Burrito of Peace wrote on Apr 10, 2023, 22:28:
Dan =0) wrote on Apr 10, 2023, 21:42:
Not to derail the thread (cool picture, not sure about specific thoughts on McGee's retirement, though I enjoyed playing American McGee's Alice), but...
1. I will address this from a professional perspective because hiring people is part of my job. I don't care about certificates and disregard 99% of them immediately. All they show is that the holder sat on their ass, stared at a screen, and passed a rote learning exam. That's valueless to me. Now, throw me some links to a GitHub, gitea, or other such repo where you have proven, demonstrable skills on display and I will perk up and pay attention. Link some completed projects that you have finished or been a part of. Highlight what your part was so I can test it thoroughly and dig in to it.
2. Slackware? I think you are going to have a rough time of it going that route and even if you do, and stick to -current at all times, you're likely to run face first in to problems where some packages are too old and some are too new. If it's the stability you're after, you can't really go wrong with Debian on that basis. If it's "Because I want to install everything from source", well there's Gentoo for that. The "security" of Slackware is somewhat of a myth in 2023. You can harden any distro if that is your mindset and there's always distros like Fedora's Silverblue or Kinoite if you want an immutable system for ultimate sysroot level security.
Proton is really good these days, by and large. Sure, there are edge cases but they are just that...edge cases. Lutris will cover you for GOG, Steam, Humble Bundle, and EGS. Not sure how it will handle Origin/EA or Ubisoft, however. I think it comes down to "How often do I play games that justify me keeping and maintaining a completely different OS just to play those particular titles?" Only you can answer that for yourself.
3. I think you need to sit down and take a very honest inventory of what services you use and make an assessment from there. For myself, everything I use is pretty Google/Apple/MS taint free. I use ProtonMail and ProtonVPN for those purposes listed in their names and that is literally all they do. For maps, I use Magic Earth. Messaging is done via Wire or Matrix. Password management is handled by a self-hosted BitWarden Docker image. I have my own personal wiki. I use NextCloud as my "cloud" storage but I host it so I have ultimate control over it. Jellyfin for media streaming. Everything is both publicly accessible by me and authorized users but not public facing. The magic of that is Tailscale which made it dirt simple to setup a mesh VPN for all of my services. I have zero inbound ports open on any of my firewalls. Don't need them.
Part of my assessment was asking "Am I willing to put in the work to own all, or as much as possible, of my own data? Am I willing to maintain it?" Because, make no mistake, it is work. At least the initial setup was. I've deployed a lot of automation for resiliency and redundancy so there's not a lot of actual work I need to do these days. Most of the work is reading logs and going "Yep. That all replicated successfully."
But this is a lifestyle change and only you can decide if you are willing to make that change from being a bloodbag for the corporations to suck dry or someone who values their security, privacy, and control above all else. Even convenience. It's going to mean thinking and operating differently. It's going to mean that distrusting a corporation is your default state and making sure that, on your end, they can't wend their tendrils in to mooch as much of your data as possible.
Might be better to respond in message at this point so as to not clog up ItB, but:
1. I wonder what the ratio is of those who hire who do accept certs versus not? Having no degree, a cert would be the next best option, maybe? In previous forum conversations I've figured I can only wrap my brain around so much regarding programming, with a frustration and distraction bar that is pretty low; the suggested option from there was to try to get into non-programming IT of some sort. (For what it's worth, I'm poking into Unreal Engine and seeing what I can do with it, though there is no specific timetable on whatever project.) I have put some things up on a git and linked to it, though either you or another person on BN had responded saying that I don't seem like or am not much of a coder / programmer, and I concede that what I'd put up there would mostly be considered toy / tinker programs?
2. At the very least, I know I can close off all inbound and outbound ports, and open only those needed. I recall way back using ipchains in terminal, though not sure off the top of my head if there is a different/better way currently - I would have to dig deeper. Beyond that, I only got the memo recently that net-tools (ifconfig, arp, etc) had been deprecated in Linux, in favor of utilities such as "ip". Blah blah blah. I play enough games often enough on Steam that I could justify bringing those over, at least.
3. I've been considering abandoning a lot of social media, if it were not for the sake of some family and friends with whom I keep in touch - and then there's the seeming necessity of having / maintaining profiles for music and other things. Somehow when I was much younger I got along without much of social media, save for a 2400 baud / 14.4kbps / 28.8 kbps / 56kbps connection to AOL starting in the mid-90s.
Tl;dr - anxiety/depression is a bitch, CHF and COPD are obnoxious, being unemployed now is "freeing" in some ways and a boondoggle in others, couch-surfing is not all it's cracked up to be, and I've always felt different / like a looney trying to cobble my life together, dabbling in various hardware and software things, with no real ulterior or overt goal or agenda or identity. I'm a nutter.
Edited because accidental copy of BoP's and my quote block.
Shameless self-plug(s):
http://drdk.bandcamp.com - also on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, etc.