And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.
For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.
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.
Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.
Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.
Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.
So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.
It’s…complicated.
California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.
I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.
So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.
Seriously, it is the lowest-latency and highest-bandwidth communication method we have, when used appropriately.
Newer macOS is not Unix certified.
It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.
I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.
The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.
Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).
If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.
To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.
You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches
But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).
I have one SSID with pihole (which I use), and one without. Works pretty well, if you’re ok with a VLAN-aware network.
man rot13 ;)
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!
WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.
I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.
You can turn it off, at least for ext4: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/
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.)