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Patch,

I’m not enormously bothered by the designs themselves; the new logos look fine, although I preferred the old logo.

But what really bothers me is that they’ve gone with a whole disjointed mess of different designs for each of their sub-projects. Why on earth wouldn’t you take this opportunity to design a coherent family of logos? Bizarre missed opportunity.

Patch,

Fortnite uses Easy Anti Cheat, which is made by Epic (that is, Fortnite’s own developer). EAC works fine on Linux; it just needs the developer to enable it.

Patch,

My understanding is that it uses EAC and Battleye, but in an “either/or” arrangement. That is, both are installed but which one is activated when you boot the game is essentially random (or driven by some logic that is not readily apparent).

Battleye also claims to have native Linux support.

But even if it didn’t, it would be trivial to have a Linux version which only used (the Linux version of) EAC. Presumably Epic have enough faith in their own anticheat product to rely on it for their flagship game for a small minority of users.

Patch,

Canonical have had it in Ubuntu for years, but it’s taken them a while to get it to a point where it could be upstreamed. That’s what this news is: that Canonical’s patch is finally all clear to be merged.

Patch,

The poor devs aren’t even saying “no”. They’re just saying “what the hell is going on and why didn’t you ask us about this first”.

Pretty poor form for the OP to use a “KDE Developer”-badged account when they didn’t have any backing from the KDE developers to make the post. Makes it look a lot more official than it actually is.

Patch,

Oh, come on. You’re saying that it’s a problem that snaps don’t have immediately obvious performance problems or bugs?

Let’s not get silly about these things…

Patch,

No love for MATE in this thread…

Patch,

I’ve been a Linux user for a decade and a half now, but still use Windows on my corporate laptops. Honestly, it’s baffling how Microsoft seem to consistently manage to miss the mark with the UI design. There’s lots to be said about the underlying internals of Windows vs Linux, performance, kernel design etc., but even at the shallow, end user, “is this thing pleasant to use” stakes, they just never manage to get it right.

Windows 7 was…fine. It was largely inoffensive from a shell point of view, although things about how config and settings were handled were still pretty screwy. But Windows 8 was an absolutely insane approach to UI design, Windows 10 spent an awful lot of energy just trying to de-awful it without throwing the whole thing out, and Windows 11 is missing basic UI features that even Windows 7 had.

When you look at their main commercial competition (Mac and Chromebook) or the big names in Linux (GNOME, KDE, plenty of others besides), they stand out as a company that simply can’t get it right, despite having more resources to throw at it than the rest of them put together.

Patch,

They started selling them in the UK this year, and I’ve already started to see them on the road. They claim to be on track for around 30,000 sales per year in the country, which would put them at about half of the number of Teslas sold (about 60,000).

Why are people buying them? Well, the same reason people buy any car. They’re sold with a relatively high trim for a relatively affordable price, and they’re reviewing well with the auto press. It’s not like there’s any magic to it. China’s a cheap manufacturing country, and they’re undoubtedly willing to throw profit margins to the wolves to boost market share.

Patch,

I’ve seen a ton of posts bashing arch and commenters pretty much calling it a “good for nothing distro”, with the only more hated distro being Manjaro.

All distros have their little hate-clubs. Try being an Ubuntu user! Or Debian (“why are all the packages so old!”), or Fedora (“ew, Red Hat”), or Gentoo (“is that a laptop or a space heater?”) or…er, openSUSE (now I come to think of it, does anybody actually hate SUSE?). You get the idea, anyway. People get super weird and fanboyish about distros.

I don’t think arch has it any worse than the rest.

Patch,

It’s not a “shitty title”, because Ubuntu Linux is the thing they actually tested.

Whether Debian or Fedora or Alpine or Void or whatever would do better or worse is not a given, and isn’t something the OP can comment on because they didn’t test it.

We can probably infer that gains of a similar amount would be seen on most mainstream distros (as they’re all pretty similar under the covers), but that’s not on the OP.

In particular, Ubuntu ships with various non-free drivers and kernel patches that will be present in some, but not all other distros.

Patch,

I legitimately do this every time. I seem to be simply unable to parse it correctly.

Patch,

ChromeOS is Linux, and it has pretty decent penetration.

And I know what you’re going to say: “But ChromeOS isn’t proper Linux”. But it’s a desktop OS based on Gentoo, built on the Linux kernel and, GNU coreutils and bash (although not GCC, as far as anyone can tell). It certainly has all the hallmarks of being GNU/Linux (or something very close to it).

The fact that it doesn’t really resemble any “mainstream” Linux distro is kind of the point. It’s a locked down corporate product with a minimalist front-end locked into a bunch of commercial web services, and that’s exactly the kind of device that sells volumes.

Mainstream Linux is a tough sell. It was a tough sell 15 years ago when PCs were still the king of personal computing. In the post-smartphone, post-iPad world which we’re in now, we have to accept that that’s never going to be the device your grandma uses to check her email.

Plenty of Linux distros aren’t just volunteer-based, and are instead made and supported by for-profit companies. Red Hat/Fedora is made by the big blue, IBM themselves; it doesn’t get much bigger than that. Ubuntu, SUSE, Manjaro, all for-profit commercial outfits. None of these are failures, it’s just that their products aren’t targeting the market for cheap commercial laptops. You can buy Ubuntu preloaded on a laptop from Dell or Lenovo, but they’re targeting IT professionals and data scientists and people who work with Linux servers. Or they’re targeting fleet deployments of 100s of devices in municipal organisations. There’s a good market there, it’s just a different market.

Patch,

Slaps ocean; this baby practically desalinates itself!

Patch,

Birdtray sounds like what you’re looking for. It allows you to close Thunderbird to the system tray so that it runs in the background. Thunderbird already throws notifications to GNOME, and should continue to do so while running in the background in the way.

Patch,

It’s a typo. It should be “comprised”.

Patch,

You dry them?

Patch,

I’ve never understood why people run without swap. There’s basically no downside to having it. If you’re running a high spec, high RAM machine you probably also have a big SSD/HDD and are very unlikely to be squeezing it to the last GB (and if you are you should probably look into upgrading that). And if you’re on a machine with very limited SSD/HDD capacity, you’re probably not in an “ample RAM” situation anyway.

Even on high RAM systems, a few GB of swap can enable better caching and more graceful memory management. But heck, even if the thing sits there like an 8GB lump of nothing, were you really going to miss that last 8GB?

Patch,

Well I hate GNOME personally but it’s just because…

I think there’s a big difference between having software preferences (even very strong ones) and making the hate of something a personal crusade.

I like GNOME and I don’t really like KDE. But I absolutely, categorically don’t hate KDE; it’s a big project with a lot of high quality contributors and a lot of very happy users. I just don’t really enjoy the design.

I don’t like Mac, but I don’t hate Mac. I really don’t like Windows, but I’m still able to recognise it for the engineering feat that it is. The world is full of things that aren’t my personal favourite, but none of them have done anything to me to elicit genuine hatred.

Wayland, GNOME, systemd and snaps seem to be the unholy quadfecta of obsessive hate in Linux land these days. People seem to practically set their own personal identity against their feelings on these technology stacks. If you don’t like them, just don’t use them…

Patch,

I’m assuming that I’m supposed to download “libvirtd”, but I can’t figure out how to install it.

Try sudo apt install libvirt-daemon-system libvirt-clients in the terminal and rebooting the system.

Patch,

I know this thread is likely to quickly descend into 50 variants of “ew, snap”, but it’s a good write up of what is really a pretty interesting novel approach to the immutable desktop world.

As the article says, it could well be the thing that actually justifies Canonical’s dogged perseverance with snaps in the first place.

Patch,

You can; the issue is that you can’t add two snap repositories at once.

This is functionally pretty much the same thing, as nobody is likely to want to use snap while locking themselves out of the main snap repository, but it’s still important to make the distinction.

In theory I guess there’s nothing stopping you setting up a mirror of the main snap repo with automatic package scraping, but nobody’s really bothered exploring it seeing as no distro other than Ubuntu has taken any interest in running snap.

Patch,

It’s all open source so there’s no reason you couldn’t fork it and add that functionality. Although it’d probably be a fairly involved piece of work; it wouldn’t be a simple one-line change.

Patch,

I was referring to snapd, which is the thing that actually has the hard limit on a single repository. That’s fully open source (and there’s one major fork of it out in the wild, in the form of Ubuntu Touch’s click). The tooling for creating snap packages is also all open source.

The APIs which snapd uses to interact with its repo are also open source. While there’s no turnkey Snap Store code for cloning the existing website, it’s pretty trivial to slap those APIs on a bog standard file server if you just want to host a repo.

Not open-sourcing the website code is a dick move, but there’s nothing about the current set up that would act as an obstacle for anyone wanting to fork snap if that’s what they wanted to do. It’s just with flatpak existing, there’s not a lot of point in doing so right now.

How do y'all deal with programs not supported on Linux?

I’ve been seeing all these posts about Linux lately, and looking at them, I can honestly see the appeal. I’d love having so much autonomy over the OS I use, and customize it however I like, even having so many options to choose from when it comes to distros. The only thing holding me back, however, is incompatibility issues....

Patch,

Use an alternative, or

Use Wine/Proton, or

Use a web app if it exists, or

Run Windows in a VM.

For me, the first 3 options covers 99.9% of my usage. It’s been a long time since I had to worry about installing Windows in a VM.

But to be fair, my requirements to use Windows software are very limited and non-critical. If:

A lot of programs I work with very often are Windows-exclusive

…then I would certainly consider keeping a Windows laptop around. Right tool for the job and all that.

Patch,

Valve haven’t released Steam OS for use on non-Deck hardware yet. So you can use it on a Deck, but not on a gaming PC.

Patch,

I’ve just googled Dell XPS M1530 and it seems like it shipped with a Core 2 Duo CPU, which is 64 bit.

For reference, the last mainstream 32 bit desktop processors were launched over 20 years ago. As a rule, if you’re trying to run a 32 bit machine in this day and age it is probably an antique, and running modern software on it would not be all that sensible even if you could.

Patch,

Wine and Rosetta are fundamentally different things. Wine is a reimplementation of Windows APIs on Linux, whereas Rosetta is hardware emulation (famously, Wine Is Not an Emulator).

The equivalent of Rosetta on Linux is QEMU, and specifically qemu-user-static.

The thing about hardware emulation, though, is that it has a non-trivial processor overhead. Apple Silicon gets away with it because it’s a very fast chip which has been designed partly with hardware emulation in mind. Trying to emulate x86 on some generic off-the-shelf mobile ARM chip is not going to give great results.

Patch,

Android is already free software, and see how far that gets you. The kicker is that you’re tied into their services (with all the data harvesting, targeted advertising and monetisation that that involves).

Patch,

Exactly this. There’s no nefarious motive to doing this, because Amazon can already do everything nefarious that they want to do with their current Android-based Fire OS.

I’m actually willing to take Amazon’s reasoning at face value for this. They say that Android is too heavyweight and inflexible for embedded IoT devices, and that they want to build something lighter. This makes plenty of sense, and is indeed something that Google themselves have also said as justification for their move to Fuschia for their own embedded devices.

For Linux fans, it’s probably a good thing that Amazon has chosen another Linux-based architecture rather than doing as Google are doing and moving off Linux to a different kernel.

Patch,

I mean… yeah?

A major GPL software stack used by major Linux distributions getting more money to invest in accessibility tooling seems like a “good thing”.

Patch, (edited )

And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.

This old canard again. It drives me mad every time I see it.

snap

Came first. Flatpak was Red Hat’s “not invented here” rival. Flatpak turned out to be more popular. That’s a) not evidence that Canonical did a NIH, and b) evidence that sometimes doing a NIH pays off.

Unity

For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.

Mir

I’ll give you this one. But Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.

Upstart

Alright you didn’t actually list this one, but damn it these straw men aren’t going to fight themselves! People often mention upstart in the same list, despite the fact that it was released before systemd, became briefly widely adopted across Linux land, and then when systemd came to maturity Ubuntu dropped upstart almost as quickly as everybody else, showing that the NIH instinct really isn’t all that strong.

Most of these are just a list of things that a big company tried to see if any of it sticks; that’s the very grist to the mill that FOSS thrives on.

It also ignores all the stuff that Canonical either originated or early-adopted which has survived, like LXD, OpenStack, or cloud-init.

Patch,

Alright, I’ve just looked up both code repositories. You’re right, the first tagged version of snapd was committed one month before the first tagged version of Flatpak.

Snap is quite a bit older than that; its original codebase was released as “click”, which was part of the Ubuntu Touch project; it’s a project with a fairly long history.

Flatpak’s roots come from OSTree, which has its own depth of history, but the idea to use that to create a containerised packaging format came after clicks and Appimages (and their forerunners) were already on the scene.

Again, not a criticism of flatpaks. On the contrary, it shows that being the latecomer doesn’t mean you can’t be the winner.

Unity was neither revolutionary (looked the same as Gnome), nor usable (it was slow af).

Ubuntu had their own motivation for Unity, which was their at the time focus on full device convergence. That is, a single DE on PCs, smartphones, smart TVs and kiosks. It was something which wasn’t on the cards for GNOME and which was made clear was not going to be a design focus, and there really wasn’t (and still isn’t) any other DE that was built with that focus in mind.

Of course it didn’t work out. Partly because Canonical never had any success marketing Ubuntu Touch (on phones and tablets) or Ubuntu TV; partly because they were never able to get Unity to a place where it worked in that way (the never-released Unity 8, now Lomiri, was due to be the big pay off, but it was stuck in development hell). Canonical pulled the plug on it because it was haemorrhaging money on it and they desperately needed to get back in the black.

But honestly, there’s as much legitimate reason for pursuing that as there was in any of the others. COSMIC being written in Rust isn’t revolutionary; Rust is great, but it’s just a memory-safe C-family language. It’s a fine choice to write a new DE in, but the benefits are mostly on the side of the developer than the user.

Well, what I meant was Mir as a display server, but you got the point. Now they turned it into a Wayland compositor. Cool, but then why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Canonical’s main focus has been contributing to Mutter rather than Mir. Mir’s usecase is really more for kiosks, signage and thin client devices (where it’s the guts of Ubuntu Frame); although it’s possible to build something like that in wlroots, nobody really has yet. And in any case, I take issue with:

why not do a favor to the open source community and contribute to wlroots instead?

Mir and Ubuntu Frame are open source, and since when have we required the FOSS world to be monolithic around one solution? We have multiple DEs, multiple browsers, multiple office suites and email clients, heck whole selections of different FOSS OSs. The variety, competition, and ability to choose is kinda the whole point. If Canonical think they can do a better job with Ubuntu Frame kiosk software with Mir, they can have at it.

Patch,

You might want to get that checked out if you haven’t already… Or at least rethink your diet.

Linux on a 2in1 for Uni (lemmy.world)

Hello linix@lemmy, I got fixed on the idea of replacing my iPad with a 2in1 like the thibkpad X13 for uni since I use the keyboard with my iPad a lot. The only time I need to take handwritten notes is in chemistry, mathematics and to annotate PDFs. Does anyone here have experience with convertibles running Linux? What would be...

Patch,

Slightly sideways suggestion is the Star Labs Starlite, which is a tablet with detachable keyboard/touchpad stand. This might meet your requirements.

Patch,

If you’re after something for digital art this probably isn’t it, but for note taking and basic handwriting it should be alright. They sell a specific active stylus themselves, so it can’t be too useless.

Patch, (edited )

Wine doesn’t have any inherent overhead. It’s a native reimplementation of the Windows APIs (and not an emulator), so there’s no inherent overhead compared to Windows itself. It can be faster or it can be slower, but this has more to do with optimisation and implementation than anything inherent.

Patch,

Sure, why not. That’s all it means in the context of Disney+.

Patch,

Jokes on you, I’m not an American so it really is free for me!

Patch,

Unless I’m much mistaken, Windows 10 EOL isn’t until 2025, so two years left to run.

Patch,

Depends on the business really. For my last employer (~19,000 deployed PCs, lots of fussy mission critical legacy applications), 2 years would be cutting it extremely fine. For my current employer (~30 employees, nothing more complicated than standard office applications in use), you could do the upgrade in a week.

I imagine my current employer won’t be worrying about upgrading before 2025.

Patch,

AI image processing could do the job in two minutes with no skill, whereas manual image editing (even crappily) takes skill and time.

Why assume someone handcrafted it when there’s no evidence?

Patch,

I’m not sure I’d want my small electronics dropped onto tarmac from 12 feet up. I don’t care how much bubble wrap you use, that does not sound ideal.

Patch,

They’re dropping support for ia-64 in 6.7, I understand.

Both users will be devastated.

Patch,

WordPress remains the easy, flexible way of hosting a blog. You can self-host, or there are multiple cloud hosted services.

Patch,

If your want something that just works, Ubuntu is pretty hard to beat. Snaps are really not a big deal anymore, performance wise; a lot of the bad rap on slow startups etc. are from years (and many versions) ago.

If you don’t want Ubuntu and you don’t like Mint, there are also other options in the Ubuntu/Debian family. Pop_OS and Zorin are both popular.

Patch,

Four nice sturdy nails placed strategically, pointy end up, immediately behind each tyre. Be content to know that justice will come when the time is right.

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