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So, I have this new laptop I got which has an NVIDIA RTX 4090M GPU, and also an integrated Intel GPU. Obviously, I only want to use the Intel GPU for less intensive apps, and to use the NVIDIA GPU for games or other intensive applications, such as AI.
Through trial, error, and lucky searches on the internet, I figured out some things that do and don't work.
Plugging in the laptop makes the NVIDIA GPU run much faster
The default Fedora NVIDIA drivers work fine, I don't need to install any alternatives
To make a normal app use the GPU, all I have to do is right click the icon and click 'Launch with discrete GPU' (on GNOME), or to make it open with discrete GPU by default (and launching with the integrated GPU would be an option in the context menu), I have to copy the desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications, and edit the .desktop file so it contains the line PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true
For Steam apps, the previous method doesn't work (for some reason - maybe it uses a custom launch process?), but after trying many different ways, I was able to get most Steam apps to use the correct GPU (GPU 0) by adding the custom launch option PROTON_USE_WINED3D=0 %command%
For some reason, this doesn't work for Hogwarts Legacy. It, of all games, really wants to use the Intel graphics - even with the custom launch command, PrefersNonDefaultGPU=true, and in game setting the preferred GPU to my NVIDIA one - yes, it is listed and recognised in game - I can tell both from the Resources app and the abysmal performance that my NVIDIA GPU is not being used and my Intel GPU is
Other apps like Portal RTX, The Witcher 3, ComfyUI (running through Krita AI Diffusion), Blender, and Civilisation 6 are running great with the NVIDIA GPU
I do not have prime-run installed and do not need it
Hoosiers will see and hear changes in the ongoing coverage of state news after a team of local journalists was cut due to eliminated funding in the state budget.
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance!
And consider donating to individual instances instead
Join the lemmy.ml boycott today and help foster a better Lemmy-verse! No more posts, comments (except to counter their propaganda ofc!) or upvotes on any comms on the Lemmy.ml instance!
And consider donating to individual instances instead
Hello all. I've recently installed Fedora 42 on my laptop, it's a microsoft surface laptop studio so it's running with the custom surface kernel. The feature matrix on their github page says that everything should be supported for my laptop and that's pretty much been my experience so far but I've been having issues when testing out games.
The laptop has a 3050TI and is more than capable of running most of the games that I usually play on windows, and I've almost gotten it working on Fedora. They'll launch and run just fine, everything even looks pretty decent graphically, but it just has really bad stuttery input lag, even in more lightweight games that I've tested such as balatro and stardew valley.
I'm not sure what would be causing this, as far as I'm aware I'm running the right gpu driver, I've double checked that they're using the dedicated gpu rather than the integrated one with nvidia-smi, but honestly that's about the extent of my knowledge. Does anyone have any thoughts / suggestions? It would be much appreciated.
This kind of problem is going to require some deep debugging of the surface kernel drivers. This isn't going to be a simple or quick fix. Somebody is going to need to do some extensive debugging and analysis to chase down an issue like this. A solution to this problem could take a few hours, or it could take a few months of meticulous trial and error to narrow down the problem space and gather enough data to enable somebody to zero in on the problem.
If you want to dive into tracking down the problem yourself, I suggest starting with the kernel's own docs on the driver architecture and debugging tools, etc.
Two things: - What input device(s) are you using? Are you using the built-in laptop keyboard, or a gamepad of sorts. (By Balatro, I'd assume it might even be happening with mouse.) - Are you running these games on a platform like Steam, or are you running another way? (I'm assuming the answer is yes to Steam, by Balatro and Stardew.)
For Steam, try messing around with Steam input settings and see what happens.
The testing that I've done was just with the built in keyboard and a mouse, everything through steam. I'll take a look at the input settings and see if that helps, thanks
If you’re into Macs, you’ll always remember your first. Maybe it was the revolutionary classic of 1984 fame, perhaps it was the adorable G3 iMac in 1998, or even a shiny OS X machine in…
🚧 20 years. 1 billion dollars. 5000 workers a day. Welcome to the most ambitious construction Egypt has seen since the pyramids. 🏗️🇪🇬A stone’s throw from...
I'm looking for a federated social media platform that allows for easy topic-based following and blocking, similar to how you can follow or block hashtags on Twitter. On Lemmy, you can follow communities, but there are so many that it becomes overwhelming. I want a platform where I can see or block everything related to a specific tag, and also view only the most popular posts about that topic, similar to how Lemmy communities work. Mastodon, for example, only shows the latest posts, which isn't ideal for trending content. I don't want a chat-like experience; I want to quickly see what's trending about a topic or what's trending in general, while being able to block a few specific topics. Ideally, I wouldn't have to spend hours curating a list of communities or followed users. Does anyone know of a platform that fits these criteria?
I like kbin, think of it basically like if someone took lemmy and mastodon and made one platform that could use both. there is only one mobile app but it's pretty good imo.
On Lemmy, you might find it overwhelming by looking at the all communities feed and then blocking those you don't like. Instead subscribe to the ones you want and then just view the subscribe feed.
Personally, I use all to find more content and block communities I don't want. I then just jumpnjnto subscribed occasionally of there is too much junk.
It's a shame that there aren't finer controls, like to ramp up and down communities rather than just block or subscribe. Some communities, I wouldn't mind seeing their popular posts but I don't want to say the hordes of junk posts. Only option is to block.
So I have things working for me at this point. I was never able to get Samba worling properly. My initial issue was not having a / at the end of my folder path in the Samba config file. After fixing that issue I was able to see the shared folder but was prompted to log in each time, which was an issue in my use case. I ended up abandoning Samba and setting up Jellyfin which has been a much smoother experience, but also is providing many more features. So, if you are looking to share media on your local network, my recommendation would be Jellyfin!
Thank you so much to everyone that commented and helped me a long. I hope I get to return the favor in some way.
Hello, I've been working towards fully migrating to linux, but this is one issue I'm having a hard time with. I have a couple of folders on a storage drive that I share on my local network to stream movies and TV, but I can't figure out how to do it in my Linux install. I'm running Linux Mint 22, have installed Samba, and have tried a few different walkthroughs with no success. Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this set up?
Well I tried the UI approach of right clicking the folder and going to share options, which is when I was prompted to install Samba, but there is warning that states "The permission for prevent othersl users from accessing this share". I did some digging on that error, and everything I came across basically said that wouldn't work. My next attempt was modifying the Samba config file, I added
[FolderName]path = (file directory path I see in properties, /media/username/lettersandnumbersfordrive?/FolderName)
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = yes
create mask =0775
As instructed by a tutorial I found. When running testpram I don't get any errors, but I'm not seeing the folder in VLC like I do when sharing from Win10. That's as far as I have gotten. If there's anything else that I can provide please let me know, and on that note, the drive I'm sharing from is NTFS if that has any impact.
So I added the forward slash and now the folder shows up, but it's asking me for login credentials now. I thought "guests ok = yes" would handle that but apparently not. Any suggestions?
i know i will be like a meme of "answers completely different question", but jellyfin does this natively, so if you strictly need this for movies/media, maybe try it out?
Yeah use some sort of selfhosted mediashare, imo runtipis the easiest way to get it up and running, becuase im lazy and it has a one click installer, auto uodates, backups, etc.
All I'm trying to do is play videos on Xbox/Roku, so whatever makes that happen easily is fine with me for now. I would like to build a stand alone media pc/NAS later but for now just want to keep hosting it on my pc.
I meant jellyfin on xbox, they seem to have some version of it. If it works, then you are kinda golden, install jellyfin on pc, add a folder with movies as a library, and install clients where you need them, and it would work (if your ip on home network is fixed that is, would need some router fixing if not, cause it talks by ip:port to server (your pc)). Think jellyfin fixed sketchiest issues with transcoding, so it kinda not that involved on server side
This is actually what I did. I never could get Samba working, so I setup Jellyfin and it's been a breeze ever since. What an amazing piece of software! I just wanted to access my files, but having them categorized with images, cast and crew, ratings, and even recommended is just fantastic. The Xbox app works fine but it's basically just a web wrapper, and the cursor never goes away which is mildly annoying, but it's still a way better experience than the VLC Xbox app.
Just ran into this the other night myself. Turns out I didn't have the path the correct way, cause samba is picky. My original config was set up with the path = /home/user/Public but I had to change it to path = /home/user/Public/ You're path in your reply looks like it's missing that / at the end. After you update, don't forget to restart the service.
Well that made it show up thankfully, but it's asking me to log in. Any idea how to handle that? I don't want it to ask at all so family members have ready access.
More than 20 countries are convening in Bogota next week to declare “concrete measures against Israel’s violations of international law”, diplomats told Middle East Eye.
The “emergency summit” is due to be held on 15-16 July, co-hosted by the governments of Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of The Hague Group, to coordinate diplomatic and legal action to counter what they describe as “a climate of impunity” enabled by Israel and its powerful allies.
The founding members of the group included Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal and South Africa.
States due to take part in the summit include Algeria, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Honduras, Indonesia, Ireland, Lebanon, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Portugal, Spain, Qatar, Turkey, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Uruguay, and Palestine.
The warning was direct, blunt and left no room for doubt. "We expect all ICC actions against the United States and our ally Israel – that is, all investigations and all arrest warrants – to be terminated," said Reed Rubinstein, legal adviser at the US State Department, before delegates of the 125 member states of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Tuesday, July 8, at a meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York from July 7 to 9.
If the ICC arrest warrants for crimes against humanity and war crimes issued against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant on November 21, 2024, as well as ongoing investigations into crimes committed in the Gaza Strip and the settlement of Palestinian territory, are not dropped, "all options remain on the table," he declared.
Washington has threatened the International Criminal Court with further reprisals if it maintains arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.
Star Wars The Acolyte Season 2 was cancelled but Lucasfilm reveals a deleted scene of Sith Qimir against the Jedi. We look at how it connects to the brutalit...
I think a lot of peope understandably misunderstand this post because it doesn't really explain the situation. After reading OP's comments I gather that OP put a new server online (not on AWS) and was immediately port scanned by a host that is on AWS. Since OP did not consent to being port scanned, they filled out an abuse complaint with AWS, the hoster the scan came from, out of principle, knowing that it probably won't do much. Which is totally fine if that is how you want to spend your time.
I think what most commenters thought is that OP was hosting with AWS and complained to them that someone else scanned their server. This does not seem to be the case.
Amazon may take action against egregious mass-scanning offenders per the “…to violate the security, integrity, or availability of any user, network…” verbiage of the AUP, especially if they’re fingerprinting services or engaging in more sophisticated recon, but OP’s complaints are nowhere near meeting that threshold.
Washington has threatened the International Criminal Court with further reprisals if it maintains arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant.
It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.
Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.
Human can be shitty, but giving the control over to the few shitty people who want to profit off of making the world more shitty is whole lot of worse than people being shitty at one time or another.
It exists in here too but also that's why it's the fediverse, you can switch to a less shittyverse.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.
Hey Friends,I’m excited to share a preview video of the tune “Hey Lock” from my upcoming album “Heartfelt” coming out end of July. The album features saxopho...
Thumbing through the feed, the news on how this or that organization letting go of commercial options for day to day operations are mounting.
This led me to wonder what would be the impact if FOSS, be it on the OS front, productivity front or whatever, was to become truly a relevant option.
I'm painfully aware of the difficulties I've faced trying to take a few online courses to be faced with borderline desdain for not using Windows/Office/Etc and opting for FOSS solutions.
Paying/supporting a FOSS solution does not offend me. I'm happier when giving money directly to a developer or project than to an opaque company. But I'm just one.
But what could happen if the ones became millions, actively contributing with a few coins per year to projects we use daily?
What could/would happen in the short term (under a year), medium-long (one to three years) and the long term (over ten years)?
Realistically, probably not much for people outside of the tech industry. People will use the best tool for the job, and whether it's foss or not won't matter.
From enduser perspective the most visible change would be that all software wouldn't be hostile to users because with propreitary you have to be very picky to get that.
In the long term we would see that companies could not build walled gardens to block off competition. Contrast Windows & MacOS vs Linux with its different distros, DEs, toolkits etc.
The least difference would be for enterprise because support is expensive either way.
The scalability problem with FOSS is monetary and motivation.
The successful products need longterm financial security in order to plan and support their peoduct(s) - so, do we start seeing more subscriptions as corp. sponsorship fades away?
And, just like XKCD 2347, FOSS needs to step up and support the components they rely on
That's going to need some more maturity from the developers too: it's a great feeling doing something new and interesting, but - like having a pet - you can't just abandon something when you're bored of it, or too busy, without rehoming your project(s)...
That's where I see the industry needs to improve before they're really ready for the big time.
One huge impact mass FOSS adoption would have is that there would be a lot less software and hardware churn. Commercial nature of proprietary technology is the main driver for constant upgrade cycles we see. Companies need to constantly sell products to stay in business, and this means you have to deprecate old software and hardware in order to sell new versions of the product.
Windows 11 roll out is a perfect example. Vast majority of Windows 10 users are perfectly happy with the way their computer works currently, they're not demanding any new features, they just want their computer to continue to work the way it does currently. However, Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 and now they're forced to buy a new computer to keep doing what they've been doing.
This problem goes away entirely with open source because there is no commercial incentive at play. If a piece of software works, and there is a community of users using it, then it can keep working the way it does indefinitely. Furthermore, in cases where a software project goes in a directions some users don't like, such as the case with Gnome, then software can be forked by users who want to go in a different direction or preserve original functionality. This is how Cinnamon and Mate projects came about.
Another aspect of the open source dynamic is that there's an incentive to optimize software. So, you can get continuous performance improvements without having to constantly upgrade your hardware. For most commercial software, there's little incentive to do that since that costs company money. It's easier to just expect users to upgrade their hardware if they want better performance.
I would argue that non technical software users would be far better off if they had the option to fund open source software instead of buying commercial versions. Even having to pay equal amounts, the availability of the source puts more power in the hands of the users. For example, building on the example of Gnome, users of an existing software project could also pull funds together to pay developers to add features to the software or change functionality in a particular way.
This is precisely what makes licenses like GPL so valuable in my opinion. It's a license that ensure the source stays open, and in this way inherently gives more power to the users.
Eh... I am going to be on the Doubt column on this one until someone gets more information and other cases.
From my understanding of the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console. Nothing is stored to tie carts to hardware or accounts. Carts are meant to work with the multiple accounts on the Switch and with multiple Switch consoles at once, given that Nintendo very much expects to upsell you on a Mini/OLED/Switch 2 whatever.
This guy either a) did something else to trigger the ban, b) bought a bootleg cart somehow, although that doesn't seem like it'd be particularly profitable to sell on Switch, or c) hit a seriously weird bug.
Or, I guess d) is lying about it?
Nintendo is definitely not looking to ban used Switch 1 carts. They literally have no way to do so. There is no tool in the toolset to distinguish a cart someone else bought at the store from your own carts you bought at the store and then moved from a Switch 1 to a Switch 2.
At the absolute most I could entertain that the used cart had been used to make a backup and then the backup got flagged in a different jailbroken console or something, but I don't even know that Nintendo would be able to tell or that it would trip up their banhammer.
That doesn't mean I'm on board with their remote bricking policy, and if this turns out to be a bug or weird edge case it's just another thing to show that their overreach is not gonna play the way they thought it would.
But it is almost definitely not an attempt to ban users for buying used games.
...the way Switch carts are made there is no difference at all between a cart used on a console and the same cart resold for a different console.
IIRC every cartridge has its own cryptographic key and can be uniquely identified. When it became possible to dump game cards and load them on a flash card, there were reports, that it is possible, that this might lead to a detection - as the flashcards need to replicate this key. Now, Nintendo might have no way to tell if you lend the game to someone, of the other switch that uses it bought the game from you, etc. BUT if it is pirated, it's possible to detect, when the original and the copy are played at the same time, as the cartridge cannot be physically in two switches simultaneously. There were never any reports, that someone really got banned because of this, though...
Yes, maybe the seller dumped the cart and is still using it via emulation. Now, the buyer used the same cart with the same crypto key and Nintendo detected two uses at the same time.
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I guess the engagement bait "please contradict the headline"-title is working well, I always want to keep editorialising to a minimum when sharing videos like this, but this was one of those "what they meant could have been made a little bit clearer, and they knew it"-things.
Really the stuff he is talking about concerning that - mainly initial cost vs long term savings and lack of existing infrastructure/expertise - are just realities that are important to address in the political process. He could have gone into more detail considering Munich's attempt at Linux (LiMux) - where to my knowledge the reason it failed was a combination of lobbying by Microsoft, Conservatives (CSU) winning the local elections, and costs (as well as employee complaints) from having processes be more complicated, the latter mostly thanks to Microsoft's outright obstructionism concerning document format standards, as well as expertise being relatively costly (whereas finding MS-certified anyones in the office space was relatively easy). Those are considerations to have, but I think more and more, the advantages of Linux and Open Source clearly outweigh that stuff in the face of rising costs and enshittification, and he does talk about all the good stuff pretty well in the video.
indeed, the anti-limux stuff was a sort of microsoft marketing campain in disguise.
microsoft lobbied munich to abandon linux after they adopted it while abandoning windows, and also put in great effort to paint the narrative that it was due to linux being bad. they successfully pointed to things that didn't work with linux, masking that the reason these things didn't work were not due to linux but due to not updating or other administrative problems not related to the operating system.
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The previous attempts were about freeing themselves from an abusive unprincipled data-hungry big data monopoly,
This attempt is about freeing themselves from an abusive unprincipled data-hungry big data monopoly operating in a fascist country and in cahoots with the regime.
People are downvoting you, but they're too scared to actually argue against it. I'm obviously hoping this isn't the case, but you'd be sticking your head in the sand if you said there was no chance of it happening.
We're already seeing a massive surge of the far right in Europe. Giant media blitzes on social media such as Twitter shoving far right content in their faces.
While the former seems to be the obvious trend and Europe has historically leaned towards it. I don’t see how one results in the other. Whether they stick with Microsoft or not is more economical than political.
[Some*] Europeans just can’t get over their Arab and Muslim-hate despite neither Qatar nor Saudi Arabia posing any threat to Europe and actually being good trading partners. No tariffs, no restrictions, no unfair competition. They adopt many European standards and are a huge market for European goods and services. Yet still the hate is constantly being peddled.
* hopefully a minority but the hate seems to be universal regardless of the political leaning.
Are they democracies? No. Do they respect human rights? Also no.
I don't care as much about them as I care about pointing out the hypocrisy of my people. I have a thing against islam but that has nothing to do with this conversation.
You must have forgotten about why people were so mad at qatar in particular a while back. Remember how many workers died building the stadiums there for the world cup? If you're american i can understand you weren't aware of it since european football isn't exactly popular in america, but it was a huge deal over here with people protesting.
Hell, I'm in Silicon Valley here in California, and some of my friends are also jumping off the proprietary ship because those large firms are willing to work hand in hand with federal agencies.
If you've read the NSA document disclosures by Edward Snowden, it's apparent that there is an open door for data requests. The current administration isn't a huge fan of California's diversity, so we might as well minimize our chances of being targetted...
That might not be so much down to how serious people are but rather just how good Linux has gotten lately (especially for games). Although I do think people are more serious now.
In any complex system or "wicked problem" involving positive and negative feedback cycles, a combination of factors that push into the same direction can cause the system to flip over - sometimes in dramatic ways.
Life long windows user. I switched to Arch a few months ago and I'm not looking back. Will only be using windows in a sandboxed VM if absolutely necessary. Which, I haven't needed to yet.
Installing Arch might be a hassle, I tried it once and couldn’t figure it out so a kept on using Ubuntu and its derivatives. But when I got a Steam Deck I found Steam OS to be easy and the Arch documentation to be thorough and useful.
They didn't just give them a discount, and it was only a very small part of Europe you are talking about. It was Munich, and MS also moved a lot of workplaces to the city, to bribe it...
In the video, he talks about examples of European governments specifically switching to Linux, like a police station using an Ubuntu based distro, and foss software like LibreOffice. I don't think android, Mac or BSD are mentioned.
What's wrong with going back to pen and (e-)paper for office? My point is, if you are going to post something in the community, the word "linux" shall at least be in the title.
Good title example: Europe is slowly ditching Microsoft for Linux
It's nobody's fucking business when someone ditching Microsoft, then adopt BSD, Solaris whatnot. What matters to this community is someone adopting or ditching Linux, or they do something remotely related to it.
Point is (again), it takes zero effort to cross post a video or article here. Windows is historically having a high market share ratio, and people are migrating to Linux nowadays. That's good news to the Linux world. Even someone merely mentioning ditching Windows has an implication of adopting Linux instead.
But what if more and more posts implying this by only mentioning how bad Windows is? Is this a community for Windows circlejerk, or do we share informative stuff that's directly related to Linux? How about we share more article about how great Linux is (or can be), instead of how bad the competitors are becoming?
The European Union regulates the market so much it's hard to call it capitalism, the biggest european companies are basically EU projects like Airbus (every government funds it) or too big too fail like Siemens and/or they would use: "strategic industry" and be done with it.
Edit oh and I almost forgot it, or they are like Inditex, basically not European it's just an European getting rich while exploiting poor people all around the world, but I think this is actually capitalism and that guy isn't exactly appreciated by ruling dictator, I mean party, in Spain.
Actually, most of them already do have deals for a limited time. Skype is still available; they needed a new contract since teams does not work without communicating with Microsoft.
OTOH most things they do is via webclient.
If Microsoft was to release a mandatory update that has a single thing that required it to communicate with the organization, by law the whole governmental EU would not be able to use it.
The German state of Bavaria once did something in the direction of moving away from MS. When Microsoft put their German headquarters into Munich the idea was scraped.
And at the same time we have the Jugendmedienstaatsvertrag in Germany (and with Germany as a strong force in the EU most likely everywhere in the EU soon) that will make all operating systems without fully integrated age restrictions illegal heise.de/en/news/Minors-protec…
Manufacturers of operating systems must then ensure that "only apps that correspond to the age specification or that have been individually and securely activated can be used". The installation of programs should only be possible via distribution platforms such as app stores that take the age rating into account and have an automated rating system recognized by the Commission for the Protection of Minors in the Media (KJM).
This part of the law alone is impossible to implement on a open platform like Linux.
According to the revised Interstate Treaty on the Protection of Minors in the Media, operating systems must soon ensure they include a "youth protection device".
To make something illegal by law it is needed to have a valid reason for that law to exist. This is the case at least in every jurisdiction that has a somewhat functional separation of powers.
Due to this can't just make it illegal to use Linux, but with a Law like the Jugendmedienstaatsvertrag it comes as a free bonus.
Ok, but how to prevent programs installed as Appimage, by source compilation or just downloaded binaries from running? You need a way to prevent this methods of installation to be legal
Microsoft already has the S-Mode in Windows 11 that only allows to execute apps that come from the Microsoft Store. So it is already possible in Windows.
The law doesn't say that the option has to be active for everyone and all the time, but it has to be fully integrated into the OS so it can be activated fast and easy when children/teenagers want to use the PC.
Since it is impossible to implement on Linux, it may just be flagged as adult-only software.
This would render Linux unfit for use in Schools, Public Libraries, Youth Centers and other places where Children and Teenagers have access to PCs.
It is, in addition to that, possible that internal regulation of government offices prohibit the use of adult software. Not sure about it, but it would IMHO fit the mindset of bureaucrats
Hopefully this helps increase adoption. Maybe in a few years GNU+Linux will have 10% of the desktop operating systems market. Maybe even Wine won’t be necessary anymore except for legacy software.
I think that if Linux is to be more widely adopted a more easily used distro needs to become mainstream. Let's face it, the average computer user barely knows how to use Windows, just because you find Linux easy doesn't mean they will.
Do you think you could teach Linux to your grandmother?
Do you think you could teach Linux to your grandmother?
Yes. Set automatic package updates, Install firefox with ublock and put it on the taskbar, and bookmark Facebook and Youtube for her. It is the same thing as under Windows.
I would argue that for the most "tech illiterate" users the Linux experience can be made even easier than the windows experience, because you have to set up everything for them anyways.
Completely "tech illiterate" broser-only users are fine. It gets difficult once they happen to actually want to do something.
I have an older relative in that boat, and she was doing fine until she wanted to install some VPN to access foreign Netflix libraries. That was more difficult. Especially because she already paid for the service and that service didn't support her distro, thus there was no guide on how to use it.
Both of my grandmothers are dead, but I did teach my aunt to use Linux. She had a laptop that "ran" Windows 10. It would take 30 seconds to open the Start menu. One SSD, one RAM upgrade and one install of Mint later it's a whole new machine. She can Firefox and Mahjongg just fine.
Teaching people without computing skills to use linux is actually easier than teaching windows. Most trouble people have with linux comes from being used to windows and having difficulty to adapt.
Do you think you could teach Linux to your grandmother?
My 50+ yo mother uses Linux Mint daily with fewer problems that when she used Windows. Her crowning achievement in IT is learning how to use email.
I helped my 93 yo friend switch from Windows 10 to Linux 2 years ago. He called me 3 times in the first 2 weeks to ask how to do something, but hasn't had a single problem since that's related to the OS.
Linux Mint, Bazzite, Fedora, and several other Linux distros are already easier to use than Windows. The only thing holding most people back is fear of change.
There are some people who have specific setups in Windows or a large number of "Windows only" apps, but these people are in the minority. The average person can't even tell you which operating system they're currently using, and wouldn't notice the difference if you swapped the OS but kept the same web browser.
Actually, my mother knew how to use Debian before she could use Windows. Her first pc came with Windows XP, switched that for Debian as its been my main OS since 2000.
We already have those. Arguably Windows is much more of a hassle to use than your average "works out of the box" distro. And don't start talking about the terminal, that's comparing apples and organges. A more apt comparison to the need of using the terminal on Linux is the need to apply registry tweaks or use powershell on Windows. As if "average users" would need to do that. They install software via the "app store", change settings via the GUI and run updates when prompted, all of which are seamless on most of these distros. If something breaks, they can't fix it themselves, but then they just go to someone else to help them, just like on Windows, which they also can't fix by themselves. Maybe they manage to reinstall, which isn't any harder than on Windows, if not easier these days.
The group you're actually talking about (and likely belong to) are the Windows power-users that would need to rethink things, and would be capable of rethinking things, if they wanted, which they don't. I know some of these people myself, complaining all day about Microsoft and the privacy nightmare that they put in huge effort to mitigate, but sadly they absolutely need to rely on this one "critical" piece of freeware from the 2000s that they are sure won't run on wine (not that they've tried) or a cracked copy of Photoshop they use for cropping and changing the brightness of desktop backgrounds, but it's the industry leader, so they obviously won't use "inferior" software for that, face the facts Linux users. They think package managers are much harder than downloading and clicking through Setup.exe for the 100th time in a row, and they've had this one bad experience with "rm -rf /" 10 years ago which is why they don't "trust" the terminal, yet routinely double-click on downloaded .bat files without thought. 🤷
Thank you for the article. It brought up something quite interesting that i wasn't aware off before:
But why does Spain rely so heavily on Russia despite the almost global disapproval? The answer lies in this country’s extensive regasification capacity, which stands at 67.1 bcm - the largest in all of Europe. This enables Spain to receive LNG shipments on behalf of other countries that lack the necessary infrastructure, making it a critical hub for European energy trade.
So it seems that Spain is also taking the flak here for other EU countries that want to profit from Russian gas but not be directly associated with it.
How Spain Uses Natural Gas Europe is one of the most important markets in terms of natural gas and is home to some of the largest consumers of the fuel in the world.
Any bit of user base growth helps get the ball rolling for future MS/USA missteps. Linux has just been getting better and easier year after year. It's been a 30 year marathon ready for another 30+ years of development
The same stuff over 200% increase in 2023 so others can say we dont buy stuff to Russia we buy it to Spain (who bought it to Russia). This source even points out the liquid gas that arrived by boat from Russia wasn't sanctioned.
As we say in Spain "hecha la ley, hecha la trampa"
I can't wait until Lemmy's Peertube integration is released ^[1]^. Then, iiuc, this comment section should be able to happen directly on The Linux Experiment's videos within Lemmy.
Requirements Is this a feature request? For questions or discussions use https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy_support Did you check to see if this issue already exists? Is this only a feature request? Do not p...
I think we are looking in the wrong direction. China is the place to watch for an explosive growth of Linux and the exclusion of M$-Mossad. They have committed to replacing Windoze on all government computers and servers with KylinOS by 2026. This is not a city here and a city there, but the entire country. PC and Laptop makers will then offer units with openKylinOS. Not sure if phones will follow suit, or switch to Harmony Next.
Attacking the source instead of disproving the article.
You have hands, you can sources of your favorite side of the political spectrum, or ask an LLM.
But here are morejust because it's Saturday and I like the apple I am eating for breakfast and I am trying to make lemmy a better place than reddit: 20minutos.es/noticia/5168224/0…
La UE redujo sus importaciones de gas natural licuado (GNL) en 2024 en un 19% y, dentro de ella, España fue uno de los países donde más cayeron un 28%, aunque...
It looks like the problem are the contracts. They could go faster breaking the contracts? Yes. But it's Naturgy and Repsol, both private, not the government. Or are you suggesting that the government has to do a take over of the energy enterprises? 😉
La Comisión Europea cree que la normativa para prohibir las importaciones de gas ruso servirá de paraguas legal ante los procedimientos de arbitraje que da por hecho que Moscú planteará dado que los contratos establecen una cláusula por la que las co…
First you doubt the claim. Then you attack the source, now you find excuses.
Did they or didn't they increase almost 200% the acquisition of energy from Russia in 2023? Is the Russian Federation a major provider of gas and oil for Spain (and other European countries) or not?
If you notice I am here only to point the hypocrisy of Europe, which they undoubtedly are and Spain is no different.
I don't know if you work for a company with business in Russia, I did when this whole thing started and contracts didn't matter much when sanctions came but I guess we weren't big enough to make excuses.
I'm contemplating to replace 1-2 aging desktops in our home by "gaming" laptops.
What really bugs me with the Linux laptops I currently have is that sleep is unstable or inefficient. On one device it sometimes just won't wake up. On both the battery is drained fully within few days. I have a MacBook at work and know I'll probably not hit the same level of stability and efficiency in sleep, but I'm wondering whether hardware choice can play a role in improving the experience, especially seeing how I might make this my primary device moving forward.
I often grab the Linux laptop and end up going for the work MacBook or my ipad because the battery is dead and I only wanted to check something real quick - it's okay with an old leftover device but it sort of irritates me.
What Is Hibernate on Linux Hibernate is a powersaving state where the contents of the systems memory RAM are written to a designated storage space usuall
I didn't want to get into this debate here, but I'm not buying from companies headquartered in a fascist dictatorship if I can at all avoid it 😉 FYI: my favorite manufacturers I'm eyeing are Tuxedo, Schenker and Asus.
Thanks for your input! What's the issue with Asus? Their Rog series has some really nice hardware it seems and might be something I can actually walk into a store and try in person.
What about Lenovo? As an owner of two ThinkPads and with friends happy about their Legion devices that's the one other manufacturer I have on my radar regarding "might be available in a store in my country".
If you find a model of something you're looking to buy for sale at big box stores, it's going to be total junk: windows-centric hardware with low reliability, but really cheap to produce. Stay away from those, as their Linux compatibility is going to be horrendous UNLESS you've heard otherwise specifically about a particular model.
Lenovo has done something interesting in the last few years and blurred the lines between #1 and #2, so now it's a crapshoot. ASUS ruined their #2 tier stuff years ago by including gimmicky stuff like touch bars, and secondary displays without ANY support except for Windows.
For Linux compatibility, you need to make sure your components either already have driver support, or is made by a company who directly releases or contributes Linux drivers. AMD and Intel are top of that list, with Nvidia kinda/sorta doing the bare minimum for consumer-grade components, but full support for enterprise-grade stuff.
If you're not sure all the components in the machine you're buying already have Linux support, it's going to be a crapshoot. ASUS specifically makes crappy moves by including things that notoriously DON'T have native Linux support like: Broadcom chipsets, or random audio codecs and speakers that are essentially windows-only.
You can look around and see people's experiences with specific models of ROG, but even those are kind of iffy because of the above. Depending on what you want to use it for, you may be able to work with certain things not working, but if you're talking laptops and Linux, I'd steer clear of anything with Nvidia in it for the battery life alone.
I'm aware of the Nvidia limitations and thus quite interested int an AMD APU. The Ryzen AI series looks promising. And while it's a quirky form factor I found good reports on the Flow Z13 with an AI Max 395 running Linux. But no one talks about sleep/hibernation in their reviews .
Sleep/hibernation is mostly software config in Linux. The S-statebon every main board will support sleep states 2-4 at a minimum, and you can configure your particular setup to do hibernation without an issue.
Not quite, PC gets hacked, on hacked machine someone does something like cd, but on that PC cd has been set up as an alias for some sort of command that downloads a malicious executable to the hackers machine and executed it.
That executable very well could be a keylogger, but doesn't necessarily have to be. It could be be rm -rf --no-preserve-root / or a reverse shell or whatever really.
I imagine cd would be a terrible choice to alias given how much it's used, but maybe something else more obscure could be used that is frequently used when bots/attackers are rummaging through files for stuff to steal.
Is there anything that is specific to ssh that would allow for this? Like a command that would allow something to execute back to the other machine similar to downloading? I'm not well versed just kind of a napkin idea I thought of.
I kind of figured it would be a shot in the dark, some scripting could definitely be done to assess that, and even run code per major OS depending on some automated recon.
Let's say you've got that figured out, and the user is running putty on windows as an administrator. Is there anything that could take advantage of that fact?
I feel like this would be way easier/more feasible to run a script on your own machine as a defensive measure like OC mentioned early, but just more asking our of curiosity. I'm not skilled enough to even imagine what to do with this or write it, but I am fascinated by security stuff.
the ssh protocol doesn't provide any mechanism for your server to identity the client host architecture, nor does it provide any mechanism i'm aware of to send any payloads back to the host client for arbitrary execution.
The thing is ssh is a protocol and it's implementation is not going to be identical across clients.
So if you found a bug in an ssh client that allowed for this your hypothetical attack vector would only work on intruders using that broken client. ssh is one of the most scrutinized protocols there are and you should be a hero if you found this bug. what you're asking for, if it were as easy as you might hope, well ssh wouldn't be the ubiquitous security connection protocol if it were simple like that right?
Partially for sure. Other part of this would be somehow executing a command on the attackers machine that originated as their own input, but they wouldn't be privy to that due to the alias.
I've seen some videos where people will willingly let scammers into their machine, and Honeypot them with a file that they execute, typically named like credit card info or bank info or something. But they knowingly click that and open it, I don't know what needs to be done on the "make this code execute on the attackers machine" part.
If someone is ssh'd into your machine, are there any escalated privileges you'd already have back to their machine because they've willingly come to yours?
I've þought about how to do ðis myself. Ðe best idea I've had is to build a virus, or simply someþing destructive, or a program ðat downloads CP and emails it to the FBI; and use Justine's APE to build an executable and call it "bitcoin_wallet.exe". Entice ðe hacker to download a malicious program and execute it on ðeir computer.
Ðen I lose interest and spend the time instead doing someþing to furðer tighten security on my VMs.
[as usual, independent thinking from #ZeynepTufekci ]
"What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.
To a Washington bean counter, his loss might have looked like one tiny but welcome subtraction in a giant spreadsheet, but not in a region so prone to these perilous events that it’s known as Flash Flood Alley. Hundreds of kids at summer camps slept in cabins along the river. The plan was for folks at the upstream camps to send word to the downstream camps if floodwaters got scary. But if even the highest official in the county wasn’t on high alert, how were the camp counselors supposed to understand the danger — or, in an area without reliable cellphone coverage, to act on it?"
>> Three priests based in the village of Taybeh issued a statement calling for help in the face of growing settler violence
>> In a joint statement, priests from the three churches in #Taybeh — the Latin Church, Greek Orthodox, and Melkite Catholic — condemned the attack and asked for action in the face of growing settler violence against the village, which comes amid a spike in settler attacks across the West Bank…
A group of Jewish settlers set a fire near an ancient Christian church in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Nabd El-Haya, a radio station based in the town, has reported.
President Donald Trump expressed mounting frustration Tuesday with Russian President Vladimir Putin, promising during a lively Cabinet meeting to boost U.S. military aid to Ukraine.
[Cal Bryant] hacked together a home automation system years ago, which more recently utilizes Piper TTS (text-to-speech) voices for various undisclosed purposes. Not satisfied with the robotic-soun…
I wanted to publish constructive criticism towards Reddit on Reddit but unfortunately that's basically impossible since they'll do everything to censor/silence that for their own gains to not hurt their reputation (you might also get censored for mentioning Reddit alternatives like Lemmy).
So I have to do it here.
I'm addressing censorship because that's basically the biggest issue.
I'm not always against all censorship as it can be beneficial in some circumstances to provide constructive discussion to not end up like X where everyone is shouting hateful opinions without getting heard anyways. (But very generally I'm still strongly against censorship).
My main problem is about wrongful censorship. Reddit is basically unusable for me since I had the experience multiple times that I get banned from a subreddit for actually no reason just because a moderator feels like it. And when I then ever accidentally post on the same subreddit with a different account (which is hard when there are multiple to keep track of) your whole access to Reddit gets banned for about 12 months by advanced fingerprinting (so even if you create a new account it gets automatically banned, so you basically cannot post anything on Reddit for a year).
While Lemmy is somewhat better in this regard I think it's mainly only because it's so small, is only known by a very small enthusiastic group and therefore needs less moderation. But I realized that even here once a post is slightly controversial it will get removed sooner or later. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised if this gets removed too. I know that the fediverse theoretically provides protection against censorship by being able to host your own instance but practically that's very unrealistic to see properely moderated instances being used by enough people.
I think it's a shame that if you're looking into providing high quality topics and discussions that are valued by many people and you just want to learn by broadening your intellectual horizons, you can get banned every second because some moderator had a bad day.
And I'm not just talking about posting something maybe somewhat controversial that a moderator might not like. I literally had many situations where I posted completely normal posts that completely aligned with the subreddits rules. I could literally post a normal cat picture on a cat picture subreddit and get banned seconds later without being able to talk to the moderators. In some instances the cat picture post (I'm using that as a metaphor) didn't even get published and I got banned anyways. Often it's enough to have a single wrong word that is filtered by Reddit so your whole post won't publish.
I think the core concept of platforms like Reddit and Lemmy can be very valuable but it's executed very badly. There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it's more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don't even have to look at so many potential flags).
Maybe AI could be better for this by having less human emotion based judgement?
But I'm conflicted because on one hand these platforms can have such a great potential and value but on the other hand it's maybe better to not use it anyways since it can be quite unhealthy to spend much time on there.
Anyways I think it's sad we can't freely express ourselves on social media and can't have proper discussions. This really feels like being in a 3rd world country with dictatorship and this shouldn't be the case in 2025. Especially nowadays where it's extremely important to have open and trusted discussion about topics.
There should be a platform with good/useful censorship and a platform truly without censorship that isn't owned by a Nazi billionaire. Or even better: have an all-in-one solution that has spaces without and with censorship to varying degrees (preferably a degree that can be decided by the users and not by the corporation).
Yes, censorship is definitely an issue on even the Fediverse. A certain demographic wants the Fediverse to be an echo chamber. Fortunately, there are some instances that don't operate that way.
If people want the Fediverse to replace social media, they're gonna have to accept that there will people they don't agree with.
The major advantage with federation is that you aren't locked to one instance. If an instance censors you, you can find a different one and migrate your profile over there.
Still, the fact that people wig out if you express an opinion they don't agree with is definitely an issue, considering how many Fediverse instances bow to the "free speech for me, not for thee" mentality.
The problem is that moderators here and on reddit (i believe?) are volunteers, so they are going to have personal limits on what they'll accept. And if they can't have those, they won't do it. Someone else will have to volunteer for an unpaid position that can take up lots of their precious time on this earth.
Start a mod fund and pay people, is my suggestion. The only rewards at the moment for moderating are, like, a smoothly running community. Tiny, mostly irrelevant power. Being a big fish in a small pond. Personal satisfaction? You can get that being treasurer at your local beading club, but there you get to mess around with beads. I dunno.
As for making different platforms, there also has to be someone willing to do that work. Mostly thankless, and you'll always get it wrong somehow. I'm amazed anyone bothers.
i cannot see what you were actually banned for, but the fact you've been banned everywhere from reddit is kinda red flag tbh. i've seen people posting everything from the constructive criticism to 'fuck spez' for months and no one banned them. you might've been banned for different reasons except censorship. might it be that you just didn't "read the room" or didn't keep discussions constructive?
I think it's really just the fact that there are moderators who ban people based on their mood. It has nothing to do with the actual content as I've seen many posts that seem actually questionable but haven't been banned. Of course you only see the people who didn't get banned and can post and you can't see the people who are banned because well, they cannot post.
If I'd show you the times I got banned you will see that it is basically randomly and those moderators invent things that are far detached from reality.
There should be multiple independent steps of verifying if someone should get banned and in what way. And probably integrate a good test for joining the community so that it's more likely for people to be rational from the start (that way you don't even have to look at so many potential flags).
How much would you pay to join a community with that level of protection for user rights? Like the old subscription based forums, some of which are still floating around the internet?
Because "multiple independent steps of verifying" is, frankly, going to be a lot of frustrating, thankless, and redundant work for moderators. I mean, we know how to safeguard people's rights through legalistic processes. Courts do it all the time. It's called due process. And due process is frequently a slow, complicated, and expensive pain in the ass for everyone involved. And I think very few people would want to do that work for free.
(Conveniently, this would also serve as a good test for joining such a community - people are more likely to follow the rules and act like decent human beings if a subscription they paid for is riding on it, and it would price out AI and spambots in the process.)
Sorry for making a post for such a basic question but I wasn't able to figure out my own so I'm come here as last resort.
I bought a new CPU, RAM, and motherboard combo and I migrated all my non-conflicting parts from my previous machine, which had a Linux install and a Windows install.
When I booted into the PC, I did not see an option in the boot menu or in the boot order for Linux whatsoever. Only my windows 11 IoT install and my new nanokvm.
I had a asrock x570 extreme4 and switch to a Msi Pro x870E-P WiFi. I have updated to the newest BIOS.
I was previously using systemd as my boot manager until I tried switching over to grub but neither trying to fix system D or installing grub seemed to work for me.
So I was hoping that I could delete my boot partition or somehow start from scratch without deleting any data in my root partition (Btrfs sub volumes) . and get a step-by-step installation guide for me since I can't seem to understand the arch wiki at my current state.
I would like to give you guys more information about the scenario and more context of what I've done, but i'm sadly not capable.
/dev/nvme0n1 is my linux install while /dev/nvme1n1 is Windows 11 IoT
Researchers have developed Centaur, a computational model that can predict and simulate human behavior across a wide range of psychological experiments[^1]. Built by fine-tuning Meta's Llama 3.1 70B language model on a dataset called Psych-101, Centaur was trained on over 10 million choices made by 60,000 participants across 160 psychology experiments[^1].
The model outperforms existing cognitive models in predicting human behavior, even generalizing to entirely new scenarios it wasn't trained on[^1]. "You can basically run experimental sessions in silico instead of running them on actual human participants," said Marcel Binz, cognitive scientist at the Helmholtz Institute for Human-Centered AI[^2].
Centaur demonstrates unprecedented capabilities in capturing human cognition:
Predicts behavior with 64% accuracy across varied tasks[^3]
Generalizes to modified experimental scenarios, like switching from "spaceships" to "magic carpets" in decision-making tasks[^4]
Shows alignment between its internal representations and human neural activity[^1]
Performs well on out-of-distribution tasks in moral decision-making, economic games, and logical reasoning[^1]
"It's the first model that can do any kind of task exactly like a human can," said Russ Poldrack, cognitive scientist at Stanford University[^4].
A new artificial intelligence (AI) model called Centaur can predict and simulate human thought and behavior better than any past models, opening the door for cutting-edge research applications.
Adrian Holovaty, founder of music-teaching platform Soundslice, finally solved a months-long mystery: weird images of ChatGPT sessions kept being uploaded to the site.
T-Mobile told the FCC that it will end its DEI programs “not just in name, but in substance”The move comes as it awaits regulatory approval of two deals: USce | Just like that, T-Mobile is ending its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs to …
Lit Hub’s list of the most anticipated books of the second half of the year includes many genre titles, but, one might argue, not enough. What can I say, I’m an excitable boy, still in …
Hello everyone, I have I guess a bit tricky situation on hand
I have 4 devices (2 computers, 2 cellphones) on my home network, they're all connected on the same LAN, and additionally, all are also running Tailscale (rather out of the box configuration except specific IPv4 addresses given by me)
When going out of home, I normally take up to 2 devices with me and connect to the ones at home through the Tailscale IP
Usually I do this by typing the IP address manually on either scenario, if I'm home I connect typing the LAN IP Addresses for the devices, otherwise I manually type the Tailscale IP addresses
I would like to now optimize this process using Host Names; I would like to type in say, SSH pc1 and that connect via LAN IP if available, and otherwise fallback to Tailscale IP if not
Result being I can just type the one singular host name, and connect successfully regardless if I'm home or not, also using the best possible connection (LAN preferred over Tailscale)
I am aware Tailscale has a feature that it does this out of the box using the Tailscale IP on the same LAN, but this doesn't seem to work on all devices (the phones) and additionally that generates some noticeable overhead given their age too
I have been reading about Avahi and thinking of using it on each device, advertising the same host name with both it's IPs, which I am yet to try but figured I could use more input on solutions if anyone has experience with it, I'd appreciate any
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a nice day
I do exactly this by using DNS. You’ll want DNS on your home network to report back just the internal IP addresses for each host, but not the Tailscale IP addresses (that is, if you want the hostnames to work outside of Tailscale too).
Then for Tailscale’s DNS you’d set up records for the same hostnames but return either just the Tailscale IP addresses or both. I generally do both but it’s probably better to do the former to avoid leaks outside the WireGuard tunnels (though with a subnet router that probably won’t happen anyway).
This is much like traditional split DNS where your internal network’s DNS server is probably going to give internal IP addresses for a local web server’s hostname but a public DNS server would return a publicly routable IP address.
Avahi is going to be a huge pain because it relies on multicast. It won’t work over Tailscale (or traditional VPN tunnels other than an OpenVPN TAP interface) without lots of fighting.
I'm a bit conflicted with your answer, I suppose for a DNS server my best go-to should be my router, but I don't have access to it, next option would be DNS servers on each device and make localhost the primary server, then my router the secondary? Assuming that's the case I think that would break when I take a device off the local network as outside it would still assume things work like in the LAN. I could see it working if I had access to my router and primary server was DHCP provided (in LAN that would be my router with it's DNS configured to point to my devices with hostnames, outside it wouldn't have any and use the secondary) and secondary Tailscale's (which supports mDNS so with the same names it would hit my device's IPs from the tailnet) but I don't think I can get that router access...
Unless I misunderstood something of the solution, if so can I ask for clarification?
My comment was kind of high level because I wasn’t sure how much you knew technically already.
But yeah, you would unfortunately need access to the DNS server on your router and be able to add custom records. You’d additionally need a DNS server somewhere for Tailscale clients whether that’s on a Tailscale node or just on the public internet (and configure Tailscale to use it).
I suppose a last-ditch effort would be to buy a domain and create records pointing to both the Tailscale and internal LAN IP addresses. The downside is that you’re basically making the map to your network public but at least people wouldn’t actually be able to access those internal (LAN, Tailscale) IP addresses. The benefit would be only needing to manage one set of records in one place.
I’m really rusty on my OSI model but Avahi, NETBEUI and friends won’t work over WireGuard tunnels because those are layer 2 protocols whereas WireGuard operates at layer 3 (if I remember correctly).
I think I understand why Avahi wouldn't work with that explanation, I keep digging and now my router is not exactly inaccessible, it's managed by my ISP instead which is annoying but I supposedly can still ask them to tweak things for me so I may have a chance
Tailscale already has DNS servers working on Tailnets (they call it mDNS, or magicDNS) which is I believe 100.100.100.100... actually, the documentation states that every tailscale-running device is a DNS server on itself too but either way that IP is private on every tailnet, remains accessible and host names are configurable on the Tailnet too
If I'm not mistaken on the functioning of DNS, I should be able to do it with that primary-router secondary-tailscale DNS setup I hypothesized and on LAN that will yield perfect connectivity, while out from home there would be no such records and it'll fall back to Tailscale's DNS which is already private (worst concern is just sending a request for a hostname on public network but that shouldn't be that big of a deal)
At this point I might have this solved, but of course, more input is nice too, It'll take some time for my ISP to work for me on this
update to BP2A.250705.008 vendor files (July 2025 Pixel monthly release)
disable temporary unconditional system crash notifications since we've gotten the initial feedback we needed since releasing our port to Android 16 (users can enable this themselves via Settings > Security and privacy > More security and privacy > Notify about system process crashes)
NFC: always show standard confirmation dialog before opening a URL instead of it only being enabled for a small subset of users
temporarily remove NFC auto-turn-off feature since it can cause NFC HAL or system_server crashes in rare edge cases and we need to entirely reimplement it inside of the NFC APEX module to avoid the problems (there were rare issues reported prior to Android 16 but 1 user reported an NFC HAL crash loop on Android 16 making it clear we need to drop this until we redo it in a better way)
I went through the Denver airport once with a work colleage. We got to our terminal and she opened her bag to find a book and found a giant butcher type knife she had forgot was in there. Complete blissful ignorance it was in her bag while going though TSA, same with TSA
The TSA in and of itself has always been a make-work security-theatre project. Just as we did just fine without creating the Department of ~~Father~~Homeland Security, it's not like there'd been a whole bunch of hijackings under the previous airport-screening scheme.
Sure, you've got 9/11, but that was far more of a failure on the part of the national-security apparatus writ large than the folks at security at any given airport.
At this point, the biggest danger in air travel is boarding a Boeing. It's a shame Airbus hasn't hired Tom Bodett for a "we'll keep the doors on for you" ad campaign.
But back to the shoes. I have lived exclusively in Birkenstocks -- the generic two-strap Arizonas at that -- since 1993, with a minor excursion for my first job ("Men at the DN-R wear ties"). I have no idea what I could hide in those, especially in sufficient quantity to blow up a plane, without ripping the soles off, carving out some space in the cork and then attempting to reaffix the sole in a stable enough manner that I could even get to the airport, let alone to security.
This was a stupid rule from the get-go. That it took nearly 20 years to admit that tells you pretty much all you need to know about airport security.
I often hear how the TSA was/is security theatre. Was this ever proven with any kind of stats? Did they ever stop any big incidents from occurring?
I remember going through various American airport security in the 2000's and thought it was intimidating (i was a kid). But i figured it would at the very least deter people who might attempt some kind of crime of opportunity? Idk.
Interesting. I feel like surely there must be a way to...make things genuinely helpful lol. I would rather have effective security than shitty security. Idk if I would want nothing though? Weird. Thanks for sharing!
I truly do not know if there is a good solution, but I do know the TSA ain't it. People are pretty ingenious, and if someone really wants to get something through security, they'll likely find a way. Hell, I saw a video of someone that built a functioning weapon entirely from items purchased after the security check. Luckily he was doing it as an example, but still.
I feel like we already have the solution. The reason hijacking a plane is attractive for a terrorist is because you essentially have a precision missile. There's little security for buses or trains because you can't do the same thing. If you make the cockpit basically bulletproof and have strict procedures about entering the cockpit during flight, then it's not nearly as attractive. Those changes were already made after 9/11. Hijacking a plane only allows the hijackers to kill the people on board, which isn't as useful. Literally eliminate TSA and I think we're good.
I think a lot of people have heard of OpenAI’s local-friendly Whisper model, but I don’t see enough self-hosters talking about WhisperX, so I’ll hop on the soapbox:
Whisper is extremely good when you have lots of audio with one person talking, but fails hard in a conversational setting with people talking over each other. It’s also hard to sync up transcripts with the original audio.
Enter WhisperX: WhisperX is an improved whisper implementation that automatically tags who is talking, and tags each line of speech with a timestamp.
I’ve found it great for DMing TTRPGs — simply record your session with a conference mic, run a transcript with WhisperX, and pass the output to a long-context LLM for easy session summaries. It’s a great way to avoid slowing down the game by taking notes on minor events and NPCs.
I’ve also used it in a hacky script pipeline to bulk download podcast episodes with yt-dlp, create searchable transcripts, and scrub ads by having an LLM sniff out timestamps to cut with ffmpeg.
Privacy-friendly, modest hardware requirements, and good at what it does. WhisperX, apply directly to the forehead.
Now that's an interesting angle. I am a mediocre musician on my best day, but sometimes I incorporate phrases and lyric snippits in a piece. I wonder if I could use WhisperX to find those words or phrases from a stack of songs. For instance, I did a piece that used a line from Jimi Hendrix's 'If 6 were 9' where he says 'I'm the one who's gotta die when it's time for me to die. So let me live my life the way I want to.' I wonder if WhisperX could pick that out of a stack of Jimi Hendrix songs.
I think you won't regret it. If the container startup installs stuff, you might lock yourself out when the remote server has issues, your network has issues, or if the package you install changes due to an update.
With it baked into an image, you have reproducible results. If you build a new image and it doesn't work anymore, you can immediately switch back to the old one and figure out the issue without pressure.
Searching gives me the impression there's a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:
Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don't already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
Specific to a desktop environment or version I don't have
Just looks wrong
I'll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I'm desperate, I'll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.
Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it's just confirmation bias.
I find i to look on forums for solutions less and less anyway. Once you've been using a distro long enough unless your trying to do something you've never done before it's usually pretty simple to know what's wrong, and fix it. Because you'll get the same things popping up over and over again.
I also like to keep like a little doc of fixes I've done on each computer so that if a year later i need to do a version upgrade or reinstall i can look back to it, and see what i did last time if i get repeat issues. Especially useful on stuff like laptops where you'll have really specific hardware issues that reappear years later, and normally take hours and hours of trying to figure out what is broken.
Treat the response like you would of an LLM, it needs to make sense to you, you need to make sure they aren't messing with you or have given you a fix that only works in their case. Usually the best fixes are the simple ones. And it seems like even with the longer ones you're able to figure out your simple fixes which is awesome!
Kind of funny how quickly we've flipped from "you should treat LLM output like advice from a random stranger" to "you should treat advice from a random stranger like LLM output".
Either way, it's the right idea. If you can't understand what you're doing but you do it anyway, you're going to create all kinds of problems for yourself.
In a round about way, that does fix the problem you have, though. Just randomly changing things or installing/uninstalling packages until the whole OS is borked and you have to reinstall thereby clearing the problem.
Doesn't teach how to fix the problem, but at least they'll get real proficient with setting up new system partitions.
The difference between workable and non-workable usually boils down to whether I can understand each step and how they arrived at their solution(that is, can I fix my own fuck-up if I miss a step or impliment it wrong for my own situation), which I will know pretty quickly. That said, with my limitted knowlege, I can still spot the 50% that have no chance in hell of working pretty quickly.
OTOH, if a solution is succinct, upvoted, and still looks wrong, I'm at least going to look into the problem further with that as a reference point before I write it off completely.
First hit is a thread describing your exact problem, marked as [SOLVED]. Clicking it goes to a 404.
Second hit is a thread describing your exact problem that goes to an actual thread, but the message has been edited to just say "Solved" with no record of what was done.
Third hit is a thread describing almost your exact problem, with the first response calling the poster a noob for asking and then 15 pages of arguments.
Fourth hit is a thread describing something in the same general area as your problem, which you try anyway and makes the thing you're trying to fix break in a different way, but it's progress at least.
Actual solution is somewhere between the 5th and 8th hit, or you give up and come back to it in about a week and solve it instantly without trying for some fucking reason.
So to answer the question, I can usually tell I'm getting close to the solution when I say "Oh for fuck's sake" as I'm closing tabs lol.
I love to go with just rip out what ever is broken never look at it again and till eventually forgetting something was broken reinstalling what ever I ripped out only for everything to work again
Despite trying to reinstall things like 3 times before.
The key is you HAVE to forget about the problem or it knows your trying to trick it and it breaks it self again!
I'm just using the Cosmic Terminal that's part of the Pop!_OS Cosmic Alpha, but I ran into similar issues with Gnome terminal and even with Termius.
Scenario: I'm currently working on leveraging a VPS to act as the gateway to my homelab so I have one ssh session to Unraid server and one to VPS. One in each tab. Obviously the name shows up as what the username@servername is called in each tab. But I keep getting tripped up and sometimes try to do something from the wrong machine. Once I even failed to realize that the ssh session to one of them cut out and I was back on my desktop and took me an embarrassingly long time to realize why stuff was failing.
So what are y'all using to keep that organized in your work flow? Separate terminal windows instead of tabs? Some shell customizations to make them look different than one another? Or just so ingrained in your brain that you never have this problem?
You’ll get used to it eventually, but you can e.g. tweak your PS1 to an all-caps hostname, or use a custom tmux layout with dedicated panes for each box you connect to.
I saw that too, but it was a bit misleading. The pregnancy tester for some reason had a pretty high resolution monochrome OLED display, so the guy used the tester's display to show the Doom graphics. The actual device running Doom was a more powerful microcontroller external to the tester stick.
Trying to use my linux partition to remote into windows PCs and I am struggling to get ninja remote software to work with even a browser running through wine. Has anyone used this software before and have a solution?
Funny I just spend a few hours working on this on my workstation. Tested in VM first before deploying out to my main machine. but here are rough steps:
You have to use wine and the browser extension "User-Agent Switcher and Manager" I would say first install the browser extension then log into your RMM agent. The button to remote will appear but won't work. Click the remote in button and Download the 32bit agent from the pop up Then run wine not sudo on that exe file. Once installed you need to make a desktop entry [nano ~/.local/share/applications/ninja-remote.desktop]
Change the username and verify the path is correct by checking your wine folder
#Paste this with the correct path and username [Desktop Entry] Name=NinjaOne Remote Exec=bash -c 'wine "/home//.wine/drive_c/users//AppData/Roaming/NinjaRemote/ncplayer.exe" "%u"' Type=Application Terminal=false MimeType=x-scheme-handler/ninjarmm; ###
Second to last Register the desktop Entry: run: xdg-desktop-menu install ~/.local/share/applications/ninja-remote.desktop run: xdg-mime default ninja-remote.desktop x-scheme-handler/ninjarmm
Lastly, Paste this in your firefox extension (The we used to trick sites into thinking we are windows) Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.124 Safari/537.36
Agreed. I hope this gains even more traction. Building a digital economy around support and service of free open source software with the requirement of personnel being local seems like the best way for Europe to finally become competitive.
Look, folks, I’ve been hearing a lot, a lot, about this thing called Linux. Ever heard of it? Sounds European, doesn’t it? Probably invented in Brussels, or Sweden, maybe Russia, I don't know. Total disaster. I call it Socialist Windows, because that’s what it is! It’s chaotic, no one’s in charge. Total mess. Bernie Sanders running an IT department, terrible. Meanwhile, Windows, great American company, by the way, very successful, very strong.
I mean in the server space Linux has already won and is doing just fine. Imo it is actually the reverse and sad that it needs this level of turmoil to get Europe to even think about software and digital infrastructure as fundamental. And even with all that's going on they are just dipping their toes into it rather than properly comitting to a radical shift. Hell, even with all that's going on some parts of the police here in Germany are still getting into bed with companies like Palantir.
If a person reads a lot of theory about how to swim, different types of techniques, other people's written experiences etc., can they swim if thrown in a deep swimming pool? Or, at least, be able to swim enough to reach the steep end and save themselves from drowning?
By "a lot", I mean spending over 6 months to a year, gaining theoretical knowledge. And when we throw them in the pool, they are willing to try it, as in, "I have learnt enough, and I am willing to try it out."
What tips about setting up my stock Android phone would you give me? It's not factory unlocked so I'm sticking with Google Android.
Things I've done: - Stopped and disabled all apps that I don't use or need. - Replaced all apps that I can with FOSS alternatives from github using Obtainium. - Not installed things that I can just check on my laptop like email.
Is there anything else that I can do? Thanks in advance
Edit I've also: - Changed my DNS to Mullvad DNS - Restricted app permissions to only what they need - Not signed into the phone. I don't even have Gmail account.
I made the unfortunate post about asking why people liked Arch so much (RIP my inbox I'm learning a lot from the comments) But, what is the best distro for each reason?
RIP my inbox again. I appreciate this knowledge a lot. Thank you everyone for responding. You all make this such a great community.
Imo, the best one is the one that fits the user's needs the best. Though it sounds like a non-answer, distros are usually tailored for specific needs, so not necessarily the features or lack thereof from one distro disregard another.
My Debian is the best for my work laptop My Arch is the best for my private laptop My Asahi is the best so that I don't have to deal with f*cling macos crap
Why my distro (pop!_os) is the best? Well it's probably not, but here's why I went with it:
ubuntu based, so lots of applicable tech support online
looks nice out of the box (imo)
comes with nvidia drivers. Not a major point cause they aren't hard to get, but it was one of the things I considered when I unintentionally ended up with with nvidia
tiling (the big one imo)
Aand that's kinda it :3.. at the moment it's kinda behind all the other stuff cause they're working on the new COSMIC DE, which im hoping is gonna be an upgrade to the GNOME with extensions the current version has
While COSMIC is certainly an upgrade, current gnome extensions won’t be compatible. COSMIC uses applets instead of extensions. Fortunately, there’s already an ecosystem of applets for COSMIC, many of which have been ported from GNOME extensions.
Ye :3.. honestly as someone who doesn't use that many extensions other than the pop-shell ones, im not too worried about the extensions, since basically all of that is coming as a base part of COSMIC's interface.. I think the only extension that im hoping gets a COSMIC applet soon after release is KDEconnect lol
Same. I think there’s one extension I run in my top bar that lets me individually stop, start, or restart specific system services. It’s very handy, and I’ll miss it.
Aeon desktop is the best indeed: - Crazy fast install. - System configuration is done on the first boot. - Supports ignition and combustion. - The install USB can become a $HOME backup if you re-install. - Full disk encryption by default and mandatory. - Latest GNOME, looks clean and pretty. - Rolling. - Immutable, with Distrobox by default.
As far as desktop Linux goes, I don't see why I would use anything else atm. Give it a try!
I just want to learn more about what are the differences between distros, so that they will be better or worse? Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel so that if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian's, the system will become Debian?
Are all the distros having the same GNU/Linux kernel
Yes. Different distros have different versions, patches and so on, but the underlying kernel is the same.
if I replace all the Arch userland files into Debian’s, the system will become Debian?
If by "userland" you mean files which your normal non-root user can touch, then no. There's differences on how distributions build directory trees, file locations, binaries, versions and so on. You can of course replace all the files on the system and change distribution that way, a convenient way to do that is to use distros installer but technically speaking you can also replace them manually by hand (which I don't recommend).
Sorry, I misread your comment on my first reply. Yes, you can have gnome and hyprland installed side by side, you would just use SDDM to choose what session you’re starting at login.
But is it also possible to have the gnome login screen (so after startup) and then automatically login using Hyprland? Because I dislike any other login screen. (The gnome one is pretty asf)
My choice of distro is just a compromise and close enough to serving my needs. All distros have pros and cons, and I use different distros for different use cases.
I'm vegan, german and into fitness. There really was no other choice. /s?
Also, it's lightweight, you always get the most recent software, pacman is superb and it's super stable. In about 10 years on multiple systems, I never had anything break. The worst of it are simple problems during updates, which are always explained on their website.
Lastly, there is the wiki. The single best source of Linux information out there. Might as well be using the distro that's directly explained there, albeit a lot of information can be used on other ones as well.
With arch-install, you don't even need to learn much, but learning is never a bad idea and will be great if something does break. Every system can break. Arch prepares you for that.
having tried many distros over the years, Arch (and most derivatives) is best for me pacman is the best i've used, packages are very up to date, and it's pretty easy to troubleshoot with the enormous amount of info on the wiki and elsewhere
I (maybe) ended distrohopping last year when I gave NixOS a shot. I can't recommend it for beginners but once you understand generally how things work on Linux (and have an interest in programming) it's a superpower to be able to define your entire setup as a single git repository. If something ever breaks, I can reboot into an older commit and keep using my computer, or branch off in a different direction... I've only scratched the surface of NixOS and yet I can already make a live USB containing my setup with a single command, or deploy it ("infect") to another machine and manage e.g my work desktop and my personal laptop sharing most settings. Also it taught me about Nix (the package manager, which also runs on any distro and macOS independent of NixOS) which I now use to set up perfect development environments for each of my projects... if I set up dependencies once (as a flake.nix shell), it'll work forever and anywhere.
Same for me. I distro-hopped for about 20 years with OpenSuse, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch and Fedora being the most memorable desktop setups for me. While all that was a valuable experience, NixOS feels like graduation.
For the Nix-curious: I wish someone would have told me not to bother with the classic config and build a flake-based system immediately. They're "experimental" in name only, very stable and super useful in practice.
Absolutely +1 for flakes. It's got some annoying UX sometimes (make sure you git add any new files before building!) but absolutely makes up for it by its features.
Same for me, I stopped distro-hoping 2 years ago when I moved to NixOS.
It was tough at first, setting it up took a while and i genuinely felt stupid like i haven't felt for a while; but now I love having the same config on my two laptops. I have one that stays at work and another one for traveling. With one word/line added into my config I can as a software, configure the VPN, change the wallpaper on both my laptop, or not. Some stuff like gaming goes only on the traveling laptop.
Also, another big thing for me is the feeling of having a cleanly built system all the time. I haven't felt the urge to do a clean reinstall since I started with NixOS.
Some more points about Nix: - It's a fast way to get to a specific setup, like a particular DE or Vulkan gaming support, thanks to abstraction that NixOS modules provide - There are tons of packages - Because packages are installed by adding a config entry you don't accumulate random software you forgot you installed - Immutable updates and rollbacks - this is similar to benefits of atomic ostree distros, but the nix solutions are more general, so you have one system that does more things with a consistent interface - in addition to updating the base system, rollbacks also roll back user-installed packages, and configurations if those are managed via Nix - devshells provide per-directory packages and configuration using the same package repos as the host system, without needing to manage docker images - Nix is portable - much of what it does on NixOS can also be used in other distros, or even on Macos or Windows with the Linux subsystem - Configurations often combine NixOS and Home Manager parts. The Home Manager part can be used à la carte on other OSes is a way that is fully isolated from the host OS package management. For example on Macos this is a much nicer alternative to Homebrew. - devshells also work on other OSes - similar to Guix - but NixOS uses systemd, and is (from what I understand) more tolerant of non-free software (whether these are pros or cons is up to individual interpretation)
Nixos Is my first distro I use on desktop. I’m not sure why but I guess the fact that it won’t build till it checks Is a huge plus for me. I love to f up things to learn from them but I don’t like broken things and oh boy. Nix keeps me in the clean, safe. Don’t get me wrong im doing stupid stuff all the time but just cus i have a few configs written down i can learn a lot. Or a little that amazes me lol
Endeavour OS is the best because you get all the benefits of Arch combined with a familiar and friendly installer, a good out of the box setup with the desktop of your choice. Not to mention the outstanding community that's built up around it.
Mint. It just works and Cinnamon is a good DE (ui design peaked in the Windows XP days). Plus you also get all the software built and tested for Ubuntu without the bullshit of using Ubuntu.
For my server I use NixOS, because having one unified configuration is so nice.
My way of thinking and working is incompatible with most premade automatism, it utterly confuses me when a system is doing something on its own without me configuring it that way.
That's why I have issues with many of the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu. Those want to be to helpful for my taste. Don't take me wrong, I am not against automatism or helper tools/functions, not at all. I just want to have full knowledge and full control of them.
I used Gentoo for years and it was heaven for me, the possibility to turn every knob exactly like I wanted them to be was so great, but in the end was the time spend compiling everything not worth it.
That's why I changed to Arch Linux. The bare bone nature of the base install and the high flexibility of pacman and the AUR are ideal for me. I love that Arch by default is not easy, that it doesn't try to anticipate what I want to do. If something happens automatically it is because I configured the system to behave that way.
Linux is so great, because there is a distribution for nearly everyone out there (unless you are blind, then things are not that great apparently, but it seems to get better).
MX Linux (Debian based), using it for almost 10 years now (before, it was Ubuntu). Based on Debian, very stable, always up to date for every kernel/apps, use native .deb no snap no flatpak no systemd. Also it is using Xfce by default, the best DE.
For your info, it was a kind of "square" picture, I used yce.perfectcorp.com/ai-image-e… to extend it left and right, it created new clouds/flowers, not bad
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With Guix you have reproducibility, freedom, good docs and peace of mind, also when configuring things more deeply. You also have a powerful programming language (Scheme / Lisp) with which to define your system config as well as your dotfiles. This is my insight after years of GNU/Linux usage. I run Guix on laptops, desktops and servers, and I never have configuration drift, as well as the benefit that I have a self documenting system.
By default it is, but there are many non-free channels you can use to add the OG Linux kernel to your Guix install as well as nonfree drivers. A famous one is nonguix, which i also use in my config. They also make custom ISOs with the Linux kernel, which helps some hardware indeed. So the libre only policy is a non issue if you read into it a little, but unfortunately most people stay at surface level
Arch. I tried other distros and always came back to Arch. Other distros are very bloated and honestly I can't be bothered with removing them manually. I also love the AUR and the wiki.
Another interesting distro was NixOS, but that is a bit of a pain in the ass to learn.
For newbies, Fedora KDE Plasma edition or Mint Cinnamon is my recommendation. Kinoite is Fedora KDE Plasma edition but immutable for the ones that keep breaking the system because they keep following some absurd guide online for whatever.
Mine is the best for me because I like it the best. It does what I need with a minimum of configuration or customization. My needs and preferences are probably different from yours though, so Linux Mint Debian Edition with Cinnamon desktop environment might not be the best for you.
I use fedora silverblue for a couple reasons. After jumping from elementary to Ubuntu to Manjaro to Artix I got tired of dealing with distro specific modifications and weird issues. With the Ubuntu based distro I never enjoyed how out of date some packages were. I’d hear about a cool new update for a program I use and realize it would be a while till that would be in my repos.
I really liked artix and Arch’s rolling release nature and I would probably enjoy arch if I still used my computer daily like I used to but now I can be away from it for a couple months at a time and I need updates to be stable.
I’ve found Fedora (silverblue in particular) to be a perfect middle ground between rolling release and having a more regular update schedule. I use silverblue because I never wanted to have to worry about an update breaking my install ever again.
I will admit that because silverblue uses flatpaks almost exclusively, my appreciation for software being up to date could be achieved on almost any other distro, but the vanilla style of fedora is what keeps me now. I’m a big fan of vanilla gnome and not too many distros ship it like that.
Honestly, having tried both atomic and regular Fedora, I ended up with regular, as it allows you to do all the same things without limiting you to them.
Install flatpak? Sure. Use Distrobox? Of course. But if you have to use native package, you can simply install it without jumping through the hoops with rpm-ostree (which doesn't even always work properly).
Fedora itself is great, though - a healthy release cycle, high stability, and mature base.
Gentoo works best for me because I'm a control freak. It lets me tune my system in any way I want, and I don't mind leaving my computer on while I'm asleep so that it can compile its way through libreoffice, webkit, and a couple of browsers. Plus, based on complaints I hear from people using other distros, Portage beats other package managers in every way except speed.
This doesn't mean that it's best for everyone, mind you, just that it's best for me.
ZorinOS is the best for me, because it works out of the box, looks a lot like Windows which i'm used to, is relatively configurable and is free (the paid version is just cosmetics and prebundled additional software). I consider looking into Arch though, thanks to your post and the comments there ;)
I use Fedora. I like that it's very up to date and that it doesn't change the GNOME defaults. It also has a big community and many resources to look into if anything goes wrong.
It's my plan. Not in the mood to distro-hop on my laptop right now, and I got to get through my Epic Games backlog (and also the Steam demos I can't be bothered downloading again) before I swap over my Windows 10 desktop.
Arch. I think when people say "bloat" they don't mean it in the traditional sense of the word. Most people are installing plasma or gnome and pulling all the "bloat" that comes with them. To me at least it's more that no one is deciding what they think you're likely to need/do, and overall that makes the system feel much more "predictable". Less likely to work against what I'm trying to do.
Ignore all the comments about Arch being hard to install or "not for beginners". That view is outdated. When I first installed Arch when you had to follow the wiki and install via the chroot method. Now it's dead simple to install with the script and running it isn't any more difficult than any other distro.
I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a decade now. I’m a computer engineer by trade and use a variety of distros in the office (Debian and RHEL primarily). I’ve also experimented with various Ubuntu spin-offs and a few flavors of Fedora. But old habits die hard.
Since I'm old and need to deal with administrating a bunch of machines for work, I settled on the most dull and unsurprising distros of all: debian. Sure, when I was younger and eager to learn and with much time on my hands, I used gentoo (basically what is now arch) and all the others too.
Tumbleweed is the only bleeding-edge rolling release distribution that just works and never fails and is super easy to install and manage without any expertise. And it is massively underrated and forgotten for no good reason.
All Tumbleweed packages go through extensive and to this day unrivaled automatic system testing that ensures no package is ever gonna bork itself or your system.
If you're still worried about stability, there is Slowroll - currently testing, but in my experience very stable distribution. It makes rolling release updates...a bit slower, so that they're only pushed after Tumbleweed users absolutely ensure everything is great and stable (not that it's ever otherwise). It does the same job as Manjaro, but this time around it actually works without a hitch.
Both deliver great experience and will suit novice users.
Why? - I guess I'm too lazy for distro hopping now 🙁
Besides, this was the 1st Linux distro I tried back in 2005. After the usual ditro hopping phase was over, I settled on it; somehow (irrespective of snap and other controversies) I feel at home.
For me its Linux Mint, I'm no longer in position really to do distro hopping, so long as Linux Mint keeps working I will keep using it, I see no reason to change right now. I'm glad and happy that you have settled on Ubuntu, have fun, enjoy and be happy huuuugs 😉
I agree. I tried Fedora first, then Pop!OS, and then settled on Kubuntu.
Kubuntu has been the most stable so far, no big issues. I chose it for that and its Wayland support. Snaps can be disabled or even have auto update turned off which is what I did and I had no real issues with Ubuntu past that so overall a good distro.
Widely supported, plenty of tutorials, has my favorite DE as a spin, it just does what I need it to.
Everybody think they are a special snowflake who needs bleeding edge, or a specific package manager or DE or whatever. Truth is 99.99% do not. They just like to believe they do, claim they do, try it, inflict self pain for longer than they need, convince themselves that truly they are, because of the pain, special.
As someone who ran Debian Stable for a while, this is not a distro for "99.99%".
First, Debian, while very stable in its core, commonly has same random issues within DE's and even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along.
Second, a release cycle of 2 years is actually a giant and incredibly noticeable lag. You may love your system when it just releases, but over time, you will realize your system is old, like, very damn old. It will look old, it will act old, and the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they'd be up to date.
This isn't just programs. It is your desktop environment. It is Wine (gamers, you're gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks like Bottles, which will feel like insane workaround you wouldn't have to have with a better fitting distro).
It is the damn kernel, so you may not even be able to install Debian on newest hardware without unsupported and potentially unstable backporting tricks.
Don't get me wrong, Debian is absolutely great in what it does, and that is providing a rock solid environment where nothing changes. But recommending it for everyone? Nope.
I feel like a lot of your points were true at one point, but are becoming lest relevant.
For one, at least with XFCE, I found myself not really running into DE bugs.
Also, I don't think two years is as obnoxious anymore. During the era of the GTK 4 transition a couple, it drove me nuts, but now that a lot of APIs like that have stabilized, I really don't notice much of a difference between Debian Testing and Stable. I installed and daily drove Bookworm late in its lifecycle on my laptop, and in terms of DE and applications, I haven't noticed anything. I get the feeling Debian's gotten better at maintenance in the past few years - I especially see this with Firefox ESR. There was a time where the version was several months behind the latest major release of ESR, but usually it now only takes a month or two for a new ESR Firefox to come to Debian Stable, well within the support window of the older release.
Also, I don't think Flatpaks are a huge dealbreaker anyway - no matter what distro you're using, you're probably going to end up with some of them at some point because there's some application that is the best at what it does and is only distributed as a Flatpak.
Frankly, I probably am a terrible reference for gaming, as I'm a very casual gamer, but I've found Steam usually eliminates most of these issues, even on Debian.
Also, the official backports repository has gotten really easy. My laptop had an unsupported Wi-Fi chipset (it was brand new), so I just installed over ethernet, added the repo, and the install went smoothly. There were a few bugs, but none of these were specific to Debian. Stability has been great as ever.
In conclusion, I think right around Bookworm, Debian went from being the stable savant to just being an all-around good distro. I'll elaborate more on why I actually like Debian in a comment directly replying to the main post.
I might disagree with 99.999% like you - maybe I'd put it in the 50-75% range.
As a KDE fan, I had some bugs on some devices (like on one of the laptops, wallpapers did not install correctly and the setting to always show battery charge didn't work) even on Debian 12.
XFCE is well-known for stability, but seems to be increasingly irrelevant for the average/newbie user because the interface looks outdated and configuring is relatively complicated.
Interesting you mentioned Firefox ESR - iirc, even at release the version shipped with Debian 12 was considered very old, prompting many to install Firefox as a flatpak. Two years later, it's two years older.
Flatpaks are good and suitable options for many tasks - no argument here! But some things are just better installed natively, and there Debian just...shows.
Steam is a godsend, but there are many non-Steam games and, importantly, programs out there, and launching them through Steam often feels like yet another bloated and slow workaround; besides, you cannot choose Wine over Proton, and sometimes (granted: rarely) you may want to use Wine specifically.
To conclude - it's alright to choose Debian anyway, it is good! But I just feel like newbies and casual users could save a lot of trouble and frustration simply going with something that doesn't require all that - say, Fedora (non-atomic), or OpenSUSE, and then go from there to whatever they like. There are plenty of distributions that are stable, reliable, but without the tradeoffs Debian sets.
If you feel like stability is your absolutely biggest priority ever, and you have experience managing Linux systems - by all means, go Debian. But by that point you'll already know what you want.
Debian Stable actually updates Firefox ESR through the typically on by default security channel.
The current ESR version in there is 128, which is about a year old, which replaced the 115 that came with Debian 12 by default.
The newest ESR, 140 just came out 2 weeks ago. 128 still has 2 months of security updates, and 140 has already been packaged for sid. I have no doubts 140 will come before those 2 months are up.
even programs that may likely just sit there until the next release comes along. ... the only thing you can do is install flatpaks for your preferred programs so that they’d be up to date. ... Wine (gamers, you’re gonna cry a lot unless you work it around with flatpaks
I already posted on this a while ago but that's is a recurring misconception. No distribution, literally 0, provides all software to the latest version or to the version one expects. Consequently IMHO it is perfectly acceptable to go beyond what the official package manager of the distribution offers. It can be flatpaks, am, build from source, etc but the point precisely is that the distribution is about a shared practical common ground to build on top of. A distribution is how to efficiently get to a good place. I also run Debian stable on my desktop and for gaming, I use Steam. It allows me to get Wine, yes, but also Proton and even ProtonFix so that I basically point and click to run games. I do NOT tinker to play Elden Ring, Baldur's Gate 3, Clair Obscur, etc and my hardware is well supported.
So... sure if you consider a distribution as something you must accept as-is and NOT rely on any of the tool to get the latest software you actually need, can be games but can be tools e.g. Blender, Cura, etc, then you WILL have a tough time but that's the case for all distributions anyway.
TL;DR: a distribution is the base layer to build on. Its package manager, on Debian and elsewhere, is not the mandatory and sole way to get the software you need.
Debian. Truly the universal operating system. Runs on all of my laptops, desktops, servers, and NAS with no fuss and no need to keep track of distro-specific differences. If something has a Linux version, it probably works on Debian.
Granted, I am a bit biased. All of my hardware is at least 5 years old. Also came from Windows, where I kept only the OS and browser up to date, couldn't be bothered with shiny new features. A package manager is already a huge luxury.
Because I don't have a fickle heart, and My distro is the best, right now, for me. There's nothing more to it. I do like Mint - but a few apps are out of date, and that's annoying. But it's stable, looks great, and works like a charm.
NixOS. - I have access to more packages than with any other package manager. - everything to get my setup in the exact state I want is in my config, which is 90% useable on any other distro thanks to home manager - My config is all in one place and easy to share - If I ever break something, I can always roll back - I don't need Docker
slackware the og linux distro. super stable, sane package management etc. i've wanted to try void/arch/gentoo/crux for a pretty long time but still haven't because this just works perfectly
IDGAF if it's the best (mint), it was easy to install, easy to transition to from Windows, and in 6 months hasn't given me any trouble. I just wanna use my computer.
Yeah I was gonna say, I dunno if my distro is the best (Arch BTW) but it's the best for me. Doesn't give me any nonsense and lets me tinker as much as I want. Other people just want their OS to get out of their way, which of course is equally valid. Whatever works for you!
I've discovered that I don't much care which distro I'm using, it's the DE that matters most. I have Fedora GNOME, Debian GNOME, and openSUSE GNOME running on different machines. I can't really tell much difference until I enter the command line or package manager, and even then, it's the front end of the command that changes while the backend stays mostly the same. Flatpak has made the difference between distros even fewer.
While I still care somewhat of distro differences for functional reasons, I completely agree that DE's are the most important part in terms of user experience.
Both my machines use KDE, and while they run two different distros, they look and feel pretty much the same since I use a very similar layout on both of them. This, along with file sync through my NAS and similar apps, makes switching from one computer to the other a breeze (pun not intended), despite some differences under the hood.
EndeavorOS. It runs smooth, i dont get errors, all my games work, the taskbar and notifications work like I would expect them too. Switching from Windows 2 months ago, I cycled through a few distros but they all were giving something up until i found EoS.
Also PKGBUILD's are the superior packaging format. Back in the day people use to talk about preferring debian or redhat based distros based on how much they liked debs or rpms. Building packages on Arch is easier than pretty much any distro I have ever tried to build packages on.
I wanted the awesomeness of pacman and like the way Gardua comes pre-configured as well as packages it installs from the get go. The only thing I hate about it is the "gamer" universal KDE theme it comes with.
Man, I wanted to try Garuda a couple of weeks ago and the thing would never even boot into the live environment. Went ahead and installed Cachy OS and it's been great.
Mint Cinnamon. All my hardware works, and it can do the few things I require my work PC to do. It even remembers things like my default audio device - something Ubuntu refused to do for years.
I like the way Pop!_OS looks. Not gonna pretend it's the best. But as far as default UIs, it clicked with the most. Default gnome seemed too spartan and all of the Windows-like DEs remind me too much of Windows. Which I don't like. If that makes sense.
Hopefully none, why do you like Gnome? I thought it was okay, but I really love KDE more. I don't hate Gnome. It seems really good for anyone who uses a touchpad or touchscreen.
I can't speak for anyone else but I can tell you what I personally love about Gnome.
I like that it's Spartan. I like that it looks good without me having to customize a thousand different settings.
I like that It has client side decorations, so every window doesn't have to have an obscene, chunky, mostly useless title bar.
I don't miss every single application having 100 different options packed into a menu bar. Once you get used to it, you realize that it was mostly getting in the way the whole time.
It's just a really streamlined workflow for 98% of what you do. The problem is that 2% where it's too spartan and God do you wish you had some options.
But I also think KDE is a great desktop environment. If I were more of a gamer I'd be using KDE. I think XFCE is an excellent desktop environment for aging hardware and Windows converts. It is very much a matter of taste, Use cases, and your preferred workflow.
Most packages have sane defaults, and it's so stable. It's true that it sometimes means older software versions, but there's also something to be said for behavior staying the same for two years at a time.
If hardware support is an issue, using the backports repo is really easy - I've been using it on my laptop for almost a year with no problems that don't exist on other distros. If you really need the shiniest new application, Flatpak isn't that bad.
It also feels in a nice position - not so corporate as to not give a darn about its community, but with enough funding and backing the important stuff gets maintained.
I just moved to Debian trixie (soon to be stable) because I needed an upgrade after ~15 years of Gentoo.
I was a proud Gentoo user. I learned a lot about systemd and kernel configuration. Many advances in portage made it possible to find the time to maintain my Gentoo setup. On my laptop I gave up Gentoo even earlier, because updating my system was just too time consuming. I actually learned less and less about the software I was using, because I was trapped in dependency conflict management. The new binary repos did save some compile time, but the actual time sinks are decision for your systems, use flags and the forementioned dependencies.
So, I installed Debian on my main workstation (two days ago). I am already using Debian on on my Raspberry Pis. I did choose a more challenging way using debootstrap, because I want to use systemd-boot, encrypted btrfs and have working hibernation. I am still busy with configuring everything.
One could argue, that I could've used the time on Gentoo to solve my current python_targets_python3_13 issues and do a proper world update. No, this is a future investment. I want the time to configure new stuff, not wait for dependency resolution or waste time solving blocking packages.
The main reason to switch from Gentoo to Debian is being able to install security updates fast without blocking packages in the same slot.
Obligatory "There is not a single distro that's the absolute best for each and every one." disclaimer aside, my personal favorite is definitely secureblue for being a hardened-by-default distro that adheres to the ~~'immutable'~~ reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis paradigm while enjoying a healthy stream of improvements pushed out by an active group of contributors.
This is going to be a longer blog entry, but here’s a TL;DR: I propose that instead of "immutable" or "read-only" when talking about operating systems (such as Fedora Core…
I love Pop OS because it got me back into Linux after ditching it for windows for the last 10 years, partly to do .net development and partly because I hated the state of Ubuntu/Unity.
As soon as cosmic is stable and easy to install on Nix I'll switch to it.
Arch btw, only been using it for a couple of weeks, only installed it because of the meme. Got my hands on a few years old thinkpad for practically free, so why not. It's actually quite good so far, been struggling a bit with external monitors, but I don't miss windows
Arch, everything it does provide works extremely well, I can configure everything how I want it without having to fight a distro maintainer trying to be clever, I get new features and bugfixes whenever they go in without having to worry about a distro maintainer deciding whether it’s relevant or whether I should just live with crashes and security issues for another two years because they figured it wasn’t important or critical enough.
OpenSUSE tumbleweed: Up-to-date, unbreakable due to Btrfs+snapper, very secure defaults (firewall), based in Germany. It works perfectly on my Thinkpad, so I couldn't ask for better.
Linux Mint because it's extremely simple and has caused me no issues for over a year. It's the best distribution to get someone who is afraid to switch from Windows or MacOS to understand that using Linux can be just as easy.
I recently needed to build newer versions of some packages for Debian. Now, they're go based so the official packaging is super complicated and eventually I decided to try and make my own from scratch. After a few more hours of messing with the official tooling I start thinking "there must be a better way."
And sure enough, after a bit of searching I found makedeb which allows you to make debs from (almost) regular PKGFILEs. Made the task a million times simpler.
I use Kubuntu. It is defintly not the best Distro. I am just used to it and too lazy to get used to another distro. My days as a distro jumper lie 15 years back...
Tbh though, I might switch to Debian stable whenever Trixie comes out.
It isn't. I'm on PopOS 24.04 Alpha 7 (soon to be Beta 1), because of COSMIC (and because I was having some bugs with Fedora a few months back).
I recently wanted to tinker with a piece of software that wasn't packaged, and I couldn't compile it because of outdated libraries. I could return to Fedora specifically to tinker with it but as an ex-distrohopper, I know it isn't worth the effort.
Even though Fedora or some version of it will likely be my forever distro, I will stick to PopOS for now because I can't be bothered to distrohop and back up months' worth of files, including game saves and a ton of stuff in my Downloads directory.
I was a Nix user (more specifically, nix-darwin user) but after being away from the computer for like one year (to study for the university entrance exam), I completely forgot how to use it and resulted in erasing the computer. Nix/NixOS is fun, but it was too complicated for me.
I use Nobara with KDE for my gaming computer, Mint with Cinnamon for pretty much everything else.
Mint is the closest to a "Just Works" experience for me. Cinnamon is rock stable, especially on Mint Debian Edition. I don't remember the last time Cinnamon crashed or had any major bugs for me.
I use Debian for most of my servers, stable and simple. Arch on a junker Thinkpad to test and mess around with new programs and window managers.
Tumbleweed. Rolling release with automated testing (openQA), snapper properly setup out of the box.
Honestly the entire openSUSE ecosystem. Tumbleweed on my main PC that often has some of the latest hardware, Slowroll on my (Framework) laptop because it's rolling but slower (monthly feature updates, only fixes in-between), and Leap for servers where stability (as in version/compatibility stability, not "it doesn't crash" stability) is appreciated.
openSUSE also comes in atomic flavors for those interested. And it's European should you care.
With all that being said, I don't really care much about what distro I'm using. What I do with it could be replicated with pretty much any distro. For me it's mostly just a means to an end.
Gentoo because it is as stable as Debian, less bloated than Arch, has more packages than Ubuntu, is rolling release, can mix and match stable, testing and unstable on a whim.
Even its one downside, compile times, is now gone if you just choose to use binary packages.
And less stable than Arch, and more bloated than Ubuntu... If that is something you want for whatever reason! It is the most versatile distro in existance because it's literally anything you want it to be - clean and nice, or total chaos. What is there not to love?
Since I mostly use computers for entertainment these days I keep coming back to Bazzite. It’s fast, stable, kept up to date, reliable, and “just works”. I’ve created custom rpm-ostree layers to faff around, but it’s not actually necessary for anything I need.
I used to keep a second Kubuntu Minimal partition around but I realized I just don’t need it. If I wasn’t so happy with Bazzite, I would probably go with openSUSE or Endeavor.
Yes, but also I had to run through proton off steam and the modding process is less streamlined. I unironically have had a less complicated time running windows and dealing with its "special" features than running Linux and having a custom setup for every other game.
I've been using (X)Ubuntu for ages. I just wanted something that "just works". Tired of too much tinkering and there's plenty of (non commercial) support. Mixing it with i3 as my window manager.
For me it's openSUSE Tumbleweed on my Desktops/Laptops and openSuse Leap on my Servers. The killing Feature for me was the propper BTRFS integration with Snapper for seamless rollbacks in case I borked the system in some way.
One "downside" for me is the mix of Gnome Settings and Yast on my Desktop. But I like yast on my servers for managing everything (enabling ports in firewall, network config, enable autoamtic isntall of security updates, etc.). Also openSuse is not that common, so sometimes it is hard to find a solution if you have a distribution specific question.
Personally never looked to closely into openSuse Build Services (OBS). But I know some people who really like it.
I am using Bluefin, based on Fedora Silverblue. I realized that I was already exclusively using flatpaks for everything except one random app, so I thought why not go all-in?
Haven't had to worry about updates or system breakages since, and it's been great so far.
I used to use Debian Stable, but since doing SysAdmin work I've just become used to the way Fedora / RHEL does things.
Lots of projects claim to be the “smallest” or “simplest” Kubernetes, but they never provide data to back it up. Let’s look at how these distributions compare to Talos Linux.
Keep in mind that this post is by a company that offers one of the options they compare. So there is an obvious conflict of interest, and I wouldn't trust the conclusions that were reached
And obviously their option is the "best". From the conclusion:
Talos Linux is unique. It’s the only option that includes OS management in a purpose-built distribution for running Kubernetes. There’s no compromise for scaling up or down. In terms of small-scale numbers, it “wins” in several of the examined categories, including memory usage, disk r/w, and installation size. But all of these metrics are side effects of Talos Linux’s defining characteristic: It’s simple.
So, a while back I installed Xfce with Chicago95, but was disappointed. Xfce just doesn't vibe with me, and a strict emulation of Windows95 is not really what I wanted, I just wanted something that "felt" that classic.
So I was gonna give up and just use KDE, until I saw TDE. I think TDE is probably what I'm looking for but I'm concerned about using anything so minor because security.
It TDE secure (for personal use)?
Can a DE even be insecure, or are they all generally as secure as each-other as long as you follow the rules (trustworthy software, closed firewall, install patches fast, and disaster recovery plans)?
What vulnerabilities can a desktop environment even have (edit)?
It's good that it looks to be still maintained, but I imagine their resources are limited with so little market share and it doesn't look like they have the resources to switch to Wayland (which I assume is more secure).
I'm not sure my noob questions are worthy of asking the devs directly.
Desktop environments are not equal form the security perspective, but they all are rather insecure, because security is hard and harms UX, and the GNU/Linux desktop is traditionally focused on UX and the user freedom by sacrificing security. However it is possible to build a secure environment based on an insecure DE, what Qubes OS does with XFCE, for example.
The question I want to ask here is, what does "secure" and "insecure" mean in the context of a DE. What distinguishes a secure and insecure DE from a practical perspective (physical access, privilege escalation, rootkits, etc.).
Looking at the FAQ, they do "maintain" their version of TQt3. Whether they maintain it to the extent that it's secure is anyone's guess. There's always the question of what kinds of exploits can even exist in a desktop environment (which I should add to my original post).
Probably not significantly less secure than Xorg itself, I wouldn't mind using in your place. DE security is usually not a huge problem, if someone can exploit these vulnerabilities usually you are quite bonked.
Remember most of what happens on screen is xorg, the wm is a simply interacting with xorg and other parts of your DE are simple user level programs like the panel etc..
What kind of threats could affect Xorg? I can't imagine anything really exploiting the display manager without arbitrary code execution elsewhere (not that I know anything at all about software security).
I guess the biggest risk is whichever browser I use becoming a Wayland exclusive and not getting updates.
There are no open security bugs against TDE that I'm aware of—if there were, I'd expect them to be fixed in the next release. In my experience, the development team, while not huge, is active and competent.
I've been using TDE since a little while after Gentoo sunsetted KDE3, and I've had no issues. Just make sure your X server is secure—-nolisten and all that stuff—and don't try to use Konqueror as a web browser (it remains an excellent file manager), and you should be fine.
Wayland is "more secure" than X in that it makes less LAN contact by default and tries to sandbox programs from one another to an extent, just in case some future browser exploit that can copy random swathes of your screen tries to screenshot your password manager or something. There are no active exploits against a correctly-configured X server at this time that will magically vanish if you switch to Wayland, as far as I'm aware—it's more future-proofing stuff.
Thanks, that's a very clear response. I guess I basically can use it until X11 stops getting security updates. I wonder whether an X11 vulnerability can trigger a serious vulnerability even if it doesn't get security updates.
No idea what that -nolisten stuff is about. Is that to do with the firewall?
-nolisten is an actual option passed to the X server—your distro may do so by default—to work around a known security issue in some versions. I admit I'd have to look up the details, as it's been a couple of years since that issue was reported. Recent X versions almost certainly have a patch.
That might be a better fit for me. I know KDE has a polish and security I want, I imagine I could make it how I want.
Apparently TDE has lower resource usage, so I wonder if for that reason TDE might be a better fit. Clearly I should get both more experience with KDE and a better idea of what I'm actually looking for.
Before you give up on XFCE and/or Chicago95 - have you replaced the default menu with Whisker Menu? For me, Whisker Menu is a must-have for any sane XFCE user. When I used it with Chicago95, I found I could have a Windows 7 style interface with Windows 95 aesthetics.
Honestly, even if Chicago95 is aesthetically not what you want, I'd recommend trying an alternate theme on XFCE - I currently use modified DesktopPal '97 combined with a pack of Haiku-style icons.
Overall, I'd be interested to know more about your qualms with XFCE and see if customization can help you overcome them. A lot of distros have annoying defaults for XFCE, but I changed a few simple settings and have a desktop I rather enjoy using. It is totally fine if it still isn't the thing for you after any potential discussion, but I just want to make sure you really know what XFCE has to offer before you move on.
I don't really like how I keep accidentally rolling-up the windows in Xfce and how long the settings menu takes to load, I probably had more qualms but I don't remember what they are. It works fine (except for some aspects of Chicago95), but it feels outdated in a bad way rather than good way. Part of it is probably my crummy laptop with broken CTRL keys and incompatible bluetooth.
DesktopPal '97 seems really cool, but right now my top priority is switching to KDE Plasma 6 with custom themes and seeing how that goes.
Also, the settings menu thing is weird - mine takes less than a second to load, and I'm on a machine with a 7 year old processor at this point. I almost worry that if that takes a long time KDE will be more miserable performance-wise, unless you've already tried it on here.
By the way, what distro and XFCE version are you running - just for good measure.
The outdated sentiment is probably based, honestly. I think it's gotten better, but there are rough edges. In the end, do what works for you.
Roll up is when you scroll-up while hovering over the title bar and everything except the title-bar disappears. In the image monovergent provided the title bar is highlighted in red.
I use Linux Mint with Xfce. Gonna change to OpenSUSE once I can be bothered distro-hopping.
EDIT: Specifically it's the Font Settings that take forever to load, not all of the settings menu.
Mine used to be bogged down by the half-a-million Noto fonts, which I alleviated by uninstalling fonts-noto-extra, leaving only fonts-noto-core and fonts-noto-mono.
If you decide to return to any GTK-based desktop environments, I'd suggest trying out the GTK3 port of the Raleigh theme (github.com/thesquash/gtk-theme…). It's a much less involved install compared to Chicago 95 but gets you most of the look-and-feel.
The Whisker menu properties menu also has settings to make it fit the Windows 95 style a bit better. Here's how it could look:
Since Pango / HarfBuzz have dropped support for many legacy bitmap fonts, the following Helvetica OTB font works as a replacement for MS Sans Serif, including bold and italic versions. Add the file...
I made the changes, and it's slightly better but I think the main issue is my bad laptop and the negative association I have with Xfce as a result (since Xfce was what I was interacting with).
Raleigh isn't really my style. Too many lines. Plus I've decide I'll switch to themed KDE (and probably FreeBSD with TDE on one device).
The theme in the image you sent is really nice. Beige makes it feel more classic, and the red title-bar is far less jarring than a blue one is in 2025.
As far as the TDE devs know, there haven't been any issues resulting in a user getting hacked, they've modernized the underlying code, and actively patch any reported vulnerabilities: redlib.tiekoetter.com/r/linuxq…
That said, it is still a niche codebase with a small team, so they might not have the resources to be so proactive against theoretical vulnerabilities as a project like KDE or GNOME with Wayland. If you're being targeted, TDE would certainly be a shiny attack surface, but otherwise, I don't really see why a hacking group would go for something as niche as TDE. There's a tradeoff, like the one I take with X11 because I refuse to give up my XFCE+Chicago95 setup for an arguably more secure Wayland setup.
Most of the issues of a desktop environment just come down to there being more code and therefore a larger attack surface. Lots of widgets, obscure processes, and nooks and crannies to hide malicious stuff too. And legacy code with expansive privileges from the days before security was as much of a concern. While not Linux, it is analogous with security being a big part of why Microsoft released Server Core, which stripped out much of the GUI.
An extreme case, I also know of a someone who used Windows XP to do rather important work on the internet until around 2020. Only thing that stopped them were websites getting too bloated to load on their computer. But they did follow the basic rules as you mentioned and seemed to be just fine.
Oh damn, so just viewing a file in your file manager is enough to get infected in an insecure desktop environment, as thumbnails can be generated programmatically? If I clicked a bad link that would 100% infect my system.
I'm not worried too much about screen-capture. I'm worried first and foremost about triggering any arbitrary code execution and thumbnail generation on a file would definitely do it.
So basically they still require arbitrary code execution as a starting point.
Another guy shared this link from Secureblue that goes into thumbnail generation, which can be done programmatically and has been documented in the past as an avenue for infection in Nautilus.
My understanding of Keybase is that it was some kind identity aggregator. You were able to link identities not just by keys, but also by external services, like Twitter (at a time), email and other things.
Is the data and public keys being replicated in the communication between instances? it's not made clear how the federation actually works, because "enabling users on different servers to share data with end-to-end encryption" (from foks.pub/) is something all services with TLS / HTTPS support already do...
Also.. one big plus for the OpenPGP HKP protocol is that technically you can self-host your own key in a static HTTPS server with predefined responses and be able to have it interact with other servers and clients without issue. I'm expecting the more complex nature of FOKS might make self-hosting in this way difficult. I'd rather minimize the dynamic services I expose to the outside publicly if I'm self hosting.
journalctl is the one part of systemd I really do not like. For whatever reason, it's insanely slow, taking multiple seconds before it gets around to display anything. It also has all the wrong defaults, displaying error messages from a year ago first, while scrolling to the bottom again also takes forever and consumes 100% CPU while doing so.
There are flags to filter and display only the relevant parts, but not only are none of them intuitive, doing a mistake there just gives you "-- No entries --", not an error. So you can never quite tell if you typed it wrong or if were are no messages.
Maybe it all makes more sense when studying the man page in depths and learned all the quirks, but /var/log/ kind of just worked and was fast, without any extra learning.
I totally agree. I used to hate systemd for breaking the traditional Unix philosophy, but the reality is that a tight init and service-tracking integration tool really was required. I work with and appreciate systemd every day now. It certainly didn't make things simplier and easier to debug, but it goes a long way towards making a Linux system predictable and consistent.
Poettering can go fuck himself though - and for PulseAudio too. I suspect half of the hate systemd attracted over the years was really because of this idiot.
Is it really breaking it? As far as I'm aware, it's more like gnu. It has components and you can select what you use (here meaning distros and packagers).
People mistake this for a monolith because it's all named systemd-thing. Integration, like you said, was and is needed. But what if all those separate utilities and services are actually disconnected and speak some protocol different to pipe? Does it make it less unixy?
And poettering is an absolute good guy here. Pulseaudio wasn't perfect, but did it improve things compared to what was there before? Sure it did. Even now, pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
Perfect is the enemy of good. And while all these tools might not be perfect, they are the best in the Linux world.
Agreed. But he's also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.
pulesaudio protocol is used within pipewire and it works just fine.
I wasn't talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can't count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.
I always assumed that Poettering is an arse to people because of the hate he got for systemd. I imagine it's hard to see the best in people when there's a crowd of haters everywhere you go. Though I have no idea what he was like beforehand.
Everybody who is hated and popular gets death threats. Hell, even the nicest actors get death threats.
They are easy to write and send, and there's 0.01% of the population that is mentally unstable enough to actually do so. You and I don't get death threats because we aren't popular enough.
Nah bugger that. Famous actors are known by a vast majority of people. It is not normal for open source programmers to receive abuse to the level of death threats. That only happens when you get the attention of kiwi farms types.
I feel that generally, when the issue is that the person is an arse, then the complaints are often not about the software. You might see people campaigning to boicot the software out of spite, but they won't give you a technical reason, other than them not wanting the creator to get any credit for it.
When the complaints are about discrepancies in the way the software is designed (like it was with systemd), there's no reason to expect the person to be an arse. Though him not being an arse does not make the criticism about his software invalid... in the same way as him being an arse would not have made the software technically worthless. Don't fall for the ad-hominem.
Pulseaudio was introduced in 2004. How come it took almost 20y for it to be replaced if it was that bad?
Implementation, being what it is, improved the situation compared to alsa and other things before it. Again, while not perfect it made things better for everyone.
It's funny that this is a thing attributed to poettering as bad since things before were way worse... why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?
I really don't get it.
And all of these things are optional. The fact that distro people and companies select them is because they solve real world problems.
things before were way worse… why not throw Sticks and stones at those people?
My earliest memories of Linux audio were in Slackware in the mid 90s, reading and re-reading the HOWTO that started off with a bunch of attitude about how real computer users don't need audio, but we can do it anyway "so, if you must hear Biff bark..." and then a bunch of very unhelpful things to try following that never ever worked on any system I ever tried to use them on. Diverse systems that, of course, all played audio through Windows flawlessly.
Agreed. But he’s also an abrasive know-it-all. A modicum of social skills and respect goes a long way towards making others accept your pet projects.
This isn't what I get when reading bug reports he interacts in. Yeah, sometimes he asks if something can't be done another way – but he seems also very open to new ideas. I rather think that this opinion of him is very selective, there are cases where he comes off as smug, but I never got the impression this is the majority of cases.
I wasn’t talking about the protocol, I was talking about the implementation: PulseAudio is a crashy, unstable POS. I can’t count the number of hours this turd made me waste, until PipeWire came along.
PipeWire for audio couldn't exist nowadays without PulseAudio though, in fact it was originally created as "PulseAudio for Video"; Pulse exposed a lot of bugs in the lower levels of the Linux audio stack. And I do agree that PipeWire is better than PulseAudio. But it's important to see it in the context of the time it was created in, and Linux audio back then was certainly different. OSS was actually something a significant amount of people used…
From what i understand the problem is that while systemd is technically split up into different components, you can't really use it with the stuff you don't want ripped out.
You obviously weren't actually around when he was granted mini-king status and acted like a jackass to literally anyone who objected to pulse or systemd. As a result, redhat, canonical, and Debian had to eat criticism over pushing these before they were ready... because of "superstar" poettering.
Linux audio has been a cluster^$%< of epic proportions since the mid 1990s. At least you can make single application systems work well these days, but Windows has really whipped the llamas ass on the audio front for 30+ years now, in terms of "it just works" user experience - without being hyper-draconian on the application ecosystem.
It definitely depends on what you are trying to get out of it.
I'll grant: low lag audio performance in Windows is... dismal. Which is why everyone had conference call lag adjustment issues in 2020, "go ahead", "no you go ahead", "ok" - both start talking simultaneously again... It seems better these days, I'm sure that's at least in part due to training of the conference participants, but maybe they have been working on getting the lag down without too many dropout / stutters.
We have a bespoke low lag audio system that was specifically implemented in Linux even though we put the GUI in Windows because of those lag / stutter issues, years back the audio was done on a dedicated DSP chip, but a Core i7 is more than up to the task on Linux these days.
The Linux audio pains I refer to were: A) audio just doesn't work at all, and B) audio works, until you start to try to use two audio applications simultaneously - then they start to mess each other up. Both of those were better in Windows long before Linux came up to speed. But a lot of how Windows audio gets acceptable performance is big laggy buffers.
I totally agree with the functionality of systemd. We need that. But the implementation… Why the fuck do we need to cram everything into pid 1? At least delegate the parsing into another process, god damn. And could we all just agree that ’systemd-{networkd,resolved,homed}’ don’t really have a reason to exist, and definitely not that coupled to a fucking init system. Systemd-timers are wonderful, but why are we running cron-but-better in pid 1?
We have an init-system where the developers are afraid of using things like processes and separation of privileges. I’m just tired of patching fleets of servers in panic every time Pöttering’s bad design decisions hit the fan with their CVEs and consequences.
I don't know why they are downvoting you, it's true. I'm dealing with this kind of problem currently.. sometimes the boot lasts forever to the point that I have to use AltGr+SysRq commands to force kill everything.. other times it simply boots as normal. It's not consistent at all.
At least before with the old init it was relatively simple to dig into the scripts and make changes to them.. I feel now with systemd it's a lot more opaque and harder to deal with. I wouldn't even know how to approach the problem, systemd-analyze blame does not help, since the times I actually get to boot look normal. But I do believe it must have to do with the mountpoints because often they are what takes the longest. Any advice on what should I do would be welcome.
Also, I have a separate Bazzite install in my living room TV, and while that one does not get locked, sometimes NetworkManager simply is not running after boot... I got fed up to the point that I wrote a workaround by creating a rc.local script to have it run, so I can have it available reliably when the system starts (that fixed it.. though some cifs mountpoints often do not get mounted.. so I'm considering adding the mount command to the same rc.local script too....).
I'd say the main bad part of systemd is how it's used and now expected everywhere.
If you search for some Linux guides or install something complicated or whatnot, they always expect you to have systemd. Otherwise, you're on your own figuring how things work on your system.
This shouldn't really happen. Otherwise, yes, it's great, it integrates neatly, and is least pain to use.
There is no authority delegating responsibilities of writing tutorials for Linux. It is the responsibility of nobody and everybody. If you can't find one for your problem, write it yourself when you have figured it out.
If you think so and that this is important, maybe you could be the one that makes it happen. Start a project and gather like-minded people. That is how Linux, FOSS and community driven efforts operate. It's useless to complain that nobody else makes the effort if you have the capabilities but can't be arsed making an attempt yourself.
I like systemd overall. The ease of use, uniform interface and nice documentation is awesome.
Though each time I try to run it on outdated hardware (say, my Thinkpad X100e, which is, well, a life choice xD) — it makes whole system much slower. IMO, openrc is not as bad, and in some ways it gives some capabiilties of systemd these days.
I hate to admit I didn't want anything to do with systemd because it took me forever to get somewhat familiar with some other mainstream init systems.
Then, I didn't care for a while until I developed software that had to keep running using some sort of init system. The obvious choice was whatever the default I had (systemd) and I fell in love with the convenience of systemd (templates, timers, ..). I started shipping sample systemd with the things I provide & yes, you are on your own if you use something else.
I'm over here still using OpenRC. Mostly because I want to. Some servers I run have systemd on them. systemd is generally nice. OpenRC has finally gained the ability to run user services, which is also very nice.
I've been using systemd on most of my systems since it was released; I was an early jumper to upstart as well.
The thing I don't like about systemd is how pervasive in the OS it is. It violates the "do one thing, do it well" Unix philosophy, and when systemd went from an init system to starting to take everything over, I started liking it less.
My issues with systemd is that it isn't an unmitigated success, for me. journald is horrible: it's slow and doesn't seem to catch everything (the latter is extremely rare, but that it happens occasionally makes me nervous). There are several gotchas in running user services, such as getting in-session services working correctly (so that user services can access the user session kernel keyring).
Recently I've been using dinit on a system, and I'm pretty happy with it. I may switch all of my systems over to it; I'm running Arch everywhere, and while migrating Arch to Artix was scary the first time, in the end it went fairly smoothly.
Fundamentally, systemd is a monolithic OS system. It make Linux into more of a Windows or MacOS, where a bunch of different systems are consolidated under a single piece of software. While it violates the Unix philosophy, it has been successful because monolithic systems tend to be easier to use: users really only have to learn two command-line tools, vs a dozen. Is it categorically better, just because the user interface is easier for new Linux users?
Systemd is modular not monolithic. Distros choose which parts of system d to implement and it just happens to be most of it since its really good at what it does.
It is not modular. This is a lie Poettering keeps pushing to defend building a huge edifice of interdependent systems.
Look at the effort required to factor out logind. It can't just be used in it's own; it has a hard dependency on systemd and needs code changes to decouple.
I will repeat that journald is really bad at what it does, and further assert that you can not run systemd without journald, or vice versa. That you can not run systemd without getting timed job control. Even if you chose not to use it, it's in there. And you can not get time job control without the init part. In most unix systems, init and cron are utterly decoupled and can be individually swapped with other systems.
Systemd is not modular if you can't swap parts out for other software. Systemd's modularity is a bald-faced lie.
The one exceptions are homed and resolvd, which are relatively new and were addedlong after systemd came under fire for being monolithic. And, ironically, they're the components most distributions don't use by default.
Systemd boot, Systemd network and elogind I'm pretty sure can be decoupled. There's 69 modules so I'm not entirely sure about all of them just the ones ive encountered.
I know logind can't easily be, because I ran Artix for a while and they were using a decoupled version of it, and there was a big discussion about swapping it for something else because it was so hard to maintain.
It's refreshing to read to someone that actually says "I was so wrong"
I was wrong also with systemd, I hated it mainly because I already knew init.d, where files are, where configs where etc. Some years later hate is gone, I'm not a power user, but I just now know how to handle my things with systemd and all is good.
I see most often that it's the people who live in init.d - interact with it multiple times a day - who are most vocal about systemd hate. I'm going to call "old dogs don't like new tricks" on that one.
I do get into that layer of system maintenance, but it's maybe 1-2% of my time, mostly a set-it and forget-it kind of relationship. There was a time when the old ways were easier due to more documentation and guides on the internet, which I lean on heavily because I interact with this stuff so rarely. Those days passed, for me, 8-10 years back.
I decided to finally lean into using systemd more while i've been using NixOS, since the OS already relies heavily on it anyway. Created targets for my window managers, starting all my programs with services instead of autostart scripts, etc. And it worked fine for the most part, except for some reason, in qtile the systray widget refuses to load the nm-applet when it's started through systemd. Waybar does not have this problem. I can't help notice that systemd is not just a little slower, which isn't the biggest deal in the world, but it also tends to hang more often when shutting down, which is a bit annoying and reminds me of windows lol. Before NixOS i used Void, and while i never really cared too much about what init system i'm running, i can't help but really appreciate runit for being so simple and fast. I'm thinking of moving back to Void but using the Nix package manager on top. I recently found a solution to the nix driver problem when using it on other distros, so now i should be able to combine the best of both worlds.
I've never used any other init system since I'm relatively new to Linux (8 years of use). So, systemd is all I know. I don't mind it, but I have this one major issue with it. That "stop job for UID 1000......" Or whatever it says. It's hands down the most annoying thing I have ever experienced in Linux. Making me wait for 3 minutes sometimes is just insane. I know I can go in and make it wait for 5 seconds /etc/systemd/system.conf or whatever, but why? Also, another one usually pops up.
Other than that, I really like how I can make timers. I like how I can make scripts run on boot, logout or login. And I like how I can make an app a background service that can auto start if they ever crashed. Maybe all of this can be done with other init systems? I wouldn't know, but I like these in systemd
I use it because I'm frankly too dumb to use something else, but if that wasnt the case, i dont think id be speaking fondly of it.
I'm a ram usage fetishist, I absolutely disagree with the "unused ram is wasted ram" phrase that has caught on with people.
I see some of these distros running a graphical environment with only 90mb ram usage and i cream myself. All of them run something other than systemd, usually avoid GNU stuff, and...require you basically to be a developer to use them.
I already run a half broken, hacked together system due to my stubborness, I can't imagine how fucked I'd be if I tried one of these cool kid minimalist distros.
If you're in a system where 256mb of RAM is the limit, sure - go for the RAM efficient OS options, they're out there.
Can you even buy less than 2GB of RAM in a desktop system anymore? Even the Raspberry Pi 5 starts at 2GB (and, yes, the older models have less, but I did say desktop system, implying: reasonable desktop performance.) Maybe if you feel the need to use a RasPi 3 as a desktop for something then you should dig around for one of your more efficient OS configurations, but I'll note... back when RasPi 3 was the new model, Raspbian came default without systemd, but offered a systemd option. The systemd option booted from power off to the desktop (such as it was) in about 1/3 the time.
You can play around with the mount option nofail, if that's set, systemd will not wait for the mount point to be ready and continue booting normally. Can be useful with HDDs that take a while to spin up and aren't needed for the boot process (e.g. backup drives, etc.).
Another thing to look out for: SDCards or USB flash drives that might randomly fail to "spin up" and hang, unplugging those helps.
I hated it and still do because for a period of years every weird, difficult to find issue on a bunch of servers was caused by systemd. It may be fine now, but I switched to Devuan and have had incredible stability. Poettering's response to security issues was also terrible and honestly the dude seems like a real piece of shit.
I think it strongly detracts from the post. I basically skipped right to the comments without clicking the link because I'm assuming it's AI slop, and I'm hoping the comments are interesting.
People would be less mad if you straight up used a stock image with a watermark so I don't understand why people go out of their way to use AI when they know people will comment on it and it will detract from the point of the article.
Also, using AI in the thumbnail makes people automatically assume you're using AI in the text as well. And if you're not doing that, why would you lessen the perceived value of your writing by making it seem like you are?
It just seems pointless and actively harms your actual goals because people will get hung up on the fact that you used AI and ignore your actual valid points. Especially when you're writing about open source projects when most people interested in open source are vehemently anti-AI, it really just shows you don't know your target audience.
While I mostly agree with you (and 100% on it distracting from the article), I think you’re not thinking about image rights.
If you’re a serious blogger with a good sized blog, a lawsuit or DMCA or otherwise is potentially a killer outcome of using an image you don’t 100% sure have the rights to. With AI, you can be 100% sure you can use the image however you want, without any repercussions. I’d imagine that’s huge in the considerations for a blogger.
I dont think this is a reasomable counterpoint because the target audience in question would also vastly prefer shit as simple as an mspaint illustration or a dithered irl image.
Also, it is quite feasible to find royalty free images, and I have no idea where you're getting the impression it is not. There are a host of images that provide licensing metadata. Google image search and co. can find these. It's simply a matter of verifying the license authenticity.
Any idea how well verified the images are on those sites? What's the chance that one with copyright gets uploaded and I get hit with a giant fine for using it?
Dunno. I feel like if you've used an image from a reputable source under the proviso that you're licensed for it, and it turns out you're not... you may be able to blame Unsplash etc. and just swap the image out.
Personally I think it's fallen out of fashion. For my blog I'd either use a meme or other dump picture for each post. When generated images first came out I used a few for blog posts, it was new and interesting and said "I'm interested in technology and like playing around with new things".
Nowadays I'm back on the meme pics. I feel now it's so much easier to generate images, it more says "I want to look professional but also spend no money and have no standards".
i’m downvoting ai slop every chance i get. i’m sure it’s just as futile as downvoting every post that used the acronym ‘FAFO’. i hated that one because i think the people who used it thought they sounded sooo cool.
if you’ll excuse me, i’ve got some clouds outside i need to go shake my fist at.
I don't appreciate the attitude and arrogance of the guy behind systemd because he actually believes what he produces can replace everything that already "just works". He wants to push out systemd-homed because "why not". He wants to replace grub. He wants to replace a myriad of things that just flat out don't need to get replaced. autofs, cron, you name it! That kind of thinking and one-size-fits-all mentality is backwards and does not benefit the community in any way. All it does is stuff everything into one bin and so long as influencers like this guy continue to restrict what works or doesn't work according to their own work, the community and its users will not be able to freely develop FOSS. Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency on systemd and so when you're trying to use something like Gentoo, it becomes very difficult to get that done and hacks have to made in order to get it working. FOSS shouldn't work like that. He'll keep stripping away legit projects from major distros until IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good. Sorry if I can't rejoice in the woah whiplash.
So, I don't like the guy either, but for a little devil's advocacy:
The stuff that already "just works" was developed during a very different era in terms of computing power, tasking of the computers which were running the systems, etc. Nobody (serious, and he is serious) develops something different because "why not?" they, at least from their perspective, feel that they are improving on the status quo, at least for the use cases they are considering.
one-size-fits-all mentality is
being decided by the distro maintainers, not the developers. Sure, developers promote their product, but if a distro thinks that multiple flavors are a better path, they distribute multiple flavors. It's not like the systemd developers are filling billion dollar war chests with profit because they're using strong-arm tactics to coerce distro maintainers to adopt their products.
stuff everything into one bin
When one bin serves the purpose, it's a lot easier to maintain, modernize, security harden, etc. than ten bins.
the community and its users will ~~not~~ always be able to freely develop FOSS.
Fork it and your loyal users will follow.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That's the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
FOSS shouldn’t work like that.
FOSS, by its very nature, should be expected to work all the ways. If a particular way can't get enough developer traction, it stagnates but never really dies, not until the ecosystem it is dependent upon can no longer find hardware to run on and users willing to run it.
IBM/Red Hat finally decide to seal the deal and lock everyone out for good.
I am very glad that I walked away from CentOS about 8 years back, its proximity to Red Hat never made me happy. I have been trying to walk away from Canonical (toward Debian) for about 3 years now, but it still has some hooks that keep our professional team happier than Debian. If the unhappy ever outweighs the happy, we'll execute the move.
Sorry if I can’t rejoice
Never asked you to. End of devil's advocacy. I still don't like the guy, but I never really interact with him. I do interact with his products and the alternatives, and in my use cases the products speak for themselves. There's nothing about systemd that makes me dig around for systemd free alternatives - they are out there, but for my use cases I don't care. YMMV.
Gnome is a good example of something that creates too much of a dependency
Agreed, I was never happy with GNOME, and starting about 5 years back I have been migrating my systems, personal and professional, off of it. That’s the nature of FOSS, no contracts to negotiate, make the choices that make sense for your use cases and execute them.
Does Gnome have too much dependency on Gnome: yes or no?
Absolutely. If you don't mind using Gnome exactly as Gnome wants you to - this year - then it's usually a pretty refined desktop experience, but if I wanted to be told what to like, how to like it, and to shut up and be happy, I'd use a Mac.
I prefer XFCE for its modularity... don't want a launcher bar? Don't run the launcher; nothing else misses it when it's gone.
Mess around with Gnome too much and it becomes a nightmare mess of dependencies.
Well, it is not one bin. There is no monolithic systemd bin that does everything. There are a lot of separate bin files for all the different tasks. Well and if you don't want to use timers, then don't and just use cron instead. If you don't want to use journald, then just don't and use rsyslog or whatever you want. Don't need systemd-homed? Well, then don't use it. You want to configure your network with something else then systemd-networkd? Great, do it if you want.
The Poettering Army will not come and force you to enable all the options 😜
If it breaks it is, in my experience as a grub user for over 20 years and as a guy working in server hosting for 15 years, either because of failing HDD/SSD or because of user error. People don't read when the updater tells them that running "grub-install" is needed (or they perform it on the wrong drive/partition) and then blame grub when it fails on the next boot.
The crappy bootloader that comes with systemd very often, in my experience, fails to register that a new Kernel was installed and boots the old one (or fails to boot if the package manager removed the old Kernel).
Oh and GRUB has so many useful features, like booting a ISO image. GRUB is a piece of programmer art!
Even a system that uses 90mb of ram on a cold boot will accumulate gigs of stuff in cache if you're using it. (assuming it has the memory for it) That isn't what people have a problem with though.
Maybe this is an incorrect use of language on my part, but I feel like I'm not the only person who means "memory actively being used by a process" when referring to memory usage. I understand the whole linux ate my ram thing. That just isn't what I or what I assume a lot of people mean when talking about this.
When I boot up my system, pull up my terminal, run htop, and see 800-1200mb being used just by processes (not in buffer, not in cache), that doesn't raise any flags or anything, but I also know that some people have gotten their systems so streamlined they use 10x less than that. That's all memory that could be used by other things. That could be the difference between a low memory system running a web browser or not. Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system. There are endless possibilities.
Could be the difference maker in a game someone wants to play on their system.
One reality of the world is: the developers choose what hardware/OS configurations they target. If the makers of your game don't target your RAM efficient system, you're outta luck. Developers make their choices for their own reasons, but even with the ever-growing FOSS communities, the majority of developers work for a paycheck, that paycheck comes from profitable businesses and those businesses have very strong influence on what the developers work toward. The businesses only exist because they are profitable... FOSS may not be bound by those realities, but it lives in a world dominated by them.
Because people here accuse Poettering of being an asshole: I've read some of his blogposts and seen some talks of his and him doing Q&A: He answered professionally, did his best to answer truthfully, did acknowledge when he didn't know something. No rants, no opining on things he didn't know about, no taking questions in bad faith.
As far as I can tell all the people declaring him some kind of asshole are full of shit.
He is not that bad, the issue is that, as all foss devs, he is not interested in solving problems he does not feel like are important.
The problem is, he disapproves when resources are allocated in his project to those problems and one main area he is not a fan of is support for legacy stuff.
It just happens that legacy stuff is the majority of the industry, as production environment of half the globe needs to run legacy software and a lot of it on legacy hardware
I have seen with Oracle Java and OpenOffice (as two examples) that the open source community is very good in just leaving and forking a project if the current owners fuck up.
The same will happen with systemd if needed. Red Hat may be the primary source behind systemd now, but they don't own it. All the code is fully open source, none of your ramblings have any hint of facts or any real foreseeable danger behind it. I asked for facts, for anything with some kind of real information behind it.
There is nothing that powers the claim that RedHat or IBM could take over Linux with systemd. How would they do it? They can't, because even if IBM would tomorrow change the license to a closed one and would want money. Who cares, everyone will just fork the version before the license change and good is.
Just as it happened back then with Xorg (I mean the change 15 or so years ago, not the current strange fork), like it happened a short while ago with Redis, and there are so many examples more.
I must assume Gentoo does require manual intervention here and there, and updates must take eternity for packages that are not precompiled, ain't it so?
So, this is kind of an awkward problem, and I think i know the answer but I just want reinforcement before I do anything. My friend recently got me into doing these dip powder nails, and they're super cute. I've been doing them for a couple months now, and I've enjoyed having them.
About a week ago my husband informed me he was interested in trying fisting. Before this we haven't been intimate in probably two or three years.
To be clear, I'm super on board with trying it, I'm looking forward to the intimacy, and I'm aware the answer is probably just "do short nails without glow in the dark shit on them", but is there I way I could tickle his insides without shredding them to pieces with long nails, or any suggestions before diving into this?
Well, generally, the answer is a no. Nails and intestines do not mix well, and once you're past the anus, that's what you're dealing with.
It isn't impossible to modify the nails to be less risky, but never to the degree that I'd be willing to have them up my rear, even if I was into that. There's reasons that nurses and nurse's assistants are often expected to keep their nails short, and that's one of them. We don't go wrist deep, and it's still too big a risk.
Way I see it, you have two options. One is to cut them back to where they don't extend past the end of the fingers, then use two nitrile gloves over your hand that's doing the work. You can still keep pretty nails like that, they just won't be as showy
The other is to take the risk, and wrap the nails in something like gauze, then tape them, then glove up. I've heard of people doing that with no injury, but it is still risky.
If you can't/won't do either of those, call it done and get a fist dildo.
Yeah, I was afraid of that. I'm not gonna risk hurting him, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing another obvious solution i guess. I appreciate it, thanks.
The National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers’ union, has voted to cut all ties with the Anti-Defamation League over the group’s weaponization of antisemitism and attacks on supporters of Palestinian rights.
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