Ooh yeah, that is better 🤌

Slopilot

Yeah, it’s a neat little tool. I used it recently at my work. We had a big list of endpoints that we needed to make sure were powered down each night for a week during a patching window.

A sysadmin on my team wrote a script that pinged all of the endpoints in the list and returned only the ones that still were getting a response, that way we could see how many were still powered on after a certain time. But he was just manually running the script every few minutes in his terminal.

I suggested using the watch command to execute the script, and then piping the output into the sort command so the endpoints were nicely alphabetical. Worked like a charm!

The watch command is very useful, for those who don’t know, it starts an automated loop with a default of two seconds and executes whatever commands you place after it.

It allows you to actively monitor systems without having to manually re-run your command.

So for instance, if you wanted to see all storage block devices and monitor what a new storage device shows up as when you plug it in, you could do:

watch lsblk

And see in real time the drive mount. Technically not “real time” because the default refresh is 2 seconds, but you can specify shorter or longer intervals.

Obviously my example is kind of silly, but you can combine this with other commands or even whole bash scripts to do some cool stuff.

I’ve been lucky, at two of my previous jobs, I was permitted to use a Linux laptop instead of the default Windows ones, it was wonderful.

Sadly you’re right though, at least in the US, even in the IT world, unless you’re working specifically at a Linux company, you’re almost certainly using Windows.

My current job is all Windows, even though my team spends a significant amount of time maintaining Linux systems. I just open up WSL and try to pretend It’s running on bare metal. 😞

~/Repos (For all the github and other code repositories I work in)

~/Scripts (All my random Bash scripts, sometimes for testing out stuff)

~/Junk (Mostly used for testing programs or small project components that aren’t mature enough to have their own repo)

One reason: It’s not FOSS, and because of that, it’s not protected from the Capitalist profit motive that’s always pushing the creators/owners towards enshitification.

The same forces act upon FOSS too, but the difference is that FOSS has structural immunity built into it. If the software enshitifies, it can be forked and maintained by a community that values software freedom.

We’ve seen it happen time and again. Terraform, CentOS, RHEL, The Xen Hypervisor, etc. When companies try to take freedom away from FOSS, they fail, because their users and maintainers are empowered by FOSS licenses (especially restrictive ones like the GPL) and can fight back.

With proprietary software, the users are powerless, only the owners have control.

Don’t trust promises, good intentions, or corporate slogans. Trust free software and the open ecosystems they thrive in.

PS, Jellyfin is amazing ❤️

Tailscale, Netbird, or Pangolin. Foss overlay networks have completely eliminated traditional VPN setups for my self-hosting needs.

Not necessarily morons, although many are, just sociopaths. They are so rich and powerful and removed from normal society, they don’t have to care.

They don’t have to work hard, they don’t have to think critically, they don’t have to compromise, they don’t have to worry.

It’s like the monarchs and aristocracy of old, so far removed from society, most things we consider virtues are considered insulting to them.

Remember when Bill Gates “worked” for a few hours at a Dairy Queen scooping ice cream? It’s a demonstration of elitism, they can choose to play working class for an afternoon, like an outfit they try on.

Oh how quaint, the little workers going about their day scooping ice cream and making fries! Mummy, I want to try to be an ice cream worker today!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuxPIPKMjXI

Pay for your FOSS! I’ve paid far more for my FOSS than for any proprietary software.

If you believe in subscriptions, then subscribe only to FOSS software like Bitwarden, Tailscale/Netbird, etc.

Find your favorite FOSS projects on Open Collective and support them there.

And above all else, treat FOSS devs and maintainers with the utmost respect! They are the unsung heros who are building the only alternatives to the corpo-dystopian hellscape of proprietary, enshitified, slop software.

Send a message to a dev today, just saying thank you to them for everything, and asking if you can send them a tip if possible.

Folks, let’s treat each other lovingly please, FOSS has freed us, give back what you can, and never take it for granted.

To all the devs, maintainers, tinkerers, supporters, FOSS educators, and helpful community members across the FOSS world, thank you so much, and much love. ♥️