When done right they complement each other. I’m not going to sit here and argue everyone should be handjamming their own XFree86 config file but there are still a lot of austere environments out there where you don’t really get a GUI. A basic knowledge of VI can go a very long way and as long as someone doesn’t go out of their way to disable terminal access the capability never stops being useful.

Kiosks are a good example of a GUI-only environment, but I’d never want to use one as my main computing environment and don’t understand wanting to be limited to that world (which is not what anyone here has suggested).

The average user can’t be expected to remember all of the commands needed to use their regularly used programs

They were expected to do so for decades, or they hired a computer (as in a person) to do it for them ($$$).

the terminal could be used to reformat storage devices, but MintStick essentially replicates the Windows GUI for doing it

Depends on what you mean by “doing it.” I’ll look in a second, but from the name and your description I’m guessing it’s got parted/mkfs.xxxx/dd and the lot installed on it, maybe something for dealing with boot sectors or GRUB. I’m also guessing that behind the scenes it’s just using a GUI to build up the command line behind the scenes, and I like that style of GUI.

The more users Linux has the more resources it will get.

Concur.

For power users, nothing stops developers from also maintaining terminal support.

UX design/GUI development isn’t entirely orthogonal with backend core program stuff, but they’re close. I’ll argue that you’re better off starting with the core stuff and save the GUI for later.

I looked at the mintstick code. It looks like it’s using python to pull down some OS image from the internet and burn it to a USB. I’d rather just stick to the way I know :-) I didn’t know python had a parted library, so that’s new.

I am all for more people knowing how to use a computer, but I’m also in the camp that I ate the learning curve enough years ago that I don’t want to give up my ways. I don’t expect everyone to want to master the terminal, but I won’t give up the power in favor whatever a GUI designer chooses to implement. The trade isn’t worth it to me.

To make Linux more palatable to Windows and macOS users, I think it’s important to shift as much of the Linux experience away from the terminal and into GUI programs as possible.

Nope. LLMs have opened the door to nearly everything that’s ever been searched for or commited to the internet, and roughly none of that is going to be PDFs with screenshots of how to click through the GUI equivalent of grepping for “foo” and “bar” in a file that may or may not have a space, in files that end in .biz, but only files from the last month or so.

The world is full of crummy Domain Specific Languages (DSLs). Want teams to always show you online? Just do this one weird trick with the mouse sensor! Need the dog to come to you for its bath? Rattle its food bag. The terminal setup UNIX has had for decades turns out to be a pretty good way to control a computer. Whether we’ve molded ourselves to fit the 70s terminal paradigm or whether we just happened on a really good solution right out of the gate is a pretty interesting question.

The learning curve for a terminal isn’t nearly as bad as people make it out to be, and its various DSLs being Turing complete mean that at the top of the learning curve is a massive amount of efficiency. GUIs are there to limit complexity, so while it may make the inital first usage of a computer easier it ultimately caps how powerful/efficient someone can be. There are people who research that kind of thing, but you’ll have a very tough time selling VIM users on the idea that notepad.exe is a text editor just like VIM is, but newer.

Most of the complaints about Windows 11 that I’ve read/noticed are around how much it “helps” you by doing little searches all the time trying to guess what you want. Those turn 10ms tasks into 250ms tasks which seems like petty whining until you have to do it a thousand times a day and “ls” has been around for 50 years now.

The market will decide for us so it’s a moot point; I just like to shit on Windows.

Ah. That’s a misunderstanding on my part, and a good news story. Still don’t want to wake up tomorrow and see a published AES break, though.

A MITM doesn’t require decrypting. It just requires telling a convincing enough lie to each side of a conversation that they think they’re talking to the other party. Then you end up encrypting to their key which they can just read. That’s different from breaking the encryption.

Are you sure they can’t decrypt?

No, and none of the state actors who do that kind of stuff will ever tell you. Watch The Imitation Game for a good/bad time and some context.

If you had a break for the modern crypto schemes and published it right now you would shut down all digital commerce, a lot of the spy traffic if not most of it¹, and nothing could be started back up again until everything was redone from scratch. Best hope would be that the post quantum algorithms² the cryptographers have aren’t succeptible to whatever you did to break the existing algorithms. It’d take a bit to get the software implementations and keys in place, etc. The hardware stuff would take longer.

• [1] The stuff using One Time Pads would still be fine, but its limitations wouldn’t take the place all of all the rest of it.
• [2] The rollout of post quantum algorithms is going on now on a more accelerated schedule than originally planned.

Like someone else said (in this thread or some other) the places they’re putting the datacenters need to be thinking in terms of infrastructure upgrades: water, fiber, and electrical lines, and they need to mandate putting the datacenter in some vacant industrial area that needs cleanup from some industry that moved to china in the 80s. Instead they’re thinking in terms of jobs that just aren’t going to manifest (I believe). There’s already that video of the muni guy refusing to answer whether he’d signed an NDA or not. I wonder if the deal he signed was contingent on success of the venture.

At least with this announcement it seems like the winds are blowing more in the direction the people predicting a bubble said it would. AAPL became a trillion dollar company in 2018. Now NVDA is worth more than 5 trillion with AAPL on its heels. If it goes it may take some time to come back.

That was kind of why I asked. I don’t know enough about that world, but it seems like as soon as ink is on paper then whatever company signed on to build it starts baking their profits into their corporate calculations and planning for staffing, etc. I’m sure lawyers know all that stuff going into those types of talks and baked penalties into the contracts (or whatever). But can you just “oops, our bad” out of buying up so much of the world’s expected RAM supply, so much of the property (some through eminent domain), so much cooling and energy capacity, signing construction contracts, etc, and walk off? That risk is sitting somewhere, and with NASDAQ futures only being down 1.25% as of right now I’m not sure what to think.

But we’re living in the future, so I’m sure it’ll wind up being the local municipality catching hell for it. All the tax breaks they paid for companies to bring in “jobs” won’t amount to anything, and the land will all have been acquired.

Musk: Yes, we should all slow down. With no external verification and upon the agreement of this handshake, we should all stop developing so fast. We, especially, will slow down. You can trust us.

Actually, what does that look like? I assumed from the expansions the bottleneck wasn’t algorithmic, i.e. each data center that they bring online was designed from the ground up to be at 100% all the time. Is that not the case? Can you even (for lack of a better metaphor) underclock your datacenter? Does the cooling work that way?

For that matter, are they doing that trick where the datacenter is owned/operated by Independent DC Company X, and has exclusive lease agreements for compute?

Anything that creates a reproducable build for you is fine; however, learning Ansible (or Puppet, etc.) puts you on the road to being able to do that sort of thing professionally.

Install gnome-tweaks. It’ll be under “Accessories” or you can search for it in their activities travesty. There are some gnome-shell-extension-X things to install as well before you head into the tweaks program. They all used to be part of gnome-tweaks and now they’re not. If I recall a helpful web lookup occurs when you’re messing with that stuff and tells you what package to install.

gnome can be rough until you tailor it to your usage or if you’re in an austere environment with no internet. I think all those settings can be changed via editing dconf directly, but I don’t know how, and at this point in my life I don’t really feel like trying to hack a user experience provided to me into usefulness (no root, admin doesn’t want to use linux at all so he sets up the minimal least risky thing he can and won’t change it). gnome’s interpretation of “minimal” is pretty painful.

I use LXQT when I can. I’ll get around to trying modern KDE at some point.

You can customize gnome pretty far. The code to have normal human minimize/maximize/close buttons is all still there, and the window bar is there as well. You just have to know which programs to pull from dnf that know what registry dconf settings to adjust. I have yet to find a use case for nautilus between Dolphin (KDE) and using a terminal.

Debian.

This is the future so Virtual Machines and containers are where most of the stuff will end up anyway. If you need a specific distro it’s minutes away with a VM or container.

If you think there’s a chance you might want some Redhat cert for a job at some point it might be the time to jump to Rocky, and I’ve never used Proxmox so I can’t comment except to say that if I come into two fairly large computers for self hosting, the first one will get Rocky so I can get much more familiar with it, and the second will get Proxmox.

It’s all systemd anyway.

Ah, sorry.

D-Bus has a similar mechanism to the one that got this hacker arrested. I guess I was expanding upon the previous conversation about how much stuff is considered inside the inner security circle for d-bus.

Long story short: Microsoft just helped pop an alleged hacker using some windows device ID. I linked to a post in the hackernews thread about d-bus:

https://lemmy.world/post/49138921

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48815684

Who defines the untrusted applications though?

¯\(ツ)/¯

If GNOME wrote it then they probably trust it. If you’re using GNOME, then you’ve accepted their security model on some level.

At least you know to go look for it. Attackers will only get more sophisticated:

https://ioctl.fail/preliminary-analysis-of-aur-malware/

according to their stated security model, untrusted applications must not be allowed to communicate with the secret service.

That won’t be a popular stance to take when someone eventually steals a bunch of cached, unlocked credentials off of D-BUS because of an oversight somewhere in the npm/aur/pip/cargo/whatever ecosystem.

More rabbit hole:

• https://www.openbsd.org/papers/bsdcan14-libressl/mgp00001.html
• https://gpg.fail/ (including the presentation)
• https://github.com/FiloSottile/age
• https://jedisct1.github.io/minisign/
• https://github.com/jedisct1/encpipe