I’ve used Seafile for years just for this. I haven’t ran that on pi, but on virtual machine it runs pretty smoothly and android client is pretty hassle free.

I want to prevent myself from reinstalling my system.

Any even remotely normal file on disk doesn’t stop that, regardless of encryption, privileges, attributes or anything your running OS could do to the drive. If you erase partition table it’ll lose your ‘safety’ file too without any questions asked as on that point the installer doesn’t care (nor see/manage) on individual files on the medium. And this is exactly what ‘use this drive automatically for installation’ -option does on pretty much all of the installers I’ve seen.

Protecting myself from myself.

That’s what backups are for. If you want to block any random usb-stick installer from running you could set up a boot options on bios to exclude those and set up a bios password, but that only limits on if you can ‘accidently’ reinstall system from external media.

And neither of those has anything to do on read/copy protection for the files. If they contain sensitive enough data they should be encrypted (and backed up), but that’s a whole another problem than protecting the drive from accidental wipe. Any software based limitation concerning your files falls apart immediately (excluding reading the data if it’s encrypted) when you boot another system from external media or other hard drive as whatever solution you’re using to protect them is no longer running.

Unless you give up the system management to someone else (root passwords, bios password and settings…) who can keep you from shooting yourself on the foot, there’s nothing that could get you what you want. Maybe some cloud-based filesystem from Amazon with immutable copies could achieve that, but it’s not really practical on any level, financial very much included. And even with that (if it’s even possible in the first place, I’m not sure) if you’re the one holding all the keys and passwords, the whole system is on your mercy anyways.

So the real solution is to back up your files, verify regularly that backups work and learn not to break your things.

What’s your end goal here? You try to keep files just on that one media without any options to make copies of them? Or maintain an image which has enforced files at their directories? And against what kind of scenarios?

ACLs and SELinux aren’t useful as they can be simply bypassed by using another installation and overriding those as root, same thing with copying. Only thing I can think of, up to a degree, is to use immutable media, like CD-R, where it’s physically impossible to move files once they’re in place and even that doesn’t prevent copying anything.

Geeqie is a quick one to go trough photos and it groups RAW+JPG as a single item on preview, so even a few hundred photos are quickly ran trough with just a keyboard. I’m not sure on how well it manages tags as I don’t use it for tagging, but it’s most likely in your distros repository so testing it out is quick.

Then do sudo apt install xfce4 and sudo apt purge cinnamon* muffin* nemo*.

It’s been a while since I installed xfce4 on anything, but if things haven’t changed I think the metapackage doesn’t include xfce4-goodies and some other packages, so if you’re missing something it’s likely that you just need to ‘apt install xfce4-whatever’. Additionally you can keep cinnamon around as long as you like as a kind of a backup, just change lightdm (or whatever login manager LMDE uses) to use xfce4 as default. And then there’s even lighter WM’s than XFCE, like LXDE, which is also easy to install via apt and try out if that works for you.

I understand the mindset you have, but trust me, you’ll learn (sooner or later) a habit to pause and check your command before hitting enter. For some it takes a bit longer and it’ll bite you in the butt for few times (so have backups), but everyone has gone down that path and everyone has fixed their mistakes now and then. If you want hard (and fast) way to learn to confirm your commands, use dd a lot ;)

One way to make it a bit less scary is to ‘mv <thing you want removed> /tmp’ and when you confirmed that nothing extra got removed you can ‘cd /tmp; rm -rf <thing>’, but that still includes the ‘rm -rf’ part.

Absolutely. Maybe leave Gnome/KDE out and use a lighter WM, but they’ll be just fine. Specially if they have 8GB or more RAM. I suppose those have at least dual core processors, so that won’t be a (huge) bottleneck either. You can do a ton of stuff with those beyond just web browsing, like programming/text editing/spreadsheets and so on. I’d guess that available RAM is the biggest bottleneck on what they can do, specially if you like to open a ton of tabs on your browser.

Make sure you have package alsa-utils installed and try to run alsamixer. That’ll show all the audio devices your system detects. Maybe you’re lucky and it’s just that some volume control is muted and if you’re not it’ll give you at least some info to work with. Majority of audio devices don’t need any additional firmware to work and they almost always work out of the box just fine. What’s the hardware you’re running? Maybe it is something exotic which isn’t installed by default (which I doubt).

And additionally, what you’re trying to play audio from? For example MP3’s need non-free codecs to be installed and without them your experience is “a bit” limited on audio side of things.

They both use upstream version number (as in the number software developer gave to the release). They might additionally have some kind of revision number related to packaging or some patch number, but as a rule of thumb, yes, the bigger number is the most recent. If you should use that as a only variable on deciding which to install is however another discussion. Sometimes dpkg/apt version is preferred over snap regardless of version differences, for example to save a bit of disk space, but that depends on a ton of different things.

Mullvad (apparenlty, first time I’ve heard from the service) uses DNS over TLS and I don’t think that the current GUI version has the option to enable it. Here’s a quickly googled howto from Fedora on how to enable it on your system. If that doesn’t help search for ‘NetworkManager DOT’ or ‘DNS over TLS’.

Imperial, adjustable, left handed wrench. Or left handed any common hand tool (hammer, spanner, screwdriver…). Muffler bearing. Light bulb for the crank case. Blinker fluid. The list goes on.

And, within reason, I think those are pretty decent pranks. No one gets hurt, many get a good laugh out of it, including the one looking for a two headed hammer if executed properly.

Estonia alone can’t, but with Finland, Sweden, Poland and eventually Germany, Denmark and Norway joining the fight russians have pretty slim chances to operate from Petersburg if they’re willing to challenge NATO. The bay is narrow enough that both finns and estonians need to be careful not to shoot each other across it with just modern artillery. That combined with pretty capable airforce and navy from Finland and Sweden says that Baltic sea is off limits to any kind of military actions. And additionally, an F-35 from Finland and a Gripen from Sweden could both reach St. Petersburg in about 30 minutes, so good luck to getting anything out of the harbor before it’s out of order.

I don’t know where the Debian project is based.

Trademark and at least some copyright for the project is owned by an entity in the New York and Ian Murdoch who started the project was US citizen. But calling the whole project as USA based is wrong, it is based ‘on the internet’ as even the core team is spread across the globe.

Wikipedia lists a total of 14000 tanks, reserves included, (majority being T-72 and modernized variants) + unknown number of T-54 and T-64. I suppose even the russians don’t know how many of those are in combat ready shape by any stretch, but apparently at least a half (not counting ones they’ve bought from elsewhere).

So, as the war has been going for two years that 1-2 years more sounds plausible. If current news are anything to go by I’m quite afraid that Ukraine doesn’t have that much unless they really start receiving reinforcements from Europe and US. And should Ukraine collapse it would take 5-10(ish) years for Russia to rebuild enough hardware to do the very same thing with some other country. Maybe not with a NATO country and maybe not one the global west is as interested as Ukraine, but it could (or would, depending on which prediction you want to follow) happen.

Plus the wild card of China, who no doubt are following the situation and spesifically western response pretty closely. I wonder what happened to those 800 000 artillery shells Czechs promised to gather…

According to minusrus they’ve lost 7193 tanks out of 3300 Russia had before the war started. I sincerely hope that the article is correct, but so far they’ve been able to replace lost hardware with a decent rate with manufacturing and presumably purchasing from their allies.

One can hope that the current massive attack ends with the Swan Lake on Russian tv’s, but right now I’m more worried if Ukraine can hold the lines long enough for that to happen. They really need reinforcements, it’s pretty difficult to fight a war without ammunition.

I’m tempted to say systemd-ecosystem. Sure, it has it’s advantages and it’s the standard way of doing things now, but I still don’t like it. Journalctl is a sad and poor replacement from standard log files, it has a ton of different stuff which used to be their separate own little things (resolved, journald, crontab…) making it pretty monolithic thing and at least for me it fixed a problem which wasn’t there.

Snapcraft (and flatpack to some extent) also attempts to fix a non-existing problem and at least for me they have caused more issues than any benefits.

It’s been a while (few years actually) since I even tried, but bluetooth headsets just won’t play nicely. You either get the audio quality from a bottom of the barrel or somewhat decent quality without microphone. And the different protocol/whatever isn’t selected automatically, headset randomly disconnects and nothing really works like it does with my cellphone/windows-machines.

YMMV, but that’s been my experience with my headsets. I’ve understood that there’s some propietary stuff going on with audio codecs, but it’s just so frustrating.

I’ve ran into that with one shitty vendor (I won’t/can’t give any details beyond this) lately. They ‘support’ deb-based distributions, but specially their postinst-scripts don’t have any kind of testing/verification on the environment they’re running in and it seems to find new and exiting ways to break every now and then. I’m experienced (or old) enough with Linux/Debian that I can go around the loopholes they’ve left behind, but in our company there’s not too many others who have sufficient knowledge on how deb-packages work.

And they even either are dumb or play one when they claim that their packages work as advertised even after I sent them their postinst-scripts from the package, including explanations on why this and that breaks on a system which doesn’t have graphical environment installed (among other things).

But that’s absolutely fault on the vendor side, not Debian/Linux itself. But it happens.

You can’t just tell the cops “no but seriously, I’ve been practicing with an air gun in my backyard, trust me bro”.

Obviously, but you conveniently didn’t quote the part where I said you need a signed proof from a licensed weapons trainer.

But really, can you find me a single one who’d certify you without having been a part of the association? In the current climate? Seriously?

I can. Multiple even, a phone call away. But in here you just of course have to ‘trust me bro’, I’m not going to prove that just for the sake of random conversation over the internet.

Good luck getting a pistol for execution as a farmer without being a hunter. Regards, someone who was born in a village of hunters and farmers.

I know several. Coming from someone currently living in a village of hunters and farmers. Obviously many of them are hobbyist hunters as well, but you don’t get a permit for 9mm pistol for duck hunting.

I’m getting more and more doubtful that you actually have a license for any sort of firearm.

I don’t care. The law, and my very real world experience, says that you don’t need to be a part of any association or club to get a permit regardless of the weapon type, as long as you otherwise qualify to have one.

Because ranges do have weapons you can go shoot with

Some do, but that’s the main attraction on their business where they loan weapons and let you shoot with them. Vast majority of ranges however are just a place in the middle of nowhere, some even without any kind of electricity and often they go days or even weeks without anyone visiting. Most of those places don’t have any kind of winter maintenance either. So if you were forced to leave your firearm there there would be very little of stopping someone malicious visiting with heavy tools and breaking into every safe on site.

For instance, if you want to shoot moose. I’m not sure if exceptions exist, but I’m pretty sure felling permits aren’t given to individual people, but hunting parties.

If you own enough land you can apply for an permit for yourself. You’re correct that vast majority of them are granted to parties and associations, but strictly speaking you don’t have to join one.

You need to show at least two years of shooting with a firearm. Where would you get that kind of experience if you’re not practically part of an association?

By yourself. You can train with a air pistol and all you need is to prove that you’re an active hobbyist. In practice you need to have a certified weapons trainer to prove your word and some of them might not sign the certificate if you’re not a part of their association, but it’s not a strict rule nor something required by law.

We have a freedom of association and that includes freedom of not associating with anyone. I’m not a member of any kind of sport shooting clubs as there’s none around here and that’s not a problem. Sure, you need to find out a certified trainer who trusts your shooting diary, but that’s it. And ‘valid reason’ is as good an explanation as any. Your hobby is target shooting? You can apply for a license with that. Your hobby is hunting? Same thing. You’re a farmer and need a weapon in case you need to kill one of your cows/wild hogs in case it injured itself and/or is a threat to safety? Sure. And if you happened to be a farmer in the 70’s you could get a permit for semi-automatic .22lr pistol for pest control, but I don’t think that’s a valid reason anymore.

So, with that in mind, I’d be very surprised if the gun used in today’s tragedy were illegal but as the media has already covered, it was a legally licensed firearm, so there’s no point of speculating with that any further.