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Nibodhika

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Nibodhika ,

This looks awesome and exactly what I have been looking for.

One question about implementation just out of curiosity, is there any database? I’m worried that when it gets to hundreds or thousands of pages querying things becomes slow if it’s just scanning files.

Nibodhika ,

SQLite should be more than enough, I can’t find the file on the space folder though, is it created inside the docker container on server startup? Is there a reason not to store it in space so it doesn’t need to be regenerated each time?

Nibodhika ,

I said hundreds or thousands, I don’t expect to be creating hundreds of thousands of pages, but from your reply on the other thread SQLite should be more than capable of handling this scale.

Nice knowing that you have close to a thousand and it’s still fine. It will take me a long time to get to that amount of pages, but if I can get started with this it seems like an awesome way of storing knowledge bases, so I expect it will grow quite rapidly as I migrate all of my different things into it.

Nibodhika ,

I feel like facepalming myself to death for having asked such a stupid question before running an ls -a on the folder.

One last question, I’ve been reading on Plugs because there’s one thing that I use regularly that I think doesn’t exist and want to know if it would be possible for me to implement, it’s called plantuml. Essentially it’s a plug that would act on a specific block of code, like the latex one, and would use POST the code to a configurable url, get an image as return and display that instead.

Nibodhika , (edited )

Because they mean very different things. Imagine you tallied the spending of 5 people in your restaurant:

10 15 30 100 150

First of all that distribution has no mode, so let’s then check the next 2 customers.

10 15 20 30 100 150 150

Cool, now checked with 7 people this, and we can say the following.

The mode is to spend 150. Almost no one does this, but that is the mode regardless.

The median is 30, this tells you that half the people spend more than this, and half the people spend less than it. However it doesn’t give you an accurate idea, because the people who spend less spend close to it, but the people who spend more spend way more. So if a guy spends 35 he would look like a high spender, but in fact he probably should be in the low spending category.

The average is 67.85, no one spent this amount, but this tells you that if a person spends more than that he’s a high spender, so of someone came in and spent 35 you would know he’s not one of your high spending customers.

Now let’s see how each of those numbers is at predicting how much 7 customers would spend, let’s look at the same values, where the customers spent 475. The mode tells you that people will spend 1050, that’s absolutely wrong. The median tells you that they’ll spend 210, that’s also very wrong. The average however tells you that they’ll spend 475 which is the exact number.

This is the same for every other statistics, even if it doesn’t make any sense to say that people have an average of 2.3 kids, if you were planning on receiving 10 random families they would probably have 23 kids in total. Average is good at predicting large groups, and that’s the information we usually care about when we’re trying to express a large group in a single number. If you want a second number the obvious choice is the standard deviation, in the example above the standard deviation is 63.76 this gives you an idea on how accurate is your average at predicting, so in the case above not very accurate at all, but if we imagine that the number of kids above had a standard deviation of 0.2 you can be 68% certain that the 10 families will have between 21-25 kids, or 95% certain that they will have between 19-27 kids, or 99.7% certain that they will have between 17-29 kids. Working with the level of confidence in a prediction allows you to evaluate certainty at doing things. If you only knew that the median was 2 kids or that the mode was 1 kid you couldn’t predict things with any accuracy.

Nibodhika ,

Oops, sorry, english is not my first language. You’re correct, I’ll edit my post.

Nibodhika ,

Yes, it works best for small integer numbers, but it doesn’t provide any meaningful degree of confidence in the amount of kids, because 0,1,2,2,2,3,5 and 1,2,2,2,3,5,6 have the same mode but express very different groups.

Nibodhika ,

Not really, it depends on extremes, imagine you have 1001 couples, 400 have 0 kids, 201 have 1 kid, 100 have 2 kids, 100 have 3 kids, 50 have 4, 50 have 5, 30 have 6, 30 have 7, 20 have 8, 20 have 9. The mode is 0, the median is 1, the average is 1.88.

In this case you get two extremes, a lot of people with 0 kids, and people with lots of kids that move the average up.

Nibodhika ,

I love how every time I read a “Critical” vulnerability in Linux it’s essentially “The user must leave their computer completely unlocked in an accessible area for a long period of time. Also he needs this very specific combination of programs running in these specific versions. Ah, and the planets have to be aligned for it to work. If all of these happen, an attacker might glimpse at your desktop wallpaper, so definitely critical”.

Nibodhika ,

First you need to understand the difference between a dominant and a recessive gene. Dominant genes manifest if they’re present, recessive genes manifest only if there are no dominant genes present. A quick example is blood types, 0 is recessive, both A and B are dominant, you have two genes that specify your blood type, if both of them are 0 you are type 0, any other combination with 0 you’re not 0, i.e. 0A or A0 are A, while 0B or B0 are B. This means that a person with blood AB can’t have a son with blood 0, because his son will either have one A or one B inherited from that person.

Genetic diseases that happen because dominant genes are hard to miss, if you have the gene you have the disease, however genetic diseases that need recessive genes can be carried for generations without anyone manifesting symptoms. But of two persons have the same recessive gene it’s quite possible that their children will have both of the genes be that one and manifest the illness. The chances of two random people having the same recessive genes are quite slim, but the closer people are genetically the higher the chances that they have the same recessive genes. Using blood type as an example, if a parent is AB and the other is B0 their children have 0% chance of being 00, but they have a 25% chance of being A0 and 25% chance of being B0 (the other 25% being AB and BB). Now if their children A0 and B0 have a child of their own that child has a 25% chance of being born 00, whereas if any of them had a kid with a AB, AA or BB the chances would be 0%.

How can i rsync over my network without using ssh?

I have 6 devices that i rsync to a central location to back them up. Ive been using ssh as the -e option. Problem is i use public key with passphrases, meaning to backup all six i need to go to each device and run the backup script. Since i typically backup /etc, /home, and /root this means entering sudo and the ssh passphrase...

Nibodhika ,

You can create a second SSH key without passphrase, add that to the authorised keys, and specify to use that key instead, for example using an SSH config file.

Now this is a bit of a security flaw because anyone with access to the key can use it, so you can use rrsync to make sure that key only has access to rsync, so worst case scenario it can destroy your backup, but that’s expected since you want write access to your backup without inputting a password.

Nibodhika ,

I love this answer because it’s exactly what he’s asking, but absolutely what he shouldn’t do hahahaha.

Anyone wondering, go to a computer and type nc -lp PORT > file (Replacing PORT with the port you want to use), now go to a different computer and type nc IP PORT < FILE (Replacing IP and Port with the IP from the first machine and the PORT you ran on the command there, and FILE with a file you want to copy). Congratulations, you just copied a file from one machine to another without using SSH.

Nibodhika ,

Which church asks people to study? You can simply start going to a church and no one will bat an eye. I’ve met Christians who couldn’t even read, and even the ones that can have a very limited interest in reading what they consider to be the most important book there is. As a general rule just as a casual reader I’ve read more of the bible than the average Christian, I definitely can’t say the same about Jews since they point out that I didn’t read it in Hebraic and usually know it better than I do.

Nibodhika ,

You’re using refind, you need to specify the quiet splash parameters in refind config. You can do this every time you boot by manually editing the entry, for example if you want to test that editing this would work, or you can edit the config file with the boot parameters.

I don’t know how you have your refind configured, mine has a /boot/refind_linux.conf file where I can put the boot parameters, e.g. mine looks like this:


<span style="color:#323232;">"Boot with standard options"  "rw root=/dev/nvme1n1p2"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"Boot to single-user mode"    "rw root=/dev/nvme1n1p2 single"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">"Boot with minimal options"   "ro root=/dev/nvme1n1p2"
</span>

For more information check out wiki.archlinux.org/title/REFInd

Nibodhika ,

Read my answer again, that’s the wrong file.

Also use Pastebin or something similar, people are not going to add random stuff to their google account just to help a stranger on the internet.

Nibodhika ,

No, you should edit it to be something like “Boot with standard options” “ro root=UUID=96e2ea68-742d-4309-ae9f-4d12ba668b21 quiet splash” mine says /dev/nvme0n1p4 because that means device (/dev/) first nvme SSD controller (nvme0) disk number 1 (n1) partition 4 (p4). If yours worked with that line you copied from mine it’s only because coincidentally your / partition is the fourth partition on the first nvme SSD on your computer. (Or maybe because that config is not being used).

A question though, why do you want to use refind if you don’t know the basic about partitions and boot drives? I think you’d had a better experience using the default one which is GRUB.

Nibodhika ,

Cool, didn’t noticed you changed it to your actual partition, although I should have because there’s no reason for me to have 4 partitions on my disk. That being said using UUIDs for booting is better than device names, if you add or remove a drive the device name can change. In my case it’s a laptop and only has one name slot so I’m fairly sure it won’t change, plus I had to write that file manually when I first installed my system so I was lazy and used the device name, but you already seemed to have the proper UUID there, so changing it to the device seems a bit backwards.

GRUB is also customisable, although I agree that refind looks a lot nicer. I don’t think refind is any better than GRUB in dealing with Windows updates, the problem is that Windows has this annoying habit of formatting the MBR so it essentially wipes all other boot managers from the drive, which is why people recommend having windows in a different drive so it can’t fuck up your boot manager, but I know that’s not always a possibility.

As for the splash screen being wrong I can’t help you there, I actually like the checks scroll that’s the default without a splash screen so I’ve been using that for a while now.

Steam Big-Picture wrong controls (Arch, KDE, Wayland, AMD)

My setup works perfectly with my old but gold RX580, the only issue is big picture: it recognize my controllers (SteamController or 8bitDo) but the buttons don’t work correctly (for example (B) doesn’t back but open a menu). I’ve tried to reset the chord or guide layout but nothing change.

Nibodhika ,

Is it also wrong inside games? Steam big picture has a setting for using Nintendo navigation style buttons.

If it was just the 8BitDo I could suspect pairing mode or something, but the Steam controller has never ever behaved strangely for me.

Nibodhika ,

I have a Logitech G604 and it works flawlessly with piper to setup the extra buttons.

What is a distro with updates of Arch but dependencies of Fedora?

I am currently using EndeavourOS, but am annoyed by the constant daily updates of 1GB and pacman not installing important dependencies automatically (ex: spell checker for document editor). I like the way Fedora works: you update whenever, important dependencies are downloaded automatically, and packages are recent-ish, but I...

Nibodhika ,

That’s a bad idea, even going back to his question, he wants spell checker, should it install every single language? It’s likely a bad idea to do that, you’ll get a lot of things you don’t need. Not to mention optional dependencies might contradict each-other if several of them perform the same service, e.g. video playback backend

Nibodhika ,

Important is subjective, do you consider Spanish spell checker important for your document editor? How about Arabic or Chinese? Why would you want all of that bloat installed by default? Better than whoever needs spell checker in a specific language installs that.

When you install a program Pacman lists the optional dependencies for it, just install the ones you want and that’s it.

As for daily updates you don’t need to update daily, just weekly or monthly is good enough, just because there are updates available doesn’t mean you should install them asap.

What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup?

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought...

Nibodhika ,

One thing I learnt a while back is that if you break your GUI you can always use Ctrl+Alt+F<1-9> to go to different terminals to try to solve it. Worst case scenario I would do something like mv .config .config.bkp and sudo systemctl restart that should hopefully get you back to default settings on the UI.

Source: been there, done that. Not exactly your error but similar enough.

Nibodhika ,

I’ve done my plenty of stupid stuff, from dd disks I was using to forcefully uninstall dependencies of the package manager. But the one that takes the cake for me happened back in 2012, I was working at a research lab in the university and was sharing a computer with another intern. That other intern used Gentoo and so we agreed that the machine should be Gentoo, I’ve installed it at my house on my PC and got comfortable with it before we shared that computer. One thing that I learnt when installing Gentoo is that the /dev folder is created on boot, you don’t populate it when installing, instead you mount the one from the host system you’re using to install.

The computer had an issue with a device, can’t even remember what it was, so I thought I’ll run rm -rf /dev that should take care of the issue and after a reboot it will be repopulated… It might have worked, but what I actually ran was rm -rf /etc.

Do any Spanish speaking countries play (American) football and if so what's the best way to watch it?

I’m learning Spanish, and I’m getting decent at reading it but I’m trying to immerse myself in it more since I still can’t understand it very well. so I was wondering if I could find something I really enjoy like football and watch it in Spanish. I know the NFL probably has a Spanish football channel but I like college...

Nibodhika ,

American football is, well, American… In Argentina we play Rugby, which is not entirely different as far as I understand.

Nibodhika ,

I get you, I don’t like going to the office, I hate small talk, I feel I’m not productive because people keep talking, too. That being said the proper response is to answer the pleasantries greet people and be nice, afterwards you put your headphones and work, even if you’re not listening to music a good ANC headphone is a good investment, and people will only try to talk to you for important things, because they won’t poke someone to ask them about their day or other similar stuff.

Nibodhika ,

For me if even 1 person wants it everyone gets it. People who prefer to die can just kill themselves, people who prefer to live can’t choose to survive.

Nibodhika ,

Mynd you, møøse bites Kan be pretty nasti…

Nibodhika ,

It doesn’t, you take the pills to the person, if they don’t take them immediately ask them to take the pills now, if their answer is a refusal chart it and leave, if their answer is something like “I’ll take them later”, explain that you need them to take it now, if they still refuse chart it and leave (with the pills obviously), possibly come back later, you have other patients to take care of and can’t waste time on a staring contest. But if you give pills to someone, put it in the chart that they’ve taken them at X time but they actually took it 3 hours later, doctors might act on that chart and cause problems to the patient and hospital. E.g. if the patient will have some surgery the next day the time they took their blood thinners is extremely relevant, the patient can’t be expected to know this, you as a nurse might know, the doctor who will read the chart and decide on the procedure knows but might be acting on wrong information if you didn’t watched the patient take the medicine. If the next day the doctor sees a refusal to take the medicine at the appropriate time he might choose to alter or stop the procedure, explain to the person why he’ll have to stay another day at the hospital and that this time he better take the pills at the appropriate time or he’ll have to stay another day, and not risk putting someone’s life in danger because a nurse decided to write a random time for when the patient took the pills. Think about it this way, if you wrote that the patient took the medicine at 7 but he actually took it at 10, and he died or had complications because he was still on blood thinners during surgery, who do you think will be to blame? The patient who was not told the medicine had a specific time? The doctor who has a paper signed by you that the medicine was given at 7? Nope, 100% the nurse who wrote the wrong time on the chart will be solely liable for this.

When I read the question I thought it’s stupid, he’s an adult, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense that nurses should chart only when they’re sure.

Nibodhika ,

I don’t think so, I mentioned this scenario in another answer, imagine they took the pills to the patient at 7, the patient only took them at 10, but the chart says he took it at 7. The next day the doctor looks at his chart and decides enough time has passed and a surgical procedure can be done to the patient. Because he took it at 10 that’s not true and because he’s on blood thinners there are complications and the patient dies. Who’s legally at fault? The doctor has a paper trail to explain why he did what he did, this leaves the blame entirely in the hands of the person who signed a paper saying the patient took the pills at 7.

Can I pre-install Ubuntu on an SSD?

Ths might be a silly question, but asking those is how i learn sometimes. I’m trying to install my first Linux distro to set up a Plex server and one of the few things I know is you need a wired internet connection. My intended server location is across the house from my router, and there isnt much room there to set up...

Nibodhika ,

It’s almost completely the opposite, drivers are (almost completely) a windows problem. If you’re willing and able to go the open source route, which for most people mean “I don’t have an NVIDIA card or don’t plan on getting every ounce of performance from it” you don’t need to worry about drivers at all (bar some weird cards, but they’re getting rarer and rarer, I don’t remember the last time I had to install a driver that wasn’t NVIDIA).

Nibodhika ,

I think I wasn’t clear, for NVIDIAs you need to take some action, on some distros is ticking one box during installation, on others is installing the driver afterwards, but they work, all of my current computers are NVIDIA. Even without installing the proprietary drivers NVIDIA cards work fine for 90% of things, the problem is that gaming will have less performance and you wouldn’t be able use CUDA.

I know you’re googling it, but in any case AFAIK Plex can run on integrated cards, most cards can decode video nowadays so it shouldn’t be particularly hard. If you’re looking into using Plex I recommend checking Jellyfin, it’s an open source alternative, I’ve been using it for years and have nothing to complain about.

Nibodhika ,

Life is strange is very close to what you’re asking, in the game you can rewind time to a limited degree to try different thing, but sometimes your actions only have consequences much further into the game. Even the things that you can rewind and try different things there’s rarely a clear better choice, since all of them are morally ambiguous, do you take a picture of the security guard harassing a student or do you intervene? One is obviously better, but the other gives you proof which you might need later on.

Nibodhika ,

I’ve told this story countless times, but I think it’s the perfect example of why I’ll always choose Godot given the chance.

Do you know when you’re playing a single-player game and you have to switch controllers and now your new controller doesn’t work? Or when the menu can only be navigated by Player 1? Well that happens because the game is only looking at input for the first controller. Story time, a few years back I was playing around with making a single-player game, I tried Unity and Godot, both suffered from this, you had to duplicate the input for any controller you wanted to make sure worked for all of them. So I took a look at Godot’s code, and in a couple of hours I had an “all controllers” option in the combo box to select which control to get input. I opened a PR, maintainers thought it was a neat feature, and now everyone can use this, and afaik Unity still suffers from this and there are dozens of assets on the store that try to fix it in different ways.

Nibodhika ,

As a general reply to everything, just pick any distro you’ve been recommended and start using it, you’ll learn more about what you like and dislikes and the differences between distros once you know one. Trying to answer those questions now would be like trying to explain to a person who’s never been in the water the differences between swimming styles. The main thing I would recommend is grab something geared for newcomers, Ubuntu, Mint, Pop, all are good examples, install it, use it, and eventually you’ll want to try different things. There are two things everyone who’s using Linux for a long time can tell you:

  1. The differences between distros matter less and less the more you know
  2. We’ve all tried several distros before finding the one we use now.

With that out of the way, here’s the actual answer to your questions:

  1. There are several levels of separation, which is why it’s near impossible to select things to compare to choose a distro out of the blue

1.1 Some distros vary in philosophy, this is the least important for someone who’s starting, but the most important for when you know Linux. An example of this is Arch and Manjaro are very close in most aspects, but they’re philosophically very different. I’ll not dive deep into this, since it shouldn’t matter now, but it’s something to bear in mind.

1.2 Some distros only change what comes preinstalled, for example Ubuntu and Kubuntu are essentially the same OS with different Desktop Environments pre-installed, you can install Ubuntu and install a few packages and have Kubuntu.

1.3 Other distros change the packages that are available, for example Ubuntu and Debian, they’re mostly the same but use different repositories so they’ll have slightly different packages versions or patches.

1.4 A major difference between distros is their package manager, which is why we’ll say Debian based (for everything that uses apt or Arch based for everything that uses Pacman.

  1. You don’t, there are too many differences, you start using one distro and then you find out things that you would like different and find a distro that does them.
  2. Depends, my servers have a very different setup from my gaming machine.
  3. Depends on the distro, some will be bare bones and you’ll need to build them up, others will be ready to roll and you might not even need debloating. But checking drivers and programs you use regularly are a good idea.
  4. You can ignore that, no idea why he wouldn’t want to install Qt, possibly concerned about space, if I were running my OS from a small disk, e.g. 5GB, I would be picky about what to install, since I usually leave at least 60GB to my root partition this was never a problem.
  5. Yes, just pick one, the differences will mean more once you have a parameter for comparison
Nibodhika ,

The logs say error on Vulkan, make sure your GPU is running with the correct drivers. If it’s a Vulkan thing old native games that use OpenGL should work, I think Team Fortress 2 is OpenGL but I’m not entirely sure.

I'm so frustrated rn.

I have been distro hopping for about 2 weeks now, there’s always something that doesn’t work. I thought I would stick with Debian and now I haven’t been able to make my printer work in it, I think I tried in another distro and it just worked out of the box, but there’s always something that’s broken in every distro....

Nibodhika ,

That is absolutely not true, Ubuntu has been a lot more out of the box experience for almost 2 decades. Thing is people are already familiar on how to do things on Windows, and most laptops already come with windows and drivers pre installed. Windows 10 was the first version to have a driver manager that could find the correct drivers for you, still you need to waste a few hours and reboots to get all of the drivers and updates.

Nibodhika ,

No, it’s not, I said it’s more of an out of box experience than windows, not that it was perfect

Nibodhika ,

If you tried to stumble your way around the UI on Linux you’ll probably find very similar UI paths to solve any issue. The thing is that Linux has several different UIs so when you ask in a forum it’s easier to give you the UI-agnostic solution. Let’s take a common issue with an apparent arcane solution, e.g. change your screen positions. On windows you do this by going start > settings > system > display and adjust them there, on Linux you’ll get given an xrandr command like xrandr --output HDMI-0 --left-of DP-2, but on KDE you go start > system settings > display and monitor and adjust them there, but because you might be using Gnome, Lxde, XFCE, Mate, etc (all of which have a very similarly intuitive path to adjust this) it’s easier to give you a command that does it.

For the first several years I used Linux I almost didn’t touched the terminal, and that was a long time ago so it’s not that it’s not possible or recent, it’s just that because windows has only a single graphical interface you get answers for it, but if you ask things on generic Linux forums you’ll get generic Linux responses, if you had to do things without asking anyone online they’re very much the same.

Nibodhika ,

No, the problem with Windows 9 is that a lot of things compared the version with 9* as a catch all for windows 95 and 98, so they were worried with backwards compatibility.

Nibodhika ,

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 ,

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 ,

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 ,

First let’s setup some terminology so we’re not confusing terms.

Free means no money, or monetary value, is needed. i.e As in “free beer”

Free can also mean no obligations or reprehensions, e.g. Free speech.

To avoid confusion let’s refer to the freedom one as Libre, i.e. free beer, libre speech.

Secondly I never said communism, since communism has a hard definition imposed by their creators, I said left-wing, for the purposes of this discussion let’s agree on a middle term of socialism to mean the opposite of capitalism, or if you prefer a type of government associated with left wing parties, which involve social policies and free services.

With those definitions out of the way: Is any free society by definition socialist? It is my opinion that yes, any society that’s past the need for money it’s by definition socialist, whereas any society that uses money (or monetary equivalents) it’s capitalist.

Libre or authoritarian governments can exist on either side of the spectrum of economical policies, so if you meant to ask whether is any libre society by definition socialist? My answer would be no, you can have societies where you have freedom but things cost money. That being said I believe that no society can be truly Libre unless the basic structure and needs are free.

Nibodhika ,

I’m most definitely not confusing those terms since my native language uses different words for each. Read my other reply, I use the terms free and libre when I think there’s need for clarification. Since socialist policies revolve around collective ownership and public distribution there’s no meaning to saying they are libre, only free as in free beer makes any sense in this context.

Nibodhika ,

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

Nibodhika ,

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 ,

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 ,

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.

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