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AnUnusualRelic, in What devices run with free firmware?
@AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world avatar

The disks still have proprietary firmware, as do several other components though.

Catsrules,

I bet that wireless mouse probably has some code in it.

nxdefiant,

If you’re using an active thunderbolt cable, you wire has proprietary code in it.

smileyhead,

But it’s a closed device with the firmware not being for user to replace.

While BIOS can be updated without opening the computer. Or many WiFi cards require you to load a firmware on them upon boot.

So firmware in the disk is more of a right-to-repair problem rather than free/nonfree software

ShitOnABrick, in 10 REASONS why Linux Mint is the desktop OS to beat in 2023
@ShitOnABrick@lemmy.world avatar

Linux mint at least in my experience seems to be one of those shit just works distros

miss_brainfart,
@miss_brainfart@lemmy.ml avatar

A lot of distros work really well on my laptop, but Mint has always been the only one that works perfectly

CalicoJack,

I don’t use it myself, but it’s been my main recommendation for newbies for years for that reason. No complaints yet, even from the less tech-literate.

Churbleyimyam, in What has been your experience with Flatpak?

I’ve gone back to using packages from my repo. I was all-in with flatpaks for a while because they tend to be more up to date than my distro’s packages and I liked the idea of the sandboxing but in practice I’ve found it a nuisance getting applications to speak to each other and I don’t like all the redundant code bloating my internal drive. The thing that really did it for me though was the other day when I had to restore my system from a Timeshift backup. It took an hour and a half to restore a recent backup, with well over 90% of that time showing as flatpak stuff.

Skelectus, in Am I going off the deep end by considering Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite?
@Skelectus@suppo.fi avatar

Tried it before, but went back to normal version. I recall it being slightly limited in package availability and some apps requiring extra fiddling.

Maybe it’ll be fine for your use case, though.

MartinXYZ, in What devices run with free firmware?

Is the deer the Libreboot logo? Mine has a rabbit (Coreboot). I flashed Coreboot on my old Chromebook a couple of years ago and it’s been running different flavours of linux since without any fuss.

MazonnaCara89,
@MazonnaCara89@lemmy.ml avatar
tony, in Am I going off the deep end by considering Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite?

If it’s fun, it’s not overkill!

You also have experience you can use in the workplace (even if it’s mostly experience of what happens if you f**k things up).

GustavoM, in 10 REASONS why Linux Mint is the desktop OS to beat in 2023
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

Indeed! My grandmother loves it. :^)

Aggravationstation,

And I love your grandmother :D

veroxii, in I am trying to edit a game save with an Hex editor but it doesn't allow me to change anything, it's frustrating

Do you have write permission on the file?

Sh1ft, in 10 REASONS why Linux Mint is the desktop OS to beat in 2023

I have used some distros by now and I do love mint. But a few years back every major upgrade of mint lead to bugs and me reinstalling my system. So far the only Distro i tried that just keeps working is MX Linux on my old laptop.

Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.

I am still not happy because it dont want to switch between distros for gaming and working.

woelkchen,
@woelkchen@lemmy.world avatar

Because I want to get rid of windows I installed Nobara. I love to play games. I works pretty good, but since only one guy ist maintaining it, it should be not considered a daily driver.

Nobara is just a Fedora remix. I’ve used another remix a bunch of years ago and converting that to a regular Fedora installation after its maintainer left was just removing that addon repo and letting dnf handle the rest. I think I only needed to switch to Fedora’s branding packages.

no_priority, in zsh or fish for an intermediate Linux user?

I use fish because I have better things to do than tweak my shell configuration and debug shell plugins.

When I tried oh-my-zsh and prezto (I think?) they came with tons of plugins that performed badly and made it hard to get things done (specifically, they ran git status synchronously on every new prompt, which does not work well in a moderately large repo). Fish had similar features but wasn’t horribly slow, so I use it.

techwizrd,

Same. I’ve written a fish plugin, but other than that I just fish pretty much stock. It works and just gets out of my way.

westyvw, in Trying Out & Benchmarking Bcachefs On Linux 6.7

I want to support pharonix but damn, chill out ob the ads. Especially the video overlays on mobile. It is unusable without an ad blocker, while at the same time saying they are ad supported.

I would like to help, but ouch.

wiki_me,

Premium subscription is ad free, It’s easy to judge but maybe that’s what he needs to do to make a decent income.

But yeah some financial transparency would be nice, maybe have a fundraiser where raising X amount of money would make it ad free.

lud,

If you’re from the EU you can just reject all cookies and all ads disappear.

FQQD, in What devices run with free firmware?

honestly… why? i really get why open source software is great, but there’s no benefit in replacing the bios, right?

Shrexios,
@Shrexios@mastodon.social avatar

@FQQD @p_q if you want that hardware to support something the manufacturer will not support, open source bios can be useful.

thantik,

There can be. There are certainly Bios’ that don’t give options that motherboards are perfectly capable of changing. I had an old Phenom II that I managed to patch NVME support into the bios so I could boot off of a PCIe Riser.

Granted, I was patching UEFI stuff and none of it was open source – but the idea is the same. Open source bios in theory, could unlock features.

alt, (edited )

Star Labs’ take on the matter.

Furthermore, if one is sensitive regarding their cybersecurity, then one is likely to adhere to the zero trust security model and thus choose to simply not trust; which would include the closed source BIOS. coreboot, on the other hand, at least allows one to audit it themselves. As Linus Torvalds has been approached for implementing backdoors, it should surprise nobody that (some) of the vendors we buy our devices from have been as well and thus our BIOSes might not have been as safe as one would like to believe. Qubes OS, the most secure OS on desktop, shares the view that coreboot is preferred over closed source BIOSes due to reasons related to trust.

MooseBoys,

It seems silly to be distrustful of proprietary BIOS firmware without having the same skepticism of the actual hardware.

alt,

I wholeheartedly agree.

Though, this shouldn’t stop one to pick their fights and savor the wins. The defeatist mentality is our biggest enemy, we will not be victorious in the end if we don’t resist.

Let’s hope an excellent implementation of RISC-V with eye for open-source, processing power, efficiency and affordability comes out so that we’re not limited to the expensive (but otherwise excellent) Talos II by Raptor Computing Systems.

Spore, in Trying Out & Benchmarking Bcachefs On Linux 6.7

Kent just made a reply on this.

TL;DR: Fast on his machine. The reason of the difference is unclear though.

wiki_me,

Would help if they have a repo with a test suite anyone can run, like in science making it easy to reproduce results.

flashgnash, in What's the difference between package manager and why are there so many?

Oh no, there are 5 package managers out there and they’re all wildly different

I know! I’ll make a standard, universal package manager that’ll be better than all the others that everyone will use!

There are now 6 different package managers

Pantherina,

Packagekit. Its a mess

TheAnonymouseJoker, in What has been your experience with Flatpak?
@TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml avatar

Starting delay for first time, then smooth sailing. But Flatpak has a major con over Snap - sandboxed system integration of programs.

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