sed harbors no demon beasts, in my experience.

On the other hand, by default using sed -i is where the demons come in.

No, sed, NOT in place. Not the first time. Show me what you want to do based on the instructions I gave you, and then we’ll talk about letting you play with the real data.

It’s amazing how many companies rely on a crazy amount of FOSS libs, etc.

In the relatively recent past, a boss who I had software PMd for across numerous years had the unmitigated gall to ask me for a list of licenses for “all the software we used.”

I literally laughed in his face, explained open source and the rabbit hole such a question goes down, and he just couldn’t (wouldn’t) get it.

Unfortunately, the biz side of the house doesn’t like “yeah, it’s all legal, but fuck you if you think I’m documenting every piece of code in every library in a ten plus year old code base, allllllll the way down.”

Thank you for the TL;dw. Sincerely appreciated.

Used it in a pinch once, and realized how incredibly awesome it is. Now, it’s my go-to.

Haven’t tried data and files on same stick, but…. Now I want to.

Only reason dd hasn’t bitten me is that in my head, if and of make perfect sense as input and output.

Doesn’t mean I won’t make that error tomorrow, ofc. But I tend not to alias except harmless stuff to avoid that very problem.

I have this exact use case on a work machine, because the proxy flat refuses to prompt for the login, just goes straight to deny.

I own neither the proxy, nor the steaming heap of code that lives behind it, and I’m grateful for that every single day…

That’s the one I had in mind.

If the clock is off (bad CMOS battery, as others have noted); and there is a password “max age” setting that’s intended to be far, far, far in the future…

Well, your clock being off by a few hundred years might well trigger the (intended never) expiration setting.

Malware is a possibility, but I lean towards the date being the cause rather than an effect.

Gut feeling: Nope.

Further reflection, for those who remember a certain video game in the CGA error (not V, C)

“Here’s tae us, who’s like us, damn few, and they’re all dead. “

It just freakin’ works, which is a real benefit in our world.

Yes - you’ll be well-served by the ThinkPad line in general. My first permanently dedicated Linux machine was a T430 and true to form things largely “just worked.”

That was enough years ago that I might well have needed to seed the network drivers on the usb key, and that was the worst of it.

They’re tanks, and the hw is generally easy and fairly intuitive to swap out the usual memory and HDD.

IIRC my first distro on that was Debian, had plenty of docs about the intersection of the distro and ThinkPad line.

Mint should be perfectly fine given that.

I will say that I try not to do fresh installs on unfamiliar hardware w/o some other available form of connectivity, my phone mostly is quite sufficient for the purpose. It’s just easier not to risk putting myself in a difficult position in the first place.

You’re in for some fun.