Newer macOS is not Unix certified.

It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification

One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.

I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.

The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.

Haha yeah that was the counter example I was thinking of. I agree completely — you could make a Gentoo from source beginner distro, and I think you could make it reasonably “idiot proof,” but it would still be a bad user experience most likely (too much time spent compiling).

If your distro can’t be forked into a “beginner distro” then it’s fundamentally flawed IMHO.

To be clear, I’ve used Arch as my daily drivers for a while, and while it’s not the best fit for my needs (I use Debian mostly), there’s nothing that I experienced that was incompatible with a “beginner” distro.

You can also drop cache for debugging by running something like echo 3 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop-caches

But remember that the kernel knows best — this RAM will automatically be freed up when needed and you should never run this except for debugging (or maybe benchmarking).

I’ve been super happy with it. Knock on wood it’s been super reliable. I have a single ZFS drive, take snapshots with various retention policies, nothing fancy.

Another fun thing is to set up a reverse proxy on it as an endpoint for services on your local (home) network which can only be accessed by VPN. For example, my Jellyfin service isn’t public facing, but I didn’t want e.g. my parents to need to set up WireGuard. So instead they can point their TV to a raspberry pi on their network to access the service — even a first gen RPI can handle Jellyfin reverse proxy over WireGuard for moderate bitrates!

WireGuard, and an external HDD. Run at a remote location for off-site backup.

I do this with a raspberry pi 3 at the in-laws. I copied the data over locally before setting it up, and after that it’s just nightly incremental rsync, which is fine even over my slow (35Mbps) upload.

You can turn it off, at least for ext4: https://lwn.net/Articles/784041/

Although you can use case insensitive filesystems with Linux, and case sensitive filesystems with macOS. I believe the case sensitivity is a function of the specific filesystem — but yeah, practically, the root for Linux is always case sensitive, and APFS ain’t is only if you ask it to be ( https://support.apple.com/lv-lv/guide/disk-utility/dsku19ed921c/mac ).

IIRC chvt is a privileged command, which makes sense (if an unprivileged user could execute this command they could effectively brick the computer for a local user).

That said, my understanding is that modern DE’s are given a lot of access, so presumably chvt is allowed (and in this case, is required because as others mentioned, password is required). So the only other option is to fail unlocked, which is all kinds of Bad.

It’s overpriced hardware

Have you seen the M4 benchmarks?

If you’re memory bound then sure, you can get way more bang for your buck with Intel/AMD. But for pretty amazing CPU performance I think the “Apple is overpriced” trope isn’t really true any more.

And environment — DISPLAY and PATH in particular.

So what is an easy to use or no think thing I could use a pi 5 for?

It sounds like you really want something that works “out of the box,” in which case, I would look for projects that have disk images available.

This severely restricts what you can do with it, and as others have mentioned, is a bit antithetical to the Pi’s original purpose as a tinkering machine. But you may find something you like.

The most basic would be to just use it as a desktop replacement.

Does Minecraft server have a known memory leak or something?

As a hack you can always set up a cronjob to automatically reboot at a time when you won’t be using it, but not sure if that defeats the purpose of a Minecraft server…

Maybe they mean four year uptime…

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

I like the “this can’t really be compared to Windows or macOS” aspects of tiling window managers. I like it when the window manager sort of “gets out of the way,” but that’s just me.

I think there’s a bias in the US against this sort of thing that doesn’t exist (or not to the same extent) in Europe due to the age of the cities/buildings.

In the US, a building from the 1700s is a historic artifact to be cherished, while in parts of Europe a building from the 1500s is just the local pub.

So, the US is often hesitant to modify these old buildings, but Europe seems to have more of a perspective of “it’s a building, not a museum, let’s give it new life by modifying it.”

This is just from the perspective of me, from the US — and I think these old/new buildings are really neat!

IIRC that was the release that cleaned up the make output substantially.