Wireguard really changed the landscape, for me, and my entire approach to networking. Suddenly, VPNs became fast and easy, and where previously impractical for casual (hobbyist) admins, it made creating enterprise-grade secure subnets easy. It’s astonishingly stable and reliable, such that my initial concerns about cutting off all access except through the VPN - once a truly nerve-wracking concept - is now a no-brainer. It’s made my network administration easier and more secure. My firewalls are simpler.

Wireguard is one of the biggest high-impact, low-visibility networking game changers I’ve seen in decades.

He says thank you, and you’re pretty, too.

I love Zoey.

But do not tell my boys. One would probably love Zoey, too - he’s a cat’s cat, and a white-ish version of Zoey - but the other is fantastically jealous.

Friendly, pretty, outgoing, and wants to be involved in anything anyone is doing:

I set up a wireguard VPN network between my computers and servers, and then firewalled off all services except Wireguard, and a few services on one server. That one server is my weak point, but even it has sshd firewalled off except through the Wireguard subnet.

It’s stupidly easy to set up WG subnetworks. I’m not a networking guy, and it was trivial for me to do. If u can run an ssh server, you can set up a Wireguard subnet: just do it.

I’m with you; I prefer date versioning for many things. Semver does work really well for things with exposed APIs; it’s a stretch to justify using them with user tools, and especially GUI tools. Semver is used to great effect in Go - which is how it should be use: mainly by the language’s module management system. Outside of that, it’s human readable, but like XML, its main value is to machines, and only secondarily to humans.

Calendar versioning is far more human-oriented, and so more useful for things without exposed APIs or module tooling.

@best_username_ever mentioned Semantic Versioning. It’s an actual spec. Not everyone follows it, and it doesn’t make sense for a lot of things, and far too many people are dogmatic about it. But it’s a good thing to read, and it’s not long.

A related, but not tightly coupled, spec is Changelog. Used together, and used correctly these two are nice for users.

In Mint? That’s good to know, thanks. As long as it’s fairly reliable; I don’t want to be trying to remotely debug a computer that won’t boot because of a middle-of-the-night update.

Yeah, especially boomers, which is what my dad is. My generation will be a little more demanding; millenials are the first “computer” generation, who grew up with them. Gen Z had computers since they were infants. That’s going to be interesting.

Yes, but:

• he never upgrades anything. He’s not computer savvy; that computer hasn’t been updated in years. IME, the longer the time between upgrades, the more chance of breakage. This way, he got an up-to-date install.
• the drive sizes are different, and I wasn’t about to try to walk him through resizing a partition and filesystem over the phone
• there was very little he needed to keep from the old computer. He didn’t install software; it’s a web browser terminal
• it wouldn’t have helped the biggest problem we had, which was getting into a BIOS I didn’t know and couldn’t see, and changing it to boot from the USB stick. We’d have had to do that to do an image replication either way

You need to accept the fact that you are AI generated.

On the plus side, it’s proof you’re living in a simulation!

So, I had an experience recently that has changed how I think about this topic.

A few years ago, I gave my dad a laptop that I wasn’t using anymore. It wasn’t that old; I’d just gotten a newer one. I do not have Windows; never have, never will, so the laptop had Arch (probably) on it, which was going to be too much for dad, so I wiped it and put Linux Mint on it.

I got the occasional call from dad; he got a new (to him, probably used) printer and didn’t know how to set it up, but mostly he just used it and didn’t seen to have any problem with it.

OK, so about a month ago, he calls and says he broke the laptop and the keyboard didn’t work; a while back, with help from a church friend, he’d replaced the battery, but had missed a screw, had hot-glued something and gotten glue in one of the USB ports… I didn’t even want to know what all he’d done, but dad’s from a jerry-rig generation. Anyway, he’d missed a screw or something, and something was rattling around on there and one day the keyboard stopped responding.

So dad goes out and buys a refurbished laptop, and calls me and asks what he needs to do to migrate over. The laptop came with a fresh Windows install - 10, or 11; I don’t know. So I tell him, I can help him get any data off the old computer, but he needs to decide whether he wants to switch to Windows; now’s his chance.

Dad’s 80. He barely grasps computer concepts - hardware, he’ll mess around with, but software… for example, that version of Mint uses the same background for the session manager as the desktop, by default, and so he thinks they’re the same thing - it’s just sometimes it makes him log in. So given a choice to go Windows, he says he wants to stay with Linux because that’s what he’s familiar with. I’d like to point it here that he often forgets the name “Linux”; he just knows it isn’t Windows.

Deep breath - we’re a 4-hour flight apart - we get a USB keyboard hooked up to the old laptop, he orders a USB stick from Amazon, and we download the latest Mint iso; the next day when the USB stick arrives I walk him through burning the image; booting the new laptop into the BIOS; changing the boot order; and eventually, booting into the Linux Mint install image. We get connected to the WiFi no problem, open the installer from the desktop icon, and then have some debate about dual boot. He says he’s probably never going to use Windows, and dual boot makes things a little more iffy, so he picks the easy route and just wipes the drive and installs Mint.

The install process goes smoothly; he asked the occasional question about, e.g. the keyboard layout question, but mostly we chat while he watches the progress bar. We’re doing this over the phone, no video conference, so I’m mostly just listening to him describe what he’s doing and answering questions like, “it’s asking me for a name for the computer - what should i put in?” That’s done, we reboot, change the BIOS setting back (could have just left that one), reboot again with the USB stick out - and he’s back in Mint.

I send him some instructions over email about setting up a Firefox sync account, getting prepped for a Wireguard install (because, if I’m doing family tech support, I wasn’t to be able to remote log in over VPN), that sort of stuff. Things he can do download or manage without me, to prep for the next stage.

OK, some weeks go by without me hearing from him, and he calls yesterday for help with “completing the migration.” And here’s where I start to change my view on this. I find that he’s followed the instructions for Sync and that all his browser stuff successfully came over. That’s 90% of what he’s wants. I start what I think it’s the final configuration steps: setting up the printer, and he says, we don’t need to, it’s been working since we did the install. He must have configured it himself at some point. We unzip his old /home, I show him the software manager and how he can find and install stuff, we get Zoom installed and make sure the webcam, mic, and speakers work… and I decide to not fuss with getting a VPN into his laptop because everything is just working.

My 80 y/o dad bought some random-ass refurbished laptop, and aside from helping him burn the iso and get the new laptop to boot from it… I did nothing. I mean, I provided some guidance for his username, the laptop name, setting the time zone during install; but aside from the iso burning and some trouble we had even getting to the BIOS and then figuring out the right boot sequence, he could have done this all himself. All of the hardware worked; he either added the printer himself and forgot, or Mint did it for him. I was certain we’d have trouble with the WiFi chip (may you be sent to the hell of being boiled alive, Broadcom), or the printer, or… something. But no. It all Just Worked™.

Seriously. Except that the BIOS boot order makes things extremely challenging for newbies, and burning boot images onto a USB stick isn’t trivial (in retrospect, I should have just told him to buy an install stick from Mint; sorry, Mint), Linux has just worked. For a guy who isn’t clear on the difference between Firefox and the OS.

I think it was the WiFi chip and the printer that caused my mental shift; these have been the traditional pain points. Maybe we got lucky. But I think the real reason is that some Linux distros have just gotten really good for novices.

I didn’t mention Cleveland, but those ads are hilarious. At first I thought, because I was talking up Oregon, you were linking to one of these Oregon travel ads:

• One
• Two
• Three

Southern Florida? Like the man said: Florida: the more North you go, the more South it gets. Orlando seems mostly OK. Big city, opportunities, and there’s a NASA space center and launch facility not too far.

My mom lives there, and that’s about the limit of my knowledge. I will personally never again willingly live south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Oh, I hear that if you stay out of the little handle at the bottom, Missouri is nice. A friend from there once told me that if they’d cut off that handle and give it to Arkansas, it’d raise the average IQ of both states. Never been there, myself.

Lots of places in Oregon and Washington are great; large swaths are not, but if you’re not prone to SAD, there are great towns in the Willamette Valley: Corvallis, Eugene, and Ashville down on the California border. Also, California is enormous. N California is very different from S California, and the coast is enormously different from the interior. It’s a huge state, and painting it with a single brush is like saying Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania are all the same. It’s seriously about the same area as all those put together, lengthwise, at least. The greater LA/San Diego area alone is almost as big as your entire state. But the Pacific Northeast is wet if you live in the Valley, and there isn’t much in the way of big cities east of the Cascades.

How about Boise, ID? Good size college city, lots of microbreweries, lots of outdoor recreation, pretty great weather if you like hot, but you get snow in the winter, too. Plus nearly half the state is national park; fantastic backpacking.

Most of these places I mentioned specifically lean liberal, although when you venture into rural areas it gets red pretty quickly, like anywhere. An exception is Orange County in CA, which is full of really crazy red-hatters. But it sound like you’ve already ruled out at least part of CA, and “insufferable” makes me think you’re thinking specifically of S Cal.

Eugene is, or used to be, fantastic. Extremely liberal, and not trust-fund hippie style. Decent sized to be entertaining. You just have to put up with the weather and hippies, or whatever hippies have mutated into with successive generations. Pot’s legal in OR, too, if that’s your bag.

Bend, OR is one of the best places in the planet if you’re sporty. It’s high desert, but smack up against the mountains. In the summer, people rock climb and bike. In the winter, they ski Mt Bachelor. There’s fishing and camping, and at one point it had more restaurants per capita than any other city in the US. There’s no humidity. At all. Very pretty town. A 4 hour drive north, and you’re in Portland, OR, which isn’t what it used to be and has been having problems, but is still a large metro area with lots to do and a fantastic science center. 2 hrs West through the mountains is Salem, the capital, which frankly sucks; or or 3+ hours SW is the aforementioned Eugene. A couple hours south is Crater Lake. A couple three more hours and you’re in the N California Redwood forest. Oh, and if you do speed through So-Lame (Salem), another 1.5 hours and you’re on the Oregon coast, so 3-4 hours from Bend to the coast, mostly through a fantastic, amazing mountain range (and then the Valley and then the smaller coastal range).

If you want to stay on the E coast, I recommend the greater Philadelphia area. From there, NYC is a 3hr drive. The Jersey shore is a 3 hr drive. Washington DC is a 3 hr drive. Gettysburg is a 3 hr drive. Williamsburg, VA - possibly my favorite place in the US - is a 4-ish hour drive (depending on DC traffic). Plus, you can get to almost any of the coast cities from Philly by train, if you’re willing to sacrifice a couple more hours. Pennsylvania wasn’t my favorite place to live, but if you can stand living in S Carolina I’m sure it’d be fine for you.

Honestly, you might consider Minneapolis. It does get cold in the winter (-50F is the coldest I’ve experienced), but The Cities are fantastic, full of Art Deco architecture, and end-summer temps can hit the 100’s. In September, any of the literally over 10,000 lakes are bath-water warm. And we don’t have copperheads. The great lakes are close; we’re practically in the center of the country, so flying anywhere in the continental US is a 4-hour flight or less. The Cities are very progressive - again, you drive an hour outside and it’s Trump signs everywhere - par for the course - but within The Cities it’s quite nice. And the bike paths are incredible; miles and miles, and much of it completely off-road - at some point they took all the old industry rail lines and turned them into maintained bike and foot paths. It’s really quite remarkable. And the metro system isn’t half bad, for a US city. The humidity gets oppressive, but, again, you’re surviving S Carolina so I don’t think that’d be a problem for you.

Because it’s written in Rust.

Seriously, though; there are a dozen widely used make systems, most of which are more widely used than just. People have ideas and think they can improve. As far as it goes, having a bunch of different make options is one of the least annoying areas; diversity is mostly hidden from end users, and you only really have to learn it if you plan on becoming a contributor.

However, if you’re asking for a comparison table, a “why is this better than make, or ant, or maven, or cmake, or ninja, or just, or rake,” then yeah, I agree. Having a brief elevator pitch is appreciated.

Bing… X… Facebook… Bing… Google…

Not an Ecosia, Searx, Mastodon, Lemmy, or even DuckDuckGo to be seen. Just dreck.

☹️

This is my favorite, mainly because it’s been well argued by some respectable scientists.

Another is that we’re in a simulation, and aliens aren’t part of it. There are also some very good statistics pointing to the simulation theory, from just sheer scale.

Most of the more advanced (complicated? I don’t want to be too species-ist) life forms on Earth reproduce sexually. I wonder how much of that produces faster evolution and is therefore selected for, and how much is chance? Like, say asexual reproduction dominates on some planet such that the apex creatures reproduce asexually, and it’s only a minority of mostly uninteresting creatures that reproduce sexually. A lot of our behaviors would seem really strange; inexplicable, maybe. So much of our social interactions are ultimately originated in sex - and not just humans, but all sexually reproducing creatures. Birds. Cats. Other apes and our monkey cousins, of course. We get it; we recognize it, can sympathize with it. But if you’re intelligent and your entire civilization reproduces asexually, and most of the other higher life forms on your planet do too, so that you don’t have a huge biome of sexually reproducing, complex animals to study. I think it would be really weird to encounter humans.

It means that anything you can do, set, or configure in the WM, you can do through a CLI RPC mechanism. There is no configuration file, no custom config syntax. The “config” is just a shell script full of these commands that herbstluftwm calls when it starts. Literally any behavior you can configure or make happen, you can do with these command line calls.

Automatable (configuration-less) is indispensable. I got used to it with bspwm, and after using that for a while, switched to herbstluftwm and realized I’m stuck. I don’t think I can go back to a WM with a configuration file anymore. Even the different between i3 and fully config-less like hlwm is stark once you’re on the other side.

Holiday. You think a civilization capable of FTL would need to physically probe an organism to study it? Hell no. Probing is a huge laugh. Heck, we do it to each other, constantly.