At the end of this month, I will be at 2.5 months completely on Linux. The only thing stopping me was simply not knowing that Steam and Proton existed for Linux. I can play the games that matter to me on Linux. Good riddance to Windows!
Cinnamon, xfce, MATE, Gnome 4 … I mean you’ve got lots of choice and Linux keeps getting better all of the time. Fucking supporting Windows 10 and 11 is a goddamned nightmare. I thank baphomet for being able to go home to my own lab and work on BSD and Linux systems. Open source is my sanity.
I don't entirely get this idea that Windows is easier to troubleshoot problems. I get crashes not often but regularly on Windows. It's usually some obscure error code that I can't find any info on (which is why I have this wallpaper as my dual booted Windows desktop wallpaper). Trying to get support for many errors, not even just the obscure ones, usually results in being told to reinstall software or the entire OS. Nevermind having to reinstall Windows regularly anyway because it would inevitably start slowing down over time, no matter how much I regularly ran cleaning software and whatever else.
Whereas my longest Linux install (Arch) was 6 years running. I was able to easily enough troubleshoot problems either on my own or with the help of a truly great *nix community. If it was a bug no one else had reported yet, I reported it and it got fixed. Usually I could just roll back a package version until that time or I could work around it. Meanwhile crashes and hard locks are so few and far between.
I would completely ditch Windows and not dual boot if more people got away from Adobe products and I didn't have to use them to work on projects with others.
I’ve actually had a much harder time troubleshooting Windows because everything is kind of hidden behind an abstraction layer, i.e. the GUI. The event manager often throws inscrutable error messages and searches based on the error code often come up with patently wrong solutions. To hell with Windows!
After how many decades of printers being in existence, they are STILL the worst peripheral. Did the inventor of the desktop printer sell their soul to the devil or something because I swear to gods every single one of them is possessed by troll demons.
I used to have issues with CUPS and wireless printers. Then we replaced our home printer with the business flavour (next to no difference between them but for a couple of extra features including wireless).... This one gives us trouble when printing via LAN but is completely plug and play via wireless 😬😈🤦🏻♀️🙄
The biggest issue with Windows is that their use of legacy systems holds their entire ecosystem back. They rely on 25-30 year old kernel-level services that were written for a completely different time when no one ever had to bother looking into what the problems were. Now if you take a peek into Event Viewer, it’s an absolute mess.
Yeah, I had heard an ex Windows dev say the whole kernel was spaghetti code. I'm glad I don't have next to anything to do with Windows anymore. I pity my spouse being an IT tech.
I'm in the same boat. It was getting to the point where my whole computer would randomly lock up whenever I tried to share my screen on Zoom or when I opened the Windows settings menu. Opening the Start menu could take a solid 30 seconds sometimes.
Then I got an OS notification that was actually an Xbox Game Pass ad and decided I had enough. I installed Linux, and after a few days of distro-hopping I settled on KDE Neon. I WFH from it every day, using Zoom for meetings and Parsec to connect to a Windows computer in the office for work. No issues, except that Proton isn't quite as performant as native Windows.
Unfortunately, Hyprland is built on a tagged version of wlroots, and because it will likely need to pull in newer packages than Debian, I could end up in compilation hell. And I would prefer to avoid using nix for window managers/Wayland compositors if I can avoid it.
The virtual desktops functionality is miles above any other DE, specifically. The settings are really simple, and the options in the right click context menus are really well featured.
Offtopic, but I’d steer clear of brave. They feel scammy, have crypto built in and replace ads with their own. Since it’s built on chromium it just adds to the market share of chromium and towards a Google controlled internet.
Alas, we have reached a point where lots of web stuff already just does not work in non chromium browsers. My father could not use Netflix on Firefox on Linux mint, we called Netflix customer support and they said to install Google chrome. And it then worked. I use opera and it worked for me too. So a chromium browser is needed, for streaming stuff at least. And non googled chromium probably does not have the commercial addons needed.
What would be the least bad chromium family browser then ?
You may be unaware, and it may be that it would have been possible to configure something or install something obscure and not noob friendly, but i can tell that in 2022 that situation happened, i tried to re-install firefox, did a quick google search on possible fixes, tried a handful, the netflix error continued, and then I gave up and called netflix, and installed google chrome.
I’ve been watching Netflix in Firefox for years now. Never had any issue whatsoever. The handful of times some page didn’t work as expected was when I accidentally blocked too much content through addons. Not saying I don’t believe you, it’s just weird that I never seem to have those issues.
now that you mention, i have plenty of addons on all browsers i use. Maybe i could have made it work by testing one by one, though the chromium browsers all worked out-of-the-box even with largely the same addons. I just do not have the patience for it now, and settled on using Vivaldi for chromium stuff when really needed, which should not be often.
I deleted my comment because it was a bit trolly and unhelpful. What I should have said is that I believe under normal circumstances, Netflix works in Firefox out of the box. I believe you had an issue, but I wanted to let you and others know, that that isn’t the norm.
No idea if any one is less bad from a FOSS, ethical or ideological perspective, but personally I like Vivaldi. I switched back to Firefox for ideological reasons though.
I don’t because no antivirus can protect you from yourself, I learned that the hard way while I was still using Windows many years ago.
I had antivirus and antimalware on Windows and I kept them updated and ran scans regularly, almost religiously, than I got a malware that antivirus couldn’t detect (they take a while to be updated with new viruses/malware that constantly come out) and the only way to remove it was a blank new install following a specific procedure to clean it all.
That day I understood that no matter how attentive you are about your antivirus, you’re never really protected until it’s you who learns what to do and what not while accessing the web, so I did a bit of research about how to better configure my PC, how to better recognize phishing/scamming, using adblocker, don’t download random software, stuff like that.
I basically learned “how to behave”. I stopped using antivirus/antimalware on Windows and I didn’t catch a virus since, then I switched to Linux and I still apply the same principles of “good behavior”.
That’s not to say I’m immune to viruses, I’m certainly not, but my mindset now is that if I ever catch a virus, it will be my fault for doing something I shouldn’t have done, and I’ll do my best to learn from it instead of relying on software to do that for me.
If you’re technically inclined, a simple bash script with a for loop could dump the time and discharge rate to a text file every minute. Then you could copy/paste that into LibreOffice calc and do yourself some pretty graphs, or whatever.
edit: just found a tool called powerstat which looks like it does sampling over longer intervals.
Well, no program can accurately predict how you are going to use your laptop in the next hours. The best you can do is sample a given reference period and assume it’ll be the same but you have already noted the problem with that.
I’d recommend you monitor total power draw while using your laptop. It’s inversely proportiaonal to battery life: If you could reach 10h at 5W, you’d only reach 5h at 10W, 2.5h at 20W and so on; you can think of it as a metric for battery drain.
When it comes to SBC, the choice has always been a Raspberry Pi. Why? A Raspberry Pi may not have the best performance. But in return you can be sure that it will still be supported after a kernel update. And that is exactly the problem with many alternatives. They support a certain, mostly old, kernel. And that’s it. Furthermore, the community around the Raspberry Pi is simply huge.
That is a lesson I learned dipping into BeagleBoard and it’s driving me insane.
Like, the BeagleBone Black and BeaglePlay are extremely solid SBCs; the Black, which I run off an SD card, is incredibly solid and the Play is–I mean, reading the specs it may literally be able to do anything. They’re also easy to get and at a reasonable price point. But the ecology and documentation, even the official Getting Started page, are nightmare fuel and by the way, do not use those instructions as they are broken and the associated OS is three years old. If you google enough, however, you may eventually realize you have to go to the forums and find the two threads where the latest OS updates–as in, this month–are being posted or go to the individual documentation linked off of the board, where you will probably find up something like a workflow or will give you enough for some extrapolation.
There are attempts to get the OS and kernel up to date and integrate them with Beagle-specific packages and cape firmware, but this is not just like a whole bunch of separate groups doing different things not talking to each other; it’s like they don’t even know the other groups exist when everyone is technically working on the same projects. It’s depressing.
That explains why I had such a terrible experience with the BBB. Saw how out of date the OS was and assumed it had been abandoned. Guess I’ll hit up the forums!
There’s also a discord, linked in the forum. Hit me up if you want my link collection for Beagle: I started bookmarking literally anywhere that I went that looked vaguely relevant.
Go with God. The Beagles are amazing; if they can get their shit together, their price would make them a decent rival for Pi and if the eMMC is too small, the sd card boot–at least on my Black–is faster than either of my Zeros… I found out recently Texas Instruments does have an update to do USB boot on at lest some of the boards but can’t find documentation. Which is typical.
BBB was my entry into SBCs but had to shift over to the Pi as my requirements got complex. Apart from what you’ve mentioned, there’s also the fact that BBB is waaaay less powerful than the Pi, I mean we’re talking 512 MB RAM and a single-core 1GHz processor here.
I don’t disagree on pure specs–because yeah, definitely–but on You Have One Job project level, I’m on the fence. My Black was way more stable running Open Thread Border Router than my Pi was. With the Beagle Play, the eMMC is honestly amazing. I don’t think it outperforms my Samsung Pro 990 on my laptop but it definitely beats the NVME I have on one of my Pi’s.
Got a 3b a loong time ago and I love it, I use it as a jukebox and a tinker station.
Would love to get another one but man are they crazily expensive now. Tried the banana and orange pis and the are like okay but yep, they are different and doesn’t seem to have the same community at all.
It can just be a single node with power=outlet, such as this one. Or combined with others (e.g. it looks like there are a few benches tagged as having power, and I guess a similar thing could be done for picnic shelters etc.). It depends on how micromappy you want to be I guess!
Just installed this yesterday as a dual-boot. For the most part I'm enjoying it so far, had a few issues before I updated the kernel including no sound but managed to fix that.
Now the only annoyance is that I remote into a Windows 10 work Pc on a multi-nonitor setup, unfortunately Remmina just doesn't handle zoom on a single display well at all and scales every monitor, so have had to start trying to get used to a lower zoom level on my bigger monitor.
I used E16 in early 2000 and it had really cool themes. It was the hot shit right beside the newest xmms skin for your pirated but fully tagged mp3 library (with picard) on your local hard drive.
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