You misspelled KeepAss.

I’m using VNC over an SSH tunnel. TigerVNC’s vncviewer even has the -via parameter you can use to make creating the tunnel seamless.

Here’s a couple of pointers to get started:

1. The Arch Linux Wiki is full of excellent information. It’s not for beginners, though.
2. Run top in your terminal to see what’s taking CPU.
3. Run top -o RES (or what’s easier, run top and then press M while it’s running) to see what is taking up RAM.

… though unfortunately, it’s mighty probable that the only significant consumer of memory and CPU is your browser. Get uBlock Origin, it helps web pages be lighter and eat less resources. Don’t open too many tabs at once - learn to use bookmarks efficiently, instead (folders, bookmarks toolbar and whatnot).

Reminds me of the programs that make the kernel drop FS buffers in an attempt to free up RAM. Or hog as much memory as they can in an attempt to have unused things swapped to disk. Yeah, they free up RAM all right, but at the expense of actual speed.

Most of the time, this junk is actively harmful. Forget it, modern Linux uses optimized defaults.

You can get more performance out of your hardware by switching to from heavyweight to lightweight programs - for example, instead of Skype (which uses Electron), choose some other way to chat like irssi for IRC. Instead of Gnome, choose i3 or dwm or something like that. You need a bunch of tradeoffs and learning, though, to really get the most out of your hardware.

Windows has a pre-built index as well (or at least it has a search indexer service that enjoys as warm a CPU as possible). That doesn’t appear to improve the speed of search, though.

In Linux, the locate command is crazy fast. I am amazed at how slow search is in Windows, compared to this.

I can drive my manual and eat at the same time just fine, thankyouverymuch :) I think I once submitted a pull request while on the road…

Having an unauthenticated relay imposes the responsibility to configure it correctly (the “only certain addresses” part) and protect it (the “accessible outside the local network” bit). Are you sure it’s not accessible? Did you remember to test with IPv6 too? Will it remain protected after the next time you mess around with your firewall for some totally unrelated reason?

If it works - good for you, but be mindful of all the baggage that comes with a new service.

You’re trading one security issue (profileration of app passwords) to another one (an unauthenticated relay). Is it worth it?

The last time I needed to boot a PC that didn’t have a screen, I built a NixOS installation image with SSH access. I added a user, sudo access, and prepopulated authenticated SSH keys, something similar to https://nixos.mayflower.consulting/blog/2018/09/11/custom-images/

It was about as easy as configuring my own NixOS system.

There you go: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bubblewrap

Environments are per-process. Every program can have its own environment, so don’t inject secrets where they’re not needed.

I’m using bubblewrap to restrict access to FS.

Oh, I totally agree my solution is not “proper” - it’s a homebrewn solution, full of duct tape and shoestrings. That said, it does everything I need to do. Which features of “proper programs” would you be missing? Perhaps I could add them for my own use.

Did gou look into what takes up the most memory? You could downgrade from the modern browser with 500 tabs to netsurf with 500 bookmarks, perhaps, or similar. Many modern websites don’t work there, though.

Instead of Gnome, I’m using Sway, at the moment it’s taking up 236MB resident.

Do you need that mail client to run 24x7? It’s better for mental health to check mail when you decide (once in the morning), not when some rando wants to sell you cannabis oil (best cure for any ailment!) - or you might find something tiny that checks for email and shows a desktop notification, so you know to launch your mail client.

Alacritty likes to munch memory, Foot takes up much less, but Foot doesn’t render some colors correctly, for whatever reason.

Shop around, there are more options than just changing the Matrix client.

I wrote a Bash script that uses rsync to copy data elsewhere.

It gets launched by a systemd timer, but cron would also work. At first it creates a btrfs snapshot of source, for consistency’s sake.

Then it copies stuff. It’s incremental, ie. unchanged files get hardlinked, not copied (-link-dest against the latest symlink) into date-specific directories that present the full view of the filesystem.

Finally, it cleans up the source snapshot and rewrites the latest symlink to point to the freshly made copy, if successful.

I could share my script, if there’s interest, tho it might look a bit messy. Oh, and these rdiff-whatchamacallits probably do the same thing in a more professional manner. I wrote mine to learn rsync.

Most of modern music sounds horrible. Elevators and shopping malls would be better off silent than blasting this noisome garbage.

There are exceptions - there totally are modern composers creating quality stuff. It’s just not played anywhere in public places, for some reason.

My soil is also “clay with weeds on top”, but somehow the weeds manage to grow, so I’m not losing hope. I’m digging it up, mixing with peat+manure+last year’s grass clippings, and hoping for the best. It helps to have a neighbor sell bullshit by the ton. My Mrs., on the other hand, would prefer to buy planting soil by the truckload.

A late frost eated almost all my apples, bell peppers, and whatnot, this year - everything that wasn’t covered. What was covered, though, survived fine. You can make a basic greenhouse-like thing out of bent sticks and some translucent fabric or plastic. It needn’t be clear.

As for watering - get a drip-feed system, the basic ones cost sth like 50€ here. Hook it up to a tank placed high, and add a timer, or just set up alarm clock to open it every day for 10 minutes. It’s so much comfier than dragging around hoses or cans. For bonus points, get rain catchment tanks and install them high. Your plants will grow better when watered with warm water.

I agree with other comments here (about quality, cost of growing, availability, difficulties and especially with tomato varieties being optimized for convenient commercial farming, not taste.

I’m gardening for psychological safety, myself.

When I was a kid, Soviet Union collapsed, economy was in chaos, and though I never went hungry, fancier food (like meat) was unavailable commercially, so we raised it, grew our potatoes and basic veggies. It was a ton of work.

At the moment, stores are full of yummies. However, I can imagine them yummies disappearing - there was a brief food scare at the beginning of Covid (or whenever it was), then the Ukraine war started, scaring the whole Eastern Europe into thinking “Hey, my country is not too different from Ukraine - can we be next?”

Thus we bought a farm, last year, and started a basic garden. Last year we planted some basic foodstuffs - tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, garlic. Two kinds of mint for tea. They produced next to nothing, though. This year, it’s more tomatoes, more cucumbers, potatoes, a selection of different herbs. The mints are perennial, and they’re crazy weeds - you wouldn’t be able to get rid of the beastly things if you wanted to. The yields are OK - I counted around 10 mid-sized potatoes grown from 1 large-sized potato planted, for something like 3x ROI (sample size: 1 plant, the rest keep growing). Tomatoes are sweet and tastier than anything.

You’ll ask if it’s worth the effort. Now I have a summer home (yet with a fiber optic network connection, yum!), for kids to run around in. I invest minor effort and minor funds (except for the farm, heh, hand tools are inexpensive), getting some food that I need to acquire anyway. Growing foodstuffs is linearly scalable. In the possible event of dung-ventilation, I’ll have land, hand tools, and some basic proficiency in growing stuff. Thus it’s like prepping, without really spending any money. Anything I buy will get used to grow food and recoups costs within the season. Oh, and I’m getting some badly needed exercise, spading my plant beds.

I don’t have a plan for the case of zombie invasion (or hungry mobs spilling out of large cities), except being in the middle of nowhere. I’m hoping this scenario won’t come to pass. If it does - the hypothetical robbed me won’t be any worse off than a city dweller, either.

That reminds me - I should call my neighbor and order a tractor trailer full of bullshit (that’s 15 tons, IIRC), costing 200€. I can pay now, get it here, and let it ripen for a couple of years.

Not saying my practice is the best one, but here’s what I do:

• EFI system partition is mounted on /boot
  • kernel is held here. In case of distros like NixOS etc that keep around old kernels, a small ESP might run out of space. I make mine at least 1GB.
• the rest of the disk is one luks2 volume
• inside the encrypted volume, there’s a BTRFS volume
• there’s a subvolume for /home
• and a subvolume for every distro I have (which is usually 1, but sometimes I tinker or switch)
• Kernel command line parameters specify the btrfs subvol with the right distro to boot.
• for NixOS, you need a bootloader (to choose the right kernel). Systemd-boot works well, and its configuration is easily readable. I never figured out how to work with GRUB2, its configuration is just too confusing.
• or if you like Arch, dispense with bootloaders and just use EFISTUB. You can put kernel cmdline params into EFI bootloader options with efibootmgr.

Simple yet complete. Efficient, and extensible - for example, now that everything is a subvolume, I can easily snapshot it, then create backups with rsync off the snapshot, to avoid inconsistent state between backed-up files.

up times measured in months and sometimes years

Don’t believe in installing kernel updates, eh? And even userland updates are easier if you’re free to reboot afterwards.