With Linux filesystem hierarchies you’re going to run into a lot of history, conventions, quasi-standards and simply deprecated implementations.

It’s a problem of “there’s no bad way to do it so all options are equally fine”. From this arose some “guidelines” about /bin and /usr/bin, /var, etc. but few strict rules.

For a long time there was no /media. In the '90s/2000’s you would mount your CD-ROM and floppies in /mnt (e.g. /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/floppy). That was awkward as we started wanting auto-mounted things and wanted to do it from user-space. So /media/username was created to allow you to mount things with your ownership.

If it’s something you want permanently mounted but not part of a pool you can put it under any location you like really. I like locations under /var as historically /var is used for things that “vary”. You could just mount it in your $HOME if it’s something you’re going to use as a user rather than with a service.

I have a “/exports” dir for NFS mounts (e.g. /export/media, /export/storage, etc.). Just keeps it tidy and in one location.

The important thing is to use a standard that works for you and makes sense. There’s not a lot of bad places to mount things. If “/mnt” makes sense for you then go for it.

Seems like a joke. 🙂

online banking shouldn’t be done whilst you’re sharing a browser with tiktok (as an example)

Why? Be specific because unless something has gone horribly wrong sites can’t access data from other sites or tabs unless they’re cooperating. In which case they do so with session data.

And you could simply have a separate Firefox profile rather than spinning up an entire virtual machine.

This sounds ridiculous. So much work and overhead just to usea web browser?

Scanners and printers are one area of computing that have always sucked the most relative to other things. They’re better these days but they’re still the one thing I expect to fail on a regular basis.

Where one of X, Y or Z is “update your system” and “ensure you’re using the latest drivers.”

I genuinely don’t find Windows easier to use. And troubleshooting Windows problems is a friggin’ nightmare compared to Linux.

Gaming has been the biggest change in the last 10 years or so. Mostly thanks to Steam. It’s easier to game on Linux these days than it is MacOS! It’s crazy.

Everything was harder back then - even when using Windows. But you had to be a real masochist to run Linux.

Computers were still quite new that most people had no real use for them beyond “work things”. Only nerds really used them for anything else. “Do you have an email address” isn’t a question you ask today.

“Kids these days” don’t realize how easy they have it when it comes to just general comparability. There weren’t a lot of standards yet and vendors had proprietary drivers and offered no support AT ALL for “lye nux”. You had to do a ton of research and fiddling to figure out if there was any support for your specific version of a specific chip used by any peripheral you used. And then to discover that you had to patch your kernel to add a driver that somebody had bodged together. So now you were running your own fun custom-kernel so you could get full-duplex rather than simplex audio! But it works!

Like - lets say today you want to buy an external IDE drive controller to plug in some old drives to for backup. You to to Amazon, search “USB external IDE enclosure” and buy the cheapest one you find. It probably works unless it’s defective. In '95 USB and Firewire were in their infancy so you would probably buy a serial or parallel port device. You would need to find whether Linux supported the specific version of the thing you wanted to buy, what tools there would be for it, etc. There was no standard “bulk storage device” driver that you could rely on or hope the vendor would implement. Even if you were an early adopter and got a USB or Firewire device it might have some “basic” functionality that works with OSS drivers but you couldn’t use all of it.

Vendors back then also shipped their own software with things, not just drivers. It was always just the absolute worst crap that was buggy as shit. But it would do a lot of the heavy lifting in working with their device. Like any Creative Labs audio player you wanted to get working. Sure it used USB but it didn’t just mount as storage device, you needed to use the worst GUI ever put before mankind to use it (under Windows). Under Linux you had to find a specific tool that would support pushing/pulling media from it. These days it would just mount as a drive automatically and you’d use standard desktop tools to interact with it.

Even with DOS/Windows you’d buy a game and as you came home from the store with it in a box wonder “will this work on my computer and how long will I need to mess with it?” I had to configure a specific CD-ROM driver to be used by DOS just to run Tie Fighter vs. X-Wing for example. Had a special boot floppy just for that game since that driver didn’t work with literally anything else I had.

Hardware just generally didn’t “auto configure”. “Plug 'n Play” was still very much in its infancy and you often had to manually configure hardware and install special drivers just for a particular card or peripheral.

IRQ 7 DMA 220. I probably just triggered some folks. If you were setting up a “Sound Blaster or compatible” then you had to know what interrupt it used (7) and what address it was on on the direct-memory bus (220). And you hoped there wasn’t a conflict with something else. If there was then there would be a DIP switch you could use to change the base memory address or IRQ from the default. But you were telling your software where to find the card.

USB was a f’ing game changer for peripherals. Serial and parallel ports were so slow and obnoxious to use. Before that there was no real way to “probe” the bus to discover what was there unless you knew exactly what you were looking for (there’s no lsusb for serial ports). So you just guessed at the driver you need and “modprob foo” hoping it worked.

It’s amazing what 20ish years of just developing standards has done.

If you want a taste of that world I highly recommend LGR on YouTube. He’s mostly Windows focused but look for videos where he tries out “oddware” to see how often he has trouble getting things to work on period hardware using the vendor-supplied software even. Then multiply that by 100x for Linux. :-)

If you’re generating UUIDs from different languages, libraries, etc. you want to be sure there doing it the same way.

You’re not kidding.

Go home Mr Stallman.

This is the only one I seriously doubt.

Really? Almost all of it is wrong.

I think this is a bit of a backwards way to look at it. If there is a good reason to learn a language then people will.

Not that this platform is necessarily that reason.

This is a good approach. I’ve always found it beneficial to learn “the standard things” than relying on a customized setup.

I’ve seen some people absolutely lost when they login to a system without 500 custom aliases on it…

I love UUID keys. Only drawback is they can be a bit difficult to share, but they solve so many other problems. Being able to generate them client-side makes batch inserting with dependencies easier, being globally unique means you can copy data between environments, never needing to “fix” a sequence again… So many up-sides.

OMG, are zines coming back?

Love it BTW…

The android nextcloud client works great if you’re willing to setup/maintain a nextcloud server.

JavaFX was removed from the main Java spec in Java 11. Even the Oracle Java distribution. It’s a separate project now and is pretty easy to include as as jar if needed. In fact there are non-Oracle builds of the JVM that do add it (there are Zulu builds that put it back in). Because Java is now GPL. Anyone can create a build and include what they want.

OpenJDK is the reference implementation now. Biggest differences I’ve seen are in the default list of trusted CAs.