Works for floors!

Blink-blink-blink. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink-blink-blink.

No, I don’t have something in my eyes, I swear I’m fine looks nervously at boss.

pi ends with the digit 9, followed by an infinite sequence of other digits.

That’s a very interesting use of the word “ends”.

What normal people hear: “He took down the routers with some crazy complicated algorithms. He’s Neo in the matrix.”

What IT professionals hear: “He hired a bunch of people to keep sending spam letters to their tiny mailboxes until they were so stuffed that they couldn’t receive any legitimate mail.”

to have this relationship between A and B you have to make a third database

Probably just a mistake here, but you make a third table, not a new database.

Apart from that (and the fact that one to many and many to one is the same thing), yeah, looks correct.

As long as the next line also has 5 spaces, that’s fine. Python only complains about inconsistency, not the exact number of spaces/tabs.

I kept reading waiting for the punch line, didn’t see one. I think I’ve fallen victim to Poe’s law. I legitimately can’t tell if this is satire.

So on the gaming front, pretty much any mainstream Linux distro would work for that. Proton is pretty damn stable and great on any distro that supports Steam. If you like Bazzite though, you do you.

For pen testing, must-have skills are nmap, bash, sqlmap, wireshark and the burp suite. If you know how to use all those, you’ve got basic coverage of most common attack vectors (password cracking is also covered by bash, there’s 101 different password cracking algorithms in various CLI spps).

I’m a lazy ass who doesn’t care much about customization, hopefully someone else can help you with that :))

A quick Google shows that someone got sharex working on Linux: https://github.com/ShareX/ShareX/issues/6531

Might take some effort and learning bash and WINE + winetricks to get that running, but hey, you’re gonna need to do that anyways for the pentest stuff :)

If you want something useful, maybe some more info on what you use your computer for? Advice for a glorified web terminal would be “Click the Firefox icon”. Advice for learning bash would be a massive rabbithole.

App suggestions are also very dependent on what you use your computer for.

Glad to hear it!

Just as another thing to add to your notes, in ordinary circumstances, it’s practically impossible for non-government actors to get rootkits on modern machines with the latest security patches (EDIT: I’m talking remotely. Physical access is a whole other thing). To work your way up from ring 3 (untrusted programs) all the way to ring 0 (kernel), you’d need to chain together multiple zero day vulnerabilities which take incredibly talented cybersec researchers years to discover, keep hidden and then exploit. And all that is basically one-use, because those vulnerabilities will be patched afterwards.

This is why anti-cheat rootkits are so dangerous. If you can exploit the anti-cheat software, you can skip all that incredibly difficult work and go straight to ring 0.

EDIT: Oh, and as an added note, generally speaking if you have physical access to the machine, you own the machine. There is no defence possible against somebody physically being able to plug a USB stick in and boot from whatever OS they want and bypass any defences they want.

Please don’t walk away from this feeling dumb. Most IT professionals aren’t aware of the scale of the issue outside of sysadmin and cybersecurity. I’ve met programmers who shrug at the most egregious vulnerabilities, and vendors who want us to put dangerous stuff on our servers. Security just isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.

Unrelated, but I wish you the best of luck with your studies!

Outside of monitoring individual packets outside of your computer (as in, man in the middle yourself with a spare computer and hoping the malware phones home right when you’re looking) there’s no way of knowing.

Once ring 0 is compromised, nothing your computer says can be trusted. A compromised OS can lie to anti-malware scanners, hide things from the installed software list and process manager, and just generally not show you what it doesnt want to show you. “Just remediate” does not work with rootkits.

I’m sorry to disappoint, but with rootkits, that is very real. With that level of permissions, it can rewrite HDD/SSD drivers to install malware on boot.

There’s even malware that can rewrite BIOS/UEFI, in which case the whole motherboard has to go in the bin. That’s much less likely due to the complexity though, but it does exist.

It’s not easy, but it’s really not worth the massive gaping security vulnerability you are giving your users. One disgruntled employee giving out the keys to the castle or one programmer plugging in an infected USB, and every user now has a persistent malicious rootkit. The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.

The best use case for purchasing FOSS software is contractor work, specific modules for existing platforms and/or FOSS projects. I’ve done that myself in the past. The client pays for the custom software, it’s written, and then they gets to do absolutely whatever they want with it. If the client wants to publish it, they’re well within their rights. Most of the time it’s too entangled with their internal company workflow to be useful to anyone else though.

Master Foo discourses on the GUI

Remote Follow sounds like a really amazing QoL improvement

Completely agree that these kinds of threads end up being more a popularity poll than anything more actionable and usable. Everyone has their own opinions and preferences (which is great!), but that can end up being extremely overwhelming for a newbie.

I actually disagree on what the biggest difference is. For the average everyday user, the biggest difference is the desktop environment. Having a desktop environment that the user finds intuitive, easy, and is stable is by far the most important thing.

When it comes to distros, I am a boring man with a boring POV: I just want the thing to work with as little fuss as possible. Consequently, I’m on Kubuntu. KDE is rock solid, and Ubuntu is what I’m used to.

If/when my OS ever breaks down hard enough to reinstall, I’ll probably install Fedora Workstation.