sxan

There is little better for ebooks than Calibre, and Calibre Web if you're into web apps.

For the audio book discussion, OP should use the "search" function, because there was a robust discussion about this in @selfhosted@lemmy.world within the past two months.

It doesn't. That's why I said "what they're not telling us".

It was a joke.

Edit I haven't tried this myself, but from what I can find the gparted part is not necessary. You can get rid of Windows and re-use it for Linux with a single command: btrfs device add / /dev/old_windows_partition. The rest of the considerations below still apply.

The answer to the question you asked is: make sure you know which partition it is and run dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/<partition> bs=1024. Then you'll probably want to find which boot loader you're using and remove the Windows option. That will delete Windows.

To re-use the free space, which most folks are focusing on, might be far easier than all of the other comments.

Odds are decent that you're using btrfs. Most reasonable Linux distros default to it, so unless you changed it, it's probably btrfs. With btrfs, you can simply change the position type and add it to your existing filesystem.

1. Use the program gparted. You can do all of this on the command line with fdisk, but gparted is a GUI program and is easier if you're more comfortable with GUIs. Find the Windows partition, make sure you now it's the Windows partition and not the boot partition (the boot partition will be the really tiny one), click on the Windows partition and choose the "change partition type" function to switch it to a Linux partition. There will be warnings; heed them, double check, and then save and exit.
2. Add the old Windows partition to your existing filesystem with: btrfs device add / /dev/sdx2 . This adds the partition /dev/sdx2 to the filesystem mounted at / -- your root partition. Replace /dev/sdx2 with whatever partition Windows used to be on.

That's it. Now your Linux filesystem is using the old Windows partition. Without changing the boot options, when you reboot your system may still believe there's a Windows to boot into. If you're using EFI, it should just disappear, but with grub you'll have to tell grub that Windows isn't there anymore or else it'll keep offering it to you at each boot.

You are almost certainly not using RAID, so you don't need to worry about rebalancing.

Summary: it is very likely your distribution used btrfs for your Linux partition. In that case, the absolute easiest way to get rid of Windows and use it for Linux is to add the partition to your btrfs filesystem. No reformatting, repartitioning, reinstalling; just tell btrfs to use it and you're done.

What they're not telling us is that, in all of the tests, the first thing they do is start organizing to eliminate the human race.

Every.

Single.

Time.

I hear your frustration. It can be annoying. There's a reason for it, and that's because environment variables are limited in their use by scoping: they're only inherited from the parent to children, and they're pass-by-value. This means that, from a child process, you can't influence the variables for any other sibling, or the parent. There's no way to propagate environment variables to anyone except new children you fork.

This is a significant limitation. There is no work around using only environment variables. It's a large part of why applications store scalar values in files: it's (almost) the only environmentally agnostic way to propagate information to other processes.

Herbstluftwm has herbstclient getenv and setenv, because ostensibly every user process is a child of the window manager, and it's a convenient way to communicate scalar changes between processes. tmux has similar commands; in both cases, the source of truth is the parent application, not the environment. gsettings is just Gnome's version; KDE has it's own version. I'd be surprised if Sway didn't.

Environment variables are great, but they're limited, and they are simply unsuitable for purposes. They're also insecure: anyone with the right permissions can read them from /proc. The consequence is that it can be difficult to track down where settings are stored, especially if you're still using some component of a desktop, which tend to manage all of their settings internally.

We do have a global solution for Linux: the kernel keyring. It's secure, and global. It is not, however, automatically persisted, although desktops could easily persist and restore values from the keyring when they shut down or start up. Every desktop I know just keeps it's own version of what's essentially the Windows registry.

It's a mess.

What is your question? I see you describing your approach, and think reusing an old laptop for this is perfect (built-in UPS, yay!), but it's not clear what you're seeking advice about.

Man, you make me wish I'd have followed an embedded career. When I first entered the market, embedded was niche and the domain of specialty industries like the MIC. If you cut out companies like Lockheed, building stuff to kill people, the job pool was really small. But there was a window, juuust around the time I moved to management, when you could find embedded jobs. I wish now I'd have taken that fork in the path.

I release under 3-Clause BSD, so I'm not restricting any sales, or use. You're probably right that I'm not the majority.

I know it's just nostalgia, but I sometimes really miss the days when you could memorize the entire memory layout of your computer. You knew that if you poked a value into a memory location, some pixels would flip at a certain place on the screen.

It was nice living in such a small, constrained world.

Man, I love a good nitpicking.

Lemmy is decentralized, but it's not distributed. It's decentralized because the source of truth for a community isn't your instance

It's a source of truth for you. It's locally centralized. Your admins have complete control over your account; they can log in as you, post as you, remove your content.

Compare this to git. Github may provide public hosting for you, but you can take your marbles and go somewhere else if you like, and there's nothing they can do about it. But midwest.social owns my Lemmy identity, and everything that's on it. If they propagate a "delete" on all my messages, any cooperating servers will delete those messages. For each and every one of us, Lemmy is effectively centralized to the Lemmy instance our account is on.

Now, I agree, this is different than, say, Reddit, where if the Brown Shirts shut out down, they shut out all down, and this can't happen with Lemmy.

But it's also not git, or bitcoin, out Nostr, where all they can do is squash nodes which has no impact on user accounts (or wallets, or whatever your identity is) or content.

Those can be updated asynchronously, so if data is cached locally, latency shouldn't be an issue.

They day they're not using DHT ¯\(ツ)/¯

I don't know. This post was the first I've heard of it, but since then I've seen a couple more "organic" posts asking if anyone thinks it's good. It smells a tiny bit of astroturfing, but not a lot, so maybe it's genuine interest. I'll wait a bit and see, personally.

Linux didn't exist until I was 25.

But are we talking earliest age, or length of time using it? I've been running Linux on PCs for over 30 years.

The whole thing about selling DVDs was that you were selling the DVD, not the distribution on it. You were "charging a reasonable price for the service of burning the DVD, for the media, and for distribution." Much of that went away with the internet, when people could download and burn ISOs themselves. It used to be quite common; not just distributions, but CDs full of OSS software. Again, the assumption and expectation was that you weren't selling the software, but the media. There was no such thing as a "Pro" version of Linux. There were commercial distributions, and there was a period when companies were trying to figure out ways to commoditize OSS, but there were also lawsuits, and it mostly settled out to be service agreements, which were in the end more lucrative anyway.

I disagree about the immorality of selling FOSS. Even in the very rare case that you built the entire program, from scratch, using no FOSS libraries, you probably still used gcc, or the Python interpreter, or go or rustc. And on most cases, you are using libraries that other people created and gave away for free. And instead of giving back to the community, so that the people who's software you're implicitly selling that your software is built and depends on, can't use it similarly for free. And odds are also good that, despite your shim is utterly reliant on their hard work, you're not splitting up the profit and sharing it with them. How much money do those people send to Linus Torvalds? Or the countless kernel contributors? To the people who've worked on libc?

I have absolutely no issue with people who request donations for the software that they built and regularly and consistently maintain. And people charging for OSX or Windows software? It costs more than just free time to develop and release on those platforms - the entire chain is commercial. But when your product is an unmeasurably tiny fraction of all of the gratis effort that went into the end product, well. It doesn't seem right to profit on other's work, does it?

Look, we're a capitalist society. It takes someone time and material to make a chair from scratch, and when you take it, they don't have it any more. They used nothing free except maybe YouTube videos, or their parent's training. The FOSS software ecosystem is the closest thing we have to a functioning communism in the world; it works because, while it may take my time to create something, it doesn't cost me more than my time, and once it's done it can be endlessly replicated and used by innumerable people at no significant cost to me. When actors take advantage of the free ecosystem and don't contribute back in like fashion, in my book that's unethical.