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Chobbes,

I got one recently too, and it’s already helping me with this. I hope you find joy in it :). I never buy myself anything so I was worried I’d regret it… but I really like it so far.

Chobbes,

What’s so great about the gmail app (aside from the 2FA thing you mentioned?) Personally, I’m reasonably happy with the iOS mail app (I mean, it’s bad, but it does its job and it doesn’t advertise to me, so I guess that’s a win)… But I guess I do most of my emailing on mu4e.

Chobbes, (edited )

The mail app does not support push notifications for gmail and also does not support IMAP IDLE (my naive understanding is that IDLE keeps a socket open and potentially the radio as a result which would impact battery life), so it fetches emails on a timer. AFAIK the only ways to get push notifications is with iCloud email and with an exchange server. I know you used to be able to set gmail up as an exchange server account on iOS, but I’m not certain if gmail will still pretend to be an exchange server these days. This is probably my biggest complaint with the mail app — like I said, it’s not great :), but it’s good enough for my purposes right now.

Wanting to improve my Linux skills after 17 months of daily driving Linux

I’ve been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. I’ve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could...

Chobbes, (edited )

I really do recommend doing a Gentoo install at some point, because I think you would learn a lot from it. It’s a really nice experience and a well put together distro. The compiling is potentially not as bad as you think, but there are a couple of packages that are notoriously painful to compile (there are prebuilt binaries available for some of the painful ones if desired too). You’d probably get a decent amount out of an Arch install too. Arch isn’t my cup of tea, but lots of people like it and it’d be quicker to get started than Gentoo. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for you at this stage but eventually you should check out NixOS too! You can even try the package manager out on any distro you want. NixOS is really interesting, but it does things a bit different from other distros, and if you’ve done an Arch / Gentoo install it’ll be interesting to see what NixOS does in contrast.

Other things to mess with… You mention partitioning, so make sure to check out LVM, and also consider reading a bit about filesystems. Maybe give btrfs a go :).

I wouldn’t worry about daily driving either Gentoo or Arch. Once you have them set up you’ll probably be fine.

Chobbes,

I don’t think it’s that clear cut to be honest. More code doesn’t mean the package benefits more from optimizations at all, and even if that were true you might care more about the performance of the kernel or various small libraries that are used by a lot of programs as opposed to how fast some random application that depends on qt-WebKit is:

Chobbes,

I don’t really know how I feel about steam or valve. I’m kind of nervous about how dominant they are… like it would really suck if they suddenly disappeared or started acting more maliciously. I get why people like the promises from GOG and stuff. But that said… Valve and Steam do so much good stuff and I really respect all of the Linux work they’ve done. I don’t really trust them long term, but they seem to currently be in the position where open platforms benefit them and they’re leaning into that… and that’s actually really cool.

Honestly, the fact that the steam deck isn’t locked down and you can install games from other sources, or even blow away the operating system and put windows on it is kind of incredible and I’m really glad they’ve done things like that. I’m not sure how relevant it would be to these lawsuits, but I feel like the lack of a walled garden gives them a significant brownie point for me. I hope they keep doing awesome stuff like this and don’t completely squander any good will I have towards them.

Regardless, I hope small developers can get a better cut on steam in the future… 30% seems pretty steep. It’s probably worth it for the value that steam adds, but I could see it being juuuust enough that some small game developers can’t quite eek out a living on a niche game.

Chobbes,

I hate when people ask me this because either it makes me think about how I didn’t get to what I wanted on the weekend, or how I was depressed over the weekend… On a good day the problem is that I mostly like to keep my hobbies and personal life to myself. I guess I’m probably hard to get to know 😅.

Chobbes,

He was far from the worst as far as hostility since he was polite and all

It’s good to know there are still decent people in this world 🥰

Chobbes,

I hope you gave them a good yelp review!

At the end of the day, though, if I was desperate enough to rob a store I’d probably be pretty polite about it (as far as you can be considered polite in that situation, I guess!) Like, the cashier doesn’t want anything to do with this, I wouldn’t want to bother them needlessly. I hope they got the help they needed at the end of the day, and I hope it wasn’t too bad of an experience for you!

Chobbes, (edited )

I think Arch kind of deserves the hate it gets. I love barebones distros and have been a gentoo user (now on NixOS), and I’ve used arch a fair bit too… I just don’t feel like Arch is a well maintained distribution. There’s all sorts of little things that they can’t seem to get right that other distros do, like that silly issue where they won’t update the arch keyring first, so if you haven’t updated in a while it breaks. In my experience there’s a million little paper cuts like this and I’ve just been kind of unimpressed. If it works for you that’s great! I’ve just been disappointed with it. I get the niche that it fills as the binary “from scratch” rolling release distro, but I think the experience with it is a little rough. I’ve found gentoo more user friendly, which probably sounds bizarre if you haven’t used gentoo, but ignoring compiling stuff, gentoo does an excellent job of not breaking things on updates, and it’s much easier to pin and install specific versions of packages and stuff.

Chobbes, (edited )

This was still an issue maybe a year ago, but I think they fixed the keyring issue finally in the past few months. This is not my only complaint with arch, but it’s frustrating that something this simple went unresolved for so many years. I honestly don’t understand why people love pacman. Downgrading packages is a pain, and there’s no way to install and pin a specific version of a package. I guess they want to keep it really minimal, but I find that this really gets in the way. All in all it was a death by a thousand papercuts for me! I won’t be going back to it. If other people like it that’s fine by me, I can understand the appeal, but I just find it frustrating personally.

Edit: …archlinux.org/…/ad8698e96c423dfc68405b547f310f2e… this fix is kind of disappointing too to be honest…

Chobbes,

I mean… I would consider anywhere that you might download software from sensitive. This isn’t really a smart move. And sure, the mirror’s page they link to uses https, but if the regular site doesn’t a man-in-the-middle could change the url and serve an official looking malicious version… I wouldn’t consider putting your users at an elevated risk when it’s relatively easy to set up TLS “a smart move”.

Chobbes,

Who says it hasn’t happened? :P

If it hasn’t I would just assume that Slackware isn’t a big enough target and that anybody in the position to man-in-the-middle a large number of people would have better targets. I mean, to be clear TLS is not a silver bullet either, but it goes a long way for ensuring the integrity of the data you receive over the internet in addition to hiding the contents.

Distros usually sign their ISOs with PGP as well (Slackware does this), so it’s a good idea to verify those signatures as it’s a second channel that you can use to double check the validity of the ISO (but I’m not sure many people actually do this). Of course, anybody can make PGP keys so you have to find out which key is actually supposed to be signing the iso, otherwise an attacker can just make a bogus key and tell you that that’s the Slackware signing key (on the official website too, because it doesn’t use tls!). The web of trust arguably helps some (though this can be faked as well unless you actually participate in key signing parties or something), and you can hope that the Slackware public key is mirrored in several places that you trust so you can compare them… but at the end of the day for most people all trust in the distribution comes from the domain name, and if you don’t have TLS certificates you’re kind of setting up a weak foundation of trust… Maybe it will be fine because you’re not a big enough target for somebody to bother, but in this day and age it’s pretty much trivial to set up TLS certificates and that gets you a far better foundation… why take the risk? Why is it smart to unnecessarily expose your users to more risk than necessary?

Chobbes,

I think even if you’re tech-savvy you can have issues with Arch tbh. I don’t think the distro is without merit — a minimal rolling release binary distribution is clearly something people want… But I’m not sure Arch does a great job of being that (for me, at least), and I’ve personally found pacman and the official packages to be kind of lacking (keyring update issue that they’ve maybe finally fixed, installing specific versions of packages / pinning specific versions / downgrading packages are either not supported or not well supported, immediately removing kernel modules on upgrade, even if the currently running kernel may need them, etc…). It just doesn’t feel very polished in my experience and for my use cases (clearly it works for some people!), and that’s what has driven me away from Arch personally. I think a lot of this stems from Arch’s philosophy of being aggressively minimal, which is maybe fair enough… but I don’t think it’s for everybody.

Chobbes,

This was the lesson I was hoping somebody would give. Green tea shouldn’t be “really strong” if it is you’re probably over-steeping it or using scalding water.

I like tea, but I don’t really like caffeine. It’s a conundrum :(. I wish I could have my sencha every day without it making me feel like a stranger in my own mind.

Chobbes,

Whoa, really? I feel like every attempt at a neuromancer adaptation is just doomed. I’d love to see it happen some day, though.

Chobbes,

I bounced off the first Deus Ex a few times… the first mission is just kind of dull.

Chobbes,

It took me forever to want to play Skyrim because the beginning is so dull. Not really a fan of the Oblivion / Fallout 3 / Skyrim openings. I can’t remember Fallout 4… I feel like it was a little faster.

Chobbes,

Yeah for sure! It’s not surprising that it’s a cult classic at all. But ugh, after figuring out key bindings and going through the tutorial I would always lose interest by the time I started liberty island. Deus Ex just feels clunky at first.

Chobbes,

I like the shallot turrets.

Chobbes,

To be honest, I think this can also depend a lot on the climate that you’re from. In cold and dry climates you don’t necessarily get as smelly. When I moved to a hot and humid place it was like “okay, showers are a multiple times a day thing here, I guess.” Even when staying inside and loafing about in air conditioning it was noticeably worse. There’s a number of factors that change from person to person too… some people are greasier, some people are stinkier. You should probably shower and deodorant up whenever you’re going to leave the house and be near other people as a rule of thumb, but I think a fair number of people don’t shower every day and can get by okay.

Chobbes,

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It could use energy proportional to the energy that could be gained by moving an object somewhere.

Chobbes,

Watching a play through would be kind of terrible to be honest. It would really spoil the game (more so than pretty much any other), and I just don’t think it would be fun to watch a play through of at all.

Hope you have a good time with it! It’s pretty cool and it’s probably one of the games that I have thought about the most after playing it. There’s a lot of really interesting sci-fi concepts in it. That said I will warn you that while I think this game is very good and very worth your time (especially since it’s a fairly unique experience), I do think that the game is really hyped up by people… and I’m on the fence about whether it deserves it. It’s a little rough around the edges and clunky in ways that detract from the experience a bit in my opinion. If you go in understanding that it’s going to be a little clunky and awkward I think you’ll have a better time — it’s not a perfectly polished masterpiece, but it is an interesting piece of work that’s something you won’t really find elsewhere.

Chobbes,

These things are so awesome. I had one once and it’s burned into my memory far more than it should be.

Chobbes,

Calling NixOS the new arch is needlessly insulting lol.

Chobbes,

I would disagree. I feel like nixpkgs has pretty much everything, more so than any other distro in my experience. The differences in how NixOS work can make it a little weird to run something off the cuff, but steam-run has your back in those situations.

Chobbes,

It’s the probably the best distro for dev work imo. Nix in general is really nice for development. Games work fine — you can just install steam or putrid or whatever, and you can run normal binaries with steam-run.

Chobbes,

I think it depends on the user :P. NixOS is pretty hard to get into because the documentation isn’t great… but I’d argue it’s one of the most user friendly ways to configure a system, and it can be really nice to copy configurations from other people.

Chobbes,

I don’t think it’s an apt comparison of the distros, but I agree that both have a cult-like following. I also feel like there’s a bit of a difference in the evangelism of both distros… I don’t really understand why people evangelize Arch, and my impression is largely that (1) people mention that they’re on Arch so others know they might be having different configuration issues, or less charitably (2) people mention Arch as a weird brag because it’s seen as an “advanced” distro. In contrast people seem to recommend nix and NixOS because it solves a frankly ridiculous amount of real problems that people experience with development environments, package managers, and system management. I.e., we bring up nix and NixOS because we care about you and think it might actually be useful for you. I don’t really want to dictate what other people use or brag about using nix / NixOS, but people complain to me about different problems constantly that are just resolved by nix, so it feels wrong not to mention it. It’s frustrating because it definitely makes you seem like you’re in a cult, but it really is the right level of abstraction for package management, and as a result it solves so many problems and little frustrations.

Honestly, it’s kind of frustrating to watch people not use nix. I have nix set up for the projects at work because I got tired of them not building and people randomly changing dependencies and it taking 3-4 weeks for somebody new to the project to get the thing to compile. Everybody new that I have set up with nix gets the project working instantly, and everybody else ends up spending weeks flailing around with installation. Unfortunately, I’ve given up on recommending people use nix for the project because a number of senior people have decided that they don’t like nix and there’s a bizarre amount of drama whenever I recommend a newbie just use it to get set up (even though it has always worked out better for them). It’s just not worth the headache for me to stick my neck out, but I feel bad and it’s really frustrating how literally everybody else takes 3-4 weeks to get up and running without nix :|.

Chobbes,

For sure! I don’t think we’re actually in disagreement at all, just the limits of text communication :). NixOS is certainly less important to me and I don’t really care if people use it or not at all (it’s nice but there’s enough differences that you have to be aware of that it’d be frustrating to some people — even if ultimately those differences are something that can be worked around… If you’re well versed in nix and Linux NixOS is kind of a no brainer, though). Nix for development (or something like it) is legitimately enough of a game changer to warrant some of the evangelism in my opinion, particularly since as you mention it’s pretty much free to try on any (non-windows) system, and adding nix to a project doesn’t harm non-nix users (more than they’re already harmed anyway, haha). I’ll admit that I worry about how “nix ugly and unintuitive” seems to be a huge problem for adoption, and frankly I don’t blame people for bouncing off of nix (I bounced off of nix in 2011 or so and didn’t come back to it for like 10 years — though it was a bit of a brain worm nagging at me the whole time). That said I think the impression people have of nix being this horrible and completely ugly language (an impression I’ve had in the past as well) is also somewhat untrue. The nix language itself isn’t so bad, but the expectation is for it to just be yaml because “I just want to list dependencies”, which is fair and it might be nice if we had some better abstractions to make that more clear. All of the phases in a nix derivation are confusing and poorly documented, and some operations on attribute sets should probably just have nice special syntax instead of these fancy update fixpoints that the average developer isn’t going to understand… ultimately I’m a little unclear on how much of this is “the nix language sucks and needs to be thrown out” and how much is “we really need a better introduction to what this is and how to use it, especially with some beginner examples and best practices for different languages”. I worry a bit about non-nix nix package managers just from the perspective that it’s really nice to have the one tool to rule all development environments, but maybe fragmentation won’t be a huge problem.

Chobbes,

Yeah, I don’t have good answers for you… I honestly don’t know what the best way to get people into it is. The resources really are not great.

FWIW I think when it does end up clicking everything is a LOT less complicated than it seems at first. Nix is sort of all about building up these attribute sets and then once that really sinks in everything starts to make a lot more sense and you start to realize that there aren’t that many moving parts and there isn’t much magic going on… but getting there is tricky. A lot of people recommend the nix pills, and honestly I think it’s the best way to understand nix itself. If you do earnestly read through them I think there is a good chance you will come out enlightened… they just start so slow and so boringly that it’s tempting to skip ahead and then you’re doomed. They also have a bit of a bad habit of introducing simple examples that don’t work at first which can be confusing, and eventually some of the later stuff seems like “ugh, I thought we already solved this” but it’s building up nicer abstractions. The nix pills give a pretty good overview of best practices in that sense, I think… so maybe it’s the source of truth you’re looking for (or part of it anyway). I think the nix pills are a bit more “how the sausage is made” than is necessary to use nix, but it’s probably the best way to understand what all of these weird mkDerivation functions you keep seeing are actually doing, and having an understanding of the internals of nix makes it a lot easier to understand what’s going on.

Chobbes,

Display manufacturers may understand what Valve might want in a screen, but they might not understand how many units of a screen of such a specification they would be able to sell — is it going to be a custom job for just a few thousand of valve’s experimental console (which may have different degrees of success), or is it going to be something that they can sell to more people and a wider audience.

Chobbes,

x86 to ARM translation is a fairly different problem than what proton solves, so I don’t think it’s clearly in their wheelhouse. Proton / wine is mostly just an implementation of windows libraries on Linux, but doing efficient x86 emulation on arm is a compiler problem. I would guess that Valve could do it or at least hire people to do it, but it’s a bit of a different skill set. Doing x86 efficiently on ARM (particularly with concurrency) also likely involves some extensions to ARM like Apple does with their chips. I haven’t heard if the snapdragon elite chips have anything for x86 compatibility baked in at all. Frankly, I’m treating the snapdragon elite with a fair degree of scepticism until you can actually buy the thing, but I hope it’s good!

Chobbes,

I don’t think they’re waiting for ARM specifically. If that ends up working out, sure, but if they can get x86 with the right power to performance ratio I doubt they would complain.

Chobbes,

It’s going to depend. If it’s a really old game it’s unlikely to matter. Anything heavy on CPU and particularly single core performance may struggle through a translation layer. A good translation layer on a good chip will probably lead to roughly similar performance in many cases, and most games seem to be GPU limited, so it’s possible it will just work out most of the time. It could always be the case that a critical section of the code somewhere ends up not translating well, leading to poor performance. It would not be terribly surprising for an important loop to end up two or four times slower than it should be, which could cause hiccups.

Chobbes,

If people like Arch, more power to them… but I feel like no distro despises their users as much as Arch does. Just please for the love of god update the keychain first without manual intervention T_T (I think maybe this finally got fixed recently?).

Chobbes,

The arch wiki tends to be a good resource, but I would argue that the arch wiki is not really the same thing as the arch distribution. It’s definitely part of the ecosystem and relevant to user experience with a distribution… but I think my interpretation of “best / worst distro” is mostly in terms of “when you know how to use it, how is it?” If documentation is a factor NixOS is terrible, if documentation is not a concern then it’s amazing haha.

I’ve personally been kind of disappointed with my experience with Arch, and I don’t think the Arch wiki redeems it in the sense that no matter how good the wiki is I still don’t really want to use Arch. My problems with Arch are largely just related to the upgrade processes, which I haven’t had great experiences with. In my experience it’s painful to roll back, pin / install specific versions of packages, and the update process with pacman is just rough in my experience (e.g., the keyring update issue, or the fact that it deletes all kernel modules for the running kernel on an update). My impression is that some of this stems from the philosophy of KISS (e.g., why have rollbacks for system updates when you could use snapshots for that), which I think is fair in some cases, but less fair for others (like the keyring update). Ultimately I feel like these choices in Arch just make it not the distro for me. I’ve been bitten too many times by it, and I feel like other distros do a better job of managing packages and at maintaining a stable and updatable system. I’ve had far better experiences on Gentoo and NixOS in these respects. At the end of the day if you like Arch that’s fine by me — I get the appeal as it’s kind of the main rolling release distro that provides binaries, but it didn’t scratch the itch for me unfortunately!

Chobbes,

People keep talking about a federated YouTube… I kind of want a federated Google docs.

Chobbes,

My experience running arm on x86 with qemu was dog slow. This was years ago, though, so hopefully it has gotten better.

Chobbes,

I think you’ll be waiting a pretty long time for high end RISC-V CPUs, unfortunately. I don’t particularly trust Qualcomm, but I’m really hoping to see some good arm laptops for Linux.

Chobbes,

Atom :P.

I’m with you, but I think a lot of people either switched to just consuming everything from things like Reddit and other social media platforms / never used RSS in the first place and are thinking about using it now but wondering if it’s “dead” (which thankfully it is not).

Chobbes,

It’s not, but I think this things serve a similar roll as a stream of content for people, without the need to curate their subscriptions so much.

How come there isn't more torrent based technology

Most of the problems in the current internet landscape is caused by the cost of centralized servers. What problems are stopping us from running the fediverse on a peer to peer torrent based network? I would assume latency, but couldn’t that be solved by larger pre caching in clients? Of course interaction and authentication...

Chobbes,

The iOS clients have gotten miles better in recent years. It’s still far from perfect, but I’m grateful for the improvements.

Chobbes,

Siskin, but it doesn’t do push with omemo perfectly. Monal does that better.

Chobbes,

I stopped using monal in favour of Siskin, but I think it’s gotten a lot better recently too. My problem was monal started sending notifications for every message in every chat room at some point so I uninstalled it. I assume this has been resolved.

Chobbes,

This is probably not as big of a deal as the lack of common APIs like Vulcan. I doubt Valve has much (if any) raw x86 code in their game engine, and it would probably compile to arm just fine. You still have to set up a new build chain for this, though, which is a pain.

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