d3Xt3r

I reckon with Windows it's just easier to nuke the whole thing and reinstall. Especially with most stuff syncing / backing up to the cloud (and drivers pulled down via Windows update) plus with SSDs, it's much more faster to just do a clean install.

The only major sticking point for me is ms office - libreoffice feels like office 2003 and you can never be confident a libreoffice docx is going to look the same when someone opens what you’ve sent them in ms office.

If you haven't tried it already, check out OnlyOffice - looks very similar to MS Office and has great compatibility with it too. I once did a side-by-side comparison with the same .docx running in Word (M365) and OO, and they looked virtually identical (I posted the screenshots sometime ago on Lemmy, if I can dig up the post I'll link it here).

I've been meaning to, but never got around to it. Thanks for the reminder!

A microplane grater - it's been really great for dealing with ginger, and even garlic (although for garlic I mostly prefer to just squish it with the flat side of my knife). I've also used the slicer end to make chips out of baby potatoes and turnips.

Another go-to for me is a conventional pressure cooker - I use it when I'm feeling lazy, I just chuck everything in it - lentils/beans + rice + veggies + condiments, and it's all done in one go, only takes 15-20 minutes and there's no need to soak stuff beforehand. The best part is that I put all my ingredients in just a single ceramic bowl, so cleaning the cooker is super easy (just rinse it with water), and I can eat directly off the bowl, which saves me from having to use a separate dish.

You can just install the tools you want on your host OS. But if it's like hundreds of tools then yeah makes more sense to run it inside a VM, just so it's all nice and separate from your daily-driver. And you may think it's funny but the performance of Linux-on-Linux is actually pretty good, and there isn't much of a RAM/CPU overhead either. And if you're really strapped for RAM, you could use KSM (kernel samepage merging) and ballooning.

Many Linux users use VMs (or containers) for separate workloads, and it's a completely normal thing to do. For instance, on my homelab box, my host OS is my daily-driver, but all my lab stuff (Kubernetes, Ansible etc) all run under VMs. The performance is so good that you won't even notice/care that it's running on a VM. This is all thanks to the Linux/KVM/QEMU/libvirt stack, if it were something else like VMWare or VBox, it'd be a lot more clunkier and you can feel that it's running on a VM - but that's not the case with KVM.

The big benefit is that you get damn near 100% compatibility with even games that have windows only anti-cheat because… you’re running windows.

This isn't necessarily true - most anti-cheat programs detect VMs, and depending on the game, some may prevent you from launching the game (eg games using Vanguard), others may flag you and cause you to get kicked out of the game, or even get you banned (Battleye is pretty notorious for this, from what I hear).

Now there are some tricks you can use, such as editing the XML for your VM to mimic your host machine's SMBIOS data / vendor strings etc, but it's a bit of work and can be a hit-or-miss.

Of course, the best option would be to not support games which use invasive anti-cheat in the first place. :)

And if you're on nVidia, it can be a bit of a pain to get it all going, since you need to patch your GPU's vBIOS. You can see how much work is involved in setting it all up over here: https://gitlab.com/Mageas/single-gup-passthrough - so not for the faint-hearted. :)

cc: @JinxLuckless@beehaw.org

Actually binaries can include non-executable files as well! Strictly speaking, a "binary" refers to pretty much any file that's not plain-text (so if you tried to open a binary in a text editor, you'd see gibberish).

Third concern: dependencies.

I installed a fairly small rust program recently (post-XZ drama), and was a bit concerned when it pulled in literally hundreds of crates as dependencies. And I wasn't planning on evaluating all of them to see if they were secure/trustworthy - who knows if one of them had a backdoor like XZ? Rust can claim to be as secure as Fort Xnox, but it means nothing if you have hundreds of randoms constantly going in and out of the building, and we don't know who's doing the auditing and holding them accountable.

Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?

Yes, Linux itself! (ie the kernel). It would've been awesome if Linux were a microkernel, there's so many advantages to it like security, modularity and resilience.

I'm not aware of any distros that works better on Intel Macs - in general you may find one or two things not working (like WiFi or Bluetooth), that may take extra steps to resolve.

You can check general compatibility here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Apple

In saying that, if you like the macos aesthetic, you might be interested in elementary OS.

To add to what @bloodfart wrote, the history of TTYs (or virtual consoles) goes all the way back to the early days of computing and teletypewriter machines.

In the old days, computers were gigantic, super expensive, and operated in batch mode. Input was often provided through punched cards or magnetic tape, and output was printed on paper. As interactive computing developed, the old teletypewriters (aka TTYs) were repurposed from telecommunication, to serve as interactive terminals for computers. These devices allowed operators to type commands and receive immediate feedback from the computer.

With advancements in technology, physical teletypewriters were eventually replaced by electronic terminals - essentially keyboards and monitors connected to the mainframe. The term "TTY" persisted, however, now referring to these electronic terminals.

When Unix came out in the 70s, it adopted the TTY concept to manage multiple interactive user sessions simultaneously. As personal computing evolved, particularly with the introduction of Linux, the concept of virtual consoles (VCs) was introduced. These were software implementations that mimicked the behavior of physical terminals, allowing multiple user sessions to be managed via a single physical console. This was particularly useful in multi-user and server environments.

This is also where the term "terminal" or "console" originates from btw, because back in the day these were physical terminals/consoles, later they referred to the virtual consoles, and now they refer to a terminal app (technically called a "terminal emulator" - and now you know why they're called an "emulator").

With the advent of graphical interfaces, there was no longer a need for a TTY to switch user sessions, since you could do that via the display manager (logon screen). However, TTYs are still useful for offering a reliable fallback when the graphical environment fails, and also as a means to quickly switch between multiple user sessions, or for general troubleshooting. So if your system hangs or crashes for whatever reason - don't force a reset, instead try jumping into a different TTY. And if that fails, there's REISUB.

Are you sure? I just tested it on Fedora 39, using Chrome v123 (Flatpak) and Chromium v123 (repo package), both of them were running under XWayland.