pmk

I like Ken Thompson. He wanted to play a game on a computer that didn’t have an OS that supported it so he wrote Unix.

If I remember correctly, they used KenC to bootstrap the Go compiler.

Just out of curiosity, how legal is this? Do you need to hide in complicated ways?

Iirc LMDE uses a btrfs naming scheme that is incompatible with Timeshift for example, and it removes some standard Mint features. The last time I tried LMDE is was basically Debian with cinnamon (and green theme), but what is the Mint experience?

On the other hand, being purist about openness is why GNU exists in the first place.

What’s the difference between LMDE and running Cinnamon on Debian?

Can you show me this documentation? Debian famously takes great care to ensure a good upgrade path with thorough instructions, like here https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgrading.en.html but a typical desktop user would just edit apt repos and dist-upgrade.

No, you may be thinking about combining repos from different releases aka frankendebian? That isn’t supported. Upgrades are definitely supported.

That’s actually what I’ve seen a lot! After a few years of tinkering with your system, the idea of something stable and polished is very appealing, so you can focus on getting things done.

“Zealot” is relative to where you currently are. Mint -> Debian -> Arch -> FreeBSD -> OpenBSD -> Plan 9 -> TempleOS

It’s magic

Polishing dotfiles is a valid hobby, and can be fun now and then, but when I need to do actual work I reach for my debian laptop.

Nethack runs fine on my Debian computer.

Honestly, OpenBSD often works better out of the box on laptops and workstations.

This has been my experience with self-hosting too. There are so many different areas of concepts that need to form a cohesive whole. Following a how-to and pasting some commands can lead to something running, but then there are worlds of knowledge to actually understand it. Especially when complexity seems to increase exponentially.
Funny thing is that for every low-level concept I actually learn, the more I appreciate my OpenBSD computer that I mostly play around with otherwise.

My general advice at this point is, if you haven’t already, to document the setup for your future self. It quickly gets out of hand with the amount of passwords, credentials, certificates, firewall settings, docker containers left and right, configs, workarounds, custom shell scripts, ansible scripts, git repos, backup locations and passwords, etc. Right now everything is fresh in your mind, but 6 months from now you may need to restore from a backup or an OS upgrade goes wrong, and then you’ll appreciate being able to remember the details.

I wish Linux distro devs would interview you about your experience. If the goal is wider adoption, we need to understand how to make it friendly for real. Your opinions are very valuable.