palordrolap

(FWIW the downvote wasn’t me)

That sounds like you’re suggesting that Microsoft wouldn’t care what was installed locally to be able to net-boot / run the rest of Windows.

I think it’s all but certain that they’d want user’s computers to to boot into something they made, or at the very least, slapped their branding all over, even if that was only a wrapper for their web browser.

I can definitely see them going down the line of saying that their online apps aren’t guaranteed to work under any other system, going so far as to throw in a few deliberate stumbling hazards for anything that isn’t theirs. (Until anti-trust, etc.)

And thus, dual booting will still be something that people do. Even if - as you clarified - they’re not going to cripple that as well.

Check system settings for a keyboard entry / applet. I’m on LMDE Cinnamon and have no idea what the equivalents are on Kubuntu, but over here it’s definitely possible to change/remove the default keyboard assignments and set up custom ones instead.

For example, I have Shift+WWW (the multimedia key that starts a web browser by default) set to start the browser with an alternate profile. I could just as easily set plain old WWW to, say, start a terminal instead, or run that custom command.

The hardest part is knowing what custom command to run to get the desired effect.

The only way to prevent dual booting would require a UEFI/BIOS that pulls the OS straight over a network, bypassing local storage entirely.

Even if that didn’t already rule it out, the size that OSes are these days makes it even less likely. At least not unless Microsoft (or whoever) are planning to ditch absolutely everyone who doesn’t have gigabit internet. (It would be kind of funny for an OS to go back to being 1990s-sized to mitigate that though. And funnier still when someone inevitably captures it onto a hard disk anyway.)

A more likely vector would be to deliberately break third party bootloaders every time Windows boots. And that would last until the next anti-trust / monopoly lawsuit and they’d roll it back to the current behaviour of only breaking third party bootloaders on installation.

And even if somehow that didn’t get rolled back, just wait until hardware vendors introduce this thing called a “switch” that can be added just before the power connector on an SSD. Can’t boot from a drive that has no power. BIOS defaults to the next SATA channel. And now you’re booting into Linux.

Doing the same for a mobo-mounted NVMe drive is harder but not impossible.

Should have gone for something like “Dennis Richie Advanced Computing University Lab Annex.”

Parses weird, but look at that acronym.

Mint definitely keeps a couple of previous kernels around, so that might be a Debian and Ubuntu thing too.

That said, there’s always going to be a critical point of failure that a power loss could cause things to break, no matter your OS or distro.

Writing the bootloader or updating a partition table for example.

Haven’t seen this in the other comments: Coolness factor. If you’re a successfully popular teacher, i.e. “cool”, then your students will likely want to participate in whatever it is you suggest.

However, if they don’t see you as cool, you might have difficulty, and might even put them off the platform. This is not something that can be fixed easily, and trying to be cool is about as uncool as you can get.

(Making it mandatory will work, of course, but how you go about that could determine whether they choose to stay on the platform once you’re done. This was kind of covered by OP talking about Matrix in another comment here.)

I’m not sure there’s a way to answer that without being unnecessarily mean.

Do you mean the Aether mod that recently got updated or something else?

Installing mods to Java Minecraft can be a chore regardless of the ecosystem. And usually it’s a third party mod loader that adds a new version to the default launcher config, not something provided by Mojang.

That said, Aether is a Forge mod and I haven’t used Forge in a few years at this point, so maybe things are different now, or I’m only remembering the way that the rival Fabric ecosystem works instead.

It was (and may still be) possible to make an older version of Pocket Edition run on Linux through unofficial shenanigans, but the official launcher says “Not playable on this device”.

minecraft.net also explicitly says: “Minecraft: Java Edition runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux; Minecraft: Bedrock Edition runs on Windows. Deluxe Collection content only runs on Minecraft: Bedrock Edition on Windows.”

Other unofficial shenanigans that may or may not work include but are not limited to: Running under a VM, running under something like Wine.

So, yes, technically it runs, but Microsoft are pretty clear that it’s not supposed to.

I think that can be boiled down to only cd; echo .*/

Maybe throw a ;cd - on the end if the change of directory is unwanted.

Coming back to this with thoughts. What you’re describing sounds a lot like a menu tree.

“Press 1 to do this, 2 to do that, 3 to go to submenu A, 4 for B,” etc. 1

“You have pressed 1. Do you want to turn on option ABC? [Y / n]” Y

“Do you want option QWERTY47? [Y/n]” N

“Are you sure you want to run notthebees --abc --no-qwerty47? [Y/n]” N

“Aborted.”

It sounds like a standards problem waiting to happen because no two menus will be alike, but hey, things like this can and do exist, and setting one up isn’t that hard, only time consuming.

Win7. I use LMDE+Cinnamon now and I have it looking suspiciously like how I had Win7. Old habits and all that.

Though you didn’t ask, Win2K was the probably the best Windows, IMO. Then came the bloat and the ugly UIs. (I’ve kind of got used to bloat these days. Storage is cheaper than it was, and LMDE isn’t exactly the slimmest distro.)

Maybe I would have liked Win10. Similar to how it was with the old Star Trek movies, it seems like every other version of Windows is terrible, and if that remains true, maybe 12 will be better than 11. Probably not going back to find out though.

xbiff was usually watching a file - your mailbox - on the mainframe, which would have been updated by the mail server daemon. Heck, it could be set to watch any file to see when it updated.

Basically, you could still use xbiff if you emulate that setup using your own local mail server as a proxy. (And you’re using a GUI that supports it. No idea if Wayland does.)

Worth mentioning that apt generally asks if you want to continue after listing what it’s going to remove so this ought to be safe to do, because you can always say no.

Caveat: It’s vaguely possible ultra-rare configurations might blast through without asking. If in any doubt, backup or take a Timeshift snapshot, or whatever your system does, before adding or removing software. Overkill? Maybe. It’d only really need to be the first time before you know what your local apt does.

thatsthejoke.gif

I don’t know about that. Non-binary files have been put into bin directories for decades at this point. (Feel free to marvel at the analogy.)

Delete the contents and it’s not just binaries going to the bit-bucket.

The joke here is more “Tony Lazuto said to execute these files.”

wait until you learn about .tar.lz