Quazatron

I thought this would be an article about the old TV series depicting the life of Basil Fawlty, but no, it’s another comment on LLMs. Oh well.

Just a few more billions, it’ll work much better, you’ll see!

The important stuff (my documents, my desktop settings) are in my user’s home folder. That’s what is important. The rest (the Linux distribution) is swappable and replaceable. I keep /etc (the global system configurations) because I sometimes make changes there that I like to keep when distro hopping.

I mostly backup /home and /etc on my home machines. Anything else I can recreate with configuration-as-code tools like Ansible.

Windows will not die so easily. Two reasons: 1. Too much money behind and around it. 2. Sheer corporate inertia. 3. As long as there is no competition to the AD/Entra ecosystem, companies will buy it. Ok, three reasons.

Me too, at work, on a dozen machines. ALL THIRTY TWO FLOPPY DISKS.

I can, I’m just lazy.

I remember Microsoft Bob.

I respectfully disagree. XFCE having the same experience is its main appeal.

AFAIK it’s a project that does not have many developers, so the pace is quite slow, but the reverse side is that there are no surprises. When running production systems you do not want surprises. You want a desktop that lets you work and gets out of the way. That is the reason why XFCE doesn’t get much press but has quite a few satisfied users.

You have much to learn about how things work in FLOSS.

Projects don’t die because you and your cool friends decided that they are old news. They will live on as long as there are users and developers interested in keeping them going. There are countless examples, I’m sure you can find some if you get past your short sightedness.

ABS was the last good life-saving technology added to cars. That thing saved my dumb arse several times already.

Now I want to get a new car because the old one is getting too degraded, but I dread the fuckery I’ll find in new models. I just wanted a 3.5 cm audio jack and simple controls. I guess I won’t have much luck.

So, you’re telling me that if I want to cheat I should use Chinese models. Got it.

I just want to add that you that you can also setup multiple user accounts for different uses. One for banking, one for gaming, one for downloading random crap. It will not protect against privilege escalation attacks but will help against random scripts exfiltrating your personal documents.

Another nice layer is containers and containerized applications (flatpaks, bubblewrap, etc). Each app will be somewhat limited in what damage it can do.

Running pi-hole as your DNS or using some other filtered DNS provider (Mulvad or others) will also protect you from some shady sites.

Cups is awesome. I have an ancient HP laserjet 1100 connected to an ancient parallel-to-Ethernet adapter, connected to my ancient router. Cups works flawlessly with this setup, Windows never worked.

I have an issue with ReactOS. It’s not technical, I’m sure technically it’s great.

Any software that tries to mimic proprietary technology will always be subject to the whims of said technology owners, be it patents, undocumented APIs, broken legacy APIs maintained for retro compatibility.

This much can be said of Wine, but that is pretty much just a wrapper for games, not a full OS, so it’s not critical.

I hope I’m wrong, and please enlighten me if I’m wrong.

Same here, I heard about the reliability of Unix while enduring Windows 95’s appalling crashes.

Last month I finally moved my wife’s Windows 10 laptop to Endeavor OS. She recognizes that her unusable laptop is now snappy and stable.

My house is now officially Microsoft-free.

Meanwhile, copy/paste is still awfully impaired by random emoji boxes popping up, because of course I want to give a ❤️ to my boss’s Confluence url.

I feel sad that I can’t boycott these spineless cowards because I haven’t been a customer since forever.

I’m sure they were not killing each other over imaginary friends, or debating whether mammary glands should banned.

It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.

Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son’s laptop, because that’s what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs… and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.

It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.

It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.