Point being that OP must’ve installed Windows before and therefore should be able to build a computer hardware-wise?

Absolutely. Anything can be learned and unless things build on top of each other you can’t really compare difficulties.

What downsides though right? “We” object to Ubuntu over matters like Canonical being a for-profit company or their choice of Desktop Environment. At the end of the day, who cares? If it works it works, right?

It’s an interesting angle, the hostility thing. People in the know have largely fallen out of love with Ubuntu but imho that’s not necessarily because Ubuntu fell in quality but just because so many “better” things have come up since Ubuntu 04.10. It is definitely a sound choice for non-techy people, maybe more than ever. Personally I’d prefer (almost) any contemporary desktop over Gnome these days, but I can definitely see the appeal for others in terms of simple design language.

Basically you can turn any old laptop into a Chromebook these days using Linux, and most people just like your parents most definitely do not need more than a functional webbrowser. Basically a smartphone with a larger screen and physical keyboard. Even if you don’t care about your privacy (or freedom from notification-spam) why still pay the Microsoft-tax.

Which are about as related as the knowledge required to mount drywall and the knowledge required to run a ham radio station. You tell me which is more complicated but either way there are most certainly radio amateurs out there that don’t know the first thing about handywork and handymen that could barely find the on-off switch on a broadcast-rig.

Yes @[email protected] please save yourself dozens of future headaches by listening to this person.

oftentimes (and this is more of a general statement) throwing into google exactly what you would otherwise type into your shell of choice should get you on the right track, ie searching for “man systemctl”

as far as the inability to reboot goes, if a regular sudo reboot can’t bring the machine back up either then this is probably a hardware issue outside the sphere of the operating system’s influence. can’t say I experienced something like that myself. I guess the closest I witnessed would be a computer that when rebooted with an old USB-Keyboard plugged in just refused to get past the POST screen. The keyboard worked fine if plugged in later, but the computer couldn’t reliably get through the boot process with the thing present. Maybe there’s a similar variable to your setup.

I bought a used old gen Sonos Connect about a year ago to integrate my Logitech Z906 into an existing pair of Sonos speakers. They made it deliberately tedious to downgrade those speakers (who had gotten the S2 “blessing”) back to S1 to make them work with the Sonos Connect. I’m an IT repair shop guy and I cursed all the way through this downgrade process.

I would have gladly bought current hardware from them again if their prices were anywhere within the realm of plausibility. Credit where it’s due, that Sonos Connect hookup with the 2 wall-mounted 1st party speakers works absolutely reliably. That company just seriously lost its bearings since they engineered those parts.

How easy would it be for you to find (natural) laxatives? ChatGPT names Prunes and Kiwis, Broccoli, Almonds and Walnuts, Yogurt (the white non-sweet kind would be best)

Basically the above is just a who’s who of healthy dieting if you ask me lol. If you need high caloric density for the “eating as much as possible” part just go for anything high in fat and or sugar. Nutella would check both boxes but this is really not recommendable from a health perspective obviously.

Competitive eaters like Beard Meats Food would just chug on double cream if they wanted to get as many calories down as possible. The only “problem” there is that it doesn’t make for a very entertaining video.

Found the sister.

They often say it’s the oldest business in the world. Which might not be relevant to how we should treat it as a society today, but what seems obvious to me is that when you de-facto criminalize and discourage something the working conditions are going to suffer.

There probably isn’t a place in the world where it isn’t practiced yet we love to pretend like we’re somehow past that. Not sure how much of that is based in religion and how much is just us being in denial of our own biology-based desires in a secular modern society. Either way it is hurting people who are just as entitled to making a living as anybody else.

Besides what others have said basically asking “what is it that you’re trying to protect (from)?” I would say the main questions in terms of usage are, are you on a degoogled Android phone and are you using Linux on your Desktop yet?

Yea sure VPNs are nice but I personally often feel like I don’t want to have to hide behind someone else’s IP-Address just to add a layer of obfuscation to the data-collectors. If your browser is clean and working for you there is no need for a VPN (unless you need it for the sake of coming from a different geolocation). If your Operating System isn’t Open Source it can be assumed to be tracking you with or without a VPN.

There are definitely downsides (especially in terms of convenience) to using Android without Google on it. If those inconveniences are too much for you (as you are alluding to in your described hassles) then it’s probably just a question of which desire is stronger. That for certain privacy or that for ease of use.

Not the guy you’re asking but I agree. There would be no need for Falcon Sensor on every Windows-machine deployed inside an Enterprise (assuming that Falcon Sensor serves a purpose worth fulfilling in the first place) if the critical devices on their network were sufficiently hardened. The main problem (presumably the basis of such a solution existing) is that as soon as you have a human factor, people who must be able to access critical infrastructure as part of their job, there will be breakages of some kind. Not all of those must be malicioius or grow into an external threat. They still need to be averted of course.

I feel that CrowdStrike is an idea that seems appealing to those making technological decisions because it promises something that cannot be done by conventional means as we have known and deployed them before. I can’t say whether or how often this promise has ever enabled companies to thwart attacks at their inception, but again, I feel that in a sufficiently hardened environment, even with compromisable human actors in play, you do not need self-surveillance (at the deepest level of an OS) to this extent.

And to also address OP’s question: of course there is no need for this in a *NIX environment. There hasn’t been any significant need for antivirus of any kind in any of the UNIX-based world including macOS. So really this isn’t about whether an anti-malware solution in itself can satisfy the needs of a company per se, the requirements very much follow the potential attack vectors that are opened up by an existing infrastructure. In other words, when your environment is Windows-based, you are bound to deploy more extensive security countermeasures. Because they are necessary.

Some may say that this is due to market-share, but to those I say, has the risk-profile of running a Linux-based server changed over the last 20 years? They certainly have become a lot more common in that timeframe. One example I can think of was a ransomware exploit on a Linux-based NAS-brand, I think it was QNAP. This isn’t a holier than thou argument. Any system can be compromised. Period. The only thing you can ensure is that the necessary investment to break your system will always be higher than the potential gain. So I guess another way to put this is that in a Windows-based environment your own investment into ensuring said fact will always be higher.

But don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say Windows needs to be removed from the desks of office-workers. Really this failure and all these photographs of publically visible bluescreens (and all the ones in datacenters and server-rooms that we didn’t see) shows that Windows has way too strong of a foothold in places where plenty smart people are employed to find solutions that best serve the interests of their employers, including interests (i.e. security and privacy) that they are unaware of because they can’t be printed on a balance-sheet.

Not having DOS-Mode anymore must’ve been a bummer though.

Serious question how do you get bored of Windows during its heyday?

My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu 4.10 and it seemed super cool and all but I could’ve never switched fully during those days. And if we’re honest most legit Linux users up until not too long ago were forced to have a dual boot setup because so many things just hadn’t been universalized yet.

So just to illustrate where I’m coming from asking that question, my first personal computer (as opposed to family PC) ran XP and that was a pretty exciting time when it comes to market dominance and all the advantages that came with being a user of the biggest platform. Looking back I just don’t see how I could’ve ever made that switch in the noughties let alone the 90s. The adoption just wasn’t there yet.

Nobody is doubting the growth potential of “BICS” (if you will), countries which aren’t currently spending heaps on destruction. China is making one hell of a bargain at Russia’s expense too.

But I do envy the person that is able to see potential in a country that needs to contract North Korean soldiers for its war efforts.

Let’s hope so. With every passing day this situation is more likely to become a mixture of East Germany and North Korea. Whether the West recognizes eastern Ukraine as Russian or not will be irrelevant. The only “upside” is that Putin’s Russia doesn’t look like it will be able to sustain itself for as long as the Soviet Union could after WW2.

Look. You can’t have it both ways. You can either be the “i use arch (and so should everybody else) btw” guy or you can be dumbfounded by people accusing you of being the “i use arch (and so should everybody else) btw” guy. If you do both (in succession I guess) you’re just a parody of your own pro-FOSS message.

I know I’m probably opening another can of worms by saying this but I’m an absolute privacy advocate. And guess what? I use multiple Windows-installations as part of my day-to-day. Yes I do want that number to migrate towards zero but so far, especially when it comes to laptops (and more so laptops with multiple GPUs) I just never saw any appeal in crippling my own experience just for the sake of subjective “freedom”.

So now imagine a person like me trying to look for help setting up a Pi-hole installation for the sake of privacy. In comes the evangelical “If you actually truly care about your privacy, why are you using Windows?” Sound familiar? How about helpful (in terms of getting someone closer to a Pi-hole installation)?

Said like a person that doesn’t want to “argue till the end of the universe”. Maybe just take the hint once there’s multiple people trying to politely tell you the same thing? Prove that you’re not just good at fortifying the walls around your bubble. Criticism is rarely meant to attack us. Nobody is accusing you of a crime. I know it’s hard to take that step back from one’s own perspective.

Again, just because something works for you doesn’t mean you have to be evangelical about it. Don’t try to be the “I use arch btw” meme for real.

don’t owe OP an answer

Exactly. Since its dawn forums on the internet have been full of people countering legitimate questions with “why would you even ask that?”. Not only is nobody owed your “contribution”, it is of zero value.

because something exists doesn’t mean it should be installed

Elitist much. Why would you rather assume that a tech-savvy person is asking for tech guidance than the infinitely more likely opposite case? The answer is because you (elitist) think what works for you is the only valid path and all must be guided to your subjective treasure. Your intentions may be benign but your methods are not.