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2 yr. ago

  • Would you know a virus if you saw it?

  • Snaps (and flatpaks) have a much better way of handling DLL hell than good ol deb/rpm/pacman. As such, each app is better able to chase the latest version of all of its dependencies, without worrying about messing up the libraries for anyone else.

    Snap/flatpak also sandbox their apps, reducing the blast radius of exploited or bad apps.

    My personal preference is to use flatpak, and set it up so that it is all --user. With a --user install, you don't need sudo to update anything. Use Flatseal to tighten up or loosen the sandbox, use Warehouse to roll back any broken updates. I don't think snap has any tools like Flatseal or Warehouse, which makes it the weaker packager.

    Anything that can be installed as a flatpak, I do it there first. Then I can just pick up my home directory, drop it in a different distro, and almost all of my stuff follows. A distro becomes little more than "a kernel, a compositor, a baseline desktop environment, and some background daemons".

  • It's a miracle that the battery is still working at ten years. The most realistic thing is to just keep up with your backups, and be ready to dispose of that laptop the moment the battery starts swelling.

  • TLP is my favourite tool for messing with the charge limit. And also far, far too many power/thermal management knobs.

  • Heroic has definitely had some brown-paper-bag releases. I've had to roll back and hold off on Heroic for a lot of their "major" updates.

  • It is a bit different. Have you invested thousands of hours developing skills with a piece of productivity software, and locked your data into their proprietary data format? Has that vendor looked at your investment, and found that they have plenty of leverage to turn the screws on you?

    With a game, you invest tens of hours developing skills, lock your "master sword" in a proprietary save format, and then you save the princess. After that, you're done. It is an ephemeral experience, give or take wanting to replay a few really good games. The game vendor doesn't have that much hold over you, and their grip doesn't get stronger the more you use it. I can replace your game with hundreds of other games, and I don't really lose anything by doing so.

  • They don't allow you to install other OSes?

    The worst thing that Valve has done is "the main kernel tree hasn't gotten around to merging some of the Deck's EC bits yet". You could run Batocera or Bazzite on your deck today if you want. You probably don't want to, those distros aren't as good an experience as SteamOS yet.

  • There's a simple solution. Open up your drivers Nvidia, like Intel and AMD have done.

  • Ubuntu has an installer that largely works. I just went through trying to install Bazzite (fedora), it insisted that I needed another -890GB of space. At best, I managed to get to where it errored out at the end of another install attempt, and left a broken grub setup.

  • I just tried installing Bazzite on a desktop, and its installer is a hot mess. The most I could get out of it was an error screen at the end, and an unbootable OS. Grub's config file was just an error message. I couldn't make heads or tails of how its ostree mess was ever supposed to boot, so I moved on to Debian.

  • Frosty Diarry Dessert®️

  • The database is running on an IBM made in 1954. Commas literally weren't invented yet.

  • Do the sysreq sometime when your system isn't hung. If it isn't enabled, welp you have to enable it harder.

    Having ssh set up would be a way in when the whole graphics stack falls over (but the kernel is still alive in there). On intel there are /sys entries to dump GPU state, ATI probably has something similar. You have a reproducible bug, if you can get in and grab data while the gpu is in la-la-land, you might be able to submit a valuable bug report.

  • If you're RDPing from a malicious client, how do you know what you're seeing is real? How do you know that your viewer didn't show the same screen for just a little too long while the host popped up a cmd, curl, run, close, continue in the background? How do you know that closing your session isn't "forwarding it to someone else for a bit, but they'll close it when they're done"? One time you start a session, verify it with your phone, waiting waiting waiting, an error occurred try again. Did it fail, or did it go to someone else?

  • There's another patient who didn't get the toe amputation, and gangrene spread to where he lost the entire leg and 80% of his kidney function. This one did not thank acupuncture for his outcome.

    This one very famous case of a guy who got very lucky, and ended up alive and uncrippled and didn't have to take time off from perpetual dialysis treatments to smile for magazine covers maybe doesn't represent what generally happens to people in his situation.

  • Tim Cook reads every single LOC submitted to his OS.

  • Use Trixie instead of Sid. With Sid you're getting new packages right as they come out of the oven. If Sid users don't get burned too badly, the packages go into Trixie two weeks later.

  • pv. It's just cat, with a progress meter.

  • I believe h.265 has particular handling for "film grain". And it has hardware decoding on just about every chip out there. And you probably already have a hardware encoder, so you can do something like QSV in a reasonable time frame.

    300MB for a half-hour is a pretty reasonable bitrate, for one and a half hours it is quite dire.