Typically the user group is identical to the username but not always. For example a name containing uppercase letters may be transformed to be all lowercase for the user but contain both cases in the group.

Thus you should get the user group in scripting separate from $USER

Ubuntu is a fine “nice to meet you” distro – the criticisms I’ve gathered happen a few months in. Nvidia+Xorg updates dropping GUI to TUI, MDADM shitting the bed and dropping RAID, the awkward 6 month upgrades where you go from old weird issues in apps to new weird issues – thou snap and flatpak improve this a lot over stock.

Canonical NIH, Canonical CLA agreement, history of charging forward only to abandon in house tech over and again after users get comfy.

Then there are inner politics and the occasional hankyness inside, or discourteousness like when they shit the bed dropping lib32 without talking to partnrrs like Valve on how this would effect their business after they made Ubuntu their target.

Criticisms typically are based in something. I had started using Ubuntu since 2004 IIRC and its been an interesting ride.

Oh also, PPA’s, avoid those, they’re not stock and don’t be surprised if your OS doesn’t boot with the less than stellar ones not staying in sync with the latest kernel updates.

YMMV and this is by no means advice on your personal fit.

Personally I am not fond of most casual user low barrier distros but I still recommend them. Manjaro, PopOS, LinuxMint, Endless, are all fine options depending on what kind of user.

I recently recommended one to a GameDev and considering SteamOS is Arch he decided on Manjaro over Debian.

YMMV, and its important to listen first to people to see what they want their machine to do.

One last criticism of Canonical and Ubuntu. Their HQ is UK based and I honestly wonder how the culture effects development. Germany, UK, California all have different “feels”, its hard to be more specific.

Choice is good, always keep your data backed up and the @home on a different partition. The differences across distros are largely not a big deal like they used to be. People find solus in being captain of their Linux adventure and even Ubuntu will do just fine at the basics, just know if you hit a snag it may not be like that on every distro.

It may be a little too late but if you have a chance to use a feature like btrfs snapshots (+time shift) it can be a game changer.

Any time you need to do something risky to the OS you can just snapshot before like installing 1000 packages, or Nvidia driver update, you can just revert to the old working version by swapping the names on the snapshot and is subvolume.

If you dislike telemetry,

Audacity => Tenacity

Firefox => LibreWolf or FireDragon (GraudaLinux default, good in telemetry respects IIRC)

You may like btop, Mission Control,

Avoid any terminals and editors that advertise as “AI” – there were some big ones recently but the community thankfully overall was like nah.

Get some decent browser extensions, ublockorigin, privacy badger, libredirect

some people like to pihole their network, opensense/pfsense/ddwrt router is nice to have

AVAHI broadcasts your services on the LAN IIRC.

Obviously vscode has telemetry, if you use that try vscodium IIRC, personally I use neither but that’s just me.

RPI print server + sshfs?

I still never understood how V equals “Paste”

Due to Wayland naming schema I’m having trouble decoding this title.

So Wayland, a protocol, is needing the addition of other protocols?

Is this like how we call Linux and Linux distros both Linux?

Does this make it a Wayland Distro?

Is this the new one or the old one? Cuz I thought the new one was balls.

First I heard they even had a fedi.

Just now, sounds like it’s feature incomplete, still I am curious if I missed anything big

Store reviews are 2.4 / 5 why the poor reception

instead of curly brackets if statements are closed with fi

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7010830/bash-whats-the-use-of-fi

This is a fascinating concept.

If files are removed from the Index it would only seem natural that they can be undeleted until their physical address is recycled and overwritten.

In fact I remember something like this pre Windows 95 era where files were crossed out. Undeleting them was like magic.

This is why the windows term “Recycle” is more appropriate because the data remains until the space is reused or zero’d out.

This is the kind of reexamining we need, does our current iteration make sense from an engineering perspective or is it just a evolution of a bunch of archaic stuff from a time that doesn’t represent the present tech world at all.

I would be okay with replacing rm with recycle and shred as their function is more clear in the name.

True, I still think it’s fair to criticize the package managers and distros for not anticipating this common scenario and having the ability to roll back easily. How many millions of Linux users have experienced this issue? I’ll bet a few.

Debian, Gentoo come from another generation and sometimes it shows, I mean snapshots weren’t even a thing yet AFAIK.

This was definitely one of my least favorite things when I used Debian.

It shows that we need to think about how users are performing tasks and how to intuitively make their usage more successful. The OS should try to get out of the way and always have the ability to easily revert in the case of platform failure.

Do you use this in conjunction with any other input devices?

Sabotage

Step 1. Built Internet to get away from TV

Step 2. Corporate Greed TV moves over and ruins Internet.

Step 3. Build New Internet to escape Old Internet Ruined by TV bloodsuckers.

Step 4. Go back to step 2 and replace tech names with next itteration.

Even owning Smart devices and having them always plugged in may potentially be a vector, Rob did a good breakdown on how this is achieved.

https://odysee.com/@RobBraxmanTech:6/radio:64

Did you know that your IOT devices are secretly communicating with each other? This includes IOT devices that are not in your home. Did you know that what your IOT devices do may be transmitted to third parties? Did you know that your TV may also have the capability and may currently be transmitting your activity far and wide?

There are secret communications occurring between IOT devices using protocols like Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, Thread, 802.15, and LoRa that you likely didn’t expect or was not explained when you bought these devices.

Just like Amazon Echo has been conscripted to work with the Amazon Sidewalk Mesh network, other networks are in operation

I’ve looked, are there any clear winners I might have missed?