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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Since it’s your first time, my first suggestion is to try Xubuntu (Ubuntu with XFCE desktop) or Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE desktop and generally more popular than Xubuntu). Both distributions are lighter on resources and they have an Ubuntu base which means there’s a ton of documentation online so if you run into problems, you will have plenty of resources.

    Alpine is small for sure but it is more niche and it doesn’t use systemd which most major distributions use which means if you happen to run into weird issues, your pool of resources will be smaller. Don’t get me wrong, Alpine is great but I wouldn’t recommend it for new users. I don’t know anything about Puppy Linux; maybe it’s fine?

    If your machine can’t run Xubuntu or Kubuntu, then worry about trying more niche distros like Alpine or Puppy.

    If you run into issues, feel free to ask questions. The community is generally nice but you’ll want to try fixing it yourself first and then including what you tried in your post to get a better reception.

    Embrace the terminal. It’s daunting at first but it’s such a powerful tool. Don’t use sudo with every command. Don’t paste random command in the terminal without doing a little research to understand what they do. Again, ask if you need help, you won’t learn everything overnight.

    Good luck!

    Edit: Linux Mint is also probably a good choice. Never used it myself but I’ve heard good things.




  • I clearly don’t know enough about reverse ssh connections.

    My understanding is that you tell the VPS to connect to your computer, a shell pops up on your end, and commands run in it will control the VPS. It helps get around firewalls and makes it less obvious to defenders that an attacker has control of a box because it’s not an inbound connection, it’s an outbound connection.

    What’s your workflow? So you ssh into the VPS and maybe use Tmux or Screen to connect to a terminal session, that session is connected to your home machine but instead of sending commands back to the VPS, it sends commands to your home computer?