narc0tic_bird

@narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee

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narc0tic_bird,

Why are lobbyists allowed anywhere?

narc0tic_bird,

With Steam having a gaming audience I’d argue that this has at least a slight bias towards Arch, as the latest kernel versions and other software are often advantageous for gaming in particular.

But even with the Steam numbers note that Arch is just listed as one single variant, while Ubuntu has separate entries for different versions. Ubuntu LTS 22.04 alone is so close to Arch that it’s probably ahead once you include all versions.

narc0tic_bird,

Ran the beta of KDE Spin since it released. Great update :)

narc0tic_bird,

This is one of the (small) gripes I have with Fedora (at least the KDE Spin, not sure about the GNOME edition): it doesn’t really have an “official” way to handle backups. Distros like Linux Mint do a better job here.

Yes, you can use pretty much anything and I ended up using Restic, but it’s not great for your average “office” user who would rather just have an entry in the system settings where they can configure a reliable backup easily. Then add a restore process to the installer.

Apple’s Time Machine is a good template in terms of UX I’d say, it’s built-in, easy to setup and also easy to restore either single files/folders or a whole system with an option in the setup assistant.

narc0tic_bird,

Sony also built up momentum during the second half of the PS3’s lifespan by focusing on what’s most important for a games console: games. And they made the PS3 more affordable and therefore accessible with a great, focused PS3 redesign in form of the PS3 Slim, saving costs while only cutting features that weren’t really important to most potential customers (PS2 backwards compatibility).

They took that momentum, watched Microsoft fail and made a home run with the PS4 based on the perfect storm that was created.

The PS5 was simply a continuation of their good form, and Microsoft has just been going along with their Xbox brand and consoles, seemingly not knowing where to go, buying studios left and right which then proceed to release mediocre titles. They also tried something with their subscription service, but it turns out most people just buy the games they want to play instead of picking from a selection of games of which they wouldn’t have chosen most of them if they weren’t included in a subscription.

narc0tic_bird,

Oh I agree with that and I’m a PC gamer 99 % of the time (well, like 95 % desktop PC, 4.5 % Steam Deck, 0.5 % consoles). I mainly use my PS5 for playing BluRay nowadays. I don’t fancy paying more for games, a subscription for online gaming and getting a worse experience (in terms of graphics/performance and things like modding but also voice chat options etc.).

narc0tic_bird,

Apple does a weird half-assed (or not even half) attempt at “proper” gaming on Macs. They released their Proton-like compatibility layer 1-2 years ago now, but it’s targeted at developers to help them “port” their games over and there isn’t really a user-friendly way to simply use it with any game (plus the results are very spotty, further considering that developers are supposed to make adjustments to their games).

I don’t think Apple wants to support just about any game to run on their platform. The games themselves aren’t the problem for Apple, but rather that established gaming store fronts don’t bring Apple any money and they’d rather sell these games on the App Store.

narc0tic_bird,

Same for me, but don’t get your hopes up. Riot just fucked up the code doing the check, but let’s just trust them that their permanently running kernel driver has no security flaws.

narc0tic_bird,

Unlucky, sold my RTX 3080 for a Radeon 7800 XT because of superior Linux support. Would’ve loved to have helped.

narc0tic_bird,

It performs as expected, that is to say similar to an RTX 3080, so it wasn’t really an upgrade performance-wise (RT performance is probably even a bit worse), but Nvidia drivers caused tons of issues combined with Wayland and certain games when I tried it, so the switch was definitely worth it for me. It’s quite a bit more efficient though in terms of power draw and the model I got (PowerColor Hellhound) has a great cooler that that’s very quiet even under high load.

It’s pretty good with somewhat recent kernels, although I started experiencing an odd issue starting with kernel 6.7 (at least combined with KDE Plasma and VRR) that I reported here: gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues/3268. Apart from that I’m very satisfied. I’d imagine a 7600 XT would work just as well.

narc0tic_bird,

Depending on where you live a 6700 XT or 6750 XT might be available at a similar price. They only come with 12 GB VRAM and lack RDNA3 features like AV1 encode, but both models are quite a bit faster than a 7600 XT.

narc0tic_bird,

I know some of y’all like to bash Windows at every chance, but except for the activation it’s portable as well and the OS wouldn’t normally break. You can put your Windows SSD into other computers and it will boot just fine. This might have been different with Windows 7 and earlier versions, but as of Windows 8 it’s smooth sailing.

narc0tic_bird,

It’s not stable, hence why it’s called beta. Does it run without crashing? For me it does. I get some SELinux warnings from Proton/Wine with F40 even though I ran fixfiles according to their upgrade instructions, so there are definitely some oddities left. Some packages get daily updates. RPMFusion provides repositories for F40 already. Kernel version as of now is 6.8.4.

Is xz 5.6.1-3+ still dangerous?

When the xz backdoor was discovered, I quickly uninstalled my Arch based setup with an infected version of the software and switched to a distro that shipped an older version (5.5 or 5.4 or something). I found an article which said that in 5.6.1-3 the backdoor was “fixed” by just not letting the malware part communicating...

narc0tic_bird,

Fedora 39 and 40 (which is still in beta) uses xz 5.4. Fedora 41/rawhide (essentially the development branch) was affected it seems: access.redhat.com/security/cve/CVE-2024-3094. CentOS Stream and RHEL have way more outdated packages than that, so they were never vulnerable to this backdoor.

openSUSE Tumbleweed (their rolling release) was affected: news.opensuse.org/2024/03/29/xz-backdoor/, Enterprise or Leap were unaffected.

narc0tic_bird,

If they’d make this the default a lot of leas tech-savvy people would regularly lose their data because regular account recovery mechanisms don’t work with E2EE enabled. The vast majority of people don’t even use password managers and yes, people forget their passwords and yes, the same thing happens with a 28-digit recovery phrase. No, many won’t remember where they put it when they wrote it down. Many won’t even understand what this phrase means, even when the setup process directly explains it to them.

But we can obviously also be all negative about why this isn’t enabled by default and make assumptions.

narc0tic_bird,

It’s the other way around. Wayland will add support for explicit sync. Nvidia drivers can do explicit sync, what they can’t do is implicit sync, which is what’s currently causing issues with Wayland + Nvidia.

narc0tic_bird,

Yeah, let’s make sure all exploits are patched before the device inevitably becomes obsolete in a couple of years, so we can throw it away and buy the next version instead of not being wasteful.

narc0tic_bird,

I recently started playing Zelda The Minish Cap (GBA) on my PS Vita, and for me the appeal - especially with old handheld games - is the simplicity in terms of game mechanics.

The game only has like a dozen of equippable items, dialog with NPCs is very simple, there’s a lot of puzzles cleverly integrated into the map, a small trading system (forgot what it’s called, these round things where you match your half with an NPCs half), a few different collectibles (heart containers for example) and they pretty much made a very enjoyable game out of that.

Today, a lot of games come with a crafting system, some sort of hunger/food mechanic, complex character progression systems etc. And while I enjoy this a lot of the time, playing a well crafted game based on much simpler (and fewer) mechanics is a welcome change from time to time.

narc0tic_bird,

I’d say it highly depends on the title. Not all games age well, maybe most didn’t. Nostalgia is definitely a factor when it comes to enjoyment of some of these games. I never played Zelda The Minish Cap before and I still enjoy it now, but maybe part of it is generic nostalgia for GameBoy type games. I’d also say GBA games are often more accessible than even older (say NES) games.

And graphically, sure, newer games look quite a lot better. This game didn’t get the remake treatment (yet) though. I disagree that there has to be a “balance” between visual effects and gameplay though (aside from prioritizing development resources). A game can have both amazing graphics and great gameplay mechanics. I also think great graphics and visual design can enhance the gameplay experience.

But I don’t know, I still enjoy the odd “retro” game every now and then.

narc0tic_bird,

In the end I don’t care whether the “default” Fedora is KDE or GNOME, as long as the spin of the other DE is maintained well. Except for the ootb experience which is better on the GNOME version with setup steps for proprietary drivers and whatnot, the KDE spin feels like a first-class citizen.

But KDE just makes more sense for most users I feel. Currently you start wondering where your tray icons went (for example) when switching from a non-Linux OS. For gaming, KDE is simply more mature with built-in Wayland VRR support for example.

narc0tic_bird,

No. joshuastrobl.social/@me/112197672362783955

narc0tic_bird,

I know, that’s available just now with Fedora 40. And you have to know that the flag exists, it’s not a visible setting until you enable it. With KDE it’s just there (and has been for quite a while).

narc0tic_bird,

Whether it makes sense for Ubuntu I’m not sure, but I don’t think that it would make less sense on Fedora either way.

Fedora is a “batteries included” distro the way I see it, and besides, I don’t see how KDE likely feeling more familiar for, say, Windows users makes it a worse choice for experienced Linux users.

A big part of what should be the default DE for a given distro is obviously very subjective, so I’d actually be surprised if they really changed the default because of this proposal. It has valid points and I’d say KDE is on average more appealing to the very broad target audience that Fedora aims to have, although as I said: that’s just my opinion/gut feeling.

As long as KDE support stays at least as good as it has been so far in Fedora, I’ll be happy.

narc0tic_bird,

I wasn’t saying everything is included, and sure, proprietary things like Nvidia drivers aren’t included (and I’m aware of the mesa-freeworld packages that replace the bundled ones). I was referring to Fedora being a “complete” experience in a sense that you get a preconfigured desktop environment, an installer where you can say “just install to this drive, I don’t care about anything else” and quite a few preinstalled applications. It’s not like Arch for example, where you manually partition your drives and chroot into your system to install packages and a bootloader just to get up and running.

narc0tic_bird,

“Won’t have to” is one thing, but “won’t be allowed” is bullshit.

Oh well, why would one buy something from Meta anyway?

narc0tic_bird,

When upgrading to the beta, does it become the stable release once that’s out via regular dnf package upgrades? Or are you then on some kind of beta channel that you have to switch back from?

narc0tic_bird,

In terms of impact it had it’s the 2600/VCS (same thing) by far.

narc0tic_bird,

With VRR as an experimental feature at least. Finally!

narc0tic_bird,

Text and vector graphics should scale quite well. There are some cases where fractional scaling doesn’t work out, for example on borders that are 1 pixel wide @1x. Do you render them 2 pixels wide @1.5x, or 1 pixel? I have a Windows system for work and 1.5x scaling in Firefox renders buttons uneven, so the borders are thicker on some sides and thinner on others.

Fractional scaling isn’t the best solution, but even with most desktop displays transitioning from 2560x1440 to 3840x2160 we get fractional scaling. Sucks that 5120x2880 isn’t more mainstream for ~27" displays.

Longtime Arch user, first time Debian enjoyer

As the title says, I’ve been using various flavours of Arch basically since I started with Linux. My very first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, but I quickly switched to Manjaro, then Endeavour, then plain Arch. Recently I’ve done some spring cleaning, reinstalling my OS’s. I have a pretty decent laptop that I got for...

narc0tic_bird,

To me, the best OS will always be the one that gets out of my way as good as possible. That includes stability, maintenance, compatibility, usability and sensible defaults. I don’t want to deal with the OS when I’m trying to get stuff done or I’m looking for entertainment.

And yeah, Debian is pretty good at most of those things.

narc0tic_bird,

This should be pretty much impossible to replace short-term without resorting to Google. Building a database that maps routers, cell towers and more to coordinates from scratch takes a lot of time I imagine.

narc0tic_bird,

The crowdsourcing part is what I meant. And you probably underestimate infrastructure as well.

This also isn’t something you can just let a few volunteers do once and forget about it. It needs to be something that people run often on their phones. Wi-Fi access points change, cell towers sometimes change. You need to keep this data up-to-date. With Google’s or Apple’s location service, when a person buys a new router, it’s probably added to the database within hours or days at worst.

narc0tic_bird,

If it’s all that “classic”, then why is there no dedicated server software available? Let people run their own servers like back then. Would’ve fixed the issue of only 3 being available at first.

narc0tic_bird,

In general it’s pretty stable. That being said, especially when you’re using bleeding edge hardware, it’s not perfect.

Take my Radeon 7800 XT as an example. I’m using Linux on my desktop as of January 1st pretty much, and decided I’ll go for Fedora as it’s pretty up-to-date in terms of kernel releases but also has a great out-of-the-box experience. Kernel 6.6 has been pretty good for me, but newer kernels (6.7.x and 6.8) have issues with my setup. Engaging VRR (variable refresh rate) after the computer wakes up from standby leads to part of the screen flickering white for a few frames every now and then, and eventually the system crashes. Up to 6.7.4 the GPU only output a black screen after standby or even after a warm restart. The latter has been resolved in 6.7.5 but the former issue has not. I’ve been following a few issues, adding a crash report here and there, trying patch files, but so far to no avail.

This means I’m basically stuck on 6.6 for now, which also means I’m compiling the kernel myself to get the latest patch release, as Fedora doesn’t maintain 6.6 anymore.

I had even more issues with Nvidia combined with Wayland. Ironically, Intel Arc probably works the best in terms of stability in my experience.

I’m going to say that in terms of GPU stability, I had a better experience with Windows. Sure, the odd AMD driver release has issues, but Windows does a way better job in recovering from a GPU driver crash. The monolithic nature of Linux means a GPU driver crash will often kill the whole system. I had a case where the system recovered, but in a new desktop session with my running desktop applications orphaned somewhere (basically forcing me to restart). Windows usually just restarts the GPU driver (because it’s mostly running in user space, which it isn’t in Linux) and you can continue.

I also had an issue with my network adapter (Intel 2.5G onboard) dropping connection after several hours of use. A workaround involved editing boot parameters to prevent PCIe from going into some sort of power saving mode. Searching for the issue revealed that it’s likely because how ASUS (mainboard) configured the onboard network adapter.

You’ll also need to fiddle with Feral GameMode to properly pin games to the 3D cache cores on a 7950X3D. This is more “set and forget” with Windows Game Bar.

To be honest, Windows is a pretty solid OS from a technical perspective. It has its downsides, but so has Linux. Don’t switch for an allegedly technical superior experience. Switch if you don’t agree with what Microsoft is doing from a user experience perspective. That’s why I switched.

All that being said, Linux at its core is super stable. I use Linux on a few servers for many, many years now, and I don’t think I ever had a system crash.

narc0tic_bird,

I hope there’ll be an official, well-supported Fedora COSMIC spin once it matures a bit more.

narc0tic_bird,

It’s still so weird to me that Microsoft - who has their own, now modern, native UI framework for Windows - barely uses it in any of their own applications, instead more and more relying on Electron Edge WebView2, barely following their own design language. Do they even want people to use Windows?

narc0tic_bird,

You can install WebView2 separately without the Edge GUI actually.

narc0tic_bird,

By repairing it instead of modding it…? Am I missing something here?

narc0tic_bird,

KDE has this feature built-in.

narc0tic_bird,

I’m still on 6.6. 6.7 onwards (including 6.8-rc7) caused flickering and crashes with VRR enabled after waking up from standby on my Radeon 7800 XT. I’ll check out the final version, but I doubt this is fixed.

narc0tic_bird,

Yes. Fedora 39, KDE Plasma 5, Wayland, VRR on dual displays.

narc0tic_bird,

Thanks for the suggestion, but the system eventually crashes and automatically restarts.

narc0tic_bird,

S3 compatible? Wasabi is $.99/TB more, but has no egress or API fees whatsoever. So depending on use, it can be cheaper. For archiving purposes, Amazon Deep Glacier is a lot cheaper for storage (but expensive for retrieval).

Non-S3? Take a look at Hetzner Storage Box.

narc0tic_bird,

And? :)

narc0tic_bird,

As of Xbox One/PS4, all disc games are fully installed to the HDD/SSD, so you’ll most likely have to sit through a lengthy install process. Not sure how fast the drive is, but it’s probably 6x, meaning a theoretical 27 MB/s read speed, which in reality is probably averaging more like 20 MB/s. So the installation will likely take more than two hours.

narc0tic_bird,

Nice! Looking forward to using this with Fedora 40.

narc0tic_bird,

Is anyone actually daily driving this on their phone? Would be interesting to hear about the experience.

It looks great and certainly promising, but looking at the supported device list of, say, postmarketOS, it’s clear that there’s a lot of work left to be done.

narc0tic_bird,

Feature-wise probably next to nothing, and it’s usually behind one or two generations in terms of bandwidth. HDMI is often the only port available on TVs though, so GPU makers likely can’t afford to just leave it out.

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