I have three ideas: First, you could switch the desktop environment to one of the ones that has a GUI settings tool to set passwordless automatic sign in. I think Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, and Mate Desktop on Linux Mint have that feature. There are probably others.

Second, you could switch your display manager to “nodm”. The display manager is the thing that runs the X server or Wayland, and it starts the greeter (the greeter is the program that shows the login screen). nodm is a special display manager that doesn’t use a greeter or ask for a password. It immediately starts the session using the username and desktop environment specified in its configuration file.

I use nodm for my HTPC and it works very well. The only downside is that you have to edit its configuration file, /etc/default/nodm , using a text editor. I’m not aware of any GUI configuration tool for it. However, it’s pretty easy to configure.

Third, you could abandon all display managers, and start the session manually, either from a shell script, or over SSH. This is a little more complex. You will probably want to get comfortable with SSH before trying this (SSH is the command-line analog of remote desktop).

If you want to get a fair price at Dominos, you have to play their game. At least look through the website for special offers on pizza, because the “menu prices” are 2.5x higher than the average price a person pays. After that, if you still want a lower price, search the Internet for coupons (although that doesn’t work as well nowadays since they use account-locked rewards systems instead of coupons).

Even if you play the game, it will still be more expensive than you remember, due to massive inflation.

I don’t go to Dominos any more due to repeated bad customer service, their website malfunctioning in a lot of ways, and the last time I visited the store it smelled strongly like ammonia.

The existence of one or more gods can’t be conclusively proven or disproven. So it makes sense to me that some people believe in it and others don’t.

I fucking guarantee that Linus Torvalds DOES believe in cryptography. Stop calling cryptocurrency “crypto”, because “crypto” is short for cryptography, not cryptocurrency.

Why is the antivirus software detecting my Cortex-M3 binaries as dangerous to an amd64 computer? Happens on Windows 7 through Windows 10, across 3 different employers.

And how do I submit my builds to Virus Total if they’re getting deleted as soon as they come out of the linker?

I agree with this sentiment. Steam notably falls into the third category, while otherwise being pretty good.

But I’m quite disgusted now seeing an image of a Yubikey for the first time. I’ve heard so many good things about them that it’s a major disappointment to see now that they use that awful noncomplaint shape of USB plug.

There are two very important reasons for the metal shield around USB plugs: 1. For ESD protection, and 2. to hold the receptacle’s tongue in place and prevent it from bending away and losing contact. Every USB device I’ve owned that was a flat plug (like this Yubikey image in this post) has within a month deformed the USB receptacle it’s plugged into to the point that the device no longer works in that port. Compliant USB devices still work in that port’s deformed receptacle, because they have a correct metal shield that bends the tongue back into the correct position.

Haha. I sent them an opt-out notice by email, and it bounced!

They are using Google email servers for discord .com and Google has apparently shadowbanned me. It gives an error message saying “The account [my email address] is disabled.” but I have never created a Google or Gmail account, and my email address is on a domain not associated with Google at all.

So I’ve completed my obligation to opt-out. Discord will have no record of it, but I have the email server logs to prove I sent it.

If, in the future, anyone needs to sue Discord and forgot to opt-out, feel free to use this same excuse.

Microsoft has enforced mandatory digital signatures for drivers, and getting a digital signing key from Microsoft costs a ton of money. So, presumably they do care.

In contrast, consider nProtect GameGuard, the anti-cheat system in Helldivers 2. It is a rootkit, and runs in the kernel. Why does Microsoft permit this? Shouldn’t this be blocked? It must be using either an exploit like the article, or a properly signed driver. Either way, Microsoft could fix it – by patching the exploit, or revoking the signing key.

The fact that Microsoft hasn’t done anything about malicious anticheat rootkits is a sign that they really don’t care. They just want their payment.

The good news is: the error shown there was a PCIe bus error, which means the error is somewhere between the NVME controller and your processor’s PCIe interface. Also good news: the errors you experienced were fully corrected, so you probably lost no data.

So the flash memory in the drive isn’t failing. That’s good because if the flash memory starts failing, it’s probably only going to fail more. In this case, your errors may be correctable: by replacing the motherboard, by replacing the processor, by reseating the NVME drive in its slot, by verifying that your power supply is reliable…

However, if your NVME controller actually does fail, it will be little consolation to tell you that your data is all still there on the flash chips, but with no way to get it. So now might be a good time to make a backup. Any time is a good time to make a backup, but now is an especially good time.

If you keep getting these errors at the same rate, then you probably don’t need to do anything, since the errors are being corrected. If you’re worried, you could use BTRFS and enable checksumming of data.

Using a VPN (like Tailscale or Netbird) will make setup very easy, but probably a bit slower, because they probably connect through the VPN service’s infrastructure.

My recommended approach would be to use a directly connected VPN, like OpenVPN, that just has two nodes on it – your VPS, and your home server. This will bypass the potentially slow infrastructure of a commercial VPN service. Then, use iptables rules to have the VPS forward the relevant connections (TCP port 80/443 for the web apps, TCP/UDP port 25565 for Minecraft, etc.) to the home server’s OpenVPN IP address.

My second recommended approach would be to use a program like openbsd-inetd on your VPS to forward all relevant connections to your real IP address. Then, open those ports on your home connection, but only for the VPS’s IP address. If some random person tries to portscan you, they will see closed ports.

You know that stuff that appears on the screen before the operating system? That is the computer’s firmware. Sometimes it shows a brief memory check, sometimes it has a silly error message like “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue.” Sometimes it’s just a big image of the motherboard’s manufacturer’s logo. That firmware exists independently of the operating system, and will run even if you don’t have any operating system installed.

Most people refer to the firmware as the “BIOS”, but technically, BIOS refers to an API between the firmware and the operating system. About a decade ago, some people decided that “BIOS” was going to be replaced by “UEFI”, and operating systems would start having a new way to boot. What ended up happening is: the firmware on all recent computers supports both UEFI and BIOS interfaces (and everyone still calls it “BIOS”). Recent Windows versions seem to only boot in UEFI mode, but most Linux distros can boot in either UEFI or BIOS mode. The GRUB bootloader can also start itself up in either UEFI or BIOS mode.

USB live operating systems are limited in size and may have less functionality than other operating systems, so maybe they are only able to boot in one method or another. Try looking around in the firmware (or “BIOS” if you prefer) to see if you can change the boot method to allow both UEFI and BIOS operating systems.

It may help if you can take a picture of some of the firmware’s boot configuration menus.

How would me joining a union help with the Amazon problem? My pay and benefits (and my coworkers’ pay and benefits, to the extent of my knowledge) are very good, so we don’t currently need a union. My job is completely unrelated to Amazon, and my employer isn’t a customer of Amazon or its competitors.

I’m not going to stop complaining about Amazon.

Nobody’s saying to host it on-premises. The SaaSS article is advocating running software that you control on servers that you control. That’s it. The server is likely in a datacenter, and its hardware could be owned by the datacenter, the customer, or someone else. It could be a virtualized host.

The SaaSS article is about software and services, not hardware.

According to the repo, it builds fine on Linux. They just don’t distribute a binary for it.

https://github.com/intel/openvino-plugins-ai-audacity/issues/27

So are you able to view content, but pay to download? If that’s the case, I could probably write a scraper for the site.

If you have to pay to even see the content, then you may have a bigger problem. Try pooling resources with some of your fellow students, to have one person download all the content, and then make it available to everyone else.

Another option is to expose your instructors. There’s a high probability that they are getting kickbacks, especially if this is at college level. Maybe in the form of 10% of each dollar spent by one of their students. Or, they might be getting free equipment or content from Docsity, in exchange for forcing students to use it, and offloading the costs to students.

When I was in college, one of my instructors used these “clickers” that cost students $40 per semester to rent. They used radio to allow submitting realtime quiz answers during class. Students were scored on how many questions they answered, not whether they were correct. If you didn’t pay the clicker fee, you lost that 10% of your final grade.

I was suspicious, so I looked into it. It wasn’t hard. The clicker manufacturer advertised kickbacks on their own website.

Cloudflare seems to incorrectly classify my Internet connection, which is a residential Internet connection going to my house, as a datacenter connection or VPN or something.

Many websites that use Cloudflare give me endless captcha forms. As soon as I solve one, it demands another, and never lets me access the website.

Sometimes I solve one captcha, and then it says I’m blocked forever for sending automated queries, even though I filled it out correctly. The error message is: “You are blocked.”

Sometimes it lets me in after one captcha, but I still resent having to enable Javascript for these assholes just to access a site that doesn’t otherwise require Javascript.

Sometimes Cloudflare adds extra security to certain pages, just for me. The developers of the website didn’t program it to handle this extra security, so the site fails for just me, and the site developers don’t believe me, telling me I have a browser problem (in three different browsers, which I can fix by using a proxy). For example, when the site’s javascript has my browser to do a CORS operation, the first step is the browser sending an OPTIONS request. However, the extra security of the proxy introduced by Cloudflare responds slightly differently from the actual website, so the site breaks.

Cloudflare uses a holistic approach to deciding whether you are a legitimate user or a bot. In other words, they use every single possible piece of data they can get on you, including tracking your visits across other Cloudflare sites. They do discriminate against certain user-agent strings.

Cloudflare completely blocks many Tor users, even from having read-only access to a site.

When you ask Cloudflare why your IP address is blocked, they falsely claim that it’s a setting created by the website admins. I strongly suspect that this setting is something like “use Cloudflare™ Adaptive Security™” and probably doesn’t explain to the site admin that they’re blocking large quantities of innocent users.

Cloudflare has previously used Google Recaptcha, which has a ton of problems (tracking, accessibility, training AIs that will make my life worse).

In many cases, they will cherrypick security fixes and other major bugfixes from the bleeding edge version, and put those fixes in the old versions of the software.

This is the same thing the PHP folks would do while the old PHP is supported. Once the old PHP is out of support but Ubuntu LTS is still in support, then the Ubuntu folks have to put in the extra work to do the cherrypicking.

You are correct that the Desktop Environment and Package Manager are the most important part of any distro. Of those, the Desktop Environment is the most important. Switching between Ubuntu with KDE Plasma and Arch with KDE Plasma is less visible of a change than switching from KDE Plasma to Gnome in any distro.

Most distros include all the major Desktop Environments: Mate, Gnome, KDE Plasma, and probably several more.

The biggest missing feature between Mint/Ubuntu/Debian is Container-based package management. This is an additional installation method, for “application”-like programs, usually proprietary. Debian has the infrastructure to run these, but you have to find or make the containers yourself. Mint has more support, in the form of a graphical package manager installed by default.

There’s really not much difference in the feature set of distros. Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint have a lot more in common than they have differences.

Desktop environments usually include a full set of these. I just use whichever comes with it.

Linux usually has the drivers already set up right away on first boot. You shouldn’t need to install any drivers. There’s very little bloat. Any superfluous packages are likely consuming no CPU time, just drive space. Every default installation comes with a media player and file archiver, but you can install VLC or RAR if you like them better.

They probably had a bad experience with one or more qt-based programs, or got a negative response when they filed a bug report to a qt program or library. Or, they were using some weird mix of old and new software, and ended up in a weird dependency loop that blocked a large set of packages on their system.

Probably. The most common distros will have the most community support.

Spend most of your effort choosing a Desktop Environment. Fortunately, this can be changed after installation.

Still no Linux support. Lazy fucks are just using Steam Play to get Steam Deck verified.