Anything with the KDE desktop!

That’s a neat thing about Linux, the look and feel is actually totally separate from the distro. Everyone focuses on distros when really, that’s mostly under-the-hood stuff, the look and feel is the desktop environment.

KDE is windows-10-like (out of the box, you can also rearrange the crap out of it, ours is set up more like Mac!) and also happens to be one of the most full-featured desktop environments, so you won’t be missing stuff (like HDR support or whatever).

So, a distro with KDE.

Debian is great if you want something that Does Not Break on you. Ever. It will never throw you a curveball with an update. That also means you just won’t really get updates very much, outside of a Big Major Upgrade every couple of years. If you’re tired of Windows Update screwing with you, Debian’s perfect.

Fedora is pretty good if you want the new shinies all the time. Major updates every 6 months. Debian has a bigger appstore and even stuff that isn’t in there often provides .deb packages, which Fedora can’t run, but it’s not a huge deal.

Mint doesn’t have a convenient KDE version (but you can install KDE after the fact). It has its own desktop called Cinnamon. More Windows 7 vibes. It’s based on Debian so you get the Debian compatibility, as well, and they put work into making sure you have GUI apps for stuff like installing drivers (Debian you might need a terminal command or three during initial setup).

There’s also immutable distros like Bazzite, which is basically SteamOS But Desktop. It also comes with similar restrictions to SteamOS, though. Good for an Appliance Computer, an absolute fucking pain if you ever need to install drivers/VR stuff/other system software or what-have-you. I’d avoid for your main computer.

– Frost

I’m a furry and even I don’t get most furries, haha!

Like, I’m here to be an animal. I heard “people who like to be animals” and went “whoa, sign me up!” and it turns out a lot of furries DON’T like to be animals, they just… pretend to be animals but “oh that’s a character not really me” and they still consider themselves human…?.. also they’re only half-human-half-animals, not actual animal shape either?.. I don’t get it

turns out most of the actual “I’m just an animal” animals are the therians instead (once I found them I decided I’d be both). I’m still a non-character, non-anthropomorphic (the furry jargon for normal animal shape is “feral”) furry though, and the anthro furries can just deal. :3

– Frost

That makes sense!

Whatever it is, it must flow.

We were homeschooled.

Not the “religious nut” kind of homeschooling though. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!

Personally I’m glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you’d expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of “you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you’re actually being taught stuff”, which probably helps. But like, I don’t think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I’m pretty sure they actually cared, too.)

The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I’ll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we’ve heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.

– Frost

SELinux is also just a pain in the tail. We’re on Debian which has got AppArmor instead and while it has caused problems, it’s caused problems a heck of a lot less often than SELinux did when we tried Fedora.

– Frost

That’s a thing?? Whoa. The wooden ones SUCK, plastic is alright but plastic… how are the potato ones to clean? One of the nice things about the plastic ones is you can clean them and keep them around in your bag for next time you need a spoon.

a) you’re using “animal” like an insult. That’s not cool.

and b) calling shitty people “not people” isn’t cool either.

and c) just to reiterate, by contrast, animals (human or not) are people, and calling them “subhuman” is just… dude.

– Frost

Yeah, Pipewire is pretty great IMO.

People love to go “you hate on Systemd/Wayland? you just HATE PROGRESS!!”, but like, no, new stuff itself isn’t the problem and this proves that. Pipewire doesn’t seem to be all that controversial, I don’t really see anyone hating on it, or people going “YOU HAVE TO ACCEPT IT!!!”.

– Frost

The moment you get a TLS cert, it’ll show up in Certificate Transparency logs and apparently the attack bots scan that for targets.

Oof, yikes. 🧡 Maybe switching instance to a more chill place would help?

If people are jumping on you like that, that should a thing your mods can deal with. I don’t know if lemmy.world has the kind of mod team that would go out of their way to protect you from this kinda shit (since they’re a big generalist instance), but if not, you’re likely to get better moderation on a smaller server. Like how we’re on pawb.social and it’s probably pretty good here. Just like, having a place with admins who care. But it might be worth bringing the stuff up to the lemmy.world mod team, because if they can handle it it’s easier than packing up and moving.

(We’re not teen here, but are also Super Online. And also various forms of queer and otherwise marginalized so yeah, I get it.)

– Frost

The server you’re on!

Like how you’re on infosec.pub, the OP is on break3.social, the community (subreddit equivalent) is on lemmy.world, and I’m on pawb.social. :3

– Frost

You can totally do that yeah!

We have our stuff set up so inbound VPS traffic (for HTTPS) comes in on port 4430, while LAN traffic is on 443. It’s not done for firewall reasons, it’s so we can pass the client’s IP through with Nginx’s proxy_protocol feature, but you could just make your local-only services not listen on 4430. Boom, done.

Fail2Ban on the VPS is probably good. On the home server, it might just lock out the VPS (since everything comes from there).

Anyway yeah, I’ve got a whole guide on this sort of setup! https://frost.brightfur.net/blog/selfhosting-with-a-bounce-vps-part-1/

– Frost

Hah, the title (being just “Plastic is…”) makes it sound like it applies to plastic in general! I wish.

Well, actually I don’t wish. It sure would be inconvenient for all the electronics and stuff that are made out of plastic.

– Frost

Ah yes, “medical condition”. As if being trans is like having a cold or a busted knee or whatever.

It, uh.

That’s not how it works.

Fedi, tracking accounts? What do you mean by “tracking”?

Semi-permanent, yeah, I’ll give you that one. That said, if you delete something, generally it’s actually deleted. Any servers which turn out to be ignoring delete requests tend to get cut off from everyone else pretty quickly. I guess there’s always the possibility your “hey this post was deleted” notification might not bubble through to a given server, but it should work.

We have a spindle of CD-Rs. I wish it was DVDs! We’d have a use for DVDs! It’s WAY easier to just burn a Linux ISO than it is to faff about with a USB stick. Less convoluted to boot from, too (hybrid ISOs are a bit cursed; it doesn’t matter if you’re doing the usual pure “overwrite the entire stick” thing, but it’s not great if you’re also using the drive for other stuff – that’s not an issue with DVD[-+]Rs, they come in packs and each individual disc is cheap enough it’s one disc per thing).

Wee do have a couple OpenBSD install CDs. We don’t use them enough to be super useful. But a Debian install DVD? I’d use that.

– Frost

It’ll definitely be more expensive than a console, since they sell the consoles at a loss expecting to make it back on the games. (But not that much more.)

… Especially in this fucking economy when it seems they’re deliberately trying to destroy the concept of having a functional computer that you own and can run arbitrary stuff on.

Which, is why it’s more important than ever to have a PC.

It, uh, was at least definitely possible to do a <$1000 computer back in 2020-25. Ours is under $1000 (I think we started at $400 for a no-GPU build in 2020ish, then got a used RX 580 ($150) once the GPU craze died down and a slightly better CPU ($100), and have an RX 6600 now). Though now with the exploding RAM prices…

– Frost

The fact that I’m stuck in a human body. I’m a wolf, dammit.

– Frost

Look, between the “let’s not do anything at all” party and the “wants us, specifically, dead” party, I’ll take the “let’s not do anything at all” party.

You don’t have to 100% like everything a given party is doing to recognize that they’re the least bad option. Sure, they aren’t really actively good, but a vote for them is a vote against the people who want to kill us. (And voting third party is just tossing your vote in the garbage, unfortunately.)

– Frost