I need to be able to “RDP” into remote machines

Remmina, do this every day for work from my Debian system.

I also need to be able to setup a Hyper-V equivalent, to run other machines from my main laptop

Virtual box or QEMU + KVM. I use QEMU + KVM, works really well.

And for my media server (Plex), I need to understand the best way to setup a RAID5 or better across multiple drives.

Recommend Jellyfin over Plex but in either case - if you want software RAID then use mdadm, this is how the RAID5 array on my jellyfin server works. Otherwise, there are compatible drivers for some hardware with actual hardware RAID5 arrays you can look up if you have such hardware.

For reference, all my machines whether client or server run either Debian 12 or Debian 13.

Most people’s reasons in my experience demonstrate to me that they have a perception of Linux as it was 15+ years ago.

I discussed switching to Linux with a group of friends in a voice chat some time ago, most were fairly open to it, and one or two have switched since, but mainly their reasons were time constraints, not wanting to go through the process of backing up files, and finding alternative software.

One guy in particular brought up gaming, MS office, and some other particular software they used. I showed them protondb and every game they looked up was gold or higher, showed them libre office which they could not complain about since it generally works a lot nicer, and it turned out that other software was available as a .deb. After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.

Fair enough I guess, though they couldn’t really produce the reason as to why.

Generally, people just don’t like any kind of change, even if it has the potential to make them a lot happier.

True what people are saying about no ability to roll back, but if you want to install windows 10 to the device, you used to be able to buy 1 time activation keys for stupid cheap (under $10). Then you just have to flash a USB with the windows 10 installer ISO and use the key when you get to that point.

The downside of a one time activation is that if you ever brick the OS or some such, you have to buy another key and can’t reuse the original you purchased.

Yea, in my case im not sure what the impression of me was. I am single and work full time and don’t have the money or time to cook meals for 4 people let alone the dishes and stuff for that many.

Not in my experience. I guess it might depend on the brand or affect individuals differently, but I’ve been using grocery store off-brand dish soap for this for like 10 years and never had a problem.

Oh neat, I’ll have to go watch the new one when I have a chance. I recall it working quite well and being absurdly cheap - I can’t recall if he did a cost analysis. Maybe I’ll watch the old one again and then the new one haha.

Yes, that’s what I mean. I don’t pay for TV because I just put all of my media on a Jellyfin server as I also don’t want to watch ads, let alone pay to watch ads.

Ah I seem to recall a video he did about dishwashers and why the pods are bad etc. I think he may have briefly touched on making your own detergent using bar soap and borax as well as the manufacturer recommendation to put some detergent in the bottom in addition to behind the spring loaded door.

Yes but I think there is a miscommunication here.

I’m not talking about detergent/dishwashing liquid - I’m talking about liquid dish soap which I can purchase locally for about $3 to the litre and is a different thing.

Detergent/dishwashing liquid is definitely much more expensive and probably would not be great for washing hands.

Bar soap is definitely still cheaper though overall, you are correct.

True enough. I haven’t had any problems in using it myself but I supposed you could ratio it with some water or something to make it not as intense for hands.

It’s a lot cheaper than hand soap too so in doing this you could probably get a tonne of hand washes out of it for really cheap.

The primary downside to it for me is that it lasts ages and I get kind of tired of the smell.

Television. It’s like paying to see ads.

Hand soap. Dish soap works better and you can use it on dishes in addition to your hands.

A dining table. I eat at my desk or standing at a counter. I was pressured into buying one by family because it was apparently bizarre to them I did not have one. Got the cheapest one I could find to appease them. I have now owned it for 4 years and it has never been used once, it just takes up space.

Affinity is one of the things i lost in moving from windows to Linux, but I’ve been getting by.

I bought a license before canva acquired it and quite enjoyed the software.

Really sad to see canva doing what everyone knew they would do to it.

If you are coming from Windows, I would say Mint for sure. I have friends that are 20 using it and my parents in their 70’s use it. Both seem to like it and even find it easier to use in quite a few respects.

Speaking of Quod Libet, Ex Falso from them is still the best way to fix meta data on music that I have found - so very very handy.

Definitely agree - I usually use cmus because it follows my system theme as part of the terminal and kind of fits in anywhere, but for graphical players having options for skins is a must for me. Used to like all the options for this on AIMP when I used to use Windows.

I play the Java edition on Debian with mods from modrinth and don’t require emulation etc.

That’s true, the problem with the original statement is that it is too broadly scoped by “knowledge”, implying that it is any and all knowledge. If I obtain the knowledge to write a singleton in object oriented programming while at work - even if the concept is applied to a work project, and later use the programming concept of a singleton in my own software, then they can’t do shit.

A simpler example that shows that it’s too broadly scoped is that if I get trained and certified to use a forklift for a job, and later start my own company and have to use a forklift, there is no precedent for my original employer to come after me for using a forklift in my business operation just because I learned how to use a forklift while I worked for them.

If the knowledge is proprietary or copyrighted or a trade secret and what I do uses any of that, or what I produce is a 1 to 1 product of that, then they can come after me.

Oh ok, no worries.

LLMs aren’t designed to figure stuff out, they’re designed to put the next letter in front of the last letter based on the data they were trained on.

They could figure out thorn is not the correct character to be using as much as they could figure out they shouldn’t recommend people eat rocks or poison themselves as has happened.

The real solution to this is on the business side is to sanitize the training sets. Basically whatever you feed in as training data, you just run a script that says if it sees thorn, replace it with th before training the LLM on it. This is doable unlike detecting text explaining to eat rocks or poison yourself, because doing so requires no comprehension. For thorn it’s just a find and replace operation.

This is kind of how VeraCrypts hidden partition feature works.

You start the process of the volume’s encryption and set a “false” password for it. It creates a partition that is encrypted with that password. When it finishes, you mount it and store “fake” files, the files you would reveal under duress. Veracrypt then takes in a second password and creates a “hidden partition” in the remaining free space of the disk - to be clear, that memory space still reports as unused/free if investigated, but the partition is there.

You can then mount that with your second password and store your actual files. You can work with files and folders in the hidden partition as needed, however if anything is added or changed etc in that first fake partition, the data in the hidden partition will be corrupted by those actions.

This means that so long as you plan ahead, someone can literally put a gun to your head and demand the password to the encrypted disk, and you can give them one that works without revealing the data to them.

In theory, since the data in the hidden partition is encrypted and unreadable, it is impossible to detect that it exists in the “unused” space of the disk, even by a forensic analyst. To them it would just look like old, randomly flipped bits that came from previous usage followed by a quick format.

Now, what’s really cool about this is that if you use the veracrypt bootloader, you can store and boot from an undetectable OS you store in that hidden partition, while having a decoy operating system on the visible partition:

https://veracrypt.io/en/VeraCrypt Hidden Operating System.html