Nibodhika

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism

That phrase that you said has absolutely nothing to do with the Linux/Libre philosophy.

You take care of your self and scratch your own itch

While I understand that you meant to make an analogy with people creating the projects they want to use, the vast majority of people don’t create their projects, and instead contribute to others, and they contribute with existing issues not necessarily things that they want or need. Alternatively you can see that a lot of issues are fixed by people who are not affected by it, it’s very common for issues to ask people to test specific changes to see if they solved the issue they were facing.

and you should not be a liability to the society

The vast majority of people just use the software that the community maintains, and when they need a feature they open a PR and let the community implement it. So the vast majority of people are a liability to the community, even if you contribute to one project actively you use several others that you’ve never contributed to.

but make your self useful and contribute back.

This has nothing to do with right-wing philosophy, in fact most right wing people are against any form of contribution,

And I think this is kind of the reason FLOSS works well, it can be aligned with many philosophies.

You might not like it, but FLOSS is extremely aligned with left wing ideology, where people contribute to the community because they want to and the community provides back without asking anything in return.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in TIL that operating system Linux is an example of anarcho-communism

If you believe, for a particular issue, that people should work together to create something that anyone can use for free, then for that particular issue you do have a socialist ideology. That’s the definition of a socialist policy, other examples of this are public education, public health care, or Universal Basic Income. You might disagree with healthcare being public, but agree that education should be, people are not entirely socialist or capitalist, each issue can have a different answer.

People, especially those in the US and Brazil, need to stop thinking communism/socialism are bad terms and look at them for what they really are and analyse the specific issue at hand.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to selfhosted in What's wrong with using cloudflared?

There’s a third point which is: Things in CloudFlare are publicly accessible, so if you don’t put a service on front for authentication and the service you’re exposing has no authentication, a weak password or a security issue, you’re exposing your server directly to the internet and bad actors can easily find it.

Which is why some services that I don’t want to have complicated passwords are only exposed via Tailscale, so only people inside the VPN can access them.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in Best distro for data science? [request]

Which is the correct answer to 99% of questions that start with “Which distro…”

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

Don’t know what kind of program you’re running but… No.

My Linux has updates every week, which means that if I was on Windows to keep everything the same up to date I would need to check every website to see which app released this week, maybe this week Firefox had a new release, maybe next week it’s mullvad VPN, and next week is the NVIDIA driver, but if I hadn’t checked all of them I would not know which ones have a new release.

Also if you want adoption you need to make your product easy to use and not ask them to become experts at how things work

Agreed, but also you should have options so that power users can take advantage of it.

Do you think all bike riders know how to adjust their derailer or even care to know?

Do you think that bikes should not have gears since most people don’t know how they work? No, because even if you don’t understand the mechanics you can understand the general terms, and even if you don’t understand gears you can just not use them, same as a package manager. Options is always better.

if Linux requires users to understand how to do things manually in the terminal then the “year of the Linux computer” will never happen.

It doesn’t require it, you’re ignoring the fact that OP could have just clicked download and download an installer same as he would on Windows. But if you can use the terminal and understand package managers you can use Linux in a way that Windows is impossible, if you can’t you can still use Linux in the same way you would windows with all of the sales downsides.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

The problem is that for most users, when their setup is completed they won’t need to play with it for a while so after that any time they need to install something new through the terminal it means losing time to find instructions again.

Which is why it’s better to understand what you’re doing than blindly copying pasting. You won’t need to remember these since whatever you want to install if it’s not on the repos you’ll have to google it same as if you were on Windows.

Also on Windows the steps are: Download the install file, double click it, follow the on screen instructions to automatically install the program, then every week or so go back to the website, check if a new version was released, if so download it and install it again. If the configuration would be destroyed by doing this first, make a backup first, if the new version is not backwards compatible for configuration move the existing configuration changes so that you get the new default after install and can apply your changes afterwards.

That’s closer to the truth, and you need to do that weekly for every one of the dozen or hundreds of programs a person has, no wonder people don’t update their programs on Windows and become susceptible to lots of exploits over time.

Also, read my option 1, which is what most websites offer you first, i.e. download a .deb and run it which is the equivalent of Windows, with all of its downsides. For example if you go to that website that OP posted and click on downloads you can select Windows, Mac or Linux, and you can download an installer that way and be done with it. But only Linux has a better option that takes a couple more steps but saves you lots of time in the future.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

This is one of the hardest walls for people to jump over mentally, from scavenging the internet for binaries to using a package manager.

I think ideally one should understand what they’re doing, I think that if you did you would realise it’s not hard, just different from what you’re used to. Usually you install things using the graphical package manager, of which there are a lot, since I don’t know which one you are using nor have I used any of them in a long while, I’ll use the terminal as an example (same reason the site uses terminal commands), but all of this is almost assuredly possible via GUI.

To install things you usually do sudo apt install , this is a huge advantage on Linux, it works similar to your phone in that everything gets updated together but also it installs dependencies separately, which means that instead of having 10 copies of the same library for 10 programs that use it (like on Windows) you get a single one, which is part of the reason binaries are smaller on Linux.

The problem with this approach is that some programs are NOT listed there, the only programs there are the ones the maintainers of your distro (Ubuntu in this case) can review and approve. So you can have a lot of different solutions for this:

The first and most obvious for Windows users is to download the .deb from the website and just run that like you would a binary on windows, i.e. double-clicking it, or from the terminal you can run sudo dpkg -i . This works, but you lose the advantages of a package installed via your package manager, i.e. you would get the same experience as on windows, so it’s not ideal.

The second way is the one they’re describing, essentially you’re adding a new repository to the package manager, that the people who wrote the program are maintaining (instead of Ubuntu guys), this is a two step process, sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc that command is downloading the file https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/mullvad-keyring.asc and putting it in /usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc, this is needed because repositories are not trusted by default, that would be a security nightmare, you can do this via GUI if your problem is with the terminal , just download the file and copy it to that location, it’s just harder to explain than giving you a command. Then it’s adding the repository to the repository list, the command is echo “deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=$( dpkg --print-architecture )] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable $(lsb_release -cs) main” | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list that command has a lot to unwrap, in essence it’s editing the file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list and writing a line like deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/mullvad-keyring.asc arch=amd64] https://repository.mullvad.net/deb/stable focal main" there, but because the guy who wrote this doesn’t know your architecture (e.g. amd64) nor your version (e.g. focal) he wrote a command that gets that information from your system, you can instead write the file yourself if you know those. Then install via package manager as normal.

There’s a third way which is more recent which is install via snap/flatpak which is similar to install via package manager, except you don’t add new repos.

There’s a fourth way which is manually, usually when you compile stuff you install them manually.

I know it’s a lot to take in, but I’m of the opinion that if you understand what’s happening it makes things easier.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux in New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?

Same reason you don’t download installers for your phone, why don’t you think it’s confusing there?

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to selfhosted in Fed Up with DigitalOcean

I have used Vultr and I’m quite happy with them, however I had not moved backup level data into the servers so can’t attest that they’ll work great for you.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux_gaming in Can enabling Linux support on anti-cheats such as EAC or Battleye create more cheaters in competitive games?

Yes and no.

Most anti-cheats require root access on windows, but not on Linux (even if they did it would be possible to bypass), so in theory it’s easier to bypass them on Linux. That being said, even on windows, client side anti-cheats are “easily” bypassable. Client code is NEVER trustable, even the best anti-cheat can be broken because the binary of the game is at the hand of the would-be hacker, so they can control what it does. Think about it this way, the best anti cheat checks every possible attack and let’s your server know that all is well, someone in control of the game client can make the game always tell the server that all is well regardless of the test, that’s just a matter of insert a goto in the correct address pointing to the correct place, hard to do but very much possible. Even if you had an anti-cheat that controls the entire OS, it’s possible to just use a second computer with computer vision to cheat and inject the movements through a mouse that reports itself as a normal one. This is why it’s impossible for a client side anti-cheats to be infallible, they serve more as a deterrent than anything actually useful, it’s the same as a speed camera that sends the picture to your house for you to send to the authorities to report the infraction.

Nibodhika , 6 months ago to linux_gaming in "I would like to switch to Linux, but it's just not good for gaming"

Damn, mine also has a Windows slice this year because one of the games I was playing with my wife didn’t run well enough on the Deck so we played it on her desktop. It runs on Linux, it’s just that it was a bit on the heavy side for the deck so the fps were bad and her desktop was already plugged to the TV

Nibodhika , 7 months ago to nostupidquestions in What is the best way to safely and completely erase all data from old laptops?

The easiest options in order of effectiveness, and how to bypass them:

1. Do nothing.
2. Reset Windows or erase all files you don’t want to be found. To recover from this you need a specialised piece of software that will recover the files, but not the names or locations, so while the actual data is easily recoverable, the person would need to sieve through most files you’ve had in your PC since forever with no order.
3. Zero the disk, my way to do this would be to boot a Linux USB and run for example dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda, this will delete EVERYTHING on that disk, including windows, partition table and the bootloader. The way to recover from this involves specific hardware and a sterile lab, unless the authorities are investigating you it’s very unlikely someone will recover from this.
4. Multiple passes with zeroes and random data, the way I would do this is the same as above but use /dev/urandom for the if parameter, run it multiple times, then run once with zeroes. Theoretically it could be possible for the same lab as before to recover some data if the machine ran out of entropy and didn’t wrote actual random data, and someone could predict the random data and compensate for it on the residual magnetic field, but it’s highly unlikely. Almost no one would be able to recover this, and if someone can they will charge A LOT.
5. Physical destruction, e.g. drill a hole or smash the disk for an HDD, break the chips for an SSD.

All of that being said, why throw it away? Why not sell it or use it to self-host something cool like a media centre or a steam machine if the laptop is good enough.

Nibodhika , 7 months ago to nostupidquestions in What is the best way to safely and completely erase all data from old laptops?

That doesn’t work for SSDs though.

Nibodhika , 7 months ago to selfhosted in Any recommendations for monitoring my servers?

I use netdata, it’s quick and easy, but I don’t think it monitors docker containers specifically.

Nibodhika , 7 months ago to linux in Is linux good for someone tech illererate.

Linux and Windows are very similar, but they have some very important differences. My recommendation to you would be to install a VM and try to use Linux, if your computer can’t handle a VM or you want a closer experience at running Linux, you can create a Live USB with a program called Rufus, it should even allow you to set some permanence so you don’t have to redo everything every time you boot it. Running Linux from the USB will let you use the system without altering anything, and you’ll have an install button that will have a graphical interface to install Linux on your system should you want to.