So… you’re afraid of the command that does the thing you’re trying to do?

The actual answer to OP’s question is to look up cognitive biases, and to eventually realize that “black” isn’t the relevant descriptor here.

Like seriously and I’m not even intending to be racist

(Though some smarmy asshole will for sure post this unironically thinking that they’re not being racist.)

Google the concept of an escrow service.

I’m surprised no one’s mentioned the security implications. Mounting with nosuid and nodev options can undermine rootkit or privileged escalation exploits.

Flatpak is itself a file manager.

That duplicate of your folder in /run is due to filesystem links (or more likely a fuse mount, I’ve never actually looked into how flatpak works). But either way, they aren’t copies of the data.

Don’t “declutter” manually. Use your package manager.

You’re going to want to look up things like symlinks, hard links, fuse filesystems, and bind mounts among other concepts. Your “whole directory” and other duplicates are artifacts of how the filesystem and process management works, and simply running fsearch or find over them is going to be confusing if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

One Unix concept that carries over to Linux is that everything is a file. Your shared memory space, process data, device driver interfaces, etc, all of it is accessible somewhere in the same virtual filesystem tree as the actual files.

Because of this, there’s very little reason to have the whole filesystem indexed from root. If you’re worried about space usage, you want to work with packages through the package manager. If you’re worried about system integrity, you’ll want package validators.

The above is accurate, and can be considered accurate for any directory below or at well.

Per /run, it’s also mounted in memory, so trying to “declutter” it won’t get you anywhere and things will return on reboot.

Yup. Treating VMs similar to containers. The alternative, older-school method is cold snapshots of the VM, apply patches/updates (after pre-prod testing & validation), usually in an A/B or red/green phased rollout, and roll back snaps when things go tits up.

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If you are in a position to ask this question, it means you have no actual uptime requirements, and the question is largely irrelevant. However, in the “real” world where seconds of downtime matter:

Things not changing means less maintenance, and nothing will break compatibility all of the sudden.

This is a bit of a misconception. You have just as many maintenance cycles (e.g. “Patch Tuesdays”) because packages constantly need security updates. What it actually means is fewer, better documented changes with maintenance cycles. This makes it easier and faster to determine what’s likely to break before you even enter your testing cycle.

Less chance to break.*

Sort of. Security changes frequently break running software, especially 3rd party software that just happened to need a certain security flaw or out-of-date library to function. The world has got much better about this, but it’s still a huge headache.

Services are up to date anyway, since they are usually containerized (e.g. Docker).

Assuming that the containerized software doesn’t need maintenance is a great way to run broken, insecure containers. Containerization helps to limit attack surfaces and outage impacts, but it isn’t inherently more secure. The biggest benefit of containerization is the abstraction of software maintenance from OS maintenance. It’s a lot of what makes Dev(Sec)Ops really valuable.

Edit since it’s on my mind: Containers are great, but amateurs always seem to forget they’re all sharing the host kernel. One container causing a kernel panic, or hosing misconfigured SHM settings can take down the entire host. Virtual machines are much, much safer in this regard, but have their own downsides.

And, for Debian especially, there’s one of the biggest availability of services and documentation, since it’s THE server OS.

No it isn’t. THE server OS is the one that fits your specific use-case best. For us self-hosted types, sure, we use Debian a lot. Maybe. For critical software applications, organizations want a vendor so support them, if for no other reason than to offload liability when something goes wrong.

It is running only rarely. Most of the time, the device is powered off. I only power it on a few times per month when I want to print something.

This isn’t a server. It’s a printing appliance. You’re going to have a similar experience of needing updates with every power-on, but with CoreOS, you’re going to have many more updates. When something breaks, you’re going to have a much longer list of things to track down as the culprit.

And, last but not least, I’ve lost my password.

JFC uptime and stability isn’t your problem. You also very probably don’t need to wipe the OS to recover a password.

My Raspberry Pi on the other hand is only used as print server, running Octoprint for my 3D-printer. I have installed Octoprint there in the form of Octopi, which is a Raspian fork distro where Octoprint is pre-installed, which is the recommended way.

That is the answer to your question. You’re running this RPi as a “server” for your 3d printing. If you want your printing to work reliably, then do what Octoprint recommends.

What it sounds like is you’re curious about CoreOS and how to run other distributions. Since breakage is basically a minor inconvenience for you, have at it. Unstable distros are great learning experiences and will keep you up to date on modern software better than “safer” things like Debian Stable. Once you get it doing what you want, it’ll usually keep doing that. Until it doesn’t, and then learning how to fix it is another great way to get smarter about running computers.

E: Reformatting

I actually want to learn enough code to contribute, but there’s this gap between “how to code” and “how to participate in a modern software project”.

Like, I’ve created plenty of little things. Discord bots, automation scripts, plenty of sysadmin stuff for work, etc. But like, I clone a git repo cause there’s a home assistant bug I’d like to fix for example, and I’m immediately lost on where to start.

This is an AB problem in which you’re going to eventually solve the actual problem that isn’t actually systemd after looking real hard at ways to replace systemd.

Or else you’re going to find yourself in an increasingly painful maintenance process trying to retrofit rc scripts into constantly evolving distributions.

There’s a lot I prefer about the old SysV, and I’m still not thrilled that everything is being more dependent on these large monolithic daemons. But I’ve yet to find a systemd problem that wasn’t just me not knowing how to use systemd.

.local is reserved for mDNS responses, don’t use that.

It’s more than best practice. Your active directory controllers want to be the resolvers for their members, separate from other zones such as external MX records or the like. Your AD domain should always be a separate zone, aka a subdomain. “ad.example.com”.

If your DCs are controlling members at the top level, you’ll eventually run into problems with Internet facing services and public NS records.

Also per below. You can’t get commercially signed certificates for fake domains. Self hosting certificate authorities is a massive pain in the ass. Don’t try unless you have a real need, like work-related learning.

made it a subdomain

That is the correct answer.

Your experience must be extremely limited.

Conversely, as a system engineer that is involved in the hiring process for software development in addition to various types of platform and cloud engineering jobs.

I look for, in order of importance:

• demonstrated experience
• additional skills

That’s it. College degree isn’t even considered, but if you got relevant experience in college that can count.

Most of my interview time is spent digging into technical details to see if you can back up your resume claims. The rest is getting an idea of how you approach challenges and think about things.

As far as certifications, they’re often required to get in the door due to qualification regulations. Especially security certs. If you list them, I’ll ask a few questions just to make sure you actually know what’s up.

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