I’m not sure whether this should be a “standard”, but we need a Linux Distribution where the user never has to touch the command line. Such a distro would be beneficial and useful to new users, who don’t want to learn about command line commands.

And also we need a good app store where users can download and install software in a reasonably safe and easy way.

tldr

no often today we don’t know what the code is actually doing

yes this is an important problem

no nobody really seems to take it as serious as it should be taken today

no i’m not gonna change that over night

What distro are you using, and how difficult was it for you to get started with it?

I’m currently making a list of distros and looking at each’s pros and cons, including:

• what did work out of the box?
• what required more work to fix / workaround?

May i suggest a technique for remembering the password?

write it down

but instead of writing down the password, write down questions that only you can reasonably answer. For example:

• what was the name of the first girl i kissed?
• where did i go to on summer camp?
• which special event happened there?

and the answer would be: “mary beach rodeo” or idk what. this way, you construct a password out of multiple words that each are an answer to a simple question.

Only encrypt the home partition, for the root partition it just unnecessarily slows down the system.

Also, I think, there could be different approaches instead of encryption. AFAIK, android doesn’t use encryption underneath, but uses a semi-closed bootloader (which means, if you install a different OS, all user data gets wiped). I’m currently investigating the feasibility of such an approach in the long term.

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this just reminds me of please which runs the previous command with sudo

socat - connect anything to anything

for example

socat - tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

socat tcp-listen:12345 -

socat tcp-listen:12345 tcp-connect:remote-server:12345

nmap *your_local_ip_address*

for example

nmap 192.168.1.43/24 will show you what devices are connected to the local network, and what ports are open there. really useful, for example, when you forgot the address of your printer or raspi yet again.

you can also use it to understand what ports on your computer are open from an attacker’s perspective, or simply to figure out what services are running (ssh service).

losetup

it’s useful for dealing with virtual disk images. like a real physical hard disk, but it’s a file on the computer. you can mount it, format it, and write it to a real physical disk.

it’s sometimes used with virtual machines, with iso images, or when preparing a bootable disk.

how is that better than

cat /dev/zero > /dev/null

or

while true; do :; done

I think the reason is that most real numbers are gonna be the result of measurement equipment (for example camera/brightness sensor, or analog audio input). As such , these values are naturally real (analog) values, but they aren’t fractions. Think of the vast amount of data in video, image and audio files. They typically make up a largest part of the broadband internet usage. As such, their efficient handling is especially important, or you’re gonna mess up a lot of processing power.

Since these (and other) values are typically real values, they are represented by IEEE-754 floats, instead of fractions.

Actually, you can consider RGB values to be (triplets of) floats, too.

Typically, one pixel takes up up to 32 bits of space, encoding Red, Green, Blue, and sometimes Alpha (opacity) values. That makes approximately 8 bits per color channel.

Since each color can be a value between 0.0 (color is off) and 1.0 (color is on), that means every color channel is effectively a 8-bit float.

Honestly, having a declarative package manager is pretty important.

Consider the following: We’ve had the transition from Sys V Init to Systemd recently. But what does it actually mean?

It means, that instead of running a command to start a service, you now flip a switch in a clear, standardized way. The advantage is that you can get a table-like overview over all the services that are currently running. You get an overview, in other words. That is worth a lot because it brings structure and clarity into your system.

Now, with package management it’s the same way. Instead of running a command to install a package, we should instead give a list of all the packages that we want to have installed, and the package manager should take care of making sure that they are installed. That would improve clarity, because you get a list of all the packages that are installed. It might also increase efficiency if you’re installing many packages, because large parts of the work can be done in parallel. And importantly, you get reproducibility. Imagine you just have a file where it names all the packages that should be installed. You can just take that list and copy it to another machine. Now you’ve cloned your package installations. I guess things like Docker, with their docker files, are kinda already going in that direction. But it would be nice to have support for it in the mainline operating systems.

Yeah, it’s also very difficult for me to focus on something if I don’t know where I’m going.

IMO the best knowledge comes from doing practical examples that actually interest you. I wouldn’t rush that.

I honestly started out not liking systemd at all, mostly due to the reports that it did waaay to much, but nowadays, I like the concept.

It is basically officially moving daemon management from a script-based approach to a table/database-based approach. That improves static analyzability, therefore increasing clarity, and probably even performance.

I agree that we should abandon scripts and move towards declarative software management, and abandoning sudo for a more declarative system seems like a good step to me.

GIMP feels non-intuitive sometimes.

For example, layers.

I expect that GIMP internally has a list of all objects that I added to the file. Like, text, brush drawings, pasted images. Instead, I cannot find that list anywhere.