JATtho

For hopping into the GNU/Linux, installing any distro in a Virtual machine or testing liveboot is an good way to to start. The first choice of distro has no meaning. My first was Knoppix on Win98 machine. Tried Ubuntu. Linux Mint got me hooked ~2014, moved to Arch Linux after Antergos. I'm still using Cinnamon DE.

Some "funny" realizations I have made over the years:

• Distros are just vast collections of the same software. The choice is simply what includes your subset.
• Most of the bad rep is missing in-kernel driver for device. Once AMDGPU got usable everything changed for me.
• You can "copy-paste" the entire system into different disk, plug it into another PC and it's like remote accessing the original.
• It will feel like learning a new language, every time you need to something new. This just fact of life.
• If you want to be "bad person": find the exact lines of source code and who wrote them. Then curse that person and the program.
• If you want to be mediocre: post an bug report. Maybe it is fixed asap or put onto "wish-list" and forgotten.
• If you want to be an amazing: donate code. Like actually write it. But be warned, the other users are also like vampires, really picky and demands are unreasonable for the time required. If nobody does this then the software turns into stone.
• By popular vote, some things have surpassed their black boxed counter part and there is no equivalent black box to be purchased. It has become free-software-only.

From above, the making of bug report/feature request is an introduction point into an amazing community behind the software you used. It is not an black box of faceless shareholders.

The occasional awareness tests for Linux users:

• When is the new kernel released? I must have the newest kernel.
• Update removed the floor you were standing on.
• The horror of installing anything on windows makes my skin crawl.
• The horror of accidentally pasting "rm -rf" into prompt and knowing it was yourself who pushed the button.
• No back-doors, unless you installed one.

Until you would have to replace a HDD: +23 hours of nerve racking RAID repair time for 10TB drive at 120MB/s Even with some advanced (like ZFS etc.) system you can't go around the fact the HDDs are slow.

And when the HDD fails, you can't read it. It's toast. Some cheap non-volatile memory devices are like this too, but good ones go into read-only mode and you can at least attempt data recovery from them if no better option is left.

I'm liking that it is possible get cheap+good 1TB NVMe devices for less than 100€. The consumer SATA market for large SSDs (capacity over 1TB) is unfortunately quite dry. I need replacement for HDDs and even if the speed is capped by SATA bus it would be an massive improvement.

It gets more cursed the more you look at it:

• you have to convert the coordinate axes (swap z,x,y)
• then you find out the right/left handed is flipped
• now your brain melts if you even try think how to solve this with transformation/rotation, what ever.

This post is literally an pwns-list of users admitting what they use as password manager that may be stolen.

I encrypted an file, I put it on a device and mostly forgot it exists. Now if service locks me out I have go hunting.

I recently switched my default search from Google to DuckDuckGo: Google has begun refusing to find anything while exact same search on DuckDuckGo just works. Google is slower because I have to think+ignore first half of the page due to Ads/SEO crud.

On 1st gen ryzen cpu (until rzen3), don't have branch recording with "perf record -b" So no way to make your program +15% faster with profile data/PGO/FDO without effort. 😞