Optical Character Recognition. Basically just extracting text from an image.

No problem, thanks for replying.

That makes sense. It looks like a really clever way of letting the boot process allow for basically any arangement. Thanks!

Thanks for explaining it! So systemd-boot finds the kernel in the EFI partition, which it then loads, and then that kernel loads another kernel from the main partition, which is then the full OS.

Is there a reason it’s done this way, and not just the bootloader loads the main kernel?

Also, are the two kernels the same, or does this use two different kernels?

If you use btrfs snapshots and systemd-boot instead of grub, then be carefull restoring updates from before a kernel update.

If I understand it correctly, with systemd-boot the kernel lives in the EFI partition, while the kernel modules live in the main (btrfs) partition. If you restore a snapshot with a different kernel version, it doesn’t restore the kernel itself, but the kernel modules have different filenames, which stops the system from being able to boot.

At least that is my understanding of the problem, from having to debug it twice (just start a live-boot system and use Timeshift to restore the system to after the update again). The next time I install Linux, I think I’ll go with grub instead of systemd-boot.

That being said, I really like btrfs snapshots as a sort of “almost backup” (still do regular backups on an external drive). They are quick and easy, and most packet managers can be setup to automatically make a snapshot before installing/updating stuff.

It automatically replies when it can read/summarize a site, but that isn’t always possible (maybe it has problems with some paywalls).

I’d like to elaborate a bit on why DNS can be used to track you.

Nearly all web traffic is encrypted (https), you can check by looking at the padlock next to the URL in your browser. But DNS requests aren’t encrypted by default. This means anyone, most likely your ISP our the admin of your home network, can see what domains you’re accessing. That means just google.com, lemmy.world, etc. and not lemmy.world/post/… This isn’t a huge amount of info, but it does tell anyone who’s looking approximately what you’re doing (googling something, looking at lemmy, etc.).

To fix that there are a few different ways to encrypt DNS requests, the most common of which (afaik) is DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt DNS requests like any other web request your browser makes. I don’t know why this hasn’t been made the default yet. Firefox has a setting for DNS over HTTPS, it calls it secure DNS.

I’d try mysterytool -H