That screenshot shows the dnf clean working as intended

does a dnf update still not work?

Some plastics get gummy and start to disintegrate as thet age. You might be rubbing off the aged/oxidized plastic.

sudo dnf clean all

NO

I like having no boots on my neck, not just changing out what demographic is wearing it

And… why not? OpenVPN is 10 times worse

Classic tech holy wars rhetoric: “someone dared speak ill of the One True Software, time to talk smack about the competition”

Sometime people have problems when they’re learning new software, sometimes people prefer software solutions that aren’t what you picked. Live and let live.

Good lawd, these are the basic tenants of networking. I’m so sad people are unfamiliar.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

I’ll give you the most extreme solutions I can think of, and let you decide how much of each you want to enact.

First and foremost: use a secure and privacy friendly OS—Qubes on a burner pc or GrapheneOS on a burner phone—with secure and privacy-friendly networking—use DNS-over-HTTPS, or self-host as much of the infrastructure as you can, consider a VPN, keep the device on an isolated VLAN—use a secure/private web browser like LibreWolf.

General rules of online interaction apply for maintaining privacy within the servers: e.g. don’t talk specifics about your location, your age, your physical appearance, your childhood, your employer, etc.

As with most modern apps, the web app is necessarily less intrusive than the installable binary. Use the web app when you can, and limit your usage to only when you can use the web app on a computer and network you own—privacy enforcing habits are more important than all the software stopgaps in the world.

If you absolutely must use a binary, consider breaking Discord’s TOS and using a modified front-end: I know some people who use Aliucord for Android, and I just this moment learned about GoofCord for desktop

don’t install/run any software without verifying the integrity of the developers/distributors and binaries yourself, or building from source and verifying the code

It’s better to have Discord stealing your browsing data to sell you shit than have some random github malware rootkitting your phone.

I recently started reading Eichmann In Jerusalem, because I was aware it introduced the phrase “banality of evil” and always think of that in moral/ethical discussions about the real world (versus hypotheticals), and was immediately struck by how uncritical she was of zionism when it crops up in her reporting/writing. It’s almost like just a quirk of some of the heads of state that is used to explain their politics, rather than anything with more sinister implications.

Perhaps this comes from some immature SJW-ish ideal that an author should always negatively represent harmful ideas—or maybe she does later and I’m just impatient—but it still strikes me as ironic that in the seminal work on The Banality of Evil, genocidal colonialism is treated as, well, banal.

I have a similar story from a different medium:

Frank Zappa has an album called Francesco Zappa. On the back of the sleeve, Frank describes finding out about a distant relative who composed and played music during the 18th century. After telling some friends about it, I got to thinking that Frank had invented another character (á la Ruben and the Jets), because that’s the kind of thing he would do, and felt very foolish for repeating this information uncritically.

Years later I looked the album up on Wikipedia, and it turns out Francesco Zappa was a real musician in the 18th century (who was not actually directly related to Frank).

He got me twice with one album.

Stalker. The movie, not necessarily the games.

Roadside picnic is a fantastic book that feels thrilling for a scifi story. There’s everything you could hope for, from deep philosophical questions to fictional technology that’s described in a way that fascinates but doesn’t attempt to over-explain; there’s political implications to the geopolitics of the time that the authors consider. And at the center, an anti-hero who just wants to get his wish fulfilled and get out of this place, who’s willing to make a deal with the devil for it.

To take all that and reimagine it as a long trialogue in an eerily deserted nature reserve/post-apocalyptic wasteland that touches upon all sorts of deep philosophy—from the divine to whether we can truly know ourselves; the struggle between logic and creativity; the vast ineffability of the natural world, not so much as Man vs. Nature conflict but as a reminder of how large and apathetic the natural world is to humanity—while maintaining a strained atmosphere of invisible threats that we never see. I could draw parallels to Dante’s Inferno and Sartre’s No Exit.

chef’s kiss

It is one of the most aesthetically beautiful films I’ve ever seen, and does something I wish more filmmakers would do: focus on atmosphere rather than plot and action. It sounds boring, but it was a transformative work of art.

It’s dark, it’s broody, it’s strangely serene. I love it so much.

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

Sorry for seeing some media and commenting about the similarities between it and situations I’ve experienced firsthand in my offline life

Now for another observation you won’t like: this type of person is not representative of the entire country, and it’s weird that you jumped to that conclusion

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.

I’m seeing a few comments suggesting OpenWRT, which is what I use and love: the correct response to this level of capitalist tomfoolery should absolutely be to 1. buy hardware that supports FOSS out of the box, or 2. install FOSS firmware.

BUT: OpenWRT isn’t for everyone. Installation on supported devices is usually pretty easy, but it does require being invested in setup, maintenance, and understanding of the software. There is little built-in handholding, and most setup beyond basic functions requires reading the docs and wiki; sometimes, some functionality requires running commands directly on the device rather than the LuCI web-interface.

This kind of understanding and investment should be the end-goal of all privacy-oriented tech users. Technology is complicated, and each layer of handholding that devs add also necessarily obfuscates behind-the-scenes functionality, which runs counter to privacy and security. That being said, the barrier for entry to privacy-respecting tech shouldn’t be “a masters in CompSci,” and thus any alternative to major tech brands is still a step up from just accepting what they give you. Just be aware that your current firmware may be a stepping stone towards software freedom, instead of a stopping point.

OpenWRT is really hard to get onto routers

I bought the Nanopi R4S, and it was extremely easy to switch out their modified OpenWRT for vanilla (literally just use a command/program to install the image on an SDcard). Granted, I did have to find a solution for wifi, but even that was easy with the Belkin RT3200s and the instructions (more in-depth, but still hand-holding). I also flashed it onto a Netgear AC1200 using nmrpflash, which sounds imposing, but really just entailed installing the pre-reqs, hooking the router’s ethernet port directly to my PC’s and running the command.

I did have to do my research to arrive at my decision to buy these specific models for their compatibility with OpenWRT. If you don’t, you might end up with something that requires popping open the shell and setting up serial comms, which is a pain.

As far as I could find, out of the three Wifi6 enabled Asus models (RT-AX###) that are compatible with OpenWRT, 2 require ssh and running commands that are given in the guide; the other one, and all of the supported AC### models, seemed to work using ASUS’s built-in web-app to upload the OWRT image. I wouldn’t say any of it is easy, but I also can’t agree with “really hard.”

Another consideration is setup and maintenance. Proprietary firmware tends toward being as “click here to set and forget everything, here are the only 3 pieces of info you need to know from now on”; OpenWRT is definitely more hands on and requires a lot of RTFMing and routine maintenance.

If this isn’t an accurate representation of a large portion of Americans.

They see themselves as the badass hero stopping The Scum from fucking up everything around them, when really it’s just these guys fucking up everything around them in their thirst for vigilante justice.

Redox isn’t Linux, it uses its own kernel. I want this one to succeed above all others, just because Rust was born to perform this kind of application: guaranteed memory safety when dealing with tens of thousands of lines of code handling hundreds of moving parts running thousands of different tasks, all at a very low level.

I’ll second Plan 9, just because it sounds like scifi and truly takes advantage of how interconnected all computing hardware has become.

Third place goes to anything based on GNU Hurd. The microkernel architecture intrigues me, and I’d like to know how it effects the end user. Plus I’m just a big fan of the copyleft/FOSS aspect.

Also, I’d just like any mobile device alternative that’s not AOSP, and Linux seems like a bad fit for mobile in general. Why do we need a fully-featured, all-purpose kernel when we’re only gonna put it on a known number of SoCs and therefore a known set of hardware configurations? We could be optimizing the hell out of our privacy-friendly mobile OSes, but instead we’ve shackled ourselves to google or linux