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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

    But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

    It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.


  • Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed. All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.

    I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.


  • Man, you’re basically saying “I want to move to a new country, but I don’t want to lose any of my friends, I can’t change my job, I don’t want to learn a new language, I want to bring all my furniture and appliances with me, and we just had a new baby a month ago so I’m sleep deprived and don’t have any spare time. How do I do it?”





  • I get how this could be interpreted as offensive, but I think it is just poorly worded.

    This option is for if you are using a legacy version of Linux such as 2.6.x (eg, on an old RedHat distro that your business systems are designed to be run on).

    This enables a compatibility mode so the old kernels don’t complain.




  • The term Display Manager is a vestige of the use of X11.

    X11 is a Server/Client protocol.

    When a user logs in to an XServer, they are given an Xsession. The user can use that Xsession to create one or more X11 Displays (they are just IDs). The X11 Display ID is passed to the X11 client application (that’s what the XDISPLAY environment variable is for). The client apps render their content to that Display ID. This whole thing allows for more than one user to be able to use a single operating system on a single XServer at the same time.

    All of that is pretty cumbersome for a user to do themselves in their terminal, that’s what Display Managers are for. They:

    • Start the XServer if it isn’t started yet
    • Provide a method (eg, login with username and password), to start a new XSession.
    • Use that XSession to create an empty X11 Display.
    • Look up which is your configured default DE or WM
    • Launch the DE or WM with the right parameters, passing it the new XSession and XDisplay

    If you’re using Wayland, then the architecture is very different. The Display Manager then simply operates as a login screen.




  • These are some rules of mindset I’ve given to others in the past when trying linux-based operating systems.

    1. Don’t try to apply the same computing and productivity patterns you’ve learned from Windows. Don’t try to force Windows concepts onto Linux OS, you will confuse yourself and get frustrated.
    2. If something doesn’t work the way you expect it to, doesn’t mean it’s broken.
    3. Just because something doesn’t behave the same as in Windows, doesn’t mean it’s worse. It’s probably designed that way for a good reason.
    4. If your daily work routine or gaming life revolves around the use programs developed specifically for the Windows platform, you’re gonna need to invest time and effort to try to recreate that in Linux. It may not even be possible to fully replicate it. And that’s not the fault of Linux, it’s not designed to be a drop-in Windows replacement.
    5. Everyone has their own taste and preferences. Just like some people prefer driving a manual car and some prefer auto. If you try Linux and hate it, that’s okay, that doesn’t make you bad or wrong, but keep in mind that those who do prefer Linux are not weird or daft or wrong either.



  • Yep, not bricked. Just frozen.

    There are two forms of bricked:

    1. hard bricked. This is when a software change (eg, installing a custom firmware) caused the system to fail to boot, and there is no possible way to ever get it to run again.
    2. soft bricked. Where a software change caused the failure to boot but there is a way (eg, reflashing using UART) to recover back to an older version that does boot.

    Both are terms from the Phone modding community (ie, a phone has become as useful as a brick after this update) it’s quite hard to actually brick a modern PC.