Glorified network janitor. Perpetual blueteam botherer. Friendly neighborhood cyberman. Constantly regressing toward the mean. Slowly regarding silent things.

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • What else am I missing?

    Large scale manufacturers pre-installing Linux? Readily available multi-language support for home users? Coherent UI regardless of computer and distro underneath. Billions on lobbying money spent on politicians for favorable policy crafting? Billions spent on marketing campaigns to actually sell the idea to the masses who simply don’t care any of your points (or any technical reasons, privacy or anything else that might be top of mind of the current Linux userbase).

    I’d say Linux has a good chance of capturing 5-6% of the market in the coming years if lucky (I believe we’re somewhere around 4% at the moment), unless one of the big tech monopolies decides to start throwing money into it (Like Google did with Android)










  • Teaching kids good, healthy anticapitalist values is important. It’s also good to teach them some basic computing and privacy skills, because they’re not going to get that anywhere else. They’re going to be under lot of social peer pressure to have the latest phones and being connected on social media, consuming information from algorithms.They need to understand how to minimize the harm from Meta and the big tech.

    Same applies to the copyright industry and their practices (along with corps who are heavily anti-repair like Apple) - they need to understand the exploitation model of capitalism and lobbying - from there, let them make their own choices.


  • A symlink is a file that contains a shortcut (text string that is automatically interpreted and followed by the operating system) reference to another file or directory in the system. It’s more or less like Windows shortcut.

    If a symlink is deleted, its target remains unaffected. If the target is deleted, symlink still continues to point to non-existing file/directory. Symlinks can point to files or directories regardless of volume/partition (hardlinks can’t).

    Different programs treat symlinks differently. Majority of software just treats them transparently and acts like they’re operating on a “real” file or directory. Sometimes this has unexpected results when they try to determine what the previous or current directory is.

    There’s also software that needs to be “symlink aware” (like shells) and identify and manipulate them directly.

    You can upload a symlink to Dropbox/Gdrive etc and it’ll appear as a normal file (probably just very small filesize), but it loses the ability to act like a shortcut, this is sometimes annoying if you use a cloud service for backups as it can create filename conflicts and you need to make sure it’s preserved as “symlink” when restored. Most backup software is “symlink aware”.