rufus @ rufus @discuss.tchncs.de

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2 yr. ago

The accustomed workflows sometimes don't translate well to other platforms. RDP might be such a case, I don't think it's the standard in the Linux-world, maybe try the standard solution of your distribution, or look up which one is good for multi-monitor setups, there are lots of other VNC solutions. Yeah, and I'd skip Ubuntu as a first choice, but you figured that out the hard way.

And it also sucks in the cloud. Depending on the scenario there might not be many alternatives, though. CUDA is pretty much the standard in machine learning.

I'll just weasel my way out of the capitalization mistakes by saying I'm German... Or by saying I type too much English on the internet...

In this case I did it to stress it and make a point.

I can see the resistors being somewhat a more likely scenario. But it's also a big difference. A mΩ is somewhere in the order of magnitude of what your copper traces have between two (close) components. And such resistors would for example be used as a shunt to measure current. They're made to withstand quite some current and below 10mΩ I don't think there is even a color code available. Footprint might be different, too.

Would that be worth your while? I mean if you're talking about an one year plan here, that'd mean you're making $20 per year off these 20 people. Or $1 per year by handling one customer of yours. Let's say you find 600 people and manage all of that. That'd give you a monthly salary of $50. There is quite some uncertainty to your business model, it is work and you're violating the TOS of your VPN suppliers and committing tax fraud. I'd advise you to do the maths first, before starting with a business like that.

Agree, if you do it, there is no harm in doing it right. However, I grew up with the metric system and I've never seen capitalization of the prefixes being a mistake that happens in the real world. I.e. your ADC can measure up to 500 mV and you instead 'accidentally' put 500 Megavolts through it. That is somewhat unlikely to happen. But then mistakes like that do happen. People wanting to order 500 rolls of toilet paper and getting 500 shipping crates of it. Things like that definitely happen. Especially in combination with computers that just do whatever you typed in. I'd just not call it 'common'.

Thank you very much, I'll try to re-wire my synapses.

Concerning the privacy aspect: I'm really no expert on that. I believe a VPN either provides you with IPv6 and is the solution to both of your problems, or you're circumventing it and making it less secure by introducing a side-channel. I wouldn't do both.

If you want to protect from law-enforcement you have to read the exact terms of your VPN or tunnel broker. There are companies who keep logs and some who don't, some cooperate with lawful interception of your country. I don't know which one to choose. I suppose it's the same with tunnel brokers. And for security: I don't think a VPN or IPv6 tunnel does much for that.

Fair enough. I need someone to provide me with a way on how to remember which one was capitalized and which one small.

I'm somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that's of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.

I tried a public tunnel broker and it immediately makes everything super slow. All the connections that grabbed the IPv6 connectivity went from my theoretical 300MBit/s to like 10-20 MBit/s.

The most important downside for me is: I'm looking for some information about an issue I'm having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn't help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.

I'd rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.

Sure, if GUI apps don't handle it they just keep running. It's just asking them to terminate. [Edit: I'll try that]

(We could just have a look at the code of GQRX in specific or just try it.)

https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/ and several other free software projects already provide LLM interence on your laptop. I'm not sure which ones support AI powered OCR, I think that isn't quite there yet, maybe stick with the traditional OCR solutions for a bit longer. But llama.cpp currently already supports 6 different multimodals models. And integrations to some IDEs also already exist, so something like Copilot is definitely there: https://continue.dev/

However, I think the desktop side, and integration into other parts of the system are still entirely missing. I'm not aware of anyone working on it. I'd like speech regognition and nice TTS on the desktop.

That is not true. If you use SIGKILL (9) it ends the process totally. Other signals don't do that. And per default the cli commands don't send SIGKILL, but SIGTERM. It nicely asks the program to terminate and the program is supposed to write down it's data and do what it needs to do when signaled like that. You'd need to attach a '-9' to kill it without warning. (Even if the command is called 'kill'.)

could also try SIGTERM (15)

Yes, Googled a bit and found how to virtualize macOS, the install did the first reboot already. Seems they took inspiration from Scotty from the TOS Enterprise, it suggested 2h50 at first but the minutes are coming down fast.

We'll see about that graphics accelleration. The laptop doesn't have a dedicated GPU anyways. Either QEMU/KVM does it or I can pass through half the intel iGPU or it'll just be slow.

I can empathize with your story about the GUI automation. Sometimes you just need a solution for your problem. If it's still running more than 10 years later it probably was the right call. Sometimes crazy workarounds stick and do the trick. You can always calculate if buying software/a license or paying someone to come up with a solution is cheaper. 13x12x50.000€ is a good amount of money.

It just gets a bit messy once you're forced to re-work a hacked together solution in production. But it really depends on the circumstances. I've seen old machines that did crazy jobs and broke down or had to be integrated into something else at some point. And then you have an 10 year old operating system you can't change much on, the employer who cobbled together that solution had long left and the company who initially sold the expensive and specialized software/hardware had changed the product twice in the meantime... Might turn a few of your hair grey, especially if someone absolutely needs to use it on Wednesday, but somehow it usually works out. If it's tastefully done and documented, everything might be perfectly alright.

Thank you for the Midtown Madness 2 link. I need that, too. Spent quite some time in that blocky version of San Francisco when I was a kid.

I don't really have a better use case for Windows on my laptop at home. I use it to update stuff like the GPS and probably one or two other things. I moved a few games there after the SSD with Linux on it was filled up.

(Edit: The install is done. You were right, the desktop is totally sluggish and I don't have any sound. And I skipped the AppleID. I've closed it for now. Maybe I can find better settings on the weekend and try to install something on it.)

Hehe, yeah I see. I can agree to a lot of that. Maybe I should try a Mac for once and for more than 20 minutes. I think I mostly read the iPhone stuff and shake my head. How they force developers to buy a Mac, restrict the whole iPhone ecosystem. I don't think I'd feel at home on a platform like that

Concerning the Macbooks: I've recently learned about their M2 and M3 Macbooks and their outstanding performance at some workloads. For example people doing machine learning (AI) stuff on them. And the numbers of tokens an LLM can process/generate on them is on a whole other level than what my Intel machine does. I think Apple did a good job with that hardware. However they cost so much more... I can get a very decent frame.work laptop with a modern Ryzen for $2.070 or buy a new Macbook for $3.400 with a bit less RAM and the same amount of storage. It'd be faster at a singular workload i'm somewhat interested in. But I'm not sure if it is worth that kind of money.

And I think I'm about to get old. I'm accustomed to how Linux works, I know my way around, have my workflow set up. I'm not sure if I can be bothered to learn something new... Exchange the little annoyances for something that requires me to adapt to an entirely new workflow... Maybe I'll try it anyways. See if there are cracked versions of MacOS that I can boot in a VM and see if I like it. I have to think about that.

Thank you for the discussion. I really don't see Flatpak as the pinnacle of software distribution. But Linux is constantly evolving. I'm pretty sure we'll someday get there for desktop applications. I think all the containerization stuff, CGroups and SystemD stuff is a good approach. It makes many things so much easier than they used to be. And I can spin up light containers, services and have them run with arbitrary permissions and environments on a server and all I need is a few lines of text. Sure, I configure the permissions and what they're allowed to access myself on the server. That can't be transferred directly to the desktop. We still need additional interfaces and especially ways to address what you said. Linux is a good desktop operating system, but there are some things that need to be solved better (or at all).

Since you mentioned that GUI application automatization. That is a crazy approach. I saw some CI pipelines using such tools to test GUI applications and web interfaces. Load XY, press TAB 4 times, hit enter, search for an element with Z in the name, press ALT+F, do something else and then do a screenshot... The whole thing looked completely mental (to me.) And I think there is something like that on Windows, too. I can only imagine things like that break easy and you're never able to change things if people actually rely on it. But I'm really not an expert on this. Might have valid use-cases. Or it's just a silly way of doing things.

Something I don't agree with is Windows and MacOS succeeding because of solid and stable APIs. Theoretically this might be the case for developers. For Windows desktop end-users it is certainly not the case. My family threw out several printers because after an Windows Update there were no drivers available any more. Most of my old games don't work any more, I've tried. Installing the old dotnet or c++ runtimes and directx versions is a hassle, sometimes impossible. Some games crap out entirely. I can't do it the other way around and install an old version of Windows on modern hardware. So while in theory the Windows Kernel API might enjoy a good development model, it has little to zero effect on the end-user and why they buy Windows-Laptops in large quantities. And if success at the market is the measurement, contrary to Windows, Linux is the dominant operating system on servers an very successful there. So I don't think this is the real reason. But reliable interfaces is certainly something we want. Apple changed the entire kind of processor architecture, and then again. With them things also don't stay the same. They solve that with other techniques. And a Macbook won't be thrown to the garbage after a few years because it's gotten so slow. I see people keeping them for quite some time. But they usually don't run the latest version of MacOS any more. At least that's what I've seen.

Anyway, it's getting kind of late here. Thanks for the comment and the additional info you linked. I'm going to read the links tomorrow.

I wasn’t comparing in the way you think, I’m comparing in the sense that cohesion and important details aren’t usually a thing when it comes to the desktop Linux experience.

That is kind of what I said with 'you're probably comparing different things'. However, my experience is entirely different. I've been using Linux for quite a while now. While not everything is perfect, I think it does the job reasonably well. On my laptop all the applications I chose work quite well. I'm currently within the GNOME desktop (since you mentioned that) but I can't really follow your woes. I've installed like 50 desktop applications, do development and stuff. And everything just works for me. I think they all apply the GTK theme I chose and most of them also honor the dark mode settings and tie into the system very well. I really can't complain about that part of Linux. Additionally I have the command line where everything ties into another superbly. It follows the unix philosophy. That means I have tools that are supposed to do one task, but do that task well. And then I have a simple means of connecting them, concatenating them and it makes things really easy. I don't know how Apple does stuff. I suppose you can also instruct it to find all the vacation pictures from 2021, transfer them to the external harddrive and then remove them from the laptop. Might be easier or more time consuming on a Mac. But it really shines if you do complex development stuff, prepare a complex development project, handle the dependencies, do automatic (unit and integration) tests and deploy it. Or stuff like that. I really can't live without that convenience.

And which kind of cohesion on the desktop are you missing and I don't? I mean sure, Apple has one big ecosystem with everything tied to it. It is convenient and easy as long as you're within that one ecosystem. And Linux for example doesn't sell an operating system and online services and software, and have a central software marketplace all at once. That is true. I sometimes like not to put all my eggs into one basket. But that is personal preference. How easy is it on Apple if you want to break free from these confines? Or if you want to use something that isn't integrated well there? Like a game that isn't available for Mac or you're forced to use Microsoft Access or other specific software for work? Or you want to watch Virtual Reality pornography and that happens to be something the app store cuts down on?

Apple also has sandboxing

This is something I'd also like to see for Linux. Not Flatpak that gets on top and circumvents the system. But something that is baked into the system. I think you're mixing things up a bit. Flatpak isn't something tightly integrated into the system and it isn't Linux's default choice. While Apple's sandboxing is part of the system and a (default) way to run software. If we really compare that to Linux, Linux is entirely missing that kind of sandboxing and clean way of software distribution. A Linux program spreads its files all across several directories and if it's desktop software, it just runs with the user's permissions. That is the old-fashioned way of doing it. And since Linux is profoundly more diverse, it is really difficult to change this. SystemD, cgroups and so come along to address the permission aspect of that. But we're far away from achieving a proper sandboxing feature per default.

You just can't compare specifically Flatpak to the way Apple does it. It is something that is focused on decoupling things from the system, not integrate them. You'd have to compare that to a solution that decouples things on a Mac. Since Flatpak isn't available there, you'd probably compare that to a virtual machine. And if you now install Windows in a virtual machine on your Macbook, does it follow the Mac theme? No it doesn't. Does the browser on the Windows have access to your Mac password manager? No it doesn't. But this would be a better way of comparing the two things.

I would really like Linux to step up their game regarding a few things. Desktop application sandboxing and distribution is one thing. If you use Flatpak for this, the blame is on you. It is not the solution I'd like to see. And it is not the intended way of using Linux, so you can't really complain. We need a proper solution instead. And another thing I'd like to see is mobile apps. We also don't have anything that allows for things like connected standby. Android for example can receive chat messages and E-Mails while it's sleeping and the screen is off. So can iPhones. When I close the lid of my laptop or use Linux on my phone, it just stops receiving chat messages once the screen is off and the processor is on standby.

Flatpak is great, I use it and like it but it was also blunt “we just isolate things and fuck it” from the start.

Flatpak was designed to fit a purpose. And the people who develop it have some motivation to do so. That might not align with your motivations. Maybe they wanted something to isolate things and you want something that connects things. That clashes. You might be using the wrong tool.

I think you're getting downvoted because this doesn't make much sense.

[...] it is only on Linux that [...]

And which other platform is Flatpak available on? As far as I know it's just available on Linux. You are probably comparing two entirely different things.

A password manager can't communi[cate] with a Browser [...]

Flatpak is a utility for software distribution and sandboxing. And that is what it does. Sandboxes are a means of isolating software from the rest of the system and each other. By using Flatpak to install software you deliberately choose not to choose the version of the browser that would have been tied into the rest of the system... And now it isn't tied into the system...

I'm sorry if I sound a bit negative, but this is how it is. Lots of people use Flatpak because it is popular, but it is the wrong tool for many users. Some don't know how it works and why they should or shouldn't use it. I always recommend you install packages from your distro first, unless you have a valid reason not to... And then you need to pay attention to which tool you use and how to use it. Flatpak has means of connecting software and the feature to give more permissions to software or lessen the sandboxing. But since they do isolate software, it doesn't come with that as a default. Also there are other tools to distribute software you could choose. And I think this specific situation with the Firefox Flatpak has gotten better. I think they're slowly addressing stuff like that but it's probably not something they focus on. I don't really know the specifics of this situation, I installed Firefox or LibreWolf and the password manager from the package repository. It works and the themes also work.

(Edit: I'm not sure but imagine the 'flatpak run' issue might be a security measure. It might require less correctness to just download something, but it needs to be precise once you execute something on your system. This would be analoguous to how some browsers allow you to download executables from the internet, but require you to confirm you want to run them in a separate dialog that pops up. Or the additional 'chmod +x' on Linux. You often don't want to run random stuff by mistake. That could be probably implemented differently if this is the case.)

What is it? A metasearch engine? A distributed or central database and crawler?

We seem to share similar ideas. I think we don't necessarily have to be constrained by how stuff works in the real world. There, it is impossible to listen to everyone, you need to transfer power to a small amount of representatives. And one or few people at the top or it gets messy and nothing gets done. Also you need to come up with a single solution that applies to everyone.

I don't think it has to be that way in the realm of online services. Technically, we can ask an arbitrary number of people for their opinion. Vote with less effort since networks are fast, databases quite capable and everything interconnected anyways. Have people just represent themselves or just 5 family members or transfer their democratic power to whomever they deem appropriate. It doesn't even have to be a vote by majority. There are better weighted voting systems out there that are just impossible to implement in real-world countries. It doesn't have to be one solution for everything, it could individually apply to communities of the platform or work differently for different topics. And big platforms already provide different content and algorithms for their individual users. We could also just everyone be provided with a unique perspective on the same data. Someone can be faced with something while another person has it buried at the bottom or not displayed at all. And we'd just choose things for ourselves, not vote on how other people are treated at all. (I mean that somehow emerges on it's own... Once everyone chooses to not listen to trolls and annoying people, they'd just lose their audience and become meaningless.)

I see many technical challenges and negative consequences. We'd need to keep the crypto and blockchain people away from it. Everything I've seen that uses blockchain technology to achieve this has failed in the meantime. And was mainly intended to make money by some means. But things like ActivityPub are also not made for this. I'd really like to do away with the current voting mechanisms. I'd rather say I trust what this person says and my interests align with those people and this would replace global up- and downvoting. It's certainly possible from a technical viewpoint. But would it really encourage good behaviour and foster a nice place? People sometimes like to engage especially with the things they oppose and comment on them. It would also be a massive filter-bubble. Algorithms confine people into small and similar-minded bubbles, not a diverse and realistic and stimulating world. I think it's really difficult to find a delicate balance here, design choices that automatically push towards good behaviour and interesting engagement per default.

I completely agree on the admin stuff. Someone has to provide the computing power and take responsibility for what's stored on their servers. And sometimes mistakes happen, things turn out bad or break. There are malicious people out there. Someone needs to have the power to fix things. I think that's perfectly possible. Lots of platforms have succeded at that, there are people available, perfectly able to handle that responsibility. And ultimately, the whole internet is quite resilient and was designed with the idea of being a level playing-field and connect things and people.