The watch command is very useful, for those who don’t know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not “real time” because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)

One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

The only thing missing is full fishnet tights with a girdle for Gentoo.

I just tested this on my dual monitor setup, Nobara Linux, KDE Plasma version 6.5.2 running Wayland and it worked no problem.

Set my main monitor to 150% scaling and left my side one to 100%.

Now on my setup, both monitors are 1080p, although my side one is oriented vertically, so Idk if it would act different if I had one at a completely different resolution.

Edit -

I just tested it on one of my laptops running Linux Mint Debian edition 7, (Debian 13 Trixie under the hood) with the Cinnamon desktop environment running X11 and it worked perfectly also. 4K TV set as the primary monitor scaled at 150%, the laptop’s screen as the secondary, 1080p at 100% scaling, applied the settings and it was completely fine.

Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️

“Hacking” is essentially effective and insightful tinkering. All great hackers in history have been insatiability curious about how things work.

They poke and prod and test and experiment, and every now and then, they find something interesting. Unexpected behavior, hidden code, useful bugs, etc.

Exploiting software vulnerabilities is only a small segment of hacking. Figuring out how to hook up a Raspberry Pi to your thermostat to control it remotely is hacking. Splicing a custom microcontroller into your old keyboard to give it all sorts of extra functions is hacking. Flashing a custom BIOS onto your GPU to unlock special overclocking features is hacking.

If you want to be great at “hacking” including software exploits, you need to understand computers at a deep level. You need to study electronics, logic, low level programming like Assembly and C, networking, circuits, operating systems and kernels, compilers, parsers, abstraction layers, encryption, and more.

The more concepts you learn and understand, the more interesting insights you will get from poking around, and the better you’ll get at using and developing tools to do even more advanced and interesting things.

There is no fast track, you have to take it slow and steady. Know what a computer is. Not the physical object, the abstract concept of a computer, a Von Neumann architecture, a Turing machine, what it means to be Turing complete, what is “code” and how does a static collection of tiny gates run it? The more stuff you skip, the worse you’ll be. But if all you want is the aesthetic of a “hacker” then just install Kali Linux, open the terminal and run tmux with a few panes, start btop, cmatrix, and neofetch in them. Put on a hoodie. Dim your lights and hunch over the keyboard for maximum effect.

I’m alright with this as long as the controller is easy to repair, which Valve has been pretty good about with the Steam Deck.

If swapping batteries is a fast 5-10 minute process I have to do every 5 or so years, and the batteries are widely available and reasonably priced, that’s a win in my book.

You ain’t getting one then lol.

Get ready to pay $200-$300 more than that.

Get ready to be horribly dissapointed…

300€ ??? My guy, if you think it will be anything even slightly near that price, I want to know what you’re smoking and how I can get some lol!

A new Steam Deck OLED is $650 right now. Y’all are absolutely delusional if you think Valve is gunna sell the new Steam Machine with 6x the power of a Deck for $600.

Personally, I think $800 is the absolute lowest these things will go for, and that is a stretch. Unless they are planning on cutting the price on Decks by 20-30% which would be ludicrous considering they are already selling them at a loss and making up the difference on the game sales.

Valve has already said they are pricing the Steam Machines as entry level gaming PCs. And Idk what world some people are living in, but this ain’t 2010 anymore. Entry level PCs are $750+ nowadays, unless you are buying some parts used.

I’m not happy about this. I remember back in highschool building some nice entry level gaming rigs for $500, but those days are long past. I probs won’t be getting a Steam Machine, but that’s because I am a tinkerer and I’ll just jank one together for my own use, but for somebody who wants a solid entry-level gaming PC that has a really great ecosystem around it and is no muss no fuss, the Steam Machine is a pretty good option.

My prediction: 512GB Steam Machine will be $800-$900, the 2TB one will be $1,000-$1,200.

Love to see it! I got my parents onto Linux Mint about a year ago and it’s been great for them.

Their home PC is way too old to upgrade to Windows 11, plus I didn’t want them subjected to Microsoft’s trash software and spying, so Linux it was.

Themed it similar to Windows 10, even changed the “Start” menu icon to the Windows 10 logo so my parents felt safe using it lol.

It’s built on FOSS software, Valve is a main contributer to a bunch of Linux-specific frameworks like Proton, AMD FOSS drivers, and others. This means that the FOSS world benifits from their contributions, regardless of Valve’s future contributions.

That’s the beauty and power of FOSS, it can’t be restricted or locked away, everybody gets to enjoy everybody else’s contributions, big and small.

Even if Valve totally enshitifies and tries to restrict their tech, the community will fork their projects, take the code and continue building cool stuff.

Look what happened with Terraform, the largest infrastructure as code platform in the world. They tried to close down their codebase by changing the license to a more restrictive one, and the community rebelled and forked Open Tofu, which not only has 100% backward compatibility with Terraform, but has newly developed features that terraform doesn’t have.

Same thing with Red Hat, a multi-billion dollar corpo owned and controlled by IBM, which tried to lock out devs from their codebase recently unless they were building code specifically for Red Hat Linux. Rocky and Alma Linux not only survived, but still thrive.

I could go on, but the point is that right now Valve is a fantastic force for Linux and FOSS development in the gaming space, and because they started with a largely open platform and ecosystem, that protects the community at large from future enshitification.

I will be so happy when the era of client-side anticheat is over. I think it will happen eventually, especially now that Valve is releasing the new Steam Machine and has been so successful with Proton-based gaming lately.

Plus, Windows getting so much worse and the zero days and exploits of these kernel-level anticheats will put pressure on the devs to move away from them imo.

Yeah, but think of the potential shareholder value!

…allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.

What a great idea! There aren’t any other ways to generate or store solar power, grow crops beyond daytime hours, or create good urban lighting…

Buying my copy soon!