Interested to know if this is for international travel, or just within your country’s borders? I would be concerned with this going through airport security, whether in carry-on or checked luggage - x-rays can damage electronics, and the potentially suspicious appearance of electronics to the non-technical could cause problems.
TBH the only time I’ve ever got involved with autoscroll was when a user accidentally clicked the wheel, and got “stuck in a funny mode” and the mouse was no longer working. I’m not sure how many regular users know it even exists - there are a lot who still don’t even use the scroll-wheel at all.
In Linux, the scroll-wheel works as I expect it to anyway, so I’ve never wanted to change it.
It’s because X-Window, the original Unix (and thus Linux) desktop system, supported 3 button mice WAY before Windoze did. It used it for the clipboard paste operation; you highlight some text in one window, and it’s immediately put on the clipboard; then when you middle-click, it’s pasted into whichever window is under the mouse pointer. Most old hand Linux and Unix users like this behaviour.
It’s been optional, and configurable for a long time. It’s mainly controlled by the receiving window’s configuration, but you can set it globally to do just about anything supported by your version of X-Window, including to scrolling. It’s been like this since about the late 1990’s, but it’s just not the default behaviour, probably because for much of that time, most Linux users preferred the X-Window behaviour.
Can confirm. Do not recommend.
Everyone who uses O365 is pushed to use the web versions by the O365 ecosystem. When you click on Word/Excel/Outlook/whatever from your menu, it opens the web version; to use the locally installed app, you have to go to File/Open in Desktop or similar. The Open and Save dialogs default to using OneDrive - saving to local filesystem requires extra steps. The locally installed ones are becoming increasingly hard to use, by design, and the new features seem to be going into the web versions first and the local versions “eventually”. For example, the new excel “matrix” functions did not work in local excel the last time I tried to use them, though they might now, but there were a few features (special formatting I think) that only worked on the local version. Templates for word do not work on the web version.
Interestingly, the web 365 apps seem to work on Linux Mint, but I’ve not used them extensively, or on another distro. I did a migration from Win10 to LM last autumn, and I was genuinely shocked to find that web Outlook and OneDrive work on Firefox on LM. Confirmed that web Excel and Word worked enough to allow display and editing of documents - not an extensive test, but definitely worth a look. Obviously, there are still differences between the web and desktop versions, but it might even be possible to run them under Wine, but I have not tried that, and woudn’t expect it to go too well tbh.
Can confirm. I used Linux and Unix almost exclusively for about 20 years, and when I more recently had to use Windoze again for work, this is pretty much what happened.
Could be QOS or packet shaping going on at your ISP, or just throttling or congestion. Speed tests only really test for typical traffic patterns, so will give you a warped view: it certainly disagrees with your observed measurements. There are lots of factors that can affect how quickly traffic passes between two hosts on the internet, but domestic broadband is generally the worst of all worlds - you usually share bandwidth with other subscribers, and although the throughput can be quite good, the latency and error rate can be quite bad, and you can get fragmentation as frame sizes can differ between network segments, causing buffering especially when congestion is occurring. Your ISP might also have deprioritised your type of traffic, or they might be dropping packets, which causes retries, and thus slows your connection down.
Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990’s, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on “older” PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows…
Digital ads do not promote things I’m interested in buying. I do not see ads very often at all - I haven’t had a TV for 20+ years, I don’t go to cinemas, so I don’t even see those kinds of ads. Occasional ads on YT pop up, and I’ll skip them; if they are unskippable or too frequent, I’ll abandon the vid. I’m not on any commercial “social media”, so I don’t see ads on them either. I’ve just never liked social media - Lemmy and Mastodon are all I use these days.
Occasionally, very, very occasionally, I’ll see a meatspace ad that I pay attention to: there’s a local alternative music collective that wheatpaste ads around in a nearby town. I actually WANT to know about these events, and I will actually go to them, and I actually sought them out in the first place. I also see ads at my local community centre, for local events. Same kind of thing.
So how is this resistance futile?
Had to do some work with SuSE post Novell acquisition for a customer. IIRC the package manager is a bit odd, but I haven’t looked at it in what nearly 15 years, so I can’t really remember much about it. What I CAN remember involved running packet traces using Wireshark - it was mostly network problems, I think, so nothing to do with SuSE. It was certainly very popular in Europe, though I have no idea what they’re doing these days!
You never know … maybe THIS year!
The way windoze 11 is going - people really hating it - you never know, but I’m not holding my breath. Linux is still very niche, and people are wary of “strange” “new” things, especially FREE ones - where’s the catch? I’ve seen it surge and blossom over the years, but it’s still got a really tiny install base (as long as you don’t count Android and embedded tech, where the OS and kernel are largely irrelevant to the user). But I don’t see people moving over to Linux in droves any time soon, really: I’ve seen too much.
For context, I’ve been using it since [dredges up old memories] slackware was new, so about 1994, when a work colleague and I installed it (off about 20 floppies) onto an old 386sx PC with probably 4MB of RAM. Been using it ever since - and from Red Hat 4 onwards (about 1999) it’s been my only OS on my own computers. I’ve always preferred it, and I’ve seen it grow in so many ways - I’d still use it if it was illegal. I haven’t tried EVERY distro, but I have tried most. These days I mostly stick with Debian or Debian-based distro’s (I’m currently on Mint LMDE).
Don’t have any experience with this particular model, but I have found that with most printers on Mint you don’t have to “do” anything at all - if it’s on the network or plugged into the USB, the system will find it and install a driver automatically. I’ve used MANY printers with Linux over the years, and some were a right PITA to set up, but so far all the printers I’ve tried with mint have “just worked”. The only problem I’ve had recently was that when I updated to the Debian Trixie based LMDE 7, a bug in CUPS misconfigures EPSON ET2860 when automatically discovered, but it still works on stock Mint 22.3 without manual intervention. The fix is to manually add it, rather than accepting the auto discovered one, so it’s a problem with the discovery function, not drivers, and I suspect it’s due to some kind of quirk with this printer’s firmware that defines how it interacts to discovery queries on the local LAN.
Yeah it was wild, but I suspect few orgs do things that way any more.
You mean in the context of high availability?
tl;dr: It’s to test if the cluster fail-over configuration is working properly.
So this was before things like Kubernetes or Terraform were a thing, so had to be done by the operating system itself. The simplest HA cluster is made of two nodes, one in “active node”, the other “passive”. The active node does all the work, and the passive node just keeps its data synchronised with the active node. I used to use DRBD for this, which is a system for copying writes to the active node over a network link to the passive node. That only gives you a “second, up-to-date copy” which is not that useful on its own - you also need a way to automatically switch over to using the passive node if the active one “dies”, and for that I used to use “heartbeat”, which simply passes packets back and forth between the two cluster members - ping-pong style - and if the passive node notices that the active node hasn’t sent its scheduled packet for, say, 10 seconds, it cuts it off the current active node (kills it), and promotes itself to the active role, thus preserving the service. Killing the “other node” is necessary to stop data corruption or user requests going to a node that can’t actually service them, and is called STONITH - Shoot The Other Node In The Head. STONITH can involve an electronically controlled switch, which literally cuts off power to the “other” node, or can isolate it on the network, by shutting down its network ports on the switch, or in a VM setup, sending a notification to the hypervisor to kill the VM.
The reason you need to be able to kill the kernel on the active node, is that when you manually shut down the active node, it automatically informs the passive node that it’s going down, known as an “orderly fail-over”, and you’re not actually testing if the heartbeat fail-over works, you’re just testing an orderly fail-over. Killing the active node’s kernel tests that the passive node is properly configured to take over during a catastrophic failure of the active node. You can watch the heartbeat status go from “up” to “down”, and then see the passive node decide to take over, promote itself and bring up its services, and begin processing requests.
To make sure it’s all working, you need to test orderly fail-overs first, from both nodes, then test disorderly fail-overs both ways, by using the kernel gun on the active node.
Things moved on from Heartbeat-based HA clusters to multimode clusters managed by Corosync and other software, enabling other strategies to be employed. This was eventually supplanted by “orchestration” systems like Kubernetes, and proprietary Virtual Cloud systems that move this functionality to the platform rather than the operating system.
Nah man. “kill” doesn’t shut the system down quickly. This is the “instant death” way - the kernel reset gun - no shutdown scripts, no disk sync, just reset to BIOS boot sequence, instantly:
As root:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq
echo b > /proc/sysrq-trigger
If you change out the “b” in the second command for “o” it will just halt the kernel instead of rebooting. Still switched on, but the system is doing absolutely nothing.
I used to use this trick all the time to test high availability server clusters.
Sounds great, look forward to seeing that. After using it a bit more, another thing occurred to me - there’s no way to open arbitrary files. I don’t use MarkDown for “just notes” or “just one thing”, I keep markdown files all over the place. I had set the repository directory to be that of my blog posts during first run, but then I can’t open things in my notes directory or documents folder, and I can’t see anywhere in the settings dialogue to change it. Am I missing something?
Yeah “but not as annoying” lol. No idea what you mean about jeeps: I’m in the UK, and not a car enthusiast either.
Seems quite good - I’ve tried a LOT of MarkDown editors over the years, but until quite recently, I’d stuck with Zettlr for a long time. I’ve recently reinstalled my laptop, which made me look for alternatives to some software, and I’ve been playing round with MarkText for the last few days, which seems nice.
HelixNotes is definitely good - if I had to drop MarkText, I think I could get on well with it. I like that they have a debian repository, so I can keep it updated with the usual system update software. I downloaded the AppImage as a quick test, but it didn’t work because it was compiled against an old version of glibc.
The only thing I don’t like so far is the format toolbar is at the bottom of the editor screen, and I haven’t found a way to move it.
Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)
First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)
Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)
Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)
Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown
Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)
Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu
Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)
Over time, I’ve used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.