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.

Duh, just read it back from /dev/random

You will recover the data, you just need to wait long enough.

At 28 years old, it’s safe to say Leo doesn’t use KDE.

Happy birthday!

That’s how I started using Linux — big book with CD, I think it was “RedHat Linux Secrets 5.4” or something. 2.0 or 2.2 kernel.

Honestly, it was fantastic. And almost all of it is still relevant today. (Some of the stuff on xfree86 and the chap/pap stuff not so much.)

But it gave a really solid (IMHO) intro to a Linux/*NIX system, a solid overview of coreutils, etc. And while LILO has been long replaced, and afaik /sys didn’t exist at the time, it formed a good foundation.

I’ll refrain from commenting on any init system changes that have taken place since then.

It’s mostly so that I can have SSL handled by nginx (and not per-service), and also for ease of hosting multiple services accessible via subdomains. So every service is its own subdomain.

Additionally, my internal network (as in, my physical LAN) does not have any port forwarding enabled — everything is over WireGuard to my VPS.

My method:

VPS with reverse proxy to my public facing services. This holds SSL certs, and communicates with home network through WireGuard link configured on my router.

Local computer with reverse proxy for all services. This also has SSL certs, and handles the same services as the VPS, so I can have local/LAN speeds. Additionally, it serves as a reverse proxy for all my private services, such as my router/switches/access point config pages, Jellyfin, etc.

No complaints, it mostly just works. I also have my router override DNS entries for my FQDN to resolve locally, so I use the same URL for accessing public services on my LAN.

As a long-time Debian user, I’d have to throw my vote behind Slackware for the title of most UNIX-y, which is I guess a bit different from most Linux-y.

Debian got me through grad school, but Slack got me through undergrad on a hopelessly underpowered old ThinkPad — Volkerding is a legend, and Slack will always be dear to my heart.

This happened to me when Debian switched from SysV to systemd. I am not the only person who experienced this (e.g., https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=147478 ).

This is not to say the systemd behavior is wrong, but it essentially changed the behavior of fstab. Whether this is Debian’s fault, Arch’s fault (per the above link), systemd’s fault, or my fault is a fair question. But this committed that most egregious of sins per our Lord and Savior Torvalds — it broke my userspace.

My favorite was when the behavior of a USB drive in /etc/fstab went from “hmm it’s not plugged in at boot, I’ll let the user know” to “not plugged in? Abort! Abort! We can’t boot!”

This change over previous init behavior was especially fun on headless machines…

Getting TLS certs will be complicated

I just use Let’s Encrypt with a wildcard domain — same certs for public and private facing domains. I’m sure this isn’t best practice, but it’s mostly just for me so I’m not too worried :)

Yeah I don’t expose Jellyfin over the Internet, so it doesn’t matter for me, and wouldn’t work at all over WAN (unless VPN’d to home network).

Also, it’s all reverse proxied, and there’s nothing preventing having two Jellyfin hostnames, e.g., jf-local.mydomain.com and jf-public.mydomain.com.