Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.

In my country that would cost me 20 dollars

The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.

nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box

There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)

pupoose

What’s on your “Everyday Carry” USB stick?

• scans of my DL and other licenses
• scan of my DD214
• system rescue ISO
• a TEMP dir with random things I need in the short term
• portable apps versions of putty, WinSCP, etc.

Do normal people who don’t do this stuff for a living use Linux now, outside handheld gaming devices?

I run into folks using linux fairly often in tech hobbies. Ham operators, DIY solar folk, people dorking around with a RasPi, etc. And some Normals who want a lighter experience than Win.

Last dedicated windows box I ran at home was Windows NT 4, IIRC. Last time I had to use it at work was Win7 (?) before I retired. I do have a Win7 virtual somewhere around here I spin up every couple years to run something obscure I can’t get to run in WINE.

Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time

Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…

10W? What kind of roof? Residential? RV?

When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)

Could my 10 year old SDF account still exist?

Mine does. I finally remembered to log back in and there she is…

Caveat: the hostname had changed; I signed up at lonestar.sdf.org IIRC (no longer extant) and now it is on freeshell.org

I found my notes from ten years ago so I know what my username was

Another caveat: I think usernames were truncated to 8 chars in that time period. Don’t know if that’s the case now or not, or if extra chars are thrown away anyhow.

Wireguard self hosting

I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)

warning: some non-linux included below

• minix
• slackware
• early Debian
• FreeBSD (ftp installs instead of 20 floppies! OMG!)
• Debian
• Crunchbang <-- loved that original project
• Solaris (friend gave me a Sparc 5)
• DSL, Puppy linux (had a tiny netbook)
• **Debian on workstations and servers since ~2014 **
• various debian-based distros on RPI

I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)

Yeah, they look like horses and act like cats. My grey was the finest doggo I ever had.

I’d rather mods who don’t want outside participation to be able to stop their communities from showing in All.

Agreed. Niche communities can get hammered with downvotes and “I don’t want to read this” comments from readers of ALL.

It’s confounding: “show me everything”, then “I don’t like the content in your niche community”. WTF?

the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.

It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.

In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).

I might try to find or rewrite it.

PDAnet I’ve tethered a laptop to a phone via usb and bluetooth that way. Nowadays I just run my SIM in an LTE router and share the connection via wifi.

hide tether usage if possible

Some solutions involving tweaking TTL.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo’ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

“You’re not the boss of me” :-)

Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”