"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

My sister is 16yo and she is not interested in the C.S field. I gave her last year my laptop and it has Debian on it, since i bought a new one. She never told me that she has to deal with any problem, she was just using it.
Today she got a new laptop from our grandma and she texts me "hey, is there any way i can install Linux on that? I don't want to use windows".
Well i told her that she has to wait me to come back home next month and i will take care of it.

I had never thought that i will listen something like that. Good day.

Friend messaged me:

"could you install Linux onto my laptop? I'm getting really fucking tired of windows 10."

YES YES YES OF COURSE I CAN AND I WILL. EVERY DE-WINDOWS-ED PC IS ONE MORE!

Linux sucks.

Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:

1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.

2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.

3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?

4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).

5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!

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

Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.

I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.

But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.

Meeting with client.

Me: our solution does not require a central server, any computer (windows, Mac or Linux) on which you install our software can act both as a client and a server

Client: no we need to have all our data on our server

Me: sure, you can install our software on any computer

Client: no, we need it on our server

Me: ok then, we can make the needed changes to install our software on your server, it will cost an additional fee though

Client: very good then

Me(m) vs Apple(a)

m - hey apple!
a -
m - apple?
a - oh yeah, who are u?
m - umm, titan?
a - titan who?
m - titanlan- .. umm nevermind . hi , i am a developer :D
a - developer ? hah.. get out.
m - but wait, I want to develop apps for you! I have been developing android apps for last one year and i love mobile dev! wanna talk more on this ?
a - umm.. ugh ok. so you wanna develop apps?
m- yes!, i am doing great at java an-..
a- yeah wait. we don't have that in here. we use swift
m -Oh. no worries , the principles are the same i will watch some free youtube vids and have a plugin for studio or vsco-..
a- yeah wait you can't do that too.we don't have plugins
m - Really, no plugin? then where do people develop ios apps?
a- xcode
m - Oh , how stupid of me , an IDE of course. anyways i can simply install it in my windows or linux an-..
a - nope, you can't do that.
m - what? then where does it run?
a -macOS
m -Oh, then surely you might have some distro or-
a - nope, buy a mac. pass $3000
m- wha-? i just want to run your bloody IDE!
a- oh honey, your $3000 will be totally worth it, you will love it!
m- but i haven't even started making an app, leave alone publishing it.
a- oh, that will cost you another $100 . plus if you wanna test your apps, make sure it runs in our latest , fragile iphones otherwise we won't publish it. that will cost another $1500
m- what? but I already have a fine , high tech laptop and a smartphone!

a- yeah you can dump that

FML. how the fuck is apple living and thriving? lots of selfish motives and greeds i guess? because i don't see a single place where they are using the word "free" or "cheap" .

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

1. Go to office!
2. Make coffee!!
3. Start computer.
4. Get to wo.."Windows must restart in order to install some updates".
4. 3 hours later => "Working on updates 68% n/ Don't turn off your PC. This will take a while."
4. Fuck this, I'm going home.

I miss Linux...

Movie idea: a plane in mid air catches the wannacrypt virus and refuses manual control. The plane flies straight forward but they only have 2h until they're out of fuel and crash. The only way to pay the ransom is to get enough bitcoins but a recent price-fluctuation made the amount of bitcoins to pay way too high. The only way to resolve this is to create a tumoil on social media causing the bitcoin price to go down.

Visit your local cinema this summer to see 200 passengers and a group of devrant-guest-starrings use nothing but their brains, geniuety and arsenal of devices. Will they find the guy that blocks the wifi by watching 4k porn? Will alice and alexdelarge have to resort to building a fuel-powered mining-rig? Or will linux and linuxxx compile an open-source cockpit program before they run out of time? If so, will they even be able to decide on a linux distro to install on the cockpit?

Coming out in <% new Date().getFullYear() + 1 %>

Do not continue reading if you value your life.

Visual fucking studio 2015 installation. MOTHERFUCKER !!!

OK new project will only work on VS2015. Need to download it. OK, go to MS website. Project works with community edition. Fucking great. Download the installer. Run the installer. MOTHERFUCKER DON'T OPEN THE FUCKING BROWSER TO THANK ME, YOU FUCKING FUCK. Ok...Wait to download the packages. One fucking eternity later download completes. FUCKING GREAT. Proceed to package installation. After two fucking hours installation progress bar stays the same. Google "vs 2015 installation stuck windows 7". MOTHERFUCKING BACKGROUND PROCESS IS FUCKING STUCK AND INSTALLATION DOES NOT CONTINUE. FUCK YOU. I'VE LOST TWO HOURS. OK, stop the process. Installation gets cancelled. Run the installer again. STOP THANKING ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT :@ OK, check again all downloaded packages. All good. Continue with installation. Installation completes. MOTHERFUCKER WHY YOU WANT TO RESTART THE WHOLE SYSTEM ? FUCK YOUR WINDOWS UPDATES. Ok, restart and be done with it. SSD to the rescue. Try to set up the project.

MOTHERFUCKER I DIDN'T INSTALL THE C++ PACKAGES. WTF WERE YOU DOING ALL THAT TIME? OK, run installer again and install C++ packages. I SWEAR TO GOD MICROSOFT, IF YOU THANK ME ONE MORE GODDAMN TIME, YOU'RE GETTING HATE MAIL.

Ok, installation completes. It's coding time. NO BITCH. VS2015 silently crashes after splash screen. :@@@ Google wtf is wrong again, turns out the C++ packages fuck shit up. Ok, pass some arguments to devenv.exe to reset. Restart VS. Ok, seems to be working now. Make a test project. Fucking awesome. Close VS and get the project files from perforce.

OK, files downloaded. Open VS again....

VS: "You're my bitch, you won't code today. Run from console and pass some shitty reset parameters"

YOU FUCKING FUCK. GO FUCK YOURSELF UP YOUR FUCKING ARSE. Ok, pass the parameters from console. Run again. Same "you're my bitch message" :@ OK, run with administrator rights, opens like charm. Run without admin rights again, "you're my bitch message". :@@@@@

Restart system, VS2015 finally opens project normally. Build project, 6934 errors.... :@ I'M DONE ! IM GOING BACK TO LINUX PROJECT. FUCK YOU ALL.

Ranted about him before but this just came to my mind again.
The fucking windows (to the max) fanboy I had to deal with for too long.

Every time I mentioned something about what programming language to use in a project he was NOT part of:
"I know it's none of my business, BUT I think you should use .net"
(All backend JavaScript and php guys).

Every time I mentioned something about what server system to use:
"I know it's none of my business but I think you should use Windows server"
(All Linux guys)

Every time I'd say something positive about Linux he'd search as long as needed to prove that that was also a windows thing (didn't even come close sometimes)

Every time I told the devs there about a windows security issue (as in "guys they found this thing, install the next update to stay safe :)" - "ahhh will do, thanks for letting know man!") he'd search as long as needed to prove that Linux also had had security issues like that.
(Okay?!? I know?!? I'm just trying to notify people so their systems stay secure and they're genuinely happy with that so STFU)

MOTHERFUCKER.

A conversation with our network/system admin.

Me : Can I install linux on my computer, windows is slow and terrible.

Him : No, if you use anything but Windows in this company, you will be fired for bypassing our security protocols. Its written in your contract.

Me : *boots up my Macbook*

More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.

TLDR: Got the wrong internship.

Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”

Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.

Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.

Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.

Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.

I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.

Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.

... *sigh* ...

!(short rant)

Look I understand online privacy is a concern and we should really be very much aware about what data we are giving to whom. But when does it turn from being aware to just being paranoid and a maniac about it.? I mean okay, I know facebook has access to your data including your whatsapp chat (presumably), google listens to your conversations and snoops on your mail and shit, amazon advertises that you must have their spy system (read alexa) install in your homes and numerous other cases. But in the end it really boils down to "everyone wants your data but who do you trust your data with?"

For me, facebook and the so-called social media sites are a strict no-no but I use whatsapp as my primary chating application. I like to use google for my searches because yaa it gives me more accurate search results as compared to ddg because it has my search history. I use gmail as my primary as well as work email because it is convinient and an adv here and there doesnt bother me. Their spam filters, the easy accessibility options, the storage they offer everything is much more convinient for me. I use linux for my work related stuff (obviously) but I play my games on windows. Alexa and such type of products are again a big no-no for me but I regularly shop from amazon and unless I am searching for some weird ass shit (which if you want to, do it in some incognito mode) I am fine with coming across some advs about things I searched for. Sometimes it reminds me of things I need to buy which I might have put off and later on forgot. I have an amazon prime account because prime video has some good shows in there. My primary web browser is chrome because I simply love its developer tools and I now have gotten used to it. So unless chrome is very much hogging on my ram, in which case I switch over to firefox for some of my tabs, I am okay with using chrome. I have a motorola phone with stock android which means all google apps pre-installed. I use hangouts, google keep, google map(cannot live without it now), heck even google photos, but I also deny certain accesses to apps which I find fishy like if you are a game, you should not have access to my gps. I live in India where we have aadhar cards(like the social securtiy number in the USA) where the government has our fingerprints and all our data because every damn thing now needs to be linked with your aadhar otherwise your service will be terminated. Like your mobile number, your investment policies, your income tax, heck even your marraige certificates need to be linked with your aadhar card. Here, I dont have any option but to give in because somehow "its in the interest of the nation". Not surprisingly, this thing recently came to light where you can get your hands on anyone's aadhar details including their fingerprints for just ₹50($1). Fuck that shit.

tl;dr
There are and should be always exceptions when it comes to privacy because when you give the other person your data, it sometimes makes your life much easier. On the other hand, people/services asking for your data with the sole purpose of infilterating into your private life and not providing any usefulness should just be boycotted. It all boils down to till what extent you wish to share your data(ranging from literally installing a spying device in your house to them knowing that I want to understand how spring security works) and how much do you trust the service with your data. Example being, I just shared most of my private data in this rant with a group of unknown people and I am okay with it, because I know I can trust dev rant with my posts(unlike facebook).

Slowbro: Do you have time tonight?
Me: No sorry, I can't stay late tonight, I have a thing with my wife.
S: Oh yeah, I'm not staying late either.
M: Oh, so what do you want?
S: Can you help me install linux?
M: Uh no, I can't stay late -
S: No, no you don't have to stay, you can do it from home.
M: What? No I don't have time tonight. Wait you want me to take your computer home?
S: No, no I need to use my computer tonight.
M: So... What do you want me to do?
S: You can do it on your computer.
M: You want me to install an OS on your computer, but on my computer??
S: No, no *sigh* just try it on your computer so we know it will work on my computer. It is a proof of principle.
M: Reinstall my OS?
S: As a proof of principle. So tomorrow when we do it on my computer, we need not waste any time.
M: ... No I'm not going to reinstall my OS just as a test for you.
S: Not a test, a proof of principle.
M: What are you.. I'm sorry, I don't have time for this tonight.
S: Just a proof of principle!!
M: Ok see you.

I really, honestly, am getting annoyed when someone tells me that "Linux is user-friendly". Some people seem to think that because they themselves can install Linux, that anyone can, and because I still use Windows I'm some sort of a noob.

So let me tell you why I don't use Linux: because it never actually "just works". I have tried, at the very least two dozen times, to install one distro or another on a machine that I owned. Never, not even once, not even *close*, has it installed and worked without failing on some part of my hardware.

My last experience was with Ubuntu 17.04, supposed to have great hardware and software support. I have a popular Dell Alienware machine with extremely common hardware (please don't hate me, I had a great deal through work with an interest-free loan to buy it!), and I thought for just one moment that maybe Ubuntu had reached the point where it just, y'know, fucking worked when installing it... but no. Not a chance.

It started with my monitors. My secondary monitor that worked fine on Windows and never once failed to display anything, simply didn't work. It wasn't detected, it didn't turn on, it just failed. After hours of toiling with bash commands and fucking around in x conf files, I finally figured out that for some reason, it didn't like my two IDENTICAL monitors on IDENTICAL cables on the SAME video card. I fixed it by using a DVI to HDMI adapter....

Then was my sound card. It appeared to be detected and working, but it was playing at like 0.01% volume. The system volume was fine, the speaker volume was fine, everything appeared great except I literally had no fucking sound. I tried everything from using the front output to checking if it was going to my display through HDMI to "switching the audio sublayer from alsa to whatever the hell other thing exists" but nothing worked. I gave up.

My mouse? Hell. It's a Corsair Gaming mouse, nothing fancy, it only has a couple extra buttons - none of those worked, not even the goddamn scrollwheel. I didn't expect the *lights* to work, but the "back" and "Forward" buttons? COME ON. After an hour, I just gave up.

My media keyboard that's like 15 years old and is of IBM brand obviously wasn't recognized. Didn't even bother with that one.

Of my 3 different network adapters (2 connectors, one wifi), only one physical card was detected. Bluetooth didn't work. At this point I was so tired of finding things that didn't work that I tried something else.

My work VPN... holy shit have you ever tried configuring a corporate VPN on Linux? Goddamn. On windows it's "next next next finish then enter your username/password" and on Linux it's "get this specific format TLS certificate from your IT with a private key and put it in this network conf and then run this whatever command to...." yeah no.

And don't get me started on even attempting to play GAMES on this fucking OS. I mean, even installing the graphic drivers? Never in my life have I had to *exit the GUI layer of an OS* to install a graphic driver. That would be like dropping down to MS-DOS on Windows to install Nvidia drivers. Holy shit what the fuck guys. And don't get me started on WINE, I ain't touching this "not an emulator emulator" with a 10-foot pole.

And then, you start reading online for all these problems and it's a mix of "here are 9038245 steps to fix your problem in the terminal" and "fucking noob go back to Windows if you can't deal with it" posts.

It's SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING, I spent a whole day trying to get a BASIC system up and running, where it takes a half-hour AT MOST with any version of Windows. I'm just... done.

I will give Ubuntu one redeeming quality, however. On the Live USB, you can use the `dd` command to mirror a whole drive in a few minutes. And when you're doing fucking around with this piece of shit OS that refuses to do simple things like "playing audio", `dd` will restore Windows right back to where it was as if Ubuntu never existed in the first place.

Thanks, `dd`. I wish you were on Windows. Your OS is the LEAST user friendly thing I've ever had to deal with.

WHAT THE FLYING FUCK WINDOWS???

You change the icon for the multi desktop button... ok fine,
*clicks*
son of a bitch now contains Bing Ads

Fuck you Windows, and Fuck me for not being able to find a linux distro that will fucking boot after install correctly, and FUCK you acer for not having linux support.

"For our app we are using Docker, so for the new server we will need a barebone Linux install"
"Oh please no, Linux is not for a stable server and is very hard to manage, let's install Windows Server 2002 and you can virtualize everything you want"
"Wait, we really can use our cpu cycles to something better..."
"Sorry, too late, already installing!"

Our sysadmin is a Microsoft integralist, we should RUN!

How to from hapiness 100 to 0 in seven simple steps:
1. Buy a new 2018 gaming laptop..
2. Install Linux on it for work..
3. Figure out your touchpad is not supported even by latest kernel rc..
4. Spend four days going through forums, bugzillas and overflows while messing around with recompiling kernel, drivers, configs and 3rd party libraries..
5. Lie down and pray someone will add support for your device in kernel in near future..
6. Try not to cry..
7. Cry, cry a lot..

My mother-in-law asked me to reinstall her laptop. I made a deal with her that I will happily do that, but only if it can be a Linux distribution.
She eventually after asking questions about it agreed.
She don't want to go back anymore.

Funny enough, the co-workers didn't understand why is her laptop slightly looks different, so they started to tell her , that the laptop is full with virus.

I explained her that she doesn't even have system privilege to install one even if she wants.

She was happy with the answer :D

Sometimes I really feel bad for windows.

Someone with a potato Windows laptop that costs around $400 who has a bit of IT knowledge:

"Windows is so shit. Why does people buys this?"

installs Linux:

"OMG! Linux is so much better"

Even though it'll probably take a day or two to get the touchpad and wifi working. Want to install a software? Sure let me just download the source, compile it (Which will take another 2 hour to meet all the dependecies).

Another scenario:

Someone with a potato Windows laptop that costs around $400:

"Windows is such shit. Why does people buy this?"

Buys a $2000 Macbook.

"OMG! So much better. That's why people love mac so much"

I've used Fedora and Elementary for the last 3 years. But the amount of hate Windows gets is ridiculous.

Trying to install Ubuntu onto my newly acquired Asus T100.

It's hardly compatible with Linux but after tweaking around I did get it to boot with Ubuntu 16.04.

I'm actually quite nervous 😅

But leaving windows on that poor thing would be a no-fucking-go so I hope this will save it.

I don't know who you are but I will find you and I will install linux in your pc

Fuck off bitch
My bios is password protected

Why do devs hate windows (and all its products) so much? I mean yaa okay it is a shit os for you to get your development thingies done. Yaa I know its not open source. Yaa I know its not free. Yaa I know a lot of malwares are targetted towards windows. Yaa I know it takes decades to install updates which are released almost every week. And so on....

But wasnt windows the first operating system you laid your hands on? I mean me being a 90s born kid from India, Windows 98 was my first operating system and I was really in love with it as a teenager. MS paint was my playground and I used to go berserk over there. I mean come on. Being a teenager and knowing nothing about how a computer actually works, would you have been able to figure out how to run an NFS on linux? All the kickass presentations made in power point were so in during that time. The first code I ever wrote was in turbo C running on Windows XP. So whoever is bashing Windows and any of their products is a shit person because though Windows is not meant for developers (that too only some) it is a great operating system and I will always root for it in any forum/post where it is being bashed or criticized about. Not a Windows fan-boy (I dont known if there is even such a thing) but Windows is best for non-devs.

Recently started using Linux for software development and it is waay easier to get things done than on windows. As a beginner in CS and a total Windows person, I am beginning to really enjoy Linux. I will definitely install a dualboot on my Laptop for the new semester in school.

I need a new 'main' language to do all my projects in as java is kind of grinding away at my psyche.

Golang I liked quite a lot when I used it for my job a year ago, I'll give that a try..

Golang installed and up and working fine.

Oh, I know lets see if there are GLFW bindings for golang. And sure there are lets go!

Oh I need gcc and mingwex + mingw32 which I will acquire through cygwin.

hmm.. mingwex + mingw32 not found and my drive is almost full. I'll reinstall on my D:\ drive before continuing troubleshooting.

> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> Change permissions Access denied.

No problem I just don't own this object!

> Change to be the 'object owner' Success!
> Change permissions Success!
> Delete C:\Cygwin Access denied.
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.
> takeown /F C:\Cygwin /A /R /D Y Success!
> cmd rmdir c:\test /s /q Access denied.

At this point it would be more efficient to manually open up my ssd, and using a fridge magnet change every single bit to be exactly what I want it to be.

Or install linux.

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

Rant:
Why in the freezing cold all people think that linux = secure. Ransomware... Bla bla not happening on linux bla bla... Linux is secure.

If Linux would have been the most popular one people will pretty much run everything on root and install every stupid package available and never run: apt-get update.

Users were so dumb they got scammed by a phising mail... In freaking 2017... This is user stupidity not OS fault...

God its stupidly annoying seeing the same stuff : Linux secure...
Everything can be secure if you paid attention to the same stuff in freaking 2000.

I really want to.
I want to get away from Windows.
But I have yet to find a distro that works.

Today I tried again again.
I found out Linux Mint released version 19.
Snapshots integrated. Cool. I will try it.

Installed with Cinnamon. Looks nice. Everything is running fast.

Aaaaand I hate the mouse movement...
Why is there no 1:1 movement? Is acceleration on? Does not feel like it.
Ok. We can fix this right?
Opened the Mouse settings.
There is no way of deactivating mouse acceleration. Only customizing the amount of acceleration. What?

Ok customize it. No change at all.
Try extreme settings. Nothing.

Google for a solution. Says I should install dconf-editor and change settings there.

Install it, change the settings. Hey it works!
It is far from perfect but I can live with that.

Now the scroll wheel is so slow...
But there is no setting at all? Not even in dconf-editor.

Google the solution. Need to install imwheel and configure it. Really?
Okay will do. I wanna use this.

Finally. Mouse works as it should.

After all that, why is my lap so hot? Fucking hell the cpu seems to be burning.

Fuck that!
I am out! Back to Windows!

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

I've never used Windows in my day-to-day life. No kidding.
When I got my father's first computer, I used an old distribution called BBC Linux. I didn't have any computer knowledge, it was my first contact with a computer, so I went to a friend's house and asked for a CD to install on my computer. I don't know if this friend ended up making a "gotcha" and thought I'd give up, but I just read the manuals and fell in love. That was year 2000.
Then I used Conectiva Linux, then I went to Red Hat 9, then Slackware, then in 2007 I started using Solaris. And I stayed on Solaris (Solaris 10, Solaris Nevada and OpenSolaris) until 2011.
In 2011 I bought a Mac. I stayed at Apple until 2020, when I couldn't stand Apple forcing me to buy new computers (I still don't understand how a 2011 iMac, i5 (4 Hyper Thread cores) with 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD only runs up to High Sierra).
Then I bought a Dell. It came with Windows 10, the first thing I did was install WSL2. I could not stand it, the system is bad, sorry. I installed OpenSuse and have been using it for two years.

It's just that every day someone tells me "how can you use this"? "There is no alternative to Windows, do you want to be different?"

I know that my story was the reverse of the "mainstream", so I'm going to talk about my vision of Windows, that in my brain it is actually the "alternative".

- Having a file explorer without "tabs" in 2022 is unthinkable for me.
- I love terminal. And the Windows terminal is very limited. "ps ... | awk ... | xargs ..." is a must for me. "find ./ -name '...' -exec ..."... these things on Windows are totally "different" and have the "powershell way" while all other operating systems keep the same form. And cygwin is not an option. As Wine for serious work is also not.
- Dragging a file into the terminal, and having it write its path, is so natural, that when Windows didn't do it, I was dismayed.
- I've always used StarOffice, OpenOffice and now LibreOffice. All the people in my story received my documents and reports as a PDF and no one complained. Until a coworker saw me editing in LibreOffice and said "oh I want it in word format". As long as he didn't know, everything was fine, right?
- Windows is paid. And is there advertising? I don't understand. And I refuse. If you want to display advertising, then excuse me. I have no problem paying, I'm not an opensource shiite. It's just that paying and not working bothers me much more than an opensource that I can fix or expect a fix knowing the good will of the people involved.
- Hyper-V is a joke. QEMU/KVM is better, and Bhyve on FreeBSD which is a very young project, is already a million times better than Hyper-V.
- Developing in C/C++ for Windows is only possible in two ways: Either you've always lived in Windows and your brain is conditioned, or you compile with MSYS2 (CLang or GCC).
- There is no significant evolution of the windows desktop since 95.
- Multiple workspace support with multiple monitors, not ready. It's another joke.
- REGEDIT does not need any comment.
- The system loses performance over time. I still don't know how Windows achieves this.
- I've seen people complain about desktop fragmentation on Unix and Linux. Many DEs end up leaving applications with different themes (like running a Qt application in Gnome and GTK in KDE), but to be quite honest, the lack of Windows standard bothered me much more. Even Microsoft's own software is completely different: Control Panel, Calculator, Paint and Office, To-Do, and Settings, have horrible style differences and look-and-feel fragmentation.
- Dark mode has not been implemented. It's another joke. Many applications are white while everything else is dark. Sorry, even on Linux which is a mess, this has been resolved. And well resolved.
- NTFS? Serious?
- C:, D:.. It doesn't convince me since DOS.
- Bloatware.
- News "biased" in the search bar is a lack of respect for those who use the computer to work.

And that. For me, Windows is the alternative operating system. I can't take Windows seriously, for me it's an experimental one like Haiku or ReactOS. It's good to play.

About market share, it doesn't convince me to use it. But convinces me to sell. I've always developed applications to run on Windows. And when I need it, I turn on a VM to compile the project. But in everyday life? Impractical.

Alright, i'm fucking done.

Fedora: Packages are self-referencial, using the system is like sprinting through a fucking minefield.

Linux Mint: "lol just don't update packages on the repo because shit can't break if it never updates! Don't add custom repos either or we'll just fucking break your PC."

Debian Raw: "We have all of 5 packages on our repos and GPG is fucking broken so you can't add more repos."

Arch: "Have fun modifying the boot disk for 30 hours so it'll boot, and let's tack on another 30 to make it install properly."

Gentoo: "LOL what is swap. Let's just pipe garbage into this partition as fast as the disk will let us for literally no reason. I'm sure you can still use the system for all of 30 minutes, at which point your SSD will give out. No big deal..."

when did Linux go to shit?

Windows isn't any better without billions of tweaks and then a build upgrade (in that order specific) to make it run properly.

Nor is OSX, as it runs on the model of "lol gotta hack your own PC to run custom unapproved binaries!"

Fuck it.

I'm installing DOS.

Oh don't worry I just wasted a whole day, it's not like I had homework to do, projects to finish and VM's to install and I busted my sick ass trying to make it all work on my Linux machine which is now tainted with software I didn't even want to install and useless docs while having a 105 fever. It's all fucking worth it because at the end, of the next day, oh wait...you didn't even install the updates properly, fuck you windows! I swear the first thing I'll do after graduation will be getting rid of you!!

You stupid lousy price of potato shit windows, yes that’s right - this pissed of windows user is pissed the fuck right off.

Here I am letting you sit there idling along and then I press the start button, you know that fucking button I press regularly for fucking years, only for you to go “fuck you, I’m going to blue screen instead” like what the flying fuck? There hasn’t been any updates in a while that I’ve noticed but this shit is just a shit.

So what ever, let’s reboot this mother fucker, oh wait now you can’t fucking boot, I can hear the hdd spinning a million miles an hour (coz non ssd) but noooo your just going to sit there like a dumb ass prick who doesn’t know what the fuck your doing.

So fine, let’s pull out that old USB with w10 on it and do a MBR repair... (coz nothing else will fucking work in your shit list of options) ok so apparently an MBR repair gets you booting.. but wait there’s more, now you useless piece of shit are going to run a scan disk which has sat at 0% for the past 20 minutes and I don’t think I’m ever going to see that fucker move, I get it you want to do something useful, but Fucking Do it already!

Like wtf, how does a stable system just decide to shit itself.

Oh and before you say it.. no I can’t install Linux on this piece of shit, see my previous rants for that problem.

Was forced to do some work on Windows this week (CAD tools that runs only on Windows). I spent a few days just setting up the tools. There were quite a few things I realized I forgot about Windows (as compared to Linux).

1) Installation times are down right horrific. What exactly are the installer doing for 10 minutes?
2) .NET is a cluster fuck. Not even Microsofts repair tool can fix it, but rather just hangs. I ended up using another tool to nuke it and reinstall.
3) Windows binary installs are insanely huge, thus, takes forever to download.
4) The registry is a pointless database that must have been written in hell with the single intent of destroying users will to live. The sole existence of the registry is another proof that completely incompetent engineers designed Windows.
5) Rebooting is the only way to solve many problems. This is another sure sign of a fundamentally fucked up OS design.
6) What the heck is wrong with the GUIs designers? The control panel must be the worst design ever. There are so many levels to get to a particular setting I'm getting dizzy. Nothing gets better by the illogical organisation.
7) Windows networking. A perversion of the tcp/ip stack that makes it virtually impossible to understand a damn thing about the current network configuration. There are at least 3 different places that effects the settings.
8) Windows command prompt. Why did they even bother to leave it in? The interpreter is as intelligent as retarded donut. You can't do anything with it, except typing "exit" and Google for another solution.
8) Updates. Why does it takes hundreds of updates per month to keep that thing safe?
9) Despite all updates that is flying out of Redmond like confetti, it is still necessary to install antivirus to keep the damn thing safe. That cost extra money, and further cost you by degrading performance of your hardware.
10) Window performance. Software runs like it was swimming in molasses. The final stab in the back on your hardware investment, and pretty much sends performance on your hardware back a few hundred bucks more.
11) Closed source is evil. If something crash consistently, you might find a forum that address the issues you have. Otherwise you're out of luck. On the other hand, it might be for the better. I imagine reading the code for Windows can lead to severe depression.

I'm lucky to be a Linux dev, and should probably not complain too much... But really, Windows, go get yourself hit by a truck and die. I won't miss you.

Welp. Fucked up my system trying to install a dual boot. Guess I will only have linux now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

Which Linux flavour should I install in my newly ordered ssd ?
My usage will be
vscode, chrome, mongodb,
android studio

Please take consideration of ease in installing hardware drivers. Didn't want to waste so much time on it.

I love open source and all that fun stuff but I am very unimpressed by having to use GNU/Linux based OS after the last fuck up... the lack of games, stuff that actually works, the almost constant need to compile something and the need to have DDG open at all times because something broke. I mean why the fuck do I need to install libcurl3:i386(for 32 bit programs and games) if there is already libcurl4 and why the actual fuck does it conflict?!... Why the fuck do I need to glue together and compile drivers for my printer?! And they only have "beta support" so like half of the functions that the printer would normally have... Why the fuck don't any games work? Witcher 2? Nope, you click launch and the launcher just closes itself. osu!lazor? Nope, the game will run but only as a process in the background, no window will open no matter what I do. StarCraft: Brood War? Nope, Wine hates the battle.net client and running it in a VM is a really bad idea, the game flickers like crazy... Any other games? Pretty much out of luck... I would really like to play KCD but I doubt it would be playable...

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

Estimate for writing a custom WordPress plugin:

1 hour - Learn the API the plugin will support
1 hour - Review how plugins are written
60 hours - Set up XAMPP only to find that the version with PHP 7 no longer supports MySQL but something called MariaDB which my host doesn't support and then uninstall XAMPP and install MAMP only to get really frustrated setting it up and beat myself for not just buying that $99 Windows Pro upgrade so I can install Kalabox with HyperV which is much easier than all of this and why doesn't Kalabox have a way of supporting Windows Home because not everyone buys Windows Pro or can afford a Mac or has time to screw around with 100 possible Linux distros to figure out which one will work best and then buy gasoline and matches and set it on fire and watch it all buuuuuuurn such pretty fire.

I mean, I really, really like Linux, don't get me wrong but I don't know if it's my Pi or something I've done but I've always gotten issues with it after a few weeks/months.
Everything will flow smoothly until it crashes, and it won't start the x server, and pretty much everything tells me there is a segmentation fault. A fresh install fixes the issue but I also loose all the stuff I've done with my previous install. Really annoying and I haven't found a definitive answer as to why this happens.
Oh well.

*needs to repartition disks
*is mounted, need live usb
*download and burn gparted live, ≈20min
*reboot, usb not bootable
*try again, maybe it's corrupt...
* nope it just won't boot
*download and burn puppy Linux ≈20min
*is bootable
*installs gparted
*opens gparted
*repartition disks
*NOPE
*e2fsck failed: get a newer version of e2fsck
*already the latest version
*hmmm, maybe if I build it myself
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*dependency hell
*give up
*download and burn Debian live ≈40min
*try to install gparted
*can't get WiFi drivers working
*give up
*download and burn Ubuntu
*opens gparted (already installed)
*partitions disk, leaves to complete overnight (it will have to move ≈60GiB)
*comes back in morning
*computer went to sleep after 10 mins
*late to work but oh well I at least got it done

Linux update! After spending the weekend installing and configuring Ubuntu, I decided I instead wanted ElementaryOS. I then proceeded to install that in an hour and 45 minutes. -_-

Anyway, I'm pleased with the result, and hopefully this will be good enough that I make the switch for real by buying a non-apple computer when I have the money--and urgent enough need--for an upgrade.

2017 has ended and I want to throw this fucking rock of anger with it out of the Window.

I will tell you how my last 3 to 4 years as private IT Guy (IT Dumpster) for everything was.

My Gaming Community:
It was so fucking retarded that I would like to punch everyone there in the face over a thousand times.

Seriously there are over 60 People in that Community and they take every shit for granted and only cry about everything.

I'm Paying since 4 Years over 60 € for our Server every month. Some people donated some small bucks over the time and in the end it was around 150 € Donations over 4 years.

Im thankful for the Donations, but these people really think that they can demand for this Donations private Gameservers for over years for free or think that they now own the Servers. WTF?? FUCK YOU!!

Im managing 2 Linux Server with Web, MySQL, Voice and Gameserver. What did 1 guy donate? 10 € for 4 years, thats around 15% for just a month. You would get our Teamspeak for 7 Days for that price idiots!!

I did all the damn Webdev and am now writing a App in Kotlin for Android man!!

Since last everybody in the Community gets on my nerves, because they are so ignorant and dont appreciate the work of others 😡.

My Association where I support the hole IT with a friend:

We decided in the commitee that we would take on major changes in our infrastructure.

We need to finish the barebone concept in the end of January 18.
Early December 17 I wrote my friend, that we need to have a meeting and plan everything.

Well, now I mostly designed the roadmap by myself and didnt receive any reply from my friend 💀.

I really dont understand why the shit always sticks at me and I need to finish it.

I really love to code something, install or repair PC's with joy or manage Server but the people around me are in my free time like poison and they take out my fun for it.

The only fun and enjoyable IT Part for me is at my fulltime job. Thats the only good place left for me as Safe Heaven and the people there really appreciate my knowledge and work I do.

I have a dream that one day I will build my own computer and install arch linux so that I could say I assembled both hardware and software.

So I have to install visual studio which will take about 8gb of space for node-gyp to work.

WHY THE FUCK DID I SWITCH? I WAS HAPPY WITH MY LINUX

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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

Before, when you bought $3k Cisco router you got the box that will run indefinitely as long as it has power in about any environment you can go to install it; with or without fans, it had more important business than to give a shit about such things.
Now, when you buy $500k Cisco box you get a over-engineered chassis with 5 separate fan modules with their own firmwares, self tests, watchdog timers and shitload of bugs. It's a fucking fan, it should spin, not do quantum chromodynamic simulations.

Pic related.

Next rant could probably be how Cisco's switch from monolithic to modular linux arhitecture (in order to reduce downtime) turned into having time bombs just waiting to do some crazy shit.

i hate linux like a lot , how do you guys use it

like you guys dont want an advertising ID, how the fuck will advertisers know who you are and what you like?

open source , give me a break, you mean your os devs are soo untrustworthy that you just have to see what they wrote in the code, who does that?

free come on, how poor are you linux people, i mean, quality stuff gets paid for, free stuff just means it's trash

and the linux devs , the aint like real coders they are just hobbysts, making your os in their free time

and who wants to install their own software anyway, on other platforms the company curates restricted software that you can use, and i know you'll say its oppressive but its just customer protection.

and i do want my platform to track everything i do, it only helps them build better stuff for me.

and whenever they decide to outdate my hardware and kill support for it, it only means they care and want me to get the latest tech, how considerate.

wait , i hear you say, there are no bugs in linux, my vendor makes sure my os comes with the latest antivirus software, nothing can break my system.

and just because linux runs on servers and most super computers only shows that common users like you and me are ignored, at least my vendor is not a sellout, and still makes stuff for the masses.

you say freedom i say safety i can sleep safe and sound for am protected nutured under one echosystem of software that i can not leave.

Guys seriously why would you buy a macbook if apple will support it for like 7 years then you won't be able to upgrade to newer OSX versions? whereas a good laptop machine could run Linux for a lifetime, you could even change distros if you got bored.

Let me dive into it, If I buy a brand new macbook and use it rarely, its condition will barely change however one day I will get the message you need a greater version to install X app, seriously apple?

Real life scenario: I have an ipod touch 5 i rarely use it, one day i decided to install an application and boom no you can't buddy you need to upgrade the iOS however the currently version of iOS is the latest version i could get for that ipod touch model, so the thing is, I have a perfect condition product that is unusable unless for some music playing and what i already installed as apps, does it look fair to you? I have the same issue with an ipad mini, its condition is perfect, battery life is decent, I can't receive anymore updates, the youtube app stopped working, im stuck again with a product that i can use only to read some ebooks or use youtube through the browser, apple wants me to buy a new ipad which is absurd.

I will never buy an apple product again

Fuck you Apple

I. HATE. DELL. WITH. MY. GUTS.

Their low tiers products are full black plastic overpriced fuckshit, if you press too much the cover you can actually destroy your display. Fuck shitty laptops and fuck this shitty laptop in particular. It's slow. It's so slooooooow. It's everflying fucking slow motion, being on the web is like being in the matrix while dodging bullets made of wordpress plugins. The only good thing I can say is that is living right now, it has been... Three years? I only picked it because of high discount and ubuntu preinstalled (that made me think: oh, maybe they have components that are linux compatible regardless of distros. It was not). I'm enjoying Manjaro, when I'll have the skillz i'm going full Arch.

I will start university this fall. It's going to be a math major. I absolutely need something better than this anyway. I am also freaking out because I don't know which genre of software they could want to make me install and if they're windows/mac only. In the meanwhile I do photography, video, design and as you may suppose Adobe is often my go-to; I also have to build a workstation at home. I am freaking out because WELL FUCK WINDOWS 10 AND ITS PRIVACY NIGHTMARE PERIOD.

Which laptop I buy?
How well does heavy software run in a Windows virtual machine (on the desktop, not the laptop)?

PCs are a clusterfuck these days. Microsoft has abandoned the niceness of Win-7 and opted for Win-10 - with spyware, untested forced updates and forced online licence checks to make sure you have to get the shit. Macs are total crap, and Apple doesn't care because they instead prefer to milk customers with overpriced iShit. Linux sucks and looks like a Soviet tractor, but at least, it doesn't fuck up itself just by switching it on.

I had Linux as only OS from 2001 to 2010, and while I obviously can deal with it, I finally hated it enough to switch over to Win-7. From 2020 on, it looks like I will be back because Microsoft has managed to fuck up Windows even worse (and then these suckers wonder why Github users don't trust them). Maybe I'll buy a Tux when I install Linux so that I can punch it in the face.

Progress was yesterday - today it's about damage control. Welcome to a world where the brightest CS guys are thinking about how not only to shove up even more ads into peoples' asses, but how to also transmit lab data of the poo.

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

Ransomware has the effect to destroying data and my will to live.

I come in to work yesterday to see everyone panicking. We got hit by WannaCry. The boss is with IT dealing with it and sends all of us home. No biggie, since all of my work data is backed up on an offsite server.

I come back into work to still see everyone in a frenzy. I think they are still overreacting to the attack, so I go to my corner in the office. I boot up to see the Ubuntu logo, which is a huge problem, not for me of course, but for everyone else who can barely work Windows. I barge in on my boss and ask him why the fuck is Ubuntu on the PC's.

He replies, "I looked it up, Linux is not affected by viruses".

What the fuck is wrong with people? After I tell him to revert back to Windows because he's being a fucking retard, he goes ahead to send all of us home.

I can only hope he doesn't install Zorin or Elementary because I will quit.

Hey guys, wanna install Linux first time, but had some doubts.
Config - core 2 duo 2.93GHz, 2GB ddr2 ram, 320 hdd, AMD graphics card.
Doubts :
1. After writing it on usb and setting it in usb boot mode, the system didn't read the pen drive data ... is it because of the writing software ... I used power iso.
2. What about the partitions ? Do they still remain and will the install guide only ask to format the c drive or the whole hdd ?
3. Which distro do y recommend... I had kali/debian/fedora/mint in mind
My friends complained about fedora taking 45 seconds to boot up, I don't know about the other distro's ..
Thanks in advance

Tl; dr: Linux on Ryzen is a pain at the moment.
Now for the long part: Our student council got new computers because the old ones where slow as hell. As one of the admins, the others and I together decided that ryzen would be a good option, because they are not that expensive and we wouldn't have to buy gpus. (Wrong decision it turns out.) We settled on the ryzen 3 2200G and bought three systems to replace the old ones.

We meet Saturday morning and build the systems. All was fine and we were happy. The we tried to install ubuntu via preseeded netboot, which seemed to work fine at first. Then we started having weird screen issues and couldn't proceed with the installation. (See image) we then grumpily decided to just install them all one by one, flashed two usbs and started installing. On two systems the installation worked and we installed our packages, we weren't so lucky with the third one. It would crash on us all the time, even in bios. While that was going on we tried to set the other two up, turns out those two were also crashing but not as frequent as the other one. So we start to google and find people saying that kernel 4.19 kinda fixes it. We install it on the two working machines and the crashes get less frequent but are still there. At that point it was midnight and we went home.
Sunday morning: we reseated the cpu on the third system and it seems to be better now (it installed on the second try) and we were able to change the kernel. Yay. Now all three are in a state where they will sometimes randomly reset. :/ and we don't know what to try anymore.... Any suggestions?

Linux tip: if you're setting up a new computer w/ a fresh install of Linux or you got some new device you'd like to make Linux friends with, don't start by searching for drivers. Start with upgrading your kernel to the newest Mainline version you can. It's very likely it will bring your devices' support with it.

Damn I didn't think I'll like my P1 gen4 THIS much. Even better with a flavour of LMint!

I want to install Linux on my computer but windows 10 updates have been going on for 25 days now. Will I ever be free?

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

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.

Today I fucked Up by making friend install Linux when he doesn't even know what OS is.

Friend's Windows 7 broke. Unbootable & unfixable. I told him to reinstall. He has no idea how so he told me he will rent a PC (apparently that's a thing) until he buys a new one (he wanted it anyways). I told him it's bullshit to rent for PC when yours is totally ok only without OS.

He agreed and that's where I fucked Up. I told him how to make bootable flash disks(it was pain to get some info from him tho..) and he said he downloaded cracked Win7.. I told him it's suicide to use cracked OS for MANY fucking reasons. He agreed and I told him to install Ubuntu.... I thought it's easy that even my grandma could use it...... Well, apparently I was, in technical terms, "FUCKING WRONG"(all caps cuz tech terms).

He wasn't even able to Google how to install Steam on Ubuntu(apt install steam?) ... Constantly asking me "well and what should i write to Google?" And other shit..

I Always woke up to messages From him like "This shit doesn't work I'mma uninstall it" and I Always responed in one command or first Google result and it suddenly started to work.

After 2 days he gave up and is using cracked Win7. Can't wait for his reaction when I pwn him on nearest LAN party 😂 Maybe he will reconsider using cracked OS.

Anyway I learn from my Mistake. Just fuck me...

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

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)

It's fucking sad that when you buy a new laptop with good specs, good nvidia graphics, good sound and install Arch Linux because you hate fucking windows and arch way is the right way. But, then Linux fucks you because there is no proper nvidia support and you have to use wine which doesn't support new games and you run frequently into problems like audio (P.s. maybe in linux 4.10.11). You have to configure microphone everytime while using Skype and see some other guy having same laptop playing happily latest games without much burden.😣😣😥😥😔😔

When will Linux kernel be amazing for gaming??

I knew this might be an issue, but really Linux just sucks balls. It may not be Linux's fault, but the user experience could be a fuck ton better.

Spent 1.5 hours trying to get mint installed on second drive. It works fine if you don't want to do anything with it.

As you can probably surmise I died on getting the gpu driver installed. Just starts to a black screen. No amount of juggling is helping. It just refuses to show the screen with an nvidia driver installed. What is worse is that settings that might help are not set. Like nomodeset in grub. If you know some drivers fuck up the grub interface then add nomodeset and not leave it up to the user to "figure this shit out". Because users are tired of figuring this shit out.

Really really fucking disappointed. I thought to myself: lets install steam and see how it does. The reality: fucking stuck for 1.5 hours on trying to boot into x with graphics acceleration and failing.

Many of you hate on windows, but one thing it has going for it. It doesn't do fucked up shit like this. It has failsafes that try and account for this.

Fuck you linux. You need to fucking grow up and stop relying on users to fix every damn thing in the command line. Go back to server where you belong.

I know I will get the "I told you so" messages, but guess what? The computer I got doesn't come preinstalled with windows. You have to pay to get it. At this point windows is the only fucking viable solution to make my shit work.

Nvidia, go die in a fire bitch. Fix your fucking Linux support you worthless shit heads.

This has been a rant brought to you by "the pain of others". I hope you enjoyed the experience.

PS, I love you all. Even the "I told you so" bitches.

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

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

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

Why does noone implement autoupdater, especialy on linux side? Is there a reason i dont get? Sure, most system stuff is better in apt, but if i install servers, i do not want to wait for these stupid linux release timings! If it were hard, id understand. But most of this is possible with something like GitHub API and 20 Minutes of time. I mean, yeah backwards compatibility and what not, but then handle that internaly.

Example: I use dnsmasq on a raspberry pi. RPI is running raspbian. Raspian is debian 8. Debian 8 has a version of dnsmasq with a pretty annoying bug, which prevents me from using dnssec, as i cant open any cloudflare pages. Why, o why isnt this updated at MY will? Then, if it isnt, why is it so impossible hard to compile this myself, no docs for that, no binaries, NOTHING? Dear server devs, please add atleast basic autoupdate functionality without having to rely on the base os.

Or, give me easily deployable binaries, if you cant write something integrated.

Was installing Arch linux in dual boot with Windows and I fucked up.
Now I can't boot back into Windows. I tried to restore the boot 'thing' and I wasn't able to.
So tomorrow I will have to reinstall every single program I had since Microsoft doesn't make installed softawared recoverable.
P.S. This is the 4th time I try to install Arch without success (had problems with the bootloader, kde and gpu drivers and ended up bricking the os) but I'm still going to try until I get it to work. Why? Because I hate my life.

After spending 3 days trying to install Ubuntu on an XPS 15, I am ready to give up.
It's just not possible to install Linux on it, it will either freeze on install, freeze on boot, freeze on shutdown, or freeze in the middle of all of these.
Using the dedicated GPU is impossible since Nvidia are fucking retards. The touchpad constantly stops working.

The internet is filled with distro respins and 500 page long manuals on how to get things working on an XPS 15, but nothing works properly. Even the fucking keyboard backlight doesn't turn on without writing 100 things in GRUB

For those saying Linux is "faster" and "more reliable", well fuck right off, my unlit keyboard says otherwise, I'm done.

I ve decided to install a Linux vm just to see what will happen if you run rm -rf *

How to replace rEFInd bcuz M$ locks linux out of your system if M$ installed first.
-----
This will be long so get your salsa ready.
-----

1. Get your rEFInd from sourceforge
Since we are installing INTO windows, dl the zip.

2. extract to a folder.

2-a-: Install themes if you want any or edit the config if you want/need to, at this stage.

3. open a cmd as Admin and cd to the refind's folder.

4. mount system volume
`mountVol S: /S` will mount it to S:

5. use xcopy to copy as system
`xcopy /E refind-bin-x.xx.x\ S:\EFI\refind`

6tynice: go to System volume and to the refind folder
`S:`
`cd EDI\refind\refind`

7:Set rEFInd as Windows Boot Manager
`bcdedit /set {bootmgr} \EFI\refind\refind\refind_x64.efi`
(It's possible to use ia32 or aa64 for different architectures)

At this point, try plugging a linux thumb drive and restart your computer. Windows Boot Manager should be deactivated and should show refind.
You can use mouse and keyboard to select an OS boot or just set config to start one automatically unless you are holding a "power" button.
rEFInd also offers "fallback" boot for linux, which boots the efi from rEFInd and not from syslinux.

Trying to install Linux on an HP Stream 7 has been way more difficult than it should have been, even when you take into account that it's a 32-bit processor with a 32-bit EFI!

First off, the only thing I've been able to get it to boot right of the bat is Android x86 and BlissOS... kind of. You would think that Android x86 would be perfect for a tablet, right? Nope, performance sucked sooooo bad.

After reading some forums, I was finally able to get Ubuntus to load up... with the limiting factor being no on-screen keyboard.

So... at the moment I guess I'm stuck with a useless Windows tablet, and probably will be for a long time (you know, since 32-bit architecture is being dropped)

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

This is why I don't use and will probably never use Python.

Back in the uni days, I had a very important assignment. It determined whether I was going to the fourth grade from the third or not. It involved math and charting. It was very complex, and I spent a very long time on research, naturally. I knew Python 3, and I decided to use it. The only lib I needed was matplotlib, which I installed with pip. So I did the whole thing, tested it again at home, closed my laptop and was ready to go. My laptop used Windows 7 and was set up to ignore the lid closing. When I closed it, nothing would happen, even the screen stayed on. When I arrived at the lab, I opened my laptop, hit Ctrl + B as usual… and matplotlib import wasn't working. I obviously panicked, I tried to do something about it, but it just kept throwing an import error. Reinstalling the library didn't help. My friends too weren't able to help me. It just wasn't working, and that was it.

I failed the assignment, automatically. I had nothing to show. This was the first time I failed anything in the uni. Later I rewrote the code in C++ with Qt plotting library, and everything worked fine.

I never used Python since. I did everything uni with C++, and later with JavaScript. I don't care if it was Windows error or Python's. My Windows install was clean, I reinstalled it pretty much every year and kept the default settings. My laptop was for studying purposes only, and all my personal life happened on my desktop.

I didn't use exotic things like PyPy. It was just Python 3, the most basic, official installation. If you promote your fucking language as a cross-platform solution, please be bothered to make its basic behaviour stable on the most popular OS out there.

I will probably never use Python again. Maybe this issue was addressed and fixed. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it never would've happened on Linux or Mac. I don't care. It's like maintaining friendship with a person that betrayed you. I just can't do it.

JS and NPM never failed me.

No I don't want your updates every single day, Windows 10. Maybe I don't want to be so edgy with your updates. May be I like it XP style when updates didn't used to bug me with every single boot up and power down. It has become even worse. Who thought defering updates to the next boot up was a good option? It fucking interferes with the flow of work. They were like -
"You know what, let's update till 35% and then fucking update the remaining 65% at next boot"
"But users will be frustated"
"We'll show the update screen with clean font and a nice background. It will calm them down"
"Okay, so let users choose when to download the updates"
"That's not a fucking option, mate"
And if you are going to force updates down our throats please fucking mention what is being changed as a short description instead of showing a 'KBxxxxxxx' update number! If not that, at least hyperlink the thing to your update docs page! OR Mention a version buff if not it! I HATE seeing 'Update for Windows 10 Version xxxx for x64-based Systems' EVERY. SINGLE. TIME I see an update ready to be downloaded.
And no I don't play Candy Crush, or other games that are pre-installed as soon as I re-install fresh Windows or go on Xbox App. I hate to do this ritual of turning off auto download from Windows Store every time. So please don't pre-configure anything for me. Keep it fucking raw. That's why Linux distros win.
I'm just saying, Service Packs were a great thing with a need of little improvements. You guys ruined the whole experience, Microsoft.

Alright dev's, I have pretty much given up on ChromeOS and Chromebooks, my Samsung Chromebook Plus is far from the rock solid stable and battery sipping champion it used to be, constantly crashing, sluggish, 4 hours of battery at most, terrible android performance and the list goes on (Plus fucking bullshit Pixel device exclusive features can fuck off)

I use my Macbook Pro more than ever but the lack of being able to install Linux is a massive blow, so I'm looking for some laptop recommendations and here are the criteria.

1. Don't want a tablet
2. Prefer a clamshell but will deal with a convertibal
3. Max price of $1000 AUD (~$4.25 USD)
4. If it has dedicated graphics, prefer AMD
5. Prefer windows to not be pre-installed but can deal with it if it is

Was previously looking at the XPS line but um... Base model 13 inch is ~$1600 AUD so nope .-.

Fire away people!

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.

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

What the fucking shit, Arch. In what universe/reality is a user expected to easily/quickly address GPG/PGP bullshit when they install Arch. It's already hilarious enough as it is for the user to input every single command in order to install the thing. -- That's actually what's great about Arch; you get return and assurance from each command. -- I understood the fact that you need the latest ISO release in order to even install Arch, but now, if you decide to pacstrap linux-hardened, or god forbid, a package that is who knows what, less maintained?... fuck knows what will happen.

The fantastic part, is that you can't do shit when you're in an arch ISO install. All of the simple and possible solutions that involve GPG DBs/keyrings/etc require you to have the all of the shit installed already; which is fucking impossible if the package manager is bitching about keys not being imported. The most fantastic part, is that there is probably some complete bullshit, ultra-exclusive command or simple solution that will fix this crap. - And if you even dare ask the Arch forums, you'll be branded as a "newbie" and sentenced to read the fucking wiki. - ??? -- That's not a fucking good thing. -- The majority of people who are installing Arch right now, are people who are installing it for the first time, and chances are, most of those people have no fucking clue what is happening; they're learning what is happening. Furthermore, they're probably the kind of people who aren't inclined (or they don't know how) to scour Google or the Arch forums for answers to vague, lazy-ass error messages. The whole point of this thing is show and confront the user about what they're installing and what they want on their computer. Holy shit. This is all the more reason to ensure that total, stupid, ambiguous bullshit errors do not occur. -- "error: key "dogshit master <dogshitmaster@dogshit.org>?" could not could not be imported". -- That's it. That's the error in it's entirety. For a fucking OS install. What the fuck.

TL:DR linux newbie, looking for advice/links (skip to bottom for questions)

!rant
After i had been looking for a job for quite some time, a couple of months ago i got hired by "smaller" company doing web stuff. So far it have been a great place, good colleagues, and overall just having a great time!.
They seem to value me alot, so that's great!.

Anyway, yesterday i got called into a meeting - and got told they wanted me to start learning "Server stuff (linux)". That got me quite excited, because it always was something i wanted to learn - but never really got around to doing.

But i never touched a linux installation before, so i'm really on ground zero - but im not afraid, i'm a quick learner and quite efficient at googling :)

I figured i would ask here, since other people here always seems to be happy to help other people out.

So far i have manage to setup a server, install various stuff (php, mysql and so on) and done setup a couple of domains/subdomains on my server. Also got a vestacpinstallation working - so overall im quite happy so far.

I figured maybe somebody had some good links/advice for a linux newbie :).

* Performance/Security, will obviously be a big focus - anything i should look at? - any must look at?
* Monitoring tools, how do i monitor various websites running on my server? Here i'm thinking bandwitch, cpu/ram usage and so on pr site basis.
* Any other stuff i should be looking at?

Little about what the server will/should be running :)

* Centos
* vestacp
* WordPress installations only (e-commerce mainly)
* PHP 7 / MySQL / phpmyadmin

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Ok, so until I manage to install Linux again on my notebook, I am stuck with windows.

I am a rather optimistic guy usually so I will take this as an opportunity to learn, see how far I can go with privacy on Windows and I will give rainmeter a try.

@linuxxx please don't be too mad :P

Hey fellas, I have a question about Windows and Linux.
I love Ubuntu on my Laptop and since gaming is no prio at this time I'd like to install Linux on my Rig.
I want to install Linux on a separate drive and unplug my Windows drive so Linux can boot alone without selection at Bootmanager.
However, I'd like the possibility that Bootmanager will let me choose if I plug the Windows drive back in (just in case I'm really in need of Windows).
Is it possible?

A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.

We tried, in order:

Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...

Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.

Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.

Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.

CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.

All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?

some call
- yo bro do you have some time ?
- quick cause I'm taking a dump
- I think I have been hacked, got black screen kernel panick, linux freeze seldomly I have to reboot, no internet connexion
- save your stuff and reinstall linux
- I don't have enough stockage to backup
- Then buy one and save, probably either OS is fcked up or you have some hdd problems

Time that it will take: ~30min to reinstall whole shit
Peace duration: ~2years

Later on the same day
aunt
- I can't log into windows
- Did you change the password ?
- Yes but it does not work anymore
* looking at shit
* logs successfully. Reason: interface changed after automatic update.
* wait.
* wait some more so fucking windows fucking starts
* Desktop is ugly as fck.
* Some stupid settings messed up (like high contrast set, black theme or so)

aunt (the same)
- I can't log into my (other) laptop either
* logs
* wait more more more

Guess what: automatic updaaaates. Freezes 100%cpu

* Being a very experienced user: wait before reboot because this suckass os will probably fail to boot otherwise
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates...
* reboots
* Blackscreen with a percentage: Installing updates continuing...
* finally boot (feels like a miracle windows succeeds lol)
* still slow
aunt now sleeps
* look at running process and install programs
* sees shits like camera recognition (vendor installed), candycrush
* occasionnaly get adds

time lost: 2h
peace duration: ~3month

FFS I am a dev, not a fucking trash lover
It is already pain to fix someone os, but windows is the cream of cream

It brings no ease of use for novice user
It is so insanely slow
It has stupid settings set up by default!!!!!!!! Who FFS wants candycrush and ads
The maj are so fcking hazardous. It is 2022 pretty much the same as 15y back then. Updates take fucking eternity. And needs reboot. and are not even finished!!!

I swear I am gonna stretch my ass and install linux and any fckin other toolsuite needed so they can use Micro$$ word, which is the only fucking usecase they need windows for in the first case anyway
I SO wish this OS would die

I mean, even more than safari

So, I'm starting cross platform mobile app development with NativeScript. Just side projects at the moment, nothing "business-related".

Well, as for the Android part, I'm free to choose whether I'd like to develop on Windows 10- or on my Linux machine. I can compile the project on either system. As for publishing it to Google Play, I might do it, I might not do it, since it is possible to install an app by providing the apk file.

As for the Apple part: I'd either have to buy an completely overpriced Apple computer (iMac, MacBook, etc.) or subscribe to a pricey online CI/CD service... just to be able to compile the fucking project. And if that wouldn't be enough, Apple wants to charge me 99 $ a year so I may have a chance to publish the app to their App Store... of course without any guarantees that my app will be published, because it might be revoked by them. WHAT THE FUCK?

After some time, planning to install Linux again for personal use and some dev work at home. My current pc is getting too slow sometimes and it irritates me a lot.

My current pc 2gb RAM, Dual core Intel, 32 bit.

Main criteria, os should be fast, I can compromise on GUI, should be stable, should support my old configuration. I like to work on Java/Scala, python, js and sql. Eclipse will be there since I use it at work.

Short listed Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS,
mint (huge confusion on gui),
Opensuse, elementary OS and arch. I had Ubuntu, mint for some time as secondary OS. Arch will be totally new world for me. I have tried few OS in USB boot but couldn't fix one.

Right now I am confused about which one to choose, since everything looks fine but I want the best choice based on my criteria.

So, today, I wanted to try setting up a wireguard VPN server on my little raspberry pi at home. I... expected /some/ issues, but what I found dumbfounded me.

1 - I already had the wireguard package from the unstable branch of the main raspbian repo installed... Huh, okay.
2 - Setting up config was extremely easy... Wow, so the rumors were true. Wireguard really is almost dumb-simple.
3 - Failed to create a network interface? Oh, trouble, here it is! So lets see... modprobe wireguard... Nope. Don't have the module? What?
4 - Reconfigure package to rebuild the module - missing kernel headers? Huh... weird

This was the simple stuff... Then I went down the rabbit hole of the Raspberry Pi ecosystem:

1 - There is the Raspberry Pi Bootloader, that is apparently separate from the Kernel itself. And I didn't seem to have any of the standard linux-image-* installed... What? Weird, yet there I was, running a 4.19.42-v7+ kernel...
2 - No kernel and no headers... What... The... Fuck
3 - Okay, so... Lets just... try to install the latest kernel image then? One apt-get install... It downloaded the image, but during package configuration, it failed because... I didn't have... its headers? What? What for? And if it needs them (for whatever reason), why isn't the headers package as a dependency? Ugh, whatever...
4 - Another apt-get install and... Okay, building the initrd image aaaaand...
FAIL
WHAT. What is it this time!?

Oh... Ran... No more space on device? What? Is /boot independent? Of course it is, it has to be, its a bloody different filesystem

Okay, so, lets che-OH MY GOD WTF.

Its just bloody 45 MBs big! The entire /boot is just 45 MBs large. WHY. THE. FUCK.

This was a default raspbian install from I have no idea when. But... Why. Oh WHY would ANYONE pre-configure /boot to be this incredibly tiny!?

No wonder the new init ramdisk couldn't fit in there! Its already used up from 64%!

Thanks, Raspbian Devs, now I gotta reinstall the whole system because, yes, the /boot is, of course, sector 8192. Just far enough from 2048 that there are *some* sectors free - About 3 MBs.

So what did I try? Remove the partition and recreate it from the very beginning. Only... I never tried in in the past, and okay, kernel doesn't like having the partition where its image resides deleted on the fly, it will not give up FDs pointing there or something.

So now, I have a system I cannot reboot, or it will never boot back up :|

Thanks, Raspbian!

I need to get a cheap 1U somewhere or something T.T

How can not one, not two, but many many things JUST be so wrong!? like..
Windows. (Yes. THE OS). Why? well... we begin with the garbage, right? the BLOAT.
cortana
mspaint
internet explorer <- wh..WHA?! wh?!?!
ms edge <- okay.. (I saying okay as in a figure of speech I would like to remove it honestly)

why can't I remove internet explorer, and they make another internet explorr called microsoft edge - you guessed it - I can't remove ms edge either.
What's next?! :D
bloat umbruella version -0.1? :D <- a new internet explorer. for 2042.

Cortana. <- some might say "that's not Sooo bad tho". It might not be, but if if it is for me - I would like to remove it.

Okay. okay. moving onto the software.
`V`-Yeah you guessed right. on the first letter.
VISUAL STUDIO.

my face: 😲
I compare visual studio to windows xp to internet explorer to windows overall. they share so much in common...

forced updates,
fixes,
BLOCKS you to compile programs because of NUMEROUS REASONS LIKE..
comment out "CRC303030 whatever" to ignore this message.
you need the build tools vx.x.x.y.x.y.x.t..z.z.z.(100 billion digits later)..x.x.Z OR alternatively you could re-target your solution by (...) (and now today I had enough, I dont see the retarget solution - And I am sure, WHEN I SEE IT - it will just be another problem..

... 💥

I am surprised how windows can run so fluently, with all this crap. Fluently as in actually being running. I am a fan of linux instead though but..
(question to me would probably be why you use windows not linux then?) sometimes I code on windows.. 🤦‍♀️

and it is a pain.

workloads,updates,options,BILLION OF OPTIONS, BILLION OF BUTTONS, stuff I never ever use, takes time to reinstall,install,remove, - windows also needs to restart after each simple thing.... (!?)

sorry. this was nice to write this rant. PHEW! thank GOSH this site exists! 😘 😍

Hi,
I want to install linux besides windows on my new computer (i7-8700k, gtx 1080). I use debian with i3 on my laptop for work and want to have a similar development environment at home. Does anyone have an adive to choose between ElementaryOS and Arch, or just stick with Debian. i3-gaps will be the wm, I just can't use another one ;)
Does one distro has better support for Nvidia cards in fact I would like to try CUDA.
I do not have other requirements; mostly webdev with python in the backend, and a little c++ game with SDL. This should not be a problem in a new distro.

Thanks for some advices and pro/cons

So, i have that assignment about docker stuff. nifty piece of software i must say.

anyways im installing docker software on windows bc im thinking if i have something that gives me at least the correct structure and some skeletal syntax i will have a faster grasp of the thing. expecting some sort of high level ide but end up instead with what looks like a blank window, with the only obvious choice being sign into some bullshit i dont need. but thats another story

my point is:
when installing the thing it prompted me to install WSL2. which i supposedly am not supposed to have because my cpu doesnt support intel virtualisation. but being impatient (thats why i came to look for an assisted solution), i pursued the installation.

lo and behold: i end up with a shell prompt at the root of a linux filesystem!
i ran 2 or 3 muscle-memory commands and closed the prompt, i was in docker stuff up to the neck.
later on, when i go back to my project, in a virtual machine its sluggish af and screams at me that amd-v is not supported because of something something nested pages (will look up later how that one works).

dont have time to explore it some more yet, and especially experiment or even barely look at this glorious mess because i have something barely working and no time to have it fail.
but this story definitely left me perplexed.

and also : you can run WSL2 on an fx8350

Currently trying to make a multi boot machine, with a lot of linux distros inside, like debian, fedora, gentoo and arch.

I know I will have to format everything a lot of time, because of stupid mistakes, I want to try to put /home in common, and play with some more SSD, and to put a preempt_rt patched kernel somewhere.

I am starting from debian,
Format counter: 3

Reason 0: because i need to install at least once...
Reason 1: I am stupid
Reason 2: I disconnected the SSD,to connect a disk with windows. Now bootloader doesn't find any os in the SSD anymore... still no clue, and in case of doubt: give windows the fault 😠😠😠

DAMN YOU WINDOWS, how did you find that I want to use debian? What did you do to break it?? (Despite it wasn't even connected?!?)

I have checked everything about secure boot, and I am sure it is disabled...

And every search online gives results about dual boot, but it is not my case... :/

1 of the many windows rants i will make since i have to use that on work's laptop.

Let's start.
20GB for an IDE? what a joke.

Seriously MS. Are you fucking retarded? You have a fuckin retarded windows store, and i need to open it 3 times for it to be functional? Fuck you.

I want to change the default browser. YES I FUCKIN WANT TO CHANGE IT, STOP FUCKIN ASKING ME 500 TIMES IF I'M SURE ABOUT IT AND DO THE THING I TOLD YOU TO DO. Fuck you.

2GB on startup? Thanks, appreciated. Miss my 250MB on my linux laptop. FUCK YOU.

Did i fuckin tell you i want to sync the onedrive? I clicked that shit to disable it and you decided to sync the fuck out of it? Fuck you.

Candy crash and other retarded games? LOL, can't say anything. The laptop is from the job, i won't bother uninstalling that shit. In any case MS would reinstall them again. Fuck you.

Fans at 100% for no reason and battery draining like it's a cold drink that drinks someone who is thirsty? Thanks MS, very helpful. Fuck you.

Powershell? Well i leave that. Whenever i remember how slow it is i want to throw the laptop of the window. Fuck you.

Notifications? Thanks, it's very good thing to spam them for no fucking reason. Fuck you.

Skype? Who the fuck told you to install it? Fuck you.

Well i won't say anything about their fuckin updates. Every one knows how retarded and piece of shit they are.

if people will start choosomg their os on the basis of the time taken to install, I bet everyone will prefer win 10 over sierra (excluding linux based distros because they are real os)

I'm considering getting a new laptop. Any suggestions on good brands / laptops?

Okay so i did an internship in Laravel for 6 months. I started there and i had zero experience with it. Later, i started to learn more about it and i realized their Laravel version was at 5.8 and their bootstrap was at 3.4. It annoyed me so much but i wasn't allowed to update it to a better version.

What happened is, i installed Linux on my laptop and had to install some things. I accidentally did composer update and updated the whole thing. I updated it to Laravel 7.4 and i thought, well, that's good right, it will not effect the whole project right? No it wasn't right. I got Teams messages from my colleagues. They normally don't really respond to me, ignoring me but this time, they responded quickly. It was wrong what i've done because the code on the server wasn't working anymore and it was pretty bad they said. So i had to get the last version in Gitlab and i should not do composer update again.

Also, i was annoyed because i couldn't use so many font awesome icons. They all didn't work! I had to make this dropdown menu with an arrow down but even that didn't work, so i used a transparent image to do it because that was my only option to have a good arrow. I wanted to update that as well but nope, not allowed.

Oh yes, i'm not done yet.

They have put so much CSS on the project, that i couldn't even use bootstrap columns. I struggled with that and seriously, no help. The pages were styled really weird and it was dramatic.

When i asked for help, for some PHP code for example, no one responded for days and i was angry about that. Later at the end of my internship, they told me I wasn't the one who was responding and that i should have asked for help and i had to start the conversation. They really just said that? Yes, they did and i'm not happy about that. It costed me some points on my end essay, because they haven't been doing their best.

I wanted to learn more about PHP, but ended up doing all the frontend. I like it, but it's not what i originally wanted to do. So basically, i learned stuff in frontend but almost nothing in backend. It saddens me and hope to get a better internship next schoolyear.

I really had to rant about this, oops.

Fuck windows for not implementing a software backend for modern OpenGL
I just wanted to run minecraft and my game, i have to install a linux vm to use mesa for OpenGL because my computer is from 2008 or something and doesn't have any form of gpu except for the chipset,
I know that mesa dlls are available for windows, but for some reason they will randomly work sometimes and sometimes they won't, because apparently i need to take ownership of system32 to replace default openGL dlls and those take precedence no matter what

This question might make you lose a brain cell because of stupidity in the question. Read with caution

Is there a way to compile a game for Windows from Linux in Unreal engine? I did google some posts but the answer was either use a Virtual machine which will not be done or use the the theoretical method of using mingw but the forum posts state that it will be tricky business or use a windows machine. I have dual booted windows with linux on my machine.

However since the machine has a 512 gb ssd most of the storage space is devoted to unreal engine which takes 47 gigs in itself and have a lot of programs installed I have a usable 20 gigs left out of 145 gig partition. Windows has around 318 gigs of storage to it but I have 100 gigs free at most. So after installing the windows sdk, visual studio with extensions, unreal engine and some other stuff I don't have much space left for myself. I need that much space since I install a lot of games to my ssd. So now I cant load my bigger projects for playing on my windows. I could use my hdd which is mostly used for backups and 100+ gig stuff. Though the hdd's are of course far slower than ssd's which shouldn't be a problem however last time I used visual studio it ate more than 2 gigs of ram for a solution meaning that the compiler has very low memory for itself to actually compile so for any large files the hdd has more of a bottleneck.

Oh and I can't upgrade my ssd's or ram because I don't have enough money.

Thanks for the answers in advance

Altera Quartus II. Fuck it. Fuck its licensing, its installation script, and its humongous size!!!
Seriously! It's almost impossible to install it properly on Linux in one go! 😠

And "Aborted. The application will now exit". Well, thank you my good man, for the fucking helpful error message!!! Go screw yourself!

Also, first post ^^

I have been working on a long time, low progress project of mine that keeps on giving and giving.

Let's begin like two years ago where I dipped my toes into "more then gigabit" networking thanks to a Linus Techtips video about infiniband.
I had the dream of booting my Workstation from my NAS, a so called diskless setup.

Well, since I run FreeNAS on my Nas , a very nice Freebsd based Nas OS, everything's gonna be good.

In the beginning, there was no infiniband support.
Turns out, you don't need it, since the mellanox CX2 nics can do ETH too.
Yay.
Just took me a few weeks of anger.

So, to be able to boot something over the network, you need firmware that finds the bookable stuff and loads it.
That protocol and firmware is called PXE.
PXE needs a DHCP telling it what to do, and what is where and etc.

Freenas here I come! Installing dnsmasq on the actual freenas install turned out to be not that great of an idea because freenas thinks of itself as being an "appliance" that you don't fiddle with. So things work, until you update/ upgrade when everything will basically be wiped, except what you have done through the ui.
Ok. So I gona use a jail, a container like thing for that.
Everything is great, jail has internet, everything Installs fine, what could go wrong?
Dnsmasq can launch and work, but not as dhcp server. Some thing about permissions.
Turns out, jails have permission like things.
A few days of head scratching later, it has ALL the permissions.
Dnsmasq still can't work as DHCP server though, why you ask?
Because it needs a specific kernelmodule that isn't contained in the jail. Since jails are kind of like a docker container, they run on the same OS kernel, who does not have this module, I'd need to patch the freenas, which is an appliance, so fuck that.

Like a year later, freenas has finally added good VM support, so why not make a VM for the dhcpserver?

Well, about a year ago, I didn't know that the virtual Intel nic is a fucken unstable piece of garbage, crashing nearly any OS at some point.

So that was it for a while again.

Now to the last few weeks.
Finally dnsmasq is running in a freebsd VM with a good and working configuration which is rather simple, if those tutorial fuckers out there would explain shit instead of just telling you to copy, paste and replace X.

Now back to the PXE side.
I'm using iPXE because I have no clue how to boot anything over tftp so iSCSi it is, since that is what I can relate too.
The idea behind iscsi is to fake a SCSI disk over the network. Attached devices appear as if they are actually directly connected to the machine instead of over the network.

iPXE gets a lease from the server, can connect to it, everything is fucken great. Finally.
Except that if it "sanBoots" the iscsi drive, it can't find anything to boot.
Well fuck.
If I attach a Linux live USB over iscsi, it boots, finds grub, and crashes because the live iso isn't configured for network-boot.
But it boots.
So what's so different?

Well iPXE is booted in legacy mode, where as the content of the target is windows 10 in efi mode.
Ffff.

Ok. Can I get iPXE to boot in EFI mode?

Well yes, after like 3 days fiddling with it.
But it only finds the onboard Intel nic instead of the new Mellanox CX3 cards, and can't even connect to the target....

Sooo, I guess my options are as follows.
Either, get PXE efi to work on the network cards directly, its called flexboot and might be able to since I just found some firmware options for that.

Or give up on efi and install windows in legacy mode.
Which isn't that easy when it has to end up on a drive on my nas.