People have already given direct answers, and the indirect answer of ‘set up regular automated backups’ (which everyone should set up right now if they haven’t already), but for the sake of throwing another option out there, people could take a look at ‘trash-cli’: https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli

(P.S. I know OP might not have actually deleted the files with ‘rm’, but this addresses a broadly similar issue.)

I think it’s worth emphasising here: Don’t put it off!

There are millions who can tell you from experience that good intentions count for nothing when it comes to backups.

I’d recommend going and setting up Timeshift right now: https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift

It’s easy to set up, it takes literally 10 minutes, and if you decide later you want to use something else, you can just uninstall Timeshift and delete its backups. But in the meantime you’ll be protected with backups.

It’s literally the first thing I install on a new system and it’s saved me multiple times from having to do a complete reinstall.

Void - https://voidlinux.org/

Pretty decent, although the inclusion of the last paragraph without the following paragraphpointing out that this incident shows that’s not true is a little misleading if you’re not paying attention.

They ingested it, but only as a joke.

Whether someone will somehow find a way to extract profit from this system is remain to be seen.

I think it’s inevitable that someone will find a way to profit, even if it’s just scraping the data for training LLMs, or for something like those shitty sites that just duplicate GitHub issues.

The question of enshittification isn’t whether someone can find a way to profit, it’s whether someone can find a way to change the platform to increase their profit.

I think that the FOSS Fediverse platforms are significantly resistant to enshittification.

That same article explores what enables enshittification and what precludes it:

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability).

Fediverse platforms:

• are highly interoperable - e.g. you can use Lemmy or Kbin and still see the same posts
• mostly FOSS, so anyone can fork them whenever they want if they don’t like some particular change
• most instances currently aren’t operated for profit - certainly if your instance started displaying ads you could switch to another instance (or set one up) and still access all the same content as you did previously

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

From https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Not supported yet, last I checked (within the last two weeks). There’s a feature request open on the Github.

I’ve mainly just been navigating to it manually by opening the community, it’s usually a post near the top when I’ve had cause to do it. You can also use the search functionality.

The minotaur/labyrinth design is cool, but it feels stylistically disconnected from the background

Only very recently, and people are rightly suspicious of their motives: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/

Well the latest development is that Apple is now going to support the current right to repair bill in California, but people are rightfully suspicious that they’re going to get some loopholes written in or otherwise neuter the bill.

An article: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/

Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it’s impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the ‘right to repair’.

Check out the work of Louis Rossmann for details.

New to Linux so I’m sorry if I’m being ignorant, but it does seem crazy you can get access to a machine without the password.

This is always the case, no matter what OS you use, unless you use full-disk encryption. User credentials are all just data on a disk, so if someone has physical access to your machine, and your disk isn’t encrypted, then they can access (and change) those credentials or any other data.

See also: https://ostechnix.com/reset-windows-password-with-linux-live-cd/

What’s even the point of having a password

As you say, preventing remote access is one, but also a password will slow someone down a bit, and stop low-knowledge adversaries entirely, possibly. Also you will at least know someone has messed with your machine if they change the password.

Really, though, there’s nothing malicious someone can do to an unencrypted computer by changing the password that they couldn’t do without changing the password (copy all your files, delete all your files, install malicious software). Except I guess annoying you by making you change your password back. 😆

They mean ‘Guix System’. Just like there is ‘Nix’ the package manager and ‘NixOS’ the distro, there is ‘Guix’ the package manager and ‘Guix System’ the distro.

See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guix_System

Thanks for the info!

Not sure where to find those kind of benchmarks, but you may want to look at Gentoo. It compiles everything locally, optimising specifically for the hardware.

EDIT: Best I could find for benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/spring-2020-distros

Way more interesting than I thought it was going to be!

This is not true, but the National Geographic Facebook page posted it, so it’s been perpetuated:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/false-hippopotamus-milk-pink/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_at_The_Venetian_Resort