f00f/eris

Going by their Mastodon account, seems they were erroneously detected as “from a US-sanctioned region” and it took too long for said error to be resolved, so they just made the switch.

I’m not a classic Linuxer (I switched in 2015) but I did once try Mandrake out of historical curiosity. From what I hear it was the recommended “beginner-friendly” distro before Ubuntu came out. And based on how hard it was to get working on a VM, I now understand why classic Linuxers talk about Ubuntu like it was this huge sea change.

It’s nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don’t feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.

If my American university has a system in place for students that don’t own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux. A surprising amount of the software required for classes has been open-source, too.

The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

Wasn’t screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway…

chmod’d all my home directory’s files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

Debian needs a better installer. It’d be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn’t install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).

Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds’s involvement; he “only” created and maintains the most popular kernel.

But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.