"everything is a file" is such a godsend. It makes absolutely everything so much easier and intuitive. I remember trying to get an old dot matrix printer to work using a parallel-to-usb adaptor cable. Without reading any documentation or having any prior experience I tried echo testing12345 > /dev/lp0 and it just worked lol. Meanwhile my friend spent like half an hour digging in windows gui settings trying to figure out how to print to a parallel printer.

I also posted about this before, but a while back I had to configure my system so that a non-root user could start and stop a root daemon without sudo. On a runit system all you have to do is change the permissions of some control files and it works. On systemd? When I looked it up, the simplest solution involved writing a polkit policy in javascript 🤮

systemd-regedit

That's just dconf lol. It sounds great in theory -- after all, isn't bringing standardization to a chaotic battlefield of different formats a good thing? But in practice it's absolute garbage. I would much rather just edit a config file. Heck, even if you program uses some obscure config format like xml or something language-specific like .lua or .py, I would much rather take a few minutes to learn the specifics of your format than fuck around with dconf. Fuck dconf.

idk man I use /dev/sdX when running commands interactively and PARTLABELs in my /etc/fstab. All those letters and numbers in UUIDs are too much for my monkey brain to handle lol

Ooh, I've never heard of bcachefs, sounds exciting! I see it supports encryption natively, which btrfs doesn't. Pretty cool!

Personally I've never had any issues with btrfs, but I did start using it only a couple years ago, when it was already stable. Makes sense that you'd stick with zfs tho, if that's what you're used to.

I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations

Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it's the most disgusting and overly verbose code you've ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could've exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.

Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!

I'll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you're describing. I've been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there's not much to break on such a minimal system.

...well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.

I can think of a single instance where a Redhat-ism is better

I don't know if it would be accurate to call it a redhat-ism, but btrfs is pretty amazing. Transparent compression? Copy-on-write? Yes please! I've been using it for so long now that it's spoiled me lol. Whenever I'm on an ext4 system I have to keep reminding myself that copying a huge file or directory will... you know... actually copy it instead of just making reflinks

I'd do away with network-manager on a stationary system too, but I'm on a laptop, and unless there's some trick I don't know about, configuring wifi by hand for every new network I come across sounds like a bit of a pain. Especially for corporate/institution network that use fancy things like PEAP

Thanks! I love this format so much. I can't find it now, but one of my favourite memes in this genre was something like this:

STOP DOING

• Tasks were never meant to be completed
• Years of working, but there's STILL MORE SHIT TO DO
• Wanted to get some work done anyway, for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called SIMULATION GAMES
• "Please let me sacrifice a third of my life to justify my existence. Please let me spend eight hours a day working just to be able to do it again the next day" - statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged

Look at what people have been demanding our respect for all this time, with all the schedules and todo lists we have built for them:

These are REAL things done by REAL people

<Pictures of gmail, microsoft outlook, and some TODO list app>

They have played us for absolute fools

What I really don't understand is why distro maintainers feel the need to actually go along with these changes. Like, sure, if this predictable interface naming thing worked as intended, I can definitely see how it can be useful for server administrators. You could just hardcode the automatic interface names instead of assigning them manually in /etc/mactab. But why would the rest of us ever need this? Most personal machines have at most one wifi card and one ethernet device, so wlan0 and eth0 are perfectly predictable. And even if you have multiple wifi or ethernet adapters, your networking is probably handled by network-manager, so you never actually have to put interface names into config files. Why force enterprise-grade bloat on users who just want a simple desktop experience?

No, the "old scheme" is the one that assigns wlan0, wlan1, eth0, eth1, and so on by default. I would say these names are pretty usable.

The part you quoted is what you need to do if you specifically need to be sure that a specific card gets a specifc name 100% of the time. You don't have to bother with it unless you have a reason to.

"reddit makes a linux distro" would be hilarious and terrifying

Thanks, glad you like it! I spent quite some time re-making the template from scratch in inkscape, because the original meme din't have enough space for the text

idk man ipv4 NAT sounds like the "complicated bloat" to me.

Thanks, will take a look when I have time

No, it's an edit. I linked the original in the post text. If you can't access it for some reason, here's a transcript:

Government of the Netherlands

Home > Topics > Coronavirus COVID-19 > Travelling to the Netherlands from abroad

Checklist for travel to the Netherlands

Do not travel to the Netherlands.

Agreed. Though I wonder if ipv6 will ever displace ipv4 in things like virtual networks (docker, vpn, etc.) where there's no need for a bigger address space

So switching to a slower wifi AP causes packets destined for outside of your network to not be dropped? That sounds like one of those cursed issues that's a complete nightmare to track down lol. Maybe the faster speed of the 5.8ghz network is causing your router to get overwhelmed or something? Does the same issue happen if you connect via ethernet? I don't really know what else can cause this, I hope you can get it fixed!

No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs?

I cannot for the life of me find the particular fix I followed, but I swear it was a missing symlink to busybox. Not in initramfs, but in the full booted environment. That's why I was so confused haha. I can't find anything about it right now, so maybe I'm misremembering something...

Flatpak is awesome, I love it so much. It lets users pick a distro based on the unique features that distro provides, without having to worry about whether their favourite apps are packaged. Since you're considering switching to debian+flatpak, here is a list of pitfalls I've run into in flatpak so far, maybe this can save you some troubleshooting:

• You need to have a thing called an "xdg dekstop portal" installed. Otherwise filepickers will be broken. On Debian this should be a dependency of flatpak, so it should be installed by default tho.
• If you're manually restarting Xorg without using a display manager, make sure the xdg desktop portal process doesn't get started twice. Otherwise it will be broken
• As far as I understand, there's no way to use xdg desktop portal to forward an entire directory through to a flatpak'd app, unless the app itself asks specifically for a directory. So stuff like opening a .html file that references a .css file in the same directory with a flatpak'd browser will be broken, unless you manually make an exception using Flatseal or flatpak override.
• Make sure your root filesystem is mounted with "shared" propagation, otherwise umount commands won't propagate into flatpak's sandbox, and drives will get stuck in a weird state where they're mounted in some namespaces, but not others. This should be the default in Debian tho.
• If flatpak'd Firefox has ugly bitmap fonts, follow this workaround

Anyway, this is just my experience running Flatapk in Void, hopefully it works smoother for you on Debian.