There have been many improvements in making documentation more inclusive across the IT industry which shouldn’t be scoffed at. The first that comes to mind is changing “master” and “slave” to “primary” and “secondary” (or “replica” etc.) because references to slavery is inconsiderate to many.

I don’t think pile-ons are productive, but I think inclusive language and thinking is important.

I stand corrected, thank you. I’ll have to try that out.

The biggest issue I’ve had with I2P so far has been lack of content.

postman.i2p only permits torrents which includes its tracker in the torrent file, which means popular torrents from 1337x, TPB et al can’t be uploaded there (at least not without changing the infohash). Torrent clients like qBittorrent and BiglyBT can cross-seed on I2P and clearnet networks which is a recent development since libtorrent 2.0 came out (software packages take a while to bump to.the latest library), but from what I’ve tested nearly all of the infohashes I put into my client from “clearnet” torrent sites have stalled, probably because I2P is a little too bespoke at the moment.

The potential is definitely there IMO, but unless you’re just watching mainstream movies and TV it’s not a replacement for clearnet/VPN.

If I’m missing something I’d like to know :)

There are different types of cycling. I would always wear a helmet to work because I live 6km away and it’s a decent ride. There are hills and I often get to a reasonable speed.

Compare that to someone living in South Brisbane commuting to the CBD, or someone going for a leisurely bike stroll on the riverwalk - they may not go fast at all. We don’t wear helmets whilst walking or jogging, but why is it mandatory for a slow ride?

The big reason helmets can be offputting is because they can mess up your hair. If the city wants to encourage people who live relatively close to their jobs to ride in, more flexibility on helmets could be a good thing.

FWIW I do think helmet safety should always be encouraged. Riding down a hill? Going more than a leisurely stroll? Wear a helmet. Makes sense. But it’s really not that necessary for people who are riding slow.

You can definitely work in an office job, bring your clothes in your bag and get changed at work.

If that’s not your thing, catch PT. Nobody’s saying you have to do the cycling thing. But plenty of people ride into offices for work and wear their smart clothes just fine.

I ride all year round in Brissie. I find my comfort level depends on when I ride, distance, speed and my bike setup.

First, I ride to and from work in the morning and arvo when it’s cooler, not in the middle of the day.

I ride 6km each direction which is manageable. In winter I barely break a sweat. In summer I have a shower on each side. I can and sometimes do get away without showering by riding slowly. Or I just catch PT if I’m going somewhere else after work.

The other thing I noticed is that not wearing a bag helps a lot with reducing sweat on my back. I have a basket on the back of my bike and just throw my bag in. A lot of other people use pannier bags.

Everywhere that I’ve worked so far has had an End of Trip facility except for my supermarket job as a teenager.

Something that often gets missed is the difference between packaging conventions between distros.

For example, Debian has Apache httpd packaged as “apache2” and has wrapper scripts for enabling sites. Fedora/RHEL has “httpd” and includes conf.d from the main conf. Arch also has “httpd” but doesn’t have a conf.d out of the box. Of course you can pretty much configue Apache to your heart’s content and have an identical setup between all three distros.

From what I’ve read, Debian tends to patch and change software to fit more into their overall system whereas Fedora and Arch tend to be more upstream.

RPM and Arch both have group packages and metapackages. Debian just has metapackages AFAIK. Debian also has “recommended” and “suggested” levels of soft dependencies, the former which is enabled by default. RPM has the capability for weak dependencies but AFAIK most RPM distros don’t use it. Arch doesn’t have soft/weak dependencies AFAIK.

When you install a new system daemon on Debian, it’s generally enabled and started by default, whereas RPM-based and Arch don’t do that.

When I think of the base of the system I tend to think of some of those more subtle idiosyncrasies that tend to spread around the ecosystems, like Ubuntu and Debian behave quite similarly for instance.

I much prefer Librewolf. They are a little more transparent about it is, an independent, open source repackaging of Firefox with Arkenfox(ish) patches applied to it, rather than an entity which signs up for deals with other businesses.

Bash scripts will only get you so far and I can wholly recommend Ansible for automation.

Basically the main advantage of Ansible is that its builtin tasks are “idempotent” which means you can re-run them and end up with the same result. Of course it is possible to do the same with bash scripts, but you may require more checks in place.

The other advantage of Ansible is that there are hundreds of modules for configuring a lot of different things on your system(s) and most are clear and easy to understand.

You could use HAProxy on the client side to load balance apps in multiple locations, but it really depends on the application.

I like to manage my software with Ansible but Docker stack files might make it simple enough for you.

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would’ve been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn’t take me long to figure out what happened. That’s the story of how I stopped using Windows.

Yeah, too frequent and too buggy. It got annoying having to do upgrades every six months and have to deal with all the new bugs that came with it.

Basically give me Debian-style biannual releases or Arch-style rolling releases.

There’s also dotnet (.NET Core) available on most distros which is an open source subset of .NET by Microsoft

See https://fiodar.substack.com/p/differences-between-mono-and-net-core

I use Debian at home on my homeserver and a mix of Debian and Arch for my workstations. Most of my stuff is managed with Ansible to make rebuilding easier and most workloads in podman containers.

Personally I don’t overthink the distro thing. I recently started using Arch and quite like it. I’ve noticed packages that are available in Debian but not Arch and vice-versa. Debian Stable is nice because it’s just, well, stable.

Fedora has an annoying release cadence IMO. I have experienced desktop bugs in the early GA releases before which put me off. If I wanted instability I would sooner go with Arch (and I am yet to have many issues with Arch yet).

If I were to go with a BSD for a home server it would probably be OpenBSD or FreeBSD. OpenBSD has vmm and a bunch of tooling around it, and FreeBSD has bhyve and jails. I haven’t taken the plunge because Linux works and it’s what I know.

These days I hear about people using proxmox on their homeserver with LXC containers and/or VMs.

Trying to talk to a human at the big tech companies is nigh impossible these days. It’s actually quite concerning how unaccountable they have become. If a billionaire can’t do it, what chance do us commoners have?

Last edited 2014-01-12 12:30:18 UTC

Thanks, I wasn’t sure what the situation with Darwin was. Android is definitely more free than iOS, but the spirit of AOSP is dead and many of the old AOSP apps have been discontinued. For example Google no longer maintains a calendar app and so LineageOS maintains its own fork. Google’s proprietary suite is front and centre of a lot of the Android distros except for LineageOS and co.

We really didn’t say the same thing