I don’t follow lemmy development too closely, but I suppose they have a open bug tracker somewhere and these sound pretty serious, so, just to gain more information on these myself, I suppose you could provide links to bug tracker tickets?

There’s patreon link on FAQ.

I want to prevent myself from reinstalling my system.

Any even remotely normal file on disk doesn’t stop that, regardless of encryption, privileges, attributes or anything your running OS could do to the drive. If you erase partition table it’ll lose your ‘safety’ file too without any questions asked as on that point the installer doesn’t care (nor see/manage) on individual files on the medium. And this is exactly what ‘use this drive automatically for installation’ -option does on pretty much all of the installers I’ve seen.

Protecting myself from myself.

That’s what backups are for. If you want to block any random usb-stick installer from running you could set up a boot options on bios to exclude those and set up a bios password, but that only limits on if you can ‘accidently’ reinstall system from external media.

And neither of those has anything to do on read/copy protection for the files. If they contain sensitive enough data they should be encrypted (and backed up), but that’s a whole another problem than protecting the drive from accidental wipe. Any software based limitation concerning your files falls apart immediately (excluding reading the data if it’s encrypted) when you boot another system from external media or other hard drive as whatever solution you’re using to protect them is no longer running.

Unless you give up the system management to someone else (root passwords, bios password and settings…) who can keep you from shooting yourself on the foot, there’s nothing that could get you what you want. Maybe some cloud-based filesystem from Amazon with immutable copies could achieve that, but it’s not really practical on any level, financial very much included. And even with that (if it’s even possible in the first place, I’m not sure) if you’re the one holding all the keys and passwords, the whole system is on your mercy anyways.

So the real solution is to back up your files, verify regularly that backups work and learn not to break your things.

What’s your end goal here? You try to keep files just on that one media without any options to make copies of them? Or maintain an image which has enforced files at their directories? And against what kind of scenarios?

ACLs and SELinux aren’t useful as they can be simply bypassed by using another installation and overriding those as root, same thing with copying. Only thing I can think of, up to a degree, is to use immutable media, like CD-R, where it’s physically impossible to move files once they’re in place and even that doesn’t prevent copying anything.

Geeqie is a quick one to go trough photos and it groups RAW+JPG as a single item on preview, so even a few hundred photos are quickly ran trough with just a keyboard. I’m not sure on how well it manages tags as I don’t use it for tagging, but it’s most likely in your distros repository so testing it out is quick.

Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

It’s been a while since I installed xfce4 on anything, but if things haven’t changed I think the metapackage doesn’t include xfce4-goodies and some other packages, so if you’re missing something it’s likely that you just need to ‘apt install xfce4-whatever’. Additionally you can keep cinnamon around as long as you like as a kind of a backup, just change lightdm (or whatever login manager LMDE uses) to use xfce4 as default. And then there’s even lighter WM’s than XFCE, like LXDE, which is also easy to install via apt and try out if that works for you.

I understand the mindset you have, but trust me, you’ll learn (sooner or later) a habit to pause and check your command before hitting enter. For some it takes a bit longer and it’ll bite you in the butt for few times (so have backups), but everyone has gone down that path and everyone has fixed their mistakes now and then. If you want hard (and fast) way to learn to confirm your commands, use dd a lot ;)

One way to make it a bit less scary is to ‘mv <thing you want removed> /tmp’ and when you confirmed that nothing extra got removed you can ‘cd /tmp; rm -rf <thing>’, but that still includes the ‘rm -rf’ part.

Absolutely. Maybe leave Gnome/KDE out and use a lighter WM, but they’ll be just fine. Specially if they have 8GB or more RAM. I suppose those have at least dual core processors, so that won’t be a (huge) bottleneck either. You can do a ton of stuff with those beyond just web browsing, like programming/text editing/spreadsheets and so on. I’d guess that available RAM is the biggest bottleneck on what they can do, specially if you like to open a ton of tabs on your browser.

Make sure you have package alsa-utils installed and try to run alsamixer. That’ll show all the audio devices your system detects. Maybe you’re lucky and it’s just that some volume control is muted and if you’re not it’ll give you at least some info to work with. Majority of audio devices don’t need any additional firmware to work and they almost always work out of the box just fine. What’s the hardware you’re running? Maybe it is something exotic which isn’t installed by default (which I doubt).

And additionally, what you’re trying to play audio from? For example MP3’s need non-free codecs to be installed and without them your experience is “a bit” limited on audio side of things.

They both use upstream version number (as in the number software developer gave to the release). They might additionally have some kind of revision number related to packaging or some patch number, but as a rule of thumb, yes, the bigger number is the most recent. If you should use that as a only variable on deciding which to install is however another discussion. Sometimes dpkg/apt version is preferred over snap regardless of version differences, for example to save a bit of disk space, but that depends on a ton of different things.

Mullvad (apparenlty, first time I’ve heard from the service) uses DNS over TLS and I don’t think that the current GUI version has the option to enable it. Here’s a quickly googled howto from Fedora on how to enable it on your system. If that doesn’t help search for ‘NetworkManager DOT’ or ‘DNS over TLS’.

Imperial, adjustable, left handed wrench. Or left handed any common hand tool (hammer, spanner, screwdriver…). Muffler bearing. Light bulb for the crank case. Blinker fluid. The list goes on.

And, within reason, I think those are pretty decent pranks. No one gets hurt, many get a good laugh out of it, including the one looking for a two headed hammer if executed properly.

Estonia alone can’t, but with Finland, Sweden, Poland and eventually Germany, Denmark and Norway joining the fight russians have pretty slim chances to operate from Petersburg if they’re willing to challenge NATO. The bay is narrow enough that both finns and estonians need to be careful not to shoot each other across it with just modern artillery. That combined with pretty capable airforce and navy from Finland and Sweden says that Baltic sea is off limits to any kind of military actions. And additionally, an F-35 from Finland and a Gripen from Sweden could both reach St. Petersburg in about 30 minutes, so good luck to getting anything out of the harbor before it’s out of order.

I don’t know where the Debian project is based.

Trademark and at least some copyright for the project is owned by an entity in the New York and Ian Murdoch who started the project was US citizen. But calling the whole project as USA based is wrong, it is based ‘on the internet’ as even the core team is spread across the globe.

I’m pretty sure it’s a bug somewhere in Lemmy and not technically speaking an issue on the server itself. It’s slow for me too every now and then, few times a week or so for couple hours, regardless of what I’m doing.

Think a large office space or industrial application with several hundred (or thousands) of hosts connected to the network. Some of them need to be isolated from the internet and/or rest of the network, some need only access to the internet, some need internet and local services and so on.

With that kind of setup you could just run separate cables and unmanaged switches for every different type of network you have and have the router manage where each of those can talk to. However, that would be pretty difficult to change or expand while being pretty expensive as you need a ton of hardware and cabling to do it. Instead you use VLANs which kinda-sorta split your single hardware switch into multiple virtual ones and you can still manage their access from a single router.

If you replace all the switches with routers they’re quite a bit more expensive and there’s not too many routers with 24 or 48 ports around. And additonally router configuration is more complex than just telling the switch that ‘ports 1-10 are on vlan id 5 and ports 15-20 are on id 8’. With dozens of switches that adds up pretty fast. And while you could run most routers as a switch you’ll just waste your money with that.

VLANs can be pretty useful in home environment too, but they’re mostly used in bigger environments.

Wikipedia lists a total of 14000 tanks, reserves included, (majority being T-72 and modernized variants) + unknown number of T-54 and T-64. I suppose even the russians don’t know how many of those are in combat ready shape by any stretch, but apparently at least a half (not counting ones they’ve bought from elsewhere).

So, as the war has been going for two years that 1-2 years more sounds plausible. If current news are anything to go by I’m quite afraid that Ukraine doesn’t have that much unless they really start receiving reinforcements from Europe and US. And should Ukraine collapse it would take 5-10(ish) years for Russia to rebuild enough hardware to do the very same thing with some other country. Maybe not with a NATO country and maybe not one the global west is as interested as Ukraine, but it could (or would, depending on which prediction you want to follow) happen.

Plus the wild card of China, who no doubt are following the situation and spesifically western response pretty closely. I wonder what happened to those 800 000 artillery shells Czechs promised to gather…

According to minusrus they’ve lost 7193 tanks out of 3300 Russia had before the war started. I sincerely hope that the article is correct, but so far they’ve been able to replace lost hardware with a decent rate with manufacturing and presumably purchasing from their allies.

One can hope that the current massive attack ends with the Swan Lake on Russian tv’s, but right now I’m more worried if Ukraine can hold the lines long enough for that to happen. They really need reinforcements, it’s pretty difficult to fight a war without ammunition.

I’m tempted to say systemd-ecosystem. Sure, it has it’s advantages and it’s the standard way of doing things now, but I still don’t like it. Journalctl is a sad and poor replacement from standard log files, it has a ton of different stuff which used to be their separate own little things (resolved, journald, crontab…) making it pretty monolithic thing and at least for me it fixed a problem which wasn’t there.

Snapcraft (and flatpack to some extent) also attempts to fix a non-existing problem and at least for me they have caused more issues than any benefits.

It’s been a while (few years actually) since I even tried, but bluetooth headsets just won’t play nicely. You either get the audio quality from a bottom of the barrel or somewhat decent quality without microphone. And the different protocol/whatever isn’t selected automatically, headset randomly disconnects and nothing really works like it does with my cellphone/windows-machines.

YMMV, but that’s been my experience with my headsets. I’ve understood that there’s some propietary stuff going on with audio codecs, but it’s just so frustrating.