Right now, I have a cron job set to run on Monday and Friday nights, is this too frequent?

Only you can answer this. How many days of data are you prepared to lose? What are the downsides of running your backup scripts more frequently?

Unicomp still makes this extra-chunky layout in a buckling spring: https://www.pckeyboard.com/mm5/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=UB40B5A

Why would you event need a mouse with that many arrow keys!?

People have already given direct answers, and the indirect answer of ‘set up regular automated backups’ (which everyone should set up right now if they haven’t already), but for the sake of throwing another option out there, people could take a look at ‘trash-cli’: https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli

(P.S. I know OP might not have actually deleted the files with ‘rm’, but this addresses a broadly similar issue.)

I think it’s worth emphasising here: Don’t put it off!

There are millions who can tell you from experience that good intentions count for nothing when it comes to backups.

I’d recommend going and setting up Timeshift right now: https://github.com/linuxmint/timeshift

It’s easy to set up, it takes literally 10 minutes, and if you decide later you want to use something else, you can just uninstall Timeshift and delete its backups. But in the meantime you’ll be protected with backups.

It’s literally the first thing I install on a new system and it’s saved me multiple times from having to do a complete reinstall.

Thanks for your thoughts, I appreciate it!

I assume you have got it by now? I certainly hope so! xD

Have you been enjoying it?

I’m considering buying a Shinobi - I’m inclined towards having dedicated function keys - so I’d love to know what you think about the Shura compared to the Shinobi.

Void - https://voidlinux.org/

There’s a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages

Yeah, you’re quite correct, it’s not exactly equivalent, I just went on auto-pilot because it’s used so much for that purpose 🤖

It’s much closer to being a true null-coalescing operator than ‘OR’ operators in other languages though, because there’s only two values that are falsy in Ruby: nil and false. Some other languages treat 0 and "" (and no doubt other things), as falsy. So this is probably the reason Ruby has never added a true null-coalescing operator, there’s just much fewer cases where there’s a difference.

It’s going to drive me mad now I’ve seen it, though 😆 That’s usually the case with language features, though, you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it in some other language!

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it’s nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

That is so much better 👍

Go as the Blue Screen of Death: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_screen_of_death

Now that’s spooky! 🟦😱

Wear all blue clothes, and get a copy of the screen printed (not on your home printer) to wear on your chest.

Not supported yet, last I checked (within the last two weeks). There’s a feature request open on the Github.

I’ve mainly just been navigating to it manually by opening the community, it’s usually a post near the top when I’ve had cause to do it. You can also use the search functionality.

New to Linux so I’m sorry if I’m being ignorant, but it does seem crazy you can get access to a machine without the password.

This is always the case, no matter what OS you use, unless you use full-disk encryption. User credentials are all just data on a disk, so if someone has physical access to your machine, and your disk isn’t encrypted, then they can access (and change) those credentials or any other data.

See also: https://ostechnix.com/reset-windows-password-with-linux-live-cd/

What’s even the point of having a password

As you say, preventing remote access is one, but also a password will slow someone down a bit, and stop low-knowledge adversaries entirely, possibly. Also you will at least know someone has messed with your machine if they change the password.

Really, though, there’s nothing malicious someone can do to an unencrypted computer by changing the password that they couldn’t do without changing the password (copy all your files, delete all your files, install malicious software). Except I guess annoying you by making you change your password back. 😆

They mean ‘Guix System’. Just like there is ‘Nix’ the package manager and ‘NixOS’ the distro, there is ‘Guix’ the package manager and ‘Guix System’ the distro.

See here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guix_System

Thanks for the info!

Not sure where to find those kind of benchmarks, but you may want to look at Gentoo. It compiles everything locally, optimising specifically for the hardware.

EDIT: Best I could find for benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/spring-2020-distros