d3Xt3r

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

As for the –apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).

As I said before, it does work for system updates, the only exception being the kernel. The –apply-live flag was added for that exact reason, to avoid the need for an unnecessary reboot.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 5 months ago)

It looks like you’re still using PulseAudio? I’d highly recommend switching to PipeWire+WirePlumber instead, installing it should make your earbuds work automatically.

Follow the installation instructions here: wiki.debian.org/PipeWire#Debian_12

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

Give Zorin a try. It’s based on Ubuntu but even more user friendly - so much so that my elderly mother has no issues using it, she even prints and scans (a Brother MFD) and has no issues.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

As long as it doesn’t break I would take this over any alternative minipc

May I ask why though? One of the biggest advantages of using a MacBook is the performance-battery efficiency. If you’re going to get a Mac mini and loading Linux, you lose that advantage.

Unless you’re looking specifically for an ARM64 machine for whatever reason, I think an AMD mini PC, say something like the Minisforum EliteMini UM780 XTX would be technically a better option - you get dual NVMe, dual 2.5G network ports, USB 4.0, Oculink for even more b/w than Thunderbolt, and far more I/O options in general. Not to mention, excellent Linux support.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

For a macOS-like environment I’d also recommend Elementary OS.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

You can see the results for this here: openbenchmarking.org/…/x265&eval=3361398242e5…

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

TIL about PostWatchBot, that seems handy. Thanks!

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

I haven’t tested it myself but apparently it’s supported now. areweanticheatyet.com/game/planetside-2

Anti-cheat support in general has been a thing in Linux since the past couple of years, thanks to the efforts of Valve and the Steam Deck’s popularity. But not every game works though, depending on the anti-cheat system used and it’s implementation, some effort from the dev might be needed to make it compatible. areweanticheatyet.com tracks the current status of these games, and www.protondb.com is also a good reference in general to check Linux game compatibility.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Not quite. Bcachefs can be used on any drive, but it shines the best when you have a fast + slow drive in your PC (eg NVMe + HDD), so the faster drive can be used as a cache drive to store frequently accessed data.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

If you’re talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn’t touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we’ve had Storage Sense on, but it’s been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we’d get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

A GPU is used for a lot more than just gaming these days. It’s used to render videos, accelerate normal 2D programs (like some terminal emulators), accelerate some websites/webapps (those which use WebGL for eg); also modern DEs like Gnome and KDE also make use of it very heavily, for instance for animations and window transitions. Those smooth animations that you see when you activate the workspace switcher or window overview? That’s your GPU at work there. Are your animations jittery/laggy? That means your setup is less than ideal. Of course, you could ignore all that and just go for a simple DE like XFCE or Mate which is fully CPU-driven, but then the issue of video acceleration still remains (unless you don’t plan on watching HD videos).

Without the right drivers (typically NOT nouveau, unless you’re on a very old card), you may find your overall experience less than ideal. As you can see in their official feature matrix , only the NV40 series card fully supports video acceleration - these are cards which were launched between 2004-2006 - that’s practically ancient in computer terms and I highly doubt your PC uses one of those. Now recent-ish cards do support video acceleration, but you’ll need to extract the firmware blobs from the proprietary drivers (which can be a PITA on normal Debian as it’s a manual process), plus, even after that, the drivers won’t support some features that may be required by normal programs, as you can see from the matrix.

The natural solution of course would be to install the proprietary nVidia drivers, but you do NOT want to do that (unless you’re a desperate gamer) as there’s a high possibility of running into issues like not being about to use Wayland properly, or breaking your system when you update it - just Google “Linux update black screen nVidia” and you’ll see what I mean.

You’ll be avoiding a lot of headache if you just went with AMD; or even just onboard graphics like Intel iGPUs (if your CPU has it) would be a much better option - because in either case, you’ll be using fully capable and stable opensource drivers and you won’t face any issues with that.

Also, watch this video: youtube.com/watch?v=OF_5EKNX0Eg

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

Or maybe you’re using a distro that updates Gnome late, which may give extension makers enough time to update?

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

None of the comments here explain how WINE works, so allow me to elaborate a bit.

WINE is like a translator or a compatibility layer. When a Windows program tries to perform a function that would normally require Windows, WINE steps in and translates that request into something the Linux system can understand and process.

As you may know, Windows programs work by making API calls (eg using Win32 APIs) to operate and perform basic tasks. WINE takes these API calls and translates them to their Linux equivalents (POSIX calls, to be specific, which means Wine can run on several Unix-like systems). This way, when a program asks to say, open a file, or display something on the screen, WINE converts these requests into a form that Linux can execute.

WINE’s approach is about providing compatibility for user-level applications rather than replicating the internal workings of the Windows kernel. It includes various libraries and components that mimic the behavior of those in Windows. This helps in executing the Windows applications as if they are running in their native environment.

• The core of it is NTDLL. NTDLL.dll is a core Windows library that provides low-level system functions to interact with the Windows NT kernel. In WINE, ntdll.dll is adapted to work with the Linux kernel instead.
• Then you have the Win32 API libraries, providing the basic APIs that Windows applications use for functions like window management, text rendering, and system calls. Examples include user32.dll (for user-interface functions), gdi32.dll (for graphics device interface functions), and kernel32.dll (for basic system functions).
• Shell32.dll for handling Windows Shell API functions related to file operations and the user interface.
• DirectX Support, for running games and multimedia applications. WINE implements parts of DirectX, like Direct3D for 3D graphics, DirectDraw for 2D graphics, and DirectSound for sound processing. Note that WINE’s implementation converse Direct3D calls to OpenGL, whereas there are community projects like DXVK and VKD3D which translates these calls to Vulkan.
• Finally there’s a Registry Implementation, so that applications that need to read or write to the registry can function correctly.

Of course, there’s a LOT more to it, the above is just an example of some key components. Basically Wine has reimplemented (coded from scratch) various libraries and executables that, on the outside, look like standard Windows dlls/exes, but internally they use POSIX APIs to talk to the Linux kernel and other POSIX components. This, along with the Syscall translations, bridges the gap between Windows programs and Linux.

Now naturally, this is neither a perfect, nor a complete implementation of Windows APIs; plus there are some things which Wine will never implement (such as ntoskrnl.exe), so not every program will work as expected - so check out the Wine AppDB for compatibility reports with various Windows apps.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.

And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.

Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

Are you talking about for work or home usage? And do they have any specific proprietary application/hardware requirements?

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Apparently there’s still some limitations, according to the Arch Wiki:

• Initial LUKS2 support was added to GRUB 2.06, but with several limitations that are only partially addressed in GRUB 2.12rc1. See GRUB bug #55093.
• Since GRUB 2.12rc1, grub-install can create a core image to unlock LUKS2. However, it only supports PBKDF2, not Argon2.
• Argon2id (cryptsetup default) and Argon2i PBKDFs are not supported (GRUB bug #59409), only PBKDF2 is.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Yes, I do provide a password on boot, as you said, keys can be extracted from the hardware so that’s not secure, which is why I don’t use the TPM to store the keys.

There are no hooks necessary in the bootloader, as it’s the BIOS which prompts you for the password and unlocks the drive.

And yes, there have been implementation problems in the past, but that’s why the Opal 2.0 standard exists - don’t just buy any random self-encrypting drive, do your research on past vulnerabilities for that manufacturer, and check if there are any firmware updates for the drive (don’t just rely on LVFS).

Also, the common hardware attacks rely on either a SATA interface (to unplug the drive while it still has power) or older external ports vulnerable to DMA attacks such as PCMCIA or Thunderbolt 3.x or below; so those attacks only affects older laptops. Of course, someone could theoretically install a hardware keylogger or something, but this is also why you have chassis intrusion detection, and why you should secure and check any external ports and peripherals connected to your machine. Overall physical security is just as important these days.

But ultimately, as always, it comes down to your personal threat model and inconvenience tolerance levels. In my case, I think the measures I’ve taken are reasonably secure, but mostly, I’ve chosen Opal for performance and convenience reasons.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Foreground targets are where writes initially go. Data is moved from foreground to background targets while idle or as needed. Data which is read from the background targets is moved to promote targets.

If you set your NVMe as a promote target, SSD as foreground and your HDDs as background targets, all writes would first go to your SSD, then get copied to your HDD during idle, and finally the copy of the data on your SSD will then be marked as a cached copy. In case your SSD becomes full, then it’ll store the data on other drives. As for the promote targets, any time you read data from either the SSD or HDD that wasn’t on the NVMe, it would get cached to it, so the next read will be faster.

The main point of the foreground vs promote is to prioritize write vs read speeds. If you value faster writes, then set your NVMe as foreground. If you value faster reads, then set your NVMe as promote. Of course, you can also set your NVMe as both foreground and promote to benefit from both faster reads and writes.

But since you plan to introduce an SSD in the mix, you can create a single group for your NVMe + SSD, and a second group for the HDDs, and set your SSD group to foreground + promote, which will simplify things.

The Arch wiki illustrates this well:

A recommended configuration is to use an ssd group for the foreground and promote, and an hdd group for the background (a writeback cache).

Modified example to your scenario:

<span style="color:#323232;"># bcachefs format 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --label=ssd.nvme1 /dev/nvme0n1 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --label=ssd.ssd1 /dev/sda 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --label=hdd.hdd1 /dev/sdb 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --label=hdd.hdd2 /dev/sdc 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --replicas=2 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --foreground_target=ssd 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --promote_target=ssd 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">    --background_target=hdd 
</span>

If you’re concerned about chucking both the SSD and NVMe in the same group, no need to worry cause bcachefs will automatically prioritize reads from drives with lower latency as mentioned in the wiki.

If they are different speeds, reads for replicated data will be sent to the ones with the lowest IO latency.

But regardless of which setup you go for, main thing to remember is to use the NVMe (or the group containing the NVMe) as the promote target, as that will be your primary cache drive.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

Yeah, unfortunately it looks like the reader on the X1 is a special case. Thankfully, this isn’t an issue with my Z13 - the reader itself worked out-of-the-box, just had to enroll my fingerprint from the Settings menu and then added fprintd to my pam.d rules.

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

I thought NixOS was already reproducible, like, isn’t that the whole point? What’s the big deal here, and why is it a “great achievement” - does the Linux world now completely change? Does this revolutionize how Linux ISOs are built?

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

Seconded, Distrobox is the way to go.

Here’s how you can actually make it work seamlessly @Macaroni9538 :
github.com/…/run_latest_gnome_kde_on_distrobox.md

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

You’re not breaking the law, you’re breaking a software license agreement. That does not automatically make it a crime, at least, that would depend on your exact local laws, and the lawyer’s interpretation of it - in many cases the actual wording around this is ambiguous and could be argued both ways. A better term for it would be a “legal grey area”, which means if you’re a company then don’t f*** around with it, and if you’re just a random user then no one gives a f***.

In any case, if those scripts were truly illegal, then the Microsoft-owned Github wouldn’t host them in the first place. Clearly Microsoft themselves don’t have an issue with it, so why should anyone else care about it?

d3Xt3r, 1 year ago

No.

No headphone jack, no buy. It’s not a question of whether a headphone jack is useful to you, it’s just the principle of it - there’s no good reason to remove it (especially for the asking price of FP5), and more importantly, it goes against what the Fairphone stands for, IMO. I can understand if it were some other profit-driven company making a shrewd business decision, but for Fairphone to do it, seems very unfair to me.