Linux doesn’t really know about drives, it knows about partitions and mount points.

Obviously this is a simplification, but in general it’s close enough. It also could well be your problem - timeshift doesn’t know or care that /boot is on the same physical drive as the rest of your system: if it’s a different partition, it’s separate.

It’s a little more than 100€

It’s half as much again! If your budget is that flexible you really should have mentioned it in the original post so that people could give you a wider range of options.

Translate it up by a couple of orders of magnitude and you get “I want to buy a car, I have €10,000 to spend” … “I found one for €15,000, it’s a little bit more but …”

It’s a great story. It’s also completely Fake News. DIdn’t happen at all.

Without a published POC there’s a slightly longer window before clueless script kiddies start having a go at exploiting the vulnerability, though.

It’s a very flexible language so can find a niche almost anywhere. I know of fintech companies that use it extensively for their back end data processing systems, and I’ve seen some really interesting stuff done with Clojure and Apache Kafka. They’re a good fit for each other - Clojure, as a lisp, is optimised for processing infinite lists of things and Kafka topics can be easily conceptualised as an infinite stream of data.

Also, when combined with Clojurescript, it provides a single language that can be used full-stack, so could drop in anywhere that you might otherwise use Node.

But I think one of the best things about it is the way it forces you to re-evaluate your approach to development. It’s a completely functional language so you have to throw away any preconceptions about OO and finding new ways to resolve old problems is one of the things that should be a joy for most developers, even if it has no practical application.

Give Clojure a go.

It’s a modern variant of lisp that runs on the JVM and has deep interoperability with Java, so you can leverage your existing knowledge of Java libraries.

But as it’s a lisp, it will have you thinking about problems in a very different way.

Not really a viable solution for many scenarios though. What if your PDF has half a dozen pages, your answer becomes really tedious. And in a lot of cases a PDF with forms is expected to be sent back to the person or company that created it once the fields have been filled in. They’re not likely to want to receive a bunch of JPEG screenshots instead.

From the sidebar

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.

Nothing there saying it’s specifically for Linux News.

You don’t need a desktop for CAD anymore.

Not for the raw processing power, but anyone doing serious CAD work is going to want at least a 21" monitor, relying on just the laptop screen is going to be difficult especially (and I speak as someone aged over 50 myself) as your eyes become less able to focus on fine details as you get older.

So OP needs to decide if they’re going to want to use the machine for other things as well, in which case a laptop + external monitor might be fine, or if it’s a dedicated work/hobby CAD machine in which case why not get the desktop + monitor.

That all seems … incredibly complicated.

Why not use fwupd? (link is the Arch wiki but should be relevant for any distro). I’ve been using fwupd to keep my Dell XPS15 BIOS updated for the last few years, with no problems at all.

I’m still struggling to understand what advantage Docker brings to the set-up.

Maybe the application doesn’t need to write anything to disk at all (which seems unlikely) but if so, then you’re not saving any disk-write cycles by using docker.

Or maybe you want it only to write to filesystems mounted from longer-life storage e.g. magnetic disk and mark the SD card filesystems as --read-only. In which case you could mount those filesystems directly in the host OS (indeed you have to do this to make them visible to docker) and configure the app to use those directly, no need for docker.

Docker has many great features, but at the end of the day it’s just software - it can’t magic away some of the foundational limitiations of system architecture.

I’m not sure why Docker would be a particularly good (or particularly bad) fit for the scenario you’re referring to.

If you’re suggesting that Docker could make it easy to transfer a system onto a new SD card if one fails, then yes that’s true … to a degree. You’d still need to have taken a backup of the system BEFORE the card failed, and if you’re making regular backups then to be honest it will make little difference if you’ve containerised the system or not, you’ll still need to restore it onto a new SD card / clean OS. That might be a simpler process with a Docker app but it very much depends on which app and how it’s been set up.

Yes, I think that ‘masquerading’ is the key bit to grasp. The MITM Proxy isn’t just intercepting the traffic, it alters the traffic as it passes through.

markdown support

If you are on (or migrate to) a server using the Glitch-Social fork of Mastodon, you’ll get markdown support. It’s a game-changer, in my opinion. (glitch-soc has lots of other nice features too, btw).

While true, I think most people’s concern is that their laptop is stolen and along with it all the access details for their email, online banking and so on.

If you’re doing things that mean you’re going to be the target of people with the knowledge, time, and technology to freeze the RAM and attempt to recover the data, you’re presumably already well aware of those (and other) dangers anyway.

systemd [is] a niche

Maybe in the wider world of all the operating systems installed on all the computers, but for Linux-based computing it is, like it or not, near ubiquitous these days. And in particular for server systems (and this is, after all, /m/selfhosted), good luck finding something that isn’t systemd-based unless you’re deliberately choosing a BSD or aiming for a system which has ever-decreasing amounts of support available.

what if I’m not using CoreOS?

Podman runs on any distro (or more strictly: any distro that uses systemd). It’s essentially a FOSS alternative to Docker.

GRUB (or any other bootloader) doesn’t care about and in fact doesn’t even know about X, Wayland, or any other userland GUI system.

There is a long abandoned (but it still runs) project called eDEX-UI (https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui) which basically provides a working, useable terminal surrounded by all sorts of the crap visual appearance of hacker terminals in the movies. Pair that with a terminal editor and you’ve almost got a movie IDE!

It’s kinda fun for a while although I’d be amazed if anyone actually used it as their main terminal emulator program. But you could.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but a good way to think about it if you’re not a programmer is to say “why do we need recipes when we can just buy a product in the store and read the ingredients list”.

Just because you know the ingredients, that doesn’t mean you know how to put them together in the right order, in the right quantities, and using the correct processes to recreate the finished product.