#it's a unix system i know this

[monaddecepticon]

Yeah it's the least it can do. It is also running the Jurassic Park file navigator

[thunderboltfire]

I've tried to run BG2 again (I need to finish my modded playthrough) and my laptop is in such a bad state it prectically lags BG2. BG2, which could be run on a determined microwave, on a laptop that has 8GB of RAM! It is heavily used and it has a lot of apps, but I've uninstalled everything I didn't use and cleaned the registry awhile ago. I suspected the antivirus, but the system manager shows it actually doesn't consume a lot of resources. It's not the disk space, since it's got plenty. It turns out it uses 100% of its disk all the time, and the main culprits seems to be.... *drum roll* system and Windows telemetry service! I now have to spend the evening elbows deep in frankly confusing system settings to find a way to turn the telemetry service off, and it may or may not improve the situation.

Once I finish this playthough, I'm definitely switching the laptop to Unix.

[mountmortar]

annoying to me that macOS by default hides the root directory from the user in finder. like i get that it's because most users never actually have to do anything with the root directory but come on man (<-complaining for no reason. it took like 0.02 seconds to pull up and pin the root directory to the sidebar in finder)

[abbiistabbii]

I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.

Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.

It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.

Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.

Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.

Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.

On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.

On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.

What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.

Linux is fucking wild.

[mordcore]

ever notice how the people who will be like "eww linux haha" are just bullying a group of mostly autistic people

but it's okay because they're stereotypically men and disabled men get no rights i guess

like yes cis male linux-fans can be annoying (often in an autism way btw) but as someone who has spent years among them they are on average less sexist than your average man. also a lot of us linux users are genderqueer poople. the trans women in STEM you've heard about? most of them are linux users as well, if they don't use unix or more obscure systems.

the techbros you hate? they don't use linux, they use windows and mac. linux is overwhelmingly non-commercial, and techbros are hyper-neoliberal. most of linux is FOSS (free & open source software)

linux comes from the same ideological corner as firefox. if you think firefox is great but think linux is nothing more than a funny joke you need to look in the fucking mirror. and at your own computer because if you use windows you'll have a lot of anti-features that you take for granted. if you made the switch to linux it would be like exhaling the breath you didn't know you were holding for years. not saying that you have to, just, most people don't even consider making their own lives easier. you know?

[daemonhxckergrrl]

Favorite weird obscure operating system that nobody’s heard of

on pure "woag i didn't know that", i'd say minix purely bc it runs inside basically any intel cpu since 2008. inside your cpu on a level so low not even your uefi/bios can tell it exists, is an entire version of an educational unix clone (the very one that inspired torvalds to make linux) and it runs a full networking stack, filesystem, web server and more. why ? intel management engine. it manages cpu stuff apparently.

feeling scared ?

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

yes, I only did JP the original, because the minute you go beyond that you invite controversy,

[kettlovahr]

This looks like a kitty, but it is actually a Wabbit

[unsoundedcomic]

I see you use lots of computer-y terminology for the Khert when you're talking out here in the real world. Occasionally the characters do too, like the Khert hubs.

Is there value in reading Unsounded's whole world as textually a big simulation on some machine – with the gods as original coders, and wrights as parts of the program which have learned how to modify it directly?

Or is it more of a helpful way to conceptualise their magical realities for us in this computer-heavy world – like Duane could read a story set here and ask "Does their internet imply everything is just a big pymaric?" for much the same meaning?

No worries if it's something you'd rather keep mysterious for now, or potentially metaphorical without committing either way!

It's tough to say it's definitively NOT a simulation. After all, you and I could be in a simulation and the comic could be a feature of it. So I leave that up to your interpretation.

But I use that terminology... for a very specific reason. And it's not a reason the story will ever broach. The true origins of the world will never be revealed, not in the text nor on here, but I know them. And the structure of it all is, of course, relevant to that.

It's funny to imagine Duane isekai'd to our world and finding computing strangely familiar. Like the little girl in Jurassic Park. "This is a UNIX system... I know this...!"

[nhaneh]

Sometimes I kind of wonder to what extents people know, like really know-know, that smartphones are computers.

Not sorta-computers, not computer-adjacent, but actual computers.

I mean, if you have an iPhone, that's a Unix system; if you have an Android, that's straight up Linux. It's computer software running on computer hardware, and the only reason it's not immediately apparent is because they're set up to obfuscate the fact, hide away the computer-ness, blur the lines between local and remote, between offline and online, between system and network.

The only reason you have less access to the inner workings of your phone than you do that of a PC is due to software locking set up by your phone's manufacturer.

[solottrpgchronicles]

1d. First Day at the Lab - Outliers

Name: Ren

Day: 1

Funds: $ 100

Today is my first day working at Ar Leith Labs - I can't believe I finally landed a job!

To be honest, I didn't look too deeply into what they do at Ar Leith Labs - I basically sent my curriculum to every neuroscience research lab that was hiring. Now that I'm here, I can't even find a pamphlet explaining the research in detail.

Ok, I'll be professional and go introduce myself to my coworkers now; either them or the PI can tell me more about the job.

---

There are only two other research assistants in my group: Leanne and Perry; neither of them seems to be the chatty type, at least not with me. I was looking forward to meeting my PI, but Leanne told me that she has never shown her face around here.

Right then we heard the PI speak; it felt as if she was standing right next to us. This lab must have a pretty technologically advanced speaker system!

The PI's voice welcomed me and introduced herself as C.N, just her initials; she invited me to get acquainted with the lab environment, and help my coworkers out with anything they might need.

I found it a little odd that she's not meeting us in person, but maybe there's an excellent reason for it. I don't want to pry, especially not on my first day.

Nobody was available to give me a tour - lots of work to do, which is fair - so I walked around the lab by myself, studying the equipment. I didn't recognize any of the machines, except for the obvious desktop computer in the corner. That one even looks a little old, in contrast with the rest of the devices.

Leanne noticed me looking at the computer and asked if I know how to code; heck yeah I do, I took a few classes and I'm pretty ok at it! So she asked me to write a bit of code to generate graph data for her latest research data. It's strange that they don't have software for that already, but I decided to avoid asking any questions.

I took this opportunity to look over the data, hoping it would clarify what kind of research we're supposed to do here, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Oh, well.

I couldn't recognize the OS the computer is running either, but it seemed loosely based on Unix. I was making good progress until I started testing my code; I got the error "Unable to find or open '/Brain/TemporalLobe/Hippocampus/MISTAKE.png'". I'm 100% sure I never referenced this file, and what a bizarre name!

I immediately thought this must be a prank - Leanne and Perry must have planned this as a funny welcome for me. I resolved to laugh and tell them it was a cool prank; that would show them I'm chill.

Unfortunately, they kept insisting they didn't know what I was talking about. They looked annoyed, so I assume they were being truthful. Alright, time to debug.

A quick search of the codebase and external libraries for the file path in the error message yielded no results. I tried looking just for "Mistake.png" and got nothing once again.

Interestingly enough, though, "Ren/Brain/" exists, except there's only a "temp" folder in there. Maybe I don't have the right access levels to see other folders? There doesn't seem to be a root user either.

I bothered Leanne and Perry to see whether they have access to the other folders - they don't, but they have their own users on this machine, with their own "/Brain/" folders. Also, my code wasn't available to them. They said the users were already set up for them when they joined, just like mine; IT support must be incredible around here.

In the end I decided to share the code with Leanne's user, in the off chance it would work for her. It did, just like I hoped, and Leanne got her graph.

I don't fully understand, but... great. Maybe I should talk to the IT support people, or take a few more coding classes.

---

The rest of the day was spent on boring menial tasks.

I bet my coworkers think I'm more trouble than I'm helpful, but hey - they'll change their minds, soon enough. After all, I didn't graduate top of my class just to be ignored at my job.

Luckily, at least C.N. already sees potential in me: before I left for the day, she said tomorrow I'll be tabling at an event called "The Gathering"! My first table, and on day 2? I can't wait!

I forgot to ask for the address, but I bet I can find all the info I need online. I'm obviously being tested, and I will show initiative, dependability, and bring a ton of new participants for the study!

--------------------

This is a playthrough of a solo TTRPG called "Outliers", by Sam Leigh, @goblinmixtape.

You can check it out on itch.io: https://far-horizons-co-op.itch.io/outliers

[strangest-neutron]

Are these pictures jpgs or pngs or gifs or what?

Because there is a magic incantation to moving a lot of stuff at once, but you need to know the file types.

If you make a folder "Photos" on Documents, and then open a Terminal (Cmd + T), a rectangular screen will show up on your screen.

That's the official place to "Yell orders at the computer to execute programs"

Then, you can type on the terminal screen the following line

mv ~/Documents/*.jpg ~/Documents/Photos

mv is the program that moves things from one place to another.

~/Documents/*.jpg is telling to mv "Take all the files that are in the folder Downloads and that have names that end with .jpg"

~/Documents/Photos is where you want to move all these files

Now, mv is old-school, before mice and graphical interfaces were a thing. So it'll just do what it's told and not ask for confirmation. This should move all the jpgs from Documents to Photos. And photos usually, but not always are jpgs.

If you want to move say, pngs, you'll need to edit that line so it'll be

mv ~/Documents/*.png ~/Documents/Photos

And so on. That said, there are two things to keep in mind:

This will move all .jpgs or all .pngs, not just "old photos but not the newer photos". It's a sledgehammer, not a precision tool

It's good practice to never just copy stuff from the Internet directly into the Terminal unless you know what it does. Feel free to google what the mv utility does, so you can be assured it does what I'm saying it does!

Why do 70% of people Understand Computer and refuse to tell the other 30% of us how to achieve enlightenment

[canmom]

a silly analogy

it's like, a common analogy is that D&D players are Windows scrubs and story games players are akin to Linux power users. and sure, Windows is painfully market-dominant and kind of an incredible hassle to fix, I'm with you there.

but if anything, both Linux and Windows are designed to be very general-purpose operating systems - Linux comes in a variety of flavours depending on what you install along with the kernel, so perhaps we could analogise it to an oldschool generic trad game like GURPS, or an abstract framework-for-games like PbtA, or a even a design paradigm that comes in a variety of similar flavours like the OSR. it can do a lot very efficiently, with some effort.

meanwhile, the way a lot of indie games are presented, they describe a very specific activity revolving around one scenario that the game is designed to support, and offer little affordance or suggestion to modify it. if you're doing exactly what the game is designed for you'll (theoretically) have a slick, polished time... but if not, good luck.

that's not Linux. that's, like, iOS.

(or Android - and both these are running a Unix/Linux system under the hood, you see, the analogy, it all works!!! if you squint.)

if I'm having a horrible time trying to get Windows to do what I want, and you (abstract you) say I'll probably have an easier time using an iPad... well, sure, maybe I'm doing the one thing the iPad is really good for. if I wanna play a fast-moving game with the feel of a Coen Brothers movie, I should definitely play some spin on Fiasco. if I wanna play a game about various suitors fighting for the attentions of a wandering ronin, why, wouldn't you know, there's a game called Kagematsu that does that. if I want to play a game about a vast fractal sweep of history... I'd better look at Microscope.

if not... well, fine, if we get too specific, the analogy kind of falls to bits, because there are many trad games, many indie games, and only a few operating systems to analogise them to. 'try starting with another game' might still be good advice, whereas with OSes, if Windows or Linux don't do the trick, what are you gonna do?

[sl33py-g4m3r]

ramble about FreeBSD and Unix~~

how out of my depth would I be trying to install FreeBSD?

would it even boot on my machine?

am I smart enough to go through the install for the system itself as well as get the GUI that I want?

I think you have to go through the command line for quite a bit of time before you get a GUI up and running....

I started off being really interested in BSD/Unix in high school, and tried to fiddle around with a BSD live disc thing in a book (that I don't remember the name of) and then only fiddled around with Linux.

I've been watching videos on youtube of people expressing how stable FreeBSD's modern release is~~

I want to use it on my own hardware; but that's a problem with it I believe, is that it works on sort of limited amount of hardware, as opposed to Linux, that you could even run on a toaster...

Is it really that much harder to deal with than Linux?

Of course I've only dealt with a few distros~~ the rundown of distros I've messed around with are;

Ubuntu (not anymore tho)

Debian (current os being Linux Mint Debian 6)

OpenSUSE briefly (tried to get my sibling to use it on their laptop, with them knowing next to nothing about Linux, sorry...)

Fedora back in high school, I ran it on a laptop for a while. I miss GNOME....

Mageia (I dual booted it on a computer running windows 7, also in or right after high school, so a long time ago)

attempted GhostBSD but it wouldn't boot after install from the live CD (also many years ago at this point)

I like to hop around and (hopefully now I have, yeah right...) I can't make up my mind which I actually want to use permanently.

Linux Mint Debian edition is really good so far tho~~!!

Current PC is an ASUS ROG Stryx (spelling?) that I bought on impulse many years ago~~ Was running windows 10, fixed the issue and now use the OS stated above~~

or maybe I should maybe ditch Mint and run straight Debian... Thought of that too. and it might have an easier time installing and actually booting than FreeBSD on this machine...

but then BSD and by extension unix is meant to be used on older hardware and to be efficient both in execution of things, and space.

"do one thing and do it well" iirc was a bit of the unix philosophy...

yeah, no I HATE technology /heavy sarcasm/

[possibly-j]

Linux and BSD

More specifically: Linux and Choice, and What an Operating System Should Be

Choice brings the opportunity for error. A perhaps profound statement on life, but we're talking about operating systems here. When the user is given the opportunity to make choices, they are given the opportunity to make mistakes. What choices the user wants to make, and what choices they do make, will define their experience with an operating system.

This is the crux of many operating system debates in my opinion. What is an operating system to you? Much of the online Linux space is populated by those who see their operating system as a hobby, something to be played with. I think this is why we see distros such as Arch, NixOS, and Gentoo so often. They are the perfect vessels for this sort of use. But you also will encounter those who simply want an operating system that works. They don't want to constantly dig through their config files, fix broken packages, or add pretty animations to their WM, they just want to use their operating system as a means to an end. This is where you'll find Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and as the title suggests, BSD.

BSD users in my experience value consistency above all else. When they encounter an install of a BSD system, they expect it to work exactly like any other install would. They expect the same commands, same software, and same experience. This is Unix after all, not Linux. When BSD users talk about Linux, this is the most common pain point I see. X11 or Wayland? PulseAudio or PipeWire? SystemD or alternatives? Each Linux install, even of the same distro, has the potential to be wildly different. And this can lead to frustration.

I think there's a tendency for us as Linux users to assume this is how an operating system should be. Millions of choices allowing for personalizing your experience. After all we associate the opposite with Windows. But I think monolithic operating system designs should not be dragged down by this association. Customization is just one reason to not like Windows. A well designed monolithic system, as we see with the BSD's, can provide a seamless experience out of the box that is difficult to recreate with component based designs.

This is not to say that either is bad. In fact, both I'd say both are good. I am a Linux user primarily. I know Linux quite well and at this point in my life I'm not willing to put in the effort to learn anything else. This also means that I know what I like to customize, how I like my Linux to work. But I see the appeal of BSD's and their consistent design.

To end this post I would like to ask a hypothetical. If one of the BSD's were currently in the position of Linux, an upcoming competitor to Windows, would we see easier adoption from Windows users who are used to monolithic designs?

[trashgremlendoesart]

So my dad is somewhat of a computer wiz and I asked him about some of the tech stuff in the magnus protocol

my dads says..

"I was involved in a rollout of about 1,000 NT4 workstations over four campuses back in the day (mid to late 90s)

Our machines started at Pentium 120 with 32Meg of RAM and 1.2G hard drive in a mini tower case. Apart from the drive bays in the case front for 3 1/2 floppy disk drives and CD ROM drives they don't look all that different to a small gaming pc today.

The mice still have balls though, the keyboard have big 5 pin DIN plugs but otherwise are just as dishwasher safe as modern ones.

If connected to a network you are very likely to find its Novel Netware 4.1. The networking will look like a thin black cable strung from machine to machine with a little silver T shaped connector on the back of each one, apart from the first and the last they have 'terminators'.

You probably won't be connected to the internet yet, there is probably no TCP/IP on your LAN at all, only Novel IPX. The ZenWorks NT4 workstation management tools from Novel are sublime, it take Microsoft quite a while to copy them.

If you are in our publishing class we will be teaching you Photoshop, Illustrator and Quark Express. If you are in our business course we will be teaching you Office 97 with that bloody paperclip. We will also be teaching you Groupwise, Microsoft haven't copied that off Novel yet so there isn't any Exchange.

If you have email its probably Pegasus, maybe early Eudora. Its unlikely you can email out of the organisation you are in. Internet connected mail is still to come, mind you so is any interoperability between mail systems. You expect attachments to work?

We still taught some things on Windows 3.1 so our machines all boot from the Lan initially to fetch the boot menu. You can choose Windows 3.1, NT4, in some classrooms Win98, or you can re-image you machine if its broken. Thats all done in assembler in the boot sector on the network boot disk image, theres no PXE yet.

Internet arrives one day in the form of a product called "Instant internet", it will share its single built in 36Kb dial up modem with a whole classroom of only IPX connected NT4 workstations if you install the Winsock32.dll file that it comes with.

You are probably looking for Mosaic or early Netscape if you want a web browser, Altavista is likely your search engine.

Better things are coming though soon we have a whole 128K ISDN service to share with about 10 classrooms, we have TCP/IP on the LAN now. Your classroom is still going to have to book when it wants internet access though, as that's still woefully inadequate.

I think the Macs are System 8 or 9 they have not made the jump to the unix kernel of OS X yet, they keep my colleague busy, she seems to be reinstalling the System folders on them on a daily basis.

One day you find I have changed the default home page for all the machines to Google Beta.

My job is done, the world as we know it has been ushered in."

Dad worked In TAFE (only Australians will get that lol) for a few years as well as other tertiary education providers.

This is probably not going to be very relevant for anyone but I figured having some sort of info available could be helpful for other people's writing, fanfic or whatever.

Feel free to send asks for any clarification or further info