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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2024

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  • Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

    With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

    And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

    This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

    (I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)




  • On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

    That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

    Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.









  • I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.

    Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!



  • IIRC chvt is a privileged command, which makes sense (if an unprivileged user could execute this command they could effectively brick the computer for a local user).

    That said, my understanding is that modern DE’s are given a lot of access, so presumably chvt is allowed (and in this case, is required because as others mentioned, password is required). So the only other option is to fail unlocked, which is all kinds of Bad.





  • Immich looks particularly good to me.

    It is! Been running it for a few years now and I love it.

    The local ML and face detection are awesome, and not too resource intensive — i think it took less than a day to go through maybe 20k+ photos and 1k+ videos, and that was on an N100 NUC (16GB).

    Works seamlessly across my iPhone, my android, and desktop.