cyclohexane

@cyclohexane@lemmy.ml

West Asia - Communist - international politics - anti-imperialism - software development - Math, science, chemistry, history, sociology, and a lot more.

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cyclohexane,

Which sites or apps does it not pop up? It is rare for it not to pop up for me.

[Question] Why is Matrix mentioned more often than XMPP in self hosted forums?

I’m looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?...

cyclohexane,

Makes sense, but to me newness alone is not a benefit. In fact, it is a bit of a disadvantage. XMPP has more clients for example, and they are more mature.

cyclohexane,

From a quick look into XMPP’s clients for android, they seem nice and some have modern features too.

Is there any technical limitation that would prevent xmpp client from having a WhatsApp-like UI?? WhatsApp started out with XMPP and probably still uses a variant of it. If anything, I’d imagine its harder with matrix given the complexity of the protocol.

cyclohexane,

Arch works well for gaming. However, depending on what you’re doing, you should keep this in mind:

  • on any distro, updates may break things or change the behavior of apps. The difference in arch is that youll update no less than weekly on average, maybe biweekly at worst. This would matter more if you have a complex setup. If you’re just using steam, I wouldn’t worry
  • arch only uses the latest versions of software. If you ever install something from outside the arch repos, you have to make sure it is compatible with recent versions. Sometimes it may not be.
cyclohexane,

Why not matrix?

cyclohexane,

Can you please explain what this is?

cyclohexane,

Markdown is awesome, I agree! I did not realize you could extend markdown with anything other than html. The html extension is quite nice to do anything that markdown doesn’t support natively, but I wish there was an easier way to extend markdown. Maybe the ones you listed are what I need.

cyclohexane,

Is it practical outside of academia? I heard the learning curve is kinda big

cyclohexane,

Outside of academia, would you say it still provides significant upside over markdown?

cyclohexane,

I’m aware of tails, but I am not confident it qualifies. With Tails, I still connect through my own Internet connection, presumably. I know using tor obfuscates this, but is it to the degree of, say, Monero?

Moreover, I am still at the mercy of the platform I use. Most of them require email or phone verification, and creating an account with lots of data sent over from the clients.

Tails is a necessary component, but the platform is also important.

cyclohexane,

Doesn’t work on Mull browser (hardened Firefox for android) :(

cyclohexane,

It uses the arkenfox thingie. It doesn’t block JS, but it does block a lot of things and possibly certain JS features.

cyclohexane,

Wouldn’t you be able to do the same with NFS?

cyclohexane,

Yes you’re right. Did not realize that’s what you meant 😅

cyclohexane,

A symlink works more closely to the first way you described it. The software opening a symlink has to actually follow it. It’s possible for a software to not follow the symlink (either intentionally or not).

So your sync software has to actually be able to follow symlinks. I’m not familiar with how gdrive and similar solutions work, but I know this is possible with something like rsync

cyclohexane,

I have a feeling this is a joke. Either way I’m not following sorry 😭

cyclohexane,

Xorg is a display server for Linux ecosystem. Every ecosystem has a display server. It is what makes it possible for you to have graphical applications with movable windows that can talk to each other, or have a mouse cursor that can click on things.

Wayland is a replacement for Xorg because Xorg is old and its developers said an alternative is needed. Wayland has differences that I won’t discuss here, but I’ll be happy to do so if you ask.

Hyprland is a wayland compositor. A compositor is basically an implementation of wayland (there are many) and gives you a windowing system that you can run graphical applications through. It is usually a lot more minimal than having a full graphical desktop like KDE or Gnome.

Hyprland belongs to a class of comositors called “tiling”, which forces windows to be in a tiling formation. In other words, windows do not overlap or stack on top of each other. Hyprland stands out in having a lot of eye candy and visual effects.

I use CLI for moving files, etc. After you use it for a while, you find out it can be more efficient, faster, and more pleasant to work with.

cyclohexane,

Doesn’t feel like that to me. I’ll need to see evidence that that is the main reason. It could be but I just don’t see it.

cyclohexane,

Why would one be discouraged by the fact that people have options and opinions on them? That’s the part I’m not buying. I don’t disagree that people do in fact disagree and argue. I don’t know if I’d call it fighting. People being unreasonably aggressive about it are rare.

I for one am glad that people argue. It helps me explore different options without going through the effort of trying every single one myself.

cyclohexane,

Why would one be discouraged by the fact that people have options and opinions on them? That’s the part I’m not buying. I don’t disagree that people do in fact disagree and argue. I don’t know if I’d call it fighting. People being unreasonably aggressive about it are rare.

I for one am glad that people argue. It helps me explore different options without going through the effort of trying every single one myself.

cyclohexane,

The terminal world has Ctrl+C and Ctrl+(many other characters) already reserved for other things before they ever became standard for copy paste. For for this reason, Ctrl+Shift+(C for copy, V for paste) are used.

cyclohexane,

This is not a good argument imo. It was a miracle that xz vulnerability was found so fast, and should not be assumed as standard. The developer had been contributing to the codebase for 2 years, and their code already landed in debian stable iirc. There’s still no certainty that that code had no vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities in the past were caught decades after their introduction.

cyclohexane,

Unlike other commenters, I agree with you. Debian based systems are less suitable for desktop use, and imo is one of the reasons newcomers have frequent issues.

When installing common applications, newcomers tend to follow the windows ways of downloading an installer or a standalone executable from the Internet. They often do not stick with the package manager. This can cause breakage, as debian might expect you to have certain version of programs that are different from what the installer from the Internet expects. A rolling release distro is more likely to have versions that Internet installers expect.

To answer your question, I believe debian based distros are popular for desktop because they were already popular for server use before Linux desktop were significant.

cyclohexane,

I disagree. Stable, yes. But stable as in unchanging (including bug-for-bug compatibility), which imo is not what most users want. It is what server admins want though. Most newbie desktop users don’t realize this about debian based systems, and is one of the sources of trouble they experience.

Debian tries to be secure by back porting security fixes, but they just cannot feasibly do this for all software, and last I checked, there were unaddressed vulnerabilities in debian’s version of software that they had not yet backported (and they had been known for a while). I’m happy to look up the source for you if you’re interested.

cyclohexane,

Lots of eyes is not enough. As I mentioned earlier, there are many popular programs found on most machines, and some actually user facing (unlike xz) where vulnerabilities were caught months, years, and sometimes decades later. xz is an exception, not a rule.

cyclohexane,

Not sure what that is. Plesse explain more.

cyclohexane,

Thank you 😄

cyclohexane,

Please feel free to make me a mod too. I am not crazy active, but I think my modest contributions will help.

And I can make this kind of post on a biweekly or monthly basis :) I think weekly might be too often since the post frequency here isn’t crazy high

cyclohexane,

Here’s an example:

reddit.com/…/debian_chromium_package_has_many_sec…

Being able to run a distribution on multiple machines does not mean it is free of vulnerabilities. You’d only know if you’re checking CVEs for each package you use.

cyclohexane,

Running something at start-up can be done multiple ways:

  • look into /etc/rc.d/rc.local
  • systemd (or whatever init system you use)
  • cron job
cyclohexane,

I unfortunately don’t recall them by name, but there are distributions that are specific to Macbook and run better.

cyclohexane,

Debian is not bad. It is just not suitable for newcomers using it for desktop. I think my arguments hold this stance.

cyclohexane,

Why is that? It shows proof of the exact thing I said. If you don’t like that it’s on Reddit, I can copy paste it here.

If you want more examples, I’m happy to provide them. Here is another example:

security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/…/linux

cyclohexane,

Are you able to demonstrate with supporting evidence?

cyclohexane,

wine is not a distribution. It is a program that allows running windows applications on Linux, and is available on most distributions.

cyclohexane,

To summarize: the major difference is that Arch Linux gives you the latest versions of all programs and packages. You can update anytime, and you’ll get the latest versions every time for all programs

Debian follows a stable release model. Suppose you install debian 12 (bookworm). The software versions there are locked, and they’re usually not the latest versions. For example, the Linux kernel there is version 6.1, whereas the latest is like 6,9 or something. Neovim is version 0.7, whereas the latest is 0.9. Those versions will remain this way, unless you update to, say, debian 13 whenever it comes out. But if you do your regular system updates, it will only do security updates (which do not change the behavior of a program).

You might wonder, why is the debian approach good? Stability. Software updates = changes. Changes could mean your setup that was previously working, suddenly isn’t, because now the program changed behavior. Debian tries to avoid that by locking all versions, and making sure they are fully compatible. It also ensures that by doing this, you don’t miss out on security updates.

cyclohexane,

What do you mean by other roots? Isn’t root only one?

cyclohexane,

I do not have a lot of knowledge on this, but I suspect that nvidia does not support the GTX1070 that well on Linux.

AND supports Linux better. As for nvidia, newer cards have a bit better support but I bet there’s still some disparity.

cyclohexane,

I’m sorry I don’t know of any way to do that :( does it appear even when you’re browsing your main feed??

cyclohexane,

I just unpinned the post. I figured there may be others bothered by this, and plus its been enough weeks at this point. Thanks for voicing this to me :)

cyclohexane,

Unpopular opinion, but Gentoo is perfect for ARM. Availability of pre built binaries for ARM can sometimes be an issue. Gentoo gives you the option to compile from source, so that if a package is available for x86, it will still most likely work with ARM

cyclohexane,

You already said it, but even if you want mostly binaries, gentoo is becoming a distribution that can do that. So I don’t think this is something that sets them apart.

Plus, gentoo handles compilations so well, it is almost as simple as binary package managers.

cyclohexane,

GURU is source only

Is void different? Does it have a user repository that provides binaries directly?

My familiarity is with AUR, which does not provide the binaries directly. I suppose you can write a PKGBUILD that only installs a binary, but you could do the same with ebuild.

On binary support, I imagine you’re right. Binary support in gentoo is new. I imagine it will only get better.

cyclohexane,

I didn’t look much into void, but when I did, gentoo’s repository is much larger and there are many packages that I’d call obscure that happen to be in the main repos.

The situations I’ve had to reach to guru are rare. I bet that gentoo has more obscure stuff in its main repo, though I don’t have the numbers to prove it.

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