TootSweet

@[email protected]

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TootSweet,

…unless SCOTUS overturns it.

TootSweet,

Every time the topic of fanfiction comes to mind, I think “I ought to read more of that.”

But when I actually try to find some fanfiction to read, I find I have to sift through a veritable mountain of erotic fanfiction to get to anything else. (Nothing wrong with erotic fanfiction, mind you, but it’s not really what I have in mind when I think “I ought to read more fanfiction.”) Maybe I’m not looking in the right places.

I do think it’s on balance a good thing, that more of it ought to exist, and that it should be legal. (It pretty unambiguously isn’t legal at least in the U.S., but it should be IMO.)

Why does open source take up so much memory space on Macos

I have macbook air with M1 chip, I wish I could change to linux but unfortunately I cant so I try to stick as much as possible to using open source on macos. But i cant understand why FOSS apps take up so much space in memory. I’m even getting messages that says that I dont have space left in memory and i must close apps, and...

TootSweet,

Huh. It’d be interesting to see how much memory LibreOffice or some such takes on a Linux system.

I’d test myself, but I’m currently on a Raspberry Pi and my beefy box is a) off and b) all the way over there.

TootSweet,

Thank you, less lazy stranger.

TootSweet, (edited )

Are all the spots taken or if somthing gets more upvotes than one that’s already taken, does it override the one already listed?

If the latter, I’d like to submit “twelve tribbles birthing.”

Edit: Oh, but it says to submit only for the following day. But if that’s the case, why are they all filled out? Just what you’ll use if you don’t get any submissions?

Oh, also, the image on this page: Kirk up to his chest in tribbles looking dejectedly at one

TootSweet,
  • Preheat oven to 425 MAGA temperature units.
  • Put as many frozen brussles sprouts as you can fit in a single layer in an 8x8 roasting pan (disposable pan for extra laziness).
  • Oh come on. You can fit another couple in there. Just cram 'em in.
  • That’s better.
  • Spray olive oil all over 'em.
  • Garlic salt all over 'em.
  • Paprika.
  • Onion powder.
  • Black pepper.
  • Throw a frozen Aidells-brand pre-cooked andouille or italian sausage on top.
  • Cook for an hour.

If you want to be just a little less lazy, you can throw a handful of raw pecans on top of the brussles sprouts to roast about 18-20 minutes before that hour is up.

TootSweet,

I know, right? Maybe if I ever create a social media platform, I’ll require people to write a short explanation why every time they downvote. Lol.

The “MAGA temperature units” comment was tongue-in-cheek and making fun of Americans like me for using the cockamamie Fahrenheit system, I promise.

TootSweet,

I don’t know much about Link’s Awakening DX HD. But I’m curious about three things:

  • Did Link’s Awakening DX HD have a price on itch.io or was it a free or pay-what-you-want thing?
  • Did they distribute assets from Link’s Awakening along with the engine, or was it just the engine with a tool to extract the assets from a Link’s Awakening ROM?
  • Is Link’s Awakening DX HD open source?
TootSweet, (edited )

Thanks for the answers!

Too bad it was never open sourced. Seems like someone could have stripped out the assets, made a tool to extract assets from the ROM, and the result wouldn’t infringe.

Maybe the author would be willing to open source the engine with no assets now. We can hope, I guess.

Just seems like it wouldn’t have taken that much more work to make it less likely to be taken down by threats from Nintendo.

Edit: I wrote this response before I saw @nanoUFO’s response about it having been open source.

Edit2: I just realized the GitHub repo doesn’t indicate what license that code is under. So, not FOSS and it’s unclear what’s legal to do with that code.

Do you think it would be understandable/alright to be discriminatory towards people who identify with a world culture if that culture ended up declaring nuclear war and going through with the threats?

It’s no secret I’m on the misanthropy spectrum, but as such a person you could say that about, I wanted to ask this ever since hearing this conveyed in response to recent events which sees three spheres of influence now arguably possessing the potential to deliver on such promises. Like… what’s the deal?

TootSweet,

Cultures don’t declare war. Governments do. Conflating cultures and governments is what Nazis do.

TootSweet,

It’s a technicality that makes a difference, though.

If someone is advocating for genocide or whatever and accuses you of discrimination for saying “how 'bout not, tho”, they’re just making up bullshit to push their reprehensible agenda.

Meanwhile, it’s totally possible to be from a country that does bad shit while abhoring said bad shit (and also appreciating the cuisine and music or whatever of their community.) There would be no benefit whatsoever to punishing such an individual.

TootSweet,

Am millenial. Can confirm the first part.

TootSweet,

Dear Diary,

Today I saw the silliest internet argument.

TootSweet,

English sucks ass and it’s all the fault of people who pronounce the word “avove” with two distinct vowel sounds like weirdos.

(Jk jk I don’t mean it please don’t hurt me wedge/schwa distinguishers.)

TootSweet,

Shite. How did I not notice I’d typo’d.

I meant “above.”

TootSweet,

Conservates: He already won in 2020 just you wait until he rides back in on a bald eagle and jails all the pedophile aliens from Georgia who stole the election. Hunter Biden!

Liberals: I learned my lesson making predictions in November 2020.

TootSweet,

Ha! Yes, I do.

TootSweet,

ChatGPT’s pronouns are hype/scam.

TootSweet,

It’s great, isn’t it?

When it first came out, I was still pissed about what Discovery season 1 did to Klingons. (Not to say I’m not still pissed about that, but anyway.) And I didn’t give Lower Decks the benefit of the doubt. (“Oh now they want to make even more of a mockery of my beloved Star Trek by turning it into an animated comedy?”)

But I eventually gave it a chance and I’m glad I did.

Honestly I’m surprised they actually did manage to pull off a Star Trek comedy without appearing to make fun of Star Trek and its fans. But they did. (At least in my view they did.)

TootSweet,

The whole idea of a service being “open source” sounds like nonsense to me. “Open source” refers to code, not services.

Might as well call my cat “100% open source.”

I might use a term like “open source friendly” for a service to mean “can be used without using any proprietary software.”

What are the differences between linux distributions?

Hey guys! Trying to understand what developers actually do to create a yet another distro, or what are the differences between existing distros. Lets say we have ubuntu and fedora. What are the differences? Excluding DE, Installer, theme, installed packages/libs and package manager. They both are FHS compliant, both running...

TootSweet,

This is a great question!

It’s hard to really wrap your head around it without doing a ton of low-level taking things apart and putting them together differently.

But to answer, it’s pretty impressive the extent to which a full Linux install of any distro tends to just be like a bunch of legos put together in one particular way.

Theoretically, there’s no reason why you couldn’t ship-of-Thesius one distro into another. You’d have to have a good idea of what the differences between the two are, but it can certainly be done.

There’s a thing called a “chroot.” It’s basically a whole OS installed in a subdirectory on another whole OS. And there’s a command (also called “chroot”) that can be used to tell the parent OS to “give me a shell in the chroot OS – as in run the /path/to/chroot/bin/bash (or whatever) executable in ‘The Matrix’ such that that process thinks that the chroot is the root OS.”) That lets you do some pretty cool stuff like building an OS to be installed on another box. But when you run in the chroot, it doesn’t load the guest OS’s kernel or (typically) init system or anything. The processes run on the host system’s kernel.

And it’s entirely possible to have the guest chroot system be a whole different distro than the host. (Though some distros will have tools that make it easier to chroot into a guest chroot of the same distro.) Which implies that you can just kindof substitute one distro’s kernel for another distro’s, right?

Turns out the answer to that question is “at least mostly yes.” Quick funny personal story. I started working somewhere recently where they allowed new hires a choice between Windows, Mac, or Linux on their work laptop. I chose Linux, but didn’t like the distro they pre-installed on it. (KDE Neon. I preferred Arch. Insert hate here.) But the laptop had secure boot enabled and the PC support department wasn’t willing to let me disable that. The laptop would only allow certain kernels to boot. Windows and some kernels from some unknown set of Linux distros.

Just as a quick aside, the way it knew how to deny a specific kernel from running or allow another to run was with signatures. Canonical which makes Ubuntu includes cryptographic signatures in the kernel file identifying that kernel image as made and certified by Canonical. (Microsoft does roughly the same thing for Windows kernels.) The secure boot system on the laptop has a list of trusted certificates. If the kernel that the bootloader (which is also signed, by the way) asks the secure boot system to boot is signed by one of those certificates, it boots. If not, secure boot denies the request. Theoretically more certificates can probably be configured/trusted, but that wasn’t an option in my case.

But I still wanted to run Arch! Now, KDE Neon uses the Ubuntu kernel, so I knew that was one I could boot without access to the secure boot config. So I grabbed the .deb for the Ubuntu kernel, wrote a script to convert the .deb for the Ubuntu kernel into an Arch package. (Arch doesn’t use .debs or .rpms. It uses “pacman packages”.) I installed that arch package, configured the bootloader to point to the arch install including that Ubuntu kernel, and booted it. Viola! Arch (mostly) without secure boot access!

What I was running was really kindof 95% Arch and 5% Ubuntu kernel. Kindof a Frankenstein’s monster of OS’s. But it worked perfectly.

And theoretically, just about any part of a distro can be replaced with the equivalent from another distro. (Or from the upstream/source version.) You could technically take a Fedora system and replace the package manager with apt (I’m guessing there isn’t an rpm package that would install apt on your Fedora, so you might have to make it yourself or just build it from source and install it manually) pointed at Ubuntu repositories and transform Fedora piece-by-piece into Ubuntu. It’d be a pretty wild and messy process. And it would probably be easier to just reformat and install Ubuntu. But it could be done.

Similarly, you could replace the init system. Artix is a fork of Arch that gives a choice of init systems whereas Arch only supports Systemd. And it’s kindof another Frankenstein’s monster of an OS because it still relies heavily on the Arch repos. But it works.

TootSweet, (edited )

Funny you should mention the company network.

To tell the next part of my story, when I did all of what I described, I first backed up the KDE neon install onto a tiny little partiton. So I still had it to go back to if I needed to.

And after I’d been using Arch for a good while, the VPN folks decided to retire OpenVPN and switch to something called “GlobalProtect”.

They run BMC, a remote machine management program, on all freshly-imaged machines. That lets them (un)install shit without the user’s knowledge and stuff. Windows users had lots of horror stories about “the great Java uninstall of 2018” where the PC Support folks just randomly decided one day to uninstall OpenJDK from every Windows user’s machine. While we were trying to write/maintain Java software written in-house. (This happened multiple times within a few years.)

One of the biggest benefits to running Linux (even if it was KDE Neon) was that the PC Support folks were scared of Linux and stayed very hands-off. They never (un)installed stuff remotely for KDE Neon users.

…until they switched to GlobalProtect. They wouldn’t give out the .deb for GlobalProtect to let folks install it themselves. They’d only install it for you via BMC.

But since I was running Arch and had never installed BMC, (actually I have another story about BMC on Arch, but I’ll save it for when I have more time), my machine was passed over when they installed GlobalProtect on all the KDE Neon machines.

So I rebooted into KDE Neon, asked pretty please that they install GlobalProtect, and have been using KDE Neon ever since.

Now, I’ve done nothing to disable the TPM or anything on Arch. I don’t think even if GlobalProtect uses the TPM that there’s any reason it couldn’t do so while on Arch. But I tried just copying the install from KDE Neon to Arch file-for-file and running it. It didn’t work. I had to strace it to get more info and… don’t remember what the error was about now. Some inter-process communication thing I had never heard of before wasn’t able to talk to the daemon process.

I keep telling myself I’m going to get GlobalProtect running on Arch again so I don’t have to keep using KDE Neon, but it’s been a while since I’ve worked on that any.

Also, one of my coworkers had been working for years by connecting to the company VPN from a personal machine. And I told him he needed to figure out his VPN situation months before they actually turned off OpenVPN. But he didn’t heed my warnings and when they shut off OpenVPN, he was screwed. He took the Mac they’d sent him when he was first hired off of mothballs and tried to get it running. They ended up just telling him they needed to send him a new machine. So he basically couldn’t work for almost two weeks while he waited for the new KDE Neon machine he ordered to get set up/imaged/etc and then shipped halfway across the country. He uses KDE Neon on a company laptop now.

There are some great stories about how we’ve messed with PC Support at this company. Lol.

Edit: Ok. I’ll tell the BMC-on-Arch story now.

Same company. Back before they were issuing secureboot’d machines, and before they offered the option of a Linux machine (or without special manager approval, a Mac, actually), I installed Arch on my host on a forgiveness-rather-than-permission basis.

When they started supporting Linux, they got BMC set up for Linux. (It had worked on Windows prior, of course.) And then they started sending me nagging emails about installing BMC. They knew my boss would back me up if they pressed me to switch back to Windows, so they didn’t push for that. But they wanted me to install BMC just to get the feature that it periodically phoned home to let PC Support know it was still in use and all that. (I think it also offered features like if I ever reported it stolen, they set it up so it would wipe its own hard drive next time it phoned home. To protect any trade secrets.)

I kindof ignored them for a while. Eventually they visited my desk in person. (This was before I was working remotely.) I was like “yeah, ok, tell me what to do” (I figured it was a good compromise that would let me keep Arch) and they were like “we’ll send you the installer.”

Now, the Linux distro they supported at the time wasn’t KDE Neon. It was Ubuntu. And I was on Arch. And I asked “the installer was probably was packaged for Ubuntu, right? BMC is supposed to run as a daemon and Arch doesn’t even use the same init system. I’d be surprised if it worked.” And one of the PC support guys looked me right in the eye and passed his hand over his head in a “you’re talking over my head” gesture. And then walks away.

I received the installer. Tried to run it. It immediately choked for exactly the reason I suspected. Basically it looked at my system, didn’t find the init system it expected, and aborted before extracting the files to be installed.

So, was I going to give up and switch to Ubuntu? No! I wasn’t daunted.

So I broke out strace and gdb and managed to trick the installer into extracting the files. (Basically when it checked for the init system, I altered a variable from false to true to make it not abort before extracting.)

And then I just had to stick it at the right place on the filesystem. I never made a service file for it. I just manually ran it every now and then. And killed it a little while later. No one nagged me again.

Now, I wasn’t the only one who ran Arch. I had a coworker there who also ran Arch and somehow he was never nagged to install BMC. Not sure why. But when I left the company, I left all my work with this other coworker in case he ever needed it.

And then I returned to this company. It was after that that I did the Archbunkenstein thing because they’d started using machines that enforced secureboot. The coworker who was still running Arch when I returned had lost my BMC installer reverse engineering work. And still had never been nagged by PC Support. I expected to be nagged again, but I ran Archbunkenstein for a good year or so without anyone nagging me. When I switched back to KDE Neon for the VPN, it had BMC installed, so I’ve been using BMC ever since.

TootSweet,

I’m glad to hear I’m not the only one who feels that way. I use GPL3.0 and AGPL3.0 exclusively. AGPL for anything that makes sense. Anything that’ll be used over a network, basically. And GPL for things that aren’t used over a network.

There are things I wish in retrospect I’d made AGPL rather than GPL. But I think copyleft is a fuckin’ great thing that ought to be used more. For non-code works (3d-printable models, mostly), I also like the Creative Commons share alike licenses. I usually go for CC BY-SA. I’m fine with commercial use mostly as long as it’s only used in things that aren’t going to deprive the end user of the same rights that the seller got from me. And I very much want to encourage remixes/derivative works.

TootSweet,

A whole lot of UK voters just became single-issue voters.

TootSweet,

Studying for 65 years under a shaolin monk who has a secret technique for performing fine motor skills while under general anesthetic is the missing step 2.5.

TootSweet,

I’m told that as a young child when I first started learning about “the birds and the bees,” I said something about how “isn’t it amazing how the sperm finds the egg right through the jeans?” (I confused “jeans” with “genes.”)

TootSweet,

We did it, everybody. High fives!

(Ok, I can’t take that much credit. I haven’t been here all that long. But I’ll still high-five you if you want.)

TootSweet,

Jesus. QA is not a corner you should cut when it’s literally life and death.

TootSweet,

Maybe don’t use highlighter markers on your monitor?

(But seriously, it’s no different color than other comments in this thread for me. Maybe it was a “new” post for you when you wrote that and the rest weren’t?)

TootSweet,

Are you assuming that the majority (or even a plurality) of folks here are flat earthers? (Are you a flat earther?)

TootSweet,

I’m probably the weird one here, but I love cranberries. But not in cranberry sauce or anything. I have them in parfaits or pancakes/waffles mostly. But I frequently eat a few just plain without anything on them while I’m cooking.

I’m sensitive to sugar, so anything with more sugar in it makes me ill. But cranberries are perfect and tasty. I love the intense tang of them.

TootSweet,

Here’s one nobody has mentioned yet. Hasbro. Owner of Wizards of the Coast which recently tried to massively fuck over D&D players and sent hired mercinaries (literally Pinkertons) after one of their Magic: The Gathering players for something that totally wasn’t the player’s fault.

TootSweet,

So, D&D first. WotC back in 2001 realized something. There are a few books that they sell a ton of copies of and make a lot of money off of. (The Player’s Handbook, The Dungeon Master’s Guide, Monster Manual, etc.) And then there are a ton more books that take a lot of effort to make but that they don’t sell many copies of so they don’t really make much money on them, but they still have to be made in order to ensure that the more profitable books sell. (These are mostly the published adentures.)

They figured that it would be in their best interest to incentivize third parties to write a lot of these published adventures so that WotC itself could focus more on the core books. So they licensed a lot of their core content under a license (The “Open Gaming License version 1.0a” or “OGL 1.0a”) that allowed third parties to use it in their own modules and sell those modules. It created a vibrant ecosystem of publishers.

The OGL 1.0a was intended as a perpetual license. They promised third party publishers that the wording of the license didn’t allow WotC themselves – creators of the OGL 1.0a – to revoke the license. (This was on an official FAQ on WotC’s site.) So you’d be able to sell your module that included verbiage and elements from official D&D materials forever.

Well, in 2022, they changed their tune. They created an “OGL 1.1” (which was not “open” the way the 1.0a was) and started pressuring publishers they partnered with to accept the new license. It basically allowed them to rip off any third party content and include it in official WotC stuff without paying the third party publisher and also ban the publisher from using the material they wrote. It also put ridiculous restrictions on virtual tabletop software (software for playing D&D remotely.) Now, that’s not so catastrophic because they couldn’t revoke the OGL 1.0a and publishers were under no obligation to accept the OGL 1.1, right?

Well, they came up with a legal argument why the language of the OGL 1.0a that they’d been telling everyone couldn’t be revoked on existing works actually was something they could revoke. Basically, if they convinced a court they could do that, every third-party D&D module that relied on the OGL 1.0a would have to accept the OGL 1.1 terms that would let WotC rip off their work or stop sales immediately.

There was massive backlash from the community. D&D players were remarkably unified in their response. And the CEO of WotC was really tone deaf and dismissive and soured WotC’s relationship with the D&D community even further. Enough subscriptions to D&D Beyond (an online service owned by WotC) that shareholders started asking tough questions at shareholder meetings.

So, finally, WotC hired a slick PR firm to smooth things out. And, honestly, I have to admit they did good. They ended up leaving the OGL 1.0a in place (unrevoked it, sorta). But also, WotC had already said “actually, we can revoke it” and nobody trusted the OGL 1.0a any more. So WotC also dual-licensing the same OGL-1.0a-licensed content also under a Creative Commons license that is (more certain to be) unrevokable and is more open than the OGL 1.0a. The upcoming version of D&D will be OGL 1.1 only, but players and third party publishers are pretty unified on the idea of refusing to migrate to the new version and the current version is safer from the evil clutches of WotC than it was before this whole fiasco went down.

Now, the consensus among the D&D players is that WotC isn’t the bad guys so much as Hasbro, WotC’s parent company. When WotC backpeddeled and did the dual licensing thing, I decided to end my boycott of Hasbro. (I was actually DM’ing a D&D campaign at the time.) I looked forward to buying more D&D books. To seeing the latest Transformers movie and the D&D movie. Stuff like that.

And then, very shortly after that all went down, there was the other fiasco started by WotC.

I’m a little less familiar with this one, but some player of Magic: The Gathering purchased packs of MTG cards from a small reseller and the reseller fucked up. The reseller, not knowing the difference, gave the customer packs of a not yet released but similarly-named line of cards that weren’t supposed to be available to customers at all yet.

The customer made an unboxing video of these not-yet-officially-released cards and stuck it on YouTube. And that’s when shit hit the fan. WotC could have DM’d the customer on YouTube and asked if the customer could take down the video and exchange the cards for the ones he’d actually purchased, but instead they sent the actual, literal Pinkertons (a private security/mercinary company known for union busting and lots of illegal quasi-military/quasi-police actions against innocent people) to go harass the customer’s neighbors and intimidate (like while sporting assault rifles and body armor and camo – on the customer’s front porch) and bully the customer.

Now, my understanding is that the customer did nothing legally wrong. The fuck up was the reseller’s. The customer was under no legal obligation to return the cards or take down the video or otherwise cooperate in any way. The customer also said in later videos about the whole situation and the visit he got from the Pinkertons that they would totally have fully cooperated if they’d have just contacted him and asked.

As soon as I heard about WotC sending the Pinkertons after a customer, I recommitted to boycotting Hasbro and I intend never to end that boycott. I really didn’t expect something far worse to follow right on the heels of the OGL 1.1 fiasco.

TootSweet,

Glad it was informative! Back when the D&D situation was all happening in realtime, I was so addicted to any and all news about it. I watched all there was to see about it on YouTube constantly. (And there was a lot.)

I’ve never played Magic, but especially given how soon after the D&D debacle it went down, it felt like a continuation of the same story. So I watched a lot about that as well.

TootSweet,

In my experience, if you need to do Linux kind of things on a Windows computer, it’s far less glitchy, buggy and laden with weird caveats and edge cases than the alternatives (like Cygwin and Git Bash).

To be fair, I’ve never used it. But I’ve been the guy people come to when shit doesn’t work. Switching from Cygwin or Git Bash to WSL frequently fixes issues.

TootSweet,

All these no-nut November memes are jokes, right? There aren’t massive numbers of people on Lemmy who don’t jack it during Nobember, are there?

TootSweet,

This thread is helping me realize what a curmugeon I am. Everybody’s like “such-and-such is so much better that it was” and I’m coming up with so many reasons why all of them suck way worse.

(Maybe that says more about me than about the state of the world.)

TootSweet,

Just to your specific examples…

Most of your electronics sell your personal data to a myriad of third parties. They mostly prevent you from replacing the whole OS or turning off anti-features. All in a way they didn’t at one time. And of course there’s the repairability issue. (I just discovered about a week ago that my phone with a non-replaceable battery is bulging. sigh)

We live in a world where our vacuum cleaners go down when some AWS service nobody has ever heard of has an outage and our robot vacuum puctures take pictures of us on the toilet that eventually get leaked to the internet.

Your car too. I bought a car recently. The car I had before was a low-end 2005 model. This one’s a 2021 Subaru. The backup camera is kinda nice I admit. But it’s got StarLink and a mic in the cabin. And the privacy policy basically says “we can record you and use the recordings for whatever we want.” I have half a mind to see if I can’t disconnect the microphone one day. And despite being impossible to disconnect from the internet at any time, the clock hasn’t updated for the daylight savings time change yet. (Having that happen automatically seems like about the simplest possible convenience.) And SiriusXM is spamming my mailbox now. And the tire pressure gauge is slightly off and it nags me in cold weather. And it tries to get me to accept the EULA every time I start the car. (I haven’t hit the accept button yet. Not that I’m under any illusion that affects my legal standing on any issue in any particular way. It’s just my own tiny little protest.) And the touchscreen I have to look at while driving instead of physical buttons I can use by feel seems less safe. Plus, this car has a lot more bells and whistles. I did go for one that had more manual things like a non-power rear hatch and manually/mechanically adjustable driver’s seat and a keyed ignition rather than push start. But still. Is the car going to brick and incur a big repair fee if the rear view camera (that wasn’t a feature of my previous car) breaks?

Finally, have you heard of Wirth’s Law? There are tons of memes out there about how in the nineties they crammed really impressive software into small amounts of storage and they worked on very low-power computers. Now the ads alone on a lot of recipe sites and news articles (previously seen as about the lowest power things one could do on a computer) will bog down a fairly powerful computer.

TootSweet,

“You’re finally awake” opening cutscene from Skyrim.

Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data (www.404media.co)

ChatGPT is full of sensitive private information and spits out verbatim text from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, fandom wikis, Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, Wikipedia pages, news blogs, random internet comments, and much more....

TootSweet,

LLMs were always a bad idea. Let’s just agree to can them all and go back to a better timeline.

TootSweet,

I’m just me, but I’d rather contribute to GPL projects than MIT ones, all else being equal.

That said, I’ve not really done any significant amount of “contributing” to other folks’ projects. Mostly the open source code I publish is my own single-handed thing. So far, anyway. (Maybe I don’t play well with others. 🤔 )

short question by an aspiring user

Hello, apparently hanging out in Lemmy inadvertently makes you thinking about using Linux. I am planning to install Linux Mint cinnamon on an older laptop, which I want to bring to LAN Parties. From what I read I can just format my C:\ windows disk, install Linux via bootable drive and from what I understand, proton is basically...

TootSweet,

Ok. Lessee.

Just to quickly explain first off:

  • A disk is just a big collection of bytes. A 100GB disk has 100 billion(-ish) bytes. Each one has an index. The first byte has index “0”. The second has index “1”. There’s a byte 8,675,309. Each byte has a particular value at any one time. The computer can set the value of any byte to any value. (It could set byte 8,675,309 to 01100001 and later it can reliably be read back from the same index as the same value, until it’s changed to a different value.)
  • A disk can be divided into partitions. Basically you (or rather a tool you use) writes data to a location near the beginning of the disk that says "treat this disk as multiple separate devices. The first starts at byte X and ends at byte Y, the second starts at Y and ends at Z, etc."
  • When you plug a disk into a Linux computer (on most modern full-featured desktop/laptop Linux systems, though maybe not on, for instance, some embedded systems) a new “file” appears in /dev for the disk along with more files for each of the partitions on the disk. For instance, an external USB hard drive with three partitions might show up as /dev/sda and the partitions as /dev/sda1, /dev/sda2, and /dev/sda3 respectively. (Ok. Technically the things in /dev are only files in some senses. They’re technically “devices”. But they have paths like files do and they can be read from and written to like files.)
  • If you want to, you can read and write to those partitions or to the disk directly as you would read or write any file. You can open it in a text editor, for instance. You might get lots of random-looking broken characters if you do that, and god help you if you try to save over it, but you can. If you read from a disk or partition, it just returns all the bytes in the disk or partition starting from the first (or from whichever index your application asks it to start from.)
  • A “filesystem driver” knows how to interpret the bytes on a partition as files and directories.
  • If you want to know what device in /dev a file lives on and what filesystem driver is used for that device, the mount command just typed into any bash terminal will tell you. It’ll output rows like on type (…). If you read/write a file or list a directory, it’ll pick the entry in the mount output that has the longest that is a prefix of the requested file. The is the “file”(/device) in /dev that corresponds to the parition on which that file is encoded. `` is the name of the filesystem driver. So, for instance, if I have an entry /dev/sdb3 on /mnt/pringles type ext4 (…) and I read a file named /mnt/pringles/apple/unicorn/potato.txt (and if there are no entries in the mount output with longer paths that are still prefixes of the requested file path), the kernel will ask the ext4 filesystem driver to please look at the partition /dev/sdb3 and interpret that partition’s contents as a hierarchical filesystem to find and return the contents of the file at the path apple/unicorn/potato.txt relative to the root of the filesystem encoded on the /dev/sdb3 partition.
  • There are other filesystem drivers that don’t deal with disks. Some like tmpfs store data in RAM only (and RAM isn’t intended to be persistent, so you can’t expect anything in a tmpfs to last reliably through a reset.) Others like procfs don’t look at a disk but make these ephemeral files that basically decide what data to return when read from at the time they’re read from. (Files in procfs filesystems usually expose data about the Linux system. Like, for instance, what processes are currently running.)

Now, the question of where files should go is… kinda unrelated to the above. Files that are system-wide configuration should go in /etc. Files that are system-wide executables should generally go in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/bin. Anything your own user downloads/creates should go in /home/$username. Etc. More specifics of all this here.

It can be useful to make decisions regarding what disk/partition a particular directory like /home lives on. But whether /home is on the same partition with /etc and /bin and /var etc or whether it’s on a different partition (and both of these options are quite common), your users’ files should go somewhere in /home.

To elucidate a little more, if you decide to put your /home on the same partition as /bin and /etc and /var and such, you’ll have an entry in your mount output like /dev/sda2 on / type ext4 but nothing with a `` of /home. If you decide to put /home on a separate partition, you’ll have your /dev/sda2 on / type ext4 entry plus another entry like /dev/sda3 on /home type ext4.

So which partition does a file go on when you write a file to /home/keenflame/document.txt? Well, in the first case, it’d be on the partition Linux calls /dev/sda2. In the second case it would be written to the partition that Linux calls /dev/sda3.

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