After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.

My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.

The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.

I love the old Mac Pros and even built a trashcan setup for Debian a few years ago. But TBH, they use a lot of electricity for the processing power they provide. If you already have one or can get one for free, great, use it. Linux runs great. But I wouldn’t go to OWC and buy something that would be outperformed by a fanless, low TDP machine these days.

Yes. At one employer, we had an entire domain in our AD forest that was Red Hat / CentOS / Ubuntu workstations for the developers.

I’m not sure there’s much of an ecosystem. It’s just three products and I don’t think the guy even looked at the budget tablet.

Usually you end up with products from the same manufacturer because there is a package deal or promotion sale. Which is the case now for their earbuds.

OpenBSD is clean and well thought out.

MS-DOS is simple.

At the bottom in the

Education, Professional Development, & Credentials

section

Something like: Open Source Computer Science Coursework Completed XX hours of coursework through ABCD, EFGH, HIJK Universities Relevant Coursework: Linear Algebra (Princeton); Machine Learning (Stanford); Cryptography (Stanford)

It would weigh less than my traditional degrees, but if pressed on it (unlikely), I would describe exactly what this is: an effort to liberate CS education in the spirit of the Free Software movement, using synchronous and asynchronous learning methodology in an online learning platform from accredited, reputable universities.

At this point in my career, it would show continued aptitude for growth and professional development, since it’s been close to two decades since my first degree.

Also, at this point, I’ve seen people put shit like Strayer U and ITT Tech and Liberty on their resume and get hired for very high paying jobs. Honestly I would take this over that trash.

Even 15 years ago, most lower level undergrad coursework was 150+ students in a lecture hall where the professor would pull up Blackboard and just load the slideshow. It was only at the 300+ level where class size shrunk down and interpersonal relationships sort of mattered.

My wife’s graduate degree a few years later but still over a decade ago was almost entirely online; they only met in person to discuss their progress towards the capstone. And she has a nice prestigious degree with a very expensive university name on it, walked across the stage at that University, and nowhere does that diploma read, “Online.”

I have a lot of beef with the US university system. Change has to start somewhere.

How did I miss this five years ago? What an excellent idea. I think we should be able to just finish the coursework and then put it on our resume.

I love this idea so much. I’m established in my industry but I think I’ll start working on it and just add to my resume. Thanks for sharing.

OnePlus is like, the only mainstream phone manufacturer worth it anymore. Half the price of other flagships, high frequency pwm dimming to reduce eyestrain, and still great camera. People say OxygenOS is bloated but that’s because stock Android is so stripped down and has had so many features removed over the years. But OxygenOS kept things that make sense, like a usable swipe down menu, floating windows, per application refresh rate, etc. and still has the IR blaster. And no AI gimmicks.

I really don’t see anything competitive with the OnePlus 12 or 12R in the US market at that price. The high frequency pwm is the biggest selling point for me though. I literally can’t use a Pixel because of the low pwm.

Yeah, OP12 and OP12R both have high frequency pwm. So does the Fairphone 5, apparently.

240Hz pwm dimming means lots of flicker and eyestrain at lower brightness levels.

I guess I’ll just hold on to my current phone a little longer and see what the OnePlus 13 brings.

Depending on the country, if they don’t give special preference to speedtest.net, they might just block it.

10.4 down / 3.13 up

I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t played Minecraft.

We have a family Minetest server runnning Asuna since Summer 2023. Usually based around just crafting different things. Even for a few months we just put on creative mode and built two huge cities about 8,000 blocks apart and sky train connecting them, and then a third underground cave city about 2,000 blocks away.

We’ve had major upgrades of both Asuna and Minetest within the past few weeks so it’s pretty exciting.

Surprising that ThinkPads are only going to captive screws when Elitebooks had them 15 years ago.

Every Linux user should try Slackware at some point.

If they are competent with computers, they can probably figure out Ubuntu and maintain it theirself.

I left Ubuntu for systems I manage because I’m not smart enough or willing to invest time learning snaps, and snaps kept breaking Firefox updates and generally made Firefox unusable. Since I’ve been around a while, I found it was just easier to migrate my fleet to Debian and set it to look like Ubuntu with the dock on the left. This has been fine since 2022.

If it’s something you would be partially managing, and they didn’t like Mint, have them try Pop!_OS.

If it’s a super simple, low maintenance desktop, just go Fedora Silverblue and it will stay solid and up to date until the hardware dies.

NFS and Minetest (Asuna) server.

Libre hardware:

• Turris Omnia router with their OpenWrt-based distro. Bought in 2017, upgraded to Wifi-6 in 2022. Great product.
• 3x system76 laptops with Coreboot and Debían
• The desktop is a system76 darter pro with a broken hinge, so it’s connected to a widescreen monitor and external mouse, keyboard. Also Debían.

The non FOSS systems are:

• HP Dev One running proprietary UEFI, and Pop!_OS
• a couple of Pixel phones running stock OS
• an iPad Pro with keyboard from 2018
• X201 Thinkpad with AFFS upgrade running Debían. Connected to some AudioEngine speakers and Spotify, this is our media player.
• a Thinkpad T43p with XP for Age of Empires and Freecell
• an Apple TV.

Nice looking phone, within my budget.

No word on the pwm rate though. I know the 12 and 12R had high frequency pwm dimming; hopefully NotebookCheck does a review of this phone.

Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old … Skylake seems recent to me and that’s the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.

I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because that’s how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. It’s only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their “trusted computing” bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.