• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle
  • If Arch wants to make things more stable it would end up looking like Tumbleweed. If Arch wants to make things even more stable it would end up looking like Debian. Arch wants to be at the level of bleeding-edge that it is, and this is roughly what it looks like when you choose that.

    That’s actually a fair point and reading this does change my perspective a little. Tumbleweed gets me 95% to where Arch is, but a lot can go wrong in that last 5%. People who chose that understand that. I think we’re in agreement that those who genuinely need that last 5% bleeding edge are a very small group. Back about 10 years ago I was a massive Gentoo fanboy and I admit that Gentoo was my hobby, rather than simply a tool to get work done. I suspect a lot of Arch users are using it for the hobby aspect rather than necessity too, which is fine, I’ve been there myself. I sometimes wonder if there is a certain type of person who just gets bored when using something stable, and the constant threat/thrill of breakage gives them the drama they crave. I think that describes me fairly well in my Gentoo days.

    I still think Tumbleweed is the best compromise between “my grub blew up” and “my kernel is 2 years old”, especially when it comes to laptops and gaming. I’ve not really run into problems with a lack of software, but I do make good use of distrobox environments and flatpak. I’ll use OBS builds when only when necessary, namely Mullvad which can’t be run sandboxed.


  • Thanks for the Tumbleweed shout out. I’m always curious about Arch people’s opinion of Tumbleweed. Arch seems to cast a large shadow over it. But man do I swear by Tumbleweed. There is nothing in Tumbleweed that you can’t do in Arch, but I guess my main question is why would you want to? TW has all the benefits of Arch without the problems. Rather than updating each package individually, TW bundles all the new versions into a snapshot and tests that snapshot to ensure everything works within it. This way no random rogue update conflicts with anything else within that specific snapshot. As a user, when you update you just move from snapshot to snapshot. With Arch you can set up snapper rollback, but you better make sure you’ve partitioned everything correctly or you need to reinstall, TW will just enable rollback by default.

    Some people can’t seem to live without AUR, but I feel like distrobox is a much safer way to install software that isn’t available on your distro. If you need something that only comes as a .deb, you can do something like:

    distrobox create --image unbuntu:\

    And now you have a super minimal version of Ubuntu you can run your software inside of using the official packages instead of something someone else has hacked together/compiled. It also makes setting up custom dev environments trivial without littering your install with dependencies. I get the allure of AUR but I’d rather use distrobox or, if I must, flatpak.

    The main defense I see of Arch is "it’s not Arch’s fault, I did ". I guess with TW I don’t ever really worry about \ because the OS really just sort of takes care of itself. And even if I did do a stupid \ rollback is there to reverse my boneheaded idea instantly. I say all this after having experimented with Arch for a little bit now. It felt like taking a vacation: everything was new and different and you start thinking about how cool it would be to live here, but then you start to notice the little things, and after a while you just want to go home and sleep in your own bed.

    I have nothing against Arch but the constant defense of “Arch broke, but it’s not Arch’s fault” seems like a meme. Just read this comment section and take a shot for every person who says it. Meanwhile I’m over here on TW running the same versions of everything as Arch has and all I ever did was “zypper dup” and maybe 1-2 times a year “snapper rollback”. I don’t know if I sound defensive, maybe I do, but I feel like Tumbleweed is criminally underrated and a large portion of people on Arch would probably be better served by something like Tumbleweed judging by the forums/Reddit.


  • I think your experience is more to do with nvidia + Wayland than anything OS specific. Although I think other distros have done a lot of patching and coding around nvidia’s incompetence to get Wayland to work better and I think Arch doesn’t really do this sort of thing. Definitely seems like you unwittingly took on a project.

    I also use nvidia but I have no desire to move to Wayland any time soon. X11 works just fine unless you get into esoteric setups like multiple monitors with different refresh rates. My first boot into KDE with Arch was completely broken and I thought “okay, here comes the hard part” until I realized it was defaulting to Wayland. Changed it to X11 in sddm and it’s perfect. I use my ForceCompositionPipeline script on login and set kwin to force lowest latency and it’s smooth as butter.

    Wayland is the future but nvidia is definitely gatekeeping that future. I’ve got a 3080 in this machine that is going to last a pretty long time I suspect, but unless nvidia can manage to remove head from ass I see AMD in my future.


  • Ah, I see. That sounds like a completely fair scenario for using something a little more automated. Thanks for sharing.

    Arch seems fine and I’ll probably stay here for at least another few months, out of laziness if nothing else. If I’m not completely happy I’ll probably end up back on Tumbleweed which is my usual daily, but I can’t say I’ve had any problems that would drive me back immediately.


  • I guess I used a whole lot of words to say what you just did in just a few sentences. Thanks for summarizing my thoughts. Just out of curiosity though, why EndeavourOS? See this is also something that tripped me up. I see quite a few Arch spinoffs that all claim to be easier versions which naturally lead me to believe Arch itself was complicated. Which again is probably a community/communication problem and has nothing to do with the OS itself.


  • The Gentoo install isn’t hard, it’s very methodical. But it is a much more in-depth process than Arch, that’s for sure. Granted these days Gentoo seems to only do Stage 3 installs which is half the system in a tarball anyway. The way people spoke about getting through the Arch install I was thinking it would be a step-by-step process like Gentoo is. It’s really not.


  • That’s exactly how I installed it. The install media boots to cli. You partition your disks, install the boot loader, add a user, and then pacman does the rest. I didn’t really find this all that “hands on”. Sure it’s not the same as clicking Next on an installer but none of it is very complicated at all. Don’t get me wrong, as someone else replied, being needlessly difficult is stupid. But when people are saying “advanced users only, DIY, etc” I’m thinking like a Gentoo install or something. I was surprised how simple it was with all the hype and evangelizing that goes on around Arch. It’s a good package manager, AUR seems interesting even if I don’t really need it. But you must admit the hype is a bit overboard.


  • Yeah I get that. I’m running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn’t find it hard to install, but as you say I’ve been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it’s people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about “getting through the install” like it’s some rite of passage.

    I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I’m not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it’s not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.

    Just to reiterate my position, I’m not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I’m not fully convinced it’s deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that’s warranted because it’s so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my “learning in a VM” distro.


  • I know you’re making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I’m running it right now. I was told it’s a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you’re doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.

    …and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It’s literally the same as every other distro. “pacman -Syu” is no different from “zypper dup” in Tumbleweed. I don’t get the hype. I mean it’s fine. I don’t have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it’s annoying to change distros. It’s working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless “arch btw” attitude made me think it would be something special.

    I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That’s DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it’s just Linux and it’s no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.


  • I don’t know about glasses but the various Night Mode applications help my eyes a lot at night. I use a soft white bulb (4200k) and match my screens to the same temp and I have noticed much less eye strain/pain. Whether that helps sleep or not I have no idea, but it’s certainly more comfortable on my 4k tv/monitor that wants to blast 800 nits into my face at 11:00pm. I use an application called Iris on both macOS (when connected to the tv) and Linux (always connected to the tv) to adjust the color temp and also the brightness because this tv simply doesn’t get dark enough on it’s own without messing with color or contrast. You can offset the reddish hue by increasing the green tint, which is a color that doesn’t mess with your eyes or ruin your night vision.


  • I think you’re missing the point. Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don’t need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business. I don’t know why you think SUSE is unable to “create or maintain a Linux distribution,” they’re one of the oldest distros out there. SLES and SLED are extremely well regarded, and SUSE is doing further work/research into immutable server distros for the future. They certainly can “create a Linux distribution”. Oracle has a mixed history but certainly anyone could view them as successful overall.

    No, what they’re actually doing is creating a clone for the downstream packagers so they aren’t suddenly cutoff by Red Hat’s (IBM’s) decision. They’re trying to give the community back what was lost. A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests. They’re not really doing anything other than restoring things to the way they were. Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn’t looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don’t really understand your complaint there.

    I mean, really, the whole Linux ethos is community. These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.


  • Sorry if I wasn’t clear about that. My essential thinking with the NAS was: Cloud is nice, but how vulnerable are you if the Cloud provider turns evil?

    With Apple and Google, you’re basically screwed and there is nothing you can do.

    With a NAS, you own the server. You don’t rent it. You own it. You can hold the thing that stores all your private data in your own two hands.

    So what if the data center I host my backups on becomes evil? Well, then they find a bunch of encrypted blobs they can’t access while I move my backups to a different host. I’m not sure even the server hosting you’re talking about is as secure as that. What if they become evil? How much access do they have to your data? All “evil” takes is a single policy change from a suit who has no idea about actual tech. It happens all the time.

    Maybe that comes off as paranoid, but with all the data breaches and enshittification happening lately I feel much more secure having my data literally in my own two hands and a built-in defense against evil policy changes/government overreach for anything that must be hosted externally. Coupled with Tailscale for remote access I believe this as secure as you can get.

    And again, Synology was my choice for ease of use, but you can build a capable NAS from an old Optiplex on ebay for 200 bucks + drives.


  • I don’t really understand your comment.

    PC breaks? House burns down? My data is encrypted in a datacenter. My account gets cancelled? My data is on my NAS.

    I don’t store much data on my PCs or devices at all. Any data that is there I treat as transient. The NAS acts as permanent storage. So if the devices die, I can quite literally restore them to the state they were in within hours of their death from the NAS. If my house is hit by a tornado and my NAS dies, my data is safely encrypted in an external location. I’ve lost nothing. If my NAS, devices, and Wasabi’s data center are all hit by tornadoes at the same time we have bigger problems to worry about. If that ridiculous scenario happened your server would not be immune either.

    I’m not seeing the advantage of your rented server vs having backups in the cloud. Is it because the server will keep running? But if you’ve lost your devices in a fire you still can’t access it whether it’s running or not. When you replace your device you can then connect to your server, but I can simply download my data again. HyperBackup Explorer is available for every platform and can do a full restore back to a NAS, or individual file downloads for anything else.


  • I feel like JRPGs completely changed what an RPG video game is. They are watered down compared to the original cRPGs from the 80s and 90s. Then the “westernized” version of JRPGs watered it down even more. The old cRPGs were so big and so complex. OG Baldur’s Gate, yes, but also Wizardry and Ultima too. I enjoyed Dragon Age because I liked the story, but I’d say Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 are more direct descendants of the old cRPG days (DA 2 & 3 bear no resemblance to cRPGs at all). I think Dragon Age games are good modern RPGs everyone should play but Baldur’s Gate 3, imo, is a proper cRPG straight out of the 80s with 2023 graphics.

    I’m so thankful this game is proving to be so popular. Maybe people are discovering (re-discovering) what RPGs used to be, and what makes them so great.


  • I felt this “prison” very strongly with iCloud. Don’t get me wrong, I think iCloud functions exceptionally well. It’s an extremely well integrated cloud and works seamlessly with all Apple products. It’s just that after a while I start to realize just how much of my life was sitting on Apple servers and what a dependency I had on Apple, hoping they are the good guy (narrator: they were not, in fact, the good guy) or at least, not as bad as the next best option (I feel Google has legitimately become evil at this point). I was constantly reading about security and getting myself worried, etc.

    Finally I just bought a NAS. Synology is my current choice, but use whatever you prefer. A NAS can replicate anything the “cloud” can do, it’s faster, it’s safer, it doesn’t rely on the good graces of any cloud provider. YOU hold the access to your data. As it should be. I still use the “cloud” for my backups with HyperBackup sending encrypted backups to Wasabi, but that is a different matter. Even if Wasabi decided to be evil, my data is encrypted before it ever leaves the NAS and Wasabi could never see my raw data like Apple/Google can.

    The only thing holding people back from this, I guess, is price. Apple charges $0.99/month for 500gigs, while just the NAS itself with no drives will cost you several hundred. But man, not being worried about the latest cloud drama, government overreach, privacy scandals, etc is worth every cent. A Synology NAS with Tailscale is just about the safest place to put my data. All the Snyology mobile apps even pass the gf test for features and ease of use. I recommend a small 2-bay NAS to everyone I can.

    Turn off the cloud, and take your data back.


  • I see people say they turn off notifications about updates and just do it once a week, but man, if I open Discover and see 30 updates sitting there I cannot ignore it. I get real twitchy about it. So my update routine is daily. Every morning with my fresh cup of coffee I run “zypper dup”. If all goes well, I start my day. If all does not go well, I rollback to the previous state with snapper, and then start my day. Using snapper takes about 30 seconds, and frankly nvidia is the only reason I can remember ever having to use rollback.

    Tumbleweed is really painless to maintain, even if you update every day. You don’t have to update every day, but my particularly specialized Update OCD doesn’t allow me to wait a week, it seems.


  • The reason is because of 5 years of nonstop propaganda from the GOP and tax payer funded expedition into Hunter Biden (the probe began in 2018). And after all that talk, all the lies and misinformation, all of your money they spent in their retaliatory attack on Hunter Biden, they come up with two misdemeanor tax counts and a minor gun charge. Yeah, sure. He did it, he deserves whatever the consequences are for it. But what was uncovered was not worth the amount of time and money, and lets face it, propaganda, the GOP put into it. I promise they spent more money trying to uncover something, anything, Hunter did than the $100,000 he owes the IRS.

    So for me it’s not so much that Hunter doesn’t deserve to be charged, it’s the means by which the charges we filed and the extreme amount of wasted time and money and poisoning the well the GOP has done to arrive as such minor charges.


  • What I’m taking issue with is essentially the same thing that is getting Reddit into hot water. Spez is acting like all the content on Reddit is exclusively his. And legally, it probably is, since it exists on his servers. Now if you extrapolate that out to Meta on ActivityHub, any instance that federates with them immediately puts all of your content directly onto Meta’s servers. Once it’s in their possession, it’s legally theirs to do with as they please. If they want to pull a Facebook or Reddit, using your data, they can with no way for you to opt-out. Sure, nothing is stopping people from doing it already, but Meta does not have your best interest in mind. Ever. They’ve shown it again and again. So I think people are preemptively wanting to cut off this spigot of user data to Meta because their abuse of it is a matter of when, not if. Any other company might deserve the benefit of the doubt, but Meta? We know who they are already.

    Also, as I said elsewhere, Meta could already use a bot to scrape Lemmy instances, but you can’t sell a bot to investors. But you can sell a platform. Meta will build a slick platform to sell to investors and sit back while federation fills up their instance with data which they’ll turn around and sell the same way they do on Facebook. And the insidious part of it is that they’ll take your data even though you didn’t use their platform. Right now I can decide not to be data mined by Meta simply by not using Facebook. To do that here if instances start federating your data onto Meta servers, you’d have to not use ActivityPub at all. Either that or the fediverse fractures into Meta and not-Meta, which also sucks.

    This is really a lot more than simply setting up an RSS feed.


  • The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they’d have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn’t on board with this, it’ll cause a huge fracture to form.

    Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they’ve unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.


  • Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don’t have the power you think we do.

    What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They’ll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn’t even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it’s Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It’s like an absolute wet dream for them. They don’t even have to coax people to use their own platform!

    Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you’ve ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.

    Edit: And it’s even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.