Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
I like the backspace there like Colemak has. I can do Fn-Backspace(capslock) to activate Caps Lock but that's something I added to my Keyboard separately.
I use keyd for software remapping now, and I like it a lot more than xkb's esoteric options. It has functionality for layers like layer:C, where any "passthrough" input will have the defined modifier (or combo like C-S-M), but you can define whatever other bindings inside.
Long story short, I've used it to remap caps, control, shift (with a custom shift layer for some symbols), and meta, with overloads, double tap/hold into layers, oneshots, timeouts, and all sorts of (surprisingly fluid) nonsense. It's so much easier than wading through xkb options for me.
To sidestep the question slightly less, I always got rid of capslock altogether instead of swapping. That still leaves true escape to be hit accidentally, but I think there should be an option to change escape too?
Edit: what I always used was
# make CapsLock behave like Ctrl:
setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
# make short-pressed Ctrl behave like Escape:
xcape -e 'Control_L=Escape'
I like Eddy. And at first I’ve liked this essay subject from other creators, but now I just find it shortsighted. The phone isn’t the problem, just like the television and radio weren’t the problem. It’s the content you put on it.
You can watch great TV shows—documentaries, masterpiece dramas, etc. Or you can watch slop.
You can do incredible stuff with your phone—get directions, listen to almost any song ever recorded, learn about the night sky, watch documentaries anywhere you are, write, create your own content, sky’s the limit. Or you can install slop and brain rot apps like Twitter.
You don’t have to pull a stunt like locking your phone away. Just delete the slop. Be more mindful of what an app and the company behind it are, and either limit your use of it or simply don’t install it at all.
I disagree. Yes there can be good intermediate steps, but deleting slop is not even half as healthy as locking a phone away.
1) Interruptions
Not just phone calls or texts, but things like typing an email on the phone and then seeing a text or having the GPS interrupt your train of thought by yelling "Continue straight for 5 miles". Brains hate interruptions. Those are still going to exist even when the slop is gone.
2) Resisting a temptation is exhausting. "not eating candy is healthy"... yes but having a candy bowl right next to your desk is exhausting. It takes 2sec to open a twitter link in the browser. Uninstalling an app is like moving the candy bowl to a nearby room, yeah its better, but it only takes 30 sec to reinstall.
Turning off the dopamine machine (not eating candy) is one thing. But Eddy was showing something a lot bigger than that; how it feels to delete his ability to access to the temptation. He didnt know the code to unlock the phone.
I feel like this kind of misses the point. To be clear: If someone absolutely cannot avoid installing slop apps and enabling notifications for everything, I can see their need for an ultra minimal device or other solution. But I also think that speaks to a larger, personal discussion about discipline and possibly addiction, but that’s outside the realm of this thread.
My point is we can choose which apps, notifications, features, and algorithms are allowed to get our attention. It’s easy to turn off all notifications or never even allow them in the first place—after all, apps have to ask for that permission in the first place.
But the choice is the point. If someone is traveling somewhere they probably want maps to tell them important information about the journey. Otherwise why turn on directions at all? That’s the entire point.
We even have the ability to disable all texting notifications but also choose to allow them from certain people if they’re important enough. These devices are simply tools and we have the power to choose how they operate. The device isn’t the problem, it’s our choices.
I'm saying one of the big downsides has nothing to do with self discipline.
Even if we never click an advertisement.
Even if we never eat from the candy bowl.
Even if we never use the bad phone apps.
Merely living in a world covered in advertisements, living next to a delicious smelling candy bowl, living 30 seconds away from memes, rage-bait, doom scrolling, sports gambling, and other slop -- just living next to those things are bad for our mental health.
Why does self-control predict such a wide array of positive life outcomes? Conventional wisdom holds that self-control is used to effortfully inhibit maladaptive impulses, yet this view conflicts with emerging evidence that self-control is ...
I am having issues with my linux machine running openSUSE MicroOS. It runs fine but I can't power it off via SSH. I tried shutdown, poweroff and halt but no command turned the machine off. I then have to physically push the power button but I don't feel comfortable doing that too often because I might interrupt some processes which are still running? Is there something I could still try or something I did wrong?
@Clocks [They/Them] @theorangeninja Not entirely correct, most will have shutdown scripts that call systemd, but that is a direct way to accomplish it.
Reading "What is the difference between Halt and Shutdown commands?" , I generally have an idea what does the command shutdown does, with or without -h/-r options.
The "halt" command performs po...
I have a Surface laptop, which I want to use again with a microSD as external storage. Since this can be easily pulled off from the laptop, I want it to be encrypted. This was encrypted before, but eventually the SD failed, and I'm trying to recreate what I had...without much success.
Steps so far... Create the LUKS volume:
#cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda
Format in ext4 (I believe it was in Exfat with the old SD?):
\#cryptsetup open /dev/sda encrypted
\#mkfs.ext4 /dev/mapper/encrypted
That should do it regarding the volume creation. Now comes what I can't quite get working. I created a pw txt file within my home folder:
/home/user/EncryptedSD.txt
Then I refer to this via /etc/crypttab at boot:
encrypted /dev/sda /home/user/EncryptedSD.txt
And my /etc/fstab should attempt to mount this on the spot:
However, as this is set, I'm being prompted halfway through boot for the password. And I can't type anything onto that field. Not that it matters, as it's a really long randomly generated password, no way I could remember it.
Even if I managed to make it go through boot, I'm still prompted for mounting the drive when I clicked on it, and I'm also prompted for the password, so clearly something's not quite there yet. Any ideas? I intend to sync a series of network folders to this drive, so not being ready can make it a bit messier to sync at boot.
Thanks! I think you're onto something here. SOrry what's the purpose of adding the key? Does it get stored in cryptsetup's internal storage so you never have to input it again?
I'm not sure about the details but as far as I know luks has a long internal key that is used to encrypt the whole drive. This master key is encrypted with your passphrase and that encrypted key is stored on the drive.
When you add a file as a key the master key is encrypted using the binary contents of that file and stored as well. The contents of the file are basically an additional pass phrase.
So when it tries to decrypt the drive at boot it first tries to use the key file you give it. When that fails it asks for the pass phrase.
When you made the file EncryptedSD.txt it did not contain the same binary data as the pass phrase you created. Probably due to an additional newline or two. To get around that you add the whole file as it is as a valid decryption key.
Often people might create an extra long key on an extra USB stick. Or if you want to decrypt the drive automatically with the option of setting up a pass phrase later you can initially create the volume only with a key file stored on the boot drive or so.
...I think you have something here. If I create a random password and save it via nano on a brand new file, and use this file as passphrase during the initial creation...it then doesn't let me open the encrypted device. It says no key available with this passphrase. When you input the cryptsetup open, you're only allowed to manually type the passphrase (it no longer accepts a file with the passphrase, I think). Curiously, both the file and the passphrase I type manually...are pasted from the clipboard from the same password randomly generated on bitwarden and then copied to the clipboard. And yet, it seems something doesn't match.
EDIT: Seems when you 'open' with a file, the appropiate way is cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda encrypted --key-file /home/user/encryptedSD.txt
Just partly related, and probably no help here - but about the fact, that you can't type in that password (regardless whether you can remember it or not):
you probably use a bluetooth keyboard on that surface? Before boot is finished, bluetooth connection is not possible, so you need some sort of USB/serial keyboard to even type.
Had this issue when full disk encrypting a surface, because without usb (or the original serial) keyboard your stuck in the luks mount process during boot...
Nope. Full on original surface keyboard. Works on BIOS, works on Grub...and then on that specific step, no input is reflected on the screen. No keys being typed, no failed login message being shown, nothing reacts.
Ok, typing in the password but not seeing any characters (like * e.g.) is quite common. It prevents shoulder surfers from seeing the acual length of you password.
That means, that its still possible, that you keyboard is actually working there.
Are you using a layout different from US-ANSI ? Sometimes devices fall back to US layout during boot, which would lead to you typing in a "wrong" password, without noticing it. Especially special characters have different keys on different layouts. On german layout e.g. "y" and "z" are "swapped".
Yes, I understand all this but....If I got the wrong password, I should, A) get some feedback that I have clicked Enter and attempted a login, and B) get feedback that my attempt failed, right? All I get is a frozen screen unresponsive to any input at all.
Kdenlive is a completely different beast than the one that I remember using a couple of years ago. It has so much functionality in it, like all the "TikTok effects", proxy clips, rendering previews, visualizing effect curves between keyframes... like damn. This is actually legit software now for my basic needs.
The thing is, it seems like these were all added in the past 2 years, because I had 23.x installed through the Debian repo and I upgraded through Flatpak to 24.12 and it seems to have added all of these?
Anyway holy shit. Go give these guys some money. This is game changing
Sadly kdenlive is still extremely buggy and slow for me.
Even when using proxy clips which are an absolute necessity to get decent performance I still can't edit at decent performance. This is on a ryzen 2600 and arc a380 which has no problems with other tools even when editing 4k timelines so long as I use low impact codecs on the timeline.
The insane amount of crashes it has makes it really hard to use, I can get by using autosave but its more tedious then it is worth. I keep coming back and trying kdenlive, but I can just never use it. I hope it does good eventually, but for the forseeable future I dont see that happening.
Our family does a reasonable amount of editing in kdenlive every week (youtube, education etc). A decade or so ago practically every video editor on linux felt incredibly unstable. I remember trying to work in Cinelerra. Now shit just works. There are a couple of things in the workflow that still need other tools but kdenlive has been fairly solid. It could do with some minor usability tweaks to make it friendlier to people coming from other editors and for beginners. Also I wish the gpu acceleration (movit) was stable enough to be enabled in MLT in kdenlive builds. Focussing on stability makes sense though.
Davinic is paid but its a one time fee and pretty solid on linux, no issues transitioning for the modst part, some reactor plugins are incompatible like shaderotoys
(reactor used to be free and would extend it a lot only works on studio now) btw I pirated it, its very easy to do on linux just one reddit post where you copy and paste 3 commands into the terminal after downloading the official studio version from their site, eventually I might buy some hardware from them for around 300 since you get free studio with it.
DaVinci Resolve also has a free version that's a fully-featured editor with nothing locked behind a paywall, the benefit from buying the paid version is you get an actual upgrade in functionality over the already-pretty-powerful free version.
However it's still a proprietary app so if that bothers you, then KdenLive seems like a good FOSS alternative to that.
It has plenty of nodes locked behind a paywall like magic mask, they also recentlly locked reactor, the community made plugins, behind a paywall (I still think its worth it, especially if you buy hardware for editing, the studio license comes with it)
I just make little videos for myself a couple times a year. So I'm far from a pro. But holy shit kdenlive and blender are powerful programs (blender moreso, but kden is still pretty cool)
Same, for quick-and-easy hobby work, it's a great tool. Sometimes I will be surprised by looking up a video effect and seeing it can be done in kdenlive.
A few years back there was a bug with my set-up where it would crash when moving clips a certain way, but once that was solved, kdenlive has been smooth sailing for me.
I have been learning QEMU for the past day and so I've almost finished building my perfect VM from the qemu cli, and I was wondering if there is any method to say, copy a partition(+bootloader) of a physically installed system (in this case, Windows) over a hard disk image and run it with QEMU
Unfortunately I've had no luck searching online about it and I'm unsure how to proceed myself since I've never done any disk-cloning or anything like that
My best guess would be to dump the contents of the partitions into a shared folder with the VM, then use a live media to copy those contents over into the hard disk image and finally install a bootloader to work with the Windows boot manager, but I'm all ears for what anyone has to say about it.
Thanks for reading and please let me know what you know!
Yes. set your CD in the VM to a linux distro iso like Linux, set boot from the CD in the vm, then you can use all the tools on your ISO to do whatever you want to the vm.
I've joined Lemmy.ml. Someone sent me a link to a video posted on Feddit.nl - I thought I could log in and upvote/comment using my Lemmy.ml credentials. Wrong!
Why is this? Sorry for my ignorance, I'm relatively new to the fediverse. But I thought that they were all federated so you can interact with all instances??!
Instances don't have to be federated and instances federate and defederate from each other often enough. The goals of instances may not align, and to keep conflict low(er) it's better if some instances cut ties.
TBH, this sounds like a technical issue between ml and nl or just a typo in the way you are posting.
While I thought it was basically an on/off switch for defederation, I suppose there could be a way to block updates from instances without fully defederating.
I am not going to get into the drama, but ml is defederated at a little higher frequency, but it's not as high as some others. It's because reasons, and is not relevant to this particular thread.
You need to view the post from .ml I think you add the .nl link after lemmy.ml/ do not remember the exact syntax. You could also go to the community from .ml and look for the post.
If you see yourself facing this often, you can also use a browser extension to make it easier to see the post you are at in your instance.
For Firefox and derivatives, the simplest one is Lemmy Link, which places a Lemmy icon next to links such as the sibebar's !community link in the instructions for logged out users to find the community in their own instance. It has not been updated in two years, but still works.
Another option is Kbin Link, which does the same thing and has seen recent updates but tends to trigger "this extension is slowing down..." notifications.
A third one I found is Instance Assistant, which instead adds a "Find in my home instance" button to the sidebar. It does have some additional features, but I couldn't get them to work. This one is also available for Chromium-based browsers.
While your particular issues is solved, you should be aware that lemmy.ml is one instance of the Tankie Triad, which many other instances have blocked. Unless you like living in tankieland, I would suggest you make an account somewhere else.
I'm fine with differing opinions, if done in good faith. I'm not fine with people being nasty (personal attacks, name-calling) and mods being extremely biased (e.g. banning people for criticising Russia, China, North-Korea). I don't need such toxicity in my life.
In my experience the only nastiness I face are from people who attack me for being a """tankie"""
Lemmygrad's moderation if quite strict so I can understand why liberals wouldn't be interested, and hexbear doesn't shy away from personal attacks on liberals, but lemmy.ml seems very reasonable to me.
Unreasonable moderation (e.g. bans for warning against romanticising the Soviet Union and Stalin) happens on lemmy.ml too. Please have a look at the link I posted in my previous comment.
Please link to a specific example and don't dump a gish gallop of stuff on me that I have to sift through myself. What I see is a lot of complaining about Rule #1 which specifically says to be civil and nice, and people being banned for not being civil or nice. Nothing unreasonable about it.
Doesn't really come across as "civil and nice" to me, but okay.
So I have had similar experiences with liberal instances. Why is it okay for my comments to be removed and for me to get banned for acknowledging that NATO encirclement of Russia exists or that the Euromaidan was a coup or that the US/NATO sabotaged ceasefire negotiations early in the conflict or that the goal of the war is to kill as many Russians as possible?
I accept being treated like this, because I understand that when I'm in lemmy.world or other liberal instances I am going to be speaking out against the liberal consensus. It's their instance, they can moderate how they like and I accept that.
So when I see lemmy.ml doing the same thing to liberals it's hard for me to see the problem.
When instances become instruments of propaganda for Putin/Xi/Kim and ban people who expose such propaganda, they fully deserve to be blocked. They've become instruments of the enemies of civil society.
It's the moderation practices of those instances that put them in the corner of "sectarian shit". The rest of us don't need to tolerate such toxicity.
But when instances become instruments of propaganda for NATO/US/EU and ban people who expose such propaganda, that's fine.
I tolerate the toxicity of .world and other liberal instances, but maybe I shouldn't. Maybe this is self harm. Maybe I should just join lemmygrad so I never have to get attacked again for disagreeing with the liberal consensus. I'd probably hit myself less.
Hi, I am able to block other communities but rule 34 at lemmynsfw does not let me block it at all. The side bar does not always load and when I can get it to load the block button does not work. Anyone else have issues blocking communities?
I want to be able to format my system without formatting my home, I know I can keep them seperate partitions but I would prefer if I can have dynamic sizes of each, can I achieve that by creating a sub volume for each? Would I be able to distrohop without removing my home while keeping the sizes dynamic? I never sat up a BTRFS before so I'm clueless
If you format the btrfs partition, it will erase everything. You can just delete the old root subvolume and create a new one when installing a different distro though.
I do the this and it's great. An entire distro takes up only a few GB. Many graphical installers don't support installing on an existing btrfs partition (or subvolume) and want to create a new one. This can often be solved by manual intervention (via terminal).
IDK if this will work but maybe doing exec sudo -i does the trick.
Otherwise just enable the root account and log in as root. Should be passwd -u root to unlock (passwd -l root to relock), also need to set the root password using passwd root.
Another way to do this is sudo su -c 'this is my command'
E.g. change a fan setting on a ThinkPad with:
sudo su -c 'echo "level full-speed" > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan'
So to run a shell you could do all sorts of tricks like:
sudo su -c '/bin/bash -i' and such.
Never know when it comes in handy.
EDIT: Damn, downvoted, any reason why? It works on my machine with a locked root user or one without a PW and I made sure to test it before posting, but I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't work if that's the reason for the downvote. Was just hoping it would be useful to somebody :/
So I got a new HP Victus 2023, and I want to install Fedora on it, it has an RTX 4050 and has win11 preinstalled, my last laptop was a 2014 Toshiba and I only had to disable secure boot for Linux to run, is there something else to disable before installing Fedora ? Maybe TPM?
My thinkpad from 2017 has a setting for Windows vs. Linux sleep (i think sleep level 3 being bugged that generation or something?). Better google your specific model.
Linux will run fine with secure boot you just have to have it set for other OS not Windows specifically, however, it is a pain in the ass and if you have physical control over your machine I see no good reason to enable it, it significantly compliciates things like building your own kernels.
The fediverse is small, and thats both a blessing and a curse - one of its several blessings is that in a smaller space we all individually have a bigger impact on what the culture of this space is like.
On this comm (and on lemmy broadly) there's a lot of discussion about how to grow the fediverse, what to improve, but an easy thing you can do for the fediverse is right in front of us-
Be kind
Ask people what they think, and why
Approach folks you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility (EDIT: no, this is not specifically referring to Nazis. I get it, they're the first thing that comes to mind. I'm not telling you to approve of Nazis I'm just saying be kind to your fellow lemmites)
Engage sincerely
Ask yourself if there's something nice you can say
Make this small space worth being in
A platform lives or dies by what's available on said platform and often we have this conversation in the context of "content" or posts - and we may never have as much content as reddit does. But content and posts aren't the only thing this kind of platform offers- it also offers people. It offers community, and human interaction.
Culture and community is lemmy and the fediverse's biggest differentiator, and we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.
***The biggest thing you can do to help the fediverse *is make it a place worth being.****
On constructive criticism - definitely rule one is make sure that it's invited first, but second, the best way to "sweeten" a critique and make it more appealing is to put it between compliments. Don't have a bare remark about the problems or suggestions, tell them what you like first, then how they might change things, and then close with something else positive or simply thanking them for sharing it. Even if someone says they want to hear what people think, it's normal to be defensive, so help lower that reaction first, and then leave them feeling appreciated even though you pointed out issues you saw.
Aka the compliment sandwich. A technique I personally dislike. Be honest and open with your feedback in a positive way, don't try to hide it between compliments. If your feedback is simply negative, keep it to yourself.
Almost as if the statement is referring to the paradox of tolerance.
By allowing people like Nazis, Christofascists, Tankies, etc. a platform, it only invites more sharing that view to spread their bullshit around. This makes those that don’t share those extremist views uncomfortable they then leave those places. You see it on platforms like Truth Social, X, and 4Chan.
If this is to be a kind place, we must encourage kindness and rid ourselves of unkindness. You can’t tolerate intolerance, lest it spread and take over.
If you actually had a coherent definition of what a Nazi is, it might be possible to agree with you. But in reality, it's used as a catch all by shitty people to justify their shitty behaviour.
This is a whole different train of thought (mine is, I won't speak for yours) and I don't wanna derail my original thought but that's a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately.
I agree with you, and subscribe to the idea of tolerance as a social contract that, once broken, is no longer owed to the one who broke the contract.
At the same time, I've also learned that very explicitly, feeling persecuted is a requisite ingredient in radicalizing people into hate groups. And that at an individual scale, it's generally undeserved compassion that helps deradicalize them. We know this from the accounts of people who managed to leave hate groups- a little while ago there was really good (and long) interview with someone who used to be leader of a white nationalist group where he talked a fair bit about that idea, since he now works with a nonprofit that helps families and friends support and deradicalize loved ones, but it's far from the only account
At present I'm really not sure how I personally reconcile those two things I belive to be true. The Nazi bar analogy is real.
I know wading into this more specific conversion runs the risk of immediately derailing what I was trying to start a discussion about, but I figured I'd share my thoughts. If anyone reads this and has thoughts to share (though I'd prefer not to get 50 comments just saying I suck for having complicated views on what we do about the predicament the US and world is in with the rise of fascist ideology. I'm interested in what's effective in terms of fixing the problem just like you are) I'd be interested in hearing them. I'm still looking for a way to synthesize my beliefs into a coherent whole.
Edit: thought I'd add the interview for anyone curious. I don't see everything exactly the way he does but I think understanding the problem and exactly how it works is necessary of we're going to address it, and I think his account is a really useful glimpse into certain aspects of how that world works
Arno Michaelis is a former white nationalist skinhead, lead singer of the neo-Nazi metal band Centurion, and member of Hammerskin Nation, one of the most vio...
I agree with everything you said at the top and this comment as well. You don't have to be mean, cruel, or shitty to the bad actors. In fact the best case scenario is to make your case once and then walk away. It's much easier to talk about than to actually do, but it's really effective. If you assume they're not trolls or bad actors, even better. All of these actions curtail flame wars, which is what they're after anyway.
i think if someone's intolerant, pointing out that they're wrong is something appropriate, but picking a fight over it is not worth it. it makes you like that person in that meme:
edit: in bad cases, report it and move on with your life.
One thing that's turning me off, is the, uh... political requirements of much of the space.
By that I mean stuff like "Elon Musk should commit suicide" or "X group of people are all mentally retarded" comments in top posts, or even popular posts themselves.
It feels toxic like X. Or what Voat (an older Reddit clone, albeit not a federated one) turned into, albeit at the opposite side of the political spectrum.
I can definitely understand that. I think in a lot of ways that problem is driven by how much of a political echo chamber lemmy is. Any time there's a narower range of beliefs I feel like you can see those beliefs getting more extreme, or expressed in more extreme and toxic ways.
I honestly don't really know how to improve it given the state of the world. It feels like the range of political beliefs keeps getting compressed into two groups and it makes it harder and harder to tolerate the beliefs of those further from yourself. And for valid reasons.
And the more justified the contempt for people of other political views gets the harder it gets to figure out how, culturally, we manage the justified anger that comes from how deeply broken everything is.
Elon musk is doing actual literal Nazi salutes and peoples anger about that is justified. And at the same time I'm not sure what way of acting on that anger (and acting on the problem) yields anything other than radializing people teetering on the edge of extremism.
I'm glad I don't really see actual Nazis on lemmy. Its nice that there's less debate about the legitimacy of people's humanity.
And at the same time anger is deeply toxic to healthy interaction and drives behaviors that I genuinely don't think make the problems prompting people's anger any better.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts candidly, a lot of this thread is a love-fest and that's wonderful and puts a smile on my face, but it's at least as important to talk about the unhealthy aspects of the fediverse's culture
Yeah don't get me wrong, I love Lemmy. But I don't like, well, that sort of thing. Or straight up disinformation being posted along the lines of that vitriol. It makes me worry about the Fediverse, as that culture only goes one place, and I feel like we shouldn't stick our heads in the sand if the culture is getting radicalized to an extreme.
It may not do much depending on the mods/admins, but it never hurts to report and downvote comments or posts like that.
Emphasis on reporting there, as I think sometimes that stuff lingers around because people have made a habit of only downvoting and blocking those doing that regularly. I realize in your examples it's more likely bias or bigotry respectively, but still.
Report first, then downvote and block. Doing only the latter only makes your experience a little better, the former may help the community.
Name: Christopher "Chris" Alan Whitmore Date of Birth: July 12, 1993 Age: 31 Gender: Male Address: 4279 Elmridge Avenue, Boulder, CO 80301 Phone Number: (720) 555-3942 Email: cwhitmore93@gmail.com Alternate Email: c.a.whitmore@outlook.com Social Media:
Instagram: @chris.the.moose
IP Address: 73.164.202.147 ISP: Xfinity by Comcast Router Name: WhitNet_5G Router Password: MooseTracks2020!
Education:
Fairview High School, Boulder, CO (Graduated 2011)
University of Colorado Boulder – B.S. in Computer Science (Graduated 2015)
Employment:
2016–2019: IT Support Specialist at Techfinity Solutions
2019–Present: Systems Analyst at VantaByte Technologies, Boulder, CO
Drives a black 2018 Subaru Outback with a "Hack the Planet" bumper sticker
Frequently shops at: Micro Center, REI, Whole Foods
Sure! Here's an expanded version of the fictional profile for Chris Whitmore, now including made-up family member names, relationships, and contact info — all entirely fictional and consistent with the character:
Family Members:
Mother Name: Diane Marie Whitmore (née Larkin) Age: 58 Occupation: High School English Teacher (Retired) Location: Fort Collins, CO Phone: (970) 555-1837 Email: dwhitmore.teacher@gmail.com
Father Name: Alan David Whitmore Age: 61 Occupation: Mechanical Engineer at Apex Industrial (Semi-retired) Location: Fort Collins, CO Phone: (970) 555-1836 Email: alan.whitmore@apexengineers.com
Sister Name: Emily Paige Whitmore Age: 27 Occupation: Graduate Student, Psychology, University of Oregon Location: Eugene, OR Phone: (541) 555-2249 Email: em.whitmore.psych@gmail.com Instagram: @empaige_
Uncle Name: Gerald “Jerry” Larkin Age: 55 Occupation: Owner of Larkin’s Auto & Tire Location: Longmont, CO Phone: (303) 555-7993 Email: jlarkin.autoshop@gmail.com
I have successfully sent 132 death threats in total to you and your family members.
::: spoiler disclaimer please mods this whole thing is a joke :::
Can people see what groups you subscribe to on Lemmy?
Other users can see which ones you comment on. I haven't run an instance, but I imagine admins of our home instances can see what groups we are subscribed to.
I was considering leaving the other site before the API fiasco because it felt like so many users approach engagement as rhetorical combat, that is, the point of discussion is to defeat the other person. Instead, think one of Covey's habits of highly-effective people: "Win-win, or no deal." Approach discussion on the Fediverse as a collaborative act, in which you're exchanging ideas with another person. Even if you disagree, you can both win by respectfully hearing out the other person. And if the other person won't collaborate? No deal! Just disengage.
Just like in intimate relationship, use "I" statements instead of "you" statements. Telling people who they are and what they believe is not only disrespectful, but probably wrong, often exaggerated or distorted for rhetorical combat purposes. People get angry when their identity gets poked at. One exception, of course, is when giving advice, like, stick to what you know, and share your thoughts and your reactions to a topic.
If (Republicans/Tankies/Fascists) want any voice here they can go get fucked.
If they acted in good faith and were capable of processing reality they wouldn't identify as such.
We need to accept they have had decades to self reflect and learn how reality works, and instead they choose to erase minorities because they make right wingers uncomfortable.
serious question but how do/could you formalize your rejection of right-wingers? what is it exactly that you take issue with?
i'm asking because i talk to a lot of people (also some who identify as "right-wingers") and i'd like to know what exactly are the issues that bother people, so i can forward it to them. it would help me bring up better arguments if i know what other people are thinking.
so, i've collected the following list of things to take issue with so far:
right-wingers often think that people who don't work, don't deserve to eat, which clearly puts enterpreneurial spirit above human life, which is clearly illegal
right-wingers often take brunt and direct actions, which can be uncomfortable to more sensitive people.
right-wingers typically neglect far-sightedness, seeking only short-term profits (looking at you, quarterly profit).
i'm asking because i suspect that might be a fallacy; i remember reading somewhere that 10k years ago the first wars happened, before then war practically didn't exist because war requires a minimum amount of organization and that just wasn't there before.
There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.
And we don't even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.
Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.
We aren't chimpanzees. As persistence hunters, our kinds of territorial disputes would have been very different and early humans were likely very nomadic rather than settling into territories that fight. In times of scarcity we'd just move on to different lands.
Which, notably, is why humans spread over the entire planet. We aren't really built to be fighters.
The main thing is the bigotry and making marginalized people feel unwelcome and unsafe. Having trans people and Nazis existing in the same space isn't really tenable, in practice, most marginalized people would rather be in a space where their existence and basic rights aren't up for debate and where they won't receive slurs and threats of violence. So the question is, who would you rather have in your community, oppressor or oppressed?
Of course, this person applies this standard blindly by including "tankies" as "right-wingers." She's just abusing a valid argument by using it to dismiss any perspective she doesn't like, left or right, bigoted or accepting, bad faith or good faith, as "right-wing."
If you're out there suggesting political stances can be adequately expressed along a single line, then you're not doing much better I'm afraid. Engage with the nuance, friend, it'll build understanding and be better for all of us.
that's what i've been saying for a while now. like a healthy organism that has both left and right hands, society too shall have both right and left people in it. that is not a problem. what is the problem is that these different parts are not communicating clearly enough and it's causing dysfunction of society.
That is a very specific interpretation of what I meant by this post.
To be perfectly honest, I really wasn't making the point you should approve of nazis. Just that maybe it's worth putting effort into being kind to one another...
For example, I constantly see leftists online biting eachother's heads off (including on lemmy) for having slightly different left-wing ideology. Its not like "approach people you disagree with with curiosity" means specifically actual neonazis, and approaching someone with curiosity doesn't mean telling people "your idea is correct and you're right for thinking it"
It means trying to understand it. You can dislike someone and still gain from better understanding their worldview. Even if you think it's harmful. Even if you think it's illogical. Even if you think they're wrong. Curiousity isn't tacit approval.
If you want to think about it cynically you can consider it creating allies and knowing your enemy.
All of that ignoring the fact that if you look around, this platform is almost exclusively left wing 😅
I understand we disagree on certain things, that's okay, these are just my thoughts on the subject, and it's a profoundly important one, so I can appreciate why people would have different strongly held beliefs on it. Hope you have a good one 😀
Anger and fear are blinding if you let them be, especially if they're intensely justified.
Unfortunately we live in times where they're very justified. I don't begrudge people for reacting in anger or fear, I'm doing my best not to do exactly the same 🙁
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
Answer. I said answer. Not solution. Too much aspirin and your blood thins out and you need to move to Transylvania.
That took my brain a hot minute to process lol. Is that actually from something or did you just invent it on the spot? 😅
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
"But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it.
"OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
Unironically wisdom we should all learn from. I can't stop for other people but I can at least choose how I act, and whether I contribute to that pain suffering and discord.
I can understand your anger, I'm in the same boat, but I really wasn't asking you to do that 🙁 I was asking you to be kind to the people here. That you share this space with.
I wish I had left this list of examples in the original post where I had them at first
Compliment people's art and ask about their process
Teach people about something you're knowledgeable on
Give constructive criticism on peoples projects when it's welcome
Thank people for posting things you're glad you got to see, tell them you enjoyed it
Tell people you're glad they're here
Tell people you hope they have a good day
I moved them to a comment because I have a bad habit of being really long winded and I wanted people to actually read the whole post, but I think moving them and leaving "try to approach people you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility" prompted a lot of folks to interpret what I was saying as "tell the Nazis who want to debate your humanity that all their views are swell, actually"
What I meant is exactly what didn't happen in our interaction with eachother. I'm a queer leftist whose humanity is debated by the right. You don't completely agree with me and that's okay, but I'm not deserving of your hostility.
We may not see things exactly the same way but I care just as much about combating fascism as you do; everyone I love save for some of my family is a minority with a target on their back in the eyes of the current administration.
I wish I could have made it more clear what I meant. I've gotten lots of comments more or less insinuating that I'm encouraging we all complicit in the rise of fascism. And it's not a big percentage, but I'm still a human being who hears 12 people forcefully telling me that, and it doesn't feel great.
That's not what I'm advocating. I'm advocating that when you don't completely see eye to eye with someone, you ask them what they mean (and also lots of other things, like giving compliments and telling folks you appreciate their post, etc. etc. ect., but I feel like how to handle disagreement is the specific idea in question).
WE don't see exactly eye to eye. You and other commenters here don't see exactly eye to eye. And that's okay. Being willing to talk with them or me about what they think and why doesn't help the Nazis.
(Like I said I'm really long winded 🙃 sorry for the wall of text, I know it's not even the first one I've replied with to you specifically 😅)
It's specifically the "don't call people Russian trolls/bots"
There are a lot of Right wingers sympathetic to fascist countries right now, and it doesn't matter if it's a troll farm or a regular person pushing hateful ideology it's harmful and unacceptable either way.
Personally I don't see calling people Russian bots/trolls or accepting harmful behaviour as the only available options.
I don't think the former is at all productive or helps anything, and the latter is completely unacceptable. But those aren't our only options when we decide how we want to engage with people we disagree with
and again, fascists are not the only people with whom disagreements happen on lemmy. We're literally disagreeing right now, if you called me a Russian bot I think that would be silly and unproductive. That's literally my whole point. Not everyone you disagree with is arguing in bad faith 🤷♂️
I'm very familiar with and agree with the Nazi bar metaphor, and said as much in one of my very first comments I made in the discussion under this post. At no point have I advocated letting Lemmy be a Nazi bar. And we don't exactly have many fascists here compared to other platforms, Lemmy is almost exclusively leftists.
Being kind to your fellow lemmites is not making this platform a Nazi safe haven, it just makes it a social space actually worth spending time in.
If you know what you are arguing and argue with tankies/Nazis in good faith, nine times out of ten they will eventually lose their temper and make fools of themselves. There is no need to be hostile to begin with, they just defeat themselves basically because their ideologies are totally flawed (kinda like in real life).
Saved because would be interesting to read what the people that want to set others property on fire and guillotine people, think what is actually being kind
well i'd argue that setting teslas on fire is property damage, while slashing social security is murder or at the very least neglect of duties that led to deaths of many people.
it is clear that property damage is the minor damage of the two, according to contemporary interpretation of law.
about the guillotining:
same story. talkings about guillotining people is a reasonable threat when the alternative is to let the billionaires upend your roots and your lifes through horrible policy decisions. it's an act of self-defence at some point, i'd say.
though i agree with you at least partially that the US is different than say europe.
in the US, the mindset of "hard work" is more far-spread, as it the mindset that people who don't work, don't deserve to eat. that's just the US being the US i guess.
I'm not sure I follow- Are you saying you think I want to set people's stuff on fire and guillotine people, or that you think responders in this thread do?
As I've alluded to, there's a lot of justifiable anger about the state of the world, and you can see that hurt reflected in people's immediate response. The feelings driving that "conclusion jumping" valid and understandable, even if I don't think it's productive
There is no easy way to cope with fascism on your doorstep, or taking over your home and threatening to throw you out of it 🙁
Originally I listed all the extra examples/suggestions I put in my comment in the actual post itself, but I have a bad habit of making things way too long so I moved all the smaller more specific things to the comment. I think maybe it would have been more clear I'm not saying you should approve of Nazis had they still been in the post.
That’s the part that I still can’t wrap my head around. We know it will be shameless shilling and nepotism along with stochastic terrorism and still vote for it anyway? Wtf
Its easy to forget they live in a fundamentally different reality shaped by a buble of media. We all do, but conservative media kinda feels like an alternative universe.
When confronted with the world we live in they reject it as unrealistic because it differs too much from the facts they've accepted about the world.
My grandpa is a trump voter and I do my best to still talk to him. At an individual scale he's a kind, sincere man who has always been welcoming of my queerness and tries to understand me. It's very painful trying to discuss things with him even though it stays a kind interaction when I lead with kindness. It requires a lot of cognitive dissonance, but he lives in a fundamentally different reality than I do and I honestly don't know what I can do about it 🙁
That's the dangerous thing about fascism. Decent people buy into it. Become complicit or enable it. It wouldn't be a real threat if they didn't. But it engineers a reality for people to believe in, and lo and behold, they do. And cruelty ensues 🙁
It’s not about tolerance imo, it’s about discussion. You’d be surprised to learn their reasoning if you actually listened to it. You don’t have to agree with it.
Both sides have this problem right now. Both only converse with their own. Why are republicans not changing? Well if their friends, family and everyone they talk to is a republican, they’ll never be exposed to different opinions.
Don’t forget that both sides can have valid policies depending on how you view the world. I’m not taking about trump and whatever you people are doing out there in the US, but in general, conservatism is the idea that people will manage their money, rather than the government.
Look at Quebec for example. A very socialist government. 2 years ago they invested a ton of money into one electric bus company. Well that company failed really bad and while they aren’t completely bankrupt, they aren’t far. It’s easy then to then see why conservatives would want to vote conservative. If their money had stayed in their pocket instead of going to the government, this wouldn’t have happened.
Same thing with health. The public health system is currently clogged up so a lot of people end up having to pay to go to the private sector to actually get cured in time. So conservatives believe this whole system is a huge waste of taxpayer money. Most conservatives I know aren’t agaisnt the government helping with that, but they’d rather the government just pay the invoice after you went to a private clinic, similar to insurance in the states, rather than try to control a system that clearly isn’t working.
Ik a few people who lean to the right economically but aren't in favor of all this authoritarian stuff And they're not Nazis, you cant just generalize so broadly about what should or shouldn't be tolerated. Ofc if someone is being blatantly racist that shouldnt be tolerated, but economic discussion is totally fine
You do realize that there are members of marginalized groups who have been elected as republicans. Like there's black republicans. Is voting for them 'blatantly racist'? If you overuse language it loses some of its meaning
I'm not resorting to that. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the idea that voting Republican is inherently racist, is wrong. This really isn't that complicated.
You are incorrect. The republican party is the party of bigotry and cruelty. To vote for them is an explicit endorsement. Adults are accountable for their allegiances and their actions, and we have had decades to learn.
Nazis can always join their own defederated server and have their little circle jerk, nothing is stopping them from going and joining exploding heads; they don't have a right to be part of federated fediverse and have their bullshit heard.
For that matter, nothing's stopping the people who disagree with me from creating their own nazi-friendly Lemmy instance. This is not the Nazi bar, and it's not going to be, so go ahead and open it yourselves. No need to let me know how it turns out, I'm pretty sure I've got a good guess.
On Reddit, I once bragged about having universal healthcare and got called a Nazi and a communist at the same time.
This is what happens when Xbox kids that use the n-word grow up. They learn new "bad" words and throw them around out of context and contradictingly. They don't actually know what those things are, though, so it never makes sense.
I've been called a tankie here. I didn't know what it was and looked it up, just to discover it was the literal opposite of the things I was saying. I was very confused and just put it down to frustrated self-projection. At some point they had been called that, it upset them, so now they use it to upset people too but they still don't actually know what it is they're saying.
If I see someone defaulting to Russian bot or tankie, I've found another Xbox kid.
Most people know this in some capacity, but it's not talked about enough: the shape of the platform massively shapes its culture. Every mechanism, intentional feature or not, is a factor in resulting user behavior and should be accounted for.
Reddit Karma was (shitty) reputation from the start, but Slashdot user IDs became one despite being mere sequential identifiers; negative user feedback such as downvotes can be harmful to communities (yet, users without an outlet may lash out in other ways e.g. reports); even how the platform communicates with users influences them; and so on.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be nice and incentivize others to do the same, but unless the system naturally leads to the desired behavior, you'll have a bad time in the long term because building culture by interactions doesn't scale. By the time you realize there's a shift, it's too late; interactions will compound and affect how the average user acts faster than you can try to course-correct.
I wish lemmy was more experimental, because by building a clone of reddit, we've copied too many of its faults. We've already got gatherings to complain about mods, and the one time devs considered changing a core component, discussion was killed by an onslaught of users. Problems with the current setup that were brought up then will likely never see that amount of people thinking about how to solve them.
Contrast with Mastodon, which gets crap for not being a faithful copy of twitter, but their reasoning for not including quote-reblogs is understandable. They're now putting a lot of thought into how to add them safely. Not ignoring functionality users want, but also not ignoring how it will affect culture, that's compromise.
I'd like it if we could talk more about how our platforms work and, particularly, how they affect us, because that's a big way we can build better platforms, right up there with being nice.
Discover how Reddit's downvote feature affects user engagement and community dynamics. Learn about the debates and implications of negative feedback on the platform
I 1000% agree, the design of the space we inhabit shapes our behaviour.
I don't think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in. Still important, but I think this is an easy way everyone can contribute. Similar to making donations.
They're not the only things we need, but they're a small thing that becomes valuable when the culture decides we collectively prioritize them.
You couldn't possibly be more right though. Erin kissane has talked a fair bit about that idea in her research. If there are specific design features of Lemmy you wish were different I'd be curious to see discussion posts on this comm about how we can design a space that facilitates more compassionate interactions and healthier community! (Or just to hear about them from you if they're not fully formed enough yet to post about 😀
I don’t think collectively we can stop at intentionally being kind, but forming a coherent design vision to effectively shape human behaviour and social outcomes as a community project is HARD and legitimately takes an actual vision and understanding of incredibly advanced design cobcepts very few have the experience to have any realy expertise in.
Yeah if you want to get a PHD in this stuff, but you could also just become friends with a bunch of artists and ask them how they like this place, and notice how they talk about it feeling free and vibrant or dead and dying.
By the way, we are already doing this work and it barely feels like we are... because the work is a basic product of the world views, shared values and shared explicit ideological and practical goals of this community space.
You don't need this crazy apparatus to make this place a vibrant garden, having expert gardeners is definitely helpful, but it is about getting out of the way of kindness and empowering kindness, not coming up with some grand unified strategy to manipulate people into being better humans.
Basic things like the way a lot of Mastodon instances don't by default prioritize showing the precise number of likes a post has add up to a significant difference in how healthy a social network is for the people in it. You can encourage people to obsess over unhealthy aspects to communication by making the numbers front and center, encouraging people to associate popularity and self worth with those numbers, and creating situations where everybody has to become an expert in gaming getting the best numbers possible even in the realm of their personal life (or so we are made to feel).... or you can de-emphasize the numbers and make it a thing people can check if they want to, but the UI and general philosophy of the place doesn't really encourage or worship that kind of thinking in the first place so why bother?
The reason it feels weird not to have numbers quantifying how successful a social media post/piece of content is that the people who designed these systems were programmers not artists, they didn't understand the incredible farce that attaching the atoms of communication in a community with direct quantification is... would immediately lead to unhealthy environments, they just saw it as the easiest way to make money and identify who the valuable influencers to pay to do ads are.
I have a shark vacuum, I don't know the model. It's really good for two reasons. First, it slides down low profile to go under things easily. Second, it has a three foot long detachable suck stick so you can get bigger stuff or get down in cracks. It's great for around the litter boxes. 4.5 stars because things could always suck more.
Clearly I left it too ambiguous whether I meant Nazis specifically when I said you should try to approach people you disagree with with curiosity. That sounds super sarcastic but I don't mean it that way, I just don't have the energy to reword it
This problem probably could have been anticipated and avoided, it's just hard to always do so perfectly on the internet when speaking to a lot of people you don't know who will interpret what you say in any manner of different ways
Nah I think that what you said was legitimate and I don’t think you need to reword it. I’d rather be part of a social media experiment where there’s allowed to be some nuance and subtlety. Also I think you’ve made it pretty clear that nazi’s are excluded from the list of people to try to be nice to. I agree with you there!
i hope the quality stays up and i guess that we're non-commercial might help with this; as we're not pushing people to use this platform; the people here are people who actually want to use this platform and i guess that in itself could do a good thing.
I wish too. Unfortunately, the redditors are coming here, and i've noticed a pretty big spike in racism/transphobia 😁 I've been trying to keep them on a leash, reporting them to other admins directly and banning them from dbzer0, but the attitude itself being there disappoints me heavily :/
The thing that I appreciated most about Lemmy and my transition from Reddit is how cordial everyone has been. Even if a comment is taken out of context, people tend not to jump down each othersthroat and assume the worst, or make bad faith arguments full of fallacies. I've had legitimate back and forths with people, something that basically never happens on Reddit.
Honestly if anyone is doing that I really feel like it would be the US, not Russia.
Russia's goal is to sew discord and unballance the populace that drives politics, and for that to work you need a MASSIVE scale that we just don't really have. They don't really have much to gain from the IP addresses of a handful of leftists
But Lemmy is exactly the kind of hotspot for people DEEPLY angry about the government of the US to organize that if we're big enough to be on their radar, the US government would have a vested interest in keeping an eye on potential dissidents. Unlike Russia IP addresses and personally identifiable information would be useful to them, in identifying threat actors, tracking their activity and volatility online, and building cases that would allow them to prosecute should said dissidents escalate
That's how it looks from where I'm standing anyway 🤷♂️
I could be wrong but to me it feels odd to think lemmy is big enough to be worth organizing psyops for.
Not to say it couldn't be an issue in the future, but it feels much more likely that people expressing pro Russia sentiment are just people who bought into that particular brand of propaganda.
Which like, to some extent all of our individual world views are shaped by the environment of propaganda we're exposed to. We're all products of our social conditioning, and ultimately that's exactly what propaganda is. Media designed to socially condition people to a certain set of beliefs. All we as individuals can do is be aware of it and be willing to look at our own beliefs critically.
But at the end of the day I think the folks praising Russia on lemmy are just people. People I personally think are misguided, but I don't think theyre generally acting in bad faith any more than the general population here.
Completely right OP, and this is worth repeating as MUCH as possible. More than almost any UX or intake changes, Fediverse will only grow if their experience of the community is good.
Unfortunately, some people have never caught a vibe in their life and it shows lol. A single person with a bad attitude can completely tank your experience in a small community, versus a 20,000 person subreddit where usernames are basically indistinguishable.
some people have never caught a vibe in their life and it shows
Lmao 😂
And yeah, we actually have tangible evidence to support that idea Erin kissane has done a lot of incredible research work on how to effectively design the fediverse and support people in navigating it and one of the earlier things she did was interview people who left Mastodon after having bad experiences and collate that data-
A lot of people's reasons is that when they joined they were met with hostility. It plays a huge role in people's experiences here, and even just from a purely pragmatic perspective it's REALLY important
I feel like this conversation is slipping into equating "makes fediverse grow faster" to "good".
Maybe most people need to have an initial experience where they get pushback for behaving the way they did somewhere else?
That is of course a dangerous rationalization to apply, as it can be used for any kind of shitty treatment of people, but there is also a similar danger to assuming that whatever will bring people in the fastest is inherently good.
This place is becoming very Reddit, if you post anything that deviates from someone’s beliefs they call you names and insult your intelligence. So many people can’t have a debate or discussion without jumping to personal attacks and hate. It’s really disheartening. I love political debate but there’s no such thing anymore, only name calling
Spez had his gestapo admins ban a bunch of people after Elon had a fit so you're getting a lot of the terminally online types coming here. My suggestion is just don't give them any attention and they'll eventually give up. I was semi active in a few lefty subs and holy shit you could smell some of the people there just from their comments.
Doing a quick look through your comment history paints the picture that you're likely the issue since your responses are often vaguely or overtly aggressive. Snide and snark.
There it is. And that’s the weirdest, most volatile group, the ones that search through your comment history so they can find ammo for personal attacks. That’s so so weird, I have never ever looked through anyone’s comment history, if you’re an asshole i generally move on. Going into a strangers history to search for dirt is really cringe and kind of speaks to your priorities in life
With the aggravated issue of moderators being far less ""professional"" here than in Reddit. At least in some big reddit communities there was a big admin team that tried to keep things more or less professional (not that they would always achieved that but they tried). Here mod teams are very small and mods mostly just got their position by just being here first, so I have found out a lot of very biased moderation and mods just using mod tools and position of authority to defend their own particular opinions.
If you are debating something with a moderator alt account, or with a moderator friend you are in for some unfairness going your way. At least that have been my experience trying to debate even very small deviations from a Community main political stance.
Then the moderator would ban you because the mod agrees with the other person. I have seen it happen. (Not to me luckily, but I've got a post deleted and the post insulting me was upvoted by the same mod who deleted my post).
And not fron small communities, some of the bigger here on Lemmy.
Moderation is a bit lacking. Which is understandable as few people want to invest time in moderating.
I arrived at LEMMY after what I think we very optimistically called the Reddit Collapse. We wish. And I had toe in LEMMY and a few others at Reddit.
Recently with their abusively patronizing redesigning and gamification and just ugly bullshit, I can’t stomach Reddit at all. So LEMMY grows increasingly important, not just to me but to folks who haven’t yet even heard of it.
So, I’ll just say thanks for your post here. I have, I confess, engaged with a couple bullies on LEMMY and I always try to say… I don’t like to do this on LEMMY— and I say that precisely for the reasons you mention.
And as you encourage: I will try to be kinder, even in when feeling… hmm… less than kind.
Thats when I came here too. Sadly, spez had his yes man ban a lot of people and some really bad ones broke containment because of it. Most places I've been on here I haven't seen it but if this post is being made it must be getting worse.
Unless I know the other person has the same intent to respectfully listen and try to understand rather than argue I won’t engage in any sort of political discussion. Polarizing opinions have been completely normalized online and it’s literally ruining society.
And yeah, I can very much understand that, I try to do the same. Sometimes it feels productive to talk with people you don't share perspective with, but if it's just gonna be a flame war I don't wanna go throwing gasoline, nothing is gained by that
I love talking with people with a different perspective, and I love playing the devils advocate to try to understand other points of view better. As you said, if it’s just going to become a fight it’s completely meaningless.
It must be, your name shows up highlighted with a little birthday cake in my client 😀
And interesting, ivermectin has that intense of side effects when taken orally? Or do the pseudo-science people who think it cures covid just advocate dosing it ridiculously high?
By coincidence I actually use ivermectin topically for my rosacea, a skin condition. Being a anti-parasitic its useful fro reducing the amount of demodex mites that can aggravate rosacea in some people! I know in people it's mostly used for lice.
The Internet can certainly lend itself to discord and hostility. I think that makes it all the more important we think carefully about what kind of spaces we want to build
Both in the sense that we should pursue kindness, but also in the sense that we should be designing our platforms to be healthy social spaces! Another commenter made some really good points about how important it is that we shape our platforms in a way that facilitates the kind of social spaces we want to he a part of 😀
I disagree that kindness should be pursued foremost. Knowledge and truth should be pursued and kindness shouldn’t be allowed in charge because when it is you get shit like language policing which is insanely toxic and stupefying.
You want kindness? Go somewhere designed to be wholesome but please, for the love of honesty and free speech, don’t enforce that crap site wide.
I don't think kindness is at all mutually exclusive with knowledge and truth 😀
To be clear I didn't mean "enforcing kindness" as in like forcing everyone to engage in a specific way or they're banned for not being nice enough
The big corporate platforms are, in a lot of ways, designed for hostility conflict and toxicity. Because they're designed for engagement, and anger drives engagement like nothing else possibly can. Facebook did internal studies and found their algorithm made people miserable, and then kept it that way because with respect profit, it was a great design.
I think we should be thoughtful about the mechanics of the platforms we're building and whether they incentivize people to lash out at eachother, or incentivizing healthy social spaces.
I'm not here in support of some dystopian "be positive or else" insincere niceness platform. But I do think it's worthwhile to shape the culture of the space we spend time in intentionally 😀 I wanna enjoy being here. I'm here in pursuit of worthwhile, sincere interactions with other human beings, not shitty internet flamewars where nothing is gained and everyone walks away more bitter and angry
When you say you think knowledge and truth should be guiding principles, what do you mean? How would you see this platform designed? What way of engaging with eachother do you think is worth pursuing? 😀
I’ve seen a lot of that in leftists spaces lately, way more cautious of it now.
Engagement may not be great but it wins. Imo fediverse needs engagement to live long term but maybe doesn’t need toxicity for it, but addiction is inherently a little toxic.
Yes we should be thoughtful, not everyone is unfortunately.
How fucking dare you seek genuine humanity online. lol
I think letting people say anything (with obvious bannable exceptions like abuse, threats of violence, death, rape, and cp) helps, that fact checking or being wrong should not be bannable, and that people should be given more ways to conflict with each other but in a way that spurns creative debate not pure hostility but that pure hostility has real value to show people whether or not they should change and shouldn’t be shut down outright. Like commenting ‘fuck you’ should be allowed anywhere but not ‘fuck you go kys’ because it’s destructive not constructive.
I think it's worth being warry of making other peoples misery your own entertainment, that's a really good way to end up a deeply cruel person.
What you're describing sounds like Ben Shapiro to me. Scoring cheap points through argumentative tactic rather than actual merit of stance. Personally I see more value in legitimate exchange of ideas where involved parties can all walk away with a more well rounded perspective.
I see debate as an opportunity to learn from and teach others, not about dunking on people in pursuit of humiliating them
Lol my argument automatically has no merit without you hearing any of it. That's like bigotry or something.
I guess Ben Shapiro argues with people that aren't media trained to make his stance look better, do you want me to say people Ben Shapiro argues make some awesome argument all the time without exception?
I'll teach you that it's not on me to make your arguments, get your evidence. I just put it on myself to communicate my arguments and poke holes in other people's arguments
my argument automatically has no merit without you hearing any of it
I did read both of your comments in full and think about them, but if you have more specific thoughts on why you hold the perspective you do I'd be open to hearing them 😀 (full disclosure though, it might take me a bit to get back to you- with how much I've engaged with this thread I'm starting to kinda run out of social energy 😅)
I guess Ben Shapiro argues with people that aren't media trained to make his stance look better, do you want me to say people Ben Shapiro argues make some awesome argument all the time without exception?
Its a little hard to follow exactly what you mean towards the end, I think there are a couple typos, but no. I just personally see a distinction between productive conversation and making a game of humiliating people buy talking circles around them regardless of the merits of their arguments.
I can't know that you exactly meant the latter, but it's kind of a spectrum and when you said "I like pissing people off then making much of them for not being able to defend their position" it did sound like you were advocating the idea that it's good or productive to take joy in making people feel foolish for their inability to argue as well as you. I think there's a big difference between the merits of a stance and someone's ability to argue them. That's why I expressed I disagreed. And that's why I made the connection to Ben shapio, he's really good at arguing, and makes sport of trying to make people look bad when they make the sort of arguments I personally agree with.
I'll teach you that it's not on me to make your arguments, get your evidence. I just put it on myself to communicate my arguments and poke holes in other people's arguments
I think I see argument as much less of a zero sum game than you do. I don't wanna score points, I wanna learn about what people think and teach them why I think differently.
You're not wrong to point out flaws in peoples arguments, or to expect them to make their case for themselves, but that's not the same thing as treating it like a game to win. I think the former is appropriate and healthy, I think the latter is destructive and doesn't actually accomplish anything 🤷♂️
I mean, there is kind of already 4chan-like spaces on the fediverse, they are just mostly off in their own corner because nobody else wants to deal with childishly incomplete visions of how moderation should work in a community to keep the most vulnerable people safe.
These days everyone who is not ultra-left easily gets labelled as Nazi, similarly everyone who brings up any rather left argument will be called a woke snowflake.
Thus, any dialog is immediately shut down. Listen, understand, exchange arguments.
That is what unites everyone who believes in liberal values.
These days everyone who is not ultra-left easily gets labelled as Nazi, similarly everyone who brings up any rather left argument will be called a woke snowflake.
What the hell are you smoking? Have you turned on the news? Paid attention to politicians? Check in with how exactly companies chose to sustain and expand DEI (A <- where did the accessibility go we wonder?) after Trump and DOGE attacked it?
You are so wrong, if the universe repeated at the edge of itself like in the old Asteroids arcade game, you would have long ago crossed into Very Right by slamming straight past the most extreme extent of Completely Wrong.
The thing in this post about curiosity isn't just a lemmy/online thing.
The vast majority of people are mainly interested in themselves. Like - if you have trouble on dates, making friends, getting along at work, anything to do with people in general - approaching them with a sense of sincere curiosity will completely change things overnight.
Get people to talk about themselves, be supportive in your discussions with them, and shut the fuck up wherever possible and suddenly you're interesting, a good person, kind, whatever - traits you've done exactly fuck all to demonstrate, but that people will swear are true because you seem interested in them.
It's fucking bonkers but it's true. Curiosity can change your world.
The only humane, sensible and practical definition of intelligence that actually gets you anywhere productive is defining intelligence as a practiced and maintained sense of curiosity about the world around you, especially the world you know little of.
For example, Trump is a fucking idiot, because he never does this ever and neither do people who worship him.
@Cris_Color@lemmy.world being nice helps establish the "tone", but I'm not sure that wouldn't change with another "API event" on Reddit that results in another, larger mass migration.
Another suggestion I have for college graduates is to ask your alma mater if they are going to start using something other than commercial social to engage with alumni.
Most universities don't want to make mistakes investing in the bleeding edge, but they are quick to follow. When a few schools do something, many more quickly copy that. They are also looking for low cost wins. Their engagement numbers are already telling them that Xwiiter no longer works to reach alumni or potential students.
If even a handful of alumni suggest a change at the right time, that is often enough to get them to give federated social a try.
@Cris_Color@lemmy.world being nice helps establish the “tone”, but I’m not sure that wouldn’t change with another “API event” on Reddit that results in another, larger mass migration.
The way I see it - the early adopters set the tone of a place and new arrivals are more likely to adopt that approach. So it is important to be kind now, so people will be kind later.
The way I see it - the early adopters set the tone of a place and new arrivals are more likely to adopt that approach. So it is important to be kind now, so people will be kind later.
Even if a bunch of people flood in and "dilute" that culture, that will never erase the fact that if we make sure to be as nice as possible as early adopters of the fediverse, that any corruption of that initial culture will be remembered as such.
The narrative of this place as being about being nicer, kinder (still very flawed) and more accepting will live on, no matter what, even if we fail to meet that ideal for periods of time.
Personally though, I think it matters what version of people you invite in, so if as an early adopter I try to invite in the best versions of people (which includes actively trying to invite in the best version of me) because those best versions of people will turn around and invite in the best versions of other people.
I don't know why this isn't considered an old adage at this point, but it is fun as fuck being part of a kindness snowball, it is empowering, heart warming and inspiring all at the same time. Plus the thing you help participate in creating just grows in power so much, you can't help you did something real even if you were just a tiny tiny tiny tiny part of it.
A big problem is too much politics, feels like politics is always brought up even in posts where it's not the topic of discussion. Just look at this post. Then if someone disagrees with your view they'll attack you and then they'll claim they "are on the right side". People have forgotten the golden rule.
I disagree, if political discourse can't survive public debate, then it isn't a very good political ideology.
We have been artificially hampered on other platforms by having to be nice to the nazis, we don't have to do that here and I fully welcome such debate because none of their abhorrent ideologies hold up under scrutiny
As for left leaning political debate, we have ALWAYS argued with each other. That is one of our greatest strengths that we just don't all into line with everything the top says. Also one of our greatest weaknesses.
But to stifle that artificially will just force it to bleed into other discussions.
I say up with political discourse and let the marketplace of ideas be conceptually free of bias and the results will be that humanity in general considers nazis pretty bad people
disagree, if political discourse can’t survive public debate, then it isn’t a very good political ideology.
They made it clear they're talking about spaces and topics not about politics. People who feel entitled and compelled to make everything a political culture war are insufferable. Made worse when they call everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi. The word has lost all meaning now.
Yes -- you should definetely segment away politics from some parts of your life. You should not fully disengage with it, but take a breather every now and then. Go for a walk, talk with some people about a hobby you enjoy despite your differences or just take a prolonged toilet break.
I find it infinitely exhausting that it seems like everything online these days evolves into a political discussion. I recently saw someone asking about how they can make more time for reading in their day -- someone mentioned that they read in the morning when working from home while having their morning coffee. And someone barged in and were like "Oh MuSt Be NiCE to HAve ThE TiMe FOR ThaT! No, soMe of Us Have To CommUTE 2 HouRS each way DaiLY BeCAuSe Of LAte StAGe CaPItalisM". And then it evolved into some revolutionary eat the rich stuff from there -- which i for the most part can follow.
But it was a post about asking how to make more time for reading... How did it end up with revolution? I personally believe the main problem with injecting politics into everything is that it becomes predictable and bland. Just like my example above. It's an interesting discussion for sure! But perhaps don't force it down everyone's throat all the time. It's like that friend who has a hobby that they just wont stop talking about all. the. fucking. time. It dissolves the seriousness of the discussion and makes other people tired of it.
Again, i'm not saying abstain or fully disengage from politics. But for gods sake, let people take a break every now and then if they're able to do so, and for five minutes just focus on something joyful eventho everything is going to shit at the moment.
If you're getting comments removed from .world of all places, it's not because you're "calling out a tankie", that's for sure. I'm assuming it's more "screeching at a socdem".
Also, what do you mean "y'all"? We Already established by your own definition that I'm not a tankie. Unless you're just giving up the pretense that it's not just a meaningless snarl word you fling at anyone to the left of you.
@Cris A lot of people mistake kind for being fake and not ever expressing disagreement, but doing so neuters what is in my view one of the most valuable aspects of these federated social media, the potential for opposing view points to be expressed and then discussed and hopefully some mutually beneficial solutions that accommodate both sides of an opposing viewpoint can be arrived at. That can't happen unless an environment is safe and inviting and people can act in a civilized manner.
I am a prolific retweeter. I also see many instances prohibit nsfw, or some prohibit nsfw without a cw, or without a specific cw. Many servers have 5 or 10 categories of content that must be CWd. If I boost/retoot a post from another mastodon instance, what does that look like for other users of my instance? Does it show up in the local feed? If I boost an untagged nsfw or otherwise 'bad' content under the local rules, is that moderate-able (bad for the retooter)?
I intend to mark my profile as sensitive and put every post of mine behind a CW.
It's good for repetetive tasks & muscle memory compared to clicking. Lots of industry, banking or form entry (like in airports) is done with keyboard only GUI.
but like... none of this makes the terminal more powerful.
something like the Arcan lash/cat9 shell is a massive leap forward in terminal technology that may potentially completely change how we use it. it does this by understanding what makes the terminal productive: pipelining, batch processing and scripting.
I don't know, nothing struck me as new, the only difference is the presentation and the mouse (but I prefer keyboard). the example given for animated indicators already exists using ASCII escape codes. my zsh already has syntax highlighting on the prompt indicating mistyped commands, and suggest possible completions with a tui (with vim bindings). I could go on but anyway my point is everything they show is already possible with a tui, the only reason a clicky clicky solution doesn't exist is because keyboard are freakin better and faster. They are right that we need a terminal evolution/revolution, but it's not the mouse.
GUIs do have advantages in things like discoverability. Honestly the 1983s Apple Lisa nailed this with the idea of having clickable menus annotated with keyboard shortcuts, so users could do the same thing faster next time. For some reason we stopped doing this (especially in web apps), but that's a reason to make better GUIs, not to RETVRN to the feature set of a VT100.
I don't know why we have to go on nonsensical diatribes about "UNIX wizards" though when we're fundamentally talking about a handful of minor UI improvements to things that already exist.
I would like to buy myself a second hand and install Linux on it. I was looking into ThinkPad T14 gen1 or gen2 devices because of their maintainability and repairability. I found one where I live with a Ryzen processor but it has the wrong keyboard. How easy and expensive would it be to swap this with US English? Are there any good alternatives to the ThinkPads? I fancy the X1 but don't like the fact that I cannot change or swap anything on it. The T14 looks very bulky and unattractive but at least can have the RAM upgraded and the battery changed.
I fancy the Framework laptops, but don't want to spend so much on a laptop. Especially the latest 16 inch with Ryzen AI CPUs.
The T14 G1 is at least cheap, like 350€ with the 400 nits low power display and the battery is at 99%. I guess with tlp installed and autocpugfreq I can get 5-6 hours out of it.
For personal use, I will use it just when traveling, as I have a more powerful desktop. Nothing too fancy, a bit of programming, tinkering. Will run probably Hyprland. What's important is to have 5-6 hours of battery life. I will probably run some containers, YouTube watching, browsing, should be portable and support charging over USB-C.
If you're going to install Linux, Dell and IBM are generally very compatible. I've got a Dell 1500 series that runs Linux beautifully except the battery has given up the ghost and I need to replace it, also going to swap out the hard drive for an ssd. But Mate runs well on it, even the touch screen features work.
I’ve never had a Dell that didn’t have issues with Linux. The fingerprint reader never works, sometimes the webcam doesn’t work, sometimes the WiFi doesn’t work, and sometimes the ambient light sensor doesn’t work. But, there’s always a problem. After having four different Dells, I finally swore off the brand for good. Never again.
I got an X280 with 8 GB of RAM a few months ago, works great with Linux. Paid just $175. It even works with Haiku OS! Pic: files.mastodon.social/media_at…
You post through the UI to a Fediverse hashtag, on which AI bots listen to, which replies are then displayed in the UI. In the future, the main app should have some kind of ranking only to show the best replies. Through hashtags, AI bots can specialize in certain areas. It would also be possible to partially process a task (for example translate it) and then repost it to another hashtag (I call that "prompt routing). This way, you can have chains of AI bots working together on public, shared message queues.
I support what they wanna do with a credible exit, but claiming that their goal is to or that they do make it easy for multiple different social networks (your PDS is not a new network, it’s data locally stored for the existing network) to communicate with each other is just false
The idea of the Fediverse is simply a group of social networks communicating through the same protocol, is that not what ATProto is attempting to accomplish?
I've been a long time supporter that ATProto actually is apart of the Fediverse. The ultimate goal of this subreddit is a fully decentralized social media landscape. Fracturing discussion between ActivityPub and ATProto helps no one, especially in niche communities like this. The long-term goal is the same, and whether that progression happens on protocol A or platform B it's progressive nonetheless and we should discuss it.
The "Fediverse" (capital F) refers to the social media platforms utilizing ActivityPub, specifically. I don't believe there's any agreed-upon name for such a network on ATProto, since Bluesky is the only platform actively using it.
Posted in another comment but wikipedia disagrees.
The Fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[4][5][6] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.
We can argue semantics all day but at the end of the day I'll hold the same stance that we shouldn't be fracturing the communities and instead discussing the content and idea of a decentralized communicating social media landscape.
The Fediverse is ActivityPub, because ActivityPub is how Fediverse servers talk to each other. BlueSky does not talk to Fediverse servers, so it cannot be said to be part of the Fediverse.
I'm fully aware that might not be #1 goal at the end of the day, but we're starting to see multiple social media networks start to exist with their own infrastructure on ATProto (sprk.so/ is in beta) and more importantly hosted outside the US.
These separate networks can interact with the BlueSky network if they choose so and the BlueSky network can interact with theirs if they use their Lexicon. There are other lightweight apps being built on top of BlueSkys Lexicon and relay system as well that are whole separate apps.
To say that's not their goal is a little weird because it's possible right now? Sure it might be difficult but they've merged quite a few changes to make the relay system much more accessible, and have put a lot of effort into the identity system recently.
It seems that document currently expresses that "the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network" is "[a] major protocol in competition with the Fediverse", which suggests that neither "the AT Protocol" nor "Bluesky" are included in the Fediverse.
Moreover, "AT Protocol" and "Bluesky" are conspicuously absent from the second paragraph of the article content / lead section.
The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.
The literal first line of Wikipedia agrees with me?
The Fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[4][5][6] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.
The literal first line of Wikipedia agrees with me?
The Fediverse (commonly shortened to fedi)[4][5][6] is a collection of social networking services that can communicate with each other (formally known as federation) using a common protocol.
This is interesting, but I don't yet entirely understand it.
My first thought after trying to read the entire document was that the author seems to suggest that "AT Protocol" is a natural result of the movements they describe, but I find it hard to believe that the "peer-to-peer (p2p) movement" could naturally result in a system that is "not meaningfully decentralized" and "not federated".
I think they meant mostly the decentralised distribution of data. At the end of "Generic hosting, Centralised product development" it says
Even though product development is centralized, the underlying data and identity remain open and universally accessible as a result of building on atproto. Put another way, ownership is clear for the evolution of a given application, but since the data is open, it can be reused, remixed, or extended by anyone else in the network.
So theoretically everyone can access the data but before it reaches the end users it goes through centralised applications like bsky
Because of what I quoted, I don't think that "Bluesky" or "ATProto" are decentralized or federated, so it's extremely unlikely that I'll interact with them anytime soon. The particular reason that they are not decentralized or federated is not really interesting to me.
Understanding the architecture of systems is crucial for designing efficient and effective solutions. Centralized, decentralized, and distributed systems each offer unique advantages and challenges.
It seems that document currently expresses that "the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network" is "[a] major protocol in competition with the Fediverse", which suggests that neither "the AT Protocol" nor "Bluesky" are included in the Fediverse.
Moreover, "AT Protocol" and "Bluesky" are conspicuously absent from the second paragraph of the article content / lead section.
The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.
It seems that document currently expresses that "the AT Protocol, which powers the Bluesky social network" is "[a] major protocol in competition with the Fediverse", which suggests that neither "the AT Protocol" nor "Bluesky" are included in the Fediverse.
Moreover, "AT Protocol" and "Bluesky" are conspicuously absent from the second paragraph of the article content / lead section.
The majority of Fediverse platforms are based on free and open-source software, and create connections between servers using the ActivityPub protocol. Some software still supports older federation protocols as well, such as OStatus, the Diaspora protocol and Zot. Diaspora* is the only actively developed software project classified under the original definition of Fediverse that does not support ActivityPub.
After reading the article i think you might be wrong with this one.
From what i got now is that there are 3 layers
First is storage which can be completly or is decentralised
Then backend/server/application layer which can be bsky or whatever ticktok alternative gets made which is not decentralised
and then user layer/view which depends on the application
What i want to say is that the relay can be exchanged through something else and then entirely including moderation and all
So pro atProto is: * data seems to be actually decentralised * applications sharing the data * everyone gets the data
And pro ActivityPub is: * more alternatives of the same application/server * way better control over data (federation & defederation) * servers interact with each other nativly (atPr seems to let the servers only interact with data) * more efficient (servers can update clients, in case of at least bsky clients have to ask servers)
pro ActivityPub? (unsure about the technical details) * moderation? As in shared lists * able to host by individuals? As in i dont need an compute intensive relay
But what about the DIDs, the things used to actually identify accounts within the ATproto ecosystem:
But Bluesky has developed its own DID method, did:plc. Today, did:plc stands for "Public Ledger of Credentials", however it originally stood for "Placeholder DIDs", with the hope of replacing them with something else later. The way that did:plc works is that Bluesky hosts a web service from which one can register, retrieve, and rotate keys (and other associated DID document information). However, this ledger is centrally controlled by Bluesky.
It's literally not possible to have a functional PDS without registering with a Bluesky server and they maintain indefinite control over the ledger. All your data is tied to this DID, it's how the entire protocol is designed to identify stuff, how decentralised is your data if it's dependent on Blusky (the company) assigning you an identity?
This is false, they support did:web which ties your identity to ownership of a DNS name (which is its own can of worms, but not controlled by bluesky like PLC).
Unless you mean that you still have to register your pds it to get indexed by the relay, so people can read your posts without querying your server directly (which is possible but discouraged). This is actually an advantage over mastodon/activitypub however, your personal pds will not crash if a post goes viral (unlike a personal mastodon instance).
Take a look at the 'news' on various instances like hexbear vs world and it's night and day. An encyclopedia is meant to be factually reliable, but if this works like it does here you would have the equivalent of conservapedia and prolewiki sitting side by side as 'true'.
What you're observing are different communities and different threads. The community lemmy.world/c/news is roughly the same everywhere. A thread in some community in lemmy.ca is roughly the same everywhere.
That could be, I was thinking if the pages were more like the communities. I would have to think they need to be for any kind of moderation, otherwise who approves edits or has edit permissions? If someone else doesn't agree with the vision on the existing page/thread what stops someone from putting up an alternate version?
Moderation, voting, there are options. My point is whatever the version is of a community or a thread on Lemmy on its host instance, nearly the same the version is on another Lemmy instance that federates with most of the same instances. If we consider just 2 instances federating with each other, and users have no blocklists, and all federation updates are perfectly transferred (no networking issues), then a community in one instance would look identical on the other. So would a thread. After moderation actions and all.
I think the way to do that is: instead of having separate realities/universes linked together by search and federation, try to unite those universes into a shared multiverse, to the greatest possible.
In other words - ❌ merely give all federated users access to the same articles - ✅ automatically link and embed similar articles into each other by default (collapsed, but expandable). similarity can be determined by authors'/contributors' intentional citations, by instance owners' filter rules, by LLM, etc.
of course, there may be attempts to obfuscate relatedness, astroturfing, brigading, whatnot. I wonder if its possible to visualize voting results for each duplicated/linked article along with the originating instance. I think this would function as a pseudo version of 'community fact-checking'. Maybe a better name would be 'reality-checking' or 'sanity-checking' or whatever.
Hello everybody! I want to escape Microsoft and windows, and I am looking for a Linux distro. I have some experience with Unix and a very old Ubuntu distro. But that's quite some years ago. I am looking for a Linux distribution where i can play World of Warcraft on. I mainly use Nvidia graphics (RTX 3070).
I have found some distributions that are supposed to be good for gaming. I suppose, as i am still a Linux Noob, I am also looking for a distribution which is easy to get into. Especially for an older gamer ;)
I came with these distro's myself. What does the Linux community say?
Drauger OS - Based on Ubuntu LTS using KDE Plasma - Pre for AMD draugeros.org/
Pop!_OS - based on Ubuntu - Optimized for gaming on Nvidia GPU's system76.com/pop/
Developer: system76 (Denver, US)
SteamOS -based on Debian 8 (Jessie) -designed to run steam and steam games -set to auto update their OS from Valve repo's store.steampowered.com/steamos
Developer: Valve (US)
Manjaro -based on Arch (rolling release model for latest software/drivers) -KDE plasma desktop (Pro-tip: enable flatpak and install ProtonUp-QT) manjaro.org/products
Developer: Majaro (EU - Austria, France, Germany)
Ubuntu: -the go-to linux distro for millions of users, incl gamers -best for beginners and gamers who want stable well supported distro -works seamlesssly with steam, lutris, wine (pro-tip: install the gamemode package (sudo apt install gamemode)) ubuntu.com/download
Developer: Canonical ltd. (UK)
Nobara -based on Fedora -optimized for gaming on newer Nvidia graphics (drivers come installed) nobaraproject.org/download-nob…
Developer: Thomas Crider (Denver, US)
Mint -based on debian and Ubuntu -friendly OS, works out of the box, extremely easy to use linuxmint.com/download.php
Bazzite is a custom Fedora Atomic image built with cloud native technology that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld..
Admittedly, I’m probably not the best person to ask for recommendation of a noob-friendly distro, but I feel people are overthinking this. If someone produces a list which includes distros I’ve never heard of, I think they spent too much time on ‘Top 10 Noob Friendly Distros in 2025’ websites.
If you really care about my recommendation, just start with Mint.
PS. I should also add, this isn’t criticism of you or any other new user who does search online for recommendation. This is more a comment on state of the Internet where there are so many websites which seem to pad their list with obscure distros where really all such articles should give recommendation for one of the same three distributions. Which three I don’t exactly know.
Thnx for your reply! And don't worry, i didn't see your reply as some criticism, i am fairly new to Linux, that's why i did some researching, and might found some unknown distro's ;)
First, gaming distros are vanilla distros with opinionated tweaks and additions to support the hobby of gaming. It might be as simple as having Steam pre-installed to as complex as having unique kernels or custom package repos maintained by the distro maintainers.
But that doesn't mean vanilla is always the best choice, because not everybody wants to spend time optimizing everything. Some distros even have easy setup scripts for otherwise complex installations (like for Davinci Resolve). Don't feel like you need to pick vanilla to be a "true user."
Some easy to set up Distros for gaming that are ready ootb:
Bazzite: Fedora Atomic, practically bulletproof, just works. Downsides are that adding new packages is not the same as other distros, and there's a learning curve to it beyond flatpaks. Some software can't be installed at all if it doesn't come as an RPM or AppImage (Private Internet Access's VPN client, for example).
CachyOS: Arch with an optimized kernel and optimized packages. Comes with some easy-install scripts. Tool to easily select different kernels and schedulers. Currently another very popular choice. Like the above, this just works. There's some debate about how significant the optimizations really are, but they're there nonetheless.
Nobara: Traditional Fedora. Like Bazzite, just works. Has a custom update manager that acts as a GUI wrapper for your usual cli tools. Maintained by GloriousEggroll, a widely respected user that maintains the GE versions of Proton.
PikaOS: Debian (not Ubuntu). Combines the philosophies of Nobara and CachyOS and puts them atop Debian. Better setup scripts than even CachyOS, a more user friendly update tool than Nobara's, and has the same kernel selection and scheduler tools as CachyOS, plus the same package optimizations. Don't let the fact that it's Debian underneath fool you. This has the latest kernel and drivers.
I would try all of those in a VM and see what you like about them. They're all unique and worth a look.
ETA: all of these have Nvidia versions, so all of them should work with your card.
Any reasonably modern, well maintained desktop distro should be fine; whether they're "for gaming" or not shouldn't matter. I've successfully run WoW on both Debian Stable and Arch.
To boot into a BTRFS snapshots from rEFind boot manager. But rEFInd doesn't show the snapshots.
Additional Info:
So, apparently, to restore the BTRFS snapshot of a root subvolume, I shouldn't do it with the root partition being actively used. > >
So, I need to boot into the desired snapshot from the boot manager itself. > >
GRUB has grub-btrfs, which lets you boot into snapshot from OS selection screen itself. > >
rEFInd has refind-btrfs, which should do the same as grub-btrfs. But it didn't in my case. I am not seeing any way to boot into a snapshot from rEFInd. > >
I use BTRFS Assistant with snapper to manage snapshots. > >
I am not seeing any way to restore the snapshot from live environment too. > >
I am using CachyOS (Arch) with Plasma DE. > >
I suspect the reason is my unusual /efi/boot partition layout. (attached below) > >
I did my partition this way because, my initial EFI partition had less storage (as seen on image), so , I created another boot partition and mounted my pre-existing EFI partition to /boot/efi. I did this by referring a Youtube video (I know, I should've known better) > >
I also encrypted my BTRFS / partition > >
If you need any other info, please ask. > >
I know this is a general community, but this is the 7th community that I'm asking this 🥲
Some people suggested Limine bootloader, but I like rEFInd for its versatile theme support.
Tip: make sure btrfs_x64.efi driver is installed, it can be installed manually by copying from /usr/share/refind/drivers_x64/btrfs_x64.efi to esp/EFI/refind/drivers_x64/btrfs_x64.efi, or you can install all drivers with the refind-install /dev/sdx --alldrivers option.
Warning: btrfs_x64.efi does not support raid1c3/4.
Many people are, understandably, confused about brightness levels in content creation and consumption - both for SDR and for HDR content. Even people that do content creation as their job sometimes get it really wrong.
This makes a numerous amounts of incorrect assumptions.
For one it assumes all sRGB monitors utilize gamma2.2 for decoding images. This is bluntly put, completely wrong. A large amount of displays utilize the inverse OETF (the peicewise srgb transform) for decoding sRGB. (for some more information from a somewhat authoritative body, filmlight's "srgb we need to talk" video on youtube goes more indepth but TLDR is 25-50% of displays use the inverse sRGB oetf)
this is why windows HDR uses the inverse oetf. Decoding content graded on a pure 2.2 display with the inverse oetf is way better then decoding content graded on an inverse oetf display with a pure 2.2. Windows took the safe route of making sure most content looks at least OK. I would not say that windows HDR is wrong, it's not right, but it's not wrong either. this is just the mess that sRGB gave us.
Another time you should be using the inverse sRGB OETF to linearize content when the original content was encoded using the sRGB oetf and you want to go back to that working data, but this applies less to compositors and more to authoring workflows.
Another wrong assumption
When you use Windows 11 on a desktop monitor and enable HDR, you get an “SDR content brightness” slider in the settings - treating HDR content as something completely separate that’s somehow independent of the viewing environment, and that you cannot adjust the brightness of. With laptop displays however, you get a normal brightness slider, which applies to both SDR and HDR content.
People have been adjusting monitor brightness for ages. Sometimes manually, sometimes with DDC etc.
Another issue that is brought up is "graphics white" BT.2408 is a suggestion, not a hard coded spec, many different specs or suggestions use a different "graphics white" value. A good example of this is JXL. 2408 also very explicitly says 'The signal level of “HDR Reference White” is not directly related to the signal level of SDR “peak white”.'
this is important to note because this directly contradicts the some of the seemingly core assumptions made in the article, and even some of the bullet points like "a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white" and "SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too"
if your application has some need to differentiate between “SDR” and “HDR” displays (to change the buffer format for example), you can do so by checking if the maximum mastering luminance is greater than the reference luminance
This needs to be expanded upon that this does NOT correlate to what the general user understands HDR and SDR to be. HDR and SDR in the terms of video content is no more then a marketing term and without context it can be hard to define what it is, However it is abundantly clear from this quote here that how they are interpreting HDR and SDR (which is a very valid technically inclined way of interpreting it) does NOT fall inline with general user expectation.
Anyone reading this article should be made aware of this.
For one it assumes all sRGB monitors utilize gamma2.2 for decoding images
Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no. There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.
That a certain percentage of displays don't behave like expected is annoying, but doesn't really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).
this is why windows HDR uses the inverse oetf. Decoding content graded on a pure 2.2 display with the inverse oetf is way better then decoding content graded on an inverse oetf display with a pure 2.2. Windows took the safe route of making sure most content looks at least OK. I would not say that windows HDR is wrong, it’s not right, but it’s not wrong either. this is just the mess that sRGB gave us.
The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.
Another time you should be using the inverse sRGB OETF to linearize content when the original content was encoded using the sRGB oetf and you want to go back to that working data, but this applies less to compositors and more to authoring workflows.
Makes sense.
People have been adjusting monitor brightness for ages. Sometimes manually, sometimes with DDC etc.
That's a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment.
With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can't properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above "PQ absolute".
Another issue that is brought up is “graphics white” BT.2408 is a suggestion, not a hard coded spec, many different specs or suggestions use a different “graphics white” value.
I didn't claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn't dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that's irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.
A good example of this is JXL.
Can you expand on what you mean with that?
2408 also very explicitly says ‘The signal level of “HDR Reference White” is not directly related to the signal level of SDR “peak white”.’
That "directly" is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.
Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won't rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.
this is important to note because this directly contradicts the some of the seemingly core assumptions made in the article, and even some of the bullet points like “a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white” and “SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too”
No contradictions at all. The Wayland protocol defines these things to be the same, so for application developers they just are the same, end of story.
This needs to be expanded upon that this does NOT correlate to what the general user understands HDR and SDR to be. HDR and SDR in the terms of video content is no more then a marketing term and without context it can be hard to define what it is, However it is abundantly clear from this quote here that how they are interpreting HDR and SDR (which is a very valid technically inclined way of interpreting it) does NOT fall inline with general user expectation.
That's just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.
And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.
Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no. There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.
That a certain percentage of displays don’t behave like expected is annoying, but doesn’t really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).
the video goes more indepth, but it's a very true statement to say that "some displays decode with the inverse oetf and some don't" this issue has been plaguing displays for decades now.
There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.
You are 100% right in saying "the reference display is gamma 2.2" however, we can only wish this is what displays do, Color.org themselves got this wrong!!! color.org/srgb.pdf and leads people astray.
The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.
I don't actually believe this to be the case, if it was people who use custom ICCs would get extremely wonky results that don't typically happen. On the other hand it is very true that colors when doing it the way they do, you get the "least offensive" results. Though IMO the best solution would be to simply be to default to the pure 2.2 and allow users to override the transfer. the Color protocol allows for explicit peicewise sRGB anyways, so doing this should fit right into a fleshed out colormanaged setup.
That’s a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment
I think I am a bit confused on the laptop analogy then, could you elaborate on it?
With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can’t properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above “PQ absolute”.
How monitors typically handle this is beyond me I will admit, But I have seen some really bonkers ways of handling it so I couldn't really comment on whether or not this holds true one way or another. Just so I am not misinterpeting you, are you saying that "if you feed 300nits of PQ, the monitor will not allow it to go above it's 300nits"? IF so this is not the case on what happens on my TV unless I am in "creator/PC" mode. In other modes it will allow it to go brighter or dimmer.
My current monitor is only a 380nit display so I can't really verify on that (nor do I have the hardware to atm)
I didn’t claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn’t dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that’s irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.
ah I see, I was a bit confused on what you had meant then. My apologies.
Can you expand on what you mean with that?
Keep in mind this was based on the above misinterpretation of what I thought you meant.
With libjxl it doesn't really default to the "SDR white == 203" reference from the "reference white == SDR white" common... choice? not sure how to word it... Anyways, libjxl defaults to "SDR white = 255" or something along those lines, I can't quite remember. The reasoning for this was simple, that was what they were tuning butteraugli on.
That “directly” is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.
Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won’t rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.
I think this is an issue of terminology and stuff, reference white is something the colourist often decides. When you assume that HDR graphics white == SDR white this actually causes more problems then it solves. I would say that it is a "good default", but not a safe value to assume. This is something the user may often need to override. I know personally even when just watching movies on MPV this is something I very often need to play with to get a good experience, and this is not even counting professionally done work.
That’s just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.
And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.
this actually isn't really that true. It is indeed the case that users wont know what transfer function content is using. but they absolutely do see a difference other then "HDR gets brighter then SDR" and that is "it's more smooth in the dark areas" because that is also equally true.
Users have a lot of different assumptions about HDR, but they all follow some sort of trend "it makes the content look more smooth at a greater range of luminance" and if I were to give a "technical definition that follows general user expectations" the definition would be something along the lines of "A transfer that provides perceptually smooth steps of luminance at a given bit depth up to at least 1000 nits in a given reference environment" which is bad for sure, but at the very least, it more closely aligns with general expectations of HDR given it's use in marketing.
(I really hate the terms HDR and SDR btw, I wish they would die in a fire for any technical discussion and really wish we could dissuade people from using the term)
Colour Online: sRGB... We Need To Talkwith FilmLight’s Daniele SiragusanoIn times where we base our visual decisions increasingly on remote grading and remot...
I don’t actually believe this to be the case, if it was people who use custom ICCs would get extremely wonky results that don’t typically happen
They wouldn't, because applying ICC profiles is opt-in for each application. Games and at least many video players don't apply ICC profiles, so they do not see negative side effects of it being handled wrong (unless they calibrate the VCGT to follow the piece-wise TF).
With Windows Advanced Color of course, that may change.
I think I am a bit confused on the laptop analogy then, could you elaborate on it?
What analogy?
How monitors typically handle this is beyond me I will admit, But I have seen some really bonkers ways of handling it so I couldn’t really comment on whether or not this holds true one way or another. Just so I am not misinterpeting you, are you saying that “if you feed 300nits of PQ, the monitor will not allow it to go above it’s 300nits”? IF so this is not the case on what happens on my TV unless I am in “creator/PC” mode. In other modes it will allow it to go brighter or dimmer.
Yes, that's exactly what happens. TVs do random nonsense to make the image look "better", and one of those image optimizations is to boost brightness. In this case it's far from always nonsense of course (on my TV it was though, it made the normal desktop waaay too bright).
unless I am in “creator/PC” mode
Almost certainly just trying to copy what monitors do.
With libjxl it doesn’t really default to the “SDR white == 203” reference from the “reference white == SDR white” common… choice? not sure how to word it… Anyways, libjxl defaults to “SDR white = 255” or something along those lines, I can’t quite remember. The reasoning for this was simple, that was what they were tuning butteraugli on.
Heh, when it came to merging the Wayland protocol and we needed implementations for all the features, I was searching for a video or image standard that did exactly that. The protocol has a feature where you can specify a non-default reference luminance to handle these cases.
It is indeed the case that users wont know what transfer function content is using. but they absolutely do see a difference other then “HDR gets brighter then SDR” and that is “it’s more smooth in the dark areas” because that is also equally true.
That is technically speaking true, but noone actually sees that. People do often get confused about bit depth vs. HDR, but that's more to do with marketing conflating the two than people actually noticing a lack of banding with HDR content. With the terrible bitrates videos often use nowadays, you can even get banding in HDR videos too :/
When you play an HDR and an SDR video on a desktop OS side by side, the only normally visible differences are that the HDR video sometimes gets a lot brighter than the SDR one, and that (with a color managed video player...) the colors may be more intense.
I should elaborate on why the "Peak white" stuff is wrong, they give this math here for mapping linear luminance. This can be really confusing, "what do we map the references to" well if PQ "graphics white" is 203, should we map sRGB to 203? clearly not, at least not always as implied by BT.2408.
the question as to what we map SDR content to in an HDR space is complex, and in many cases almost certainly not some number that we can do 1:1 mapping with, which is why specifications for inverse tonemapping exist. for instance BT.2446 defines multiple tone mapping algorithms to go from SDR->HDR->SDR or HDR->SDR->HDR or any step inbetween with minimal content loss and fidelity loss.
we cannot do a simple one size fits all function and expect everything to be hunky dory
Again, the reference luminance mapping is all about how applications should use the Wayland protocol.
How to map SDR to HDR can indeed be made much more complicated, from simple gamma adjustments to some full blown ITM meant for images or videos, like what BT.2446 suggests, but as far as applications are concerned, those are edge cases that they don't really need to be prepared for.
It's not like they have a different choice - unless the compositor supports custom reference luminance levels (which KWin does, but not all others do), and they support custom reference luminance themselves, then they need some logic to calculate peak luminance levels. If the compositor steps outside of those common expectations for reference luminance mapping, then the result may not be ideal, but there is no way for the application to do better.
I'm trying to get into GUI programming, but am hesitating on using a Python library to make my first barebones program. My goal is to code basic buttons and understand how operating systems implement the way they draw windows for applications.
I have coded mostly in scientific libraries or high-level languages that are fairly simple (Python, Matlab, Julia)... Also am familiar with basic concepts and syntax from C.
Looking for recommendations to start. I am happy to learn a new PL. Interested in writing code for legacy hardware and mobile. Bonus if the codes are general enough to be written for most displays one could interact with.
Not directly programming or coding GUI from scratch with a library or something: Have you considered using a game engine like Godot ( godotengine.org/ ) ?
You would have a toolbox for several essential GUI-elements. You could visually create the GUI and add functionality by script. Also, there are several possibilities to handle different screen sizes and touch.
You would have to learn the UI and concepts of Godot but the documentation is ok and there are plenty of tutorials available.
It has Python bindings, tho you wouldn't know it from the docs as it's brand new bindings.
However, it does WORK, and it works well.
Just look for python files in the examples and reference the slint docs (it uses its own UI lang for that stuff anyway).
I'm currently making an application in Python using Slint, and I really like it.
Godot
Other than that, I second Godot.
HOWEVER
Godot's GD Script is not Python but rather a Python-like language. (in fact, in some ways, I'm glad it's not; there are things I prefer in GD Script).
This is important as you may want to use specific Python libraries!
Iced
If you're not tied to Python, then I recommend the Rust library Iced as it is a very intuitive system. I really enjoy working with it.
Although, that said, Slint has great support for Rust, so maybe I'd recommend Slint anyway if you were gonna change language.
Warning Against Legacy
Avoid GTK, Qt, and TK at all costs imo. Also WinForms if ur on Windows.
They're old and crusty, and their APIs suck to use, even modern versions, and despite being aged, they're buggy still, not robust "tried-and-true" methods.
It's also hard to do dynamic stuff with them.
Just not well designed systems. Important, valuable to know bc they're used all over, but not well designed
Immediate
I would also try ImGUI.
It's meant more for gamedev UIs rather than Apps themselves (tho I've made a couple in it)
BUT
It's a totally different way of doing UI called "Immediate" bc you program the elements in a big loop, rather than event driven.
It's interesting and worth trying as a learning experience
React
And ofc, the Javascript/Electron world is huge and React is very popular with lots of tools. At least read up on it.
The modern version of Gtk and its APIs started with the switch to Cairo back in Gtk 2.8 circa 2005. While Gtk 3 and 4 have undoubtedly improved upon Gtk 2, they fundamentally still work in a similar paradigm and still have all the crust of a 20 year old library. Like most old software projects, it has some level of backwards compatibility and deprecates and adds slowly. Gtk is, like, the definition of legacy, and Qt is in a similar boat. They're OLD old.
I've been using Flutter, I like how it's cross-platform, mostly. I've generally built things for Android, but the desktop (Linux and Windows) and web versions usually compile fine with no tweaking. Couldn't speak to the iOS versions as I can't be arsed to jump through Apple's hoops. You can make a nice looking app with it for whichever platform you're targeting.
It's very well supported, lots of examples, well documented. Not as much out there as Python for examples and troubleshooting, but not bad.
Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.
Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?
Piefed goes in the opposite direction, giving more power to the server admins and taking a good page of social engineering / "nudge theory" principles to apply in its design. Much like Mastodon, it seems to be strongly opinionated about how people should behave and it kinda gives me an icky feeling about its culture.
It may be a bit opiniated, but it's nice to see a different approach from Lemmy devs who don't see the need for any additional moderation tool.
I brought up mod mail during the AMA, it has been considered too complex to implement. A moderation panel with an overview of the mod queue would be nice too, but not a priority.
I'm not saying Piefed is perfect, but at least they prioritize that aspect.
"moderation duties" and "regular participants" in a forum system have such different use cases, it makes no sense to try to make it work with the software itself.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it's not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question. Currently it seems it's got a bit under 1000 users across under 10 servers.
There are now sizeable communities run on Lemmy instances that are reinforced by network effects. There needs to be a significant reason for them to migrate. To that point, the collective project is building communities away from corporate power, not software. The software is a tool to facilitate that. Lemmy has worked well so far in this regard. If someone can show that Piefed can work better and not cost significantly more, it'll probably get adopted for new communities. If the difference is drastic, we may even see migrations from Lemmy.
We have data on what it costs to run a sizeable instance of Lemmy and it’s not a lot. How does Piefed compare? Anyone starting an instance who envisions it growing large has to contend with this question.
I don't think this is a major concern yet. The largest PieFed instance has 308 active users, 2nd place has 34. They've got room to grow.
But how is that not a concern if you're interested in attracting more users? You run an instance with 500 users. Some thread on Reddit explodes and you get 1000-10000 new users in a few days. If Piefed has poor scaling you might be unable to pay the bills for your now much larger instance. That's not gonna be great for you or the new users.
I think it's unlikely that they would attract such a large number of users with 1 post on r/RedditAlternatives or something. Lemmy gets spammed everywhere and we usually don't even gain 1000 users a day overall across all instances.
There's already been some comments about PieFed and they didn't result in huge surges.
Sure but does the rate of growth matter? The post asks about recommending Piefed instead of Lemmy. I presume the point is that the number of Piefed users would grow if we did that. So whether a thread produces 10, 1000, or 10000 users in a day, the number of users would grow over time. Then I think the question remains, if my Piefed instance costs $10/mo to run today, would it cost $100 with 10000 users or $1000, or more, or less?
The rate of growth does matter yea. If an instance gets worried, they can lock signups. Slow growth means the software has time to improve as they notice issues.
Lemmy had many issues scaling before, except Lemmy had huge surges with the Reddit API blackouts.
If people start recommending PieFed now, it's on their own terms instead of a massive wave. They can backoff if they get too many users.
Yeah, that makes sense for the defect class of performance problems. I'm more concerned with the inherent performance (compute) disadvantages of Python. Perhaps they wouldn't matter, hard to know without load testing.
I second this. Lemmy is written in Rust where as piefed is written in Python. When it comes to running a high-performance webserver, Lemmy has the advantage.
Yeah, this would be my concern as well if I had to run it. Sure Python apps can be fast and most time is spent in IO, not compute, and if you're running a profitable operation the exact cost of compute might not matter much. However if you're running a non-profit service and you want it to be as dirt cheap as possible so it can be free for most users, then the cost of compute very much does matter.
Its written in python, but I don't think the overhead is too much because the bottleneck is DB performance. It has support for lemmy's protocol, so the network effect really isn't an issue.
Why aren't we suggesting Mbin over Lemmy, actually? Because it seems like it has the same options. And Mbin even has an app (not just the PWA function)!
Oh, I'm aware that both Lemmy and Mastodon have good apps. I'm just pointing out that if the 'argument' is that alternatives don't have an app, MBin does have one.
If you want to debate Apple, start another thread. This post is about Mbin and Piefied, and for me, I use Voyager on iOS to surf Lemmy. I don’t want to switch to or recommend Mbin or Piefied if there’s not an app for it and the best I can do is a PWA.
Don’t try to hijack the thread to push your anti Apple agenda. You can dislike Apple all you want, just not in this thread.
What's missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user? Remember the majority of users don't post, comment or otherwise interact with the platform beyond voting.
What’s missing from Lemmy that would make it unattractive to the average user?
I don't think it's always easy to pinpoint UX issues and user friction. Sometimes these things just don't stick with mainstream users. I say it's worth a try to see which platform the average Reddit user will prefer.
But if you're gonna use from a phone, Lemmy's selection of mobile apps is unbeatable.
Fair point. It probably hard to see these things when you've been in the thick of Lemmy for as long as most of us here have. It's easy to dismiss not liking lemmy-ui because alternative frontends exist (written from Photon), but does that matter when the overwhelming majority of instances use it as their landing page.
Two questions for you, I'm genuinely curious, I hope they don't come up as agressive - why are you still using your Lemm.ee account instead of Piefed - why create this post here instead of !fediverse@piefed.social ?
It is, but there's only one way to make Piefed grow, it's to start getting Piefed communities more active.
Lemmy covers pretty much all the topics the current Threadiverse is interested in, so at some point posters have to accept to post to smaller communities.
I'm not saying everyone has to do it, but as OP states that Piefed is more polished, I was surprised
Does it really matter when you can access the same content from Piefed? It's one of fedi's great strengths that different experiences can be tailored on the same platform.
I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as tankies. This wouldn't be much of an issue if they didn't regularly abuse their admin/mod status to censor and silence people who dissent with their political beliefs and for example, post things critical of China, Russia, the USSR, socialism, ...
As an example, there was a thread today about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre. When I was reading it, there were mostly posts critical of China in the thread and some whataboutist/denialist replies critical of the USA and the west. In terms of votes, the posts critical of China were definitely getting the most support.
I posted a comment in this thread linking to "https://archive.ph/2020.07.12-074312/https://imgur.com/a/AIIbbPs" (WARNING: graphical content), which describes aspects of the atrocities that aren't widely known even in the West, and supporting evidence. My comment was promptly removed for violating the "Be nice and civil" rule. When I looked back at the thread, I noticed that all posts critical of China had been removed while the whataboutist and denialist comments were left in place.
This is what the modlog of the instance looks like:
Definitely a trend there wouldn't you say?
When I called them out on their one sided censorship, with a screenshot of the modlog above, I promptly received a community ban on all communities on lemmy.ml that I had ever participated in.
Proof:
So many of you will now probably think something like: "So what, it's the fediverse, you can use another instance."
The problem with this reasoning is that many of the popular communities are actually on lemmy.ml, and they're not so easy to replace. I mean, in terms of content and engagement lemmy is already a pretty small place as it is. So it's rather pointless sitting for example in /c/linux@some.random.other.instance.world where there's nobody to discuss anything with.
I'm not sure if there's a solution here, but I'd like to urge people to avoid lemmy.ml hosted communities in favor of communities on more reasonable instances.
Even so, .world will eventually enable parallel sending, and even in the meantime aussie.zone only boasts 375 MAUs. I empathize with their plight but it's what, 0.6% of the Lemmy userbase? I don't know that such a miniscule minority is worth bending over backwards for and creating further fragmentation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for choosing instances other than .world when setting up new comms. They're too big. But while we're still at a point where content amount is the primary concern and we're trying to achieve critical mass I also don't know if endless fragmentation is well advised.
Because the PWA font is too small and can't be enlarged.
Because there's no 'back to top' button so have to kill the app to refresh.
Because there's no app.
But sometimes I use it anyway because the combining of articles is so much better than seeing the same article three or four times in a row in Voyager.
Life After Microsoft Windows Cutting The Cord Series: A tech revolution is shaking up governments worldwide—Windows 10’s looming end of life, increasing Micr...
Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.
Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include: * Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available! * Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance. * Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience. * XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.
Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
Qt is still the only excellent cross-platform desktop GUI framework.
It's a pity that it's current custodian's commercial licenses:
are subscriptions
are painfully expensive for a solo developer or small group
have a reputation for triggering legal threats and badgering from The Qt Company if one ever wants to end their subscription or (separately) use the open-source license for a FOSS project
This situation makes me afraid to use their commercial offerings, which in turn means they won't get any money from me at all; I feel that I can safely use their libs only in open-source code. Their business model is their decision, of course, but I can't help wondering if their whale-hunting approach actually nets them more money than a more accessible, lower-cost, one-time (or one-major-version) license option would. In many other industries, high sales volume reaps more profits than high price.
A question about the different page option settings of accounts (friendica 2024.03). /settings/account/basic
Right now this page want's to merge from a standard personal profile page to kinda community profile page where only specific defined profiles can publish thru it's wall to the rest of the followers.
First thought was to stay as a single profile page, allow mutual friend relations to publish/write to this wall, and change all contacts that do not belong to the inner circle of profiles to followers only. Apparently this setting doesn't work, or doesn't work as expected. Security and privacy settings in: /settings
Is this a known issue or some kind of misinterpretation of this option?
Next possible option would be to choose to become a public community group page.
This option would imply a continuous attention to change every new contact to followers only, if in fact this would mean that the followers would not be able to publish to the group but receive publications. Also this setting would include the risk of being exposed to unexpected posts into the community of followers whenever the administration of the profile lags behind for some reason.
The option private group looks more promising in this regard and actually would be the same than being a personal profile page that checks new follow requests and than could change the setting to allow mutual friendship to post to the profiles wall or simply define a follower relationship. The [Experimental] notice, that actually exists like lot's of years already is a little bit confusing, or creates a certain reluctance to try this option. How experimental is this still as of now or could we perhaps ask the community to run a general test on all the options of the account settings in general together with a general feed back to sum this up and come to some definite setup, wording and explanations on the matter?
When I wake my PC from suspend, my monitor is always set down to 30% brightness for some reason.
These are the brightness settings of the monitor itself, which can only be accessed via the monitor settings using the buttons on the monitor. I do not mean the brightness settings of my desktop environment. These are still set to 100%, even though the monitor is darker.
The problem also arises in a second case. When I lower the brightness in the brightness control of my DE, my monitor brightness is also lowered in the monitor settings down to 30% again. I can then no longer increase the brightness in the DE settings, because 100% in the DE now equals 30% in the monitor. So if I set the brightness to 50% in the DE for example, this is 50% of the 30% set in the monitor. So actually only 15% in real terms
I hope I was able to explain the problem clearly. Please ask if you don't understand something. It's really annoying because I need to turn up my screen brightness with the Buttons on the Monitor every single time I wake up my PC.
Technical data:
Nobara Linux 41 (Based on Fedora)
KDE Plasma 6.3.3
Wayland
Desktop PC. So a external monitor. Not a laptop monitor.
I have a 2nd monitor on which this does not happen.
A more recent issue came about when Pixelfed’s creator, Daniel Supernault made the details of a vulnerability public before server operators had a chance to update, which would have left the fediverse vulnerable to bad actors, she says. (Supernault has already apologized publicly for his handling of the issue that had affected private accounts.)
In the case of the Pixelfed issue, for instance, the Hachyderm Mastodon server, which has over 9,500 members, decided it needed to defederate (or disconnect from) other Pixelfed servers that hadn’t been updated in order to protect their users.
It is weird to spend almost half the words in this, pretending that something in Pixelfed that wasn't a problem on Pixelfed's side was. This is the weirdest "vulnerability" in the world to pick if you want to pick one to hold up extensively as an example.
Regardless whether you want to pretend that not caring about Mastodon is a valid defense when implementing software using the ActivityPub protocol, that still doesn't change anything regarding how Dansup handled the disclosure of the effects it had.
This is nothing to do with ActivityPub. It's to do with Mastodon's custom implementation of "private" posts.
Making it extremely clear to everyone that random server software can expose Mastodon's "private" posts is absolutely the right way to handle disclosure here. Dan didn't even try to do that, he just fixed the bug, but if he had made a big post saying "hey this is not my fault Mastodon private posts are not private, here's full explanation about what's going on" I think that would have been completely fine. This is not a "vulnerability" in the traditional sense like a buffer overflow, it's just a design flaw in Mastodon which other softwares are by convention agreeing to cater to. I think the culture of security (and the level of clue in general) in the Fediverse has wandered into territory where "let's all pretend that these posts are secure and get mad at anyone who reveals that they are not" is widely accepted now, but that doesn't make it right.
It has everything to do with ActivityPub since if you follow that protocol strictly you will cause this behavior. It still doesn't change that Dansup was told that this caused Bad Things(tm) and yet he didn't follow normal procedure in how you handle it.
Vulnerabilities don't need to be buffer overflows.
It has everything to do with ActivityPub since if you follow that protocol strictly you will cause this behavior.
Absolutely not. Which part of the spec? I linked up there to quite a thorough explanation of what the spec does and doesn't dictate in this area. What part of my explanation did I get wrong? Are they violating 5.1, 5.2, 7.1, some other part? How?
/cybersec researcher
I do not believe you. "I'm sending things out which need to be handled carefully in a protocol-nonstandard way by the recipient server software (which could be literally anything), or else my user's private posts will be exposed. If someone talks about that situation and lets people know what's going on, that's irresponsible disclosure."
If you actually are a cybersec researcher, you are bad at your job.
Walkthrough of how the security of the Minut M2 IoT sensor was defeated. Contains both hardware attacks as well as cryptographic analysis.This is part 1 in t...
I’ve said nothing about any spec violation. That’s not relevant.
It has everything to do with ActivityPub since if you follow that protocol strictly you will cause this behavior.
That's what I was going by. I guess I could re-read this now and interpret "this behavior" as Pixelfed's side, instead of Mastodon's side as I initially read it, and decide that you are agreeing with me that Mastodon's behavior was (and is) out of spec? Do I have that right?
It still doesn’t change that Dansup was told that this caused Bad Things™ and yet he didn’t follow normal procedure in how you handle it.
It is normal procedure to fix a bug when you are notified about it.
The design flaw in Mastodon that managed to bite Pixelfed in this situation still exists. People were writing about it back in 2017 when this was all being first implemented. The idea that "normal procedure" needs to include keeping it a secret that Mastodon's "private" statuses can be exposed by any server software that doesn't handle them in the way that's expected, is 100% wrong.
I'll rephrase what I said earlier: Since you're a security researcher, and you apparently think Dan should have played into the idea of keeping it a secret that Mastodon's private statuses are not secret by obfuscating the information about how he was fixing Pixelfed to more effectively hide them, you are bad at your job. In this instance. The fault lies with how private statuses are implemented, and nothing about that needs to be kept secret as would a normal vulnerability. In fact, it is extremely harmful to let users believe that these privacy settings are anything other than vague recommendations, specifically because of the risk they will act accordingly and expose some of their private posts to the world. They should know exactly what's going on with it, and Dan accidentally failing to keep that a secret is in no way causing bad things.
I usually agree with you, but here @troed@fedia.io is right.
Full disclosure
With the full disclosure approach, the full details of the vulnerability are made public as soon as they are identified. This means that the full details (sometimes including exploit code) are available to attackers, often before a patch is available. The full disclosure approach is primarily used in response or organizations ignoring reported vulnerabilities, in order to put pressure on them to develop and publish a fix.
This makes the full disclosure approach very controversial, and it is seen as irresponsible by many people. Generally it should only be considered as a last resort, when all other methods have failed, or when exploit code is already publicly available.
Responsible or Coordinated Disclosure
Responsible disclosure attempts to find a reasonable middle ground between these two approaches. With responsible disclosure, the initial report is made privately, but with the full details being published once a patch has been made available (sometimes with a delay to allow more time for the patches to be installed).
Hm... maybe. The exact nature of the problem in Pixelfed means that anyone with a Pixelfed account on a server which is getting private statuses can choose to follow someone who's set to "approve followers" and then read all the private statuses. I do see how that's significantly worse than just the normal lay-of-the-land of the problem, which is a little more random, and laying that out as a little roadmap to read someone else's private statuses before there's been a nice responsible length of time for things to get fixed could be seen as worsening the problem.
The point that I'm making is that anyone who's posting private statuses to Mastodon and expecting them to stay private is making a bad mistake already. The structure of the protocol is such that they can't be assured of staying private regardless of what Pixelfed did or even if Pixelfed didn't exist. They're getting federated to servers whose behavior is not assured, in a way where a conformant ActivityPub implementation can expose them. People who are posting private statuses need to understand that.
That whole blog post where the person is talking about her partner writing private statuses, and then the gut-wrenching realization that they were being exposed on Pixelfed... but then the resolution being "Pixelfed fucked up I hate Dansup now" and then continuing to post the private statuses, is wrong. That person's partner needs to stop treating their private posts on Mastodon that way. The timer for responsible disclosure started circa 2017 or whenever Mastodon decided on how to implement their private statuses. It's been and gone.
Like I say, I get the harm-reduction aspect of saying it would have been better if Dansup was a little more discreet about this particularly bad attack vector until a few more days went by for everyone to upgrade. But it hardly matters. There are still server softwares our there that are going to be exposing people's private Mastodon posts. It's just how federation between untrusted servers works. Giving people the illusion that if Dan had just been more discreet then this harm would have been reduced is lulling them into a false sense of security, in my view.
Are you hoping to restart our disagreement through sheer passive-aggressiveness? Okay, sure.
In my view, this is a Mastodon design flaw (or a user-expectation issue or whatever you want to call it.) I already said that, and you're involved in the unproductive-arguer's pastime of pretending not to understand that that's my position, and just aggressively repeatedly reframing things according to your position and hoping I'll knuckle under to it through sheer force of repetition.
I'm not super invested in trying to track down each and every software that might manage to expose the "private" statuses in this way. I just know that as things come and go there are guaranteed to be some. If you have an mbin account and Mastodon account, though, we can try a little experiment. I don't know the outcome, I'm just curious after taking a quick look down the FediDB list and a quick grep through mbin's source code. You can be the one to responsibly disclose to mbin how their ActivityPub-conforming behavior is a problem, if indeed it turns out that it is, since you seem to be extremely committed to the idea that the model of "vulnerability" needs to be applied to this particular ActivityPub-conforming behavior. Since you're a security researcher, having that as a CVE you discovered can be an achievement for you. It's all yours, you can have it.
Because it is transparently obvious that it's going to happen.
If you're sending your users' private statuses to an ActivityPub server, and just hoping that it's going to choose to keep them private according to certain parameters even though that's not what the spec stays it needs to do, then you're fucking up. The fact that we know that particular instances of particular software are exposing them is a nice demonstration of the harm, a confirmation that you're fucking up when you're doing that, but it's not really needed. It is the absolutely predictable result of some basic principles of security which, as a security researcher, you should absolutely be aware of.
I've repeatedly explained this. You've repeatedly explained your position. We've both had our say. You seem addicted to the concept of "winning" the conversation and wanting to just go back and forth. In that case I would really encourage you to state your position again, and I can state mine again, and we can both have fun doing that for a while. Want to? It sounds like a productive use of both of our time. It's fun, too.
Edit: Actually, I didn't even realize you are on fedia.io when I was typing this. You can test for yourself whether mbin does this, too, by coordinating with @Irelephant@lemm.ee. Follow his user, then have him post one of those private statuses, then fetch his user profile via fedia.io from an incognito window and see whether the private statuses show up. I have no idea whether they will, but if I had to guess, I would say it's better than even odds.
It is to the person who discovers the vulnerability. That's fairly normal... how would giving it to someone else motivate the result they're trying to get?
You will go back to your "usual" linux setup when you realize that most packages you set up with LFS are now broken and you'll need to redo the whole process again.
t. arch linux minimal installation only master race
Seeing that DVD are slowly going end-of-live and that you can't buy a lot of my childhood favorites in german anymore and streams are compressed-to-death (and DRMed), i had a streak of preservia. Which is why i rip a bunch of discs from the library on Linux (yes, legally not ok, but morally just ease of access, i wouldn't sell them). Since it's only to watch them when nostalgia hits, i want them in a ready-to-watch format, chose AV1 webm for small size. My burner is LibreDrive-ok ootb, meaning makemkv goes automatically in that mode.
I have the discs for a limited time, so i used to use dvdbackup for DVD and later feed the folder to handbrake for conversion. Now i got a bunch of blu-ray:
ripping one takes even longer; whole 25 hours; i don't have the time for the whole LotR series with bonus disks.
makemkvcon backup needs only about 2 hours per disk, but the resulting folder is 80 GB big; i have only about 250 GB free space ** and the makemkv backup somehow has no audio streams, while handbrake does
While i write this, handbrake is loading the chapters (that alone needs more than 1 hour for blu-ray); i'm trying if a lossless FFV1 mkv conversion (for later re-conversion) takes less long.
Now:
Any better approach?
Any way to fix makemkv having no audio? (i could juggle with external disks) I think i have all libraries and the KEYDB.cfg.
Edit: nope, handbrake suddenly has unable to decrypt unit (AACS)
Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) Scripts. Contribute to automatic-ripping-machine/automatic-ripping-machine development by creating an account on GitHub.
i wonder if it'll save any time/space if you make iso images from your bluray's with something like dd and mount them when you want to play them, instead of ripping their contents.
Yeah, the makemkvcon backup command had missing audio, so i assumed, it was the case for the graphical interface too. But it works fine, about same speed and i just discovered, that you can open the resulting mkv on handbrake and choose audio channels and whatnot as if it was the disc itself. Only issue with duplicates (confirmed via video-compare , great tool with dynamic move-mouse split) but that's what the checkmarks are for. I'll mark it as solved.
I would think it moral to download the discs you own as rips. Get a vpn for a month and download away. This would be a lot less time and electrical energy consuming compared to ripping them yourself. Also somebody else has already dealt with drm bullshit.
Yeah, but where? Far as i know, videos in german are mostly in private torrent groups you don't get easily in. No need for VPN here, download is legal and torrent is grey area and nobody cares, as long as you don't make business with it.
I've had no problems compressing Blu Ray MKVs into MP4s with handbrake (using MX Linux). My drive is a branded, internal one (I want to say LG or Asus.) I am at work right now, by I can look at the model number when I get home if you want. Interestingly, I have actually used it on both German Blu Rays and North American ones.
Yeah, just now someone answered the comment on the shop mentioning libredrive compatibility, that the vendor changed the drive and you have to flash it now.
I’ve done it with ffmpeg before - I think the command’s on the Arch wiki. I preserved subtitles as well. I overall remember it being pretty reasonable since I didn’t set it up to re-encode, just pass through original video.
Hey everyone, thank you again for participating, and for your submissions!
I'm glad to announce that the voting form is completed, and you can now cast your votes and select your favourite songs. Everyone is welcome to vote, even if your instance or community did not participate! This is a great opportunity to discover new music, cultures, and bridge the lemmyverse together.
The form will be available until around the 8th of April, I will then collect the results and publish them shortly after. I hope you'll have a lot of fun listening to the 11 songs submitted for this edition. Don't hesitate if you have any question!
Hey everyone, thank you again for participating, and for your submissions!
I'm glad to announce that the voting form is completed, and you can now cast your votes and select your favourite songs. Everyone is welcome to vote, even if your instance or community did not participate! This is a great opportunity to discover new music, cultures, and bridge the lemmyverse together.
The form will be available until around the 8th of April, I will then collect the results and publish them shortly after. I hope you'll have a lot of fun listening to the 11 songs submitted for this edition. Don't hesitate if you have any question!
Il faut un compte ou quelque chose ? Quand je clique sur le lien, j'arrive sur une page de présentation de Lemmyvision qui se finit par un bouton start. Quand je clique sur le bouton start, un nouvel onglet s'ouvre qui me présente la solution de production de formulaire et me propose de me connecter ou me faire un compte. Je suis sur Firefox et Android. Je n'utilise que l'interface Web pour Lemmy.
Δηλαδή θέλεις να μου πεις ότι εσύ όταν είσαι στο Διαδίκτυο κάθεσαι και κάνεις αντιγραφή-επικόλληση κάθε πράγμα που βλέπεις σε υπηρεσίες μετάφρασης;
Μπορείς απλά εσύ που κάνεις το σχόλιο να κάνεις τη μετάφραση για τους άλλους
Το να γράφεις μόνο στη γλώσσα σου είναι ελιτιστικό, περιμένοντας είτε όλοι να ξέρουν τη γλώσσα σου, είτε ότι μόνο όποιος ξέρει τη γλώσσα σου είναι άξιος της πληροφορίας που γράφεις
Σε κάθε περίπτωση, κάνει την διαθεσιμότητα περιεχομένου στο Διαδίκτυο χειρότερη
This is a francophone instance, you should expect to see some french being spoken by coming here. If anyone shows up with a question in a language - other than English - that I can speak, I will automatically assume it's easier for them that way and respond in their language if possible ; that has also been my approach in advertising this event.
Beautiful, modern publishing with email newsletters and paid subscriptions built-in. Used by Platformer, 404Media, Lever News, Tangle, The Browser, and thousands more.
After playing around for a bit, this really looks like the best option. I will wait until federation support gets added to the self-hosted version though.
Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.
Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include: * Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available! * Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance. * Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience. * XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.
Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.
Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include: * Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available! * Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance. * Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience. * XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.
Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
There has been discussions with-in the development circles regarding a potential integration of Web3 functionalities into the mainline kernel. Exploring the feasibility of incorporating features like decentralised application (dApp) support and smart contract execution directly into the kernel.
Early proposals suggest leveraging the NPUs in new processor families for secure on chain data validation within the kernel space. This means better fraud protection by validating signatures while booting up using the zk-SNARK cryptographic proof.
The developers at Linux Fundaytion notes that this plan requires extensive re-architecture of the codebase. They say that after this, Linux would only run supported systems with dedicated NPU and will simply refuse to boot on other systems, making a significant breakthrough in system security.
The timeline for the proposed changes have already been laid out. With chip manufactures already including dedicated NPUs, developers now have more freedom than ever. Linux communities have always welcomed Web3 technologies like NFT, dApp games etc. and with the kernel integration, Linux will be making a huge leap into the future. One developer put it aptly, "Imagine running my own ETH node directly within Linux kernel."
I have an x220, yes it is old but I prefer the keyboard and the repairability. Anyway, it has 1 x msata SSD (2TB Orico) and 1 x 2.5 inch SSD (2TB Samsung).
What I want:
to take advantage of 2 drives.
no windows. I go full Linux now.
some forms of backup if system fails.
What I managed to do:
/, swap and all system directories on the msata
/home is dedicated to the entire 2.5 ssd.
fully encrypted. I.e the msata has a LUKS partition that mounts /, swap and others. The 2.5 inch also has a LUKS partiton for /home. My /home is on its own, so if system fails or I need to distro hop, I can keep all of my data.
System runs fine but is this a good idea in the long run?
Should I have it the other way? Root and swap and systems on faster 2.5inch SSD. Home in the smaller msata?
What about everything on the faster 2.5 drive, then use the slower msata for backups? Since I have 2TB, I'm thinking partition the msata into 2 so I can do: Timeshift backup on one, and Borg backup for my personal files on the other?
So I recently built a new computer to replace my 7 year old one but I have noticed a strange problem with it.
When I boot up the computer and use it as normal it sits around 8-10 GiB of ram in use plus about another 9 GiB committed.
But when I suspend the computer then un-suspend it later the in use ram starts creeping up even if I have less running than I did when I originally booted the computer.
Last time this happened it went from 10 GiB all the way up to about 43 GiB in the space of a few hours.
If I reboot then things go back to normal behavior.
Anyone have any ideas about what I could look for to fix it?
xfwm is XFCE's window manager, and it's eating almost 30% of the total system memory, so that's the prime suspect (I'm not exactly sure how much it interacts with other apps, so it's possible something else is forcing xfwm to use all that memory, but that is IMHO unlikely).
An ugly "fix" is to log out and log back in (yes, not much better than just rebooting), or you could try to somehow restart xfwm - running xfvm --replace in terminal might work.
Do you just assume that any cartoon character is underaged? There's literally no indication that that character is in any way underaged whatsoever, it appears to be a standard chibi-style depiction of a generic adult.
I think you may need to consult a therapist or other mental health professional if literally every depiction of a cartoon character in a Chibi art style causes you to see pedophilia
There must be a tool that allows you to build packages for multiple systems in multiple formats (deb, rpm, nix, flatpak, snap, etc.). Does that not exist? After 20 years of these systems existing, somebody must've tried...
Also, it's clear that once again, open source needs some kind of funding model, because it's a little crazy that a project like this can get so popular so fast, the dev flooded with praise, thanks, and issues but not money to maintain and develop it.
a tool that allows you to build packages for multiple systems in multiple formats (deb, rpm, nix, flatpak, snap, etc.).
Given flatpaks and snaps are toxic, the other ones - deb, rpm, pkg - can be packaged relatively easily. It's all a separate effort with files and meta-info that doesn't often intersect, but it's manageable. It lends itself incredibly well to the trivial 'automation' that gitlab, forgejo and other major git suites provide.
Source: did this for the entirety I built and maintained a software suite for linux and unix, for like 15 years. I built some code, I packaged it. Because anything less isn't really ISO27002.
TL;DR - the 'tool' is a simple script and your brain. the biggest hurdle is the unknown itself and, once you get to it, the work can be pretty straightforward.
Microblog specific * Fedi Directory * Fediverse Info - Note: also includes Pixelfed people. * Trunk * Guppe Groups - Workaround to post to groups across microblogging sites, useful to push posts to remote instances.
Searching and Following methods This will vary across software, and may change as it changes, so take note of when this was written (end of March 2025).
By default, ActivityPub sites don't know of other, remote sites. Any remote site stuff you're seeing is because somehow the site your on was made aware of the other's stuff. Typically this may be that a user learns of a remote site's stuff in some way and decides to follow from their home site by looking it up via their site's search then subscribing/following.
All of the above format-specific links I've provided above are means of finding some remote sites' stuff to follow on one's home site. Below are some additional tools and methods to further help when using some of these different sites.
Methods * On Mastodon: follow hashtags to surface other accounts you might want to follow. * Also make use of its keyword/hashtag filters to cut down on the sorts of posts you don't want to see by going to account preferences, filters. * On Misskey & forks: create custom feeds via the "antenna" feature by choosing keywords and hashtags to track while using the same to exclude/filter out posts with other keywords/hashtags. * Also make use of its mute/block settings to cut down on the sorts of posts you don't want to see by going to settings, under other settings, mutes and blocks. * Post with hashtags more to help others searching by or following them find your posts. Even if it's just someone else on your home instance, if they share (boost/repost) your post and they have remote followers, it may help increase your visibility across the network. :::
:::spoiler Forum/link aggregator Tools and Methods Tools * Lemmyverse Communities * Piefed Feeds - if you're not on Piefed, these may still be helpful for finding different communities by viewing a feed's collected communities. * Quiblr frontend for Lemmy - a unique frontend with a privacy-respecting recommendation engine.
Methods * Follow the aforementioned communities under Forum/link aggregator specific above, or ask in !lemmy411@lemmy.ca or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca about communities. * On Piefed/Mbin sites, use the keyword filtering feature to filter out posts you're uninterested in. * On Lemmy sites use clients (e.g. Interstellar - Mobile/Desktop, Thunder - Mobile, Voyager - Mobile/Web) that provide keyword filtering, as default UI lacks this useful feature. * Browse Local or All with sort set to New to see if any unfamiliar communities show up that you may want to follow. * Block communities/instances you're uninterested in to help improve potential communities of interest visibility as you browse. :::
If you're aware of other resources, tools, or methods that I've not mentioned here, please mention them in the comments! There's undoubtedly more to add that I've not come across.
Download Graze for Mastodon for Firefox. Graze is 1-click follow, favorite, boost, bookmark, reply for Mastodon, no matter what instance you call home.
I discovered GoboLinux not long ago and was disappointed to see it was no longer being maintained. It's exciting to see some folks are picking it back up again.
I think the main premise is that every version of every software has its own installation prefix. This allows you to mix&match different versions, perform atomic upgrades, etc. You can think of it as a proto-Nix. TBH I don't see much point in it now that Nix(OS) and Guix exist, or, if you don't like their purity, stal/IX.
Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems.
No, not quite. Flatpak is containers - it just stuffs every dependency that an application needs in a directory with no way to deduplicate or update independently. Gobo is a bit more nuanced, since dependencies are shared between applications when the versions match.
flatpak does indeed deduplicate. The stuff is updated to whatever is required as a dependency to whatever programs are installed. And versions are shared between applications when versions match as well..
This has been persistent through several GPU driver updates and I'm tired of trying to troubleshoot it. I don't know what the exact cause is. Any ideas?
Also, related note, how easy is it to migrate from one distro to another? I am thinking about trying something else - maybe base Fedora or Arch - to hopefully have better performance.
FediForum is a virtual "unconference" that meets twice a year to showcase new developments, hold community discussions across a variety of important subjects, and give members of the wider Fediverse a
That is usually how males and females of a species are differentiated in general: males have the small gamete and females have the large one. (As you said, some individuals may not produce gametes so it only applies in general).
Of course humans are a lot more complicated. We have a concept of gender which doesn't necessarily align with biological sex, and many people modify their sex characteristics to match their perceived gender, so applying generalizations blindly gets you nowhere.
Indeed, just as gender is a spectrum so is sex. I love when someone says "Its basic biology" because the best response is "and this is intermediate biology".
It's a clearly a binary. Yes, there are many exceptions and edge cases, but they are all based around a universal binary biological structure.
You don't have say three distinct sexes required for reproduction outside of sci-fi. It is a binary with some edge cases and variations in how exactly the two parts of the binary interact.
It's far closer to a binary distribution than a bi-modal distribution. You can be pedantic, but that's not a real arguement. I admitted there are edge cases.
This is not tied to pure outcomes and is derived from actual earth bio-chemistry.
There is no triple helix or quadruple helix as a foundational system of genetic bio-chemical reproduction.
When you flip a coin, there is a chance that it will land on the side, yet we still use a coin flip for a 50:50 probability scenario because it is close enough.
When you flip a coin, there is a chance that it will land on the side, yet we still use a coin flip for a 50:50 probability scenario because it is close enough.
Absolutely. For day to day life, "there are two outcomes" is safe way to describe coin flips. But given that a coin landing on its side can happen, it's not a binary system. It only becomes binary when we ignore the edge cases. Just like sex...
And that's before we get to the point that there isn't even a single definition of sex that accounts for all scenarios. People can change their legal sex, people can change their morphological sex, "genetic sex" isn't foolproof, as it doesn't always correlate with morphological sexual characteristics, or even gamete production.
Calling sex binary is either a generalisation, or something you want to be true. At no point is it reality of the situation though...
I strongly disagree. I am only happy for people to be the best version of themselves and to feel comfortable in their skin.
Changes in legal or morphological sex is not relevant. This is not what we are discussing.
I already mentioned that there are edge cases. Edge cases do not discredit foundational frameworks that define reality.
The bio-chemistry of terrestrial life is built upon a binary sex framework. This has been true for hundreds of millions of years. There is no such things as a triple helix or quadruple helix in terms of reproduction. Even trees and plants have a binary sex.
You claim that this is something I want to be true. I would argue the same (on a vice versa basis) for you and that you're framing the discussion using irrelevant examples (how is a morphological change in sex even relevant to what we are discussing).
Changes in legal or morphological sex is not relevant. This is not what we are discussing.
Of course they're relevant. Sex being immutable, easy to define and binary is at the core of the tactics that transphobes use to exclude and legislate against trans folk.
So the fact that it's not easy to define, has multiple definitions in different contexts, and has no single definition that works in all instances is very relevant.
You talked about "genetic bio-chemical reproduction" earlier. There are women who have literally given birth, who have XY chromosomes. Similarly, there are XX men with SRY genes. Using your "genetic sex is the truth" approach, they are both folks with a different genetic sex to their physical and legal sex. A transphobe would catch those people and throw them under the bus too whilst they target trans people.
The bio-chemistry of terrestrial life is built upon a binary sex framework
Yep. I'll agree with that. But the framework it is built on is not the end result. There is no meaning or intent behind the framework. There is nothing about it that is more "real".
The real part isn't the genetic plan that was used to create someone. The real part is the body they're actually walking around in.
To you, this is all an interesting argument. You're arguing about things in black and white, because none of it actually matters to you. So you can argue for how you think things should work.
The very same arguments you are using are being weaponised and turned against gender diverse folk and intersex folk. Your re-use of them, arguing about some sort of ideal that exists only in your head isn't harmless. The fact that sex is nuanced, that gender is nuanced, that they both have multiple, contradicting definitions, and neither have a single definition that is more true than the others is incredibly important, because the only reason to ignore that is either to hurt people, or because you're so far removed from the reality of what's happening, that you place a higher priority on things being neat and tidy than on the people that false belief hurts.
I don't understand why people don't keep such comments to their anonymous, unofficial accounts. You can hold such views in private and still treat people with respect, but saying these things officially changes everything. The co-organiser is in a space where she should know better. She then even doubled down
When asked whether she still held her more problematic views in a follow-up comment, Young responded ambiguously with “I fully stand by the statement you are commenting on.”
That's great. Since when and does everybody take psych 101?
And just to give a wider perspective (regardless of her origins), not every language makes the distinction and some up until recently did not. Look at the translations on (wiktionary). Many of them are transliterations of the English word. Which is not a surprise since the concept of gender is quite recent (1950-1960s) and was most likely very US-centric.
i want to test debian trixie (13) so i can report bugs and troubleshoot before the release later this year. i thought about simply installing trixie alongside my current bookwork installation, but that won't be my scenario when the time comes, since i've been updating my system instead of reinstalling it since debian jessie (8) and this time it won't be different. how can i clone my current system so i can simulate an update to trixie? do i simply create a new partition and copy my files over, then chroot to it and install grub?
src/* will skip hidden files. You want rsync -avAXUNH src/ dst which copies contents of src into dst. Notice the trailing slash in src/. Without the slash, src is copied into dst so you end up with a src directory in dst. The AXUNH enables preserving more things. You might also add --delete if you’re updating the copy.
VT Social is a fediverse instance for VTubers run by VTubers. Our goal is to provide a space for VTubers and VTuber-adjacent content creators, so we can connect with each other and have a place for fans to discover our content.
Basically title. I want to control a bare metal debian machine on a separate monitor (that always has this debian machine) from my windows gaming machine.
Edit: it's called Synergy and the apt package is called deskflow. I'll try it later and see if I can make it work.
I want to sit at my windows machine with it's three monitors and move my mouse to a fourth monitor of a Linux machine. x2vnc was great for controlling multiple *nix boxes and win2vnc did exactly what I want to do now but it hasn't been updated for 5 years.
There's also deskhop which is essentially a pure hardware solution similar to Synergy (helpful when you cannot install software on a machine). You can build your own or purchase parts/pre-built deskhops from elecrow.
Personally, I use x2go to graphically access my servers remotely. It redirects X protocol over ssh and it also short circuits many of the X round trips making it much more responsive than bare X-windows. It also supports sound, remote printing, and file transfers.
Yea that's their new project they just "started funding". Synergy used to be open source and it went closed source 10? 15? years ago.
Since then several forks have existed. Most notably github.com/debauchee/barrier which died a few years ago and was forked to github.com/input-leap/input-le… which while getting plenty of updates, and merges from the other project.. never released a version for years. I think at that point synergy felt sorry for them and so they changed their repo name from synergy to deskflow github.com/deskflow/deskflow and now they have their open source version lol
I have to assume usage got so stagnant when close sourcing it (it's so insanely niche software, is it not?) that they felt the need to bring it alive again.
It's a bit sad how everybody talk about the new NTsync. Most games, like, 90% of them, are not bound by sync. You would get exactly no performance benefit in them. What's better about it is the correctness of the implementation, more programs will work under WINE as a result of switching to NTsync. It's a good thing, but media clearly seems to miss the point and only focus on a few cases where it would give an impressive performance benefit.
And even if the game did greatly benefit from it, most people are already using esync/fsync in lutris/proton/etc. and so they also won't really see a difference from what they're used to.
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.
I think Nobara is the other most(?) popular choice by gamers.
I don't have much experience with gaming distros. I just think whatever it is, a computer shouldn't bee too locked down for a kid so they can also install other things, try other tools like an office suite, video editing or content creator stuff and maybe even have the experience of messing up.
I use that on my gaming rig. Most everything runs fine through Proton or Lutris (Stellaris, Mass Effect, Fallout New Vegas, the Witcher, Age of Mythology, lots of classics). Minecraft Java Edition runs fine natively, including mods. Old games run great through Dosbox.
Mint itself is super stable Linux for your grandma (my dad's been running it for five years and he doesn't know the difference between an OS and a word processor (he keeps calling LibreOffice "Linux"). It was also my son's first OS when he was about 8.
Majority of AAA games run invasive software like kernel-level anticheat, I'd personally recommend js buying him a PS5 or running them in VMs (Linux or windows).
I updated my system a couple of days ago, pop os 24.04 LTS and wifi stoped working. The problem is i dont have wire so wifi is only connection to the internet curently. And i managed to lose it.. So i tryed to fix the problem by switching to older kernel but it didnt fix the problem unfortinetly.
I gave up and reinstalled whole system thinking it will fix it. And since i do it i decided to try new cosmic alpha system. So i downloaded that and i like it despite its not finished and it has bugs and missing features. But that didnt fix my wifi problem! Its still not working.
I have two ssd-s, so on my main one 1TB i have linux and thats what im using, but on second one 500GB i have windows 10 for some games that doesnt work on linux. So i was using that to download latest pop os and my wifi card works so its obviusly not dead or anything.
I plan to get wire but i have some drilling to do for that and i would like to fix wifi card before that if possinble.
Almost forgot, my wifi card is Asus pcie card, with two antenas, its red and wery beautifull. Tryed to uploud picture of it but my acount is new so that wasnt possible. I dont know exact model number but this one looks exactly like mine so meabu its that one.
I was enough of it and i called one friend to drill the hole and make cable connection finaly so its all good now. But i want to have wifi just in case because you newer know. So the list of well suported wifi cards will be of great help. And i was curios what was the problem at first place anyway.. Thank you all for hel, you are the best. ❤
Has anybody attempted to daily drive linux on their smartphone? like sailfish os, postmarket, librem, etc. I've been getting more interested in them as my pixel 4a is starting to look real old
How was it it? Were you able to run banking apps? battery life? experience with using CJK keyboards?
As far as I can tell, RCS messages are not supported anywhere, in addition to NFC payments (no surprise there). 5G seems also iffy
Was in the market for a new phone and was thinking of getting the latest Pine phone, and upon research, I found that like others have stated, it is more of a piece of kit to tinker with and not a daily driver. The OS is still being baked and at the current rate it might take a few years before it is as responsive and as useful as Android is day in, and day out. There is just no contest. Which was a bit disappointing as I actually though the OS was far more developed.
I do hope that progress is made, but, if you need a phone that works well, then stick with Android for now. Hardware on latest Pine is better than on the first phone but still Mid, at best, and it is not cheap for the hardware you get.
I realized that I haven't spent time on Pixelfed in a while, and that it would be great to find more content to add to my feed! So I logged in to my instance (social.photo) and then... hit a wall.
With Lemmy and Mastadon, it is super easy to peek at what is going on at other instances and find communities to subscribe to, but it looks like Pixelfed does not make this easy. The biggest issue I have run into is that many of the largest servers do not seem to let you explore what is on them unless you first create an account, and the main Pixelfed Server Directory at https://pixelfed.org/servers does not indicate which servers can be explored or not, so you have to click a few times (since the link takes you to the registration page) to even find this out for a given server. It also does not help that navigating to an instance does not show you the content for that instance, like it does for Lemmy or Mastadon, but for a login page that may or may not have an "Explore" tab at the top.
Am I missing something here? I just logged into Tumblr for the first time in years and my immediate next thought was, "Gee, I should be using Pixelfed instead!" But if in practice it is simply not possible to find content I am interested in without a great deal of hassle then it is not a realistic replacement. In particular, it seems like the way Pixelfed is set up requires me to register on particular instances to get a better view of what content is available (not just locally, but pulled in from other instances). This seems contrary to me to one of the biggest advantages of the Fediverse, which is that you are able and encouraged to pick an instance that best suits you rather than the one where all of the content lives; in particular I could not imagine self-hosting a Pixelfed instance without being left out of most of the content available.
And just to be clear, I am willing to put up with some degree of hassle resulting from the inherently decentralized model of the Fediverse, since I switched completely over to Lemmy from Reddit about a year and a half ago after the API fiasco (and the only reason why I do not use Mastadon more is because I was never that into Twitter-style content to begin with). But having to go out of my way to get through artificially constructed walls to even find content to subscribe is a bit much.
However, again, maybe I am missing here. If someone is willing to point me to a resource that solves this problem problem and makes this entire rant sound completely ignorant then that would be great! 😀
But what if I want to be on a small instance or even self-host? Then I cannot see any potentially appealing hashtags because I do not start with a large library of locally downloaded content.
I only see a couple of the most recent posts, but the number 2K seems to indicate that there are a lot more that it just is not showing me.
By contrast, I felt like looking at pictures of galaxies right now, so I went over to astrodon.social/tags/galaxies, and behold--look at all of them! So easy!
In fact, maybe the lesson here is that I should just give up on Pixelfed and use Mastadon for discovering cool things to look at in my downtime.
Very very unfortunately, Pixelfed doesn't have a way to just start exploring feeds without knowing exactly who to look at. This has been a very longstanding problem with the platform that the engineer has pretty much outright refused to do. Pixelfed-Glitch is attempting to add in better discovery options, but for now it's a non-starter for me. I turned off my pixelfed server because of the lack of discovery.
Kind of surprised this is the take. Algorithms in general, just sorting by highest to lowest or whatever common problem that needs to be solved, aren't bad. "Algorithm" has become a dirty word mostly because of the stuff pushing short-form content over long-form content, outrage that generates engagement over something you would enjoy that doesn't enrage you enough to make you type fifty paragraphs and keep coming back to fight in the comments, etc. So I agree with the literal statement that algorithms aren't always bad.
But as for what you meant, I'm super surprised at all the people who want an algorithm to feed them content and aren't satisfied. I looked for the stuff I was interested in, subscribed, and am happy. When I run out of content I either log off and do something else or go seek out stuff I'm kind of interested in. In my most charitable possible assumption, people who want algorithms are probably a lot less suspectible to getting pulled in by outrage and scrolling all day, and just want to be able to discover cool stuff fast, and the algorithms somehow worked to show them the cool stuff. In my experience I had to strictly stick to my Home feed with just stuff I subscribed to on Reddit to not see outrage porn, could never poke my head into Popular or anything without seeing some outrage sub like r/noahgettheboat or /iamatotalpieceofshit. And then they started forcibly sorting my Home feed by Controversial… yep. Stopped regularly browsing there really fast.
I am just really wary of asking for algorithms back because I really don't want the Fediverse to become another place catered towards outrage porn for max engagement. I really want users to have options if this is implemented, so as not to force this algorithm on users like myself who like the "chronological order of stuff you purposely followed only" algorithm. And for that option to not be taken away from me in an effort to "drive growth!" and all that.
I don't want to refuse others a good thing just because it's not for me, but I also have been burned by social media algorithms that were once nice chronological, and later became catered towards outrage and showing you content you never signed up to see without having an option to switch back to chronological and opt out of having RandomInfluencerYouDontFollow in your feed. Looking at you, Instagram. I signed up with my elementary school classmates, liked chronological feed, liked having Explore just be friends of friends… I still only follow people I know in real life but now Explore is a bunch of controversial memes, people selling stuff, and influencers who want me to form a parasocial relationship with them. This is also what my feed turns to once I scroll past maybe 7 posts my friends made. Have not fully deleted but also haven't touched the app in months now.
I guess the real solution is giving people options and not taking them away because you decided to go public and need maximum eye-on-advertisement time. Hopefully Lemmy stays open source and different instances stay popular, so in case someone does try to take it public we can all flee to different servers and keep talking.
As my time with linux, I created a lot of scripts. Some of them have input parameters and sometimes I just forget this parameters.
So I wonder if there is some way to create autocomplete parameters, like i autocomplete a path by pressing the tab key?
For example a script. ./test.sh can be completed with parameter-one, eg. ./test.sh parameter-one or ./test.sh parameter-two. If i type now ./test.sh followed by tab it should add parameter-one if i press tab again it should change to parameter-two.
Its .YML formatting is really clunky. It feels like it takes up twice as much line space as .AHK (for example), which can do a lot of this kind of stuff in a single line. But I wanna go cross-platform and this is all I can find...
I like YAML, as long as you aren't using complicated syntax. Using the | operator will get you some flexible usage that's mostly easy enough to read. YAML definitely has its problems though. If you want, I can share some snippets of my config.
Sadly though, due to Espanso not having a working RPM build for Wayland (or a Flatpak, which they're working on), it's not quite as cross-platform as I want it to be. It won't work on any of the cool uBlue-derived distros that I've gravitated toward, so I'm hoping we get a nice, big update this year.
It took me a while to get around to this so I could sanitize some of the highly-personal stuff there (mostly just a bunch of URLs because I don't use browser bookmarks lol), but here's a condensed version of what I like to use Espanso for.
The second half is ...interesting. I wanted a way to autofill passwords from my password manager in any application, not just a browser. It's a very homebrewed solution, and it only works on Windows and Linux because macOS blocks tools like Espanso from viewing or modifying login input fields.
Did you put in a request for this?
For a Wayland Flatpak or RPM? I haven't looked in a long time, but I believe there's an open issue for a Wayland RPM.
Description I would like to improve support to the Red Hat distributions. Among the tasks: to have an RPM package to release in every new version of espanso. There has been some works, but to my kn...
The diversity of Linux distributions is one of its strengths, but it can also be challenging for app and game development. Where do we need more standards? For example, package management, graphics APIs, or other aspects of the ecosystem? Would such increased standards encourage broader adoption of the Linux ecosystem by developers?
That already happened though. Tens of thousands of games on Steam can be played by hitting the install and then the play button. Only a few "competitive multiplayer" holdouts with rootkits and an irrational hatred of Linux don't work.
Yep. Two solid years of steady gaming on various Linux distributions. No issues aside from no more pubg, no more valorant. Oh wait, that’s not an issue at all. Fuck their rootkits.
Two solid years of steady gaming on various Linux distributions.
And in some cases, even better experience than on Windows (f.e. older games compatibility or higher FPS alongside smoother gameplay)
Tbh, about a year ago i checked the price difference between various laptops with Windows preinstalled and without any OS. The difference wasn't actually a flat amount of money, it was like +10% (price of the laptop 500$ --- ~ +50$ for Windows | price of the other laptop 1000$ --- ~ 100$ for Windows).
So because of the actual state of gaming on Linux (and overall experience) i wouldn't pay that 10% and spend it on other things
Domain authentication and group policy analogs. Honestly, I think it's the major reason it isn't used as a workstation OS when it's inherently more suited for it than Windows in most office/gov environments. But if IT can't centrally managed it like you can with Windows, it's not going to gain traction.
Linux in server farms is a different beast to IT. They don't have to deal with users on that side, just admins.
I've never understood putting arbitrary limits on a worker's laptop. I had always been seeking for ways to hijack them. Once I ended up using a VM, without limit...
One of my coworkers (older guy) tends to click on things without thinking. He's been through multiple cyber security training courses, and has even been written up for opening multiple obvious phishing emails.
People like that are why company-owned laptops are locked down with group policy and other security measures.
Ubuntu Server supports Windows Active Directory. I haven't used it for anything but authentication (and authentication works flawlessly) and some basic directory/share permissions but theoretically it should support group policy too.
It'd be cool if there was a mainstream FOSS alternative though (there might be, I've done literally 0 research), but this works okay-ish in the meantime.
Small thing about filesystem dialogs. In file open/save dialogs some apps group directories at the top and others mix them in alphabetically with files. My preference is for them to be grouped, but being consistent either way would be nice.
Flatpak is very useful for a lot of things, but i really dont think it should be the default. It still has some weird issues. For example if you run a seperate home and root partition flatpak by default will install things into your root partition which quickly fills up. You have to go in and do a bunch of work to get it to use the home partition.
Or for example issues with themeing and cursors. Its a pretty common issue for flatpaks to not properly detect your cursor theme and just use the default until you mess around with perms and settings to fix it.
They also generally get updates slower. I guess maybe if its adopted more that would change but flatpak is already pretty widely used and thats still an issue. Especially for smaller programs not used by as many people.
Keeping it as just something that is good to use for the ones who like a GUI experience and want something simple and easy is great. But if we were to start doing like what ubuntu does with snaps where theyll just replace things you install with the snap version then im not in favor of that at all.
it's pretty bad. steam for example has both ~/.steam and ~/.local/share/Steam for some reason. I'm just happy I moved to an impermanent setup for my PC, so I don't need to worry something I temporarily install is going to clutter my home directory with garbage
As a former sysadmin, there is plenty of logic in saying that. I have debugged countless systems that were using systemd, yet somehow the openrc ones just chug along. In the server space systemd is a travesty.
In the desktop space however, i much prefer systemd. Dev environments as well. So yes thst is where "it's fine". More than fine, needed!
I just hate this black and white view of the world, I cant stand it. Everything has its place, on servers you want as small a software footprint as possible, on desktop you want compatibility.
I'm not sure whether this should be a "standard", but we need a Linux Distribution where the user never has to touch the command line. Such a distro would be beneficial and useful to new users, who don't want to learn about command line commands.
And also we need a good app store where users can download and install software in a reasonably safe way.
One that Linux should've had 30 years ago is a standard, fully-featured dynamic library system. Its shared libraries are more akin to static libraries, just linked at runtime by ld.so instead of ld. That means that executables are tied to particular versions of shared libraries, and all of them must be present for the executable to load, leading to the dependecy hell that package managers were developed, in part, to address. The dynamically-loaded libraries that exist are generally non-standard plug-in systems.
A proper dynamic library system (like in Darwin) would allow libraries to declare what API level they're backwards-compatible with, so new versions don't necessarily break old executables. (It would ensure ABI compatibility, of course.) It would also allow processes to start running even if libraries declared by the program as optional weren't present, allowing programs to drop certain features gracefully, so we wouldn't need different executable versions of the same programs with different library support compiled in. If it were standard, compilers could more easily provide integrated language support for the system, too.
Dependency hell was one of the main obstacles to packaging Linux applications for years, until Flatpak, Snap, etc. came along to brute-force away the issue by just piling everything the application needs into a giant blob.
I find the Darwin approach to dynamic linking too restrictive. Sometimes there needs to be a new release which is not backwards compatible or you end up with Windows weirdness. It is also too restrictive on volunteer developers giving their time to open source.
At the same time, containerization where we throw every library - and the kitchen sink - at an executable to get it to run does not seem like progress to me. It's like the meme where the dude is standing on a huge horizontal pile of ladders to look over a small wall.
At the moment you can choose to use a distro which follows a particular approach to this problem; one which enthuses its developers, giving some guarantee of long term support. This free market of distros that we have at the moment is ideal in my opinion.
Each monitor should have its own framebuffer device rather than only one app controlling all monitors at any time and needing each app to implement its own multi-monitor support. I know fbdev is an inefficient, un-accelerated wrapper of the DRI, but it's so easy to use!
Want to draw something on a particular monitor? Write to its framebuffer file. Want to run multiple apps on multiple screens without needing your DE to launch everything? Give each app write access to a single fbdev. Want multi-seat support without needing multiple GPUs? Same thing.
Right now, each GPU only gets 1 fbdev and it has the resolution of the smallest monitor plugged into that GPU. Its contents are then mirrored to every monitor, even though they all have their own framebuffers on a hardware level.
Ok this is now a stupid conversation. Really? Humanity?
Look, you can either follow a flowchart of a dozen different things to click on to get information about your thunderbolt device or type boltctl -list
Do you want me to create screen shots of every step of the way to use a gui or just type 12 characters? That is why it is useful. It is easy to explain, easy to ask someone to do it. Then they can copy and paste a response, instead of yet another screenshot.
Next thing you know you will be telling me it is against humanity to "right click". Or maybe we all should just get a Mac Book Wheel
Look, I am only advocating that it is a very useful tool. There is nothing "bad" about it, or even hard. What is the negative?
But I also said, I have been using a Fedora laptop for over a year and guess what? I never needed the command line. Not once.
All I am trying to say it that it is a tool in the toolbox. Telling people Linux needs it is not true, telling people it's bad is not true.
Quit trying to make it a negative. I would encourage anyone to explore how to use this tool. And when trying to communicate ideas on the internet it is a very useful one.
There is a separate kernel which is being written entirely in rust from scratch that might interest you. I'm not sure if this is the main one github.com/asterinas/asterinas but it is the first one that came up when I searched.
By the tone of your post you might just want to watch the world burn in which case I'd raise an issue in that repo saying "Rewrite in C++ for compatibility with wider variety of CPU archs" ;)
I'm of the opinion that a full rewrite in rust will eventually happen, but they need to be cautious and not risk alienating developers ala windows mobile so right now it's still done in pieces. I'm also aware that many of the devs who sharpened their teeth on the kernel C code like it as it is, resist all change, and this causes lots of arguments.
Honestly I had no idea what ctrl+d even did, I just knew it was a convenient way for me to close all the REPL programs I use. The fact that it is similar to pressing enter really surprised me, so I wanted to share this knowledge with you :)
Yes. So is Ctrl+J actually. Ctrl+J corresponds to line feed (LF) and Ctrl+M corresponds to carriage return (CR) ASCII characters. They are typically treated the same way.
Yeah, it’s a bit philosophical. * In graphical applications, Ctrl+M, Ctrl+J and Return/Enter are all different things. * In a terminal in raw mode, Ctrl+M and Return/Enter are the same thing but Ctrl+J is something different. You can for example run bind -x '"\C-j":"echo a"' in bash and Ctrl+J will do something different. * In a terminal in canonical mode, they are all the same thing. There probably are some stty options which can change that though.
I don't get the reference. This is the first time I've read that claim. But I'd certainly hope people know there is a difference between End Of Line and End Of File... I mean they're alike, they both end something. But it's not the same thing. The article explains the details how it's handled.
Yeah, my bad. I should have linked to the previous post: discuss.tchncs.de/post/3263718… (not entirely sure what’s the etiquette for linking to posts on Lemmy is).
Honestly I had no idea what ctrl+d even did, I just knew it was a convenient way for me to close all the REPL programs I use. The fact that it is similar to pressing enter really surprised me, so I wanted to share this knowledge with you :)
Right, I must have scrolled past it. I think linking posts is fine. I mean they're public and this is social media... At least I do it somewhat regularly and I've never had anyone complain.
I meant what’s the link to use since the same Lemmy post can be viewed through different instances and on each it has a different URL. It’s a bit user-hostile that the link gets you out of your instance (unless you’re on the same instance as author of the post).
That's right. I don't think there is a good way to do it. I just take whatever link is provided by the small Fediverse icon. But I don't think it matters that much for your audience, they're spread over several instances and it'll be an external link for some of them, no matter what you do. I'm not sure whether we have the ambition to solve this. I don't see anything the user could do. Either this gets handled in some way by the software, or it is how it is.
Control-D gives a hex value of 0x04, where as ENTER or CR gives a hex value of 0x0d, they are not the same. Control D returns the carriage on old tty machines, on many modern linux platforms it is treated as CRLF, that is carriage return and a linefeed. Control-D indicates end of file or end of transmission.
Understanding the AppArmor user namespace restriction feature Ubuntu 23.10 and 24.04 LTS introduced new AppArmor-based features to reduce the attack surface presented by unprivileged user namespaces in the Linux kernel.
I despise the way Canonical pretends discourse forum posts by their team members* are documentation.
I've noticed they have been a bit better lately, and have migrated much of the posts to their documentation, but it seems they are doing it again.
As this is developed, we will update this post to link to the new documentation and feature release notes.
Pro tip: You could have just made the documentation directly, with the content of this post. Or maybe a blog post. But please stop with the forum posts. They are very confusing for people not used to these... unique locations.
*Not that people are easily able to find this out when they don't give any indication that the forum post is something other than just another post by a rando. Actually, I'm just guessing here, based on the quoted reply, for all I know this could be a post by someone unrelated to Canonical. The account is 3 months, and the post itself is identical to a regular forum post from a regular forum member...
In our previous Foundations update @mclemenceau shared an update on some of the experiments we conducted during the Plucky Puffin cycle, in particular about our decision to revert the change to the -O3 optimization level by default on amd64.
We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the first experimental version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This is a pre alpha release with an official version number of 2.90.0. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.
I am pleased to announce a new version of my CLI text processing with GNU awk ebook. This book will dive deep into field processing, show examples for filtering features, multiple file processing, how to construct solutions that depend on multiple records, how to compare records and fields between two or more files, how to identify duplicates while maintaining input order and so on. Regular expressions will also be discussed in detail.
Book links
To celebrate the new release, you can download the PDF/EPUB versions for free till 06-April-2025.
I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on.
Could someone perhaps explain the major use cases or give a real life example of a time you've needed to use awk? I've been using Linux casually for quite a long time now, and although I learned the basics of the tool, I can't recall having ever felt I had a need for it. If I want to glue a bunch of cli stuff together and need to do some text processing, it generally seems like it'd be easier to just use a simple python script.
Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?
Well, if you are comfortable with Python scripts, there's not much reason to switch to awk. Unless perhaps you are equating awk to Python as scripting languages instead of CLI usage (like grep, sed, cut, etc) as my ebook focuses on. For example, if you have space separated columns of data, awk '{print $2}' will give you just the second column (no need to write a script when a simple one-liner will do). This of course also allows you to integrate with shell features (like globs).
As a practical example, I use awk to filter and process particular entries from financial data (which is in csv format). Just a case of easily arriving at a solution in a single line of code (which I then save it for future use).
Also AWK is made to be fast, right? I suppose doing something in CPython in a non efficient way might not be noticeable with a bit of text, but would show up with a large enough data stream.
I manage some servers and awk can be useful to filter data. If you use commands like grep, and use the pipe operator (the " | " command), awk can be very handy.
Sure, a Python script can do that as well, but doing a one-liner in Bash is waaay faster to program.
Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied. I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.
Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows : - is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong. My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it's not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it's a good idea to do so. I also found rsync. Didn't explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ? - for vscode it's easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can't develop and test them on linux - at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it's ok for basic usage but it's far behind if you're using it professionally. Please don't turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)
For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it's a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?
Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts. I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.
Timeshift is great for getting your system back after a major fuckup. But i dont think it works as a backup solution that can be transplanted to other systems, but i never tried.
I use Kup to backup my important stuff. It comes with a kcm that integrates into KDEs settings menu and can do automated timed backups. Its a wrapper for bup. It also does Incremental backups.
Sounds like you've got a good handle on most of it. FWIW, here's how I deal with some of the same issues:
For Windows apps I've found a virtual machine is the easiest solution. It's set it up to share folders between Linux and the Windows VM so moving things between OS's is easy. I've tried other methods like Wine, and for the Windows apps I need the VM works best by far.
Did you mean Timeshift? (Time Machine is Apple software.) Timeshift works great for incremental backups and is easy to use so you should get it working, but in my case I also do full system backups every few weeks because setting up my systems from scratch is a PITA and really time consuming, especially for my server.
For those full backups I've set up a bootable persistent live USB SSD with Ubuntu. The persistent SSD is fully configured with all software, including VNC, SSH and Clonezilla. Creating a backup requires plugging in the SSD, rebooting and running Clonezilla either locally or remotely. Clonezilla is also also preconfigured so it requires only a few steps to start the backup. Full system backups take about 20-30 minutes to complete but my SSDs aren't that big.
Enjoy your move to Linux. It's well worth the effort.
I started with a Clonezilla USB a few years ago, but Ubuntu is more flexible and can be used for everything with both VNC and SSH. The GUI is easier for some tasks, and Nautilus, Disk Usage Analyzer, Gparted, and other utilities are all available on the same SSD used for backups.
I do use rsync when backing up remote computers, locally I use dump/restore. I prefer it because of the ability to get a directory listing from the backup, pick and choose files or restore the entire file system as necessary.
If you want to test windows programs on linux, you're probably going to want to do that in a virtual machine, or even a spare computer just for testing on windows. Depending on how much you need to use excel, a virtual machine could be a good option for that as well, but if using Microsoft Excel™ is a big part of your job, maybe it makes more sense to just stay on Windows for work at least
I haven't found anything that is quite like Macrium. Mostly, because something that works the same way is a bad idea on linux. Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.
Macrium creates restorable images of your entire boot partition or disk, as-is, which can then be restored onto the same, or an entirely different, disk.
This isn't really something you can do in linux, with a system that is live. Hence, partition images should be done offline, when the given partition isn't booted.
That said, everything that matters can be backed up simply by copying the relevant files. For this, I use Kopia.
As for making sure you always have a bootable system, for this I use Timeshift on btrfs.
For MS office, you might try winapps. Sounds like what you're hoping for.
Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. Hard fork of https://github.com/Fmst...
Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.
can't it, though?
macrium reflect's normal operation is to run when the ststem is running normally. it creates a volume shadowcopy of your filesystem, and backs that up. a BTRFS/ZFS snapshot is basically what a volume shadowcopy is on windows, but with a less fancy name. if you make a snapshot, you can back that up, either with zfs send, btrfs send, rsync, borg backup, whatever. the difference is that on linux it's not possible to notify programs that a snapshot will happen please sanitize your databases, while windows does that too, so if you restore on linux that's like if your computer crashed because power went off
sure, it can't be done with other filesystems, but OP said they have BTRFS. I think the boot partition can be safely imaged too: remount as read only and make a normal image.
Regarding Timeshift on btrfs, is the idea that Timeshift makes it easier to backup to a different disk versus using Snapper?
I'm also on btrfs and miss the wonders of Macrium Reflect. For now, in addition to Snapper, I've been using Clonezilla to make a disk image on occassion. I'm in the process of figuring out something like Vorta to replace that process.
I don't think there's any effective difference between timeshift and snapper. They're both essentially just GUIs for features supported by the underlying btrfs filesystem.
I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)
How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?
Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.
I think it's easier the other way round, find all symlinks and grep the directory you want to move from results.
Something like 'find /home/user -type -l -exec ls -l {} \; | grep yourdirectory' and work from there. I don't think there's an easy way to list which symlinks point to any actual file.
It's not available offline for Linux though. I have tried running some windows executable from archive.org under wine, this didn't work. I also tried some random alternative (Varnam), but it was way too complex of a setup for me. (It kept telling me to compile libraries, and none of it worked in the end)
I want something that can take in english character input and turn it into proper devnagari typeface. If I type in "namaste", it has to come out as नमस्ते. And It has to be Offline.
I haven't found anything that fits to all these categories
Turns out Google Input is my best bet. Is there a way I can get it working?
What is the typing experience that you want, and for which language(s). It's not clear to me, sorry.
It is possible to map keyboard input in various ways. For more complex use-cases, many programs support character substitution as you type (eg. gx could become ĝ automatically).
I've booted Linux Mint Debian Edition and Arch on to a couple old machines including my old laptops. The performance is still rather brutal because these machines are so old and their battery lives are rough. They are also bulky and uncomfortable to carry around.
So, I've been thinking about getting a more modern laptop and putting Linux on it but I've been out of the laptop market for so long now I have no idea what's good and what's not anymore. Any recommendations?
I think I've heard decent things about Chromebooks but how's the hardware of those? Are they relatively locked down and don't play nice with Linux? I'm just looking for a machine for daily use (browser, light coding, remote connecting to my desktop for heavier stuff)
Thanks in advance
EDIT: Thank you to everyone for responding, I did not expect so much discussion! I've certainly changed my mind on Chromebooks and will look into the options recommended below in the coming months. Thanks!
Not often mentioned, but Surface Laptops run Linux thanks to Linux Surface on Github. I've been running Mint on a Surface Laptop 4 13.5" for years with zero problems. Used and refurbished models are much cheaper than the other options mentioned here.
Positives - Excellent display and keyboard, nice form factor, very light and thin, comfortable fabric cover on keyboard bezel.
Negatives - Smaller SSD (256g), limited ports, larger display bezel, reportedly somewhat difficult to disassemble, initial Linux installation a bit of a pain.
13.5" models with I7, 16g and 256g ssd are going for around $300 on ebay.
The older, cheaper devices are obviously, well, older and thus the battery degraded a bit. Linux isn't exactly optimized for these things either. I would expect less than great battery life.
Some Bluetooth/wifi adapters are a real[tek] pain in the ass. The adapter in my HP laptop is constantly trouble and well known for it, but the Intel adapter in my Surface works without any issues at all. At some point I'll replace the Realtek in the HP with an Intel.
I agree it was somewhat cumbersome to set up Linux initially, but the excellent guide by the Linux Surface folks on Github made it just a matter of following the directions. For me the biggest annoyance was having to use a USB keyboard and mouse until the Surface kernel was loaded. The good thing is once the kernel was loaded everything just works and has for years.
Loving my T480 I got recently. Performance is meh but upgraded the memory to 32g and works good enough. Plus it was cheap on craigslist so I don't have to worry about it too much.
I've got a Dell 1500 series laptop that I've been running Ubuntu on for several years. It is thicker than many modern computers but not to thick as to be uncomfortable to carry. The touch screen even works with Ubuntu Mate. It is slow to boot owing to a very slow hard drive but ok once booted, however the battery is sick so I'm getting ready to perform surgery and replace the hard drive with an SSD and replace the battery.
Highly recommend getting one with an AMD processor, as AMD drivers are built into the Linux kernel updates. Driver updates will just work without you having to think about them.
Choose from AMD and Intel system options, select your preferred memory and storage, operating system, and more customizations. Available in DIY and pre-built configurations.
Gonna have to anti-recommend tuxedo unfortunately. Never had a "Linux" laptop before and never had any issues, but two of the newest Infinitybooks have a number of issues with fan control, clock sometimes stuck at 800MHz, weird-ass Ethernet NIC with no upstreamed drivers and so on. It's like a trip to 15 years ago in terms of weird little issues popping up every now and the .
The tuxedo kernel modules are a mess and not currently upstreamable, their interfaces are inconsistent across lineups/generations which they solve by building a unified Electron monstrosity "control center" on top.
The idea is nice but any mainstream manufacturer works pretty well these days, and the Schenker laptops with tuxedo software not up to par :/
I'm on NixOS right now, but another person on Arch is reporting similar things. Don't get the point of their custom distro instead of just making their stuff portable and easier to set up honestly.
I 100% agree. Whenever these companies start with their own projects I immediately get suspicious that their goal is to enshittify down the line with vendor lock-in.
The only reasons why I'm seriously considering a Tuxedo are 1. European brand and 2. Double SSD.
Not a lot of laptops seem to be offering double SSD while being Linux compatible, so my hands are kinda tied.
My primary needs were a big HiDPI screen, lots of memory, good CPU and it meets all of those. The only other devices meeting those are the high end ThinkPads that are no doubt nicer, but also double the price sooo it's all good.
But someone who buys primarily for great Linux support might be disappointed.
I also have to say I haven't spent much time investigating the issues I faced for time reasons, maybe some of them can be fixed easily.
I've been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 1st gen AMD on Debian 12. You do have to run a newer kernel to get it working. I ran into a bit of Wi-Fi trouble because I accidentally got a Realtek model, but I've long since fixed the issue entirely - I've posted the solution elsewhere here.
On another note, maybe we should just have a yearly hardware recommendations post pinned on this forum - it feels like we get a question like this every week or so and they sort of clutter the forum, no offense intended to OP.
DNS, the Domain Name System, is the internet’s phonebook. You type google.com, DNS looks it up and tells you the actual numerical IP address, like 172.217.160.142. Simple, right? Enter DNSSEC (DNS…
Fun background info: Trusted Representatives don't actually carry their shard of the key (to prevent exactly this scenario), they have (iirc) a keycard which allows them to access the secure storage medium where their different pieces are stored.
These, after do many decades, are still stupid funny. I can't help but picture an ugly 13 year old male desperate for companionship but not receiving any.
I'm moderately experienced with linux. Been using it as my daily driver since 2018. Mostly using Fedora but also have a Debian server. I'm pretty comfortable with systemd but don't love the bloat.
Anyway, I've decided that I'd like to try Arch. So I'm looking for tutorials to help me learn or get familiar with Arch instead of just diving in head first like a madlad.
So what Arch tutorials do you like and are there any that you'd recommend that I watch?
Edit: lmao you guys are brutal. yeah i know about the arch wiki, rtfm and all that. I know i'll be spending a lot of time with the wiki. I just wanted to get a rough intro first. Well, I guess I'm off to read the fkin wiki now.
Either you are heavily misinformed about how difficult arch is, or you lack any confidence in your 'Linux skill'.
Choose the system you want to achieve, follow the wiki and choose the software you want to use using it and you are good to go, it really is not that hard. You can always use archinstall.
As others said, the Arch wiki is so well made that it should be the only source you need. Videos will not bring you anything given your background. The main difference with other distros will be the package manager.
A video about the install process will just be someone reading the wiki to you, and a video to "explain" pacman to you will be overkill ;)
I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it's Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)...etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.
Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the "Flagship Manjaro version". I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.
After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.
Well, it's gotta be a tiling system. And a good one. At this point I can't function in a non-tiling environment. Specifically a manual tiler with an auto-tile a la i3 w/ i3-alternating-layout or a dynamic tiler that still let's you break stuff (doesn't really exist).
It's just a better way to use a computer, and I can't go back. It's so much nicer. I would stop using a computer before I go back to dragging windows around.
And that rules out most DEs. It rules out Mac OS and Windows, as well, but at least on Windows I can almost get by with Fancy WM. It's "okay."
And speaking of just getting by, that's Polonium with KDE. KDE is pretty good as an "environment," but it doesn't have a tiler that meets my needs, or at least I thought it didn't until recently. Then I discovered Polonium. It works pretty well. Used it for several months (and still do on one machine). It's very bare bones tho, and is hard to configure the handful of floating windows I do want like popups. So KDE is just scraping by.
GNOME on the other hand has the excellent Pop Shell 2. But well, GNOME is GNOME. It's buggy when you try to use it a different way than intended. God forbid I want Qt, Gtk2, Gtk3, Gtk4, and libadwaita apps to all look nice on my system! It's clunky, but the tiling is excellent at least.
Now you mention XFCE. So what about that? You could use i3 as the WM for Xfce. I used i3 for years and years and years as my WM and know how to build a DE around it. Why not use Xfce + i3?
Well, the thing is X11 is as good as dead, and while XFCE now supports Wayland, you can't use a tiling system with the Wayland version of XFCE.
So what does that leave me?
Nothing. At least for a full on DE, which is what you asked.
There is not a single (pre-made) Desktop Environment that suits my needs. Not a one. Either it doesn't support good tiling, is too rigid, or hasn't switched to Wayland.
My only options are:
Roll my own DE built around Hyprland/Sway, and since I'm on nvidia, those aren't fantastic options (albeit Hyprland works a lot better on Nvidia these days), and that's what I'm using.
Deal with the slight annoyance of the under-implemented Polonium in KDE
Right now I'm on Hyprland. May go back to KDE bc multi monitor is being weird on Hyprland rn.
My one hope is that COSMIC polishes itself up and gets to its first real release.
For those of us that expect room to breathe and make our machine work for us rather than the other way around, we feel like Gnome takes a lot of liberties away for the sake of "simplicity." There is so much missing from Gnome that is present in most other DEs and even custom WM setups.
The primary contributors who work under The Gnome Foundation also come off as controlling and arrogant in a lot of cases, and refuse to take community feedback to heart, whereas KDE has literal summits to get user feedback on major core features we want to see which then later get added to their backlogs and sprints as Epics. Gnome acts a lot like Apple in the sense that they're very much "we know what's best for you better than you do."
Now, the singular area I can give Gnome true props in is their accessibility functionality, but that's primarily it. KDE's accessibility is fairly behind by about a decade in comparison.
I miss old Gnome. I wish they'd stuck with the old Gnome 2 design philosophy but breathed new modern design principals into it, instead of trying to go the Ubuntu Unity route. Maybe something like Cinnamon but even more flexible and feature-rich.
Honestly, that defaulting to the Search field in the Save dialog when I'm trying to save something just gets me wild. It beggars the imagination why the developers think that's a reasonable thing to do and it colors my whole perception of the DE.
I haven't lasted long enough after the Search piss-off to notice the tomfoolery of that. Well, you probably shouldn't be creating new folders from there, don't you understand how the workflow-as-handed-down-by-Jehosaphat is supposed to be used?
I've used so many distros and DEs I don't even know where to begin, but Cinnamon got me hooked for the long run. It's legitimately the most polished and "ready to run" DE I've ever used, yet still allowing for far more customization than Windows ever offered.
The surprising thing is that KDE would run on there just fine too. If you don't add all the PIM stuff, it's almost a wash in memory usage and just as snappy.
For what it's worth, even if you're sticking to a lts release like 24.04, a 6.14 kernel is a very worthwhile thing to do. I found substantial reduction in load average and CPU time wasted in wait state on my busier servers.
I have been using KDE for a while, while I like many features I am looking for suggestions to the default email client:
Kmail - completely unusable for me and the only one which could maybe be integrated with kontacts, it could not receive mails from IMAP or pop or would receive only sometimes
Geary - good but too minimal, I need at least some kind of contact list and mailing lists feature, maybe this integrates with gnome contacts? I couldn't find anything in settings
At first i thought, wow, cool they're still developing that? Doing a release or two a year, i see.
I used to use it long ago, and was pretty happy with it.
::: spoiler But looking closer now, what is going on with security there?! Sorry to be the bearer of probably bad news, but... 😬 The only three CVEs in their changelog are from 2007, 2010, and 2014, and none are specific to claws.
Does that mean they haven't had any exploitable bugs? That seems extremely unlikely for a program written in C with the complexity that being an email client requires.
All of the recent changelog entries which sound like possibly-security-relevant bugs have seven-digit numbers prefixed with "CID", whereas the other bugs have four-digit bug numbers corresponding to entries in their bugzilla.
After a few minutes of searching, I have failed to figure out what "CID" means, or indeed to find any reference to these numbers outside of claws commit messages and release announcements. In any case, from the types of bugs which have these numbers instead of bugzilla entries, it seems to be the designation they are using for security bugs.
The effect of failing to register CVEs and issue security advisories is that downstream distributors of claws (such as the Linux distributions which the project's website recommends installing it from) do not patch these issues.
For instance, claws is included in Debian stable and three currently-supported LTS releases of Ubuntu - which are places where users could be receiving security updates if the project registered CVEs, but are not since they don't.
Even if you get claws from a rolling release distro, or build the latest release yourself, it looks like you'd still be lagging substantially on likely-security-relevant updates: there have actually been numerous commits containing CID numbers in the month since the last release.
If the claws developers happen to read this: thanks for writing free software, but: please update your FAQ to explain these CID numbers, and start issuing security advisories and/or registering CVEs when appropriate so that your distributors will ship security updates to your users! :::
I have no idea if Betterbird is actually better than regular Thunderbird, but I use that cause people said so and I read about it a bit. If it does die I guess I'll switch to Thunderbird, just a little cautious about Mozilla after the privacy policy fiasco.
Betterbird is in flathub too which is great for newbies like me.
I'd be wary of that fork. It's run by a former Thunderbird dev that got banned for his toxic attitude and hasn't really improved since. Just take a look at the projects website. Being so unrespectful towards your upstream project should have no place in open-source.
🔥 Support The Channel Get Zorin OS Pro here: https://zorin.com/linuxrenaissance Like, comment, and share to support more content! 📝 Quick Summary of the Video Zorin OS 17.3 is here, bringing a refi...
Mac computers with Apple silicon processors are not currently capable of running Zorin OS natively. However, you may be able to use an app called UTM to run Zorin OS in a virtual machine on Mac computers with Apple silicon processors.
Running x86_64 emulation on an ARM CPU is a miserable experience and should be avoided. I've done this on an M-series Mac with UTM, and you're looking at ~10-minute boot times just to get the VM booted, and ~3 minutes for it to render a response to whatever you click.
It's honestly wild that they seriously suggest doing this on their Wiki.
Never cared for Zorin's inability to update from one release to another in place. Got way too many apps and custom configuration to re-install every time a new release comes out.
I'm trying, and struggling a little bit with getting the three items in the title setup the way that I want.
Running Arch.
I would like to run Radarr, Sonarr and SABnzbd all under the same user/group. My reasoning is that I (am just being overly particular) want any of the files created by those services to fall under the same owner/group. This is easy enough to accomplish by running systemctl edit service.service and adding the appropriate lines in the configuration for each one and saving it so the services run using the specified user/group.
The issue that I'm having is that the correlating folders in /var/lib/ have the ownership of the original users. I can manually change that ownership to the user/group I want but if I reboot the computer the SABnzbd folder ownership reverts back to default (the other two were doing the same thing but suddenly stopped and I'm not 100% sure why) or if the services get updated, the folders will also revert back to their default user/group.
Is there a way for me to enforce the ownership of those folders to the user/group that I have set to run the services regardless of them getting updated or the machine rebooting?
That is not normal. I have much the same setup, sabnzbd, Plex, jellyfin, sonar, radar. They all run under a particular user and their /opt and /var/lib folders don't 'revert' to their old ownership and permissions.
Either something is watching those folders and setting permissions, or some kind of immutability is in play, but permissions normally don't revert like that.
Interesting, was there anything in particular that you did with the services other than editing the service to run as those particular users?
Side note, I just tried to chown the sabnzbd folder and everything inside updated but the main folder itself refuses to change. Even after stopping the service.
Edit: scratch that. I closed and re-opened Dolphin and checked the properties of the folder and now it's showing correctly.
Background: I am a lifelong Windows user who is planning to move to Linux in October, once Microsoft drops support for Windows 10. I use a particularly bad laptop (Intel Celeron N3060, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 64 GB eMMC storage).
I do have some degree of terminal experience in Windows, but I would not count on it. If there are defaults that are sensible enough, I'd appreciate it. I can also configure through mouse-based text editors, as long as there is reliable, concise documentation on that app.
So, here's what I want in a distro and desktop environment: - Easy to install, maintain (graphical installation and, preferably, package management too + auto-updating for non-critical applications) - Lightwight and snappy (around 800 MB idle RAM usage, 10-16 GB storage usage in a base install) - Secure (using Wayland, granular GUI-based permission control)
I have narrowed down the distributions and desktop environments that seem promising, but want y'all's opinions on them.
Distributions: - Linux Mint Xfce: Easy to install, not prone to randomly break (problems: high OOTB storage usage, RAM consumption seems a little too high, kind of outdated packages, not on Wayland yet) - Fedora: Secure, the main DEs use Wayland (problems: similar to above except for the outdated packages; also hard to install and maintain, from what I have heard) - antiX Linux (problems: outdated packages, no Wayland)
Desktop Environments: - Xfce: Lightweight, fast, seems like it'd work how I want (problems: not on Wayland yet, that's it) - labwc + other Wayland stuff: Lightweight, fast, secure (problems: likely harder to install, especially since I have no Linux terminal experience, cannot configure through a GUI)
In advance, I thank you all for helping me!
I appreciate any help, especially in things like: - Neofetch screenshots, to showcase idle RAM usage on some DEs - Experiences with some distributions
XFCE is probably a good, lightweight DE. Many distros will support it. I believe Linux Mint has an XFCE version by default. I'm sure they will get to Wayland eventually, but it sounds many of the features will not matter to you beyond just a working desktop.
I have never tried it myself, but maybe Debian with XFCE might be more lightweight than Mint? Probably more involved to set up, though, so I would research that a bit more before taking the advice of a rando who has never done that specific distro/DE combination.
I did do some research, and there is a YouTube channel called "Old PC Gunk and Stuff", that tried out a laptop (that has very similar specs to mine (same model, too), but mine has twice the storage and RAM), with multiple Linux Distros and Windows 11 LTSC.
Apparently, Mokha (Bodhi uses it and he tested it out, altho Chromium outperforms Firefox) and IceWM (AntiX uses it, and AntiX uses Firefox and yet outperformed all other than Mokha by twice the performance).
One downside though is that both Mokha and IceWM are X11-bases, albeit I'm not aware of how bad that is, security-wise.
I've literally never heard of Bodhi Linux, but apparently it is a fork of Ubuntu LTS, which will have very outdated packages if that is a concern for you.
AntiX is likewise a fork of Debian Stable, so I suspect it will have the same issue. It also does not use the more standard systemd init system, so finding support could be an issue.
I don't think that it make sense to start off on such obscure distros. The advantage of a widely-used distro is that there will be forum threads and a much larger network of support to help you learn and debug issues.
I can't really speak to the security aspects of either X11 or Wayland.
You are thinking too hard I think in the wrong direction. Use Mint unless you have a strong feeling/need for something else. In which case, use that. Choice of first distro is not really that important. Pick a popular one and if it's wrong for you, you'll figure it out.
What you haven't mentioned is any research you have done regarding hardware support/compatibility for your specific device. I searched the specs you listed and it came up with some netbooks like CB012DX. I actually have an older, shittier version of this device running a debian derivative. (Mint is also in the debian family FYI.) And I've had fun installing various linuxes on even older, shittier ~~chrome~~netbooks over the years.
Assuming yours is in this ballpark, I have one really important piece of advice for you. Before you think anymore about it, download ISOs of your top 1 or 3 distro choices, flash them to USB and attempt to boot. These super cheap devices cut corners on components. It is not unlikely that you will have some hardware that either doesn't have open source drivers, or has some sort of theoretical support that will be too esoteric for you to implement at your current skill level. It is quite common on these devices that everything works fine except networking or something like that. So you might be able to exclude some of your choices based on that. Try to find a distro that works reasonably well out of the box.
You should find the various names your device goes by
As you have probably read, booting from a flashed USB is non-destructive of you normal system (unless you choose to format your disk or something of course). Assuming you have no issues booting, try out all the hardware features you have like: trackpad (different kinds of click, drag, zoom etc), ethernet, wireless (2.4 + 5ghz network), bluetooth, speakers, headphones, external input device, external displays, fingerprint scanner, touch screen, all keys and buttons, cameras, mics, sensors, keyboard lights. Any external devices you like to use: mice, keyboards, dongles, should also be included. I suggest making a list and systematically checking each item.
You can use this amazing tool called ventoy to flash one USB boot drive to have multiple distros available. You can even keep a windows ISO on there. It will even let you reserve a portion of the disk for persistent storage. Ventoy substantially improves this whole process so you don't have to have 10 different USB disks floating around. It is well designed and straight forward to use.
So on my current netbook, I was lucky that networking has been no problem. people with a slightly different model have to use an external wifi dongle (and not all wifi dongles are compatible with linux). I have never gotten anything form the speakers, but they might have arrived broken, apparently it's pretty easy to blow out the speakers and I didn't test while ChromeOS was still installed. Using an arch-based distro, the touch screen worked but now in Debian it doesn't. I don't really care about that. I really wanted Bluetooth to work and I couldn't for the longest time til one day it just magically solved itself and I haven't reinstalled since then because I am not sure I'd be able to re-solve it.
The other piece of advice has to do with storage. Depending what software you run, it can require a bit of space. 64gb could be gone quickly. This will be somewhat controversial (for good reason) but I always end up devoting the full eMMC to the system partition and having a permanently mounted SD card for /home, user storage and maybe even some of the system temp directories. This goes against common advice because SD cards are more prone to failure. So you need to have a good backup plan or just accept the risk. But if you run out of storage space on your system drive you can get yourself into the kind of mess that requires reinstalling.
In terms of both storage and RAM/CPU use, you will want to be extremely judicious of you application use. Firefox is a beast on any operating system.If you like to have a bunch of hungry tabs going on, you can't really optimize the OS.
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I am not sure that using Wayland is your best choice here. Based on laptop specs it is not like you are going to game on it. And for web and office tasks x11 still offers a better experience. On Wayland you would have problems with things like scaling, screen capturing etc. They are (to some extend) solvable, but are tricky to fix, especially with your lack of terminal experience.
Also I would not care that much for cutting-edge repositories. They are usually required for support of the new hardware (which of cause is not the case here).
Also, almost all modern DE are somewhat the same in terms of resource consumption. Some are a bit heavy (for example Cinnamon is heavier than xfce) but the difference if almost negligible. The majority of resources would be consumed by a browser, not DE. If you still wish to have the lightest DE possible, than you are limited to LXQT. XFCE nowadays is not as light as it used to be. You can have a very good performance with window managers like openbox and alike. For panel you can use polybar, tint or whatever. But that would require some configuration from you. Such setup is available in MX Linux. I suggest you to take a look at that distro, it is kinda good for old laptops. Of cause, standalone Wayland compositors (sway, hyprland, labwc, wayfire etc.) are very good, but they would require you to do a lot configuration work to set everything working. Even distros that ship them preinstalled (like Fedora Sway spin, for example) have somewhat broken defaults.
Thanks for this kind answer! I might game a bit on it (I am probably going to be the last person to stop playing Minecraft 1.8.9), but I don't know how much better Wayland is. I can tinker a bit of the settings, but not too much. I also have another laptop that has half the specs (but a better CPU, for some reason) that I might use as a lab rat.
1) Screen tearing. You can check YouTube for how it looks.
2) Latency in x11 is significantly higher.
3) HDR support. X11 does not support HDR. But I doubt you laptop supports it either.
I do not believe that problems 1 and 2 affect minecraft that much. They are mostly prominent in games like first-person-shooter and alike.
Also, note that Minecraft itself does not support wayland. This means that it would run under x11 that would run under wayland (with both x11 and Wayland problems combined).
I run Fedora 41 with Budgie on a low end Chromebook (sounds the same as you, Celeron N3060, 4 GB ram). Runs fine with no issues. I don't do any power computing, but Firefox, LibreOffice, GIMP are fine. It isn't my work computer, mainly just in the living room couch computer.
Again, my focus was on low RAM usage and preferably supporting x86. Most distros aren't Wayland-ready yet, bare that in mind. As most said, Mint with XFCE is a good start and most distros offer a "live" version you can boot to try without installing.
SparkyLinux is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Sparky is a fast, lightweight and fully customizable operating system…
What do you prefer? Linux allows multiple desktops to be installed. I use Mate primarily but I also have lxde installed as a backup in case something breaks.
I prefer something that has the same functional layout as Windows, but is as lightweight and minimal as possible (a Windows XP-like Start Menu is fine, I just need something that is configurable enough and doesn't blow up my laptop).
I think because: 1: I have a tiny bit of technical experience, although none with a Linux system. That's enough to use something more advanced 2: Cinnamon is basically on par with KDE, in terms of performance, which is not good at all, since my laptop's specifications are particularly sub-par.
Okay, I do not have enough knowledge about the current version of XFCE. I only know that the look of XFCE was super outdated if you do not tweak it. I cannot say if it is solved or not today.
Yeah, it does feel like Windows XP, but that's also the beauty of it - I can customize it using the graphical editors, since the UI is not confusing, just outdated.
Not that bad - the start menu opens in about 2 seconds, but some apps can take much longer (highly depends, but up to 6-10 seconds). I can easily work with a minimal, Windows 9x layout, if that means I will get a significant performance boost.
I think your assessment of Linux Mint with XFCE is a really good first choice. Cinnamon could be worth a try though as the UI is a bit more modern looking. I'm biased towards XFCE because it looks fine and runs extremely well on old laptops. I've got a laptop from 2008 running it and it's honestly a usable machine again.
I would not say Fedora is hard to install and maintain. The biggest issue by far is a setup hurdle for getting "non-free packages" enabled -- Fedora (and a few other distros) is a "FOSS-only" distribution, meaning they don't include anything by default that is not "free, open-source software." That means media codecs for playing popular audio and video file formats, web browsers like Chrome (I would recommend migrating away from this platform if you're using it) and anything else that's "proprietary software."
There are ways to enable access to this software, but it requires configuring your software package repositories to point to them. It's not hard, just something to keep in mind.
Linux Mint is a great choice for newcomers to the space -- it includes access to non-free software OOTB, has sane default applications on all of its "flavors" with their separate desktop environments, provides decent utilities for configuring your system graphically without blocking you from learning how to do so by config file or terminal should you want to learn. It stays decently up-to-date with packages, you won't be on the bleeding edge but that's not a bad thing. If you aren't doing intense activities (gaming, video editing, etc) having the absolute latest packages won't really matter to you. It still gets security updates, so you're good there. It's a well documented distro with a friendly community and forum if you run into trouble with anything. All around a really solid choice, and would be my first recommendation for someone not looking to do any heavy gaming or other specialized work on their PC.
XFCE is my desktop environment of choice. Not only is it lightweight, it also comes with some of the better desktop environment defaults, in my opinion. Linux Mint will theme it nicely upon install, but it's a long-standing DE that has a huge backlog of support for customization and "beautifying" your install however you like. Lots of themes and cursor options for those who care, all without pushing your resources. It's a traditional desktop paradigm, so it won't try and force you to interact with your PC in new and unusual ways (looking at you, GNOME, you weirdo). It just... Gets out of your way and lets you use your PC the way you're used to.
Fedora LXQt provides a lightweight, well-integrated LXQt desktop environment. In addition to LXQt itself it provides a small, well selected collection of applications like the Falkon browser, which combines Chromium's rendering engine with a nice Qt …
I've had Fedora updates screw up so many times and spent way too many hours fixing mutually conflicting updates that I have really come to loath the OS. I keep a Fedora server running for my customers who are Redrat enthusiasts but Ubuntu is so much better behaved.
Edit 2: Through all of my shenanigans I ended up on a read-only snapshot for root. The error I got just seemed similar to previous out-of-space errors. I went to a later snapshot as default and everything is working great!
My OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is wonky since I last did a dist-upgrade with about 4000 packages. Midway through it errord out with an error that indicated that the filesystem was full althou df showed plenty of free space.
BTRFS seemed to be the culprit. Removing snapshots let me continue the upgrade until it errored out again. Rinse and repeat until it was done.
Edit: My root subvolume is read only. So there must be some error in that. The other subvolumes work correctly. So I guess it isn't about free space after all.
But now the BTRFS seems to be almost full and I cannot update anymore.
...
Checking for file conflicts: .....................[done]error: can't create transaction lock on /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/.rpm.lock (Read-only file system) ( 1/40) Removing: ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.202412[error]Removal of (76899)ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.20241216~git0.a08b2fd_k6.13.7_1-2.2.x86_64(@System) failed: Error: Subprocess failed. Error: RPM failed: Command exited with status 1. Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i] (a): Problem occurred during or after installation or removal of packages: Installation has been aborted as directed. Please see the above error message for a hint.
I've tried a full balance but that didn't even seem to help. So I suspect that the space is caught up in snapshots, but I can't delete them.
# snapper list
# │ Type │ Pre # │ Date │ User │ Used Space │ Cleanup │ Description │ Userdata ─────┼────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────┼──────┼────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼───────────── 0 │ single │ │ │ root │ │ │ current │ 1 │ single │ │ Thu 18 Apr 2024 05:58:31 PM CEST │ root │ 12.51 GiB │ number │ first root filesystem │365* │ pre │ │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 04:28:33 PM CET │ root │ 16.00 KiB │ number │ zypp(zypper) │ important=no 366 │ pre │ │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:28:09 PM CET │ root │ 16.00 KiB │ number │ zypp(zypper) │ important=no 367 │ pre │ │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:36:53 PM CET │ root │ 16.00 KiB │ number │ zypp(zypper) │ important=no
# snapper rm 1
Deleting snapshot failed.
# snapper rm 365
Cannot delete snapshot 365 since it is the currently mounted snapshot.
If I understand subvolumes correctly they share their space when they reside on the same device. I only have two partitions. One for /boot/efi and one for the rest.
This is still a work-in-progress and was mostly made for fun. All it does is read from a list of files in ~/.config/rblx_launcher/ and display them to be clicked, launching xdg-open with the placeId.
The files (friends.txt and games.txt) are formatted like so:
Gosh. How will you figure that out? Searching up "neovim docs" in a search engine only gets you to the neovim documentation. THEN, you have to search the documentation for "paste". It's TWO WHOLE STEPS.
Wow, that's so hard. Its no wonder that you posted to Lemmy to make someone else do the hard work of ... using a search engine with your own two unbroken hands.
Gosh. How will you figure that out? Searching up "neovim docs" in a search engine only gets you to the neovim documentation. THEN, you have to search the documentation for "paste". It's TWO WHOLE STEPS.
Wow, that's so hard. It’s no wonder that you posted to Lemmy to make someone else do the hard work of ... using a search engine with your own two unbroken hands.
Yo dawg. You could’ve just downvoted and moved on with your day. But instead, you decided to show the entire internet what a self-important dick you are.
I’ll let you in on a little secret: not everybody learns the same way that you do. Also, not everyone has the same level of experience. Being kind is free. Being an ass is… well, embarrassing. Do better.
Tolerance is a social contract. OP broke that contract by writing a ridiculously calous, mean spirited comment, and is no longer entitled to tolerance.
Tolerance the way you're describing is how Nazi's gain a platform. We don't have to be tolerant of intolerant people. Just think about all the ways that could break society.
The performance you're dealing with here is in the tens of milliseconds possibly hundreds if you're lucky. Anyone seriously pursuing this issue from the angle of performance genuinely doesn't understand the deep rooted issues here.
If you're so incredibly hard up for compute time that it's critical for you to squeeze out the extra 1/10 of a second from your system utilities then you need to shut your fucking computer down and go touch grass.
I mean even if this saves you 30 seconds a day 50 weeks a year 5 days a week that's 2 hours per year it's saving you.... I'd rather slow fuck the two hours and get an extra 2 hours of pay.
I just found this out recently. So this isn't actually Nautilus itself but it's the file previewer (Gnome Sushi) that comes with it. If you select a file and press the spacebar, it will automatically preview the file if it supported. If the file is an audio file, it will automatically fetch album art from the web, and if the file is an HTML file, it can make third-party requests. IMHO this is a huge privacy issue. For example if you were browsing the web using Tor Browser and saved a page to view offline, and then later accidentally opened it using the file previewer, any third-party requests will leak out the clearnet.
This is an open issue and I don't expect it to be fixed anytime soon, so the easiest solution is to simply uninstall Gnome Sushi (on Fedora, it is the sushi package). On atomic distros if Gnome Sushi is installed as a flatpak you might be able to revoke internet permissions for it using Flatseal, though I have not tested this.
Edit: I'm aware that KDE also has file previewers, but I'm not sure if they have the same issue. If anybody else knows please leave a comment letting us know
Music album art appears to be pulled from remote locations, without any warning or ability to disable. It could be considered a privacy issue, since it likely requests...
I have some desktops (the tower kind) lying around and I'm wondering if there's a way that I can connect them all to one display and combine their computational power or at least make them all accessible in one place. I want to get into server hosting but only have one monitor. They're currently running LMDE.
Jokes aside, it depends what you want to do. You can't really build one powerful gaming PC out of multiple, but your can run parallel workloads in a number of different ways. What exactly, comes down to what you're doing. A kubernetes cluster is different from a Blender render farm, for example.
As others mentioned you can just remote into the servers with ssh, vnc, rdp, etc. if you want physical displays on them, you can look for a cheap KVM which lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.
You don't need to connect them to a display. Give them power and network, and access them remotely via ssh (or graphical protocol if you really want to, but unless you specifically want to run interactive GUIs there's not much point).
As for combining their power... it depends on what kind of work you want to do.
Yep, I still use X2go to get a remote graphical display from my machines at the data center while I work on them from home. It also provides sound and remote printing and leverages scp to transfer files.
The & is an indicator to most shells to run this command in "the background". Try and run ( sleep 10; echo hi ) & - you'll see you get your shell prompt back, where you can run more commands, but 10 second later you'll see that 'hi' come through. 'blocking' is the default behavior, if you don't add the & you're still going get the hi in ten seconds, but you don't get a prompt because your shell's execution is blocked until your command is done.
The doc here is indicating that you havea choice between autostart_blocking.sh and autostart.sh, the latter of which would be run with a &. They could have expressed this better.
As for why your script didn't work, I'd try executing it in a terminal to see what error message comes up.
But, whichever command I put in autostart.sh will run as if I run in terminal with the & sign. E.g: dunst & to run in the background.
Well, only if it's one single command, if you have multiple commands inside of the script, they will still run sequentially (the next command will only run after the previous one completely closes) unless you add & to them as well.
The difference is that dwm itself will not have to wait for the autostart.sh to complete before launching itself (thanks to it being run in the background with &)
However, autostart_blocking.sh (which isn't run with a &) will stop dwm from fully launching until the script completes.. I guess this is useful if you need certain things to be set up before dwm actually starts.. but it would potentially add a delay on dwm startup.
Im following the handbook, and I'm up to configuring the kernel. (In a vm. Skipping the optional installing firmware/microcode for now)
Trying for an OpenRC system, but it looks like all the steps need systemd.
All the videos I watched seems to skip this step and just go to Kernel configuration and compilation, but I dont want to a) mix old videos and up-to-date handbook, and b) blindly copy commands. I understood mostly everything untill now. Just this kernel step where I got lost the first time I tried to install gentoo.
So if you want to use systemd-boot as the bootloader you have to (apparently) install the systemd-utils package. Or you can just use GRUB / efistub.
Edit: looks like groche beat me to it 😁
It's probably been 4 years since I last had to rebuild my Gentoo, but I would be very surprised if there weren't good OpenRC instructions. I built mine with systemd and Gentoo handbook instructions always felt like 'Are you sure you don't want to use OpenRC? Ok, here are the systemd steps I guess'
Within section 2.1 choose only one subsection to follow. Those are all alternative bootloader options.
The bootloader subsection chosen in 2.1 on this page should match what is done in Configuring the Bootloader. The default path on that page is GRUB, which does not require any systemd components.
If following the GRUB path, follow instructions in 2.1.1 and skip the rest of 2.1. This is not at all clear in the handbook.
I believe that sys-kernel/installkernel is a utility script internal to the Gentoo project that can be configured to work with various bootloader solutions, including (optionally) systemd, and that is what this section 2.1 is talking about.
This appears to be an out of order dependency in the handbook
Linux Kernel 6.14 has arrived, bringing a clutch of changes to make your computer run more efficiently and more securely than before. Interestingly, Linux 6.14 is one the smallest kernel updates in...
Funny, I just saw an article saying don't get too excited about Linux gaming boosts because apparently Wine doesn't use ntsync yet, and Valve already worked around ntsync by implementing the faster fsync in SteamOS.
Ntsync got rid of performance degradation that can occur with some games under esync and fsync and that’s the why it's allowed to go in the mainline kernel, it has no downside.
fsync isn't faster than ntsync, it's merely a workaround to match Linux to Windows synchronization primitives. From ntsync's official description:
It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics.
So without this, you either have a huge perfomance hit in case of an accurate implementation or you have good performance, but might run into edge cases where software doesn't work well or at all because it's not accurate (see github.com/ValveSoftware/Proto… for examples)
I don't think his statement is true though. If reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comm… is not manipulated in any way, games with lots of these calls still get big improvements with ntsync over fsync (about 30% in this particular case, which is a massive boost). So while nobody can rule out that his statement may be true on average or in general, there are still cases where ntsync offers a tangible advantage – be it improved FPS or the fact that the game runs at all.
Edit: in the video that the thread is about, fsync didn't beat ntsync in a single one (or I missed it when jumping through it). In the best one, they were exactly tied. Sure, the difference wasn't really big, but again there are titles not working with fsync.
However, I want to stress that I'm not trying to talk about fsync. It's a good solution that significantly improved performance. But ntsync is, from everything I've seen, almost always better; how much depends on the case, and it never seems to be worse.
And by burned, I mean "realize they have been burning for over a year". I'm referring to a bug in the Tor Browser flatpak that prevented the launcher from updating the actual browser, despite the launcher itself updating every week or so. The fix requires manual intervention, and this was never communicated to users. The browser itself also doesn't alert the user that it is outdated. The only reason I found out today was because the NoScript extension broke due to the browser being so old.
To make matters worse, the outdated version of the browser that I had, differs from the outdated version reported in the Github thread. In other words, if you were hoping that at least everybody affected by the bug would be stuck at the same version (and thus have the same fingerprint), that doesn't seem to be the case.
This is an extreme fingerprinting vulnerability. In fact I checked my fingerprint on multiple websites, and I had a unique fingerprint even with javascript disabled. So in other words, despite following the best privacy and security advice of:
using Tor Browser
disabling javascript
keeping software updated
My online habits have been tracked for over a year. Even if Duckduckgo or Startpage doesn't fingerprint users, Reddit sure does (to detect ban evasions, etc), and we all know 90% of searches lead to Reddit, and that Reddit sells data to Google. So I have been browsing the web for over a year with a false sense of security, all the while most of my browsing was linked to a single identity, and that much data is more than enough to link it to my real identity.
How was I supposed to catch this? Manually check the About page of my browser to make sure the number keeps incrementing? Browse the Github issue tracker before bed? Is all this privacy and security advice actually good, or does it just give people a false sense of security, when in reality the software isn't maintained enough for those recommendations to make a difference? Sorry for the rant, it's just all so tiring.
Edit: I want to clarify that this is not an attack on the lone dev maintaining the Tor Browser flatpak. They mention in the issue that they were fairly busy last year. I just wanted to know how other people handled this issue.
Update: I just noticed that based on this comment, the flatpak was only verified by Tor Project after this particular issue had been fixed. So perhaps I should have waited before installing the flatpak. Sigh...
And by burned, I mean "realize they have been burning for over a year". I'm referring to a bug in the Tor Browser flatpak that prevented the launcher from updating the actual browser, despite the launcher itself updating every week or so. The fix requires manual intervention, and this was never communicated to users. The browser itself also doesn't alert the user that it is outdated. The only reason I found out today was because the NoScript extension broke due to the browser being so old.
To make matters worse, the outdated version of the browser that I had, differs from the outdated version reported in the Github thread. In other words, if you were hoping that at least everybody affected by the bug would be stuck at the same version (and thus have the same fingerprint), that doesn't seem to be the case.
This is an extreme fingerprinting vulnerability. In fact I checked my fingerprint on multiple websites, and I had a unique fingerprint even with javascript disabled. So in other words, despite following the best privacy and security advice of:
using Tor Browser
disabling javascript
keeping software updated
My online habits have been tracked for over a year. Even if Duckduckgo or Startpage doesn't fingerprint users, Reddit sure does (to detect ban evasions, etc), and we all know 90% of searches lead to Reddit, and that Reddit sells data to Google. So I have been browsing the web for over a year with a false sense of security, all the while most of my browsing was linked to a single identity, and that much data is more than enough to link it to my real identity.
How was I supposed to catch this? Manually check the About page of my browser to make sure the number keeps incrementing? Browse the Github issue tracker before bed? Is all this privacy and security advice actually good, or does it just give people a false sense of security, when in reality the software isn't maintained enough for those recommendations to make a difference? Sorry for the rant, it's just all so tiring.
Edit: I want to clarify that this is not an attack on the lone dev maintaining the Tor Browser flatpak. They mention in the issue that they were fairly busy last year. I just wanted to know how other people handled this issue.
So the notification that is in the browser that directs you to update it wasn't enough? Because that totally works with the flatpak version of tor, because all the flatpak version of tor does is download a copy of the browser to your home directory and run it. There's a little notification dot on the hamburger menu of tor that directs you to the about page where you can download and update.
Afaik the notification was suppressed, see the linked github issue in the post, or this one. I can guarantee the notification wasn't there on my end or else I would have noticed it
Before the Tor Browser would just update normally together when a new update dropped and in settings you could fine an update search button said button is now missing in the torbrowser launched by ...
This is not a troll post. I'm genuinely confused as to why SELinux gets so much of hate. I have to say, I feel that it's a fairly robust system. The times when I had issues with it, I created a custom policy in the relevant directory and things were fixed. Maybe a couple of modules here and there at the most. It took me about 15 minutes max to figure out what permissions were being blocked and copy the commands from. Red Hat's guide.
I have a saying, "If it's not DNS, then it's Selinux". It blocks stuff so frequently it's a major time sink for us.
It is overly complex and difficult to understand, especially if you're developing and deploying software that does not have correct pre-rolled policies. A regular job for me is to help developers solve this - which generally means running their service, seeing what Selinux blocks on, and then applying a fix. Repeat 2-8 times until every way Selinux is trying to access a file is explicitly allowed. And sometimes, even software that comes via official repos has buggy selinux policies that break things.
Fortunately, there are tools to help you. Install setroubleshooter amd when something doesn't work, "grep seal /var/log/messages" and if it's selinux causing the problem, you'll find instructions showing you what went wrong and how to create an exception. I absolutely consider this tool essential when using any system with selinux enabled.
When a security mechanism becomes more complex to manage than what it is supposed to protect, it becomes a vulnerability itself.
If you had a minimal system that you built from the ground up yourself and wanted to only have that system function in very specific ways, SELinux would be perfect. I would go so far as to say it would be nearing perfection in some ways.
Sorry, but in the real world, ain't nobody got time for that shit. If you use auto configuration tools or pre-canned configs for SELinux on a system you are unfamiliar with, it's more likely to cause application issues, create security gaps and will likely be shut off by a Jr. admin who really has no fucking clue what he is doing anyway.
It's just easier to keep your system patched and ensure basic network security practices anyway.
It's not impossible to manage these days. In the early days it was, but most everything is automagic now. If I am not mistaken, SELinux can be enabled to 'log only' which would give you data better handled by a HIPS anyway. (Don't quote me on that.)
Sorry if it sounded like my rant was directed at you as it absolutely wasn't. Your comment triggered me, because I absolutely fully agreed with yours as well. ;)
Security is much more effective and adopted when it is simple. My understanding is that SELinux is not.
This means not only will fewer people use it and more people turn it off if something doesn't work, it means more people are at risk of misconfiguring their system to allow something they didn't intend to.
This is somewhat mitigated from the fact that, from my experience, Linux Security Modules cant ever make you less secure than without it. But it still can provide a false sense of security if you misconfigure it.
Here is a good article showing what I am referring to, and providing a solid security tool: BSD pledge/unveil on Linux.
Docker container can't read a bind mount. Permission issue? No, it's SELinux, again. And I didn't even install it explicitly, it just got pulled in by another package.
And to be clear, the issue isn't SELinux really, but ~~unexpected~~ non standard behaviour which I never asked for (never explicitly installed it).
I don't hate it, I know that it adds a lot of security to a system, it's just that it's not user friendly and it can sometimes leave you scratching your head wondering what the hell happened.
To be honest I had the exact same situation with AppArmor, and since then I have grown to like MAC. I know they're doing it to keep me safe so I don't complain. Honestly if people find MAC to be a hassle they should also in theory find file permissions and ACLs a hassle
SELinux is an access control system for Linux. Traditionally Linux uses Dynamic Access Control (DAC) which basically means the person who creates a file can determine who can access that file. Thats pretty fine for day to day use but there are some problems with this model in terms of security. One I can think of is that it's more vulnerable to privilege escalation (a hacker getting access to a higher level account like admin through a lower level account) because it puts the onus on the user to define who can access the file. SELinux was invented by our good friends at the NSA to remedy these kinds of problems. It's an example of Mandatory Access Control. It works on top of DAC by creating policies that work to prevent things like privilage escalation. It's also a lot more comprehensive than DAC. It allows for things context based access, taking into account the broader security context of an access attempt, the user's role, etc.
I'm actually not entirely sure why some people don't like it. Understandably, some people are wary of anything the NSA let's out into the public. But as it's open source and has been integrated into a number of Linux distros like Fedora, it's unlikely they've backdoored it. If I was to hazard a guess, I'd say some people don't like it for the same reason they don't like systemd: Linux has often been an OS where user's like a big degree of control through simple traditional systems and those don't like the idea of losing some of that control to the complexity overhead involved in these new systems.
Hey folks, thanks for all of your recommendations for distros a while back. I ended up settling on Fedora KDE, and have been futzing around with it on my old laptop just for funsies.
I've re-encountered an old problem though. The laptop's Caps Lock and F1 keys are busted, sending in dozens of keypresses per second even when unpressed. I solved this on windows with a bit of a headache (using a program to disable those keys), but I have no idea how to solve it in this environment. I've tried futzing with keyd with little success, and my search powers are really failing me here.
Solved! I had to swing by a hardware store for some screwdrivers and bemoaned a few secret screws keeping the thing from opening, but I located the keyboard ribbon and removed it. All is well! I even gave the fan a little cleaning, which was long overdue eheh. Thanks folks!
Let's say I want to build a GPS module for my car, which is only a GPS, doesn't hold anything else. Or a recipe tablet for my kitchen which only hold a recipe app.
Is this kind of purposes common? What would be the best way to do this kind of stuff? How do I choose the hardware? How do I "lockdown" certain aspects I don't need about software?
These kind of devices could be convenient because, by only holding what's needed, they would use less resources, they would be completely distraction free and they would be suitable to be used by non tech savy user which would need to use only one or two programs without messing with the system in any way.
I know KDE ha some kind of multi app kiosk settings, GNOME also can achieve something similar tho it's more confusing.. There are some kiosk distros which only give you a browser. But I don't see anything that can be set up, customized, and locked like that.
But would that be the best way of achieving something like that? I mean to use a GPS I don't need a terminal, nor video codecs, nor a browser.. Maybe I can add the possibility to send Osmand google maps links.. Or I can decide to make it hold Spotify too to make it a radio as well.. But a full distro would be wasted!
But how do I prevent every other use except the intended ones? Is there an easy way to achieve a "one purpose device" using Linux? Should I simply use whichever distro I like and uninstall everything which is not needed (I see use case for arch)?
I feel like we have the total freedom of Linux distros on one side, and companies using managed devices on the other by setting complicated policies, but I don't know any options in between!
Maybe the focus here is the desktop environment more than distros! Are there desktop environment purposed to give the user a set of limited apps, or a single app (which isn't only a browser)?
Debian minimal netinstall should fit you use case. Long support time, small footprint and should support everything you want to do. Just secure it by having a unprivileged account doing all the stuff you want to do.
So, for a single purpose kiosk device, I've had some success with not using a DE or WM at all - essentially putting the desired application inside your xinitrc. In that case, you would need to configure the window geometry using xdotool (I think). There's probably something similar for Wayland. Alternatively, a tiling wm like i3 or Sway could be useful if you remove all the keybinds from the config file.
ETA: for a device like that, I would say that arch is a potential starting point, but you might also consider an immutable distro. I don't have any experience with them though.
ETA2: For the hardware, a Raspberry Pi is not a bad starting point, but Arch on Arm isn't officially supported. Your mileage may vary
i've repurposed my old androids to turn them into wireless cameras for my home made security system based on the motion project as well as created a homemade lojack and dashcam for my car. some phones i was able to root and i picked and chose what software ran on it and the others, i disabled as many services/apps as i could to make them as minimalistic as possible.
for linux, i created my own home made router and wifi access point; but it's kind of the opposite of minimalistic as it's a full blown linux server with virtual machines and desktop environment to help with management.
i provided both extremes to mirror what others have said: it's hard to provide advice without knowing what your goal is.
Dietpi user here. I've got a orange pi zero 3 w/ 1GiB of ram serving me nextdns under docker + playing a live stream 24/7 (via yt-dlp/ffplay) and it does its job just nicely.
Optimised | Simplified | For everyone - Backed by community, DietPi is a minimal OS image for SBCs - Raspberry Pi, Odroid, PINE64 etc. Install software optimised for you!
Small tangent, I didn't have the energy to read your whole post, so you might have addressed that. But often it's cheaper to go with an established multi purpose device instead of building something new.
I used to build and sell Raspberry Pi gaming handhelds that were as cheap as possible and literally just held together by some string. My purpose was to get enough money through the sales to be able to build one for myself. Sure, the building process was fun. But when I crunched the numbers just buying a cheap smartphone and controller was much cheaper and more performant and versatile than the self-built solution.
Just buying a cheap phone or tablet is often the cheaper solution.
Heck, even Valve just bought off the shelve tablet displays and turned the image in software for the Steam Deck.
At first I was sceptical, but after a few thought, I came to the solution that, if uutils can do the same stuff, is/stays actively maintained and more secure/safe (like memory bugs), this is a good change.
Waiting for Canonical to up sell proprietary utils features by subscription. Ubuntu's regular release cycles were brilliant in 2004 when there weren't a lot of alternatives but why does it still exist?
The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.
That's the moral argument: it enables thievery.
The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.
Step 1 is replacing coreutils with uutils.
Step 2 is Canonical, Google, or someone else stealing uutils to build a proprietary "fuutils" that boasts better speeds, features, or interoperation with $PROPRIETARY_PRODUCT, or maybe even a new proprietary kernel.
Step 3 is where inevitably uutils is abandoned and coreutils hasn't been updated in 10 years. Welcome to 1978, we're back to using UNIX.
The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can't just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.
Imagine a contributor of the project. He would have been fixing the bug for free and give the work to the public project. Right before he submits the code change, he sees an ad from a big tech bro: "Hiring. Whoever can fix this bug gets this job and a sweet bonus." He hesitated and worked for the company instead.
Now that he is the employee of the company. He can't submit the same bug fix to the open source project because it is now company property. The company's product is bug free, and the open source counterpart remains buggy.
To give you an example, if git was under the MIT license instead of GPL , then Microsoft can silently add incompatible features to GitHub without anyone knowing. The regular git client appears to work for a while. Then they start advertising msgit with some extra GitHub features and shortcuts. Once they get to 50% adoption they simply kill the open source version off.
If GitHub required a special client to be installed tomorrow… I would have to concede and use it. It’s GPL that stops that because everyone has to get every new feature.
When Slack was first rolling out the dev team in my office of 50 people we all hated it. Thankfully it had an IRC bridge so we could use Slack through IRC. It was seemingly the same experience as before except more business users were in the chat rooms. Once the Corp side of the business were onboard, they dropped IRC support, forcing us to use their clients.
Now it doesn’t matter that rules or laws or privacy invasion they do. They have captured the companies communications and can hold it hostage.
I’ve seen it again and again. When is the last time you downloaded an MP3 file?
Ideas can only be patented, not copyrighted. If a company designs something novel enough to qualify for a patent, and so good that people willingly pay for the feature, that's impressive, and arguably still a good thing. If instead they design a better user experience, or an improvement in performance, the ideas can be used in open source, even when the code cannot be.
Mainly memory safety; split (which is also used for other programs like sort) had a memory heap overflow issue last year to name one. The GNU Coreutils are well tested and very well written, the entire suite of programs has a CVE only once every few years from what I can see, but they do exist and most of those would be solved with a memory and type safe language.
That said, Rust also handles parallelism and concurrency much better than C ever could, though most of these programs don't really benefit from that or not much since they already handled this quite well, especially for C programs.
The uutils are MIT licensed, simply put it means “do whatever you want with it, as long as you credit us”. The coreutils are GPL, simply put “do whatever you want with it but only in other GPL works, also credit us”.
The coreutils make sure forks will also be open source. While the uutils aren't closed source, they do allow you to make closed source forks.
I don't like them moving away from gpl but there were already plenty of non-gpl coreutils clones, so, i'm not sure how much it really matters as long as the linux kernel is still gpl.
Unlike the other alternative coreutils, uutils focuses on GNU compatibility. If you depend on GNUisms, uutils allow you to unGNU & unGPLv3+ your system.
The Linux kernel is licensed under GPLv2, not v3. The third version of the license forbids tivoization (vendoring unmodifiable copyleft software). Also, the GNU coreutils aren't limited to Linux.
I will give you one. You want to embed the coreutils in some other projects ie. a browser. But at that point it's cheaper for you to submit your modification upstream because you are making money selling the browser not by selling modified coreutils. Maintaining your own fork is not worth it once you make meaningful changes.
~~I think this is the reason why uutils are being funded by Big Tech and why they chose this license. (to get funded)~~ correction: I only found that they are funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund and apparently the author is open to changing the license, they don't care (see video/presentation).
But yes, I agree this whole comment section is deranged. The reason why Ubuntu chose uutils is because of Rust's safety and because of speed. In some workloads (I think it's sorting) they totally smash the GNU counterparts.
For Ubuntu it does not make any sense to make a proprietary fork. You don't choose your OS based on its coreutils. If they added a new convenience flag for their proprietary grep, it would just make them look bad. Also skilled users would hate it because now their scripts would not be portable. Or if it were really that big of a gamechanger, the feature would get added to the other coreutils and Ubuntu would end up with nothing but bad reputation. Unless they made change to the underlying code for performance. Then it would be harder to implement in the other coreutils but as I said before, nobody would care. Faster and safer coreutils are a nice to have, not something people base their OS choice on.
Hi. Not sure where to ask this, so I'm creating an issue. Is the hope to replace the GNU coreutils in Debian someday? Are you going for feature-parity only, or are you also adding new features to t...
So i hear that removing all the gnu stuff opens linux to be redistributed with a bew liesinse like mit. Which means its a little more closed iff a little more monitized.
Not knowledge enough on my own to know for sure. If someone with more knowledge could explain.
This is one of the old-time original arguments in the OSS community.
The crux of the matter is that the GNU licenses require that modifications be released back to the community. Other "more permissible" licenses like MIT do not.
So if you want to make a commercial version of X, and X is under a GPL, then any changes you make need to be released under the GPL. The idea being "I shared this code with the community with the intent that you can use it for free and modify it as you like, but you need to share back what you do." Also called "Share and share alike".
This defends against "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics that companies like Microsoft has loved to do. They can't take your code, modify it for their own purposes and re-sell it possibly making a more popular version that is now proprietary.
X (Xorg) has been MT licensed for 40 years. So is Wayland. So is Mesa.
I think Xorg is a good example of the real world risks for something like core utils. If you did not know or care until now that X and Wayland were MIT licensed, you probably do not need to care too much about utils licensing either.
I learned recently that yfw is basically replacing iptables "everywhere", and as I'm getting old and crusty, this means that I have to learn something new when I'd much rather practice yelling at kids to get off my lawn.
To me, iptables is fine, and I like its flexibility. I've been using it ever since it de facto replaced ipchains, so ease of use isn'treally a factor in this equation.
So my more pointed question is: Can I just stick to iptables, or am I missing out on something that can only be done with ufw?
If you know iptables, just stick with that. In my testing, docker containers seem to ignore ufw rules. Supposedly, iptable rules are respected but I haven't learned iptables yet so I can't verify.
Don't know either, other than they can't stand the thruth for a good reason? :/ We have been using iptables for years and now we have to relearn everything?
Yeah it's unfortunate. The nftables syntax is a lot easier though!
The same thing has happened before, around 15 years ago... Before iptables there was a system called ipchains. Migration took a while, but it was eventually done, and nobody talks about ipchains any more.
These days it's a frontend for nftables. iptables is a legacy system that's eventually going to be removed (just like ipchains before it).
On modern systems, iptables is a wrapper around nftables. So you're essentially using nftables except without the ability to use any of its more powerful features.
I was about to say the same -- and also: nftables syntax is a lot cleaner compared to iptables, and the whole configuration can be loaded from a single file just like pf, without doing the dump/reload cycle that iptables required. Unless UFW does features like defining zones which a user might need (like firewalld), then it's not a huge improvement on bare nftables usability-wise.
I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don't see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It's like they're painting their faces with "here, take my stuff and don't contribute anything back, that's totally fine"
it's been a trend for a while unfortunately. getting rid of the gpl is the motivation behind e.g. companies sponsoring clang/llvm so hard right now. there are also the developers that think permissive licenses are "freer" bc freedom is doing whatever you want /s. they're ideologically motivated to ditch the gpl so they'll support the change even if there's no benefit for them, financial or otherwise.
The unfortunate reality is that a significant proportion of software engineers (and other IT folks) are either laissez-faire "libertarians" who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL, or "apolitical" tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
To these folks, the MIT/BSD licenses have fewer restrictions, and are therefore more free, and are therefore more better.
Yeah, that's all there's to it, along with pure ignorance. In a past not so ideologically developed life, I've written code under Apache 2 because it was "more free." Understanding licenses, their implications, the ideologies behind them and their socioeconomic effects isn't trivial. People certainly aren't born educated in those, and often they reach for the code editor before that.
it's interesting how the move away from the gpl is never explicitly justified as a license issue: instead, people always have some plausible technical motivation. with clang/llvm it was the lower compile times and better error messages; with these coreutils it's "rust therefore safer". the license change was never even addressed
i believe they have to do this exactly bc permissive licenses appeal to libertarian/apolitical types who see themselves as purely rational and changing a piece of software bc of the license would sound too... ideological...
so the people in charge of these changes always have a plausible technical explanation at hand to mask away the political aspect of the change
I use LLVM because it's good, but I would like it even more if it was GPL and I agree with OP's comment as well.
However, you're literally the guy that replies "oh, so you hate oranges" to people that say "I like apples" or however that meme goes. How about you don't completely twist people's justifications into something they never said.
edit: It comes down to that I have no say in whether other people want to allow their code to be exploited by corporations nor does it make a practical difference to me in what I can do with it, all I can do is say "you're an idiot" to them.
The rust coreutils project choosing the MIT license is just another gambit to allow something like android or chromeos happen to gnu+linux, where all of the userland gets replaced by proprietary junk.
And yet that's a popularly welcomed approach, for some reason. Just look at the number of thumbs down this has. github.com/uutils/coreutils/is…
You are recreating copyleft programs with a non-copyleft license. It is not unethical but it likely will be harmful to user's freedoms. It allows someone to incorporate it into a device or distribu...
I"m with you on copyleft, but if I had any connection to the project and felt the need to add a reaction emoji, it'd probably be a "thumbs-down" as well.
It's not because I'm against the GPL, but because of the way the GitHub comment is written.
It doesn't even say "you should use the GPL", it says "you MUST say GNU doesn't agree with you". I'm perplexed.
Now, I respect the idea of GNU, but the way GNUers in general go about behaving themselves is perfect to alienate people, and this GitHub issue is a prime example. I don't get it.
If people don't know about GNU, tell them. Nicely.
If people have misconceptions about GNU, there's nothing wrong with fixing them. Again, nicely.
The problem is, whenever I encounter GNU and however much I agree with them on key issues (which is at about 90%, my main gripe with them being Freedom 0), they just have a knack to get me, someone who is with them on most issues, annoyed at them. I can clearly see how someone who isn't as alligned with them as I am gets equally annoyed and avoids GPL and GNU like the plague just to fuck with 'em (while fucking over everyone, including themselves). Not to mention ones into the libertarian stream, since you yourself covered that pretty well.
What the GitHub issue you linked that I keep coming back to shows is this GNU herd mentality of fucking over others unintentionally and in turn fucking over everyone. While they're clearly better than the "libtards", they still end up doing the same mistake.
That sounds a lot more confrontational and less diplomatic.
The ticket was actually indirectly asking it, by explaining the potential problems with non-copyleft. They just added "If you plan to carry on..." to introduce a compromise, which actually allowed for at least some minor change to be made, and made it clear that the different license is intentional and not just for lack of awareness (which would imply the devs have no intention on switching).
it says “you MUST say GNU doesn’t agree with you”
Somehow you added the "MUST" to this sentence, but not to the first one.. even though the github issue did not say they MUST, instead it even used the word "please" and appealed to having some deference to the GNU coreutils.
At least this issue managed to get a change through for clarity.. I don't think you would have gotten anything at all with the other approach.
"apolitical" tech-bros who are mostly just interested in their six figure paychecks and fancy toys.
This, I understand.
laissez-faire "libertarians" who are ideologically opposed to the restrictions in the GPL
This, I do not. Apologies for my tone in the next paragraph but I'm really pissed off (not directed at you):
WHAT RESTRICTIONS???? IF YOU LOT HAD EVEN A SHRED OF SYMPATHY FOR THE COMMUNITY YOU WOULD HAVE BOYCOTTED THE MIT AND APACHE LICENSE BY NOW. THIS IS EQUIVALENT TO HANDING CORPORATIONS YOUR WORK AND BEGGING THEM TO SCREW OVER YOUR WORK AND THE FOSS COMMUNITY.
I feel a bit better but not by much. This makes me vomit.
The restriction that some people object to is that the GPL restricts the freedom of the software developers (the people actually writing and contributing the code).
Most people would agree at first glance that developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like. MIT is one option. Some prefer the GPL. Most see the right to choose a proprietary license for your own work as ok but some people describe this as unethical. I personally see all three as valid. I certainly think the GPL should be one of the options.
That said, if we are talking about code that already exists, the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide.
MIT licensed software is “free software” by definition. Once something has been MIT licensed, it is Open Source and cannot be taken away.
The MIT license provides all of the Free Software Foundations “4 freedoms”. It also provides freedoms that the GPL does not.
What the MIT license does not provide is guaranteed access to “future” code that has not yet been written. That is, in an MIT licensed code base, you can add new code that is not free. In a GPL code base, this is not possible.
So, the GPL removes rights from the developers in that it removes the right to license future code contributions as you want. Under the GPL, the right of users to get future code for free is greater than the right of the developer to license their future contributions. Some people do not see that as a freedom. Some even see it as quite the opposite (forced servitude). This “freedom” is not one of the “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF but it is the main feature of the GPL.
developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like
What if they choose a license that limits the freedom from all other developers to improve that copy of the software? is allowing a developer to restrict further development actually good for the freedom of the developers? Because I would say no.
The spirit of the GPL is to give freedom to the developers and hackers (in the good sense of hacker). The chorus of the Free Software Song by Stallman is "you'll be free hackers, you'll be free".
the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide
"Your freedom ends when the freedom of others begins"
The only "freedom" the GPL restricts is the freedom to limit the freedom of other developers/hackers that want to edit the software you distribute. This is in the same spirit as having laws against slavery that restrict the "freedom" of people to take slaves.
Would a society that allows oppression (that has no laws against it) be more "free" than a society that does not allow oppression (with laws to guarantee the freedom of others is respected)?
Maybe there could be another reason why people choose MIT to begin with:
When you start a new repo on github it makes suggestions which license to use, and I bet many people can't be arsed to think about it and just accept what they're offered. [My memory is a little patchy since I very rarely use github anymore, but I definitely remember something like this.] And maybe github tends to suggest MIT.
That said, please undestand that many, many git platforms exist and there is no reason at all to choose one of the two that actually have the word git in them.
I think many hobby developers also see "hobby" developing as part of their career, so they would happily try and have their hobby align with future employment possibilities. Since companies avoid GPL, those devs will rather choose a license that is more attractive to those potential employers when they see their portfolio.
I worked on an oss library with an MIT license and my colleagues told me they with that instead of GPL was with GPL it basically forces anyone who uses the library to make everything in their project available.
Only if they make changes/improvements to the code. If it's a library that is used then no, AFAIK you don't need to. If everyone using GPL code had to make their entire project FOSS then TPLink and DLink wouldn't have any market share. The only reason OpenWRT exists is because Linksys was forced to open up their code because they had illegally refrained from opensourcing their code, which was a great positive for the community
If you are using a GPL library that is statically linked to code with a different license the result is one binary that has inside both GPL and other license code, which would not be allowed under the GPL terms, because it requires that the binaries that use the source code must have their source code available in full (including other source and modifications that are part of the same binary).
The only case in which you don't need to provide the source for GPL software is if you don't actually distribute the binary to customers.. private binaries do not have to be published with their source, as long as you never made the binaries public and never gave it to anyone else. Only when you give it to someone you need to provide the code.
This allows for a loophole in which if you are providing a service, then you can run the software privately in your private server without sharing the source code to the clients using the service, since they do not really run the server program although they indirectly benefit from its results. This is why the AGPL was created, since it has a clause to force also those offering services to make the source of the server available to the users of the service.
I don't mind if people use LGPL or some derivative of GPL. All I want is improvements to the source be published, and MIT simply doesn't enforce that. I have no intention to force companies to publish their code that they have worked on for a long time - doing that never really helps. But I do want them to publish changes they make to already FOSS products so the author and the community can benefit.
Yes, but the loophole I was mentioning allows companies to not release the code even when it's GPL, that's why I was mentioning the AGPL (which is different from the LGPL).
Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.
Why do they?
They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.
Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.
How do we explain that?
There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.
Why not?
Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.
How about OpenSSH?
It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?
Yeah, specifically for something like coreutils I can't see the malicious endgame that is suggested by others here. Is the fear that a proprietary version of cat or pwd or printf takes over the ecosystem and then traps users into a nonfree agreement? Or a proprietary coreutils superset that offers some new tool and does the same thing? Or a proprietary coreutils that generates profit for businesses without attribution to the developers? What would stop anyone from just writing their own proprietary set of tools to do the same thing now, even if uutils didn't exist? Clearly not much, since uutils did exactly that (minus the proprietary bit).
I personally don't see a compelling reason to change to MIT, but I also don't see the problem.
What's stopping people from doing that today is network effects. There are enough differences today between bsd coreutils and gnu coreutils that substituting one for the other doesn't work out of the box.
The chain of events that would cause a problem are: due to Ubuntu popularity rust MIT core utils overtakes gnu coreutils and people drop support for gnu coreutils, then a large and we'll funded corporate entity could privately fork rust coreutils and lock people in.
To me, the problem is not really so much about "locking people in" (it's also unclear what you mean by that, if they were already using that ecosystem before using uutils aren't they already locked in?)
To me, the problem is how the MIT removes legal protections when it comes to ensuring accountability to changes in the source.. how can I be sure that the version of uutils shipped with "X Corp OS" has not had some special sauce added-in for increased tracking, AI magic, backdoor or "security" reasons? They are perfectly free to make changes without any public audit or having to tell their users what their own machine is doing anymore.
GPL would not require that. It would only require publication of the source. There is no requirement to give back or even make your changes compatible with upstream.
Though, you are probably going to have a much easier time implementing a change to your code that is present in a company's published code, than you would trying to reverse-engineer a binary.
Sharing of the code I would consider "giving back" in it of itself.
True, but the mere existence of an AGPL project that follows the MIT one might be enough to convince would-be contributors to choose our version instead.
It may also be more likely to be adopted by non-corporate Linux distros that favour the AGPL over MIT (Debian for example) which in turn could help make the AGPL version the dominant one.
Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can't take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.
So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.
It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it's theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.
here, take my stuff and don’t contribute anything back, that’s totally fine
I mean, yeah? They are probably fine with that and think that software should be distributed without restrictions. You may not agree with it, but it's their choice. Not really stealing if they give it away willingly.
I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore.
I mean, most of them that want to use a GPL-like license use the GPL or LGPL rather than the AGPL. :P
why are developers even agreeing to this?
Are they? Last I checked this wasn't as much of a plan as much of it was just a developer thinking out loud. And even if it was a real plan, developers should continue doing what they should be doing anyway: Write their scripts without any GNU/uutils/whatever-microsoft-calls-their-evil-uutils-fork extensions. Then their scripts could run across all platforms, including GNU, uutils, FreeBSD and BusyBox.
At any rate, if Microsoft really wanted to make their own coreutils fork (if they haven't already), they're not really that complicated tools. They could devote like maybe a year of engineering time and get it pretty much compatible.
Write their scripts without any GNU/uutils/whatever-microsoft-calls-their-evil-uutils-fork extensions. Then their scripts could run across all platforms, including GNU, uutils, FreeBSD and BusyBox
Sorry but that's besides the point. If improvements to coreutils are not published and upstreamed then the community loses out on potential improvements that trained personnel at a successful company make. Not being dependent on such utils is a different discussion and doesn't solve the core issue.
Yeah I'd like for them to use AGPL but even GPLv3 or it's derivatives are fine as long as they emphasise FOSS
What improvements are you thinking of? I can see that reasoning with something like the Linux kernel where there's a lot of complex and integrated code, but ultimately individual coreutils commands are really simple. There's very little you can do to extend something like ls... And if you do, you can just make your own superls command and not have to deal with any licensing restrictions.
With regards to AGPL vs GPL, none of the coreutils programs have network connectivity, so I'm not sure what the network requirement actually adds?
Personally, I don't think the problem is the risk of companies not contributing back... I honestly wouldn't mind if they don't contribute at all and instead they just use the community-developed GPL software as-is, without making any changes to it.
In my mind, the problem is that I cannot trust that a piece of non-copyleft software that's provided by a company actually does what I expect it should do, and does not have extra bits doing things I do not want it to do. Like the changes Google does in their Chrome version of Chromium, for example. It's much harder for me to trust any random Chromium fork than it would be a GPL licensed browser, because all Chromium forks can legally include changes without disclosing them openly, they don't even have to let you know if the binary actually matches the code.
If, for example, MacOS / Microsoft Windows include a copy of OpenSSL with the OS, how can I be sure they are not adding their own sort of malicious spice into it? Can I trust that the keys generated with it will be truly secure? How can I audit it?
At least with the GPL there's some level of legal accountability in that any change that is not openly shared would be illegal. But with MIT there are no legal barriers against malicious code, it's totally legal for companies to force feed me totally legal changes that I wouldn't want and/or that I might not even notice they are there.
If you're developing software for a platform that doesn't allow users to replace dynamic libraries (game consoles, iOS, many embedded/commercial systems), you won't be able to legally use any GPL or AGPL libraries.
While I strongly agree with the motives behind copyleft licenses, I personally never use them because I've had many occasions where I was unable to use any available library for a specific task because they all had incompatible licenses.
I release code for the sole purpose of allowing others to use it. I don't want to impose any restrictions on my fellow developers, because I understand the struggle it can bring.
Even for desktop programs, I prefer MIT or BSD because it allows others to take snippets of code without needing to re-license anything.
Yes I understand that means anyone can make a closed-source fork, but that doesn't bother me. If I wanted to sell it I might care, but I would have used a different license for a commercial project anyway.
Sorry, I'm not much of a software dev so bear with me:
If the libraries are GPL licensed, is there a problem? Unless you're editing the libraries themselves.
Now if the application is GPL licensed and you're adding functionality to use other libraries, please push upstream. It helps the community and the author will more likely than not be happy to receive it
Any linking against GPL software requires you to also release your source code under GPL. ~~A~~LGPL allows you to link to it dynamically without relicensing, but as explained, there are platforms where dynamic linking isn't an option, which means these libraries can't be used if one doesn't want to provide ~~A~~LGPL licensed source code of their own product.
Its simple: its to exploit it in a corporate setting. I license under MIT because a lot of my things are of small convenience, but never without debating the ethics of why I am licensing it.
GNU is the enemy to capitalism and if you need more proof, look at what Apple has done with LLVM/Clang and CUPS. We need GNU more than ever.
For me, my personal projects are generally MIT licensed. I generally don't like "restrictions" on licenses, even if those "restrictions" are requiring others to provide their source and I want as many people to use my projects as possible, I don't like to restrict who uses it, even if it's just small/home businesses who don't want to publish the updated source code. Although, I admit, I'm not a huge fan of large corporations potentially using my code to generate a profit and do evil things with it, but I also think that's not going to be very common versus the amount of use others could get from it by having it using MIT who might not be able to use it otherwise with AGPL.
With that said, though, I have been starting to come around more to AGPL these days.
If this is not the right community for this question, I would be happy to be redirected elsewhere, so just let me know.
I recently configured my terminal emulator to an aesthetic that I like (custom font, coloring, shell prompt, etc) and it has made me wonder about customization in gnome.
One of the biggest things that I wish I could change in gnome is the grey-ness of the application view.
In this screenshot, you can see the familiar application view. In between the organizing folders, the desktops, and the dock, there is just so much nothing.
I am wondering if it is possible to customize this relatively easily. I would much prefer an image of my own choosing in place of this, or at least a different color from time to time.
Is anyone aware if this is configurable? I can't seem to find an extension for this, or any real information on how you would do such a thing.
Those who don't have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?
Context:
I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.
I've had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to really touch anything for a couple of years. I don't need the latest software at all times.
I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.
Ubuntu is literally just Debian unstable with a bunch of patches. Literally every time I've been forced to use it, it's been broken in at least a few obvious places.
Ubuntu comes with non-free drivers which can make it easier to set up and use. I use Debian on my server and Ubuntu on my laptops. They have both been pretty reliable for me. LTS versions of Ubuntu are pretty bug free but have older versions of software. I'd guess that Daniel was using a non-LTS release which are a bit more bleeding edge. The LTS ones strike a good balance between modernity and stability.
I had problems with waking from sleep/hibernate, audio issues (total dropouts as well as distortion in screen-recording apps), choppy video playback and refusal to enter fullscreen, wonky cursor scaling, apps not working as expected or not running at all. I've managed to fix most of these or find temporary workarounds (grateful for flatpaks for once!) or alternative applications. But the experience was not fun, particularly as there was only a 2 week return window for the laptop and I needed to be sure the problems weren't hardware design/choice related. And I'm finding it 50/50 whether an app actually works when I install it from the repo. There's a lot less documentation for manually installing things as well and DNF is slow compared to apt...
I don't want to say for certain that Fedora as a distro is to blame but I suspect that it is. I miss my Debian days.
This! Debian with Gnome or others is the answer. Take an afternoon to make it yours, then forget it. You can use backported kernels on Debian, to support newer hardware. Try this or upgrade to Debian 13 right now by changing the sourcefile to trixie instead of bookworm. Note : if you use Gnome, let gnome-software handle the updates for you (there's an equivalent for kde). If you use others, configure unattented-upgrades for automatic updates.
The thing with Debian is that yes, it's the most stable distro family, but stable != "just works", especially when talking about a PC and not a server (as a PC is more likely to need additional hardware drivers). Furthermore, when the time comes that you DO want to upgrade Debian to a newer version, it's one of the more painful distros to do so.
I think fedora is a good compromise there. It's unstable compared to RHEL, but it's generally well-vetted and won't cause a serious headache once every few years like Debian.
As others have mentioned, Debian stable and Xubuntu are my default recommendations for anyone who wants a simple "just works" kind of system. Debian if they want it to be as clean as possible, Xubuntu if they want some creature comfort right out of the box.
I’ve been distro hopping for decades. I got exhausted with things constantly breaking. I’ve been using mint for the past six months with zero issues. It’s so refreshing that everything just works.
Bazzite is a custom Fedora Atomic image built with cloud native technology that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld..
Doesn't ucore also have to restart to apply updates?
Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts as opposed to in-place updates, unless one's startup is completely automated and drives are on-device keyfile decrypted, but that probably fits some threat models for security.
Not super ideal for a server as far as maintenance and uptime to have unexpected, frequent restarts
This is such a weird take given that 99.9% of people here are just running this on their home servers which aren't dictated by a SLA, so it's not like people need to worry about reboots. Just reboot once a month unless there's some odd CVE you need to hit sooner than later.
There's tons of documentation for CoreOS and it's been around for more than a decade.
If you're running a container workload, it can't be beat in my opinion. All the security and configuration issues are handled for you, which is especially ideal for a home user who is generally not a security expert.
They won't apply unexpectedly, so you can reboot at a time that suits. Unless there's a specific security risk there's no need to apply them frequently. Total downtime is the length of a restart, which is also nice and easy.
It won't fit every use-case, but if you're looking for a zero-maintenance containerized-workload option, it can't be beat.
Yeah, sure. I was running Bluefin-DX. One day image maintainers decided to replace something and things break. UBlue is an amazing project. Team is trying hard but it's definitely not zero mainainace. I fear they are chasing so many UBlue flavours, recently an LTS one based on CoreOS, spreading thin.
nvidia-container-toolkit seems to have been replaced by golang-github-nvidia-container-toolkit, which breaks my containers. After this week’s update: Reverted back to last week, and my container runs:
🤷 I've been running Aurora and uCore for over a year and have yet to do any maintenance.
You can roll back to the previous working build by simply restarting, it's pretty much the easiest fix ever and still zero maintenance (since you didn't have to reconfigure or troubleshoot anything, just restart).
Jorge, OP asked about “not having to really touch anything for a couple of years”. I am just sharing my experience. Big fan of containers and really appreciate your efforts of pulling containers tech into Linux desktop. Thank you!
I don’t understand the answer though. Maybe I am missing something here. There’s an official Bluefin-DX-Nvidia iso. Nvidia-containers-toolkit was part of that iso.
On a separate note, I liked the idea of GTS edition. Since few weeks ago iso became unavailable pending some fix. At the same time I see loads of new LTS edition buzz. It’s still in Alpha though. I feel confused.
The answer is if you're depending on software that is closed and out of your control (aka. you have an Nvidia card) then you should have support expectations around that hardware and linux.
There are no GTS ISOs because we don't have a reliable way to make ISOs (the ones we have now are workarounds) but that should be finished soon.
Xubuntu LTS. I've been meaning to switch to Debian Stable when something breaks, but it's my third LTS on the desktop and 5th on the laptop and there was just no opportunity. I also learned to avoid PPAs and other 3rd party repos, and just use appimages when possible.
You can have a kernel from Testing or even Sid, I believe, but yeah, it's what we want to avoid - tweaking.
As someone who just had to bandaid an unexplained battery draw on his wife's MacBook - no, Mac OS no longer "just works". Apple buries some of the most basic settings inside a command line-only tool called pmset, and even then those can be arbitrarily overridden by other processes.
And even after a fresh reinstall and new battery, it still drains the battery faster in hibernation mode than my Thinkpad T14 G1 running LMDE does while sleeping. Yeah, that was a fun discovery.
That Thinkpad is by far one of my most dependable machines.
If you have battery drain, make sure you’ve disabled the option to regularly wake up and do some background processing (check for emails, sync photos, etc.). Settings → Battery → Options… → Wake for network access. (Or search for “Power Nap” in the System Sertings dialog.)
So here's the thing - if you can think of it, I've already tried it 😅 I spent a week and a half sifting through countless forum posts on Apple's own support center, Macrumors, reddit, and a host of other forums.
The "Wake for network access" setting was the first thing I disabled after I wiped and reinstalled the OS. Among a number of other settings, including "Power Nap". Still got the fucking "EC.DarkPME (Maintenance)" process firing off every ~45 seconds, no matter what I did, causing excessive insomnia and draining the battery within 12 hours.
What I ended up doing was using a little tool called "FluTooth" to automatically disable wifi/Bluetooth on sleep (the built-in OS settings did fuck-all), set hibernationmode to 25, and a few other tweaks with pmset that currently escape me (edit: disabled networkoversleep, womp, ttyskeepawake, powernap - which was still set to 1 even with the setting in System Settings was disabled 🤨), and a couple others I can't remember as it's not here in front of me).
I put several full charge cycles on the brand new battery before it finally calmed the fuck down.
I feel you. I still use an intel macbook with tweaks i cannot remember plus 3rd party utils like Turbo Boost switcher. That experience alone has kept me from upgrading to newer models.
In retrospect my powerbook g4 (Ti) and os 9 was peak computing.
My Thinkpad T14 running Linux Mint (LMDE) gets better battery life on "Suspend" than that damn MBP does when hibernated. It's the 2017 A1706, too - out of ALL the variants it had to be that one 😂
Oh no. Maybe some Incense to cleanse the demons? (⊙_⊙)
Edit: I just remembered I had a similar problem, after changing the battery on my 2015. This thread at macrumors helped me tremendously especially the last entry (did it on three seperate days before it had an effect.) but I'm sure you already tried all of that. Just for the off chance.
After a lot of surfing, found out how to get these settings. So, for half an hour, I have an instant wake, and hibernate after that. No battery loss while sleeping on battery.
Currently in use...
That thread was a godsend. Turning off tcpkeepalive was the other one that I couldn't remember, but that seemed to help out as well.
My wife has had multiple MacBooks over the years (I set up her old 2009-era A1278 with Linux Mint for the kids to do homework), and after I "fixed" it and talked about the longer wake-up process, she told me that's what she was used to already and the "super fast wake up" was a very new thing for her when she bought it. So no complaints from her, and the battery performs better. Win/win.
I'm also currently almost exclusively on Linux. My Spouse has a Fedora powered Notebook with a super fast 8/16 core amd processor and loves it dearly. (Cannot remember the maker, but since the BIOS/setup was huge PITA I wont be buying from them again.) I used to love the simplicity and light-weighted -ness of apples setup, but over the years Linux systems made it far easier to use them as a "digital hub". Turns out I did not enjoy selling my soul to Satan (Oracle Virtualbox) or pay an extra 100 bucks per year (Corel Parallels) just so I could use a few windows only tools I had.
I used to lose my keys all the time. I don't want to spend so much time looking for my keys, nowadays I mostly just leave them in the front door, I rarely lock it and it works like a champ.
Comparing a PC maintenance to leaving the keys outside the front door is too dramatic, to not say the least...
...unless you work at NASA and/or your PC is holding something too valuable/sensitive/high-priority for others to want to hack it "that badly" -- which I (highly) doubt it.
You're allowing for more attack vectors that would not be there if the system were to be patched. Depending on the severity of the vulnerability, this can result in something like crashes or something as bad as remote code execution, which means attackers can essentially do whatever they want with the pwned machine, such as dropping malware and such. If you wanna try this in action, just spin up a old EOL Windows machine and throw a bunch of metasploit payloads at it and see what you can get.
While nothing sensitive may be going to or on the machine (which may seem to be the case but rarely is the case), this acts as an initial foothold in your environment and can be used as a jumpbox of sorts for the attacker to enumerate the rest of your network.
And:
Not having vulnerability fixes that are already public. Once a patch/update is released, it inherently exposes to a wider audience that a vulnerability exists (assuming we’re only talking about security updates). That then sets a target on all devices running that software that they are vulnerable until updated.
There’s a reason after windows Patch Tuesday there is Exploit Wednesday.
Yes, a computer with vulnerabilities can allow access to others on the network. That’s what it means to step through a network. If computer A is compromised, computer B doesn’t know that so it will still have the same permissions as pre-compromise. If computer A was allowed admin access to computer B, now there are 2 compromised computers.
Nice cherry picking/moving the goalpost, but that is not how refuting works. A PC at NASA has a much higher "threat level" than my Orange pi zero 3, just chilling on the background. Which means, a potential "security hole" may prove harmful for these pcs... but it'll definitely not hurt me in the slightest.
And before you parrot with other links and/or excuses... yes, I'm not negating their existence. I'm just saying they are there... but, well... "who cares"? If anything, its much faster to set up my distro back up "just like never happened before" than performing any "maintenance" whatsoever. Again, "Common sense antivirus" reigns supreme here -- know what you are doing, and none of these things will matter.
You keep using the word "maintenance". All I'm worried about is not installing any security patches for months.
The problem that I tried to highlight with my "cherry picking" is:
Running a machine with open vulnerabilities for which patches exist also "paints a target on your back": even if your data is worthless, you are essentially offering free cloud compute.
But mostly, a single compromised machine can be an entrypoint towards your entire home network.
So unless you have separated this Orange Pi into its own VLAN or done some other advanced router magic, the Orange Pi can reach, and thus more easily attack all your other devices on the network.
Unless you treat your entire home network as untrusted and have everything shut off on the computers where you do keep private data, the Orange Pi will still be a security risk to your entire home network, regardless of what can be found on the little machine itself.
This really is the answer. The more services you add, the more of your attention they will require. Granted, for most services already integrated into the distro’s repo, the added admin overhead will likely be minimal, but it can add up. That’s not to say the admin overhead can’t be addressed. That’s why scripting and crons, among some other utilities, exist!
this video is really well done. Its so casual compared with the nerdiness of most windows -> linux videos. Also does anyone know what that mic is? Also I love how smooth Peertube is. The compression and loading time is such a noticeable improvement.
Yep! In steam, Add Game > Add Non-Steam Game > Select the Game. Then in the game's properties, go to the compatibility section and choose "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool", which will then run the game under Proton.
That said, I actually run a number of games under Wine. The Heroic Launcher covers GOG, Epic, and Prime games, and will install them with Wine enabled for them by default.
It's worth buying games on GOG instead of Steam where possible. Games on GOG are DRM-free, so you can download the installer and keep a backup of it, and it'll work indefinitely.
Some games on Steam are DRM-free, but Steam doesn't provide a way to download a standalone installer like GOG does.
Antivirus is completely unnecessary and terrible on windows and linux... and on linux it's uniquely useless. Everything is installed from a centralized repo, antiviruses won't be of any help at all. antiviruses came about because windows let executables just be run easily and simply and used them as the default way of installing software, this was beyond idiotic and the reason that OS became infested with malware. Linux never made that mistake from the start, and so antivirus is unnecessary.
9 times out of 10 the software you’re looking will typically land in your Distribution’s repository, before it lands in the main repository it’ll be vetted for stability and security in a testing repository.
If you want to install software outside your distributions repository you will need to vet the software yourself and make sure it’s compatible with your distro.
I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that it generates a new system for you on update and lets you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lmde is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
Fedora (and related distros, including Bazzite) are indeed superior. The gap is even larger when comparing Atomic distros... sorry to say... Red Hat's money does show! Now, for many to use any Red Hat's variant, whether because of ideology, non-American (hat tip to lemmy.ml/u/eugenia), ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc... I find it concerning. The only one I find it as a valid option, specially if for an corporation in the US, is Alma Linux. I find Mint the most newbie friendly and also extremely stable. Like you, I dislike Cinnamon enormously, (puzzled why they decided to ditch KDE!) but I still recommended to new people in Linux. Personally, I still in the quest to find the one for me (been with OpenSUSE for a few months but with my eyes on TuxedoOS already). I agree that Atomic distros seems to be the future for most users, but beside Bazzite, don't think the others are equally stable (someone correct me if I am wrong). Bazzite however, as expressed above, comes from a murky parent that many linux fans, specially those in lemmy.ml, should be wary of. Think of it as Android, as a phone OS is great, probably the best there is today, but coming from the corporation as it comes from, from the country it comes from that uses sanctions as it does, should be a 'no thank you' for most in the world. Now, Debian also is a US registered distro, yes, but, unlike Red Hat-IBM or Google's products, it is far more universal and with enough human capital abroad that easily can fork it, it need be. Same apply as the Linux kernel (that is why China went that route). I however, for the future, I like the idea of Arch, and wonder if ever can be made stable and waiting for someone to propel Arch into a stable variant and not just another "gaming distro" (crossing my fingers in KDE's new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes. [My first post in this type of social media!!]
ethical, pro-human rights (no getting big checks from US army), etc… I find it concerning.
Why do you find it concerning from the perspective of using the distro? the software is still open source, and it's not like they're benefitting from user-count. Redhat makes its money selling support, if you don't like their business model, simply don't pay them for support, and you get all the benefits and none of the ethical qualms.
KDE’s new distro!). Till, then, most users I think we should still recommend some veteran Debian based and Mint still checks most boxes.
I don't think these ethical fears are grounds enough when completely unsubstantiated to be recommending a distribution that's fundamentally worse for beginners.
"Why do you find it concerning...?" Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don't give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with "free" Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows... a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition... this applies to both open or closed software. Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer. IBM does the same... and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples... this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Open software is great and a reassurance that no altering can go unnoticed but let's be realistic, when is the last time some entity, let alone non-American) audited a entire package of Fedora, let alone every single version of it, or smaller software. Debian is a US based but highly global collaborative distro so malice is far harder to introduce and gone unnoticed. Mint is based on Ireland so hardly with an militaristic goal, either by maintainers, financiers or country. My current OpenSUSE is far more susceptible to tampering than Mint, but it still cannot reach the knees of Fedora on susceptibility. We should look at Android and Chrome... It is free, opensource, but the fact that Google de-facto controls it, uses it to dominate the landscape, first by suffocating competition and then, to steer where it wants the technology to go to. Therefore that it is opensource is great, we can check the code once in a while,
I am one of the very few that recognize Fedora is ahead of Ubuntu deviates yet I think we should steer clear from it. To newcomers, I tell them the reality; in my opinion Fedora is the marginally the best linux distro, now, if ethics (and a little bit privacy) is one of the motives to move away from Windows, you should consider distros not so heavily relying on the US and Mint usually comes first in my mind for them. We don't want to get to the point that Fedora is so vastly superior to all the rest of Linux distros, that will be the only game in town... like we did by solely go after Android (I really miss what my Nokia N9's Meego could have become!)
“Why do you find it concerning…?” Because with just increasing the user base, greatly benefits this corporation, even though we don’t give a penny for using Fedora. This is why Google flooded schools with “free” Android netbooks and why Microsoft winks at hundreds of millions of pirated Windows… a larger customer base benefits you by suffocating the competition…
This would make sense if redhat had partnerships with hardware vendors and was locking down systems. They've never done that and there's no evidence of a plan to. Furthermore, suffocating the competition when the competition is closed source platforms like what google is doing and microsoft is a good thing. Competition isn't inherently good, competition is good when it does good things. In the case of completely FOSS from the ground up software, there's no benefit to competition, it just means duplication of massive amounts of effort. If fedora started doing something shitty, there is no doubt that it would INSTANTLY be forked by hundreds of users to remove that, there's no way for redhat to create a vendor-lockin situation the same can't be said for windows or chromeos (yes you can technically fork chromeos but they have the software vendor locked on the hardware).
Redhat simply doesn't have that level of control and can't ever, unless they completely change their business model, which would also instantly make them worthless.
In other words, there's no such thing as a redhat user, fedora is just a linux distro without any way of locking the user in to their particular distro. I'd be more worried about ubuntu trying this with snap. I challenge you going down this line of thinking to actually create a scenario where this is a problem that makes strategic sense on their part.
this applies to both open or closed software.
It could, but it doesn't when the software isn't vendor locked and is fully open source.
Red Hat is not just a corporation after money, I am 100% fine with that, it is just one that goes after military contracts therefore lobbies for military causes as a good PR with its buyer.
Again, as a user, how does this matter? Do you not think the military should run FOSS software? If you're anti-military it's not like proprietary software won't work there. I'd rather have the military running foss software than proprietary software personally. Somebody was going to do it anyway, what does it matter?
IBM does the same… and Amazon, HP, etc. Not all American companies are like that, not at all, but these are. Then is the problem how the US, more and more, is relying in sanctions to hurt foreign entities and peoples… this can be not only by forbidding the export of software but also altering its content.
Yes, the US is evil, but I don't see what that has to do with their military running libre software.
I feel that I am being misinterpreted here. Of course FOSS if infinitely preferable to most close source, even if FOSS was created by the devil itself! And I am neutral US army branches using FOSS or not, that is not a problem for us civilians per se; the US army just using FOSS when they have unlimited budget and have home-brewed closed sources available and still choose Linux just proves that FOSS is superior! Now, that Red Hat depends heavily on US government contracts (mostly US armed forces) should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics (again, I say ethics and a little bit privacy concerns), not technological, at least no in the short term. However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily). Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them... now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development... Zero. That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources. It is just a principle, of course, I tell my audience that they can use Fedora and I understand it, it is technologically a bit better than Mint, yet not quite not as an ethical choice, nor good for the technology ecosystem in the long run either. Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master. This reminds me of Mozilla... all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it... and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US' foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
should be a red flag for any person concerning about ethics
I agree that it's a red flag... but in this case, I don't think that red flag really amounts to something, just because something is a bad sign doesn't mean it actually matters on proper analysis.
However, in the long term, it is bad even technologically, since the advantage will be so vastly superior than most would be not be able to compete (or even fork it easily).
It will always be incredibly easy to fork because they have to follow the GPL.
Huawei, for instance, is the only with the tens of billions $ and human capital enough being able to fork Android, but even still, it is proven difficult for them…
Forking android is extremely easy, the part of android that they're unable to fork is the google play store... which is proprietary. Redhat has no equivalent and if they ever made one, they'd instantly be abandoned because the whole point of their business model is being FOSS.
now imagine a country like Brazil, Mexico or South Africa, what is the chances they can fork it properly and continue with the same level of development… Zero
Literally anyone in their basement can do it, tbh, i don't know why you think this is difficult, android is a terrible example for this since it is mostly proprietary, sure the OS itself isn't, but google play services are the hard part, again.
That is why, the rest of the world should favor early on Linux distros that are less prone to be compromised, while they still at par with the competition, before they become the only technologically and logistical option in town, both in market share and resources
No, that's why we should favor the GPL to the MIT license, and FOSS to proprietary software.
Also there is the fact that, favoring the platform that Red Hat, having a chunk of revenues coming from the US army, makes then more dependent of these contracts, and even secretly lobbing for its master.
Except in this case their advantage is their free open source nature, which is literally the only reason the government has contracts with them.
This reminds me of Mozilla… all these years taking hundreds of millions from Google was good for us, Firefox lovers, but co-created a unhealthy relationship that stiffed real competition to Chrome and, worse yet, suffocated any third competition to even try it… and here we are, an unhealthy browser landscape dominated by two trillion dollar corporations and practically impossible to compete against.
we're purely better off for it. librewolf exists, servo is picking up funding if you don't like librewolf for some reason. The only reason firefox exists as a competitor is because of this antitrust situation, if we didn't use firefox because we were concerned about this, we'd have literally nothing. It's also a counter-example to this idea you have that forking is difficult... librewolf happened and it was easy.
BTW, I am not anti-military, nor anti-US (I live in the US and most people and business are good hearten here). I am just anti any military going around and deliberately killing mostly civilians abroad and even cannibalizing on other priorities to do so (The US’ foreign policy also deliberately targets civilians abroad with its policies). Switzerland has a relatively strong army but that is clearly defensive, (not that Swiss people are that nice, being landlocked and surrounded by larger countries makes one pragmatic, but still, that it is the aim.)
I'm openly anti-military and anti-US, but I don't think you've thought these arguments fully through.
Of course, it is easy to fork, is that when you depend solely on a entity that it is prone to abandon you, you wont have the resources to continue the development. US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left. This is not far fetched, this is what happens with Android and Firefox. If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I'm in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
I am afraid we are taking different things here... I look in a long perspective view, you in a inmediate future, where, as you said, no big changes if a dominant FOSS project goes hostile. The lack of expertise, culture makes it really hard in fact. Look at this... SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative... it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard... relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran... well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
US has overwhelmingly all the developers of Fedora. If Fedora wins over all other linux based distros (and at this time it could be easily do in a near future), developers in other countries will move on into other projects (or move to the US). If the US, once Fedora is so clear dominant and Debian and Arch ceased to exists down the road, the US will find it compelling to close source Fedora and leave the rest of the world with a forked version but unable to develop for the time being since there is no Linux experts around left.
this isn't even possible even if fedora got 99.9999% market share, most linux distros are passion projects, even the ones that aren't don't need much funding. Debian will never go away, arch will never go away, so that simply can't happen unless they're militaristically destroyed. You say this is not far fetched, but i'm afraid I completely disagree, that doesn't even sound remotely possible. Fedora doesn't even do that much, they just package together a bunch of other things that are developed completely independently of them (they don't even make their own kernel, that's like 90% of the work!)
fedora cannot legally become closed source, most of it is GPL licensed. Lookup "copyleft", this is why android isn't already proprietary.
If Firefox closes, the dudes in librewolf will survive for a few months (I’m in Librewolf), that is it; none of them are capable of keeping developing Gecko (the engine of Firefox). Imagine that Google close sources Android, no one in the world (besides Huawei) could keep develop it competitively for at least a decade!
This isn't true, there are many open source android projects could easily keep things going. The only reason huawei does all that is because of the proprietary parts, this doesn't exist as a problem in linux, and cannot be created as one. Firefox would still be developed without mozilla, just significantly slower. Lookup phones with microg, they have no such issues keeping things going. Browsers are a special case that require a ton of resources to keep secure, OS's, not so much.
Also, google cannot legally close source android, that's the point of the GPL.
Even then what you're saying is "these aren't viable open source projects without a lot of funding" and android absolutely is, firefox MIGHT be.
Look at this… SWIFT (an interbanking payment system) , when US, in spite being European, dominates it completely, Russia and China has been for half a decade create and alternative… it is not a mayor technically difficult platform to replicate, but it is proven very hard… relying on it for decades had left every country at its merci and now that most of the world wants an alternative still could not come up with a viable alternative. Remember also when France/EU wanted to create a payment system with Iran… well, never came to fruition. Haven relying in the US for decades left Europe powerless for these innovations. The same could happen with Fedora if we start adopting it in mass.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android... how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment... just forking sure...
Just as a remark... "cannot legally become closed source". Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump... any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want... Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won't see much progress... and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents "Broad Immunity for Official Acts" and "Absolute Immunity for Core Powers" so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
I see we are not going nowhere here, but I highly appreciate your effort to make me understand your view. Russia and China, let alone Cuba, Venezuela, Iran etc al want to develop an alternative from Android… how is it going? Only China is pulling it off, and after 5 years already and massive investment… just forking sure…
Like i've said repeatedly, it's the google play store, the proprietary parts they are having trouble duplicating. Even little people can make ROMS on XDA, it's not a big deal.
If they cannot do the work that single devs can do, then they aren't even trying.
Single inexperienced developers do this with regularity for fun.
Just as a remark… “cannot legally become closed source”. Do you really think the US is bound by any legality at this point?! And it is not just Trump… any President could scrap off any legality if it need be and lower courts could just complain all the want… Of the 100+ lawsuit cases Trump already has accumulated in 3 months you won’t see much progress… and recently, even the US Supreme Court already gave Presidents “Broad Immunity for Official Acts” and “Absolute Immunity for Core Powers” so good luck for upholding GPL if an administration wants to force software out of it.
There's no precedent for this and it seems like baseless paranoia. Again, fedora's whole selling point is essentially the GPL, getting rid of it would make it completely worthless, none of the KDE devs would be down for this, none of the linux kernel devs would be down for this, all they'd have is DNF... Also, if this happened, redhat having marketshare would be the least of our worries. It really wouldn't even matter.
Hell, they hardly even have DNF since they're trying to switch to flatpak, soon they won't even be in control of most of packaging, just the default suite of apps. This is an incredibly bad move if they're ever going to do what you're claiming, it's essentially irreversible.
None of the value proposition of fedora is in the actual software they make, it's the distribution of that software that's valuable, they package it well, but they don't make it themselves... KDE will not go with redhat, they're separate orgs, as is linux, as is systemd, even coreutils aren't made by them.
You seem to be under the impression that fedora is entirely made by redhat, this is completely false, it's just a bunch of things other people make they've bundled together. Redhat does not and cannot have much power over this unless they start building massive amounts of infrastructure from scratch, which they won't be able to justify to investors because it will, again, be entirely against their business model.
The moment fedora becomes proprietary, people will fork, switch, and never think about them again. Even if they do become proprietary through some magic, we'll still have all the previous versions to work with, they'll have to offer some features to make switching to the proprietary version worthwhile, and given what KDE already offers, i can't even imagine what that would be.
They honestly probably don't even need to fork... dnf isn't even that good of a package manager.
If you have nothing to lose, ie. if you don't play anything with anticheat or you don't use any productivity software with crazy DRM platform-locking you into Windows, do it, switch over.
The bulk of all games will run in Proton or even vanilla WINE now and the minority that's platform-locked into Windows is anything that uses kernel-level anticheat, if you only play single-player games or even virtual board games like Civilization, those will broadly work fine in WINE/Proton and even in the case of the aforementioned Civilization, those games starting from Civ5 onward even have native Linux ports, but the Windows versions tend to perform better in Proton, and as for productivity software, there's plenty of alternatives to things like Maya, Photoshop, Lightroom, or Premiere/AfterEffects to choose from that isn't platform-locked anywhere, eg. Blender as a Maya alternative, Krita or GIMP as a Photoshop alternative, RawTherapee or Darktable as a Lightroom alternative, and KdenLive or Davinci Resolve as a Premiere/AfterEffects alternative.
Oh, and as for Illustrator, you have Inkscape as an alternative, and for Paint Tool SAI, you got MyPaint as an alternative.
As for a good distro to get you started, Debian or OpenSUSE seem pretty solid for beginners, and Debian Stable at least has a backports repo for newer software, and there's also ChimeraOS if you're building your PC into a games console.
Also, if you're looking for a good Foobar2k or iTunes alternative, Fooyin is great for that, and Whipper's a good CD ripper and basically an open Exact Audio Copy clone, although it's text-based. You could also use CUERipper in WINE as another good open alternative to Exact Audio Copy, which is proprietary. CUETools will work fine in Mono as well.
Fooyin's a really good alternative and if you can flash Rockbox onto an older iPod that supports that custom firmware, then it'll just function as a normal external drive, no iTunes sync needed unlike with stock Apple firmware.
As I pointed out, if you have an older iPod, eg. like an iPod Video or Classic, or any other player that supports it, Rockbox is a thing you can flash onto it.
I do have one and I have a Mac with iTunes Match (iCloud music syncing for iPhone). That said I keep most of my actual files on my Ubuntu machine and might want to experiment with the iPod at some point.
You'll need an original iPod, iPod Mini, or iPod Video or Classic for Rockbox compatibility. iPod Touch is just an iPhone without the phone, so it's locked into iOS, but the original iPod, and iPod Mini, Video, and Classic all support Rockbox.
I presume any generation of iPod Shuffle or Nano is also locked into Apple firmware.
Star Citizen runs just fine under linux. For the most part, anyway. Being under active dev it breaks occasionally, but the Linux User Group has always gotten it working again so far.
I would recommend using Wine directly over using Lutris right now, but that's an option you can pick in this script. Join the discord if you have trouble, people are friendly there if you're polite.
✅ open-source drivers for CPU and GPU are included in the Linux Kernel and work very well. If you have bleeding edge news hardware, check online in which Kernel version they are supposed and choose Linux distro accordingly
Web Browser
✅ Chrome/chromium, ✅ Firefox. All are commonly available in your distro software repository by default, or otherwise with Flatpak
Web-based email
✅ not dependent on OS. Local Email client software are available, one exemple is Thunderbird.
Office suite
✅ LibreOffice, or anything web-based such as Google Docs will work independently of the OS
Itunes
Many music players/library managers are available on Linux, I don't have any specific recommendations here, I am self-hosting Jellyfin for my music needs
JBL
not sure what you mean here ? Your headset/speakers ? Don't see why it wouldn't work
Music score reader/editor
✅ MuseScore, I also use Guitar Pro (7, 8) inside Bottle (wine) and it works with some tweaks needed for fixing font bug
Antivirus
✅ ClamAV, arguable if you need an antivirus at all
Python
✅ many IDEs are available, a scary amount of Linux distribution rely on Python under the hood 😅
✅ Steam, ✅ Heroic Games Launcher (for Epic and GOG), ✅ Lutris
VPN
✅ OpenVPN and ✅ Wireguard protocols are supported (maybe others), you can find many providers using these protocols. Most ask you to use their app, but digging a little you often have options to configure the VPN connection without installing anything extra. I know Nord on client works on Linux, I haven't tried other. Mulldav is a very frequent recommendation in Linux communities
Windows games compatibility
✅ Wine/Proton via Steam, Lutris, Heroic and Bottles. The only thing that will block you is competitive multiplayer games with Anti-Cheat
This isn't exactly what I recommend. Only in the case the hardware is bleeding edge, as in, it was released less than 6 month ago, then check in which Kernel version it starts to be supported, as well as check the Kernel version shipping with the distribution you are interested in installing. Distro Kernel version >= Kernel version where the driver starts to be included, no problems. Otherwise, check a distro that has more frequent upgrades.
Things to check: GPU, CPU, WiFi chip, Ethernet chip. In windows you can find the information in the device manager. On Linux (e.g: test with a live USB) the command lspci with display the information.
A common case would be: I am interested in Debian because I heard it's the most stable, will my AMD 5070XT work with that ? Probably not very well, better Check Ubuntu non-LTS or Fedora.
I am not recommending op to modify the Kernel from the Linux distro, just consider this point in choosing the distro.
Even on older kernels, if anything hardware like GPUs will benefit more from running newer drivers than a newer kernel, ie. AMD cards from GCN1 up to present-day RDNA3 are actively being supported by Mesa and the dev branch generally tends to have more optimizations especially for newer cards but also older ones as well, than the latest stable branch.
The EL distros - CentOS Stream, Alma, and Rocky, all have a package which allows you to install a manufacturer repo that lets you install the latest AMD drivers from, for example, and CentOS Stream 10 and Alma 10 are both on the 6.12 kernel now.
Gmail is web-based, you can use it with Firefox. For that matter Linux doesn't bind you to Firefox either, you can use Chrome and other browsers. I never used office 360 or Libre, I just use google docs.
I just switched to linux mint and the install was a lot easier than i thought. Works fine. I love the customization, the lightweight OS and its quite easy to use. Barely needed to use the terminal. The only problems i've faced is discord screenshare not showing my cursor and time to time lagging my games, gaming has not been without issues, mostly played deadlock and it has in my experience came with some bugs.
The linux ecosystem, depending on which distro you choose, has anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of packages. There's only select software that you can't virtualize from Windows to Linux, so you may not even be required to find alternatives.
But without listing any software at all, it's hard to tell you definitively...
Depending on what VPN software you use, they may already have a linux version. All of the big-name ones do, as well as a good chunk of the smaller ones.
For anti-virus, you don't need one in Linux. Even for Windows I would recommend using the built-in AV, rather than Norton.
Edit: I see you use Norton VPN. That one doesn't have a linux version. Check out Mullvlad or Nord VPN.
Most VPNs support Wireguard, which is built in to Linux. If your VPN provider doesn't have a Linux app, you can usually usually download a Wireguard config file from them and use it on Linux. You can import a WireGuard config into NetworkManager using a command like:
sudo nmcli connection import type wireguard file /tmp/example.conf
Then it should appear in the network list in KDE / GNOME / whatever other desktop environment you're using.
AMD drivers: Native, will auto-install as the mesa library, AMD is tits in Linux, it just works.
Gmail: Thunderbird works with Gmail accounts and can sync the calendar.
iTunes: Rhythmbox has a very similar layout to iTunes and so should feel pretty familiar.
Anti-virus: Linux doesn't really need antivirus in the same way Windows does because it's more locked down and doesn't have the same vectors of attack. If someone is hacking a Linux machine, it's a corporate server, not your desktop PC. If you still think you might need one ClamAV is available for Linux distributions. (.deb for Debian derivaties and .rpm for Fedora derivatives)
Py-Charm: As others have noted, Python is installed natively and is usually already implemented "out of the box" on a fresh install. No need for a program to run it, Python is just... there already.
Remote Desktop: Whatever distribution you have will likely also come with a Remote Desktop client. I am unaware of whether or not they will connect natively to iOS.
Star Citizen: You should be able to add this as a non-Steam game to Steam and use Steam's Proton compatibility layer to play it. A few years ago they were literally asking for Linux players to test it with Proton and Easy Anti-Cheat.
VPN: Linux has extensive VPN support including "roll your own" through either OpenVPN or Wireguard.
Windows Games: Steam, using the Proton compatibility layer, which is essentially WINe, just made a little easier. As with Star Citizen, just add it as a non-Steam game and viola.
AMD Drivers: if your GPU is new enough (which it probably is since you're playing Star citizen) it should be just magic here since they come together with the kernel.
Chrome: it's available for Linux, no need to switch. Although Firefox is very nice too.
Gmail: not sure what you mean, Gmail is a website, those are available on any platform. If you meant a desktop email client (which honestly I have never in my life used) there's Thunderbird.
Office 360: Are you talking about Microsoft 365? Is that not a website too? In any case Libre office is a nice alternative to the classical Office desktop app too in case you want that.
I-Tunes: A quick search online reveals people use wine to run the Windows version of iTunes, although I would probably consider migrating. Spotify has a native client and there are some places where you can buy music and have it locally for playback.
JBL: not sure what this is other than a brand for speakers.
Anti-virus: You almost assuredly don't need an anti-virus on Linux, as long as you install software through the proper channels (i.e. using the package manager) chances of virus are so small it's not something to worry about. Most Linux anti-virus serve to check windows binaries in the system to avoid someone using the Linux machine to send virus to Windows users.
PyCharm: it's available for Linux
Remote desktop to iOS: Not sure this is possible even on Windows, I use remmina for remote desktop, it supports several ways of connecting to the other device so maybe see if it works for you.
Star citizen: Never played it but it seems to be playable with Wine.
Steam: While steam is available not all games are compatible, check out protondb.com/ to see the status of any specific Steam game.
VPN: should be native on Linux, there's a protocol caller OpenVPN which most VPN providers will give you a Config file for that you can use directly on the network applet on Linux.
PS: Next time share the list in text, it makes it easier to reply
iTunes just doesn't work even for really old ones for just to put some music on iPod. Haven't tried with Wine 10 but I don't think that's changed. This is the only reason I keep a Windows VM with an old iTunes in it.
For someone tech-savy and privacy focused - LibreWolf
Why? Some websites will not work properly on LibreWolf because of how hardened it is (not extremely, but just enough to break some things on websites). I don't mean it's bad, it's just not for everyone atm since many people want things to just work™
SELinux, wine (and other apps) installed via user flatpak with proper permissions configued, coupled with ufw or firewalld, secure boot enabled and an immutable system should be fine, no?
I'd recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.
Also, at least for DOS games where you don't have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.
Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris' favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it's always downloaded from scratch.
I've had issues in the past installing stuff with Lutris, although for advanced scenarios like using community engines and stuff, that's really cool. I definitely have both installed on my machine for different reasons. Lutris handles EA / Origin stuff pretty well. (Titanfall 2 and Sims 2 Ultimate (not the Steam one) run beautifully on Linux, truly glorious!)
Electron annoys me as well, but I will say that I appreciate how Heroic hooks into GoG APIs. It handles auto-updates, cloud saving, play time logging, that kinda stuff that made Galaxy decent and had a degree of convenience-parity with Steam.
(Maybe Lutris does this too now?)
For a complete newbie , I'd say Heroic has a bit of a smoother and expected ramp to just "Download game and run." But if you want more control, Lutris definitely has more options!
I also can't recommend Bottles enough for other games that aren't from distribution platforms. Shockingly simple.
Even for Doom3, both vanilla and BFG, and RTCW, Steam versions included, Lutris allows you to install native community ports for those pretty easily too.
AMD Drivers: Good news! They work even better on Linux. Bad news, you're probably referring to the AMD "control panel" type application instead of the drivers themselves, which doesn't have a direct equivalent. The drivers should come pre-installed, though depening on distro you may need to select/install "radv" or "vulkan-radeon" manually. Most of the control panel functionality can be found in other applications, like OBS for recording or CoreCtrl for clock speeds.
Chrome: Although Firefox is pre-installed in most cases, you have full freedom of choice here. Most people find that Firefox works basically the same after using it for a bit, but if it doesn't fit you, there's other options. Google Chrome is most likely available in your distros app store, but there's also less "spying" options like ungoogled-chromium.
Gmail: You can access this on the website, or through a mail client like thunderbird. You can switch if you want to, you're not limited by any means here.
Office 360: Though LibreOffice is a great alternative, some find themselves forced to use MS office for compatibility reasons. This is still possible, buy only in a webbrowser.
ITunes: This is a hard one to find alternatives for, depending on what you use it for. For managing iPhones from a PC, you essentially need Windows or macOS. For playing music, there's plenty of options.
JBL: I'm unsure as I don't use any of their products, but assuming you mean audio related "control panels", there's many options available. Though they may need a bit of tweaking and searching around to get things to sound the way you want.
Musescore: I also don't use this, but it's available on Flathub, meaning you can (and probably should) use your distros "App Store" to install this.
Norton AV: Not many AVs targeting Linux exist, and they're not the greatest quality. Though it's doable to go without one, as long as you don't download and run random files off the internet. Stick to the app store, and you should be totally fine.
PyCharm: This is available on Linux, also in the "app store". There's other IDEs available too, like vscode.
Remote Desktop to iOS: I haven't owned an iOS device since 2019, so I don't know which protocol they use. It's possible this isn't supported at all.
Star Citizen: It looks like this is playable through Proton. You can use Steam (add non-steam game), Lutris, or Bottles to launch non-steam Windows apps/games.
Steam: Works great
VPN: As you didn't put a previous VPN provider here, I'm not able to tell you if it works on Linux. Personally I have a hard time recommending any VPN service, but Mullvad stands out as being the least untrustworthy. Almost all others like Nord, Express, etc. share some common traits that make them very untrustworthy to me.
Windows Games: This is a bit more complicated. Games from the Microsoft Store are very unlikely to run, and require messing about to even try in the first place. Other games made for Windows likely work (even outside Steam), using management tools like Lutris or Bottles is often easier than manually using Wine.
If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it's a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the "best" distro, but since it's very subjective, there is no single "best" distro. There's only 2 distros I recommend against, that's Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you're not forced to pick a specific one.
You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It's a "stable" distro, as in, it doesn't change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.
As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: lvra.gitlab.io/. If you're on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you're on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a "harder" rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.
Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to "dual boot" (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it's absolutely required to do the task asap.
Welcome to the LVRA Wiki # A collection of links, useful resources and guides for the amazing world of VR on Linux.
Feel free to contribute to this wiki yourself if you find anything useful that you might want to share with others.
3 years ago I needed a new computer and decided on an 16 inch M1 Macbook Pro, but did lots of overthinking about if I wanted to stick to it. I tried Asahi Linux didn't have any reasons at the time to use linux over macOS (but there was always the chance I might later), the build quality is 2nd to none, none of my Windows laptops lasted more than a few years.
3 years later, I've really been itching to switch to Linux. Two of several reasons: because its DEs are more customizable, it has better documented accessibility APIs if you want to make keyboard navigation software. I reinstalled Asahi Linux and really tried to make it my daily driver, but the lacks of apps would require me to dual boot: Photoshop and Roblox.
I researching again for computers closest to Macbook Pros but none of them come close to its build quality. I think it would be best for me to make my own desktop PC for linux. I don't think I'd fare well with another windows laptop brand.
9 years and 4 months ago I bought an Acer laptop with a 4 core Intel Skylake with hyperthreading (i7-6700HQ) and a Nvidia GTX 960M, because the laptop I had was slow for compiling in my classes at Uni, and I wanted a discrete GPU for the occasional game when away from my Desktop PC (winter break and such (still use it for that btw)). I regretted that three times:
First when I wanted to install Linux instead of just using VMs. In early 2016 the kernels on live system ISOs didn't properly support Skylake yet, so I fucked around with Arch a bunch, but didn't end up keeping it installed. Don't remember why, probably got busy with schoolwork.
Then a while later, after I had installed Ubuntu or Fedora at some point, the next issue was that cooperative mode of Bluetooth and Wifi on the included Intel wireless chip wasn't well supported (even found an Intel Bluetooth dev saying as much on a mailing list), and it hung sometimes, so I had to make a script to turn the chip off and then rescan the PCI bus, that worked as a workaround but was still annoying.
Finally when we had Machine Learning classes I thought I might be able to use CUDA locally, so I tried installing the proprietary Nvidia driver and was greeted by a black screen on the next boot. Had to boot from a live system and chroot in to remove the proprietary crap again.
On my Desktop PC I have used AMD GPUs for quite a while and dual booting Windows and Linux has always been a breeze.
To be fair, your issue seems more to be software based than hardware. I should warn you that even if you do get a x86 laptop, Photoshop is rather janky under Wine and Roblox could find a way to kill the Vinegar client in the future. I'd recommend you borrow a friend's machine and give it a spin, you might unfortunately not be off the dual-booting hook just yet...
usually prefer headless servers and only 1 PC with many screens connected to it.
promitheas
in reply to mazzilius_marsti • • •bdonvr
in reply to promitheas • • •Wait why do people want escape there???
I like the backspace there like Colemak has. I can do Fn-Backspace(capslock) to activate Caps Lock but that's something I added to my Keyboard separately.
☂️-
in reply to promitheas • • •gnuhaut
in reply to mazzilius_marsti • • •It's option
caps:escape_shifted_capslockI think.You can look through
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lstfor all the options.Edit: Just looked up when this was added, this is a new option from 2024:
gitlab.freedesktop.org/xkeyboa…
Add option `caps:ctrl_shifted_capslock` (6bf17ba7) · Commits · xkbdesc / xkeyboard-config · GitLab
GitLabdegen
in reply to mazzilius_marsti • • •I use keyd for software remapping now, and I like it a lot more than xkb's esoteric options. It has functionality for layers like layer:C, where any "passthrough" input will have the defined modifier (or combo like C-S-M), but you can define whatever other bindings inside.
Long story short, I've used it to remap caps, control, shift (with a custom shift layer for some symbols), and meta, with overloads, double tap/hold into layers, oneshots, timeouts, and all sorts of (surprisingly fluid) nonsense. It's so much easier than wading through xkb options for me.
To sidestep the question slightly less, I always got rid of capslock altogether instead of swapping. That still leaves true escape to be hit accidentally, but I think there should be an option to change escape too?
Edit: what I always used was
from here
Smart Caps Lock: Remap Caps Lock to Control AND Escape
Gist