chameleon

It depends on if you can feasibly implement compatibility layers for large parts of the “required” but very work-intensive drivers. FreeBSD has the same driver struggles and ended up with LinuxKPI to support AMD/Intel GPUs. I know there’s a whole bunch of toy kernels that implemented compatibility layers for parts of Linux in some fashion too.

It’s a ton of work overall but there’s room to lift enough already existing stuff from Linux to get the ball rolling.

In my experience, most hangs with a message about amdgpu loading on screen are caused by an amdgpu issue of some kind. I’d check to see if amdgpu ends up being loaded correctly via lsmod | grep amdgpu and just a general journalctl -b 0 | grep amdgpu to see if there’s any obvious failures there. Chances are that even if it’s not amdgpu, the real failure is in the journal somewhere.

Could be a wrong setting of hardware.enableRedistributableFirmware (should be true) or the new-ish hardware.amdgpu.initrd.enable (can be either really but either true or false might be more or less reliable on your system).

Did a physical-to-virtual-to-physical conversion to upgrade and unbreak a webserver that had been messed up by simultaneously installing packages from Debian and Ubuntu.

It’s a problem in the Secure Boot chain, every system is affected by any vulnerability in any past, present or future bootloader that that system currently trusts. Even if it’s an OS you aren’t using, an attacker could “just” install that vulnerable bootloader.

That said, MS had also been patching their own CVE-2023-24932 / CVE-2024-38058, and disabled the fix for that in this update due to widespread issues with it. I don’t think anyone knows what they’re doing anymore.

My dotfiles aren’t distro-specific because they’re symlinks into a git repo (or tarball) + a homegrown shell script to make them, and that’s about the end of it.

My NixOS configuration is split between must-have CLI tools/nice-to-have CLI tools/hardware-related CLI tools/GUI tools and functions as a suitable reference for non-Nix distros, even having a few comments on what the package names are elsewhere, but installation is ultimately still manual.

There’s been an exFAT driver in the kernel for a couple of years now (merged after Microsoft’s patent pact added ExFAT), it works fine. Same driver gets used on Android for SD card support.

Easiest way would be to use borg create --read-special --chunker-params fixed,4194304 '/home/user/sdcardbackup::{now}' /dev/sdX (which I copied from the examples in the documentation). I’m not sure if Vorta has a way to activate --read-special but I suspect not; you can most likely still use it to make the repo and manage archives inside of it though.

Backing up from a command/stdin might also be relevant as an alternative, since that lets you back up more or less anything.

Elixir, or Gleam/pure Erlang/some other Erlang VM language. I think Erlang is extremely cool and I’ve enjoyed the little time I spent with Elixir. I also have absolutely no use case to make proper use of it.

My suggestion is to use system management tools like Foreman. It has a “content views” mechanism that can do more or less what you want. There’s a bunch of other tools like that along the lines of Uyuni. Of course, those tools have a lot of features, so it might be overkill for your case, but a lot of those features will probably end up useful anyway if you have that many hosts.

With the way Debian/Ubuntu APT repos are set up, if you take a copy of /dists/$DISTRO_VERSION as downloaded from a mirror at any given moment and serve it to a particular server, that’s going to end up with apt update && apt upgrade installing those identical versions, provided that the actual package files in /pool are still available. You can set up caching proxies for that.

I remember my DIY hodgepodge a decade ago ultimately just being a daily cronjob that pulls in the current distro (let’s say bookworm) and their associated -updates and -security repos from an upstream rsync-capable mirror, then after checking a killswitch and making sure things aren’t currently on fire, it does rsync -rva tier2 tier3; rsync -rva tier1 tier2; rsync -rva upstream/bookworm tier1. Machines are configured to pull and update from tier1 (first 20%)/tier2 (second 20%)/tier3 (rest) appropriately on a regular basis. The files in /pool were served by apt-cacher-ng, but I don’t know if that’s still the cool option nowadays (you will need some kind of local caching for those as old files may disappear without notice).

Company offering new-age antivirus solutions, which is to say that instead of being mostly signature-based, it tries to look at application behavior instead. If Word was exploited because some user opened not_a_virus_please_open.docx from their spam folder, Word might be exploited and end up running some malware that tries to encrypt the entire drive. It’s supposed to sniff out that 1. Word normally opens and saves like one document at a time and 2. some unknown program is being overly active. And so it should stop that and ring some very loud alarm bells at the IT department.

Basically they doubled down on the heuristics-based detection and by that, they claim to be able to recognize and stop all kinds of new malware that they haven’t seen yet. My experience is that they’re always the outlier on the top-end of false positives in business AV tests (eg AV-Comparatives Q2 2024) and their advantage has mostly disappeared since every AV has implemented that kind of behavior-based detection nowadays.

For the debugging thing on Linux, the major tunable is kernel.yama.ptrace_scope.

vim has better default keybindings/commands that allow for less movement of your hands. Nowadays, in reasonably current versions of nano, that’s mostly it. The main difference is nano is somewhat usable but extremely inefficient unless you learn it, while vim forces you to learn it to get anything done at all, which also pushes people to spend a bit of time learning it in general.

If you’re sure of the numbers you’re using, vim’s ability to repeat commands is also helpful. In practice I find that it’s really hard to make use of them beyond low numbers, where nano can still achieve things in similar amounts of keypresses. Eg something to delete 3 words like <escape>3dwi can be done similar with a sequence like Alt-A ^→ ^→ ^→ ^K in nano. Make it 20 words and nano is going to be a lot slower, but that’s quite an uncommon action.

But the practice is that nano users don’t spend time learning any of that and just hold delete until the words are gone, which takes forever. Everyone that can do basics in vim quickly learns that you can dw words away and make it 3dw to delete 3 of them. The default, easiest to use & access tool for any given situation gets blamed not just for its flaws, but also for the users that don’t want to spend time learning any tool.

qalculate. It’s a calculator. A good one, though. You can put in 2 * x = 5.5 or 100 inches to meters and get an answer, it loads fast, it keeps history, the arrow keys work and it has all the fancy scientific buttons you’d ever want too.