I know it’s bad form to suggest using other software that handles the same functionality instead of suggesting a fix, but it looks like sddm doesn’t have the functionality to change displays at the time of writing.
GDM seems to have a workaround
But it looks like every display manager chooses whichever display based on arbitrary criteria.
chmod -R 777 my_project_managed_by_git && rm -r my_project_managed_by_git
Unless you experience physical pain from driving, it’s a slippery slope because every facet of modern life gets easier in car culture if you have a car.
Just look at Road Ragers: people who experience extreme emotional duress from driving, possibly endangering everyone with their angry antics and maybe giving themselves health problems from the blood pressure fluctuations, and yet they keep doing it.
And some people even drive without a license, simply because getting between places in time is nigh impossible otherwise.
As for why I decided to give up renewing my license, here’s my rant from elsewhere:
It’s not just the pollution from the exhaust, it’s not just the tons of trash/scrap that rots away in junkyards, it’s not just the rubbers and plastics from tire wear and tear getting into ecosystems, it’s not just the gigagallons of hazardous chemicals required to maintain, it’s not just the steady trend toward “Cars as a Service” while locking your premium features behind a paywall, it’s not just the carwashes draining their runoff into the local groundwater, it’s not just the needlessly large cities to accomodate every individual having a car to themselves, it’s not just the ever expanding highways in between cities that continue to have congestion but now take more space and more time to repair and do more damage to the environment, it’s not just the asphalt island effect, it’s not just the burden on local economies that is car culture, it’s not just the hostility drivers have for pedestrians and bikers, it’s not just the millions of accidents causing hundreds of millions dollars in medical damages and 40,000 deaths every year, it’s not just the blatant disregard for millions of animal and insect lives left on the roadside and windshields as warnings, it’s not just the arms race between assholes for bigger and louder and more dangerous death machines so they can feel like they’re the only one on the road who matters.
It’s all of it, and more.
I haven’t found a good GUI (Balena’s Etcher is cross platform, but the flatpak never worked for me)
dd has never failed me
sudo dd if=<path to ISO file> of=<path to USB> bs=4M status=progress conv=fsync
(double, triple and quadruple check that the output file, of=, is the correct device with multiple different commands before running this)
Seek more work. Find tasks you can help on, earn brownie points, don’t offer to do anything extra that takes more than 30 minutes to get done. Don’t overdo it, and make sure to also use the downtime to grab a federally required break, stretch, drink water, meditate, do some calisthenics.
The first part boosts how you’re perceived by others: your bosses will take note of your enthusiasm, your coworkers will appreciate you more; this is why it’s important to not overdo it—you don’t want your extra effort to be the new baseline expectation.
The second part boosts your health, mood and productivity.
If you find you have more free time than these fill, consider asking your employer to sponsor certifications/continuing education in your field to further your career, or just talking with your boss about taking on more responsibilities for a raise. But still make sure to “leave room on your plate” to do the aforementioned breaks. If the money/career growth isn’t an issue, consider negotiating reduced hours so you have more free time.
I have 2 lenovos (ideapad and yoga) and a pinebook. I’m happy with all of them, though I’m happiest with the pinebook and yoga’s impressive battery lives
While I’m not gonna argue the merits of GPL—it is technically restricting modification, even if there is no practical difference for those only interested in adding/removing functionality—I disagree with the assessment that using the GPL causes harm to the users.
The reasoning seems to be that a 3rd party’s refusal to use the software because of the license, and suvsequent use of a shittier product is somehow the (hypothetical GPL-using) OpenSSH dev’s fault.
The problem is that accepting the premise that the devs are responsible for what people who choose to not use their software do entails that they are then responsible for everyone who uses any type of software tangentially related to OpenSSH’s functionality. It also means that it’s their fault for whatever consequences of using the licenses they currently do, which inevitably drive some people away for various reasons. It also means any potential license (or even lack thereof) is open to the same criticism.
How does it restrict modifying the software?
I couldn’t find any primary source on OpenSSH’s licenses, but wikipedia says “BSD, ISC, Public Domain.”
Both BSD and ISC explicitly grant permissions to modify the software (and redistribute the modified software), and Public Domain means no rights reserved whatsoever, so the mailing list user’s points aren’t relevant to any of the Four Freedoms (aka the Sacred Texts).
Without access to the source email: it looks like it’s a debate about using copyleft licensing instead of BSD/ISC, which is sometimes considered the Fifth Freedom. If you want an argument about that, I’m happy to do so (later), but it isn’t a valid reason for saying some piece of software fails to meet the definition of Free Software.
Did you mean
Is that related to the gpl advocates who criticize BSD/MIT/ISC license and laugh at FreeBSD for letting Apple do something (I can’t remember what)?
I’m not trying to be a grammar nazi, I just want to make sure I’m interpreting you correctly and not putting words in your mouth.
Afaik, BSD and MIT licenses qualify as Free Software licenses. I could be wrong; I am not a lawyer, nor am I Richard Stallman.
As for your first question:
Can you explain more?
@rand_alpha19@moist.catsweat.com did a good summary of the distinction, so I will expand on m$'s role:
By most Free Software advocates’ accounts, the rise of the term “Open Source” was a deliberate move to make proprietary software less of a bitter pill for us radical digital anarchists: “look, our code is Open and Transparent (but you still can’t reproduce or modify it, even if you buy a license).” At the same time, Open Source advocates argued that this was the “Shoe-In-The-Door” for Free Software into the corporate/capitalist landscape—it’s not, because it doesn’t actually advocate any of Free Software’s Four Essential Freedoms (Five, if you consider Copyleft to be essential, as I do).
So basically the corporate world took the concept of Free Software, which was starting to be a threat to their businesses, sanitized it of any actual freedom, and sold it back to devs and users as some kind of magnanimous gesture that they were letting us look (but not touch) the code they wrote. Open Source.
M$ has been essential in this shift. Perusing their github, they make it clear that they’re willing to toss projects onto the pile, but make sure as hell to keep the Freedom from infecting any of their larger, popular software (e.g. Office, Visual Studio, Windows). And in return, they get access to whatever code you host on their service, assuming they can interpret vague phrasing in their Privacy Policy loosely enough.
After beginning to wrap my head around atomic immutable OSes, I can’t believe they’re not the standard for most servers. i can’t believe Debian doesn’t have an official atomic and immutable version yet, seems exactly like the kind of stability they aim for
Not to mention that self-hosting/federation comes with a million small headaches.
If the devs are paid, do you want to pay them to work on the project or work on maintaining a contact infrastructure?
If they aren’t paid, do you want them using what little free time they have working on the app or working on maintaining a communications network?
If it’s someone else’s forum/matrix/chat server, are you okay with 1. a third party having access to your communications and 2. being able to force a comms blackout for any reason whatsoever?
Or would you rather they use their time and money focusing on finding a provider who meets every need of the project AND every user?
They tried to destroy linux and free/libre software, and when that didn’t work, they started cornering the market and pushing for a move from “Free” to “Open Source.” They also support SaaS model, and have made it next to impossible to get a new computer without their mediocre OS. On top of that, their OS is full of spyware, and is starting to become adware too.
But that all pales in comparison to the fact that you do not own your own OS: you can run Microsoft’s OS, but you can’t modify it or share it.
Oh, and this falls more in the realm of personal preference, but the deliberate lack of customizability is a real pain in the ass.
4/10 OS, only slightly better at disguising its capitalist greed than Apple.
Good lawd, these are the basic tenants of networking. I’m so sad people are unfamiliar.
I never said there was a right choice, and I do not like people putting words in my mouth only to attack a strawman.
That’s something fascists do, and I refuse to converse further with someone who supports genocide.
I never said there was a right choice, and I do not like people putting words in my mouth only to attack a strawman.
That’s something fascists do, and I refuse to converse further with someone who supports genocide.
Nothing, it’s just no more efficient than using a GUI text editor
What do you recommend I do about disk partitions?
I recommend using defaults unless you do disk-level backups, or plan on switching disks/partitions between systems (you can put your whole /home dir on a NAS, but should you?)
I’m keeping a Windows install for the few things that demand it, does Windows still occasionally destroy Linux partitions?
Yes*. Many such cases.
*there’s always a reason why it was preventable (as the top comment on that post explains), but c’mon… Really?
Do I need separate partitions for data and OS?
Probably not, for reasons I explained above
Is it straightforward to add additional distros as new partitions or is that asking for trouble?
It’s straight-forward-ish. It will require deviating from installer defaults, and depends on how interconnected you want the OSes to be.
This is actually a good reason to get into partitioning shenanigans, if you’ll use all the distros regularly, and you want them to have shared access to certain folders (e.g. /root, /var, /home, /tmp, /etc, etc). I recommend turning everything (except windows, /boot and /boot/efi) into logical volumes with LVS to avoid space issues when you can’t extend a partition sandwiched in between two others.
By default, /boot and /boot/efi should be their own partitions–/boot should be created for Linux, and Linux will use the EFI partition created by micro$oft–and I’d recommend giving /boot N times the default amount of space (N being the number of distros you plan on keeping in rotation at any given time); this shouldn’t eat up too much space, Debian gave me 500 MB for /boot. The reason being /boot carries the kernel images for each and every OS, and often duplicates thereof for rescue backups.
Is disk encryption straightforward? And is that likely to upset the Windows partition?
Yes it’s easy with LUKS. Full disk encryption encrypts everything, and that will likely upset windows, idk haven’t tried on my dual-boot.
Is cloud storage sync straightforward? It’s my off-site backup solution on Android and Windows (using Cryptomator with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) but I don’t think that many providers have Linux clients. Is something like rclone recommended?
Yes, if you use a DE with it integrated. Otherwise, it’s up to you to choose the right software, rclone looks like a good choice to me, but I have not used it
Should I just use apt to install software? I know there’s some kind of graphical package manager (synaptic?), does that use apt under the covers or is it separate?
synaptic is no longer used iirc. It’s just called “Software Manager,” but yes, I believe it’s just a GUI for apt. I personally prefer doing as much as I can with the command line. Not only is it the simplest, most straightforward way of achieving whatever I’m trying to do, it’s usually also the quickest and best documented. YMMV
Is it recommended to install something like Flathub too?
My experience has been to avoid non-defaults as much as possible. If there’s a software you can only get as a flatpak and you need that and can’t make do with an alternative, then do it. Otherwise, just see what you can do with the apt repositories
Any other pearls of wisdom? … Any warnings about what not to do?
I could spend a few hours digging up every mistake I made and telling you what not to do, but I’d rather focus on giving you the tools to clean up after yourself when you make your own. The one best piece of advice I can give is “keep at it.” There will be times when you shoot yourself in the foot and your options are to give up and lose the foot or do foot surgery right then on your own (with the help of the online community ofc). Don’t be afraid to ask questions everywhere or anywhere, don’t let assholes dissuade you from enjoying your Linux your way or seeking help doing so, and do read the docs. But most importantly, do keep trying; it’s such a rewarding feeling.
Another would be to change as little as possible from a known working configuration at a time. Go with installer defaults as much as you can, change the stuff later. Want to try out new software? Try one new thing and get it working and looking how you envision before moving on. Read the docs so you don’t take any settings for granted, that way you’re not left with something that’s passable instead of exactly what you want.
Make backups. Get a second SSD or an external drive and backup your system. Things like /usr, /etc, /root, and /home at the very minimum. Backups are the best way to unfuck your foot when you inevitably shoot it.
Learn the coreutils. You might not use them daily, but you’ll be glad you know they’re there when you need them and don’t have to install extraneous software that isn’t well maintained because it’s a redundancy of the most common pieces of linux software.
How do I keep everything tidy?
Learn the FHS. As with most documentation, it’s a bit dry, but very enlightening and will automatically put you in the top 10% of linux users with your newfound special knowledge.
There are some automatic file organizers, but you can recreate them yourself to suit your exact needs at 1/10th the resource cost using bash scripts.
Sidebar: another good piece of advice, learn to script in Bash. It basically immediately qualifies you to be a *nix sysadmin, and it makes everything automatable. It’s so much easier than downloading new software or compiling a git repo for each individual task you want to automate. Additionally, it helps to learn to use cron, to run the scripts automatically, and to learn a command-line text editor (no, nano does not count)–but those’re mostly just for efficiency boost, the big timesaves are in learning to script first and foremost.
As with any skill, the common wisdom is to “choose a project you want to make, then learn the skill by making it.” So it’s not a bad idea to learn scripting by, say, writing a script that detects files of a certain format in a directory tree and moving them elsewhere. E.g. check ~/Downloads and all of its subfolders for files ending in .jpg, then move them to ~/Pictures/JPGs (and make the directory if it’s not already there). This should give you a good chance to practice file operations and string manipulation/parsing. After that, learn how to have cron run it once a week or something.
Should I use a particular terminal emulator or Firefox fork?
This just falls under my “probably best to stick with defaults and branch out later” advice, but:
I use terminator, purely because it has a logger plugin (which saves all input and output, including stderr, into a file if I’m doing something that needs that much documenting). I’d say learn to use tmux at some point as well, but that’s just because I like moving my hand between keyboard and mouse as little as possible.
As for firefox, vanilla has always worked for me. It’s not private enough for some people, so they will recommend something like LibreWolf or even Tor. On my laptop (which is completely keyboard driven so I can avoid using a touchpad) I use qutebrowser; it’s not as full-featured (i wouldn’t use it for video streaming), but it avoids using a mouse.
Hey, I recognize that art! That’s the Pepper & Carrot guy! iirc, that’s a FOS webcomic (CC BY 4.0 license, artwork and transcripts available for each episode). We need more people like him: using FOSS to create FOS media and contributing to the community with write-ups and guides; what a mensch.
I haven’t had many issues with wayland, but there are a few sticking points, and it’s usually when you get into the weeds like this. Wayland is ready for mainstream release because all the software that gets the most use is taken care of already, but when it comes to niche edge-cases, it still has a long ways to go; and it will take a lot longer to “get there” all across the board, given how uncommon it is for the already relatively small amount of people doing the edge-case work to also either have time enough to walk devs through the issues or have enough coding knowledge to contribute to the software directly.
Don’t use hacky unlocks if there’s an official way. The best case scenario is it becomes a headache and isn’t reliable; ghe worst case is that it bricks your phone or installs malware in the bootloader
All I could find looking for custom ROMs for your phone was XDA users shrugging their shoulders and unverified downloads from very shady websites/githubs. I’d suggest getting the most out of this phone you can before selling it and getting one you know works with the OS you want