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  • 10 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • motsu@lemmy.worldtolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•i find it's a great tool.
    197·
    1 year ago

    Yep, to add on as well as summarized this… Linux has historically had a design methodology of “everything is a file”. If your not familear with the implications of this, it means your command line tools just kind of work with most things, and everything is easy to find.

    For instance, there’s no “registry / regedit” on Linux… There’s just a folder with a config file that the application stores settings in. There’s no control panel application to modify your network settings… Just a text file on your OS. Your system logs and startup tasks were also (you guessed it) sinole filea on the system. Sure there might be GUI apps to make these things easier for users, but under the hood it reads and writes a file.

    This idea goes further than you might assume. Your hard drive is a file on the file system (a special file called a block device). You can do something like “mount /dev/sda1 /home/myuser/some_folder” to “attach” the drive to a folder on the system, but that special block device (dev/sda1 in this case) can be read and written to byte by byte if you want with low level tools like dd.

    Even an audio card output can show as a file in dev (this is less the case now with pipewire and pulse), but you used to be able to just echo a raw audio file (like a wav file) and redirect the output to your audio device “file” and it would play out your speaker.

    Systemd flipped this all around, and now instead of just changing files, you have to use applications to specify changes to your system. Want to stop something from starting? Well, it used to be that you just move it out of the init directory, but now you have to know to “systemctl disable something.service”, or to view logs " journalctl -idk something.service" I dont even remember the flags for specifying a service, so I have to look it up, where it used to just be looking at a file (and maybe use grep to search for something specific)

  • motsu@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What single purchase has returned the most in terms of value?
    1·
    1 year ago

    No, not at all… Its an enclosure for an existing hard drive that makes it into a portable media device (like a flash drive), but because its an actual ssd you get much better sustained speeds.

    There’s also some cool features like drive encryption, as well as if you put an iso file on the drive, you can navigate to it on the on the iodd device using the screen and buttons, and then select it. The enclosure will emulate a DVD reader, and you can just boot the iso without having to do any etcher / Rufus / yumi / dd stuff

  • motsu@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•What single purchase has returned the most in terms of value?
    13·
    1 year ago

    I bought counterstrike source way back in like 2008/2009 when I got a computer fast enough to play it. Steam was pushing garrysmod as a 5 dollar bundle purchase with counterstrike, and I bought that too on a whim.

    I liked garrysmod more than cs:s, and played it a bunch. Eventually I figured out how to add wiremod to the game, which also involved using svn (a source control precursor to git)

    I learned basic digital circuits and boolean logic by making bases with elevators and fancy alarm systems that would shoot intruders with turrents and stuff.

    Eventually wiremod added a programming language called expression2, which was a mashup of c and lua. I basically taught myself coding because of a video game.

    This lead me to get into computer programming, and eventually computer security, which ended up being a lucrative career path… So thanks Garry for your mod, and thanks Gabe for pushing said mod to kids that just wanted to shoot virtual terrorists. That 5 dollar game is responsible for a good chunk of my life :)