I’ve been using Emacs for a few months after several years focused on a Vim workflow. They’re both great! I’ve gone with the vanilla versions of each initially - I figured that I might as well learn the basics before going down the configuration rabbit-hole. To get started with Emacs, I wrote down a list of commands and actions that I do in Vim and build a mirrored list with the Emacs equivalents. There are definitely workflow differences (modal vs nonmodal for starters), but building a baseline fluency with both programs has been a lot of fun.

Shell scripts usually expect something POSIX-compatible, but you don’t have to stick with the default for user-facing tasks. Fish, zsh, powershell, and a whole bunch of niche shells are available to try. Anyhow, in the broad context of Unix default installations bash has a lot of competition.

On several unix-like Oses more than one shell is used depending on context. A great interactive shell with loads of features may be overkill if you just want to execute a script. Some OSes don’t use bash at all.

FreeBSD uses tcsh as its default root shell, but it uses ash shell (sh, it started as a clone of Bourne shell) for users and as the interpreter for system commands. This combo confused me at first and led me down a shell research rabbit-hole. ash is a stripped down shell that aims to be small, fast, and largely POSIX-compliant.

In Ubuntu, bash is the default shell for interactive terminals, but dash is used to execute scripts by default. I think that dash started as a debian port of the ash shell.

MacOS and Kali both use zsh as the default shell. I don’t know what they use by default to run scripts, but I would guess that it isn’t bash.

Also, something that took me a while to figure out is that Bourne-Again Shell (bash) is not the same as Bourne Shell (sh). Further, sh does not always denote Bourne shell, but could be ash or dash or something else.

I’m pretty happy with the linux installation process these days. Unless you’re a distro-hopper it isn’t something that you have to deal with on a regular basis. Even before developers put in a lot of hours to make the process easier, it was something that I only had to get right once per device.

For active files, yes. I have three synced systems doing backups at different times of the day when they aren’t otherwise being used. In any reasonable scenario, I’d lose 8 hours of work at most. I don’t change my dotfiles enough to keep backups of those. Distinct from my backup of active files, I archive anything that I’ll keep long-term. That includes useful dotfiles, install lists for new systems, and a less granular set of old backups.

That 26mb Trisquel Mini minimum ram requirement has got to be a typo. Still, 256 mb (more likely) is still very impressive.

Kind of. I’ve been running Xbuntu for four years on a system with 1 gb ram total. Running XFCE, I’m using a little over 500mb of ram at idle. I could probably optimize that. If I switch to i3, I use around somewhere between 300 and 350mb of ram at idle.

Another option: Check out Ubuntu Core if you’re shooting for super-tiny and you are willing to use snaps instead of deb packages… It targets embedded systems, so it is designed to run on 250/500mb of ram depending on which version you pick. I’ve used it on a Pi before and their website indicates that it works on other architectures. It isn’t meant to offer a desktop experience.

If you’re reading DRM-free ebooks on an android device, Librera Reader is available on f-droid and it works well. I have been using it for several years and it has many more customization options than Kindle does. There are several ebook readers available for Linux. I use the one that comes with Calibre, but there are a few that are lighter on system resources. If you’re looking for an e-ink device with FOSS elements, you may want to keep an eye on the PineNote as it develops, as noted by other posts.

Calibre can easily shift the format of DRM-free ebooks. If you have an epub, it can make it a mobi or azw3 file. A fun option is to convert a copy of your ebooks into txt format. Then you can read your books in less or in your favorite text editor! Before you know it, you’ll be reading multiple books simultaneously in tmux over ssh!

I’ve been enjoying rolling releases for several years but I have a long and cordial relationship with point release distros.

For me it comes down to fresh software and personal taste. I like the ‘flow’ of updates that rolling releases have and prefer dealing with small recurring issues over twice-a-year big upgrades. That being typed, I keep an eye on update news to see what potential problems may arise and I’m comfortable dealing with minor breakages as they occur. I know more about troubleshooting than I did when I was younger, so a bit of instability doesn’t ruin my day. Anyhow, a little bit of research is worth my time if it benefits several machines at once.

I still have a few Debian-based machines that I’m keeping as-is due to how difficult initial install was on those particular machines. I don’t have time to re-learn how to change them over and I don’t want to risk getting stuck partway. While the occasional release upgrades are irritating the scope of the irritation is small. If I were starting over they probably would all be on rolling releases as well, but I don’t mind them.

Excellent. Any time you swap out an operating system, it is very useful to have a backup device in case you need to spend some time troubleshooting. Most of the frustration and stress is removed from the equation.

Apparently, yes. I’ve never tried doing that with a live usb, but give it a shot and let me know how it works out for you.

You probably have much better hardware than my old tablet. My tablet was marketed as a $99 dollar Windows tablet and I got what I paid for. 1gb ram soldered to the board, a weak 64-bit atom processor with 32-bit efi. One micro-usb port that doubled as the charging port. It took a powered usb hub, a custom-modified installer, and a lot of patience to get that thing up and running. It still works!

Fedora would be a good starting point since it has a straighforward version of GNOME as its default DE. It would be a wise to try out the fedora live disk for a while to verify that the touchscreen works well before installing anything. If Tails worked on this laptop then Fedora should as well, but it doesn’t hurt to check before doing anything permanent.

System memory and processor speed may be bottlenecks on a touchscreen laptop that old. My 2014 touchscreen tablet runs linux, but it can’t handle GNOME or anything remotely touchscreen-friendly. Onscreen keyboard+tiling wm=awkward user experience.

I don’t have any solid data to back up my ‘significant portion’ comment above, other than the fact that I see a lot of active users on lemmy.ml who seem content with the leftist vibe on the server. Not a very good basis for making such a broad statement. Whoops!

It’d be interesting to dig deeper into the issue through polling or something similar, but this type of self-sorting is probably hard to capture. People who read the description and choose not to join aren’t around to vote in a poll and neither are people who get scared away by what they see. For other ‘apps’, it’d be possible to catch some data from the second category of people by exit-polling people who choose to delete their accounts.

Your question was probably rhetorical, but I went ahead and did a search since I didn’t know the background. From the AMA that I found it looks like two people developed Lemmy from scratch and their only financing was obtained through donations. I don’t blame them if they wanted to call dibs on the most obvious server name and make ground rules for it that appealed to them.

Founder effect, to a limited extent. The people who developed Lemmy started lemmy.ml, a server (aka instance) specifically for “leftist privacy and FOSS enthusiasts”. This was the description that they chose for the server and a significant portion of the people who joined the server did so because of that description. Leftist is a political term.

By design, Lemmy can be pointed at different servers for different content. You can pull up https://join-lemmy.org/instances for some ‘approved’ servers. A given server could be right-leaning, centrist, or totally apolitical. It may be that you chose to join lemmy.ml because it seems to be the most active lemmy instance. It currently is, but it also happens to have a lot of users who are interested in politics.

Ultimately the answer to your question is “Because you linked up your app with a lemmy server that chooses to focus on politics.”

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Hopefully it will be useful for you! Everybody learns differently, but it was a good starting point for me when I was trying to figure out bash.

The Linux Command Line at https://linuxcommand.org/tlcl.php is a good resource. Well-written and structured in a fairly logical way. The primary focus is on doing things in bash on Linux but it also expands into related topics that aren’t strictly about bash, such as editing text files from the command line, using ssh to connect to remote computers, etc.

Tom Waits reference. Originally an obscure one from Bone Machine, then an obvious one from Mule Variations.

“Desktop Linux needs to be pre-installed on retail hardware to succeed in the mainstream. That’s it.”

Ding ding! It certainly worked for ChromeOS.

Installing an operating system is not a typical part of the computing experience. Buying something that has been pre-built it is the default for the vast majority of users outside of the Linux world.

I don’t personally know a lot of people who have tried installing Linux, but most of the people in that limited group made the mistake of trying to install directly on top of hardware that they hadn’t researched. I am not criticizing that mindset - I have been one of those people on more than one occasion.

Even on ‘successful’ installs, it isn’t uncommon for something to not work without additional steps. To be fair, the same often goes for vanilla Windows installs if you don’t have a bunch of device-specific driver packages ready. No big deal if it turns out to be a fingerprint reader or a webcam that needs a tweak, but a wifi or video card that doesn’t work by default is a huge problem for someone who hasn’t prepared for it.

Nowadays I try to do my research in advance and come to an install project fully prepared, but I’m glad that I don’t have to put an operating system on new, unfamiliar hardware on a regular basis.

This is actually a good first step for anybody who is trying out a new operating system. When I made the switch to MacOS for a few years, I had a checklist of tasks to learn before I pivoted away from Windows. There were ways to accomplish everything, but I had long since forgotten how long it took me to learn how to do things in Windows. For everything that was different, I had to fight muscle memory and a false expectation of simplicity. I had the same problem with BSD and Linux.

A lot of things seem simple because they build on things that we’ve already learned, but if you switch to a new operating system, some of the old building blocks are swapped out with something else. Experience is context-sensitive and simplicity isn’t always as simple as it seems.