people who insist on using windows should just run it in a VM, it has suprisingly low overhead these days, you can even game with it if you insist, but i’m hearing wine/proton is getting good enough that it doesn’t even matter
Siege is honestly awful these days (not complaining about the sci-fi ops, reality is lame as shit why not spruce it up a bit) but what they have done to the UI and the queues (bring unranked back please) is honestly unforgivable and makes the game hard to play. (It isn’t all bad, but more bad than good)
You're still stuck when it comes to anti-cheat in multiplayer games. Some do allow it to work on Linux, but a significant number don't. Hopefully the tides slowly start to change thanks to the Steam Deck.
I mean I do that currently and it is okay, but file transfer is still not working. The rest is, and I think it even was pretty much ootb, but the SPICE drivers are a real hassle to get installed, while it could be a one click solution?
(This “insert spice CD” thing has no option to download the driver ISO, right?)
Also windows11 is a bit bloated. Bulk crap uninstaller and ChrisTituses Winutil really help making it less fancy but more performant, or just usable.
But yes, VM is way better than hardware. If your Laptop supports that.
Is it wireless? If so, and the controller supports it, try using it in wired mode. Sounds pointless, but have had issues with wireless controllers that worked fine when connected via USB.
Ex arch btw user here. I noped out and wiped after thinking I had it all nailed down, then I tried to connect my Bluetooth headphones and I came to a grand awakening. I am too old for this shit.
I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.
If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.
Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?
I just installed Nextcloud on Arch and the official packages caused the most headaches I ever had within my 3 years of arch. In contrast I installed the official Jellyfin and Prometheus Server packages and they ran OOTB.
I ended up with not using the official packages but extracting the tar.bz2 into /var/www/nextcloud and slightly modifying the nginx config from their site. I had to move the inclusion of the MIME-Types file to a different block for nextcloud to deliver its CSS, SVGs and images. It wasn’t exactly straight-forward too considering permissions. I found it a beast compared to many other server software.
Its probably just one package. I guess for example pacman -S plasma-desktop plasma-meta flatpak fish plasma-wayland-session sddm sddm-kcm && systemctl enable --now sddm does the trick.
Archinstall with the entire plasma desktop is probably also nice, or just EndeavorOS which will be preconfigured
I actually did the whole KDE shebang with archinstall. I never really expected that Arch btw deigned it too opinionated to just provide an audio and Bluetooth interface. Instead I have to choose between pulse audio and pipewire and bluez and a bunch of others. I just didn’t have the patience nor time to look into what and why these options are presented, and this was after I already wasted days figuring how to get my pc to boot with my 12th gen Intel and Nvidia gpu combination.
Turns out there’s a bunch of kernel finagling you absolutely have to do first before it even decides to boot from the gpu and not the igpu. Oh well.
Bringing back memories of my own. Mandrake in 2004 was a but before my time, but I’m sure I’ve still got my Ubuntu discs I downloaded at the local library and burned myself almost a decade after this Mandrake disk.
I must be ancient then. I recognized, and I think used, all of those cards/chips.
Some personally. Some at work. At work I used to maintain and MS-DOS / early Windows graphics program. I had to test the program’s compatibility with a stack of graphics cards.
I’ve been using (or, in some cases, trying to use) that when it was brand new. Kernel side was relatively easy - but there was a lot of compiling custom versions of XFree86 trying to get acceleration working properly.
On the one hand a bit sad to see that kind of history I’ve experienced myself go - on the other hand, it’s probably been a decade since I’ve last used something without KMS, and the ease of use of modern KMS drivers is way ahead of all the older stuff.
I’ve had a system in the late 90s with a 3dfx voodoo card. Also had a laptop with a SIS card from the early 2000 era.
The voodoo card was THE card to have it it’s day (mine was an older second hand system though). The SIS card… for some reason they decided that standard VESA mode probing wasn’t a thing they supported and would hardware crash when that API was used. I eventually got it working in Linux after patching xfree86 to not attempt probing when loading the VESA driver.
I had a SIS card back in the day as well. I never got it working with Xfree86 itself but I did find a proprietary xserver called Accelerated-X that supported it.
I think I remember running into that as well but for whatever reason I couldn’t get accelerated-x working with the opengl libraries I was using for school. Likely the issue was just a lack of understanding on my part as I don’t think I had a good grasp of the Linux library loader until well after I graduated.
You can delay all other updates with the group policy editor. You can disable preview builds and you and delay quality updates by 30 days and delay feature updates by 365 days. The bugs are always worked out by then.
Feature updates are necessary after a while. There’s SOME important stuff in there. And if you wait a whole year before installing the new one, all the bugs will be fixed by then
Seems like you’re annoyed that I pointed out that what you were saying was irrelevant? And so you reply with more irrelevant crap (on a very nerdy, not-fun-at-parties internet forum for Linux discussion)? Let me know if I got that wrong.
If you’re doing it for the memes then you don’t really need to worry about malware. Your machine is probably too old for anything that’s still floating out there to even work on it.
Many people browse 4-5 pages a day, see a few emails, print a few pdfs, and a core2duo, or x4, for 40#/$/Eu a box run flawlessly with linux and xfce/lxde for example.
Even video-conferencing works fine.
Driver code is still there, you can add it back if you want, same with ide drivers and such, support was removed but code still exists, just add it and compile your own kernel, there are alot of tutorials in internet about it
The drivers were removed in 6.3. Debian 12 is still running on 6.1. Debian 12 just came out and still has many years of support ahead of it (at least 5). You can get plenty of use out of these cards before they stop working.
Someone needs to maintain them for them to keep working. Nobody else is willing to do that anymore, but you can still volunteer as a maintainer. If you don’t, it’s as much your fault as anyone elses.
Linux 6.1 will be maintained for another 10 years by the CIP. The hardware in question will be almost 40 years old at that point. I don’t have a violin small enough for users losing free support after 40 years from maintainers who most likely don’t even own the same hardware to test on…
On the other hand, they were probably unchanged for decades. Did anything really change, or is this just a case of we need to remove 500k lines of code, what is most useless ? Let’s cut that.
In other words, removed because it’s a KPI to remove lines, and this makes number go up.
So if it’s been unchanged for decades then you can just add it yourself and recompile the kernel. Elsewhere you argue that you can’t just add old drivers to a newer kernel, which implies these drivers require some nontrivial amount of maintaince. Which is it.
Keeping code around isn’t free. Interfaces change, regressions pop up. You have to occasionally put in work just to keep it in a working state. Usually in cases like this there are discussions on the mailing list about who is going to maintain them and nobody volunteers. You can do that if you’re so passionate about keeping these drivers around.
They were fine all this time, what changed suddenly ? I bet it’s the security nerds stirring shit, making it all a liability and easier deleted than fixed.
I doubt any hardware 25+ years can even run a modern vanilla linux kernel, you’d have to compile it yourself with some serious customization for it even work
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