100% this. I’ve gotten the same spam even on Mastodon. They are cat fishing. They will get you engaged with photos they stole off the Internet (sometimes you find them with reverse search), then try to get more personal on a less moderated medium like email or text, maybe Signal or something. It’s a long con, but can go as far as “pig butchering” scams that can cost you everything.

When you get these, just report and block. They’re most likely a bot, or worse: people who are victims of human trafficking forced to scam people. (I suggest not researching this if you have any shred of faith in humanity left.)

I can’t think of a single thing I miss. I use Windows for work and it’s a relief every evening when I can switch to my Linux desktop.

Linux Cons:

• there is always some minor thing that doesn’t work quite right, or it takes a lot of searching to find a fix. However this is true on Windows too
• on a fast moving distro things can randomly break here and there, but usually are fixed fast
• some games and apps won’t work. Usually when they’re trying to do something invasive. Be prepared to find an alternative (or dual boot)
• some hardware doesn’t work because the vendor doesn’t provide drivers and no open source version exists. If they are actively blocking foss versions, they’re a good candidate for the never buy list
• no Copilot (/s)
• if you want things to “just work” and you don’t care about personalizing anything and you don’t care about your privacy, you may happier on Windows or Mac because you can just take it to a shop and have them fix it. There are just more resources for an OS that commands 80% of the desktop market

Linux Pros:

• my computer is mine and I can control everything
• I can customize things much more than on Windows
• I can upgrade when I’m ready and opt out of any shenanigans
• Everything I care about works. I switched to open source for photo editing. There was a learning curve, though
• software development, even with Microsoft tools (!), is just much nicer on Linux. You don’t need WSL when it’s already your OS

Workarounds:

• I choose to not buy unsupported hardware
• I choose to not buy unsupported software and games
• I put vendors hostile to freedom on my never buy list (e.g. Adobe)
• I have access to a Windows PC if I need it. But I have not needed it in the last year or so I’ve been full time on Linux

Not saying going full time Linux was necessarily easy (I gave up Adobe Lightroom and I can’t play some AAA games) but I have no regrets. It was actually easier than I had feared.

It’s like diet and exercise: it’s not easy to change but you’ll feel a lot better in the end.

Yep. That is the simplest answer. From the link, directing stdout and stderr to a file:

nohup mycommand > mycommand.out 2>&1 &

GNU Screen is an alternative.

You can also use tmux and just disable the mouse by adding this to ~/.tmux.conf

set -g mouse off

I read that they walked it back but only partially. And the fact they tried it tells me they can’t be trusted with my data.

They also make it very difficult to move your data off their NAS once it’s on there, because everything is proprietary.

Your best option remains open source with commodity hardware. Had I known what I know now in 2023, I would have probably just built a low power PC server with TruNAS.

Synology has started enshittifying their products lately by forcing you to only use their hard drives, etc. I have a DS933+, but I’m only using it for file storage and trying not to lock myself into their apps. It works well, but to avoid lock in your only real option is open source.

Married with five kids?

best known for his ability to roll cigarettes with his lips.

I see.

No. You should scrape off chunks but you should not rinse them off completely.

Like others I highly recommend seeking the wisdom of Technology Connections on YouTube, but if you prefer reading over video, here is an article from The Spruce that covers the main points.

It really depends what you want out of your computer, how much you like to tinker, and how comfortable you are getting your hands dirty. I got back onto a daily driver Linux desktop a little under two years ago, but I’ve been running Linux on servers since um…mid 90s? I’ve had Linux desktops mostly on secondary computers, but didn’t go back fully until more recently.

I don’t run Arch, but I feel like that community is probably closest to the feeling Linux had back in the day–when we recompiled the kernel with the specific drivers we needed for everything to save memory, I knew every process running, every program I installed. I compiled most of my own programs from source. Or maybe Gentoo is the current version of that. If that’s your jam, go that route.

For a while in the early aughts I ran a ton of servers with RedHat and developed an aversion to rpm and its mess of dependencies. Debian felt so much more stable and I’ve been picking Debian for servers ever since. If you want boring and stable, you can’t go wrong with Debian. I have many times just set up Debian with automatic update and reboot, and those things just keep going for years. I can’t remember when a Debian update broke my system, which I definitively can’t say for every OS.

Then, I started wanting to game on Linux. The flip side of boring and stable is outdated. So when I planned my new Linux desktop build I went distro shopping a bit. I tried out a few live distros at first. I knew I wanted up-to-date drivers (for new hardware), but not a lot of tinkering, because I got a lot older and less patient at this point.

I ended up on Fedora this time. My choice was driven by the balance of being up to date enough for my (simple) gaming needs, yet mainstream enough (read: boring) that if anything broke, there would be forums available and I could get back to just enjoying my computer. I prefer KDE Plasma over Gnome, so that’s what I ended up with.

I’m happy with it and not planning to change. But I do get that sinking feeling of not really knowing what my computer is doing, because, just like on Windows, there are a hundred processes running in the background and I don’t know what half of them do. It’s just that at this point I’m not curious enough anymore to go digging into the man pages and the wikis and peruse the source code to find out. I just want it to work and let me get to my doom scrolling.

So for mainstream and boring, I recommend Debian or Fedora, maybe one of the Arch derivatives like CachyOS. If you want to customize and tinker, probably plain Arch or one of the smaller distros that are well documented and less opinionated. I didn’t mention Mint, because I think it’s a bit too simplified for someone with some Linux experience. I would install it for my parents, though.

Unfortunately I don’t think the latest SDL works with the Linux console frame buffer anymore, but thanks for the links!

Back in the olden days we used to run games buikt with SDL on the console without a desktop. But they have to be built for it and Steam doesn’t fit that bill.

Vennligst stable stolene når dagen er over. 🇳🇴

I’m on Fedora, so ironically in experiencing more frequent updates and rebooting than on Windows. I simply changed the reminder frequency. Due to the nature of Fedora being on the leading edge, I do sometimes experience a glitch here and there but nothing yet that has turned my system unstable.

Most of my hardware is compatible, except my Blue Yeti needs unplugged and reconnected after every reboot.

I still have a laptop on Windows 11 and I miss Linux when I use it. I’m have to try and get Linux running on that someday, but hardware support is a little more iffy.

I don’t miss any software. I had to give up Adobe Lightroom, but that felt more like leaving an abusive relationship. I went to Digikam and she’s been treating me with respect. I also use Rawtherapy, which is great but has a learning curve.

So I’m conclusion: if your hardware is supported and you’re not opposed to learning new software I don’t think you’ll miss it. I haven’t.

This was the first thing that came to mind when they mentioned a program. I very rarely create programs that don’t need to be updated later, unless they’re single use throwaways.

I’ve inherited support for programs that we had lost the source code for, though, and that sucks.

So that’s a no from me.

I see. My concern was with security scanning tools often put on computers by enterprise IT departments but it sounds like that’s not the case here.

In your situation, assuming you’re not finding what you seek with journalctl, I think I would use a tool like vmstat or sar to collect periodic snapshots of CPU, memory, and io. You can tell it to collect data every X seconds and tee that to a file. After you reboot you can see what happened leading up to the crash. You should be able to import the data into a spreadsheet or something for analysis, but it’s not very intuitive and you’ll need to consult man pages for the options and how to interpret them.

There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread. I would lean towards a hardware or driver issue, maybe bad RAM. Unfortunately these things take a lot of trial and error to figure out.

It may not be the raw RAM usage.

My first suspect is the Windows VM especially if it’s running enterprise security software 4GB is probably not enough for modem Windows and it could be trying to use its page file, thrashing your disk in the process.

Are you able to collect some data from system monitor on paging and disk activity? That could help you narrow it down. You can use btop for a quick terminal option if your gui is non responsive (assuming your could switch to a console). Vmstat is another option that you can run in the background to collect stats over time, but it’s not user friendly.

Tie it to your internet bandwidth usage, so that the bulb starts dimming when utilization goes up and maybe flicker a bit, as if you’re drawing too much power off the grid when you’re downloading stuff.

I speak standing on a hill if my own dead projects. Just remember personal projects are supposed to be fun and educational, maybe with a little resume padding for good measure. Scratch that itch you can’t get to at work. It’s great when other people enjoy them, but as soon as they become a commitment, they start feeling like work. To me, at least.

That’s why I think games or little tools are great. They small enough so you can throw them out and start over. People won’t get (too) mad if you stop maintaining them (if you open source them) because it’s easy for someone else to take over.

I don’t have a concrete idea for you, but I suggest starting with something really simple. I think simple games are a good place to start. Or create a front-end for some command line tool to make it easier on beginners. That way you can focus on the UI development you’re interested in without getting bogged down in the rest of it.

Remote, because my commute would be 140 miles round-trip again. Otherwise I mostly enjoy working in an office with people and I don’t mind going in every few months or so.

Remote is also nice because it actually makes it easier to collaborate with other developers when we can both be at our own keyboards and share screens.

I work well alone, but I spend a lot in time in calls, either work meetings or collaborating on code. I do enjoy the social aspect of that as well.

I use AI pretty much every day, but mostly as a search engine/SO replacement. I rarely let it write my code for me, since I’ve had overall poor results with that. Besides, I have to verify the code anyway. I do use it for simple refactoring or code generation like “create a c# class mapped to this table with entity framework”.

This is one of the reasons I prefer using ctrl-insert/shift-insert when it’s available. Unfortunately the Insert key seems to have disappeared from a lot of keyboards. Scroll lock sometimes works instead of ctrl-s and ctrl-q. I would be ok remapping ctrl-c to ctrl-break, but I still use ctrl-z to background a job. Would be great if terminals had a quick easy way to select your preference of Microsoft, unix, or CUA shortcuts.