A reasonably secure operating system @qubesos-official - Tumblr Blog

wow how original it's one of those {distro}-official blogs

i have been running qubes full-time on my primary workstation for years. it allows me to feel in control of what i share with which megacorporation, and be confident that i can keep promises about privacy. it also gives me seamless and complete access to fedora, debian, arch, gentoo, and ubuntu, which can be invaluable when debugging distro-specific software or packaging issues

it's not sutable for all use cases, though. you need an x86 machine with a lot of memory, and multi-user setups aren't viable. i also like to have other computers running other distros for things like video games. either way, my asks and DMs are open and i can probably help you with qubes-related questions or problems

this account is not an alt, but i read tumblr using an rss reader, so my follows on here are not representative of my timeline

#qubes

you should fill out the qubes user survey before it closes on the 13th of july (this year, 2026)

it has fun questions about how your synethesia works and whether you like to sleep

#qubes

homoidiotic

qubesos-official

page 50 of the bay area reporter, vol. 28, no. 47; 19 november 1998. available on the internet archive. findable via full-text search

other things in this issue include: a mention of the heritage foundation, an explanation of quantum immortality, and an invitation to this mural's unveiling

#context

have you heard? all the cool kids who can afford it are taking the Pay More Than Harry Did For The Killer Challenge and posting it with the hashtag #pmthdftkc

#pmthdftkc

nekomimidusteon

they need to make giant marine isopods that aren't marine. i need to bring my big armored friend around on a leash for walkies and also make every cute girl jealous she doesn't get to be an armored many legged bottom feeder getting led around by me.

qubesos-official

she can smell doritos

i don't expect much of github at this point (and i would love for the qubes project to move away from it), but come on. how do you fuck up relative date humanisation this bad

#it's still january #that was not last month

debian-official

tumblr doesn't let you export the posts you made in a machine readable way. maybe they'll do it if you email them

qubesos-official

one of the things i really like about reading tumblr with an rss reader is that i have a local copy of every post i've ever read and over three million more, including my own. and i can export to json if i like

this includes a lot of nuked accounts, and it also means i have a sort of tumblr search that actually works

unfortunately, tumblr rss feeds only contain twenty posts at a time, so i'll miss posts from before i subscribed or if someone's posting really quickly; it will never be a complete archive

qubesos-official

if you, reader of this post, have a trans friend who has had their account nuked and has lost writing as a result, i might have a partial archive. put me in touch and i'll try to help. i have almost two thousand tumblr feeds in here, around two hundred and fifty of which are no longer reachable. i may also be able to find public reblogs of orphaned posts

#rss

apas-95

maybe this is just the autism speaking but i miss 'lurk moar' culture. the expectation being that any given person should silently watch and analyse the norms, behaviours, and shared facts of a space before engaging in it themselves is both relieving (when you do suddenly join a conversation for the first time, with no introduction, acting practically like an insider, it's a nontopic) and also avoids so much of the irritation modern online spaces have, where people seemingly don't value others' time and will petition openly for other people to provide them with knowledge they could have spent five minutes searching for.

i suppose part of it is that there don't really exist anymore, in popular usage, spaces to actually lurk in. instead of irc channels and forum boards, the modern internet is an interconnected sea, where there's no actual membrane separating one group from another. someone showing up in the replies of your post hasn't navigated to it. they aren't engaging in a specific space for this post or for your social circle. at most they're browsing through a hashtag. the post and them have floated past each other and it's likely they'll never interact with you again. there is no delineated community for them to lurk in and become accustomed to.

#never post

beesmygod

before contributing to a conversation online, one should think: is this a valuable contribution? am i educated enough in this subject to speak authoritatively on it? is what im about to say something that's probably been observed hundreds of times? is it funny?

if you cannot answer these questions, you need to (as we once said in The Old Times) "lurk more".

beesmygod

the other laws of the internet that used to be considered obvious pillars of online communication have been totally abandoned by 99% of people. NEVER FORGET THESE:

you are not the personal army of another person. when someone you like or admire bitches and moans publicly, that's not a call to act on their behalf. it is in fact a practice widely viewed as pathetic and bitchmade. if they do actually try to sic their audience on someone, they should be laughed out of reality for being incapable of solving their own problems lol

you know less than you do and what you have to say is probably really dog shit. lurk more (or...moar) before you post any stupid shit and get a feel for the community you are joining.

stop believing what you read online. assume things are lies unless proven otherwise. stop believing things are true unless proven otherwise. literally why would anything you hear or read be true unless you can literally see the source it came from in the space where people lie for fun and profit openly and without shame. stop being a chump.

reveal nothing about yourself unless you understand how it can be used against you. use a pseudonym. i literally cannot believe people use their real ass names online lmfao. esp in this much more reactive internet age where people can easily look you up and blow up your entire life.

stop letting algorithms decide things for you. this is the biggest possible loser behavior in the world. the amount of people who decry "the algorithm" and then continue to use it are the biggest losers in the world. turn off all of your tracking and stop helping companies fuck you in exchange for nothing.

#did you know you can read tumblr with an rss reader and thus remove the buttons prompting you to respond to everything immediately #you also remove any algorithmic stuff by doing that. it's just what you've chosen to follow in order #rss #never post

rapedbyreality

lurk moar newfag

#never post

creekfiend

people talk about how we need to bring back "don't feed the trolls" rhetoric for modern internet ragebait and I agree but also I think the most useful thing from the Old Internet that I miss is LURKING

be a lurker. just read things and think about them without feeling the need to weigh in or call out or disseminate everything you encounter. it's so nice and so freeing and it's a good way to learn things.

I have frequently regretted getting involved in shit that didn't involve me online but you know what I've never regretted doing? Lurking. literally lurk moar

#never post

probuccalfat1

we need to bring back the phrase “lurk moar newfags”

#never post

hustlerose

nobody wants to lurk anymoar

#never post

3liza

we've talked a lot about bringing back calling people "poser" which is so important but we also need to bring back telling people to lurk moar

#never post

qubesos-official

We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes OS 4.3.0! This minor release includes a host of new features, improvements, and bug fi

qubesos-official

i've updated my main computer to qubes 4.3

my VMs wouldn't start after rebooting to begin stage four of the upgrade procedure and i had to do lvconvert --repair qubes_dom0/vm-pool as root in dom0 to proceed. it would have been fine if it hadn't worked, though; i could have just switched to the clean install and restore procedure since i had backups from immediately before starting

debian and fedora and whonix upgrades (ie. the ones that are actually supported) worked perfectly

my arch templates broke for reasons i wasn't interested in digging too much into so i just installed them from scratch again and switched my appvms over to the new templates

gentoo seems to not be supported any more; there is no release4.3 branch in the package repo. this is unsurprising; the ebuilds had been broken for a while anyway. i'm moving the stuff i had running on gentoo away from it and while it's a shame to lose the option, i'm going to appreciate the reduction in maintenance overhead. i did have to enable the librewolf repo on my big fedora template, though, since none of the remaining supported templates have packages for it

i like getting notifications about every VM that starts or stops, and about clipboard actions; that wasn't working in i3 in qubes 4.2 and i never looked into why

im not sure how i feel about the flattened tray icons. it's nice that it mostly distinguishes dom0 stuff from stuff running in VMs, but it does make them harder to distinguish from each other. the 'update available' icon is pretty stealthy, and the qube management and volume control icons stick out now. the disk space warning is way better at drawing attention to itself, though; it turns into a yellow warning triangle

non-dom0 tray icons still break when hotplugging a display device, so i have to restart nm-applet in sys-net if i want to see wifi connection info there

having notes you can put against each qube in the settings is really nice! you can keep records about maintenance status or what you intend to do with something. i really like that

yukisyoma

I remember reading up on virtualization at some point (still don't know mich about it) and in particular about compiling things from source in a virtual machine and I wanted to ask, how did your experience with virtualized gentoo go? everywhere I went googloig for stuff like that mentioned that the advantages of compi|ing from source do not apply to virtual environments, so I wanted to ask about how it was for you

qubesos-official

it was fine, just slow. i did get some benefit out of being able to customise builds for the whole system, but probably not enough to be worth taking a whole weekend to rebuild the world when some core library updated. the main reason i bothered having a gentoo template in the first place was because it had packages that weren't in fedora or debian or arch

yukisyoma

thank you for your response!

yeah, gentoo's repos are the most comprehensive and biggest out of any distro I've tried, usually* having the packages I need without needing to deal with AUR/custom relos

* with few exceptions requiring the use of custom overlays

qubesos-official

yeah. fwiw, though, nixpkgs has way more than gentoo, and that's a lot of why i run lix on devices that can't run qubes