Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Judging by the camera angle, OP may have been today years old when they learned this as well (I learned it well into my 30s, too).

Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

(I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)

My favorite is Barry Marshall. He thought there was a connection between bacteria and ulcers, which was an unpopular opinion at the time. So he intentionally drank the offending bacteria, got sick as expected, and then people believed him.

More here, including (which I didn’t know until now) cardiac catheterization.

I’m sure better sources exist but https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/these-five-doctors-experimented-on-themselves-and-made-big-breakthroughs

Innovation, perhaps; progress…that’s something else.

And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.

For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.

This realization/acceptance led to us having kids.

Not sure if trolling or not, but googling around and it sounds like Sensory Processing Disorders can cause this level of passionate hatred towards bananas…

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.

There’s also the very real issue of rail priority: https://www.marketplace.org/2024/09/10/amtrak-spars-with-freight-train-industry-over-rules-of-the-railroad/

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

What’s the alternative? Strong arm a democratically elected — even if stupid at times — government to change policy? That’s a terrifying precedent.

The other alternative is to backdoor or otherwise compromise users in other jurisdictions. Glad they didn’t do that.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

I switched from raspberry pi and orange pi to a cheap Intel NUC, and I think it’s just a much nicer experience.

The pi is great fun, but the HW transcoding on a NUC “just works,” and the SSD and 16GB RAM opens a lot of doors. My N100 NUC was less than $150, and it included everything (case, power supply, 500GB SSD).

My pi found new life as an off-site backup: attach a big HDD, set up WireGuard, and have a cronjob do daily rsync and snapshots. I have it set up at in-laws, and it works great.