Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

A quite normal Windows day:

Bios to Windows: "Go now! Get up!"

Windows to Bios: "Always slow with the young circuit boards."

"I've got something weird on screen."

Windows' answer: "Ignore it first."

Hardware assistant to Windows: "The user puts pressure. He wants me to identify this thing. Could be an ISDN card."

Windows: "Well, well."

Unknown ISDN card to all: "Will you please let me in?"

Network card to intruder: "You can't spread out here!"

Windows: "Quiet in the case! Or I'll cut both their support!"

Device Manager: "Offer compromise. The network card is allowed on Mondays, the ISDN card is on Tuesday."

Graphics card to Windows: "My driver retired yesterday. I'm crashing now."

Windows to graphics card: "When will you be back?"

Graphics card: "Well, not at first."

CD-Rom drive to Windows: "uh, I would have a new driver here..."

Windows: "What's ich´n supposed to do with it?!"

Installation software to Windows: "Leave it, I'll mach´ that already."

Windows: "That's nice to hear."

USB connection to interrupt management: "Alarm! Just been penetrated by a scanner cable. Request response."

Interrupt management: "Where are you coming from?"

USB connection: "I was in the computer right from the start. I'm joined by another colleague."

"You're not on my list." - "Say something."

Windows: "Hopefully there won't be another printer."

Graphics card: "The new driver twitches."

Windows: "We'll just have to get the old one out of retirement."

Uninstall program to new driver: "Go away."

Unwanted driver: "Fuck you."

Windows to Norton Utilities: "Kill him and his brood!"

Utilities to driver rests: "Sorry, we have to delete you."

Important system file: "Arrrrrrgghh!"

Windows on blue screen: "Gib´, the Norton Boys are over the top again."

Blue screen to user: "So, that's it for this week."

Excuse me for stealing your time

And I know it's way too long

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Not just another Windows rant:

*Disclaimer* : I'm a full time Linux user for dev work having switched from Windows a couple of years ago. Only open Windows for Photoshop (or games) or when I fuck up my Linux install (Arch user) because I get too adventurous (don't we all)

I have hated Windows 10 from day 1 for being a rebel. Automatic updates and generally so many bugs (specially the 100% disk usage on boot for idk how long) really sucked.

It's got ads now and it's generally much slower than probably a Windows 8 install..

The pathetic memory management and the overall slower interface really ticks me off. I'm trying to work and get access to web services and all I get is hangups.

Chrome is my go-to browser for everything and the experience is sub par. We all know it gobbles up RAM but even more on Windows.

My Linux install on the same computer flies with a heavy project open in Android Studio, 25+ tabs in Chrome and a 1080p video playing in the background.

Up until the creators update, UI bugs were a common sight. Things would just stop working if you clicked them multiple times.

But you know what I'm tired of more?

The ignorant pricks who bash it for being Windows. This OS isn't bad. Sure it's not Linux or MacOS but it stands strong.

You are just bashing it because it's not developer friendly and it's not. It never advertises itself like that.

It's a full fledged OS for everyone. It's not dev friendly but you can make it as much as possible but you're lazy.

People do use Windows to code. If you don't know that, you're ignorant. They also make a living by using Windows all day. How bout tha?

But it tries to make you feel comfortable with the recent bash integration and the plethora of tools that Microsoft builds.

IIS may not be Apache or Nginx but it gets the job done.

Azure uses Windows and it's one of best web services out there. It's freaking amazing with dead simple docs to get up and running with a web app in 10 minutes.

I saw many rants against VS but you know it's one of the best IDEs out there and it runs the best on Windows (for me, at least).

I'm pissed at you - you blind hater you.

Research and appreciate the things good qualities in something instead of trying to be the cool but ignorant dev who codes with Linux/Mac but doesn't know shit about the advantages they offer.

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

Hi everyone, long time no see.

Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.

Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.

She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.

The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.

She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).

"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"

Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.

There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.

So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.

TL;DR
I accidentally surpassed(?) my user permissions and closed some of my classmates browsers and locked up a terminal for me

In school we have 2 primary operating systems: Windows and Ubuntu. Windows is hell in general and but not as hell as the firefox installation on Ubuntu.

"Just loaded this page. Now wait half a minute so that I can render it"
"Woah, woah, woah. Slow there. You just made an input event. Give me those 5 seconds to compute what you just did"

Executing "top" or "htop" shows you a long list of firefox processes with a cpu usage of 99.9%, since the whole school shares that linux environment.

Anyway, one day it was way more servere than normally and I way forced to kill my firefox instances. So I pressed CTRL+ALT+T for that terminal, waited 5 minutes until it accepted input typed "killall firefox" with a delay of half a minute per character and smahed that enter key.

At this very point in time I could hear confusion from every corner of the room. "What happened to firefox?"

Around 30% of the opened browsers where abruptly stopped. I looked back to my screen noticed I was logged out. I couldn't login from that terminal for the rest of that day.

Our network admin, which happened to be there, since the server is just next door, said that this was just convenience, but the timing was too perfect so I heighly doubt that.

I felt like a real hackerman even if it was by accident :)

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I've disabled automatic updates on windows 10 long time back. Still they download and updates every time.

Do they have some hidden settings that only can be disabled by a non-linux user?

A little reflection on the relationship between me/my dad/computer:

When i was younger my dad showed and taught me how to work on his (10 - 15yrs+ old) laptop running windows xp. Soon we got a simple desktop pc (those ones that took nearly a minute to start). i remember my dad sayin something like "don't download anything cause (the pc will brake/it will be a virus/...)", I don't remember exactly ... but i know that i still did it (being fucking nervous😅) and it went well😌. later me and my little sister would go to "spielaffe.de" several times until getting some kind of "virus"😅😅.
Time passed and i got passionate about pc's (programming, trying Ubuntu, reading about internals of a pc,...). It didn't take long that i passed my dad's knowledge and so here i am studying CS😎.
In the end, regarding my dad:
first he was the master i looked up to, then he became the buddy i talked to and asked for problems, then ... he remained the light user who would like to return to his windows xp era and asks me first as his personal google when something happens out of his "comfort-zone"😅😌.
And sometimes i believe my dad is becoming incompetent for pc's😂😅

Trying out linux. Any recommendations on what to do/learn.

[linux distro stuff]
Hey guys!
Im considerig switching to linux because:

My macbook does not support mojave and the new ones are expensive af.

Windows 10 is bloated and not a great user experience(removing stuff from the control panel and adding it to the very stripped down settings app, privacy etc..).

I love open source software

However i did not used linux for a long time, back then i used ubuntu and SUSE.

My considerations:
Debian - because .deb on them haters
OpenSUSE - because i used it in the past and it seemed very stable and fast
Arch - i heard from a lot of sources that it’s “da best”

My use case is game development and 3D modeling. I use gimp, blender vscode and unity (the game engine) at work i sometimes use autodesk stuff (motionbuilder, 3ds max) because of fbx.
For audio stuff i use audacity

So overall i’m looking for a distro that is fast, lightweight, i can develop on it (mostly 3D stuff) and occasionally play some games

Anyone has experience with the mentioned distros? What distro would you use for this?

I've been a long time Windows user, worked with Linux a lot while working on servers.

Installed Linux Mint on laptop. Fell in love. Can't switch because I like to game in my free time and my favorite games are Windows only :/

Status: Got off hour+ long call with provider teir2 tech support because their "sync service" isn't syncing. "It's all cloud controlled" they tell me. Whatever.

It does have the ability to install a Windows service to do the needful! 🎉

However the program that does the actual syncing is the "launcher" application, and the service's only job is to tell the launcher to run. 🤦‍♂️

Their assumption is that there will be a user that gets smacked in the face with a UAC prompt when they first log in and just shrug it away. Which is the Launcher application.

The sync service is not capable of running the sync application without a desktop session I guess?

MOTHERTRUCKERS do you understand what the point of a Windows Service is?!?

I tried relating this situation to how Windows Update works: It will update whenever the fuck it wants without the user doing anything because of the Service, and you only configure the service with the Control Panel/Settings App. You don't need the Control Panel/Settings App running in order for Windows Update to work, but it's there for status info and configuration.

Anyways, this software does not do that. It apparently *requires* both the service AND the launcher program running in order to work. Not work properly, to work *at all*.

Anyways, It's installed on a computer that's not normally logged into, but is always on (where other "always needs to be running" programs live). Normally the hackaround would be to launch the program via Scheduled Task.

This program apparently does not want to run as a scheduled task, or the Task Scheduler is being stupid and can't figure out "Hey, it's time to run this program. Do it!". Naturally it runs if told manually.

The fact that I'm even doing this at all is stupid, but even more infuriating is that it's just not working unattended. You know, what the service should be doing. But no, the service runs happily all alone, doing nothing of note, while Task Scheduler sucks its stick running OneDrive installer but not the launcher program.

Pluckin' donuts...

As promissed.

Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!

Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!

Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!

Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!

So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share

Curious question to fellow Mint Mate user (if there is any).

Do you experience a long restarting phenomenon with your mint?

I have used this and that distros and windows in the past. I am fond of light and fast things; long time user of xubuntu and lubuntu. Mint saved my ass when I had some display driver issues with my xubuntu. So I have switched to and I have been using it for a while and noticed that sometimes the restarting process can take more than 90 second.

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

I've been a windows user for a long time now, but I've been thinking of trying out Linux sometime soon. Which distro should I start with? And can I still play steam/origin games? I might also use a VM to see how I like it before I move over.

I'm sure I could google this, but a lot of you seem to use Linux, and this isn't stack overflow so I'm not expecting too many people to shit on me for asking 🙂

This is a repost of an original rant posted on a request for "Community Feedback" from Atlassian. You know, Atlassian? Those beloved people behind such products as :

• Thing I Love™
• Other Thing You Used One Time™
• Platform Often Mentioned in Suicide Notes, Probably™*

Now this rant was written in early 2022 while I was working in an Azure Cloud Engineer role that transformed into me being the company's main Sysadmin/Project Manager/Hiring Manager/Network Admin/Graphic Designer.

While trying to simultaneously put out over 9000 fires with one hand, and jangling keys in the face of the Owner/Arsonist with the other, I was also desperately implementing Jira Service Desk. Normally this wouldn't have been as much of a priority as it was, but the software our support team was using had gone past 15 years old, then past extended support, then the lone developer died, then it didn't work on Windows 10, then only functioned thanks to a dev cohort long past creating a keygen....which was now broken. So we needed a solution *now*.

The previous solution was shit of a different tier. The sight of it would make a walking talking anthropomorphised sentient puddle of dogshit (who both eats and produces further dookie derivatives) blush with embarrassment. The CD-ROM/Cereal Box this software came in probably listed features like "Stores Your Customer's First AND (or) Last Name!" or "Windows ME Downgrade Disk Included!" and "NEW: Less(-ish) Genocide(s)"!

Despite this, our brain/fearless leader decided this would be a great time to have me test, implement, deploy, and train everyone up on a new solution that would suck your toes, sound your shaft, and that he hadn't reminded me that I was a lazy sack enough lately.

One day, during preliminary user testing I received an email letting me know that the support team was having issues with a Customer's profile on our new support desk. Thanks to our Owner/Firestarter/Real World Micheal Scott being deep in his latest project (fixing our "All 5 devs quit in the last 12 months and I can't seem to hire any new ones" issue (by buying a ping pong table)), I had a bit of fortuitous time on my hands to investigate this issue. I had spent many hours of overtime working on this project, writing custom integrations and automations, so what I found out was crushing.

Below is the (digitally) physical manifestation of my rage after realising I would have to create / find / deal with a whole new method for support to manage customer contacts.

I'm linking to the original forum thread because you kind of need to have the pictures embedded in said reply to get really inhale the "Jira-Rant" ambiance. The part where I use several consecutive words as anchor links to tickets with other people screaming into the void gets a bit sweet n' savoury too - having those hyperlinks does improve the je ne say what of it all.

bit.ly/JIRANT (Case Sensitive)

--------------------------

There is some good news at the end of this brown n' squirty rainbow though!
Nice try silly little Jira button, you can't ruin *my* 2022!

• I was able to forget all about Jira a month later when I received a surprise vacation home! (To be there while my Mom passed away).
• Eventually work stress did catch up to me - but my boss thoughtfully gave me a nice long vacation! (By assaulting *while* firing me (for emailing in a vacation request while he was a having a bad (see:normal) day))