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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2023

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  • Didn’t really hop much, started with Windows, went on to OSX, got annoyed at it and ran Arch in a VM until I was comfortable with it, then went bare-metal with it.

    Happy Arch user for some years now, though recently I’m using Fedora for work and I really like it. It’s not a good fit for some machines I’m running which need a lot of customisations to run properly.




    • I usually use bash/python/perl if I can be sure that it will be available on all systems I intend to run the scripts. A notable exception for this would be alpine based containers, there it’s nearly exclusively #!/bin/sh.
    • Depending on the complexity I will either have a git repository for all random scripts I need and not test them, or a single repo per script with Integrationtests.
    • Depends, if they are specific to my setup, no, otherwise the git repository is public on my git server.
    • Usually no, because the servers are not always under my direct control, so the scripts that are on servers are specific to that server/the server fleet.
    • Regarding your last question in the list: You do you, I personally don’t, partly because of my previous point. A lot of servers are “cattle” provisioned and destroyed on a whim. I would have to sync those modifications to all machines to effectively use them, which is not always possible. So I also don’t do this on any personal devices, because I don’t want to build muscle memory that doesn’t apply everywhere.




  • If someone comes to me I’m more than happy to answer questions and help, but I won’t bring it up. People don’t like being told that their tool of choice is “bad” “not optimal” or anything like that. Even if it’s only their choice because they grew up with it or don’t want to learn anything new. And they still need to learn if it’s more than browsing the web.

    Also I really don’t want to be the one they come running to once something doesn’t work the way they expected - or not at all. I don’t have the time nor the inclination to be tech support for my family and half of my friends.






  • Is anything keeping you from just reinstalling the system and mounting your home into it again (maybe the majority of your customisations live in /home too)? I feel that is a lot less of a hassle than copying files around.

    In principle you should be able to restore your system by just copying all of the relevant files from the backup to their correct partitions - it can’t really get any worse if it doesn’t work.

    For the future: A backup is only any good if you know how to restore it and tested that that actually works.

    Regarding the permissions: If you do a cp fileA.txt fileB.txt fileB.txt will normally be owned by the creating user. So a sudo cp ... will create the files as root.

    I would personally use rsync with a few additional options, archive among them. This way the fs is restored exactly as it was. But that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if the files weren’t copied that way too.