Maxy

Maxy, 7 months ago

People who need MS Office because once you have to collaborate with others Open/Libre/OnlyOffice won’t cut it;

I use office almost daily, Libreoffice is fine for local editing and office online works if I have to collaborate.

People that just installed a password manager (KeePassXC) and a browser (Firefox/Ungoogled) via flatpak only to find out that the KeePassXC app can’t communicate with the browser extension because people are “beating around the bush” on GitHub instead of fixing the issue;

I simply installed the Bitwarden extension in Firefox and it worked flawlessly. I’m not quite sure why you would want a desktop app for a password manager (never needed this even on windows), but if you do, basically distro ships a regular Firefox package which will work just as on windows.

Anyone who wants a simple Virtual Machine and has to go thought cumbersome installation procedures like this one just to get error messages saying virtualization isn’t enable when, in fact, it is… or trying to use GNOME Boxes and have a sub-par virtualization experience;

4 commands doesn’t seem that cumbersome, it can quite literally be done in 30 seconds. Add to this the fact that it will be updated together with all other apps managed by you package manager, which is incomparably faster compared to windows update (or even most apps’ integrated self-updater)

My experience with gnome boxes was also one of the most hassle-free one ever when working with virtualisation. Worked without advanced setup on a very low-end laptop (i3 4th gen, 4gb DDR3), so I’m not quite sure what would be “sub-par”.

Designers because Adobe apps won’t run properly without having a dedicated GPU, passthrough and a some hacky way to get the image back into your main system that will cause noticeable delays;

Adobe doesn’t have a monopoly on design software. I’m not an artist though, so it could be true that the Linux alternatives aren’t full replacements. I would like to point out that, IIRC, Linus Media Group (a company with 100+ employees) uses macs for Adobe apps; windows would constantly crash, so even here the author’s conclusion (just buy a windows key) doesn’t hold up.

Gamers because of the reasons above plus a flat 5-15% performance hit;

In my experience running games though proton, this is more like a 5% difference in either direction. Native games generally run significantly better for me. Though I will admit this can depend on specific hardware and games (and proton has improved a lot over the years).

People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;

Wine is actually starting to support an API which Microsoft has deprecated (www.phoronix.com/news/Wine-8.16-Released). These apps might only work on Linux in the future, not on windows anymore. I will admit that I’m not much of a retro gamer, and other API’s might be a different story.

Developers and sysadmins, because not everyone is using Docker and Github actions to deploy applications to some proprietary cloud solution. Finding a properly working FTP/SFTP/FTPS desktop client (similar WinSCP or Cyberduck) is an impossible task as the ones that exist fail even at basic tasks like dragging and dropping a file.

Want to start using a new language? Just apt install the new interpreter/compiler and start right away. Want to use sftp? Just type sftp into your terminal. Also, most regular file managers just support these protocols out of the box; not having to install a separate app to use these protocols sounds like a Linux win to me. Furthermore, when developing software intended for server use, linux is simply superior due to its similarity to the environment the software will eventually run on.

Just to make it clear, I understand that Linux is not perfect for everyone. But this article appears almost wilfully ignorant to multiple facts. It almost sounds like the author tried Linux for 2 hours, had a single issue they couldn’t resolve during that time (probably nvidia related, which is nvidia’s fault), and decided to give up and write salty articles instead of seeking help.

Maxy, 7 months ago

Yes, libreoffice doesn’t really work for live collaboration. But office online is a good solution for that collaboration, and it works in any browser (including Firefox on Linux). Therefore, the author’s conclusion (you need windows to collaborate on word docs) is still wrong.

I personally also believe that WYSIWYG editors are highly overrated: markdown is significantly better for note-taking and similar small documents, and reports would often be better off with LaTeX or something similar. But I understand why the “4 commands is too much hassle to install VirtualBox” crowd might prefer word.

Maxy, 7 months ago

Yes, some minor formatting changes occur when opening a docx file in libreoffice. Hardly sounds like a deal breaker to me. And yes, you do get a pop-up when saving to docx in libreoffice (with the toggle to disable the pop-ups right there in the message). Microsoft office does the exact same thing when saving to an odt file though: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/7c7c3a1b-df3b-48c5-aeca-8e0f2b766ba9.png

Once again, if you have to collaborate with office-users (and you cannot deal with the horror of having a different amount of space between the items), just use office online. How many times do I have to repeat myself?

Let me guess you’re someone who works in IT and never had a typical “office job” that includes spending 90% of your time writing reports and pushing spreadsheets around.

1. No, I do not work in IT, nor do I aspire to work in IT. I’m just a regular PC-user, who just so happens to have other opinions than you do. HOW DARE I?!?
2. Wouldn’t IT-workers of all people know what the more optimized editors are?

This is why you don’t get it, you’re not the typical user of MS Office and you don’t share the same use cases the OP, the article author and myself share.

1. The article you shared was talking about gaming, the adobe creative suite, virtual machines, electrical engineers, labs, architects and sysadmins/developers. Please don’t try to claim that the article author and OP ever had “the same use cases”.
2. I guess you are finally correct though, I’m indeed not the typical user of MS Office (thank god). The typical user pays $70 a year just to edit word docs, while calling the family tech support each time they try to add a horizontal page in word. If your use case is being trapped into a proprietary office solution, where you have to provide a reason before microsoft allows you to shut down your onedrive, where all your documents are saved in a mythical “cloud”, then I am glad that our use-cases differ.
3. I hope you see the irony of you using markdown in a comment describing why I am “out of touch” for using markdown.

If you want to use windows, that’s fine. But please don’t share such blatantly ignorant articles, and don’t try to defend them when multiple people point out why it is wrong about so many things.

I probably won’t reply to your next reaction (should there be any) unless you come up with some actual arguments, instead of “the line spacing is broken, you’re out of touch, not me”.

Maxy, 7 months ago

Some context for the last tldr’d paragraph:

The negative Wall Street sentiments about the global economy have been echoed elsewhere. Last week, the Economist published a leader article entitled: “The world economy is defying gravity. That cannot last.”

Maxy, 7 months ago

The more you compress the longer and more CPU intensive it is to decompress

I believe this is becoming less and less true with modern algorithms. Take for example ZSTD: while the compression speeds differs by several orders of magnitude between the fastest and slowest modes, the decompression difference is only about 20%. The same holds true for flac, where the decompression speed is pretty uniform across all compression levels.

These algorithms probably aren’t used by repacked like fitgirl (so your answer is generally correct in the context of repacks). I do believe it is still interesting to see these new developments in compression techniques.

Maxy, 8 months ago

Are you just running and AMD CPU with integrated graphics, or do you also have a dedicated graphics card? From what I can gather online, the DRI_PRIME variable is mostly used for render offloading to a dedicated GPU, but your question appears to be about iGPUs.

You can also try to manually enable hardware decoding in VLC’s settings. Just go to Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs and choose VA-API (AMD’s preferred standard).

Maxy, 9 months ago

If I understand your post correctly, you have 2 PC’s at home: one running wireguard, and one you want to wake using WoL. This is similar to my setup, where I have a server and a personal desktop. When I want to wake my PC remotely, I just ssh to the server and use the server to wake the desktop. Connecting to the server and telling it to wake your PC seems easier than trying to redirect your phone’s WoL app over wireguard.

Maxy, 9 months ago

I use the “wakeonlan” package. Simply install it, ssh to your server, and run “wakeonlan xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx”, where “xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx” is the Mac-adres of the PC you’re trying to wake.

Maxy, 10 months ago

Except safari of course (almost 20% market share).

Also, there are plenty of other browsers using Mozilla’s gecko engine. A quote from Wikipedia: “ Other web browsers using Gecko include GNU IceCat, Waterfox, K-Meleon, Lunascape, Portable Firefox, Conkeror, Classilla, TenFourFox.” (en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software))

Maxy, 10 months ago

MPV has automatic native wayland support, VLC doesn’t (yet, see wiki.archlinux.org/title/VLC_media_player#Wayland…)

I haven’t found any other large differences in functionality when it comes to simply playing video (only thing I use either one for).

Maxy, 10 months ago

I am currently using the proprietary Nvidia driver, simply because nouveau isn’t performant enough. I can’t wait for NVK though, maybe that driver will finally be viable for us Nvidia-users.

Maxy, 10 months ago

Just out of curiosity, are you sure “fd” is the right command in the “format storage” section? I don’t have a rasbian system to test this on, but on my arch system, “df” is used to list disks; “fd” is a multithreaded version of “find”, which I manually installed.

Maxy, 10 months ago

No problem! It actually seems like a great guide, especially for beginners, I might link it to some friends.

Maxy, 10 months ago

To add to this with another example: my server runs

• jellyfin
• Nextcloud
• gitea
• Monica (a CRM, look it up on awesome-selfhosted)
• vaulwarden (rust implementation of Bitwarden)
• code-server
• qBitTorrent-nox
• authelia (2FA)
• pihole
• smbd
• sshd
• Caddy

In total, I’m using about 1.5GB out of 6GB of RAM (with another 1GB out of 16GB of swap being used), and the idle CPU usage is only 1%-ish (i5-3470 with the BIOS-settings set to power saving).

Even on very old and low-powered hardware, you can still run a lot of services without any problems.

Maxy, 10 months ago

It depends on your linker. By default, Firefox appears to use the LLD linker. There is a faster one available, which runs perfectly fine on my 16GB machine: github.com/rui314/mold. After installing, it can be enabled by setting —enable-linker=mold instead of —enable-linker=lld

Maxy, 11 months ago

There is an “TI-nspire CXII connect” web app from Texas Instruments themselves. You can find it by going to the webpage of your calculator, and then going to the software section (education.ti.com/en/products/…/software-overview). If you scroll down far enough (past all the teacher/student software) you’ll see a small section about nspire connect. This should lead you to the following website: nspireconnect.ti.com/?ref_url=https%3a%2f%2feduca…. This should allow you to update your OS, send and receive files, etc.

Maxy, 8 months ago

I have had decent experiences with TiLP on linux. According to their website, it “can handle any TI calculator (from TI73 to V200) with any link cable.”. Their website also explicitly states support for the NSpire and NSpire-CAS, but the NSpire CX II isn’t mentioned. It might be worth a shot?

If it doesn’t work, the easiest solution would probably be a windows VM with USB-passtrough (which wine doesn’t support as far as I know). You could then use the webapp I linked earlier.

Maxy, 11 months ago

I personally use the “slav art” discord bot. It lets you paste links from Spotify, deezer, qobuz, tidal and a few more. Some of the music providers are down from time to time, and the server gets nuked by the mods sometimes, but when it works, it’s great.

Link to wiki page (2nd option in the wiki): fmhy.pages.dev/audiopiracyguide/#download-apps

Direct link: discord [dot] gg/NgPJTt3WK3

PS: Reddit migrator here, is it still necessary to change the links and avoid directly linking?

Maxy, 11 months ago

To add to this, all of the packages mentioned have a -git version in the AUR. The people who really need the absolute newest version can always install these packages. The rest of the people (those who prefer stability) can continue using a slightly older, but well-tested versions of these programs.

Maxy, 11 months ago

I’m not too familiar with Ubuntu, but the arch wiki has a section about moving /usr to a separate partition: wiki.archlinux.org/title/Mkinitcpio#/usr_as_a_sep…

Maybe using these instructions, you can still offload /usr to a mechanical drive.

Just out of curiosity, how large is your /usr directory? Mine is only 30GiB (arch Linux, kde plasma with all apps + hyprland), which only takes up 17GiB on my disk due to btrfs compression (zstd level 15).