tmux vs screen: Never Lose Work to a Dropped Connection
A terminal multiplexer keeps your work running when SSH drops. What tmux and screen each do, the keys that matter, and why the older one is still worth knowing.
Tailscale: Reaching Your Servers Without Opening Ports
A mesh VPN that puts your machines on one private network wherever they are — no port forwarding, no exposed SSH. What it does, and what depending on it means.
ncdu and dust vs du: Finding What Filled the Disk
du tells you the truth in a format nobody enjoys reading. ncdu makes it navigable and lets you delete from the results. When to use each, including on a server…
htop and btop vs top: Watching a Machine Work
htop makes top's information legible and lets you act on it. btop goes further. Here is what each one shows, the keys worth learning, and why top is still the…
fd vs find: A Friendlier Way to Locate Files
fd finds files with a fraction of find's typing, but find can do things fd cannot. The syntax translation, the fdfind naming trap, and where the classic still wins.
ripgrep vs grep: Which Should You Actually Use?
ripgrep is faster than grep and skips the files you did not want anyway. Here is what it changes, a syntax translation table, and the cases where grep is still…
Processes and Memory: What the Numbers Actually Mean
What a process really is, why load average is not CPU percentage, why free -h always looks alarming, and how the OOM killer decides what to kill.
How Linux Boots, and Where It Goes Wrong
Firmware to bootloader to kernel to systemd, in order — what each stage does, how to tell which one failed, and how to recover from each.
The Linux Filesystem: What Every Directory Is For
A tour of the top-level directories on a Linux system — what belongs in each, why /usr and /var are split, and where to look for the file you are…
Users, Groups and Root: How Linux Decides Who Can Do What
UIDs and GIDs, why most accounts on your system are not people, what root actually is, and the group memberships that quietly hand out administrative power.