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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Fair enough!

    So you would suggest to get bigger and bigger storages?

    Personally I would suggest never recording video. We did fine without it for aeons and photos are plenty good enough. If you can still to this rule you will never have a single problem of bandwidth or storage ever again. Of course I understand that this is an outrageous and unthinkable idea for many people these days, but that is my suggestion.


  • The local-plus-remote strategy is fine for any real-world scenario. Make sure that at least one of the replicas is a one-way backup (i.e., no possibility of mirroring a deletion). That way you can increment it with zero risk.

    And now for some philosophy. Your files are important, sure, but ask yourself how many times you have actually looked at them in the last year or decade. There’s a good chance it’s zero. Everything in the world will disappear and be forgotten, including your files and indeed you. If the worst happens and you lose it all, you will likely get over it just fine and move on. Personally, this rather obvious realization has helped me to stress less about backup strategy.



  • This is great news! Debian is back in contention for me.

    Recently Debian developer Helmut Grohne initiated the Debian development discussion around removing more packages from the unstable archive. He argued in favor of more aggressively removing unmaintained packages from the archive given the QA-related costs, additional work/complexities when dealing with major fundamental changes to Debian, and other non-trivial costs



  • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlGoldilocks distro?
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    9 days ago

    For years I used Debian. Because it worked, but also because Debian looked to me to be the purest and most solid FOSS distro. That is, it’s not run by a for-profit company, and it isn’t a derivative that will go away one day. It looked - still looks - like the “universal” Linux distro, which I believe is even its motto.

    Firstly, is that assessment justified?

    Next: the problem. A few years ago I read a disturbing report about the behind-the-scenes dysfunction at Debian. Specifically:

    • a serious dearth of maintainers
    • lots of very outdated packages with possible untreated security holes
    • silly political wrangling by Debian insiders - one representative allegation was that more time was being spent debating the positioning of a Black Lives Matter logo on the Debian site than on the technical challenges just mentioned

    Possibly this was disinformation by someone with a scurrilous agenda. I want it not to be true because I believe Linux needs a flagship FOSS distro and Debian is the obvious candidate.

    Can anyone set the record straight? Because when I had to do a new install I went with Ubuntu (LTS), and this was partly inspired by the above. I would really like all this to be wrong and to know that Debian is on the right path.


  • The Zeitgeist of the internet of the 20s is considerably less kind to people who form their own thoughts.

    This rings true and it may come from the wider world. Seems to me that we have entered an era of fear and pessimism. Partly as a result of that, today’s younger generation had protected childhoods and now, given the state of the world, they themselves are afraid for their futures (with some justification). All this is creating an atmosphere of hypersensitivity, aversion to causing offense, a general lack of openness to new ideas and contradiction.

    Nothing I say there is particularly original and I can’t offer data to support it. But my anecdotal experience on this forum and elsewhere backs up the hypothesis completely. Something has changed.





  • Looks great, well done.

    Personally, the deb-related annoyance that I have encountered most often in recent years is that there is an APT repo but I have to jump thru hoops to add it. An example is signal-desktop, where the handy one-click installation goes like this:

    # 1. Install our official public software signing key:
    wget -O- https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt/keys.asc | gpg --dearmor > signal-desktop-keyring.gpg
    cat signal-desktop-keyring.gpg | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg > /dev/null
    
    # 2. Add our repository to your list of repositories:
    echo 'deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/signal-desktop-keyring.gpg] https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial main' |\
      sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/signal-xenial.list
    
    # 3. Update your package database and install Signal:
    sudo apt update && sudo apt install signal-desktop
    

    Why does Debian-Ubuntu not provide a simple command for this? Yes there is add-apt-repository but for some reason it doesn’t deal with keys. I’ve had to deal with this PITA on multiple occasions, what’s up with this?









  • Useful to know, thanks.

    For the record, I once had a bad experience with the Debian installer’s version. That is why I will not be trying Debian again. Installation is a moment of vulnerability, when you don’t have ready access to your data, or the network, and this is one extra factor. IMO it really is non-negotiable for a distro to provide a bulletproof installation experience.