A fingerprint is a password you leave a copy of on everything you touch.

The meme text itself refers to “frequent” updates. Seems weird to compare apples to oranges, since release updates are not frequent. Even still, updating from buster to bookworm was relatively painless; certainly not 3 hours of reconfiguration. Before that, I was on Ubuntu, and the release updates were also painless; I remember multiple times not needing to do anything except uncomment the sources.list(.d) changes.

[edit: Another quick point. Since Debian/Ubuntu manage configuration for you to some extent, you don’t need to fix configuration files as often as you would need to on Arch, hence not needing to do ~20+ config changes for two years of updates all at once.]

I’m running 4 Debian machines, all configured to automatically update every night, and this has never happened to me.

You should set up mail delivery, so when sudo reports you it reports you to you

Ok, but we all should admit: .net is a terrible name.

IMO the best way to ensure that traffic always goes through a VPN is to use network namespaces. The wireguard website has an article describing the process. In a nutshell, you create a dedicated namespace to put the physical interface in, create the wireguard interface in that namespace, then move the wireguard interface to the root (“normal”) namespace. That way the only way to get traffic out without the VPN is to run a program in that dedicated namespace.

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software

I had really hoped that by time we would finally have got beyond good & evil.

Check out the Framework 16. Ubuntu and Fedora are officially supported. I run Debian on my Framework 13 no problem.

Bummer! Best of luck with the new one.

Check out Navidrome. Also the audio streaming section on awesome-selfhosted

https://automatisch.io/

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

https://www.activepieces.com/

Are a few that I saw on the Awesome Self-hosted list

The AUR is the reason I don’t use Arch. It’s a huge pain in the ass and the opposite of lazy. I truly don’t understand this comment.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding the point of the AUR, but my understanding of it is that it fills a similar role as PPAs/third party repos in debian/ubuntu. To use the AUR, you have to first:

1. Install base-devel.
2. Install an AUR helper (unless you want to do all this fully manually). But the AUR helpers are themselves on the the AUR so you have to learn to use it and go through all these steps yourself at least once.

Then, for every package you have to:

1. Download the package build file. (The AUR helper can do this for you)
2. Review the package build file. AUR helper tools don’t let you skip this step, despite it being mostly security theater.
3. Install the build dependencies. (The AUR helper can do this for you)
4. Compile the software on your own machine. (There are some binary packages on the AUR, but it seems most are source packages). This takes time and replicates work, wasting electricity. This step must be done as a normal user. None of the tools I found will de-escalate privileges if you are already superuser for the build step.
5. Install the resulting package using pacman, as a superuser. Note that if you have an AUR helper, you have install sudo and run as a user that has sudo privileges.

Then, every time you want to upgrade the software, you have to do it all again.

Admittedly, this is not a ton of work. But having to do it for every package and every upgrade is a very real hassle, when most of the time I just want to be using my computer.

Contrast this to a PPA/third party repo in debian/ubuntu.

1. Search for the repository.
2. Copy/paste the commands to enable it.
3. apt update && apt install package

… and you’re done. You get seamless automatic upgrades. There’s no compilation or need to install extra build dependencies. It’s so much easier.

I truly do not get why Arch users put up with the AUR.