Just don’t try plugging it into a Raspberry Pi 5.

No data loss, but won’t work without changing your kernel. The other way around is much worse though — you can use an RPi5 to make a BTRFS drive which essentially only works on RPi5s.

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_console

Right, that’s what the & exit is supposed to prevent, since it’s already logged out.

I did all of grad school with i3wm. And I spent a very, very long time in grad school…

I always ran startx & exit to prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)

Been a while but isn’t that very insecure? Gotta run startx & exit ;)

Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

Compiling a kernel yourself isn’t a big deal these days, especially with DKMS. Generally the type of people I’ve encountered who care about which kernel version they’re usiyare the type of people who are capable of compiling it themselves…

One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

Oh I love Debian on the desktop! More a comment on the feeling of the OS being very concerned about downtime and stability, with minimal “surprises.” Not a bad thing at all!

When I used Arch I updated once and it removed the running kernel and its modules. So when I plugged in a webcam it didn’t work, since the module was gone.

Not a catastrophe, but it was an off-putting user experience coming from Debian. Arch felt more like a desktop OS, Debian feels more like a server OS to me (updates generally warn/confirm when you need to restart services or the machine).

To each their own! Having more up to date stuff was a nice perk of running Arch, certainly.

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.

The next crowdstrike mistake could happen at any time…

Sounds like the tagline to an action movie.

Colloquially, I’d use it to mean “requires physical access to fix.”

protected

Um, about that…

Yeah, something this big is absolutely not one engineer’s fault. Even if that engineer maliciously pushed an update, it’s not their fault — it was a complete failure of the organization, and one person having the ability to wreck havoc like this is the failure.

And I actually have some amount of hope that, in this case, it is being recognized as such.

My Debian system was bricked when it “upgraded” to systemd.

Required attaching a monitor to a normally headless server to fix. (Turns out systemd treats fstab differently and can hang booting if USB drive isn’t attached.)

Steam, a 3rd party program, has nuked the home directory of users who didn’t really do anything wrong.

Programs have huge abilities to bork systems, be it Windows or Linux…

Also X often supported a different size viewport and desktop so the view would scroll.

I remember encountering that the first time I used Linux! Can’t recall personally finding a good use for it but…neat I guess?