I can’t speak to Lunduke, but dhh is quite the piece of shit himself.

Your math is waaaaay off. Let me help you.:

Let’s assume that you commute a rather conservative distance of just 25mi to work. That’s 50mi/day, 5 days/wk, plus let’s say half that over the weekend. Assuming an (again, generous) fuel efficiency for your truck at 25mpg, given a ballpark 300mi/week, that’s 12 gallons of fuel/week. The current average price of gas in the US is a remarkably low $3.071, and that adds up to $36.85/week.

Now consider the costs of maintenance. If you’ve really had zero problems in the last 20 years on a pickup truck (honestly this is far from average), you likely did an oil change every 3 months at the very least. These days it’ll run you about $100.

In terms of insurance, I asked this site for the average cost of insuring a Toyota pickup truck for one year: $1937. Let’s be grossly optimistic and pretend that those rates will never go up.

Initial cost: (Provided)                    = 11000.00
Fuel costs: (50 × 6 ÷ 25 × 3.071 × 52 × 20) = 38326.08
Oil changes: ($100 × 4 × 20)                =  8000.00
Insurance: (1937 × 20)                      = 38740.00
Parking:                                    = ?
------------------------------------------------------
Total                                         96066.08

Excluding the cost of parking, the purchase of your miracle never-needs-repair truck if purchased today would be roughly $100,000. Note also how very conservative these values are. It’s entirely possible that your real costs are well above what I’ve stated here.

The total cost of the rental was $1000 plus fuel costs, so using our above figures, that’s a grand total of $1042.99 assuming you drove it roughly 50mi/day for all 7 days of the week. That’s assuming that you don’t opt for the much lower rates that appear to be available to you in the area of $250 - $350/week.

So, if you didn’t own a car and instead only rented one when you needed to “move a couch”, you would save just over $95,000. In other words, your insistence that you absolutely must own your own vehicle has cost you the equivalent of a downpayment on a house.

Car rentals are exceptionally cheap compared to paying to own and drive a car capable of hauling a couch for that one time 4 years ago when you needed that.

As a big car-hater myself, I can agree with most of what you’re saying here (the “but it snows” argument is baseless though, see Denmark).

I think that if you’ve chosen to live in sparsely populated areas, then being car-dependent is your choice and you should be able to have that… but you don’t get to drive your car into the city.

Cars ruin cities. They’re loud, dangerous, dirty, and they kill millions. If you’re happy to live like that, then that’s on you, but you (I’m using the “motorist demographic” here rather then the personal “you”) can’t insist on having wide, multi-lane, high speed roads and plenty of free parking where most of the world’s population actually lives. You park at the periphery and take transit or a bike into town.

If you build for a containerised environment, standing up your service in Kubernetes with HPA gives you all the scalability (and potentially cost) benefits of serverless without all the drawbacks.

“Oh hi! Here’s some code. I didn’t write it and don’t understand it, but you should totally run it on your machine.”

The bit of information you’re missing is that du aggregates the size of all subfolders, so when you say du /, you’re saying: “how much stuff is in / and everything under it?”

If you’re sticking with du, then you’ll need to traverse your folders, working downward until you find the culprit folder:

$ du /*
(Note which folder looks the biggest)
$ du /home/*
(If /home looks the biggest)

… and so on.

The trouble with this method however is that * won’t include folders with a . in front, which is often the culprit: .cache, .local/share, etc. For that, you can do:

$ du /home/.*

Which should do the job I think.

If you’ve got a GUI though, things get a lot easier 'cause you have access to GNOME Disk Usage Analyzer which will draw you a fancy tree graph of your filesystem state all the way down to the smallest folder. It’s pretty handy.

Plus the FF extension is really full-featured. I can clip in different formats or even take a screenshot if the webpage makes clipping hard.

I didn’t even know there was a Firefox extension! I might give it a look.

I was a Windows user as a kid in the 80s & 90s doing pirate installs of 3.11 and later 95 for friends and family. I got into “computers” early and was pretty dedicated to the “Windows is the best!” camp from a young age. I had a friend who was a dedicated Mac user though, and she was bringing me around. The idea of a more-stable, virus-free desktop experience was pretty compelling.

That all changed when I went to school and had access to a proper “Mac lab” though. Those motherfuckers crashed multiple times an hour, and took the whole OS with them when they did it. What really got to me though was the little “DAAAAAAAAAAA!” noise it would make when you had to hard reboot it. It was as if it was celebrating its inadequacy and expected you to participate… every time it fucked you over and erased your work.

So yeah, Macs were out.

I hadn’t even heard of Linux in 2000 when I first discovered the GPL, which (for some reason) I conflated with GNOME. I guess I thought that GNOME was a new OS based on what I could only describe as communist licensing. I loved the idea, but was intimidated by the “ix” in the name. “Ix” meant “Unix” to me, and Unix was using Pine to check email, so not a real computer as far as I was concerned.

It wasn’t until 2000 that I joined a video game company called “Moshpit Entertainment” that I tried it. You see, the CEO, CTO, and majority of tech people at Moshpit were huge Linux nerds and they indoctrinated me into their cult. I started with SuSe (their favourite), then RedHat, then used Gentoo for 10 years before switching to Arch for another 10+.

TL;DR: Anticapitalism and FOSS cultists lead me into the light.

What exactly is an external drive case? Are you just talking about a USB enclosure for a single drive or something that can somehow hold multiple drives and interface over something more stable than USB?

Joplin will do this for you. It comes ready to sync with all sorts of cloud options, as well as “local folder” which works well with Syncthing. It’s offline-first, cross-platform, and FOSS.

…or contribute to Mozilla’s work while getting something in return.

Serious question: could we not just fork the project under the GPL and use that?

There’s a GNOME extension called “Just Perfection” that may be exactly what you’re looking for. It let’s you hide/disable pretty much any visual thing you can think of.

It does get better, but… it’s kinda like river rafting.

Coming from Windows, Linux can and does often feel like you’ve spent your whole life trapped in a box. Suddenly “that thing that’s always annoyed you” is something you can turn off, replace, or improve with very little effort. I remember for example that when I switched back in 2000 I was blown away by a checkbox in the KDE PDF viewer. You could, in the basic settings, with no special hackery required, simply uncheck the box labelled Respect Adobe DRM. Suddenly, my computer was actually mine.

Using Linux these days is still just as amazing. You go from an OS that spies on you, pushes ads into your eyeballs, and has some of the worst design patterns ever, to a literal bazaar of Free options. It’s different for everyone, and that’s sort of the point: Linux is “Free” in all senses of the word, as you can make your machine do whatever you want.

It takes some time to get there though, and a lot of it is hardware unfortunately. A lot of the machines out there are built exclusively for Windows and the companies that make these things hide a lot of their inadequacies in their (proprietary) Windows drivers. So, when you try to use not-Windows, you end up using drivers written by people who had to reverse engineer or just do some guesswork to get that hardware working. This arrangement works very well for both Microsoft and these budget hardware vendors because it provides lock-in for the former, and a steady market for the latter.

The reality is that if you want to make the switch to Linux, you’re more likely to have a hard time if your hardware choices fall in this camp. For example, some times it’s just easier to buy a €12 USB WiFi or Bluetooth adapter that you know works with Linux than it is to rely on the chip that came with your laptop. It’s better now than it once was, but Nvidia cards, the occasional webcam, and a few WiFi devices have presented as problems for me in the last few years.

My advice is to embrace that “patience and stubbornness” and temper it with an honest pricing of your time vs. the cost of replacing the problematic hardware. When buying new stuff, look up its Linux support online before buying anything. You’ll save yourself a lot of pain.

In cases when you really want to dig in and understand/fix your problem (because it’s Linux, you’re allowed to understand and fix things on your computer!) then I recommend looking at the Arch Wiki and even using Arch Linux since (a) that’s the basis for most of the information there, and (b) Arch tends to favour “bleeding edge” stuff, so you’re more able to install the latest version of things that may well support your hardware.

I know it’s probably not the answer you were hoping for, but if you stick it out, I promise it’s worth it. I’ve been doing this for 25 years now and I’m never going back. Windows makes me so inexplicably angry with it’s constant nagging, spying, and inadequacies, I just can’t do it.

Most of the comments here seem to be from the consumer perspective, but if you want broader adoption, you need to consider the corporate market too. Most corporate software these days is web-based, so the problem is less with the software and more with the people responsible for it.

The biggest hurdle is friction with the internal IT team. They like Windows because that’s all they ever learnt and they’re not interested in maintaining a diverse set of company laptops. They won’t entertain Linux in a corporate environment unless it’s mandated by management, and even if the bosses approve it, IT will want a way to lock you out of your laptop, force updates, do a remote wipe, etc.

There are (proprietary) tools to do some of this, but they generally suck and often clash with your package manager. Microsoft is just way ahead of Linux in the “bloatware that tours your hands” department.

That sounds like a nice feature we could use for the Aur actually. We already have the votes value, but some sort of verification body could help rescue the Aur’s reputation.

This all appears to be based on the user agent, so wouldn’t that mean that bad-faith scrapers could just declare themselves to be typical search engine user agent?

I’ve been thinking about setting up Anubis to protect my blog from AI scrapers, but I’m not clear on whether this would also block search engines. It would, wouldn’t it?

I don’t think there’s an official “way”, but here’s mine (which I love):

On start-up I open all the apps I usually use, one per designated workspace:

1. Slack/Teams/Mattermost, whatever my work requires.
2. Thunderbird
3. Kitty
4. PyCharm/RustRover, whatever the job requires
5. Firefox

Workspaces 6-9 are left empty, ready for whatever app I need in the moment, but only ever one app per workspace.

With this setup, I’ve mapped Ctrl+Fx to each workspace, so Ctrl+F4 takes me to PyCharm where I write the code, and Ctrl+F5 followed by another F5 takes me to Firefox and reloads the page. Ctrl+F3 is always the terminal, etc., so you quickly start building these shortcuts to mean Fwhatever is $APP_NAME.

I almost never use the mouse, unless what I’m doing is necessarily mouse-driven: browsing or drawing charts etc. Everything else is keyboard-driven.