PeerTube App v1 is out!


App v1 is out! | JoinPeerTube


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/29207242

PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.

Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.

If you are curious about PeerTube, we can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.

The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!

If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:

If you want to follow the PeerTube project:

in reply to cyrano

When do we get that version on F-Droid?

Also, is the body text just a low effort copy-paste of what Peertube is? We know that... And there is a news article about the new version which could have been copy pasted instead: joinpeertube.org/news/app-v1

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to hendrik

You should be able to use Obtainium with this link to download directly from their git source and stay up to date.

Edit: Changed source link.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Fediverse.com is available for sale


How is that even possible???

If he wanted to, couldn't spez just buy it, and make it serve as a redirect to reddit? I don't understand how SOMEONE hasn't bought/used this domain for fediverse purposes.

in reply to Lost_My_Mind

The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of 'specialness' to it.

I understand your worry - that some 'bad actor' could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don't have a profit motive. We don't care.

People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain 😀

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Cheap Portable USB Touch Monitors - any experiences?


I've got these things locally available in the $50-60 range. This being a generic brand, I imagine a buncha those are available globally. Anyone tried 'em, do they work OK with modern desktops (gnome, plasma)? Touch? DP-Alt or are they DisplayLink? Do they have PD?

Sellers are helpful nada, same with youtube videos, just marketing fluff.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to glitching

Bought a 9 incher for server because I sucked at remoting in.

Fairly delicate but it was like 40 dollars. It is serviceable and serves the need. Am able to complete simple tasks via the touch screen. It kinda spazzes out with multi selecting/ touch but again 40 dollars.

Cords are fairly obtrusive but never bugged me. Solved by getting on that's mini hdmi but didn't like those from experience with pi

Can turn it off with a little switch in the back which it's mostly off. No issue on power up. Quicker than my dells honestly

I realize this is the dumbest setup but it works 🤷

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

pinchflat install not going my way


I'm trying to recreate an install of pinchflat in a podman container that was working on a previous install, but now I want it to run as its own user. I created the quadlet and put it at /home/pinchflat/.config/containers/systemd/pinchflat.container but the user I'm creating this for is a system user without a shell. So I cannot just su into it or sudo -u the command systemctl --user daemon-reload. I'm not really understanding where I'm going wrong.
in reply to muusemuuse

Pinchflat is one of the good containers that doesn't try to play with ID remapping or anything. You just need a container quadlet like the following:
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

[Container]
Image=ghcr.io/kieraneglin/pinchflat:latest

Environment=TZ=CHANGEME

Volume=CHANGEME/config:/config
Volume=CHANGEME/downloads:/downloads

PublishPort=127.0.0.1:8945:8945

It'll run as the quadlet user id by default.
in reply to Static_Rocket

So I found I had 2 problems. First, I have a Name= line instead of a ContainerName= line in there. Second, diagnosing all this is impossible when theres no shell for that account. Turn on a shell (/bin/bash) for the user, fix this thing, activate it, disable the shell (/bin/nologin), drink heavily.

I ended up with:
-----/fuckingarray/homes/pinchflat/.config/containers/systemd/pinchflat.container----------

[Unit]
Description=PinchFlat container
After=local-fs.target

[Container]
Image=ghcr.io/kieraneglin/pinchflat:latest
ContainerName=pinchflat
UserNS=keep-id
Volume=/fuckingarray/homes/pinchflat/pinchflatdata/config:/config
Volume=/fuckingarray/homes/pinchflat/pinchflatdata/downloads:/downloads
PublishPort=8945:8945
Environment=TZ=America/New_York

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

LibreOffice: We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues




Hi everyone! 👋 We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_O… – So if you see someone recommending it, please inform them about the risks – but also that there are actively maintained successor projects (like LibreOffice). #foss #OpenSource

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to guest

The date seems to be misleading. When you open the comments section and load all comments, you'll see that there are quite a few comments that are 9 years old. The article is thus far older than what it's saying, and it unfortunately showcases again how many people rely on very old (and in this case misleading) information about LibreOffice.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

MSI gaming laptop questions


I'm thinking about putting Linux on my MSI laptop.

First how does Linux handle 2 video cards. CPU Intel and a discrete Nvidia 970...

Can Linux work the light up keyboard? ( I game in the dark lot.

External monitor hooked to the display port?

Last what would be the best noob friendly distro to use. Haven't played with Linux in 10 years and really don't have time to tinker now

in reply to Crashumbc

MSI Sword 15 here, with Intel + Nvidia, In my personal experience is runs almost without issues using Manjaro as a Distro (have not tried other distros on this specific machine).

Your experience could be different depending on your specific laptop model and how recent it is.

Keyboard lighting and fan on/off works without issues, the only 'Fn' key that does not work apart from the one for MSI windows software is the one to block the trackpad (and I just configured another keyboard shortcut for it).

~~Using Wayland, I can not use an external monitor connected to the HDMI port on the Nvidia card (No idea if it is fixable now, haven't looked on it recently), but with Xorg I can run an external monitor in the HDMI port and extra ones with a dongle on the USB-C (so far tried with 3 without issues)~~ Edit: I can use multiple monitors without issues on Wayland as of my last test.

Friendly distros recommended these days as far as I know are Mint and Zorin if looking for something Ubuntu or Debian Based, Apart from that there is Fedora or Arch based distros but may need a bit more knowledge and getting used to.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

New Debian release on the horizon?


Looking at Debian's release-critical bugs, you can see that Trixie is close:
Testing now has fewer critical bugs than Stable, and the number is dropping quickly.
About 200 bugs still need to be fixed to get the number down to where the previous releases were done.

Maybe you can help? Bugs blocking the next release can be as simple as missing translations for the upgrade instructions.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to superkret

Trust me, at that point there won't be any explaining possible 😁

We've been burned by a lot of distros in the past and right now it all boils down to using Debian and RHEL, everything else mostly failed at some point or will not uphold the stability guarantees. Even containers with Alpine fucked us over once with the musl DNS issues and a few other missing parts...

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Linux cannot be installed from DVD's anymore?


I burned and tried different distros and all of them the DVD reader laser was moving back and forth like mad and loading and install was so slow that it impossible to continue. Tried 2 different readers.

Fedora Silverblue: the optic reel was moving like mad and loading was so slow that it triggered the anaconda text installer


It stayed there for hours so I desisted

Elementary OS 8: Same as Fedora Silverblue but at least could load the wallpaper installer UI. Not possible to load live OS

Lakka OS: Lakka state on their site DVD's can' t be used anymore for their images lakka.tv/get/linux/generic/

Yeah I know USB thumb drives are like £5 but I wanted to have my silly little fun with my discs and newly bought burner. I remember when I started using linux distros didn't had this kind of problem and live versions could be used, slow but usable.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Hybrid PC/Tablet support


Dear fellow linux users,

I'm comming to you for help. One of my family members recently got fed up with windows bloatware and I managed to get them ready for a switch to Linux.
This person's daily driver is a hybrid PC/tablet machine ( Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 510-12IKB ).

I booted a Linux Mint live usb session to check hardware compatibility and almost everything is working fine. The only exception is the virtual keyboard display, when physical keyboard is disconnected. It never appears.
Would a full install with third party stuff fix the issue ?
This is a blocker for the person, and I'm wondering if any of you have experience with switching on a same model, and would advise any distro that comes with full support of the hybrid PC/tablet hardware.

I tried to look for answers and non of the ones I find are recent enough. Some mention hardware compatibility issues (wifi, camera) that have been resolved and are working according my live session test.

in reply to return_void

I used a lenovo x380 yoga with Fedora. I seldom used it in tablet form, but the keyboard appeared when swiping up from the bottom in GNOME. I did not like it as well as the windows one.
I tried KDE as well, I had a better experience there as there are more config options for it.
As for drivers and sensors like for the hinge positions, wacom touch stuff all just worked.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to return_void

try it with a live USB with Gnome as it is way more touch friendly. Fedora latest recommended because the live USB has a Wayland session (older default to X11).

as to seamless transition, no DE on linux is there yet. Gnome is way better than it was a year or two ago in that regard, but flakyness is still present, expecting the polish and reliability of Android or iPadOS isn't realistic.

Changing key mapping with xmodmap is broken. Is there a workaround?


I want to change the key mapping of Shift+Backspace to Delete.

Running xmodmap -pke gives me (among other lines):

keycode 22 = BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace BackSpace

I change this line to
keycode 22 = BackSpace Delete Delete Delete Delete Delete

and save it in the file ~/.Xmodmap and run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap. Apparently, this worked in part. When I run xev and press Shift+Backspace I get:
KeyPress event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
    root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133664788, (484,630), root:(584,799),
    state 0x0, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyPress event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
    root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665052, (484,630), root:(584,799),
    state 0x1, keycode 22 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 119
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
    XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
    root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665116, (484,630), root:(584,799),
    state 0x1, keycode 22 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES,
    XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 119
    XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
    XFilterEvent returns: False

KeyRelease event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
    root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665444, (484,630), root:(584,799),
    state 0x1, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
    XLookupString gives 0 bytes: 
    XFilterEvent returns: False

With other modifier keys (LeftAlt, RightAlt, LeftCtrl) I still get BackSpace.

But xev seems to be the only application that recognizes Delete. In Wayland applications I get only Backspace, no matter what modifier key (Shift, LeftAlt or RightAlt, LeftCtrl) I press. In Firefox (an X application) there is a change. Now, Shift+Backspace does nothing. I suppose this is because Shift+Delete does nothing as well. The KeyPress event of Shift_L seems to block Delete from being obeyed by applications, which is unfortunate when Shift is part of a key combination that maps to Delete. How can I undo this block of Delete? How can I make the key mapping work in Wayland and X applications?

in reply to ccmskw

Try keyd or kmonad. I do all my key mapping on the keyboard itself, so I can't vouch for either.

discuss.kde.org/t/remap-keys-o…

github.com/rvaiya/keyd

sokinpui.github.io/Blog/post/k…

github.com/kmonad/kmonad

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Malicious Go Modules Deliver Disk-Wiping Linux Malware in Advanced Supply Chain Attack


Packages:
* github.com/truthfulpharm/prototransform
* github.com/blankloggia/go-mcp
* github.com/steelpoor/tlsproxy
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Debian 12 Firefox games run terrible when i press buttons or use the mouse


Hi all,

I recently installed Debian 12 on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, and am using the GNOME desktop (x11). From time to time I play a game called survev.io . It's a browser battle royale game, not hard on graphics.

I have an Nvidia rtx3060 and have the proper drivers installed. I checked using nvidia-smi and Firefox is using the Nvidia gpu.

The issue is that the game runs smoothly until I press a button or move the mouse. Then the framerate decreases significantly and it becomes unplayable.

I already tweaked the following settings in Firefox to no avail:
- gfx.webrender.all = True
- enabled hardware acceleration
- layers.acceleration.force-enabled = TRUE
- gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled = true

And now I'm out of ideas. The game itself isn't too important to me, but other browser games do the same, so it's a wider issue I want to solve.

Any ideas on how to resolve this?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Why does Lemmy use "@" instead of ":" like Matrix does?


matrix is #room:matrix.org and @username:matrix.org

why does lemmy use !room@sh.itjust.works or @username@sh.itjust.works ? it looks like email.

i like the matrix version better

in reply to Itte

Matrix was influenced by the traditional URI schema approach however they also used an inverted URI to have the most significant segment be the first segmont. This is why it has a prepended segment followed by a : and then a URL.

The relationship the URI is describing is homeserver owns user and traditionally we might go homeserver:user I'd argue it is obvious to just invert that into user:homeserver. See Java, dotnet, etc reverse dns naming conventions.

A matrix room is not at a URI, it is on every homeserver that participates in the room. I am not talking about Lemmy and its garbage entirely incorrectly semantic URI scheme. Matrix rooms are globally uniquely identified, and so the room URI only describes the idea of the resource of the room. room:homeserver.

The prefixes are an obvious and neccesary evil for parsing them out of unstructured text. A requirement for most users.

ActivityPub and related went "fuck everything, fuck reason, the web is fucking amazing" and came up with their own flavor of stupidity. Emails use an ancient first attempt at a URL. A URL. What does the URL do? It is explicitly intended to tell you which server to contact. People are going "yeah but email!1!!" entirely moronically ignoring historical context.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to deur

For anyone who can't read that many words at once: URI means identifier and URL means locator.

Matrix does not mix the roles of its URIs beyond the ability to attempt to reach that homeserver through NOT ONLY DNS but also through routing between homeservers. Matrix, unlike this garbage, actually wants to support ephemeral clients and such as well.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

This looks cool but can it game?


I was browsing on system76's offering to see what PCs they have and noticed that they have an ARM Computer that apparently faster than the fastest Apple Mac but for cheaper (Based), but I'm wondering, how well does ARM computers game on linux with proton, it is very expensive to me atm and I can't afford it, but maybe in the future I could consider it to be my first desktop as I always been using laptops, obviously gaming isn't like the main priority as I would like a workstation to do heavy work such as blender and stuff and perhaps put gentoo on it in the future (if its supported) but I would like to game on the side when I'm winding down that's all, so can it game well?
in reply to Ace120C

With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with -j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you'd expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the "CPU Power" is 16W and 56W in those two situations.

Should be awful for gaming. It's possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn't matter through qemu.

Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren't bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don't happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.

in reply to zarenki

Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread)


Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it’s not all one “bundle” that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, “libraries” from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.

What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses ­— like graphic drivers. It’s because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it’s not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.

moonpiedumplings.github.io/blo…

The Facebook/Meta table had a booth where they had an ARM macbook that was running steam and they were installing games on it.

in reply to moonpiedumplings

"Dynamically compiled" and dynamic linking are very different things, and in turn dynamic linking is completely different from system calls and inter-process communication. I'm no emulation expert but I'm pretty sure you can't just swap out a dynamically linked library for a different architecture's build for it at link time and expect the ABI to somehow work out, unless you only do this with a small few manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI. Calling into drivers or communicating with other processes that run as the native architecture is generally fine, at least.

I don't know how much Asahi makes use of the capability (if at all), but Apple's M series processors add special architecture extensions that makes x86 emulation be able to perform much better than on any other ARM system.

I wouldn't deny that you can get a lot of things playable enough, but this is very much not hardware you get for the purpose of gaming: getting a CPU and motherboard combo that costs $1440 (64-core 2.2GHz) or $2350 (128-core 2.6GHz) that performs substantially worse at most games than a $300 Ryzen CPU+motherboard combo (and has GPU compatibility quirks to boot) will be very disappointing if that's what you want it for. Though the same could to a lesser extent be said even about x86 workstations that prioritize core count like Xeon/Epyc/Threadripper. For compiling code, running automated tests, and other highly threaded workloads, this hardware is quite a treat.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to zarenki

You're right, my bad. Dynamic linking and dynamic compilation are different thinks.

The library inter operation is a part of the translation layers that, like fex-emu which is becoming more and more supported by Fedora.

github.com/FEX-Emu/FEX/blob/ma…

manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI


Yes, but usually games are ran with wine which does have a standard set of libraries it uses.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

A quick question


Would you guys be interested if I start a Youtube/PeerTube Channel where I talk about Unix Topics related to Linux, BSD & Plan9 etc... and perhaps rants and rambles about stuff that I like and don't like about how the mainstream treats linux etc etc. (I have a lot to talk about and say) and perhaps devlog updates about a game I'm making (its open source obviously)
I don't wanna look like a stupid influencer shill (nobody likes those)
but basically I just want a platform where I can speak about what I like and passionate about thats too long to write here, and if a mod/admin is reading this please delete this if its unsuitable for this thread, sorry in advance.
in reply to TabbsTheBat

I don't wanna copy them, I have other topics I think they are untouched and it would be nice to start a conversation about them.
for example "why the normies complain about the proprietary apps they use but then whene you suggest something they just brush it off" ("I hate facebook messenger, its buggy as hell", "try signal then", "no.") thats one example of the stuff I will cover, basically very obscure topics, that nobody have covered yet

Linux Mint installation stalling and not finishing


I'm unsure what is going wrong and not having any luck finding a command or file I can tail to figure out why it's having so many problems finishing. Last weekend I tried just installing mint to some unused space on a drive but that seemed to get stuck in the same place. This weekend I'm using the "install alongside windows" option in the installer with the same behavior.

This is being installed from a USB drive into an nvme SSD and I'm really lost s to why it would be like this after more than an hour. Any advice on how to figure out why it gets stuck is appreciated. Hoping to transfer some files over after this is done and then reevaluate if I want/need the windows partition.

Is there any community for Linux for noobs ?


in reply to nagaram

It's run by the main developers of Lemmy, and they're both authoritarian communists (which I just got from Wikipedia as I'm trying not to use the pejoritve "tankie").

Anything that could be perceived as speaking down towards Russia, China, maybe even North Korea, ends up with your comment getting deleted and your account banned for a period of time.

They started Lemmy because @dessalines got banned from Reddit. The backwards thinking is that people shouldn't be banned for speaking their minds, yet their instance is the absolute worst for that.

By avoiding .ml you are helping Lemmy be what it should be -- a decentralized, user owned, user moderated place with sensible decisions behind the scenes.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

in reply to walden

Yep that's pretty much the long and short of it. People will say, if you just stick to the technical topics then you're fine and they'll ignore you. Which is true to an extent. But you should not have to. And most people don't want to popularize places like that to begin with if they knew.

This part is a small tangential nitpick. What Russia China North Korea Etc have is not communism. They may call it Communism. But what is important to note is that one is uppercase and one is lowercase. One is an adjective that describes a stateless classless society. The other is a noun often used to refer to a tightly controlling state with a strict regiment class structure between the political and non political classes. Honestly I think the term communism is beyond Rehabilitation. Though I would still like to try and see it differentiated from the noun.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

dudes, I am linux pilled


I was a poor young man, I refused to pay $100 to put windows on a hard drive I had installed into a hand-me-down desktop.

I found linux and made it work, through thick and thin.
As a lazy jackass i somehow got skyrim to work through wine via copied and pasted terminal commands. wintetricks and all, i found it wildly difficult. Playing was almost as thrilling as seeing it work.

I have only ever attempted to make a linux ISO bootable drive through windows that one time, more than ten years ago.
My wife was given a laptop with windows 11 installed and I wanted to install firefox.

what, the actual fuck, is "S" mode?

ctrl-alt-t "install that shit"!

A computer should not come with a subscription baked in. That's trash.
The issues i get through linux come from my failure to understand it and/or the walled gardens it hasn't found its way into yet.
The issues I experienced this evening on windows were there by design.

Thank you to all of the homies that make the weird and sometimes uncomfortable linux/ open-source community work. You guys are the shit.

Surface-like laptop alternatives?


Hi,

I might need to give away my Surface Pro 7 soon, and I'm considering what laptop to buy next. For a MS laptop, the surface behaved rather well on linux. Well, if it wasn't for the cameras, which never worked.
I'm now wondering which laptop has good hardware support, that would be kinda like a surface, a 2-in-1 laptop. As in, detachable keyboard, that can operate in tablet mode and then once you attach the keyboard you have a full laptop. But with full Linux/cameras/everything support?

Does such thing exist?
Thanks!

in reply to LukeSky

Windows apps (particularly ones that require that kind of acceleration) are unlikely to work with Wine. And if they do, either they'll be crashy, or they can break at any consequent Wine update. Forget Windows apps. Windows games that are invoking only fullscreen 3D are much more likely to work on Linux because the part that gets re-interpreted is simpler. But apps, that use obscure optimization Windows APIs are a pain to get good support of.

So, I suggest you install kdenlive or Shotcut to do video editing. Even Davinci resolve is a hit or miss on Linux and it doesn't support AAC at all. So get it done with the two OSS apps I suggested instead. In another life I was a music video director for local bands, and so I was doing a lot of color grading, invoking tricks and things that FOSS apps can't do. I switched full time to Linux and FOSS apps, and I just do the basic color grading now. It was sad to see that part of the fun go, but that's what I had to do.

Additionally Filmora is a primarily Chinese company, probably mining data, so it's best to not use it. Same for CapCut.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to LukeSky

I prefer the UI of Shotcut, but kdenlive is admittedly more powerful. You can try both to see which one you prefer. I suggest you download the .appimage files of both of them from the website (this way you'll get the latest versions). I'd suggest against the flatpak versions as sometimes they come with limitations of various kinds. Just download their respective .appimage files, make them executable (right click on the downloaded files with your file manager and then go to their Properties to set them as executable), and then double click them to load. If you go that route, make sure you manually update them every 3 months or so, as that's when they usually release updates.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Backup on RPi + Nextcloud


Would it be reasonable to expect a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Nextcloud and manage a photo backup of +100 Gb?

The Raspberry Pi is from 2020, running Raspbian, and it was used as an intervalometer with the help of gphoto2 (meaning no great efforts were demanded from it).

The pictures are on two external hard drives

*1Tb WesternDigital SATA (bought second hand, but "like new" according to the sales guy.

*320Gb WesternDigital SATA (inherited from an AcerOne laptop once I realized it could not even handle lubuntu)

My very limited knowledge on the subject tells me I need to:

*Get rid of Raspbian and install Raspberry Pi OS

*Install Nextcloud (and upgrade an existing account)

*Upload +100 Gb

Would the aforementioned steps allow me to access the files on Fedora/Kubuntu (two separate hard drives on a desktop) and openSUSUE (on a laptop)?

I’m also testing a filen.io account and a sync.com account. All three services (NextCloud, Filen, and Sync) work as I expect on an Ipad.

Filen and Nextcloud have Linux applications, and both have been working without problems on test backups of 100 pictures.

Sync is CANADIAN but not Linux friendly (I tried Wine, didn’t work, gave up)… I’m accessing a free account via Firefox only, so I’m not counting on them for this journey.

So, long story short, I want to back up my files (mostly pictures/scans and some pfd documents) on someone else's computer and locally.

Now the question. Can anyone recommend a guide to achieve what I want?

I’m a cook by trade without any technical (software/hardware) training who has been using Linux (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, Mint) since 2012. Please forgive any mistakes on terminology.

I included a picture of my intervalo-Frankenstein-meter from 2020.

Thank You.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to MangoPenguin

Do you need nextcloud?

I am looking for an alternative to proton drive. It does not seem like the Linux app is happening anytime soon, and I want to be able to have a backup of the pictures I duplicate and edit without having to download the file and upload it after the changes I make.


  • filen.io does that, but the servers are on the other side of the Atlantic.
  • sync.com does not have a Linux app either.
  • google drive and mega allow that, but I do not use those services.
in reply to justblackcoffeeplease

In which way do you plan to transfer your photos to the backup storage? In the picture I can see a camera and I assume it uses an SD card. I would, if I were you:

  1. Buy a consumer grade storage device with USB port, like those desktop storage towers from WestDigital
  2. Build a RAID with it if the data is important enough
  3. Connect it to my computer and just run rsync

Some storage tower even comes with an Ethernet port and a web interface. It's practically a personal "cloud".

Nextcloud is resource heavy, slow, hard to setup, and hard to backup/restore. This is from someone who has been using it from when it was Owncloud.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

What should the subset of the Fediverse that is Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed be called?


Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that encompasses Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, which is called... what exactly?

Is Threadiverse too traumatic & tainted by association with Meta's (all but entirely defunct) Threads? Is The Verse too cool/poetic/nerdy (but niche) to be understood? I highly advise against Lemmyverse bc mainstream normal people are far less tolerant of tankies than we who are here are willing to put up with. Simply listing the software available sometimes is the best option - like the Interstellar app supports all of Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, but most support at best 1 or 2 of those - but usually is too long to say and does not roll off the tongue, plus will just keep growing as time goes on. Is Forumverse thus the least bad of the available options, or perhaps you have a better idea? 💡

Anyway, the start to a listing:
1) Threadiverse
2) Forumverse
3) (The) Verse
4) Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed
5) Something else?

img

- source for image

in reply to julian

IIRC Lemmy and Mastodon PMs are different and incompatible. If you can receive PMs from Lemmy users then you should be able to receive auth codes. Currently @rikudou@lemmings.world is adding both Lemmy and Mastodon PMs here: github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-…

Also software other than Lemmy and Mbin needs to add ‘roleName: Administrator’ to their user webfinger requests. This is because ActivityPub doesn’t have a standard way to expose user roles.

I’m thinking of adding another ways of verifying like DNS based verification but still not sure. Any recommendations are welcome 😀

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Broken SSD - Disaster or not


This week, it finally happened. I think it’s the first time in 20 years that a hard drive has died on me without warning. And it was also the first time I was using an NVMe drive, but that could be a coincidence.

The drive was still under warranty (barely a year and a half old). I even had a spare lying around. But the true cost of restoration is, of course, my own labor. My planning had not been perfect (for such a remote event, as I had judged). However, it was easy enough. I simply installed NixOS from a USB loader and downloaded my configuration from my backup on my NAS (daily rsync jobs to the rescue). I also downloaded all the important files for my home directory. Then, it was simply a matter of adjusting a few things in the configuration file, rebuilding the system, and voilà. Well, except for a few things that didn’t work quite right for some reason and had to be manually fixed, but nothing major.

However, next time I want this to be even easier. It’s probably overkill to install a RAID controller and have multiple drives running in RAID1 or RAID5, but the restoration process is still too much manual work. I was thinking of regularly backing up my main drive on the block device level, so I would just have to swap out the drive and restore the delta from the backup. I’m not quite sure if that’s feasible or a good idea. For my personal system, I have to balance the investment of preparing for a disaster with the likelihood and impact of such an event. This seems like a good trade-off, but I would be curious to hear how other people prepare for drive failure.

in reply to julian_hoch

The BIOS does not know about the RAID, the is why the EFI partition has to be a regular partition, but there is nothing forbidding more than one EFI partition so simply duplicating that across both drives ensures the same redundancy the RAID offers, but GRUB DOES know about RAID 1, so if you setup a raid1 array as the boot partition and then just write the boot block to both drives along with the EFI partition you can RAID everything except the EFI boot partition. Sorry your motherboard reduces your speed if you have more than one nvme, sounds very odd. Mine does share bandwidth if the SSD's are SATA but NOT if they are nvme.

Cleaning up packages?


I noticed while updating my system just how many packages I have installed that I don't recognize.

I tend to think that minimalism is better for security, so I'd like to remove any packages that I'm not using, but this is a bit of a scary task.

Does anybody have a safe method for reviewing and purging unused or bloat packages while obviously making sure not to accidentally remove important dependencies?

I'm on arch btw.

in reply to brownmustardminion

Just leave it. Either they do something in the background. Then you'll get issues when they're missing, and you'll never know which package is missing for what.
Or they don't do anything, then they just take up a few MB of disk space.

"Cleaning up" is the most sure-fire way to destroy your OS, and absolutely not worth anyone's time. Trust me, I've made that mistake multiple times.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Finally using Linux as my desktop


I'm a retired Unix admin. I've been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I'd developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.

Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn't even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don't have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don't understand what that means..) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can't have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It's very clean and no video tearing. I still don't have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I'm very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I'm used to that already after only a day.

It's only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.

Distro for a really low spec PC


This is my sister's old PC and I want to bring it back to life. But it seems to struggle even on lightweight distros.

It's an HP All In One 19-2114 with following specs.

CPU: AMD E1-2500 @ 1.4GHz with integrated Radeon HD 8240

RAM: 4GB DDR3 @ 1333MHz single channel

Storage: Samsung EVO 1TB SSD

The Radeon gives me headaches as it has screen tearing on Linux and fails to boot on Haiku unless I choose fallback graphics

What should I expect upon switching from windows?


I currently use windows 10 in my daily life. I often play games, use browsers, basic stuff like that. On top of that, I also experiment with different music software, mostly Reaper for now. I edit videos and images at a very basic level as well. Upon switching, what should I expect to change? I'm considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching. What's the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I'm nowhere near involved in computer science, I'd just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.
in reply to Cattypat

For games it's really great unless that game you're looking for has kernel-level anticheat. You can check ProtonDB for Steam games, Lutris for other platforms. If you prefer single-player games mostly like me, you won't have much of a problem.

For music, there are software like Ardour and LMMS. For video editing, you can check KDEnlive.

Before switching, I suggest you to try at least a couple different distros on a virtual machine, better if you have a separate laptop to try things. PopOS is great. You can also check Linux Mint, Bazzite and openSUSE Leap.

in reply to Cattypat

I'm excited you're giving Linux a try!
There are a ton of excellent ressources online for learning about Linux, how to make it your own (a practice commonly called 'ricing'), or fix errors you may encounter. These are explored further in the links below 😀

  1. Picking a distro. What I hear is that, unless you have some problematic hardware it doesn't really matter what you pick.
    So if it feels overwhelming, don't stress too much over if it's the "right one", you can always try different ones out.
    Having said that, my impression is, many coming from Windows seem to be happy with 'Mint'. Likewise 'Bazzite' seems popular as of late. But 'Pop_Os!', 'Debian' or 'Fedora', are also all perfectly valid choices. Personally I've liked using Endeavour OS with KDE, for quite a while.
  2. Software. There's so much cool software out there, so maybe search around for which can solve your needs. I like browsing Flathub.org or blogs, such as, Phoronix to discover new software. There might also be a discovery feature in the distro itself.
    Both Firefox (and its derivatives such as LibreWolf) and Chromium (along with its derivatives: Chrome, Brave, etc.) runs well. Even the much smaller project: LadyBird, does so. I have no experience with music production software on Linux, so cannot comment on that.
  3. Games. Might depend on which types of games you play. But to me it seems Steam (using Proton/Wine), Heroic Games Launcher, and Lutris, works great. The steamdb as others mention is also a super ressource!

If you made it this far through my wall of text, I'm delighted by your curiousity.
Two Linux "introductory videos" I'd like to share are respectively from Nick@thelinuxEXP Linux isn't (just) better, it's also more FUN! and Brodie Robertson's Linux Resources Every New Linux User Needs Odysee YouTube

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Linux distro recommendations


tldr:
What reliable, up-to-date, linux distro would you recommend a gaming softwareengineer and privacy enthusiast?

Full text:
Hey all,
I know this is the age old question, but I would like to ask it anyway.
I am currently switching from windows to linux on my main pc and am on the hunt for a fitting distro. I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.

My thought regarding a few distros:
- I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too "old" for my liking.
- Ubuntu - Canonical is out for me.
- I also looked at fedora, and liked it, but after reading more and knowing it is backed by IBM and that is US based I am not too sure anymore. I ideally would want to have something independent. Although being backed by a company promises continuous work in the future (with the risk of becoming bad).
- OpenSUSE tumbleweed seems promising (german origin!) but also quite intimidating as it is apparently mostly targeted towards power users and I am not sure if it fits an all purpose desktop pc.
- Arch based distros seem great as it contains all the newest packages and is infinitifly customizable. But the KISS nature of arch and the (as far as I understood) high effort to get everything running is a bit intimidating when switching from windows. But I also do like the fact that it ships with only the bare minimum and not anything bloated.

Further more I somehow think that using a base distro (in comparison to a fork of a fork...) is more ideal as they receive updates, etc faster. But that is just a feeling and I couldn't argue more precisely about it.

Regarding a DE I am definitely going KDE.

I would be very happy for some tips, opinions or pointers in the right direction to continue and finally get rid of windows... Well at least mostly. I guess i will keep it in dual boot as I do play a few games that unfortunately won't run on linux.

Thanks in advance already!

in reply to HappyBerry

Doesn't seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I'm gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.

It's a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it's not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I'd recommend you read up on it, since I can't explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to spin up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren't available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

NιƙƙιDιɱҽʂ

I never intended to insult you, I was merely explaining how my ADHD manifests.

I made the incorrect assumption that you were coming from a more neurotypical perspective, and for that, I sincerely apologize, but nowhere did I insult you. If you took this as an insult, again, my apologies.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to MonkderVierte

Yeah, I just checked the logs with journalctl /usr/bin/Hyprland. You won't believe what it said.

``` [LOG] Hyprland PID: 7331
[LOG] Hyprland Version: 0.48.1-dev+ (git commit: feedbeef4dead)
[LOG] Built: 2025-01-27
[LOG] OS: Arch Linux (Stallman-Approved* Edition) *Approval pending code audit
[LOG] GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics (Trying its best under ideological scrutiny)
[LOG] Monitors: 1 AOC (Currently displaying philosophical paradox)
[LOG] Running on XWayland: Only for non-free blobs (shame!)

[INFO] Initializing Hyprland... Preparing for purity inspection.
[INFO] Loading config from /home/user/.config/hyprland/hyprland.conf
[INFO] wlroots: Initializing DRM backend.
[WARN] Ambient Freedom Levels detected: 98% (Dangerously high for proprietary hardware!) Source seems localized to... desk peripherals.
[WARN] Analyzing visual input field... Multiple instances of stallman_visage.jpeg detected taped to monitor bezel and desk surface.
[ERROR] Potential Purity Overflow detected! Excessive whitespace concentration in peripheral visual field identified as 'rms_white_liquid_anomaly'.
[ERROR] Specifically correlating anomaly with:
- Photo ID: RMS_Laptop_Rocks.jpg (High concentration near shirt area)
- Photo ID: RMS_Boat_Ponder.jpg (Moderate concentration, background water reflection misinterpreted?)
- Photo ID: RMS_Desk_Stare.jpg (Critical concentration, direct optical path to sensor)
[ERROR] Compositor attempting to render scene, but framebuffer contaminated with recursive 'freedom.h' includes apparently leaked from white pixel data.
[FATAL] GPU context lost. Reason Code: 0xDEADRMS (Driver unable to handle ideological load). Possible short circuit caused by concentrated freedom particles (aka 'white liquid').
[LOG] Received signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at address 0x474E554C494E5558 (ASCII: GNULINUX)

Backtrace:
#0 0x... intel_dri_bo_map() <-- Mapping failed, possibly due to freedom interference
#1 0x... CRenderer::renderScene() <-- Scene contaminated
#2 0x... CCompositor::renderFrameForMonitor() <-- Monitor displaying pure ideology now
#3 0x... main_loop() <-- Loop couldn't handle the truth
#4 0x... libc_start_main()
... (stack trace obscured by what appears to be... beard hair?)

[CRITICAL] Hyprland Crashed. SIGSEGV. Probable Cause: Exposure to concentrated doses of Richard Stallman via photographic prints. The 'white liquid' (high-intensity whitespace/purity) from the photos appears to have overloaded the rendering pipeline. Recommend shielding hardware or using less ideologically charged desk decorations.```

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

[anecdote] You learn something new every day with linux


Wanted to share an anecdote (I hope that's OK). I jumped to Linux on my gaming pc last August (Bazzite) and I've been having a blast. Almost everything works either out of the box or with a minor tweak (the tweak being updating Proton). But I am the sole linux user in my D&D/gaming group, so obviously this is the source of some of our banter.

Last night, we decided to play some Valheim. Bought it before switching to Linux and never tried it, so steam had to install some compatibilty stuff. But once everything was installed, it too worked like a charm (surprise surprise). We were having fun, sailing around on our ~~crappy raft~~ mighty longship and striking a nice pose while doing so. I decided to take a screenshot, but didn't know if there was a keybind to disable the HUD, so I asked the two more experienced Valheimers with whom I was playing. Neither of them knew it by heart, but one of them looked it up. He said: "It should be Ctrl + F3". I tried it and it didn't work for me, but it did for him. "Wow, imagine playing on linux where nothing works" our other friend chimed in (jokely, don't worry). Our first, more helpful friend said: "Maybe try Ctrl + Alt + F3?" So I did. Then, my whole computer froze, just as we landed on the edge of a dark forest with our raft. I thought: Oh fuck what did I do this time. Pressing again didn't help, but after about 20/30 seconds, I was greeted with a shell login. Now I could hear my friends and the game in the background again, and they could hear me, but all I saw was a shell. I decided to log in, and still only got a shell. So, as my friends were frantically fighting a skeleton, I was searching for what on earth happened, and, more importantly, how to fix it.

Thankfully, I wasn't the first idiot to start pressing random buttons on their Linux system, and someone had this exact issue years back as well. I had a quick read, and learned that apparently the Ctrl + Alt + Fx buttons switch between virtual terminals. The post on the Ubuntu forums mentioned needing to switch to terminal 7 (Ctrl + Alt + F7), which also didn't work. But trying the other buttons, I found that the desktop environment is on terminal 2 (at least on Bazzite/Fedora).

And the funny thing here is that, even though I was essentially gone for a full minute, maybe a minute and a half, my character was fine, my Linux naysayer friend had died to a skeleton, and I had learned something new about our great OS 😀

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Blubber28

It is possible that you are running the windows version. You can find out in properties of the game. If the 'force compatability tool' is checked, under compatability, it will download the windowns version and run it through compatability layers. Otherwise you might have just seen the dialog about precompiling shaders.

Worth noting that sometimes developers make a linux version of their game, but neglects maintaining it. In those cases it is preferable to just run the windows version with comp layers. I think the linux native valheim version is alright though. Good devs.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Best way to resolve tailscale and wireguard race condition


I've had a VPN running on my server via Wireguard for ages with no issues. A couple of weeks ago I finally got round to setting up Tailscale so I could access it remotely and again it worked fine without any issues. I rebooted my server this morning and while I was out I realised I could no longer access it, once I got home I discovered everything else was working fine it was just inaccessible over Tailscale.

After some troubleshooting I've come to the conclusion that if Tailscale starts first the other VPN's routing entries take priority and Tailscale doesn't work. If Tailscale starts second then it seems to work fine. As far as I can tell I have a few options for fixing this but I'm not sure what would be the most recommended. The simplest solution is probably just to disable Tailscale from autostarting and start it manually, however I'm likely to forget that at some point and will probably only notice when I'm out and can't access the server to start it.

If I add the following to the Wireguard config file this solves the issue: PostUp = ip route add 100.64.0.0/10 dev tailscale0
PostDown = ip route del 100.64.0.0/10 dev tailscale0
However in that case if the other VPN tries to start first it just fails as the tailscale0 interface doesn't exist yet, so all I've done is reverse the order I need them to start.

I could also edit the wireguard or tailscale service files with before or after targets, that would be fairly simple to do but I think its not recommended to manually edit package provided service files? The tailscale one specifically says its meant to be read only.

The final option I can think of is to disable the tailscale service on startup and then create a systemd timer to start the tailscale service with a slight delay after boot. I think this may be the best method as I can't see any downsides, but maybe I'm overlooking something?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Looking for advice buying a laptop - lists of requirements inside


Hey everyone!

I just bought a Lenovo Yoga L13 Gen2 and I am greatly disappointed, after installing Arch on it it's overheating a lot even when I only have Firefox open. During my research buying this laptop I also made the mistake of not checking if the RAM can be upgraded and now I'm stuck with 8 GB of soldered on, non-upgradable RAM.

Anyways this is why I'm turning to you, I spent hours upon hours researching trying to find the perfect laptop to buy before settling on this one, and since the result was so catastrophic I figured why not ask around in the community a bit.

I was only going to buy a used model since my budget isn't that big. The laptop is intended for browsing and some (Java) coding, so it doesn't need to be extremely powerful. The main use case is for a small laptop that I can use on my lap on the couch or in my recliner to browse or do some coding while using (Arch) Linux.

My MUST have requirements are:
- 13 inch screen (max 14 inch)
- Touchscreen with at least Full HD (1920x1080) resolution
- Good/ perfect (Arch) Linux support
- Good cooling/ doesn't get super hot

Ideally the following requirements should also be met:
- Touchpad buttons with dedicated middle-mouse-button
- Backlit Keyboard
- Bright screen
- Upgradble RAM or alternatively 16 GB RAM version available

I intend to spend around 300€ max used, for reference I paid 190€ for the L13 Gen2 with 94% battery health.

I would prefer a laptop that isn't older than 8th/9th Gen Intel and equivalent AMD. I would be open to models with Intel and AMD chips.

I am so grateful for anyone who sees this post and comes up with some suggestions, after hours upon hours of research I am a bit exhausted and desperate for some community suggestions.

Have an awesome day everybody! 😀

(RESOLVED) Network is slow after installing Fedora


For context, I just installed Fedora Workstation and I am dual-booting alongside Windows.

For some strange reason, download speeds are hovering around 200 KB/s, and sometimes randomly dropping to below 70KB/s. This occurs when I boot into either Windows or Fedora. Before installing Fedora, my speeds were usually >50MB/s, sometimes a couple hundred MB/s if the network isn’t very busy. This might be an issue with network drivers being weird since I’m dual booting, or maybe I need to manually install drivers for Fedora.

(for comparison my phone, using the same network, has >100MB/s download speeds)

EDIT: I’ve updated to Fedora 42 and network speeds are now in the MB/s again. Not sure what happened. Now it seems that when I install from “flatpak-1” rather than just “flatpak” speeds are great. Also, dnf install has good speeds now.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to sbird

Here's my testing recommendations

Testing methodology


To get consistant results, use a consistent method of test. If you're downloading a large file, always test by downloading that same file from that same source. If you're using a speed test service, use the same speed test service with the same server. If you're using a tool like iperf3, always use the same tool against the same iperf server.

Potential issues


Networks can fail from hardware issues, software issues and infrastructure issues. Since you don't control 99.9% of the infrastructure if the internet is involved, lets leave that for the last option.

Hardware Issues


The hardware involved you control are mostly your NIC, and your Remote Connection. For wired ethernet at home, this is likely a physical ethernet port on your computer on one end, and another physical ethernet port on a switch/router/ap provided by your ISP.

Testing Wired Hardware Issues


  • Using the same switch and cable, run a speed test on another computer. If the issue persists, the problem is not with your computer, if it resolves, its related to your computer.
  • Using the same computer and cable, run a speed test on another switch. If the issue persists, its not the switch or cable, its your computer, if it resolves, its not your computer.
  • Using the same computer and switch, use a different cable. If the issue persists, it's not the cable and its either your computer or switch, if it resolves, its the cable.

With these three you can figure out what device is causing the problem.

Testing Wireless Hardware Issues


The hardware involved is the wireless NIC in your computer, the environment your wifi signal is in, and the wifi AP. The steps are much the same as testing for a wired issue

  • Using the same AP and physical location, run a speed test on another computer. If the issue persists, the problem is with the AP or location, if it doesn't it may be your computer
  • Using the same computer and physical location, run a speed test on another AP. if the issue persists, the problem is with your computer or location, if it resolves, it may be the AP
  • Using the same computer and AP, run a speed test in another physical location. If the issue persists, the problem is with the computer or AP, if it resolves it may be the environment


Software Issues


The issue could be software related. Something like the drivers running on your laptop or connection point.

Testing Computer Drivers


You've already done this for your computer by dual booting. This proves the issue is not driver related, since the problem persists with two different sets of drivers.

Testing Connection Point Drivers


  • You have less control over the drivers on your switch/router/ap. If the hardware tests resolve when using a different AP, then you can attempt a firmware upgrade/downgrade before replacing the physical device. This isn't usually worth the hassle since ISPs are quick to replace them with a service call.


Testing Computer Configuration


Your network settings could be misconfigured.

  • If you are using DHCP, turn it off, and enforce a speed negotiation, IP address, subnet mask, and DNS server and try again. If the issue persists, then it's likely not related to your configuration. If it resolves it probably is.
  • If you are using a static configuration, turn it off and use DHCP. If the issue persists, it's likely not related to your configuration, if it resolves, it probably is


Infrastructure Issues


If your home network is more sophisticated then an ISP provded router/switch/ap combo connected to everything over wifi and ethernet, theres more devices to troubleshoot. But if you have something like this, you probably already know what you're doing a little bit and wouldn't be making this post. But who knows! Re-run the process isolating each device and replacing it with something known good to identify whats causing the problem.

As for the internet, it's not a stable and safe place. Speeds vary drastically day to day. Internet weather happens and partial outages occur regularly. Don't forget that the service your using to speed test could be the issue itself. It's another component to isolate and test.

Process


Use the above steps to identify what device is causing the problem, and if its a hardware or software issue. Hardware issues are mostly resolved by replacing devices, while software issues are resolved with software updates and configuration changes.

Good luck and god speed!

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Reddit infiltrators, need a shortened Lemmy link to evade Reddit filtering? DM me


I don't know how long or well it'll work, but so far I was able to evade the initial "no URL shortener" Reddit filtering with it.

But for reasons I ended up paying for a month of a Pro plan on a URL shortening service to only find out I didn't need to for what I needed, so now I've got a limit of like 1k links on a custom domain LMAO

So if it'll help, DM me a comm you want a "cloaked" link to to spread around on Reddit and I'll send you a link on a custom fresh domain you can throw around

in reply to johntash

There's definitely something going on. Whenever I add a Lemmy instance URL that isn't obfuscated somehow, like replacing the periods with commas or (dot), then my comment gets no likes or responses, whereas a very similar comment in the same thread without a link does.

It seems to down rank it in the algorithim, if not outright shadow remove them.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to nycki

Don't believe so, best that's currently available is skimming through the video to look at the slides.

Here's my short summary of the presentation, I tried to denote what's being worked on (open PR), what's kinda being done (WIP), and things stuff they'd like to be done in the future (wishlist). May be somewhat wrong.
* Flatpak is stagnant
* Red Hat is working on a better way to preinstall flatpak apps (open PR)
* Flatpak should is slowly moving towards OCI and away from ostree (more tooling available, don't need to maintain their own tools)
* Better permission handling that is more backwards compatible (open PR)
* Should directly use Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio (WIP)
* Allow user namespaces in flatpak sandbox (WIP)
* Move dbus proxying into dbus brokers (wishlist)
* Improve network sandboxing (wishlist)
* Improve drivers handling, currently drivers need to be built for each runtime, could cause issues if using EOL app on new hardware (wishlist)
* Work on portals directly improves flatpak

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Leaflet

Haven't seen the video, I'm only commenting based on the summary in the comments.

It's good that flatpak is switching to OCI containers. Hopefully that will end the flatpak's dependency hell. This week I was looking at flatpak as a way to publish my app and found the user experience (user is the app publisher in this context) quite bad. Could be skill issue obviously.

I thought I could just look into a database of flatpak runtimes, pick the one with the software I need, add additional packages and be done with it. Unfortunately it is not that simple.
First of all as far as I know, there is no "database" like archlinux.org/packages. You have to download the runtime and then search /usr/include/ or /usr/bin/ to check if particular piece of software exists in it.
Adding additional packages is also quite difficult. There are these runtime extensions which are like "baby runtimes" for special software like ffmpeg, java, etc. They kinda suffer from issues similar to the issues of the runtimes. And unlike in regular distros where you can get a package for almost anything, here you don't have the luxury and have to bundle that not so popular dependency.

I hope that with OCI I will be able to just provide the binary, a link to the base image and a list of dependencies to install and be done with it.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

I swapped the entire school computers to linux mint


I go to a programming school, where there were computers running ancient windows 8 and some were on windows 10, they ran really slow and were completely unrelaible when doing the tasks that are required, those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em, so long story short I decided to talk to the principal about it explaining why linux is so much better than windows and gave him reasons why linux will be better for us for education and he agreed after considering it for a bit, he let me know that some students play roblox or minecraft in middle of the lesson and he asks if linux would stop em from doing that, I stated that as long as they dont know how to work with wine/lutris or know any specific linux packages that run windows games on linux they should not be able to play in the middle of lessons.
he gave me the green light to do it, so I spent like 3 days migrating like 20+ computers to linux (since I had to set them up and install some required applications for them)
in the last day where I was doing a last check up on the PCs to make sure they are in working order, there was a computer having a problem of which where it didnt boot, I let the principal know about this to get permission to work on it, he said yes, so after some troubleshooting I realized the boot order was all screwed, so since Ive worked with arch before I knew how to fix it, I booted up linux mint live image, chrooted, and fixed the boot order and computer went back to life, prinicipal came in checked on everything to make sure everything works, told me to wait for a bit, and then came back and paid me for his troubles (was a bit of a surprised since I expected nothing of the sort), the next day I came to school, sat down, turned PC on, noticed something was in the trash bin, opened it, found "robloxinstall.exe" on it, told the principal about it, he was pleased with it, so now 2 weeks later he seems now to be confident about linux, as he told me there is another class he is considering to move to linux.

so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?

(considering now, that I got a win win situation, I get to use an OS that I like in school, students gets to focus on the lessons instead of slacking.)

What's a good, beginner-friendly distro that allows for easy switching between GNOME and KDE?


I'm thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I'm wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I've heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don't like Cinnamon all too much.

What's a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?

edit: Woah, it seems that you're able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?

edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences...

On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I'm open to using either.

I'm running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It's one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.

I would say I'm open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don't want to do anything too out of my scope. I don't want to spend too many hours setting it up, I'd rather have something that works mostly out of the box 😁

I want a stable distro as in I don't want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I'm open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.

edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)

My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?

edit 4:

Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD

now I’m slowly installing my programs again…

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Vopyr

I want a more stable distro, so I'm not considering the rolling release options (like manjaro and EndeavourOS). I've also heard that not many people like Ubuntu because of snaps, why is that?

edit: are rolling release distros stable enough (e.g. will it randomly crash/have weird issues?) and is it possible/easy to roll back to a previous version if there's a breaking update

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to sbird

I’ve also heard that not many people like Ubuntu because of snaps, why is that?


Well, people don't like snaps for a number of reasons, because they are forced on users, bloated and slow, Canonicals themselves are quite shady, systemd, etc.

I would rather use several different types of packages than trust one that is tied to a shady company.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Fediverse Corporate and National Sabotage


The GenP subreddit got banned on Reddit. We can only take a guess as to why(I seriously don't know, please let me know if you do).

But regardless, it brings up a serious question. How will big corpos and nations force their control on lemmy and other fediverse communities?

Places like reddit, twitter, instagram and even "fediverse" bluesky cave to demands from corporates and countries all the time. But what happens when the real fediverse platforms get attention?

How will they ban, sabotage and coerce instances and communities to cave into demands?

I know lemmy and other fediverse platforms are still very small right now, but I believe it's only time before the sabotage begins. Instagram stepping into the territory tells you how scared zuck already is.

And How will we get around this?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to SpicyColdFartChamber

Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won't be as wealthy at least not in the short term.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Which (Lenovo) notebooks to buy when coming from Apple Silicon?


Which notebooks are recommendable when coming from Apple Silicon-MacBooks in terms of runtime and efficiency, preferrably for Fedora or Manjaro with KDE Plasma? For now, I am looking towards Lenovo T14(s) or X1 Carbon - mixed use scenario including simple media (photos, cutting 1080p-videos, media management, Office & mail) stuff? Still love the "Lenovo"-brand and its keyboard and look 'n feel so this vendor would be my favourite.

Can anyone of you here recommend Snapdragon-devices yet which would be the best comparison as it's also architecture based on ARM? Both Fedora and Manjaro have ARM-builds so I hope that the Snapdragon-devices could get along with my desires here...

Thanks for any input!

in reply to Oliver

The Linux support of Snapdragon SOCs for desktops and laptops is unfortunately severely lacking. Qualcomm pledged to provide upstream divers, but then the Windows drivers turned out to be a mess and the Linux version had to wait.
It is nowhere near production ready. Most of the hardware enablement work is currently as far as I can tell being done by German OEM Tuxedo Computers because they are working on a Snapdragon powered laptop that ships with Linux. But even their work was impacted by Qualcomm stalling (the linked blog article lists Christmas 2024 as their target release date and that didn't happen).
in reply to Vittelius

Um. No on Tuxedo.

The work Tuxedo is doing is on drivers for their own hardware. It has nothing to do with core Snapdragon SoC support and will do little to help other vendors. The delay has more to do with their internal priorities than anything else.

Core X Elite support has been coming into the kernel since 6.8. Support for your hardware depends on the availability of a device tree. Probably the easiest road right now is Ubuntu:

discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-…

The best supported hardware seems to be the Thinkpad T14s at this point. I am not sure where things are with Ubuntu 25.04. I would expect an update from Ubuntu soon.

Here is a more detailed account of support on a Yoga Slim and a screenshot of Chimera Linux running on HP OmniBook. So, Ubuntu is not the only option but it is likely the smoothest sailing.

wezm.net/v2/posts/2024/linux-o…

It is early days for X Elite on Linux for sure. The same can be said for Apple Silicon of course.

[edit: it seems that Ubuntu 25.04 works out-of-the-box on X Elite:
discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-…

Get it here:
cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/…
]

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Anyone here rocking the Linux Format magazines?


Believe this is one of the few vendors left making and distributing Linux magazines still(?). Would be interesting to hear what peoples feedback on these are, whether its this one or another. Seems like a fun monthly delivery to get!

Source;
magazinesdirect.com/az-single-…

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to ReversalHatchery

Nextcloud can embed Collabora Code (essentially Libreoffice) so you can open all your documents in Nextcloud in the browser and edit them together with multiple people.

collaboraonline.com/code/

Works pretty well.

@cy_narrator@discuss.tchncs.de

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

GitHub - vinifmor/bauh: Graphical user interface for managing your Linux applications. Supports AppImage, Debian and Arch packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications


in reply to Vincent

Don't feed the trolls, especially the ones that are bad at it. But yeah, this app doesn't let you select and uninstall multiple things nor does it have all the functionality of Synaptic (which is amaze). I'd settle on a CLI tool for this too, I just want a one stop shop because I get so triggered having to juggle different managers. It's just fucking annoying really. Like, I found the cli tool Topgrade and it is just the best thing ever for keeping things up to date from all package managers, I want that with extended functionality as even this tool doesn't manage every manager that Topgrade does. Something modular, otherwise I waste time fucking around with everything.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

A load of mastodon users think groups are just autoboost accounts.


Just realised this, most mastodon users who have had experience with groups think they are just bots that auto-boost any posts they are mentioned in.

This is kinda annoying me.

watty doesn't like this.

Request for Opinion - JCL but for Linux??


Any interest in this:

LJL is a job creation language that takes a job file, gathers items mentioned in its various lines and here-documents, and generates a runnable .deck file (short for "deck of cards").

The .deck file is a complex Bash script that creates a log spool and several temporary files in /tmp/. It automatically cleans up scratchable files after the run. The log file contains the output of each step, including any program results.

Any questions about it? Any suggestions?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Download and play a windows only steam game?


Hey !
I bought a game on steam, but I cannot install it on lutris as it's not even listed...
It's a windows only game. Is there a way to play it? Am I doing something wrong?

The game is Wednesdays : store.steampowered.com/app/274…

Thanks!

The time has come: how do I safely resize the C: partition and move Linux to that disk?


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/28921393

It may be too much to ask but here it goes:

I have temporarily installed LMDE6 on an HDD where I had a bit of free space, worked with it, experienced Steam with Proton and now I am convinced: I want to move to Linux from Windows for good.

Have another disk, an SSD in which most of the space is taken up by the Windows C: partition.
Would like to move Linux there after shrinking the Windows partition a bit more than what it currently occupies now.

I have tried to do this with Paragon on Windows, but after restarting no change can be seen, despite no error being presented.
Tried from Linux with GParted but all attempts end up with an error when running ntfsresize.

So
1. What do I use to do this and how do I do it safely?
2.How do I move the content of my current Linux partition (less than 50 GBs) to that disk keeping the bootloader and everything else working? And what filesystem is best to use?

Thank you in advance for your help!

in reply to biofaust

Others have pointed out what may he going wrong (drive locked due to Windows fast startup).

A slightly different tack - dual booting windows and linux on the same drive is a bad idea. One reason is the messy boot set up which can cause issues with windows not booting or linux not booting, or either/both fighting over the boot partition. It can get to the point of using repair disks to repair one or the other or both. It can be managed but make a mistake and its a real headache to fix (I say that as someone who has been their and done that and learned the lesson)

If you want to switch to linux but keep windows "just in case" and have a desktop I'd get a new SSD and use it as a dedicated linux drive. SATA or even better an m.2 card if your motherboard has the slots.

A separate drive is far better as linux can be the drive booted by the BIOS and then Grub can then point back to your untouched windows drive to boot it when you want. If linux updates it won't affect windows, and if windows updates it won't affect linux. Also if you have a drive failure you won't lose 2 OSes and all data in one go.

Personally I have 5 drives in my PC - easy expansion of storage is a big benefit to a nice full size PC. I have one largely unused windows drive, and 4 ext4 drives.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to biofaust

If I was to install one more home partition from the LMDE installation USB, would it automatically fix things for me in Grub or would I have to fix things myself before or after?


If I understand you right, you want to install two additional SSDs, one for Linux root (system), probably ext4 formatted, and one 'home' for your personal data?

If that's the case, the boot loader GRUB is going to be installed onto the system SSD and will usually automatically detect the Windows boot loader on your current, Windows only, hard drive. If it didn't, you need to toggle an option in GRUB's configuration file and run update-grub again.

For your home-partiotion on the other SSD, there exist two options:
1. The home partition is Linux exclusive, probably ext4 formatted (this doesn't work with NTFS), and all your data will be stored there. Yet, afaIk, you need to install an ext4 driver in Windows to access the data when you're on Windows.

  1. The home partition is mutually accessible. (This the setup on my wifes laptop). There it's NTFS formatted and the respective folders (Documents, Downloads, Pictures,... ) are mounted one by one using bind in /etc/fstab to their Linux counterpart.

Edit: I've forgot to mention that, first I created folders named Documents, Downloads,... on the new partition before being able to mount them in Linux.

After copying the data in Windows from the old folders to the new ones, the old folders can be deleted and replaced by hardlinks to their new counterparts using the Windows command line or PowerShell.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to biofaust

Just a possibility: Check if the m2 slot is for disk. There are many boards where there are WiFi exclusive m2 ports. For disks there are also m2 sata and m2 nvme port variations. You need to find out what yours are. Consult your motherboards technical documentation if in doubt. If the BIOS can boot from it, Linux can too.

Edit: that beeing said I never encountered problems with a similar setup ( I boot from Linux on nvme m2 then there is a combined windows /data disk)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Fediforge - An easy way to host a lemmy instance


Hello

After about a year working on Fediforge, I have finally launched it. Fediforge provides managed hosting for lemmy and there will be added support for other fediverse platforms(Such as Mastodon, Peertube and more) in the future.

A little info on the setup of Fediforge.
- Hosted on servers from OVH + Colocrossing and are located in east USA(Around chicago)
- Automated backups of database with 10 days retention
- Replicated s3 storage for media files
- Active monitoring of all instances hosted.

Let me know, if you have any issues, ideas or feedback(and optionally add it here).

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Transport endpoint is not connected


Hi, folks! 👋

I want to create a local ip address for my virtual machine. I use virt-manager + QEMU. So, as I got it - I need to create a bridge for doing this. But... When I'm trying to connect a created bridge to a virtual machine:

Then trying to start a virtual machine, I gets this error:

Ошибка запуска домена: /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br0 --fd=32: failed to communicate with bridge helper: stderr=failed to create tun device: Operation not permitted
: Transport endpoint is not connected

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 72, in cb_wrapper
    callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 108, in tmpcb
    callback(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/libvirtobject.py", line 57, in newfn
    ret = fn(self, *args, **kwargs)
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/domain.py", line 1402, in startup
    self._backend.create()
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/libvirt.py", line 1373, in create
    raise libvirtError('virDomainCreate() failed')
libvirt.libvirtError: /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br0 --fd=32: failed to communicate with bridge helper: stderr=failed to create tun device: Operation not permitted
: Transport endpoint is not connected

For creating bridges I use the standard network manager for Xfce:

I use MX Linux operating system for the host machine.

So, what do I do wrong, and how can I fix this problem? 🤔

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to HungryLemon

Thanks so much! 😄 I finally solved my problem 😉

First step that I've do - I found this article 👉 **mike632t.wordpress.com/2021/04… and doing all from there.

The next step - I've add a bridge to an existing network interface:

sudo brctl addif br0 eth0

And the next step - I've started up this bridge:

sudo ip link set br0 up

And now everything works fine 👍

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

How I gave up a one-game addiction to switch to 100% Linux (long story warning)


Let me apologize first. I'm both old and new to Linux and have made a ton of noob moves since switching back. I know most people in this community are probably already Linux users, but I'm hoping that some Linux-curious people will stumble upon this.

Lets start with the game. I am a former League of Legends addict. Embarrassing, I know, but I had been playing since the glory days (I started right at the beginning of season 2). I never ranked; I would play ARAM and URF to either pass time or keep myself awake if I felt drowsy. I was good, too. Not great, but more often than not I'd go 16/2/12 or something similar. It released massive amounts of dopamine for me. The ARAM bridge felt like a home away from home.

Moving on from League... I had been starting to smell Microsoft's shit from a long loooong ways away. Like, Win7 days (rest in peace, XP). I had been introduced to Linux and the basics of maintaining Linux from a class I took in high school. Lets be honest, though, Linux wasn't really in a gaming state then. You could, but you would be jumping through a lot of hoops for a 50/50 chance it would be stable gameplay. Honestly, though, Microsoft's stink flows much further back than you'd think and it was already grating on me then. I was already considering the move.

I sat on Win10 for a while and even opened my PC to the Win11 beta. It was okay, I didn't auto-hate it like most because a lot of the Windows UI I used was third party and I changed theme colors through the registry. There were ways to remove bloat and most Microsoft snooping garb, but it took work. Thinking I knew what I was doing, I messed with the system32 folder. If this were the Win7 days, I probably would have known what I was doing. I simply wanted to change the internal image viewer to a 3rd party viewer. Microsoft gave default selections for a lot of things, but changing photo gallery was a fight for some reason.

Needless to say, I messed up. No default apps would open anymore. Couldn't even get calculator running. So I reinstalled. Back then, you still had to use Win10 and update to 11. I reinstalled, saw my windows old folder, knew everything was safe, and updated. Huge mistake. Win11 was not just an update, even if you start it from the update panel. It's a full OS install. My ignorant self thought it was just a Win10 glow up. My windows old folder got overwritten by an empty windows old folder.

After a whole day of recovery process I probably recovered 99% of my files, but my time with Windows was quickly closing. My friend pointed out that this was a good time to try Linux. Steam Deck had just launched and Linux was gaining ground in the gaming scene and FAST. So I backed everything up to external (which I should have done earlier, smfh) and grabbed the most likely candidate, Pop!_OS. Soon after, at my friend's pestering, I switched to Arch- Manjaro- and then later EndeavourOS.

I messed up EndeavourOS by using topgrade. It didn't occur to me that it was user error, and I just thought it was something EOS didn't rub shoulders well with in my system. So back to Manjaro. Then D4 came out. Another shame of mine. I'm a huge Diablo 2 fan and played my fair share of D3. I got the early access. Couldn't play. Panicking, I reinstalled Windows 11... just to find that the game was pure garbage. I played for a bit, hoping things would improve but.... Blizzard got me again. But I was not moving back. I had moved so much already. Funny thing is: Proton came out with an update not even 24 hours later that fixed D4... Doh.

During my second time on Win11, Riot pushed out their knuckleheaded kernel-level anticheat. I wasn't worried, I was on Win11, w/e. Then Microsoft dropped some big shits on Windows. Snapshots of your screens ("it'll be held in a private encrypted partition of you drive!", yeah fucking right... pull the other one), ads in the start bar, and then pushy af popups to integrate your system with their AI. I was insulted. Win11 was already one giant piece of malicious software even before all this. Granted, I used startallback so I didn't get the ads, but it was the idea of the thing.

So I did it. I dropped League and moved to base Arch. I will not let Microsoft have even 100gb of my drive now. I make do by playing other games, being actually productive in life, or diving into something new within Linux. I grew up. I said no. PC owners should be banding together and dropping Windows right into the garbage. Screw their proprietary plugins, screw their insecure kernel access, screw their ads and data-harvesting AI, and screw their sneaky photos of my screen. I knew when they backpedaled on that screenshot shit that they'd push it more quietly later. I told everyone that they would. And they did.

Dive into VSCodium, or Neovim, or VIM, or emacs. Explore open source and, like me, find that most apps are pleasantly better than their commercial counterparts. Play with your terminal. Wreck things and reinstall (just hard copy everything to external first). Lets make ODF industry standard, like it should have been before Microsoft outbid and muscled docx in. It may take ten, twenty, fifty years but fuck it. I'm all in and my bet is on Linux. My next big project for my next PC build? Gentoo (I am not quite ready for Linux from Scatch, lmao). Its time I actually learned more. I've already dived deep into the Arch Wiki and I've already dived into NixOS and nixlang. We need to go deeper now.

Linux is easier than ever now. Experiment with it! Scared to fully make the move? Grab a small SSD to test it out safely! Just... know what you're doing with partitions before you do. Either that or take your main SSD out before installing. However, most Linux distros let you use them right from the USB stick to check them out. Just ignore the installer and play around a bit. Remember that USB is going to be substantially slower, so don't make your decision off of speed. You'd be surprised at how much faster Linux can be.

tl;dr: Switch to Linux and stop giving out your data for free. Ad analytics should be a choice, and one you're paid to do. Your information is incredibly valuable and so is your privacy. If you pay for a product, that company should NOT be triple dipping and making more money off of you, no matter how non-invasive it is. Its all invasive, even if its hidden.

PS: I won't mention mac here. I really have no experience in iOS or macOS. Apple garden is Apple garden and that's about all I know. Microsoft and I go way back (Windows 3.14), and I've watched them slowly and then quickly corrupt over time. Like a turd rolling downhill and collecting garbage.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Sausage, a terminal word puzzle in Bash, inspired by Bookworm


gitlab.com/christosangel/sausa…

sausage is a terminal word forming game, written in Bash.

This game was inspired by en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookworm….

https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/1024/7186470

The aim is to score points by creating words, moving around in six directions in the grid, using consecutive letters.

When the user created longer words, coloured letters appear. The user can score more points by using these coloured letters.

More points can also be scored, when the user manages to create the bonus words.

When smaller words are created, or low point yielding words, red letters appear in the grid. If not used, these red letters will drop one cell in every turn.

When a red letter reaches beyond the bottom of the grid, the game is over.

The user can also reshuffle the letters in the grid, in order to be able to create words. However, there is a price to this action: the existing red letters will drop one cell, all other bonus coloured letters will be lost, and more red letters will appear.

If the score is among the 10 best scores achieved, it makes it in the Top Ten Highscores.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Selfhost offline software


Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time.
Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc.
And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio.
But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens.
I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, just name it.
Of course for GNU/Linux (using Arch myself BTW).
Thanks in advance.
in reply to 6R1M R34P3R

You mentioned ham radio --- definitely fun! It's a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF ("walkie talkie"-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power ("QRP") it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup...

There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.

Good luck!

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to 6R1M R34P3R

So... I've done that May 2023 for a holiday trip.

I left with my RPi4 and fee gadgets but no Internet.

There I built git.benetou.fr/utopiah/offline… and my main take away is

  • you can build what is missing

and more importantly the meta take away is

  • you need to iterate preparations

because just like first aid you need to be actually ready when needed and knowledge change over time. You need to actually try though, test your setup and yourself genuinely otherwise it is intelectual masturbation.

Have fun!

Firefox prevents suspend and shutdown


Currently running Nobara 41, and if Firefox is playing a video, or even just has a paused video on it, my computer will not go to sleep until I exit Firefox entirely. If I try to shut down instead, it will seemingly close all open apps, and the displays will go black but the mouse cursor remains on screen and does not respond.

If I start Firefox from the CLI, it shows nothing when I try to suspend.

This only happens with Firefox, and as far as I can tell, doesn't happen when playing a video elsewhere.

I don't have any power savings settings that I'm aware of that should be preventing anything, so I don't know what's going on. This is a recent issue, starting maybe 2 weeks ago. I haven't installed any new software besides updates in that time.

Does anybody have any idea what is going on here?

in reply to moody

I had this issue on my desktop in Windows. Haven't tested to see if it's an issue on Linux (I just recently set up dual-booting with Kubuntu). I know your request is for Nobara but this may be helpful for troubleshooting.

The fix for me on Windows was always to power off my audio interface. Using powercfg /requests would show Firefox kept the audio device active once a YouTube video started playing. The software fix was arbitrary... sometimes closing the YouTube tab would work, sometimes I had to close the window, and sometimes none of those would work. What *always" worked was physically powering off my interface, waiting about 2 seconds, and turning it back on.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Now introducing "haxx", a nonsense hacking generator.


Gives you a bollywood experience right into your terminal, with more than 1000 ips simulated! An INFINITE amount of simulated names! Over 100 different types of glitches! An overly dramatic hack, just like seen in the movies! And more (If you -REALLY- have a lot of time to spend staring at this command.)

Click here to grab the C code, followed by instructions on how to compile it.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

[Solved!] No EFI system partition found (dual booting Mint/win10)


Hello, im trying to install mint to try getting away from Microsoft, but im running into issues installing, and all my troubleshooting is making me even more confused (I am not very techy)

I have windows installed on my nvme drive, and a 30gb section partitioned off for mint. I also have an empty ssd for more storage (/home). When I go through the installation process, it doesn't recognize another operating system on the computer, and when I try "something else" to install it, I get an error saying "no EFI system partition was found".

I know I can partition off a small section for the EFI partition, but I am trying to dual boot and I assume this is not the right way to do it, especially considering it doesn't recognize that windows is on the system. I'm also very hesitant to just send it, as I don't want to lose any of my stuff (the most important stuff is backed up)

Edit: I'm trying to install mint 22.1, but almost all of the resources online are talking about 21

Edit 2: I have learned my BIOS mode is legacy, not UEIF (i assumed it was since my bios screen says UEIF when booting)

Edit 3: got it working!

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to FilthyShrooms

Edit: I just realised your Edit was saying you've got legacy bios! So this is all irrelevant. I'll leave it up in case it helps someone else.


Could it be selecting the wrong SSD to put the boot loader on?

When I reinstalled mint the other day on my laptop with an nvme and SSD (also dual boot) it labelled the extra SSD as sda and the original nvme as sdb, so it was going to try to put the bootloader on sda.

I set up the partitions on the third option (1. Install alongside windows; 2. Wipe everything; 3. Set it up manually) and on the manual setup there's a selector for the bootloader device just underneath the main section where you select partitions to use for /, /home, etc.

IIRC you set the bootloader to the full device (in my case sdb) not the EFI partition (sdb1) and it works out out.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Is there any lemmy instance that's truly liberal enough to tolerate a completely divergent point of view ? The EU norms are not for me, and I'm also far far away from the MAGA politics of USA !!!


in reply to Curious Mind

That's what I wrote. Lemmy is a software, which can be ran on servers. You're currently on somebody else's server. In a group that is moderated by yet different people.... They gave some rules to you and you now have to choose whether you're willing to play by their rules.

Obviously, they haven't banned you yet, despite you saying lots of unproductive, short sentences. I'm not sure if your original question got answered here. If you're more interested in the details of how Lemmy works, read for example the documentation and Wikipedia article.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

[SOLVED]Unity Hub hangs at login: what terminal commands can I use to see what it's doing?


I switched to a Linux Mint/Win11 dual boot system over the weekend and installed Unity from Flathub. Running Unity Hub is fine but when I try to login, it hangs with no errors. I can log into the asset store just fine, so nothing wrong with the credentials. I'd like to know what terminal commands I could use to see what it's actually doing and figure out why it hangs.

I really don't want to continue using it in Windows and only keep it to run work programs, and really need to use Unity for University.

Edit: Troubleshooted via the terminal, then uninstalled the .Deb package that I downloaded from the Unity website and then followed another tutorial from another part of their website with terminal commands. Managed to log in and run my projects.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

[SOLVED] Weird root permission issue on Sway which is not present in i3


Hello fellow lemmings

I am a long-time i3 user and have decided to switch to Sway.
I have encountered a weird error which has left me utterly bamboozled.

I am using Ubuntu 24.04 which has gone from 20.04 -> 22.04 -> 24.04.
It has Ubuntu-Gnome, i3 and Sway currently installed.

The issue


The error that I'm facing is when I'm using Sway, I simply don't have sudo access.

This is what the error looks like

$ sudo visudo
[sudo] password for xavier666:
Sorry, user xavier666 is not allowed to execute '/usr/sbin/visudo' as root on <HOSTNAME>.

When I switch back to i3, my permissions are fine for the same user.
I have not done any crazy modifications to the sudoer's file as far as I can remember.

PS: I have added a command to no-sudo xavier666 ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/brightnessctl

The "fix"


I temporarily solved it by adding xavier666 ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL to the sudoer's file.

IMO, I think this should not be required.
I don't remember ever adding the default user to the file for all the installations that I have done.
(But this is the first time I've installed Sway)

Logs/Outputs


Running sudo -l without the fix (on Sway)

Matching Defaults entries for xavier666 on <HOSTNAME>:
    env_reset, mail_badpass,
    secure_path=/usr/local/sbin\:/usr/local/bin\:/usr/sbin\:/usr/bin\:/sbin\:/bin\:/snap/bin,
    use_pty

User xavier666 may run the following commands on <HOSTNAME>:
    (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/brightnessctl

When I run the same command on i3, i get this (ALL : ALL) ALL extra line in the output.
And when I run sudo -l with my fix on Sway, (ALL : ALL) ALL is present and the permission issue is fixed.

What is causing Sway to remove the root permission for the user?

Note: I'm just asking for the standard sudo behaviour. I'm not trying to run GUI applications as root.

Edit:

The issue was caused by swhkd.
It was installed as a setuid binary (as instructed by the developer of the project).
Once I switched back to sway's default keybinds and disabled swhkd, the permissions were back to normal.
I removed my previous "fix" in the sudoers list and I still have sudo access.

Thanks a lot everyone and specially @gnuhaut@lemmy.ml for pointing me in the right direction.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to xavier666

Yeah so this does not confirm my hunch, and I don't think sway is changing your group membership. Version 1.9 does not allow sway to be installed setuid root, and it isn't, as confirmed by the ls output.

So it must be something else. It could be anything between the login shell in the console and the shell started with the messed up groups. What's weird is that in order to change group membership, you would need root permissions (technically you only need CAP_SETGID, but why would you have that?). I think there are really only two ways to do that: Run a binary that has the setuid bit (like e.g. sudo) or CAP_SETGID, or talk to some process (e.g. a daemon like systemd) that is already running as root, and ask it to do that for you.

I cannot imagine why anything between the login shell -> sway -> ??? -> zsh would be either setuid root, or have any reason or permission to change groups in any way. So that's really weird and interesting.

How do you open the shell inside sway? Keyboard binding from sway config? Launcher? Which terminal? Do any of the involved programs have setuid root bit set (looks like rws instead of x in ls -l output)?

About zsh: I mean I guess in theory one could change groups in the zsh configuration if you had the permissions (which you shouldn't have), but I cannot think of any reasonable explanation why anybody would want do that.

in reply to gnuhaut

Issue resolved!

It was swhkd. Thank you very much for your insight and extremely detailed response!

$ ls -l $(which swhkd)
-rwsr-xr-x 1 root root 2583192 Mar 10 17:16 /usr/bin/swhkd

Since we know what's causing it, can you make a "guesstimate" of what it's doing? Why are other applications are getting infected by it? And why is a keybind manager affecting permissions?

I will raise an issue on their github. The project is already looking for maintainers.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

~/bin vs. ~/.local/bin for user bash scripts?


For one user account, I want to have some bash scripts, which of course would be under version control.

The obvious solution is just to put the scripts in a git repository and make ~/bin a symlink to the scripts directory.

Now, it seems on systemd systems ~/.local/bin is supposedly the directory for user scripts.

My question, is mostly, what are the tradeoffs between using ~/bin and ~/.local/bin as directory for my own bash scripts?

One simple scenario I can come up with are 3rd party programs which might modify ~/.local/bin and put their own scripts/starters there, similar to 3rd party applications which put their *.desktop files in ~/.local/applications.

Any advice on this? Is ~/.local/bin safe to use for my scripts or should I stick to the classic ~/bin? Anyone has a better convention?

(Btw.: I am running Debian everywhere, so I do not worry about portability to non systemd Linux systems.)

in reply to wolf

I migrated to fish recently and at first I was really annoyed that I had to decompose my ~/.bash_aliases into 67 different script files inside ~/.config/fish/functions/, but (a) I was really impressed with the tools that fish gave me to quickly craft those script files (-

~> function serg
    sed -i -e "s/$1/$2/g" $(rg -l "$1")
end
~> funcsave serg
funcsave: wrote ~/.config/fish/functions/serg.fish

) - and (b) I realized it was something I ought to have done a while ago anyway.

Anyway, all this to say that fish ships with a lot of cool, sensible & interesting features, and one of those features is a built-in place for where your user scripts should live. (Mine is a symlink to ~/Dropbox/config/fish_functions so that I don't need to migrate them across computers).

in reply to applemao

Thank you all so much for your help, here is my output of systemd:

It must be something weird with my initial boot. I am dual booting, but on separate hard drives. My PC does have 6 hard drives in it however. Or, maybe something is messed up in my install?


<br />43.616s fstrim.service
11.630s plocate-updatedb.service
10.593s systemd-suspend.service
 4.389s plymouth-quit-wait.service
 4.277s ufw.service
 4.028s systemd-resolved.service
 3.964s systemd-timesyncd.service
 3.330s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
 2.759s apt-daily.service
 2.293s fwupd.service
 1.563s logrotate.service
 1.316s NetworkManager.service
  835ms apt-daily-upgrade.service
  693ms motd-news.service
  653ms blueman-mechanism.service
  458ms user@1000.service
  450ms dev-sda2.device
  432ms dpkg-db-backup.service
  404ms udisks2.service
  349ms accounts-daemon.service
  335ms gnome-remote-desktop.service
  309ms ubuntu-system-adjustments.service
  307ms apparmor.service
in reply to applemao

fstrim.service is disk tool (that's supposed to only be run once a week, not every time you boot) that automatically cleans up old deleted SSD data. opensource.com/article/20/2/tr…

It looks like it's running too often, or on the wrong devices, every time you boot your computer. You can actually safely disable it; askubuntu.com/questions/116512… but it's worth looking into why it's taking so long and being run so often.

Running this should show you the log results of fstrim doing it's thing without actually doing anything;
sudo fstrim --fstab --verbose --dry-run

These two will show the status of fstrim and it's autorun service;

systemctl status fstrim systemctl status fstrim.timer

I got most of this from a quick google search; duckduckgo.com/?q=fstrim.servi… You can do the same for the other major time-takers on your boot list. For comparison, here's the top results of my semi-fresh install of linux mint;

dageek247@mintPC:~$ systemd-analyze blame
2.237s NetworkManager-wait-online.service
2.077s systemd-binfmt.service
2.003s systemd-resolved.service
1.976s systemd-timesyncd.service
1.916s fwupd-refresh.service
1.365s logrotate.service
1.326s NetworkManager.service
933ms fwupd.service
401ms blueman-mechanism.service
334ms udisks2.service
263ms apt-daily-upgrade.service
254ms dpkg-db-backup.service
229ms dev-nvme0n1p3.device
215ms accounts-daemon.service
201ms power-profiles-daemon.service
199ms polkit.service
197ms smartmontools.service
183ms rsyslog.service
173ms ubuntu-system-adjustments.service
169ms systemd-udev-trigger.service
156ms user@1000.service
155ms proc-sys-fs-binfmt_misc.mount
146ms ModemManager.service
132ms apparmor.service
123ms avahi-daemon.service
121ms bluetooth.service
114ms grub-common.service
111ms lm-sensors.service
106ms switcheroo-control.service
105ms secureboot-db.service
in reply to applemao

On my last computer I found that the boot process was looking for things that weren't there but that the motherboard had rudimentary functionality for like a floppy drive. It didn't even have a connector for one.

For whatever reason, that caused a 10-30 second delay while the kernel tried to determine if there was a floppy drive connected. Pretty sure I had everything disabled via the BIOS but apparently it wasn't disabled enough and the kernel could still see it.

That required throwing something into the system config, probably somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d, to blacklist that particular kernel module.

There was another problematic module as well; I can't remember what that was, but I'm pretty sure it was the same fix. Got the boot time to login screen down to less than 10 seconds.

But all that said, even on this computer where the boot time is pretty quick, I usually put the computer into suspend mode to keep times down.

Sausage, a terminal word puzzle in Bash, inspired by Bookworm


gitlab.com/christosangel/sausa…

sausage is a terminal word forming game, written in Bash.

This game was inspired by en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookworm….

https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/1024/7186456

The aim is to score points by creating words, moving around in six directions in the grid, using consecutive letters.

When the user created longer words, coloured letters appear. The user can score more points by using these coloured letters.

More points can also be scored, when the user manages to create the bonus words.

When smaller words are created, or low point yielding words, red letters appear in the grid. If not used, these red letters will drop one cell in every turn.

When a red letter reaches beyond the bottom of the grid, the game is over.

The user can also reshuffle the letters in the grid, in order to be able to create words. However, there is a price to this action: the existing red letters will drop one cell, all other bonus coloured letters will be lost, and more red letters will appear.

If the score is among the 10 best scores achieved, it makes it in the Top Ten Highscores.

https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/1024/7186458

This game is named sausage as a tribute to

Renowned writer and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson starts to read a tiny scrap of paper containing Baldrick's miniscule novel:

Once upon a time, there was a lovely little sausage called...


...only to realize that after 18 years of arduous work, he failed to include the word SAUSAGE in his magnum opus.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to learnbyexample

I'm confused, is this different than:

send.vis.ee/

This site states "⚠️ Send will be terminated on May 24th. ⚠️
Costs are getting too high to keep hosting this service. Find an alternative instance here or host your own."

My Thoughts on the Fosstodon Drama | Kev Quirk


in reply to Ulrich

I have to ask, then: what motivates people to do it?

If mods are not financially compensated for it, the only rational explanation is that they are either getting some form of benefit (soft power, access to privileged information) or they are getting some pleasure out of it, i.e, power tripping.

don't like this

in reply to Ulrich

Ah, I thought you were talking about something here on the Fediverse.

In any case, I wish people didn't feel afraid to talk about business here. Maybe more people would realize that behind the majority of "business" there are genuine people and not just the cartoon capitalist pigs.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

in reply to poVoq

Some people chose to do the right things because they are right


This is just another way of saying that people do things for moral validation - a.k.a, self-righteouness - and is no at all different from "power tripping".

in reply to rglullis

That is a rather toxic way of looking at the world. I get it, I kind of can rationally understand the idea that you can explain all selfless behavior as being selfish because the least you get out of it is dopamine, so you are wired to feel good doing what you think is right.

Now, can you tell me how this is just not a very shitty and cynical lens to view humans through? I've had my nihilistic phase in my 20's. I hope you also find a way out of the hole of the "arbitrariness" of ethics.

Because each other is all we have, and ethics is ultimately what makes us human. The ability to reprogram our own pleasure circuit and maybe, just maybe, just use it to be not an asshole, just to start with. And then at some point just do something nice for others. Because if everybody did that, the world would not be the shithole it is.

I'm thankful to mods who volunteer their free time to tend to the garden of the communities they care about.

in reply to zenforyen

I am not at all talking about the cases of someone who is passionate about some topic and then goes on to cultivate a community around it, and I am not saying "every moderator is doing it for some ulterior motive".

I am talking specifically about the types that put on themselves to become mods of dozens of subreddits. Or instance admins that go months in a row begging for money to be able to pay their own bills, instead of shutting down the instance or make it only for those that contribute back.

IOW, I am talking about the cases where people act beyond what anyone would consider "healthy".

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

in reply to rglullis

Okay wow, thanks for the clarification. That is indeed weird. Yeah, then I guess I agree, it's really ... Just not very healthy behavior.

Okay I mean for some people maybe this whole Internet thing, becomes too much an end in itself, maybe they are missing something in life and trying to get it that way.

If you are employed, have family and/or friends and a hobby or two, how do you even have the time to mod dozens of subs and stuff like that?

So if they are doing it while being nice, one can actually say they could need some empathy. If they are not being nice, well, for such cases it might explain why the other things in life might be lacking.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to poVoq

Hey, any comparison to Ayn Rand or their fans should be an immediate ban. No need to go that low.

All I've been arguing with you could be summed up as "if we want the Fediverse to be universal, we will need to grow a lot faster and we need to accept the reality that not everyone values the same things as you do" and you responding "No, I don't to make the Fediverse universal because most people are too morally weak to stand for the things I care about".

(And if you think I am exagerating: don't make me look for the conversation where you said that people should be okay using this crap because the other open source alternatives committed the grave sin of "raising money from investors".)

don't like this

in reply to rglullis

Fine I didn't need to go as low as Ayn Rand.

But I think you still didn't get my argument last time. Tl;dr: there is no point in doing what you propose as it just results in recreating the same shit we already have. This has nothing to do with moral failings and everything with strategy and not repeating the same mistakes all over again.

And besides that I agree that Siskin isn't great, and most likely suggested this instead. And that "open-source alternative" is now open-core and can't pay their bloated expenses now that VC funding has run dry. I hope you see the irony in what you just wrote, because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to poVoq

it just results in recreating the same shit we already have


This is you passing opinion as undisputed truth. I am not proposing "Let's take on the big corporations by building another big corporation", I am saying "we can get rid of the dominance from big corporations if we help foment an economy of small, independent businesses." and I am saying "if we keep this anti-business culture where we are hostile to even some food truck owner trying to connect to their customers, then don't complain when the food truck owner continues using Facebook/Instagram/Twitter".

And that “open-source alternative” is now open-core


Synapse is still AGPLv3. Their closed parts are for Enterprise. No one is being locked out of crucial features. No one is being locked out of reaching out other users of the network. No one is being forced to "upgrade" after reaching a certain size. To call it open-core is just yet-another display of bias.

and most likely suggested this (Monal) instead.


Monal does not make video calls! Not having video calls was a non-starter in 2015, let alone today.

because that is really a clear example of how unsustainable and ill advised that kind of growth is.


Is it? Because so far I managed to talk with a lot more people on Matrix than I ever did on XMPP, and that wouldn't change even if Element closed shop tomorrow. And even if it did, the odds would be highly in favor of some other company like Beeper picking up the pieces to serve its customers and it would still be in their interest to keep things open to have the ecosystem around.

So, at the end of the day, yes, I'd rather have this "unsustainable" growth than claiming any moral victory for sticking to the Betamax of chat protocols. This "unsustainable" system gave me and few hundred million people something that is far from perfect, but at least it can make video calls on iOS.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

don't like this

in reply to rglullis

I like high quality communities, which cannot maintain quality without staff, and which would probably struggle to maintain any funding.

One example of a community I became a moderator for often had trolls occasionally show up and post obviously malicious content, and commercial ad spam. Due to timezone differences, these often took hours to be deleted by existing staff.

So it wasn't about morality, righteousness, money or power. It was about me wanting to develop a community I cared about.


Edit: in a comment chain, you mentioned people who clearly moderate for other motives. They exist, I've seen them and helped get some removed in one particular community. Like you said, there are other motivators.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to JoeTheSane

it gives them personal satisfaction to help out with something that is meaningful to them.


What about the cases where "what is meaningful to them" conflicts with "what is meaningful to the others"?

I said on a sibling comment but it bears repeating: I am not talking about someone who enjoys a hobby and goes on to create/mod a community about it. I am thinking about the cases where someone finds themselves as part of a large community and realizes that the majority of the members keep pushing you to things you either don't want to or disagree with.

LandedGentry doesn't like this.

in reply to LandedGentry

It is a broader issue, namely: there is no such thing as doing a "thankless" job for purely altrustic reasons. This is not an issue on a small scale, but once it reaches it some critical mass we should wonder what motivates those who keep a position of authority.

(And before I get another barrage of people saying "I do it because I care about it/ I want to help / someone needs to do it"... yeah, sure, but if you are cultivating something because you happen to like the thing at hand , then you are doing for your own personal interest and it is not entirely altruistic. And that is totally fine.)

in reply to LandedGentry

No, I missed it before.

My "axe to grind" is not against mods. My "axe to grind" is against Small Fedi. I can elaborate more later if you want, but now I need to get back to work...


As I often do, I made a poll on the fediverse about two concepts I am interested in: Big Fedi versus Small Fedi. Although I think these are interesting topics, I couldn’t come up with exact summations of what the “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi” positions are. So, I wanted to write down what I could here.

The fediverse, in this case, is an internetwork of social networks. It works a lot like email; you can have an account on one network and follow, message, and react to people (or bots) on other networks. The biggest software tool for making fediverse networks is Mastodon; there are a lot of other Open Source servers for setting up nodes. There are also some proprietary nodes — Meta Threads and Flipboard are two of the biggest.

The following are some clusters of ideas that I think coalesce into “Big Fedi” and “Small Fedi”. I haven’t been able to tie them all back to some fundamental principle on either side.

Big Fedi


The “Big Fedi” position is a set of ideas that roughly cluster together. Not everyone who agrees with one or a few of these agrees with them all, but I think they tend to be related.

  • The fediverse should be big. Real big. Like, everyone on the planet should have an account on the fediverse. It will make the internet better and the world better.
  • We should make choices that help bring the fediverse to new people. Because the fediverse should be big, we should be doing things to make it bigger; in particular, to bring it to more people.
  • There should be a lot of different account servers. (I’m using “account servers” instead of “instances” or “servers”.) It’s good to have a lot of choice, with a lot of different parameters: software interfaces, financial structure, what have you.
  • Commercial account servers are welcome. This variety includes commercial services. If they provide the right mix of features and trade-offs that certain people want, it’s good to have them, especially if they have a lot of users.
  • Moderation can be automated. Shared blocklists, machine learning, and other tools can be used to catch most of the problematic interactions on the fediverse.
  • Account servers can be big. It doesn’t matter how big they are: 1M, 10M, 100M, 1B people is fine.
  • The fediverse should have secondary services. In order to grow, we need secondary services, like people-finders, onboarding tools, global search, bridges, and so on.
  • The individual is central. People should be able to set up their environment how they like, including their social environment. They have the tools to do that. The account server may set some parameters around content or software usage, but otherwise it’s mostly a dumb pipe.
  • Connections should be person-to-person. The main social connection is through following someone. Building up this follow graph is important.
  • People I care about should be on the fediverse. I have a life outside the fediverse — friends, family, colleagues, neighbours. My governments, media, celebrities, sports figures, leaders in my industry. It would be good to have more of those people on the fediverse, so I can connect to them.
  • People should get to make choices about their account server. Everybody has different priorities: privacy, open source, moderation, cost, stability, features. We can all make our own choices about the account server we prefer.
  • It should be possible to have ad-free account servers. Technically and culturally, we should be able to set these up.
  • It should be possible to have Open Source account servers. People who prefer free network services should be able to run them and use them.
  • It should be possible to have algorithm-free account servers. You should be able to just follow things reverse chronologically.
  • It should be possible to have individually-run account servers. A normal technically-minded person should be able to run their own account server for themself, friends, their household, or even for a larger communty.
  • Harms that are mostly kept to account servers are up to people on those servers to solve. Good fences make good neighbours. If things become unbearable, people can move servers somewhat frictionlessly.
  • Affinity groups should stretch beyond account server boundaries. Groups, lists, and other social network features are important and should be fully federated. They should provide a lot of features.
  • There may be some harm that comes with growth; we can fix it later. We’re going to find problems as we go along. We can deal with them as we come to them.
  • The fediverse is going to look very different over time. The way things work now are not how they’re going to be 1, 3, 5, 10 years from now. Especially as the fediverse grows, different structures and ways of working are going to develop.
  • Open standards are important. By having public, open standards available through big standards organizations, we gain the buy-in from different account network operators to join the network. We definitely don’t have time to negotiate bilateral agreements; we need solid standards.
  • Variety in types of account server operators is good. Different people have different needs and tolerances. If we want to have more people, we need to cater to those different needs with different account servers.
  • Existing organizations can and should provide account servers. Not just existing tech companies; also businesses providing servers for their employees, universities for students, cities or other governments for their citizens.
  • Existing services, even if they’re bad, will become somewhat better if they have fediverse features. People on those services will get to connect with a variety of new people. They’ll find out about the fediverse, and might move to another account server, or try something else new.
  • It’s more important to bring good people to the fediverse than keep bad people off it. More people is good, and the people I care about on other networks are also good. There may be some bad people, too, but we’ll manage them.


Small Fedi


Here is a rough cluster of ideas that I’d call “Small Fedi”. Again, not everyone who agrees with one or two of these agrees with all of them.

  • The fediverse should be safe. Safe from harassment, safe from privacy violations.
  • Growth is not important. We’ve gotten along this long with a small fediverse. It’s OK how it is, so growth is not important. Growth is a capitalist mindset.
  • People who aren’t on the fediverse don’t matter as much as people who are. Their needs, at least. When discussing the future of the fediverse, we don’t need to talk about people on other networks much at all.
  • If people want to get on the fediverse, they can join an existing account server. We don’t need to bring new account servers to the fediverse; there are a lot already. People who really care about getting on the fediverse can join an existing account server, or set up their own. If they’re not willing to do this, they’re probably not that interested in the fediverse, so why should we bother trying to connect to them?
  • If growth could cause harm, we either should fix the problem before growing, or we shouldn’t grow. We should examine opportunities carefully, but by default we should say no.
  • Commercial account servers are discouraged. Most commercial services do harm. Even if they’re on the fediverse, they’re going to try to do harm to make more money. So, they should be avoided as much as possible.
  • Secondary services can cause harm and should be severely limited if allowed at all. People search and content search can be used for privacy invasion or harassment. Shared blocklists can be manipulated to cause echo chambers. Machine learning can be biased. Onboarding services favour big account servers. They should be discouraged or, preferably, closed.
  • The account server is central. Moderation decisions, cultural decisions, account decisions, most social decisions should happen at the account server level.
  • Account servers are the primary affinity group. You should find an account server that feels like home. Any other groups are less important.
  • Feeds like “fediverse” and “local” are important. There is a public community of account servers that your account server connects to, and the public feed from that community is important. You might use it more often than your home feed. Your local feed is also important, because your account server is a group you belong to.
  • Moderation should be primarily by hand. The courage and wisdom necessary to make most moderation decisions can only be managed by hand. Automated tools can be manipulated.
  • Account servers must be small. Human moderators can only do so much work, so the account servers they moderate can only be so big.
  • The fediverse works just about right right now, and shouldn’t change. There’s a good reason for how everything works, and it’s fine. People who want to change the way things work just don’t get it.
  • It’s not important that people from my real life are on the fediverse, and it’s kind of discouraged. The account server is the most important affinity group, then the larger “fediverse”. That’s enough; other people are needed or welcome. People who I know who aren’t on the fediverse don’t care about fediverse stuff, so they’d get bored here, anyway.
  • It is highly discouraged to have ad-supported account servers. Even if they only show ads to their own users, they are causing harm. In particular, they’re showing our content next to ads, or using our content to develop ad algorithms. Either way, harm goes beyond the server border.
  • It is highly discouraged to have proprietary account servers. They just can’t be trusted with their own users’ data. Also, they’re going to get some of our data, just through federation, and who knows what they’ll do with it.
  • It is highly discouraged to have algorithmic timelines. Anyone having these causes problems. If you want one, you just don’t get it.
  • Open standards are less important than making things work the way we want them. In particular, fiddling with standards to keep people safe, and to discourage particular account server structure, is an OK thing to do.
  • Most existing institutions have proved themselves untrustworthy and should not provide account servers. Name any particular part of civil society, and I can come up with an example of at least one bad practice they have.
  • Harms that happen on one account server are a problem for every account server. Server blocks, personal blocks, and protocol boundaries aren’t enough to isolate problems to their account server of origin. Secondary or tertiary effects can happen and cause harm.
  • Existing services, if they’re bad, will make the fediverse worse. Bad practices, bad content, bad members will cause problems for everyone on the fediverse.
  • It’s more important to keep bad people off the fediverse than to bring good people to it. Bad people can be really horrible. There aren’t actually that many good people on bad services, and if they really wanted to connect with us, they’d find another way.


Where do I land?


I’m mostly a Big Fedi person; I did the work on the fediverse that I’ve done in order to bring it to everyone on the planet. I don’t think people should have to pass a test to be allowed on the fediverse.

That said, I respect that harm can come from new technical decisions and new network connections. As someone deeply involved in the standards around ActivityPub and the fediverse, I’d like to make sure that we give people the tools they need to avoid harm — and stay out of the way when they use them. I very much like the Small Fedi suspicion of new services and account servers, and careful consideration of the possibilities.

I’d like to find ways to mitigate the problems of so many people on proprietary social networks being unconnected to the fediverse, but still centre the safety of existing fedizens. I don’t have an easy answer to how this can work, though.

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. Also, an acknowledgment: I borrowed the term “Small Fedi” without permission from Erin Kissane’s great piece on Untangling Threads. I’m also using it differently, stretching it out, which admittedly is an ingrateful thing with something you borrow. I hope it is not ruined by the time I return it.

Another acknowledgment: this framing is loosely based on the worse is better series of essays by Richard Gabriel. His lists of ideas are much shorter, more cohesive, and more algorithmic.

evanp.me/2023/12/26/big-fedi-s…

#bigfedi #fediverse #smallfedi


This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to LandedGentry

I think there is a spectrum between what you did (you were mod until you no longer thought that the pain of dealing with Reddit was worth it or morally justified) and someone who sticks around as a mod of 50+ subreddits because they see as an instrument of control, or someone that keeps running a big Mastodon instance despite financial struggles; and my point is to understand where most people lie.
in reply to rglullis

Ugh, the comments here are so full of BS and distortions of what really happened 🤦

So here is the actual tl;dr: Some people asked the main Fosstodon admins what they think about having an openly Trump supporting, islamo- and transphobic moderator in their team and their response was "not here on Fosstodon and not our problem" (paraphrased, but close to their actual response).

That is pretty much like this scenario: lets say you get (credibly) informed about someone openly corrupt in your organization. If your response is: I have not seen them steal money in our organization and our processes should prevent any theft happening, then you are missing the forest for the trees.

If an organization can't get such basic governance issues right and prefers to hide behind a "neutral" stance on something that is really concerning to a large percentage of their members than they irrevocably lose a lot of trust and that is more than justified.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to dblsaiko

Actually, I don't really know differences between. Just all guides use cfdisk and I forgot about mbr and gpt. But I changed mbr to gpt using gdisk(after start he say, that I have mbr and gpt and which I want to use. I chose "create blank gpt" and now I can use gdisk to partition disk. And after gdisk lsblk show right information!
Thats it
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

XrossMediaBar Desktop Environment?


I built a home theater PC and now I'm obsessed with getting an xmb ui on there. I know retro arch has a nice implementation, but I couldn't find any support for jellyfin or spotify menu items. Should I forge ahead and create custom ones? Does anyone know a better way? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

peertube recomendation algo alpha build


cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/28808772

Finally released an alpha build for the PeerTube recommendation algorithm!
Basic UI is complete. If you want to try it out, the link is here:
👉 github.com/solidheron/peertube…

New features since the last build:
- Sort by videos that share your time engagement similarity.
- Sort by videos that share your like similarity.
- Display of like similarity cosine values.
- Basic information shown for recommended videos (title, account, and channel names).
- 404 check for generated instance links (so you don’t get stuck clicking into dead videos—you’ll know which instance hosts the video).
- De-ranking for previously seen videos (simply a 0.5x multiplier on time and like similarity).

Features from previous builds:
- Ability to input multiple instance domain names (DNs) and generate playable video links.
- Limit of 5 recommendations per channel to avoid floods (e.g., during testing, The Linux Experiment would dominate otherwise—this limit is more of a failsafe than a feature).

Personal thoughts:
I still think cosine similarity beats chronological algorithms.
This algorithm also synergizes with other algorithms—it's great for finding videos that appear next to or below what you're currently watching.

You can also revisit videos you previously liked to help strengthen your like similarity vectors.


Moving forward: basic design philosophies and current issues

There’s an issue I’m calling the “Linux pipeline.”
Basically, Linux-related videos tend to dominate PeerTube’s well-produced content.
Since the algorithm relies on English words in descriptions, titles, and tags, Linux videos—which sometimes have fewer general keywords—end up being more "orthogonal" to typical user vectors, causing lower ranking.

Another challenge:
It’s really hard to properly combine like cosine similarity and time engagement cosine similarity.
You could add them, but it doesn’t fully make sense:
- High like similarity + high time engagement similarity = you probably like and will watch the video longer.
- But short videos can be liked even if they contribute almost nothing to time engagement (because time engagement is based on percentage watched × video length).

If I combined them, it would basically enter machine learning territory:
You'd have to adjust proportions dynamically based on user behavior.
Since I want this algorithm scoped to one person only (no data sharing yet), that level of ML is out of scope for now.

(Sharing data across devices could come later—Brave browser has sync features, and PeerTube watch history syncing could be possible.)


Summary:
Most of the data structure is settling into place.
Future updates will probably focus on expanding the data structure and making small improvements.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Cattail

I think open discovery algorithms are the way. We are against algos but sorting by like similarity would be beneficial.

What are you guys thinking? @dessalines@lemmy.ml @nutomic@lemmy.ml Are you optimistic about this or fuck any algorithms?

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

"This Linux thing is better than normal computers"


A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend's then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife's friend say something funny that I thought I'd share with you.

They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid's first computer, and his mom doesn't have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn't be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn't visit that often, and the kid's games still worked so it wasn't a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.

When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I'd give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:

This Linux thing.. We've never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.


Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.


Recommend a distro for a 13-year-old gamer


Couldn't find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it's ok to ask here.

A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend's kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can't play Factorio.

For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can't easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don't spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn't seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.

  • Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
  • Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
  • Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn't need to be "kid proof", I don't think he touches any stuff he doesn't know what it does.


in reply to Bieren

  • GIMP (with photogimp patch)
  • Steam
  • Librewolf (I could also opt for a chromium based browser)
  • Tor Browser (to browse onion links/throwaway browser)
  • Heroic Games Launcher
  • Prism Launcher
  • latest Java lts (either from adoptium or openjdk i dont care about flashy new features)
  • Libreoffice Still (similar to the second reason above and onlyoffice in appimage due to Libreoffice weird handling with ppsx files and powerpoints)
  • QEMU/KVM with virt manager
  • Gnome evolution (if it's gtk desktop I could opt for other email clients)
  • Proton-GE
  • WINE
  • Ghostty(Kinda sucks it's based on libadwaita and gnome forces this theme on you no matter your desktop)
  • Fish/ZSH(fish not having posix compatibility is kinda annoying)
  • MPV (I could still use vlc but I prefer mpv because it can stream youtube links)
  • ytp-dl(I can opt for a gui for convenience sake)
  • BTOP
  • Fastfetch
This entry was edited (1 month ago)

I have an Asus laptop from 2007


Like the title says I want to install a Linux distro on my old laptop. I am currently looking into installing a SSD, but I want to learn a distro for fun! I haven't been able to find a good current resource aside from the Linux Masters here, so I am actually asking for help on the Internet! What distro is the best!?

imgur.com/8zldESD

EDIT: thanks so much everyone for your recommendations and advice! I installed a couple of different systems before deciding that I think the laptop can support Fedora with KDE plasma, and I'm finding it really attractive and easy to use. You will see once I get some more disk space used how the performance holds up! If it runs into trouble I might switch the machine back over to mint with, that one seemed to run really well and was pretty familiar seeming from my Windows days, also seem more low end and booted a little faster. I think I might even end up switching to Linux on my desktop I had so much fun with it last night!! I really appreciate all the information and will probably be experimenting with a more lightweight build on this computer in the future! I'm a Linux user and it was easier than I ever thought! ❤️

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Bristlecone

I want to learn a Distro for fun.


Are you just using this laptop to dip your toes into Linux and see if you like it? I would recommend Debian + XFCE. It's lightweight, it prioritizes stability over new features, and it's a fairly easy UI for a newbie to understand. Alternatively Linux Mint MATE Edition might be worth a try. It's also lightweight but is a bit more "up to date" than Debian feature wise.

in reply to Bristlecone

Debian gets feature updates significantly slower than other distros, instead it focuses on insuring stability and security. It's rock solid.

Linux Mint is actually based on Ubuntu (which itself is derived from Debian), so for the most part the two are fairly similar. There are a few key differences but for someone learning Linux you don't need to worry about them. Pick one of them, get your feet wet, and then google the differences to see if you want to switch.

After all, endless Distro hopping is a right of passage for all fledgling Linux users! 😀

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Bristlecone

Objectives of learning and fun?

You do not state noobliness, ease of setup or time to install, number of failures/retries or anything like that.

**EDIT: you did state noobliness later on in comments so . . . i'd go stock debian +lxqt. ****

~~or all that I'd recommend arch. Do not use archinstall script , that reduces both learning and fun. Resource? follow the archwiki and go through lots of linked pages at each step. If you do wuss out and install stock debian (+lxqt)~~

maybe partition off a spare 10-20GB so you can play around with an arch install after you realise how boring and uneducational the others are (joke)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Camera app that photos/films in the background to be conspicious?


I remember some time ago installing an app that allowed me to film in the background whilst having another app open on top. I believe this was from f-droid. I actually have a legitimate use for this for crime evidence.

Could someone please suggest its name if they know, either from f-droid or a decent (trustworthy) app from the play store please.

Allow traffic only through tun0 via wlan0, ssh, and localhost in and out


Hi all, I'm trying to have my rpi5 running raspberry OS communicate with the Internet only through the tun0 interface (vpn). For this I wanted to create a ufw ruleset. Unfortunately, I've hit a roadblock and I can't figure out where I'm going wrong.

Can you help me discover why this ruleset doesn't allow Internet communication over tun0? When I disable ufw I can access the Internet.

The VPN connection is already established, so it should keep working, right?

I hope you can help me out!

This is the script with the ruleset:
sudo ufw reset

Set default policies


sudo ufw default deny incoming

sudo ufw default deny outgoing

Allow SSH access


sudo ufw allow ssh

Allow local network traffic


sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/16

sudo ufw allow out to 192.168.0.0/16

Allow traffic through VPN tunnel


sudo ufw allow in on tun0

sudo ufw allow out on tun0

Add routing between interfaces (I read its necessary, not sure why?)


sudo ufw route allow in on tun0 out on wlan0

sudo ufw route allow in on wlan0 out on tun0

sudo ufw enable

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

How I made a blog using Lemmy - a write-up


This is a followup to my introduction of BlogOnLemmy, a simple blog frontend. If you haven't seen it, no need because I will be explaining how it works and how you can run your own BlogOnLemmy for free.

Leveraging the Federation


Having a platform to connect your content to likeminded people is invaluable. The Fediverse achieves this in a platform agnostic way, so in theory it shouldn't matter which platform we use. But platform have different userbases that interact with posts in different ways. I've always preferred the forum variety, where communities form and discussion is encouraged.

My posts are shared as original content on Lemmy, and that's who it's meant for. Choosing for a traditional blog style to make a more palatable platform for a wider audience, and in this way also promoting Lemmy.

Constraints


Starting off I did not want the upkeep of another federated instance. Not every new thing that is deployed on the Fediverse needs to stand on its own or made from the ground up as an ActivityPub compatible service. But rather use existing infrastructure, already federated, already primed for interconnectivity. Taking it one step further is not a having a back-end at all, a 'dumb' website as it were. Posts are made, edited, and cross-posted on Lemmy.

The world of CSS and JavaScript on the other hand - how websites are styled and made feature-rich - is littered with libraries. Being treated like black boxes, often just a few functions are used with the rest clogging up our internet experience. Even jQuery, which is used by over 74% of all websites, is already 23kB in its smallest form. I'm not planning on having the smallest possible footprint*, but rather showing a modern web browser provides an underused toolset of natively supported functionality; something the first webdevs would have given their left kidney for.

Lastly, to improve maintainability and simplicity, one page is enough for a blog. Provided that its content can be altered dynamically.

*See optimization

How it's made


Graphviz

1. URL: Category/post


Even before the browser completely loads the page, we can take a look at the URL. With our constraints only two types of additions are available for us, the anchor and GET parameters. When an anchor, or '#', is present websites scroll to a specific place in a website after loading. We can hijack this behavior and use it to load predefined categories. Like '#blog' or '#linkdumps'. For posts, '#/post/3139396' looks nicer than '?post=3139396', but anchors are rarely search engine compatible. So I'm extracting the GET parameter to load an individual post.

Running JavaScript before the page has done loading should be swift and easy, like coloring the filters or setting Dark/Light mode, so it doesn't delay the site.

2. API -> Lemmy


A simple 'Fetch' is all that's required. Lemmy's API is extensive already, because it's used by different frontends and apps that make an individual’s experience unique. When selecting a category, we are requesting all the posts made by me in one or more lemmy communities. A post or permalink uses the same post_id as on the Lemmy instance. Pretty straight forward.

3. Markdown -> HTML


When we get a reply from the Lemmy instance, the posts are formatted in Markdown. Just as they are when you submit the post. But our browsers use HTML, a different markup language that is interpretable by our browsers. This is where the only code that's not written by me steps in, a Markdown to HTML layer called snarkdown. It's very efficient and probably the smallest footprint possible for what it is, around 1kB.

Optimization


When my blog was launched, I was using a Cloudflare proxy, for no-hassle https handling, caching and CDN. Within the EU, I'm aiming for sub-100ms* to be faster than the blink of an eye. With a free tier of Cloudflare we can expect a variance between 150 and 600ms at best, but intercontinental caching can take seconds.

Nginx and OpenLiteSpeed are regarded as the fastest webservers out there, I often use Apache for testing but for deployment I prefer Nginx's speed and reliability. I could sidetrack here and write another 1000 words about the optimization of static content and TLS handling in Nginx, but that's a story for another time.

* For the website, API calls are made asynchronously while the page is loaded and are not counted

Mythical 14kB, or less?


All data being transferred on the internet is split up into manageable chunks or frames. Their size or Maximum Transmission Unit, is defined by IEEE 802.3-2022 1.4.207 with a maximum of 1518 bytes*. They usually carry 1460 bytes of actual application data, or Maximum Segment Size.

Followed by most server operating systems, RFC 6928 proposes 10x MSS (= Congestion Window) for the first reply. In other words, the server 'tests' your network by sending 10 frames at once. If your device acknowledges each frame, the server knows to double the Congestion Window every subsequent reply until some are dropped. This is called TCP Slow Start, defined in RFC 5681.

10 frames of 1460 bytes contain 14.6kB of usable data. Or at least, it used to.
The modern web changed with the use of encryption. The Initial Congestion Window, in my use case, includes 2 TLS frames and from each frame it takes away an extra 29 bytes. Reducing our window to 11.4kB. If we manage our website to fit within this first Slow Start routine, we avoid an extra round trip in the TCP/IP-protocol. Speeding up the website as much as your latency to the server. Min-maxing TCP Traffic is the name of the game.

* Can vary with MTU settings of your network or interface, but around 1500 (+ 14 bytes for headers) is the widely accepted default

10kB vs 15kB with TCP Slow Start
\
Visualizes two raw web requests, 10.7kB vs 13.3kB with TCP Slow Start\
- Above Blue: Request Starts\
- Between Green: TLS Handshake\
- Inside Red: Initial Congestion Window

Icons


Icons are tricky, because describing pixel positions takes up a considerable amount of data. Instead SVG's are commonplace, creating complex shapes programmatically, and significantly reducing its footprint. Feathericons is a FOSS icon library providing a beautiful SVG rendered solution for my navbar. For the favicon, or website icon, I coded it manually with the same font as the blog itself. But after different browsers took liberties rendering the font and spacing, I converted it to a path traced design. Describing each shape individually and making sure it's rendered the same consistently.

Regular vs. Inline vs Minified


If we sum up the filesizes we're looking at around 50kB of data. Luckily servers compress* our code, and are pretty good at it, leaving only 15kB to be transferred; just above our 11kB threshold. By making the code unreadable for humans using minifying scripts we can reduce the final size even more. Only... the files that make up this blog are split up. Common guidelines recommend doing so to prevent one big file clogging up load times. For us that means splitting up our precious 11kB in multiple round trips, the opposite of our goal. Inline code blocks to the rescue, with the added bonus of the entire site now being compressed into one file making the compression more efficient to end optimization at a neat 10.7kB.

* The Web uses Gzip. A more performant choice today is Brotli, which I compiled for use on my server

In Practice


All good in theory, now let's see the effect in practice. I've deployed the blog 4 times, and each version was measured for total download time from 20 requests. In the first graph we notice the impact of not staying inside the Initial Congestion Window, where only the second scenario is delayed by a second round trip when loading the first page.

Scenario 1. and 3. have separate files, and separate requests are made. Taking priority in displaying the website, or the first file, but neglecting potential useable space inside the init_cwnd. We can tell when comparing the second graph, it ends up almost doubling their respective total load times.

The final version is the only one transferring all the data in one round trip, and is the one deployed on the main site. With total download times as low as 51ms, around 150ms as a soft upper limit, and 85ms average in Europe. Unfortunately, that means worldwide tests show load times of 700ms, so I'll eventually implement a CDN.

Speedtest 4 scenarios

  1. Regular (14,46kB): no minification, separate files\
    - dev3.martijn.sh/
  2. Inline (13,29kB): no minification, one file\
    - dev1.martijn.sh/
  3. Regular Minified (10,98kB): but still using separate files\
    - dev2.martijn.sh/
  4. Inline Minified (10,69kB): one page as small as possible\
    - martijn.sh/

I'll be leaving up dev versions until there's a significant update to the site

Content Delivery Network


Speeds like this can only be achieved when you're close to my server, which is in London. For my Eurobros that means blazing fast response times. For anyone else, cdn.martijn.sh points to Cloudflare's CDN and git.martijn.sh to GitHub's CDN. These services allow us to distribute our blog to servers across the globe, so requesting clients always choose the closest server available.

GitHub Pages


An easy and free way of serving a static webpage. Fork the BlogOnLemmy repository and name it 'GitHub-Username'.github.io. Your website is now available as username.github.io and even supports the use of custom domain names. Mine is served at git.martijn.sh.

While testing its load times worldwide, I got response times as low as 64ms with 250ms on the high end. Not surprisingly they deliver the page slightly faster globally than Cloudflare does, because they're optimizing for static content.

Extra features


  • Taking over the Light or Dark mode of the users' device is a courtesy more than anything else. Adding to this, a selectable permanent setting. My way of highlighting the overuse of cookies and localStorage by giving the user the choice to store data of a website that is built from the ground up to not use any.
  • A memorable and interactable canvas to give a personal touch to the about me section.
  • Collapsed articles with a 'Read More'-Button.
  • 'Load More'-Button loads the next 10 posts, so the page is as long as you want it to be


Webmentions


Essential for blogging in current year, Webmentions keep websites up-to-date when links to them are created or edited. Fortunately Lemmy has got us covered, when posts are made the first instance sends a Webmention to the hosters of any links that are mentioned in the post.

To stay within scope I'll be using webmention.io for now, which enables us to get notified when linked somewhere else by adding just a single line of HTML to our code.

Notes


  • Enabling HTTP2 or 3 did not speed up load times, in fact with protocol negotiations and TLS they added one more packet to the Initial Congestion Window.
  • For now, the apex domain will be pointing directly to my server, but more testing is required in choosing a CDN.
  • Editing this site for personal use requires knowledge of HTML and JS for now, but I might create a script to individualize blogs easier.

Edit: GitHub | ./Martijn.sh > Blog

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

PewDiePie using Hyprland on Arch wasn't on my 2025 bingo card!


What he did was half a decade ago! The comment section is wiled, keep it down.

I saw this in my Mastodon feed and wanted to share, and that was a mistake.

Edit: I label myself an anarcho-syndicalist, and I don’t watch PewDiePie. I have my fair share of opinions about him from his early days but there is no need to label Felix as a nazi. I used my brain cells to check some of his latest videos and I don’t see any mention of nazism fascism or any political mentions! What I do see is Felix starting a family in Japan, traveling around Japan, and just being a human living his life!

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

PewDiePie: I installed Linux (so should you)


I don't normally watch him but this popped on my feed, and I'm pretty impressed. Dude really fell the Arch+Hyprland rabbit hole and ended up loving it.

Probably one of the largest YouTuber switching to Linux, and is very positive about it.

That Hyprland rice is pretty sick too.

in reply to Max-P

It's good, and it's funny. So much so that I'm jealous.

With this potential critical mass combined with the gaming community it's all downhill for Windoze from here.

PS To force GPU on Steam games in Linux, because games might unknowingly perform needlessly bad.

- -
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

The power of Linux


Today i took my first steps into the world of Linux by creating a bookable Mint Cinamon USB stick to fuck around on without wiping or portioning my laptop drive.

I realised windows has the biggest vulnerability for the average user.

While booting off of the usb I could access all the data on my laptop without having to input a password.

After some research it appears drives need to be encrypted to prevent this, so how is this not the default case in Windows?

I'm sure there are people aware but for the laymen this is such a massive vulnerability.

in reply to Aussiemandeus

This is not that big of a deal most of the time, since you are the only person interacting with your computer, but it's worth remembering when you decide to recycle or donate -- you have to securely wipe in that case. Also bear in mind, if you do encrypt your drive, there are now more possibilities for total data loss.

Oh, fun fact: you can change a users windows password inside Linux. Comes in handy for recovery, ie, user forgot their password.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Aussiemandeus

Yes, any laptop without an encrypted storage drive will have its data accessible by someone booting from a live USB.

It really is a massive vulnerability, but it's not well known because so few people even understand the concept of a 'live USB' to make it a widespread threat or concern.

So yeah, if you're ever in possession of a Windows machine that doesn't have an encrypted disk, you can view the users' files without knowing their password via a live USB.

It's also not limited to laptops.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to GnuLinuxDude

The developer is just kind of insane. They reimplemented wlroots from scratch all on their own, a feat that cannot be understated, and the reason they did that is because of how massively they were outpacing wlroots development in terms of features.

just some things:

  1. a full proper animation stack for eyecandy
  2. single window capture (sway still doesn't have this)
  3. keypress forwarding to specific windows (like xdotool)
  4. global hotkey support
  5. insanely good documentation: wiki.hyprland.org/
  6. color management and HDR (sway is just now getting this)
  7. proper permission management for screencopy (coming in the newest version, first compositor to implement)
  8. a full plugin system for extra things you want to do
  9. a proper app not responding dialog

If the feature exists, hyprland has it, almost guaranteed, they are not minimalists, which I appreciate right now while wayland is still getting everything sorted out.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to ssillyssadass

As always, the answer is "depends". It shouldn't hurt unless you're dual-booting windows (they used it last her as a weapon in their "mess up grub" game), but, Imo, it's worth the trouble if:

  • your data is also encrypted -- otherwise one just removes the HDD/SSD and reads what they need;
  • you provision your own keys -- to not depend on Microsoft signing shims for you;
  • you delete the already provisioned keys -- Microsoft signed a few vulnerable things, like one kaspersky's (iirc) live CD with grub not locked down, so one can boot up literally anything anyway;
  • you lock down grub or whatever bootloader you're using -- otherwise you become that vulnerable live cd;
  • you password lock the uefi -- otherwise one can simply disable the secureboot;
  • your vendor's implementation isn't terribly buggy -- iirc, some MSI laptops would just ignore all the discrepancies.

So, a lot of ifs, and a necessity to store the uefi password somewhere safe, as those may be a pita to reset.

As for standalone stuff -- idk, it might protect you from malware injecting itself into the bootloader or something, but given there's likely no chain of trust (I.e. the bootloader doesn't check what it bootloads), it can move in on some later step.

in reply to ssillyssadass

Simply: Do the protections against someone taking your computer and installing a malicious program before u, or a program that has attained root on your machine and installs itself before/as your OS, matter enough to you to justify the increased risk of being locked out of your machine and the effort to set it up and understand it.

If you don't understand and don't want to, then my advice would be to leave it off. Its simple, and the likelihood it saves you is probably very miniscule.

in reply to ☂️-

Fair. Although, I consider Microsoft's market "Most laptops" since Apple kind of does its own thing and Chromebooks are ultra-low end laptops. Thus Microsoft gets ~95% of the market for themselves.

Personally, I'd say that's a clear case of monopoly since MS controls this entire segment of "non-Apple, non-ultra low power laptop, PCs", but you're right - there are other players. The thing is, they have relatively tiny niches in which they thrive and in fact pose no threat to the monopolist.

But I now I see how you see it as an oligopoly, which is quite valid.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)

Installing Firefox on windows 11


I recognize this post is mostly about windows, but I'd like the feedback of some Linux users who use windows, have had similar issues or can reproduce it. If nothing else, if anyone has seen this issue before, this thread will show the rest of how bad things have gotten.

TLDR: You can't install Firefox on certain windows versions unless you use the store, and even then, it's very difficult to find. I'm installing Mint on my friend's laptop Monday.

This all started with my friend having issues logging into a web portal on her personal computer. She was unable to do so on any browser on her home computer, and only on Firefox on her office computer.

When I tried to download and run the installer myself, windows refused, telling me something called s-mode was preventing me. Progressing through the dialogs, I realized the way to disable s-mode was in a greyed out foot note link a few pages back. Fuck you windows.

I go back, click the link, and I was redirected to the store with a prompt to disable s-mode, but the button to do so was greyed out and can't be clicked. It mentions you can do so by getting windows 11 pro. Fuck paying. I'll install Chocolately.

This is where it started to get REALLY. Press win key. Start typing powershell. It shows a link to me some automation app with the powershell icon. I must have mistyped something. I did it again. Powershell pops up. I wasn't convinced I typed it wrong, so I did it again. BACK TO THE AUTOMATION APP. I do it again. BACK TO POWERSHELL. I do this five or 6 times before I asked her to watch so I can confirm I'm not losing my mind.

So I click on the correct admin powershell and paste the chocolately install command. I didn't expect it to work at this point, and my suspicions were confirmed. Once again, I was redirected to the windows store. I look at the settings and several other things. Nothing. This was the point I said fuck it, I'll install it from the store. She's upset and needs it to work remotely.

I type in the search bar "firefox" and I am given 3 results: "firefox", "firefox browser", and "mozilla firefox". None of which have an icon. Everything below it, safari, chrome etc have icons! I look at every of the 'firefox' results. None actually have Firefox. But now their's Vivaldi and Duck Duck Go. It fucking had Thunderbird!

Ok. Now I am PISSED. There is only one thing left to do. Alphabetic lists. I am scrolling down the F's the rest of the day if I have to. I am finding this shit. But no alpha lists. My last hope is 'Free Apps' And I FINALLY found it!

Does anyone have any idea at all what the fuck is going on? Have you seen this or anything remotely close? Has the hive mind awoken? I do recognize this is version-dependent, and Microsoft does distributed versions and telemetry to test prereleases against hardware. I'll get her version number on Monday. And then I'm installing Mint.

With FOSS, what is to stop scammers from hiding malware or worse in their programs?


Something I've wondered. One of those "too good to be true, it probably is" type things. With all the FOSS especially for linux, installing package after package because a web search said it would fix your problem, how is it Linux isn't full of malware and such?

Id like to understand better so I can explain to others who are afraid of FOSS for those reasons. My best response is that since it's open source, people can see what it's doing and would right away notice something malicious. I wouldn't, since I'm not that into code, but others would.

SOLVED GNOME extensions stopped working after upgrade to Fedora Workstation 42


I've just upgraded to Fedora Workstation 42 and am now unable to activate any GNOME extensions. The little switches in the GUI do not respond and it's the same for all extensions. The Extensions and Extensions Manager apps are both installed as flatpaks - do I need to adjust their permissions in Flatseal? Is the problem due to something else? Thanks!

Edit/solution:
I totally missed the 'Use Extensions' switch at the very top. All my extensions are working on the current GNOME version (48) now. I am the most silly. Hopefully the other solutions in the comments will be useful to someone else in future 😀

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Dariusmiles2123

I get you, like "been there, done that"

Nowadays I have like 10 if not 15 extensions (most of which are not essential to my workflow) and they make the already wonderful Gnome base just better for me personally

this is why I usually wait with recent distribution upgrades, another upside is: it saves me a bunch of headaches too since – by THW time I do upgrade – all the little bugs have usually been fixed

This entry was edited (1 month ago)