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 ).
awk(1)ward
FTFY
My city has a fleet of vintage streetcars that it runs on standard routes (i.e., it’s not just a tourist novelty — and it’s the same cost as bus and other light rail).
It’s always a joy to ride those and read the history of the individual streetcar — they all wear fun livery.
It’s overpriced hardware
Have you seen the M4 benchmarks?
If you’re memory bound then sure, you can get way more bang for your buck with Intel/AMD. But for pretty amazing CPU performance I think the “Apple is overpriced” trope isn’t really true any more.
Ah, pretty sure that’d be the whole OnStar transceiver, too (which isn’t a bad thing to disable…).
I thought the antenna itself was behind a fuse (as in, feedline has an inline fuse) which would be a peculiar design I think.
Are antennas usually behind a fuse?
Pick your favorite tech company, pick a small team with a “nerdy” engineering mandate, and I’m confident you’ll find the academic, geeky science and engineering types you’re talking about.
They probably aren’t very vocal though, because 1) there’s a huge PR/marketing budget which is responsible for being the face of the company, and 2) well…these are nerdy STEM folks who probably like their job because they get very well compensated to be nerdy STEM types, and not because they’re fanboys/girls.
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.)