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pmk

@[email protected]

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

pmk ,

If you don’t want to touch anything, you could boot from a live USB image and try it?

pmk ,

I wonder how much work would be needed to make a “FreeDesktop Linux” complete OS, with the runtime + whatever it needs beyond that. Then when you install a flatpak, it’s just like installing, uh, I didn’t think this through tbh.

pmk ,

PC-DOS on an IBM 5150 (iirc).

pmk ,

There’s a difference between stability and reliability. Stable means that functionality is the same over a period of time, no major changes to how it works. Reliable means that it doesn’t crash all the time. If something crashes the same way for the same reason, it’s stable but not reliable. If something changes a lot but doesn’t crash, it’s reliable but not stable.
In practice what it comes down to is a choice if you want outdated but known bugs or new surprise bugs.

pmk ,

Which features are you looking for beyond what can be done on Debian?

pmk ,

Maybe Debian with a wm? I like cwm, but there are many to choose from. You can add pretty much any cool feature on top.

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy’s massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It’s been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let’s say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they’re what’s colloquially referred to...

pmk ,

thread as in threaded posts as opposed to other parts of the fediverse with another layout. it’s not about the instance Threads, but the type of fediverse service allowing a lemmy/kbin type of conversation.

pmk ,

Ubuntu (2007) >> Arch (2009) >> Debian (2014) >> Fedora (2024)
Plus now and then installing OpenBSD for fun for a couple of months at a time.

pmk ,

You are more than welcome to remove the need for any passwords at all on the linux systems you admin. Good thing about free software is that you decide how you want it, hack up or put up.

pmk ,

On my laptop with nvidia (msi, debian 12), if I unplug the charger the screen orientation goes from landscape to portrait, everything is tilted 90 degrees. I hate this laptop, so I rarely use it.

pmk ,

Hm, not that I remember. My memory isn’t the best though.

Folders and files sorted skipping preceding underscores?

I’m in the process of switching my machines to Linux Mint from Windows and on my network drive I have a bunch of folders that are sorted with the help of preceding underscores (like this “__folder1” “___folder2”)) so that folders appear in a specific order....

pmk ,

Are you using Caja file manager? If there’s no setting, it could be that the authors of that file manager just wanted it that way. You can try other file managers like thunar and see if they are different?

pmk ,

Ah, I see. It seems like you’re not the only one wanting this behavior, there is a workaround that might work: github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues/2085#issuecommen…

pmk ,

I picked some this year and made a nice potato soup with mixed in wild garlic. Simple and good.

pmk ,

If you ever do write with pen and paper, it takes little effort to focus on just one improvement. A first step could be to try to get a consistent height of letters. When I’m in a hurry my “o” and “i” become way smaller than, say, “e”. Just a quick look when you’re done writing and a reflection like “next time I’ll try to make this letter as tall as that letter when I write”. When all lower case letter are as tall, focus on something else, like ascender height or baseline. Maybe your “l” tilts more than your “t”, then that’s a good thing to fix. One small step at a time.

The countries with the most Fediverse servers are rich and former/current colonial powers. One of the best true barometers of the success of the Fediverse is how quickly we can turn that on its head. (sopuli.xyz)

In the end I don’t think internet users in rich powerful countries are the users most likely to benefit and invest their time into in the fediverse. They might be the ones with the most free time, money and privilege around computers which makes being on the leading edge of niche technologies far easier, but I don’t think...

pmk ,

Things you can do in finland: tango, fight with knives, computer stuff.

pmk ,

Back in the day, find required that you added “-print” to actually print out the results in the terminal. That was bad UX, and now -print is the default. But… following some syntax like supplying path as first argument for find is necessary to not create ambiguity in some cases, and enforcing it makes it more readable imho.

pmk ,

Is the breaking change going to happen in stable mid release cycle? Or at a major version upgrade?

pmk ,

I think you actually convinced me to start using OpenBSD again.

pmk ,

OpenBSD works surprisingly well as a desktop, probably because the devs use it themselves. As long as you have supported hardware that is.

pmk ,

If you want something faster than a snail, Spirallinux has you covered:
spirallinux.github.io

pmk ,

The second part of the Tractatus.

pmk ,

I bet some of those people use neovim instead of the more unix philosophy ed.

pmk ,

Free cost and free as in freedom to understand and modify the code. I also think it’s a beautiful way of doing things. We also have Wikipedia and Openstreetmap. The internet has a tremendous potential for collaboration, people doing things because they want to, for the benefit of everyone.

pmk ,

Honest question, the way the original question was phrased, do you think that the resulting discussions have been a net positive or negative for increasing empathy and understanding?

pmk ,

New users found it hard to download the right installer if they needed non-free firmware. Experienced users know they can add firmware=never in the installer to disable firmware lookup if they want. If they want to decide on a firmware by firmware basis, that’s an option too. If the hardware doesn’t need non-free firmware it’s not installed.

pmk ,

The current method is to set a boot parameter to opt out of non-free firmware, it’s documented in the installer manual.

pmk ,

I bet they considered the options. It could simply be that no one has had time to change the installer. It could also be that the people who care about free software to the degree that they want to avoid non-free firmware usually figure out how to do it, and that too many options confuse new users. I don’t know. A feature request discussion in the appropriate mailing list could be a good idea if you want change.

pmk ,

“You mean I just made a very complicated array-manipulating way of calculating (2^n)-1?”

pmk ,

Consider this: when you speak the listeners know what you mean based on the rest of the sentence. When you write you give the reader the intended word through spelling. People who read will see your words and assume you really meant “then” instead of “than”, and the sentence will make little sense.
The words “I” and “eye” sound similar, but if you write “eye” I will read a sentence first thinking you are trying to say something about an eye, then when it breaks down, go back and find the issue. End that my friend is less then eye-deal for comprehension.

pmk ,

And before that, black text printed on white continuous form paper.

pmk ,

Check out the neat themes of UNIX legends:
…unix.se/…/screenshots-from-developers--2002-vs.-…

pmk ,

If you look at the Lascaux cave paintings, there’s great potential for a soft earthy color theme imho. Black and red on off-white, similar colors as medieval vellum with black ink and vermillion red/orange.

pmk ,

I was very upset when they released gnome 3. Suddenly things were different, and there were rough edges. I used XFCE for many years after that. But… I have come to appreciate it now. I like that the devs had their vision and didn’t give in to all the demands to make it work differently. It’s their project, and I can use it if I want, or not. I respect it the same way I respect OpenBSD doing their thing. Can you imagine demanding that the OpenBSD devs changed their vision due to popular opinions? “We want closed source nvidia drivers and bluetooth support!” They just tell people to use another OS then. But from that stubbornness something beautiful is created.

pmk ,

This is paraphrasing a swedish politician called Annie Lööf. She has been made fun of and ridiculed for that phrase for a long time.
However, that’s not what she said. The context was simplifying rules and regulations for companies, and she was asked if fewer rules would make it easier for companies to do illegal things. Her answer was: “In Sweden it has since long been illegal to run a business with criminal intent, and that will continue.” This “criminal intent” is the difficult part. If I buy and sell antiques that’s one thing, if I buy and sell stolen goods, that’s another. The difference is criminal intent.

pmk ,

To increase their UNIX skills.

Yes, it is all Unix (feddit.nl)

Alt text: meme with the ‘Always has been’ formatLinux, MacOS, OpenBSD and ChromeOS logos on top of the Earth The first astronaut says ‘Wait, it’s all Unix?’ A Windows logo, on top of the second astronaut. The second astronaut says ‘Always has been’ and points a gun to the first astronaut.

pmk ,

To be fair, iirc, macOS is certified UNIX despite having the XNU kernel which stands for X is Not UNIX.

Should I join "free speech" alternatives?

Hello! I’ve been searching for a reddit alternative, and yes, I’ve picked Lemmy and Raddle, but here’s the thing. My morbid curiosity is perked up, and a part of me wants to join the “free speech” alternatives, like Saidit, Poal, etc. What’s wrong with me that I want to join toxic places? I mean, yes I’ll find a...

pmk ,

As long as the consequences are words and non-violent actions. Advocating violence as a consequence for someone expressing an idea is imho dangerous and should be avoided.

pmk ,

I agree that speech that incites violence is dangerous too. In theory I can imagine a net benefit if we could silence some voices in various places. The big question then is, who do we trust to decide which people should be silenced? I think governments have historically shown that they can’t be trusted. Then private people? Lots of people across the political spectrum feel that their version of truth is so important that they deem it moral to silence others, so what it comes down to is just who does it better. The image of an angry mob is no fun if the mob has decided that you should be silenced, even though you feel like you’re on the good side. They probably think they are the good ones. Who then?

pmk ,

Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD once said: “Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft. We do what we do because we love Unix.”

pmk ,

The ice sheet covering northern europe started to melt away, and with that we got what is called “glacial erratics”. Rocks had traveled from once place to another, and then settled. In Sweden we call those “giants throw”, because it was assumed that the only way those big rocks could be where they are was if a giant had thrown it.

pmk ,

I think we have the same terminology then, we also call them “flyttblock”. Is there a story behind them being called Devil’s rock? It sounds very finnish to me to be honest.

pmk ,

På riktigt? Vad kommer efter dnf då? Jag tänkte att dnf5 var det nya.

pmk ,

I’m genuinely worried sometimes that a Ken hack has been introduced. I don’t know by who, but possibly some government agency. Then again, we also have a Minix system built into the CPU doing god knows what and we just accept that.

pmk ,

itsfoss.com/fact-intel-minix-case/

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers....

pmk ,

I wanted to try inserting and removing kernel modules, so I looked around and thought “well, I don’t have a USB stick in right now so I can safely try removing the usb kernel module.” So I did that, and after pressing enter I realized my keyboard is connected with USB.

pmk ,

Oh yes, same for me if I’m positioning an image or making a table, I compile to double check every little edit to the code :) I just mostly have plain old text so no surprises.

pmk ,

I started with LaTeX back in the day, but it was too hacky and complex, so I went to ConTeXt, which felt more consistent and planned out. Then I did OpTeX for a while and eventually I picked up the TeXbook by Knuth and it all just started to make sense to me. So now I use plain TeX with my own macro file to fill the gaps in functionality, I implemented colour support and picture support and small macros that I needed. I am very much into grid typesetting, so I need to know where all the vertical material comes from. There are areas that still scare me, like modifying the output routine or several \expandafter in a row, but usually that’s not needed. With plain TeX I can know every detail of the code down to the primitives. Of course this is possible in LaTeX too, but, there’s just a lot of code, layer upon layer, and I’m not smart enough to keep all that in my head.

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