Maoo [none/use name]

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2023

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  • I recommend installing a Linux distribution that requires a hands-in approach like Gentoo or Linux from scratch. If you don’t have an extra computer you can do it on a virtual machine on the computer you do have.

    The process will require you to use the various incantations and rituals of using the terminal. As you do so, learn what they do by googling them or using their man page.

    For more practice, write a shell script or otherwise choose a task you want to do using the terminal like browsing through your files or searching for a file whose name matches a pattern and so on.






  • Gentoo is good for learning. It’s not really a privacy or security-focused distribution per se. It promotes you being comfortable with the command line, configuration files, networking, unix-ie things, and of course compiling programs. If you’re tired of the compiling there is basically no downside to switching to Arch as a “one step up” distribution.







  • Different distros are better for different things. For example, some require give you more control over the OS but are more difficult to learn, or require learning more things at once. Others will be easier to try out but may make choices on your behalf that you don’t like - or distribute software in ways you don’t like.

    Linux from Scratch will have a fairly steep learning curve. Nothing wrong with that, but you’d want to prepare yourself to be cool with things breaking or not making sense for a while.

    Puppy Linux is minimalist, which is something people usually only want after they’ve tried out something else that’s not minimalist. I would recommend trying out something more general-purpose and try out different desktop environments and applications first.








  • You can burn em with your burner of course. I haven’t burned discs in so long that I can’t remember what software I used to use, but there should still be open source, free software that can do exactly that.

    If long-term, secure storage is your goal I’d go with redundant, error-correcting digital storage with off-site encrypted backups (don’t forget the password!). A proper system like that will survive a tornado (because it’s backed up off-site). A home-built RAIDZ2 NAS with one of many off-site backups will work very well. If you don’t want to figure out how to build that system, you can also just buy a NAS with a similar level of functionality (I do still recommend RAIDZ2 with at least 6 disks, though).

    Blu-rays will eventually degrade, either from scratches or a slow phenomenon where they get little holes in the foil. Even if you keep making copies, you’ll run into this problem. Of course, data corruption can also occur for files on a computer, but that’s why you use a strategy that keeps ~3 copies of each file around (basically what RAIDZ2 accomplishes) so that errors can be auto-corrected.

    There are other benefits to a NAS as well. You can store your own backups of your other devices there as well and have them backed up off-site. You also have the option to share your blu-ray rips over your home network, basically running your own local streaming service.

    If you want to share the love, so to speak, the bandwidth of a USB hard drive is actually pretty great.