monsieur_jean

The 90s are calling, they want their UX back.

mindustry. I’ve kinda quit playing games. But still play mindustry on my ipad. :)

Windev and Wlanguage (French).

It’s almost 2024 and we still don’t have any significant open source project for cloud storage privacy.

Users are responsible for their own privacy.

Having Open Source projects providing the tools for that is extremely important. But ultimately the responsibility lies in the users hands. End to End encryption is the way. My files should 100% be encrypted on my side, with private keys that I own and nobody else. :)

That’s a great setup. Until someone breaks in and steal all the hardware, of the house burns down.

I would add regular backups from the NAS to an archiving cloud like Backblaze, Amazon Glacier, Azure Archive… Doesn’t eat too much bandwidth and it cost very little (until you need to recover the data, but hopefully you won’t). :)

You’re a senior CS person and you are asking if you should have a backup system in place? o_O

Sorry if this sounds like a personal attack but it’s something you should have though of a long, long time ago, as a CS person. Even when still using Windows.

Assuming you are serious, then yes there are ways to save your data under Linux, with different levels of complexity and privacy.

The bare minimum is some basic cloud backup. Not ideal for privacy, but at least if your drive dies you won’t lose your files.

Local backup in the form of a NAS or home server is also an option, and allows different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) to save a copy of their files. Way better from a privacy perspective if setup properly BUT your are one fire or one burglary away from losing everything.

If you want to reconcile privacy AND safe storage then to me there are a few options :

• End to end encrypted cloud storage if you trust the third party (Proton drive, Tresorit, etc)
• End to end encrypted cloud storage that you control (requires very high skills and a lot of work and money. And a lot of maintenance)
• Local network storage (NAS/homeserver) with an encrypted backup regularly sent to the cloud
• Hybrid end-to-end encrypted cloud using a non encrypted cloud solution (like Google Drive) with Cryptomator or equivalent (if you trust them).

So many options, depending on your sensibility to privacy and your technical knowledge. You can also mix. For example most of my personal files are hosted on Microsoft OneCloud because it’s stable and fast enough. I mean almost my entire home folder (excluding configuration) is replicated there. But some of the sensitive files, mostly scans of official documents like tax returns, healthcare receipts, etc, are end to end encrypted using Cryptomator. Also my passwords are saved in an shared encrypted Keepass database. And all my drives are encrypted (with LUKS) including my external drives.

Anybody who has dug that topic long enough knows that total privacy and total security are a myth. It simple doesn’t exist. You need to find the balance between privacy, security and practicality that suits you. If you are paranoid, then getting to a reasonable level of all three is going to be a LOT of work and money. If you are just cautious, and are willing to trust reputable third parties, then it’s quite possible to have a working solution without spending too much time and money. And the very bare minimum is to chose between a backup with little privacy, or more privacy with the acceptance that you may lose everything.

Sorry just saw the answer.

Virtualbox is very easy to use out of the box, even if you have very little experience with virtualization. Everything is in one place and pretty much self explanatory.

Hyper-V is more complicated and requires that you have a Enterprise, Pro or Education license. It cannot be activated on the Windows 10 or 11 home edition.

You just want to get a feel for it, so I suggest what I’ve used with success in the past :

• Windows host
• Virtualbox
• Linux Mint with the XFCE desktop environment.

All free, Linux mint is newbies friendly and XFCE is light enough to run well in a VM. It is Ubuntu based so it’s very well documented (basically 99% of the tutorials for Ubuntu work with Mint) but it comes with less bloatware and a more ethics.

Of course no single Linux distribution is perfect or we would all be using it but I suggest you don’t lose time looking for a distro. Just pick one and install it. If you don’t like the look and feel, then try another. You can distro hop through several of them to taste the variations. But the general principles are pretty much the same across the board.

Completely agree on Linux Mint, even though it’s still one of my favorite distributions and the one I’m using usually. I’m comfortable with the base Ubuntu system but it comes without all the Canonical garbage (like Snap trying to quietly install itself back when I install an APT package).

Still too much bloatware though, and to my knowledge there is no modern, well documented APT based distro with a community active enough that I can fix my issues reasonnably fast.

I guess I will have to make the jump to Arch. Currently happy with my Regolith install now though, so I’m a bit lazy to explore other options.

Funny you say that, the French are I believe the only nation to have come up with an institution specifically tasked with regulating the French language : l’Académie Française.

They have been around for almost 400 years, are rife with corruption, have produced a new version of the “official” dictionary every 50 years on average (and it’s not even a good one), a single grammar book that was so bad and full of ridiculous mistakes that the linguist community have been laughting at them continuously since then, and of the 40 members (for life) none has been a linguist since 1903. And although their enormous wealth has been subsidised by the taxpayers since its creation, the French governement has waited until 2015 to FINALLY require them to submit their accounting to the State accounting supervisor.

So you are very right, the French have foreited their linguistic rights indeed…

• Combien pour ma commande ?
• Alooors… Une bavette de trois livres et deux-cent trois vingt et douze grammes… Ca fera deux-vingt et sept euros et deux-vingt et cinq centimes s’il vous plait.
• Tenez, voici un billet de deux-vingt et dix tout neuf !
• Et voici votre monnaie, deux-vingt et quinze centimes et un comprimé d’aspirine.
• Merci bonne journée !
• De même !

Should a language be something else that the product of what those speaking make of it? :)

The other way around. We started with base 20 everywhere then simplified some of it.

During medieval times it used to be :
10 Dix (10)
20 Vingt (20)
30 Vingt et dix (20+10)
40 Deux-vingt (2x20)
50 Deux-vingt et dix (2x20+10)
60 Trois-vingt (3x20)
70 Trois-vingt et dix (3x20+10)
80 Quatre-vingt (4x20)
90 Quatre-vingt et dix (4x20+10)

Then they switched to base 10… But only up to 70 for some reasons in France. Belgium and Switzerland (and some parts of France) have gone all the way to 100 by using Septante (70), Octante or Huitante (80) and Nonante (90).

Although most French say “Qu’est-ce que c’est”, it is worthy to note that the proper/formal French is “Qu’est-ce?”. So strictly equivalent to “What is that”, word for word. :)

It’s base 20.

80 in French is 4 x 20. A long time ago, 60 was “trois-vingt”, 3 x 20. We still have a hospital in Paris called “Hopital des Quinze-Vingts”, 15 x 20 because it used to have 300 beds.