with Cinnamon DE: very Windows-esque UI

While I support the general advice, “very Windows-esque UI” is not a benefit for less tech-literate people. It’s the former Windows-users that conditioned themselves to expect Windows UI with all it’s shortcomings. The average elderly relative who doesn’t use anything but ~3 pre-installed programs does not care normally and can get much eaiser and more intutive UIs than those close to Windows.

Yes, the system expects regular updating. But Arch is entirely pragmatic. What has enough popularity and a mainainer to do the work will be kept in the repositories, even more if you include the AUR (also stuff moving between them when popularity and/or demand of packages changes). And because it is constantly moving on with new packages a lot is kept in parallel: There are a lot of packages in the repos in different versions, one being cutting edge, one being the lower version dependency for other packages not upgraded yet.

For reference: Yes, Arch for example expected you to update to the new open source NVIDIA drivers the day NVIDIA dropped the Volta, Pascal and Maxwell cards (GTX 1080 and below). But at the same moment the nvidia-580xx driver was introduced to the AUR, including explicitly being supported officially still. And the same happened every time a set of hardware got dropped (nvidia-470, nvidia-390, nividia-340), still kept unofficially for legacy reasons as long as it’s technically feasible. So I can in fact still run graphics cards from 2006 20 years later…

Or for another example: Yes, Arch runs kernel 7.0.12 right now and updates the kernel on a weekly basis. Yet it also has the LTS version 6.18 (guaranteed to get support until end of 2028 upstream) fully supported in the repos. And again, including the AUR I can still run the oldest still officially supported (until end of this year) long-term-support Linux kernel 5.10.

And those are basically the most extreme examples in terms of losing support, one being the constantly developed core of the whole system, the other on proprietary drivers of a private company. Otherwise the amount of 1990s tech still support by Linux is actually insane.

— Written on an ancient toaster (AMD FX series from 2011, gtx750ti from 2014, non-EFI motherboard) running Arch… which nowadays runs -given: older- games with better performance than years ago, because “the newest stuff” does introduce constant improvements and optimisation instead of new drains on your ressources like you are used to because they want you to buy new stuff.

Well… People finding and disclosing security flaws are often much closer to hackers than what happened with the AUR.

Calling people adopting outdated and orphanded packages hackers is like calling the guy that finds a banknote on the ground a bankrobber.

The term “hacked” seem to have lost all meaning…

There is the option to explicitly set DefaultTimeoutStartSec and DefaultTimeoutStopSec per systemd service.

If you don’t specify it in a service file, the default values from /etc/systemd/system.conf (both set to 90s) will be used, so you can change those values to 30s, too, to affect all services (that don’t have their limit set explicitly) globally.

While I understand the idea in general Tux, the penguin, is basically freely available, do whatever you want with it, and you are explicitly encouraged to integrate the design into Linux related projects… as long as you mention the author should someone ask (source)

I wouldn’t even buy a pre-fabricated sticker but do one myself. But that wasn’t the question…

PS: the Impressum here or here, down at the bottom labeled “Impressum”?

https://www.linux-shop.info/aufkleber/maxi-aufkleber/maxi-sticker-tux-pinguin?number=LI18700.9

oder

https://www.linux-fan-shop.de/aufkleber/maxi-aufkleber/maxi-sticker-tux-pinguin?number=LI18700.9

People tend to read them the first time when installing stuff, yet rarely think about the scenario of a well used package taken over by a malicious actor making changes.

While you are right in general, you are just creating a file with a <user>:<hashed password> line without any identifying context. So have fun searching the world for where I might have actually used it. Sounds like a really bad use of ressources to create list of passwords.

PS: Yes, as an Arch user I am still pissed that this tool is not available in the repos beside installing the complete Apache server…

The options to password protect it are in the (usually /etc/radicale/)config file und [auth].

For proper security you could use

type = htpasswd

htpasswd_filename = /etc/radicale/users

htpasswd_encryption = bcrypt

then create a users file with apache tools (htpasswd -c -B users User1) or one of the million online htpasswd file creators.

Is it even apt-get still? thought they changed over to apt long ago and apt-get is just a symlink for legacy reasons.

At least that’s what I last read… (speaking as someone also loving candy) .

You could click the link already provided above. Just the Table of Contents at the top gives you a good overview about issues with Brave without reading anything else…

irrelevant metaphysical distinction…

The point here is that SystemD’s natural behavior is to send SIGTERM then wait an eternity.

Those “service XY is shutting down (5sec/2min)” messages you sometimes get on shutdown are coming from SystemD not waiting for 3 seconds like the meme suggests, but waiting for minutes before giving up and switching over to SIGKILL instead.

upgrade to next kernel version != patch the kernel with backported security fixes

Debian daring to suggest that using your real name to identify yourself on the system is a reasonable choice for most people. So get the torches and pitchforks…

Also don’t tell those people about the fact that such fields for additional information (like real name, address etc) exist in most user-handling parts of their software since forever.

You get asked for your real name when creating a new user for longer than Linux even exists. It’s just that noone actually cares. But now that’s suddenly an horrific anti privacy policy because the narrative demand that it is.

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Occasionally I need to run an “occ” command after an install to fix some indexes

That then fails and breaks it (in about 1 out of 3 cases). Which requires rolling back everything, running the commands again pre-update, then updating and praying to not have to do another re-install (~ 1 out of 5).

I actually moved away from classical self-hosted cloud storage solutions after trying the usual suspects like opencloud, nextcloud etc.

And for me the time and effort (also the ressource-hogging if you don’t use quite overpowered servers) just weren’t worth it. Not when the used interfaces most of the time are open standards anyway and simpler solutions do the job:

Radicale for contacts and dates via a webdav subset. Webdav concidently being widely supported for integrating online storage into any filesystem (or as the backend for several other things like for example syncing my bookmarks over several devices and browsers). SFTP or the million tools being just a frontend for it.

One shiny platform like for example Nextcloud to do it all might be nice for a lot of users when they have someone dedicated to maintain it. But for selfhosting (as in: mainly for myself) the constant attention needed to fix stuff was quite tedious.

When I think of “Google Drive” or “Dropbox” alternatives nowadays it’s just a drive hooked up to some low-spec device and accessed via one (or several) already existing open standards.

(Bonus point: that lost phone is simply cut off by deleting its keys - unlike so many dedicated platform where you have to manage -if you even can- multiple dedicated users and their rights just to easily separate your personal access from your devices that are by design not all equally secure.)

Have in mind that compressed filesystem would be slower.

Often the opposite is true, depending on case. Compressed files load faster, so if you have the cpu power to spare (which you usually have in games while loading) and loading speed is the bottle-neck then compression speeds things up, often considerably.

And even in the age of ssds processing data and moving it through ram is much faster than the disk, so even for writing some amount of transparent compression is possible without affecting speeds.