When I change devices or hit file size limits, I’ll compress and send things to my NAS.

Whaaatt!?!!? That sounds like you don’t use git? You should use git. It is a requirement for basically any job and there is no reason to not use it on every project. Then you can keep your projects on a server somewhere, on your NAS if you want else something like github/gitlab/bitbucket etc. That way it does not really matter about your local projects, only what is on the remote and with decent backups of that you don’t need to constantly archive things from your local machine.

It doesn’t technically have drivers at all or go missing. All supporting kernel modules for hardware are always present at the configuration level.

This isn’t true? The Linux kernel has a lot of drivers in the kernel source tree. But not all of them. Notably NVIDIA drivers have not been included before. And even for the included drivers they may or may not be compiled into the kernel. They can and generally are compiled with the kernel but as separate libraries that are loaded at runtime. These days few drivers are compiled in and most are dynamically loaded depending on what hardware is present on the system. Distros can opt to split these drives up into different packages that you may or may not have installed - which is common for less common hardware.

Though with the way most distros ship drivers they don’t tend to spontaneously stop working. Well, with the exception of Arch Linux which deletes the old kernel and modules during an upgrade which means the current running kernel cannot find its drivers and stops dynamically loading them - which often results in hotplug devices like USB to stop working if you try to plug them in again after the drivers get unloaded (and need a reboot to fix as that boots into the latest kernel that has its drivers present).

I don’t get it? They seem to be arguing in favor of bootc over systemd because bootc supports both split /usr and /usr merge? But systemd is the same. There is really nothing in systemd that requires it one way or another even in the linked post about systemd it says:

Note that this page discusses a topic that is actually independent of systemd. systemd supports both systems with split and with merged /usr, and the /usr merge also makes sense for systemd-less systems.

I don’t really get his points for it either. Basically boils down to they don’t like mutable root filesystem becuase the symlinks are so load bearing… but most distros before use merge had writable /bin anyway and nothing is stopping you from mounting the root fs as read-only in a usr merge distro.

And their main argument /opt and similar don’t follow /usr merge as well as things like docker. But /opt is just a dumping ground for things that don’t fir the file hierarchy and docker containers you can do what you want - like any package really nothing needs to follow the unix filesystem hierarchy. I don’t get what any of that has to do with bootc nor /usr merge at all.

TLDR; yes it does affect security. But quite likely not by any meaningful amount to be worth worrying about.

Any extra package you install is extra code on your system that has a chance to include vulnerabilities and thus could be an extra attack vector on your system. But the chances that they will affect you are minuscule at best. Unless you have some from of higher threat model then I would not worry about it. There are far more things you would want to tackle first to increase your security that have far larger effects than a second desktop environment being installed.

So, why wait for windows 10 EOL? If you are already mostly on Linux and are planning on getting rid of the last bits anyway? If you really need to you can always reinstall windows on a second disk or in a VM later on if you really need to - no real need to preemptively do that if you dont plan on using it.

If you have everything you need backed up you can reinstall on a new hard drive and restore everything you need. So you should not be completely fucked. Just an inconvenience you might have to go through. You will lose the stuff not backed up so if any of that is a pain to get again it might be more painful to restore everything.

Others have said some thing you might want to try. But having a spare disk you can swap to is never a bad idea. Disks to fail and you should plan for what to do when they do. Backing up your data is a good first step.

I would say it is not a bad idea to just get a new disk now and go through the process of restoring everything anyway - you can treat it like your disk has failed and do what you would need to do to restore. With the ability to swap back when you need to.

This is a good way to find things you might have missed in your backups.

Not if you have backed up your data. You have a backup of your data right?

Why wait? Start using Linux friendly software in your day to day workflows. Then start to dual boot Linux with your current system and start using it more and more. By the time windows 10 reaches EOL you will know if you still need a Windows install or not.

And then relabel all the old standards when they create a new one so every generation you need to figure-out what al the new names mean.

Linux makes up exactly one package on a so-called Linux system.

True, it was a poor proxy for what I really meant - which was the amount of code that my system runs. Linux as a project is growing quite fast these days and is getting bigger and bigger. But the number of GNU tools I use (and thus their code that I use) is growing smaller and smaller.

Musl, systemd, Freedesktop, etc. were never OS projects. GNU and Linux are OSes.

What the hell makes a project an OS project? What even is an OS - that is a debate as old as computers. What makes GNU more of an OS than systemd or musl or anything else? GNU is not a complete OS on its own. It has failed to meet that goal for decades. Is it just because it claims that title? Are the other projects just not ambitious enough? Hell why are we not raising pitchforks at GNU for being a all encompassing project that wants to consume everything like everyone complains systemd is trying to do?

The lines drawn here are meaningless and arbitrary. GNU is no more important to my systems as any other project mentioned here and makes up no more of my system then they do. I don’t see why so many are obsessed with singling out GNU and explicitly excluding everything else. It is a pointless distinction created by a guy that was pissy that his pet project was not getting the attention he thought it deserved.

Why not also recognize systemd, or musl, or kde or gnome or any of the other millions of non GNU packages that are needed to make up a complete OS.

Fuck if I am going to rattle off all my installed packages every time I want to mention what OS I am running. Linux is good enough. People know what you mean when you say it. And these days GNU makes up less and less of the core packages that most distros run anymore.

Also the copy pasta that this all stems from explicitly calls out eliminating nonfree programs which most popular distros do not do these days:

Making a free GNU/Linux distribution is not just a matter of eliminating various nonfree programs. Nowadays, the usual version of Linux contains nonfree programs too. These programs are intended to be loaded into I/O devices when the system starts, and they are included, as long series of numbers, in the “source code” of Linux. Thus, maintaining free GNU/Linux distributions now entails maintaining a free version of Linux too.

And they even link to a vanishingly small number of approved free GNU/Linux distros. Of which non of the mainstream distros are listed. So can we really label anything not on that list as GNU/Linux?

The problem with bash scripts is they tend to explode in unexpected ways when thing don’t go as intended. This could be one of the command you run returning some expected or not output which might work now but might not in the future. Best to program bash defensively.

Remove the loop and sleep from the script you created so it just runs and exits.

Then create a file at /etc/systemd/system/battery-alarm.service with the following:

[Unit]
Description="Sound alarm when battery is low"

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/battery-alarm.sh # point this to your script

Then create a file at /etc/systemd/system/battery-alarm.timer with the following:

[Unit]
Description="Run battery-alarm.service every 2 mins"

[Timer]
OnUnitActiveSec=2m
Unit=battery-alarm.service

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then sudo systemctl enable --now helloworld.timer to start and enable the timer on boot.

This will be a little more robust then your current script. It works without the user needing to log in. And there is nothing to get killed so will always trigger. The current script will just silently stop working if it ever gets killed or crashes.

Worth running shell scripts though https://www.shellcheck.net/ (has a cli as well). Finds lots of common issues that can blow up scripts when input is not what you expect. With links to why they make the suggestions they do.

Line 4:
        battery_level=`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity`
                      ^-- SC2006 (style): Use $(...) notation instead of legacy backticks `...`.

Did you mean: (apply this, apply all SC2006)
        battery_level=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity)
 
Line 5:
        battery_status=`cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status`
                       ^-- SC2006 (style): Use $(...) notation instead of legacy backticks `...`.

Did you mean: (apply this, apply all SC2006)
        battery_status=$(cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status)
 
Line 6:
        if [ $battery_status = "Discharging" ] && [ $battery_level -lt 21 ];
             ^-- SC2086 (info): Double quote to prevent globbing and word splitting.
                                                    ^-- SC2086 (info): Double quote to prevent globbing and word splitting.

Did you mean: (apply this, apply all SC2086)
        if [ "$battery_status" = "Discharging" ] && [ "$battery_level" -lt 21 ];

Probably nothing. This is more steamdeck related stuff since the SteamOS is based on ArchLinux. And even then, it does not mean much for SteamDeck users. They wont notice much at all really. This might help with development a bit on valves end. The big news is really for ArchLinux users and maintainers which will see more effort in the development of that distro.

There is some wild speculation that maybe this makes arm for Arch Linux more official in the future. Which is based of the other recent news that Valve are creating an ARM emulation layer for running games on ARM devices. Which means maybe they are working on an ARM device and maybe need to start working on getting ARM support for Arch. Though again this is all wild speculation.

The Steamdeck was motivation for the collaboration - since it is based on Arch Linux. But as a desktop client they only support ubuntu officially which makes level 1 tech support easier as supporting every distro can be very complex.

Arch normally immediately updates to the latest version of every program

This is not true though. Arch packages new program versions as soon as they can - for popular stuff this happens quickly but not everything updates quickly. And when they do publish a new package it goes to the testing repo for a short time before being promoted to the stable repos. If there is a problem with the package that they notice it will be held back until it can be solved. There is not a huge amount of testing that is done here as that is very time consuming and Arch do not have enough man power for this. But they also do not release much broken things at all. I have seen other distros like ubuntu cause far more havoc with a broken update then Arch ever has.

The devs from ΔV: Rings of Saturn give a completely different story. Yeah, most bug reports come from Linux - but platform specific ones a vanishingly rare: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/qeqn3b/despite_having_just_58_sales_over_38_of_bug/

Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

Not to mention the quality of the reports from the Linux users was vastly more details and useful to them.

One of the fabricated battery pouch cells was even able to work after being folded and cut off. “That proves its high safety for practical application,” the researchers emphasized.

If you can cut it in half and it still works I doubt piercing it will do much.