(NEW!) Go through airport security with an encrypted laptop, sensitive information and free conference stickers showing your affiliations as an activist. Let airport security confiscate your laptop. Airport security drugs and wrenches you. You give them your laptop password. The police arrests you based on suspicions of terrorism.
Not that other means of accessing the passwords aren't worth considering, but in the real world, it takes a lot more for someone to actually coerce your password from you than to use unencrypted storage.
I generally like xkcd, but this is a harmful trivialization of the value of encryption. In the real world, anything that isn't encrypted is negligent as hell. There's no valid reason not to do it, with maybe the exception of a thumb drive you're sharing across a computers you don't control and are clearly aware is not secure.
Except when your drive is encrypted you can easily destroy its contents. Let’s say you’re DorkPirate1337 who happens to care about their opsec; you luksEncrypt your drive and have a simple script that runs when a specific USB key is disconnected, triggers luksErase, and then poweroffs. Voila, when the school principal snatches your unlocked laptop while you’re in the lib, all your pirated hentai becomes permanently unaccessible whether you give up the password or not. [Edit: the USB key is strapped to your wrist]
Note: luks uses 2 encryption keys, where one is randomly generated and encrypts the actual data, and the second one is given by the user and encrypts the first one; luksErase destroys the luks header containing that first key
There was a time when Nixpkgs was smaller than the AUR. And, until recently, Nixpkgs was larger than the AUR but still smaller than the combination of the main Arch repos with the AUR.
As it turns out, the current total package count for Arch and the AUR is 85,819.
For nixpkgs unstable, that number is 88,768.
NixOS 23.05 Stable has 83,740.
And considering the mention of 9,147 new packages and 4,015 removed packages, that would mean that 23.11 would have a total of:
88,872 packages. This is more than the current figures for Nixpkgs unstable, but this is going off data from separate sources (NixOS devs and repology, with repology still being slightly outdated)
And, as such, I think it’s fair to say the winner is (drumroll please)…
The USER for having such incredible distributions, giving him the vast breadth of choice for what distro matches their workflow best.
To be fair, the level of support for packages in nixpkgs is inconsistent. My config has a number of backported packages overlaid on top of nixpkgs where upstream is not up to date enough for me.
Package count is interesting to look at, but it doesn’t really give a good picture of software availability. Distributions will split or combine packages differently. For example, the AUR has both binaries and source versions available for many packages.
This is one of the reasons why I am very unsure about the whole archinstall thing. On the one hand, it lowers the barrier of entry for less techy people, which is always good. On the other hand, it allows for installing the OS without ever having to use the archwiki, which leads to people making a blog post like this that could be solved by looking for “bluetooth” in the archwiki and following the instructions. To somebody not familiar with the OS, this makes it seem like arch is much more complicated than it actually is. “To run arch, you have to hope that there is a blog post or youtube video for simple things like bluetooth!”
No, you simply go here: wiki.archlinux.org(Also very useful resource if you are on any other distro btw)
What on Earth for. I don’t think I’ve used it more than a couple of times over the last 5 years, and that was for arcane stuff like enabling rc.local (which is something every user should probably not know about…)
Plex, CUPS (printing services), Minecraft servers, VPN, file sharing, DHCP/DNS/Wifi, bluetooth are some examples of basic level things systemd can help regular users manage.
Unless you have very specialized requirements (and quite possibly you do) the solution is usually to unhook yourself from thinking of needing specific programs and to instead focus on needing to perform specific tasks. (Then finding the Linux way to perform that task.)
Barring that, the codeweavers suggestion is a good one. I used it in my early days when I thought I couldn't live without particular pieces of Windows software and although that was several years ago, even then it was pretty good about being able to easily run arbitrary Windows software. IMO it's cheap enough to be worth the investment.
If you truly have bespoke requirements that just can't be satisfied by either of the above, staying on Windows may legitimately be your best option.
More generally - if you decide to take this step, expect to have to learn to use a computer substantially differently than you have in the past. It's not harder; in many ways it's easier. But if you are very experienced and comfortable with Windows, a lot of concepts are going to feel foreign to you. Tackle one task at a time and your experiences will build upon each other. Go into it expecting to have to learn, and you'll do fine. Bizarrely I find the least tech-savvy folks sometimes have the easiest time transitioning.
Accidentally flashed a live image (PCBSD, IIRC) onto my 1TB external HDD instead of the thumb drive. Lost years of collected music and movies that night. I learned two things:
Don’t do this sort of thing in the middle of the night, when you’re tired and should be sleeping.
Late to the party but this why I like Ventoy. It only looks for removable drives and then all you do is drag and drop your live images onto the removable drive. Pretty hard to mess anything up.
This looks like it represents the image with block characters, so it ends up being very low res. I suspect it will be horrible at rendering text.
@RickyRigatoni, maybe you can hack this together with something like plymouth. Normally it’s for the boot process, but it might work for shutting down as well.
If the terminal resolution is high enough and I tweak the image a bit it should look fine. I’ll look into Plymouth, too, because I might as well use that for a classic windows boot.
It seems like it’s using blocks that are half a character tall, and I imagine using the combination of foreground and background colors to get two colors into each character space.
Therefore your horizontal resolution will be equal to the length of each line in characters. Your vertical resolution will be equal to two times the number of lines on the screen. So maybe it’s doable with high resolution and tiny font. I don’t know what the limits for those are.
Pop!OS. It is maintained by a company called System76 who make Linux computers. You might think about getting one if you want a new computer. Support the cause!
I will second Pop!OS. I have it installed on my gaming desktop and have been very satisfied with its stability and ability to play every game I’ve wanted to. Between Steams Proton layer and Wine (with the wineglass GUI) there is nothing I want for right now.
(I do run an AMD card, YMMV with an Nvidia one as I cannot speak to experience with that).
I do use Mint for my laptop/daily driver outside of gaming and love that as well. In my mind the two distributions fit the use cases well.
Ease of installation would be a huge one. Pop was run the installer from USB and go. After it was online there was just installing steam and whatever games I wanted. I have not dug further into void or what its capable of. I wanted as little fiddling as possible. To me the interface felt good out of the box.
I mainly sought out Pop!OS after reading about people’s experience with it and gaming and liked what I heard. I jumped directly from windows 11 to Pop. If void works for you, that’s awesome. This was my “how do I get it running now without messing around” moment. I really just wanted to game, immediately after install. Later on I started to fiddle with things.
Pretty happy with my Lemur Pro, 3.5 years in. I just replaced the battery, which was fairly painless. Also had to replace the wireless radio, which was as easy as popping in a new one. I wasn’t happy that it failed, but apparently that’s industry wide, not just these laptops. Replacement was like $35. Other than that I’ve only had cosmetic issues, like the System76 sticker came off, which I don’t care about.
Personal opinion. If you successfully booted Debian, stick with it. No need to try out a bunch of distros. Debian is well known, well supported, tons of resources AND everything works out of the box with your POS systems. Sold!
Cory Doctorow has a book, “Walkaway” that is basically exploring the politics of FOSS on a societal scale. It’s pretty nerdy obv but I enjoyed it and it doesn’t overly glamourize any political system the way you’d typically see in political fiction.
There’s a book called Opt-Out from Rory Price about a future where humanity starts using AR more and more to the point that it’s almost obligatory to have a device of this kind for everything, even as ID. It then talks about a group that develops a free/libre version of this device’s OS and they have to decide about personal issues or try to maintain their views. It’s entertaining and not too long, but I think it shows a very possible future.
I haven’t heard from its author in some time, but I think they discovered they were someone else too ;), that’s why I love this book.
From your other responses, this is a system issue not a problem with the website.
Lemmy.world’s code has this font list for sans-serif: system-ui,-apple-system,“Segoe UI”,Roboto,“Helvetica Neue”,“Noto Sans”,“Liberation Sans”,Arial,sans-serif,“Apple Color Emoji”,“Segoe UI Emoji”,“Segoe UI Symbol”,“Noto Color Emoji”
I’d use the dev tools to check which font is being rendered. I’m on Windows so I get Segoe UI, which I find entirely acceptable.
I’ve never been a fan of the UEFI logo inserting itself into the boot screen. It’s basically just an advertisement for the hardware vendor because they’re jealous of the OS having the spotlight. And it’s an ad that, like so many other ads before it, screws over the security and privacy of the advertisee because fuck you that’s why.
I don’t know. It looks more aesthetically consistent. Your computer has to display something. Average users would be scared if it dumped logs on the display. so the vendor logo makes sense. It COULD just say loading, but this is a bit pedantic I think.
With UEFI, it goes “Motherboard Logo -> Motherboard Logo”
Sure, it’s more consistent, but the alternative is not user unfriendly, the only people it’s unfriendly to is the marketing wankers at Dell, Lenovo, Acer, etc.
When it comes to security, particularly at boot time, fuck the user. Users don’t interact with devices at boot time so it doesn’t matter if it shows a blank screen, a mile of logs or a screaming clown penis. If it was up to users no device or service would have a password or security of any kind, and every byte of information about your life would be owned by 'The Cloud." Let the marketing wanks insert their logo into the Windows boot process,
I want to insert my own logo into the boot process, and I want these ducking vendors to properly validate and assess their mother ducking software. But nooo, penetration tests and any remediations are too expensive for these pieces of bit. Why do it when you can just stick your dick in everyone’s face, right?
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