Can apt-get refresh package list?

“…and there are no comments, because it’s Self Documenting™”

Modern bots are bad, but the old school IRC (maybe early Battle.net?) bots… I’m cool making an exception for them if you are.

Sounds like you’ve only ever used desktops and/or laptops…

A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.

I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

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With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions.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.)

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.

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.

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.

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.

I have one SSID with pihole (which I use), and one without. Works pretty well, if you’re ok with a VLAN-aware network.

My comment from cross post:

Sounds like it was a 2 petawatt pulsed laser, with picosecond pulses, so 2kJ/pulse. Staggering amount of power and energy for a pulsed laser!

Note that it’s not CW, so the average power will be much, much, much less than the pulsed power. Too lazy to find the rep rate to see average power.

TIL, thanks! Edited my earlier comment.

Yeah, the only thing I could imagine would be that image loading/processing uses an optimized library, but a single color is (unlikely but possibly) implemented poorly as a loop over every pixel, with some egregious overhead.

Most likely shit post though… See reply, apparently real!

In my experience, the blue (405nm) lasers pointers can far, far exceed the nominal (5mW?) power.

You can turn it off, at least for ext4: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/

Although you can use case insensitive filesystems with Linux, and case sensitive filesystems with macOS. I believe the case sensitivity is a function of the specific filesystem — but yeah, practically, the root for Linux is always case sensitive, and APFS ain’t is only if you ask it to be ( https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/disk-utility/dsku19ed921c/mac ).