• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

    I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

    So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

    Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.


  • And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

    • Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
    • Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
    • Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
    • Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

    The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

    And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

    Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.







  • I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.

    If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.

    I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.

    So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.




  • GUI and CLI are tools, both with separate advantages and disadvantages.

    CLI let’s you chain different commands easily to create functionality that originally wasn’t there. It’s really flexible, but it’s also very non-obvious. Even after more than a decade of Linux usage, I still find new commands I have never heard of that do exactly what I wanted to do for a while.

    GUI is great for visual stuff (nobody in their right mind would do video/audio/image editing on CLI). It’s also very obvious/explorable, so you tend to find functionality much quicker. That makes it great for any tools that you don’t use on a daily basis. And GUIs can utilise the bandwidth of human visual input much better, which makes them better whenever large amounts of data are presented.

    Neither CLI nor GUI are better, they just have different use cases where they are better.

    And it annoys me a lot that people don’t get that.

    When you say “X is better than Y”, you always need to state for what it is better.





  • As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple adb pm enable [packagename].

    I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.

    Regarding the launcher:

    I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.

    To override that, there are two options.

    • Install the Automate app by Llamalab and make a small flow that detects when the stock launcher is the currently active app and then automatically launches the new launcher. This option is completely safe.
    • Disable the stock launcher. If Android doesn’t find it’s set default launcher, it will instead open the first launcher it finds. Worked good on the Fire Tablet, but I can’t verify that this doesn’t cause issues on a Fire TV. So this might be a bit risky.



  • I wasn’t specifically talking about this product alone, but about the general trend. I don’t own any Amazon hardware.

    A few years ago, piracy was all but dead because or really good offers like Netflix. All the stuff you wanted was there and the price was ok.

    Now to get the same that you got for a tenner a month on Netflix, you have to pay for half a dozen of streaming services.

    Youtube forces you to watch more ads than actual content. All services are increasing prices while decreasing what you are getting for that money. And all sorts of products are retroactively introducing ads.

    I mean seriously, if someone bought that stick, they paid for it. They shouldn’t have to worry about updates actively making the device worse.

    It’s an industry-wide trend that sucks, and it’s one that creates resistance. People start pirating, use adblock and some hack their devices. Not because it’s impossible to have a situation that suits everyone, but because they purpously use enshittification to suck more money out of their customers.