PShaw, that’s how I had to do it. Slackware on floppy. Pre-internet search engine, one computer per household. No cellular data.

windows -> Dial up -> look at some docs, take nodes -> reboot into Slackware -> mess with the console -> get stuck -> reboot into windows -> repeat

kbin obviously!

that includes a large 285MB ZIP archive to install a Linux VM with a pre-installed backdoor.

When I just use one of the older distros that fits on a floppy?

Yeah, a company got toasted because one of their admins was running Plex and had tautulli installed and opened to the outside figuring it was read-only and safe.

Zero day bug in tat exposed his Plex token. They then used another vulnerability in Plex to remote code execute. He was self-hosting a GitHub copy of all the company’s code.

I keep a root folder. On Windows it’s in c:\something on Linux it’s in /something

Under there I’ve got projects organized by language. This helps me organize nix shells and venvs.

Syncthing keeps the code bases and synced between multiple computers

I don’t separate work from home because they don’t live in the same realm.

Only home stuff in the syncthing.

Running a bun two on my 2015 air I struggle to get 2 hours out of it. I was able to get TLP to bring it close to 4, But it was at the cost of being borderline unusable.

Great, now we’re not going to catch the next zero day compression vulnerability. :)

I used enlightenment for something like a decade. When Gnome hit the big time I used Gnome because it looked Nice and was very flexible. I went back to Mac and Windows Land for a bit, when I came back I went Gnome again. I just screw around for a day looking and picking plugins and fighting with it to get it exactly how I wanted it. After fighting with one of the older plugins that mustn’t doing what I wanted to do I saw somebody mentioned using KDE. I tried KDE and sure enough every single thing I was plugging the hell out of Gnome for was a default setting in KDE. I’m currently running Plasma. I must say that Cinnamon’s not bad either.

It gives a whole new meaning to my buddy’s Ford escort.

Taskkill /f is reasonably close to sudo kill -9

Hitting the X in Windows and hitting the X in Linux both cause the application to start a save yourself routine. From the OS standpoint they’re not far off.

The problem is we have a lot of confirmation bias in windows because every time we want to close an application that’s not working, that save yourself call has to sit around for a hellaciously long time out followed by a telemetry call so that Microsoft can track that it happened.

It’s pretty rare that Linux apps don’t just close.

The crypto is decent, it’s electron so it’s source available. If you want to ignore their hosting solution, you can disable the syncing and just take the vault from its config directory and sync it yourself

The real downsides are that it’s not actual open source, so if they decided to screw around with the security or turn the crypto off somebody can’t just fork it.

Realistically with that screen size you could put anything in that thing. How do you get the impression that it might be a little smaller than it looks though.

I’d vote for anytype or obsidian

Anytype has a learning curve, But it has built-in encryption and IPFS syncing provided by the company. The templating system is really slick and the relational aspect is pretty solid.

Obsidian + syncthing fork is a really solid contender. It’s much easier to work with out of the box but the features are a little more generic.

Neither of these are really self-hosted, so much as they are contained in their own ecosystem. You get some measure of higher availability that you have to really work for if you’re really self-hosting a product.

I you’re going to hack one, this one is much cooler

https://www.ebay.com/itm/186640570101

there’s a teardown here:

https://hackaday.com/2020/04/27/teardown-vtech-whiz-kid-luggable-computer/

I totally agree. Quake GL improved quake 100 fold. RT quake did the same all over again

Each distro picks the things it likes the things it doesn’t like and it combines what it wants into a working operating system. Maybe they make some of their own custom stuff, maybe they just borrow other people’s stuff.

Debian, up until the last couple of revisions was very big choosing on only free things. If you wanted to use any non-free products you had to jump through small hoops. So Ubuntu took debians core, and rewired it to properly support free things making installation and maintenance on newer hardware much easier. Because it was so much easier, they got a huge support community, and became the default for a lot of people just starting out. But then the guys that run Debian also made other decisions, like trying to monetize some of the aspects or push for the use of different package managers that people don’t love. Mint came along and kind of filled the gap in between ubuntu’s up sides and downsides and became the easy default for a lot of people. In the midst of all that turmoil, Debian slipped in their own version of making non-free software seamless. A lot of the support thrown into Ubuntu and mint also helps Debian.

Red hat, fedora, and centos have the same kind of story going on, But it’s much less exciting and more about support and payments.

The next thing you weren’t into is immutable operating systems. Like Fedora silver blue or NIXOS. They’re extremely secure, because you’re not allowed to make changes to the operating system blindly while it’s running, But it complicates just about everything you do in the name of security.

The other thing you mentioned were window managers. (Gnome, KDE…) They’re basically affecting the look and feel of the gui for the operating system. It’s your right click and your start menu and your window shades at the top and how windows are moved and snapped and organized. KDE looks and works by default a lot more like Windows, Gnome has a rather flexible plug-in system in tons of plugins available. Most of the other window managers are designed for low memory usage.

Another thing you’ll run into is X-Windows and Wayland. They mainly deal with backend internals of how the gui does its work. X Windows is ancient and compatible with just about anything that was ever made, Wayland is a bit flashier a little more efficient, and a little more secure, But at the same time it has a lot of compatibility issues with new hardware. Like if you’re going to run auto hotkey you’re going to have a harder time getting it to run under Wayland.

If you’re running on an x86/64 PC you can choose whatever you want, with the lion share of tech support being available for Debian variants (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint)

If you’re running on Mac, some distros are better supported.

If you’re running on a raspberry pi you’re usually best going with one of the ones they recommend.

When someone says that an application is tested to work with a certain distribution, most likely it can work or be coerced to work with most of the other distributions, But the developer designed it under and tests it under whatever distribution they recommended regularly. So don’t be surprised if you choose something else and you have to fight with it a bit to get it to work or in rare cases it doesn’t work at all.

$500 might be a stretch, It weren’t for the horrible keyboard, and horrible screen, it might be worth putting a raspberry pi into as a sleeper project.

Yes I realize it’s a joke.

The whole point behind it was that everything was too slow to handle it efficiently themselves in an uncontrolled manner. When networks and computers got faster we started using ethernet.

They intended to make people think about the gameplay. Which you did. A lot of people will take that as a challenge.

The MAU turned a physical star topology into a logical ring topology.

Moving to star was more of an assistance to physical installs