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Comment by anaisbetts | Hacker News Reader

This article jumps through so many weird hoops to avoid reinstalling Tailscale on (relatively rare) system OS updates and while I appreciate the author's creativity and dedication to user experience - just write a script. Your actual _settings_ / config / user data doesn't get overwritten, it's just the stuff in /usr so reinstalling means everything is exactly back to where it was before

Every system update (which again, is rare, Steam Client updates are much more common and don't change the OS), I SSH in and run `sudo ./reinstall-software.sh`.

Example script:

https://gist.github.com/anaisbetts/194def8511823c2290dbb9ecf...

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I think the last point gives away the reason. He wants to make it a packaged thing that users can install with very little knowledge. The blog post is more as an insight into a dev process than it is a 'howto' for others - although obviously it's that as well!

Bingo! This post was originally intended as an "engineering log" to work you through my thought process as I attacked putting Tailscale on the thing. It was also an exercise in trying to document how to think laterally and abuse second and third order properties of immutable operating systems to get them to do what you want.

Also as an aside, please use they or she to refer to me. I try to not be intrusive about it, but you are making a factual error by referring to me as "he".

Eurgh, that's embarrassing. Also annoying that I can't now edit the comment.

Thank you for correcting me, this is not a problem you should have to deal with.

You're welcome. I've unfortunately gotten used to it. With this kind of thing you either be polite and accept things with grace or you become a bitter sad person. It is really hard to stop myself from becoming bitter about all of this. I wish reality was better and that I didn't have to be literally an expert in so many things to be taken seriously.

Is there a way to put your pronouns on your Blog username or near the beginning? It would make things easier for anyone who doesn't know you.

Far too often tech people (myself included) make the false assumption that most everyone in this space identifies as He/Him.

I can look into that, but it may be a good idea to just stop assuming that tech is full of dudes. I'd need to think about how to do it without being an asshole about it, which is kind of hard. I may just make it show up only when hacker news is the referer.

Very cool, I know it looked like an aside but it really was cool to see all of that information in the blog post!

I've had my deck since launch and have gone through several OS updates, it's not super common but I wouldn't call it relatively rare.

The only reason I noticed every update is because it kept wiping the screen keyboard I installed, because I couldn't get the built in one working at first. It wasn't until later that I found out the actual steam client has to be running in the desktop environment for the built in keyboard to work.

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