What's your list of underrated Linux features?

I was reading this 9 year old bug report this morning:

Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that was mounted under /media.
Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything on system owned by user. · Issue #3671 · ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux · GitHub

And I thought. Well good thing I use a continuously snapshotting file system!

A few from my own experience:

  • NILFS2 - a log structured filesystem that keeps snapshots every few seconds
  • nftables - a successor to iptables, which was a successor to ipchains. But with a friendly new configuration language. Finally my Linux firewall rulesets don’t like like ass next to my OpenBSD rulesets
  • auditd - because I like to know what programs have been reading ~/.ssh/
  • opensnoop - ebpf powered way to list files being opened on the system. ebpf in general is very impressive
  • below - a much superior take on top/htop/atop focused around Linux cgroups. It’s just easier for me to work out what’s going on in a modern system
  • Pressure Stall Information - more useful than load average these days IMHO
  • Running prometheus-node-exporter+prometheus on your gaming desktop. Minimal config needed (on Debian, I just bumped retention and polling rate). Records a pile of temperatures, my GPU power draw, and a lot of other things out of the box. Helps me troubleshoot weird behaviour. Having a long history of system metrics is awesome. Not strictly Linux but I bet Linux has the best support :slight_smile:

Variable sector size (VSS) and T10 protection information (PI) support almost never get talked about. Enterprise SSD manufacturers don’t even consistently advertise support for it despite actually supporting it. It’s one of the reasons I’ve had to do my own legwork to figure it out. One of the very few threads dedicated to T10 here even shows up on the first page of DuckDuckGo’s (or Google’s) results for “T10 integrity.”

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I just want a true working atmos. Its the only thing I have been waiting for