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Markaos

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Markaos ,

xrandr is Xorg only, it doesn’t work with Wayland. You should be able to make SDDM use your Plasma display configuration - wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Match_Plasma_displa…

No clue if that’s going to fix your issues, but at least it’s supposed to work with Wayland.

Markaos ,

Convenience (after you install it, all you have to do is enter the code and you’re connected, no other setup required), familiarity (it’s the default name people will think of or find if they want remote access - that alone means they can get away with pushing their users slightly more) and - IMHO most importantly - connectivity: if two computers can connect to the TeamViewer servers, they will be able to connect to each other.

That’s huge in the world of broken Internet where peer to peer networking feels like rocket science - pretty much every consumer device will be sitting behind a NAT, which means “just connecting” is not possible. You can set up port forwarding (either manually or automatically using UPnP, which is its own bag of problems), or you can use IPv6 (which appears to be currently available to roughly 40% users globally; to use it, both sides need to have functional IPv6), or you can try various NAT traversal techniques (which only work with certain kinds of NAT and always require a coordinating server to pull off - this is one of the functions provided by TeamViewer servers). Oh, and if you’re behind CGNAT (a kind of NAT used by internet providers; apparently it’s moderately common), then neither port forwarding or NAT traversal are possible. So if both sides are behind CGNAT and at least one doesn’t have IPv6, establishing a direct link is impossible.

With a relay server (like TeamViewer provides), you don’t have to worry about being unable to connect - it will try to get you a direct link, but if that fails, it will just act as a tunnel and pass the data between both devices.

Sure, you can self host all this, but that takes time and effort to do right. And if your ISP happens to use CGNAT, that means renting a VPS because you can’t host it at home. With TeamViewer, you’re paying for someone else to worry about all that (and pay for the servers that coordinate NAT traversal and relay data, and their internet bandwidth, neither of which is free).

Markaos ,

Right, now get a borderline computer-illiterate person to connect to your network, ensure their firewall isn’t misconfigured to block all incoming traffic (with TeamViewer, this configuration would still work because the device just connects to the TV server) and open and set up a completely separate screen sharing program.

I know none of these steps are difficult if you have any idea what you’re doing, but I’ve met plenty of people who would most likely need assistance going through the motions. Funnily enough, the best way to do it remotely would probably be to get them to install TeamViewer to then set this up for them remotely.

By the way, as far as networking goes, Tailscale does the same thing TeamViewer does, just for a VPN instead of a screen sharing application - it will try to do all the NAT punchthrough techniques and IPv6 connection and fall back on tunneling through relay servers if all else fails. It’s not any more of a direct connection than TV.

Markaos ,

It’s less about the computer and more about the card itself - Talos II and Blackbird both use the BCM5719 chip for their integrated NICs. Basically, you’re flashing part of the motherboard with this firmware. A PCIe card built around the same chip might connect the interfaces in a different way, and firmware doesn’t generally have a way of poking around to find out how everything’s set up from the hardware side of things - it needs to just know this, and that’s why there are separate firmware builds for different hardware.

If you flash one of these files to that card, it might just so happen to work perfectly, but it most likely won’t. You would need to figure out how it’s wired up and modify the firmware with that knowledge. And then you could use the modified open firmware with that specific card model on any computer that supports the proprietary firmware, because IIUC this is meant to be functionally identical.

So in short, no, you cannot currently use this open firmware on any computer other than Talos II and Blackbird, but for slightly different reason than you might think.

Markaos ,

So I did look more into it, and apparently the open firmware is technically compatible with PCIe cards using this chip, but doesn’t provide any advantages over just wiping the firmware and letting the chip default to its built-in fallback firmware, and so the maintainer doesn’t see any value in explicitly supporting it.

Now the question is whether you consider the proprietary fallback firmware to be acceptable to run - this might sound weird, but for example FSF has explicitly made exceptions for devices with built-in firmware to be able to qualify for the Respects Your Freedom certification, so if your view aligns with theirs, you might consider this to be completely OK. If not, the free firmware appears to have a similar feature set, you’ll just have to jump through more hoops.

Also do note that both the fallback firmware and the free firmware are missing many features of the proprietary firmware, so make sure to check it’s not missing anything you need (wake on LAN, Jumbo frames and PXE boot seem like the most notable missing features to me).

More info on support for various PCIe cards

Markaos ,

It doesn’t slow charge, at least not on Pixel 7a. Well, you could argue whether 20W is slow charging, but it’s all this phone can do.

It just charges normally to 80%, stops, and then resumes charging about an hour or two before the alarm. And last time I used it, it had a cool bug where if it fails to reach 80% by the point in time when it’s supposed to resume charging, it will just stop charging no matter what the current charge level is. Since that experience, I just turned this feature off and charge it in whenever it starts running low.

Markaos ,

If it doesn’t come at the expense of battery wear, then sure, lower charge time is just better. But that would make phone batteries the only batteries that don’t get excessively stressed when fast charging. Yeah, phone manufacturers generally claim that fast charging is perfectly fine for the battery, but I’m not sure I believe them too much when battery degradation is one of the main reasons people buy new phones.

I have no clue how other manufacturers do it (so for all I know they could all be doing it right and actually use slow charging), but Google has a terrible implementation of battery conservation - Pixels just fast charge to 80%, then wait until some specific time before the alarm, then fast charge the rest. Compare that to a crappy Lenovo IdeaPad laptop I have that has a battery conservation feature that sets a charge limit AND a power limit (60% with 25W charging), because it wouldn’t make sense to limit the charge and still use full 65W for charging.

is there an arch Fork where I can compile every package myself?

In order to be able to Further configure my system, I am looking for a fork of my current OS (artix with openRC as init system) in which i am able to compile every package from source in order to Further configure it with make flags. I am currently not using gentoo, and because the packages in its default repos are only updated...

Markaos ,

Also, the Arch repos are pretty much just an “AUR with binaries” - they contain the same PKGBUILD files used by AUR packages, because that’s how Arch packages are built. So you can just download an Arch package PKGBUILD, modify it however you wish, and then build and install it.

Markaos ,

If it is an Arch-based distro (sorry, I don’t recognize the package manager), then this might just be the recent Wine update that made it 700 MB smaller (which would mean the rest of your system grew 300 MB)

I made a post here about it: this one

Btw, is there a way to link to a post in a way that resolves on everyone’s separate instance instead of hard coding it to my instance?

Markaos , (edited )

I don’t really see the big problem here? Like sure, it’s silly that it’s cheaper to make wireless headphones than wired ones (I assume - the manufacturers are clearly not too bothered by trademarks and stuff if they put the Lightning logo on it so they wouldn’t avoid wired solution just due to licensing fees), but what business does Apple have in cracking down on this? Other than the obvious issues with trademarks, but those would be present even if it were true wired earphones. It’s just a knockoff manufacturer.

Cheapest possible wired earphones won’t sound much better than the cheapest possible wireless ones, so sound quality probably isn’t a factor. And on the plus side, you don’t have multiple batteries to worry about, or you could do something funny, like plugging the earphones into a powerbank in your pocket and have a freak “hybrid” earphones with multi-day battery (they’re not wireless, but also not tethered to your phone). On the other side, you do waste some power on the wireless link, which is not good for the environment in the long run (the batteries involved will see marginally more wear)

Honestly the biggest issue in my mind is forcing people to turn on Bluetooth, but I don’t think this will change anyone’s habits - people who don’t know what Bluetooth is will definitely just leave it on anyway (it’s the default state), and people technical enough to want to turn it off will recognize that there’s something fishy about these earphones.

Markaos ,

Cheap Bluetooth might have connection hitches

Fair enough, but I’ve only ever seen this happen with cheap wireless cards / chipsets that do both Bluetooth and WiFi and don’t properly avoid interference between these two (for example, I can get perfectly functioning Bluetooth audio out of my laptop with shitty Realtek wireless card if I completely disable WiFi (not just disconnect)). I think this is less of an issue for dedicated Bluetooth devices.

Bluetooth doesn’t work with airplane mode although I think most airplanes these days aren’t actually affected or we’d have planes dropping out if the sky daily.

Yeah, that’s true. As for the second part, AFAIK there was never an issue with 2.4 GHz radios (which is the frequency band Bluetooth uses) interfering with planes, it was more of a liability / laws thing - the plane manufacturer never explicitly said that these radios are safe (so the airline just banned them to be safe) and/or laws didn’t allow non-certified radios to operate on planes.

Also, does Bluetooth get saturated the way WiFi does?

Eventually yes, but it’s much more resilient than WiFi - 2.4 GHz WiFi only has three non-overlapping channels to work with (and there’s a whole thing with the in-between channels being even worse for everyone involved than everyone just using the same correct three channels that I won’t get into), while Bluetooth slices the same spectrum into 79 fully usable channels. It also uses much lower transmission power, so signal travels a shorter distance. And unlike WiFi, it can dynamically migrate from channel to channel (in fact, it does this even without any interference). 100 people actually seeing each other’s devices might be a problem, but I don’t think that’s a realistic scenario - Bluetooth will use the lowest transmit power at which it can get a reliable link, so if everyone’s devices are only transmitting over a meter or so, there shouldn’t be any noticeable interference on the other side of the plane.

Markaos ,

Yeah, but that’s the RPG where you carry a baby on your chest. Clearly a very different kind of game, silly.

Markaos ,

Also, some programs, such as many terminal emulators, can cache you PW so you don’t have to enter it multiple times.

Terminal emulators don’t (or at least shouldn’t) do any such thing. sudo itself is responsible for letting you do privilege escalation without password for some time after successfully passing once - whenever you run it and successfully authenticate, it saves your user id, current time and a session identifier (each open shell gets a unique identifier) into a file. Then, when you attempt to do anything, it will check this file to see if you’ve if you’ve authenticated within the last few minutes in this terminal, and only ask for a password if you haven’t.

For more info, see man sudoers_timestamp

Markaos ,

It should not be controlled by a company that is known to make you lose your games.

Are you referring to the fact that Valve promotes digital game distribution (which is a very fair view), or are you talking about some incident where Valve removed games from people’s libraries? Because if it’s the second one, then I would really like to hear about it.

Markaos ,

CS:GO got a controversial update and got renamed. Old versions are still available under CS2, you just can’t use Valve’s servers anymore. Playing old versions on private servers is possible. But OK, I give you half a point for this one - you can’t play matchmaking with old smoke physics anymore (but then again, it’s not like it’s the first CS:GO update to change the gameplay in a fundamental way).

Moving on, Artifact. It’s in my library, ready to be played - Valve definitely didn’t “make me lose Artifact” like you claimed. The community is dead, but there are still 40 people playing right now according to SteamDB and servers are up. One point down for easily verifiable lie.

And finally, Team Fortress 1. I assume you don’t mean the Valve’s game called Team Fortress Classic, because that one is still available for purchase on the Steam Store and oscillates between 40 and 100 active players at any time. So that leaves us with Team Fortress, a mod for Quake. But that one is available from ModDB without any problems, so… What’s the issue supposed to be, exactly? No points, because I have no idea if there’s more to your claim.

Hint: blatantly lying about some points heavily undermines the other points you make. So at least try to be subtle.

Markaos ,

I’ve explained my reasoning for all the points I disagree with. Which one do you have a problem with? CS:GO? The last version of CS:GO is still available on Steam and fully playable, the only missing part is matchmaking servers - you can play with bots or on third party servers without any problems. That seems far from gone.

Markaos ,

Are you sure you didn’t set DNS directly on some/all of your devices? Because in that case they won’t care about the router settings and will use whatever you set them to.

Also as the other commenter said, DNS changes might not propagate to other devices on the network until the next time they connect - a reboot or unplugging the cable from your computer for a few seconds is a dirty but pretty OS agnostic way to do that.

Markaos ,

I feel like the ingest system will be sophisticated enough to throw away pieces of text that begin with a message like “ChatGPT says”. Probably even stuff that follows the “paragraph with assumptions and clarifications followed by a list followed by a brief conclusion” structure - everything old has been ingested already, and most of the new stuff containing this is probably AI generated.

Markaos ,

If a thief knows your PIN (by watching an earlier unlock), Android is now requiring “biometrics for accessing and changing critical Google account and device settings, like changing your PIN, disabling theft protection or accessing Passkeys, from an untrusted location.”

Sounds great for Pixel 6 series with their reportedly highly reliable fingerprint sensors /s

Honestly, I’m not sure what to think about this - extra protection against unauthorized access is good, but requiring biometric verification with no apparent alternative irks me the wrong way.

Maybe that’s just because of my experiences with Nokia 5.3 and its awful rear fingerprint sensor with like 10% success rate. But then again, there will eventually be phones with crappy sensors running Android 15.

Markaos ,

I had a similar opinion when I was buying that phone - pretty much every phone had a fingerprint scanner and people generally didn’t complain about them, so decent scanners should have been mass produced and cheap - but HMD/Nokia managed to make me reconsider that opinion.

For context, Nokia 5.3 is a 3 or 4 years old model, so it definitely doesn’t disprove your statement, but I remain sceptical.

Markaos ,

The downside is that you’re then zooming in on the compression artifacts and all the “enhancements” we’ve all learned to “love” over the past decade (thanks, Google!), while the in-app zoom probably works with raw image data before zooming in.

Markaos ,

GadgetBridge is not really against supporting online-only functions, it just can’t be part of the main app. Weather Providers is what you’re looking for.

Markaos ,

Oh sorry, I understood your comment as saying that you couldn’t get weather info with GadgetBridge because of its somewhat unique architecture. If you’re using a different companion app then apps for GadgetBridge probably won’t work.

Also I’m not familiar with Pebble, I’m just assuming it works similarly to other GadgetBridge-supported watches / bands like the Mi Band I use.

Markaos ,

What’s sketchy about creativecommons.org/licenses/…/legalcode.en ?

Markaos ,

Well, feel free to click on this link then: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en

(it’s just a link to Google homepage - the point is that you really shouldn’t trust the link text lol)

why cant we connect 2 computers using USB

So i tried to connect steamdeck to pc using usb and i read its immpossible because steamdeck is a computer and some explanation on quora about strong master slave relationship. But then why is it possible for android phones to connect to pc whilist also having the ability to use USB and other usb c accesories. Also why cant it...

Markaos ,

Not a fair comparison IMHO - Ethernet is designed to be a connection between two or more otherwise independent peers (on L2), while USB’s goal was to allow connecting simple peripheral devices to computers. There was never meant to be a situation where it’s unclear which side is the Host.

Also note that the bridging “cable” is literally just two USB devices, one for each computer (although they are both on the same chip, so there’s that), with some internal link to pass the data.

Markaos ,

Yeah, it’s not practical right now, but in 10 years? Who knows, we might finally have some built-in AI accelerator capable of running big neural networks on consumer CPUs by then (we do have AI accelerators in a large chunk of current CPUs, but they’re not up to the task yet). The system memory should also go up now that memory-hungry AI is inching closer to mainstream use.

Sure, Internet bandwidth will also increase, meaning this compression will be less important, but on the other hand, it’s not like we’ve stopped improving video codecs after h.264 because it was good enough - there are better codecs now even though we have the resources to handle bigger h.264 videos.

The technology doesn’t have to be useful right now - for example, neural networks capable of learning have been studied since the 1940s, even though there would be no way to run them for many decades, and it would take even longer to run them in a useful capacity. But now that we have the technology to do so, they enjoy rapid progress building on top of that original foundation.

Markaos , (edited )

You could put your .desktop files in a separate directory and just symlink them to ~/.local/share/applications. If you want to have all your aliases together, you could have a directory like Aliases or whatever and then have Aliases/desktop for .desktop launchers, Aliases/bin for scripts or binaries (and have it in PATH), Aliases/bashrc for your bash aliases (and just put source …/Aliases/bashrc in ~/.bashrc), etc.

Of course everyone has their own opinions on how to organize stuff, but this is IMHO pretty clean for what you probably want to do.

Edit: and to quickly (re)create the symlinks, you could use a bash one-liner like for f in …/Aliases/desktop/*; do ln -s “$f” “~/.local/share/applications/$(basename “$f”)”; done - put it into your bashrc as a function and remember to run it whenever you create a new .desktop launcher, and you should be golden.

Android app dependency? (slrpnk.net)

I have found the translation from camera source feature useful in Google Translate and I use it from time to time. Last night was one such occasion, yet when I attempted to enable camera mode, I received the message shown in the screenshot, “Please install the latest Google app in order to use camera translation”. I...

Markaos ,

Honestly, I’m kinda surprised that the live translation in Google Camera wasn’t dependent on other Google apps before - I thought all Google apps were developed with the assumption that the apps mandated for Android certification would be available, and that losing functionality if the user starts disabling stuff is fine.

As to why it isn’t very common: Android conditions users to think of the apps as fully self-contained units. There’s no way to have Google Play suggest installing app B as an optional dependency when you install app A, and asking the user to install it during the first launch would go against common user experience wisdoms. The current best practice is to get the user up to speed as fast as possible, with every extra tap they have to make increasing the possibility of them leaving for another app.

But there are definitely apps that do use this. For example OpenTracks, a GPS tracking application, has no integrated map to show captured routes and instead expects the user to find another app that supports its API. Or GadgetBridge, an alternative companion app for many smart watches / fitness bands - it is common for these devices to have some weather forecast widget, but one of GadgetBridge’s design goals is to not to have internet access (to help with trust). So it has an API for weather provider apps to make this work.

Edit: First paragraph is toast, I misread the OP

Markaos ,

The astrophotography mode on Pixels (the only way to get 4 min exposure in the default camera app) works by taking quite a few photos with shorter exposures and then matching them up in post processing.

You even get a short animation at the end where every captured photo gets processed using the rest, so you can see stars moving around during the capture.

Markaos ,

It’s somewhat hidden if you don’t know where to look. You have to switch to Night sight mode, turn on astrophotography in the settings, and then set the phone down on a stable surface. After a few seconds without any movement, the capture button will change from moon to three stars and pressing it will start the 4 minute capture.

Markaos ,

I don’t think that’s a similar situation - the Linux kernel lost some functionality there, but in this case Ext2 filesystems are still fully supported by the Ext4 driver, so there’s no difference in “hardware” support.

The separate Ext2 driver was being kept for embedded devices with extreme memory or storage limitations where saving some kilobytes by not having all the new Ext3/4 features was useful, but when you can afford the extra memory, there’s no reason not to just use the Ext4 driver for all Ext2/3/4 filesystems.

Markaos ,

Mandatory XKCD 1000016743

Source for alt-text

Markaos ,

I’m pretty sure all of those entries are in the same /12 network - 172.16.0.0/12. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with it, but I think you can significantly simplify that config by just removing all the extra ones

Markaos ,

That just uses normal fast charging to get to 80%, then stops the charge and finally resumes charging about an hour or two before the planned “charged by” time. No slowing down.

Oh, and it also has (or had on Android 13) a cool bug where it just stops charging if it fails to reach 80% by the time it wants to resume charging (for example if you put the phone on a slow charger late at night - that’s how I woke up with 60% battery after 4 hour sleep).

So I just gave up on the idea of using a slow charger to better preserve the battery because the phone clearly wasn’t expected to be used that way.

Markaos ,

Does UEFI initialize all the cores? I know the OS always starts with only one core available, but I’m not sure if UEFI just disables the cores after it’s done its thing, or if it doesn’t touch them. Because if it stays on core 0 and never even brings the other ones up, then this issue with core 2 could let it boot this far just fine.

Markaos ,

It’s a very common feature for monitors, at least in my experience - both of my cheap AOC monitors support it, as well as all the other monitors I’ve ever connected my laptop to (a few HP and Samsung monitors iirc).

But it also feels kinda janky due to how long the display takes to change the brightness, so maybe that’s why Microsoft decided not to support it?

Markaos ,

Maybe. To be clear the delay isn’t that large (my very rough guesstimate is somewhere between 100 and 300 ms, probably more towards the lower end), and if I just click somewhere on the slider, it feels fine.

It only feels janky when I drag the slider and the screen brightness updates in very noticeable steps. But that is how I naturally interact with sliders, so it’s hard not to notice it for me.

Good mini PC for around 100€

My current setup consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4gb RAM and a 1tb external SSD. I’m thinking of getting a used mini PC for around 100€ to replace that tho because it would give me a lot more power and especially RAM (I currently need to use an 8gb swap file). My plan so far is to get a used mini PC that’s quiet, has a...

Markaos ,

Because of the built-in SSD, I could also sell the external SSD and buy an 8-12tb HDD instead.

If you’re going for a 3.5" HDD, then you’ll most likely have to look for a bit bigger form factor than TinyMiniMicro (Lenovo Tiny / HP Mini / Dell Micro series) - these computers can’t fit a 3.5" HDD.

If size isn’t a major concern, I’d go for the SFF variants of these computers - they are often cheaper than minis for same specs, but probably have a bit larger idle power draw and take up more space. As a bonus upside, you get some small PCIe slots in these computers, so yay for expansions.

Markaos ,

The APT error is most likely a result of using PPAs - some PPA you use (probably the one with simple64) provides libxapp1 2.8, but doesn’t provide happy at all, so you end up falling back to the much older version from your distro’s repositories. But xapp needs an exact version of libxapp1, so you get this error.

That said, if the simple64 PPA doesn’t provide the xapp package, then it perhaps isn’t required and the module should be provided by libxapp1 (and the problem is something different). Or maybe it comes from a completely different PPA - I believe apt policy libxapp1 should tell you where it’s coming from.

Markaos ,

If it’s a Flatpak, then installing anything with APT shouldn’t help you at all - it is possible to build a Flatpak that accesses host libraries, but it would defeat the point of using Flatpak in the first place. So your xapp issues are moot anyway.

As to the meaning of the output of apt policy: it says that the most up to date libxapp1 is from Linux Mint repos, and that there’s also an older version in Ubuntu repos. That means that Linux Mint doesn’t provide a xapp package at all, and the only one you could install is the old one from Ubuntu (which conflicts with the newer libxapp1 from LM)

Markaos ,

Not really - report your issue on their issue tracker if you can and feel like spending your time on it, then move on (and maybe check back in some time). Flatpak are meant to fix dependency issues, there’s not much you can do if they got it wrong for whatever reason.

Encrypted hard drive asking for password every time

I recently switched to Linux (Zorin OS) and I selected “use ZFS and encrypt” during installation. Now before I can log in it asks me “please unlock disk keystore-rpool” and I have to type in the encryption password it before I’m able to get to the login screen....

Markaos ,

The idea is to use TPM to store the keys - if you boot into a modified OS, TPM won’t give you the same key so automatic unlock will fail. And protection against somebody just booting the original system and copying data off it is provided by the system login screen.

Voilà, automatic drive decryption with fingerprint unlock to log into the OS. That’s what Windows does anyway.

Markaos ,

If you boot the computer into the currently installed OS, you will be presented with a login screen and will have to enter the correct password to log in (kernel parameters are part of the checksums, so booting into single-user mode won’t help you, that counts as a modified OS). If you boot a different OS, you won’t get the key off the TPM.

Markaos ,

Yeah, but a lot of those things will trip the TPM module, so you will get a different decryption key if you for example try to use the single kernel parameter to boot into a root shell. And different decryption key means no access to the data.

Markaos ,

Yes, but they are asking how to set up FDE in the same way it works on Windows, where automatic unlocking works using TPM. They just don’t know the technical details.

Markaos ,

Or is there any functional difference between the two methods?

Can’t test right now, but I have a strong suspicion you will have trouble getting IP broadcast to work. Normally broadcast address is calculated by setting all bits after the network prefix to 1, but your computer believes to be in a /32 “network”. It won’t broadcast over routes that are not part of its network.

And even if you calculate the broadcast address successfully (maybe the software you use has /24 hardcoded for whatever reason), no computer configured with a /32 address will receive it - 192.168.0.255 is not within the 192.168.0.1/32 network, so it will probably get forwarded according to your routes if you have forwarding enabled (except it shouldn’t in this case with one network interface, because you never send packets back the way they came from)

Markaos ,

Only if you consider ROMs like LineageOS to be stock Android and ignore the many things they do to make the user’s life easier.

AOSP never had internet access as a toggleable permission, and it never will as long as Google is calling the shots and wants ads to work the way they currently do.

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