There is t really a whole thing. Wayland is where Linux is going as the people who developed X11 say it is insecure and it’s to hard to fix the issues so they went and started Wayland. They should have called it X12 or something then there would probably be less complaining.
Haha that’s my thoughts exactly. Anyone that complains should go try to maintain x11 so they can understand way development is moving to Wayland. I’m not a dev at all and I don’t understand but I love reading the blog post from devs
+1 for this. My tech hope in 2024 is… “RISC-V has reach the perfect system for consumer level” like I installed Debian on my thinkpad laptop, without any error…
If Google and Qualcomm already develop RISC-V on smartwatch in 2023, then why not on laptop in 2024? Ohh… of course it’s because trade war chips tension that halt the development. But still… optimistic on this is not wrong either IMO. Just because “it’s far from” doesn’t mean it cannot move fast…
Its because its not as simple as just freely supporting it. Frameworks CEO talks about it in a podcast on yhe idea if they fully went behind coreboot, the hardware release cycle would at least be a generation behind, and if youre a fledgling business whose main focus is environment, repair and upgradibility first, that would likely end in the bankruptcy of your business.
On a side note, t440p’s {core,libre}boot is not completely foss, they still use a proprietary blob for mrc (at least AFAIK). Yet it’s still way better than other options
That’s not true anymore, somebody from the community reverse engineered the MRC blob a couple months back. The only RYF concern is Intel Management Engine (which is disabled, but still its there). LibreMRC is still being tested, the resolution for SeaBIOS is still messy but it works!
Well, I guess I now have an incentive to order yet another t440p motherboard to bring mine back to life and go playing with it once again. Tnx for the info!
Now I’m wondering, with which fingers would you press all those buttons? The most comfortable way to press these keys with 1 hand is to rotate the keyboard 180 degrees
They don’t intend for you to, it’s just easier to make a giant button combo that their generic HID driver handles as a special case than to create a custom keyboard protocol with their special key enums and a custom driver that only windows supports.
When it breaks, it isn’t always obvious or easy to fix, but can cause problems for anything that has to talk to anything else. The biggest thorn it puts in my side is that short names [ThisPC] are served differently than fqdn [ThisPC.MyDomain.com]. Does NotMyApp use short or FQDN to resolve other machines? I don’t find out until the Wireshark.
Okey, I understand this is fundamental and when not working can cause the service to stop working. But I don’t yet know how does it break or is not easy to troubleshoot?
Haven’t hosted anything big yet, so I always just had to check the records via “dig” command if they are served correctly.
DNS setups can get fairly complicated with enterprise VPNs and stuff, but the main thing is probably just that DNS is built entirely around caching, so when something does go wrong or you’re trying to update something it’s easy for there to be a stale value somewhere. It’s also really fundamental, so when it breaks it can break anything.
Overall, though, DNS isn’t terribly complex. It’s mostly just a key-value store with some caching. Running your own nameservers is pretty cool and will give you a much better understanding of how it all fits together and scales.
Really annoying is when recent devices don’t respect the DNS you’re advertising or allow configuration (Android…)
My site is behind CGNAT on IPv4 with recently added fully routed IPv6. There are legacy control devices all over it that don’t speak IPv6, with local DNS records that allow them to be readily accessed while walking around with a mobile device… Allowed them to be accessed that is, until IPv6.
The Android IPv6 stack ignores the RA for my local DNS and also resolves via v6 by default, forwarding local queries upstream and returning no results. Then it doesn’t bother to fall back to v4. Unrooted Android has no exposed configuration for IPv6 of any sort to modify its behaviour, no hosts file to override or any way I can see to fix this. I can’t even disable IPv6 on my phone.
So to access my local devices from Android I need to use their full IPv4 address or VPN back into my own network… Oh wait, the stack is so broken that despite setting DNS in Wireguard, it still tries to resolve through upstream v6 first!
Apparently recent smart TVs are doing similar even on IPv4, hard-coded to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 to dodge ad blocking, which is plain malicious and ignores all standards…
So I think Guix (and Nix) is the most technologically advanced package manager in existence, and I hope someday all package managers work like Guix.
One other very interesting feature about Guix (which I don’t think Nix is doing yet) (which Nix also does) is that they have implemented a fully verifiable bootstrap, meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough for a group of humans to check for correctness and safety. Also, every step of the build process exists in the package repository, with no reliance on externally built binaries for anything, not even the C compiler toolchain. They accomplish this with a multi-phase bootstrap process, where a smaller, simpler C compiler is used to build GCC.
Do I use Guix? Well, no. Simply put, it is not quite to the point where it just works on a lot of the computer hardware that I own. With a bit more work, with a few more developers, and a bit more money invested, Guix could pretty soon become as reliable and useful as Debian or Fedora. But it is not quite there yet. And frankly, I have other more important things to do than worry about debugging problems with the operating system I am using.
Nix is also working on reproducible builds. In fact, the minimal installation CD for NixOS last release was reproducible. discourse.nixos.org/t/…/34756/
meaning every step of building the kernel, including the steps taken to build the C compiler toolchain, are produced by code that is simple enough to check for correctness and safety.
Full-source bootstrap isn’t about just the kernel, it affects every piece of software. With GUIX and Nix, every single package can be fully traced back to the bootstrap seed.
Though it should be noted that you do require a running Linux kernel on an x86 machine in order to bootstrap.
it is not quite to the point where it /just works/ on a lot of the computer hardware that I own.
Unless we get some serious money, effort and/or regulation w.r.t. OSS firmware, that will likely never be the case.
That has nothing to do with its technology though, that’s a political issue. GUIX is a GNU project and acts like proprietary software does not exist/is not a basic necessity in 2023.
Another interesting thing about Guix is that it compiles everything itself (with an option to outsource the heavy lifting in case you’re on a Raspberry Pi or something). Layers of abstraction not talking to each other properly is a conceptual pet peeve of mine, so I like the idea of everything being visible to the compiler like that.
As far as I understand it, Guix will download pre-built binaries for most packages from a cache by default, and the Guix OS distribution makes sure the x86_64 binaries for the latest package descriptions are always cached, so you should usually not have to locally build packages.
But of course you can easily tweak the default configuration of packages you install and trigger a local re-build of those packages, since changing the configuration of any package causes a cache miss.
Snaps are centralised packaging, a’la Apple App Store or Google Play. Now if someone forked snapd, added third party repo and made It so you could select which repo is the main one, that’d be a start.
But as long as Canonical commits to a centralised form of distribution with no third party support I’m going to advise desktop users to stay away from Ubuntu.
They have the ability to arbitrarily push out Snap updates.
That’s right! Your production server is getting patched without your knowledge or consent. Thankfully they magnanimously decided to let admins delay it by a few weeks.
Linux is about control. I decide what my machine does. When it updates. What it updates. The feedback from Canonical regarding Snaps was so tone dead and condescending it made Steve Balmer look sane. It boiled down to, don’t worry your pretty little head off. We know what’s best.
This article can pretty much be summed up as I don’t like GTK or Gnome so I’m going to just present them being shit as a factual statement. I use Arch and KDE btw.
Gnome 3 released close to 13 years ago and was announced 16 years ago. At some point, people need to stop crying about the UX changes and get the fuck over it.
If you don’t like it, use something else and stop being so entitled.
Apple, Microsoft and Google, on the other hand, decides what is best for them, shove it down the users’ throats and get users’ money (and personal data) in return…
I think some criticism still valid though (but not the entitlement).
Run a live version, and see if everything works. Generally speaking, the TBs aren’t made for consumer Linux. Even Windows kind of works with it, but the drivers are spotty. Search for a CF-33 with Linux from factory, and install that version, if that even exists. The TBs are laptops for a very specific use-case, and support for them on the consumer market is lacking. Good luck, though!
Edit: quick search found this for CF-33 but is not Ubuntu specifically, and this specifically for CF-31 but it may still be helpful.
Will do. Yeah, when I got it I did a fresh install of Win 10 Pro and did a driver download from the Panasonic site and still had issues getting the sierra wireless card, gps, and rear camera working. Yeah, it’s been a bit of a journey for my use case. I deploy into pretty austere environments for work and it’s been hard to both hardware (laptops, tablets, cell phones) that are extremely rugged durable and can run open source. Thank you for the help.
I’ve done antiX on the CF-30, but the touchscreen wasn’t working. I didn’t really use it in the first place, but it was still a bummer. To be fair, the touchscreen barely worked on its original WinXP with OEM drivers built specifically for it. Good luck! I really hope you get all the needed hardware running!
Success!! Ubuntu 22.04 LTS installed and running. Surprisingly most of the drivers are working, including the touch screen digitizer (about as well as the Win10 pro which is eh. Like you, I don’t really use the touchscreen too much) thanks again!
Nice!!! I’m so glad you got all the important hardware working! I have a CF-54 (I think) that I got from a random auction with Win10. I never tried to install Linux on it, because of the failure of the CF-30 at work, but in light of your success, I may just give it a go.
The principled “old” way of adding fancy features to your filesystem was through block-level technologies, like LVM and LUKS. Both of those are filesystem-agnostic, meaning you can use them with any filesystem. They just act as block devices, and you can put any filesystem on top of them.
You want to be able to dynamically grow and shrink partitions without moving them around? LVM has you covered! You want to do RAID? mdadm has you covered! You want to do encryption? LUKS has you covered? You want snapshotting? Uh, well…technically LVM can do that…it’s kind of awkward to manage, though.
Anyway, the point is, all of them can be mixed and matched in any configuration you want. You want a RAID6 where one device is encrypted split up into an ext4 and two XFS partitions where one of the XFS partitions is in RAID10 with another drive for some stupid reason? Do it up, man. Nothing stopping you.
For some reason (I’m actually not sure of the reason), this stagnated. Red Hat’s Strata project has tried to continue pushing in this direction, kind of, but in general, I guess developers just didn’t find this kind of work that sexy. I mentioned LVM can do snapshotting "kind of awkward"ly. Nobody’s done it in as sexy and easy way to do as the cool new COWs.
So, ZFS was an absolute bombshell when it landed in the mid 2000s. It did everything LVM did, but way way way better. It did everything mdadm did, but way way way better. It did everything XFS did, but way way way better. Okay it didn’t do LUKS stuff (yet), but that was promised to be coming. It was Copy-On-Write and B-tree-everywhere. It did everything that (almost) every other block-level and filesystem previously made had ever done, but better. It was just…the best. And it shit all over that block-layer stuff.
But…well…it needed a lot of RAM, and it was licensed in a way such that Linux couldn’t get it right away, and when it did get ZFS support, it wasn’t like native in-the-kernel kind of stuff that people were used to.
But it was so good that it inspired other people to copy it. They looked at ZFS and said “hey why don’t we throw away all this block-level layered stuff? Why don’t we just do every possible thing in one filesystem?”.
And so BtrFS was born. (I don’t know why it’s pronounced “butter” either).
And now we have bcachefs, too.
What’s the difference between them all? Honestly mostly licensing, developer energy, and maturity. ZFS has been around for ages and is the most mature. bcachefs is brand spanking new. BtrFS is in the middle. Technically speaking, all of them either do each other’s features or have each other’s features on their TODO list. LUKS in particular is still very commonly used because encryption is still missing in most (all?) of them, but will be done eventually.
A typical Linux distro, especially lightweight and simpler ones like Arch, will of course be better than a bloated OS, like Pop or Windows. The only problem with Linux distros might be the choice of tools - X and AMD will work much better overall than Wayland and Nvidia.
Just that many people may have an Nvidia GPU before deciding to use Linux, and some people just prefer to use Wayland over X for literally everything else.
My PC with Wayland + Nvidia has so many problems with gaming, especially flickering and performance, while my Laptop with Wayland + integrated Intel graphics has no problems at all - even in games, that I wonder if Nvidia + Wayland still really sucks ass or if my GPU is just broken. Currently there’s a bug where frames are ‘switched’ somehow, so it’s not Frame 1, Frame 2, … Frame n, but Frame 1, Frame 3, Frame 2, Frame 5, Frame 6, Frame 4 etc.
I expect it to be fixed by an update of nvidia in the future, but there are always such bugs.
If my experience is any indicator, your GPU is fine :(. Any chance you’re using mixed display scalings? I’ve got an RTX 3050 eGPU for my Plasma/Wayland laptop, and for the most part it actually works fairly smoothly (albeit more slowly compared to windows), but if I try to run a game at a higher resolution than my monitor (used by Plasma for mixed scaling) I get constant flashing/frame shifting, but when I drop it down to the native 1080p it starts working again
As a side note, X and eGPUs do not play well together, but Wayland is literally plug and play after installing the drivers–I can even hot plug/unplug as long as nothing’s using the GPU!
That frame issue is because of the fact that Nvidia uses “explicit sync” and AMD/Intel use “implicit sync” - XWayland is built to only support implicit syncing for now (Nvidia is trying to get it changed), and since most games right now run under XWayland… Along with a ton of apps of course.
Until then, that issue won’t be resolved sadly. It’s what finally pushed me to get an AMD card since the issue has been open for over a year with a ton of back and forth.
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