It was a glass cube maybe 10 feet across, and it was crammed full of people. Completely full, like those Japanese trains. And there was a crowd of people outside waiting to get in.

I went outside. It was pretty nice, there was no one around.

The small web still exists, largely exactly the same as it always has. It's just not linked on reddit/Facebook/google/etc.

The old internet is still there, it's just buried by miles of corporate excrement. If you go looking you'll find neat weird blogs, message boards and forums, honest-to-god webrings, and more.

The internet as a whole isn't shit, the six biggest websites owned by rich megalomaniacal assholes are shit. Those same assholes would also really like you to believe that the entire internet consists of their six websites and literally nothing else.

Which really isn't too much different, docking ports were by and large PCI with extra sauce

But you still get the raw unadulterated power of the archwiki, and the same full control of the internals. It's a great middle ground between Ubuntu and rawdogging pacstrap.

Then again you still have the slightly heretical option of running Manjaro but using the unstable repos so you're getting the full Arch experience

I guess you could make a new user to run the harness under and give it no-password sudo rights for select commands? That doesn't feel like a great solution but it's the only thing I can come up with

But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.

Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.

Personally I have never, ever heard that concept referred to by the initialism. Granted, it's almost never come up in my circles, so... shrug

I wish I could have paid $100 less to not have an entire computer running a full WiFi stack.

Though shockingly, the owner's manual includes MQTT API documentation. If I really cared to, I could put it on a VLAN and have HomeAssistant talk to it.

I am very smart.

/s

Why should I use your software with oceans of padding and unlabeled hieroglyphic icons from which you've removed 99% of features? I can just do it myself now. Ostensibly, yes, the software is "worse" in some technical sense, but better in the ways that actually matter: it can be used it can do a job. It no longer exists as a stage for the author's minimalism fetish or as a vehicle for some pointless middle-manager's promotion package.

Software is a tool, it's supposed to be useful and do tasks to help the user. We've spent so much time, money, and brainpower this past decade making software as unusable and unhelpful as possible. Is it any wonder that when computer literacy has hit a huge low that people immediately and with gusto jump onto the "make your own software the way you always wanted it to be" machine?

Whether good or bad, this is a pretty natural reaction to the previously-modern state of software. The industry decided to only publish software that can only be used One Correct Way, and physically prevented any use other than the single happy path by stripping out any feature that wasn't absolutely critical. If a user wanted something other than the author's personalized emacs file, fuck them, that's their problem. We decided to only publish UIs that cannot be understood by humans and HOW DARE anyone suggest ultra-minimalist UIs that are 85% whitespace are bad, what are you a Luddite?! And the huge crew of self-entitled "well just fork it if you hate it so much" crew.

We did this to ourselves. We made software exclusive, elitist, and are shocked when the masses go "okay, I'll make my own"

Whether a bug is exploitable is an entirely separate category of unknowable, because seemingly-innocuous bugs quite often have very deep and very subtle implications that when combined with another innocuous bug, result in an RCE or PE.

Therefore, it's sensible to treat all bugs as potential threat vectors unless and until proven otherwise. Which brings us full circle: state 3, all bugs being public, is probably the safest thing because nobody can know if a bug is in state 1 or 2.

- A bug exists and nobody knows

- A bug exists and some people know

- A bug exists and everyone knows

As an outside observer, there is no way for you to determine if a bug is in state one or two, you only know once it's in the third state.

Which is the entire problem here. Having the bug be known to everyone is a vastly improved state over being known to a few. Yes, the bug being completely unknown is better than being known to a few, but there is no way to ever know if that's the case.

From the outside, known to none and known to a few are indistinguishable, and thus both states are the worst possible case. The only remedy is to make the bug known to everyone such that it cannot be covertly exploited.

Trades can pay very well and frequently require nothing more than on the job training.

You think you need college for the same reason you equate "job" with survival. These are not universal truths, not even in capitalist hellscape America. It might be harder but it is in no way a requirement. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.