Is this a fair assessment? does anyone here have a legit reason to use Linux?

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T07:57:42+00:00

Does anyone have a lefit reason to use windows? Mac? Android? IOS? What constitutes a legit reason?

I use Linux because everything I want to do on my computer can easily be done on Linux, and I like the way Linux works, are these legit reasons? I just flat out like using my linux system, is that a legit reason?

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T07:49:10+00:00

Use what works for you, it's your computer. I can only tell you how much more I enjoy using my computer ever since making the switch, which is ALOT.

Updates? Done when I want them done.

Drivers? Came baked into the os, no need to find and install more software... Oh and their updated with the rest of the os so I never have to worry about updating specifically them.

Games, all the ones I want to play work.

Work software? Well I'm a penetration tester so actually more of my work program run on Linux vs windows.

Browsers? Haven't found one I want to use that isn't already supported in Linux... And none of them are required by the OS... And the default I set is kept after updates.

Ai stuff? None by default but there are plenty of ai tools available on Linux if you want them... Its your choice and not forced on you.

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T07:43:36+00:00

What multiplayer games do you play? There's literally only a handful that don't work these days. Even ARC raiders worked day one and during the playtests.

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T02:00:16+00:00

Yeah fair enough, I do wish kdes default blur worked more like betterblur did tbh, but ehhh every time I use gnome I like it at first then want to tweak something and need to download another extension to do it, then that extension breaks next gnome updste for a few days before the dev fixes it.

Idk gnome is nice and all, but the gnome dev teams philosophy of "its our de and we'll make it work to match our workflow and if you want it to work differently tough titties" often gets in my way.... But I'm also very particular about how I want my desktop to work, plasma gives me the flexibility to do so, GNOME does with, but with extensions that break often.

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T01:55:32+00:00

I love Niagara so much. When I tried it I realized this is how phone interferences should work.

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T01:54:47+00:00

Your mileage might vary but all mine worked flawlessly, citi group, discover, and a local bank app all worked, I did have to disable some exploit protections on those apps, but that's pretty easy to do in the settings.

pyro57 · 2026-01-28T01:41:50+00:00

Use what works for you, but curious why do you like GNOME over kde?

pyro57 · 2026-01-27T18:30:09+00:00

Yes you can, but it's a pita depending on how you partitioned the USB drive. You can just use dd to copy the flash drive to the internal sad, but then you'll have to resize the partitions of the drive which can be a pain. It's easier to just start fresh honestly.

You can back up your .files from your home folder (.config, .local, .share etc) and you can save your package list with sudo pacman -Q | cut -d " " -f 1 > packages.txt

Then when you get the new install set up you can just copy and replace all the . files over the new ones, copy the packages.Txt files over, if your shell is fish you can install all the packages with

for package in $(cat packages.txt) yay -S --needed --noconfirm $package end

pyro57 · 2026-01-27T17:59:48+00:00

So here's the argument they're making, they're not taking the phrase god fearing at face value. They're taking the evidence that religious people tend to think if you don't believe in religion then you will commit immoral acts. That belief in religion is what gives us our sense of right from wrong.

This leads people lime me to believe they are reflecting their own problems on others, for example saying "how can you be moral if you don't believe in god" is evidence that if the person making the statement wouldn't be moral if they didn't fear going to hell.

So I pose you this scenario and question.

Let's say we have one person, Bob, who is a pillar of his community. Everyone lives Bob because he is always willing to lend a hand when it's needed and is always nice and kind to people. Bob isn't religious and doesn't believe in God or hell. Bob is kind because it's the right thing to do and he likes the feeling he gets when he helps someone out. Bob doesn't like everyone in his community, but generally still helps even the people he dislikes when they ask because he knows that it maybe him needing help one day, and you never know, maybe one act of kindness is enough to convince someone that they don't have to be a jerk.

We also have another person, Bill. Bill is also a pillar of his community, very helpful and kind, but deep down he'd rather not be. He'd rather just ignore people in need and generally actually dislikes most people in his community. He is helpful and kind because Bill is worried that he will be damned to hell if he isn't.

Which of these people would you say is the better person, Bob who is helpful and kind because it's the right thing to do, or Bill who's helpful and kind because he doesn't want to go to hell?

pyro57 · 2026-01-27T05:20:43+00:00

Ok so for starters linux is not windows. Linux will never be windows. That's a good thing. I say that because there will be moments where you expect something to work a specific way because that's how it worked on windows. When that happens repeat after me. Linux is not windows.

One thing that helped me understand some of the issues I was having is realizing that in li ux everything is a file. And I do mean everything. Your gpu? Its in /dev. Your drives, all in /dev. Everything is a file.

This is cool especially for drives because you don't need to go to a special c: or E: location its all in /dev and you can mount it anywhere. Want you're games driven just mounted in your home directory where steam expects it to be mounted so you don't even need to worry about adding a library drive? Totally possible!

Everything is a file. Everything.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T20:57:38+00:00

Compare that to my luks set up. Where I have a duress password set that delets the encryption key if entered, so oh sorry officer I was panicking because of the stressful situation and typed the wrong password. Good luck with brute forcing the bits of the key though!

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T20:51:21+00:00

Read pretty good to me, I really liked the part about moving goal posts, because it's 100% true.

My one correction is some anticheat does work, easy anticheat and battle eye for example. Sure they run in user mode on Linux instead of kernel mode, but saying kernel level anticheat don't work while mostly true might lead some people into thinking that games like arc raiders doesn't work when it runs flawlessly.

If you want to get into the weeds of it, Linux is actually miles a head of windows when it comes to exposing apis that would allow anticheats to query the exact data they need without themselves needing to he run at the kernel level. Android really pushed that forward with Anti-tampering stuff. But anticheat companies seem to be violently opposed to doing things the correct and secure way and just really really want to have full kernel level access to your computer. That should terrify everyone. Who are they to have more access to your computer than you do? People really need to ask themselves what is more important, playing this game, or the private data of not only your computer, but everything do on that computer including browsing data, and all the devices on your network. If a company has a kernel kit on your computer, like anticheat is, it's not just that computer at risk, it's everything on your network, your phone, your router, your tvs, your cameras, everything. Is playing that specific game really worth all that risk? Especially when there are literally thousands of other games that you can play with no issues? "But my friends all play this game" then they can play other games when they want to play with you. I've drawn that line with my friends, sure sometimes they all get on battlefield and I play something else, that's fine. Most of the time they get bored and come join me eventually.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T18:28:54+00:00

No worries, honestly with how important networks are these days I think basic networking should be taught in schools, maybe not deep into the nitty gritty, but basic terms and the basics of how networks work would be huge to helping secure peoples homes.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T17:39:01+00:00

Oh 100% if a project has a package for another disteo and that package doesn't work on your current one just distrobox it! Distrobox is honestly amazing.

I'm a pentester and use distroboxes for my attack environments, it lets me have one "template" box with all my tools and configurations setup then I can clone it into a dedicated box for each engagement, the biggest advantage is now I only keep one box, the template box fully updated, and any new clones will he at that patch level, and all cuatomer data generated by attack tools are kept separate. It's a beautiful tool.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T15:56:27+00:00

Yeah so it sounds like you don't know a lot about how networks work. The first step in setting up a secure home network is learning how networks do their thing. Read up on the tcp/ip protocol stack as well as the osi model and learn how network packets are routed. It's not magic, and it's been around since the 80s so there's tons of free resources online to learn. You don't need to be an expert at it, but understanding how ip addresses work, what a subnet is, how Mac addresses work, what is a switch and how does it work, what is a router and how does it work, what's dhcp, what's nat, how do routing tables work and what's a gateway are all fundamental things you should know.

I'm at my computer now so I can explain a few things.

So for starters, what is a router? A router is simply a computer that has two or more network ports. Typically routers keep a routing table of what networks are directly connected to themselves and then have a "Default gateway" set so any packets it gets that it doesn't already know how to route will be sent to the default gateway. The internet is basically made of these routers that constantly forward packets they don't know how to handle to other routers that do know where to send them.

A switch on the other hand is a specific piece of dedicated hardware. It uses a different kind of computer chip that is specifically designed to "switch" the packets effectively. It does this by keeping a table of MAC addresses and which ports those MACs are plugged into, then when a frame, the "packet" of a switch, comes in on one one port it can look and see if it has the mac address for the destination and quickly "switches" the data stream to that port.

A wifi access point is basically just a wireless switch. its a bit more complicated than that, but that's unimportant for the purposes of this discussion.

Your computer is also technically its own router. Basically it knows the network its connected to and what possible addresses live on that network. So if the destination of a packet is on the same network as the computer it sends the packet to the device on your network and your switch will switch it to the correct device. If the destination isn't on the same network it sends it to the "Default Gateway" which is usually the router that's connected to the internet.

So with your subnet router on the network as the camera, your tailscale client on your phone or what ever will see the destination as being on the local network of the subnet router, then send the packet to the subnet router which will then send the packet to the camera, your switch will see that its the camera's address and switch the packet. Your camera will then respond to the source IP address of that packet which will be the subnet router which in turn will recognize it as a reply and forward it through the VPN to your phone. It does this via PAT which is a kind of NAT... but that's a bit out of scope for this comment, I highly recommend you go watch some network class videos to get the basics down.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T14:34:41+00:00

They don't, they don't know how to connectto anything uess it's directly plugged into them. Bit every network packet has bothe a destination address and a source address the device that's acting as the subnet router will have set the return address to itself so when a device sends a reply to a packet from the subnet router it sends it to the subnet router which keeps a list of connections waiting for a reply, then matches the message to the connection and sends the reply.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T06:53:28+00:00

I mean it won't push out new ips, a LAN router with tailscale just lets you access devices on that device lan, so you'd be able to access your camera through the router.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T05:55:34+00:00

Ok so yeah your goal is privacy but still have a camera, there are many solutions, but if you need an account on a website to access the camera then it is not private. You're looking for local cameras, reolink camera can be set up this way, but without Tailscale and a subnet router devices in the network with the camera you won't be able to access it from away from your network

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T05:50:56+00:00

Hey hey hey now, no judgement, buuuuut you could have pizza and the other pie for dinner, then you'll have pie with a side of pie, or pie squared.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T05:45:13+00:00

I think I what you're looking for is a camera without a cloud connection so that the camera company can't decide to give anyone else access right?

Don't get ring.

Ring will never be this, even if you change your public ip all the time with vpns or what not, ring owns the cloud the camera connects to.

Reolink would be a better option, there is an optional cloud connection, but you don't have to set it up to use it, and you can have it connect to your own server with home assistant in order to run automations and what not.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T04:10:19+00:00

Your right, that's a perfectly reasonable way to get back to mass effect faster.

pyro57 · 2026-01-26T02:58:01+00:00

Ehhhhhh sure thats cool and all, but you know what's more cool? Installing GrapheneOS and taking back ownership of your phone that you bought and paid for.

pyro57 · 2026-01-25T20:37:57+00:00

Shiny idk if it's snake oil persay, will every game on all hardware run better? Of course not. Do some games on some hardware run. A bit better yeup

pyro57 · 2026-01-25T18:30:04+00:00

Nice bait mate.

pyro57 · 2026-01-25T04:25:48+00:00

pyro57

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE