When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?

These both can be answered in depth at Debian’s releases page, but the short answer is:

Debian developers work in a repo called “unstable” or “sid,” and you can get those packages if you so desire. They will be the most up to date, but also the most likely to introduce breaking changes.

When the devs decide these packages are “stable enough,” (breaking changes are highly unlikely) they get moved into “testing” (the release candidate repo) where users can do QA for the community. Testing is the repo for the next version of debian.

When the release cycle hits the ~1.5 year mark, debian maintainers introduce a series of incremental “freezes,” whereby new versions of packages will slowly stop being accepted into the testing repo. You can see a table that explains each freeze milestone for Trixie (Debian 13) here.

After all the freezes have gone into effect, Debian migrates the current Testing version (currently Trixie, Debian 13) into the new Stable, and downgrades the current stable version to old-stable. Then the cycle begins again

As for upgrades to packages in the stable/old-stable repos: see the other comments here. The gist is that they will not accept any changes other than security patches and minor bug fixes, except for business critical software that cannot just be patched (e.g. firefox).

I keep finding tracks to love on each album, but Controlling Crowds has too many, so I just recommend the entire thing.

Also Axiom is killer too, but that might just be because I’m a sucker for narrative concept albums

Robert Glasper - Black Radio

Sungazer - Perihelion

Unexpect - Fables of the Sleepless Empire

Frank Zappa - Civilization Phase III

Will Wood - “In case I make it,”

The Algorithm - Brute Force

Devin Townsend - Empath

Miles Davis - Bltches Brew

Oneohtrix point Never - R + 7

Panopticon - Autumn Eternal

King Capisce - Memento Mori

Cynic - Kindly Bent to Free Us

Archive - Controlling Crowds The Complete Edition Parts I-IV

Intronaut - The Direction of Last Things

SHT GHST - 1: The Creation

Dan Deacon - America

Opeth - Ghost Reveries

Steve Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

those still require root, they just don’t explicitly say so. They still pop up with a password prompt

Jump ship. If you can make do without windows, do so. It takes away so much of the frustration, and you just learn to let it go when devs won’t make linux-compatible binaries: after all, it’s basically them telling you they need to be able to spy on you, so why use their app?

The point of security isn’t just protecting yourself from the threats you’re aware of. Maybe there’s a compromise in your distro’s password hashing, maybe your password sucks, maybe there’s a kernel compromise. Maybe the torrent client isn’t a direct route to root, but one step in a convoluted chain of attack. Maybe there are “zero days” that are only called such because the clear web hasn’t been made aware yet, but they’re floating around on the dark web already. Maybe your passwords get leaked by a flaw in Lemmy’s security.

You don’t know how much you don’t know, so you should be implementing as much good security practices as you can. It’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model of security: you layer enough so that the holes in one layer are blocked by a different layer.

Plus, keeping strong security measures in place for something that’s almost always internet connected is a good idea regardless of how cautious you think you’re being. It’s why modern web-browsers are basically their own VM inside your pc anymore, and it’s why torrent clients shouldn’t have access to anything besides the download/upload folders and whatever minimal set of network perms they need.

Beyond The Black Rainbow - A psychedelic loveletter to the 80s, about a dying cult and its first and last victims.

Anything by David Lynch, but particularly Mullholland Drive and Twin Peaks.

Mullholland Drive is a dream logic trip through Los Angeles as a small town actress finds work and love and heartbreak and murder in the big city while the world becomes increasingly incomprehensible and nightmarishly surreal; it also includes one of the best acted, directed, shot and scored scenes in all of horror.

Twin Peaks is the story of a small town deep in the forests of Washington, struggling to solve the murder of a high schooler, an FBI agent arrives and proceeds to explore esoteric and supernatural causes; part drama, part cosmic horror.

image editing

imagemagick for basic transformations/compression/conversions, CLI (locally hosted) AI for the shops

Funny you should say that, because…

https://vim-adventures.com/

Real wizards use ed

EBDB?

I know it’s not new, but I’ve been seeing a lot more “suggested” (read: sponsored) places along my routes these days. Either businesses are just now discovering the feature, or they lowered the barrier for entry. Either way, it’s annoying as fuck to have ads pop up that I have to avoid when moving the map around to navigate

When I think of exquisite sound design, two of my favorite movies spring to mind: Stalker (1979) and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The former has such a subtle soundtrack that it’s almost like it’s not there, but without it so much of the atmosphere of a movie that is heavily atmospheric would be lost.

The latter is just a perfect western with a perfect western soundtrack. The theme is well known, but L’estasi Dell’oro gives me chills every time it starts playing.

real. Geinoh Yamashirogumi elevated that movie beyond “weird mindfuck anime” to an immersive experience.

On the same note, Ghost in the Shell’s soundtrack is also a masterwork, though it doesn’t have a single stand out track like Kaneda’s Theme

Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment’s notice).

Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.

I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven’t tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.

I’ll just add to: don’t believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that’s way blown out of proportion. Arch isn’t breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn’t so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.

Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it’s unlikely to brick your pc, and you’ll just need to reconfigure some settings.

Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don’t look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds’ most powerful web browser.

Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war

I’ll have to give starship a try, seems like a cool way to handle customizing the prompt

as to the “omz is bloat and slows down your shell”:

1. How slow? Because I’ve never noticed. Are we talking about waiting for 15 seconds when I should only have to wait for 1, or are we talking theory and the difference between 0.5 vs 0.08 seconds in benchmarks?

Because I’ve never been inconvenienced by the speed of my shell nor terminal emulator, despite having tried all kinds of setups. Turns out that “blazing fast” gpu accelerated terminal really didn’t make much of a difference on human timescales. Now I’m at the point where I appreciate the features over the performance.

2. In reply to Brody’s point, I’m inclined to say “yes, and…?”

OMZ automates a lot. Sure, I could follow his way of manulaly sourcing dozens of individual shellscripts and making my own aliases and have a zshrc 1200 lines long… Or I could just let omz handle it.

Yes it’s mostly just a plugin manager, and…? Yes it automates a process I could do manually, and… ? Yes, it uses bindings that I didn’t personally write, and… ?

Fuck off with the clickbait “You’re living your life wrong, do this lifehack instead!!!” (and the lifehack is to reinvent the wheel) bullshit

Here’s a fun real lifehack: try things out for yourself, don’t just listen to and parrot other people’s opinions, don’t be afraid to go against the grain. Way more fun and fulfilling that way!

Ctrl + D (EOF character) also does that, so I’m just confused what the ‘A’ is doing

It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.

To the feature creep: that’s kind of the point. Why have a million little configs, when I could have one big one? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical. I get that there are use cases, but the average user doesn’t like having to tweak every component of the OS separately before getting to doom-scrolling.

And that feature creep and large-scale adoption inevitably has led to a wider attack surface with more targets, so ofc there will be more CVEs, which—by the way—is a terrible metric of relative security.

You know what has 0 CVEs? DVWA.

You know what has more CVEs and a higher level of privilege than systemd? The linux kernel.

And don’tme get started on how bughunters can abuse CVEs for a quick buck. Seriously: these people’s job is seeing how they can abuse systems to get unintended outcomes that benefit them, why would we expect CVEs to be special?

TL;DR: That point is akin to Trump’s argument that COVID testing was bad because it led to more active cases (implied: being discovered).

I’m gonna laugh if it’s something as simple as a botched fstab config.

In the past, it’s usually been the case that the more ignorant I am about the computer system, the stronger my opinions are.

When I first started trying out Linux, I was pissed at it and would regularly rant to anyone who would listen. All because my laptop wouldn’t properly sleep: it would turn off, then in a few minutes come back on; turns out the WiFi card had a power setting that was causing it to wake the computer up from sleep.

After a year of avoiding the laptop, a friend who was visiting from out of town and uses Arch btw took one look at it, diagnosed and fixed it in minutes. I felt like a jackass for blaming the linux world for intel’s non-free WiFi driver being shit. (in my defense, I had never needed to toggle this setting when the laptop was originally running Windows).

The worst part is that I’m a sysadmin, diagnosing and fixing computer problems should be my specialty. Instead I failed to put in the minimum amount of effort and just wrote the entire thing off as a lost cause. Easier then questioning my own infallibility, I suppose.