on it too. Thankfully, Steam has made great strides in getting Linux support in the gaming world.
But its not just my laptop. All 3 of my kids and my wife have laptops. My son has a desktop as well. Only one of these laptops is Windows 11 compatible. I have no idea on my son’s desktop. But all of these PCs work plenty fine.
I know I keep pushing this, “It works fine” point, but part of that is because the Windows 11 “requirements” really feel like a weird appeasement to PC makers to try to “encourage people to upgrade hardware.” I feel like these people are greatly overestimating just how often people buy new hardware. I had a neighbor at my old place with a Windows XP machine he would ask me to work on sometimes. The reality is, an XP machine would work just fine for what he needed.
PC power basically just, plateaued in usefulness a decade or so ago. It kind of feels like why there is such a big push for AI crap as well. “Get the new PC with an NPU! Get AI locally somit can make stuff up without the cloud!”
I could put Linux on some of these machines, but I already get grief over having to occasionally fix things on my family’s laptops as it is, I don’t really need that extra layer of grief AND a learning curve. I know its all much easier now, but like the upgrade cycle, its a “regular people” thing. Its a “Why doesn’t this scanner software work” thing, or a “why can’t Install my SIMS game” thing.
Though I will say this, for my case. Linux Mint runs 1000x better than Windows 10 did. I do get occasional weird lock ups though, which is annoying. Seems to be some sort of memory issue with Firefox because it happens if I get too ambitious with tabs, which I very often do. Its fine fine, then suddenly, the shole system is unresponsive.
But it also helps that I know how to use Linux already. I have been using it on some level now for like 25 years. I failed to install it the first time while at college in the early 2000s. But I have used it since. And prefer it.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Linux Post Install Clean-Up
So, now that I’ve returned to Linux again, I’ve come across several sort of, clean-up tasks that needed to be completed to get things working fully. A lot of my activities are, by design, machine agnostic. That is to say, they run off “the cloud”, either through a service or something I am hosting.
One big one I use is One Drive. I don’t NEED one drive running locally, but it’s convenient and nice to have. Aside from just syncing and backing up all my writing through it, I also use it to do things like, sync blog graphics files and screen shots. I’ve found this One Drive Linux Client, which seems promising, I’ve gotten it set up easily enough, but I have not quite worked out how to get it fully working with a selective sync. I don’t need everything off my One Drive, and don’t have the drive space for that anyway. So this one is pending a bit.
That hasn’t really slowed me down, I already also use GitHub for a lot of my writing as a secondary place with versioning, etc. I made sure everything was up to date in Windows, then did a pull from the three remote repositories I care about, my Journal, my Digital Notes library, and my Web Clips library. I made a few updates and made sure I had the workflow down for keeping things synced. This also prompted the creation of a simple script to push everything at once.
#!/bin/bash
git add -A
git commit -m "Updated via Simple CLI Push"
git pushI thought about adding the option to add a custom commit message, but these are all private repositories so I don’t really care about what the commit messages are. I also added this to the shell so I can just run it with “gitpush” from anywhere.
This also meant properly setting up SSH keys in Github, so I could actually pull the libraries. I also realized I would need to set up my SSH Keypairs for my web server space, which wasn’t hard but was mildly inconvenient because account based SSH is disabled. The simple solution was to reenable it using the Digital Ocean console, add the keys, then disable it again.
Probably the biggest hassle I had was getting the two NTFS partitions, one on the old primary Windows Drive, and a second on the same physical secondary drive as the system. I mostly use this drive for “working files”. Ebooks to read, monthly file dumps off my phone, programming projects, etc.
It’s just files.
I could manually mount both drives when I started, but any reboot would unmount them. I went out and looked up the fstab settings to use, and had no luck. In fact, I had the opposite of luck because at one point, I couldn’t mount the secondary storage drive at all in Linux. Only in Windows. I tried many options in both OSes, and finally just, backed everything up and wiped the partition in favor of a native ext4 format.
Since I had all this space now anyway, I remapped my /home/ folder to it, which is kind of good practice anyway, then copied everything from the old working files drive into a folder in my own home folder.
This ended up being a weird hassle too, because at one point I had “pre copied” the working files, before the migration, only to discover they had vanished when the /home/ folder was moved. I think what was happening, was they were not part of the encrypted blob, so the system simply, ignored them. So I had to unmount everything, reboot, which failed because now there are no user settings, drop to a recovery console, move the files OUT of the personal home folder, remount it all, then copy the files, again, from inside the OS, so they would receive the proper encryption and show up properly.
What a hassle, but it’s done.
The only real missing element here is that my copy of Affinity Photo is only licensed for Windows, so I’ll need to buy the Linux version. I don’t mind, I have been meaning to upgrade to version 2 anyway. I think Version 2 even has a new sytle liscence that is OS agnostic.
Another last one I’d like to do is automount the network shares from my NAS and file server on boot, if present. I don’t always use the laptop at home though, which means this could be weird when it can’t access them. But I also have an Open VPN tunnel to get to my home network, so there is probably a way to set it up in a way that connects through that always.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
Linux, Again
So, I am back on Linux again. On my laptop at least. I never really STOPPED using Linux, I use it on Raspberry Pis and my Webserver and in the Windows Subsystem for Linux all the time.
Just for the record, I just went with boring Mint Linux.
But I have moved back to using it full time again on my laptop. I still have the Windows partition for now, but I seriously doubt I am ever going to go back to it again. And FWIW, I have previously used only Linux on laptops in the past. The concept is not at all alien to me.
I have wanted to make the switch back for a while but was a bit hobbled. I had been using an app to tether connectivity off my phone over USB. I could never get it to reliably work in Linux. I discovered recently that my cell plan now just includes regular WiFi based hotspotting, so I can just connect via WiFi when needed.
This was literally the only hurdle.
Another motivation though is the end of life for Windows 10 coming next year. I really feel like this is going to get pushed out because Windows 10 is really going strong still. But just in case, I need to get off of it.
Side note, Microsoft is really over estimating just how often people upgrade their PC hardware with their push of Windows 11 from 10. The blocking factors of the upgrade are extremely arbitrary and most of the PCs that can’t be updated to Windows 11, still function just fine for 90% of use cases for “regular people.”
Anyway, I plan to keep using my laptop for the foreseeable future. So moving to Linux is the best option.
I also want to use it as a bit of a test bed for migrating my project PC to Linux as well, mostly I have questions relating to Docker and the easiest solution will just be to test it.
Anyway, the migration itself was surprisingly smooth. Most of my workflow has been shifting to be very “floaty”. Almost all my writing for example, is Joplin and local files, which are in a private Github repository.
Joplin just worked, and then I set up Git and pulled the repository down. Visual Studio Code has a Linux option, I think it was even pre-installed I think. I already have been using it as a txt editor so I am familiar with the best ways to set things up.
The real missing piece is OneDrive syncing, but its something I can work around, especially since these folders already sync via my Synology.
Most everything else I use on the Laptop was just a matter of making a list in Windows and then downloading them in Linux. Mostly I just use the thing for writing and for sorting image files off my phone.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.
NAS Recovery
What a fun time it’s been with my Synology NAS lately. And before I get going here, I want to make it clear, nothing here is a knock against Synology, or WD for that matter. The NAS I have is like ten years old, if it had failed, I was already pricing out a new, up-to-date, Synology. Heck, I may still get one anyway.
But for now, it seems to be working fine again.
As I mentioned, it’s been like ten years or so. I ran on one 4TB WD Red drive for a long time. Eventually, I did add the second drive to make things RAID and redundant. Sometimes last year, my original WD drive died on me, I ordered a replacement and swapped it out, and everything was fine.
Sometime, maybe a month ago now, I received an error about a drive failure. The newer drive was already showing bad. I made up an RMA request with Western Digital, wiped the drive, and then sent it in. They sent me a replacement.
A short time before the replacement arrived, I found another error, “Volume has crashed”. It showed that the, at the time, one drive was “Healthy”, and I could still read all of my data. This was starting to feel a bit suspect. I have everything important backed up online to OneDrive, but just in case, I started pulling things off to other storage as a secondary backup. This basically involved eating up all the spare space on my project server (temporarily) and using a USB enclosure and an old 2TB drive that, seems to be failing, but would work well enough for short-term storage. The point was, if I had to rebuild things, I would not have to download mountains of data off OneDrive. USB transfer is much easier and faster.
With everything backed up, I received the replacement for my RMA drive. My hope was, I could attach the replacement drive, and whatever was causing this Volume to show as crashed would clear itself out. Unfortunately, I could not really interact with the volume at all.
After several attempts at various workarounds, I gave up on recovering the Volume. I had the data, that is what matters.
I pulled the crashed drive out, which allowed me to create a new volume using the new drive. I then recreated the set of shared network folders, Books, Video, Music, Photo, General Files, as well as reestablished the home folders for users.
Fortunately, because I kept the same base names, all of my Network Mapped drives to the NAS, just worked. Fixing my own connections would be easy, hassling with connections on my wife and kids’ laptops, would be a pain. They get all annoyed when I do anything on their laptops.
Unfortunately, the crashed volume seems to have killed all of the apps I had set up. This is not a huge loss honestly, I don’t actually use most of the built-in Synology apps anymore beyond Cloud Sync and the Torrent client. The main one I need to reconfigure is the VPN client. I may just move that to a docker instance on my project PC. Fortunately, last year, I pulled both my email and blog archives off of the NAS. All my email is consolidated again in Outlook, and my blog archive is in a Docker container now. This means I can just remove all of these apps instead of reinstalling them.
I did find that I had failed to do a fresh local backup of my “Family Videos” folder, but I was able to resync that down from the One Drive backup. Speaking of which rebuilding all those sync connections was a little tedious since they are spread across two One Drive accounts, but I got them worked out and thankfully, everything recognized existing files and called it good. While I didn’t put everything back on the NAS, I have a few things that are less important that I’m just going to store on the file server/project server, I somehow gained about 1.5TB of space. I’ve repeatedly checked and everything is there as it should be. I can only speculate that there was some sort of residual cruft that had built up over time in logs or something somewhere. I also used to use Surveillance station, so it’s possible I had a mountain of useless videos stored on it.
In general, it’s actually been a bit of an excuse to clean up a few things. I had some folders in there that used to sync my DropBox and Google Drive, neither of which I use anymore, for example.
I am 99% sure everything is back in working order, and the last step I keep putting off is to whip the drive from the crashed volume (it still reads healthy) and read it to the current, new volume.
It’s been a hassle, but not really that bad. The main hassle is because it’s large amounts of data, it often means starting a copy and just, letting it run for hours.
Josh Miller aka “Ramen Junkie”. I write about my various hobbies here. Mostly coding, photography, and music. Sometimes I just write about life in general. I also post sometimes about toy collecting and video games at Lameazoid.com.