This was an unknown unknown for OP. Again, it’s completely fair for a new user to see the alias feature, think “ah, that’s built for aliasing one thing to another, let me try it for this directory name”, and be confused when it doesn’t work. OP can’t know what they don’t know.

And the open source community is just that, a community. Asking questions in forums is the accepted practice. And “basic” is hard to define. What is basic for you isn’t basic for someone else, in the same way that what is basic for someone else isn’t basic to you.

Highly recommend remapping common characters to easy-to-access hand movements. The keyboard is a tool to make things easier. I never use caps-lock, but I use esc all the time, so I regularly swap them (or just have a second esc bind).

It is worth acknowledging that this probably seems unintuitive to a new user. Makes it look like the shell has two different aliasing systems.

It makes sense the more familiar you are with bash, though. If you ever tried to cd /some/other/path-with-docs/in/the/string you’d end up accidentally running cd /some/other/path-with-/media/docs/in/the/string.

Which would be confusing at best, or a security issue at worst. Better to see that $ in the cmd and know you’re injecting a var’s value.

I knew the article was going to mention NTSYNC, but is that really it?

I get that we don’t want the argument for compatibility to effectively allow windows to define what the linux kernel has to looks like, but afaik this is one instance. The headline makes it sound like a systemic issue.

I was trying to do this recently and learned that, I guess certain bluray drives have been identified as compromised by the powers that be. As a result newer bluray disks ship with a list of those drives, and when your drive’s firmware sees that it is on the list, it will refuse to open the disk. I have an old bd drive from ~2008 that was ~60% effective at ripping my library.

I also tried my best to use fully open source tools in combination with an up-to-date KEYDB.CFG, but never had as much success as just using makemkv.

The most extreme route I found is to refer to makemkv’s list of drives that can have their firmware flashed to prevent it from refusing to read a disk. I haven’t gone that route, but would definitely consider it if I was looking for a drive.

Also very windows like, aside from Mount.

For an actual answer, it looks like WD has something called wdckit that is available on request.

I see a corresponding AUR entry that looks like it’s grabbing some zip from a personal Russian CDN. Super sketchy looking tbh.

But it’s possible this tool has whatever functionality the windows WD Utility uses to toggle the light in the drive’s firmware.

IMO, it’s not worth it. I’d just go the electrical tape route and maybe ask WD Customer Support if there’s a way, and if not, ask that they support Linux better in the future.

Everything is always optional for power users on linux. What I’m saying is they shouldn’t have made a GUI checkbox that’s also easy enough for non power users to check.

The difference is they test the core packages they release. That’s their selling point. Just downloading old pkgbuilds without vetting anything is called an attack vector.

The AUR just hosts pkgbuild files, no source or built packages. The pkgbuild can point to arbitrary external sources that could update separately. Manjaro could have their own AUR that hosts old pkgbuilds, but that wouldn’t be foolproof since the external sources could change. Also, if a pkgbuild was updated for security reasons, now Manjaro is putting users at risk by continuing to serve the old version, and now that’s another problem for them to solve.

I used Manjaro up until a couple of years ago. I don’t recommend it now. I switched to endeavor os. I hear cachy os is another popular arch based one these days.

IMO they should have made this the official policy instead of adding optional support for the AUR in pamac.

At the end of the day, the AUR is just a pastebin full of pkgbuild files for people who know what they’re doing. And as a distro aimed more at the average Linux user, rawdogging the AUR probably just shouldn’t be part of the equation.

Good luck!

No one has ever gone out of their way to run windows. At least not in 25y.

That seems as reasonable as suggesting they could pass a law requiring everyone to hire a govt licensed computer user in order to interact with their devices, and otherwise touching a keyboard or touchscreen would be illegal.

It doesn’t feel like a realistic estimation of what they would actually try to do. There’s too much that is currently dependent on Linux, you’d do better to just dismantle and ban the internet.

Doesn’t even make sense. Virtually all Linux distros can function completely offline. How do you do age verification completely offline? Classic politician who doesn’t understand tech trying to look like they’re doing something to save the kids.

I just use gimp, but for the record, someone recently got modern Photoshop working in wine

Yeah, seems like there needs to be a distro made for retrofitting various phones or something with those features. Maybe even using the zune hw.

There’s nothing wrong with a DE, those are great for the people who want an experience that “just works”. But I switched to Linux because I was tired of someone else deciding to install hundreds of packages I’ll never use, and start up dozens or hundreds of services in the background that I never asked for.

Part of the feeling of owning my machine has been looking at the list of packages installed, and the list of processes/services running and knowing why each one is there.

If you want an OS that lets you own the machine you bought, Linux is the most viable option. Conversely, Windows is not an option. I don’t consider an OS where you are the product to be one that works for me at all, much less one that “just works”.

Linux users seem to enjoy problem solving and tinkering for fun

Like with any OS, those are a subset of users, but not all. The thing is, Linux users spent the last 30y building a set of tools that enable you to use as little effort as possible to do very powerful things with your hardware, and yes, with great power comes great ability to break everything. But in the last 15y, there are distros designed for people who want an OS that “just works”, that don’t require you to know or use the risky tools that could break things, and they’re getting better every day.

Why did you switch

I wanted to use Linux for the last 15y, but gaming was a sticking point. Around 5y ago, thanks to valve, it is no longer a sticking point. I do all my gaming on Linux.

what was your process like?

I first switched to fedora on my laptop about 12y ago. I didn’t do a lot of gaming on my laptop, so this was fine. Eventually I switched to Manjaro. Around 5y ago I put Manjaro on my desktop. Then eventually switched both to endeavor.

I’ll admit, I create problems for myself by refusing fully featured Desktop Environments. But I always learn something more about my machine in the process. As a result, I believe I can now simply do more with less effort on Linux than I could on windows. I have bash scripts on keybinds that open custom UIs for various things. I can seamlessly access multiple servers on my network running various services. I don’t ever have to worry about some update overhauling my UI and sneaking an AI in the background. Any experimentation I do with AI is on my own terms, and none of my data gets shipped off without my consent.

What made you choose Linux for your primary computing device, rather than macOS for example?

I used a Mac 20y ago. It was solid. But eventually the cost outweighed the hardware capabilities. And then they deprecated every graphics API but Metal. Now there’s relatively nothing in the way of gaming on Mac. On top of that, it’s just as bad as windows when it comes to doing what some company wants it to do rather than what I want it to do. So I don’t consider it an option that works for me.