If you don’t want to sail the high seas, and you don’t want to pay, the library is a great, free option.

What kind of cutlery are you dropping that requires refinishing your floor?

For very simple tasks you can usually blindly log in and run commands. I’ve done this with very simple tasks, e.g., rebooting or bringing up a network interface. It’s maybe not the smartest, but basically, just type root, the root password, and dhclient eth0 or whatever magic you need. No display required, unless you make a typo…

In your specific case, you could have a shell script that stops VMs and disables passthrough, so you just log in and invoke that script. Bonus points if you create a dedicated user with that script set as their shell (or just put in the appropriate dot rc file).

EulerOS, a Linux distro, was certified UNIX.

But OS X, macOS, and at least one Linux distro are/were UNIX certified.

IIRC Torvalds uses Fedora.

(Debian for me.)

Remote backup server would be my suggestion.

Configure it with a VPN to talk to your home network and set it up at a trusted friend’s or family’s place.

I do this with a raspberry pi and an external HDD that takes daily/weekly/monthly snapshots, with daily rsync. Works nicely for me.

My headcanon for The Matrix’s “humans are batteries” is that it’s the machines’ perverse interpretation of this — killing the humans is off the table, and for whatever reason letting them live with no purpose to serve the machines is also disallowed. But giving their lives “meaning” in the form of a shitty (and thermodynamically dubious) “battery” somehow satisfies the rules.

It’s a very big stretch, I’ll admit…

I’m guessing it’s because the developers either have a different speciality that they focus on, are employed to support specific hardware, or both.

If you have a TV, you likely already have the receiving device. Antenna can cost, or you can play around with wire length and orientation.

It can be daunting to get into the hobby, there are a ton of niches.

To start: where are you? I’m in the USA, so that’s where my experience is.

License: required to transmit on the ham bands; you can listen without a license.

Range: are you looking to talk to people in your city/region? If so, a cheap “walkie-talkie” style (called “HT” in the biz — best avoid “walkie-talkie”) is a good place to start. These VHF/UHF (very/ultra high frequency) radios are affordable — something from Baofeng(~$30) or similar will work just fine, though they are often looked down on (I have one — for the price, it’s great). You will have the most luck if there is an active ham scene in your area, in large part because they may have a repeater, which can greatly extend your range. Many regions will have scheduled “nets” where you just go around and chat.

If you’re looking for the ability to chat with folks on the other side of the world, you’ll want to look into HF (high frequency). This is much lower frequency, thus longer wavelength, than the handheld VHF/UHF HTs. So…the antennas take up a lot of space. Mine is 52 feet long, in the attic. And the radios are much more expensive (more like $1k new). ICOM 7300, Yaesu FT710 are popular entry level units (but you also need power supply, cables, and antenna).

That said: if you just want to listen to HF, the antenna doesn’t matter as much at all, and you can use an SDR (RTL-SDR probably works?) for listening. You can probably also find a used shortwave radio that covers some of the HF ham bands.

The only flaw in Corel’s logic was that as soon as you’re running Linux, you lose all desire to run WordPerfect, and develop an irresistible need to align yourself with vim or emacs…

I think (?) it’s generally true that the root user should never mess with users’ files.

Imagine your home directory is shared across many systems on a network (my alma mater did this). It would be really bad if a sysadmin for alpha.university.edu removed a program, and suddenly your personal settings were removed from beta.university.edu — even though that computer still has the program.

This is one of the “UNIX on the desktop” issues — a lot is designed for a sysadmin/multiuser situation, and it has some gotchas when using it as a desktop machine (I’m used to/really appreciate the directory structure and settings management at this point, but it may take some getting used to).

Right, I just meant that you can’t sudo cat file > /dev/sda but you can sudo dd ..., because IO redirection isn’t elevated to root with sudo. I’m not saying anything too profound :)

Compiling a kernel yourself isn’t a big deal these days, especially with DKMS. Generally the type of people I’ve encountered who care about which kernel version they’re usiyare the type of people who are capable of compiling it themselves…

One caveat is that you will need write access to the drive, which probably means you need to run as root — can’t run that with sudo as-is, unlike dd.

Also a super useful tool for measuring real world bandwidth, both on physical media and over the network ( dd status=progress ... | nc ...).

I picked up an old HP LaserJet (with the Ethernet option) for free during grad school. It was a great printer — good CUPS/Linux support, reliable, cheap 3rd party toner.

It’s sad how the mighty have fallen. Would never recommend one for someone today.

Also X often supported a different size viewport and desktop so the view would scroll.

I remember encountering that the first time I used Linux! Can’t recall personally finding a good use for it but…neat I guess?

Multiple desktops, 1999. What an amazing feature.

A quick web search suggests that macOS (then OS X) got this in 2007 (“Spaces”), and Windows not until 2015.

This alone makes this GUI more functional IMHO.