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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: December 27th, 2023

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  • Your experiences are anecdotal.

    by pulishing them they become measurable, which also removes the “anecdotal” flag with numbers, also maybe ask archaeologists how much of an evidence a complain written in papyrus actually is a “while” after it was written.

    also the studies that found out “why” public services don’t serve in the first place have become quite old* meanwhile, which is the very opposite of anecdotal, but nothing was done so far to change the known state of not serving services for decades, so why should they have changed without changing actions affecting them?

    *) i read parts of them >20 years ago and the studies observations and conclusions i read fitted 100% of what i personally experienced/witnessed from within a family “working” in such services.


  • Which Western country has send troops to the Ukrainian front?

    so just choosing how to exactly limit the question changes if “help in war” was provided? what if western countries just helped with some nukes instead of only some normal rockets or whatever was sent there to help? what if western countries troops quick-changed their passports to be ukrainians instead?(guess that secret agencies already have enough passport printing capabilities,or just get them printed on demand), would that be sufficient to say no “western” troops were sent even if it were millions of soldiers “from” the west?

    but living in a propagandainfested country i’ld already expect such bad manipulations to happen instantaneous.

    what if western countries didn’t send “troops to the front” but to the rest of the country so that invading military would have to fight western troops while ukrainian troops could concentrate on the front. would that also not be help in war by your (seemingly) position?

    or the other way around: what if one would only call the directly by russian soldiers occupied area (like 1m² where they each actually stand) would that still be an invasion or just a US-style visit with US style damaging of democracy and economics? manipulating questions is a bad propaganda habit and does not prevent wars, it creates them.





  • you’re welcome.

    what i’ld suggest… a general rule that i like to always follow is to use a test system for everything new. but that does not need to be a full separate system every time.

    lets say you have your mailbox and want to try getting new mails from it using fetchmail. first you can use uidl mechanisms to only fefch every mail once and besides that leave them all on the server, but i like it a bit more secure: create a second email adress/account at your mail providers service only for testing. thus you can do whatever you like to to test the mechanisms only without even touching your real inbox (maybe even fill it up with large emails and look how the system reacts, i once had an email account with a cheap provider that deadlocked the inboxes when full…). then when everything is as you want it, switch the account and password (or create another config file for fetchmail) and your’re done. every change (not only fetchmail things) could go tested this way before going live with the changes. filtering could be done with procmail for example, but when the mda that is called by procmail somehow exits with success when the email really isn’t delivered, then the email might get lost forever depending on the settings of course. so fiddling with new stuff always carries the risk of not fiddling correctly ;-)

    have fun !


  • Its possible to tell your mta (like postfix) to use another mta for all mails, or only some domains etc, so using a third party to play the internet facing service then getting the mails by fetchmail, storing them in a dovecot server is easy. on the sending part you could use your standard email client (i.e. thunderbird on pc or k9-mail on smartphone) to send it to your postfix instance that also sits on the server hosting your dovecot service. the mta there takes the mail and delivers it by rules which could just be using the mta of your freemailer using username/password of your account for all outgoing emails. i am doing this but the “external” mail system are my servers as well, i just don’t want emails to stay too long on VMs in the datacenter where i have no access to the physical disks in case something goes wrong.

    a raspberry pi is sufficient for such a aetup (i am using a pi4 currently but for emails only i’ld say a 3 or older would do too), adding a disk via usb makes storage huge and cheap then, i use two usb ssd’s in a raid1 for storage… that server could be only accessible through vpn if you whish, depending on your skills and needs (i mainly use ssl client certificates that are supported by k9mail and thunderbird so it fits seamless to be connected through a haproxy that authenticates these before proxying the plain connection to the pi) clients like thunderbird can offline-store all emails (configure download-or-not per imap folder) making searches easy and quick while my k9 client can search locally or on the server if needed.

    maybe adjust maximum mail size of your own mta to exactly match (or slightly less) that of the freemailer you use to prevent surprises of big but later then unsent emails.

    its possible to have a nextcloud instance on that same pi that acts as an email web mailer just in case of (i really dont need it, but i’ve set this up anyway). nextcloud is also great for syncing/backup files pictures, contacts notes todo lists and calendar of your phone (where i use davx5 opentasks and foldersync for). there are other webmailers available but installing /using nextcloud is not a too bad idea either ;-)

    i suggest also setting up some automatic offsite backup with snapshots of that pi then to cover emails and the setup and its configs ;-)


  • smb@lemmy.mltoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksWhy is that?
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    29 days ago

    isn’t “making others believe their product would be worth a multiple of too expensive by numerous lies” one of the very few reasons why billionaires even exist? and whoever can manipulate you to believe such, could possibly also use these skills to manipulate you to believe someone else would be a demon. maybe thats why that is. 🤷



  • maybe thats where he has that lie-and fraud-habit from ;-) but i believe that this post is not more than just some more election campain lies 🤷 just look at the “the democrats” part. if voter fraud would be that easy, voting should be delayed until fixed. following that argumentation there already is no democracy but only feudalism in the us (or isn’t it already?) and all the voting stuff is just theater to calm the masses while beeing abused like cattle. and if its not that easy, this seems to be yet-another-musk-lie in a row of how many?

    but… even if it wasn’t that easy to fake votes, is it democracy then only because of the votes are done and counted correctly? what about the candidates and where they come from, who or what decides which candidates can be voted? who or whatever does or impacts this filtering is an attack vector where democracy can be directly attacked. and limiting the candidates to who one could manipulate or who shares the same fraud wishes from the beginning is a very powerful attack vector.

    now what do you think who would want to attack democracy in the first place? or how would that be done while leaving the vote-counting system intact? and who would maybe want to point to nonexisting voting problems just to distract from much bigger fraud? that is if those voting problems do not exist of course.

    so many questions, so many lies and nobody seems voteable? what a coincidence!



  • smb@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlA word about systemd
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    1 month ago

    one example of a program that did multiple things is sfdisk, it used to make the kernel reload the new partition table but that was not its main job, only changing them. the extra functionality moved to blockdev which is nearer to doing such as it also triggers flushing buffers and i think setting read/write status. i am fully ok with that change as it removes code from a program that doesn’t need it to another that already does similar things so that other partitioning programs like gdisk fdisk or parted could go the same way so that maintainers of the reread-partition-table things can concentrate on one solution at one place (in userspace) instead of opening issues at an unknown number of projects that also alter partitioning. the “do one thing” paradigma is good for developers who maintain the code and i pretty much appreciate their work. if you are up to only want one-day-flies that either die or take huge amounts of resources only for keeping them alive (image of a mayfly in an emergency room and a heart-lung machine attached while chirurgs rushing around trying to enlenghten its life a few seconds more) then you are good with monolithic tools that could hardly be maintained and suck allday as no one wants to fix any bugs or cannot without creating new ones due to the tightened dependency hell it has internally.

    the point is not a lack of examples doing wrong but where one wants to be heading towards.


  • smb@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlA word about systemd
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    1 month ago

    Lol what???

    wouldn’t that be the definition of stable?

    the computer on voyager 2 is running for 47 years now, they might have rebooted some parts meanwhile but overall its a long time now, and if the program is free of bugs the time that program can run only depends on the durability of the hardware, protection from cosmic rays (which were afaik the problems the voyager probes faced mostly, not bugs) which could be quite long if protected from hazardous environments and maybe using optoelectronics but the point is that a bug free software can run forever only depending on hardware durability and energy supply, in any other way no humans are needed for a veery long time ;-)


  • smb@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlA word about systemd
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    1 month ago

    However, systemd makes the system much more secure and reliable as it is

    less secure and less reliable day-by-day you meant? systemd introduces needless dependencies ever since as if that was it sole intention ever from its very beginning, which already were used for wide attacks, and exactly those attacks that the people working hard to remove unneeded dependencies for security reasons meant to prevent by things like “do one thing only” (but security was not the number 1 reason for this one i think), systemd instead: ‘lets add another level of that exponential dependency tree from the insecurity hell’ felt like they did this stupid thing intentionally every month for a decade or more.

    and stability… if you don’t monitor what systemd does, you’ll never know how bad it actually is. i’ve made custom scripts to monitor systemd’s failures (failing in doing a very primitive of its job) and there are hundreds (actually varying around 200 to 300 sometimes more) of such per day on all our systems for one particular(!) measurement only that was breaking service stability and i wrote a measure-and-fix+monitor workaround. other fixes were not monitored however, only silently fixed by workarounds, thus just unnumbered systemd bugs/instabilities in the dark that stole a lot of work capacity…

    if you run distros with systemd, unreliability is your daily experience unless you don’t really care or have never experienced stability before - like running a service (a single process) for 8 years without any interruption then it suddenly stops and you go like “was it maybe an attack? the process died, how could that be? were there any connects from outside at that moment?” not talking about not updating something that long, but “stability” itself CAN be like if you dont stop it, it’ll still run in 10000+ years maybe millions, more likely that humans extincted themselves way earlier than of a process “just dying” by a bug… while systemd even randomly stops things that were running well for no reason (varying) once a month more or less (also varying in what it actually randomly stops, sometimes (2 times) it even stopped ssh on my servers, me asking myself if i should create yet another workaround for systemds buggyness to not locking me out again from network or ratjer go for the real solution for most* of all systemd problems - *see below) on the few standard installs i personally have as i didn’t have the way to automatically replace provider installed distro on VMs in the DC. i want this replacing automatically for the same reason why i don’t like systemd, it causes manual work for a thing that should go automated. however due to systemd’s perpetuated instability i now managed to have this way, and every second working on getting rid of systemd is worth it 100k times. this however does not solve all systemd-introduced problems as the xz attack showed (a systemd-dependency on xz made the infected xz library beeing useful-for-the-atracker during compiletime of sshd binary with which then the attacker could infect the newly built sshd binary),one could still be attacked through systemd’s dependency hell even if one does not use systemd by oneself, but the build machines used for your distro could be affected/infected by systemd’s needless dependencies when “also” compiling for systemd-affected distributions thus there is the risk of becoming a victim of needless-systemd-dependencies while not using systemd at all. however the attack through systemd dependency (and that the public solution was not the removal of needless dependencies only included as source for superflous third party “needs”) made clear that systemd is an overall problem for security that will not be solved quickly but stay just like all windows insecurities will stay as long as they whish to push them to their “users”.

    systemd reducing overall security and its unreliability combined with some builtin impediments (i.e. when debugging its defects) is what drove me away from systemd. there are solutions way more stable and way more secure (and way better documented btw) that do not call in for needless dependencies, reducing risks, attack vectors and increases overall debuggability i.e. by deterministic behaviour as an easy example. and none of its important (to me) promises have been fulfilled yet by systemd, drop-in-replacement? have heared that lie thousands of times, but in the last decade i have not experienced it a single time in a distro and it does not seem to be included/finished any more.

    for windows users or windows admins a linux with systemd on it IS an improvement in stability, security and of course for updating, yes. but all of that does not come from systemd, rather the opposite is the case, systemd reduces it month by month, thats my experience and thats the most important experience for me, idc what lies whitdepapers tell or what broken promises are believed by anyone or the masses, i want secure and stable servers and services and systemd does not fit in for any of these goals and the time it was still “young” and early problems could be accepted in the hope they get fixed soon are gone, but without those fixes having ever appeared.


  • maybe try to find a linux user group near where you live. if there is one, usually you get help there, but its usually kinda different sort of help, you don’t get “the solution” to get your personal whishes come true ready prepared in bite-sized piezes for easy consumption but just the help by advices or suggestions that those there can give you or directly would try out.

    open source is about sharing knowledge and todays mainstream OS distributions are way more complicated than long ago so the learning curve to adjust things in ways the distribution didn’t prepare (which is often a lot) might be high but always worth a try at least for the learning.

    for a lightweight desktop environment that is somehow similar to the old windows98, i’ld say give XFCE a try. i think on debian/ubuntu trying out could be as easy as installing the xfce (or xfce4?) package (or maybe an xfce4-desktop-environment paclage) i don’t remember the exact package name but there is one meta package that depends on all needed stuff, i did it like 4 years ago… when installed you could try it by logging in and (your distro should have a login manager that allows this, or you’ld have to change that too) choosing xfce as desktop environment at login time, thus if you don’t like it, logout again and login with the other again.

    i am using xfce because it is clean, lightweight, it does its job, does not invent new unneeded features every few month (like it felt when i used kde long ago) and is adjustable enough for me. i removed the lower task bar and put the open windows components into the bar above adjustedbthat a bit, thats basically what i changed and i think it is quite similar to what win98 was (but thats not the reason for me to have it that way)

    also, it is possible to change the window manager (that handles how windows are placed), the desktop manager (like task bar, application menu, maybe widges, logout buttons) and of course also one could change x.org to wayland and back without changing the other components. the login window could come from gnome project but after login one could use a complete different projects toolset.

    “can” does not mean that every distro makes that an easy task. also mixing things will likely end in a fuller disk for lots of “needed” components that are maybe mostly unused. (i think i once used gnome but installed kde only for their printing dialog *lol)

    when using the big distributions it is likely that no 3rd party downloads are needed to try other window managers or desktop environments, maybe search for such keywords in aptitude , apt search, or such. but new fancy stuff also often first comes from unknown 3rd party websites (or git*.com which is the same security risk as 3rd party websites) before it gets into main repositories after years (or maybe even never)

    Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. […] and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

    maybe “TwisterOS” tries to invent air movement by software? it might be a random unrelated incident and the fan is simply broken, it might also be that it enabled some fan control and the fan would start if you only heat up the system enough which might not happen with a lightweight distro and the maybe not cpu consuming programs you use (?). “stress” is a program that could artificially create such cpu consumption for testing (but with a broken fan it might be not a good idea to actively and unnecesarily heat up the cpu, but also cpus usually have failsafe shutdown mechanisms so they dont overheat but that might be like a sudden power down so maybe expect unsaved work to just vanish) another test could be to just give the fan another power source and see what happens, and put abother fan that works in place to see if that changes something



  • smb@lemmy.mltoMemes@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    the OS was not the comparison, but the hardware it runs on (just as @Freefall said) but also you seem to be wrong with your other assumption:

    And both those devices are tied to a specific OS.

    Which seems not to be the case as install instructions for another OS can be found here (i didn’t try it though) for the mentioned device:

    https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/pdx215/

    lineage os still is an “android”, but another vendor with clearly different approach than the original firmware and what hinders you from writing bsd drivers and compiling a bsd kernel for it instead? So i count the Xperia 1 III as NOT bound to any OS or OS vendor.

    But despite the way longer possible support/security, freedom of choice and endless other possibilities that often come along with free OS choice, this pure and great advantages weren’t even mentioned there, thus it wasnt an OS comparison as it also wasn’t a bound-to-an-OS vs. absentness of vendor-lock-in-limitation-jungle comparison.