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dan

@dan@upvote.au

Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
d.sb
Mastodon: @dan

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Is Ubuntu deserving the hate? (lemmy.ml)

Long story short, I have a desktop with Fedora, lovely, fast, sleek and surprisingly reliable for a near rolling distro (it failed me only once back around Fedora 34 or something where it nuked Grub). Tried to install on a 2012 i7 MacBook Air… what a slog!!! Surprisingly Ubuntu runs very smooth on it. I have been bothering all...

dan,
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Testing is the middle ground. Tested for a bit by unstable peeps but thats it.

IIRC packages have to be in unstable with no major bugs for 10 days before migrating to testing. It’s a good middle ground IMO.

Of course, you could always run unstable and be the one to report the bugs :)

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I used to run Debian testing on my servers. These days I don’t have much free time to mess with them, so they’re all running the stable release with unattended-upgrades.

However, mind that it’s not supported and they do not pay attention to security fixes.

To be clear, it can still get security updates, but it’s the package maintainer’s responsibility to upload them. Some maintainers are very responsive while others take a while. On the other hand, Debian stable has a security team that quickly uploads patches to all officially supported packages (just the “main” repo, not contrib, non-free, or non-free-firmware).

dan,
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How different is it from regular Debian? Like if I’m very experienced with Debian, does that equate to being able to easily use Mint Debian Edition too?

dan, (edited )
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It’s an old meme but it checks out. Older than some of the people in this community haha

For anyone that hasn’t seen it, it’s a reference to this satirical article from 2001: web.archive.org/web/…/2001.12.2.42056.2147.html

dan, (edited )
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I remember dealing with migrating from LILO to GRUB when I was in high school, maybe 2005ish? It’s been a while. I remember the migration from ipchains to iptables, too (which is happening again now with the iptables to nftables migration)

I used Ubuntu at the time… It was a great distro back then. I only had dial-up so couldn’t download large files easily, and Canonical or one of their local partners would mail you a CD for free regardless of where you lived in the world. I think that helped a LOT of people get into Linux.

dan, (edited )
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It’s funny because the first time I read it, I thought it was serious and was just written by a tech-illiterate parent. Saying that Comet Cursor and Bonzi Buddy are hacker software kinda gives away that it’s just satire though.

oh I guess that’s also something that younger people may not know about… In the late 1990s / early 2000s, it wasn’t uncommon for people to install spyware to get things like custom mouse cursors, emoticons, and purple gorillas that help you navigate the web.

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Yeah people like to hate on Red Hat, but Linux development would be significantly slower without them.

dan,
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Can’t they just automatically collect this data if the user gives permission?

dan,
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I’ve got a good fast fiber internet connection at home so I just host a Plex server and use Plexamp, which is a great app.

A lot of my music was ripped by me though, not downloaded, so my library isn’t as large as some other people’s.

dan, (edited )
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I just preordered a Framework 16 inch because their concept is amazing and early reviews are pretty good. It’s a laptop where every part is replaceable and upgradable. You can replace/upgrade the motherboard/CPU, RAM, NVMe storage, keyboard, display, etc. all yourself, and they sell the parts separately. Even the ports on the sides are swappable - you can choose to make them all USB-C ports, or make any of them USB-A, 3.5mm audio, 2.5Gbps Ethernet, DisplayPort, HDMI, MicroSD reader, etc.

They have a 13 inch version that’s already shipping today… The 16 inch is a preorder to ship Q2 2024. Their newer ones use an AMD CPU and AMD graphics which should work better on Linux than Nvidia graphics.

More expensive than a regular laptop company though… They don’t have the scale that Dell, Lenovo, etc have so parts are more expensive for them (plus large R&D costs).

dan,
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Interestingly it’s becoming more common to use front end technologies like React in AAA games, for things like in-game menus, and development tools.

dan,
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But that’s one of the benefits of open source. Post your code and find someone else to finish it :D

What distro would you recommend for a 32-bit old Acer One laptop? (kbin.social)

It's an old model (Acer One D257) Processor is Intel Atom. Memory is 1GB DDR3 with 320 GB of HDD. I currently Have MX 21 running on it, but I need to reinstall because I forgot the root password. Since I'm reinstalling the OS, I thought I'd ask here for recommendations for an OS that makes the most of this oldie.

dan, (edited )
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The Linux kernel already has OOM killing… Do you mean something like Facebook’s oomd where you can more easily control it from userspace?

dan,
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I’ve never seen /etc/opt used. Usually if an app is in /opt, the entire app is there, including its config which is frequently at /opt/appname/etc/.

dan, (edited )
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In-browser DRM usually uses a library called Widevine, which is a closed-source library created by Google that’s usually only used on Windows or MacOS.

On Linux, you can use Google Chrome to get Widevine working. You can also extract the library from Google Chrome to use it with Chromium (e.g. see github.com/proprietary/chromium-widevine). The version of Chromium shipped with Linux distros doesn’t include it since you need a license and permission from Google to distribute it. Lots of Linux users would also (understandably) really not want to run a DRM binary on their system. It’s intentionally obfuscated to try and prevent people from breaking it.

I don’t know what other Linux browsers do - I haven’t used Linux desktop for a while (going to switch back soon though). On other OSes, browsers like Firefox and Brave prompt you the first time you try to watch DRM’d content, asking if you’d like to download the plugin. I assume they license it from Google.

Also as far as I know, Widevine doesn’t allow the same security/compliance levels on Linux as it does on Windows and MacOS, as the OS is less locked down. This could mean that a 4K video streaming service works fine on Windows but won’t allow you to stream in 4K on Linux. Isn’t DRM great???

dan, (edited )
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just spoof your browser fingerprint

That won’t help if your platform or browser doesn’t support Widevine. It’s possible Amazon only support the Widevine implementation on Windows and MacOS, and no amount of browser spoofing is going to help you if your browser just doesn’t have the right closed-source binary DRM blob.

dan,
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!stallmanwasright

dan,
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There are many other places where DVCS repositories can be hosted

I mean… Everyone that’s cloned the repo has a full copy of it. You could clone it directly off someone else if you wanted to.

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How many people use Github for discovery though? I usually find interesting projects through a search engine, through word of mouth, through posts on here, etc. at which point it doesn’t really matter where the repo is hosted. A lot of the useful projects I use aren’t even on Github.

As far as I know, Gitea is current working on federation support, which will be great. It’d be like Lemmy where you can browse repos, submit issues, etc from one instance even if the repo is hosted at a different one. Git was really designed for a model like that, not for a centralized one.

dan,
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Across all devs that fill out the Stack Overflow survey: survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/-most-popula…

dan, (edited )
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Business/application logic can be 80-90% of an app’s code, and all of it can be reused across platforms. The actual UI rendering is just a small part of it.

In the UI code, some of it does have to differ across platforms but it’s mostly the lower level components like buttons, text fields, etc. Some product UI code built on top of those abstractions can be reused across platforms.

dan,
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Metric? Somebody set the region settings wrong!

That’s a weird way to spell “correctly”

I’m a metric user btw

dan,
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Why? Tubes! The internet is tubes! m.youtube.com/watch?v=_cZC67wXUTs

dan,
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amd64-noarch

ಠ_ಠ

dan, (edited )
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I got lucky since I’ve been into computers and programming since I was 8 years old (late 90s). My first job when I was at school was a part-time developer at a tiny IT company that did consulting work. Since then, all my jobs have been software development jobs.

The fact that it pays well in places like Silicon Valley was a great bonus. I moved here 10 years ago (when I was 23) after I got a job offer, and the starting salary was literally double what I was getting paid in Australia at the time.

The job changes a bit as you get more senior - there’s more mentoring of junior devs, project planning, deciding what your team should focus on, etc. I still spend a lot of my time writing code though, and still enjoy it. :)

There’s some downsides to living in Silicon Valley. A lot of stuff is expensive (that applies for California in general, but especially here). Housing is extremely expensive too.

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