slowbyrne

slowbyrne , 27 days ago

Now that apple has their own silicon, all the older intel based MacBooks are pretty cheap. I just replaced my wife’s 2013 MacBook Airs battery, upgraded the drive, and installed Linux. It’s been a solid little laptop. Not the fastest but there’s probably a few pro models within your price range. Just make sure to get at least a 16gb model since the ram is soldered. Might have issues with the webcam, but the wifi drivers are pretty good.

slowbyrne , 29 days ago

Even though I don’t typically recommend an immutable distro to people with minimal Linux experience, as a dev and a gamer I’ve been pretty happy with the various uBlue images. Bluefin is a great out of the box image for devs and the uBlue images have a lot of compatability improvements over the Fedora ostree image their based off of. Bazzite is another good one specifically built for gaming.

slowbyrne , 1 month ago

My personal definition of “the year of the Linux desktop” is when we hit a market share % that starts to convince companies to take Linux support seriously. I don’t think we’re that far off from that happening and if Microsoft keeps adding in these terrible “features” to windows, more people will move over. Is 2024 the year for that? Probably not but I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens before 2030.

slowbyrne , 4 months ago

It’s not redrawing the frame, it’s more related to aligning the monitors refresh rate to the frame rate of the content being displayed. Alignment means your monitor doesn’t refresh the screen when the frame is only partially rendered (aka screen tearing).

slowbyrne , 4 months ago

I don’t know this particular project but honestly having your government documents and policies made available on Codeberg/GitLab/Github and available for PRs is actually an interesting idea. The government would still need to be the owners and ultimately decide on what gets merged, but the transparency and opportunity for accessible civic engagement would be kinda sweet.

slowbyrne , 5 months ago

Taxes contribute to providing services and infrastructure to the people. This takes money from the people and deposits it into the bank accounts of the wealthy. I see two very different things.

slowbyrne , 6 months ago

While I agree with you that some software isn’t capable of running on Linux (even through wine), there is another aspect that’s important to remember. Want and choice. The software that doesnt run on Linux is developed only for Windows because of market share. If more people used Linux, and more importantly, demanded Linux support, more software would support it. I WANT to use Linux instead of windows, so in order for that to become a reality, I push companies to support it and I talk to people and encourage trying Linux out. Can everyone make the switch? No, but some can; and the more that do the more Linux will be supported.

Your voice and opinion and choice matters. Don’t let a big corporation steal that from you. Even if you want to use Windows, you should still have the choice.

slowbyrne , 6 months ago

My guess is if that happens, studios will choose not to put their games on sale anymore or less frequently. Why would they discount the game when the used market is an option. It also depends on the average price of the game used and if a sale undercuts the used market. Lots of variables and there’s opportunity to boost new sales in the form of perks, bundles, exclusive in game content, etc…

slowbyrne , 6 months ago

Signal provides a backup option. The auto backup for SMS on android is provided by google and likely uses google drive. I don’t know for certain but I would guess the encryption options and security of that route would be impossible to guarantee and the public backlash of signal users knowing their data was being sent to Google’s servers would be massive.

I’ve setup my signal backups to a local folder on my phone. I then have SyncThing running on my phone and home computer so it automatically gets sent once it’s created.

slowbyrne , 7 months ago

Android is not owned by Google. Android comes from the AOSP (android open source project) which is free and open source. Google contributes but so do the other OEMS.

slowbyrne , 7 months ago

True. Unfortunately Google’s intention isn’t to protect the user experience by keeping the OEMs in line, it’s to control and profit off of that control.

Is Android heavily associated to Google? Of course. Should it be? I would say no. Hence the original comment.

slowbyrne , 7 months ago

Check out protondb.com/ to see how compatible a game is with the deck (and Linux in general). The comments will usually have suggestions for getting the game to run well.

slowbyrne , 7 months ago

Macrumors just released an article talking about how the 8gb is a bottleneck in the new M3 models lol

slowbyrne , 7 months ago

As a few have already mentioned, a Debian based distro is a good choice, and you Mentioned vanilla Ubuntu isn’t ideal do to prioritizing snaps, I would then suggest Pop!_OS or Mint. I like what System76 (Pop) is doing with their scheduler and the upcoming Cosmic DE (written in Rust and should see an alpha early next year).

slowbyrne , 8 months ago

Keep an eye on Pop’s Cosmic desktop. Even the current customized gnome version is a nice tiling DE.

slowbyrne , 9 months ago

I’ve been avoiding Nvidia for a while and I generally recommend it (at least for now). I wouldn’t say it’s mandatory though. Nvidia support has come a long way.

That being said, if you can snag a good used amd card to replace your 3060ti then why not if you’re not benefiting from the rtx features and you find your current vram is causing issues, then you do you.

You could also hold out a bit longer and see if the 6800xt becomes more affordable given the recent launch of the mid tier 7000series.

slowbyrne , 9 months ago

Eventually the chromium base will be too hard to patch if Google has their way. Surfing on ungoogled chrome is keeping the user agent the same as chrome. This shows devs and companies that chrome dominates and therefore they should only code sites to support it. Only true way to protest these changes is to switch to a different browser. Firefox and its forks are the only privacy focused options.

slowbyrne , 9 months ago

I have corded USB type headphones. It’s not a good replacement. The dac is in the connector which makes the portion that sticks out much larger; the port isn’t designed for even mild leverage to be applied to it regularly. Go cycling with your phone in your pocket or even just sit down multiple times with your phone in your pocket while the usbc headphones are plugged in. They will either work their way loose or they will start to break the phone’s port. I’m not even covering how the USB type c spec leaves a lot of room to be interpreted differently by companies, significantly increasing the probability of headphones working for only some phones.

slowbyrne , 9 months ago

Brave’s objective is to create a system that looks altruistic but they control it and take a ever increasing cut. Google started off the same way. I like the idea, but it’s one that needs to be controlled by a not for profit or by the people. Giving that control to a for profit company is just repeating history.

Firefox isn’t perfect, but my argument for choosing them or a fork of FF is to combat the market share of chromium based browsers. With google pushing for Web Environment Integrity (aka web DRM) using a different browser is one of the few good ways to protest.

I would also like to point out that popular open source projects often get contributions (both code and financial) from large corporations. Sometimes it’s their main source of revenue. This isn’t just a Mozilla problem. I wouldn’t even say it is a problem. A problem would be if those contributions affect the project in a negative way.

Just like in most things these days our choices are limited to the shitty and the less shitty. Obviously where Brave and Firefox lands on that shitty spectrum will depend on your priorities, but for me at least Firefox is less shitty and far from perfect, but decent.

Edit: grammer

slowbyrne , 9 months ago

This is your friendly reminder to not use Amazon. Give up a small convenience so that you can vote with your wallet.

slowbyrne , 10 months ago

Backup all your personal data on windows prior to attempting anything. On a separate disk and cloud if possible. For cloud backups, just pick the important stuff. No need to backup steam libraries since steam servers are the backup in this case.

Like others have said, if you can use a separate disk, do that. If you can’t do that and you just want to try out Linux, use a USB live disk to test hardware compatibility and the user experience, or if you have an old laptop or desktop that isn’t being used, load Linux on that first.

Pick a popular distro for better community support. If you have a recently released laptop (less than a year old) might want to pick a distro with newer kernel for better hardware support. My personal recommendations are Pop!_OS, Fedora (both gnome and KDE versions). Both work well on newer hardware. Others you might want to try are Linux Mint and Ubuntu.

After getting Linux installed, try and keep your home partition backed up, especially if Windows is on the same disk.

Try and use Flatpak for all your apps, flathub is the web “store” for Flatpak apps.

Be open to trying the Linux alternative to apps since the windows version might not be available.

This is a new OS so expecting things to work a certain way isn’t realistic.

Most of the time a GUI is available for what you need to do, but learning the terminal is super helpful and a lot of people prefer it once they make the switch.

When searching online, try to include your distro and its version. It will help narrow down results.

If you’re gaming, check ProtonDB for game compatibility, and be willing to tinker a bit.

If you do have Nvidia graphics, Pop!_OS and other distros that bake the drivers into the disk image or install process are better for beginners.

Opinion portion: Firefox is a better holistic choice over chromium based browsers (see Google’s web environment integrity aka DRM for the web). KDE is a great desktop for people who like the Windows workflow, but I prefer Gnome. Nvidia graphics are much less problematic these days, but I still prefer amd and Intel hardware.

Life is hard; everyone is doing their best; be hard on problems and soft on people.

Good luck ;)

slowbyrne , 10 months ago

Second, gotta love the new rust based tools and apps getting developed. Although I’ve seen some weird formatting issues on windows. Linux version is solid though.

slowbyrne , 11 months ago

I think compact mode in Nautilus is part of the Gnome 43 release and might not be in the version of Gnome that you’re currently using. You might also be running Gnome 43 but your distro could have left out the Nautilus update for some reason.

slowbyrne , 11 months ago

Pop!_OS, Debian, and Fedora are my distros of choice lately. Been tempted to try out NixOS as well.

slowbyrne , 11 months ago

Did you setup this server with a boot partition?

Rolling back the root subvolume with an older kernel could create a mismatch to the boot partitions kernel. Not sure if that’s contributing to your problem, but might be worth looking into.

slowbyrne , 11 months ago

Only thing I can think of is the subvolumes left over might be causing an issue. I don’t know how snapper performs a rollback and I’ve seen a couple ways to do it. Sometimes its modifying the default subvolume to the snapshot you want to rollback to. This is fine IF your kernel params are NOT specifying the subvol. That would look like this rootflags=subvol=subvolume_name.

Usually I just rename the subvols and make sure the snapshot I’m renaming to replace the current root subvol is not set to read only.

So rename current root to root.broken Then rename snapshot to root Then set readonly prop to false.

slowbyrne , 11 months ago

Well as long as you take a snapshot of your data and move that snapshot to another drive, you’re free to tinker without real worry. Arch Linux wiki should have lots of examples of what you’re trying to fix or modify. There’s always a fresh install as well, which isn’t ideal most of the time but as long as the data is safe, then its an option. Best of luck, hope you’re able to resolve the issue.