In the US, many public universities allow access to the public, including use of computer terminals that will allow access to paid databases. In many cases, you could bring in a usb stick and save copies of articles downloaded from such databases, or at worst you could pay a small fee to print some stuff out. AFAIK, that kind of access varies state by state though, so you need to call university libraries near you to find out.

You say this machine is headless. Is it at a remote location? If not, is it feasible to connect it to a monitor an keyboard for a few minutes? If so then you could logout, switch DE, and then log back in. That would hopefully set the DE you prefer as user default.

If that's not possible, then some of the solutions discussed here might be applicable.

Who but Caravaggio can make a fruit still-life look menacing?

"Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal... says he is still happy with his investment." Cool, cool.

I'm a college professor in the humanities (religious studies, history). Got into linux about 5 years back, partly because it comports better with my lefty politics than the alternatives, but also just because I've long been a closet computer nerd. I currently run a couple of proxmox servers on old optiplexes I grabbed off ebay. Full *arr stack with jellyfin on docker, a Tails VM for TOR stuff, NAS (omv on a vm), some other dockerized stuff: linkding, radicale, alexandrite (a self-hosted lemmy client, which I'm currently writing this on), various backup utilities.

It's basically just a hobby for me, though the switch to linux has also totally changed my academic workflow, e.g. I do all my writing in nvim + latex now, use syncthing to sync my home desktop, laptops, and office computer, etc. I dig divesting myself from corporate computing to the greatest extent possible, appreciate the privacy benefits, and generally just enjoy the community-driven spirit of the whole thing.

I don't think so, no. And I agree on that point actually, but people who are used to tmux or screen, which seems to be the target audience, would presumably be fine with it.

Wow, that reviewer is an idiot. Who tf complains about default keybindings that can easily be changed?

I mostly use debian + docker or alpine + docker for this kind of thing (usually running as VMs on a proxmox server). Both are utterly reliable in my experience, though I've been tending more often toward alpine these days, because it's just so light and simple. I haven't tried any of the immutable systems, in the general spirit of why fix what's not broken. I don't even bother with snapshotting either, though that's mostly because I use some of the proxmox tools for backing up the VMs.

I think sad literature is good for you sometimes. Makes you think about what matters.

If you think that book is somber then you should read his Bewilderment. Totally fucking crushing from beginning to end.

I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn't officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I'm doing and his response was, "cool." Of course I'm totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I'm a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn't involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I'm able to just do it without asking anyone's permission, and it's worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren't like that obviously.

That's a fantastic response. Thanks.

I love linkding, couldn't live without it.

I've used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.

And then on various other machines.

• Xfce on my desktop at work that I don't use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It's totally fine, like xfce always is.
• Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don't really like gnome, but it's the only thing I've tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
• PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
• LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.

How much you wanna bet that the same people who demanded she be uninvited also insist that the Israel/Palestine conflict has nothing to do with settler-colonialism?

You have to enable it, but once you do it can do them automatically.

Linux Mint Debian Edition. Very windows-like + automatic updates = ideal for people who don't really want to have to learn anything new (assuming your parents are like mine in that respect).

However often you do it, you should definitely do it today to cover the serious backdoor that's been discovered: https://archlinux.org/news/the-xz-package-has-been-backdoored/

I'm guessing you're not old enough to remember Ronnie Reagan calling the Soviets "the evil empire." Tensions were incredibly high in the early 80s, and the Republicans were super hawkish about it. I was a kid at the time and convinced we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust.

I've been using tmsu for years to manage thousands of pdfs and images for my academic research.