yote_zip

yote_zip, 9 months ago

Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux (that’s not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it’s served as WebP it’s 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It’s a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that’s used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can’t tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people’s data for no reason.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

Yes it’s lossless. JPG->JXL lossless compression is generally 20% savings for free.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

I didn’t mean my post to be read as trying to convince someone to use Linux, but as someone trying to convince themselves to use Linux. It’s fairly common that people want to switch but have convinced themselves that unless they have their exact same workflow from Windows they won’t be able to.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

I’ve seen a trend where people move the goalposts on the reasons they’re not able to switch. “If only this program worked I could switch”, but when that program is ported it’ll be a new excuse next. Sooner or later you’ll have to draw a line and say “99% of my stuff works, the 1% that doesn’t can get bent”.

yote_zip, 9 months ago

Remember that cheap subscriptions for digital media is the compromise we made. If they want to fuck around and find out then you should remind them that you can just as easily pay nothing for the same content.

yote_zip, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

As a Debian user I agree with Loius Rossmann’s sage advice.

Edit: (make sure you enable unattended security upgrades at least so you can pretend that you only update once every few months)

yote_zip, 9 months ago

The video is clickbait and a few of the distros are in categories just for dramatic effect. I personally share Chris’s criteria for “pointless” distros however, and I hope that his main “clickbait motive” was trying to stop people from hopping around from gimmick distro to gimmick distro when the real magic has always been with the Debian/Arch base underneath the hood. I don’t care to give Chris the attention he wants so I’d rather answer your questions instead of talk about the video directly:

I agree that Debian and Arch are “S-tier” distros. Not that they’re better than everything else for every usecase but they are very high quality community-run distros with large package bases, and they accomplish their mission statements with ease. If you’re a Linux power user for long enough you may eventually settle into one of these two distros because they give you a lot of room to mold your configuration without being opinionated by downstream distro maintainers.

Linux Mint is very good, and it’s probably the only “fork distro” that I recommend people use because it makes Debian/Ubuntu very simple and usable for new users, and it’s done so for many years with a great track record. I currently run Debian Stable but if you put a gun to my head and said “you can only run Linux Mint from now on” I’d be fine with it. Specifically, I prefer the LMDE edition but the normal version is good too.

You can run cutting-edge gaming stuff on Debian Stable and Linux Mint by using Flatpak Lutris/Steam, which uses its own cutting-edge Mesa package instead of the system’s, and you can also install a cutting-edge kernel on these stable distros by using Debian backports or e.g. XanMod. I prefer using stable distros like Debian Stable and pulling cutting-edge versions of your important packages through Flatpak or other means, which gives you a “stable base and rolling top”.

I think the general usecase for Arch has diminished from half a decade ago due to Flatpak’s popularity, and IMO a stable base setup makes more sense if you can get everything important that you need from Flatpaks. With Arch, not only are the programs you care about bleeding-edge, everything is bleeding-edge, and you may end up with annoying bugs from packages you didn’t even know existed.

If you want a more modern version of the Linux desktop without the bleeding-edge of Arch I think OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is a great cutting-edge distro. They have extensive automatic testing that ensures high system stability even while living near the edge of package freshness. The main downside is OpenSUSE’s smaller package base compared to Debian/Arch-based distros.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

Not to be disrespectful but you can skip to 5:32 if you don’t need to justify piracy to yourself.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

Manjaro is one of the few distros I’ll actively campaign against. They’ve made countless mistakes and questionable decisions in the past, and their repo/packaging lifecycle is known to cause a lot of issues: One, Two, Three, Four. Go for EndeavourOS or Garuda Linux if you want the idea of Manjaro but managed by competent people.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

Usually torrents remain seeded because private tracker users are encouraged to seed everything forever. In addition, often if a private tracker has a bonus system they will offer extra bonus points for seeding low-seed torrents, and some even automatically mark torrents as freeleech if they’re below ~5 seeds, encouraging people to revive its seed count in a targeted manner.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

One potential advantage is that many private trackers are meticulously-curated. The more people that are on a tracker, the harder it is to quality control every single upload. Most of the top-tier trackers aren’t just a dumping ground for data, they have tons of categories and slots for each potential piece of data to go, and if a better piece of data can fit in that slot then the previous one needs to be reviewed, deleted, and replaced.

Another reason is that private trackers often have many rules to facilitate the overall health of the tracker and its swarms, e.g. minimum quality for uploads, minimum seed times, required ratios etc. If anyone could get an account they could break the rules over and over after being banned.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

Bypass Paywalls Clean will let you read them, as an alternative to hiding. I think you have to manually install it but it will auto-update after that.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

Note that in this benchmark, bcachefs had a debug variable turned on that allegedly severely hampered performance. Bcachefs has released an update to disable this variable but Phoronix hasn’t redone benchmarks yet. I wouldn’t put much value into any bcachefs-related comparisons from this current benchmark.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

It’s simple and solid enough to give to people who don’t know what they’re doing, and its Debian/Ubuntu base makes it flexible enough to not slow down power users who want to start modifying it. Other distros that might fit this bill keep shooting themselves in the foot and going off in weird directions, while Linux Mint has been a reputable no-BS distro for a very long time. It’s a workhorse distro without any gimmicks and that’s the point.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

I’ll add that if you want to archive games forever, storing repacks is a good idea because of their extreme compression. From what I’ve observed, Fitgirl trends towards heavier compression while DODI trends towards faster install times.

KaOsKrew is another respected repacking group that you can trust.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

I’m not an aficionado on those specific sandwiches but you should try setting your microwave to half power and cooking for twice the time. I get much better results on most things when I cook like that - food will be more evenly heated and won’t be so brutally overcooked.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

If you’re familiar with What.CD and its shutdown, the power users and their local copy of that music archive moved over to redacted.ch (stats) and orpheus.network (stats). They’re private torrent trackers so they’re invite-only, but TMK they both still offer interviewing as an entry option: RED, OPS. The interviews mostly consist of technical audio information and private tracker rules. The main downside is that these trackers expect you to seed an equal amount back, so you don’t get a free pass to download everything without limits. Of the two, Orpheus is a lot easier to maintain “ratio” on since it gives you incremental credit just for having a large seedbase (even if no one is downloading from you). Ideally you should be on both if you’re serious about music collecting, but these days they are largely just mirrors of each other.

If you don’t want to get dirty in the private tracker world, I’d recommend Soulseek and RuTracker.

yote_zip, 10 months ago

This whole story is full of hilarious bits, and there’s far too many good quotes for me to post them all, but from another angle it’s just sad that these people are so far gone from reality that they can be taken advantage of like this. You really think Walmart is going to give you a 10000% guaranteed ROI after a year of holding some funny money? That doesn’t set off any alarm bells? Why would Trump give you 100x your money before he’s even re-elected in 2024? What could he have done to bring about such economic inflation prosperity in a single year?