Max_P

Max_P , 8 hours ago

And also with the atomic/immutable distros, the switch is practically instant, so it’s not even like it forces you to watch a spinning circle for 20 minutes when you turn off your computer. You reboot and the apps all start clean with the right library versions.

It’s rare but I’ve seen software trash itself because the newly spawned process talks a different protocol and it can lead to either crashes or off behavior that leads to a crash eventually. Or it tries to read a file mid update. Kernel updates can make it so when you plug in a USB stick, nothing happens because the driver’s gone. Firefox as you mentionned. Chromium will tolerate it mostly but it can get very weird over time.

The risk is non-zero, so when you target end users that don’t want to have to troubleshoot, it’s safer to just do offline updates. Especially with Flatpaks now, you get those updated online and really it’s only system components you don’t care to delay updates taking effect

If you’re new to Linux and everyone told you you can just update and no reboot, and you run into weird Firefox glitches, it just looks bad.

Max_P , 9 hours ago

Stritcly speaking if you buy it and it comes with sources under the GPL then that is perfectly okay. The principle of freedom software isn’t that everything is free of charge, but rather that when you obtain software you should be free to access its source and customize it for your needs and share those modifications with other people.

That does make it hard for people to really have to pay for it, but it’s not like people don’t pirate proprietary software anyway. The presumption is if you’re honest and a good person you will pay the other for the software that you like and want to keep using.

It’s also not violating the GPL by having proprietary apps alongside GPL ones bundled together. SteamOS for example, comes with Steam and other proprietary Valve stuff.

But I would definitely expect it to not be popular and for most of the open-source and Linux communities to want nothing of it (paying for a programming language, what is this, 1995 when we pay for Delphi?).

Max_P , 9 hours ago

Lemmy wasn’t ready and still mostly not ready for a mass Reddit exodus. The Reddit API fiasco wasn’t anticipated by anybody and the large influx of users exposed a ton of bugs and federation issues.

But it’s not a failure, yet. I’m sure Reddit had growing pains after the Digg exodus too. Some platforms take years to become popular. Reddit was small for quite a while before it became more mainstream.

In a way to me Lemmy feels a bit like Reddit must have been a few years before I joined it 12 years ago.

The problem is the expectation that Lemmy could replace Reddit overnight, and would immediately be a 1:1 replacement.

Although personally I like it more here, and I get more interactions than Reddit. But I am a tech nerd, so.

Max_P , 11 hours ago

They most likely sent you a new board which happens to have an older BIOS on it. I don’t think they try to upgrade them at all, they pick a boxed new board from the warehouse and ship it to you. You can probably just upgrade it again, there’s no way this one’s newer. Also I guess double-check you got the same model of board back, that could also explain the old BIOS.

RMA’d an MSI board for which they released a BIOS update specifically for the bug I encountered which can get the system completely unbootable even with a CMOS reset, and it didn’t even come with the updated BIOS either. I imagine they expect it’ll eventually get updated through Windows.

Max_P , 10 hours ago

Ah it’s a laptop, I thought it was a desktop motherboard. That is strange, on a laptop I wouldn’t expect people to have to mess with the BIOS at all to make VR work, that’s usually a desktop thing to make sure rebar is enabled and stuff.

Max_P , 8 hours ago

The stability of a distro usually has more to do with API and ABI stability than stability in terms of reliability. And a “stable” system can be unreliable.

That’s why RHEL forks are said to be compatible bug for bug. Because you don’t know if fixing the bug could have a cascading side effect for somebody’s very critical system.

Arch has been nothing but reliable for me. Does it doesn’t need fixing sometimes because the config format of some daemon changed, or Python or nodejs got updated and now my project doesn’t build? Absolutely not. But for me usually newer versions are better even if it needs some fixing, and I like doing it piecemeal rather than all at once every couple years.

Stable distributions are well loved for servers because you don’t want to update 2000 servers and now you’re losing millions because your app isn’t compatible with the latest Ruby version. You need to be able to reliably install and reinstall the same distro version and the same packages at the same versions over and over. I can’t deal with needing a new server up urgently and then get stuck having to fix a bunch of stuff because I got a newer version of something.

I use multiple distros regularly, for different purposes. Although lately Docker has significantly reduced my need for stable distros and lean more on rolling distros as the host.

Max_P , 1 day ago

So what’s stopping the workers from saying no? If they have labor shortages then the job market should be favorable to the workers as you gotta be the most attractive employer, which would be those that don’t abuse that law and overwork their employees. It’s not like they can force people to work.

Or just go anywhere else in the EU.

Max_P , 2 days ago

In my first apartment, I had a smoke detector that was mains powered. The wire metals weren’t compatible and eventually the wirenuts burned and cut off power to half the room. The smoke detector’s wires were all burnt up. It never alarmed unfortunately so I only learned about it when half the room just went dark. That could absolutely have turned into an electrical fire.

Definitely worth getting it checked.

Max_P , 3 days ago

Yeah mine’s doing that too, and my dmesg is flooded with USB disconnect and reconnects.

The thing probably is overheating and shutting off. I believe I’ve seen videos of them catching fire too, not sure if it’s that one or another webcam that looks similar.

Mine’s on a USB hub with buttons for each port so I just leave its port off until I need the camera and only turn it on when needed.

Max_P , 3 days ago

Did you rebuild your initramfs? The files needs to be available pretty early during boot and that’s probably why it still seems the old one.

Max_P , 3 days ago

Dracut is the correct way to do this on Fedora so nothing else needs to be done. Then I’m not sure why it’s not taking it.

Max_P , 4 days ago

The fuck are you doing that it takes an hour to do with systemd? My experience has been the total opposite: drop a file or two somewhere, probably a symlink and done. Even encrypted ZFS root in initramfs was surprisingly easy to set up.

Max_P , 5 days ago

Sounds like it’s probably trying to inhibit sleep but uses the wrong way to do it that’s meant for video playback and games and it just wakes everything up. Look for a way to disable that for this specific app.

I guess you can also

<span style="color:#323232;">while true; do xset dpms force off: sleep 5; done
</span>

But that’s just bleh for a solution.

If it can’t be turned off, I’d just shove it into a container to isolate it and prevent it from doing that.

Max_P , 5 days ago

If it’s client side then pedos will just strip it out and keep on going. It’s a giant waste of time.

Max_P , 5 days ago

Obligatory RIP waveform.social

Max_P , 6 days ago

My instance’s been running at ~0.8 of load average, everything on one box and it also runs Matrix and a few other services. I’ve never felt the need to SSH in and even look at it.

I know it doesn’t scale great but it’s far from the worst offender I’ve hosted either.

Max_P , 8 days ago

What kind of filename do they have? How big are they?

My guess would be that they’re Android thumbnail files or some sort of hidden metadata file. Possibly some raw jpeg because all the parameters are expected to be fixed size so they didn’t bother with the header. Or it’s a custom header.

But even then, that’s a lot of zeros for an image format.

Does it seem to have a JPEG header later in the file? It could be a header followed by a normal JPEG file too.

Max_P , 8 days ago

Plug drive in main computer, install Debian on it along with network config and SSH access, put drive back into server and power on.

I guess technically you can also make an ISO that will just auto wipe the drive and install upon booting it but you still need a keyboard to get into the boot menu.

Max_P , 9 days ago

That guy’s channel got blessed by the algorithm, got it recommended yesterday as well.

Max_P , 10 days ago

I have one (FW 16 AMD), I don’t have any complaints so far. It comes mostly assembled but you put your RAM, SSD, screen bezel, keyboard, touchpad and all the port modules yourself. The machine is well built and genuinely very easy to work with. You can swap the keyboard and touchpad without touching a screw.

For the most part it seems like they’re holding up to their promise, you can buy a new motherboard for a CPU upgrade, remove the old one, put the new one in, and you’re good to go with the rest of your existing stuff (as long as it’s compatible, if the new board needs DDR5 instead of DDR4 then you need new RAM too but that’s expected). So far everything I’ve disassembled as part of the firs assembly has been a breeze. It’s a very nice laptop to work on and swap parts that’s for sure. You get the assurance that you can swap the battery, input modules, IO modules for the foreseeable future.

Where I’ve been disappointed is the third-party ecosystem for it is not what I was hoping it would be, there’s not a lot of third-party modules for it. But the designs are all open-sourced so you can 3D print parts for it. Maybe in the future we’ll have more modules. Overall though, it’s not like you could even think about that on any other laptop brands, you get the laptop and it’s what it’ll be for the rest of its life.

Runs great on Linux, most of the company actually uses Linux so support for Linux is very good. All of the models will run Minecraft very well, Minecraft in particular has been known to run significantly better on Linux to begin with, especially on Intel graphics where the OpenGL drivers on Windows are terrible.

Max_P , 10 days ago

Fingerprint reader working perfectly on my FW16. Not sure it’s the same reader module, but getting it set up on Arch was easy, pretty much worked out of the box in Plasma 6. Adding fprint to pam.d/sudo also worked right out of the box for fingerprint sudo.

Max_P , 10 days ago

Yep and there’s even a BIOS option for that use case! I really like they they go “oh, people use the parts for that, we’ll add a feature for it!”

Max_P , 10 days ago

That could also make them okay with those existing, since they’ll now play ads. Third party clients wouldn’t be such a threat anymore to their bottomline, and people can get the privacy benefits of going through those proxies.

Max_P , 11 days ago

Not really. They can precompute those and inject it in an MP4 file so long as the settings match and it’s inserted right before an i-frame so that it doesn’t corrupt b-frames. They already reencode everything with their preferred settings, so they only need to encode the ads for those same settings they already do. Just needs to be spliced seamlessly.

But YouTube uses DASH anyway, it’s like HLS, the stream is served in individual small chunks so it’s even easier because they just need to add chunks of ads where they can add mismatched video formats, for the same reason it’s able to seamlessly adjust the quality without any audio glitches.

Ad blockers will find a way.

Max_P , 11 days ago

No. This gets painted on the framebuffer when the OS boots up, it’s after firmware is done with it. It’s barely any different than when full graphics mode load up.

LogoFAIL is based on replacing the BIOS logo with one that will trigger the exploit in firmware code, before the OS even starts.

Max_P , 11 days ago

But it’s already up to date. It shows updates to the version they’re already using.

Max_P , 11 days ago

They share the same partition, but they’re treated like independent filesystems. They can have different mount options, so on one you can enable compression but not another some you may want to disable Copy-on-Write, etc. That’s also useful so you can rollback a system update without also rolling back your data or vice-versa. You can also store multiple distros each in a subvolume and boot different ones all while sharing the same partition and not wasting space. If you have multiple users it’s worth having a subvolume each so each user can independently rollback their home directory. Maybe you want your projects on a subvolume so you can snapshot and btrfs-send it frequently.

I don’t use btrfs but on ZFS I have tons of datasets: steam library gets large recordsize and light compression, backups are heavily compressed and encrypted, VMs have a dataset tweaked for disk images, my music and movies also have a larger recordsize but no compression. I have one that’s case insensitive that’s shared with Windows machines and Wine stuff. I cap the size of caches and logs.

It’s very versatile.

Max_P , 11 days ago

My feeling about that is that I should assume anyone who could monitor my traffic should be assumed to do so and I therefore should apply reasonable defenses regardless. Even if the government doesn’t do it, hackers around the world will. That means the moment it leaves my router, it’s assumed compromised.

Same for smart Internet connected devices. The government might be listening, but I certainly don’t trust the manufacturer to not be listening for the purpose of advertising either.

How many stories broke out recently of ISP router having been compromised by foreign hackers for years? Yeah. The Internet is the wild west.

Max_P , 11 days ago

That definitely looks like a Cinnamon bug, specifically its screensaver component. Worst case they’ll direct you to where to report the bug, or they’ll move the ticket themselves.

Also, obligatory this is one of the many ways X11 is insecure and unsuited to proper screen locking. Lock screens on X11 are just fullscreen windows you pray the window manager won’t ever allow to unfocus, close, resize or move or not cover the rest of the desktop.

Max_P , 11 days ago

I believe it’s also highly recommended to use Xscreensaver specifically as the author is well aware of the risks and limitations and does as much as possible to guard against all known ways to bypass it.

Max_P , 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

They’re australians, so loser pays the other’s legal fees.

Maybe there’d be less frivolous lawsuits in the US if it worked the same, it makes it so you can’t just sue someone to make them go bankrupt.

Max_P , 11 days ago

No, if you win you should be compensated for your legal fees because the idea is you weren’t in the wrong and therefore shouldn’t have had to sue, or shouldn’t have been sued. So the loser pays the fees, because they shouldn’t have sued, or they should have settled before it became a lawsuit that they lost.

If you’re big you can’t drown smaller companies, and if you’re small and you’re likely to win, you can go after the big companies for your dues because they’ll have to compensate you for the legal fees so it doesn’t bankrupt you.

In the US legal fees aren’t considered, you have to countersue if you want the legal fees back AFAIK. Not a lawyer.

Max_P , 12 days ago

FFmpeg should be able to do that without reencoding the video, possibly also audio. Basically you want to use -c:v copy -c:a copy and remap the right channel to a single mono channel, and remux all of that in a new output file.

trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/AudioChannelManipulation

Max_P , 13 days ago

Because Google doesn’t have its own AI, and other Android manufacturers aren’t also embedding OpenAI wherever they can in modern phones like Samsung.

Max_P , 13 days ago

Windows 95 and Macintosh LC, elementary school computer lab stuff. My grandpa had a Windows 3.1 IBM PS/2. Those were all pretty old and practically obsolete computers when I used those, 98SE was out and ME was right around the corner.

My very first Linux distribution experience was Mandrake Linux I believe version 9 or something like that. Didn’t last that long though, I revisited Linux later with Ubuntu 7.04 which is when I actually switched to Linux full time.

ArchLinux since 2011. Still running that install to this day!

Max_P , 13 days ago

There’s a bunch of browser extensions as well to add a “show on my instance” link whenever it detects a Lemmy instance page which basically does the same thing automatically for you, pretty useful.

Max_P , 13 days ago

It would have to go through some sort of Lemmy link redirector service because a site can’t access another site’s cookies. And even then, with third-party cookie sandboxing, that still wouldn’t work.

I don’t think this is solvable without a browser extension. The best the devs could do is let you enter your home instance URL on each instance such that eventually you’ve configured them all and it works. But the extensions are just plain better.

Max_P , 13 days ago

I’ve been using a GreaseMonkey script to do that, I can’t find the exact one I used but there’s a bunch that do posts too, and extensions.

Max_P , 13 days ago

That looks to be it, I recognize the long long list of instances in the code.

Is it the best? Don’t know but it works well enough.

Max_P , 13 days ago

Because if you’re on say, lemmy.world because you clicked such a link, lemmy.world has no way of knowing what your home instance is. The cookies are all sandboxed for lemmy.world’s use. So even if you used a third-party site whose sole purpose is to know your home instance, it still wouldn’t work because now third-party cookies are sandboxes based on the domain of the site you’re visiting.

That used to be possible with a third-party. That’s how the Facebook like buttons and Login with Google used to work, and those are also the reason it’s no longer possible. You used to be able to just embed some JS from a third-party on a site, and that JS can access cookies from the third-party site while also being directly callable from the site that embedded it. So in that case, we could agree on a third-party lemmy redirector service whose sole purpose is to store the user’s home instance in a cookie and then the script can be embedded everywhere and it would be able to spit out the URL from the cookie. But that hole’s been plugged. So even if you do that, it doesn’t work anymore because of stronger cookie sandboxes. But that’s why you’d need third-party cookies to pull it off.

So the only fix left for this is, every lemmy instance you visit, you have to set your home instance on it, which would set a cookie that the site can actually see, then it could redirect you to your home instance to view the post. But that still kinda sucks, because you have to do it for every instance you run across.

So, cookies are useless for this.

Max_P , 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

Some UIs do, I have Tesseract on mine and it rewrites the links for me.

That doesn’t solve sharing a link on Matrix/Discord/Google or wherever. I rarely have this issue on Lemmy itself, but whenever I get a link from elsewhere, that’s when I need to be able to open it on my home instance so I can interact with it.

Same deal with Mastodon. You’re reading some news, it links so the dev’s Mastodon, you need a way to open it in your home instance.

There’s no fixing that.

EDIT: test self link to this comment lemmy.world/comment/10561034

Max_P , 13 days ago

I haven’t encountered that particular one in a while. Usually it’s Lemmy links from elsewhere like Matrix or Discord or whatever that are annoying to deal with and needs redirecting.

Most apps seems to rewrite the links already just fine, at least Tesseract does. It’s not like the default UI is known to be good. It’s functional but the UX is terrible.

Max_P , 13 days ago

This is what that looks like on a good Lemmy frontend: https://lemmy.max-p.me/pictrs/image/84072838-f9e2-49b2-8b13-97b2afb013cd.pnghttps://lemmy.max-p.me/pictrs/image/075836e1-5368-47c4-9b08-a2845c13ee9e.png

I forgot the default UI didn’t do that. Both Tesseract and Boost handle those mostly just fine.

Max_P , 13 days ago

To be fair, Lemmy is super alpha software. It’ll take months and years before the platform is mature and more user friendly and has an ecosystem of really good apps.

We’re like, emails just got invented era of fediverse. It’s having to explain that yes, if you have a Yahoo address you can still email Hotmail users 2 decades ago all over again.

Now that the big ones like Threads and Bluesky are joining, users will be more familiar with the concepts and it’ll get less… confusing.

Max_P , 13 days ago

And the emulators aren’t even particularly good compared to what the community has been cooking, especially the new N64 recompiler that runs the games with interpolation at 240Hz 4K HDR graphics with raytracing in proper 16:9. Meanwhile Nintendo didn’t even get the fog right on launch.

Max_P , 13 days ago

It does away with the emulation entirely, that’s the crazy part. It’s basically a PC port but most of it is generated. Those features have been injected directly into the game itself. It renders at that resolution, no upscaling. It’s still low res textures but the anti aliasing and overall sharpness of it all works out well. The animations are interpolated in-game, no fancy frame predictions or anything.

It would play absolutely fantastic at 720p on the Switch.

Max_P , 14 days ago

Not in the way that Windows does, at that point your best bet is SysRq+REISUB or SSH in and kill kwin and possibly issue a manual reset in /sys. But even if successful, half your apps will have died as Wayland compositor handover isn’t quite reliable yet.

I also believe if the GPU hangs the kernel already tries a reset, I would start with a manual reset via SSH to confirm it’s even worth pursuing and then you can figure out a hotkey situation. Even if the GUI is locked up, you can listen to evdev devices and catch an arbitrary keyboard shortcut and run a shell script that resets the system to your liking.

Max_P , 15 days ago

That’s super nice for rooted and custom ROM users where RCS doesn’t work.