I’m generally more of a Debian user, when I use Linux at least, so anything red hat based doesn’t even occur to me to recommend. I generally don’t get involved in distro discussions though.

My main interaction with Linux is Ubuntu server, and that’s where my knowledge generally is. I can’t really fix issues in redhat, so if someone is using it, I’m mostly lost on how to fix it.

There’s enough difference in how redhat works compared to Debian distributions that I would need to do a lot of work to understand what’s happening and fix any problems.

I dunno if I’d say any distro of Linux is really beginner friendly.

It takes quite a bit of learning the ins and outs of operating systems before Linux makes sense in any capacity.

If you’re just looking to run a few basic apps like discord/slack/teams/zoom, and run a browser, then sure, just about every distro can do that without trouble, and can be configured to be as “friendly” as Windows, with a few exceptions.

But anybody who wants to do intermediate/advanced stuff with little to no prior Linux knowledge? I’m not sure any distro is much easier than others. Again, with a few exceptions.

The exceptions are distros that are almost intentionally difficult to use, or that require a high level of competency with Linux before you can attempt to use it.

There’s always a learning curve, that learning curve is pretty much always pretty steep.

I’ve been using Linux for dedicated servers for a while and I don’t use Linux as a desktop environment, in no small part because despite having a fairly high level of competency with Linux, I don’t feel like I know enough to make Linux work for me instead of the other way around.

Like a community about arch?

I guess it’s not really niche at this point.

Btw, I don’t run arch.

Yep, I’m sure they do.

Realistically, does any average consumer know what’s on which circuit?

Spanning the split phase will screw you up, across breakers won’t be fun but shouldn’t pose any serious problems, as long as it’s not in different sides of the split phase.

I’m pretty sure they say this because actually explaining what will work and what won’t either requires significant prior knowledge of power systems, or a couple of paragraphs of explainers before you can get a rough picture of what the hell they’re driving at.

Everyone I know who has used powerline, just plug it in and see if it works. Those who were lucky, say it’s great and works without issue, etc. Those who were not lucky say the opposite.

I’m just over here watching the fireworks, eating popcorn.

I’ve been doing IT work for more than a decade, I was a nerd/“computer guy” well before that. I’ve had a focus on networking in the past 15-20 years. You learn a few things.

I try to be humble and learn what I can where I can, I know that I definitely do not know everything about it, and at the same time I try to be generous and share what I’ve learned when I can.

So if you have questions, just ask. I either already know, or I can at least point you in the right direction.

It definitely sounds like you have some challenges ahead. I personally prefer MoCA over wireless, simply because you can control what devices are able to be a part of the network, and reduce the overall interference from external sources and connections.

With WiFi, being half duplex, only one station can transmit at a time (with come caveats). Whether that station is a part of your network, or it is simply operating on the same frequency/channel, doesn’t matter. So in high density environments, you can kind of get screwed by neighbors.

MoCA is also half duplex (at least it was the last time I checked) so having a 2.5G MoCA link, to a 1GbE connection (on the ethernet side) should provide similar, or the same experience as pure ethernet (1G full duplex)… The “extra” bandwidth on the MoCA will allow for each station to send and receive at approximately 1Gbps without stepping on eachother so much that you have degraded performance.

However, it really depends on your situation to say what should or shouldn’t be setup. I don’t know your bandwidth requirements, so I can’t really say. The nice thing about ethernet is that it on switched networks (which is what you’ll be using for gigabit), the. Ethernet kind of naturally defaults to the shortest path, unless you’re doing something foolish with it (like intentionally messing with STP to push traffic in a particular direction). The issue with that is that ethernet doesn’t really scale beyond a few thousand nodes. Not an issue for even a fairly large LAN, but that’s the reason we don’t use it for internet (wan side) traffic routing. But now I’m off topic.

Given the naturally shortest-path behavior of ethernet, of you have a switch in your office and you only really use your NAS from your office PC, you’ll have a full speed experience. If nothing else needs high-speed access to the NAS, you’ll be fine.

Apart from the NAS or any other LAN resources, the network should be sufficient to fully saturate your internet connection. So the average WiFi speeds should be targeted towards something faster than your internet link (again, half duplex factors in here). I don’t know your internet speed so I’m not going to even guess what the numbers should be, but I personally aim for double my internet speed for maximum throughput on my WiFi as much as I can. The closer you can get to doubling your internet speed here, the better. Anything more than that will likely be wasted.

There’s a ton to say about WiFi and performance optimization, but I’ll leave it alone unless you ask about it further.

Good luck.

It can be faster, it really depends on whether you have a clear-ish channel for the mesh, which is why I would recommend something on the higher end, hopefully with a dedicated radio for mesh, so it can be on a different channel with (hopefully) less interference.

If the mesh radio is shared with client access, or if it’s on a busy channel, it may be much, much slower than some options.

Hello friend.

You can get 2.5gbps MoCA now. You may want to consider upgrading.

Nice username btw

Depending on where you live and what your power circuits look like (not the outlets, the circuits that power them), you may have a great, or very poor experience.

I’d need to know what country you live in to know more, since power wiring standards vary from country to country. In the USA and Canada (I’m in Canada and the USA is the same), we use split phase and crossing the split phase will severely hinder the ability for powerline to perform.

It’s a viable option, not my favorite option, I’d recommend MoCA (coax) over powerline, but it’s ultimately up to you.

IMO, powerline is going to depend on a lot of factors including what kind of power you use, which varies from country to country. Where I am in North America, we use 240v split phase, and the powerline adapters are 120v (half phase), so if one unit ends up on one side of the phase, and one ends up on the other side of the phase, you’re going to have a bad time, if it links at all… So knowing which “side” of the split phase your powerline is on becomes critical, which is not something most people know about their power situation. As a result, it’s basically a crap shoot whether it will work well or not.

I have three suggestions for you.

Easy mode: find a triple radio mesh wifi system and get at least two nodes. Generally the LAN Jack on the satellite nodes will bridge to the LAN over WiFi. Just add a switch and use it normally. This will harm your overall speeds when connecting to the NAS from other wired LAN systems that are not on the same switch. I’m not sure if that’s important. As long as your internet speed is less than half of your WiFi speed, you shouldn’t really notice a difference.

Medium mode: buy MoCA adapters and use coax. Just be sure to get relatively new ones. They’re generally all 1G minimum, but usually half duplex, so there’s still sacrifice there, but MoCA is generally better than WiFi. The pinch is making sure you stop the MoCA signal from exiting your premise. You don’t want to tap into someone else’s MoCA network, nor have them tap into yours. There are cable filters that will accomplish this, or you can air gap the coax. I’m not sure how much control you have for the ingress/egress of your coax lines. You can yolo it and just hope for the best, but I can’t recommend that.

Hard mode: do ethernet anyways. Usually in rentals, nobody can complain with holes in the walls the size you would get from nails to hand pictures, not much larger than a picture hanging nail, is a cup hook. What I did at my old place, which was a rental, was to buy large cup hooks, and put them every ~18" down the hallway, and load it with ethernet cables. I used adhesive cable runners to go down walls near doors and ran the cables under doors to get from room to room. I got lucky that two adjacent rooms shared a phone jack and I replaced the faceplate with a quad port Keystone faceplate on each side. One Keystone was wired to the phone line to keep existing functionality, the rest were connected to eachother though the wall as ethernet, and I just patched one side to the other (on one side was the core switch for my network). That was my experience, obviously your experience will be different. I used white ethernet to try to blend it in with the ceiling/walls which were off-white. In my situation, I was on DSL and used the phone jack in one of the bedrooms for my internet connection, that bedroom was used as an office and it neighbored my bedroom where I used the jack to jack connections through the wall to feed my TV and other stuff in the bedroom. The ethernet on the cup hooks went from the office to the living room where I put a second access point (first ap was on the office) and TV and other stuff. Inbetween the bedrooms and the living room was the kitchen and the wet wall was basically RF blocking, so I needed an access point on either side, so one in the office near the bedroom and bathroom, and one in the living room, provided plenty of coverage for the ~900sqft apartment we were renting. Most everything was on wired ethernet, and the WiFi was used mainly by laptops and cellphones.

I live by the philosophy of wired when you can, wireless when you have to. Mainly to save WiFi channels and bandwidth for devices that don’t have an easy alternative option like mobile phones and portable computers.

I don’t think you’re in a bad spot OP, and any of these choices should be adequate for your needs, but that will vary depending on what speed internet you have, and how much speed you need for the LAN (to the NAS and between systems).

Good luck.

Very yes. Thanks.

This is probably a big reason I don’t buy/play newer multiplayer games, especially ones that are mp only, and a big reason why I buy everything on steam and avoid other platforms.

I’ve heard of games being dropped by steam, but those that already own it, still own it and can access it on steam as normal. In the situations I’m aware of, those games eventually returned to steam later, but still.

I prefer games that are either peer to peer mp, or you can self host a server for mp. I’m not saying that I’ll always self host, but if the option is there, then I’ll never lose the ability to play the game with friends, since I only need to set up a server to play on. Since I have a homelab, setting something like that up is trivial for me, and I can shut down and delete the server afterwards when it’s no longer wanted or needed.

Everyone going crazy for the latest version of whatever battle Royale type game, laying down premium money to play on day one, and spending a lot to get buffs and cosmetics… It just seems stupid to me. No thanks.

Free to play multiplayer with the option to buy cosmetics is less bad, but still not great. You can play, enjoy some time with friends while playing the game and if it goes offline tomorrow, who cares? You didn’t pay anything for it and I’m certain there’s other options in the same vein. As long as you’re having fun, enjoy.

If I’m paying for a game, it’s probably because of the single player experience. Anything multiplayer is icing on the cake, but not motivation to buy it.

For grids, there is a “world grid” which players were given access to some time ago, if you build properly on the world grid, then when you meet up one section from a factory to another section from another factory, they’ll meet properly.

I always use the world grid to get a starting point before laying anything down. I don’t want to struggle later on trying to make things fit, and doing it this way it’s a no brainer.

For rail lines, they’re completely dynamic, if you want to build it into a pretzel, you can do that. I’m not sure the trains would love it, but you can easily do that. There’s actually a problem most new players have that after going around a corner, their rail line goes all wavy because the rail curves a little bit depending on where you place it, and what it’s attached to. The solution is, at the end of the curve, when you have your ending point, remove the last section of rail at the curve, then build a perfectly straight section of rail where it will continue, then rebuild the last bit of the curve. This ensures the next section will start perfectly straight and any curve in the rail will be isolated to where the rail is meant to be curved. Then continue building as normal and the rest of the line will be straight.

Of course the rail lines can go up/down as much as you want (within the bounds of the world), so it’s not uncommon to see sky bridges with long rail lines that span most of the map. In that configuration, either very tall conveyor lifts being materials up/down from stations on the line, or there’s long, looped spirals of track to bring trains down to stations. I’ve seen both, and both methods are valid.

There will be train and truck stations frequently above or below factories for transit. I’ve also seen long bridges of conveyor belts bringing materials from one place to another. The main benefits to conveyors over trains/trucks/drones is that they’re very consistent and don’t require any additional power or fuel to run (trucks need fuel, trains use power), but a lot of people think they’re ugly, so trains or trucks are common. I’m more of a fan of consistency so I tend to do conveyors, but I don’t fault anyone for making different choices. Trains always need infrastructure, at least a rail line, trucks usually need some kind of infrastructure, though, not always. Drones don’t need any, so if you want to preserve nature in the game, you can go that way, but drones are very late-game and require batteries which are difficult to build in sufficient quantities. Not impossible, but not easy either.

I tend to build a road with conveyors hanging underneath. The road is for me to get there and to provide the necessary structure to place the conveyors.

One thing I’ve heard of that factorio has that satisfactory lacks is the idea of pollution. In satisfactory, you can spew all the toxic gases you want and the environment doesn’t change at all. Plants still grow and the world keeps looking the same. IDK, it’s a difference I know about.

The first-person style of satisfactory is more like building in Minecraft (I would assume) so getting things lined up is sometimes a challenge until you get to the hoverpack. But the hoverpack requires power, and to get it, you have to be within a certain proximity to a power post.

In any case. I was thinking the tour would be a “before you buy” kind of thing, maybe over discord or something, where I can stream my game and you can ask whatever questions you want, and I can show you the mechanics. If you’re not interested, that’s fine. There’s plenty of that kind of tour content on YouTube too if you want to look around.

For transporting materials, you don’t have to. If you build modular factories right next to where your nodes are you can produce your items and store them at that location. The only down side is that when you need that stuff you’ll have to go to that location and pick up what you need. A lot of players like to build a resource hub and dump all their finished products into bins there, so they have a single location to go to when building anything. Just pick up whatever mats you need, and head out.

I have a lot more I could say about the nuances of design and structure in such a place, but it’s all up to the person playing for what they want to do to put it all together. I tend to keep cramming too much into too small of a space and I have to engineer my way around the limitations. I need to plan better.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy factorio, as I enjoy satisfactory. My offer stands if you change your mind. If you ever buy the game and want to play some mp, let me know, I usually have a server running.

So, to address your question, raw materials only come from nodes, which require miners. Obviously miners require power, but produce raw materials (output via a belt) indefinitely. The rate of extraction depends on the quality/purity of the node (poor/normal/pure) and the level of the miner. Miners can be placed anywhere there is a node. So building smaller modular factories is definitely possible and one of many legitimate strategies.

I think that answers the question, let me know if I misunderstood. I’m not 100% familiar with all the factorio mechanics so I’m not totally sure if I fully understood the question.

Between locations, you can move materials by truck, train, or drone. You can run trucks across the ground or build roads.

When it comes to generation, coal plants can burn just about anything solid, from raw coal to more complex materials derived from by-products of oil production. Fuel generators take any liquid fuel, from regular fuel, turbo fuel, and even liquid biofuel. Additionally there’s a bunch of different ways to arrive at each type of fuel, for solids, you can use refineries to refine coal or petroleum waste into compacted coal or similar, and with liquid fuel, there’s blenders and refineries, recipes for turbo blend fuel, heavy fuel, even turbo heavy fuel, diluted fuel, and packaged fuel too (used for jetpacks and vehicles). It gets… Complicated.

With satisfactory, you can build small and just wait, or build big and use a lot of power, and things get finished much faster.

With progression, there’s two main sections, milestones and phases. Each phase unlocks more tiers of milestones, and each milestone unlocks more buildables which will allow you to complete future milestones and phases. You can complete them in whatever order you want, but some of the progression requires that certain milestones get completed before progress can be made. In that way, there’s some linearity with the progression.

The first person perspective of the game and the three dimensional design is what draws me towards satisfactory more than factorio. I’d happily give you a personal tour of one of the multiplayer servers I play on and host. No pressure, I just thought I’d offer in case you wanted to ask questions and get shown around the game by someone.

It just seems like you would enjoy the game. If you ultimately decide to play, that’s fine, if not, no worries.

Satisfactory has added blueprints. They’ve been part of the game for a while. You can design, build and disassemble blueprints wholesale. They’re not super large, which is part of the challenge. For something like a rail line, the placement of blueprints won’t connect the rail line together even if you put a rail from end to end; so those blueprints usually are all the infrastructure surrounding a rail line, and the rail line is run down the infra after the blueprint is built.

There’s plenty of quirks with it, as I’m sure there are in factorio, and there’s no “perfect way” to do anything. A core mechanic in satisfactory is alternate recipes. I’ll give you an example. Screws are an early item that’s usually a pain point for new players early game. To get them, you have to mine iron, smelt it into iron ingots, then construct rods from those ingots, and finally, convert the rods into screws. It’s a pretty involved recipe for the early game. Most other recipes are more simple, concrete is raw limestone, constructed to concrete directly, it’s a two machine setup to get it rolling. Rods are another, and plates are similar to rods (both three machine setups, miner, smelter, constructor). Screws require at least four.

There’s a popular alternative recipe called cast screws, which creates screws from iron ingots directly. Not only that, but you get more screws per ingot than the vanilla recipe.

To take that example further, there’s an alternate for ingots, which is a “pure” ingot, which uses a mid-game machine, the refinery, to combine raw iron and water, and produce iron ingots, which has a higher yield than simply smelting the raw material.

So you can do the og recipes, and build a field of miners, smelters, and constructors (to make rods, then screws), so that you get enough screws in sufficient quantities, or, with a little legwork and some alternative recipes, you can use the pure iron ingot alternate, and cast screw alternate, and get a lot more with a lot fewer machines, and fewer iron nodes (less raw iron).

There’s Infinity variant building methodologies, from building right on the ground, to large towers filled with many floors of machines to do the work. The layout can be chaotic and spaghetti, inefficient and a mess, to varying levels of perfect input to perfect output, building a variety of things continually.

You can focus on design, or efficiency, or simply the speed at which you can throw things together. The options are endless.

You can rush towards coal, fuel, or nuclear power, or flatten all of the biodiversity of the map into biofuel and run everything on plant and animal matter.

Personally, I focus on alternative recipes early on, as well as logistics (faster conveyor belts, etc), and power (mainly coal/fuel)… Collecting biomass generally sucks IMO, plus the nature in the game is quite lovely and I don’t like to destroy more than I have to.

With the verticality, you can have production floors of machines where the inputs and outputs go into the floor, out of sight, into logistics floors below, to be carted around between machines, and to storage crates, or whatever you need. If you run out of space, you can expand, or build more floors above your current build and expand that way.

Trying to solve logistical issues in three dimensions can be a challenge.

There’s caves to explore, a variety of wild animals of varying strengths and abilities in the game, even some that are radioactive, or spew toxic gas. There’s even flower looking plants that kind of stand up when you come nearby, and if you hang out near them, they emit toxic gases too… Or you can play on passive mode where the fauna generally ignore that you exist unless you attack them.

I could keep going, there’s a lot of interesting stuff in the game, including a lot of things we don’t have the story about (they’ve had placeholders in the game that won’t be explained until 1.0 gets released, hopefully later this year). I have over 970 hours in the game and I will be starting a brand new save once 1.0 is available. I’m certain I will be playing that for many more hours to come.

If you want to know anything specific, please ask. I can point you at beginner friendly YouTubers, or streamers that push the game to its absolute (and ridiculous) limits with mods, or anything in-between. I can also just discuss the mechanics or what we know of the story so far.

For me, satisfactory is an extension of the same concepts I enjoy and employ for my profession. I’m in IT, and getting everything working just right, then seeing everything working perfectly is the take away I like to get from doing a thing. Troubleshooting it when it’s not operating correctly, and ensuring everything stays running 24/7, is huge.

That’s a fair assessment IMO. They’re all related games.

I personally haven’t played factorio, but I know enough about it to prefer satisfactory.

A few friends of mine are getting into Palworld and getting away from satisfactory. IDK, it seems a bit too different to me.

Foundry is on my radar. I might wait for satisfactory to hit 1.0, play that for a few months, then switch over to foundry.

It looks good though. IIRC it’s early access and what I’ve seen of it, I kinda want to give it a bit to get closer to complete before I jump in.

I’m a big fps/3d spaces person. I gravitated to satisfactory. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the same thing but 3D.

This is 100% truth.

When you’re young, you have a lot of free time and no money to enjoy that time

When you get into a career, you have money, and no time.

When you retire, you have money and time (to some extent), but you’re old and likely not able to enjoy things nearly as much as you would have been able to when you were younger (generally due to body aches and whatnot).

Being middle/lower “class”, you’re basically fucked.