What do you have on it? I’ve considered setting one up, but I’m not sure what I’d put on it yet, and I don’t want to do the thing where I make something I never use.

As someone who is currently learning emacs, I gotta say, this comment has the energy of someone offering heroin to someone struggling to moderate their cannabis usage (given OP indicated that custom config if a thing they’re finding burdensome in a way)

I had to do it for the first time last year and I was slightly giddy from the novelty of it.

This is an excellent comment, thanks for writing this up

As a gamer, I was anxious about switching to Linux as my daily driver, but I needed to fully immerse myself to improve at Linux, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how few gaming related problems I’ve had.

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

Your comment reminded me of this https://pixelastic.github.io/pokemonorbigdata/

I was learning python as a wee scientist in training, and my variables were beyond dreadful. I tried naming a list “list” and the interpreter told me I couldn’t, so I opted for “listy”. When I needed to name a new list but listy was taken, I’d often resort to “listyy”.

Scientists who work with computers without having much (if any) targeted training on how to code can write the most horrendous programs.

I love REFind. I spent ages faffing around with a fedora/arch dual boot when I was trying to learn how it all worked; when I got sick of learning things the hard way, REFind had my back and gave me a straightforward solution

Truly cutting edge stuff, we’re on the forefront of culture here on Lemmy.

I reluctantly agree with you. Though I think the reluctance is just because there’s something in me that’s viscerally offended by the concept of time itself (probably the ADHD)

You comment gives me vibes of “I don’t do heroin because I know I’d get addicted”. I say this as someone who is currently flirting with distro hopping. I wouldn’t call myself a distro-hopper yet, but I’m certainly en route to that

Yeah, my sentiment too.

I got a manic vibe, like a similar energy to when you’ve been modding a game for 20x longer than you’ve actually played it, except in this case, it’s not a choice.

Though I wonder if even besides adding an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) (writing acronym out for anyone else who would’ve had to Google it), this might be a useful exercise recovering from outages in general. This is coming from someone who hasn’t actually done any self hosting of my own, but you saying you’re still finding down services reminds me of when I learned the benefit of testing system backups as part of making them.

I was lucky in that I didn’t have any data loss, but restoring from my backup took a lot more manual work than I’d anticipated, and it came at an awkward time. Since then, my restoring from backup process is way more streamlined.

That’s a really interesting question, I don’t know what that might look like.

As a biochemist, my brain naturally goes to the different hierarchical levels of increasing complexity in life. Like how eukaryotic amoebas are freed from some of the challenges that constrain bacteria (mitochondria really are awesome), and how similarly, the complexity ceiling is much higher for multicellular life than unicellular life.

I just think a systems view of stuff is neat, and it’s cool to see how modularisation, coupling and specialisation work together

Maybe so, but it’s much harder to learn from your mistakes and fix them on distros like Ubuntu.

I say this as someone who has recently switched to Arch because my Windows existence was aggravating me and I had never clicked well with Linux in the past. It felt too unfamiliar and I think I’m the kind of masochistic weirdo who benefits from their first proper go at Linux being Arch.

I still don’t have a fully working setup on my desktop yet because I’m working on doing it properly, but problems and mistakes are much easier to fix on Arch than on any other distro I’ve used.

That’s good advice, thank you. I spent a while learning how to set up and enable SSH in a secure way, but I wasn’t quite sure on many practical use cases for my situation yet.

It’s because most of us are autistic

(Disclaimer, this is a joke based on my personal experience as an autistic tech nerd with a strong aversion to change. My observation is that there are a lot of autistic tech nerds, but I can’t speak for their propensity for change. This is mostly a joke at myself)