savvywolf

savvywolf, 5 months ago

The steam deck does have a gyroscope for sensing rotation… Just saying.

savvywolf, 5 months ago

[Distro I don’t like] because they use [XOrg/Wayland/Systemd/Snap/Flatpak] and their powermods banned me from their [subreddit/sublemmy/forum/discord/irc/matrix] because I was telling them how wrong they were.

savvywolf, 5 months ago

I guess the Pop bubble has… Popped.

Sorry.

savvywolf, 5 months ago

Do people actually want this?

Like, I know the megacorps that control our lives do (since it’s a cheap way of adding value to their products), but what about actual users? I think many see it as a novelty and a toy rather than a productivity tool. Especially when public awareness of “hallucinations” and the plight faced by artists rises.

Kinda feels like the whole “voice controlled assistants” bubble that happened a while ago. Sure they are relatively commonplace nowadays, but nowhere near as universal as people thought they would be.

savvywolf, 5 months ago

Sure, all that may be true but it doesn’t answer my original concern: Is this something that people want as a core feature of their OS? My comments weren’t that “oh, this is only as technically sophisticated as voice assistants”, it was more “voice assistants never really took off as much as people thought they would”. I may be cynical and grumpy, but to me it feels like these companies are failing to read the market.

I’m reminded of a presentation that I saw where they were showing off fancy AI technology. Basically, if you were in a call 1 to 1 call with someone and had to leave to answer the doorbell or something, the other person could keep speaking and an AI would summarise what they said when they got back.

It felt so out of touch with what people would actually want to do in that situation.

savvywolf, 5 months ago

Remember to check your three "B"s; your balls, your breasts and your backups.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Personally, I don’t see how a TPM module is more useful than full disk encryption with a password you enter on boot.

I struggle to see how it makes automatic login safer given it does nothing to protect against the really common threat of someone physically stealing your laptop or desktop.

I don’t trust any encryption or authentication system that I don’t have access to the keys for. Microsoft has also kinda made me feel it’s more for vendor lock in, like they did with secure boot.

Still, I’m probably being unreasonably pessimistic about it though - be interested to see any practical use cases of it.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

I’ve heard that before, but there are two main problems that stick out to me:

• A lot of the marketing for TPM (at least when I was setting up bitlocker on Windows) suggests that it’s used to support decrypting drives without a password on boot. But that doesn’t seem to offer any protection from the devices being stolen. The bootloader may be safe but it’s not actually verifying that I’m the one booting the device.
• I can’t think of a situation where someone would be able to actually modify the bootloader without also having full access to the files and secrets. Especially in a single-boot environment where every time the system is running, the device is decrypted.

I’m not saying that it’s all just a scam or anything like that, but it really feels like I’m missing something important and obvious.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

I can’t see that being a reasonable approach for them to take, tbh. One option with TPM is that your system logs in automatically to the desktop, in which case they can just turn it on and use it normally. The other is that it requires a password at some point during startup, to which they could just use a (hardware) keylogger.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

I’ve actually been getting into NixOS recently; interested in replacing an old server I’ve had for like 10 years with something I can just build from a bunch of config files.

Can confirm it is confusing and I have no idea how anything works. :D

In my searches, I’ve come across nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/ , which I’ve gone through a few chapters of - seems good so far.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

I’ve tried both LMDE and Debian itself, but I think I just ended up frustrated at the age of software in the repos and how much stuff relies on Ubuntu specific stuff.

Way back in the day I was an Ubuntu user, but then everyone simultaneously decided that gnome 2 was too old and that touch interfaces were the priority. So I now use Mint and Cinnamon.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Wow, I worded that poorly. I meant that a lot of software not in the repos (usually proprietary apps) provide a .deb download tailered for Ubuntu rather than base Debian.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

I don’t know what exact situation could have happened here but I imagine a copy could have also copied the metadata into a new file. So it creates a new file as the destination (setting the birth date), then as part of copying the file it copied the access and modify times.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

You know, I do wonder how many of these statistics are influenced by Linux users tendancy to use adblockers and block tracking. Linux could be more popular than it looks.

Also, they should tell us how much of that increase is due to the Steam Deck. :P

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Mint is my recommendation, having using it myself for many years now.

If you have a Nvidia GPU, a case could be made for POP! due to the built in drivers, but installing Nvidia drivers is rather painless in Mint.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Oh, it’s a cameleon with the Linux Mint logo as the head.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Poor Keith. ;_;

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Anyone else getting that corporate “forced meme” vibe from this?

savvywolf, 6 months ago

Now that they’re working on it, I’m interested in seeing how well Wayland in Cinnamon works. Hopefully it can fix some tearing and stuttering issues in my mixed refresh rate multimonitor setup.

Will also be interesting to see how the landscape with Windows goes, especially considering I’m picking up traces of discontent in their ranks. I think Valve’s actions will probably cause them to sit up and pay attention.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

This is the future that Gen 1 fans want.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

My understanding is that there’s some DRM stuff that can’t really be implemented in open source stuff. Not sure how accurate that is, or which sites use it, but I guess it’s a technical reason. Still very scummy and annoying how poorly they treat paying customers.

savvywolf, 6 months ago

If you’re cold, they’re cold.

Run this command to warm up your computery friends.

savvywolf, 7 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

Recently switched to using Flatpaks instead of random .debs for a number of apps on my system. /var/lib/flatpak takes up 7GiB, which honestly isn’t that much (even though it’s like quarter of the OS size), given that’s the software I use most of the time.

Was skeptical at first about Flatpaks, but SteamOS showed me that is great at just giving OS developers access to a fully populated app store with minimal work.

Honestly, nowadays I’d say “ability to install flatpaks” should be the criteria on which we decide whether an OS is really “linux” or not (that is, SteamOS is, but Android isn’t).

Edit: Okay. I said something stupid here, my bad. What I was trying to get at is the distinction between Android, etc. and “Desktop” Linuxes like traditional distros, Chromebooks and the Steam Deck. Even though it technically runs Linux, it’s hard to argue that developers for Android are really writing apps that work on “Linux”. Wheras if someone releases a Flatpak version of their app because they think the Steam deck is cool, it works on other distros “for free”.

savvywolf, 7 months ago

… Didn’t Chrome get in trouble recently for scanning random files on the user’s disk looking for malware?