The absolutely never ending jank. My latest grippe, Ubuntu 22.04 . Remote desktop needs password reset after every reboot, no idea why, grdctl set password doesn’t help, only doing it in the Ubuntu settings UI works. Never ending stream of tiny annoyances like that
The main issue is that easy problems that should be solved baseline by the OS crop up far too often for the average user to want to have to deal with day to day. Also, whenever you go to ask on a forum, you’re usually told to just do something entirely different or use another distro. Every time I go to fix something on this machine it sends me down a rabbit hole of shit I don’t care about because it doesn’t solve my problem since it introduces a brand new one to solve. If I want to use solution X don’t tell me to go install program Y that’s your favorite program to use but is literally not what I’m trying to accomplish.
Today I installed Manjaro onto an old laptop and for the life of me I could not figure out why it wasn’t connecting to the internet. It wasn’t a network issue, it was the fact that the time was out of sync. It took me a while to realize that was the issue and not that I had fucked up my router config or something. It just couldn’t validate any cryptography because the time was off. There were like four different solutions that all attempted the same fix and eventually I was able to connect with ethernet and restart timesync, which only worked after a restart.
Honestly I think Linux has been on a great path with flatpak and appimages and graphical software centers. With BTRFS Snapper system recovery if an update goes wrong is even easier than the windows version to be honest. Honestly the big push now just needs to come from some corporate and also adoption at the early education level. One reason its so hard for people to switch from windows is because most windows users have at this point used windows and nothing else for 20+ years.for those of the millennial generation and gen z they’ve been trained to use windows literally since childhood. Linux and open source tech being free and open source would make it a great cost savings move forpublicc education institutions and getting newer generations of young people not straight indoctrinated into using exclusively windows is important.
But to do this IT departments need to have corporate fallback for support. We need companies like suse enterprise or redhat etc to do the corporate level support to even think about an endeavor like that.
Yea agree, not a fan of “Meta”. But I think limiting who can use federated networks kinda goes against the federated nature of such networks. What’s next, we’ll have a centralized blacklist of lemmy instances.
This is mentioned in pretty much every thread but I haven’t seen anyone apply the theory to the fediverse. The second step is for threads to create features that lure people over from Lemmy (or activitypub). So are the people saying eee by extension saying they’ll move to threads from their current server because threads have a bigger and better development team?
I’ve been saying exactly this since the news dropped. I fully understand people being worried, but I haven’t seen a concrete pathway to damage that doesn’t involve meta-hating users moving over to a meta product.
Past performance is indicative of future behavior. Simple as that. Meta has proven that at every single turn they will do what’s profitable, not what’s best for the user.
they’ll move to threads because threads will be incompatible with the rest of fediverse (thread essentially defederate themself), and if most content is being posted in threads, they’ll move there (since they can’t access it from other instance)
this has happened before, such as
MSN messenger breaking compatibility with AOL IM (MSN wins since it got 95% market share)
MS Office doing obfuscation to their office file data to prevent FOSS editor like LibreOffice from rendering it correctly
Meta’s decision to work towards federation does need to be taken with a lot of salt. Corporations using open platforms or open source to make their money has always resulted in power imbalances that, left unchecked, may become impossible to solve without concessions from said corporation, or else [X] thing just gets hung out to dry.
You have to hope the people running that company understand that these problems exist, and actively work against ruining everything for everyone else that relies on it.
The problem is when bad actors enter the situation. Meta has no interest in being a part of the community, they want to take it over and commercialize it.
Still no. If you feel ostracized because your bigoted viewpoint isn’t welcome, then you should take a hint and stfu instead of crying about it. I don’t feel bad about not welcoming hatred and for treating it the same way it treats others. Your dog whistles aren’t welcome either.
So text-based Instagram with 70 million regular users and some brand accounts is hatred? Serious reality distortion field you have there. Well, Lemmy.World has not blocked Threads at the moment, so I’m alright and actually not crying at all. It is people like you who want to police what other people look at.
Maybe you should lobby to block Trump’s Truth Social which is an Mastodon instance full of actual racists.
The nice part about federated networks is that if you disagree, you can just move instances. Nobody is bound to the will of the admins like with traditional centralized social media
Is there yet a way to fully migrate a lemmy account like a Mastodon one? Otherwise, “just move instances” isn’t great advice, it’s still having to start over. We need that ability imo or we’re losing a major benefit of being federated.
Meta has the right to join the fediverse, but instance admins have the right to defederate from them. If a user doesn’t like that, they can make an account with another instance. How does it go against “fediverse principles?”
Disagree. It should be up to the individual USERS to have the freedom to block whatever user or instance that they want. Honestly the whole point of the fediverse is just freedom and not being at the whim of some god figure overlord
It would be great if that was the way it worked, unfortunately right now it’s granular to the instance level, not user level. Not sure it’s even possible to get it down to user level unless every user runs their own instance which is unlikely to ever happen. The data has to live somewhere, so we need instances or instance -equivalent to host the data. Maybe if they get it down to where hosting your own instance is super easy one-click ordeal. Then each user would be truly in control.
or you know, just don’t use instances that have admins that are powerhungry, authoritarian, censorious dicks. (If you’re looking for a good mastodon instance like that, I’d recommend checking out qoto.org)
I think one can be “open” to a fault. If you cling to principles and morale for the sake of it and without exception or nuance, you set yourself up to be exploited or worse. Many things, entities, interactions in life contradict each other and it is important to set boundaries and make decisions for yourself. Because life and people are multi-faceted and aren’t nice and clean and perfect, which blind, naive idealism fails to take into account. The keyword here is nuance.
Many big tech companies run on greed and inhumane, unhealthy, invasive practices for the sake of pure, blind, unsustainable growth and profit. And I would argue that this is one of the driving factors of the fediverse even existing. If you don’t clearly separate yourself from these practices, then we all can simply use Reddit. But people create, maintain and use alternatives for a reason. Not taking a stance or action against what you want to escape from, even openly inviting it for the sake of being open and on a morally high horse makes simply no sense.
Idealists won’t like to hear this, but it’s the same with peace. Look at Ukraine to have a recent example. Most people want to live and prosper in peace. That is natural and desirable. But there are always some, who profit from war and who try to destroy things, disregarding the fate of others. Or political systems that want to expand territory and exploit / convert whole populations. When the desire for peace is only one-sided, and all attempts of talking or peaceful incentives fail, you can either protect yourself forcefully or be stolen from, raped, tortured, deported or murdered, watching your homeland be turned into ashes and those you love suffer for decades from the consequences.
In the same way, when the desire for openness, humane fairness without exploitation of users is one-sided, you have to draw a line and take a clear stance to defend that “safe space” you seeked in the first place from entities and principles that contradict it. And we have decades of clear evidence how big tech, especially Facebook / Meta operates, they are known to invade user privacy, strive for one-sided power, try everything to avoid or circumvent legal regulation. They have more than earned to be excluded from a place created to offer something better, healthier. And it’s not like we hurt feelings here, it’s a corporation, a virtual, soulless entity.
I can only speak for myself and do what I deem is good for me, so I’ll migrate to Lemmy.ml, because at least they have the balls to stay true to a concept, even if it involves difficult or ugly decisions. And even if blocking Meta won’t fully “protect” the fediverse, at least it is a clear message and limits the amount of power they can achieve and the amount of damage they can do here.
My many years of experience on the Internet has taught me that once the unwashed hordes of the public show up and start slinging shit around, that’s when your website dies if you like having intelligent discourse on it.
The article was a nice read. I’m surprised that there is either no awareness or discussion in the privacy conscious tech crowd over here on the lack of privacy from anonymous bad actors. Everyone seems to only care about Meta, who are bad, but the most they will do with our data is advertise to us. The other bad actors enabled by ActivityPub can actually doxx, redistribute, save our posts, messages.
I agree that the fediverse isn’t currently super privacy-friendly, although I think there’s also an inherent limitation to privacy on a social network since it’s all about sharing things. I view privacy as having the control over WHAT I share, with WHOM I share it with, and WHEN, and I get that moreso with the fediverse IMO. I choose what information I share, what I follow, etc. The major difference to me is that Lemmy isn’t tracking me elsewhere around the web like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc do. The big sites also save our posts and messages even when they claim not to, because things that are deleted are very rarely ever truly deleted.
I would appreciate the ability to send no-knowledge encrypted DMs here on Lemmy. But using PGP is not difficult, will guarantee only the recipient can read the message, and is a skill that everyone who uses the internet should be able to do anyways.
being open to everything is not better though, and being open to meta specifically will threaten and lower the quality of the place. lemmy.world should defederate with threads
You’re in no position dictate what an instance should or should not do. If you don’t like what an instance is doing, you’re welcome to join another one or start your own, that’s the beauty of decentralization.
As users, we have every right to express an opinion and to ask the admin to consider taking an action. As you say, if you don’t like it, join another instance.
Make it just run and pre install it on most computers.
With “just run” I mean things like:
Audio just working
Bluetooth just working
Bluetooth and audio working together (I still can’t get this one right, after 5 evenings of trying)
WiFi supporting all the frequencies, instead of just some
remembering monitor configurations
Troubleshooting audio shouldn’t mean that you almost completely kill your OS with that
You know, things like that that might cost you an evening or two or three to figure and make you feel like you’re the rarest edge case alive. On Windows, these work just fine out of the box.
I know this ain’t easy to get to, but I can’t recommend people to use Linux when even a phones does perfectly fine out of the box results in at least an evening of troubleshooting.
Yeah I use Debian. (At least once a while when I decide to give it yet another shot…)
Edit: in case you are interested, I can give some extra details on that list, and how I fixed them or not. But all these fixes ain’t a thing I’d expect the median user to be able to figure.
Out of curiosity, how long ago did these problems happen? I’ve been using Mint and Xubuntu for a while now, but had to use a few different troubleshooting distros to fix a Windows boot issue, and none of these came up. As these are Debian based distros, I’d expect the same problems to filter down.
The only thing I’ve had issues with lately is setting up a USB wifi adapter on a Raspberry Pi, but I’d expect some problems with that.
Around a year ago I fixed the bigger issues, but I started with Linux around 5 years ago. The WiFi issue has been around a month ago, but didn’t do a lot of troubleshooting outside of rebooting and browsing all wicd settings because well I was offline because of it. Didn’t visit that place again and at home there’s wifi on all bands as well as ethernet almost everywhere, so the issue doesn’t hurt me that much.
Booted into it today to see if things are better, ran the update/upgrade/reboot after and:
Bluetooth seems to be better! It now connects to my headphones even when paired before. But now I fails a2dp even after forget/re-pair.
I had to start the system a couple of times before it actually did start, there’s been some issues finding thermal data of the cpu during startup. I’ll play around with it a bit these days, but sadly it did not magically just work.
Why would you expect issues with an external WiFi adapter for the RasPi?
I wonder if it was an edge case that the Linux driver didn’t account for, like a minor incompatibility between the two devices.
You’ve just reminded me that I had a Bluetooth problem with my laptop a few years ago. My headset would connect and work properly, but wouldn’t be recognised after the laptop had either been to sleep or shut down. I had to go through the bluetooth device folder, something like /dev/bluetooth/, find the folder that corresponded with the headset’s address, and delete the cache folder inside. It would then work until the next sleep / shut down.
I expected problems with the Pi because USB wifi has always seemed to be a bit dodgy, even on Windows, and wifi is apparently still a problem area with Linux. Add to that the Pi’s limited distro, and I thought it was bound to go wrong.
That’s kinda the problem here. I’ve heard people say how complex and difficult Android is so they have to use iOS.
People have personal experiences and beliefs that differ and there’s no way to fix them other than to dive into it and they don’t want to dive into it. Unless they are highly motivated to change they will likely just stay where they’re comfortable.
It’s like trying to logically and reasonably explain why being vegan is morally right to someone who absolutely refuses to read the labels on the stuff they buy. They’re not going to want to go into the BIOS to fix a boot order to boot to a flash drive let alone learn a new UI. Hell, most people didn’t even want to move off Windows XP, 7, now 10 till they are absolutely forced to.
It was never about what problems you have had it is about the problems they have had. Most of the time MacOS/Windows are good enough for most users.
Ubuntu 22.04 (granted it was upgraded a few times, but origianlly a 20.10 box), even with bredr set int he conf, wouldnt work with Airpods…
pop_os does, but since its a dual boot, i have to re-pair them if i use it in another OS, since they share the bluetooth adapater.
Using an egpu has no hotplug. And you need something like egpu-switcher to manage the config. - github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher
this also wont apply to pre-login stuff. You would need to copy that over to a different file there.
this also wouldnt work if you had say…3 monitors and wanted to use 2 configs. In windows you can do that with super+P and swap between extend and only external etc.
My pop_os install wont recognize my logitech 720p USB camera thats like. Its a brand new install of 22.04.
Teams, even in the PWA, and other apps often dont respect the system defaults for sound/mic inputs. Especially if you have a few, which all laptops do since theres always shitty onboard speakers and mics.
There are all experiences of mine from this calendar year. I can work around them mostly. But my wife or others…no way. They would just chuck the PC at me and say “fix it”. These are all also things that work OOB on windows or MacOS.
A fellow laptop user :-) For the monitor setups I use batch files with xrandr settings. I could imagine there being a way to get them to run via hotkeys…
But yes, the whole thing summs up with “I may use it for myself, but I just can’t recommend the whole package without providing tech support for it”.
I just had the opposite problem, tried to re-image a brand new laptop with windows 10, keyboard and mouse dont work in setup. Works in the bios, works in linux, doesn’t work in windows until it can hit windows update. Honestly in recent years stuff in linux just works.
It’s the first step of installation, making a bootable usb/CD. Most non-technical people can’t be arsed to create a bootable drive, then go into the bios boot settings to run it. I haven’t used Windows in a long time so I don’t know how it’s installed these days, but the fact that it comes installed out-of-the-box when people buy a computer lets them skip the first and biggest step to running linux, which is getting it installed in the first place.
Distros have come a long way that a Windows user trying Linux Mint can hit the ground running. It’s no longer about the learning curve for USING linux, it’s INSTALLING linux that’s the problem.
Exactly. I’d argue that some supposedly mainstream distros are hard to install even for the competent. Last time I checked, Debian’s funnel for newbies consisted of a 90s-era website with “instructions” in the form of a rambling block of jargon-filled text with mentions of “CD-Roms” and a vague discussion of third-party apps for burning ISOs. I mean, on Linux flashing a USB stick is matter of a single dd command with some obscure switches, but even that was nowhere to be found and I had to search forums for it. Incredible! Hard to imagine how forbidding it must all seem to the average Windows user! No Debian for them!
IIRC Ubuntu’s process was much easier but still not as easy-peasy as it could have been.
The only hope for desktop Linux is a crystal-clear, bulletproof, 1-2-3-style onboarding funnel that takes the user from “this is the distro’s website” to “I have a bootable USB”. From that point on it’s plain sailing.
As somebody who likes using the terminal I too have mostly stopped using dd and use gnome disks instead. Getting the rightdd flags to get the best performance and progress indicators is a challenge to Google every time.
Install Balena Etcher. This is the website. Now install it.
Open Balena Etcher. Follow instructions on screen. Make sure you select the corrent iso file and the correct device (your USB of choice). Wait for the magic to happen… you have a bootable USB
Did not know Balena Etcher. Looks good - 1, 2, 3, professional-looking site.
But IMO even this is too involved. After all, by comparison, installing Windows is “Step 1. It’s done!”
Let’s say I know nothing about, say, Ubuntu, except that a techie friend told me to “have a go, it’s easy!” Well, personally I am going to want Ubuntu to do everything. I should not need to download stuff from random third-party sites that my friend never mentioned.
Basically, IMO there needs to be a FOSS clone of this Balena Etcher tool, which all the distros can rebrand and reskin as necessary. Then step 1 of “Install” is a native experience, just it is on the corporate OSes.
Maybe one of the slicker distros already does it, perhaps Pop_OS. If so, they deserve all the new users.
Indeed. I just checked and IMO Fedora is doing it exactly right: a big button “Get started” with the Media Writer as step 1. Now this is Linux for dummies! Meanwhile on the supposed dummy distro Ubuntu.com, you get “Follow this tutorial” and a stodgy bunch of howtos. And Debian all but screams “go away if you’re not a nerd” 😭
A long time ago, Ubuntu actually had a interesting way to install Ubuntu on your PC through Windows. It was called “Wubi” if I remember right.
It was definitely… Odd in how it worked. I believe it created a Windows virtual disk image, stored that image on your Windows filesystem, and then added an entry into the Windows Boot Loader to somehow boot into that. On first boot, it was like Windows where it asked you to create an account and then boom - all done.
And if you no longer wanted Ubuntu, you could just literally uninstall it from the Windows “Add or Remove Programs” menu and it’d remove the boot loader entry, and delete the virtual disk image.
Super super new user friendly. Unfortunately I think the reason why it was discontinued was there was an I/O performance cost from running it in a virtual image - and of course just as it sounds, it was a hacky way to do things. And of course, you couldn’t get rid of Windows because Ubuntu was living inside it.
Reminds me of how nowadays I believe Asahi Linux for M1 PCs is installed from within macOS - you don’t need to create a boot USB and load it at startup.
Ha! Amazing, had no idea. Maybe that explains Ubuntu’s early success. But yeah, in the grand strategy, better not to settle for being a Windows .exe app
Yeah, it took me way too long to get Debian running on my pc, because for some reason the website assumed that everyone would have a Linux to install Debain with. I haven’t had that, and that one tool they had didn’t work.
This is exactly what I never get. Do they not know that when you buy a new computer it tends to have Windows and only Windows on it?! I can’t help concluding that the people who run Debian must be bearded nerds who live in PC-filled basements and assume that all their users are the same.
@JubilantJaguar@Flemmbrav
For me, as long as the distro comes with with GUI of some sort, I am ok. The main issues with Linux installs, for me, is usually my wifi driver, but where there is a will, there is a way.
Ok some of these I understand but what the fuck. Why.
Edit: ok I have a theory. == checks equality without casting to any types, so they’re not equal. But < and > are numeric operations, so null gets cast to 0. So <= and >= cast it to 0, and it’s equal to 0, so it’s true.
greater than, smaller than, will cast the type so it will be 0>0 which is false, ofcourse. 0>=0 is true.
Now == will first compare types, they are different types so it’s false.
Also I’m a JavaScript Dev and if I ever see someone I work with use these kind of hacks I’m never working together with them again unless they apologize a lot and wash their dirty typing hands with… acid? :-)
edit: as several people already pointed out, my answer is not accurate. The real solution was mentioned by mycus
I shit you not, I usually light a scented candle when working remotely (because opening the window for non-smelly air would also cause light emission and increase the risk of interaction with people, you know).
parseInt is meant for strings so it converts the number there into a string. Once the numbers get small enough it starts representing it with scientific notation. So 0.0000001 converts into “1e-7” where it then starts to ignore the e-7 part because that’s not a valid int, so it is left with 1
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