I’ve always built my own PCs. And from my experience, it’s worth not to be cheap on the parts. There is always a sweet spot or a special offer and the biggest task is to find it for each part.
If you’re going to be cheap, you’ll build a PC that lasts ~2 years.
Sorry to be that guy, but this sounds like a cybersecurity nightmare. While everybody was busy to come up with schemes that make absolutely sure that only trusted sources can update a system to avoid having malicious players push their code to users, this one just takes any rando’s pile of whatever and injects it straight into the system’s core? Like, that doesn’t sound like a good idea.
Well, I’m just automating what people currently have to do manually : visit GitHub and download DEB and install DEB.
If the automated process would be dangerous then the manual process also would be, and that would be on the maintainer for not providing an APT repository or a Flatpak, not on the user for just downloading from GitHub.
.deb is a terribly insecure nightmare thats held up by the excellent debian packagers, gpg , and checksums, and stable release model. don’t use .deb files.
End users are also developers. All computer users are developers. You are developing.
user working for end users
By making a script that lets me get backdoors and shitty packages with ease? The linux package distribution system is a nightmare, Debian is the least bad approach. There is basically always a better option to using a .deb file. If you come across something that isn’t packaged, I recommend Flatpak, building from source (and installing unprivileged), or using the developers vendored tarball (installing unprivileged).
It’s a cool concept, but automation breeds laziness (by design, to an extent) and lazy end users tend to shoot themselves in the foot. So it isn’t great for security, but it also isn’t that much worse for security :)
Since some people with money tend to be litigious, and, of course, I am not a lawyer, I would advise a warning message (or part of the license if you don’t want to muck up your CLI), if you don’t have one, to force the user to accept and acknowledge that the software they are installing using this tool is not verified to be safe.
I didn’t say it was more secure, I said it’s about the same.
The difference is a person being forced to go to a website to download software means more steps and more time to consider the safety of what they’re doing. It’s part psychological.
Not all such packages are retrieved from GitHub, I remember downloading numerous .deb files direct over the past 25 years (even as recent as downloading Discord manually some years back).
The main point I’m making is that you should legally protect yourself, it’s a low and reasonable effort.
I didn’t say it was more secure, I said it’s about the same.
You said automation breeds laziness (by design, to an extent) and lazy end users tend to shoot themselves in the foot.
So, my question is : what part of automating download of DEBs from a specific source can be shooting oneself in the foot compared to doing the same thing manually every time ?
you should legally protect yourself
The MIT license will take care of that.
Also, to force the user to accept and acknowledge that the software they are installing using this tool is not verified to be safe is inducing fear and/or guilt, therefore is bad UX, I’m not doing that.
And then all those app store fronts that say whether a flatpak is verified or not is inducing fear and/or guilt and is therefore bad UX. It’s not, but you are free to have your opinion.
If you are getting your code straight from the author,
Which is not what you are doing at all with a .deb file. A .deb file is a binary with a bunch of scripts to “properly” install your package. Building from source is what you SHOULD be doing. Debian has an entire policy handbook on how packages are supposed to be packaged. Progrmatically you can review the quality of a package with ‘lintian’. .debs made by developers following a wiki tutorial can’t even come close. remember, apt installs happen as root and can execute arbitrary code.
Also, debian packagers can be project maintainers, so they can be “the author.”
I see it more as a local repo. Like, setup the repo to do what you would have done manually so that you don’t have to do it on multiple computers. I could be misunderstanding it though.
Is registration for fedia.io currently working? I’ve trying to set up an account for a couple of days. When I fill out the registration page and hit “register” nothing happens.
ok - there was a problem with the mbin queues on fedia - I think that may have caused the problem with registrations. Can you give it another shot? Also, if that doesn't work for whatever reason, please shoot me an email to [email protected] so I can debug the issue.
Everybody in a PC community is going to go to "build your own" by default, but it really isn't the only option.
It is true you won't match the price-to-performance on the Deck, but if you're willing to go a bit higher you can try a few things. For one, you can try to buy used. I would like to see a PC in person before I do that, but there may be options, depending on where you live. The good news is that upgrading from a Steam Deck anything with a dedicated GPU should be a nice boost in performance, so you can go for entry level or older desktop parts. If you don't mind a bit of bulk or have a convenient place to stash it you can also skip the whole mini-PC space, which is typically sold at a premium, and just buy a big old tower.
And then there's laptops. Used laptops devaluate a lot, which means you can find decent entry-level laptops with 30 series GPUs that will still outperform the Deck by a lot for a few hunderd bucks. Again, I'd like to look at one of those before I buy, but if you don't care about the screen quality or the cosmetics there are some affordable used options out there. Just... check the noise when gaming, because some of those sound like a hair dryer on high power mode.
As others have said, it depends on your budget and specific use case, but if you're using a handheld as a console attached to a screen you should be able to cobble something more functional together. Just maybe not as hassle-free or reliable.
Definitely agree on the used idea. Ebay is full of used previous gen parts at great prices (stick with sellers with a deep history of 99% and higher feedback, avoid those with accounts less than a year old and/or single digit feedback. Avoid single digit sellers with suspiciously cheap prices for recent hardware like the plague - these are likely scammers.)
Personally, I’d avoid laptops if gaming is your primary interest. Performance does lag behind similar spec desktops, but more importantly, if something that isn’t ram or a storage drive breaks on a laptop, the whole machine is probably done. Not necessarily because the whole machine is unusable, but many if not most repair parts are model specific and can cost more than the laptop did.
Desktops can be repaired and upgraded per assembly, which makes them pretty kind to your wallet if gaming on a budget. I just scored an excellent condition 1080ti for around $150, and I know with absolute certainty that very robust off lease workstations from a few generations back can be had for $200-ish or less if you know what you’re looking for. Pair them with that 1080ti and you’ve got some decently capable hardware to play with!
I’ve got several gaming machines that I use to run everything from old stuff to heavily modded Skyrim VR and many new titles, and I pretty much only buy storage amd cables new. Everything else is purchased used on Ebay.
IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?
I agree, but I think we need to be a little more granular than this. We don’t need to create a 1:1 mapping for every subreddit, but if at least we can make it in a way that each subreddit has a recommendation in a adjacent sub-category, it will be better than just pointing to the closest/most popular community in the higher-level category.
Imagine if you are into one specific genre of games and subscribed to a bunch of different subreddits through the years for the games you enjoy. When you come to Lemmy, the recommendation is simply that you signup to a generic “Gaming” community, only to find out that no one is really talking much about your niche genre. You’d be more likely to say “this recommendation is non-sense” than “ok, I will start posting content related to the things I am interested about”.
I suppose there’s an element of preference as well. If !myinterest exists and is limping along with 80 subscribers and a post once a month, is that less discouraging? Maybe 300 subs and a post every other day is adequate? At the risk of scope creep, maybe the answer lies in more data and options to account for the preferences of those new to the Fediverse.
Fight the good fight, friend. I need more posts about old TV shows and niche hobbies, so we just need more decent people, however they arrive. :-)
One of the things that I will be adding soon is the ability to request a community to be created. For subreddits which there is no equivalent community, people will be able to fill a form (similar to the “Create Community” page on Lemmy’s default client) which will check what is the best participating instance in the network, and if the instance admins approve, the instance can be created right away.
Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?
How would the “best participating instance” be determined?
How long would this process take?
We’ve deliberated for several days on the “best instance” for a community, and getting instance admin approval can also take time in some cases. This seems to be at odds with the “right away” goal.
Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion. Creating new communities is not the challenge. Growing them is.
Who do you imagine would create the majority of these requests?
Ideally, the answer to this is “the users who sign up to a fediversed instance and see their favorite subreddit missing on the list of recommendations.” If this is going to be true, I honestly do not know.
How would the “best participating instance” be determined?
By the categorization matching. If someone wants to make a community to bring a local community (e.g, for a city in Australia) it would try to match the request with aussie.zone. If it’s a science focused subreddit, it should try to match it with mander.xyz, etc. Granted, this assumes that those instances are participating and using the fediverser software on their side, and at the moment I’m the only one doing, but the idea of the whole project is to create incentive for instance admins to use it.
How long would it take?
A request should trigger some type of message to the admin. So, “as long as it takes for the admin to act on the message”?
Even if a community is created, it needs people to grow it, making posts and contributing to discussion
100% agree. This is why the other leg of this creature is the “Community Ambassadors” feature, which is meant to help people to grow their communities and find them content.
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