It is “backwards” from some other commands — usually you run copy/rsync/link from source to destination, but with tar the destination (tarball) is specified before the source (directory/files).
That, and the flags not needing dashes always just throws me for a loop.
And the icing on the cake is that I don’t use tar for tarring that often, so I lose all muscle memory (untaring a tgz or tar.bz2 is frequent enough that I can usually get that right at least…).
There was an old Top Gear episode with a race in a Nordic country with an interesting take on a price cap — the price enforcement was that anybody could buy your car (for no more than the price cap) after the race.
So I think you technically could enter the race with a brand new tricked out rally car…but anyone could buy it for $500/$1000/whatever.
To each their own though? I can’t imagine why anyone would want something other than i3 (or similar), because almost by definition the DE is not the program I fired up my computer to interact with, and i3 “gets out of the way better” than most others in my experience.
But…that’s just my use case. It’s a horrible UX for most people, just happens to work well for me.
I feel old…when I was learning how to run Linux I started with an old 386 (maybe 486?) my dad wasn’t using. I think it had 32MB RAM, which was fancy for those machines.
We had dial up at the time, so only one machine could be on the Internet. So, I set up a modem on the x86, plugged into an Ethernet hub (switch?), and learned enough ipchains (this was before iptables) to share a connection. It also ran Samba, an AFP server, and probably FTP and HTTP (just for local access) — but it worked for filesharing.
It could also run MP3 streaming software which amused me because the machine itself was too slow to decode MP3 (but that’s not necessary to stream).
You mentioned ham radio — definitely fun! It’s a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF (“walkie talkie”-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power (“QRP”) it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup…
There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.
Good luck!
D’oh, I’m a doofus — it’s search that I was thinking of (apt-cache search, not apt-get search).
Can apt-get refresh package list?
Edit: yes…yes it can. I was confused.
“…and there are no comments, because it’s Self Documenting™”
Modern bots are bad, but the old school IRC (maybe early Battle.net?) bots… I’m cool making an exception for them if you are.
Sounds like you’ve only ever used desktops and/or laptops…
Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).
I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.
Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.
And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.
This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.
(I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)
And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.
For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.
On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root
That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.
Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.
I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about xargs — so any time I need to loop over something I tend to use for var in $(cmd) instead of cmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.
So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.
Newer macOS is not Unix certified.
It’s UNIX 03 compliant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification
One or two Linux distros were (are?) UNIX certified, though.
I think mplayer has an ASCII output mode (VLC, too?), and I believe youtube-dl can output to stdout.
The rest is, as they say, left as an exercise to the reader.
Same — rsync to a pi 3 with a (single) ZFS drive at family’s house. Retain some daily/weekly/monthly snapshots.
I have a (free) VPS with static IPv4 which is how I connect everything.
Both the VPS and the remote site have limited network speed (I think 50Mbps for VPS), so the initial sync was done sneakernet (well…“airplane net”). Nightly rsync is no problem bandwidth-wise, and is mostly just any new videos I’ve uploaded to my local Immich instance.