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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Problem is if older Chromebooks are used for Linux in an educational environment there would be nothing stopping a student from whipping up a bootable USB and dumping another distro (bypassing restrictions). I’m also not sure if there is a enrollment mode equivalent Linux (there may be but not sure).

    They could just disable booting from USB drives in the bios and password protect it. They could install something like Fedora Silverblue, or even customize the image used to include whatever modifications they want. Any changes they made to the image would be propagated through autoupdates. Kids wouldn’t have root, so they couldn’t forcibly install a different OS. Of course they could install flatpaks to their home directory, which is probably something administrators would want to prevent, but a knowledgeable student can always find ways to do what they want.

    This of course requires schools/districts to hire people to manage that stuff, which could be a problem.



  • When I was 16 I was working at a grocery store and another worker around my age talked me into trying it out. I had heard of it from a high school class I had taken, so I figured I’d give it a try. I called him on the phone and he talked me through installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake on my laptop. The biggest issue back then was getting the WiFi to work, which required ndiswrapper to used the Windows drivers. We eventually got it working and then played Tremulous together.

    I dual booted for a while, occasionally got angry at Windows and nuked the partition to go fully Linux. Occasionally got angry at Linux and nuked the partition to go fully Windows. Eventually settled fully on Linux. I did have a separate drive with Windows installed in my desktop at one point to play around with VR, but I’m not much of a gamer so the only time I use Windows now is in a VM if I need to interface with some device that only provides Windows drivers. Pretty rare at this point.




  • I listen to Linux Unplugged and I also am not a fan of the crypto stuff. I remember they actually addressed the whole crypto thing in an office hours episode, which I found incredibly disappointing as Chris essentially said crypto is a scam and we hate it, except for bitcoin. He talks about how long he’s been using bitcoin and how you should trust him because he knows what he’s talking about. It was very patronizing, and I took a break from unplugged for a while because of it.

    I still listen to it because it’s the only free Linux podcast I’m aware of, and I understand the need to make money so I can deal with the boosts for now.



  • I use YouTube through freetube or newpipe. I use my old university google account as a free backup service using restic. It’s all encrypted and free storage is free storage. I still have an old google account that I don’t use, I’ll probably delete it.

    Other than that, no google that I can think of. I use DDG for search, with startpage as my backup search engine. I think it uses google search as a back end. I try to use FOSS stuff whenever possible. I don’t think I have any non-FOSS stuff on my laptop besides firmware. My android phone is a different story as I can’t put another ROM on it, but I’m not signed into google at least and use F-Droid mostly.

    I’ve always used Firefox and my email is hosted on mailbox.org with my own domain. I’m in pretty good shape with not relying on large corporations, but there are always things to improve on.


  • I wouldn’t worry about the command line too much, you’ll learn what you need when you need it. I’ve been using linux for over 15 years and I still have to google even simple commands sometimes because I don’t use them often enough to imprint. The important ones will come with repetition.

    The thing about using the command line is that once you get comfortable with it, it becomes faster than using a GUI for some things. That being said, on modern user-friendly operating systems you can probably get by with never using the command line.









  • The most basic benefit of immutable OSes like Fedora Silverblue is that you are prevented from messing up your system enough that you are unable to boot into it and fix it. This isn’t strictly true, you can always go out of your way to screw things up (say deleting required partitions), but in normal usage you will always have a backup to boot and fix whatever you messed up. It also makes it extremely easy to undo things even if they aren’t errors.

    It’s possible to do this without immutable OSes using btrfs snapshots before you change anything system-wide, in fact I believe MicroOS uses btrfs snapshots for their immutable system, but that adds cognitive load as it requires you to remember to create a snapshot. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed provides snapshotting automatically and adds entries to the bootloader for previous iterations, but it isn’t immutable because you can still go and modify your root partition without taking a snapshot. MicroOS, however, has a read-only root partition so it becomes a lot more difficult to make a change without a snapshot. You can still do it, but you have to go out of your way to do it.


  • I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea if the punishment fits the crime. I’m sure republicans are going to claim favoritism or something like that, and that probation is not enough, but I have no idea how stuff like this usually pays out.

    The only frame of reference I have is Wesley Snipes who had 3 misdemeanor tax charges instead of two and got prison time, but Snipes’ case was a lot wilder and more money was involved. Snipes didn’t plead guilty though and didn’t have a plea deal, so it seems reasonable enough to only get probation when you did plead guilty.