Debian.

It’s pretty great for desktop stuff these days. Basically Ubuntu minus the shit. Any desktop you want, it’s got live installers now (several different ones with different desktops), it’s got nonfree firmware on the disc, they’ve really upped their game.

(And if the recent systemd stuff skeeves you out, you can toss out systemd, even. It’s not for the faint of heart though.)

– Frost

(*wags tail at both PJ and Sam!!* =^.^=)

yeah! Terminal’s super useful but also kind of daunting.

If y’all haven’t seen the man pages, they make an excellent reference. Honestly, they’re basically written more as reference than as tutorial type stuff most of the time. So that’s there whenever your cheatsheet doesn’t cover something.

Also we use zsh (without plugins, you don’t need plugins) and it’s got really fancy autocomplete. We can just type - and hit tab and get a list of all the options for that command (that zsh knows about; I don’t think it goes and reads man pages for you or anything like that). I can’t remember how you turn that on but I think it’s something you can do from zsh’s initial setup wizard. I don’t know if bash can do the same thing or not, I think probably not (but we’re not super up to date on bash).

(I’d avoid fish, which you might also run into if you go looking for fancy features. It’s known for really fancy features but it’s also not compatible with normal shell scripts, which’ll screw you up if you ever want to get into scripting. zsh does normal shell script syntax (with the exception of protecting you if you forget to quote your variables) and also has really nice fancy features like the autocomplete.)

– Frost

Yeahhhh

We use Debian and ripped out systemd (replaced it with openrc) a bit before all this happened. Feeling really good about that choice now.

(unrelated: plural gang! :3)

– Frost

yes please! We’re using OpenRC on Debian right now, it’s very nice. Way less annoying than systemd.

– Frost

Email might actually be one of the easiest to move off of, thankfully!

There’s plenty of stuff out there, both free and paid. You can even use your own domain if you have an extra $15 or so a year. A lot of the paid options let you use your domain with them (and then if you ever need to change providers, you can keep your email address). And you can use both webmail and actual mail apps.

Youtube though… yeah, there aren’t really any good alternatives for that.

– Frost

Psst, you can keep your /home. Copy /home/username to a new partition before the install (just the username folder in the root of the new partition), do the install, and point it at your new partition as /home. Bam, it’s your new home.

Or you could copy out/copy back.

You’ll need to reinstall your apps, but you won’t need to redo all your settings for them.

– Frost

It totally does! We used to use it on Mac, back before we switched to Linux.

– Frost

Ah yes, the literal embodiment of “announcing the new OpenTormentNexus!”.

But also more generally, the whole attitude of “you’re just a Luddite who’s HOLDING US BACK!!” that people do. See also systemd.

(I don’t like systemd for completely different reasons (political rather than technical) but the very similar “you just need to get with the times!!!” attitude is also a massive turnoff for basically the same reason.)

(Also see also Rust. Ditto.)

By contrast, Pipewire? Legitimate improvement. It’s not just a “change bad” thing. There’s a reason Wayland/systemd/rust are controversial and Pipewire isn’t. A lot of it is the attitude, I think. People aren’t forcing Pipewire, either, and on the app side most stuff seems to still be the Pulseaudio API which is completely fine and means you can use either.

Hah, yeah, you probably don’t have a CRT monitor!

Having custom resolution support is INCREDIBLY important for them, because they have no native resolution and you can just throw pretty much anything at them and it looks fantastic. It’s great for getting high refresh rates in games, especially since decreasing the resolution means you don’t have to work as hard for that framerate, without the nastiness of upscaling.

And also our monitor reports 1280x1024 as the highest resolution. Which… is the wrong aspect ratio. ??? So we NEED custom resolutions to even have a usable monitor.

KDE finally came out with support for this… in a version that’s not in Debian yet… like, one major release before dropping X11 support completely. And pretty much every other desktop on the planet is just out in the cold (except for all the window managers that base off of wlroots or something, I think it has an equivalent). Gnome? Good fucking luck.

Oh and screenshot tools. Those are tied to the DE now! Want to use a competing screenshot tool? You just… uh… can’t. I mean we’re on KDE and Spectacle is pretty great so it doesn’t really affect us, but if we didn’t like Spectacle, we’d be more or less screwed under Wayland.

Also scaling the screen. I don’t mean widget toolkit scaling. I mean e.g. integer scaling the screen pixels from 1920x1080 to 4K, a simple 2x2 for 4K TVs, or what-have-you. (Because 4K TVs don’t do this themselves even though they really should.) Or going the other way, rendering at 1280x960 and then downscaling to 640x480 so our CRT can get 120Hz. Easy on X11. Straight-up impossible on Wayland.

Oh yeah, and did I mention temporarily (not as default) disabling our PS4 controller’s trackpad from working as a mouse, without disabling any other trackpad on the system, without disabling its ability to work as a button or whatever in Steam Input? That too.

Stuff like that.

I don’t think anything defaulting to Wayland is guaranteed trash, but I also think there should be way more X11 pitchfork people. Or at least less hatred directed at them when they pop up.

“just get with the times it’s THE FUTURE and you’re not allowed to say no!” is… not cool. Especially when Wayland is unusable for anything outside of “the ordinary”, by design.

– Frost

It’d be really nice if it was like Wii, where you can have the emulated console do an online system update and bang, there’s your whole OS… or failing that, the entire system is on every game disc, just in case… but nooo can’t have that.

Magnetic strips, technically all cards still have them as a backup, but 99.9% of readers accept all three and NFC tap or chip is usually the go-to!

The train station ticket machines where we reload our transit card only take swipes, though. So it is still a thing in very rare places.

When we first got our “food stamps” card (it apparently used to be physical stamps?? but that was long before our time. now you get basically a debit card that can only be used on food), it was also swipe-only. But then a year or two ago they replaced it with one that has a chip and can even do NFC! Nifty.

Cheques, nah, I think you still CAN get a physical paycheck, maybe?, if for some reason you wanted to?, but basically everyone does direct deposit these days

…at least, people who have bank accounts

that’s one reason to get a check. So yeah, those are still a thing, but not common. There are probably-sketchy “check cashing” places in low-income areas that you can take checks to instead of a bank if you don’t have a bank, I don’t know how that works.

Taxes – YEP. 100% still a thing. Fuck TurboTax & co., they pretty much bribed the government to keep this system because it makes them lots of money (because they can sell you “tax prep software” that does your taxes for you and is absurdly expensive and oh! you gotta buy a new one every year because of minor changes to the tax codes!).

– Frost

The homeserver doesn’t have to be fancy. We’re running all our stuff off a Dell Vostro from 2012 we got for like $30 on Craigslist. (It did need another $30 replacement PSU though. And it has 8GB RAM and a 500GB SSD which is nothing to sneeze at for a machine that cheap and that old.)

Funnily enough, Gajim from Flatpak (1.9.5) does drag and drop just fine!

I can’t remember what version we’ve got on our laptop– [can’t we just check packages.debian.org?] right! It’s 2.1.1-2, apparently. Good to hear that 2.2.0 is non-adwaitified, that sounds like a good place to fork from.

– Frost

Honestly, the US (where we live) does this surprisingly well, considering how backwards of a country it is in a lot of other ways.

Credit cards, and even debit cards (like the one from our bank), generally have NFC these days, just like phones do. But you don’t need to faff about with your phone. Just pull out your card, tap it, done.

No app compatibility to deal with, just as easy as phone NFC, I don’t know why that’s not the standard over there. (Plenty of people do use phone payments here too though. I don’t get why.)

– Frost

This is why we run Gajim 1.9.5 in flatpak.

Which. Got removed from flathub, so to install it on our laptop, we had to do some kind of weird flatpak sideloading thing.

On our laptop we’ve been using Gajim 2.something from Debian 13 (our desktop runs testing so we can’t do that there). It’s not Full Gnomified. It also locks up whenever we try dragging a picture into the chat window to send. So… yeah.

Someone should fork Gajim pre-2.

The moment you get a TLS cert, it’ll show up in Certificate Transparency logs and apparently the attack bots scan that for targets.

You can totally do that yeah!

We have our stuff set up so inbound VPS traffic (for HTTPS) comes in on port 4430, while LAN traffic is on 443. It’s not done for firewall reasons, it’s so we can pass the client’s IP through with Nginx’s proxy_protocol feature, but you could just make your local-only services not listen on 4430. Boom, done.

Fail2Ban on the VPS is probably good. On the home server, it might just lock out the VPS (since everything comes from there).

Anyway yeah, I’ve got a whole guide on this sort of setup! https://frost.brightfur.net/blog/selfhosting-with-a-bounce-vps-part-1/

– Frost

Man, it’s so weird to think about misogynistic/degrading/abusive porn existing. I’m used to furry porn which, generally, is much more positive “yay let’s do [insert rule 34 of literally anything you could possibly think of] and have a great time!” type stuff.

– Frost