My company's buyout has been completed, and their IT team is in the final stages of gutting our old systems and moving us on to all their infra.

Sadly, this means all my Linux and FOSS implementations I've worked on for the last year are getting shut down and ripped out this week. (They're all 100% Microsoft and proprietary junk at the new company)

I know it's dumb to feel sad about computers and software getting shut down, but it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.

That's the nature of a corpo takeover though. Just wanted to let off some steam to some folks here who I know would understand.

FOSS forever! ✊

Edit: Thanks, everybody so much for the kind words and advice!

I've been 100% on Linux for several years now and I don't miss Windows at all in any aspect.

But in my opinion, there is one thing that Windows does significantly better than Linux, kiosk mode.

I wish Linux had something similar. All the solutions I've been able to find are far more complex and technical to implement and use.

If anybody has suggestions for something that's easy to use on Linux that works similar to Windows kiosk mode, I'd love to try it.

Any Linux Sysadmins here use Timeshift on Linux servers in production environments?

Having reliable snapshots to roll back bad updates is really awesome, but I want to know if Timeshift is stable enough to use outside of a basic home lab environment.

Disclaimer: Yes I know Timeshift isn't a backup solution, I understand its purpose and scope.

A while back there was some debate about the Linux kernel dropping support for some very old GPUs. (I can't remember the exact models, but they were roughly from the late 90's)

It spurred a lot of discussion on how many years of hardware support is reasonable to expect.

I would like to hear y'alls views on this. What do you think is reasonable?

The fact that some people were mad that their 25 year old GPU wouldn't be officially supported by the latest Linux kernel seemed pretty silly to me. At that point, the machine is a vintage piece of tech history. Valuable in its own right, and very cool to keep alive, but I don't think it's unreasonable for the devs to drop it after two and a half decades.

I think for me, a 10 year minimum seems reasonable.

And obviously, much of this work is for little to no pay, so love and gratitude to all the devs that help keep this incredible community and ecosystem alive!

And don't forget to Pay for your free software!!!

I'm running a few Debian stable systems that are up to date on patches.

But I just ran ssh -V and the OpenSSH version listed is "OpenSSH_9.2p1 Debian-2+deb12u3" which as I understand is still vulnerable.

Am I missing something or am I good?

Heliboard 1.2 has just released. This version fixes a bug with certain Android devices not providing haptic feedback or audio feedback.

Thanks devs!

Heliboard V1.2

[Edited] Ironically my keyboard auto corrected its own name to "helipad." Embarrassing 😵‍💫

I have a very short equipment rack installed in my server closet. It is only 16 inches deep, fine for most networking uses, but not great for most rack-mount server cases.

I am looking for case suggestions that would fit my rack, 16 inch depth maximum. Height isn't a problem, the rack has a ton of vertical space, over 15U, it's the depth that's an issue.

Thanks!

I'm visiting my parents for the holidays and convinced them to let me switch them to Linux.

They use their computer for the typical basic stuff; email, YouTube, Word, Facebook, and occasionally printing/scanning.

I promised my mom that everything would look the same and work the same. I used Linux Mint and customized the theme to look like Windows 10. I even replaced the Mint "Start" button with the Windows logo.

So far they like it and everything runs great. Plus it's snappier now that Windows isn't hogging all the system resources.

I'm confused about protecting backups from ransomware. Online, people say that backups are the most critical aspect to recovering from a ransomware attack.

But how do you protect the backups themselves from becoming encrypted too? Is it simply a matter of having totally unique and secure credentials for the backup medium?

Like, if I had a Synology NAS as a backup for my production environment's shared storage, VM backups, etc, hooked up to the network via gigabit, what stops ransomware malware from encrypting that Synology too?

Thanks in advance for the feedback!

Does anybody have suggestions for an online service that prints things like business cards, brochures, and pamphlets?

If not FOSS, I would like to find a company online that has principles that align with positive things like workers rights, locally owned, sustainable, etc.

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks!