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Cake day: November 7th, 2023

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  • Yep… Mint is always following the current LTE version of Ubuntu, usually behind them by a couple months, which is going to be a few months to a year behind on most packages at the time of release, and will be another two years before getting a new feature update

    Anything not system level (such as the DE), if you want the latest, Flatpak. Anything else, your options are to wait a few years, try to shoehorn it in yourself and deal with the dependency hell, or hop to a distro that uses the version you want.

    Even the latest version of Mint that just released about a month ago doesn’t have KDE 6 yet, and it’ll probably be two years before it’s available. Which is why I’m thinking of switching to Fedora for a while.









  • While that’s literally what it is, that’s not really how it’s represented and requires also understanding binary numbers.

    Even knowing that, I’ve always found it easiest to get to the permissions the way I described, which when you think about it is actually the same as what you’d do to translate binary into decimal/octal if you don’t have them memorized: look at the values of each position that’s set to 1 and add them together. So, 101 in binary would be 4+0+1, or 5, which is the same as saying read is 4 and execute is 1 and add them together, the latter of which I think is easier to learn (and is how I’ve always seen it taught, though clearly YMMV)

    Both get you to the same place though


  • Quick and dirty: the basic permissions are read, write, and execute, and are applied to the owner, the group, and everyone else. They’re applied to all files and directories individually.

    It’s represented by a 3 digit number (in octal, which is base 8, so 0 to 7). The first number is the permission given to the file’s owner, the second to the file’s group owner, and the third to everyone else. So, the owner of the file is the one user account that owns it, the group applies to all members of that group. User and group ownership are also applied to each file and directory individually.

    Read, write, and execute are represented by the numbers 4, 2, and 1, respectively, and you add them together to get the permission, so 0 would be nothing, 1 would be execute but not read or write, 2 would be write but not read or execute (and yes there are uses for that), 3 would be write and execute but not read, 4 is read only, etc through to 7 which is basically full control.

    This will take a little bit to make sense for most people.

    chmod (change modifier, I think) is the program you use to set permissions, which you can do explicitly by the number (there are other modes but learn the numbers first), so chmod 777 basically means everyone has full control of the file or directory. Which is bad to do with everything for what I hope are obvious reasons.

    chown (change owner) is the program you use to set the owner (and optionally the group) of a file or directory, and chgrp (change group) changes the group only.

    It gets deeper with things like setuid bits and sticky bits, and when you get to SELinux it really gets granular and complex, but if you understand the octal 3 digit permissions, you’ll have the basics that will be enough for quite a lot of use cases.

    (Additionally to the 3 digit number, permissions can be represented a bit friendlier where it just lists letters and dashes, so 750 (full control user, read and execute group) could be shown as rwxr-x—, where r=read, w=write, and x=execute, and what they’re applied to can be represented by the letters u for user (aka owner), g for group, and o for other)

    This goes into more detail of those basics: https://opensource.com/article/19/6/understanding-linux-permissions







  • That’s only really true if you’re going to be storing the password in a secure vault after randomly generating it; otherwise, it’s terrible because 1) nobody will be able to remember it so they’ll be writing it down, and 2) it’ll be such a pain to type that people will find ways to circumvent it at every possible turn

    Pass phrases, even when taken with the idea that it’s a limited character set that follows a semi predictable flow, if you look at it in terms of the number of words possible it actually is decently secure, especially if the words used are random and not meaningful to the user. Even limiting yourself to the 1000 most common words in the English language and using 4 words, that’s one trillion possible combinations without even accounting for modifying capitalisation, adding a symbol or three, including a short number at the end…

    And even with that base set, even if a computer could theoretically try all trillion possibilities quickly, it’ll make a ton of noise, get throttled, and likely lock the account out long before it has a chance to try even the tiniest fraction of them

    Your way is theoretically more secure, but practically only works for machines or with secure password storage. If it’s something a human needs to remember and type themselves, phrases of random words is much more viable and much more likely to be used in a secure fashion.