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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • To make the desktop experience bearable: AltTab, Forklift, Rectangle, Ukelele, MonitorControl, Amphetamine, Firefox, Thunderbird, qView and duti to set the latter three up as the defaults.

    As a package manager I’m pretty happy with nix-darwin, now I get all the CLI tools there, and what isn’t packaged, like wireshark for example, I get through my nix-controlled homebrew.

    Coming from a Linux userland you might want to replace some coreutil packages with their GNU variants. I ran into one case where the GNU grep was much faster than the BSD version preinstalled in macOS for example.

    What I haven’t found a good solution to yet is Filesystem support. Both NTFS and ext4 are missing. I currently have a Linux VM just for that. I think Paragon sells a driver, have been meaning to look into it more, but haven’t.

    Edit: To be fair to macOS the App called Preview is a pretty good PDF reader in my view.

    PS: If you ever need to use dd on macOS, be aware that there are /dev/rdisk handles instead of /dev/disk for the un-buffered access. Its significantly faster for dd shoveling.

    PPS: You will probably have to turn off what they call “natural” scroll. macOS inverts the default for some reason.
















  • I wanted a mainstream option but not Ubuntu, and one that was preferably offered with KDE Plasma pre-packaged.

    So I ended up deciding between Debian and Fedora, and what tipped me to Fedora was thinking: Well SELinux sounds neat, quite close to what I learned about Mandatory Access Control in the lectures, and besides, maybe it will be useful in my work knowing one that is close to RHEL.

    Now I work in a network team that has been using Debian for 30 years, lol. Kind of ironic, but I don’t regret it, now I just know both.

    And fighting SELinux was kind of fun too. I modified my local policies so that systemd can run screen because I wanted to create a Minecraft service to which I could connect as admin, even if it was started by systemd.


    1. Ah that makes sense then. I was confused why you would wipe your ESP over and over when it was shared.

    I don’t know why it comes off as hostile, it wasn’t intended that way. Sorry for not expressing it better!

    If the last sentence came across badly, that was more meant to be incredulous that people accept all these workaround instead. There are other comments in here that go to ridiculous lengths to enforce separation, like using the UEFI boot menu to select a disk manually. To me even having two ESPs seems overly cautious, and against the design philosophy. Sharing one ESP is really not an issue (at least as long as you know you’re doing it, as you unfortunately found out the hard way).


  • First of all: You don’t have to reinstall Windows to get it’s bootmgr EFI and supporting files back into the ESP. Installing those from the CLI in from a booted install media is possible, I did it before. You can even install all of Windows manually if you ever need to, it’s just annoying to do with the windows command line tools.

    Secondly: I’m not familiar with all distro installers, but surely you can just not format the ESP? Worst case scenario you’d have to use manual disk formatting I guess, but it’s not that difficult.

    Thirdly: You said Grub doesn’t show the disk. If you mean the Grub command interface didn’t show the disk, then the issue is deeper, at a UEFI or hardware level. If you mean there are no boot entries for a Windows install to be selected, then it could be that they were not generated because the Windows bootmgr EFI was not found when Grub got installed. Sometimes just booting back into Linux and running os-prober again might be enough, if the Windows bootmgr EFI is still around. On my distro the os-proper is automatically run when I run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    I’ve always used a shared ESP for my dual boot systems and I certainly don’t reinstall one OS as the result of a change with the other.