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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Today I was looking up how to do something in a game I’m playing, there were some videos about it, usual formula starting with “Sup guys!”, intros, ads for the channel, and fluff, “remember to press like”, oh and a bunch of videos that may or may not contain the answer.

    The answer could be written in 5 words, basically what key to press.


  • I don’t really care but I have a 512GB drive, a few extra GB of NVidia packages or whatever means nothing. I just enjoy the containerization and not having to give it my root password to install things. I’m not on an immutable distro and not having an app invade my core system (in whatever way the packager felt necessary) feels really good.

    I’m watching the immutable space though, once it matures a bit more might try it. openSuse has an elegant and simple take on it with BTRFS snapshots.







  • I’m looking at how many of the bugs and security issues are due to memory unsafe code - it’s A LOT and new ones come up almost daily. Humans are just bad at writing safe code because we are so fallible. So if we can eliminate a significant percentage of these bugs from the ground up that suddenly becomes very interesting. Besides personally after two decades of C and C++ (and debugging them) I find Rust much more pleasant and “ergonomic” to use.

    If we want an OS to be more secure by design we really have to begin at the most basic level. It might never be perfect but we can greatly reduce the attack surface. This is also why Microsoft is rewriting a number of vulnerable system components of Windows in Rust.

    So why is it important to the end-user? Well, if that’s Average Joe, maybe not but Redox OS right now is not mainstream, it is for us nerds who are interested in a safer OS and to see what can be done in that space. Maybe you don’t care and that’s fine, but some of us do and just like any post here, people can chose to skip over it or dive into the discussion, we can’t guarantee that all posts or projects are interesting to everyone :)


  • I got that problem on a ROG Strix G733ZM. The solution was to install “hdajackretask” (sometimes in an ALSA tools package, sometimes elsewhere), select “ALC285” and “show unconnected pins” and map pin 0x14 to “Internal Speaker” and pin 0x1e to "Internal speaker (LFE), then install boot override and reboot.

    Oh and after reboot I went to Configure Audio in KDE and selected a profile.

    It looks like this.

    I found it randomly online, don’t remember where. I wish I knew how those pins were discovered in the first place because it may well be different for different laptops and also I really want to know…

    Oh BTW, in case you need to know: My microphone was having an awful lot of static noise. The trick was to 1) reduce microphone volume to 50% and 2) enable the ladspa-rnnoise noise filter in pipewire (it was already in my distributions repo). I checked in Windows and it sends the mic through an “ASUS AI noise filter” - so they’ve basically saved money on the hardware and are doing the same thing.


  • I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”.

    I think he explains it pretty well, he even gives some examples and mentions there are many others. For a company to support such a large component for its commercial customers has a lot of work and verification we wouldn’t consider as end users. His comment also explains why you can’t just maintain a status quo with it and make an automatic build and forget…



  • Tumbleweed. I’ve used Linux since the nineties so I know my way around but I appreciate a sane default desktop install so I don’t have to waste time fiddling too much.

    People always talk about lean/fast/customizing, in reality most distros are performant and fairly lean/bloat free, it’s just how Linux is. TW is no exception and like all the others it’s easy to customize. I don’t use YAST.

    I can get comfortable almost any distro, though I prefer those with systemD+Wayland and Nvidia drivers in a repo so they update with the rest. I like rolling release, also considering the pace of Wayland and KDE development.

    For new users I always recommend Mint.



  • Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.

    Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.

    One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don’t know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly “rot” without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc…

    I also recommend Mint to new users. I don’t use Mint, nor do I use Arch.


  • That’s not exactly my impression from following the design conversations through the years. They’re more approaching decisions from the angle of what they think is best, their philosophy is to plainly ignore what others do and follow their own direction. Of course taking inspiration from Photoshop might sometimes be a good thing, if it doesn’t conflict with the GIMP way of doing things.

    I’ve noticed in recent years some newcomer devs have had discussions on how to design their contributions, mentioning Photoshop and other alternative ways and there were just conversations about the merits of the different approaches that could be taken and what would fit the GIMP best, without bias.

    Anyway, I wasn’t aware that GIMP UX suffers, I’ve never used anything else and am happy with it. It seem logical to me, obviously with fewer features than Photoshop but how much can a couple of guys do and they’ve had to refactor most of the GIMP for 3.0, but that’ll open up for a lot of functionality being added moving forward…