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Lettuceeatlettuce

@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml

Always eat your greens!

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Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Flatpak is a universal application packaging standard for Linux. It allows devs to create a single application that gets bundled with all necessary dependencies including versioning.

These apps run in their own semi-isolated “container” which makes immutable distros possible. (Distros like Fedora Silverblue that are effectively impossible to break by installing or removing critical system files.)

This means that a Linux app doesn’t have to have a .deb version, an .rpm version, or be pre-compiled for any other distros. A user can simply go to Flathub, (the main repository for Flatpak apps), download the flatpak, and install it on their distro of choice.

It’s quickly becoming the most popular way for users to install apps on Linux because it’s so easy and quick. But there are a few downsides like size on disk, first party verification, per-distro optimizations, and the centralization of application sources. That’s why some users aren’t fully endorsing or embracing how popular they are becoming.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I’m not an expert, but from my understanding, more like android apps.

They aren’t totally isolated like a docker or LXC container would be, but they are generally self-contained.

The Linux Experiment has a really great vid that goes into detail on all common packaging formats in Linux including Flatpaks:

Linux Packaging Formats Explained

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Essentially yes, if you start using lots if older applications or mixing applications that use many different dependency versions, you will start to use lots of extra disk space because the different apps have to use their own separate dependency trees and so forth.

This doesn’t mean it will be like 2x-3x the size as traditional packages, but from what I’ve seen, it could definitely be 10-20% larger on disk. Not a huge deal for most people, but if you have limited disk space for one reason or another, it could be a problem.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Appimage is probably the most similar to a naked .exe in Windows. They are useful for small apps or simple indie games, but I prefer Flatpaks for my everyday big applications.

Agreed, Snaps are like Flatpaks but worse because locked down back end and Canonical’s sketchy nature. Imagine a really delicious pastry that anybody can make and sell, then imagine the same pastry but only one bakery in the world can make and sell it. Which would you prefer? Lol

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I have been enjoying fish a lot over the last few months, but I generally try to use Bash, it makes cross-*NIX administration that much easier.

How much is privacy actually worth?

I can’t seem to find an actual currency estimate of how much privacy is actually worth. I see a ton of articles talking about why privacy should be worth more to people or what people would pay for privacy services or how much people would sell their privacy for, but I don’t see anything that gives a value for the privacy...

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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This is kind of like asking, “what is water worth?”

To an upper middle class person in the developed world, a dollar or two. To a person stranded in a desert, they might literally kill for it.

If you are just a Joe shmoe out in the world living a basic life, privacy might not be worth hardly anything. But if you’re a whistle blower or a political dissident in an authoritarian country, your privacy is worth everything.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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True, sadly. Honestly it’s already there in certain specific respects.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Some people will never be willing to move to Linux. Even if Linux was 98% compatible with their needs, they would stay on Windows for that remaining 2%.

There are folks who would let Windows punch them in the groin or slap them across the face once per month as long as they could play their favorite kernel-level anticheat esport trash.

There are a few people who make their living using evil software like the Adobe suite, and for them I truly feel sorry that they are trapped in the dystopian hell of modern proprietary software, but we do live in a society I guess.

The tough truth is, many people don’t really give a shit about privacy, consumer rights, software freedom, or transparency, even if they say they do. They will huff and puff about how terrible Windows has gotten. They will rant and rave about how ridiculous the ads are in their OS or how they think it’s wrong for their OS to spy and track their actions constantly.

But when the rubber meets the road and they can sacrifice a few things to gain their freedom, they won’t do it. I know, because I have multiple friends and family that have been acting like this for years.

Whenever I suggest Linux or FOSS alternatives to their proprietary apps, they initially are interested. But of course they will always find the one or two things they like to use/play/have that doesn’t work or is a pain on Linux, and they bail.

I had one friend who was saying they were “totally serious about switching to Linux soon.” But they bailed when they found out that Valorant doesn’t work on Linux. Do they play Valorant actively? No, they haven’t played it in years, but they, “wanted the possibility to play it just in case they decided to get back into it again.”

Personally, there isn’t a single game or piece of software I would ever give up Linux for. I just flat out refuse to use Windows or MacOS on any of my personal computers. It’s a pledge I made years ago and I will forever stick to it.

Hot take: If you claim to be against all the big tech abuses and value software and computing freedom, but a handful of PC games is enough to stop you from leaving an abusive proprietary OS, you weren’t very serious about it to begin with.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I thought the video was pretty reasonable. I wasn’t criticizing him with my hot take.

It will always be a balance of what you’re willing to do for what you believe in, vs pragmatism and comfort.

Some things are better sacrificed, because they aren’t actually very good to begin with. But other things are better adapted or emulated into a FOSS framework.

On a more personal note, I was prepared to give up far more than I actually needed to when switching to Linux 100%. Linux has gotten so good in most areas, it’s pretty incredible.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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For sure.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Absolutely.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Fair, yeah that is a solid solution.

Lettuceeatlettuce, (edited )
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Yeah, IT is in a similar boat. Not as bad, but still where I live, Linux environments are super rare. So if you are going into IT, you are going to be working in Windows environments, and most firms use software that isn’t compatible with Linux.

Stuff like their remote management software, or their inventory management software. Plus, unless you’re the guy in charge of the IT department, almost nobody wants or even knows how to administrate a Linux endpoint.

So they don’t want one of their sys admins to be running around on a Linux machine that they don’t have as much visibility on or understanding of how it works.

I’m lucky that the company I work for is small enough that I am the entire IT department, so I can use whatever OS I want. Debian 12 with Plasma, love it.

But out in the world, you’re going to find a bunch of situations like you are in, where so much of the defaults use Windows and proprietary garbage, you’re stuck running exactly what they are.

Long term, you could start trying to build your own indie studio that is FOSS-based. Maybe years down the line you can make it on your own. Do that full time and make supplemental income as an outside contractor or something. IDK, that also comes with its own set of issues. It’s a shitty tech corpo dystopia all around us.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Not sure why GrapheneOS is getting down voted so much here, did I miss something recent that happened?

I’ve been using GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6a for around 2 years and really like it.

If I couldn’t use GOS though, I would probably go with DivestOS. I haven’t looked deep into other alternative Android ROMs.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Fair point, Pixels aren’t flagship expensive, but they definitely aren’t cheap either.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Go to your favorite YT creator’s channels and download important content! Educational content, lectures, nostalgic content. Anything and everything you have the storage for.

One day, it will be locked away behind paywalls, poisoned with ads, or just deleted entirely.

Part of preparing for war is stockpiling supplies. Buy bulk storage. An extra 2-4 TB hard drive can be bought for 100-200 dollars. It doesn’t have to be fancy, get a friend or two to go in with you on it.

Download and save everything you value. Rip your physical media and save it, pirate the shows and movies you love. One day it will be locked away or stolen from you because the terms of service changed.

Please don’t delay, I wish I had started years ago myself.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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You’re right though, actually even cheaper than I thought.

5TB portable HDDs new on Newegg for $100 - $150

All the more reason to start hoarding data!

Lettuceeatlettuce,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Eh, now days unless you’re really beating them up, most HDDs will last at least 5-7 years.

You are right that people need to have multiple backups on different media, especially really important stuff.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Totally!

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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That would be really cool.

Thinkpad recs?

I like used Thinkpads. I bought a T430s off eBay and used it for several years. Recently I got a T570 from work. It had a screen issue, so I bought a new screen. That didn’t fix it so I bought a new mobo, but it has a loose drive connector so won’t boot. Just now I killed it for good by putting an nvme in a sata slot lol....

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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T480 is a great machine. You can find them on eBay for $200-$300 quite easily. They work great with Linux and are still old enough that they are decently repairable.

I’ve also heard that the older X1 carbons are really solid if you want something a little sleeker.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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My ghost will haunt GoG’s corporate offices until they relent and transfer my games to the person who’s name I keep creepily spelling with frost on their mirrors & windows.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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And to add to this, if you want another overlay network solution like Tailscale that is fully Open source, Netbird is something to check out.

Lawrence Systems has some vids on their product, fully self-hostable 1st party control plane and Foss clients. Newer, smaller, not as well supported as Tailscale, but solid enough for homelabs and small biz solutions from what I’ve seen/read.

I’ve messed with both and each has their own strengths. Both solutions are really awesome though. Unless you need really high network performance, I feel like overlay networks are the way to go. Soooo much easier to setup and maintain than traditional ipsec tunnels or even OpenVPN firewall configs and manual routes.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I hope to God that RustDesk doesn’t get corrupted or enshitified because I absolutely love it.

Been using it for remote assistance at my workplace for about a year now and it’s been almost flawless. By far the most responsive and easy to use remote access solution I’ve used, (and I’ve used a lot.)

I use it with my family across the country to do remote support for their family computer too. It is small, lightweight, fast, handles multiple screens like a charm, and I don’t think I’ve ever had connection issues, even when on really slow network connections.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I run LMDE 6 on my Thinkpad. Takes a bit of initial TLC to get tuned, but it’s rock stable.

Cinnamon is a really stable DE, I’ve had almost zero issues ever with it. It’s a little plain, but not ugly, and you can add themes if you really want to pretty it up.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Almost certainly fake, but what a horrible thought.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I’ll throw my hat in. I’ve moderated multiple Discord communities before and currently. I’ve also moderated forums back in the day.

I am passionate about FOSS and the community around it. I’ve been a Linux user for 4+ years now and work in IT, so I have a good handle on the current trends in tech.

Thanks for your consideration!

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Here’s a proposal: First, all dog breeding is regulated as strictly as bars with liquor licenses. Criminal charges and jail time if found doing it illegally.

Breeders and owners are required to have insurance coverage specific to dogs.

Owners are held liable for all damages their dog causes, no matter what. Your dog attacks somebody, mauls them and they seek settlement? It’s on the owners. If the owner cannot be determined, the breeder is held liable.

Or, just make dogs above say, 30 pounds illegal. “But what if your dog is little and just really fat and becomes over 30 pounds?” Then you are fined and told to get your dog healthy within a certain timeframe, say 90 days, or surrender the dog and pay a fine for neglect, or get charged with animal abuse.

“Well then, nobody would want to get/breed dogs that are anywhere close to 30 pounds full grown because of the risk of violating the law.” Yes…that’s good. The only dogs people would have are small dogs that can’t severely maul/kill people even if they do go off the rails.

“But what about hunters or sportspeople that use dogs to hunt or herd?” Plenty of herding/hunting dogs are within that 30 pound weight range, like Corgis or Beagles. Obviously there would be exceptions for government organizations that use large dogs for legitimate purposes like Saint Bernards for search and rescue.

“But muh gawd damn riaghts!!!” go cry about it.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Should be distributed laws, not centralized, but you’re a statist, so this convo won’t go any further.

What is the best model of used ThinkPad to purchase?

I’m thinking of picking up a used ThinkPad on eBay for cheap to serve as my daily driver. I’ll likely run LMDE, and primarily use it for web browsing, office programs, coding, and FreeCAD. Any recommendations on which model would best hit the sweet spot of capability vs price?

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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T480 can be had on eBay for 200-300 bucks and will perform very well in modern applications. I’ve seen a few that are banged up pretty bad for under $200, if you’re cool with a well loved laptop.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Right on!

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Obligatory reminder:

Email is not a secure medium! If you need truly secure and/or anonymous communications, DON’T USE EMAIL!

Use a platform/protocol designed from the ground up for those things!

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I’m interested to try their Cosmic desktop later this year.

Overall, seems like a solid company, I’ve heard good things about their laptops, although I’ve never had one myself.

Pop_OS as a distro, heard generally good things about. The few times I’ve messed around with it have been fine. The folks that stick with it seem to like it.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Plasma has been pretty stable for the last several years I’ve been using it, especially X11. Wayland is buggier, but not terribly so, and it gets better all the time.

I’ve switched over to Wayland with Plasma now because it is stable enough for me now, I’m on Nobara.

I don’t really use Gnome, so I can’t speak to that experience.

If I were to vouch for a DE that is rock stable, it would be Cinnamon. I’ve never had any problems with Cinnamon. It’s not super pretty, and it’s a bit clunky, but if I want a DE that just works and gets out of my way, Cinnamon is my first choice.

It’s what I use for my business laptop, LMDE with Cinnamon, rock solid.

I should also add that I’ve always used fully AMD hardware, CPU and GPUs, and never brand new. Always a year or two old, so the Linux kernel has time to address bleeding edge bugs and such.

How are companies or developers supposed to make a full time living with OSI opensourced projects? (opensource.org)

There has been a lot of talk about companies and individuals adopting licenses that aren’t OSI opensource to protect themselves from mega-corp leechers. Developers have also been condemned who put donation notices in the command-line or during package installation. Projects with opensource cores and paid extensions have also...

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Also paid integrations into your existing environment.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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For invoicing at my small business, I use Invoice Ninja.

Open source, self-hostable, and they offer cloud hosting. Free for the base version with less than 20 users. It has a bunch of features, you are able to create very professional invoices, define services and products, calculate taxes, fees, etc.

It’s very clean, fast, and intuitive.

For accounting, I use GnuCash. It’s old looking and clunky, but it has a bunch of features and works fine for everything I need.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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No prob! Yeah I’ve been super happy with Invoice Ninja particularly, it’s a really solid piece of software.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Nintendon’t mind being total dickheads.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Thinkpad A485. If you’re going used, I would grab a T460, T470, or T480. Really reliable models, all those can be had for $300 or less online, work great with Linux, and last forever. Plus they are decently repairable.

If new, I would also go with Framework laptops. Super repairable and sustainable. And very high quality laptops. My friend got one and it is super nice. Runs Fedora on it flawlessly.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Not with the trackpad, but other issues yeah. For some reason, this model seems to be really finicky depending on the distro you use.

I had weird random issues with most distros I’ve tried on it over the years.

The two distros that have worked with almost no issues are Manjaro, and Mint Debian Edition, which is what I currently run on it.

The most frequent I had with it were random lockups when bringing it out of sleep mode.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

Fair point. Some folks are on an ultra tight budget or prefer the older model for various reasons.

But I agree, at $200-$300 used, you can’t really go wrong with the T480. Really nice specs for most use cases, and still fairly repairable and upgradable.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I’ve heard a lot of good stuff about the Carbons, especially the older ones as Linux machines.

Simple fix on KDE wayland for windows to remember their last position (imgur.com)

Thanks to /u/azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works for mentioning KDE window rules. In KDE, we can add rules for windows so that they behave in specific ways. One rule that can be added is the position: remember rule, and it’s possible to make that rule apply to all windows by removing the match field. This way, closing and reopening...

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Thanks a bunch for this, just what I was looking for!

Open source e reader (lemmy.ml)

I recently got a Sony prs 600 e reader from 2009. The battery is at the end of its life (It lasts about 3 days with heavy reading, and a couple weeks without reading). No backlight, no Wi-Fi, just an SD card that I can load epub files and small PDFs. The screen is slow and the contrast isn’t the best. The “touch screen” is...

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Kobo e-readers are known to be pretty hackable and many of their models can be used with ‘KoReader’ an open source e-reading OS/app

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I don’t have one currently, but from some of the stuff I’ve read, the Clara HD model is one of the most popular for hacking/modding.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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I’ve been enjoying Codeberg a lot lately.

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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DDG is my primary engine, but I’ve had good results with Brave Search too.

I’ve heard good things about Qwant, but unfortunately it requires you to turn ad block off, so no go for me on that one.

What apps would you love to have open-source alternatives for?

It seems like the FOSS community is continuing to grow, and FOSS apps keep getting better (Immich reallh blew my mind recently), which is a big win 😎 but there are still many apps I use that I would kill for an open source alternative. I am curious what you guys think? Are there any apps you’d love alternatives for?

Lettuceeatlettuce,
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Fair points.

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