Time to update https://endof10.org/ , LOL.

Annoying for the IT peeps that have to deal with this. Guess they’ll have to decide whether it’s worth continuing using the hardware with a replacement OS (Linux, ChromeOS, etc.) or more likely retire all the old hardware.

Anyone in the know on how many Windows 11 SE devices were actually in use? Seems most schools would have gone the more obvious route with something like ChromeOS for a “web first” experience unless M$ and vendors were pushing these things out at massive discounts in the first place.

Not automatic (I think) and a bit clunky but the Strawberry music player does have a transcode feature so you could select music files and transcode them a certain way output to another folder. It’s not something I ever do but I did a quick test to a USB drive and it seems to work okay. It’s an option if you opt to use a gui to click through.

OTOH if you’re happy using the terminal and/or scripting then ffmpeg would be a better bet.

PS - Strawberry does have a panel where it lists “Devices” and maybe your phone could show up there and the transcoding would work a bit more automatically, wasn’t able to test that here.

Check the log file & see if there’s any additional information you can troubleshoot with. According to your .conf it’s in /var/log/samba/log.%m

And/or maybe increase the logging level and hopefully when the issue re-occurs you’ll have lots more log info to work with. (may have to be careful with the log file sizes though) Not sure if you need to enable client specific logging or maybe just working with the main smb.conf file is enough, see the wiki

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Client_specific_logging

EDIT: If you’re not already seeing any logs maybe you do need to try enabling client specific logging (?)

To be fair Ubuntu is still okay especially starting out, it’s one of the more polished distros with a ton of online documentation when you need to search around and figure out how to do things. And no one says you have to stay with a distro, once you’re comfortable with Linux it’s easy enough to check out other distros.

That aside a lot of people have been recommending Mint for new users so that’s definitely one you can check out if you want to try branching out now rather than later.

PS - Nvidia has a less than stellar reputation for their Linux drivers, you may want to consider reading up on that for whichever distro you choose. I have an Nvidia GPU (old non-Quadro class) running on Debian, works fine now but I did have a few false starts getting it going properly at first.

Do you mean old like DOS old, or you meant something like old Windows game?

If it’s something like an old DOS game I’d maybe try DOSBox… maybe there’s something better but that’d be on the list of things to try.

EDIT: FreeDOS also exists, should be able to run that in an emulator / virtual machine and then load anything DOS compatible into it. There’s a list of emulators / virtual machines they recommend in their download page https://freedos.org/

Slightly concerned about remote desktopping though. What do I replace xrdp with?

Xrdp works on Wayland, you can keep using it if you like. There’s also Gnome’s built-in Gnome Remote Desktop as well as KDE’s Krdp, both are also Wayland compatible (though I get the feeling Krdp is still in its early stages).

According to https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-keyboard-shortcuts.html.en you should be able to use Shift + Super + Page Up/Down to move application windows between workspaces, seems to work for me.

So for your example start Terminal, then maximize it (Super + Up Key), then move the application window to another workspace (Shift + Super + Page Up/Down).

Perhaps just uninstalling Nouveau and falling back to the Intel driver, if it’s already installed, is sufficient? Or if that doesn’t work, worst case OP could blacklist Nouveau and and update initramfs? I’m just guessing as long as the Nvidia driver is never actually active perhaps that’s enough to avoid excess power consumption.

OTOH there isn’t much harm in OP keeping Nouveau enabled and seeing how things go though I’m in agreement with you, on an older laptop there’s not much advantage to be gained with the older Nvidia hardware.

Remmina and Xrdp are probably the better RDP clients at the moment. I’ve had no problems using either to connect to Windows 10 desktops but have not tested Windows 11.

FreeRDP is used by most (all?) Linux RDP clients, it does have its own active development.

Could also try the Linux RDP client that Thincast has, still uses FreeRDP in the backend like the others but it does seem work well at least with Windows 10 (https://thincast.com/en/products/client).

Also for what it’s worth I’ve seen mention of a FreeRDP bug when the client fails to connect to Windows 11 with multi monitor enabled (since most Linux RDP clients use FreeRDP the bug affects them all too). Think the workaround for now is to disable multi-monitor in the RDP client settings before attempting to connect. Think it is getting fixed in the next FreeRDP release. No idea if that’s your issue but worth a look (e.g. https://gitlab.com/Remmina/Remmina/-/issues/3403)

Still learning this myself but I’ve found that Xrdp is Wayland compatible so there’s that if you want to remote using RDP protocol.

Gnome has its own version called Gnome Remote Desktop that is also Wayland compatible.

And for KDE its own KRdp is another RDP protocol remote server that is Wayland compatible (https://github.com/KDE/krdp). I haven’t tested the KDE version yet but I’d guess it works similarly to Gnome Remote Desktop and Xrdp, AFAIK they all use FreeRDP in the backend.

All the Linux RDP servers seem to have their own quirks but seem okay for personal day-to-day use least.

Beyond RDP solutions you could also check out stuff like RustDesk and NoMachine, they seem to be Wayland compatible as well. Though I am curious what else people use.

PS - Gave up looking for a Wayland compatible VNC, not sure if VNC will sort of die out as more and more Linux distros switch over to Wayland.

Kind of seems like an ad, every link to their site has a referral in it ( /?ref=news.itsfoss.com ), guessing itsfoss gets paid for those clicks.

Not sure which country you’re in but in the U.S. I haven’t seen many gift cards that are contactless tap-to-pay so you would want to double-check. Without tap-to-pay those type of cards would need to be added into a phone app (Google Wallet / Apple Pay) to be able to tap-to-pay using it.

It’s possible outside the U.S. it’s more common for gift cards to be able to tap-to-pay.

Or if you’re talking about store gift cards then the same applies, most of those aren’t tap-to-pay either so you’d want to double-check.

Core 2 Duos are slow, yeah. I’ve got an Asus F8SP-X1 laptop from ~ 2008 with a Core 2 Duo T9500, 4 GB RAM, and a SSD SATA drive in it. It was originally a mid-range Windows Vista system. Over its years I managed to upgrade it as far as it could go. It does run standard Ubuntu and Windows 10 - Certainly not fast but it does run. Performance would lean towards unbearable without the SSD. I suspect Gnome isn’t doing it any favors and switching to a lighter DE or distro would help (or maybe just ditching the DE altogether) but since it’s just a spare laptop it’s no big deal.

One of the takeaways from your experiment is if it the system was already crap at running Windows 10 it’s not necessarily going to fare better with Linux, at least if you’re expecting a nice desktop environment. I don’t know if in 2025 we need to equate the “will this run Linux?” challenge on old Windows XP/7 hardware aside from the geek/techie users that want to do something with that old hardware. Anyone else non-technical stuck with that type of hardware isn’t thinking about Windows 10 being retired.

How to block Stremio peers from qBittorrent?

You can’t AFAIK.

Disable DHT

Don’t do that, DHT is one of the baseline methods of public torrenting. You’ll just end up cutting yourself off from tons of public torrent peers.

Unclear why you think DHT is strictly something specific to Stremio (?)

Use blocklists (I am also looking for suggestions, currently considering using this one)

That doesn’t sound overly reliable, I’d guess if you want to go that route you probably want to install all their stuff including that peerbanhelper thing they are relying on. If you do all that feel free to report back to the community and let us know if it actually blocked Stremio clients for you.

Some things you could try:

• In qBittorrent you could try using a different Upload Choking Algorithm, it’s not a real solution but it does help. (Tools / Options / Advanced / Upload Choking Algorithm) There you can try setting it to Anti-Leech or Round-Robin.

  • Anti-Leech is an attempt to stop uploading to peers that seem to request data while trying to mask their activity (e.g. leeching clients), it’s not perfect but can help. See https://www.libtorrent.org/reference-Settings.html#enum-seed-choking-algorithm-t and https://github.com/arvidn/libtorrent/issues/4217 for more discussion.

  • Round-Robin isn’t blocking leeching, what it does is tell your torrent client to split the upload evenly between the requesting peers on a torrent. The result is that you will be uploading slower to a leeching client so those type of clients will prefer to get their upload from other faster peers rather than wait on yours.

• If you’re desperate you could switch to an alternate torrent client, something like https://github.com/c0re100/qBittorrent-Enhanced-Edition it’s not an official qBittorrent client but rather qBittorrent with some anti-leech additions. They mainly focus on chinese leeching clients so I’m not sure that would help at all with Stremio but you could try opening an issue if it looks like Stremio clients are still leeching off it, maybe the devs can figure something out https://github.com/c0re100/qBittorrent-Enhanced-Edition/issues

Me personally I don’t worry about this stuff, for public torrents qBittorrent along with Round-Robin or Anti-Leech is enough. Otherwise just stick to private trackers where this sort of leeching is a non-issue.

PS - The more active piracy community is over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com you may want to subscribe there too.

Sort of. Orbot is fine but for it to work it does have to modify the system’s networking. It installs itself as a VPN so if I try to use it it’ll kick me off the VPN my Android was already using. So yes Orbot can sort of let me pick apps to run over Tor but to do so it forces me off-VPN for all my other apps. Maybe that’s an Android limitation or an Orbot quirk, not really sure.

The nice thing about this new Oniux is that it works more like a container for applications rather than have to modify the system’s network.

Would be cool if this could work on Android and essentially be able to pick and choose which apps to run over Tor.

Agreed, I always leave everything seeding and also disable queuing. Leaving “Global maximum number of connections” at default setting (can be set lower) along with configuring Global Rate Limits Upload/Download to something appropriate works perfectly.

Torrent clients are smart enough to juggle the active torrents and share the allowed bandwidth between them without you having to micro-manage the whole thing.

The qbit logs just say “torrent removed” without further explanation

So the logs don’t have the torrent finished line right? e.g. It never logs "Torrent download finished. Torrent: “YOUR-TORRENT-NAME” ?

If so my guess is what the other commenter mentioned, try changing the settings not to remove the torrent & see how it goes.

To be fair that would help out a ton for the less technical users that aren’t too familiar with needing to browse and click through a ton of different menus just to get to something they can watch for free. This kind of stuff gets challenging for the older non-computing crowd.

And honestly if these remotes are going to have a default “Netflix”, etc. button they may as well have a button for the default Google free channels.

Status is firewalled and theres no DHT

When you select the torrent in qBittorrent and click the Trackers tab does DHT display “working” ?

Status is firewalled and theres no DHT but the download works and there are no errors in the log.

I suspect you had it partially correct with your earlier test. One thing is that DHT works via UDP (from what I understand) while non-DHT torrents can be TCP or UDP. So I sort of suspect that you kind of had it half working with the iptables rule earlier but you only had it working for TCP, hence only TCP torrents get through which means no DHT and uTP torrenting.

So your solution is one/both of

• Re-configure your iptables rule to allow both TCP and UDP if it wasn’t already
• Play around with podman to get it to also publish the UDP port(s), not just TCP. According to this site podman only publishes TCP by default, there’s some extra syntax for --publish to specify the protocol. Maybe you need to give it multiple publish flags so you can use both TCP and UDP on the same port(s), not too sure on that.

https://ittavern.com/notes/podman-publish-udp-port-to-host/

I looked at an i2p torrent I was playing with too and its showing the trackers are non responsive now, but theres no error in the logs.

I2P is a very different configuration, best not to compare that to regular clearnet torrenting. qBittorrent doesn’t suport DHT over I2P so you’ll never see DHT working in that configuration.