nyan

@nyan@lemmy.cafe

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Looking for a good tablet PC distro

I just inherited a handful of Samsung Series 7 Slate PCs that I’d like to rebuild to be as “tablet-like” as possible for a few non-technical friends and family. They power up but arrived with non-functional Windows 7 installs. They’re Intel Core i5s with 4G RAM and 128G SSDs, so they should run pretty well under any...

nyan,

Just a note: there are a few on-screen software keyboards for X out there that aren’t tied to a specific DE, like xvkbd and svkbd. They might be worth trying if you find some distro that works well except that the default on-screen keyboard sucks. (No idea if there’s any equivalent for Wayland.)

nyan, (edited )

If you can figure out how to get the remote open, you’ll probably find that the buttons are all part of the same flexible rubbery insert (unless it’s 10+ years old). Put a little tape on the bottoms of the ones causing you problems. The insulation should keep them from working, and it’s 100% reversible if you ever do find a use for them.

If it’s one of the older, more expensive remotes with individual switches, then, yeah, pliers and superglue. 😅

nyan,

Aqualung—does the small set of things I need it to, and is content to operate on files and directories rather than force the creation of a “music library” that doesn’t in any way match how I categorize my music (although if you actually want a music library, it can do that). Only issue is that it’s still GTK2, which may become a problem within the next few years.

What are the differences between linux distributions?

Hey guys! Trying to understand what developers actually do to create a yet another distro, or what are the differences between existing distros. Lets say we have ubuntu and fedora. What are the differences? Excluding DE, Installer, theme, installed packages/libs and package manager. They both are FHS compliant, both running...

nyan,

The main difference between Ubuntu and Fedora is the package manager. Most of the rest is just selected default values for configuration and cosmetics, and what helper scripts are or aren’t present on the system. They’re both mainstream distributions aimed at the general user, and they’re shaped by their goals.

To see how different distributions can be, you need to compare the mainstream distributions to stuff that’s decidedly not mainstream, like Gentoo, Alpine, and Nix.

Just as a trivia note: Gentoo does package a couple of other distros’ package managers (app-arch/rpm and app-arch/dpkg), for use in installing otherwise-unavailable commercial binaries, although I suspect app-arch/rpm2targz sees more use than either of them.

I use linux for the same reason I wear fuzzy socks and sweaters

My understanding of the history of fashion is that back in the 1950s America it was expected that you wore a suit/dress at work unless you had a different uniform. There were a bunch of very boring people who thought that we should be wearing office job garb all the time, because they wore suits so much it was their default...

nyan,

That isn’t the reason most of us use Linux, and even if it were, the “administration vs. creatives” divide probably goes back to Ancient Egypt, if not further. But fight it if you want to. I give it six months before you burn out, and the division in question will still be there, and some people will still be basing their identities around it. (I mean, what do you think is a good thing to base your identity around? Your degree of appreciation for Taylor Swift? 'Cause I think you’d find that one is a lot more common.)

nyan,

And? Seems relatively harmless, as alternate realities go. No one lives in the real world 100% all the time. We’re not designed for it.

please help me, why is this happening?? (lemmy.world)

I’m currently installing Puppy Linux on an old computer, and everything is working fine, the resolution of the boot selections were looking ok, but the moment Puppy Linux boots the GUI, this happens!!! And I tried resizing from the GRUB terminal but it doesn’t work, please help me, thank you!!

nyan,

Ooh, CRT monitor. And that’s an odd resolution that it’s suggesting. You could try driving it at 1280x1024 at 60Hz. If that doesn’t work, try 800x600 at 60Hz, which is the traditional lowest SVGA resolution (picture may be slightly distorted if it really is a 5:4 monitor). If that doesn’t work, try the traditional VGA resolution of 640x480 just to get something going. I’d recommend using X as Wayland has probably not been tested very much on hardware this old. And it almost certainly has no clue how to deal with a widescreen resolution or a resolution wider than its “Recommend mode”.

(I was still using a 17" CRT with X at 1280x960 up to about five years ago. I had no issues ever.)

nyan,

They didn’t include my distro of choice (Gentoo) or my desktop environment (TDE) . . . but I’m not surprised. Lists like this aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and they always reflect the author’s biases and what they’ve been exposed to. Not including someone else’s favourites doesn’t make them bad lists for the purpose they’re intended to serve.

Probably the best way to deal with newbie choice paralysis is a big flowchart, or a questionaire: "Which of these are important to you: ‘just works’ - stability - customizability - organizational transparency - keeping up with the bleeding edge - . . . "

nyan,

Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.

TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.

nyan,

As a wild guess, try completely specifying the IP address in your fstab instead of relying on a wildcard. Wouldn’t be the first time there was a slight difference in how a marginal feature like that worked in different contexts.

would it be illegal to download Ubuntu on a Chromebook?

what if I, for example, had a job in Google and I liked Linux so much I install Ubuntu on my Chromebook, would that be illegal/send me to prison?? Or, if I had the job, would I be kicked?? I like Chromebooks because they are so smol and nice. But I don’t know if it’s legal to install a Linux distro on it. Thank you!!

nyan,

If the Chromebook is your property, you can do whatever you want with it, and it’s unlikely that anyone will notice or care. I assume you’re in the US, since you appear to be worried about DMCA encryption-related provisions. Don’t be. Even if it were 100% guaranteed illegal with all necessary precedents, Google has better things to do with its time than track down individual jailbroken Chromebooks. It isn’t like you’re going to be selling them in quantity or using them to facilitate ransomeware attacks or something.

However, I’d invest in a used laptop instead, since it’s likely to have more internal storage even if it lacks the !!shiny!! factor. Chromebooks are meant to store as little as possible locally, and that isn’t how a normal Linux works. I suspect you’d start to get data claustrophobia pretty quickly.

nyan,

It’s still a supported architecture in Gentoo. I expect it will limp along there for as long as there is viable kernel source (current or LTS) and at least one interested maintainer. So if you have an Itanium machine lying around, you can install a current Linux on it. As long as you’re willing to follow a long set of instructions, anyway.

nyan, (edited )

The actual difference, from the point of view of someone not contributing code to either project?

Wayland is newer code, and provides better support for some hardware features of more recent origin like HiDPI. Because it’s newer, it can be a bit buggy/flaky sometimes, but it seems to be past the worst of that now and works well enough for many people. On modern hardware, it will probably provide a marginally better visual experience for someone who’s paying close attention to details like animation smoothness (stuff that I personally don’t care about).

X is older, more stable, and has certain core features (X forwarding, for instance) that Wayland prefers to leave for third-party software to implement. It’s also a child of an earlier era, and wasn’t designed with the expectation that it would be under attack 24/7 by malicious actors from around the world. The codebase, like those of many other older pieces of software, contains a certain amount of cruft and miscellaneous technical debt, and between that and the fact that X isn’t adding new! shiny! features, it’s harder to get coders to work on it. I’ve always found it to be solidly reliable provided that it’s being used in the sort of environment that was most common until recently (a single largish screen of <100dpi resolution with a constant refresh rate).

nyan,

Provided that the approriate drivers and binary firmware blobs for the new card are already on your system (and with a user-friendly distro like Mint, they should be), I’d expect you to be able just to plug in and go. The only extra hoops I had to jump through while sidegrading from a 1050 to an AMD card of the same era were due to my having a hand-configured kernel and X setup with no AMD drivers.

nyan,

Subject lines on their forum suggest Firefox and Chromium are both possible.

nyan,

Nearly all hardware support is kept in the kernel until and unless it bitrots to the point of unusability. I’ve had no issues with a 5.10-series kernel on my 2008 laptop, and I don’t expect any issues when I finally get around to upgrading it to 6.x (well, except the usual tedium of compiling a kernel on a machine that weak).

nyan,

The difference isn’t all that noticeable, to be honest, or at least I’ve never found it so. If you’re using older hardware, you’re going to get an older “experience” anyway. The most user-visible kernel improvements tend to be improvements in hardware support, which is irrelevant if your hardware is already fully supported. However, I don’t do anything fancy with my machines—no full-disc encryption or the like. I usually don’t even need an initram to boot the system. So maybe you would notice something if your machines were more complicated.

(Note that the laptop I mentioned above started out with, um, a 3.x kernel? It gets a new one every year or so. The only kernel changes affecting it that were significant enough to draw my attention since 2008 were a fix in the support for the Broadcom wireless card it carries, and some changes to how hibernation works, which didn’t matter in the end because I basically never did try all that hard to get hibernation working on that machine.)

nyan,

You’re unlikely to have issues unless an entire architecture loses support from your distro, and if you’re running x86_64, that isn’t going to happen for a long, long time. I’ve never been in a position where I couldn’t compile a new workable kernel for an existing system out of Gentoo’s repositories. The only time I’ve ever needed to put an upgrade aside for a few months involved a machine’s video card losing driver support from nvidia—I needed a few spare hours to make sure there were no issues while over to nouveau before I could install a new kernel.

Note that you can run an up-to-date userland on an older kernel, too, provided you make sensible software choices. Changes to the kernel are not supposed to break userspace—that’s meant to keep older software running on newer kernels, but it also works the other way around quite a bit of the time.

nyan,

More recommendations mean more people using the hardware. More people using the hardware means more testing. More testing means more people learning and documenting how to fix problems. So in that sense, statements like that actually do become true over time regardless of their truth values at the beginning.

My few remaining gripes with linux

It’s mostly libinput. Why the hell can’t I easily change scroll speed on Gnome and not on KDE? Why does gnome have a simple tool (gnome tweaks) to change the trackpad cooldown to change the time trackpad doesn’t work as a substitute for good palm rejection and KDE doesn’t? Why is it a bit of a pain in both to change...

nyan,

You’re using software that’s being continuously developed by people for whom stability of the UI is not a priority. Pointless UI churn is normal. Half-assed solutions kept beyond their best-before date are normal. Windows does this crap too. At least with Linux you have a choice of which issues you’re going to tolerate (or you can pick a DE where UI stability is a priority for the development team).

nyan,

Some native distro formats are unlikely to ever be supported by services of this type. For instance, neither of the two services you list in your opening post will generate Gentoo ebuilds, most likely because the process is fundamentally different: an ebuild is a set of instructions for the package manager, not a prepacked binary.

nyan,

Linux mostly follows POSIX standards, even though it’s never been certified as compliant, so much code targeting POSIX systems runs on Linux too. In other words, it didn’t establish any standards so much as adopt one that already existed.

There is no POSIX standard for package managers, however.

nyan,

Enough people have thought of while (true){ print(money); } for manufacturers to have built stuff into printers to prevent that, alas.

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