CC “debt” that’s paid off in full every month is debt in the same sense that eating at a typical restaurant puts you in debt.

Don’t get me wrong, unmanageable CC debt is a real thing, but that’s not what we’re talking about.

*flea

Sounds like you’ve only ever used desktops and/or laptops…

Here’s January of this year. San Francisco, so pretty moderate weather — typically don’t run heat during the day, and low 60s at night (if at all) during the winter. Large temperature gradient throughout house, typically.

South facing windows gives kitchen and living room a greenhouse effect, particularly in the winter, hence the large daily temperature swings:

Good point — it is “incrementally free,” although I guess if you count tire wear and tear that’s not even true.

You’re just gatekeeping.

ThinkPad with a generator? Nothing wrong with that — maybe add LoRa, get a ham license and add some packet radio or digital modes and you have a neat disaster setup.

MacBook that you don’t want to scuff? Well, I’m not that precious with my gear, but you do you. Many Mac laptops last a very long time, and the performance of modern Apple silicon is really, really impressive — and you have UNIX out of the box. Plenty for a tech enthusiast to like.

A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.

I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

“First X of the month” at the zoo/a museum/whatever — lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike — lots of great stuff outside!

Having a CC doesn’t mean you have debt…

“Why the HELL should I have to press 2 for English?”

— bumper sticker I would see on my bike commute back in the day.

The bank doesn’t own the house, they just have a significant lien against it. Maybe a potato potato situation (how are you supposed to spell that phrase 🤔), but it is an important distinction.

Landlords can get pissed if you paint the walls/change appliances/remodel/etc., but so long as the property is properly insured (and you make your loan payments on time) the bank probably isn’t going to bother you.

Landlords can — and do — place restrictions on quiet hours, guest policy, who is allowed to live there, etc. Owning is definitely different.

Deja vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

Judging by the camera angle, OP may have been today years old when they learned this as well (I learned it well into my 30s, too).

Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.

With Windows, there is 1 current version of Windows (11), 1 “almost current” (10), 1 “outdated but you’ll maybe see it” (8.x) and only a few “you’ll probably only see this in obscure situations” versions. Linux has as many “parent” distros/package management systems (apt, rpm, pacman, etc.). This definitely complicates things, as each distro family does things slightly differently.

And we haven’t even touched the window manager/DE choices, of which there are a ton (as opposed to Windows). “Combinatorical explosion” maybe isn’t the right phrase, but you get the idea — Debian with i3wm is wildly different from Fedora Plasma.

This is all a good thing though, as Linux users tend to like the choice and flexibility — but it does mean that the “right way” to do something on Linux is very dependent on your particular setup, which isn’t the case with Windows.

(I have used Linux for the last 20+ years, and it’s definitely my preferred setup, and am lucky enough that I rarely use Windows for work, and never for personal use.)

I’m gonna try to guess the most likely LLM response to your post, trained on reddit data:

“This.”

How’d I do?

Pretty sure that’s completely acceptable in parts of northern California (source: born and raised in northern California).

And many folks have headless setups — raspberry pis, home servers, VPSs, etc. It’s kinda overkill to install a desktop environment on a headless box if the only reason you need it is so you can VNC into it for a simple task that could be done over ssh.

For some (most?) of us, we don’t have ssh access open to the world, so everything is over a VPN. So I can just use NFS over WireGuard which afaik is fairly secure, if you trust your endpoints, and works great over the Internet.

On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

That’s not true at all. You generally can’t use your distribution’s package manager to install or uninstall without elevated privileges. But you can download packages, or executables with their own installer, and unpack/install under your home directory. Or, you can compile from source, and if you ./configure’d it properly make install will put it under your home.

Standard Linux distributions don’t place restrictions on what you can and cannot execute; if it needs permissions for device access of course you’ll need to sort that out.