First thing you should check is if the school offers VDI - Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.

My college has VDI, where you can access a GPU accelerated Windows machine from your browser, preinstalled with tools like Autocad, Photoshop, and other stuff.

If your school doesn’t, then you should look at options like VM’s. The problem, however, is that CAD and a lot of other software is GPU intensive, and simply using it in a VM might be too slow for practical usage.

Waydroid is way nicer.

Okay, I hath returned.

So I used to play a game called krunker.io. It was browser game, but I would use a native, electron based client. I spent a lot of time tinkering to figure out what options would maximize performance, and because I had a laptop with an Nvidia gpu, a few special flags were needed. Here was the full command that I would run to run the client:

gamemoderun prime-run ./crankshaft-portable-linux-x86_64.AppImage -no-sandbox --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-gpu-rasterization --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers --enable-zero-copy --disable-gpu-vsync --disable-frame-rate-limit --ozone-platform-hint=wayland > /dev/null 2>&1

You probably don’t want gamemoderun. But you can play with the rest of the flags there. I don’t remember what was needed and what was there for performance. I’m pretty sure that the first two arguments there were needed though.

I know this issue, I had a similer issue trying to get the client for krunker.io working with my nvidia gpu. I might have the solution saved somewhere, this comment is so I can remind myself to check.

Only pixels let you relock the bootloader after flashing.

Frustratingly, grapheneos only supports pixels because of that.

Yes, but there is something important to remember.

By default, most Linux installs put there kernels in /boot, which is not on the btrfs partition. This is not an issue on distros that keep multiple kernel versions, but it can cause issues on distros that only provide one kernel version (Arch and Arch based distros).

Because the kernels are not stored on the btrfs partition, they are not restored by btrfs snapshots. And if the rest of the system, including kernel modules, are a mismatched version due to restoration, then it means your system is unbootable.

A simpler fix is to install ArchLinux’s linux-tls package, which is the stable version of Linux that doesn’t update constantly.

But what I do to get around this, I put /boot on the btrfs partition, and /boot/efi is the seperate efi partition where grub is installed. Then, kernels are restored when I restore a snapshot.

https://training.play-with-docker.com/

This is an interactive, guided docker course in your browser.

Of course, docker is easy to install and use on a Linux system.

Do you have any examples of rustic having bugs that eat data? I couldn’t find any precedent when I searched, which is part of why I used rustic.

restic is in go, rustic is in rust, both are memory safe typed languages.

Not a stupid question.

Cachyos to cachyos.

This matters. Firefox will refuse to do anything with a profile directory from a newer version of firefox. So if I switched to opensuse leap, or another linux distro that has an older version of firefox, then I might encounter issues with just directly copying the profiles.

I would say the big thing that might give you trouble is not the init system, but NetworkManager. NetworkManager is the… network management software (wow who woulda guessed?) used on desktop linux distros.

People have many criticisms of it, that are similar to criticisms applied to systemd (it’s also Red Hat software), so I see my friends switching to iwd, wpa_supplicant, or other alternatives when trying something other than systemd as well.

It gives them a lot of pain. None of the other alternatives are as reliable as NetworkManager when it comes to connecting to Wifi. Switching away from Systemd shouldn’t be too hard, but NetworkManager is much tougher to give up. Thankfully, you can run NetworkManager on non-systemd setups.

Wikipedia itself is doing fine but they have a bunch of super interesting side projects that they don’t advertise much, and aren’t doing as well. Wikinews, their news site is shutting down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Single/2026-03-31#News_and_notes (this is really close to april fools hopefully I didn’t eat the onion. Or hopefully I did?).

My favorite is wikibooks: http://wikibooks.org/ , which are open source texbooks that can be edited wikipedia style. Their programming one’s are really high quality. The idea behind those is that you can export a known good frozen version of them, as a texbook for a class. Related is also wikiversity, which is course curriculum. It’s similar, but different.

But they also have a travel voyage, wikivoyage, and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikimedia_sister_projects

It has newer packages than Debian.

This is not quite true. They have overlapping release cycles. A new Debian release will ship frozen versions of the latest packages, causing it to have newer packages than most ubuntu releases. Then the new ubuntu release comes out, with and it has newer packages. Ubuntu doesn’t universally newer packages than debian. The difference is that Debian ONLY does security updates, and doesn’t do feature updates or even bugfixes over it’s lifespan. Ubuntu, on the other hand, does ship feature updates and bug fixes, incrementing the package version as they go over the lifespan of an Ubuntu release.

Comparing the bash versions of the latest ubuntu stable version versus the current debian stable, and you’ll notice that Debian has a newer bash:

[moonpie@osiris moonpiedumplings.github.io]$ podman run -it --rm debian
root@980ac170ddb4:/# bash --version
GNU bash, version 5.2.37(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
root@980ac170ddb4:/# exit
exit
[moonpie@osiris moonpiedumplings.github.io]$ podman run -it --rm ubuntu
Resolved "ubuntu" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/00-shortnames.conf)
Trying to pull docker.io/library/ubuntu:latest...
Getting image source signatures
Copying blob 817807f3c64e done   | 
Copying config f794f40ddf done   | 
Writing manifest to image destination
root@1486a1c38699:/# bash --version
GNU bash, version 5.2.21(1)-release (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu)
Copyright (C) 2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

This is Ubuntu 24, the current stable release. 25/questing, the rolling version does have newer/same package versions of debian. But people don’t base distros off of the rolling version of ubuntu, only the stable releases.

No, they’re dual licensed. Canonical has users contributing signing a Contributor License agreement, in which they agree to allow Canonical to distribute alternatively licesed, or proprietary versions.

This change was somewhat controversial, and partially why Incus was forked from LXD.

Companies at onferences give 4/8gb out sometimes. They buy branded ones in bulk.

I have installed an OS onto just the btrfs root subvolume, leaving the home directory intact. This is how I originally swapped from Manjaro to Arch. The arch manual install instructions helped.

But this should be a feature of the graphical installers imo.

Transparent fileystem compression and deduplication (btrfs feature not in ext4) compresses data while still having it be accessible normally. This leads to big space savings.

You can use the tool compsize to check it out.

Debian repos are basically guaranteed safe: https://programming.dev/comment/22863237

Flathub is much, much safer than say, the google play store, but it ultimately does follow a model of app developers submitting packages which get reviewed and approved. In theory, someone could sneak malware past that, although there haven’t been any incidents (perhaps flathub’s review is very effective?). But the snap store, which follows a similar model has had malware. But canonical hasn’t been the best steward of that one.

In addition to this, not all stuff on flathub is open source, which is definitely concerning.

Thankfully, flatpak has a built in sandboxing system, which lets you limit what the appps have access to. KDE has a UI for it, and there is also the GUI app flatseal.

malicious code does occasionally sneak into Debian distributed apps

Do you have an example of this? The xz utils backdoor did not make it into debian stable, only unstable.

Debian stable essentially forks every package, maintaining a custom codebase. They then cherry pick security updates only (ignoring feature updates or minor bugfixes), and applying those. This makes it extraordinarily resilient to any form of supply chain attack.

Flatpak’s show up in discover, and aren’t by the distro. Usually it’s flathub.

somewhat relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_IT