Me: I need a Windows PC to test my code on.
Server dude: We don't have any free, but I can setup an old server for you.
Me: 🤔 .. I'll take it!

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

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]

Client: We want it to run on both, windows and Linux servers.

Me: Why would you want such a thing?

Client: The user should be able to connect to the server, independently from what system he or she is using.

Me: So... should we setup a Mac OS X server too?

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

Hello everyone, found this place recently, decided to bore you with one (or many) Navy story... tech Navy story. I'll start from the end.
Little backstory: I've deployed a simple domain setup on the ship I served, nothing fancy, a server, a switch, 10 computers, all Windows (details on that at another rant). I enter the ship Monday morning, and the XO tells me that he can't access his online folders.
OK, I say, I'll get to it. I fire up my laptop, try to RDP to the server (I know, I know, burn me at the stake later) no connection. WTF? Is the service down? I try pinging. No luck. I tried pinging the switch. OK. Looking at the switch admin panel, I see the server's port is dead. "OK, probably the cable." (we have old ethernet cables)
So, I drag my ass over to the server (same room with ship comms) with the cable tester to confirm that. What do I see?
The IMBECILES had pulled the plug from the server so that they could charge their mobile phones. I literally slammed my head against the door (calming exercise in case of spontaneous murder impulses - the things you learn at the Academy). My CO was nearby, and lucky for the guys, he heard me yell at them, while throwing mobiles and chargers around.
"But we thought it was OK, we just wanted to charge our-"
I kid you not, I reached for the firefighter's axe.
My CO grabbed me by the collar and dragged me to his room. I explained to him (between two cigarettes) that we MUST get a UPS and a server cabinet (budget constraints in the military are something that will give you people nightmares, trust me). I carefully explained to him that unless we got those, nothing would prevent the next moron from destroying confidential data and me from murdering him.
I plugged in and booted the server, after installing a multi socket extension. Two days after, surprise surprise, the server was off again. That was the first time I opened the door to the CO's room with a low kick. I must have looked like a psycho on drugs, he gave approval for the purchase in twenty seconds flat.
After that, I installed the UPS and the cabinet. Everything went inside, from the UPS to the very plugs. Just a locked box with cables coming out.
One of the guys came to my room, and asked if I could unlock the cabinet so that they could plug a "device" they needed.
I actually reached for my folding knife.
Disclaimer: The story above is TRUE. Even the almost violent parts.

Hacking/attack experiences...
I'm, for obvious reasons, only going to talk about the attacks I went through and the *legal* ones I did 😅 😜

Let's first get some things clear/funny facts:
I've been doing offensive security since I was 14-15. Defensive since the age of 16-17. I'm getting close to 23 now, for the record.

First system ever hacked (metasploit exploit): Windows XP.
(To be clear, at home through a pentesting environment, all legal)
Easiest system ever hacked: Windows XP yet again.

Time it took me to crack/hack into today's OS's (remote + local exploits, don't remember which ones I used by the way):
Windows: XP - five seconds (damn, those metasploit exploits are powerful)
Windows Vista: Few minutes.
Windows 7: Few minutes.
Windows 10: Few minutes.
OSX (in general): 1 Hour (finding a good exploit took some time, got to root level easily aftewards. No, I do not remember how/what exactly, it's years and years ago)
Linux (Ubuntu): A month approx. Ended up using a Java applet through Firefox when that was still a thing. Literally had to click it manually xD
Linux: (RHEL based systems): Still not exploited, SELinux is powerful, motherfucker.

Keep in mind that I had a great pentesting setup back then 😊. I don't have nor do that anymore since I love defensive security more nowadays and simply don't have the time anymore.

Dealing with attacks and getting hacked.

Keep in mind that I manage around 20 servers (including vps's and dedi's) so I get the usual amount of ssh brute force attacks (thanks for keeping me safe, CSF!) which is about 40-50K every hour. Those ip's automatically get blocked after three failed attempts within 5 minutes. No root login allowed + rsa key login with freaking strong passwords/passphrases.

linu.xxx/much-security.nl - All kinds of attacks, application attacks, brute force, DDoS sometimes but that is also mostly mitigated at provider level, to name a few. So, except for my own tests and a few ddos's on both those domains, nothing really threatening. (as in, nothing seems to have fucked anything up yet)

How did I discover that two of my servers were hacked through brute forcers while no brute force protection was in place yet? installed a barebones ubuntu server onto both. They only come with system-default applications. Tried installing Nginx next day, port 80 was already in use. I always run 'pidof apache2' to make sure it isn't running and thought I'd run that for fun while I knew I didn't install it and it didn't come with the distro. It was actually running. Checked the auth logs and saw succesful root logins - fuck me - reinstalled the servers and installed Fail2Ban. It bans any ip address which had three failed ssh logins within 5 minutes:
Enabled Fail2Ban -> checked iptables (iptables -L) literally two seconds later: 100+ banned ip addresses - holy fuck, no wonder I got hacked!

One other kind/type of attack I get regularly but if it doesn't get much worse, I'll deal with that :)

Dealing with different kinds of attacks:

Web app attacks: extensively testing everything for security vulns before releasing it into the open.
Network attacks: Nginx rate limiting/CSF rate limiting against SYN DDoS attacks for example.
System attacks: Anti brute force software (Fail2Ban or CSF), anti rootkit software, AppArmor or (which I prefer) SELinux which actually catches quite some web app attacks as well and REGULARLY UPDATING THE SERVERS/SOFTWARE.

So yah, hereby :P

> Receive sudden phone call in the middle of the night
> Check caller, unknown number
> "Either something bad happened or it's something urgent. I'd better answer."
> "Hello?"
> Friend of friend of friend says he updated his gpu drivers and now has some random fps drops.
> I was in a good mood so I agreed to help him over teamviewer, even though I don't know him.
> Downgrading to an older version of nvidia driver seemed to have fixed the drops.
> 5 minutes later, he calls again. His headset is not working properly.
> Helped him fix the issue over teamviever.
> This continued for at least 2 hours, calling me every 5 minutes to install just another driver or change some random win setting. Turned out he had some retard format his pc because he thought it'd "make it go faster".
> Calls me again, this time he's pc isn't booting up at all. After 20 minutes on the phone the fucktard admits he just tried to reformat his pc because "my pc automatically installed a bad windows update" ( no, I don't understand either) but he fucked it up.
> I begin explaining him how to make a bootable usb stick, how to change the boot order etc to reinstall windows. I even suggested that I'd help him setup win/drivers after windows's done installing.
> He lets me go for about an hour explaining.
> "So that's it. When the setup is over, call me again and I'll help you install the drivers."
> "Bro this sounds complicated, why don't you come over? This won't even take you 5 minutes"

YOU MOTHERFUCKING PIECE OF SHIT
YOU FUCKING TRASH
CALL ME AGAIN AND I'LL SHOVE YOUR GIGABYTE GEFORCE GTX1060 6GB UP YOUR ASS, PERPENDICULARLY

The motherfucker even called me "bro"

Storytime!

This customer comes in and practically throws a computer on the counter.

Customer: This computer isn't working. I've ran the diagnostics and it says it's software. *places a dvd case with a 32 bit Windows 7 disk in it on the counter* It had Windows 10 on it, but I want Windows 7 on it.

Me: Well, you may have issues with the drivers if you put Windows 7 on it--

Customer: I don't care, I just want Windows 7.

Me: You SHOULD care. That means no wifi, no display, no mouse... Windows 7 doesn't like Windows 10 hardware.

Customer: Then... check to see Windows 7 compatibility!

Me: Alright.... *makes notes to check for Windows 7 compatibility*

Me: So has this Windows 7 been used before?

Customer: Yes, it has.

Me: On how many computers?

Customer: I've installed it on two computers and it works just fine.

Me: That's weird because Windows license keys are for one computer only. Are both of them connected to the internet?

Customer: Yes.

Me: Well, okay then... *finishes up ticket*

Customer: I work in this field and I just don't understand why they don't come with the disks anymore. How much is a Windows 10 disk?

Me: *gives price*

Customer: And do you have any?

Me: Let me check *I go to where they are, find some and come back out*

Me: Unfortunately we're out at the moment and would have to special order some back in.

Customer: OK. So then how much to fix this computer?

Me: *price of installing Windows and backing up data*

Customer: That's halfway to the price of a new one of these!

Me: Well yes, an HP at Walmart... But you do have that option if you want to take it.

Customer: Well, why does it cost that much?

Me: Well, it's $labor1 to install Windows, $labor2 to do some basic setup and drivers, and $labor3 to backup and restore data.

Customer: Oh, well I don't want data.

Me: Okay, well then it would be $total - $labor3

Customer: ...Okay, fine

Me: *updates the ticket*

When she finally left I put it on the bench and the first message said "SMART ERROR." I then did 4 different tests that said "lol, the hard drive is failing."

If you "worked in this field," you would know that a SMART error is hard drive related.

If you worked in this field, you would know that Windows is only a 1PC license, so why are you lying about installing it with no issues on other computers?

If you worked in this field, you would know you would want a 64bit Windows on your computer.

If you worked in this field, you would know how to find a Windows 10 installation media online.

If you worked in this field, you would know that HPs are not good computers to get.

IF YOU FUCKING WORKED IN THIS FIELD YOU WOULDN'T BE SUCH A FUCKING CUNT.

I actually just wanted to say - what a great time it is to be a developer.

C# has stolen so many good features now that it's pretty awesome.
JavaScript and typescript are really fun to work with.
I really love angular.
Docker is great!

I can setup pipelines and deploy an angular app for free and really easily with github-pages.

I can use linux inside windows.

I can use cloud providers to do all sorts for really cheap.

I can plug my cable-free oculus quest VR headset into my laptop and build a game pretty easily with unity (thanks to all the great oculus helper prefabs).

I can use tesseract and data science technology inside my browser!!

And I can go to medium and udemy and learn all sorts of things.

Honestly...

Just saying.
I'm actually really loving being a developer right now.

And if I do have off day, I can rant on here!

My office setup.. 27" and 34" curved DELL monitors...
Plus the red bean bag.. 😸

Had this with a relative. His laptop wasn't turning on, with or without charger so he brought it back to the store to fix it. It ran elementary os by the way (detail for later). Then he got it back after a week and we booted it and it had windows 8 installed (wtf indeed). So we called the service desk to ask about it since the issue was a broken charger (!!!). Their reply: oh yeah there was a weird system installed on it so we thought we'd reset it as well for you.

SERIOUSLY, THAT'S NOT YOUR FUCKING JOB!!

He is not tech savvy and he didn't know much about backups so that was literally about one year of work GONE. Yeah, I setup a cloud backup sync thingy for him right after that.

My love towards Microsoft:

When install Windows 10, world's most advanced operating system, I agree to use express installation to make sure I am sharing all the information with Microsoft.

Right after installation, I chose Microsoft Edge as my default browser. Can't live without it really. I also make sure my search engine is set to Bing!

Then I continue to setup Cortana and share all my personal information with her. I install office 365 to to work with my documents and use skype to chat with my friends.

Then I install Visual studio and set all my projects to Windows Application only. I mean who uses any OS other than Windows?

It doesn't finish there. Groove Player is my first choice for listening to music, Film and TV for my videos and etc.

I also always use Microsoft Maps to find my way to work!

<3 Microsoft

I have a pi-hole setup in my network for ad and tracker blocking and am dual-booting my pc.
I recently noticed just how much data windows really is trying to gather from my machine.
So I took the pi-hole graph and you can VERY clearly see the os switch. All this useless traffic coming from windows. (This is with all the privacy relevant options inside the settings already turned off!)

How do you like my setup? Ubuntu laptop on the left, windows laptop on the right.

(And giant rubber duck upper left 😼)

Since posting your setup is the cool new thing on devrant, I'll jump on the bandwagon!

FUCKING HELL
My sister has that Vaio laptop from 2012 and she wanted me to "clean it up"... You get the deal. I ran the bios and booted it up from my external SSD setup so I don't have to bother with her bloody Windows fucking 7. When I'm finished deleting some garbage she managed to accumulate on her disk I wanted to switch back to Windows to properly uninstall bloatware she had. AND THEN OT FUCKING STRUCK ME. Can't load bios. F keys don't do shit. Delete doesn't either. The bloody "ASSIST" button is as useless as always. Since the computer is so slow I'm gonna waste a whole day trying to fix it and in the end she will be like: "oh, it took you so long!". Why Vaio, why can't you just get over the fact that some people actually use BIOS and make it somehow ACCESSIBLE? It's the same shit every time I try to do anything with that laptop. I'm always getting shit on from Sony as if I paid them to fuck me. One last time. VAIO, FUCK YOU.

My brother: “There’s no way you can remove games from my computer!”
Me: “Oh really?”
Bro: “Yes! I got password on Windows!”

He didn’t knew I had remote control setup on my PC... So I hid games on his PC

So yesterday our team got a new toy. A big ass 4k screen to display some graphs on. Took a while to assemble the stand, hang the TV on that stand, but we got there.

So our site admin gets us a new HDMI cable. Coleague told us his lappy supports huge screens as he used to plug his home TV in his work lappy while WFHing. He grabs that HDMI, plugs one end into the screen, another - into his lappy and

.. nothing...
Windows does not recognize any new devices connected. The screen does not show any signs of any changes. Oh well..

Site IT admin installs all the updates, all the new drivers, upgrades BIOS and gives another try.

Nothing.

So naturally the cable is to blame. The port is working for him at home, so it's sure not port's fault. Also he uses his 2-monitor setup at work, so the port is 100% working!

I'm curious. What if..... While they are busy looking for another cable, I take that first one, plug it into my Linux (pretty much stock LinuxMint installation w/ X) lappy,

3.. 2.. 1..

and my desktop is now on the big ass 4k fat screen.

Folks. Enough bitching about Linux being picky about the hardware and Windows being more user friendly, having PnP and so. I'm not talking about esoteric devices. I'm talking about BAU devices that most of home users are using. A monitor, a printer, a TV screen, a scanner, wireless/usb speaker/mouse/keyboard/etc...
Linux just works. Face it

P.S. today they are still trying to make his lappy work with that TV screen. No luck yet.

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

Fail to setup a printer on Windows and it's Microsoft's fault.
Fail to setup a printer on Linux and it's the user's fault.

New setup since today! Tell me what you guys think and show off your favorite programming places!

Two years ago: company exec (Mac fan) buys a Surface Pro to show off our .NET application to customers as he travels. Hands it to me (I build releases) and I iron out a few Win 8 bugs since we'd always used Win 7 before. Get it set up, get to like the device a little, he takes it home... and returns it within 24 hours because he didn't mesh well with Windows. (Again, Mac user.)

8 months later he buys a Surface Pro again. I install our latest release, verify that everything is working as expected with hardware we normally don't use, and give him a controlled setup that will just work when he's at a customer site. Once again, he returns the Surface within 24 hours because he can't get used to Windows.

At least we verified Windows 8 compatibility, I guess.

Had to setup 7 HP laptops today for a small hackathon.
Install windows 10...
just shout in the room and hope all cortanas hear the same answer.
done after a couple minutes.
Windows 10 rules.

...

This story could be over but no, have a plot twist.
All pcs connected to our wifi network as we tried to install Chrome ( cause edge sucks), realized it takes hours to install.
someone drawing internet over here?!
our network wasn't that bad usually.
opens windows store on one laptop by accident.
42 downloads running.
Yep on all of them.
what were they downloading?
candy crush... bubble witch saga...mcaffee.
spent about 4h uninstalling bloatware and teaching windows not to reinstall it over and over again...

Microsoft sucks...

and I didn't even mention the "tell us why you think you don't need McAfee premium protection pl0x" and "you really sure you don't want to try edge as default browser? is really fast and stuff" dialog fields...

My work laptop (windows) updated yesterday. Today my monitors keep flickering, hanging, and going black for a few seconds then come back with an error that my display drivers crashed. Since I have basically zero access to anything admin on this machine, I put in a help desk ticket with all the details, the error message, even screen shots which took forever to get because of all the crashes.

They finally respond after about an hour, and tell me that my computer does not support 3 screens so I will have to use 2, and that is what is causing the crash. Well I have been using 3 screens with this computer since I started there in 2014, and it has worked perfectly until the update, so I asked if they could revert the update.

He told me that they could not revert it, and not only that, but I couldn't have been using 3 monitors before because the computer doesn't support it and never has. REALLY??? I just freaking told you I have been doing that for over 3 years so obviously it does support it you deaf, stupid retard. Try using your brain for 2 seconds and work on a solution instead of calling me a liar and dismissing my issue without thought.

After going back and forth for about 5 minutes I gave up and hung up. Finally I fixed it by switching out my docking station with another one I found laying around. Not sure why that worked, but I'm back to working on all 3 monitors. I called the guy back to tell him it's working and sent a picture of my setup, his response: "Well I don't know why that works because your laptop is too old to support that."

Useless...

I've found and fixed any kind of "bad bug" I can think of over my career from allowing negative financial transfers to weird platform specific behaviour, here are a few of the more interesting ones that come to mind...

#1 - Most expensive lesson learned

Almost 10 years ago (while learning to code) I wrote a loyalty card system that ended up going national. Fast forward 2 years and by some miracle the system still worked and had services running on 500+ POS servers in large retail stores uploading thousands of transactions each second - due to this increased traffic to stay ahead of any trouble we decided to add a loadbalancer to our backend.

This was simply a matter of re-assigning the IP and would cause 10-15 minutes of downtime (for the first time ever), we made the switch and everything seemed perfect. Too perfect...

After 10 minutes every phone in the office started going beserk - calls where coming in about store servers irreparably crashing all over the country taking all the tills offline and forcing them to close doors midday. It was bad and we couldn't conceive how it could possibly be us or our software to blame.

Turns out we made the local service write any web service errors to a log file upon failure for debugging purposes before retrying - a perfectly sensible thing to do if I hadn't forgotten to check the size of or clear the log file. In about 15 minutes of downtime each stores error log proceeded to grow and consume every available byte of HD space before crashing windows.

#2 - Hardest to find

This was a true "Nessie" bug.. We had a single codebase powering a few hundred sites. Every now and then at some point the web server would spontaneously die and vommit a bunch of sql statements and sensitive data back to the user causing huge concern but I could never remotely replicate the behaviour - until 4 years later it happened to one of our support staff and I could pull out their network & session info.

Turns out years back when the server was first setup each domain was added as an individual "Site" on IIS but shared the same root directory and hence the same session path. It would have remained unnoticed if we had not grown but as our traffic increased ever so often 2 users of different sites would end up sharing a session id causing the server to promptly implode on itself.

#3 - Most elegant fix

Same bastard IIS server as #2. Codebase was the most unsecure unstable travesty I've ever worked with - sql injection vuns in EVERY URL, sql statements stored in COOKIES... this thing was irreparably fucked up but had to stay online until it could be replaced. Basically every other day it got hit by bots ended up sending bluepill spam or mining shitcoin and I would simply delete the instance and recreate it in a semi un-compromised state which was an acceptable solution for the business for uptime... until we we're DDOS'ed for 5 days straight.

My hands were tied and there was no way to mitigate it except for stopping individual sites as they came under attack and starting them after it subsided... (for some reason they seemed to be targeting by domain instead of ip). After 3 days of doing this manually I was given the go ahead to use any resources necessary to make it stop and especially since it was IIS6 I had no fucking clue where to start.

So I stuck to what I knew and deployed a $5 vm running an Nginx reverse proxy with heavy caching and rate limiting linked to a custom fail2ban plugin in in front of the insecure server. The attacks died instantly, the server sped up 10x and was never compromised by bots again (presumably since they got back a linux user agent). To this day I marvel at this miracle $5 fix.

*gets countless amounts of shit with Windows because of my "nonstandard use"*
WanBLowS fanbois: "Cheap hardware!! Hardware error!! Unstable drivers!!! Can't be anything else, this OS is rock solid."

I really wish that I had your ignorance. I know when I see a shitty OS in front of me. And mind you, it actually ran Linux a while back.. just that I couldn't use my Nvidia GPU in it and had to compile a kernel with all of that crap excluded to make it work decently.. fuck Nvidia. And you know what, it actually did run fucking rock solid!!! But over time I lost the config and X.org doesn't like my dualhead setup all that much, especially the ultrawide display.

So, how about we address this issue for what it is already. THE OS FUCKING SUCKS!!!

I switched to using Ubuntu as my primary development environment about a month ago from Windows and I couldn't be happier! The initial setup was a pain in the neck (esp. display scaling issues, which Windows 10 is much better at than Ubuntu), but now that it's all set up, I'm lovin' it!

Just installed Visual Studio and Sql Server for a project on a Windows VM. Thought I'd feel comfortable as I started proper development in .NET.

I fucking hate Visual Studio and SQL Server now. The whole setup, Windows, VS, everything just feels horrible, slow, and takes ages to set up to the point you can use it.

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

I'm investigating PRs for a super legacy codebase. Someone else already approved the PRs -- somebody who has never even run the code or had the project set up before.

The codebase hasn't been touched in two years, and it hasn't been updated in four. It's using CoffeeScript, Node v0, Electron v0.30, and Angular 1.x. I obviously don't have a dev environment anymore, either, and my previous dev env was on Windows, so I'll have to translate my custom build utilities from batch to bash (or much more likely: node).

To make matters worse: the PRs break both the initial project setup and the project itself (NPM can no longer find some installed packages, among other problems). And. someone already merged them into master. So: fuck.

I'm going to yell at the author and tell him to fix his shit. Why? Because when I check out my last commit prior to his PRs, everything works perfectly. Surprise!

I was so done with this project two and a half years ago. I'm still so done with it. I just don't want to maintain this anymore, or honestly even look at it. I would happily rebuild the project from scratch, but updating it from the days of IE8? No way.

Dual monitor windows PC for working/gaming and an ubuntu laptop for on the road. My desktop monitor setup is a bit ghetto tho, ones gloss and ones a matt finish, both different sizes and different heights 😋

I finally fucking did it!

I strapped up, strapped in, strapped on... uh wait what?

I finally made the full dedicated switch to linux on my personal computer. Blew away Windows and installed linux. I was able to get about 95% of the games that I actually play on PC to run under a combo of proton/lutris-wine.

I feel like after working in a (primarily) linux shop for almost 2 years now, I've learned enough to be able to actually troubleshoot if/when something goes wonky. I've been a windows/sysadmin type in my career for about 8 years and only touched small bits of linux here and there or for fun little projects like a retropie setup.

But thanks to this gig I'm working at now, as a devops engineer, I've learned so got'damn much about linux and I've been developing scripts/tools that run on linux I figured I could, or better yet 'should', take the full plunge.

So, I've decided that if there's something I absolutely need on Windows that Linux doesn't support, instead of knee-jerking and going back to Windows, I'm going to just setup a VM of windows and daily drive Linux from now on.

Some gfx tweaks for games were definitely necessary, it's still not quite as plug and play as Windows for games, but the fact that it only took like 1.5 hours to sort out all of my games performance is really impressive. Especially, considering none of these games actually supports linux out of the box and Wine/Proton is being used to get them to work.

Usually I develop in python, mongo, cordova and node. Few days back I installed Windows on my laptop cause I needed to use the Visual Studio for a specific task. Then I thought that if I can setup the python, mongo, cordova and node stack on Windows then I don't need to switch between Linux and Windows frequently. And that was a horrible decision.

It took almost 8-10 hours to setup that shit, and still I couldn't make it work. There are so much complexities and those do not make any fucking sense! I mean why the hell I need to add the python path to the environment variables, and then again add the pip path separately. Then mongodb can not autostart. And finally I needed to make and build a package, and that waa the moment when I just scrapped it.

It takes me 2-3 hours to setup a fresh Linux box (which supports apt) including the OS installation. Same for the osX. I still wonder that why Microsoft does this! If Windows is for non-dev and non-tech people then why don't they release a Windows developer edition? Developing anything except ASP.NET and Java in Windows is a fucking nightmare for me!

Just got out a very short contracted call with the sysadmin, his job was to setup a windows server and the complaint was "we can't figure out why if we disconnect - the server is not accessible anymore and none of the services work".

I made him show me what he does and shortly after doing his regular checks HE GOES AHEAD AND PRESSES THE SHUTDOWN BUTTON.

Since it wasn't an actual windows server install, it didn't prompt or warn you at all, his thought behind this was "well I dont want it to run all the time, wasting power".

I feel also a déjà vu, as if that happened to me before, but I can't recall any time I would have had that exact situation happen.

So I manage multiple VPS's (including multiple on a dedicated server) and I setup a few proxy servers last week. Ordered another one yesterday to run as VPN server and I thought like 'hey, let's disable password based login for security!'. So I disabled that but the key login didn't seem to work completely yet. I did see a 'console' icon/title in the control panel at the host's site and I've seen/used those before so I thought that as the other ones I've used before all provided a web based console, I'd be fine! So le me disabled password based login and indeed, the key based login did not work yet. No panic, let's go to the web interface and click the console button!
*clicks console button*
*New windows launches.....*

I thought I would get a console window.

Nope.

The window contained temporary login details for my VPS... guess what... YES, FUCKING PASSWORD BASED. AND WHO JUST DISABLED THE FUCKING PASSWORD BASED LOGIN!?!

WHO THOUGHT IT WOULD BE A GOOD IDEA TO IMPLEMENT THIS MOTHERFUCKING GOD?!?

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

I was noticing some slow network and it was dropping some connections. So I booted up my old XP install with Java 6 so connect to the ASA 5505, I see it’s logging max connections of 10000 has been reached.

Fine, I recon it’s my colleague backing up his entire machine to Google Drive.
Because when he shut it off, n connections dropped.

I check back in the log, and I see there’s 4-500 connections happening per second, I think WTF and check the source IP. Lots of random IPs from Vietnam, all going to a Windows2008 Server using rdp.

(I didn’t setup our servers, so I didn’t know which server it was accessing)

Ask my other colleague, he told me it’s a windows server from an earlier project that’s not used anymore.
I rdp into it, see there’s users logged in from around the world, and I immediately do a shutdown.

Would you look at that, connections per second dropped to about 50.
I guess that server isn’t going back online ever.
And I now need to ask management for a budget to update our network infrastructure, because the old ASA 5505 is begging me to die.

TL;DR gg previous employees didn’t shut down old servers and left them open to the world to enjoy

So here's my setup.
Minimalist and clean, the only environment I can work in.

My laptop spends way more time at home now-a-days since I bought the iPad Pro 12.9 2017... It's just so practical to take to lectures.

As for my desktop... well my keyboard definitely needs an upgrade... Any suggestions on a good keyboard?

My alcohol shrine, keeps me sane 😂😍. Let's see your setups.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

I """""accidentally"""'" found some security holes in my school's Windows public computer setup.

Every student and teacher has a personal Active Directory, obviously they should be able to only see their own right?
oh wait the directory up button in explorer shows me all of them and I have r/w access to teacher and student ADs.

That's cool.

Also, the command prompt, Run prompt ad Explorer path bar are disabled...

...but batch scripts work.

Sweet.

Surely I can't do something dumb like--- oh, regedit's blocked but not the reg command.

They use the-- WHY IS GPEDIT NOT BLOCKED

Well what the fuck.

(All of this was responsibly handled by emailing the tech department. They have an email just for this! ...got a bounceback "this person is no longer employed at XYZ School.")

Got pulled out of bed at 6 am again this morning, our VMs were acting up again. Not booting, running extremely slow, high disk usage, etc.

This was the 6 time in as many weeks this happened. And always the marching orders were the same. Find the bug, smash the bug, get it working with the least effort. I've dumped hundreds of hours maintaining this broken shitheap of a system, putting off other duties to keep mission critical stations running.

The culprits? Scummy consultants, Windows 10 1709, and Citrix Studio.

Xen Server performed well enough, likely due to its open source origins and Centos architecture.

Whelp. DasSeahawks was good and pissed. Nothing like getting rousted out of bed after a few scant hours rest for patching the same broken system.

DasSeahawks lost his temper. Things went flying. Exorcists were dispatched and promptly eaten.

Enough. No consultants, no analysts, and no experts touched it. No phone calls, no manuals, not even a google search. Just a very pissed admin and his minion declaring blitzkrieg.

We made our game plan, moved the users out, smoked our cigs, chugged monster, and queued a gnu-metal playlist on spotify.

Then we took a wrecking ball to the whole setup. User docs were saved, all else was rm -r * && shred && summon -u Poseidon -beast Land_Cracken.

Started at 3pm and finished just after midnight. Rebuilt all the vms with RDP, murdered citrix studio (and their bullshit licenses), completely blocked Windows 10 updates after 1607, and load balanced the network.

So what do we get when all the experts are fired? Stabbed lightning. VMs boot in less than 10 seconds, apps open instantly, and server resources are half their previous usage state. My VMs are now the fastest stations in our complex, as they should be.

Next to do: install our mxgpu, script up snapshots and heartbeat, destroy Windows ads/telemetry, and setup PDQ. damn its good to be good!

What i learned --> never allow testing to go to production, consultants will fuck up your shit for a buck, and vendors are half as reliable over consultants. Windows works great without Microsoft, thin clients are overpriced, and getting pissed gets things done.

This my friends, is why admins are assholes.

Why the fuck did Oracle change their policies on the official JDK and made the website nigh impossible to use?!

It was shit from the 90s before, and now its still shit just modern.

Why do I have to register do get the JDK, you know Im going to use the fucking 10min mail. I just wanted to setup a freaking build server and I had to go over your retarded website that for some reason *refreshes* and erases the username field everytime I put in the wrong password. Why?

Why is oracle just outright bad at making websites?! Its always a maze to navigate and now it also takes seconds to even load...

This shit is why everyone uses openJDK and adopt. 3 billion devices running java?! Not with your jre/jdk they are not, because It's a pain to get... Don't me even get started on the mess it does on windows server. Why wasn't my JAVA_HOME set automatically?! I lost almost 2 hours because I trusted your piece of shit software to so the one job it has, even reinstalled it completely...

Get your shit together Oracle, this was unacceptable 10 years ago, let alone now

My client's using some legacy server side software. I set it all up nice and isolated with proxmox, tunneled it through cloudflare, got the folks to do their install on a windows vm, passthrough their licensing usb. Hosted GLPI on it too (system inventory) and so on.

Wait for it. Windows Server refuses to accept local or domain passwords. WTF. Even went ahead and did a Utilman reset on it which lets you use an admin cmd prompt to the login screen where you could reset the password. Insane that it was even possible, but no good.

Client blamed linux for it, I switched over to Windows Server on baremetal. I setup Hyper-V thinking it should be just as capable as KVM.

Nope.

Guess what, you can't pass through usb for licensing (the legacy software). MOFOS DECIDED TO install it baremetal. I couldn't even get hyper-v to create a decent virtual network. It keeps changing all my network adapter settings. I COULDN'T EVEN PASSTHROUGH PCIE NETWORK CARDS.

This feels like an eternally stagnated, mossy soup of abandonware.

FUCK YOU WINDOWS. You've been sore pain the ass for EVERYONE.

So Microsoft, you tell me that there is a known bug, if you have Windows 10 with the newest update installed on a SSD and Apps running on another hard drive?! And this bugs causes random freezes of the whole PC from time to time?

WHAT THE FUCK?!

It is a common setup nowadays to have a SSD with windows 10 and software on other hard drives and you didn't care to check it before releasing the update? Which I HAVE to download and install?

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT!

James: Your windows dev machine is setup and now ready.

Me: Checks if something is missing...

Me: [ installs notepad++] ... it’s perfect now!!!

Why me. Why is it always me who has issues with Windows. (The OS)

I HAVE to use windows for a specific thing right now. Fair enough, I have an old system lying around somewhere with not the best specs ever but it'll do. Windows 7, clean install.

Firstly, let's boot up! Booting goes fine, login goes well... "Installing device drivers" (keyboard and mouse combi). I connected this set a gazillion times before so no clue why windows would need to download the drivers YER AGAIN. But, fine, it works.
Let's connect a USB webcam and to to the hardware testing website to see if my setup is right!

(I mostly don't blame this part on windows)

The webcam drivers install successfully, good. Although the page says it isn't working, it displays the live cam footage well so whatever.
Installed Chrome (not chromium too badly) to see if it shows fine there but chrome doesn't detect ANY cam/mic combination at all, not even the integrated one(s).

Annoying so let's reboot and see if it works normally with all checks okay on Firefox.

Rebooted.... aaaaand the USB webcam driver installation fails. I'm weirded out since the drivers were installed BEFORE the reboot already. Firefox now does not display any can/mic.... until it does after a few reloads. Windows is still saying that the driver installation failed.

The testing webpage, however, still says its not working while I'm literally seeing my ugly smug on screen. I contact support which does a remote check and says all is good but there was probably "a glitch with Windows" while the checks are still mostly red, I take a copy of the chat log just to be sure.

Now, I kinda want to shut this system down until the time I'll need it but I'm rather afraid that Windows is going to throw driver conundrums yet again and I simply *CANNOT* have this right now. So, I'm leaving this system on until I need it, and I'll pray windows plays along well.

@localhost Here's the setup I use when volunteering at my church. Room for another developer but when it's just me I use synergy on both machines. Not always by the all the windows. The wheels make it easy to go anywhere in the building.

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

My grandpa is using his computer for video editing and creating photo books. His setup was:
- A 100GB SSD for C
- A 1TB HD for D
The problem:
He never had more than 6GB free on his C Drive because somehow Windows and his programs filled it all with some utter bullshit which couldn't be removed or whatever.

So I promised him to install Linux for his Emails and Surfing and create a Windows 10 VM for him to use his programs.

The Linux installation from downloading a iso over creating a bootable drive to actually installing it was faster than finding the fucking Windows 10 Iso.

Which was about the same time as installing fucking windows because this bullshit prints out one fucking line at a time and then waits for you to read it for 15 motherfucking seconds before printing the next line.

And don't get me started on the fucking telemetry.

Just shifted my development setup from windows to linux

Windows is full of shit I never knew!

I hate windows.
I hate windows update.
I hate windows update rebooting my PC and not reopen everything from last session.
I hate windows update trying to install updates while running from battery in power save mode.
I hate windows not being able to figure out where to put windows on dual head setup.
I hate developing in windows environment.

Man I'm glad that I use windows at home only for gaming.
Man I'm glad that I can choose a non-windows PC on my new workplace.

Finally dumped windows from my tower/gaming rig!!!

I'm now running Ubuntu Budgie and Windows 10 inside a qemu/kvm VM with gpu passthrough. That way I have almost-native performance and no additional setup effort for installing games.

Why does MS need to be such a scumbag with Windows updates?
Every now and then, this unskipable blue setup screen appears and forces the user to make some decisions.

"Do you want to set Edge as the default browser?"

"Do you want a 360 subscription?"

The usual crap.

But it‘s not skippable!

You have to make a decision and the UI for "fuck off" is different for every decision.

You can‘t just press the Nope button every time.
It‘s fucking deliberate. They want you to spend time on reading their shit and force it down your throat.

And let‘s not forget about people who don‘t know computer stuff very well and are confused by this. Then call us because "the computer isn‘t working again."
And you can‘t tell them to skip this slimy rotten vomit of a marketing weasel because you need them to tell you what the options are for each fucking decision screen.

😫

!rant
I'm developing an OS. I tried running it on the laptop that's on the ground. Everything works fine except text mode. There is no output when running it in text mode(not the high resolution one shown on image). Since the OS sends all data that is printed to the first serial port I might as well read the output from the serial ports. Since the laptop I use for development doesn't have any serial ports I had to use the older Windows 98 PC. For unknown reasons I could not get any output from the serial ports so I gave up.
tl;dr I wasted some time trying to debug my OS.
Image of my debugging setup(taken with the latest potato).

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

Here is my home setup (I mainly work at home)
Left monitor is for my windows machine, right monitor swaps between my laptop and my PC (depends if I am working or not) laptop running Manjaro with i3 and the tablet on the whiteboard will be used for some monitoring in the future

Don't mind the terrible cable management behind the table :)

My setup 😁, left is parrot, Middle is windows and right is arch

The ones who use it, what do you like or value about Linux? Why do you use it?

Before I answer, let me say that I am a noob compared to the rest of this community. I run Ubuntu because Arch was too complicated when I tried and bash scripts equal to frustrations for me. That's my knowledge level.

- I don't feel "observed" when using a Linux distro compared to Windows and macOS.
- Feel more connected to the open source thought and the free spirit.
- Feel like I can do anything I want. Learning new programming languages easily, trying out web servers, try and setup own website or mail server etc.
- Everything is accessible. Read something cool about docker? ALT+T to open a terminal and start up a docker container to try out.
- No Internet browsing for software, like googling "Firefox download english".
- Sometimes forces me to learn about the workings of a computer, like networks, servers, routing, firewalls, bootup sequence etc.
- So many great command line tools. Want to find out quickly who owns a website? Want to query a specific DNS server? All possible within 5 seconds!

All in all using Linux feels like watching a documentary while using Windows is more like watching a dumb comedy show where I can turn my brain off, but get more stupid after a while.

This is why I hate Windows:

For about a month now, I've been learning/working on salesforce, so my Macbook was enough for me.
Today there was a bug in something I built in iur Python backend, and since it has a dependency on windows, I booted the old guy up.

And this is what I see. For about 1.5 hours this went on.

Then it started, but system consuming 100% disk and 80+% CPU. Can't do a thing.

And when zoom finally opened (for a quick meet), the camera turned on halfway down the meeting, and then the system restarted on it's own.

Old man showing that same screen again for more than 30 minutes.

Since I have dual boot on this one, I hard-shutdown it using power button, and now boot into ubuntu 20. This works so beautifully (although it froze for about 5 seconds before popping up the updates panel, something I CHOSE to keep enabled). I try going back to Windows, and it's hell again.

Here I am now trying to set up a ec2 instance and setup the app source there so that I can debug with RDP.

And yeah, Component Object Model is a motherfucking bitch. Person who invented it should die. People who build apps leveraging this should die. Business leaders who say "Hey this app (built with COM) can solve the problem easily, so use this" should die choking on their own phallus. And developers like me who keep using this because "the last guy did this" should die too.

Microsoft and it's products are the death of sane people.

Fucking Gates. Its the same damn hardware.

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

My non dev friend called me in middle of night for getting shortcut virus removed! I would have blasted 🔫 him but I felt pity on the guy as I know that he is poor with tech stuff

Any he had only windows, so I Google up solution and replied back to him.

He asked where to put it. I told him in cmd. He is like what so I told him to press win+r then in that type d and "black" 🏴 window will appear. Type in that.

guess what he typed exactly as mentioned in the reply and didn't replace the drive name properly .😑

I told him to put proper drive and saw that he missed spaces so l told him that he missed space 😤 and he put only one space and it still had problem so I had to explain it in weirdest was possible( shown in fig 1.1 had been writing report and figure gave yo be mentioned with number 😅)

Finally. It was all done! Well some pf my cs ( !counter strike but computer science friend) are worse then this can't use teminal or even connect to WiFi (wpa-enterprise @ college with mschap v2 and peap auth which is crackable using twin tower and brute force) properly, do I guess it not BA's that this guy cry to get rid of shortcut virus (virus > wifi setup) 😬

Finally I feel relived after ranting 😪

So my father has to deal with some vendors providing niche hardware and software solutions for a single department in the company.

Once the hardware finishes its work and transfers results to the managing PC, the PC has to upload those results to the server on the internet. The problem is that if no one's working with that setup for a few minutes the software in the PC can no longer communicate with the server.

Naturally, since idle time is in the equation, I thought of SO_KEEPALIVE (or whatever it's called in Windows). Wireshark confirms the absence of keepalive packets. However, the app doesn't seem to have any means to enable it... Hence the need to work with support guys.

One would expect the support to be professional, experts considering anything related to the app.

One would NOT expect to receive a call: "Hey, look, I was doing some googling on the internet... You might be right, enabling KA might help with the issue. We were discussing with our engineers and we tried to find some application that could enable KA on your computer. We couldn't find anything, but we believe that's the way to go. So give it a try and try to find some app on the internet that enables KA for our proprietary application". // everything in Lithuanian ofc.

I mean...seriously...?
I was startled to hear this suggestion. Since I expected them to be experts I assumed there's something IDK about Windows sockets -- could Windows enable KA globally, by-default? Did not find such a thing. Could Windows allow application A to control application B's socket options? Frankly, I'm too afraid to even look for this. I dislike Windows already. If this turned out to be true I'd probably become an anti-windows evangelist.

My Windows friend: They say I need to setup Environment variables!!

Me: Oh! I've done that before.

After 5 minutes...
Me: How do I get into that Advanced Settings???!!!

Dev of 15 years here. All my career historically started and evolved/revolved around Microsoft in one way or the other, so was my exposure to only DOS and the Windows as a child and growing up.

Like already discussed in multiple rants here, I was one of those naturally Windows -favoring ppl through all my life. That is not to say I didn't try Linux here and there, for hosting of personal projects, as one usually does. But it never quite stuck with me as a personal daily driver, mainly because all I ever needed for personal use was a browser, discord, and Steam/GOG/Epic Games store for gaming (work-wise I always had and still have company provided laptops which are OF COURSE Windows powered)

Anyway, maybe you can see where I'm going with this... I recently gave Nobara Linux a go (Glorious Eggroll's Fedora flavor, with some custom kernel patches) and I have to say, not thinking of going back to Windows at all.

Just a few thoughts on comparing two sets of experiences with Win vs Nobara
- Win definitely feels more sluggish
- Nobara's default desktop env was Gnome 42 with some extensions pre-enabled. I dove right into hacking/customizing it to my tastes and it looked glorious. Never would have achieved this customization with Win
- I was using RDP to remote into my work laptop from my personal desktop setup with Windows and I still successfully do so with Remmina now in Linux
- A week ago I dove deeper and installed Awesome window manager as a UI and mh boy does this feel intimidating at first. But then the allure of having nice window managing experience was too strong, and 15 years of coding do help with just seeing a new language and kinda feeling at home instantly (Lua language for AwesomeWM customization/themes). Fast forward a week and now I'm sitting happily with 3 monitor setup, one of them vertical, all properly auto aligned with arandr on startup, variety+wal for wallpaper auto circling and applying a theme out of main wallpaper colors every so often (+wrote a script to put those main colors into my RGB peripherals via OpenRGB)
- Gaming. I still game, Steam Deck from steam gave me all the confidence to set up Linux gaming that I needed. I think I am now properly versed in all things Wine/Proton/Lutris/Bottles/Heroic Games Launcher, you name it. Recently finished Cyberpunk 2077.

ANYWAY, thank you for coming to my Linux appreciation TED talk. It's amazing.

Feeling pretty accomplished for someone who did no "work" today lol. I needed to work on side gigs but instead I:

1) Factory reset a 2011 Macbook Pro I'm selling and reinstalled Mojave using a patch (this laptop is officially unsupported by Mojave as of June).

2) Migrated all personal files from my windows desktop to my NAS. I'm turning this computer into a gaming rig now that I exclusively use my 2017 Macbook Pro for development.

3) Setup RDP from my macbook to my desktop.

4) Fixed registry errors and deleted junk apps off my desktop.

5) Erased and formatted all USB drives I had lying around.

6) Packaged up an old Xbox One for my brother-in-law which will get mailed tomorrow (included a few USBs for him since I rarely use'em).

7) Tested streaming my Xbox One X from my PC but it's laggy as F (both are wired, have static internal IPs, and use my router for DNS...it's just the app I guess).

8) Scored a like-new Scuf Vantage for my PS4 for $140 (the guy who was selling it paid $214 a month ago lol). I traded my spare Xbox One S for a PS4 slim and in an attempt to get used to it, I got this controller with thumbsticks in the same position as Xbox's.

9) Fixed and updated my Synergy app (mouse/keyboard sharing - I can use PBP on my 38" LG ultrawide and it's fairly seamless going between them).

10) Cloned a buddy's repo and set the project up to work locally.

11) Starting to get some work done while watching the Vikings game.

The Windows SDK was failing to install because the version of vcredist was newer then it needed.

The setup simply failed without saying anything about that. I had to see the log and find out that vcredist failed to installed with error code 5100 and find that out from Google how to fix that.

Why is MS like this? Why not just say that your vcredist version is too new for this program? Just unistall it and it will be fixed?

I just wasted 2 hours behind this. If my work never needed it I would never even think about using this.

I finally bit the bullet and got a 2018 macbook pro i7 with 1 terabyte ssd. I've been needing a personal laptop for development for awhile. I thought about going full Linux but it's tough finding Linux laptops that support thunderbolt 3 charging.

I tried to make Windows and WLS work. But it's a pain getting my Golang, GCP, and Kubernetes workflow setup on it. I keep having to jump command prompts and it annoys the shit out of me. Going multi monitor helps a lot, but I like to be at coffee shops and code.

I feel sick a out giving Apple more money especially $3,000. But it was money well spent. My workflow is seamless and unlike on my Windows laptop I dont spend 3 to 4 days just setting up my environment.

If linux is used and maintained by professional power users mostly, why on earth does it never gets good support for basic things Windows does?

Screen dims while playing video, configuring lock screen to work with DM sucks as hell, you even have to define most keyboard shortcuts manually, Optimus GPU setup always buggy, you have to spend some time just configuring power management to work just fine.

We really need to fix this. I mean I am a Linux addict but time is money too.

VsCode.

I have been on a journey with editors, all the way back to using edit.exe in Windows 95, to notepad, MS FrontPage, Adobe Dreamweaver, PHPDesigner, vim, nano, then out to Eclipse, Atom, Brackets, notepad++, back to Atom, then VsCode.

And by far, vsCode has given me the most productivity and customisation of them all to not care about what project I open, what language it's written in, or what frameworks are working behind it. I can switch with workspaces and everything is setup to go, yes it's a pain in the ass to setup, but it's a ducking dream to just open and jump in.

Now being able to use VsCode for Salesforce has dropped any requirement for me to keep eclipse around.

So just installed the new vs code user setup thing and oh my god!

Finally a custom title bar that actually looks good on windows instead of a nice dark application with a blinding white titlebar :-D

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

I have finally decided to stop helping people setup a proper machine learning environment inside of their machines with Proper GPU support.

I-fucking-give-up.

Goggle Colab, EVERYONE is getting dey ass sent to Colab. I DON'T GIVE A FUCK about privacy and shit like that at this fucking moment, getting TIRED af of getting messages about someone somehow fucking up their CUDA installation, and/or their entire machine (had one dude trying to run native GPU support through WSL 2, their machine did not have the windows update version 2004 and he has on an older build, upon update he fucked everything up EVEN THOUGH I TOLD HIM NOT TO DO IT YET)

.......fuck it, I am sending everyone to Colab. YES I UNDERSTAND THAT PRIVACY IS A THING and Goggle bad and all that jazz......but if you believe in Roko's Basilisk then I AM DOING THEM A FAVOR

I work hard to get our robot overlords into function, let it be known here, I support our robot overlords and will do as much as possible to bring them to life and have me own 2b big tiddy with a nice ass android.

I should also mention that I've had a few drinks on me already and keep getting these messages.

I hate the Windows vs Linux posts and the Windows sucks posts but god dammit...
With Windows 7 becoming older and older with less and less things supporting it (latest thing is the new Oculus Dash) I yet again decided to try out Windows 10 to see if I should finally upgrade from a reasonably stable system.

So I make a virtual machine out of my physical one and boot it up in VMWare... I upgrade to Windows 10 to check it out it's kind of janky, but I attribute the jankiness to the messiness of running my physical machine in a VM... I continue with the setup process and suddenly, I only see a black screen and a cursor...
I notice VMware is hinting at not being able to connect to the monitor... I realise that, while everything is black and I can't even open Task Manager, I can still see the Ctrl-alt-delete screen so I'm fairly certain at this point it's the VGA driver, still thinking it's probably VMware...

I boot up into safe mode and I try to open up Device manager to uninstall the driver, it won't open (no error or anything, just doesn't open)...

I try opening up devices in the settings and see that the display device is giving an error, try to uninstall it from there, but it freezes the settings app, every time..

I try to uninstall VMware tools as that's where the driver is, click on remove or uninstall whatever the button says and guess what, it freezes the settings app....

I try to open task manager to kill it and task manager is not responding...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
fuck it, I'm done...

I'm freaking done trying to get Linux on my machine. I've tried every distro with many different versions of the kernel and I always run into the same problem on my desktop.

The computer super stutters for 2 seconds ish than freezes.

I've spent DAYS looking into this issue trying to find something. The worst part is that it can happen 5 minutes when I boot or 5 hours. At first I thought it was Compton. Then I thought I installed arch wrong. Maybe an update to the BIOS? How about downloading updated microcode? Maybe this obscure bug with AMD processors and setting power idle to typical? Nothing. I'm now behind on my school work because of the massive amount of time ive spent getting this fixed. It works just fine on my laptop, but it doesn't work on the machine I built to code with. I'm done. Give me Force Lightning, a red lightsaber, and call me a Sith baby because I'm joining the dark side. Here I come Windows.

For those who are wondering my setup:
Ryzen 7 1700
Rx 480
Asus x-370 prime
16 gb Corsair RAM

And no, Windows has never had this bug.

I have been keeping this inside for long time and I need to rant it somewhere and hear your opinion.

So I'm working as a Team Lead Developer at a small company remotely based in Netherlands, I've been working there for about 8 years now and I am the only developer left, so the company basically consists of me and the owner of the company which is also the project manager.

As my role title says I am responsible for many things, I maintain multiple environments:
- Maintain Web Version of the App
- Maintain A Cordova app for Android, iOS and Windows
- Working with pure JavaScript (ES5..) and CSS
- Development and maintenance of Cordova Plugins for the project in Java/Swift
- Trying to keep things stable while trying very hard to transit ancient code to new standards
- Testing, Testing, Testing
- Keeping App Stable without a single Testing Unit (sadly yes..)
- Just pure JavaScript no framework apart from JQuery and Bootstrap for which I strongly insist to be removed and its being slowly done.

On the backend side I maintain:
- A Symfony project
- MySQL
- RabbitMQ
- AWS
- FCM
- Stripe/In-App Purchases
- Other things I can't disclose

I can't disclose the nature of the app but the app is quite rich in features and complex its limited to certain regions only but so far we have around 100K monthly users on all platforms, it involves too much work especially because I am the only developer there so when I am implementing some feature on one side I also have to think about the other side so I need to constantly switch between different languages and environments when working, not to mention I have to maintain a very old code and the Project Owner doesn't want to transit to some more modern technologies as that would be expensive.

The last raise I had was 3 years ago, and so far he hasn't invested in anything to improve my development process, as an example we have an iOS version of the app in Cordova which of course involves building , testing, working on both frontend and native side and etc., and I am working in a somewhat slow virtual machine of Monterey with just 16 GB of RAM which consumed days of my free time just to get it working and when I'm running it I need to close other apps, keep in mind I am working there for about 8 years.

The last time I needed to reconfigure my work computer and setup the virtual machine it costed me 4 days of small unpaid holiday I had taken for Christmas, just because he doesn't have the enough money to provide me with a decent MacBook laptop. I do get that its not a large company, but still I am the only developer there its not like he needs to keep paying 10 Developers.

Also:
- I don't get paid vacation
- I don't have paid holiday
- I don't have paid sick days
- My Monthly salary is 2000 euro GROSS (before taxes) which hourly translates to 12 Euro per hour
- I have to pay taxes by myself
- Working remotely has its own expenses: food, heating, electricity, internet and etc.
- There are few other technical stuff I am responsible of which I can't disclose in this post.

I don't know if I'm overacting and asking a lot, but summarizing everything the only expense he has regarding me is the 2000 euro he sends me on which of course he doesn't need to pay taxes as I'm doing that in my country.

Apart from that just in case I spend my free time in keeping myself updated with other tech which I would say I fairly experienced with like: Flutter/Dart, ES6, NodeJS, Express, GraphQL, MongoDB, WebSockets, ReactJS, React Native just to name few, some I know better than the other and still I feel like I don't get what I deserve.

What do you think, do I ask a lot or should I start searching for other job?

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

The cordova-windows platform setup is such a fucking shitfest. Even after installing everything, setting all sorts of env variables it still failed to properly run.

Thank fuck there's cordova-electron, so I don't have to fuck around with that anymore and can also just have the desktop be done, without having to seperate across different desktop platforms either.

I HATE SURFACES SO FRICKING MUCH. OK, sure they're decent when they work. But the problem is that half the time our Surfaces here DON'T work. From not connecting to the network, to only one external screen working when docked, to shutting down due to overheating because Microsoft didn't put fans in them, to the battery getting too hot and bulging.... So. Many. Problems. It finally culminated this past weekend when I had to set up a Laptop 3. It already had a local AD profile set up, so I needed to reset it and let it autoprovision. Should be easy. Generally a half-hour or so job. I perform the reset, and it begins reinstalling Windows. Halfway through, it BSOD's with a NO_BOOT_MEDIA error. Great, now it's stuck in a boot loop. Tried several things to fix it. Nothing worked. Oh well, I may as well just do a clean install of Windows. I plug a flash drive into my PC, download the Media Creation Tool, and try to create an image. It goes through the lengthy process of downloading Windows, then begins creating the media. At 68% it just errors out with no explanation. Hmm. Strange. I try again. Same issue. Well, it's 5:15 on a Friday evening. I'm not staying at work. But the user needs this laptop Monday morning. Fine, I'll take it home and work on it over the weekend. At home, I use my personal PC to create a bootable USB drive. No hitches this time. I plug it into the laptop and boot from it. However, once I hit the Windows installation screen the keyboard stops working. The trackpad doesn't work. The touchscreen doesn't work. Weird, none of the other Surfaces had this issue. Fine, I'll use an external keyboard. Except Microsoft is brilliant and only put one USB-A port on the machine. BRILLIANT. Fortunately I have a USB hub so I plug that in. Now I can use a USB keyboard to proceed through Windows installation. However, when I get to the network connection stage no wireless networks come up. At this point I'm beginning to realize that the drivers which work fine when navigating the UEFI somehow don't work during Windows installation. Oh well. I proceed through setup and then install the drivers. But of course the machine hasn't autoprovisioned because it had no internet connection during setup. OK fine, I decide to reset it again. Surely that BSOD was just a fluke. Nope. Happens again. I again proceed through Windows installation and install the drivers. I decide to try a fresh installation *without* resetting first, thinking maybe whatever bug is causing the BSOD is also deleting the drivers. No dice. OK, I go Googling. Turns out this is a common issue. The Laptop 3 uses wonky drivers and the generic Windows installation drivers won't work right. This is ridiculous. Windows is made by Microsoft. Surface is made by Microsoft. And I'm supposed to believe that I can't even install Windows on the machine properly? Oh well, I'll try it. Apparently I need to extract the Laptop 3 drivers, convert the ESD install file to a WIM file, inject the drivers, then split the WIM file since it's now too big to fit on a FAT32 drive. I honestly didn't even expect this to work, but it did. I ran into quite a few more problems with autoprovisioning which required two more reinstallations, but I won't go into detail on that. All in all, I totaled up 9 hours on that laptop over the weekend. Suffice to say our organization is now looking very hard at DELL for our next machines.

!rant

What's your dream GSDR/GWDR setup?

(Get shit/work done room)

Spacious desk, three 21" monitors. MacBook Pro laptop and windows/ubuntu desktop.

A nice big dry erase or smart board on the wall.

Hardwood/hard carpet floors.

One empty wall so that I may bounce a tennis ball against it while I contemplate.

Electric piano.

A tough padded bench for naps and laying down to change perspective.

Very good lighting.

Close proximity to a gym.

I guess I'll have to move out of my parents first though 😅

So I'm basically my family's IT guy, as you'd expect, but this is just pulling my hairs.

My mom's laptop has a weird error message saying something about a corrupt windows update database.

Not wanting to mess the system up, I decided to factory reset the computer and see if that helped.

During the factory reset, windows tells me that it can't delete all files, and that another factory reset might be in order.

Alright, I don't think any more of it and proceed to setup the account on the computer, everything works fine.

Next day I decide to run windows update on it just to see if everything works as it should, the computer restarts and immediately BSoDs on me. Upon reboot the same error from before the system reset pops up again, and I'm back to square one.

Fuck windows and all its constant issues

Went through changing Apple ID email. I have 💻,📱and⌚️.

Felt like that horror movie moment when protagonist tries to be stealthy but makes a noise and a huge mob of zombies turn heads all at once. For what I love apple, the simplicity, in the email changing process there is none of that.

They forced me to enter my 60 arbitrary obscure characters password on Apple Watch screen.

On the other hand I felt nostalgic. When I was using Linux this all was my day to day experience no matter the distro, and I got a Linux Foundation certificate, I contributed to Elementary. Can’t imagine the experience of a user who just switched to Linux.

Windows? I don’t want to think about that, let alone talking. You only need to know that I successfully configured a SoE setup AND active directory in ad-hoc unstable network of literally rusty old computers. And I still switched to Linux back then.

Tmw the setup CD for your new network switch only works on Windows XP...

Installed Windows XP in a Virtual Machine today and used it as if it were my host os, people at the classes were like. wtf.. lol. Next plan, setup someone's laptop with Linux and make it look like Windows. Worth a shot lol.

Got my laptop back from SquareTrade today. This is after a month, 2 weeks of which they gave no status updates.

Per their "Repair Summary":
Reported issue: Power/Charging port
Actions: Repaired
Parts repaired/replaced: None. OS reloaded
(Note this was originally a Windows 10/Gentoo setup)

WTF??? I thought the extra M2 SSD they included might have been the drive they had replaced, but nope. Both are blank (one W8/what the computer originally came with, the other W10).
I'm at a loss right now.

Linux or Windows - still a problem for inexperienced computer users.
I was an IT professional for 35 years but haven't looked at a line of code for 10 years. And it certainly looks different today -
I have trouble using my smart Phone. I have always disliked the intimidation tehniques practised by Microsoft over the years. When
I was running OS2 in the 90's I couldn't get any software for it because MS had persuaded the developers not to release any OS2 versions until Chicago (AKA WIN95) was released. I was forced to use Windows for years until I finally decided to try Linux. Linux
is a great answer but unfortunately unless you are a current programmer there seems to be some situations that force you to maintain a version of Windows (setting up devices, Printers and developed software). Now that UEFI has been introduced as the standard in new PCs it is very difficult just to install and run Linux. So as WIN10 (the most invasive and slow running Windows to date) is the only "Valid" OS - MS is still dictating what we can and can't do. I decided to sell my new PC and pick up an old BIOS PC so that I could run linux and Win 7 to accomplish
my needs. How long can this go on? When will Linux be a "valid" Operating System. And when will a non-programmer be easily able to setup his hardware and find necessary software to run on Linux.

For those who use Windows, have a desktop and notebook computer and want to use the same keyboard and mouse on both.
Windows has a program called "Mouse without Borders" that let you use the mouse and keyboard of one computer on another like a dual monitor setup. It's works via LAN and I have to say that I haven't any lag. You can copy text from one computer and paste into another and you can drag files too (that are copied to a special folder).

My desktop computer has a big monitor and of course it's better than my notebook and I don't want to spend money in another monitor, so this is a life saver for those who are in the same situation.

Cheers!

Finally built my own rig 😋❤️

I need to setup a Windows Server with an AD (and therefore an own domain) that can be reached from a Linux host for a test environment... Holy crap I totally forgot what a huge pain in the ass that crap is!

Pro Tip: If youre connected to a Server via VPN and RDP and you create a domain and subsequently get logged out from the server, you're fucked.

Fought with the Windows Disk Manager for way too long this morning trying to shrink a partition with plenty of space so that I could setup a native dual boot...

Screw that tool, I resized the partition to nothing by formatting it.

Finally switching to single boot linux. I had to keep my double boot windows because I needed it for few classes in school.
I passed all of them (at least I think so)

I love the purity of clean install after chaotic setup.

So following a previous rant, I’ve decided to make the jump and move full time to a Linux setup on my PC, with a windows VM (I do much more Ruby and php at home than Windows stuff, so makes sense to use Linux as everyday os.

The question that I need help with is which distro to go with.

I have experience with Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, and Debian, but I’m not adverse to trying something new, I’m even toying with the idea of Arch (but with a few test runs on a vm first)

Looks like my new years resolution is to be more controversial.

I realize that all the OSes can easily have 10s with the correct setup, however that wouldn't be much fun.

Bit of background:

After I almost threw a Windows pc against the wall for not being able to ssh from the cmd after I had already spent ages trying to install something, which was one command on the Linux and Mac terminal, I thought about the differences between the 3. Then, when a friend of mine (who has used Linux for many years) spent many hours trying to connect a pair of headphones to his Linux computer, I decided to make this graph to spark a debate and hear your opinions.

F**king hate Windows for its insanely confusing proxy setup required for software development...

> Setup proxy in Windows network settings
> Then, setup HTTP_PROXY & HTTPS_PROXY environment variable at the system/user level.
> Followed by separate proxy settings for java, maven, docker, git, npm, bower, jspm, eclipse, VS Code, every damn IDE/Editor which downloads plugins...
> On top of everything, find out the domains which does not need to go through proxy and add them to NO_PROXY.. at each level..
> It does not end here. Sometimes, I need to setup proxy for SSH connections... like, if I have to use git with SSH and not HTTP/S... Uhhh....

More than half of the problems me and my dev team face is related to setting the right proxy. Why can't it be like, set in one place and everything picks up from there, like in any linux machine or for God's sake, a Mac ?

Worst of all is, my org uses a configuration script, which resolves into a list of proxy servers, from which one of them will be used. So, I need to download that script, find out which is the right proxy server and then, use it in all the aforesaid places... WTH ?????

Is this a common workplace problem for all developers ??? Will this be solved by Windows Subsystem for Linux ???

You win Linux. That was the last straw. I will never install ANY linux distribution ever again.

Setup a simple FTP server. What can possibly go wrong ?

Ok now I want it to point to /media/ftp

Easy, right ?

Just add local_root=/media/ftp

Weeeeellll nop.

Not working. Completly ingnoring this setting, all users log to home directory.

#chroot_local_user=YES

tried, no effect.

I'm wiping this server and installing windows server there.

Too bad, the process started very well, the machine is fully confiogured, ready to go, DNS working every thing working. Except this shitty FTP.

So FUCK YOU linux wioth config files, WELCOME windows with nice GUI where I can just SELECT the default ftp folder

Fed up with f@_#-$&@_ Microsoft bullshit, computer refused to install IIS without a reboot first. Rebooted, got bluescreen with some error like APC_Index mismatch since it was hooked up to an external monitor (this has happened before, but only when booting into Windows, not Ubuntu), god knows why now since it was hooked up to same monitor before reboot and worked just fine. All this because some stupid school related task requires Visual Studio and a web project-solution that takes ages to run/debug which I would rather build and devug through attaching remote debugger to the running IIS-process. Instead I get into a boot-loop when the screen is connected, and when I connect the screen after a normal boot it restarts itself. Why is it always like this? Most of the time is spent just to setup the environment or making Windows work. F#&#_ this and the assignment, goodnight.

This is an anti-rant...

I had a problematic arch-dwm setup which i've been struggling with for a looong time, and when i thought i still needed quite some time to solve all issues, yesterday i somehow managed to hit the right solutions for each problem in a single evening. My setup is now in its most stable and usable state ever, and rsynced to a flash drive. I am no longer forced to use windows for my daily needs.

Praise be to holy gnu and holy tux! Do you think maybe i should sacrifice some electronics for the souls of st. ritchie, st. thompson, st. stallman and st. torvalds?

Fuck windows!

Now that I have your attention. My problem is with "IAR embedded workbench", not so much with windows but I'll get to that.
I've used that IDE for a few years.. 2 years ago. Since then I apparently forgot how to even create a project from scratch with adding all the necessary libraries and all that.

My initial deal with a client was to give them a solution using whatever tools I deem necessary. As I recently moved to linux and IAR is not available for that os.. and I also enjoyed working with CLion and PyCharm which Are available I decide to use CLion to write my C project.
A problem was that to compile code for microcontrollers I need tools unsupported by CLion.. oh well. I can do all the compilation and uploading of the code through terminal .. so I make a bash script that does it all. Super convenient. Development is going well and all.. until they ask me for the project.

I sent them the project so that they can see my progress. They can't do shit with what I gave them because they don't even have make on their machines let alone the compiler. All they have is IAR. But the guy that wants to see the code is not really a programmer.. he is a hardware specialist so I can't expect him to do anything more than use what he knows. He doesn't need or want to learn more right now.

So I go to windows and start porting my code to an IAR project and 2 days later I am still stuck with it. FUCK. Not only was the installation process horrible but the tools I wanted to install additionally did not work as promised either.

I know it took me about 2 days to setup all I needed on linux but I was enjoying it every step of the way. While this garbage is frustrating me so much. The fact that I used to do it before adds to the pain.

I am this close to telling them to just look at my code in notepad and I can setup a vm for them in which they can compile it if they really really need to.

If they just told me from the very start that they want me to work with IAR that would have been fine. I would have never seen the easier way and would have gladly figure it out then. Not now.

Warning long rambling story cause sleep deprivation

I never really bothered with ssh outside of using putty to remote into my servers and rpi's from my desktop to run updates, install something, or whatever else.

But today I was on a call with my cousin bored cause she was just rambling, so I opened vscode to clean my install of unnecessary extensions I installed and haven't used more than once or twice.

I saw Remote - SSH and as I was bored listening to a teenager complain about high school just like I used to (lol) and responding when she asked me something. I scrolled through the page, then the documentation just casually skimming the text

I setup an ssh key on an rpi I threw manjaro arm following the instructions on their tips and tricks page
I then moved the key to my desktop using winscp (cause lazy)
leading to having a minor hicup of rsa not being an accepted keytype (thanks 'your favorite search engine' for the help)
Finally, I was able to connect using the private key

at this point my cousin went to bed cause she has school tomorrow. But I was still doing stuff with ssh, I created a new ssh connection in VSCode, but had to go to the documentation to figure out how to make it use my fancy new key file, not hard took 30 seconds of looking to get it working.

Now that I was in, I moved to my development folder, created a folder for PiHole, created a compose yml, created a pihole-data folder.
I opened the yml and pasted in a compose from dockerhub.

at this point I thought 'i can't just run this from terminal can I'. and Obviously it worked cause there's literally no reason it wouldn't I'm just stupid to think it might not.

So I created folders and files on a remote system, launched a docker container, checked for package updates after on a linux machine. All from VS-Code on a windows machine.

I know this is simple for some people, i know some people are like 'where's the interesting part'. but ehhh I thought it was cool to get it setup, I now really regret not getting into ssh sooner, and I'm definitely going to uninstall vscode on all my smaller graphical VM's in favor of doing this. and this will definitely help with my headless vm's.

I also will have to thank my cousin, might not have done this if I wasn't stuck at my computer on messenger call with her lol

I'm gonna go to bed now, But I feel accomplished for the first time in a while even if it's for something so simple as setting up anssh key for the first time

One of my coworker is shifting from Linux to Windows because he couldn't setup the machine for NodeJS and ROR development.

Is it a good time to leave the company?

After having my soul suck away by "corporate", I installed VS code on my Windows 10 gaming machine.

Now, I have a pretty hardcore dev setup on my MacOS (it's unix-based and it's good, so stop the hate). I'm talking about fully automatized Rakefile that will provision it from scratch: vim, macvim, tmux, iterm configs, 15+ brew tools, 15+ brew-cask tools, themes, plugins, etc.

Installing VS Code, Node and MongoDB on Windows, just for the fun and giggles, and not having any of my hardcore tools, made me feel like... it's something silly and fun again. I'm once again that softcore developer with no stress and no constant self-reminder to improve workflow effectiveness.

Made me a little happy.

Checkout this picture, this is my Windows 10's "tmux" lol

Well well well.
Story time.

Since we are working from home for the past 4 months, I finally decided to install a Microsoft SQL server on my home server. (Mostly was using Azure)

My server is running Windows Server 2012 R2.
Tried installing SQL 2019 : fail, 2016 : Fail, 2012 : Fail. Some obscure message about some DLLs not being at right version. (And a warning that it is no recommended to install SQL server on domain controller, but I know, it is my home setup, not roduction)

“Ok fine, I’ll install it on my PC instead”. Windows 10 PC. NOPE. “Cannot install on a compressed drive”. Welp, wtf ? (Of course you cannot select destination install folder, I could’ve put it on another drive).

So here I am. Working 100% on Windows, installed Ubuntu server 20 LTS in Hyper-V, Installed Microsoft SQL server on it (BTW, install is very easy compared to windows). And that shit is working. And new “Terminal” app does support SSH out of box, no need to add Putty !

So as a Windows user, I needed Linux to make Microsoft SQL techno work.

Nothing will ever surprise me anymore. (BTW it’s fucking fast. I like SQL server on Linux)

So I was reading a comment where someone said that Windows is sure as hell not polished, just 'psychologically pleasing.' I get that, and I've tried to main with Mint Cinnamon/KDE for a while, and I've tried so many distro, but I have too many issues with Linux to make it a true daily workstation and personal os.

For example, Windows apps typically have installers, graphical ones, which allow you to choose an install location and stuff. Does apt or yum do that? Not unless you use some crazy parametets or some shit.

Okay, fine, what if you DON'T CARE about everything being open source and you just want your 3-monitor Nvidia setup to work without vsync issues? Also a PITA, need to do either cmdline driver install and co fig or some other complicated shit.

I may be considered a power user, but damn if Linux isn't friendly to windows users. Don't get me wrong, I don't like windows, but so far it's the best option for me versus aillion Linux issues. Get me something that functions like Windows on multiple levels (Aesthetic not completely required, but core functionality of programs is.) and only then can I attempt a full migration.

How to setup Pi-Hole for a person without a Pi and is a Windows user? Yes I'm dumb

This is the worst possible thing that can happen, when you setup a new computer.

I live for about a decade on ubuntu. I got an invite for a LAN where games are being played that I cannot run with wine or are not ported to linux.
Fine I get an old harddrive and setup a fresh Windows 7. I have a little update script that takes care of updating and restarting.
BUT I CAN NOT DO ANY UPDATES.
As you can see in the picture the original Windows 7 installation disc that was part of my computer did not carry the matching NIC drivers.

A friend of mine gave me a spare WiFi dongle. That did not bring its drivers on the USB dongle but on disc that he lost.

WHY?! HOW?! This is not plug and play. This is a part that SHOULD be plug and play.

After I got an other WiFi dongle that was plug and play, I could finally download the right drivers.

Why can the Windows 7 disc that was part of the computer setup not contain the right drivers, but a ubuntu 12.04 live disc can?!
ARGH

Android Studio is by far worst development environment I've ever seen. Slow as fuck, messed up and cumbersome, not much better than eclipse. Menus are hilariously fucked up. On top of that, clear new setup (on Windows) may as well melt up your PC if you have that shit running overnight: after a weekend I came to the office and my MBP is fucking screaming and breathing hot air... I was WTF is that, and when I logged in, this fucking garbage android studio was taking 100% of all 8/16 cores ... WHAT A FUCKING HIDEOUS PILE OF SHIT FROM GOOGLE. Google: please kill this project, no need to improve or fix it, it's garbage. Start over.

So I'm trying out docker and see how I can make use of it, current setup:
1. Ubuntu on VM and Mac for Asp.Net core development
2. Windiws for MS only stuff like SQL Server
3. Ubuntu Server on VM and is running docker images: MS image for SQL and Ms image for dinner core.

What I did so far one script which will handle updating SQL Server database on windows with the changes done on docker SQL image
Then publish website from Mac or Ubuntu to docker image. I have yet to find a way to execute scripts remotely on a docker image using bash script from a remote

What should I do next? And for home setup go for Ubuntu server or CentOS? Any recommended packages for server administration? Workflow ..etc.?

So i was working on an android app that communicate with restfull web service. I setup everything , started the web service api at localhost and launched the app on genymotion (virtual machine android) .Nothing seems to work . I checked the code , debugged some stuff and it turns out i couldn't communicate with the api server. I tested the api on my browser and nothing is wrong ,I tried to test on the phone vm browser and voila 404 not found . How the hell it's working on my windows and not on the vm (with localhost url :/ ) .I kept debugging for more then 3 hours with no solution to be found .
The moment I realised wtf I'm doing and how stupid I was => shut down my laptop went to coffee shop and bought a lifeless dark espresso .

In case you didn't understand what the issue is, I was running the api on my windows localhost and testing it with same url on my android vm (I should've changed localhost with my machine IP )

My past 16hours activities

Woke up > destroyed a healthy running environment while trying to setup dual monitor on my manjaro kde > found out the nvidia driver was the culprit the whole the > the whole thing was a PITA > reinstalled the kde with windows dual boot > did the previous task 4/5 times till I felt satisfied ( call be a dumb but it is what it is ) > and now after wasting the whole fucking day I am setting up the environment finally.
Still I'm not sure if I'll be able to finish this shit before 4 am in the morning . It's now 1.26 AM .

Life is an interesting loop of hell .

I use mainly linux at home, but I have to use Windows at work. I don't hate Windows, but at least once per day at work I accidentally try a keyboard shortcut from my Arch + i3 setup and either end up with some random program from the start menu running (Windows key used in i3) or I flip one of my screens sideways... Nothing detrimental, just enough to be aggravating.

Sooo, here's my (non-professional) setup:
(I'm refering to the desktop, but latelly I've been programming in my laptop)

Laptop OS: Linux (Backbox 5.2)
Desktop OS: Windows 10 + Linux (Kali Linux 2018.3)

A story from the old days

My father had a fame around he's friends that he understood this nasty business that is computers and in the pre-windows time he was reasonably knowledgeable... But as things evolved he didn't evolve with them so when he's friends asked him to help he would take me to solve the problem...

One day he asked me to see what was the problem with a friend's personal computer. This is a 70+ year old man.

When I get to his computer I do a quick check and see it's too infected with so many viruses to the point it is better to just format and clean install, so I ask him to backup he's files and the next day I picked up the PC and clean installed and setup the all thing...

Not more than 3 months pass and the guy says to my dad the problem was back...

I get there and the antivirus was turned off and the PC was infected... Found it weird but okay, enabled the antivirus, cleaned everything... Back to as new.... This time I instructed him to keep the antivirus always updated and running...

One week later to my surprise: he reports it is all back... Now I am getting tired of this and went to he's browsing history to find out how the hell he is achieving this... Too my surprise the amount of early internet shady porn sites was over the top...

I know had to tell a 70+ year old man how to safely watch porn... But that is not my problem, so I ask him what kind of sites he's going to... He blames he's grandson for using the internet in he's computer... Only problem: he's grandson is 2 years old...

I just set up the bookmarks with some children sites and convinced my father to take a look at that and either instruct the man or the kid on how to watch porn without getting a venereal disease...

I work at a place where all the employees are pretty much on the user side of the spectrum and they have 3 chromebooks. Some would think that's not really a problem, chromebooks are fine for simple tasks BUT they weren't able to setup the printer correctly so they were only able to print one copy at a time. These people never used anything other than Windows and they already struggle with that, so I think it was a waste of money for the company, and I'm pretty sure they just went for it because it was cheaper. It's a fucking joke, since their employees prefer to bring their pcs to work and only one of the chromebooks is being used.

My experience with Fedora:

1. Copy to thumb drive
2. Find out the thumb drive wasn't good enough
3.copied to another thumb drive
4.Successfully booted
5.start installation
6.Shit forgot to partition my NTFS drives
7.Back to Windows to do it
8.back to install again
9.Start installation, setup partitioning
10. Didnt notice that my EFI partition wasn't detected
11.Fedora tries to install its bootloader in God knows what place
12.bootloader install fail
13.reboot comp
14. Missing operating system
15. Spend my whole fucking night repairing the boot partition and the problem was a fuckin missing BOOT flag
16. No grub
17.spent another decade trying to fix it
18. Give up and get some sleep

Probably Fedora will have to wait for another day, tiring experience

My desk/room setup
An Asus A555LF connected to an Acer LCD Monitor and a Samsung Smart TV connected wirelessly(Intel Wi-di) dual boots to Ubuntu 15.04 and Windows 8.1.
@localhost

Today, I have installed/uninstalled a combination of [windows 7, arch linux, dual-boot] a total of 9 times...

I wouldn't be surprised if my 120G SSD fails next week

It all started when I had to whip up a GUI-wrapped youtube-dl based program for a windows machine.

Thinking a handy GUI python library will get it done in no time, I started right away with the Kivy quick-start page in front of me.

Everything seemed to be going fine, until I decided it would be "wise" to first check if I can run Kivy on said windows machine.

Here I spent what felt like a day (5 hours) trying to install core pip modules for kivy.. only before realizing my innocent cygwin64 setup was the reason everything was failing, and that sys.platform was NOT set to "win32" (a requirement later discovered when unpacking .whl files)

"Okay.. you know what? Fuck........ This."
In a haze of frustration, I decided it was my fault for ever deciding to do Python on windows, and that "none of this would've happened if I were installing pip modules on a Linux terminal"...

I then had the "brilliant" idea of "Why don't I just use Linux, and make windows a virtual machine within, for testing."

And so I spent the next hour getting everything set up correctly for me get back to programming.... And so I did.

But uh... you're doing GUI stuff, right? -> Yeah...

And you uh.. Kivy uses OpenGL on windows, doesn't it? -> Yeah..?

OpenGL... 2.

-> Fuck.

That's when I realized my "brilliant" idea, was actually a really bad prank. Turns out.. I needed a native windows environment with up-to-date non-virtual graphics drivers that supported at least OpenGL2 for Kivy GUI programs!

Something I already had from square 1.

And at this point, it hurts to even sigh knowing I wasted hours just... making... poor decisions, my very first one being cygwin64 as a substitution for windows cmd.

But persistent as any programmer should be in order to succeed, I dragged my sorry ass back to the computer to reinstall windows on the actual hardware... again.

While the windows installer was busy jacking off all over my precious gigabytes (why does it need that much spaaace for a base install??? fuck.). I had "yet another brilliant idea" YABI™

Why not just do a dual-boot? That way, you have the best of both worlds, you do python stuff in Linux, and when it's time to build and test on the target OS, you have a native windows environment!

This synthetic harmony sounded amazing to the desperate, exhausted, shell of a man that I had become after such a back-breaking experience with cygwin

Now that my windows platter with a side of linux was all set-up and ready-to-go, I once again booted up windows to test if Kivy even worked.

And... It did!

And just as I began raising my victory flags, I suddenly realized there was one more thing I had to do, something trivial, should take me "no time" to do, being in a native windows environment and all.................... -.- (sigh)

I had to make sure it compiles to a traditional exe...

Not a biggy, right? Just find one of those py2exe—sounding modules or something, and surprisingly enough, there was indeed a py2exe—sounding module, conveniently named... py2exe.

Not a second thought given, I thought surely this was a good enough way of doing it, just gonna look up the py2exe guide and...

-> 3 hours later + 1 extra coffee

What do you meeeeean "module not found"? Do I need to install more dependencies? Why doesn't it say so in the DAMN guide? Wait I don't? Why are you showing me that error message then????

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

No. I'm not doing this.
I shut off my computer and took a long... long.. break.

Only to return sometime the next day and end up making no progress, beating my SSD with more OS installs (sometimes with no obvious reason to do so).

Wondering whether I should give up Kivy itself as it didn't seem compatible with py2exe.. I discovered pyInstaller, which seemed to be the way Kivy wants exe's to be made on windows..

Awesome! I should've looked up how Kivy developers make exe's instead of jumping straight into py2exe land, (I guess "py2exe" just sounded more effective to me then)

More hours pass, and you'd think I'd have eliminated all of my build environment problems by now... but oh, how wrong you'd be...

pyInstaller was failing, and half the solutions I found online were to download some windows update KB32946..whatever...

The other half telling me to downgrade from Python 3.8.1 to Python 3.8.0000.009 (exaggeration! But you get the point)

At the end of all that mess, I decided it wasn't worth some of my lifespan, and that maybe.. just maybe.. it would've been better to create WINDOWS GUI with the mother fuc*ing WINDOWS API.

Alright, step 1: Get Visual Studio..
Step 2: kys
Step 3: kys again.

I was working for a small welder repair shop when they decided they needed to upgrade their office computer. I suggested a PC due to it being cost effective and compatibility with the billing software the office manager /owner's wife insisted on using. They decided on an expensive Mac setup and had to install Windows on it so the billing software would work. When I realized what they did, I asked what dumbass would pay 2,000 on a Mac setup only to use Windows and the wife said "me".

!rant from a support guy

I was tasked to migrate an Exchange 2003 server (yes, those are still used) for an upcoming Office 365 deployment. There are no direct upgrade path from one another, as far as we know

My task was to export PSTs from mailboxes. Great, a native tool exist for that in 2003 (exmerge). But only for less than 2 GB mailboxes because ANSI/Unicode! Half of our mailbox busts that limit. Oh, it seems Exchange 2007 has a PowerShell command for exporting to PST as well! But pre-SP3, that command relies on a local installation of Outlook on the server (DAFUQ), and has been superseded by another "standalone" powershell command. So I install a bogus Windows 2012 server only for that purpose, with Exchange Management Tools (which, by the way, is bundled with the Exchange installation setup and REQUIRES to have IIS installed on the target machine. Also, if you install ONLY the Exchange 2007 Management Tools and wish to uninstall them afterwards, you can't because the uninstaller wants me to select an Exchange Role to remove, which are all unchecked in my tools-only setup). Never worked, and Google-fu says that the newer Exchange 2007 New-MailboxExportRequest command seems to have removed Exchange 2003 support.

So i'm back to installing a pre-SP3 Exchange 2007. Then the older Export-Mailbox powershell command whines about 64bits and 32bit incompatiblity-- actually I ***HAVE*** to have the whole OS/software stack 32bit ONLY. Don't ask me why!

Some article I found says I could fire up an XP virtual machine for that, I go for Win 7 x86. "Sorry, Microsoft Exchange won't be installed on a workstation environment because reasons." All right then, let's go for an old Windows Server 2003 x86. Have you tried to boot this up in an Hyper-V environment where mouse and keyboard support for Windows Server 2003 are apparently optional? No keyboard AND mouse events sent to the guest machine at all.

* Sigh *, let's use a Windows Server 2008, but WATCH OUT! Microsoft has discontinued x86 support on their W2008 R2 release, so non-R2 for me. Even then, mouse event wasn't sent until I installed guest additions.

After all, export-mailbox ended up working, but that costed me two days of banging my head against the wall. (Oh, and I take internal calls inbetween as well...)

And that's why I aspire to be a programmer. Thank you for nothing, Microsoft!

So I bought 2 dvd packed with old rpg games.

I didn’t know my first quest will be to get those games working.

To make my life more miserable I decided to convert those dvd to iso.

First I needed to find computer with dvd because those I use apparently don’t have dvd anymore.

Found one with windows 7 inside.
Yeah first mission complete.

Now just find dvd to iso software and burn those bastards.

I need to update date / time to be able to use internet over https.
Checked.

Started looking for the dvd to iso software. Microsoft answers giving links to bloatware with detailed instructions how to install desired things without crap. The link to download doesn’t work but at least I have the name ImgBurn.
They have website so I click on first mirror and run setup.
First fail they’re linking to bloatware that downloads another bloatware that installs some search plugin for firefox.
Uninstalling search plugin.
1 hour passed by.
Clicking last link. Success.
Now time to click it smart to omit any unwanted software and get only what I want. Reading trough install instructions and checking out not wanted checkboxes is like great quest.
Finally I have what I want and I can backup my dvd.
What a great evening.

Today in Windows Clang misadventures from one past wtf

I have 0 fucking clue what is happening, so I am starting to think that this is a windows 11 only bug.

If I (say for example) compile all of my headers into a .dll and then link them to my executable program, an executable will be generated.

If I use the dll to be linked into my executable, but DON'T use any of the code inside, then no executable is generated.

I need to at least use something from within the headers that I create into the main program for it to build and actually throw out an executable.

I could argue that doing this would be the proper way to setup a project in some scenarios, managing your headers and what not.
The only bad part is that it essentially removes the ability for newcomers to just install clang and hello the fucking world into existence.

Mind you, using the Mingw installation is possible still. I-just-don't-fuckig-understand-why-the-fucking-official-build WORKS

THIS is why people are trying to jump into other languages. My dude's shit is solved, but this fucking infuriates me. ANd go on, try googling "clang not building executable" and see how this shit is nowhere to be fucking found sdfksakjdfa

I'm a mac AND a PC! Are you? I actually quite like both of them.

My dev setup has both operating systems, with a shared mouse and keyboard (using Synergy) -> and I love it! It feels like I get the ability to do anything. There are some apps I prefer on the WIndows side and others that are fine on the mac. I use git and dropbox to share dev files between the two seamlessly.

I come from a Linux background, so I like that I can use bash on the mac, although on the PC I use Powershell mostly. I also have used the Ubuntu linux subsystem on the PC very effectively.

I was originally forced into the situation due to iPhone mobile development - now I don't mind at all!

On the mobile side I happily switch between iOS and Android all the time.

Love the way so many technologies exist to let you work across platforms so well.

Anyone else use both at the same time?

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

Update on my Minecraft server if anyone is interested, recently just setup a test server to work out requirements, so if anyone has windows 10 edition of any form of iOS or Android Minecraft PE feel free to try it...

IP: minecraft.lxmcf.com
Port: 65535

Just let me know how stable things seem and if you have any issues connecting (it constantly gets stuck on trying to find server but will connect if you try .-.)

A few months ago I switched from Windows 10 to Arch Linux on my main computer and the upgrade is incredible. I knew it would be, of course - I already had Linux on my laptop. But wow, on a dual monitor setup, and with the motivation to set it up nicely, it's brilliant.

My question is, what's everyone's favourite Linux distro, and why? Pictures of your desktops would be cool.

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

Spend hours debugging a python script because tests fail. Turns out ftp (the unix binary) adds CR bytes to every byte in a .gz file that looks like a LF on upload (in test setup). Client and server are both linux. 😭

Yes i know switch to binary mode (that fixed it - why not default??). But still WHY CR? Didn't ask for it. No windows in sight.

apparently windows 10 setup still does this shit if the fucking media it's loading from is too goddamn slow

good to know win10 is carrying on the NT tradition of not even giving you graphics mode for forever if your storage is too slow

god bless usb 2.0 sticks that perform worse than usb 1.1 sticks

Ignoring Windows update message, wen suddenly.....it did install Windows 10....Crashed in Setup... nuked my working time by 4 hours...lost 2 commits...

I got my new(to me) MacBook Pro last week, provided by work. I've got all my setup and config done, for the most part, and I've noticed something.

Performance is shit. Has anyone else noticed this about the 2017 and later models? The 2015 model I had before was much, much smoother. Just zooming windows, a previously butter-smooth experience, is noticeably choppy. I/O performance is garbage too. I have a small iotest script that just writes a string a couple hundred times to disk, deletes it, and repeats this activity 100,000 times. On my Linux machine at home with six year old hardware, this takes about three seconds. On my new system76 laptop it takes just over a second. On the 2017 MacBook Pro, it takes about forty seconds.

The 2017 and 2018 models are a direct downgrade in performance. Why isn't anyone talking about this?

So I am navigating the hellscape called vcpkg. It is a hellscape to me because I don't understand fuck all about how its supposed to work. It has things like manifests and keys which point to repo commits and other weird shit.

I am trying to learn how to get it to install boost.asio today. It keeps installing this old as fuck version 1.80 instead of latest 1.86. I try specifying the version in the vckpg.json file of my project. Then it starts throwing hands and saying it doesn't have port shit for other boost libraries. I try to provide versions for those and it throws more hands. I search and search to no avail. So I give up and let it install 1.80 and all its dependencies. Then its starting fucking erroring out compiling boost.coroutines. So I search on that. Nothing of substance. Just flabbergasted at this point. Does boost work at all with msvc?

I am looking through the errors and is says run "vcpkg update". This fails because I am in manifest mode. Why didn't it give me the command for manifest mode, is it stupid? Then I find the command for manifest mode: "vcpkg x-update-baseline". This updates it commit number is some random file I don't know about. Still don't know what the fuck that does. Then I run the config again on my vcpkg.json. This starts installing boost-asio 1.86. Okay, that is what I wanted in the first place.

So I let it run and do its thing. It installs everything and compiles everything. Its all ready to go. At this point I am like what the fuck is this shit. I don't really want to learn any of this shit. Yet there is someone somewhere that probably can't get enough of this. At work I will probably eventually need to learn this, along with cmake, and all its quirks. It just makes me tired to learn this just to get to a point to write one line of code. I am sure vcpkg will save me time and energy at some point. But 2-3 hours of guessing is annoying at best.

The last time I used boost on windows I just downloaded the source and built it. It was simple and then I just had to provide paths. vcpkg is nice in this respect. Especially when I upgrade the library.

I don't know what the point of this rant is. Getting tired of fighting tooling I guess. Already learning black magic trying to setup my build environment for making skse plugins. Docs are almost non-existent. I did find a discord with some cool people though. Respect to the trailblazers of this art.

So I'm a developer trainee. My development machine ? - was given a MacBook pro that was used by previous developer. The home screen is filled with random project files and documents.

Try to click on the pad, doesn't work, realized you have to press it real hard on side to click , wth, crappy touchpad. Back to setup.

I guess create a new account. Need to make an apple ID, heck no, create account without it, logon and just realized, shit all the tools need be installed..

Go to app store, need an apple id, heck.. , create an id, login, realize most of the tools aren't in app store...
Log back in crazy's account, power windows virtual machine..

Desktop filled with shyteload of files.. try to personalize windows, Windows isn't activated.. the heck.

Give up, just install vscode on corporation desktop machine for now, while the MacBook is a paperweight, and my shield in case of a gun situation

Better I see the crazy Dev who worked on this machine, and hit em in head with this paperweight.

Visual studio code

I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.

It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.

I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?

Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)

Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.

It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.

Back in 2013, My CEO hired a new Manager for the R&D department, who supposedly had over 15 years of extensive experience with Windows and Windows server.

On his first day he suddenly turns toward my colleague, who is sitting right next to me and asks "Do you have a setup for Sticky Notes?", we were using "Windows 7".

The entire room turns toward him as he said that and started laughing quietly.

So a few months ago I created a css grid system. I ended up fucking my windows installation by playing around with shit I knew I shouldn't be playing with. And silly old me, not backing shit up obsessively, ended up losing the only copy of my grid system.

Luckily I remember how I made it.

But right now I am lacking motivation to do any serious work. So what did I do tonight?

Signed up for a hosting account
Registered a domain name (for my grid system) through my reseller account
Setup DokuWiki
And am now in the process of creating documentation for...

... A grid system that I have not [re]created.

That's some backwards ass logic right there lol

So, My usual dual boot setup is Linux(Dev stuff) and Windows(For gaming) and for Linux I always create different partition just to make sure I don't fuck up while removing Linux(mostly switching). So at one time I wanted to switch to CentOS and I accidentally deleted windows partition of C drive which had like 90+GB just for Steam....it was not Big loss but still it was pain downloading data for steam games.

Having just endured 30 excruciating minutes of utter braindead idiocy that is trying to setup and configure WPA2-Enterprise on a Windows 10 machine, I wanna go and fucking kill myself.

How can it be so bad after so many years this protocol has been out?! Not only can the authentication options be changed only in the who knows how many years old control panel settings and not the modern settings app, but once you finish setting up the network, you can no longer modify some of the key attributes like which CA certificates to validate the radius server against!

What. The. Fuck. Microsoft.

I swear, I don't usually get my jimmies rustled at work, but this... This just bloody infuriated me!

> new job, receive new pc
> everything looks cool, but they didn't go with Windows's setup
> it pops up now
> whatever, let's make windows happy
> No I don't want Edge
> No I don't want Office
> No I don't want OneDrive
> Windows move everything inside onedrive folder anyway
> have a heart attack when all of my fucking codebase disappeared

Luckily it was just moved (didn't know where, though), but wtf Windows, if I wanted to deal with these antics I'd buy Apple. I'm sticking with Windows precisely to avoid these strange unmotivamed fuckeries, why are you doing this to me

I just think about it ...
Running docker on windows is shit
Running nginix on windows is boofff
Running apache on windows is boofff
Running WWS on windows is hugly

Install linux
All server software run like king
Don't have access to any adobe product for design and micro$hit office for client sanity because ODF is to special, i want my docx i said ... Like what do you want from me ... Shit the dev setup is a fucking mess because some enterprises don't want to wet itself in the futur...

Microsoft love linux BULLSHIT

Today I had to spend the whole day fixing a stupid bug in a legacy application in a completely different tech stack than I'm used to...

At my company we have an Internet application running where we can upload a word document and using some mailmerge variables magic, can set those vars and receive the personalised word doc back...

Now this is great, when it's working, and is used in various projects we have up and running... Suddenly the application decides to crap out for no apparent reason and guess who drew the short straw....

Anyhow I ask our sys admin for the password to the server, I remote desktop to it, turns out its a fucking Windows 2008 server...

But wait it gets better, the application, a shoddy mess of c# code, is not under any sort of version control, has to be developed on that same server and to top it all of, I have to follow some obscure barely documented deployment precedure to get my changes live....

So after a lot of cursing on the dev (not working at the company any more) who did the original setup, and hours of painstakingly piecing together how it works and what went wrong and how to fix it, I finally managed to get it working....

After this rant, I'm mailing my technical lead about this in the hopes we can get someone to do it right (yes, I'm that naive)

So, for a few months, as my finals are comming near, I was wondering is it a good idea to re-format my SSD and put Ubuntu on my laptop.
Reason? So I can't play games on my laptop and focus more on coding.
Downloaded Ubuntu, format, install, I was happy.
Soon as it installed, I downloaded all the sht I need (slack, discord, VSCode, nodejs, pixie dust and unicorns...), and did a 10 minute setup so the OS feels "nice".
After few hours of "trying" to work, I noticed it runs rather slow (vscode keeps freezing, app I'm developing stutters in chrome...), so maybe Ubuntu is being a douche to my laptop.
Downloaded xubuntu, did mostly the same (less work has to be done since xubuntu feels nicer than ubuntu (thanks xfce (mouse <3)), and started doing the same.
I realised that I can't use any of my Logitech stuff (mouse, headset (and by "can't use, I mean I can't use the Logiteh gaming software to set the DPI, mouse speed, buttons, nor set up the headset, so they sound like jack shit)).
Frustrated, I went to fix all the stuff manualy, with no success.
Also, the OS froze 3 times completely.
Luckly, I made a whole Windows 10 backup so I've spent a few hours more just waiting for it to restore.
Oh, did I mention I can't tether my Android device internet via usb on ubuntu?
Do I have so much to learn or this is how my life is going to look like when I start working as a developer?
*insert Sad panda gif here*

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

I was so bored with work in the end. It was more administration than programming. So, i kinda quitted full application development. The thing is, it's expected that you use some existing framework. First of all - they never work how you want and the programming part of your work is mainly solving the limitations the framework brings without hacking too much. You keep within the boundaries of the framework. Besides that - since all fun stuff is already done by the framework builders all you have to do left is kinda administration. Field here, field there, rest call here. Extremely boring. When you've setup the base good, there's no challenge anymore, just producing windows and input forms.

Now, a few days ago, I started to make a clone of rocket chat. I use minimalist http framework (aiohttp) and you have to build most features yourself on top. Same for the ORM, i use dataset which does schema synchronisation for you but doesn't come with models. So i made a complete model / mapper entity framework on top of that. I made one single validation system that applies on models, forms and frontend validation. There's only one truth of valid data. Within the models, services, mappers and forms there's always the services variable available making it possible to fetch any data from any object. Never weird exceptions has to be done to get data. The implemented global LRU cache system is super in auto synchronizing the objects, don't have to do anything manually.

Finally software development of a full product is fun again. If you know how to do it - making your own framework is way easier than an existing one. On top of that, it's more advanced. I do understand that frameworks are aiming to be a bit minimal to be multi purpose, but with that attitude in mind, they still achieve to make it annoying as fuck.

Regarding time, it's just a few days of development. That's nothing for something that does exactly what you want. We have to drop the use-a-framework-because-it-is-stupid-to-do-yourself mentality. We should be programmers again! Not administrators! It's not weird that chatGPT can do so much of our jobs, our projects became lame.

I got a new computer. Ended up getting a Sager Laptop. I also ended up getting Windows 10 Pro. I had forgotten how shitty Windows 10 has gotten. My biggest gripe are the start button (fixed using open shell) and the creation and adding users. Microshit goes out of their way to trick you into getting a POS MS account. I knew the trick when my PC first started to stay offline so MS could not force a MS account. However, I added a user later and again they are fucking with you to force a user account. Figured out which non-descript place to click to just add a local account. This is shitty behavior of an OS. Especially one that claims to be Pro. This is not how to win customers. It just aggravates people that know what they are doing.

The bright side to this is could take out my frustration after I moved my Fallout 4 setup to the new computer. Mod Organizer 2 makes it easy to move everything at once. Configured one config file and boom I can now run it on Ultra settings. Explode a few skulls and reduce a few more to radioactive ash/goo. Frustrations are gone. lol

Also on the bright side with running Pro. I can select Update control via group policy. This doesn't seem to work on Home.

Today i chartered new realms for me.

I created a new hyper-v vm on the company windows servers and added a 5th instance to it, but instead of running another windows server i installed an ubuntu 18.04 (cause i am a bit familiar with debian from my raspberry pi)

we have two servers, one which runs the 4 vms and a replica. I first had the new vm on the main server but it occured me to move it instead to the unusued replica machine. That kinda worked..i did a planned failover but the main server isnt configured to be the replica..and even when activating that it didnt work. This is weird.

For the moment i ignored that and proceeded to install nginx, mariadb and php 7.2..basically the lemp stack. I managed to setup nginx and a static ip adress for the machine (which was different from how i remembered it to do (in 18.04 its not done with the network conf but a yaml file).

in the end i added two different virtual servers, one for actual use and one for dev stuff (with phpmyadmin running for instance), listening on port 80 and some random other port.

as a test i brought a mediawiki onto the Port 80 server and it worked.

on monday i have to figure out how to implement the wildcard certificate i have for our company domain (internal dns simply routes intranet.company.com to the local server vm)

i am mighty proud cause all my experience with linux was with a raspberry pi so far and i am fairly certain i did it right and without shortcuts this time. (unlike my raspberry experience)

just wanted to share

(i also sweated a lot of blood when editing the hyper v settings as i did not set up the server in the first place)

((i also installed xrdp and a mate desktop, but i am less proud of that, but sometimes seeing folders graphically helps me))

!rant
TL;DR: New(-ish) dev looking for advice to improve workflow and new languages. Hopefully worth a read though :)

Newbie developer here, I took a web applications development class this year since I could take that at another campus rather than do general education courses at my home school, and I have learned and earned a CIW Certification for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, though I know the certificates do squat if I can't apply myself to them, and I have learned PHP and MySQL.

I want to learn more, technically-applicable languages.

My setup is barebones (to a Linux diehard's eyes), with a gaming laptop that I do a lot of workstation stuff on, an RPi 3 B that I do some Linux-y stuff on, and a less-powerful Development Laptop (that I call a devtop) that I occasionally do work away from home on.

I'm sure most will cringe and weep at my workflow, as I use Windows 10 on both systems and the standard NOOBS software on the pi, and I use Brackets as my text editor, as well as the XAMPP AMP stack for testing.

My biggest questions are what could I do to improve my workflow, and what languages should I learn/apply myself to for real-world application (such as Node.js for live-updating server-side applications or C# for Windows applications)?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, any feedback is helpful! I'm just a high school student with a lot of enthusiasm for development!

Windows Dev Team: "I know! We should just ask them to enable Cortana 8 different times during setup, it'll work."

@billgates

I assume that you did some Windows development.
I just made my WPF and want to publish. But VS created setup.exe for me. I want to make my own installer. How do I get the application files? not the setup file?
Please help. Thanks.

My 2 cents on different OSes to use.

I think Linux is best for running servers and services and having long run times with little issues (when its Console and not GUI based.) But I have a lot of issues with using its GUI distributions like Ubuntu and it feels kind of unpolished in that area.

I prefer macOS for its GUI as it actually works and has far less issues than Windows GUI and is (IMO) better than Linux GUI's by far. But macOS just doesn't feel like it was designed super users and it can feel like its holding you back a bit. Also you have to use Mac hardware which are amazing machines, they are just overpriced.

I prefer Windows for its GUI and despite its problems, it is very well designed for super users and has very well designed remote desktop features and scalability (although it is a pain to maintain.) Windows works well for connected company systems.

In my opion:
Linux: Servers, databases (no GUI)

macOS: Designers, photo/video editing, IT/programmers and general use as a standalone (not part of a company system).

Windows: IT/programmers, super users, general use but better than macOS at working together in a company setup, but macOS is better at being a personal laptop or PC.

I personally use Linux for our email and web servers. Windows for our company computers (designers use Macs) and I have a Macbook as my own personal computer.

can you recommend any ubuntu software which would allow me setup notes on the screen?

microsoft sticky notes for windows has been very useful for me in windows env, but couldn't find an alternative for ubuntu.
A browser plugin, which could turn my opera homepage to a set of sticky notes/ clock/music widgets would also be equally awesome

Just received an email from a high maintenance client - this is verbatim what I've just read:

"If I could pull out my Windows vista and then plug in a newer windows system without any stress I'd go for this. Do you do this service? I could pay you for an hour to come my business, Unplug, Plug in and sort this out etc etc. It sounds like a quick job to me."

Note I'm a software developer, nothing to do with day to day IT support stuff. The client's business property is a 45 min drive from my own.

So basically, according to my client I can charge a single hour (£85.00 +vat) for a 90 minutes round trip, to migrate their PC to a newer operating system and move all their data and apps over and then setup the new OS. All for £85.00 +vat. All excluding the fact I

What the literal heck. I'm face palming all over the place.

tldr; Fuck Windows networks

I do some first level support for a befriended architect when i got some sparetime after regular work. Its nice and easy extra cash most of the times but not today.

We decided to ditch the money thiving IT admin that did not care about doing his work. And instead of taking over his pile of shit i adviced to redo the whole network, drop the massive server that did idle 99% of the day and update all PCs some of them did still run IE8 and had no active anti virus, yeah that dude was real shit.

Anyways i proceded with the whole process today and everything worked expect the fucking windows network, that fucking domain controller setup blocked the fucking internetconnection even though DNS and DHCP where set up correctly. Why does fucking ms need to make it so difficult to set up fucking network accounts....

I will have to finish this shit up tomorrow and this on a weekend...

This happened last November. I was on my merry way, not using Windows on my laptop. When suddenly a friend asks me to do some heavy video editing work.
And none of the softwares on Linux are as good as Premiere Pro, After Effects etc
Davinci Resolve on Linux has codec issues and is a pain to deal with

Anyway, I boot up windows and somehow it updates itself (I distinctly remember disabling the update service permanently).
So now, it bugs me every fucking minute to reboot.
Luckily I decide to finish my project before rebooting.
Coz as soon as I reboot, it throws me an error saying something like my license key couldn't be verified. One key recovery doesn't help
I have a OEM licensed Windows 10 Home that came with the laptop.

The solutions are to either recover windows, which needs a fucking 11GB download or reinstall Windows (but hey... Lenovo didn't give me a Windows License key. And I have a lot of pre setup folders on the windows drive linked to my Linux, making it a bad choice to wipe that drive). To put the cherry on the top, I have to download a software that Lenovo provides (Windows only) to download that 11GB iso.
Every sane person around me uses Linux (I only used Windows for Video Editing)
Also, living in India, 11GB is a fucking big size to download.... And the software doesn't support interrupted downloads
One more pain in the ass....
So, fuck you Windows. Fuck you Lenovo.

Living happily with elementary OS since then
Never bothered to download the Windows iso