Nibodhika

Nibodhika , 16 hours ago

Replace Arch with Ubuntu and the answer is yes. Arch based that’s not a good idea.

The reason is that in 6 months lots can have changed, and Arch is not guaranteed a stable base, so updates might assume you have certain versions or things might break because you should have done a middle step during the upgrades that you didn’t which is now buried in months of update news in the wiki.

If you want to only update your system every six months, Arch is not ideal, it’s likely to work, but not guaranteed.

Nibodhika , 16 hours ago

What’s wrong with Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/Fedora or any of the distros usually recommended? They’re easier to maintain and more up to date than Debian

Nibodhika , 1 day ago

It’s probably fine, but you can accidentally short it when moving it around by touching it or resting it up on something conductive, even if you’re careful dust might short it as well, but this is much rarer.

As a general rule I would try to avoid it, but would not be my first concern.

Nibodhika , 1 day ago

So i really wanted to ditch windows once and for all

Why?

so i’ve tried Linux for a week trying different distros (debian, manjaro, ubuntu, opensuse, mint)

Why? Choose one and stick with it, preferably a beginner friendly one like Ubuntu or Mint.

and first of all why? Why are there so many distros out there?

Because different people like different things and have different opinions. Some people like to have the latest packages and so they choose Arch, while others prefer to have a stable system until they want to upgrade core packages and so they go with Ubuntu.

What’s the difference between debian + kde and manjaro + kde?

One is Debian based and the other in Arch based. Debian uses apt, Arch uses pacman. Debian has a slower release cycle to ensure compatibility while Arch has a faster release cycle to ensure the latest versions of things are available. Like these there are thousands of small differences between any two distros. It’s mostly philosophical, so just pick something beginner friendly and stick with it until you find a reason to switch.

They look the same, they work the same. I don’t get it.

They don’t work 100% the same, that’s like saying that a car and a truck are the same because they’re both painted black and have a steering wheel. Under the hood they’re very different.

Also why do things have to be complicated?

They’re not, they’re different. Doing stuff on Windows is also complicated if you don’t know what you’re doing, excepts you’ve had years of experience, in a few years Linux will feel easy and Windows complicated.

I’ve installed debian, installed calibre to manage my ebooks, created a library from an existing library on my hard drive (not the one with debian installed), ERROR! All the files are read-only.

Is the entire hard-drive read only? How did you mount it? What format is it on? You’re skipping a lot of important questions, that if you had answered (or asked about this issue) you would know the problem. My guess is that you don’t have ntfs-3g installed and the drive was NTFS.

What??? I’ve followed multiple guides on how to change permissions and finally solved the problem.

How? This might give us an idea of what was wrong with it.

Now let’s restart my pc. files on the hard drive are read only WHAT???

Yes, makes sense, did you applied a permanent fix or a temporary one? Since we don’t know what you did we have to assume you did a temporary fix, so it’s like asking why did Firefox not opened after I restarted my computer if I had open it before.

Fuck debian, let’s go on manjaro.

That’s a bad reason to switch distros, if you switch distros every time you run into something you don’t understand you’re going to run out of distros fairly quickly. Let me tell you right now, EVERYTHING one distro can do another one can, no exceptions. Something not working is a bad reason to switch distros unless you know why the other distro makes it work and are okay with the philosophical differences between distros.

No problems at all on calibre. Managed to create the library as easy as i did on windows. My question is: where’s the fun in this?

The same thing that’s causing you problems is an awesome feature, Linux is very modular, you can build yourself your system exactly the way you want it. That is very fun.

It’s just problems, after problems, after problems and i didn’t even start gaming.

Well, yeah, it’s an unfamiliar thing, I feel the same every time I have to use Windows.

I mean i tried installing retroarch and importing my saves but of course nothing works.

Why not? AFAIK RetroArch should have cross compatible saves.

Read this guide, read that guide. Nope. Nothing works. Ok, fuck retroarch let’s customize the appearance of my desktop: move some icons on the panel, center this, adjust height, move this on the left, spent 30 minutes tweaking, very nice…

Did you saved in the meantime? Let his be a lesson, save often, you never know when something will happen.

kde crashes, all back to default.

That’s weird, I don’t remember last time KDE crashed, but then again I’m not using Manjaro so maybe the current version there is broken? What was the error? Did you submitted a bug report? That might be an important finding.

Let’s download some apps. I want as many apps that i already know as possible. Let’s see if jdownloader is available for linux. Yep there’s one. Nope, not for manjaro (officially). There’s a AUR package available. Nice.

Not nice, don’t use AUR on Manjaro, you will break stuff.

What do i need to do to install a AUR package? A wall of text on the wiki, 20 minutes videos, yay.

That’s because AUR is not meant for people who don’t know what they’re doing. It’s dangerous and unstable, the way to get an air package is to build it yourself, the way to get an automated tool to install them is to build the package for it yourself, this should prevent people who shouldn’t be building packages from doing so. BTW, Manjaro is especially unsafe because it has an AUR manager in their official repos IIRC, which btw is called yay, so not sure if that was a joke.

Ok let’s call it a day. Do i need to live another life to make linux work?

No, you just need time to learn something new, instead of jumping around thinking that things would solve themselves. If you had started with Ubuntu you might not had either of those problems, and if you had learned what was wrong with the first problem on the first distro you would know how to fix it in every other distro and solve similar problems, just like you did with Windows before and now solving things there is intuitive for you.

Nibodhika , 8 hours ago

I see a common trend here. You seem to be very tech savvy and a windows power user, and get frustrated with Linux because you’re trying to solve problems with a windows mentality and failing.

Yada, yada, yada.

That yada yada yada is the most important part from my entire answer, choose a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Things to do to install an app on Windows: download the exe, double click on the icon, follow the instructions, done.

Nope, things to install an app on Windows: Open a browser, search for the program, click the wrong link, download a virus, go back, try again, find a more reputable site, download another virus, run anti-virus, discover your computer has been completely overrun by viruses, format, reinstall everything, find the right site, download the installer, click next 20 times, accept to have a new service running when you start your PC by accident, done?. You don’t do all of that every time? That’s because you know what you’re doing, I certainly don’t do half the stuff you mentioned for Linux.

Things to do to install an app on Linux: check the package manager

That’s it, if it’s not there you shouldn’t worry with it until you’re a bit more experienced. This is why I recommend beginner friendly distro a, they will have more stuff and possibly have snaps/flatpacks by default which should cover most of your use ases and are installed via the same GUI.

Man, there are hundreds (nonsense) distros out there, i need something like 3 lives to try them all.

Precisely my point, don’t. Pick a beginner friendly distro and stick to it.

Apparently not. I’ve saved a copy of the saves folder and simply pasted it in the retroarch folder on linux but the game doesn’t read anything.

Have you tried saving something new to see if we have the correct folder?

There were no errors. Screen went black and then everything was reset.

That’s crashing, there should be some log somewhere, can you reproduce or is it random?

This is actually fun: i have Ubuntu Budgie on my laptop and i was trying to create a bootable win10 on my pendrive with ventoy given that jesus christ woeusb is super complicated to install with all those manual dependencies installs and woeusb-ng gives problem with python. Installed ventoy, copied the iso, pasted it, nothing shows up in the drive. Copied the iso again, pasted it again, file already existing. ???. I’ve extracted the drive, plugged it back in, nothing. Extracted it again, plugged it in on my desktop, iso is actually there. Wtf is wrong with linux?

Did you installed Ventoy properly on the drive? Did you unmounted before removing the first time? Otherwise you might have corrupted the file, remember how people always say to eject before unplugging a USB drive? This is the reason, the GUI that shows you copying stuff is just a FE to the calls to the kernel for writing, the kernel actual writing to the disk is done afterwards, so even after the GUI closes the file was not totally written. Again, regardless of OS, unmount/eject drives before unplugging them. Also is your desktop Linux or windows? Does the bootable drive works? You need to learn to provide more information if you expect help, saying “stuff doesn’t work, what’s wrong with Linux?” Will get you a lot of answers of the type “the problem is between the keyboard and the chair”.

Nibodhika , 5 hours ago

I’ve never, ever got a virus on any of my pcs. I grew up with internet, since the ADSL days, i know my shit.

Therein lies the problem, you’re a windows expert, moving away from your comfort zone will always feel bad. It’s okay to stick to Windows, no one should be forced to use an OS they don’t like. But if you ever want to try again, I recommend taking a step back and accepting that for all your years of experience in Windows you are a noob here, and trying to jump into the deep end is more likely to get you drowned than learning how to swim.

Also I recommend dual-booting, so you have the safe heaven of a known OS to reboot into in times of need. Most of us started that way and dealt slowly with the difficulties in using Linux with a windows user mentality, until at some point we realized we were spending the majority of our time in Linux and Windows had become unusable because we were now thinking like Linux users. I’m sure that if I had tried to do what you did I would also be frustrated, so I completely understand you. But let me tell you something which you might not want to hear, and will possibly even get angry at me for telling you, but there’s a fairly good chance that the majority of issues you encountered were self-imposed. Linux has near infinite possibilities, but that’s like saying the ocean is nearly infinite, it doesn’t mean you should try to swim across it just because you’re used to doing it on a swimming pool, you’ll drown fairly quickly and get nowhere.

Nibodhika , 1 day ago

Steam vs GoG is a turf war, Epic vs anything will make people side with anything. The problem is that Epic has a shitty store with shitty features, and the only way it can compete with the others out there is to pay piles of money to game devs so they make their game exclusive to their store for some time. So usually people just ignore the game until it comes up in another store, and most of us have completely forgotten about it by then so when we find out just add it to the wishlist and wait for a 90% discount in a while. The game has been out for years at that point so a massive discount is expected soon and you already waited years to play, you can wait a bit more and save money, plus that teaches companies that signing exclusivity contracts is a shit deal.

Nibodhika , 2 days ago

GPU go with AMD, I don’t think I need to give much explanations here.

CPU you can do either, BUT AMD is usually better for multi-threaded applications (like video editing, modeling or animation), also an AM5 slot should last you years to come, AMD stayed with AM4 for a long time (I had most of the same PC for almost a decade thanks to that, it’s still the same AM4, but I had to replace the MOBO since the old one broke). So I would also choose AMD here, although Intel is not bad either, and if you get it in a sale it might come out cheaper.

Nibodhika , 2 days ago

One important thing, ensure the drive is CMR, the reason is that you likely want a RAID, and non-CMR disks take so long to read the entire disk that the chances of a second failure while recovering from a disk failure is significant.

That being said, how are you keeping track of the disks state? I built my RAID recently, and your post made me realize that I have nothing to notify me if one of the disks shows early signs of problems.

Nibodhika , 2 days ago

Rule against hitting the groin or gouging someone’s eyes. There are lots of combat styles that are more efficient than Jiu-Jitsu, but they’re not for competing, they’re for survival.

I used to train some of the less savoury martial arts, and ever so often we had people from the Jiu-Jitsu class wanting to train with us because they saw us doing “wrong things” and wanted to “teach us”. What they discovered very quickly is that lots of Jiu-Jitsu positions put you in a very vulnerable spot if your opponent knows and can use pressure points, including groin and eyes, and that the “wrong” things we were doing might open a counter attack but prevented those things.

I’m not saying BJJ is bad, but it’s not the br all end all that people claim it to be.

Nibodhika , 5 days ago

Nope, he finds it important no one uses what to him is a fictional character to push laws and regulations. You would also care if people prohibited you from doing something you like to do or think is important because Superman said it was wrong.

That’s a big difference, in general atheist don’t care about God(s), they care about people trying to use God(s) to push an agenda, but the people who’re trying to use God(s) to push that agenda rarely see the difference.

Nibodhika , 5 days ago

Do you find it important that Spider-Man does not exist? Do you think anyone in their right mind would find it important? No, but the moment someone starts to force you to do or not do stuff because Spider-Man thinks it’s bad it becomes important to make it clear that Spider-Man is not real.

The VAST majority of atheist are indifferent towards religion, unless that religion is trying to control them somehow. This is why you don’t see atheist complaining about Buddhism in western countries, if a religion is not trying to force itself into an atheist life he cares as much as you do about all of the thousands of other religions you’re an atheist towards. If you feel atheist are trying to impose their non-believe on you, it’s because you’re trying to impose your belief on them and they’re calling you on your bullshit.

Also, btw, I never claimed I was an atheist, so I see no reason for you to think that atheist should believe the same thing I do.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

One small but important correction. NFTs are not a scam, it’s an amazing technology that has the potential to revolutionize lots of stuff, that became popular when people used it for stupid shit.

Saying NFT is a scam because people have used it to scam others is like saying phones are a scam because people call others over the phone to scam them.

NFTs are essentially a decentralized token. This means that they can be used to represent anything you might want to represent with a token, e.g. ownership of a physical object such as a car or a house; ownership of a digital asset, such as a website or game; some predetermined amount of something, similar to a stock or bonds; etc. The fact that some people used it to mean ownership of random pictures and people thought buying random pictures on the internet for a ridiculous amount of money was a good idea tells you more about people than about the technology.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

The legal validity of things come from people using it and courts enforcing it, someone years ago might have said:

That’s neat. Until a representation of something on a piece of paper has any legal meaning regarding authenticity, ownership, or anything else, and until the overwhelming majority usage of paper isn’t as a scam, paper remains a pathetic and comically stupid class of speculative asset constituting a pyramid scheme that also happens to destroy the environment.

The thing is that even if a technology is used mostly for stupid things that tells you more about humans than about the technology itself. Or do you also think that phone calls are scams because 90% of the phone calls you receive nowadays are scams, even though the technology behind phone calls is the same used for mobile internet.

Also the destroy the environment claim is really bogus, for starter money pollutes more than crypto when you consider all of the chain of what it takes to produce and transport money. But also for example if you live in the US your home probably pollutes more than a mining farm since they’re usually in places where electricity is extremely cheap, mostly in China near a hydroelectric power plant. But also the technology itself doesn’t need to consume that amount of energy, that’s just the current implementation, but there’s a push to move to PoS instead of PoW, which would mean that NFTs (and crypto in general) would not need farms or even a specially powerful computer.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

The whole point of cryptocurrency is decentralized ownership. That’s the big breakthrough in technology, it’s the whole point of it, I can try to ELI5 how that works if you want to, but for the moment I’m just going to assume you accept that cryptocurrency can demonstrate ownership.

NFTs are an extension of that, except they can’t be split or traded by one another, i.e. they’re non-fungible. Therefore you can by definition prove ownership of those tokens, as that’s the whole point of the technology, which again, if you’re curious I can try to explain how it works.

How does ownership of those tokens transfers to ownership of something else? Well, that’s an excellent question, and the answer is that it happens in the same way that a piece of paper grants ownership of a house. There’s no innovative technology behind that piece of paper, but still everyone would agree that it grants ownership, and the reason is that the authority that enforces that chose to respect that piece of paper. Nowadays this is mostly databases and the piece of paper is just generated from the records there, but this is very insecure as anyone with database write access (or access to the physical folder containing the documents in case of old paper deeds) can transfer ownership. NFTs solve this because only the owner of a token can transfer it to someone else, so they’re inherently safer than any of the alternatives.

Again, the technology is great and has millions of excellent applications, but people use it for pyramid schemes and scamming others, but people do that with any piece of technology.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

There are some valid points here, and I agree that the energy could be used elsewhere and that green energy is not entirely green.

I even agree that for most cryptocurrency as they are now the cost per transaction is higher than alternatives. However the technology for cryptocurrency, especially with PoC can be a lot more efficient in scale. To get an idea of it you can look at Visa, which processes 1700 transactions per second, BCH can do 178, so 10% of it, ETH2 is supposed to be able to process at least 20k, so 10x that amount. I imagine either of those coins pollute a comparable amount to visa when you consider everything that visa needs to operate (machines, cards, servers, etc). I feel that people don’t take these sort of stuff into consideration when they talk about the energy consumption of crypto. There is a discussion to be had here, but blankly stating that it’s an environmental disaster is fear mongering.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

Do you consider a deed to be proof of ownership? A stock? The registry of a car? They’re not inherently proof of ownership, they’re just pieces of paper or entries on a database. If you go down the road of what is proof of ownership then no technology we have is able to prove it.

The thing is that NFTs you can prove ownership of the token, if the token correlates with something, e.g. if the DMV stored car ownership in a Blockchain, NFTs could be used to represent car ownership in a secure and decentralized way.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

No, there isn’t, but there are advantages to it as well, just like how a database has advantages over a paper folder.

An NFT can’t be transferred by anyone other than the owner, and ownership can be verified independently.

Here’s an example of a use that would be very cool and would take advantage of it (even though I know it’s unlikely to happen). Ownership of games, some games are sold on different platforms, to verify the ownership of the game (or DLC, or cosmetics) games have to verify with first party services (like PSN or Steam), which means that for the most part you need to buy games on each platform individually, but if platforms used an NFT for it games would be buy once play anywhere, and they would allow you to sell or even borrow games, and no company could prevent you from doing so. Which is obviously the reason this will never happen, but it’s a nice idea.

That being said there are downsides to it as well, such as a person being the full owner of stuff means that a person can lose the key and therefore lose access to the house, or that scammer can steal everything, whereas making you sign your house to someone else is a lot more beurocratic, which serves to protect you from you.

Just to be clear, I’m not a “we should use NFT for everything” type of person, in fact I don’t think there are many use cases nowadays that are worth using it, but the technology is interesting regardless, and solves the problem of how to prove ownership without a centralized trusted organization.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

Crypto energy usage goes up the more it’s being used and the more decentralized it becomes.

That’s wrong, crypto energy consumption has to do with how hard is the PoW difficulty, it does not correlate at all with usage or centralization, it’s only related with security, i.e the more energy it consumes the more energy someone would need to use to attack the technology.

But the energy needed to mine 1 transaction or 1000 is the same. There are problems at scale, but power consumption is not one of them.

Centralized services like Visa can increase the network load while barely increasing the energy requirements.

Not really, they need more servers to process more transactions, but cryptocurrency can scale up much more easily because the whole infrastructure from consumer to miner is decentralized.

Crypto bros always forget that to replace the banking system, crypto would need to replace the infrastructure as well, but because of decentralization it would be less energy efficient for the same result.

That’s what most people fail to see, the infrastructure for a scale at the size of visa is already in place for crypto. So there wouldn’t be an increase in power consumption by mass adoption, only by miner adoption, and that’s a difficult thought to grasp, it’s like if everyone could borrow their computer to visa or Mastercard to process their transactions, the amount of people wanting to offer their computer to visa/master would define how much resources they use, but an increase in visa users doesn’t mean an increase in visa borrowed servers and vice-versa.

You can just stop, there’s no way to greenwash crypto and decentralization. The amount of transactions happening on all crypto networks at the moment could be handled by one server if it was centralized. There’s benefits to it, stop trying to sell it as being green, it’s not and never will be.

I’m not trying to green wash, but crypto is not the environmental disaster the person claimed, especially not when you take into consideration PoS and newer coins with different validation methods.

Nibodhika , 10 days ago

First of all losing value and being a scam are not correlated, the dollar is losing its value compared to the Euro for the past year but it’s not a scam.

Secondly that would be an association fallacy, “X is a scam, X is an NFT, therefore all NFT are scam”.

Nibodhika , 9 days ago

Did you read the link you sent? It clearly states that only the amount of miners matter like I said before, the amount of transactions has nothing to do with it, you’re mixing the two.

The more people mine, the more decentralized it is

Wrong, decentralization is hard to measure, one person with a mining farm is centralized, while hundreds of people with their personal computer are decentralized but both produce the same amount of hash power. So you can have one person investing more and more in mining rigs increasing the total amount of mining power in the pool but decreasing it’s decentralization.

the more energy is necessary because difficulty is increased.

Yes, this is correct, if you have more computers mining you will have a higher energy spending.

The more transactions happen, the more blocks are required,

Wrong, there’s one blonc every 10 minutes, regardless of the amount of transactions that happen. Did you even read the link you sent?

the more energy needs to be spent to confirm all the transactions.

Wrong, the energy needed to confirm 1 or 1000 transactions is the same, and it’s related to the hashing difficulty established by the total amount of hash power, again, did you even read the link you sent?

The more it’s used, the higher the value, the more people mine.

Wrong, the value of an asset does not necessarily correlate with it’s use, for example gold is more valuable than dollar, even though dollar is a lot more used.

There’s a limit to the number of transactions per block as well, so no, your can’t just say “1 or 1000 it’s the same”.

Yes there is, but until that limit is hit the amount of transactions doesn’t matter. Also that limit is artificial and can be easily raised if needed, as it was done on Bitcoin Cash which can do hundreds of transactions per second more than Bitcoin, but because it has less miners uses less energy, thus proving you are wrong and the two are not correlated.

Visa is already able to handle 24000 transactions per second as is, no need for more infrastructure.

And ETH2 is theoretically capable of 100k, and that’s just one coin which BTW is PoS so nothing of what we talked about miners applies to it. No miners means less power consumption by the network as a whole.

Crypto uses 1% of the world’s energy production for a couple trillions in assets, the financial system uses 2.5% for quadrillions in assets, multiple thousands more than crypto, no, crypto can’t scale to that without a huge environmental impact.

Do you have a source for that? But also you’re measuring environmental impact as just energy consumption, and that’s very wrong, by that same standard I could say crypto is green because it produces no plastic, whereas Visa has huge factories to produce plastic for their cards, their card machines, etc. If you only focus on one environmental impact it’s easy to make anyone to be the bad guy, and for some reason people only see the Bitcoin energy usage and completely ignore that the energy consumption there is the whole story, whereas for other things there’s hundreds of factors pilling on top to generate the environmental impact.

Yes you are trying to greenwash crypto, just stop.

Again, I’m not, I recognize that PoW is an energy hungry method of confirmation, however it’s not the environmental catastrophe that the original comment said and if you take into consideration ALL of the environmental impact of alternatives (not just energy consumption) you will see that it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. Which doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s far from an environmental catastrophe.

Also when you take into consideration that we were originally talking NFTs, and that’s mostly an Ethereum thing, and Ethereum is migrating to PoS, it’s even less of an environmental catastrophe.

Nibodhika , 9 days ago

Cool, I’ve been out of the loop on crypto for years, just checked and you are correct, now the full Ethereum network, capable of beating visa in TpS runs at 0.0026 TWh/yr, i.e. 1/100x of the energy consumption of PayPal, therefore proving my point above.

Nibodhika , 9 days ago

Nope, never bought any of the NFTs that were sold to idiot speculators because I understand the technology and see no value in owning a token representing a digital image. I feel that the rage of downvoting comes from people who got scammed because they didn’t understood the technology and now see it mentioned and think it’s all a scam, similar to how old people used to think emails were a scam because they sent money to a prince in Nigeria.

Nibodhika , 11 days ago

As someone who’s been on the hiring side there are some legalities involved on what to answer here. But I’ve always made a point of telling people who asked why. However I’m not in HR, so lots of people might get filtered before I even got a chance to interview them.

Also we asked candidates to do a take home and we talked about their solution during the interview, so most people got a good understanding of why they were rejected, but a couple of times people asked afterwards and I replied to them with the reasons we considered they were not at the level we were looking for, but that we would keep them in consideration for a more junior role if there ever was an opening.

Nibodhika , 21 days ago

I didn’t understood your criticism, what are they unwilling to release? What are they claiming all of? Why would ownership rules cause an OOM?

Sharing stack memory is a bad practice in C as well btw.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

First of all you’re missing the point.

Drivers are automatic during setup.

That still means third-party drivers, so it’s still not a Windows win but rather a “windows is so ubiquitous that Logitech (or whoever) was forced to release a driver for it”, which is what the comment you’re replying was talking about.

Secondly, bullshit. In my 20 years using Linux I have never, ever, plugged in a mouse that didn’t get immediately recognized and worked as expected. What mouse do you have? You said Logitech, which model? The only thing that I ever needed specialized software on a Logitech mouse was to configure extra buttons or to pair it to a different dongle (both stuffs that also need specialized software only provided by Logitech on Windows)

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

I just got to work and plugged my surface pro into my external monitor. It didn’t switch inputs immediately, and I thought “Linux would have done that”. But would it?

Nope. My laptop for example doesn’t automatically use an output when plugged in, but that doesn’t bother me because I know other DEs would do that, and it’s my choice of having a minimal window manager that causes that.

And this goes into your next point, because I know that this comes from decisions I made, I’m okay with that. I also know I could probably fix it somehow, even if just by running a script in the background that checks if an output is plugged and tries to use it.

And for me that’s the big difference. As a general rule when things break or don’t work are not the fault of Linux as a general, but of a specific piece of the stack, and more often than not it’s because that piece was backwards engineered without any help from the manufacturers of the hardware it’s meant to be controlling, so I can be very tolerant of these errors since the bad guys here are the third-party who’s refusing to make their things work on Linux. But even things that don’t work as I want to, I can make them do so, and that’s a huge change in viewpoint.

In other words, on Windows I used to be of the thought of things you can do, and things you can’t, with time I noticed that in Linux this thought shifted, to the point that the only question I ever ask myself is: “HOW do I do this?”. This implies that there are no impossible things in Linux, which is obviously false, but I would argue that the correct way to think about this is “things that are impossible on Linux, for now”, and that’s a huge difference, because Linux is always evolving and getting better and better, things you thought are impossible now might be trivial in a few months or years whenever someone with the knowledge to fix it gets bothered with it.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

At the same time I think most people don’t think about how much prior knowledge you need to just be able to use Windows or Mac. And for someone without ANY prior knowledge all of them are the same.

Story time, my MiL is a zero when it gets to computer literacy, to the point that every week I had to solve something for her. Eventually I gave her a laptop with Linux in it to make it easier for me to do support, and to my surprise she had lots of problems the first months when setting things up and until learning the ropes, but afterwards there were almost no problems.

The thing is that people have a lot of Windows knowledge, so when they try Linux they expect it to be Windows and get frustrated when it’s not.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

Those are the usual problems in Linux, they can be summed up by “Third party companies don’t support Linux”, and they are especially annoying because with time you learn that there’s no reason that thing shouldn’t work, other than because the company either purposefully figures out if you’re running Linux and crashes the program (e g. DRM, anti-cheat, etc) or because they created their own closed proprietary protocol and refuse to share the public API for it so it needs to be reverse engineered.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

Those are two different things

being a self-contained wad of hardware

Steam Deck checks this, but so do laptops, raspberry pis and smartphones.

unable to be upgraded or repaired piece by piece.

Again Steam Deck is almost as upgradable and repairable as a laptop, and more repairable than a raspberry pi or a smartphone.

So that definition of console doesn’t work, otherwise raspberry pies, laptops, and especially phones would also be consoles. The differentiating factor is locking of the system with the hardware, in that sense Apple is more “console-like” than non-Apple competitors. Also The primary function of a gaming console must be gaming.

With those two extra points the Steam Deck hits one but misses the other. It is primarily for gaming, but the system is not locked down, you can change it how you want and even remove it entirely and put a different one.

So with any definition you can find the Steam Deck is not quite a console, but it does provide a console experience, so it’s in a weird space.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

I disagree. Your phone can happily do that today as long as you’re willing to play old games. This will always be the case, even when phones are able to play things today are now considered AAA, Desktop computers will be leaps ahead in what they can do.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

Yeah, but now you can buy an all-in-one convenient PC to plug on your TV with almost 100% retro compatibility, it’s called the Steam Deck and it’s awesome.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

But it is a replacement for a console like I told the person I replied to.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

Yup, you can buy the official dock or really any usb-C dock. Resolution can be set, so you can even do 4k on it if the tv supports it and the deck can handle it for that game

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

Any OS can break and need reinstalling if you screw stuff up, but the majority of them would have a hard time running constantly for almost a decade without so much as a side glance.

Nibodhika , 22 days ago

I’m fairly certain that SSH and whatever else you’re exposing has had vulnerabilities fixed since then, especially if modern distros refuse to use the ssh key you were using, this screams of “we found something so critical here we don’t want to touch it”. If your server exposes anything in a standard port, e.g. SSH on 22, you probably should do a fresh install (although I would definitely not know how to rebuild a system I built almost 20 years ago).

That being said, it’s amazing that an almost 20 year old system can work for almost 10 years without touching anything.

Nibodhika , 27 days ago

Came to say this, I remember when I first looked at VLC version and saw Rincewind (I think it was), and was like “this has to be a Discworld reference”

Nibodhika , 29 days ago

Realistically whatever problems you see in python will be there for any other language. Python is the most ubiquitously available thing after bash for a reason.

Also you mentioned provisioning scripts, is that Ansible? If so python is already there, if you mean really just bash scripts I can tell you that does not scale well. Also if you already have some scriptsz what language are they on? Why not write the function there?

Also you’re running syncthing on these machines, I don’t think python is larger than that (but I might be wrong).

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Downvoting per the rules, as I spent months obsessed with this game, having notes with the codes open on my second screen. Excellent game.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Also pissed that the Linux version never made it to Steam, now that Proton is a thing I forgot to check it again.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Out of Space a cozy co-op game similar to Overcooked but less chaotic.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Never heard of it, and sounds awesome, regexes are the sort of things that need lots of practice to be good at, a game seems like a great way to keep the skill alive

Nibodhika , 29 days ago

I don’t think it was my GotY, but still an excellent game

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Agree, I’m just explaining the reasoning behind it, that’s part of the risks of running a store. That being said even here in the EU you can’t get a full refund months after the purchase for a working product, which is what we’re talking about here so your example is not oranges to oranges.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

I agree that most of those are non-issue, which is why I specifically pointed at the EAC one.

It’s still nothing compared to Steam’s requirement of being online to at the very least install

This is a requirement everywhere, you need to be online to download the installer from GoG. And before you say you can backup the installer you can also backup the installed game on steam so they’re equivalent.

and first start of the game

Nope you don’t. This is game dependent, and many games don’t require it. I have several games that I backed up the folder and run them, some of which I’ve even copied to computers without steam to play in multiplayer lan mode with the games on Steam.

(so in 2 decades time when the Steam client doesn’t support any version of the OS supported by those games, they will be unplayable)

As long as Steam still supports Linux, and because of the strong backwards compatibility there (especially on wine) you will still be able to play them. If Windows breaks backwards compatibility with current GoG installers you’ll lose your GoG collection just as much.

and how due to Steam themselves having heavilly promoted amongst developers the tight integration of game features with Steam cloud, a dependency on Steam servers is very common even for Indie games, whilst almost all of the AAA stuff comes with their own additional (i.e. on top of Steam itself) sign-in to accounts on the maker’s own servers in order to play the game.

Here’s the thing, they don’t need to promote it, those features are good enough that developers want to integrate them. But lazy developers rely on them which is bad. Some game developers don’t though, it’s not Valve’s fault that a game doesn’t launch without steam, if I submit a game that requires GoG galaxy for offline play It would also not be on GoG’s hands, if it weren’t for the fact that they claim 100% DRM free.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Not sure if sarcasm, but in case it isn’t yes they have an offline mode so you can play games and still get achievements, cloud saves, etc while offline and then when you go back to being online it syncs those up.

Not sure why they needed an actual offline mode instead of just trying stuff and caching it for later if it fails (which I think it’s what they do now), but it’s there.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Why do you think backing up an installer is anything different from backing up a folder? What do you think an installer does that’s so special?

You claim I’m emotionally attached to Steam and claim you use GoG because it’s DRM free, and yet I show you GoG is not DRM free and that Steam has DRM-free games and your answer is that “but that doesn’t count because the folder is not inside an installer”.

It’s okay that you prefer GoG, but it’s not because of them being DRM free because they’re not. It might be because you prefer your hames backed up in installer format, or you might have developed an emotional bond over the DRM free claim. You’re the one making an argument from emotion, because you feel that different methods of backup are better or worse, and stick to GoG despite the reason you claimed being false.

Nibodhika , 30 days ago

Again even if that was the case the fact that you have a button you can click to go into offline mode to play completely negates that this is a form of DRM. How is it the “play anyways” button different from the “go into offline mode” one?