I wish they had a mastodon account... they have https://mozilla.social, but they don't have an account there... which is bizarre.

They do have an account for Firefox Nightly and Firefox Dev Tools account though.

Would to see them publish stable releases via this apt repository as well.

I wonder if it is because of the various outages on both instance and the new "dead instance" detection, lemmy.ml has temporarily stopped receiving updates?

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

And that's exactly what happened in your case David. Which is why I'm so happy (also because I fixed the tools from an author I like and already had the books at home :-P):

Really detailed and cool response from the kernel developer. I also found the use of the recent BPF feature to provide a workaround until a proper kernel fix lands really interesting.

No word on how long it will get software support though. With everyone else going to 5 or 7 years of updates, Motorola's typical 2 year support cycle is a huge negative.

Headline is a bit misleading... This is just Tails updating to the latest LTS kernel, which has the security fix (which many other distributions have done).

This update is a good thing, but the headline made it sound like the Tails project was contributing a fix to the kernel.

Anyway, thanks for sharing.

Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn't too bad (using docker)... much more straight-forward than I feared.

My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person's profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven't posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.

Likewise, my "#explore" tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I've recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts... again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.

Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It's great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.

I think this is the author being humble. jmmv is a long time NetBSD and FreeBSD contributor (tmpfs, ATF, pkg_comp), has worked as a SRE at Google, and has been a developer on projects such as Bazel (build infrastructure). They probably know a thing or two about performance.

Regarding the overall point of the blog, I agree with jmmv. Big O is a measure of efficiency at scale, not a measure of performance.

As someone who teaches Data Structures and Systems Programming courses, I demonstrate this to students early on by showing them multiple solutions to a problem such as how to detect duplicates in a stream of input. After analyzing the time and space complexities of the different solutions, we run it the programs and measure the time. It turns out that the O(nlogn) version using sorting can beat out the O(n) version due to cache locality and how memory actually works.

Big O is a useful tool, but it doesn't directly translate to performance. Understanding how systems work is a lot more useful and important if you really care about optimization and performance.

Not a fan of the XPS line (expensive, not great thermals, and meh port selection) and I have never own one (though I've seen others with them). That said, I have a few of their Latitudes (currently using Latitude 7420) and one Precision and those run Linux really well.

One thing most people don't realize is that Dell does support Linux (ie. Ubuntu) beyond the XPS line and you can buy Latitudes or Precisions with Linux support OOTB. Additionally, Dell ships firmware updates via LVFS on their XPS, Latitude, and Precision lines. The support isn't perfect, but I have been happy with using Dell hardware and Linux for over a decade now.

PS. You can get really good deals via the Dell Outlet (my current laptop is refurbished from there), and you can usually find a number of off-lease or 2nd systems or parts on Ebay (very similar to Thinkpads).

FYI, Ubuntu/Pop!_OS have already pushed out updates.

Just to note... I'm not the author of the blog post, I just shared it b/c I thought it was an interesting story. I don't think the author is on Lemmy.

According to Debian Releases

Debian announces its new stable release on a regular basis. Users can expect 3 years of full support for each release and 2 years of extra LTS support.

So about 5 years, though it is not clear how well this works in practice (how much is actually updated and how well supported).

From the Debian Wiki - LTS:

Companies using Debian who benefit from this project are encouraged to either help directly or contribute financially. The number of properly supported packages depends directly on the level of support that the LTS team receives.

I think this is sort of what the article is pointing towards... long-term support really depends on commercial support, as volunteers are more likely to work on the current or more recent thing than go back and backport or update older things. If corporate funding dries up (which it appears to be doing), then while volunteers will still contribute some to long-term linux distributions, it won't be at the same level it currently is with commercial support.

I think this is missing an article link: https://www.phoronix.com/review/downfall

Downfall, or as Intel prefers to call it is GDS: Gather Data Sampling. GDS/Downfall affects the gather instruction with AVX2 and AVX-512 enabled processors. At least the latest-generation Intel CPUs are not affected but Tigerlake / Ice Lake back to Sandy Bridge is confirmed to be impacted. There is microcode mitigation available but it will be costly for AVX2/AVX-512 workloads with GATHER instructions in hot code-paths and thus widespread software exposure particularly for HPC and other compute-intensive workloads that have relied on AVX2/AVX-512 for better performance.

Rough day for CPU makers...

Update: Of course there is a dedicated page for it: https://downfall.page/

This looks incredibly cool and fun. Would be interested trying to re-write some of the games myself when I have some free time.

Twitter and Reddit may have only lost a few million users to Mastodon and Lemmy so far, but these are nation-sized numbers, comparable to what Scandinavia is to the United States of America. The incumbents have allowed the fediverse to reach critical mass. It's only gonna get bigger, but it already works well enough that I've no need for any other social network. It's nicer here.

This resonates with me. Although they are still lacking for the long tail of small niche communities, Lemmy and Mastodon now have enough people and content that I rarely find myself going to Reddit or Twitter. The fediverse is not perfect and there is a lot of room for growth, but it is now large enough to be viable and hopefully sustainable.

Yes, most of the major distributions have package updates with the fix. A few people have mentioned updates for Arch, Debian, and RedHat already.

Ubuntu released an update yesterday as well:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glibc/2.35-0ubuntu3.4

Ubuntu derivatives such as Pop!_OS should have also received this update, along with the X11 patches.

I can recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I've read multiple times. I can also recommend Linus' autobiography Just For Fun.

You can also consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar... though ESR can be a bit much.

That said, here are some random articles I've saved that you might be interested in:

• The History of Red Hat
• The future of open source is still very much in flux
• IBM, Red Hat and Free Software: An old maddog’s view
• The early days of Linux
• The Strange Birth and Long Life of Unix

Kinda disappointing as it shows a lack of care and support for Linux, but hopefully the fix will come out soon.

I look forward to seeing the Linux numbers.

I read that, but I don't know if that means they will publish stable releases via the same repository. That just sounds like the packages themselves will end up being in those channels (which makes sense, nightly becomes beta, which becomes a release, which ends up as esr). It doesn't necessarily mean this apt repository will be a release channel itself.

That said, there is the Mozilla Team PPA.

Yeah, I already noticed this in the last few days... my texts now show two checkmarks and a lock... at least when I text another Android user.

Could be what communities you are subscribed to. I run a small instance with about 3ish users, and here are my stats after about 3 months as well:

9.5G ./pictrs
12G	 ./postgres
8.0K ./lemmy-ui

What version of lemmy are you using? A recent update also introduced some space savings in the database (I think).

You could consider using something like jmp.chat. It delivers SMS via XMPP (aka jabber), so you could self-host a XMPP server and receive SMS that way. It also has some support for MMS (group chat, media), but my experience with it was mixed (I used it for about 3-4 years).

+1 AntennaPod. Been using it for almost a decade :]

Seems like dpkg failed in configuring things in a previous update? Perhaps it was interrupted. You can try to run the configuration process again with:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

See if that helps.

It's Mozilla's mastodon instance: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-social-mastodon-private-beta-announcement/

There is a matrix chat: https://matrix.to/#/#lemmy-admin-support-topics:discuss.online

It's not a gnome extension, but you can use tdrop to implement this functionality. This a shell script that lets you make any program a drop down. Once you have the command you want to run, you can then add key bindings to gnome to toggle it.

Familiarity (my client distro is Pop and is based on Ubuntu), and I like the LTS life cycle (predictable).

I do uninstall snaps, though, and mostly just use Docker for things. I could use Debian, but again, for me it was about familiarity and support (a lot more Ubuntu specific documentation).

If you suspect that the issue is journald, you can use the following command to check how much space it is using:

journalctl --disk-usage

Rather than periodically running journalctl --vacuum-size=500 to free up space, you can just limit the journal by adding the following to a new file such as /etc/systemd/journald.conf.d/size.conf:

[Journal]
SystemMaxUse=512M

This will limit the journal from using more than 512MB. That said, if journald is filling up fast, then something is spamming your logs and you could run journalctl -a -f to get a sense of what is being written to your logs.

According to Android Authority

HMD is also offering welcome extras like microSD support, a 3.5mm port, an IP52 rating, and a dedicated Google Assistant button. We’re glad to see microSD support and a headphone jack in particular as these features are rare on modern phones.

You can escape the :

URLS  = https\://foo.example.com
URLS += https\://bar.example.com
URLS += https\://www.example.org

POSTs are how federation works (ActivityPub is a Push-based protocol). When you "subscribe" to a community on say lemmy.ml, you are telling it to periodically send you updates about that community. This comes in the form of POSTS.

As to the frequency of the POSTs, I can imagine something like lemmy.ml having a lot of activity that it needs to inform your instance of (new votes, new comments, new posts, etc)... but I'm not sure if one request per second is reasonable or not.

You can try booting into Rescue Mode (instead of getting into Emergency Mode):

https://ostechnix.com/how-to-boot-into-rescue-mode-or-emergency-mode-in-ubuntu-18-04/

That said, once in Emergency Mode, it may be possible to mount the disk with the root partition and then continue the boot sequence as noted in the article above (simply exit the emergency shell).

Hopefully that will get the machine booted and you can SSH. Otherwise, you can at least examine the machine in Emergency Mode and perhaps change the /etc/fstab file on the root partition to ignore the partitions from the failed hard drive.

You can use strace to track all open system calls, which should give you an idea of what files are being opened.

To do this, you just need to put strace before the command you normally run. It would be something like this:

strace java ...

This is really disappointing and seems to underscore the feeling that RedHat/IBM is abandoning (or pulling back from) the Linux desktop.

I think the frustrating thing is that we are in a position where we are so dependent on one company to fund and bankroll so much of the ecosystem (particularly when it comes to the desktop). FOSS really needs to figure out a sustainable way of funding and support developers who work on infrastructure and background systems (ie. beyond apps or games which have high visibility).

Yeah, initially I didn't plan on going, but my sister took her kids and really enjoyed it... she said it reminded her of her time living in New York's Chinatown.

I subsequently took my family and we all really liked it too. It's not groundbreaking or world changing, but it was a solid and enjoyable film. It is definitely an immigrant story and about how to live up to the expectations of those who sacrificed so much for you, while also finding your own way and living on your own terms, which deeply resonated with me.

Oh, just to be clear... I'm not the author of the blog post. I just shared the link :]

Pretty sad state of affairs :|

It's not a terrible idea... I actually use the mentioned Space Bar and really like it (makes me miss i3 less :)).

It really depends on the hardware and your use cases (ie. workflow).

I have a laptop (Dell Latitude 7420) with an integrated GPU (all Intel Tiger Lake), and I regularly get between 8 - 10 hours of battery life with just using terminals and web browsers (Firefox).

On GNOME, you will want to take advantage of the power profiles. With Pop, you can take advantage of their power management system. Otherwise, you can use something like TLP to minimize your power usage.

Moreover, if you are watching videos, then you want to make sure it is GPU accelerated and using the builtin hardware codecs rather than relying on the CPU to do the decoding.

I think that 12 hours on Linux on Intel/AMD is a stretch... but 8-10 hours is achievable and realistic (from my experience anyway).