“Don’t anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.”

additionally Brodie Robertson did a video about Malibal banning countries back in October: Youtube, PeerTube

with one post, Malibal turned itself into a joke

• but corporate policy is to let IT handle updates
• but Windows doesn’t like being ignored so it bypasses group policy and auto-updates

original generation of COBOL programmers where expecting their programs to be replaced (or at least rewritten) within a decade or so – and then Y2K and we realized how much COBOL was still in the wild – and now a couple decades down the line, they’re still having problems trying to convince fintech to switch from COBOL to the new language of Java …

there’s a whole world of alternative, small, or minimalist non-Chromium non-Firefox browsers out there I would love to try out – but in today’s world, if it doesn’t support at least the full un-crippled version of uBlock Origin, it’s a complete non-starter

(considering general trends, I’m just gonna have to sit down and setup PiHole aren’t I?)

we are talking Gnome devs here after all …

so next we can expect a tirade from Hans Reiser now that ReiserFS was deleted from the kernel?

“There are two types of people: those who back up and those who haven’t lost data … yet.”

aimed at beginners who confuse “hasn’t been updated for a year” with “hasn’t needed to be updated for a year”

once you have some experience under your belt, these are non-issues:

• deciding to “learn Linux” the hard way by starting with a specialized distro (Slackware, Gentoo, Alpine)
• switching to unstable or testing branches before you’re ready ’cause you want bleeding edge or “stable is too far behind”
• playing around with third-party repositories before understanding them (PPAs in Ubuntu, AUR in Arch)
• bypassing the package manager (especially installing with curl | sudo sh)
• changing apps for no other reason than “it hasn’t been updated for a year”

comparing a distro release to a new game release

• pay a LinuxGem each time you open a terminal
• Flatpak is only available as a paid DLC
• use your LinuxGems to purchase randomized LootContainers with a chance of winning a Jellyfin install

(Chris Titus Tech getting blowback last year marking a whole group of distros as “Pointless” when they did nothing more than a reskin or pre-install a couple in-repo packages)

why have menus covering stuff up when you can just use keybinds?

(completely sidetracked here – there’s a reason Dirk Hohndel (and Linus) decided to go with Qt instead of GTK)

still in the setup phase and running LabWC rather than a full desktop – but actually rather enjoying it and have been stumbling across a lot of cases finding out that even with a GUI installed, terminal programs do just as good a job if not better than their graphical counterparts (ex. I don’t think I’ll ever be a full vim/emacs convert, but for basic text editing, nano does just as well as mousepad/leafpad/featherpad/xed/gedit)

doas apk -iU upgrade

don’t really have a favorite – started with Thunderbird a long time ago but switched over to webmail fairly early on

now that I’ve started to build a new system, I started to look around at the various options (and maybe getting off webmail or at least having local storage “backup”) – the standard GUI clients (Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, BlueMail, Mailspring) seem to be … fine – but none of them really stand out

recently stumbled across some nice screenshots of aerc and the idea sounds really appealing, but I’ve never had any contact with terminal email programs and found out they’ve followed a completely different evolutionary path than GUI apps (even terminology has diverged between the two) – GUI apps keep trying to be an all-in-one (email, contacts, calendar, tasks, …) whereas terminal programs almost seem to to favor a “balkanization” of effort – aerc looks like it’s grabbed a middle-ground, you can run it as standalone or go all in with a fully customized setup – problem I’m running into is I can find lots of “how” guides, but very little in the “what” or “why” side of things …

such a weird dichotomy in Windows – secure kernel space and privacy-nightmare user space … “we’re the only ones allowed to steal your data”

• repeat the “Don’t sweat it.”
• Ubuntu is a perfectly fine starting point (the other “beginner distro” that’s commonly recommended is LinuxMint)
• »AFTER« you become comfortable with what you have:
  • try familiarizing yourself with the command line
    • far more competent than Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell
    • !linuxupskillchallenge@programming.dev
  • get overwhelmed with all the distro choices available
    • get bitten by the distro-hopping bug (“Gotta try them all!”)
      • and then try Distrobox (“ALL the distros at once!”)
• »THEN« take a look at immutable distros
  • “immutable distro” is a catch-all term that embraces several concepts
    • immutable – the root filesystem is set to read-only – makes it harder to mess up your system
    • declarative – your hardware and packages and configs are declared in a master configuration file
    • atomic / transactional – updates are checked as they’re applied, if it fails, it gets rolled back to a previous “safe state”
    • container / sandbox – ex. Flatpak or Docker or OCI – apps are isolated in their own sandbox and not allowed to mess up anything else