Operating Systems

Aurora Linux: Finally, a Desktop That Feels Like Home Ladies, gentlemen, and fellow distrohoppers, gather ’round for the story of how I went from a weekend-long sysadmin bender to a blissful desktop user—courtesy of Aurora Linux. Spoiler: I’m using Homebrew for packages, Flatpaks and containers for everything else, and there’s zero declarative config in sight. Act I: A Few Weeks, Five Distros, Zero Rest Just a few weeks ago, I dusted off my Beelink SER5 5600H mini PC to use as a testbed—and promptly launched into a frantic distro hop: ...

It was a crisp spring day on March 25, 2024, when I decided to take a detour from my usual BSD and Linux haunts. My destination? OmniOS, a distribution of the Illumos operating system. Little did I know I was about to embark on a journey that would challenge my assumptions and expand my Unix horizons. The Land of pfexec The first surprise came when I tried to elevate my privileges. No sudo? No doas? In OmniOS, I discovered, we pfexec. It’s like stepping into a parallel universe where everything is familiar, yet slightly off-kilter. I found myself chanting “pfexec, pfexec” like a mantra as I navigated this new landscape. ...

Back in the summer of 2019, with two weeks to spare before the academic year began, I took my first tentative steps into the world of Linux. My starting point? Zorin OS. It was an experience defined by both excitement and a lot of confusion. The Tarball Debacle One of my first big mistakes was trying to install everything manually from the web. Freshly minted with my new Zorin installation, I somehow thought the correct way to install Firefox was through a tarball, using tar commands. Little did I know that Zorin had an App Center ready and waiting for easy installs. Suffice it to say, my early days with Linux involved more mistakes than victories. ...