Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
Julia's posts Post Back to profile
Top-level
groxx

@b0rk otherwise, my general tactic, and what I recommend to lots of people who want to learn computers: get a burner laptop for like $100. Learn how to wipe it and start over. Then go wild. If there's no valuable data on it, it doesn't really matter what you do with it.

E.g. this is how I test backup software, because I don't want to hand my "real" data over until I think I can trust one.

People need playgrounds. Their sole machine with their entire life's worth of data is not a playground.

9 Aug 2023 at 0:09 | Wall-to-wall | Open on hachyderm.io
6 comments
Julia Evans

@groxx did you use this playground approach yourself? did it help? what kinds of stuff did you do on your playground computer?

9 Aug 2023 at 0:13 | Open on social.jvns.ca
groxx

@b0rk backups and restore testing is a very big one - lots of backup software is easy to set up but awful to recover with. By that point they've already hooked you, they have little incentive to do much but take your rent money until you have a problem, because nobody wipes their main PC to test it.

I use it for new OS testing and sometimes trying things out for friends - resizing positions is a crapshoot much of the time, and a problematic install can hose the whole system, so yeah. Paranoia.

9 Aug 2023 at 0:46 | Open on hachyderm.io
Julia Evans
groxx

@b0rk sometimes it also serves as a trivial air-gap to use potentially-shady software - just transfer stuff on a USB and erase when done. If it works, yay. If not, the risk of harm is practically zero.

9 Aug 2023 at 0:48 | Open on hachyderm.io
groxx

@b0rk and as to using it myself to learn: yep! It was by far my biggest and easiest "ok now it makes sense" stepping stone, and I still use it as such.

Plus, like, ever wondered what `sudo rm -rf /` actually does, how much it breaks, and how you can sometimes recover from it? I've done it a few times, it's interesting.

9 Aug 2023 at 0:50 | Open on hachyderm.io
groxx

@b0rk there's always the "just run a virtual machine" option, but that's often more of a pain imo.
If I need a lot of test environments for something esoteric, sure (snapshots are great), but it's often quite far from being able to tell you "does this work with my hardware" or "what is the experience of this like".

Virtual machines are also definitely not something I can reasonably recommend to complete newbies. "Follow Microsoft's recovery instructions" is easy, translating to a vm is not.

@b0rk there's always the "just run a virtual machine" option, but that's often more of a pain imo.
If I need a lot of test environments for something esoteric, sure (snapshots are great), but it's often quite far from being able to tell you "does this work with my hardware" or "what is the experience of this like".

9 Aug 2023 at 1:00 | Open on hachyderm.io
Go Up