I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade
Same here! Grew up using DOS and Win 3.1, and been a Windows sysadmin for a long time. But over the past few years I’ve been growing increasingly dissatisfied at the direction Microsoft’s been going in, particularly the way they’ve been shoving their half-baked cloud services (and telemetry) onto us, and enterprises, being married to MS, have no choice but forced to comply. At least, that’s the case where I live, companies just lap up every new thing Microsoft does and treat it like the next best thing since sliced bread.
I was being turned from an engineer into a middleman, a lackey at the mercy of MS, and I didn’t like it one bit. I hated the thought of having my entire career being dictated by one corporation. So I quit my job and finally managed to land a Linux role this year and I’m so much happier. To be honest, it feels a bit weird throwing away my veteran MS hat and all the knowledge that I gained over the years and going back to being a total noob (at enterprise Linux that is), but I’m also learning a lot of cool stuff, but more importantly, I love being in control of our systems again, and no longer being at the mercy at a monopolistic mega corporation.
On a random note, as a fellow relic of a bygone era… remember back when Windows used to be customizable, when you could modify just about any file, change themes without a hack, without things like Trusted Installer/Defender getting in your way, or even completely replace your explorer.exe with a different shell like BlackBox? I miss those days.
This is Linux (Debian) running locally on my Android phone (Galaxy Fold 4), with a Win95 theme. I think it’s pretty awesome that Linux still lets you do stuff like this, whilst still maintain a good security posture. And letting me relive the memories of the good ol’ days. :)
Is anything keeping you from just reinstalling the system and mounting your home into it again (maybe the majority of your customisations live in /home too)? I feel that is a lot less of a hassle than copying files around.
In principle you should be able to restore your system by just copying all of the relevant files from the backup to their correct partitions - it can’t really get any worse if it doesn’t work.
For the future: A backup is only any good if you know how to restore it and tested that that actually works.
Regarding the permissions: If you do a cp fileA.txt fileB.txtfileB.txt will normally be owned by the creating user. So a sudo cp … will create the files as root.
I would personally use rsync with a few additional options, archive among them. This way the fs is restored exactly as it was. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if the files weren’t copied that way too.
The article didn’t mention this, but would disabling the UEFI logo in the boot screen mitigate the vulnerability until proper patches get rolled out? (Or honestly at this point, I’d keep it disabled even after it’s patched in case they didn’t patch it right. UEFI’s are all proprietary so it’s not like you can check.) Since the vulnerability is in the image parser, would bypassing that be enough?
NixOS and nix in general is incredibly complicated imo and the documentation is… let’s just say sub par. I’d go with arch unless you really just wanna learn nix.
It’s incredibly complicated in the same way that ubuntu is incredibly complicated to a lifelong windows user.
It just requires a bit of a paradigm shift which includes a learning curve but IMO once you’re past that point it’s intuitive and even easier than other distros.
You cannot compare NixOS to ubuntu… even for as a new user to more adept user comparison, NixOS is really complicated. I’m not saying it’s bad, just that the documentation on how it works could be better. I’ve tried to use NixOS and nix itself multiple times and they were a nightmare to setup each time, especially NixOS (nix itself isn’t as complicated to me but it has some annoying things with proprietary software and not integrating with desktops at all without using hacky scripts).
Did you truly read what I said? The only logical way I can frame your comment is that you glanced at what I wrote down and started writing a reply.
To a regular average windows user, ubuntu is incredibly complicated. When you learm how it works and how you’re supposed to use it, it becomes incredibly easy. The “hard” part of ubuntu is the paradigm shift from windows to the linux ecosystem.
Similarly, to an average linux user nixos is “hard” because it does things completely differently from other linux distros. But once you’re used to it, it just makes sense and is easy.
So the comparison is average windows user -> ubuntu vs average linux user -> nixos. Not average user -> ubuntu vs average user -> nixos.
Finally: Nixos documentation is IMO 100x better than ubuntu documentation. Whenever I experience any issue with ubuntu it’s easier to just load up the arch wiki and hope it’s similar than it is to try and find anything specific for ubuntu that isn’t either 10 years out of date, a massive gaping security risk or just plain dumb. The nixos wiki may not be perfect but it has always been sufficient for my needs, and I have to run a decent amount of very niche pieces of software.
In the early 90s at the dawn of my programing/sysadmin career. I showed up to my first week of work at “Initech” in dress pants, shirt, and tie. The senior gray beard UNIX sysadmin wore wholey jeans and ratty t-shirts. I don’t recall whether he sat me down and told me, or I figured it out on my own that to be taken seriously in a technical field you must dress down. Brilliant people look disheveled (see Albert Einstein, Steve Wozniak, et al). I ditched the stupid tie & began dressing more comfortably.
Anthropologists call this antagonistic aculturation. Us IT geeks intentionally set our selves apart from the business drones & we had to exercise our privilege of dressing comfortabley while working ungodly hours to solve impossible problems.
Now I’m the gray beard and I’ve mentoed the brighter of the pimple faced youths I’ve hired in the ancient customs of our tribe. Looking back, It seems that IT’s greatest influence on business has not been the increased efficiency of the paperless office, but the casual attire that most office workers now enjoy.
I ended up briefing some very senior leadership…in a hoody.
I brief that specific group on a regular basis and it’s usually fairly laid back but this particular meeting a new, very high profile person was attending to get up to speed. Apparently everyone knew but me because they were suited up and all of the ladies were wearing makeup and had their hair all nice. And there I was, the lead brief, in my hoody and jeans and scruffy beard.
After the meeting I realized that it probably worked in my favor. Some sort of psychological “this guy must be really good because he dgaf about dressing to impress”.
Plus I think their is exactly as you said a stereotype that the better you are at your IT stuff the less put together you have to be.
It’s been a while since I’ve used pure debian, but historically I’ve used Ubuntu because debian made it more difficult to install “non-free” software. Has this changed?
Generally yes. The Fn key is usually handled either by the keyboard itself or by the BIOS, and the OS just sees the resulting key presses as if the keyboard had all the buttons. Can you not find such a switch in your BIOS? Saying what vendor it is might also help someone help you.
I honestly don’t get these posts, there’s a couple of things that is super weird.
Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
Isn’t the solution pretty obvious, stop mainting xorg if you don’t like to maintain xorg, who is forcing you to maintain xorg?
I really don’t care if I’m using xorg or wayland, I just want something that works, and I have tried wayland and that isn’t the case as of the moment. And I don’t care about the why, because I can’t be like yeah I use Wayland that’s why I can’t be on this video conference.
Just stop mainting it if you don’t want to maintain it, problem solved, move on.
Seems like a redhat problem, so why is he complaining. It wasn’t the developer who signed an agreement to maintain xorg, so I don’t get the argument. Either you do it for the money you get paid, and if you don’t feel like it’s enough, then don’t do it. The developer can just quit and do something else, ask for another project. The only one who is making him work on xorg is redhat.
But why even mention m it in the same context as Wayland, make Wayland work for the end user and 90% of people would not care if thier Linux machine was using Wayland or xorg.
Yes I’ve had multiple issues with video conferencing on Wayland, but my experience is 1 - 2 years old. I just use what works, I don’t have any technical problems with xorg and that is why I use it.
Why does every discussion about Wayland include trashing xorg?
I don’t know, really, but it’s something I feel I’ve seen before. I thought about it and it’s just fanboyism.
Some people get legitimately angry when they see someone using something they don’t like, and I think Wayland fanboys fit in this category to a tee.
I see the exact same kind of backlash whenever someone brings up Nvidia or Manjaro. The fanboys come out and all take it as an opportunity to recommend what they like because they believe their tastes are superior to everyone else’s.
This actually makes it sound like Xorg will be supported longer than I thought.
I understood RHEL9 to already be Wayland based and so I was expecting the clock to runout on Xorg when RHEL8 went off support. RHEL9 does default to Wayland but it sounds like Xorg remained a fully supported option for those that wanted it. The move to Wayland only being proposed for RHEL10 did not happen on RHEL9.
RHEL8 goes off support in 2029 but RHEL9 is supported until 2032. The implications of this article are that Red Hat will not put much energy into Xorg after 2025 ( RHEL10 ) but they will still have to support their customers. This at least means security fixes but it likely means continued viability of modern hardware to a certain extent as well.
Regardless, this also highlights one of the “hidden”‘contributions of Red Hat and how much the entire ecosystem relies on them. This can be seen as good or bad but I wish the public debate involving them would at least accurately reflect it.
And even beyond that, because any distro that ships Wayland by default does so because it has XWayland as a backup, which is essentially running an X server inside Wayland.
Xwayland is likely to be with us a very long time. I do not see Motif adding Wayland support anytime soon for example. How long for GNUstep to hop on board?
Agreed ( on the code ). Wayland and Xorg also share libinput, libdrm, KMS, and Mesa.
The biggest difference is that Red Hat will stop bundling this stuff up together, testing it, and created releases. Most of the actual code will still be maintained though.
I hate that most Linux brightness controls assume that humans perceive brightness linearly for some reason. I don’t want a flash bang in dark surroundings when I forget to use the slider. I don’t want to press my brightness up key a thousand times or resort to the slider in bright surroundings.
Windows Telemetry at first. Then Windows browbeating various products - “Edge please download Firefox” - Edge: “Why, I am better than Firefox” Me:“Do as I say” Edge: “But -blah blah nah” and so on. I know there are ways around it, but if someone can force an update against my will on my machine, it is not my machine. This leads to questions of what else can they do without my permission. Linux is my machine. I control when and how and what. Also customization.
Having to disable protected services to stop updates from rebooting in the middle of a nine hour encode was it for me. Checking on my encode at what should have been 90% and find my PC at the login screen was it for me. Handbrake works better for me in Linux, too.
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