TCB13

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Maybe first they should determine who the community is. The people who talk the loudest about nix/nixos? The contributors? The users? Who is “the community”?

Maybe it’s written the way it is so nobody knows who’s the community and they can do whatever they please while saying it was in the best interest of the “community”.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

No, no, this is the peak OS installation menu:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/c09da0ea-76c0-437c-ae16-1c22c486050d.png

😜

TCB13 , 3 months ago

exploiting

Yes, that’s the right word for it. :)

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

So… this was the plan of the Standard Notes guys all along? Now it makes sense why they never made open-source and self-hosting a true priority.

Let’s see what Proton does with this, but I personally believe they’ll just integrate it in Proton and further close things even more. The current subscription-based model, docker container and whatnot might disappear as well. Proton is a greedy company that doesn’t like interoperability and likes to add features designed in a way to keep people locked their Web UI and applications.

Standard Notes for self-hosting was already mostly dead due to the obnoxious subscription price, but it is a well designed App with good cross-platform support and I just wish the Joplin guy would take a clue on how to design UIs from them instead of whatever they’re doing now that is ugly and barely usable.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

“Kobo announces they’ll finally spend a couple more bucks in each unit so they can ship same display any other Chinese company doing e-readers ships”. - There, title fixed.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

You can always grab a USB 3.0 disk case + NVME drive or 2.5 SSD, those will give you better performance for sure. Don’t buy pre-made drives, they’re usually slower than just getting a case and picking a desktop drive.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Yes, I’m also interested in ARM because it means we can have a very light laptop / tablet running a full desktop OS without the typical limitations of iOS / Android.

Debian is for sure the most stable thing in ARM, mostly because it is the upstream of many ARM-focused distributions like Armbian and there’s also where ARM CPU makers usually test their stuff. There’s a constant stream of patches coming from those manufacturers and downstream distributions because everyone wants to mainline both kernel and userland support for their ARMs.

Unfortunately there isn’t much decent “open” tablet hardware to run Linux on. The interesting things like those ultra-thin Lenovo tablets with amazing screens have locked bootloaders and other bullshit that stops people from loading Linux into then and making drivers / the required adjustments. Then there’s the Pine stuff that (even if you can get it) it’s overpriced, bulky and not a finished hardware product in any way.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

That’s the neat part, you don’t.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Yes the Dell H310 will work, but be around 40$. Other good options:

• Supermicro AOC-S3008L-L8E LSI 9300-8i - should sell for around 40$
• Dell H200 IT - less expensive, like 25$

There are also other cards from less known brands, just search ebay or aliexpress for LSI 9211-8i or LSI 9207-8i.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Yes, but Nextcloud is also a perpetually half made project that breaks at every corner and requires a lot of resources.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Yes, but Matrix a plague of questionable open-source and a metadata disaster.

Matrix’s E2EE does not, however, encrypt everything. The following information is not encrypted: Message senders, Session/device IDs, Message timestamps, Room members (join/leave/invite events), Message edit events, Message reactions, Read receipts, Nicknames, Profile pictures

Matrix is developed by a for profit entity, a group of venture capitalists and having a spec doesn’t mean everything. The way Matrix is designed is to force people into jumping through hoops and kind of drawing all attention to Matrix itself instead of the end result.

Decentralized communication protocol Matrix shifts to less-permissive AGPL open source license Element, the company and core developer behind the decentralized communication protocol known as Matrix, has announced a notable license change that will make the open source project just that little bit less appealing for companies looking to build on top of it.

techcrunch.com/…/decentralized-communication-prot…

Stop recommending questionable open-source like Matrix. XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible. XMPP is tested, reliable, secure and above all a truly open standard and decentralized it just lacks some investment in better mobile clients.

What people fail to see is that XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation and it can be configured to be secure and private. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in. Here a quick overview of the architecture.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

I would go with Prosody or Ejabberd, and here’s a good comparison: stackoverflow.com/a/45531372 and Ejabberd is the most used thing out there. xmpp.org/software/

TCB13 , 3 months ago

The way Matrix is designed is to force people into jumping through hoops and kind of drawing all attention to Matrix itself instead of the end result

That’s just another detail where we see that.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Let me add the following: the problem is that that metadata is all over the place AND you can’t remove it from those 3rd party servers. Also there’s a ton of questionable stuff like read receipts and reactions that are never encrypted (not sure if this was fixed already). XMPP with OMEMO enables will encrypt everything.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

About the metadata part: one of the issues with Matrix is that it considers some stuff like read receipts as metadata. In XMPP all that information is special messages inside your conversation thus they get encrypted as well.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Fair enough 😂😂😂

TCB13 , 3 months ago

So the Germany has been moving back and forth between Microsoft and Linux / open-source.

When Munich decided to ditch many of its Windows installations in favor of Linux in 2003, it was considered a groundbreaking moment for open source software – it was proof that Linux could be used for large-scale government work. However, it looks like that dream didn’t quite pan out as expected. The German city has cleared a plan to put Windows 10 on roughly 29,000 city council PCs starting in 2020. There will also be a pilot where Munich runs Office 2016 in virtual machines. The plan was prompted by gripes about both the complexity of the current setup and compatibility headaches.

Do you know what this smells like? Corruption and consulting companies with friends in the govt looking for ways to profit.

What else can be more profitable for a consulting company than shifting the entire IT of a city or a country between two largely incompatible solutions? :)

TCB13 , 3 months ago

they so thoroughly took the hardest route and made questionable choices that it was almost sure to fail

Typical government move going full malicious compliance while allowing “a few selected friends” from consulting companies to make a ton of money. They could’ve just picked Debian and rolled with it. Let’s face it, nobody develops desktop applications anymore most of the govt work is already done on custom built web platforms, any OS that can run a browser is good enough to address around 90% of the govt daily work.

Meanwhile China is creating their own distro that will be successful for sure because they’ve plans to move the public sector and whatever private they influence to the thing.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

So… it’s exactly what I said but with extra steps.

A way to provide money to the friends and have underplayed govt workers without the benefits and the stability 😂

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Great share.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Modern problems require overkill solutions :P

TCB13 , 3 months ago

The situation in Palestine is horrible, but Apple isn’t going to be able to do anything about it.

+1, private companies that are not involved directly with a conflict have nothing to do with it. The thing the OP posted is complete bullshit. Besides this “issue” is a very polarized political bs stunt and both sides are essentially worse the other and no saints whatsoever.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Okay, if you think so. lol

TCB13 , 3 months ago

If you really want everything to go on flatpak why not just use Debian + GNOME? No bullshit and you’ll be able to have flathub inside the GNOME software “store”.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Only if the environmental narrative was cohesive and consistent lol.

If govts really cared about the environment they would push companies into remote working as much as possible instead of pushing for electric cars that are a hazard to the planet.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

It can be run in any LAMP stack, after all NC is just a PHP app. The thing is that no matter the setup NC will always be a pile of bugs and misbehave like nothing else.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

^this. Never run on SQLite.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Yes, writing ToS for a Cloud provider is hard. Someone mixed a few documents and this mess happened, get over it, Vultr doesn’t have the size nor the resources to go over your VPS storage looking for interesting data.

TCB13 , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

This is the first time there’s an issue with Vultr and their explanation is perfectly reasonable. If this was happening with Oracle or Amazon I would be worried indeed but not with this smaller company that most likely just fucked up without any malicious intent.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Great analysis, can you share photos of the power supply PCB? That’s usually a weak point on those kinds of units and also the reason why disks fail often - cheap power supplies that don’t properly filter power spikes and you hard drives burn.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Thanks for the feedback! It does seem to be very deep in there.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Go go go!

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Seems reasonable, unlike ultra cheap Chinese power supplies they added the bare minimum isolation and should be able to handle a few spikes here and there. Bunch of components that you can’t get datasheets on but all things considered I’ve seen and had worse.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Yes, but the one that came with your NAS is most likely better than that. Those power supplies from china with a grill on top tend to be very poor quality and have close to no filtering.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

MS not being able to run on Linux is a problem with Microsoft, not Linux

No, it isn’t a problem of MS nor of Linux. It a problem for people who’ve to be productive on those solutions and that’s why Linux isn’t a good fit for them.

I know posts of people saying they prefer Linux, and they aren’t into tech or programming, just are used to it already

Yes, normally people that use that machine for light web surfing on the weekends and dealing with a few personal things that require a document and a bullet list once every year.

You can’t expect to waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format and/or the subsequent productivity losses - it just takes you making a few slides for your boss while using LibreOffice and once he opens the document you’ve misaligned items, game over. :)

Also, iptables rocks.

No, it doesn’t. nftables is the only sane and sensible thing that was built considering modern networking and scalability concerns not hacked and dragged along for decades.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

did Debian really got better for newbie desktop users?

I mean, I just want shit to work and I don’t have any complaints, unlike I had with other distros. HP EliteBook 840 G5 (i7 model) running since Debian 11, then upgraded to 12. Debian 12 fresh install on a HP ProDesk 600 G4 Mini as well everything working right after installation (including the special keyboard keys). My main desktop i7-6800K / Asus X99-M WS/SE also had it for a while and it worked fine but due to work and small compatibility annoyances I moved to Windows. At some point I was running it on an old MacBook, the setup was harder and I had to fix a couple of thing but it worked better than macOS - at least it had a recent browser :P

The rest of the machines where I run Debian are Supermicro servers (or AMD boxes running headless) so they aren’t useful for this conversation.

Use case for those machines is web, email, VSCode for embedded development, SSH into other machines, networking related jobs and typing stuff sometimes.

I see people from time to time complaining about Debian, but frankly I don’t get it. Unlike Arch it has an installer, even a GUI, comes with sensible defaults. Installation can be done by pressing next at every step (without changing anything) and as long as you aren’t running on AliExpress hardware or some shady brand from 10 years ago things usually work fine.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Yes, I mean those formats.

It doesn’t really matter if the specs says one thing and the “indie MS dev” does another. Since MS Office was the first and most common and adopted solution it kinda sets what is the standard. When LibreOffice refuses to copy the way Word displays a simple bullet list because Word isn’t following the spec then the problem isn’t with Word, the problem is in Writer.

This is like those bugs that people rely on. Even if you can argue there’s a few lines of code that aren’t doing what was technically correct as soon as you’ve people depending on that “wrong” behavior for some task it suddenly became a feature and the right way to do things.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

“If it’s a bug that people rely on, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” - Linus Torvalds

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Sorry I have to tell you this but no one relays on fucked up format rendering

That’s the thing, people do.

The only reason why people still use it is because of familiarity & it’s mandatory for certain jobs. If it wasn’t for that they’d already be abandoneware

Exactly, people do use and rely on MS Office for rendering. MS Office is the most used implementation out there, because 99% of the corporate world uses it for documents and that makes it the biggest and most used implementation. This is the reason why it is the bug that became the feature and we can’t just ignore it.

To be fair, even Apple on their basic iWork / Pages knows that they should prioritize rendering like Word does and not like the standard says they should do. From experience I can tell you that opening a Word document in Pages usually gives you a rendering that is way more close to Word than with Writer.

This has nothing to do with innovation, to be fair what else innovation do you require in a text document? What Microsoft is doing is working on integration between multiple products and services (some of them AI tools), and that’s where there’s innovation right now, not in the way a image is placed on a document.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

There’s so many quality of life improvements in competing Office Suits that MS Office completely lacks.

Yes, definitely, like OnlyOffice where Latin accentuation has been broken since ever. Or on LibreOffice’s spell check that misses most grammatical syntax errors. You’re right, quality of life. 👍

we can learn everything about you faster than ever before and predict your every moment, and sell your moments to the highest bitter.

Yes, but the office user likes to go on a Teams call and have it transcribed automatically and with the side comments automatically filtered out… Those features actually save people time and increase productivity.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

User error.

Not even close.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

I think Adobe is looking at a web based Photoshop aren’t they?

Browsers have limitations and PS is a complex product. Consider this, Adobe made a native iOS version of Photoshop for the iPad and it has just a few select features that the desktop version offers, the performance isn’t that great as well… So, if Adobe can’t even create a native Photoshop clone for another OS (that centrally shares core code with the desktop version) what makes you think they would be able to deliver anything on a browser that would come even close?

TCB13 , 3 months ago

There’s a big difference thought: consistency.

When a MacBook fails it fails for everyone in the same way and if it’s software fixable then it’s a simple fix. With AliExpress boards you get boards that are perfect, others fail after a while, others never work unless they do updates.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

A mini pc from a reputable brand second hand is certainty more constant than aliexpress.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Fair enough.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

Just need to give great alternatives.

Alternatives, are, well, alternatives. I’m all for alternatives but they are NOT the actual thing.

If one lives in a bubble and doesn’t to collaborate with others then native Linux apps might work and might even deliver a decent workflow with performance. Once collaboration with Windows/Mac users of a specific industry is required then it’s game over – the “alternatives” aren’t just up to it.

You can’t expect to waltz in some office and have people tolerate broken documents of some format and/or the subsequent productivity losses - it just takes you making a few slides for your boss while using LibreOffice and once he opens the document you’ve misaligned items, game over. :)

It also comes down to a question of how much time (days? months?) you want to spend fixing things on Linux that simply work out of the box under Windows for a minimal fee. Buy a Windows license and spend the time you would’ve spent dealing with Linux issues doing your actual job and you’ll, most likely, get a better ROI. Software runs fine, all vendors support whatever you’re trying to do and you’re productive from day zero. Sure, there are annoyances from time to time, but they’re way fewer and simpler to deal with than the hoops you’ve to go through to get a minimal and viable/productive Linux desktop experience.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

n my last workplace, there had been more loss of productivity from the Windows computers being stuck for hours in a reboot loop, than from any Linux problems and that was when there were 60% Linux machines.

From your description it seems you had a very inept IT department on that company so, things are expected to fail - most likely a poorly managed AD without any policies running out of the box Windows installations… Linux can’t even be compared because for what’s worth the typical Linux user knows how to deal with issues on his own and/or isn’t stupid enough to mess the system like the average office using Windows worker is.

Yes, Windows is bad, but one thing I know for sure, a decent admin is capable of using group policy is all it takes to have reliable Windows machines. Picking a specific brands and models may help as well as cheap and diverse machines are less predictable thus a big factor when it comes to failure.

I’m not the Microsoft fan you may think I am, in fact I try to avoid it as much as possible - even when that means using macOS :( - but I’ve seen about everything from the startup that does no IT management to the large bank that only buys HP/Dell and applies very strict policies on everything. What I can say for that is that once you’re dealing with hundreds of the same managed machine with the right policies it is really next to impossible to see Windows failing. And Microsoft actually documents things properly because their big companies demand them to do so. You can read that and disable every piece of garbage that comes along with Windows 10/11 and your system will not fail.

if run on Windows. But from my exp, everything is slow on Windows, so the ppl not complaining about their Windows being slow,

Windows isn’t slow, it is just that maybe the garbage that people add to it or their unbranded toaster from 15 years ago is the problem. Although you can argue that Linux is faster in some contexts don’t forget that people running Linux usually are more aware of what’s a good computer and also tend to pick better hardware than the average joe.

Linux as a desktop is slow as well, GNOME relies on web technologies to render a UI, the lag when launching applications is noticeable… for instance on my i7-8550U laptop GNOME is always slower than Windows because you can’t just make a DE that is a half baked browser to perform as fast as something native. Yes, I can opt for KDE or Xfce that are way faster but that’s beside the point because then on those “slow” Windows machines you can also install Windows 7 and they’ll be fast.

Even with KDE if I pick a i3 1st gen (2010) and load with the latest Debian or Fedora KDE it will be slow, as much as with a debloated Windows 11. Obviously that if I take Windows 7 or Debian 5 (both from 2009) they’ll both be very fast.

Another anecdote with advanced Networking options. Doing anything out of the mainstream for networking stuff is way easier on Linux for me (…) how much better it is to have high quality terminal applications with man pages, rather than the mess of Windows System Settings.

I see your point, but this isn’t correct. Windows since Powershell and Windows Terminal isn’t what you think it is. Let me give you a typical network task, changing a VLAN for testing on Windows:

<span style="color:#323232;">Get-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty "Ethernet 2" -DisplayName "VLAN ID"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Set-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty "Ethernet 2" -DisplayName "VLAN ID" -DisplayValue 55 # set the network card to VLAN 55
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Reset-NetAdapterAdvancedProperty "Ethernet 2" -DisplayName "VLAN ID" # Reset back to no VLAN tag
</span>

Want to set a static IP for some config? Sure:

<span style="color:#323232;">Get-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "Ethernet 2" -AddressFamily "IPv4" | Set-NetIPInterface -Dhcp Disabled
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Get-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "Ethernet 2" -AddressFamily "IPv4" | New-NetIPAddress -AddressFamily "IPv4" -IPAddress "192.168.97.100" -PrefixLength 24 -DefaultGateway 192.168.97.182
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Get-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "Ethernet 2" -AddressFamily "IPv4" | Set-NetIPInterface -Dhcp Enable # back to DHCP
</span>

Want to automate the installation of a bunch of software? Sure, no need to ever click “next” again:

<span style="color:#323232;">winget install -e --id VideoLAN.VLC
</span><span style="color:#323232;">winget install -e --id eloston.ungoogled-chromium
</span><span style="color:#323232;">winget install -e --id Joplin.Joplin
</span><span style="color:#323232;">winget install -e --id KeePassXCTeam.KeePassXC
</span><span style="color:#323232;">...
</span>

See, not that hard.

For example, setting up a new docker image; stuff requiring other dependencies; internet telling them to use apt and then me reminding them to use yum. All the stuff that comes with people predominantly having used Windows and having no idea about Linux.

Yes, because that people that came from Windows expect that the setup of a program to be something reasonable, not the mess of dependencies and different technologies that we’ve on Linux. Having a GUI setup that is essentially clicking next until you reach the end is way more user friendly than the docker hype. There’s GNOME Software and all but again not everyone packages for it (in the same way that not everyone packages to the Microsoft store) and since there isn’t a culture of GUI installer for Linux things become way more complex for the end user. Apple even goes further with their typical “drag application to the Applications folder” and done.

The larger number of options and alternatives on Linux while great actually work against the end user, because as you said, people get confused.

TCB13 , 3 months ago

My main point is that the main thing that is going for Windows, is not any sort of Objectively Higher Quality design,

That’s my original point: Windows isn’t objectively better but is isn’t as bad as people paint most of the time.

but it’s current popularity. Similar points for Adobe software and MS Office. On the other hand, Autodesk software for Engineering CAD does have a Objective upper hand, which cannot be trumped by just people one day deciding to shift to FOSS.

What makes Windows win over the market effectively is 1) popularity driven by more users, 2) specialized software that you can’t find for Linux and 3) a development ecosystem that’s hard to replicate elsewhere.

But… there are a lot of industry specific use cases where Adobe and MS Office still have the upper hand. We can’t for, instance, get a replacement Office with an MS Project that does all the cool things between it, Excel and Dynamics NAV to provider a solution for project management across an entire business. After all we’re talking about a cross-application solution that is capable of going from checklists, reports, Gantt and Kanban to feeding information in an out the ERP taking data from accounting, RH, manufacturing, logistics to through sales. We can try (and I would like to see it that way) to replicate it with other tools but the level of pain and development time is way too big.