Well you’ll be glad to know that NTFS drivers are available these days on Linux!

I need to be able to “RDP” into remote machines

Remmina, do this every day for work from my Debian system.

I also need to be able to setup a Hyper-V equivalent, to run other machines from my main laptop

Virtual box or QEMU + KVM. I use QEMU + KVM, works really well.

And for my media server (Plex), I need to understand the best way to setup a RAID5 or better across multiple drives.

Recommend Jellyfin over Plex but in either case - if you want software RAID then use mdadm, this is how the RAID5 array on my jellyfin server works. Otherwise, there are compatible drivers for some hardware with actual hardware RAID5 arrays you can look up if you have such hardware.

For reference, all my machines whether client or server run either Debian 12 or Debian 13.

Most people’s reasons in my experience demonstrate to me that they have a perception of Linux as it was 15+ years ago.

I discussed switching to Linux with a group of friends in a voice chat some time ago, most were fairly open to it, and one or two have switched since, but mainly their reasons were time constraints, not wanting to go through the process of backing up files, and finding alternative software.

One guy in particular brought up gaming, MS office, and some other particular software they used. I showed them protondb and every game they looked up was gold or higher, showed them libre office which they could not complain about since it generally works a lot nicer, and it turned out that other software was available as a .deb. After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.

Fair enough I guess, though they couldn’t really produce the reason as to why.

Generally, people just don’t like any kind of change, even if it has the potential to make them a lot happier.

If you are coming from Windows, I would say Mint for sure. I have friends that are 20 using it and my parents in their 70’s use it. Both seem to like it and even find it easier to use in quite a few respects.

Oh for sure - I think that this method has more efficacy in production environments ran by small businesses anyway, since best practices are rarely followed in many of them (until something happens that changes their mind on what they budget for haha), and even at that it is still a rare attack to see.

I am unaware of this type of attack ever occurring on a persons personal network, most likely because so few end users make backups, there is no need to go through the trouble of doing this, making this method useful only in highly targeted attacks.

We are definitely in agreement on proper backups still being the best method to recover from the vast majority of problems - even this one, depending on the backup solution.

They usually embed themselves in within the system files and have some scheduled job that basically checks for the criteria - if you are only backing up and restoring user data then it’s a non-issue, but if you do a full recovery including the system files/the system scheduler etc, then it can happen, and it is often necessary to backup executable and system files for production environments (true, not so much for individual users and their systems).

When I was working in an IT shop, one of our clients was ransomwared with this method. The saving grace for us in that instance is that our backups were going to a product that allowed you to easily break open and dissect the compressed backups pre-recovery, so we were able to determine where the malicious files were and kill them before pushing the backups. Of course we only noticed that it was in the backups after we had tried to push the backups once already, so it was quite the timely process - I think I worked for something like 18 hours that day.

You can read about such malware if you search for “timebomb malware” or “malware does not execute until date” etc.

The attack is not super common anymore, but still happens.

For example, here is an article discussing time bomb methods on linkedin.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-bombs-malware-delayed-execution-any-run

Another on the knowbe4 blog:

https://blog.knowbe4.com/ransomware-can-destroy-backups-in-four-ways

There are viruses that are time-bombs. They specifically don’t do really do anything until some criteria is met in the future, such as the current date being beyond a specific date, at which point they proc. They do this in order to make sure they are in your backups when you restore them so that they immediately run when recovery is completed and the system is booted.

little one deleted

The Debian docs were really useful for me in setting up my 3090 on Debian proper.

Since Mint is downstream, maybe they will help you.

https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

This is beautiful.

I’ve been looking for exactly this for some time, really excited to try it out.

It wasn’t for me on Debian 12/13. I just had to add the repo for the drivers and run 1 or 2 lines of bash and I’ve been good ever since with my 3090.

I was not about to put up with windows co-pilot or recall and had already put up with enough ads and bugs.

I had been running Debian on my laptop for a year without a problem and then finally Windows 11 started doing this when I was trying to update:

Click check for updates? Same result. Wait a week and try again? Same result.

I could no longer trust that the OS was secure from even 3rd parties, so I pulled the trigger and installed Debian 12 - later upgrading to Debian 13 when it released.

There just is never any going back now - Linux is just waaaaaaay too good.

Now I just need something similar to happen with phones.

Helix, Kakoune, build Codium from source would be my suggestions.

I use Helix now mainly - I use Codium if I need a graphical editor for something, or one of it’s plugins.

At work the systems use VSCode but I use the Dance plugin with Helix bindings to get some of that functionality back.

On two versions of debian on two computers I have tried to use wayland and both times I have had really bad graphical problems and lag/stuttering of multiple visual elements. I’m sure it is fine when it works, but my problem with Wayland is that for whatever reason, it just does not work on my systems.

Each time, this was on fresh installs of the operating system as well, so I have no idea why it doesn’t like me.

Today on my win11 work system, the windows menu stopped producing output when I typed into it and webpages stopped loading. Had to perform a full system restart to get it to work again.

þ

Can I ask why you used this in place of “th” mostly but not always?

Three actually I think.

When you have a new PC, put it on the old one too. You could run a Jellyfin server off it it or use it as a NAS device or something.

Is that a starship prompt? How do you style that divider above the prompt that way? It looks really good.

edit: I’ve read up a bunch on starship and now understand, very nice.

Perhaps consider a SOCKS5 reverse proxy. If done over SSH, the client systems networking would act as though they are on the server itself, traffic would be secure, and it would walk around most firewall rules that probably exist.

Using key based authentication would also make it such that it is more secure and easier for the researchers to log in - they wouldn’t even have to remember a password, they would just need some SSH client/configs.

Specifically, read up on “bastion hosts”.