Awesome. Thanks!

It’s the year of the Linux desktop! /s

But seriously, I think I’m going to buy a SteamDeck.

Would it be enough to be able to run .deb packages on fedora?

Unpacking a .deb on Fedora, or unpacking an .rpm on Ubuntu isn’t a big deal. The files inside are often actually identical.

But would not be useful because the files inside usually rely on shared libraries, which may or may not already be installed. Those shared libraries are installed in different places on each Linux distro. Figuring out which ones to ask for (and making sure the program can find them) is the real work that the .Deb or .RPM installers do.

A fun way to try this out is with Portable Apps. Anything called a “portable app” either doesn’t use additional libraries, or carries the libraries it needs with it.

If you find a portable app for Ubunutu, there’s a good chance the Fedora version is an identical file, and works fine on Ubuntu. There’s lots of reasons it might not work, but it can be fun to try.

For the most part, the only reason any Linux program is unavailable on a different version of Linux is that no one has bothered to build the necessary installer for that combination of program and OS.

.RPM was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match .Deb was supposed to solve this by being universal, since any other OS can implement it to match (about 60% actually do). I think Flatpacks and Snaps might solve this by being universal, at some point…

Source: I’ve built installer packages for various operating systems.

Same here. I daresay my phone is now finally again as nice as in the early days of smart phones.

That’s the most evil thing I’ve heard in awhile, and I would absolutely make use of it anyway.

Some amusing context (as a big Mercurial fan, myself):

According to the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, Mercurial is the 4th most popular response, beaten only by Git, Subversion, and “I don’t use version control”.

Git was roughly 94x as popular as Mercurial.

“I don’t use version control.” was a bit more than 4x as popular as Mercurial.

As someone knowledgeable on the subject, this was my journey:

Mozilla: “While HTTPS encryts web page contents, many middlemen can still see the URL of the sites you visit.”

Me: “Yes, we know this is a problem. It has been for a long time. But if you’re adding some kind of complex new solution, it’s going to cause issues for…”

Mozilla: “We added public key encryption to DNS.”

Me: “Oh shit, that’s really smart, and it’ll just work.”

The brilliance of this move is public key encryption is old and widely supported and DNS is old and universally supported. I think we will see broad support roll out quickly on this one (at least compared to glacial scale of changes across the Internet.)

Great write-up.

Worth highlighting for folks faced with an ultimatum:

"If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be:

Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum."

And for leaders considering giving an ultimatum:

“Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. (An old dutch proverb)”

I’m excited to give it a try.

Seems sus.

I mean, the good news is I saw this post (currently brand new with very few votes) right away in “hot”. So that’s nice, I guess?

That said, I have no idea. If I were to hazard a guessz I wonder if the algorithm doesn’t have any logic for dealing with outlier vote counts, and brand new posts all end up falling into that outlier case.

Nice. Your excellent suggestion probably belongs in a meta-package somewhere so that users get it for free when appropriate.

Makes sense. I use VSCodium or VSCode for everything I used to use WordPad for. Seems overdue for VSCode to be a built-in. If they start including the HTML and PDF generation plugins as stock, a lot more folks would probably switch.

You might find good resources at https://carpentries.org/community-lessons

I feel seen.

The compromise I’ve landed on is that I host my own DNS mx records, and point them to a paid enterprise mail provider.

This gets me the advantages of a paid provider while keeping my actual email address fully mine, to take wherever I want.

I did still have to learn a bunch of DNS rules in order to send all the correct “I’m not an evil spammer” headers and DNS records. But following a one page tutorial worked for me.

Edit: A disadvantage of my approach is that I’m still at the mercy of my email provider if I want to export my message history, and for the privacy of my message history.

I have had some pretty obnoxious recurring reboots on my Pi4 when I don’t add a heat sink and fan.

Sometimes the obvious solution is the way to go.

Your idea sounds good to go ahead and publish your pubkey(s) to fully public URL you control and can memorize.

Then you can stash or memorize the curl command needed to grab it (them) and authorize something to it (them).

A lot of more complicated solutions are just fancy ways to safely move private keys around.

For my private keys, I prefer to generate a new one for each use case, and throw them out when I’m done with them. That way I don’t need a solution to move, share or store them.

Edit: Full disclosure - I do also use Ansible to deploy my public keys.

I was probably running some weird little Python web CGI dice roller or some such. I spent a lot of time teaching myself the HTTP stack the unnecessarily hard way, lol.

Yeah. Probably Apache. Can’t remember what that I was doing, but it almost certainly ran on Apache, and I almost certainly spent 90% of my energy configuring Apache.