Distro hopping is a term that refers to the activity of computer users constantly installing and trying out different Linux distributions, either on bare metal or in a virtual environment, having a really difficult time deciding what to use. This article is not about simply trying out different options, it's about being stuck because you cannot make up your mind and you just keep trying different things, getting more and more "frustrated".| unixdigest.com
| unixdigest.com
Future prediction: The so-called modern web will die soon| unixdigest.com
Perhaps the younger generation don't know anything about the past "evils" of Microsoft and naively believe that Microsoft is now the good friend to open source, but the truth is that all Microsoft acquisitions of open source projects is a business tactic that is put in place to improve Microsoft's loosing position to open source. It is a matter of control. And you should not host your open source project on GitHub.| unixdigest.com
Evilness is when profit is the sole concern| unixdigest.com
According to an article on TechCrunch Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company’s code is written by AI.| unixdigest.com
The reason why i don't use AI or even code completion| unixdigest.com
A lot of people experience online friends "vanishing" without notice. A new nonprofit project tries to help prevent this issue and it's worth joining and supporting the project!| unixdigest.com
The Internet is filled with blog posts, articles on tech media, and videos on YouTube about why Linux is not the main operating system on the PC desktop. "5 reasons why", "10 reasons why", bla, bla, bla. But they are all wrong.| unixdigest.com
FreeBSD provides optional binary compatibility with Linux, commonly referred to as Linuxulator, allowing users to install and run unmodified Linux binaries without the need for virtualization or emulation. In this tutorial I am going to show you how you can use it to install the Signal Desktop application for Linux.| unixdigest.com
I truly and passionately hate hype. From the fakeness of it to the sheer stupidity it represents, but perhaps most of all, because of the devastating consequence it often results in.| unixdigest.com
In this article I share the results of a lab test in which I tested writing data to the filesystem directly with PHP fopen versus storing data in SQLite, PostgreSQL and MariaDB on different filesystems, mainly FFS2 on OpenBSD, UFS on FreeBSD, ext4 and XFS on Linux and ZFS on both Linux and FreeBSD, while unplugging power to hard drives and to the machines mid-writing.| unixdigest.com
A lot of people running ZFS zroot have managed to break their FreeBSD systems upgrading from 13.2 to the new 14.0 release because of a broken BIOS bootcode. In this tutorial I'll show you how you can fix that without having to reinstall.| unixdigest.com
As of late, Passkeys are promoted as the killer of passwords and a lot of companies are now manically transitioning from passwords to Passkeys. I don't think that is a good idea.| unixdigest.com
Today web developers are told that in order to do so-called modern web development they need to use JavaScript frameworks because they are an essential part of modern front-end web development. What a load of rubbish!| unixdigest.com
People who consider trying out one of the different BSD variants, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD or DragonFly BSD, often ask about the main differences between the four projects. In this article I am going to address that issue.| unixdigest.com
A big percentage of so-called experts today only know how to configure tools, but they understand nothing about how things work at the deeper level. This is a real challenge and a big problem for the future.| unixdigest.com
Nowadays PC gamers are used as guinea pigs when big gaming titles are released with major bugs, major performance issues, and other similar problems. Even though PC gamers are used as guinea pigs, they still often have to pay full price for the games as well. Game development has turned into a circus and Bertheda's latest title Starfield is a disgrace, not only to game development itself, but also to the gaming community.| unixdigest.com
Throughout my life I have been involved in many different projects and exciting endeavors, not only computer or technology related, but also within other "spheres of life". Often a project has many different requirements for success, but one thing is almost a universal constant, you have to surround yourself with the right people.| unixdigest.com
Version controlling (also called revision control or source control) your database data is pretty easy as long as you don't have any binary content stored in the database, you just commit your SQL dump to the version control software, it's just SQL in plain text. But what about database schema changes? In this small tutorial I'll address two simple ways you can version control your MariaDB schema changes without using any third party tools.| unixdigest.com
Some people who use open source software think or feel that they somehow have a right upon the developers of such software to provide support or service of some kind. Some are even so deluded that they think threating the developers with promises of not using the software will somehow force the developers into compliance.| unixdigest.com
Even though being a ports or package maintainer is voluntary, it carries a heavy responsibility.| unixdigest.com
I have multiple times criticized tech on political grounds, but is that a valid reason for criticism or does that simply constitute ranting?| unixdigest.com
Admittedly, I do occasional rant on this website - sorry! Feel free to only read the tutorials, avoid my website all together, put it in your ad blockers spam list, or simply block it on your firewall :) No one is forcing you to read any of it if you don't want to.| unixdigest.com
Since my article The flaws of distro hopping and asking other people about their OS of choice I have had a number of people writing to me asking for my specific advice regarding their choice of operating system, both for personal usage and for business usage. Last night I received yet another email from someone in the US who wrote to me about a difficult situation they where facing in the choice of operating system for their business usage. So I have decided to write a little bit about it. Ho...| unixdigest.com
The POSIX standard requires that operating systems maintain filesystem metadata that record when each file was last accessed. Let's take a look at what all that means.| unixdigest.com
In this tutorial I am going to use Void Linux to "replicate" how FreeBSD is utilizing ZFS snapshots for boot environments. I am going to use a MBR based setup with a native ZFS encrypted root mirror. With a ZFS root mirror we not only get the benefits of ZFS snapshots, but we also get the benefits of ZFS' ability to auto repair any corrupted data (from things like bit rot). And in case one of the hard drives fail, we can quickly replace the broken disk with a new disk and have everything up a...| unixdigest.com
In this tutorial I am going to show you how to replace a broken hard drive in a FreeBSD GELI encryptet ZFS mirror root installation. I'll assume that you have installed FreeBSD using the FreeBSD installer and used encryption on a guided (auto) ZFS installation. The installer partitions the two hard drives in an identical partition scheme, in which one of the partitions is fully encryptet using GELI. This is a great setup, but it requires a little knowledge of the internals to replace one of t...| unixdigest.com
Hard drives fail in all kinds of strange ways, when they do, you really appreciate all the hard work the programmers and engineers has put into ZFS because it is truly amazing!| unixdigest.com
So, I saw the Hacker News post about h-m-m (hackers mind map) and thought, "We could do something similar with just the terminal and tree".| unixdigest.com
This is a small introduction to a really great article about how toxic it is to follow the daily news and what to do instead.| unixdigest.com
Even though the technology related news media isn't about inhibiting thinking or controlling the masses, like the regular news media, the technology media is mostly using the same tactics by creating sensational and story-formattet junk. You can spot a bad technology media (or any news media) by the low level of investigative journalism and the high level of sensationalism it contains.| unixdigest.com
The term zero trust is a security model, also known as "perimeterless security" that has been known for a long time and that was e.g. implemented internally at Google in 2009 in a project called BeyondCorp. In recent years, mainly due to the high amount of IT security problems we all are facing, the term gained renewed focus and popularity when cybersecurity researchers at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released their Zero Trust Architecture publication (PDF).Zero trust...| unixdigest.com
A lot of bad practice has permeated the software development industry, one such practice is to blindly trust code when using third party libraries, frameworks or packages. The reasons why this is taking place is because people want to build stuff quickly in order to save as much money as possible, and they don't want to spend time on security or even performance. But alas, now such companies are beginning to pay the price, a very costly and highly damaging price.| unixdigest.com
If you're looking for answers related to Linux or BSD (or anything for that matter), Reddit is often not the right place to search for them.| unixdigest.com
Since I wrote The delusions of Debian, I have received a lot of email. I have therefore decided to do a small follow-up about the true meaning of Long Term Support (LTS).| unixdigest.com
Debian was a very famous Linux distribution in the communications industry and it was my personal favorite for many years, and I think I have been running it in production since about 1998 up until the time when the systemd conflict arose. Since then the priorities of the Debian project changed and Debian was no longer what Debian used to be.| unixdigest.com
A lot of myth and misunderstanding exist regarding how security is handled by package maintainers on the different Linux distributions and BSD variants. Let's take a look at the subject.| unixdigest.com
Reddit, fora, mailing lists, etc. are filled with questions and debates about whether operating system A is more secure than operating system B, or whether operating system A is faster than operating system B. Such questions and debates makes very little sense.| unixdigest.com
I have previously written about some of the major problems with so-called modern web development in some of my articles, mainly So-called modern web developers are the culprits and Is the madness ever going to end? and I have addressed the issues to the developers themselves. However, in some cases the business owners and managers are the main driving force behind the bad decisions, so if you're a business owner or a manager looking for the quick fix regarding web development - or software de...| unixdigest.com
There is something seriously wrong with the IT industry. It's so bad that I haven't managed to find a single industry with the same massive amount of stupidity, with the exception of perhaps the fashion industry.| unixdigest.com
My mother turned 70, February 2021, and she has been using Linux on the desktop for the past 21 years. My mother-in-law is 65, she has been using Linux on the desktop since 2015.| unixdigest.com
As a response to my article, So-called modern web developers are the culprits, someone stated that my advice was outdated because today we make web apps, not websites. I will address that issue in this article.| unixdigest.com
2022 needs to be the year when we seriously begin to get rid of bloatware, hype and trends in web development. It needs to be the year when we focus on performance and on utilizing the technology in harmony with the intend behind it. I am not saying that we should do all web development in assembly or C, but we need to stop the JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Python with Django and PHP framework madness.| unixdigest.com
During the last couple of weeks I have had the opportunity to work with a web application that required a new user management system. As most people know I am very much against using frameworks - and for good reasons. Let's talk a little about that.| unixdigest.com
I think that most people in the software industry have been in the situation of running a legacy system that everyone dreads because it was developed on a platform that was outdated a long time ago. In this article I will address the issue of how you develop software that keeps running without fear of breakage even when you upgrade to the latest version of the platform that the system is running on.| unixdigest.com
As soon as you step outside your house or apartment, you're located in the "public arena" where there is no privacy. I don't mean juridically speaking, but practically, as everyone can see you. Now, why would you think it is any different with the Internet!?| unixdigest.com
I am sure you have heard it many times, "use the right tool for the job", yet at the same time we're often inclined toward a specific operating system or a specific piece of software. And while it's quite normal to have a favorite operating system or a favorite piece of software, it can be very counter productive to only use a single solution for every problem.| unixdigest.com
One of the main benefits of Git is that it is an extremely flexible set of tools with which you can build many development models and branching strategies from. In this tutorial I'll show you my favorite Git workflow that works very well both as a solo developer and in a team with many developers.| unixdigest.com
Have you ever lost important data? I have. I learned doing backups the hard way after I lost a entire book I had just finished writing!| unixdigest.com
There exist a bunch of really cool open source backup tools such as Borg and Restic, but did you know that you can use GNU Tar and GnuPG to create encrypted incremental snapshots?| unixdigest.com
It is extremely disappointing to watch people cheer in ignorance at having their FOSS work and time exploited by one of the largest and crookiest companies in the world (GitHub, i.e. Microsoft), but you also need to understand something else, if you're into programming, using GitHub Copilot will eventually turn you into a bad programmer!| unixdigest.com
Is it even possible to stay sane in today's world of tech? Well, both yes and no :)| unixdigest.com
Whether we deal with technology, religion, science, or any other subject, nothing has ever been more harmful to the human race, both generally and individually, than people submitting to social conformity rather than use the gift of their intellect!| unixdigest.com
| unixdigest.com
The name SQLite is a nice name, but the "lite" part is misleading, it sounds like it is only useful for tiny things - which is very wrong. SQLite should be named AwesomeSQL, because that is what it is. SQLite is probably the only database you will ever need in most cases.| unixdigest.com
Have you ever thought about developing some type of application from the ground up while people are telling you that you shouldn't do it, and that it is difficult, and that you shouldn't reinvent the wheel, etc.? Guess what, what you shouldn't do is to listen to such people!| unixdigest.com
In my last couple of articles I have been talking about the problems with object oriented programming theory and implementation, and I have been talking about the problems with frantic focusing on software testing. In this article I'm almost not going to say anything, I'll just recommend a really good talk for you :)| unixdigest.com
Code testing is not only great, it is a MUST as you cannot develop software without testing your code. However, there is something which I like to call "frantic code testing", which is what I believe needs to be avoided.| unixdigest.com
It's easy to determine if you really need the object-oriented paradigm, you just need to look for the things that you can only do with object-oriented programming and then ask yourself whether you really need that. It's called "The Three Pillars of Object-Oriented Programming". If you don't use all three at the same time, then you're not doing object-oriented programming and you don't need it.| unixdigest.com
In this article we'll take a look at some of the benefits of procedural programming in PHP, and in general, and what you need to do in order to do it well.| unixdigest.com
Some people argue that you cannot test procedural PHP code, but that is not true. In this small tutorial I am going to show you how you can use PHPUnit to test your procedural functions.| unixdigest.com
It has happened again. Another company has contacted me because they had a PHP product developed which has turned into a huge beast of complexity. Basic functionality has stopped working and nobody wants to have anything to do with it. It has serious consequences for the company because they are loosing money since the product isn't up and running. I have come to the same conclusion which I have reached in other similar situations, the codebase is one big pile of complex object-oriented mess.| unixdigest.com
Are you a JavaScript framework or library fan-boy? One of those so-called front-end developers who cannot figure out how to build a website without completely smothering everything in JavaScript? Well, if you are, let me share a JavaScript nightmare with you.| unixdigest.com
If we assume that no security bugs are injected by malicious programmers, then security issues, like other issues, are errors in code introduced by programmers by mistake. This means that the complexity of a program deeply affect the number of mistakes. This also means that one very important goal is to make code as simple as possible, until it becomes absolutely and obviously correct. Complexity is perhaps the most important factor that controls both the creation and defeat of errors, includ...| unixdigest.com
In 2020 Laurent Bercot, the developer of the s6 init tools, was contacted by a recruiter at Google. He wrote an answer which he made public. That answer deserves to be spread far and wide. I present the answer here as a direct copy from the original.| unixdigest.com
So, you normally do something like pip install foo, or composer install foo, or npm install foo, or perhaps go get foo, and you never read the source code of the package you just pulled down? Guess what, that's one (almost) sure way to blow up your project!| unixdigest.com
In this tutorial we're going to take a look at setting up full disk encryption on the Artix Linux base system using GRUB for both a BIOS/MBR based setup and a UEFI based setup. While the choice to install in UEFI mode is encouraging, vendor UEFI implementations still carry more bugs than their BIOS/MBR counterparts. You are advised to do a search relating to your particular motherboard model before proceeding. Contrary to "modern" advice I still haven't found any compelling reason to use UEFI...| unixdigest.com
The GNU Public License (GPL) was created to be the antithesis of the standard proprietary license, let's take a look at some of the problems with GPL.| unixdigest.com
The other day, as I was going through some of my old notes, I stumbled upon something I had written about the console, the terminal and the shell on UNIX-like operating systems. I have decided to rewrite these notes in order to share them here on my website. So without further ado we will now stroll down memory lane and take a quick look at the origins of the Unix terminal and shell. And I will also give my advice to new users on Linux or BSD regarding the choice of terminal emulator and shell.| unixdigest.com
About a documentary that explores the dangerous human impact of social networking. Tech experts sound the alarm on their own creations!| unixdigest.com
| unixdigest.com
Thousands of the worlds best open source projects are still hosting their code repositories on GitHub. Since Microsoft has purchased GitHub this has become a serious problem.| unixdigest.com
Privacy on the Internet is important because privacy risks range from the gathering of statistics on users to more malicious acts such as the spreading of spyware and the exploitation of various forms of bugs (software faults). Many companies, such as Google, track which websites people visit and then use the information, for instance by sending advertising based on one's web browsing history. Sometimes prices on products are changed on the same website, depending on tracking information, and...| unixdigest.com
From time to time people email me asking about what kind of work flow I use for this blog. In this article I'll elaborate on the process.| unixdigest.com
I run FreeBSD as my daily driver on both my main workstation and on all my servers and I have been running FreeBSD since about 1999 because I consider it an amazing operating system. In this article I will address some of the technical reasons for choosing FreeBSD over a GNU/Linux distribution.| unixdigest.com
Vim users swear to the increased productivity that Vim provides, yet few Vim users actually realize that they are not really using Vim. Rather, they have stuffed Vim full of plugins and a thousand lines long Vim configuration file that completely change how Vim normally works.| unixdigest.com
The suckless philosophy is all about keeping things simple, minimal and usable, but some people seem to have misunderstood it completely.| unixdigest.com
In this tutorial I'll show you a simple way you can manage the configuration of i3 across multiple computers with different setups on each computer.| unixdigest.com
ZFS on Linux might get a lot of the latest features, and with a distribution like Arch Linux you have the bleeding edge, but it makes great sense to migrate everything ZFS related to FreeBSD. On FreeBSD ZFS is a first class citizen. This means that you don't have to worry about hostile kernel commits that suddenly breaks ZFS, or kernel modules that has to be re-compiled every time the kernel is updated. Being a first class citizen also means that the entire operating system is tailored to wor...| unixdigest.com
A question I frequently get asked is how you choose between the operating systems OpenBSD and FreeBSD. In this small article I'll try to answer that question.| unixdigest.com
In this part we're going to install i3 and rice it bit. You can look further down in the tutorial at the screenshots in order to determine if you like the results.| unixdigest.com
This is the second part of the tutorial. In this part we're going to install Xfce and rice it a bit. You can look further down in the tutorial at the screenshots in order to determine if you like the results.| unixdigest.com
In this three part tutorial I am going to show you how you can setup FreeBSD with a riced Xfce or i3 desktop.| unixdigest.com
After I posted the first part of this article it got posted on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobsters, and someone named "harryruhr" posted a response on his blog which he titled Should you migrate from Linux to BSD? It depends.. In the response harryruhr makes a couple of erroneous arguments I feel the need to address.| unixdigest.com
This is a small article about some of my adventures with FreeBSD and why I believe it is an amazing operating system.| unixdigest.com
As an operating system GNU/Linux has become a mess because of the fragmented nature of the project, the bloatware in the kernel, but mainly because of the manipulation by corporate interests. There exist several technical reasons for when a migration from GNU/Linux to BSD make sense, but this article isn't about that, it's an "analyzes" of the current status in Linux-land, and it is an opinionated rant, more than anything else.| unixdigest.com
A bad trend is becoming a standard at more and more tech companies when interviewing candidates for job positions.| unixdigest.com
Usually we regard the phrase "the modern approach" as something that denote improvement over time, something that has changed to the better. However, the phrase "the modern approach" are often abused and we must be careful to separate fact from hype.| unixdigest.com
On Hacker News, Reddit, and elsewhere, people often ask about favorite note-taking methods. In this post I share mine.| unixdigest.com
Object-oriented programming is just a programming paradigm that organize code in a different way from that of procedural programming. It is an extension of procedural programming, and it is about avoiding a global scope and about sharing resources between functions. Let's take a look at some of the "object-oriented" features of Go.| unixdigest.com
In Go you have to deal with both errors and panics and while some people consider it one of the worst things about Go, I think it demonstrates exactly how well designed Go is.| unixdigest.com
Some people complain about the logging capabilities of the log package from the Go standard library, but I not only find it adequate, I really like it.| unixdigest.com
Front-end developers are pushing JavaScript as though the web could not function without it. The fact is that JavaScript is one of the top reasons for security breaches on the client computer and client mobile phones, it is a plague that turns privacy into a public exhibition, and it has paralyzed the industry in such a way that you can hardly find a website that doesn't display "the white screen of death" if JavaScript has been disabled in the browser.| unixdigest.com
If you are thinking about abstractions, design patterns, and programming principles while you are programming, you are not really programming, rather you are wasting valuable time fantasizing. The end goal is always to have good working readable code, not code that has been bent, twisted, and shoved into formations and structures in order to fulfill the vanity of someone living in a fairy tail.| unixdigest.com
In this article I share the results of a home-lab experiment in which I threw some different problems at ZFS, Btrfs and mdadm+dm-integrity in a RAID-5 setup.| unixdigest.com
In this tutorial I am going to show you how you can make a working Arch Linux USB stick with ZFS. This can be useful if you're running a homelab NAS and you want to boot of the USB stick and only use your drives for ZFS. It can also be used as a diagnostic or administration tool for dealing with ZFS on Arch Linux or some other Linux distribution.| unixdigest.com
| unixdigest.com
Hypocrisy and politics in free and open source software projects| unixdigest.com
Some of the great GNU/Linux distributions| unixdigest.com