IME, beyond the install, it’s all distro- and desktop-specific.

• How to find and install apps varies from distro to distro. IIRC, the Mint menu item is something obvious, like “Install software”, but on Arch (you’d have to hate your newbie to throw them into Arch), it requires a chicken/egg finding and installing a graphical installer. If you know the distro, this would be good information - or if you’re helping with the install, create a desktop launcher.
• Showing them where settings are. Surprising to me, this has been super-not-obvious to my newbs. Even though the KDE Settings app is called “settings”, I think Windows and Mac folks are used to looking for settings in a specific place, rather than an app name - and in Windows, there’s can be several ways to get up different settings, like changing display stuff is always in a weird place. Again, maybe a desktop or panel shortcut would help.
• One of my newbs used Mint for two years without opening a shell, so I don’t think that’s an issue. He even found and installed a piece of software he wanted, but I can’t remember if I originally showed him how to the first time. But that’s Mint. He did, however, need help setting up a printer, but that’s because he couldn’t find the settings program; he came from Windows originally.
• Edge cases, like printers and other peripherals, can be hard, and I don’t think any amount of extra documentation is going to help, because almost every difficulty is practically unique. There’s a ton of online help for stuff like that already. And then, if they want to, eg, attach a game controller… well, that’s very specific and again varies by controller. I don’t think you can cover all of these edge cases.
• Games can be hard only because of the indirection of having to install some other software, like Proton or Steam, creating an account, knowing how to check for compatability - there’s a lot of moving parts. It’s not just: go to the game’s web site, buy, download, and install something and run it, like I imagine it is on Windows. So maybe that would be useful - or - again - pre-installing one of the game stores and (surprise) making a shortcut would eliminate that.
• Network connections. Again, I always find figuring out how to get to network configuration in Windows to be hard, and bizarrely having multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, so I’d guess going the other direction would be confusing. Having a note about how to get to the configuration would be handy.

As I think about it, I realize that configuration under KDE of way more encapsulated and clear than on Windows, and people having learned the byzantine and myriad ways of Windows, KDE’s relative simplicity is confusing. Windows people look for configurations in places they’ve learned to look, which aren’t always where they are under KDE (I can’t speak much about Gnome - I don’t use it or set people up with it). MacOS isn’t as bad, having a similar configure-everything-through-a-single-settings-program approach.

Anyway, that’s my experience.

Huh. tar tf and unzip -l. I’m not sure I’d even bother to write a shell function to combine them, much less install software.

Zips just exploding to files is so common, if you just mkdir unzpd ; unzip -d unzpd file.zip it’s going to be right nearly all of the time. Same with tarballs always containing a directory; it’s just so common it’s barely worth checking.

You write the tools you need, don’t get me wrong. This seems like, at most, a 10-line bash function, and even that seems excessive.

function pear() {
case $1 in
  *.zip)
    unzip -l "$1"
    ;;
  *.tar.*)
    tar tf "$1"
    ;;
esac
}

It’s not pointless, but needlessly silly: as part of the alarm system, in addition to the standard siren, the home audio system turns on and plays Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” at full volume.

At 7pm on school nights, one of a number of versions of “Hushabye Mountain” is played, if music isn’t already playing.

Ooooh! Totally not useless, but I have a version of this.

I have a cheap, but powerful, amp for the home audio system, and discovered it burns out if left perpetually on (yeah, I’m on my third). So I got a wall switch that’s turned off after 10 minutes of no audio streaming to that snapclient.

All year? Please tell me “Halloween eyes” is just “scary eyes” and that you do this all year.

Interesting. Our sensors don’t see the cats. Unless I place once of the basement ones directly opposite the stairs; it can apparently see them if they’re a couple of feet away at sensor eye level.

But the one that sees people in the kitchen doesn’t see the cats on the counters when they get up there in the night.

I think if they saw the cats, I’d have to figure something else out, because our’s get everywhere.

My recommendation is to put all of the variables in an environment file, and use systemd’s EnvironmentFile (in [Service] to point to it.

One of my backup service files (I back up to disks and cloud) looks like this:

[Unit]
Description=Backup to MyUsbDrive
Requires=media-MyUsbDrive.mount
After=media-MyUsbDrive.mount

[Service]
EnvironmentFile=/etc/backup/environment
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/restic backup --tag=prefailure-2 --files-from ${FILES} --exclude-file ${EXCLUDES} --one-file-system

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.timer

FILES is a file containing files and directories to be backed up, and is defined in the environment file; so is EXCLUDES, but you could simply point restic at the directory you want to back up instead.

My environment file looks essentially like

RESTIC_REPOSITORY=/mnt/MyUsbDrive/backup
RESTIC_PASSWORD=blahblahblah
KEEP_DAILY=7
KEEP_MONTHLY=3
KEEP_YEARLY=2
EXCLUDES=/etc/backup/excludes
FILES=/etc/backup/files

If you’re having trouble, start by looking at how you’re passing in the password, and whether it’s quoted properly. It’s been a couple of years since I had this issue, but at one point I know I had spaces in a passphrase and had quoted the variable, and the quotes were getting passed in verbatim.

My VPS backups are more complex and get their passwords from a keystore, but for my desktop I keep it simple.

I hope this isn’t a step towards replacing the native app with an SPA.

This seriously got an out-loud chuckle from me. It’s funny, because it’s true! Thanks!

I’m not talking about your application at all; I was responding to @chrash0’s comment that JSON may not be great, but it’s better than YAML, and TOML is better than both, for configuration.

I was agreeing with them and adding more reasons why YAML stinks.

Nothing at all directly to do with your project, just having a convo with @chrash0.

Sourcehut also supports Mercurial, so you also have an option to the herd mentality.

Sourcehut also has zero, or almost zero, JavaScript in the interface, so it doesn’t suck

Sourcehut is also componentized, so you can mix and match the pieces you want or need:

• VCS hosting
• masking list management
• issue management
• build server
• man server

Sourcehut is by far the best hosted VCS option at the moment. The Mercurial support alone puts it miles ahead of the others, which are all hobbled by tight coupling to git.

Are China Parties like Tupperware Parties, where friends get together and one shills a pyramid scheme? That’s what CP is, right?

You also don’t get runtime errors with TOML when an invisible tab turns out to be invisible spaces.

It still uses Proof-of-Work, in which the coal being burned is only to prove that you burned the coal.

You just need to wait for the proof of work to complete

I will never find the irony in this anything other than pathetic.

The one legitimate grievance against Bitcoin and other POW cryptocurrencies - the wasteful burning of energy to do throw-away calculations simply to prove the work has been done… the environmental cost of distributed scale meaningless CPU cycle waste purely for the purpose of wasting CPU cycles, has been so eagerly grasped by people who are largely doing it to foil another energy wasteful infotech invention.

It really is astonishing.

I’m sure he’s very clever, but jesus fucking christ why can’t he get his shit together?

I’m mad, because I was really looking forward to bachefs, but now I’m going to hold off. btrfs is great, and they’ve got their process under control. Call me when bcachefs switches maintainers and can follow the Kernel merge process. These last minute pushes are sketchy.

E2E usually suffers from the same thing HTTP does: the MITM might not be able to read what you’re saying, but they know who you’re saying it to, and they may know in what context. This is a lot of information that can be used in profiling.

So you end up with systems like SimpleX, where everyone has a different UID for every contact, but that has its own problems, as anyone who’s used systems like that are aware. We haven’t really solved making that a good user experience for messaging; I don’t see it translating to broader social media any time soon.

Nostr has some really good specs and tooling that neatly addresses these topics, including great cryptography support, signing, ad-hoc IDs, and an entirely voluntary simple naming lookup; it doesn’t exactly solve zooko’s triangle, but it provides a toolset sufficient to mix and match characteristics for whatever your threat model is. Sadly, Nostr is utterly dominated by the crypto crowd (and is associated with some controversial personalities), and even if you’re not cryptocurrency-hostile, it’s a really dull echo chamber with little other content that has prevented people who might otherwise build interesting platforms in it from doing so.

Mastodon was around for ages before (the in practice centralized) Bluesky; why did it take Bluesky to open a mass exodus from X?

This is a hard problem to solve. Throwing E2E at it doesn’t make it easier; it’s just tossing a buzzword in.

What do you mean by “all right?” What are your concerns?

restic backups are encrypted by default; it should be safe to store them almost anywhere in the cloud. The container needs the credentials, but you can improve security with something like OpenBAO (Hashicorp Vauly fork, github.com/openbao/openbao), SOPS (gitgub.com/getsops/sops), infisical (github.com/Infisical/infisical), or any number of other secrets management tool.

Why don’t you like LDAP? OpenLDAP is a PITA (necessarily, I guess, to be considered “enterprise”), but lldap has been pretty nice to me. I mean, it’s the identity protocol, it’s just that the server software has been complex until relatively recently.

What would you use instead? A SQL DB with some custom schema, that just re-invents LDAP?

I like the motivation behind this, but have a allergy to running critical infrastructure like authentication on node.

To each their own, though, and good luck with the project. Diversity is life.