Quazatron

No. You can layer ext4 with LVM and LUKS to get a lot of features (but not all) that you get with BTRFS or ZFS. FAT is not suitable for anything other than legacy stuff.

That has been a pain point for a long time, along with signing and verifying digital signatures in PDF documents in Linux.

Adobe is up there along with Nvidia on my top of shitty companies that actually hinder Linux adoption by ignoring it.

I can hear this picture.

It will. Keep in mind that, depending on the type of job, you’ll have to keep learning new tech just to keep up: virtualization, containers, orchestrators, automation, backups, logging, auditing, scripting and God knows what else. It’s a good starting point to get you the jobs that the Windows crowd won’t touch because of the command line.

I have something like that running Haiku. Try it, you’ll be surprised.

Yes.

For me it would be harder to gather the same know-how on closed systems, because you need your company to back your training on the tools you need to do a job, spend money on the licenses, jump tool when the vendors decide to discontinue a product, etc. Where I come from, if you work for a small company you’d be expected to learn as you go. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know.

In my opinion Linux (well, FOSS actually) gave me a great big box of small Lego^TM bricks and the freedom to build anything out of it. So I’ve worked with HW clusters, then virtualization was all the rage when CPUs gained more power, then containers, then container orchestration, then cloud… Complexity is increasing, but the knowledge I gained from knowing that in the end it is just a bunch of processes running on a Linux kernel makes learning the next big thing more manageable.

Greybeard here.

I worked for a company with a wild mix of DOS, Win 3.1, and Win 3.11. Then we got new PCs, some ethernet hubs and switches (instead of the damn coax cable with terminators) and started to move to Win95.

Win 95 was a beast. It came in a bunch of floppies. It took ages to install, and you’d find after one hour that the last floppy was corrupt. Also, on our cheap hardware (Siemens-Nixdorf Pentium PCs) sometimes the sound card or the ethernet card would go missing. Nothing short of a reinstall would solve it. Temporarily, of course.

The Win 98 came along. All our problems were solved. It was a 32 floppy install job, if memory serves. No, no CDs on our company. Still, it crashed a lot, and Microsoft Office had a tendency to simply destroy 100+ page documents when it was not crashing.

At home I used Windows, because how else am I going to play games, right? But I kept experimenting with Linux, and liked what I saw. There were many pieces missing (no USB for a very loooong time, for instance), but what was there was rock solid compared to Windows. And you could COMPILE YOUR OWN DAMN KERNEL, fer chrissake! How powerful was that?

Eventually, distros started to emerge that made some pain points go away. I remember Corel Linux, Caldera Linux, Mandrake, RedHat, etc. I settled with Debian because ‘apt-get dis-upgrade’, of course. Then Ubuntu came along and made Linux more pretty and usable for simple folk. They even sent you a free CD by mail if you asked them.

I got ever more tired of Windows nuking my boot sector, the viruses (virii?), the hunting around for drivers, the having to throw away good peripherals because windows thought were too old to support.

I made a choice and dropped Windows. I missed a lot of the gaming scene until Wine and Steam caught up with the state of the art. In the mean time I made use of emulators and had a good time playing console and arcade games.

Oh I was teased about it. Fellow IT workers (proper MSCE type people) would give me a hard time because “Linux has no future”, “Unix is dying”. I guess the future proved I was right. I now earn more that they do.

How often are you going to be managing ports?

Just use any tool you like, all they do is fiddle with the Kernel’s filter table.

We played Doom on MS DOS. It was hugely popular because it was a breakthrough for PC gaming. So nothing to do with Linux.

My favorite way of reviving ancient 32 bit hardware is installing Haiku. It’s such a cool little OS, even if it can’t do all the tasks modern Linux can.

Xubuntu is still my distro of choice.

Removing snap and installing flatpak is two commands away.

Slackware.

She should abide by the company rules, use company provided software and follow company policies if she likes working there.

Otherwise she should move. Bypassing the rules is very unprofessional and can get you in trouble.

Partitioning does have benefits especially for enterprise scenarios. It allows you to specify different policies per mount point (i.e. no executables on /tmp, etc.). It prevents a runaway process from filling your hard disk with logs. It lets you keep your data separated from your OS, or have multiple OSs with the same home partition.

For home use you’ll probably go with something simpler, like separated home, root and games partitions, for instance.

Nowadays you should opt for LVM volumes or BTRFS subvolumes instead of partitions as these are way more flexible should you change your mind in the future about the sizes you allocated.

Can you run non native binaries on Linux? Sure, Linux is the Swiss army chainsaw of the OS world. There are multiple ways to achieve that.

Is it complicated? A bit. You’re interfacing a binary created for a completely different and alien environment. You’d get the same answer if you asked “why can’t l just run Mac apps in Windows like any other .exe?”

The best way to run .exe files is Windows. You have wonderful tools to help you run Windows apps on Linux, but the experience will probably never be as seamless as you want.

Nice work.

I used to get teased by the veterans for using nano instead of vi. Nowadays, I’m the one doing the teasing. Even if you don’t like it, learn the basic stuff, it’ll save you someday.

What I learned this week:

ping _gateway

is faster than looking up the gateway’s ip address and pinging it.

I also learned how to deploy stuff on AWS using OpenTofu, but the _gateway trick is neater.

I read the first paragraph and saw your prerequisites included working with nvidia.

That is a non-starter, right there. You can blame Linux for a whole lot of little flaws, but most of the blame should go to your hardware vendor for providing shitty support for Linux.

This is the attitude the OP is talking about.

Being snobbish helps noone, we’ve all been noobs at some point.

Found out the hard way that if you edit /etc/sudoers with anything other than visudo you best be absolutely sure the syntax is correct, otherwise sudo will refuse to read it and you’ll be locked out.

Also learned to add -rf to the rm command at the end, after I re-read it to make sure it does what it should do. Something like rm /path -rf instead of rm -fr /path. That protects you from your fat fingers hitting the enter key half way through.

We do what we must because we can.

FOSS software development is very much like evolution. Many projects are born but only the best thrive. It is a wasteful system because resources are spread over similar projects, but it creates very good software.