My work laptop is a Dell Precision. It was a “data science” model that came with Ubuntu. Wiped Dell’s modified Ubuntu and put vanilla Ubuntu on it and now running Nixos. Works great. There was a weird period when using triple monitors with their dock had an intermittent issue on boot where resolutions and monitors were not being detected. Cause was Nvidia drivers. It eventually got resolved and it was easy enough to rollback the drivers to one that worked.
Won’t auto update but you could add the upgrade command to a login script or something.
Won’t lie, nix has a high learning curve to get the most out of it, but installing a single app is pretty simple.
Most startups I’ve applied to are Linux friendly.
I currently work for a fortune 100 and managed to get a Linux machine purchased as a “lab” machine.
I’m fully in control. IT doesn’t even know it exists. I’m not allowed on the corporate network, but I managed to get some internal corporate access through another department’s lab network (IT sanctioned) that has a VPN with a few routes to things like ticketing, time cards, and our internal wiki. Most of the stuff I need to do my job is in AWS and we are allowed to add home IPs to the security groups.
IT still gives me a MacBook. I use it like once every 6 months.
nixos-unstable is the only thing I will use currently.
I’m running bleeding edge stuff like the latest kernel, Hyprland nightly, my own “shell” built from Gnome components and lots of custom stuff using GJS (Gnome JavaScript).
If you get one, and you are free to do whatever on it, encrypt your drives like your job depends on it. I have a memorized passphrase, pin protected hardware key, and a key in TPM. No biometrics.
As far as other nice things to have:
I work in software dev as FYI. For the few issues I have, my team has more issues getting stuff working consistently on macOS for our project. I used that as a justification when requesting the laptop: my dev environment should closely match our runtime environment. Most of that is moot now since we use Nix flakes in our repos for local dev envs.
Yeah I don’t want locally deleted media (to free up space) to sync those deletions to my remote.
My crypted remotes wrap a B2 Backblaze one which doesn’t delete, just hides. Periodically I go clean it up.
You are correct, fixed!
https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync. Not in any app store and have to download and install from GitHub.
It is an Android wrapper around rsync rclone.
Setup a remote, setup tasks, and setup triggers. Mine syncs every night. It supports encrypting with your own keys. Large number of remotes supported from self-hosted to cloud.
I use rclone and the Round Sync Android client.
Supports a ton of back ends, self hosted, and commercial options. You can transparently encrypt with private keys you control.
I personally use B2 Backblaze for storage.
My phone backs up every night and Round Sync pushes them to B2. On my desktop I can mount as a volume. I can also access my storage from my phone going the other direction.
I’ve done the same using SFTP if I don’t want the overhead of persistent file storage.
It does not support indexing or previews for searching or finding say a photo. You can put whatever you want for data. So I have caches, indexes, and thumbnails that work in Linux. I can’t really make use of those on my phone though.
Rclones bisync feature is also a bit dangerous when I tried to use it a year ago. I more than once “deleted” everything. B2 doesn’t delete by default, just hides, so I was able to recover. I now do unidirectional syncs from my machines to different buckets until I’m motivated to investigate a proper 3-way merge solution.
This is news to me. That said, I’m usually one generation behind but upgrade every 2 years as my phone is usually EOL for software updates by the end of the period. I try to time it so I can get a replacement paid outright at mid-range prices.
With the Pixel 8 introducing extended software support, I’ll have to dig more into this.
I’m on Graphene. Mullvad is only 1% for me with 16h30min since last on a charge. I’m at 56% with 1h30m screen time.
I used GPS as I did some driving with maps and my music app accounting for 29% of my battery usage.
I throw my phone on the charger at night figuring battery tech and software management is good enough.
Are you WiFi or mobile? I get shitty mobile service so if I’m off WiFi my battery tends to go to shit. The VPN usually accounts for more as I assume it keeps reconnecting.
Oh nice! I’ll have to dig into that. Wonder if its an implementation issue across vendors. I was always under the impression that DHCPv6 was the common convention if not static.
Ok. So a device didn’t get a dhcp address? No problem… It creates it’s open IP address and starts talking and try to get out on internet on its own…
Its not that different from a conceptual point of view. Your router is still the gate keeper.
Home router to ISP will usually use DHCPv6 to get a prefix. Sizes vary by ISP but its usually like a /64. This is done with Prefix Delegation.
Client to Home Router will use either SLACC, DHCPv6, or both.
SLACC uses ICMPv6 where the client asks for the prefix (Router Solicitation) and the router advertises the prefix (Router Advertisement) and the client picks an address in it. There is some duplication protection for clients picking the same IP, but its nothing you have to configure. Conceptually its not that different from DHCP Request/Offer. The clients cannot just get to the internet on their own.
SLACC doesn’t support sending stuff like DNS servers. So DHCPv6 may still be used to get that information, but not an assigned IP.
Just DHCPv6 can also be used, but SLACC has the feature of being stateless. No leases or anything.
The only other nuance worth calling out is interfaces will pick a link local address so it can talk to the devices its directly connected to over layer 3 instead of just layer 2. This is no different than configuring 169.254.1.10/31 on one side and 169.254.1.11/31 on the other. These are not routed, its just for two connected devices to send packets to each other. This with Neighbor Discovery fills the role of ARP.
There is a whole bunch more to IPv6, but for a typical home network these analogies pretty much cover what you’d use.
In nineteen ninety eight the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer’s table.
I’m kind of curious how late gen X and millennials will be at that age in regards to tech.
I work in software dev. I’ve interviewed 2 CS grads who did their whole degree on an iPad while acting as if its an accomplishment.
My engineers also religiously use ChatGPT. It has a tell in that all its code comments start with a capital letter without punctuation. All their merge requests where coding conventions were not followed and “help I’m stuck” non-working code has these comments.
They are super smart and hard workers. They just lack the experience of needing to figure shit out without aide because it didn’t exist.
As long as their isn’t some mass cognitive decline for that generation, I think there might be a dip in general technical knowledge when millennials that had to figure things out check out and all that’s left are those who want to understand the tech they use.
And track this stuff in git so you don’t need to remember how you did it when you inevitably forget, lol.
I use Nix, even on my Ubuntu machines, to install tooling in my user profile.
Nixpkgs unstable stays pretty up to date. The few I want something on release day or bleeding edge nightlies, I override the derivation source. I use nvfetcher to pull the latest release or head of the default branch as part of my update routine.
I’m pretty new to Nix, so its been slow integrating into my workflow, but I plan to start integrating flake’s into my repos. My team seems to have constant issues with keeping their tooling up to date which breaks things locally from time to time.
If the curriculum format teaches students to be test takers, I’d give them extra points for working smarter.
If my job gave me work while on my vacation, I’d be talking to the labor board if they didn’t pay me at my consultation rates.
Anecdotal, but I only see OpenWRT out of the two in commercial products which hints to me its better supported (e.g., security patches and feature support).
Kevin Sussman is going to do the prequel/reboot.
Disk encryption, computer login, and password manager are pass phrase + random characters stored on a pin protected OnlyKey and/or Mooltipass.
Regular passwords are just random characters up to min(max_len, 128)
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