I lost my data trying to back it up - <AUTHOR> https://hamy.io/post/0010/how-i-lost-my-data-trying-to-back-it-up/ <comment><USER3> > _When it comes to backing up the full OS, I don't believe in online backup > solutions._

And how did that work out for you?

If you did believe in online backup solutions, in addition to whatever else, you'd have your data now.

(I understand worrying about quick recovery, booting, etc. But, as an additional method besides hard local copies, it makes sense, as having an extra off site backup of the data is important. Better to have to spend 3 days to manually download and restore a bootable image, than to not have the data at all. And online backup services also allow for automated backups on your backup -- backup-ception).

<comment><USER4> This is how I treat it too. Always have a local backup, but an online or offsite one is also important. The mantra I've often heard repeated is "Two is one, and one is none".

<comment> et-al Two is one; one is none is more of a military slogan. Backups should follow the 3-2-1 mantra, fullstop:

3 copies, on 2 different media, and 1 offsite.

<comment><USER5> I have heard so many different definitions for the 3-2-1 rule, I have no idea which is correct anymore.

It seems that you should have 3 copies -- 1 being offsite.

But the 2 I have heard the 2 as 2 formats, 2 devices, 2 mediums, 2 storage types, 2 technologies.

I don't think the idea of 2 is reasonable for anyone except the most hardcore. Am I really expected to buy a tape for my local personal backups?

I think this rule could be updated to something 2 different cloud providers. Or 2 different geographic regions. Drop the 3 and the 1.

<comment><USER6> If one of the copies is local and another is through an online backup, it's going to be a different in almost every way from local copies so you get the "2" by any definition.

If all your backups are to a set of tapes or, say 3 hard drives, and you have a rotation to keep one tape offsite, every copy shares too many traits in common. A fair number of Mac people use Time Machine to do versioned backups to an external drive (or drive array) and use separate software to simply mirror their drive to external drives, periodically swapping the onsite and offsite mirrored drives. To me, physically moving drives around is hardcore, I don't trust anything not automated, but it seems to be not that rare. I'm fairly lazy but my machine is a work laptop so I have a backup drive in the office, one at home, and have a cloud backup service so I have 3-2-1 without much thought or effort.

If backups are solely on hard drives, it's probably best to not use the same make/model purchased at the same time, for fear that they'll all fail within the same time frame.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Getting backup right is extremely important, that is why you need proper tools. For the last 10 years I have been using ZFS snapshots and replication. I keep 180 days with snapshots on the remote backup and 30 days for the local. I use it to take backup of virtual machines, different databases including "running", sql servers. And of course important files, documents and photos.

I've also configured a daily mail with a log about how the backup/snapshot/replication went. Even if it went fine. So if I don't get mail, I know something is up and can fix it asap.

I have never slept so well after doing this with ZFS, even backup for Windows SQL Server with iSCSI volumes works great!

More people should do backup with ZFS!

<comment><USER8> Is it safe to backup a database by just straight copying its files? Wouldn't it be better to use a specific backup tool, e.g. pg_dump for Postgres or mongodump for Mongo?

(Hopefully you've tested recovery procedures, because as the saying goes, "your backups are only as good as your last restore")

<comment><USER9> With Postgres, it's perfectly safe and supported if you just do it according to the documentation using pg_start/stop_backup and also archive your WALs properly. Most databases have something similar.

<comment><USER10> Note, you do need to track the version of Postgres. So a backup from a PG 8 may need to be reloaded into PG 8 before upgrading to PG 9, 10, 11, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the moral of the story is; always use software RAID.

Hardware RAID (even fake ones like Intel) are time bombs, either you have fun configurations like this or the controller dies and no replacement exists.

Unless you'd absolutely need a HW RAID, I'd go for a Software RAID that mounts and works natively in Linux. I can put the harddrives into a fully foreign computer and it would work.

<comment><USER12> Depends on the use-case really. I use raid (if any) for performance reasons, so I prefer hardware raid with a nice controller and some lots of spindles where flash is not an option. I would never implement this with a software raid solution for reasons.

<comment><USER13> Likewise. If it's not offline, verified and off-site, it's not a backup.

Raid is useful for availability as well as performance though.

Also while we're discussing raid, the price/gb of a mirrored set of larger disks vs a raid 5/6/10 of smaller disks (for the same total capacity) is always worth checking - usually comes out in favour of mirrored pair in my experience which also has better performance (especially when resilvering) and resilience and lower energy costs.

<comment><USER14> > Raid is useful for availability as well as performance though.

Also for data integrity, with something like ZFS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Similar story but way shorter. Was working on the beginning of Typeform years ago and we had some issues in production, wanted to take a look at the logs. The logs were in a tar archive, so just needed to untar it. Mixed up the arguments in the tar command and instead overwrote the logs with a empty archive. Doh. In the end, lesson learned: be 100% sure arguments are correct if you're stupid enough to run terminal commands in production environments. Obviously, duplicate data (pull down logs locally) if you're planning to read something that can possibly write instead of just reading is another lesson.

<comment><USER16> Linux commands: with great power comes great responsibility. We're all seduced by the power, but quickly learn the responsibility part!

<comment><USER17> There was a time when tar did not remove a leading / in a tar archive when unrolling it.

That required some great caution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> There's now way he could have possible known simply booting the Ubuntu live disk would do this. He could have done that without any consideration to doing a backup. However regular tried and true backups are the way to go, preferably automated.

My worst horror story wasn't really mine. I did desktop support in my first job. The library had their own system and their own support arrangements but I had a good relationship with them and would advise from time to time. One day they said the PC running their archive management system wouldn't boot. Could I take a quick look before they called the company on their support contract? Sure enough the PC wouldn't boot, the hard drive had died. I asked if they had recent backups? Oh yes the backups were fine, in fact it had got much better recently. Before the backups used to take an hour, but for for the last few weeks it only took 2 minutes. They only had 2 weeks of tapes on rotation.

Needless to say, the backups hadn't been running at all and failed silently, probably due to early symptoms of the hard drive failure. They lost everything.

<comment><USER19> Did it end up going to data recovery? Most of the time it should be possible to retrieve _most_ of the data, at least.

<comment><USER18> I don't actually know, I didn't directly support them and they were so embarrassed about the whole thing they clammed up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Takeaways

\- Your data is at most risk from yourself. Other risks such as hackers, burlgars, fire or hardware failures aren't nearly as dangerous to your data as you are.

\- Backup is HARD. Have someone else do it.

\- Mirroring is fine for one first copy. Whether that copy is raid or just another NAS or something, but there should always be a proper BACKUP too.

\- To be a proper backup it should be 1) Write only/snapshotting, so even if you remove all your local files, the deltions aren't mirrored. 2) Have long retention. When you mess up a document you want to be able to notice 2 years later and just fetch that version 3) Be off site so theft and fire doesn't risk the primary copy and the backups.

<comment><USER21> \- Get backups sorted out before you consider using it as a production system.

If OP had iterated on having a backup system BEFORE adding important data, they wouldn't have consequences to trying to implement it. At the very least, do an online, filesystem level backup of the things that are important before trying to block level disk copy things. Run a database dump, rsync it to an external location, put important things in version control and push to a remote origin. And rsync or tarball your home directory and any other important directories(whole system if possible) and push it out somewhere, then and ONLY then should you feel semi-comfortable to start messing around with RAID settings/LVM/fdisk/ etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You should always favor mdadm (software raid) over fake RAID solutions. Sometimes it's better to use this even over real RAID cards (which are proprietary) because you don't have to find an exact clone of the card if it fails; mdadm is all software. The only time it would be appropriate to use a real RAID card is when the performance gain is an absolutely necessary requirement, or if you need to expose a logical device to the BIOS or OS that maps to the RAID array without additional setup.

<comment><USER23> I once had a particularly bad time where the 3ware RAID card had a bad interaction with the controller on our hard drives, preventing a rebuild after a disk failure. Thank goodness I had marked that system as best-effort, no- guarantees when asked for cheap local mass storage. This wasn't even fake motherboard RAID - but it was a screwdriver DIY box.

Mdadm is far more resilient, and I would never go with hardware RAID again without full vendor support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The last time I lost all most of my data was when I tried upgrading Ubuntu to the next major version using the upgrade manager in Ubuntu. I thought that since the UI was so friendly looking, it must be the safest route. WRONG. It was the second time that I trusted Ubuntu's UI for doing something critical. Never again. Now I always back up all the files I need onto an external drive and then I install the OS from scratch. Only trust the command line.

<comment><USER25> Definitely don't even trust the command line. I'm as big of a threat to my own data as a poorly designed upgrade manager.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Raid is not backup... Your data isn't backed up unless there are at least 3 full copies in 2 physical locations. I have to admit I'm slightly paranoid about it... 20-something years ago I was working in tech support for iomega (mostly os/2 and jazz calls). Nothing taught me the importance of true backups more than that job.

I do leverage a few things though... for the most part, I keep stuff on my nas. Projects are in git remotes as well as several local copies. Serial numbers, access keys etc are encrypted and stored in dropbox and copied to google drive.

These days since most of my work is in source control, I'm less worried about that aspect. That said, however, RAID is not backup.

<comment><USER27> I agree with your idea, but your definition is overkill.

A _backup_ is a copy of data on hardware separate from the live system.

A _good_ backup is a backup in in a remote location.

A backup _strategy_ is to maintain a _good_ backup.

A _good_ backup strategy is to have routine restore tests, to make sure that the backups serve their purpose.

A _great_ backup strategy requires at least 2 _good_ backups.

<comment><USER26> I understand... by 3 full copies, that can include the active in-use copy. I just don't consider something backed up short of having the data in a separate device and location.

<comment><USER27> It has to be on a separate device to be a backup indeed, just like a spare wheel isn't a spare if you're driving on it.

The location thing is trickier, and while you can't have a any backup on the same device, you _can_ have a bad backup on the same location. A bad backup is better than no backup by a long shot.

<comment><USER26> I'm fine with a backup on-site... I just feel that data isn't safely backed up unless it's off-site too. Not that everything needs to go that far. But it's usually useful to think in those terms imho.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm always paranoid about this stuff.

There's lots of fancy tech words in that article. Before you use ANY piece of backup tech you do not 100.0000000000% understand, back up your data with tech you COMPLETELY and UTTERLY understand how to use.

This likely means a simple copy to an external drive.

After that, set up your first automated backup solution. Test that it works.

After that, set up your second automated backup solution. Test that it works.

For the especially paranoid (me), you can still do manual backups using tech you completely and utterly understand.

</comment><comment><USER29> I think this is clear to the author, but readers should note that RAID isn't backup.

Separately, having at least a partial online backup would have minimized the issues caused by the offline backup.

</comment><comment><USER30> Did you log a bug against `dmraid`? You're right, it shouldn't make changes to the file system without user intervention.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not yet. I suppose I should do so via Debian bug report? Cause the last update for the upstream source seems to be around 8 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think the key mistake here was allowing the complexity of his higher-level filesystem arrangements (raid, etc) to leak into his lower-level backup routine.

Making a system backup like this should just be about imaging the raw disks, regardless of OS, filesystem, raid arrangement, etc. sda is sda is sda, period.

Keep it simple and you drastically reduce the likelihood of making a mistake like this. A copy of Knoppix and dd will do the job just fine. Paragon Software, Clonezilla, ntfs-3g, mdadm -- distractions.

Even better, if you keep the fundamental units of your system simple (a raw image of sda), you maximize tool compatibility / availability and your chances of recovering when things aren't going to plan.

</comment><comment><USER32> Sorry for your loss. Here are my two cents...

For complete system backup on Windows use Acronis [0], on MacOS use Carbon Copy Cloner [1] and on Linux Clonezilla [2].

Also never forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups [3], 3 copies, 2 local copies on different mediums and 1 copy offsite (cloud, remote) :-)

[0] [https://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer- backup/](https://www.acronis.com/en-us/personal/computer-backup/)

[1] [https://bombich.com/](https://bombich.com/)

[2] [https://clonezilla.org/](https://clonezilla.org/)

[3] [https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup- strategy/](https://www.backblaze.com/blog/the-3-2-1-backup-strategy/)

<comment><USER33> For macOS, Time Machine can do automatic backups to a mounted NAS volume over WiFi. So my Macbook backs up to a ZFS 3-way mirror. Important files are also stored in DropBox. That's how I get relatively hassle free 3-2-1 backups.

For Windows, a similar strategy is possible, but I consider my Windows box disposable (only gaming), so don't have much recent experience.

<comment><USER34> Just a risk I see here, you have everything IN your home.. laptop, backup.

Unless your NAS is somewhere (not your home's internal wifi network but a WLAN). Consider a Carbonite (or similar) that has infinite backup space to make sure you have the 'offsite' covered.

<comment><USER33> Dropbox solves that to a certain degree, too, and provides cross OS sync for the files I care about most.

Honestly though, low effort is very important for me. After all, any solution is simply reducing the odds, not completely eliminating them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Well, it is not like I didn't do any stupid things in the past, but booting into to a different OS (live system) with such a setup is obviously risky.

I am a bit conservative when it comes to backups and I do not trust myself very much. So I am doing backups on the block device level to avoid not copying certain file types, file attributes or whatever feature the filesystem in question posses.

In order to avoid, risky OS reboots, I am using lvm snapshots like this:

      # sync the filesystem to disk
      sync
      # create a snapshot with a 10GB buffer
      lvcreate -L10G -s -n "$snapshot" "/dev/vg/$lv"
      # write the backup to a backup disk
      dd if="/dev/vg/$snapshot" of="/mnt/backups/lvm-vg-${lv}_backup-$(date +%Y%m%d).dd" bs=64k
      # remove the snapshot
      lvremove -f "/dev/vg/$snapshot"

That method is certainly not perfect, as you are still taking the backup with a mounted FS in place and the snapshot size must be adapted to the use-case, but in the end, this is a method to create backups which are complete (independent of FS), easily accessible (e.g. mount via loop device) and do not interrupt the service.

</comment><comment><USER36> After reading several of these I lost my data stories, one thing that seems to popup over and over is RAID. For me, it is not worth using RAID other than RAID 1 (Mirroring). My data and my time are far more valuable than the extra storage gained. With RAID 1, I can take any working drive, mount it and instantly access it. In addition, there are fewer moving parts and fewer areas for screwups. Just say no to fancy RAID.

</comment><comment><USER37> To me the takeaway is that backup system should be designed with the storage system, when the storage system is still empty of valuable data. If you change the backup system, you should treat that as a change of the whole storage system, so first you would run the former backup, archive that securely, set up the new system, check it and only then release the former backup as not critical anymore.

</comment><comment><USER38> I guess since I do devops sorts of things for a living where we treat servers as ephemeral, I don't really even consider full drive backups any more.

Generally when I set up a computer, I use automatic configuration tools, and any sort of data store will have its own automatic backup and restore solution — or even better, won't be on that server at all.

In the case of a home computer, I'll install everything using ansible and homebrew (or the App Store or steam) and backup documents and photos to Dropbox and/or iCloud or s3, and all my code and dotfiles of course are on github.

I've spilled a soda on my laptop and been back up and running with a replacement in 10 or 15 minutes.

My whole house could burn down and in terms of data, I'd be at best mildly inconvenienced.

For people that don't trust cloud, it's way more likely that your physical copy is going to be lost or ruined than that multiple cloud services are going to lose your data.

</comment><comment><USER39> If you have the resources to run your own backup server, I heartily recommend UrBackup[1]. It does Windows right by default. It can handle Linux ARM devices. Macs, too. Setup of the server and clients is super simple.

10/10, would install again.

[1] [https://www.urbackup.org](https://www.urbackup.org)

</comment><comment><USER40> _Redundancy_

I don't have backups myself, but I have 5 copies of my data at 3 different locations + snapshots everywhere: desktop, laptop (linux, BTRFS), NAS at home (FreeBSD, ZFS); off-site dedicated server at OVH (FreeBSD, ZFS); at school (FreeBSD, ZFS/netapp, managed by school IT).

Syncthing [0] + whatever handles local snapshots [1,2] work wonders [3]

[0] [https://syncthing.net](https://syncthing.net)

[1] [https://github.com/zfsnap/zfsnap](https://github.com/zfsnap/zfsnap)

[2] [https://gitlab.com/moviuro/butter](https://gitlab.com/moviuro/butter)

[3] [https://try.popho.be/securing-home.html](https://try.popho.be/securing- home.html)

</comment><comment><USER41> RAID is not a backup strategy.

I've lost data with the Intel onboard raid, several times, so I refused to use the Intel raid implementations; if you are going to utilize RAID, I've learned the hard way to pay for a proper RAID card and cage (or use the tried and true software raid setups).

If you loose the RAID array, take a break before you start fixing it. A client had their subversion repositories with over a decade of work on a Windows server, depending on a RAID setup. It fell down and turns out they didn't have any good backups. The IT guy tried to fix it and nuked the super block and did who knows what else.

They ended up packing up and sending the entire server to some firm that specialized in data recovery and spending a small fortune.

</comment><comment><USER42> Slightly off topic, but I've learned (the hard way) that the most important thing in a backup/restore process is the _restore_ part.

It doesn't matter how reliable your backup is. If you can't restore it you've done nothing. So far I've managed to:

\- Backup encrypted content without saving the decryption key

\- Backup everything to a remote server without backing up the ssh key to that server

So do yourself a favor, don't just backup. Try restoring some of your content from time to time (or at least imagine how you would do it).

Another scenario I've been recently thinking is, if the house burns down tonight, and you lose everything, phones/computers/etc., would you be able to get your data back?

EDIT: formatting

</comment><comment><USER43> (many others including myself, have been there, different way though for me)

The bright side is, you'll never make this mistake again. The downside is, for me at least, I end up with triple+ backups of everything..

<comment><AUTHOR> I can defiantly see myself ending up with triple+ backups of everything...

<comment><USER44> Not to be a grammar Nazi, but I believe the word you're looking for is _definitely_. I wouldn't have normally picked it out, but I did see you use it like that in the article as well.

It was a good read! Thanks for taking your time to write it up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The recommendation to only wipe the first and last part of the drive before reusing them is inadequate. You're best off wiping the entire drive with either zeros or hdparm security-erase-enhanced. The reason is that not all metadata is kept just at the beginning or end of the drive, especially if you have multiple partitions in the drive.

If that is untenable, mdadm has an option --zero-superblock, lvm has pvremove, and wipefs will remove file system signatures, which you can run before changing the storage layout.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing this out.

Do you have an example (or rather source) of a RAID metadata outside of the first/last 1MiB of the drive?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I will say, when I was reading that, I got nervous as it went along. You are (were!) less paranoid than I am. Welcome to the club ;-). This is how you get more backups...

</comment><comment><USER47> I back up all my personal data from each associated desktop via SpiderOak. Personal server data I rely on a combination of rsnapshot, rsync, and SpiderOak.

I also rsync to an external drive bay that I swap out weekly.

At the end of the day, every single machine in my network of things, including my desktop can light itself on fire - and I don't care. If my office or house is bombed, I don't care. Now - if my city were bombed.. I'd argue that I probably have other fish to fry.

</comment><comment><USER48> > By doing so, I effectively set off a time bomb. That single sector stayed > around, lurking, waiting for the right moment.

Technically this is a booby trap, not a time bomb. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER49> There was a recent example with Asrock motherboards that are supposed to have compliant RAID support

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541493](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18541493)

Should open source software fill up with quirks for the mistakes of other software? This looks like a bug report to other RAID software that should clear up any obsolete flags and enforce a sane condition of the RAID.

</comment><comment><USER50> Damn, this kind of screwing around with RAID is not what you do with your actual personal data. It's like building your own car for your daily commute.

<comment><USER51> Yeah, when I first got into building PCs it was fun to do the most cutting edge, overclocked, using all possible features setups I could and then 3 years later have no memory of how things worked when I had to replace or fix something. Now I do absolute absolute bone stock simple idiot proof builds and get 90%+ of the performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> These commands look a bit dangerous:

        # dmsetup remove_all
        # dmraid --activate y --format isw

Is that y a "yes" flag !? eg answer Yes on any question.

In my experience, working with anything beside simple mirrors in a RAID config will eventually result in loss of data, and that most data loss is because of human failure rather then disk failure.

<comment><USER11> No, IIRC the --activate flag accepts either 'y' or 'n' so you can active as well as inactive the array (LVM has similar flags).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Many years ago I was the go-to guy for all friends and family for recovery. I would try my best to recover as much as I could and then I would charge them €100 and I was going and buying them 100 blank DVDs and external DVD writers so they burn the "My Documents" every week. It was a time that CrashPlan and Carbonite were not around.

</comment><comment><USER53> That sounds like a very complicated way to do a full OS backup.

Dead easy, 10 min, can't fail alternative for home projects: use a VM instead, switch off the VM, copy the disk file, switch the VM back on. Use NVMe SSDs and depending on the size, you can probably do an automated daily backup with minimal downtime.

<comment><USER54> Anyone have a solution that can snapshot a running VM that has a PCI or PCIe card passed through to the guest OS? I use snapshots on ESXi, but they don't work for guests that have a card passed-through.

<comment><USER45> Are you asking for a recommendation on how to do this with ESXi or a recommendation for an alternative to ESXi?

<comment><USER54> Either is fine. If it's within-ESXi, that's a little easier, but I'm not tightly/inextricably wed to that hypervisor.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> It's commendable that the OP was looking to backup but has the reliability of RAID against disk failure contributed to this being a "black swan" event?

Do we reduce failure rates to "acceptable" at the expense of neglecting recovery?

</comment><comment><USER56> > All it took for my RAID set to become invalid and me losing my data, was > booting up Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 ISO image.

That's quite a claim. Was there really no way to recover anything, even with testdisk or photorec?

</comment><comment><USER57> The only time I've ever lost any data is when trying to back it up.

</comment><comment><USER58> "Digital data doesn't exist unless it's backed up in at least 3 locations".

I had a professor back in 2008 that hammered this into my brain and I share it every chance I get.

</comment><comment><USER59> And... I'm backing up my data right now...

</comment><comment><USER60> RAID, not even once. At least for me.

</comment><comment><USER61> Bummer, dude.

</comment><comment><USER62> why would you try this out with "live" data? why not incrementally connect drives and do it that way?

i'm basically asking what the impetus was for "just going for it" which is probably going to be a reason that other people share...

<comment><USER63> Incrementally?

<comment><USER64> I assume by incrementally is meant to have a base backup and store the difference in between.

Personally I prefer full backups - they feel more complete.

<comment><USER65> I have a server with 300TB of data. Incremental is the only way that my backups are going to be able to run every night.

But also, there are different styles of incremental. Some are dodgier than others.

<comment><USER64> I agree for this volume of data incremental is the best choice.

My projects so far ranged from 1-100GB so a full daily backup is quite quick done and its more easy to recover compared to applying incremental backups individually.

Well, always choose the right tool for the task.

<comment><USER66> > compared to applying incremental backups individually.

At least one style of incremental backups can be restored in a single copy - <USER2> use rsync to create hardlinks to the previous day if the file is unchanged (based on modified time). This results in around 400M of additional disk usage per day due to changes, for around 90G of data in my home directory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Francisco's Money Speech" by Ayn Rand - <AUTHOR> http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826 <comment><USER2> This is one of my favorite speeches from that book. It doesn't make false assumptions like many of the other speeches and plots do - it stays focused on debunking the idea of money as bad, and as such while a lot of the rest of the book seems slightly ridiculous, this speech remains quite powerful.

<comment><USER3> What about the rest of the book seems ridiculous to you? The first time I read it, I thought that everything in Atlas Shrugged was perfect. Even with repeated readings, I never once thought anything was ridiculous. Be specific in your answer.

<comment><USER4> Ayn Rand often overstates her case for the sake of art (her evil characters, for example, are mostly shallow caricatures). I find that people who don't share her views often mock her works and call her "ridiculous" because she treats some ideas that they hold completely without nuance or sympathy.

I can see why they do this, but I think Ayn's detractors overstate their case. She is valuable because she is the only major author that writes from her point of view. I read many books in high school with a feminist or socialist moral, I read many literary triumphs that exposed the "failure" of capitalism, only Ayn dared to be different. I think every teenager should have a run-in with Rand, if only to begin the process of developing critical thinking.

However, I do think her complete philosophical system has many more flaws then she would care to admit (the one laid out in the "BFS", "Big Frackin' Speech", at the end of Atlas Shrugged). She tries to lay out a case for the absolute, unassailable truth of her ethics, but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world.

<comment><USER3> "but absolute truth shall ever elude humans in this complex world."

Why?

Do you think a grand unified field theory is impossible? Do you think that quantum mechanics is the final word in physics? Do you suppose that that truth is knowable to some hypothetical race of aliens? (You specifically say that humans can't attain any absolute truth.) Or do you simply think that some truths are unknowable, such as distant historical events?

Do you hold any superstitions (religious or otherwise)? (You probably don't, but it helps to cover all the bases.)

<comment><USER4> Physics is the crown jewel of human knowledge. But even there, the theories of Physics are mere approximations to the actual phenomena that occur in the world. If you are familiar with Physics, then you know how almost-correct theories have been discarded for even more almost-correct theories throughout history.

If our knowledge of as objective a field as Physics is so uncertain, then it makes sense that the state of knowledge in a much more nuanced field like Ethics is near hopeless.

I suspect aliens would run into the same problems as we do, even if they were much smarter than us. I suspect perfect knowledge is unattainable.

Lastly,

>"Do you hold any superstitions (religious or otherwise)? (You probably don't, but it helps to cover all the bases.)"

I don't think the religious would appreciate your reference to their beliefs as "superstition". And no, I am not religious.

However, _I_ don't appreciate your last parenthetical, which implies that I would be offended if you assumed that I was religious. Just yesterday I discovered among Donald Knuth's publications an illustrated book of Bible versus. I have thick enough skin to be lumped among simpletons like Donald Knuth.

<comment><USER5> Our knowledge of physics is uncertain, but it is not inaccurate. Perhaps absolute truth is unattainable, but we can achieve enough truth that it becomes practically equivalent to absolute truth. I haven't read any of Rand's arguments, so it is difficult for me to understand the context, but dismissing an argument on the basis of absolute truth not existing seems a little too convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I read _AS_ when I was 18 and I've thought about this quotation a lot through the last 20 months, as Reddit frothed about Ron Paul, Gold Standard, Banking collapse, etc.

As I've thought more and more about it, something seems off about Francisco's speech, namely: Money is _no longer_ the representation of value in green paper; no, it is the representation of transferrable obligation, i.e. debt.

<http://bit.ly/14idwP>

Rand's philosophical position, expressed through D'Anconia, is that money is an expression of _value_, created by a man through his labor and that through its exchange, a rational process, a rational means for motivating and directing men's labor exists, "their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun."

I don't think this works quite as cleanly if you start consider that you're selling tokens of servitude, or indebtedness.

<comment><USER7> Ayn Rand was opposed to the labor theory of value, which is a central tenant of Marxism.

<comment><USER8> While I'm not a marxist, I think she goes too far in her opposition to this. All of the protagonists are capitalists (mostly with inherited money) and those who actually work to advance the cause of the "great men" - i.e. Eddie Willers - are given short shrift, and little chance to advance. Instead we have great men with inherited fortunes, doing very little actual work, preferring whining about "looters" and in one case (Hank Rearden) spending a month flying a plane over the Rockies looking for another great person.

<comment><USER9> "who actually work to advance the cause of the 'great men' - i.e. Eddie Willers - are given short shrift, and little chance to advance"

That's because he's never advancing much by himself beyond that which he is 'given'. Eddie is definitely an interesting character in the book. Like the 'man of not so great ambition' who still knows that he will, materially and spiritually, be better off by not looting those who made their fortunes exclusively through voluntary exchanges of their own successful products, efforts and work.

Yeah, in the book he lacks their talent but shares their code of value. He's like the character introduced just so that you can't complain 'there's only great men in this book, how unrealistic'.

<comment><USER8> How does he "lack their talent?" I see little talent on display. Though perhaps that's Rand's poor writing ability - not much is ever described to the reader, she just says "talented" or "great" about her protagonists, and expects us to accept it.

<comment><USER9> It's a work of fiction, by the way. But each of the characters has their own sets of talents and strengths and they are described rather than asserted throughout the book.

The question of whether these descriptions are 'true' is quite pointless in an entirely fictional setting.

> not much is ever described to the reader > she just says "talented" or > "great" about > her protagonists

It's only fair to say you failed to sum up these 1000 pages accurately.

<comment><USER8> It's not the best written work of fiction, by the way. I'm around page 900 or so, and most of it seems to be thinly disguised rants by the author, interspersed with laughable descriptions of sex, and a really nasty strain of Social Darwinism. If this had been written by a German in 1934 it would probably be recognized as thinly disguised National Socialist Party propaganda.

<comment><USER9> That's a pretty silly thing to say. The prose may not suit your literary tastes, fine. But you will still agree that the Nazis and the Soviets were both the real templates for her 'evil collectivists'.

And collectivists they were, not just in their party name ('national socialists'). They more or less nationalized most of Germany's industrial private properties, some of it sooner, the rest of it later. They implemented most bullet points of the Communist Manifesto, only in a brown flavour and with a lot of add-on horrors on top of it.

Yeah, her 'heroic romanticism' _style_ may resemble some of the red and brown 'romantic' literature. But her content is vastly opposed to theirs. If anything, she took a style that appealed to the masses in the 30s and 40s (including America) and showed that the same devices can be used to convey the opposite message, radical individualism and libertarian capitalism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I read the full article, understand the point, and get its relevance to today's circumstances.

That said, I have to admit (and I'm sorry for being way off topic here) I found myself being drawn instead to the overall simplicity of the layout and ease of readability than to the actual message.

It's probably because I'm working on my own stuff and appreciate it when pages are done well (i.e. hacker news).

I looked at the style sheet and it's also very concise.

I know they're using .asp but I'm led to believe capmag.com is fairly easy to maintain.

Please continue using Hacker News to discuss Ayn Rand if you like, but as a developer I thought I'd throw a couple of pennies into the design fountain.

</comment><comment><USER11> Private property is the foundation of peace. Without it who gets what can only be decided by force and coercion. Allowing people to keep the fruit of their labor is a necessary condition for those people to bother producing anything that they don't need immediately (consumable goods).

</comment><comment><USER12> The Economist has an article regarding the recent resurgence of "Atlas Shrugged" sales: [http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...](http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185404)

</comment><comment><USER13> If this is supposed to be a rebuttal to the quote from the new testament, then it's a major strawman. The quote from Timothy 6:10 is "the _love_ of money is the root of all evil." (my italics)

<comment><USER14> The "love of money" is also dealt with in the article:

 _"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money--and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."_

To see men perform the most immoral of acts for money, it becomes easy to believe money to be a wretched thing.

Thus, it's not a far leap to consider the love _(or insane lust)_ of money as evil.

Hence, the quote from the bible is there to protect men from performing acts of evil in the search for or in the name of money.

<comment><USER15> "No True Scotsman" fallacy, "the love of money" has a standard meaning quite apart from "the love of traditional capitalist values".

<comment><USER16> "[T]he love of traditional capitalist values"! The meaning of money, which she explained, is the same quite apart from your "traditional capitalist values" -- didn't want to let that rhetorical slap zip by unchallenged.

If you can understand the meaning of money and claim that love of money, which embodies that meaning, is the root of all evil, fine. But then, you might as well say that love of ANYTHING that's good is the root of all evil. In the same way that this maxim exaggerates its claim, I can plausibly argue that love of sex with women is the root of all evil, because men commit most evil and, one way or another, most of it has its roots in pursuing women.

<comment><USER13> I pretty sure Paul would agree that love of sex with women is a root of much evil (not to mention love of sex with men which is even worse!).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I read this last time 20 years ago as an undergraduate student in India, and I still find it inspiring after all these years.

I find it particularly relevant today, when the Federal Reserve and the government are intent on destroying the moral foundation of money. I expand on it at: <http://blogs.zoho.com/general/money-as-a-moral-institution>

<comment><USER9> Wow! Using your corporate blog to dispense your opinions on economics (which I share!) is rather 'heroic' in Ayn Rand's sense of the word. I'm not sure I'd do it, but now I wonder why... ;)

<comment><USER18> Or, you could just read what he wrote. Maybe I missed it, but was he selling something? But then I didn't spend 5 minutes looking for a conspiracy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> THE STRENGTH OF THE STRONG by Jack London <http://www.trussel.com/prehist/strength.htm> Basically, the story tells that a tribe figured out that the basic "law" was that no man should use his strength to abuse others, so whenever one would abuse his strength, the others would kill him as to not weaken the tribe. Much later in the story, they figured out that money (among other things) also was a strength that you can use to abuse others.

This is why (more or less) I don't agree with Ayn

<comment><USER9> How so? 'Abusing others' was certainly nothing she was advocating. Her point was that simply earning money or being good ('strong') is not at all an abuse of poorer or 'weaker' people. While one may get 'rich' by abusing 'weaker' people (i.e. robbers or slave drivers), that is exactly the kind of person she is up against. More specifically, against the kind of robber or potential slave driver who seeks to gain support and assistence of one group to rob or enslave another -- by denouncing the latters as the 'actual robbers and slave drivers' when all they did was voluntary exchanges and independent creation etc etc. Now, that I'm sure we can agree on, _does exist_ and _did happen_ in reality and history. Anything I'm missing?

<comment><USER20> How do you feel about things like sweatshops and sharecropping? (Personally, I'd rather be a debt slave than starve to death, but many people see these sorts of businesses as abusive.)

<comment><USER18> Rand excessively spoke about freedom, and free competition. "Sweatshops", as we see them today, would not occur in an ideal Randian world, as, in free economies, competitors inevitably arise and are more than happy to take your underpaid employees off your hands.

The fact that sweatshops _do_ exist does not prove this false...you'll notice that almost all sweatshops exist in third world countries that are notorious for government corruption. When Rand spoke of freedom, she wasn't joking, she meant real freedom, meaning politicians that are _not_ on the take, that couldn't yank an operating license from a competitor who chose to offer better working conditions.

If you want to speculate and say honesty is literally impossible in human society, feel free, but that is something entirely different than saying that freedom leads to sweatshops.

<comment><USER19> but the world is not ideal, and if money is a strength that can be abused, should you allow anything, without restriction, to be done with it? I believe totaly free economies lead to abuses. It happened in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Could we stop believing in free will already?

<comment><USER22> I choose not to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Absolutely my favourite bit of Ayn Rand. This speech can single handedly change the way people think about money and their own worth.

<comment><USER24> Only if they don't think about it too much, I'm amazed people find this selfish drivel so influential.

<comment><USER18> Feel free to point out the logical inconsistencies.

<comment><USER24> No need to, anyone who believes this crap isn't looking to be converted. Humans don't tend make decisions logically, they make them emotionally and then use logic to justify those decisions.

I've yet to meet a Rand follower who wasn't really just a selfish emotionally stunted ego maniac who thought they were totally self sufficient and society was mooching off them, especially those lazy poor people. Generally a complete lack of awareness of the interdependence of all men on our societies and forms of government.

You can't get past the first paragraph without noticing that Rand doesn't even know what the phrase "money is the root of all evil" means. It certainly doesn't mean money is evil which is how she interprets it and spends the whole rest of the article knocking down this absurd strawman.

Anyone with half a brain knows "money is the root of all evil" means the love of material possessions has caused much evil in the world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Atlas Shrugged is my favorite book! I am very pleased to see it being quoted here.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wow. Are people impressed by that article because of the sonorous prose? Because the content definitely isn't impressive.

Rand's first mistake is not realizing that the love of money quote speaks to individuals and not to societies. An individual who loves the material world more than the spiritual world (not god necessarily, maybe just the world inside his own head), is pitiable.

The saddest thing I've ever heard was from a friend who told me that his main goal in life was making money -- he wanted that more than anything. I asked him if I wanted the money for anything in particular, and he couldn't answer me.

<comment><USER4> There is some cleverness in there, and, I believe, some truth. Here is a quote that I liked:

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth--the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it."

Besides, wealth is often demonized by egalitarians. They see its distribution as a random function of the universe, and not as a function of the productive efforts of the earners. For one person to have more money than another is considered unjust. We hear so much about how the wealthy are evil, it is nice for a different point of view to be aired every now and then.

>"The saddest thing I've ever heard was from a friend who told me that his main goal in life was making money"

It would not be so sad if he said that his goal was producing something of value, which often results in making money. As Ayn says, "Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values".

> "Are people impressed by that article because of the sonorous prose?"

Yes, I do think the prose is quite nice. When Ayn hits a good stride, she reaches a style that is all her own. I think her talents are often under- appreciated because the literary establishment is very much opposed to her political views.

<comment><USER26> _It would not be so sad if he said that his goal was producing something of value, which often results in making money._

If one's goal is to maximize the value humanity creates, she should probably become an elementary school teacher. If one's goal is to make money, she should get an MBA or financial degree.

The former, to me, is significantly nobler.

<comment><USER4> It is less sexy and less popular, but the engineer that invents a more efficient manufacturing or distribution process that slightly reduces the resources used in products enjoyed by millions of people, perhaps becoming rich in the process, does far more good for the world than an elementary school teacher. Sam Walton did more good for humanity than any thousand average teachers combined.

<comment><USER26> Had Sam Walton been a teacher, teaching thousands of children throughout his life, what are the chances he would have inspired some them to be great engineers?

<comment><USER27> If becoming a teacher is the ultimate instrumental good, then we would all become teachers, then nothing would get done.

Since that is obviously the worst of all worlds, it tells me that teachers do a good thing, but not the greatest thing.

However, without teachers, few things would get done as everyone would reinvent the wheel. This is also, while not the worst scenario, it is far from the best.

Thus, the best scenario seems to be that people should try to accomplish something, then go back and teach the next generation. The bonus is that these people will know how to get to the top.

However, people who are good at getting things done are not necessarily the best teachers, and for the people that are...

Perhaps, like we have today, those who are good at teaching and want to should teach, and those who want to produce should produce (and then later teach). The whole system relies on there being a good balance between the two. How to calculate the balance is very hard.

<comment><USER26> Well, of course you are right that everyone can't be a teacher. However, realistically, I think we are very much on the opposite end of number-of- great-people-who-are-teachers spectrum.

Also worth pointing out that this isn't necessarily true for secondary education - Universities are institutions which allow great teachers to both do great work and teach. I'd hypothesize that if the same were extended to other institutions, and also to younger students, much value would come of it.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Booktype: free open source platform to produce books for print, Amazon, iBooks - <AUTHOR> http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype/

<comment><USER2> Are there good command-line tools that accomplish this? It looks like Booktype expects you to edit in a browser. I know there are work-arounds for this but really I just want to edit in Vim then send files to some processor.

<comment><AUTHOR> Calibre has some command-line tools: <http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/cli/cli- index.html>

The easybook project (posted on HN recently) is also a command-line utility: <http://easybook-project.org/>

<comment><USER2> Very nice! Thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


IBM: Back to the Bad Old Days? - ESR - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1889#more-1889

<comment><USER2> "Crucially, two of those were patents that IBM explicitly promised never to raise against open source."

What sort of weight does that promise carry? It's hard not to draw parallels to the .NET patent discussion. Maybe these sorts of promises don't mean anything because they still have enough related patents to sink a free software project.

<comment><USER3> The promise is legally binding. IBM has no chance of winning an infringement suit over those two patents against an open source project as defined in their pledge here: <http://www.ibm.com/ibm/licensing/patents/pledgedpatents.pdf>

It's highly likely that their inclusion of those two patents in the list of 150+ they say TurboHercules might be infringing is an oversight, and if they file suit and include those, the defendants will have no trouble getting a summary judgement throwing them out.

Not that this will help much--IBM has made no such promise about the other 150+ patents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> No ESR, the Bad Old Days was when IBM did the IT for the Third Reich.

<http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/></comment>


Show HN: 500+ Wireframe Blocks in 22 Categories for Adobe XD, Sketch and Figma - <AUTHOR> https://source.forpeople.studio/ <comment><USER2> So much work went into authoring this professionally developed wireframe library, only to see it offered for sale under a non-professionally written license. I don't get it.</comment>


Lenovo's Fedora-Powered ThinkPad P53 Is Everything I Want in a Linux Laptop - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/08/10/lenovo-new-thinkpad-p53-fedora-linux-laptop <comment><USER2> For anyone looking for a Linux laptop without an Nvidia card, Lenovo allows you to customize P1 Gen2s so that they only have an Intel GPU. For day-to-day dev work it's more than enough even on a 4k screen.

I just bought one and it's a really good Linux laptop, by which I mean most of the hardware works at an acceptable level out of the box. (That's no small feat for a current-gen laptop of any brand.)

Complaints:

\- The OLED screen option has some kind of visible honeycomb layer on top. Forums threads suggest this is the touch layer, but it's really distracting and shockingly low-quality. My unit also came with a pink tint across half the screen which is a common OLED defect. I swapped it for the IPS screen which is excellent and doesn't have touch, a bonus in my book.

\- Current Intel GPU drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 suffer from visible lag and tearing when using the built-in 4k screen. I believe Canonical has fixed this for 20.10 but it doesn't seem to be backported yet.

\- The GPU drivers suffer from a bug that disables the HDMI port if a cable is present at boot. There are bugs filed in the Intel tracker but this is an older GPU so I don't know if they'll ever get attention.

\- The trackpad is coated in some kind of matte coating that makes your finger stick and skip when using it. Very uncomfortable. They claim it's glass but I've used really nice glass trackpads (in 5-year-old machines even) and this ain't it.

Besides these nits, two of which are fixable driver issues, it's a great machine and I'd recommend it with the IPS/Intel-only options.

<comment><USER3> The P series seems pretty overpriced compared to the competition today IMHO. And 9th gen Intel CPU in 2020?! My current laptop mantra is Ryzen 4000 or bust.

But ok, ok, say they didn't have time to port their design to the new AMD chips since they're new. Fine, but I better see Ryzen based notebooks with more than 16GB of RAM and 512GB SSD and 16:10 screens with res higher than FullHD in 2021 or I'm gonna lose my shit.

<comment><USER4> The P series' draw for me is that it is almost bulletproof. The body is sturdy and the internals easily accessible. I on on a P50 that is still going strong without any issues.

<comment><USER5> I have a p1 gen core i9 32gb 4K oled with dgpu. Battery life is horrible, max 3 hrs on battery saving mode. The thing doesn't really feel that fast on windows, dispute 16 threads, 8 cores. And the keyboard is horrible, constantly missing keys. (Yes, updated all the drivers). I had a t470s before, keyboard was really nice, but somehow the p1 is really bad, I only want to use it with an external keyboard.

<comment><USER2> I believe there was a BIOS fix for the keyboard issues very recently. Check to make sure you have the latest BIOS version installed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For macOS users:

Checkout Lenovo Carbon X1. It is one of the best things I own.

Ever picked up a macbook and paused for a second to think subconciously "it's gonna feel cold on my lap until it warms up to my body temp"? I know everytime I wanna use my macbook, the cold aluminum is such a pain. I think about it everytime I sit down with it.

With Carbon X1 (running macOS[1]), it just feels wonderful to touch, magnesium/carbon body is way lighter than anything Apple makes.

I think it is time for Apple to use magnesium alloys, soft touch coating and still maintain extremely premium/luxury aspect. Keyboard is amazing. LCD is on par with Apple or even better. I have the HD 2560x1440 400 nits model. There is a shutter for webcam.

I also opened it up and replaced the thermal paste with gallium since the heatsink is copper (can't do this if it is alumnium). It runs cool but there is a problem with the macOS battery management and that's being solved right now. Regardless, I still love this thing.

[1] [https://github.com/tylernguyen/x1c6-hackintosh](https://github.com/tylernguyen/x1c6-hackintosh)

<comment><USER7> How is the power management aspect of running Mac OS? That's the only complaint I have (using windows) on my X1 carbon compared to my old macbook pro.

<comment><USER6> Yea that's the only pain, sleep doesn't work and it runs slightly hot. There is an issue around it and hopefully it will be fixed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I predominately run Fedora when I use a laptop, along with Debian. I really have come to enjoy Fedora. I don't notice a ton of difference over Debian moment to moment, except perhaps you tend to have newer versions of things in the repos (like Firefox), with the flipside being, you are upgrading your distro major version much more often (and you get used to it). On the other hand there tends to be a touch more in the Debian repo and I've noticed there are some apps that support Debian packaging out of the box but not Fedora (Signal Desktop, Spotify) - for me this is less of an issue because I just make a new debian VM (I use the Qubes hypervisor, which uses Fedora for dom0 and Fedora as default in VMs).

All that said, there is no way I'd carry around a 5.5lb laptop, personally :-) Fedora seems happy with my X1 Carbon gen5 though.

<comment><USER9> I use Flatpak to install things such as Signal and Zoom. It covers most of the situations where I'd install a deb or rpm in the past.

<comment><USER8> Nice, I may try that - I assume you get everything from flathub by default?

<comment><USER9> Yup. All from Flathub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> From the Arch wiki

      Use nvidia-prime to switch between cards. External outputs are connected to the nvidia gpu.

My X1 extreme gen 2 has PRIME, and the experience is miserable. I got so used to everything just working with intel integrated graphics, but I wanted to be able to use cuda on my laptop. With hacks you can get external displays working, but my understanding is that the current solution is to run a second Xserver for the dedicated GPU and blit everything across. The display is too laggy for anything other than a static presentation.

<comment><USER11> For your use case the best option is to run video off the intel integrated graphics and leave the DGPU entirely for compute.

That's how I have this very laptop configured, and also how I configured the workstations for the people here using GPUs for DL development (because a composited desktop will get very janky if you try to run it off a GPU currently being brought to its knees by a training process).

<comment><USER10> For Gen 2? I did try that.

My understanding was that the external outputs were wired to the nvidia card, and therefore I wasn't able to use them without the wacky PRIME setup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> blaser-waffle Neat! I've had a rpm/red-hat based OS (mostly Fedora) on Thinkpads for years now. I'll check this out.

Also interesting they chose to compare to System76, presumably it's because it ships with Linux, but I feel like a real comparison would be with Dell or Acer offerings.

> Let's focus on the hardware in the spotlight now. And lest you think I've > lost my ability to be critical, I'll open with this: the bezels on this > beast look comically oversized for a laptop in 2020. I understand the P53 > isn't a sexy ultrabook and isn't trying to win any thinness awards. I also > get that the thicker bezels reinforce the durability of the display panel.

Aye, I think bezels are flimsy and lead to lots of fingerprints on the edges. I don't buy Thinkpads because they're sleek and sexy, I buy them because they're robust and starkly elegant. Same idea as having a small/mid-sized pickup truck: I don't need it to be pretty, I just need it to be reliable and functional enough for regular use.

Odd choices of gaming comparisons though -- Dawn of War III & DiRT Rally, but not LoL, Overwatch, Red Dead Redemption, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> Except it has a number pad. A pet peeve of mine because they shift everything over which is off putting for a laptop.

</comment><comment><USER13> I love that the P53 has all the ports on the back so I don't have cables cluttering up the sides of my on the road desk spaces where I like to keep a proper mouse and mouse pad and a notebook. In the office it's still nicer too even though it gets hooked up to external monitor and keyboard. No I don't have a docking station.

<comment><USER14> This works well if the laptop is front and center, but I actually have my laptop in a stand which holds it vertically to save desk space. I suppose the laptop could sit in my stand at 90 degrees but that might look a little strange! There are plenty of desk laptop stands though, so I am sure options exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm a fedora and thinkpad user for 8+ years now, I would love to see Lenovo consider selling this machine (or any 15+ inches) without the numpad and with a centered touchpad.

<comment><USER16> I'll disagree for my personal preference. I'm not a fan of small keyboards. I really enjoy having my 104 key buckling spring keyboard. So to me it is nice to see a laptop with a numpad as I like having mine.

I was seriously considering ordering a Model F keyboard ( [https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/](https://www.modelfkeyboards.com/) ) But the largest model is a measly 77 key model :( For desktop use, my requirement is to have a numpad. I realize why they did it as costs are a lot lower for 77 keys vs 104 keys. But still disappointed.

<comment><USER17> Aren't there numpads on some keyboards on that page?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well... They have P1 "Coming Soon", that is:

1\. Touchscreen 4K OLED

2\. Light(half the weight of P53)

3\. Slightly slower graphics(T2000)

4\. Also Fedora certified!

<comment><USER19> Hoping for the version without a discrete GPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I wish Lenovo gave a P53 and GTX graphics without the "gamery" glitz of the Legion lineup.

I really want a workstation class laptop where IO isn't severely limited. Lenovo really cuts down on USB-C and Display IO across their lineup, their marketing is misleading where on the t580 one of the USB-C ports only charges so you're left with just one thunderbolt USB-C port.

Right now I'm looking at the Clio based System76 series but not sure of their build quality.

<comment><USER21> I bought a Legion (the 4800H-based one) for my daughter a couple of months ago; "glitz" is not a word I'd use to describe it and I/O limitations haven't been an issue. As far as I can tell it's a fine machine, and _excellent_ for the sub-US$1000 price. The only negative I can think of is using a proprietary power brick. :(

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Hmm always found Gnome to be too bulky for laptop screens. Pop modified gnome with tiling and minimal borders is a bit better

<comment><USER23> Pop made Gnome exactly what I wanted out of the box. Plus the new tiling was the icing on the cake. Minimal tweaking to start doing what I want it to do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I heard good things about Fedora and tried to switch to it from my Ubuntu 19.10 install. I have a somewhat custom install of specific partitions across two SSDs and the installer just couldn't cope with it. It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible. Tried Pop!_OS next and all these issues went away. I could see all my partitions, assign them to whichever mount point I wanted and choose whether I wanted a partition to be formatted or not. Not a surprise though since it is based on Ubuntu and uses the same installer.

Having used several distributions, Ubuntu's Ubiquity installer is the gold standard in my opinion in terms of striking the balance between flexibility, user friendliness and UX. Pop!_OS has been awesome so far but would like to try out Fedora at some point.

<comment><USER19> What's exactly Anaconda made wrong? Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.

<comment><USER24> > What's exactly Anaconda made wrong?

As I mentioned earlier:

"It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without formatting and some others were simply not visible."

> Distro-tossing isn't a way how you can polish your Linux skills.

I agree with you. Though my primary purpose behind using Linux is not to polish my Linux skills (I've been using Linux for close to 20 years now) but is driven by my belief in open source, Linux's flexibility and the great ecosystem of software. However, one has only a finite amount of time and since Anaconda didn't provide me with an option to work with my current setup (I explored various options like advanced mode etc without much success), I had to move on to something that worked which turned out to be the Ubiquity installer used by Pop!_OS. I probably should have tried to document the probelms and raise an issue in the Anaconda forum/github - will do that next time I try Fedora.

<comment><USER19> > It didn't give a choice to map some partitions to just a mount point without > formatting and some others were simply not visible.

Yeah, I got it. I've just wanted to get a more deeper explanation of your existing partitioning situation - I've set up RHEL derivatives on some very vague partitioning variations. Never thought that there could be the problems. Maybe it's just a GUI limitation?

<comment><USER24> I think it is almost certainly a GUI limitation. E.g. I have a ext4 partition that I usually mount on /other and preserve it when distro-hopping. I can't remember exactly but one of these things happened - it didn't detect this partition / didn't give me the option to preserve it / didn't allow me to specify the mount point for it. Had a similar issue with another partition too. I think I also had some minimum space related restriction that refused to go away. Wish I had taken notes/pictures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I have been using a 17" Serval WS System 76 Ubuntu laptop for ten months, particularly heavily since March (when Covid started). I have been happy with it. I upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04 at the beginning of July and that has had no problems.

I have used System76 laptops for eight years. Around 2012-2014 I was not totally satisfied with them because of issues that would come up now and again. I kept buying from them though as I did not see any better alternatives. They have gotten better in recent years from my perspective, I have been happy with the laptop I bought last year.

</comment><comment><USER26> I ran Linux on a P50 for _years_ and that unit, which is sitting in front of me right now, is the reason that I won't buy another ThinkPad, ever.

It was the biggest lemon I've ever owned. I've been through multiple mainboards, dozens of repair center calls for battery and power issues (which persist even now).

(Having owned somewhere around a half dozen different ThinkPads, all of them well loved up till the P50, this was a sad end to my support of that platform.)

<comment><USER27> Lenovo slowly transitioned away from IBM's design over the years. They are now using cheaper plastics and have horrible chassis designs which dig into your wrists due to their non-rounded edges. They're trying to make Thinkpads look more slick while at the same time reducing the cost to manufacture them. IMHO the Thinkpad can no longer be considered a platform which you can safely buy knowing that every component will be fully supported in Linux. Some hardware components are not even working correctly in Windows or are faulty (I'm looking at you Fibocom WWAN modem; see: [https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and- newer-T-...](https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T400-T500-and-newer-T- series-Laptops/Fibocom-L850-GL-WWAN-Problems-on- Multiple-T480s-Laptops/m-p/4339294?page=2)). I would happily buy from any other brand if they have a laptop model with a good trackpoint.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I just picked up their new Ryzen 5 4500U laptop and slapped Mint on it with the latest rc for kernel 5.8. its one of the best laptops i've had, esp running linux.

<comment><USER29> Now that would make a cool review, interested in that setup!

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> As a developer, the two most important things to me in a laptop are durability (I take it many places) and a good keyboard, and I have found that the ThinkPad P, X and T series are equally good in these regards and leagues beyond the competition.

I'm currently running Fedora on a ThinkPad P52 and couldn't ask for a better development workstation.

</comment><comment><USER31> I love the P53! I got one to replace an X1 Carbon after I kept thermal throttling when compiling Rust.

I run NixOS on mine, and it's _almost_ perfect. Hopefully, with this official Fedora release, I'll be able to change the screen brightness when using the Nvidia GPU - it's currently stuck at 100%. Damn Nvidia + Linux :(

</comment><comment><USER32> No mention of battery life yet - and unfortunately for me that's pretty important. I daily drive a Linux laptop that gets 9 hours (but with a good amount of tweaking), and the day we get 13 hours or more is the day I become a complete advocate for Linux on the go.

<comment><USER33> AMD Ryzen 4000 laptops have much better battery life. My year old Intel Thinkpad (not the one discussed here) gets about 3-4 hours on a good day. My HP Envy x360 gets 12+ hours. Both run the same version of Fedora and a similar mix of browser/compiles. As an extra bonus the AMD portable chips are _much_ faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> All that space and they couldn't fit in a full-sized arrow-key cluster :(

</comment><comment><USER35> >The ThinkPad P53 is a great machine, but maybe it's time for Lenovo to implement a more ... [+] fingerprint-resistant material? \- No please, I prefer fingerprints than scratches

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Even just a matte finish should fix fingerprints, no?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I liked the mentions of the system76 boxes. I'm hoping for their internally designed laptop to be my next workstation.

Nonetheless, this Thinkpad sounds pretty good.

<comment><USER37> Interesting, can you provide any references for info about their internally designed laptop?

<comment><USER36> There have actually been no other news about that project since late last year, when they announced they were working on it.

They, however, haven't announced that the idea is shelved, so I remain hopeful that the laptop will see the light one day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Looks good except it still has a 16:9 screen. Looking forward to the rumored Titanium and Nano.

<comment><USER39> this thing is already big enough to have its own orbit. imagine a 4:3 screen on this beast

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Based on the title ("Everything I want in a Linux Laptop"), it seems like the author needs to learn about coreboot and Intel ME. It's hard to take a review seriously when it doesn't even touch upon built in backdoors.

<comment><USER41> Well, it's everything he wants, not necessarily everything you want.</comment></comment>