Nibodhika

Nibodhika , 9 months ago to linux in What distro to choose in parallel to steamos

I get what you mean, when you’re starting those 10% feel like a lot because it’s one of the main things you do when you first grab a system, but over time you install less and less stuff. Even if you’re not using Arch, the documentation there is really good, for example they have a Rosetta Stone for package managers, so if you know the command you want to do on one you can check the equivalent on other wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta so for example if you know in Debian based distros you would do apt-get install you’ll see that in Arch is pacman -S .

At the end of the day once you’re familiar with Linux the way you install packages is not that relevant to how you use your system. I currently have 3 machines, with 3 different distros, 2 of them look exactly the same and you wouldn’t be able to tell which is which, except one is Ubuntu (company issued laptop) and the other is Arch (Personal computer), sometimes I run Pacman on Ubuntu or apt on Arch and get a command not found error, but other than that they’re completely interchangeable.

Nibodhika , 9 months ago to games in What game has a great story and is worth the time investment?

From some of the games you mentioned I think you’ll appreciate some of these games. All of them are the sort of games that have very rich stories that you will want to talk to people about, remember how you wanted to get your friend to play MGS blind just so you could see him face Psycho Mantis and have his mind blown and then you had someone to talk to about it? I had the same feeling for each of these games (which means I won’t tell you much about them, and you should try to avoid spoilers):

• SOMA
• Spec Ops: The Line
• Life is Strange

I also think the Stanley Parable deserves an honorary spot it’s not exactly story rich but it’s a neat experience that I found quite unique.

Nibodhika , 9 months ago to linux in What distro to choose in parallel to steamos

TL;DR: Install Plasma/KDE on your current Linux and select it when logging in.

First a correction, SteamOS used to be debian based, it’s now Arch based, not that that should matter to you because 90% of using a Linux for day to day will be through the DE or with commands that are the same for all distros, so anything with Plasma/KDE will look and behave the same as SteamOS. The remaining 10% has to do with how you install things, on SteamOS you don’t install things to your system (i.e. the equivalent to apt/yum/pacman/portage in other distros) because it’s immutable, but there is a store to install Flatpaks for your user which I’m sure you can install on other distros (or something similar enough).

So realistically any distro with KDE/Plasma should feel the same as SteamOS for you. While technically Arch/Manjaro/Garuda are the closest ones I wouldn’t recommend any of them because Arch is bleeding edge, which means sometimes things will break, it’s rare but it happens, and Arch’s philosophy is that you should know how to fix it. If you already have Pop maybe just install Plasma on it and see how you like it, you can select your DE on the login screen, and you can even change the login manager program in the future if you want, and most of the things you’ll learn by doing so will be usable on other Linux distros. Until you’re VERY familiar with Linux the difference between a distro and another is just the package manager they use and what comes pre-installed by default, so use whatever you’re already using unless you have a specific reason for wanting to change.

Nibodhika , 9 months ago to selfhosted in TTRPG Players and DMs, what's in your self hosted toolbox?

I mostly play Vampire, Mage, Paranoia or Monster of the week, so I don’t need a full VTT, just some dice rolling and some sheet/NPC management that can integrate well with something like Discord. So I wrote my own, which then turned into a snowball of adding features, making it more generic, etc… It’s still an ongoing project, but with Foundry and others out there I don’t think anyone outside me will useine so I’ve put a lid on that and only fiddle with it when I need something for a game I’m playing.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to nostupidquestions in Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?

Yeah, makes sense, however to setup good structure for being able to do that you’ll need CLI, e.g. if you want programs that administer photos and allow you to create albums and set tags, I personally don’t need that level of organisation, but if this is your main use you might want to invest the time to setup something like Lychee or piwigo, which are easily setup through docker (which if you’re into self hosting you should learn).

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to nostupidquestions in Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?

I have a server I use among other things to backup my photos, I don’t understand what you mean by “parse”, but I administer my photos through my file explorer as if they were on my computer, because I configured the server to expose a samba share on the folder that I have the pictures.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to nostupidquestions in Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?

I think it’s still worth learning it as a hobbitst, same thing as the knife skills for someone who likes to cook, you don’t need to be super proficient with a knife, but the basics of knife skills will up your cooking by a lot, at some point you’ll reach diminishing returns and you’ll stop learning, but the basic is almost essential. Same thing for CLI, you don’t need to become a master in the command line, but being comfortable around it will help you a lot. In other words, trying to run a server without CLI is like trying to cook without a knife, is it possible? Depending on what you’re trying to do yes but in general you’re shooting yourself in the foot, just because a blender can replace a knife in some instances doesn’t mean you can use it for all of the same things you would use a knife, a GUI is the blender of servers, it makes some things easier but is not as versatile.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

Depending on the card and your use case the open source drivers might be good enough, although more modern NVIDIA cards are clock locked to the proprietary driver. Nevertheless it’s almost a guarantee that NVIDIA will do something before this kernel goes live for any major distro.

In short NVIDIA has been a crappy company in Linux support unfortunately until very recently they were the least worse option, but now with all of the other manufacturers open sourcing their drivers and not locking their GPUs NVIDIA is less and less appealing so the kernel developers can start to push back against their bullshit.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to nostupidquestions in Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?

Can you give me an example? Sure graphs are quick to spot spikes and such, but outside a webui like you mentioned servers also usually have warning triggers, you know what’s better than staring at a graph looking for a spike? Getting paged once a spike happens with information on possible causes and the state of the server. That’s very difficult to setup using GUIs, but almost trivial to do if your okay with CLIs.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to nostupidquestions in Do folks managing servers mainly do so via command-line interfaces?

If you understand that the terminal is better in the long run then you answered your own question, most people who fiddle with servers do so for a long time so the time investment is worth it. A similar analogy is learning knife skills, if you just cook for yourself being able to chop an onion in seconds saves you a minute a day from the one onion you used, not really worth outside being a neat party trick. But if you work in a kitchen that’s mandatory, chopping an onion in seconds means you save an hour for the 60 onions you chop in preparation for the service. Same idea for GUIs/terminal, it has a higher learning curve but if you try to avoid the curve you’ll never be able to do it fast, so the time investment is worth it if you’re going to be doing this daily (like most server admins do)

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

DRM is a good comparison, imagine there exists a DRM measure that doesn’t affect rightful owners in any way shape or form but prevents piracy, would you be against it?

Personally I would be 100% okay with that, the problem is that DRM usually causes issues to rightful users and doesn’t prevent piracy. This change on the Kernel seems to be that perfect DRM, it won’t affect any rightful driver but prevents companies from pirating the Linux Kernel.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

Their drivers were already leaked, any secrets they were trying to hide are out in the wild, so that point is moot.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

From a corporate perspective you should be VERY worried about this, GPL is infectious, so if NVIDIA drivers are using GPL only parts of the kernel they become GPL, and because NVIDIA doesn’t offer GPL only endpoint the license applies to everything, meaning that if your company is using the NVIDIA driver in any way shape or form anything you produce becomes GPL as well. NVIDIA has enough lawyers to delay the enforcing of this, which is why they’ll never get sued, does YOUR company has enough lawyers to keep FSF at bay? If not you should be very annoyed at NVIDIA for not providing a license term for their GPL driver (and legally their driver IS GPL if it uses those endpoints).

And here’s the thing, for a home user not updating the kernel is good enough, for a company it’s not because this is a bug fix, not new implementation, NVIDIA is already in breach of license.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

Just so we’re clear, you don’t feel like shelling for Microsoft but are okay to do so for NVIDIA? Don’t get me wrong, I also want a system that just works and I had never had a problem with using proprietary drivers, but if this doesn’t get “fixed” by the time that kernel becomes stable I’m switching to open source rather than keep an outdated kernel version, and I’m switching to AMD asap. Over a decade ago I switched to NVIDIA for a similar reason, and I discovered back then that it’s just not worth fighting against a proprietary driver that doesn’t co-operate with the system.

Nibodhika , 10 months ago to linux in Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

Why do you think that? Companies can open source their drivers at will, in fact at this point NVIDIA is the only major player in GPU market who hasn’t done this, what do you think makes this particular hardware so special that needs a closed source driver when every other competitor doesn’t? In fact what could possibly be the reason for a driver to need to be closed source?