Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

(I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)

And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.

For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.

I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.

So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.

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.