CaptainJack42

@CaptainJack42@discuss.tchncs.de
0 Post – 45 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

There's a simple reason why Mozilla/canonical does this and that is security fixes. Due to the difference in support cycles of Firefox and Ubuntu LTS versions fixes would have to be manually backported to the system Firefox version and newer versions won't run due to library dependencies. Snap solves all of that.

Don't get me wrong though, snap is still terrible, but other than flatpak or doing the work of backporting it's the only option to get security fixes to Ubuntu

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If you really want the deep dive, look into LFS (Linux from scratch), besides that I've always been the learning by doing kind of guy. Got a problem? Search a solution and read up on the intricacies of the problem

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Why do we need tmux if we have tiling window managers?

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It's just clickbait like most of his videos, I never really liked Chriss' videos, the tip of the iceberg was when he told people to disable kernel mitigation for a presumable performance boost (I tested it with disconnected network, it was like 2% on my machine), which is just plain dumb.

Use whatever distro you like, just know that you don't have to distrohop for some program (DE or WM or whatever). I personally use endeavour, simply because I've used arch (and derivatives) for a while now and endeavour is just arch with sensible defaults and a lot of the configuration one would do anyway already done.

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The short answer, as a ton of people already said in the comments of the video, is "hell no" it is not and it is most likely also not worth it. Back when the video came out I tested it (with unplugged network) on my system and the performance gain was ~1% which I'd consider well within the margin of error

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From what I recall veracrypt is basically the only option, but I've never bothered setting it up myself, i just use luks on everything these days, but you won't be able to use that with windows, though it might be possible using WSL, but I don't know

Imo any distro basically just works the same, I've never tried one of the "gaming" distros, but installing steam, proton and lutris is so straightforward that any distro will do imo. From there on it's just a matter of going onto protondb and figuring out tweaks for your games.

As for dual boot I highly recommend separate drives, windows likes to overwrite grub with every update if located on the same drive. From there on just do a basic Linux install and configure your bootloader to look for other bootable oses

IMO most users that need to / want to tinker with such settings are proficient enough in the CLI and man pages to do so and will use the CLI anyway even if a GUI tool is available for it (at least speaking for me since if I use a CLI I know what I'm doing, with some gui I don't know what it's doing under the hood, sure I could read the source, but at that point why not use the CLI). Users that aren't won't really have the need to do so. And if they have it's far safer to do so in the CLI because you have to have an understanding of what you're doing and do some research than just clicking around in a GUI without knowing what it actually does.

Hyprland is decent, it's one of the better Wayland window managers, that being said it's still in beta and not complete. Also be aware, it's a window manager, not a desktop environment. It won't do much besides well managing windows, taskbar, start menu, notification demon,... have to all be installed and setup by you and the config is done in text files, not some gui.

Also the community is rather toxic, I've made similar experiences to this in the past when trying it out.

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Factorio.

The factory must grow!

A friend of mine got his son to use Linux by just not providing an alternative, he installed Debian edu (don't know if that's the name, but basically a Debian spin for kids with parental restrictions and stuff) on an old laptop for him and that's what he used. Once he got his own PC it was over though since he wanted to play Fortnite so bad that he bought windows for that. He still dual boots Fedora, but I don't think he has used it since the windows partition is there.

I think the thing is you can't really get kids (or people in general for that matter) into Linux the way you are probably into it and interested in it. At least not if they're not already interested in it on their own. They will learn how to use it sure, but not the way we're used to using Linux, understanding the intricacies of the system, keeping the system safe,... They'll probably find a way to do what they already do on windows and ignore that the OS is different.

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My dad also made the switch to mint cinnamon about 3 years ago and I only had to fix things once for him (which was something in partitioning/fstab he or the installer messed up), he has successfully updated and maintained the system for 3 major releases yet and is even happier with Linux on his home laptop than with windows on his work laptop

Edit: he's not really tech savvy or something, he's a teacher by profession

I have never heard of streaming a screen over bluetooth and I highly doubt that the bandwidth would be enough for even a few frames per second. Are you sure that your TVs bluetooth is for streaming a screen and not for audio only?

I haven't read anything you wrote other than the title, but yes AMD is so much better, everything just works, nothing breaks with updates, no weird quirks,... It's just so much QoL you get by using AMD

Afaik the X11 standard says that this shouldn't be done and that workspaces should span all monitors (or something along the lines of that), thus most DEs don't do this (I've read this in the gnome issue tracker), don't ask me why cause I also hate this behaviour. Most window managers will do that however and luckily it's super easy to replace xfwm with another window manager. I use i3 inside xfce on my work laptop, this guide describes how to set it up with ease

Alt/Ctrl+___ are usually used by applications and shortcuts containing Super+___ are usually "reserved" (it's no rule or anything but basically no application uses Super) for the DE. That's why Super is probably the best mod key for shortcuts. You can ofc use Alt+___ as well, in that case your DE/WM will just take preference over the application and the shortcut will be handled by the DE/WM instead of the application

I've thought about trying that with my 7900xt, but never bothered actually doing it since everything I play runs on Linux. However I saw some posts about a project called something along the lines of pcie-passthrough-manager, that would be my starting point when trying that

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If I'd buy a new laptop these days I'd go with a framework. Other than that, buying a refurbished ThinkPad is always a great option and they generally run really good with Linux. As for support I wouldn't be too afraid, almost all hardware is supported these days as long as it's not something really obscure. The main thing worth checking is probably the WiFi card, I heard there are some that are a pain to set up, but I never ran into that. That being said most manufacturers won't officially support Linux and if they do they'll only support fedora or Ubuntu (speaking about big manufacturers, ofc there's system76 and stuff), but as I said I don't think I've encountered a laptop that straight up wasn't able to run Linux. Also if possible avoid Nvidia GPUs, they work, but can be a pain with drivers breaking on the regular

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There is a vim plugin called vimwiki which is pretty much what you're looking for I think, but if you're not using (neo)vim this won't make much sense I guess. Other than that I'd probably just set up a GitHub gist or repo with your doc stuff

But around the same time mozilla shortened the support cycles for their lts releases

The distro is usually not really the problem, the desktop environment usually takes up a decent amount of disk space and snap/appimage/flatpak packages compared to native packages from your package manager. At least when strictly speaking about the system and programs, personal data (videos, Images, music,...) is still the biggest storage hog. I don't think there is a good option, you could ofc shrink your windows partition and grow your Linux partition or just buy more storage, storage is really cheap these days. Additionally you can regularly clean up your system, delete the saved logs, delete unneeded files and uninstall unused packages/programs.

Maybe look into https://www.github.com/medusalix/xone there's also some useful links in there. But afaik Bluetooth controllers have pretty bad latency on Linux

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Im running a 7000 card on Arch since January (7900xt) without issues. For the first 1-2 months I had to install the git version of the drivers from a separate repo, but it still worked like a charm, a thousand times better than Nvidia (not only performance wise)

Why not stay on arch? I doubt the experience with VMS will differ between distros, just try it out. And as others have mentioned if your concern is anti cheat than vms might not work since some anti cheats can detect them. If it is not anti cheat than any distro will do, since pretty much anything not anti cheat is playable through proton these days. Another thing to consider is your GPU, keep in mind that if you want to use it for gaming in a VM you need to make a passthrough and you won't be able to use it for your Linux desktop (I think at least, there might be a way to unload the GPU at runtime, but it's probably complicated)

I don't think this was too strict, maybe I made it sound that way, but it was not like he forbid him using windows, it was just that he's using Linux, his son got his old laptop that was running Linux and they didn't have a windows license, so his son was running Linux as well. He's also doing fine on Linux and doesn't dislike it or anything, the only "problem" was that he wanted to play Fortnite which does not work on Linux. He's also getting along fine with Linux, especially on fedora where he doesn't need the Terminal.

What I wanted to say with that comment is that you can't make your kids to learn and use Linux like most of us probably do. For most people an operating system is still just some black magic on their computer that makes the browser or their games run, they don't care how it works or if it is secure or using the latest software. Most people just don't know and don't care what an OS even is and the same thing goes for kids imo

I might look into getting a refurbished ThinkPad or something before buying new hardware for this laptop, you'll probably get a lot more performance out of this than upgrading that old laptop

I'd just look for a used AMD card (or intel their drivers seem good, but I haven't seen many tests) that fits your specs

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IMO refurbished ThinkPad is the way for almost anything that is not gaming, working on huge code bases (without having a build server) or heavy graphical work like video editing or heavy photo editing. For most other things a decently new and well specced ThinkPad will do the job while still maintaining that feeling of a "new and snappy pc"

If you dual boot on separate drives it should be fine to use grub or systemd boot (or sth else), most Linux bootloaders can detect Windows installations and boot them. On the same drive it is fine as well, but windows tends to overwrite the bootloader with updates (which would be the same even when not booting Windows from the "Linux" bootloader).

As you said, just do it and try it out. In my experience basically any game runs on Linux these days, with some exceptions, most of them caused by anti cheat (like Fortnite, valorant and some others)

When I built my new PC (January last year) with an Intel 12th gen I first wanted to install Debian, cause I've used it basically ever since I've used Linux, but the kernel shipped with Debian did not support Intel 12th gen yet, so I was looking for another distro with up to date kernels/packages and stumbled upon manjaro, but quickly realised that it had some issues, than went for a manual arch install just for the sake of it, some stuff broke and I couldn't be bothered to fix it since I didn't do much on the system set anyways, I kept my home partition and installed endeavour and have been using it ever since on all my machines (with the exception of a short trip to fedora on my work laptop. It is just arch and basically any thing on the arch wiki applies, the only difference is some sane defaults and packages/services you'd most likely want to install and configure on your arch system anyways, they're just using the arch repos and have added a repo of their own with some "bundled" packages like DEs/WMs and AUR helpers

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This or add the grubx64.efi file to the trusted secure boot files

Yup that's probably what I meant. In that case idk. It's prbly still possible, but you might have to live reload the kernel, which is possible, but I guess there's a reason why basically no distro uses this feature

Unless you mess around with firewall commands/settings you don't understand firewalld should be sufficient.

That being said you might have to allow certain services at some point (openvpn) for example

I thought about this, but doesn't this make problems when working with other git repos in subfolders of your home directory?

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git.

In all honesty, I'd just write a bash script, potentially reading from a file listing all the dotfiles you want to back up, copy them into some directory and pushing to a git repo. Run that script on a systemd timer (or manually) and write another script deploying them into the correct locations

You do realise that's an April fools article? Ubuntu has an all snap packages desktop in testing right now and will most likely go down that route

I didn't even know pamac was a thing outside of manjaro, but yes ofc just use paru (or yay or sth), nowadays I rarely ever use pacman itself, but use paru for basically anything

Sounds pretty cool, though as others have mentioned it is pretty niche and I don't think I'd recommend doing this if your goal is earning money, if you're doing it out of personal interest as a hobby and because you think it is a fun project, absolutely go for it, no harm done in gaining some experience.

The idea of the side scroller would be, to give that application a compelling frontend and to "gamify" these tasks even more

This sounds a bit like hamster simulator, which we used in high school in our "programming" class, the site is in German, but you might the idea. But I can absolutely see how you can make this more compelling.

DE is desktop environment (like gnome, kde, xfce,...) And WM is window manager (like i3, sway, xmonad,...) Which is just a slim version of a de, they usually don't include things like guis for settings, file managers, ... and you just pick what you like and use that. The window manager is responsible for placing the windows in your workspace and most standalone wms are tiling, so they use your monitor space efficiently instead of putting floating windows all over the place. Basically the DE (or WM) is what you interact with most on your PC and a lot of beginners distrohop just to use a different DE when in reality you can just install the other de on your existing system, log out and select the new DE in your login screen.

The biggest differences between distros nowadays are their release cycles and their package managers (and the tepos they're using, like Ubuntu and Debian both use apt, but have separate repos)

And no you can't really change distro without reinstalling, you can change kernels tho, every distro will update their kernels from time to time and it's just a matter of install the new package and reboot into the new kernel.

With separate directories you probably mean partitions, which I'd also say it's advisable to have your /home partition separated from your / partition. That way if you ever have to reinstall or want to change distro you can just install into the root partition and afterwards add your old/home partition to /etc/fstab and keep all you're user data and configuration

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Lightweight DEs are cool and such, but if that's the thing you're saving on a lightweight WM (like xmonad, DWM or i3) will probably be the best bet