I think Windows has a very poor track record for ui consistency as well. It feels like every Windows app wants to roll its own UI; Firefox, Discord, Steam etc. I know Discord and Steam also have those issues on Linux as well, but it feels like every Windows app wants to roll out it’s own window decorarions and theme.

Honestly, I’m pleased at how consistent most gtk based apps look.

If my /bin contains exe files, something has gone very wrong somewhere…

Also, all these infographics are a sad casualty of the /usr/bin merge.

I think user friendly distros (like Mint) are very user friendly if you’re just doing simple things like web browsing or using Steam. Mint (and other distros) have a realy nice software centre that can install a lot of software with a single click from https://flathub.org/ , which removes a lot of headaches that there used to be with installing software.

However, when things go wrong (which they do sometimes because computers are complicated), you may have to troubleshoot and play around with the command line.

… But that’s honestly happened a lot with Windows in my experience as well. Only with less command line and more running esoteric exes.

Honestly, given that most Linux distros are free anyway, you may as well try it out and see if everything works. Worst comes to worst, you find something doesn’t work and end up installing Windows over the top of it.

I have a server that has multiple services running under multiple users that each store data. I want to be able to bundle all this data up and send it to another server for backups.

At a high level, how do I manage permissions for this? Currently I run the backup as root, then chown it to a special backups user which can log in through ssh. But this all feels clunky to me.

I’ve been using Sidebery. Decent little addon for a tab sidebar.

Oh wow, in the opening paragraph they say that there’s a huge conspiracy covering up the “truth” behind Cosmic’s reception. And that they are the one voice of reason to enlighten people about The Truth…

I mean, at least I’m not paying $200* for the privilege of being advertised to… I’d like an option to disable it permanently in the popup but it seems mostly reasonable?

^* This is the first price I got for a Windows licence when I searched for it. I know you can probably get them cheaper, but that’s the price they’re advertising, so eh.^

They could open up the laptop to insert a small device that reads the usb header. Or just replace the guts of the laptop with something else. Or replace one of the usb leads in your bag with one with a tracker. Or sell a usb-c cable with a tracker for cheap in the gift shop.

There’s a bunch of other ways to compromise your system and some might be easier than putting a backdoored bootloader on your device.

Also, if it’s the TSA, they could almost certainly create a bootloader that was signed by Microsoft to replace any existing one.

Okay, so my original post I think I was thinking of TPM rather than Secure Boot. TPM would protect against a hostile OS, I think. I think most of my greviences mentioned above are to do with TPM rather than Secure Boot. But they still apply to either.

There are ways to put keyloggers in devices stealthily to where they’re not perceptible to a normal person. For example, they could replace one of the USB leads in your bag with one that transmits keystrokes over bluetooth. If you’re at home, a maid could just plug a keylogger behind your desktop because most people don’t check behind their system when they boot it.

It all feels like a wierd threat model to me. You can either assume that physical access is or isn’t covered by it. If you are worried about physical access (beyond your device being stolen), there is a lot more you need to do to secure it. “It’s better than nothing” isn’t really that convincing to me with regards security models; either you’re protected or you aren’t.

The thing is… If someone has access to your system enough to replace your bootloader, they could probably just slip a USB keylogger between your keyboard and computer. Or set up a small hidden camera. Or plug all your devices into a raspberry pi to spoof the login screen.

It strikes me as odd that people assume that an attacker with a few hours physical access is going to bother going down the “change the bootloader” route when there are other, easier routes available.

Ironically, the only practical use case I can see for Secure Boot is when you have a dual boot setup where you don’t trust one of the OSes. Which I’m betting wasn’t Microsoft’s intention at all.

I have my home folder encrypted and I enter my password on boot. I’m not really sure what benefits Secure Boot has in environments where you have to enter your password anyway. And in environments where you don’t have to enter your password, someone could just steal your system anyway and boot it to get your data.

Ehh, it’ll never take off.

I’ve been using an app named “Mousepad” for filling the role of a light weight temporary textholder. Would be tempted to try this if it weren’t for the fact that it can’t save files. I’ve had many cases where I’ve realised I wanted to save text I’ve been working on, and I don’t want to open something like vscode just to write a file.

I’ve done that before when debugging system issues. Create a snapshot before and after the issue, and diff the files to see what changed.

I also took a snapshot before updating to a new version of Mint, realised it broke a bunch of stuff and rolled back.

Honestly, I wish btrfs was the default in many places since taking a snapshot is so cheap and easy.

So I tried VoxelLibre recently and I have three main papercuts:

• The lack of dual wielding (and perhaps crits and other Combat Update things).
• Shift clicking items doesn’t do the same thing as Minecraft in a lot of cases. Shift clicking armour doesn’t equip it, for example.
• I think sometimes there’s a keyboard combination for opening the inventory (shift+I?) that I keep accidentally hitting when I try to move.

Still, it’s an interesting project and Iook forward to how it continues.

I one crossgraded a debian server from x86 to x86_64.

Ages ago in the Vista era, all our Windows computers had an issue where our internet would say “limited or no connectivity” and just stop working. That happened on my desktop and I decided “to hell with it” and switched to Linux (Ubuntu, specifically).

I switched mine to NixOS a while ago. It’s got a steep learning curve, but it’s really nice having the entire server config exist in a handful of files.

I’ve been basically using btrfs on a lot of my disks because of the features it has.

Before I switched to a borg based system, my backups partition used btrfs for compression.

My main OS disk is btrfs so I can use timeshift snapshots, which are really worth checking out if you tinker with your system a lot.

I have two more btrfs partitions software raid0’d together for my steam library, nix store and other big but loosable things.

And my main home folder uses btrfs because I think the checksumming thing it does is more reliable for error detection, and cow is more fault tollerant on power failure?

… And I now fell like I’m one of those people with an over engineered storage solution. I just never get rid of old ssds or hard disks!

I don’t wanna wait that long. ;_;