Same here. It was my first Linux. The Gentoo Handbook circa 2005 did not even attempt to hold your hand. But when I got through, it worked well! I got into dependency hell and bricked my system trying to upgrade Firefox. I like how Debian is stable, but I still do wonder about Gentoo.

I would love to do something like this, but what happens if I don’t have kids? What happens if I one of them develop a IT background? Perhaps I could curate some pictures, videos, and documents that I feel are important (and not too sensitive) and send it to the Internet Archive so that extended family could always get it. Self-hosting is great until there is no more self.

It’ll probably happen in the next few years. Compiling for PowerPC went away after macOS dropped it, and it was the same story for i386. Running and targeting x86_64 will soon be a distant memory.

That being said, if you have a Mac/Hackintosh/VM with an older Xcode, keep it! You can still compile with the old version, compile with the new version, and stick the results together with the lipo command. I wrote a simple C CLI app and I can put five architectures in one binary if I want (ppc, ppc64, i386, x86_64, arm64) and it’ll run on any macOS/Mac OS X version ever made.

I’m surprised Ubuntu wasn’t using systemd-timesyncd. It seems like something they’d like based on the prefix.

OP is presenting to Adobe.com with an inability to combine two PDFs and a lack of subscription fatigue.

I’ve used Little Snitch on macOS, but I agree that a closed-source blob won’t fly on Linux. OpenSnitch exists, though I haven’t tried that one.

Can I just do an apt remove —purge systemd-ageverificationd and call it a day, or do I need to edit /etc/systemd/ageverificationd/birthday.conf and call it a day?

I wound up switching to Debian. It’s stable. It works. It lets me tinker and upgrade some packages without compromising the whole system.

My only gripe is that OS upgrades are a manual process. I miss Ubuntu’s do-release-upgrade command, though following a process isn’t hard.

Agreed. I use Secure Boot on my Linux systems with my own keys. Let’s not confuse it with Restricted Boot, which is awful.

Nah, he Base4017’d it. That’s Base64 plus all the emojis. It’s actually quite efficient.

Good question. It seems like Debian has been speeding up a bit. The software is still a bit older, but it’s not too far behind compared to some other Debian releases. I switched and it’s been rock solid, despite me running a Trixie Backports system.

Username checks out.

Maybe. Some people have used SpinRite 6.1 to rewrite every sector, and that’s improved performance on some SSD’s. It rewrites each sector and restores the cell’s charge. That’s great if you need the data on there now.

Now, if you’re erasing the disk (by any means, including just a quick format C:), any sectors you use will be written with new data, so that shouldn’t matter.

Just erase the disk (securely, if you want) and get going, and it should be fine.

I’ll second this. I’ve got tons of FLACs. I let PlexAmp do the transcoding in the background.

Because I never learned Bash scripting, for whatever reason, and WSL wasn’t yet available to load on my work PC at the time.

Windows doesn’t make you oil the machine. Your move, nerd. </sarcasm>

However, with macOS 26 (Tahoe) being the final version for Intel-based Macs, Rosetta 2 will be on the chopping block afterwards.

Starting with macOS 28, Apple said that only a limited version of Rosetta 2 will remain available for older games that rely on Intel-based frameworks

Have you tried the fork VSCodium? It strips out some of the telemetry and makes it more FOSS.

I owned one for a while. It was great. But Apple will eventually drop Intel support and these can then become well-built Linux laptops.

This is a compile-time option that will tell the compiler to optimize for the CPU in your computer, rather than any CPU.

By default, the x86_64 kernel will build itself so that it can boot and run on any 64-bit Intel or AMD processor. This means it may have to ignore or check for newer instruction sets like (let’s say, totally at random) AVX512:

if (CPU supports AVX512)
    do_efficient_avx512_thing (a, b, c)
else
    a = something()
    b = some_nonavx512_prep_work()
    c = some_other_old_way_of_doing_things()
    do_nonavx512_thing (a, b, c)

So, if you have an AVX512-capable CPU, it still has to check before using that instruction. Plus, your compiled kernel will be slightly larger because it needs to contain both ways of doing the thing.

Using this option tells the compiler to compile code optimized for your current processor:

do_efficient_avx512_thing (a, b, c)

This is a gross oversimplication. The compiler will also take things into consideration such as instruction sets, scheduling, core and thread counts, big and small cores, and more.

But the tl;dr is that optimized code is smaller, faster, and maybe a teensy bit more power efficient.

The downside? If you try to boot this optimized code on an older CPU (or rarely, a newer CPU), it will eventually say “illegal instruction” and crash.