Alt account of @Badabinski

Just a sweaty nerd interested in software, home automation, emotional issues, and polite discourse about all of the above.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I’ve been very pleased with my factory-seconds Framework 13 (11th gen i7, 64 gigs of RAM and 2TB storage acquired through other channels). Linux support has been basically perfect for me, although there were some kinks earlier on. The Framework 16 might work for you if you need something with a discrete GPU.

    If you want something more mainstream, ThinkPads are often great for running Linux. Not every model is perfect, so I’d recommend doing some research there. The Arch Linux wiki often has laptop specific web pages that show how well supported the laptop is. For example, here’s the page for the Framework 13.





  • Oof, I didn’t know that about firejail. I’d heard of it, but I’d never used it. Like, c’mon folks! If you need privilege escalation, either require launching as root (if appropriate), or delegate the responsibility to a small, well-audited tool designed explicitly for the purpose and spawn a new privileged pid. Don’t use SUID. You will fuck it up. If you reach the point where setuid is your only option, then you’ve hopefully learned enough to rearchitect to not need it, or to give up, or use it if you’re, say, someone who maintains a libc or something.

    EDIT: this is overly dramatic, but also it’s not. I personally feel like using SUID is kinda like rolling your own crypto in terms of required competence.









  • Ugh, I hate ChatGPT. If this is Bash (which it is, because it’s literally looking for files in a directory called ~/.bashrc.d), then it should god damned well be using syntax and language features that we’ve had for at least twenty fucking years. Specifically, if you’re writing for Bash (and not POSIX shell), you better be using [[ ]] rather than [ ]. This wiki is my holy book I use to keep the demons away when writing Bash, and it does a simply fantastic job of explaining why you should use God damned double square brackets.

    ChatGPT writes shitty, horrible, buggy ass Bash. This is relatively decent for ChatGPT (it even makes sure the files are real files and not symlinks), but I’ve had to fix enough terrible fucking shitty AI Bash to have no tolerance for even the smallest misstep from it.

    Sincerely, A senior developer who is known as the Bash wizard at work.

    EDIT: Sorry, OP. ChatGPT did not, in fact, write this code, and I am going to leave my comment here as a testament to what a big smelly dick I was here.


  • For me, it’s Arch for desktop usage. When I first started using Arch it would not have been Arch, but now it’s Arch. The package manager has great ergonomics (not great discoverability, but great ergonomics), it’s always up to date, I can get a system from USB to sway in ~20 minutes (probably be faster if I used the installer), it’s fast because it doesn’t enable many things by default, and it’s honestly been the most reliable distro I’ve ever used. I used to use OpenSUSE ~10 years ago, and that broke more in one year than Arch has in ten.

    I personally feel like Arch’s unreliable nature has been overstated. Arch will give you the rope to hang yourself if you ask for it, but if you just read the emails (or use a helper that displays breaking changes when updating like paru) and merge your pacnews then you’ll likely have a rock solid system.

    Again, this is all just my opinion. It’s easy for me to overlook or forget all of the pain and suffering I likely went through when learning how to Arch. I won’t recommend it to you, but I’ll happily say how much I’ve come to enjoy using it.


  • What if you need to file a bug? What if you have a question on the config that’s not easily answered by the docs? If you never, ever find bugs and never, ever have questions, then sure, separate the two. There are genuinely people like that, but they’re not common. If you’re one of them, then I’m genuinely glad for you.

    My opinion is this: You use software. You don’t use people, but you sure as hell rely on them.