ipacialsection

ipacialsection, 3 days ago

Now I’m (tentatively) excited to see how they’ll outdo a season with a novel gimmick in each and every episode, including a musical and a crossover with a parody show, in terms of gimmicky weirdness.

ipacialsection, 4 days ago

I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I’m assuming it’s normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the “Automatic” pick works.

If it doesn’t work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.

ipacialsection, 3 days ago

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.

ipacialsection, 4 days ago

My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it’s still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.

ipacialsection, 8 days ago

“Klingon ambient” would be a good concept for an album.

ipacialsection, 12 days ago

Glad we have a release date now. Although, I hope they go for weekly releases, because I don’t want to feel obligated to binge watch it.

ipacialsection, 14 days ago

Remember Me was one of the episodes that got me into Star Trek. My parents loved TNG and Voyager, but it was one of the first episodes I actually sat down and watched with them, and the whole premise of everyone disappearing, and how Beverly figured out what was going on, hit my brain in just the right way.

ipacialsection, 14 days ago

TOS: The Cloud Minders. One of the show’s extremely heavy-handed message episodes, this time about classism and labor rights. It’s quite dramatically compelling in addition to expressing its ideas eloquently.

TAS: Beyond the Farthest Star. One of the more “normal” episodes of that series, but it really works for me.

TNG: Contagion. One of the most tense and action-packed TNG episodes, featuring computer malfunctions both amusing and terrifying, but also a great showcase for all the characters, and their ability to combine their talents to solve what seems like an impossible problem, to the point that it’s one of the episodes that got me into Trek in general (alongside Remember Me).

DS9: Visionary. Pretty good episode of time travel weirdness, and one of my go to examples of what I think is best way to go about explaining time travel: don’t explain it, just do whatever wacky shit you want and laugh off the paradoxes with a recurring joke. “I hate temporal mechanics!”

VOY: Latent Image. In addition to being yet another fascinating exploration of the rights and sentience of artificial life, with a hint of an ethical dilemma in there, I really relate to how the Doctor’s trauma responses are described.

DIS: There Is A Tide. I love all of the scenes between Admiral Vance and Osyraa.

PIC: The Impossible Box. I remember that being one of the more tense and well-made episodes of the show, especially Soji’s existential crisis and Picard’s Borg flashbacks, although I find it hard to think in individual episodes with this one.

LD: Veritas. The show hadn’t really clicked with me before this episode. I loved the whole theme about the lack of attention the command crew gives to the ensigns, and how this just adds to their problems.

I’ve only really seen the consensus classics of ENT, and while I have seen SNW and PRO, my favorites are all consensus favorites that get a decent amount of buzz already.

ipacialsection, 13 days ago

Like I said I’ve only seen the consensus classics there, and it’s been a while. I’m planning to see the rest of it as the Greatest Generation podcast covers it. But it is also probably my least favorite Star Trek show.

ipacialsection, 14 days ago

It’s dangerous to go alone, take this!

ipacialsection, 15 days ago

There isn’t an alsa command on my system either, so that’s no surprise. But we’ll need more information to track down the cause, such as:

• What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
• What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
• Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
• What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just “dummy output”? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
• If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago (edited 16 days ago)

1. I believe there is still an issue with Windows deleting Linux bootloaders during some updates. You’ll be fine if you install Linux on a separate disk, and even if you dual-boot on one disk and the bootloader gets deleted, there are ways to recover it. You don’t strictly need to have separate data and OS partitions, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether I prefer it - it makes distro hopping and disk encryption easier, at the cost of potentially inefficient use of space and serious consequences if your OS partition fills up.
2. Disk encryption is very straightforward if you use separate OS and data partitions. You literally just tick a box during the install and enter an extra password. It won’t upset Windows any more than a normal install does (i.e. Windows might think it’s corrupted, but won’t do anything without your input). With one partition for everything, it’s still possible, but the encryption will be much weaker and handled by the bootloader in a somewhat clunkier way, and I’m not sure if Mint even supports that setup.
3. I don’t have much experience with this myself, and certainly not on Linux Mint, so I’ll leave this one to other commenters.
4. Synaptic is just a fancy frontend to APT, and I think Mint also has something called mintInstall, which was just an apt frontend back when I used it, but I think it also supports Flatpak now. It’s entirely up to personal preference as to which UI you prefer. I do recommend you set up Flathub if it’s not there by default, as it gives you access to a ton of useful apps that can’t be packaged by Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint for various reasons.
5. Don’t download software from random websites unless it’s absolutely necessary. Chances are, their version either won’t work well, if at all, or will break your system. Try APT first, Flatpak second, everything else is a last resort option. If a program you used on Windows doesn’t have a (working, native) Linux version, try finding and learning to use an alternative that is in the APT repositories before downloading the Windows version and using it on Wine. Back up your most important files from Windows before installing Linux in dual boot, just in case you make a mistake somewhere. To answer the last question, stick to the default terminal emulator and Firefox installation unless there’s a feature you really want in another one; the distro’s developers picked them for a reason, after all.

ipacialsection, 14 days ago

I’m working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn’t happening anymore. I haven’t been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

This is an interesting comment, actually, because instead of hating on the new shows and comparing them to the old ones, Matt’s hating on the old shows for being politically correct and saying DS9 and Voyager, the shows that were currently airing as of 1999, are the good ones. Even though DS9 was more diverse and less subtle about its themes, compared to TNG.

Imagine if Dave Cullen, Doomcock, Midnight’s Edge, Nerdrotic, etc. dedicated their careers to saying that the new Star Trek shows were AWESOME because they were less woke than TNG and DS9. That’s what this is.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

My guess is that they meant TOS.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

VLC’s file format support is amazing for a project that rolls its own codecs, etc, but it’s missing some important features for me on the music front, primarily gapless playback and library management. I generally prefer to use software tailored to my DE. I’ve yet to find a better video player anywhere though; GNOME Videos and Kaffeine come closest and are a little easier to use, but are still far away from VLC’s capabilities.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I’ve had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

Any software that is in the Xubuntu repositories will also be available in other Ubuntu derivatives, and most likely Debian and all its derivatives as well. Only the official spins are likely to advertise Ubuntu Pro.

Mint XFCE is a good replacement, but I’m also partial to KDE Neon, which keeps preinstalled software to a minimum and is by far the most performant KDE distro I have tried. I myself use regular Debian, with KDE, though you can choose XFCE during the install.

ipacialsection, 16 days ago

I haven’t had much experience with Kubuntu, but I do know it has more preinstalled apps, slightly older versions of those apps (where KDE Neon has the latest version of every KDE app the day it releases), but slightly newer non-KDE apps in the non-LTS releases, and is more beholden to Canonical’s decisions, such as advertising Ubuntu Pro during upgrades or forcibly installing some programs as snaps. Kubuntu might hold your hand a bit more under certain circumstances, while KDE Neon keeps things simpler, but the difference in ease of use is not that significant, especially if you have any experience with Linux in the last ten years or so.

ipacialsection, 21 days ago

I’ve had great experience with QKSMS on GrapheneOS. Thanks for directing me to the fork, I’m switching to it right away.

ipacialsection, 22 days ago

Elisa is just the latest (and most actively developed) addition to the long list of music players developed under the KDE umbrella.

ipacialsection, 27 days ago

Right now I’d say the best open-source DAW for Linux is LMMS if you want to do everything just on your laptop, or Ardour if you want to use external instruments.

LMMS has some shockingly versatile built in synths, including a port of ZynAddSubFX, supports LADSPA/LV2 plugins, and supports using Wine to run 32-bit Windows VSTs. I’m unsure of Ardour’s VST support, but it at least supports LV2 plugins. Either of those, if you install them through your distro, will likely include Calf Studio Gear, an extensive collection of LV2 effects and a couple synths. As for ones that run natively on Linux, there’s synthv1, samplv1, drumkv1, and padthv1, though I’ve had trouble getting them working myself.

I’ve found some good stuff on the Linux Audio Wiki but IDK how up to date most of it is.

ipacialsection, 28 days ago

1. Create a source control repository containing all your code, and publish it to an online code forge. GitHub’s docs might help with this: docs.github.com/en/…/start-your-journey
2. Choose an open-source license and add it to the repository as a LICENSE file. If you want to require any projects that build upon yours to be open-source too, the GNU GPL is a good choice. If you want to allow proprietary programs to include your library without releasing any source code other than that which is directly based on yours, the GNU LGPL is good for that. If you want to allow people to do whatever they want, even use all your code as the basis of a proprietary program without credit, the Unlicense is a good choice. There are a lot of licenses with different degrees of “copyleft” and attribution requirements in between. Technically publishing with a license file is all you need to do, but there are more things you should do.
3. Create a README text file describing what your program does, and instructing users on how to compile and run it. Consider including more detailed documentation on how to use it, as well.
4. Clean up your code and file layout so that it’s as easy as is feasible for other programmers to understand.
5. Promote your project to whoever you think might find it useful!

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

I have to borrow a school laptop just to do proctored exams, because their “lockdown browser” doesn’t support Linux, and even if it did, it seems to do some things in kernel mode, so I don’t want it on my system.

Surprisingly, most classes at my university are entirely FOSS based, aside from that one piece of software, an obscure scientific program that only one assignment used, and MATLAB (which is easily replaced by GNU Octave.)

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

No distro I’m aware of still provides official box sets and CDs. Debian still provides materials for third parties to make them, though. Most of the vendors of pre-burned Linux media have also shut down, but one that seems to still exist (and offers Debian box sets) is www.shoplinuxonline.com .

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

I was speaking of the Debian “full archive” 21-DVD sets: www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-full.html

But I don’t know about how they package it, so it might not be a “box set” as you describe.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

framatube.org/w/9dRFC6Ya11NCVeYKn8ZhiD

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

I can’t object to more Jett Reno!

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

Wasn’t screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway…

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

Unfortunately, the state of Android music players is not great. Currently I have two FOSS music players installed: Metro Music Player (the F-Droid version of Retro Music Player) and mucke. mucke has a ton of really cool features that improve the shuffle experience but it’s actually worse than most apps at pulling album art. Retro/Metro has beautiful UI, and has pretty good features for customization, but lacks the cool features mucke has and is less stable. Both have more than one annoying bug, but it took me a while to find music players that had this few dealbreakers.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

chmod’d all my home directory’s files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

Open-source software is distributed primarily as source code in a human-readable programming language. Computers can’t actually read these programming languages directly; they need to be translated into the machine language of their CPU (such as x86_64). For some languages, like Python, code can be “interpreted” on the fly; for others, like C, programs must be “compiled” into a separate file format. Additionally, most programs consist of multiple files that need to be compiled and linked together, and installed in certain folders on your system, so the compiler and additional tools work to automate that process.

Most users of Linux rarely if ever have to compile anything, because the developers of Linux distros, and some third parties like Flathub, curate collections of (mostly) open-source software that has already been compiled and packaged into formats that are easy to install and uninstall. As part of this process, they usually add some metadata and/or scripts that can automate compiling and packaging, so it only requires a single command (makepkg on Arch, dpkg-buildpackage on Debian.) However, some newer or more obscure software may not be packaged by your distribution or any third-party repo.

How to compile depends on the program, its programming language and what tools the developers prefer to use to compile it. Usually the README file included with source code explains how to compile the software. The most common process uses the commands ./configure; make; sudo make install after installing all of the program’s dependencies and cd-ing to the source code directory. Other programs might include the metadata needed for something like makepkg to work, be written in an interpreted language and thus require no compilation, or use a different toolchain, like CMake.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

In that case makepkg isn’t compiling anything, it’s just packaging the existing binaries so that they can be more easily installed and recognized by your package manager.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

Yeah, basically. makepkg automates the process of creating an Arch package, and while usually that involves compiling source code, sometimes it just means converting proprietary software that has already been compiled into a different format.

ipacialsection, 1 month ago

I hope these shots aren’t a good representation of the whole episode, because if they are, it’s a 15 minute scene of L’Ak and Moll on a planet followed by 35 minutes of close-up shots of Rayner

ipacialsection, 2 months ago

Last time I used Elementary OS, it was great if you were only using the official apps, with insane degrees of polish, but things like LibreOffice were surprisingly hard to configure the way I wanted. That was a while ago, though.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

I still follow Planet KDE and Planet Debian, and can vouch for both. They’re great for both learning about the development processes of those projects, and finding interesting blogs on unrelated topics that happen to have been written or linked by the contributors.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

This really bothers me. Closed standards locked behind a licensing fee may as well not be standards at all, in my opinion.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( packages.debian.org and sources.debian.org ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

I unfortunately haven’t found that many I can remember. But a comment on Busybox cat that linked to a talk titled “cat -v considered harmful” did send me down a rabbit hole once.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

I was dualbooting 2 Linuxes for a long time. All that you need is to install GRUB once on one of the distros, but having two or more bootloaders in the same EFI System partition is generally harmless, and might happen due to how some distros’ installers are written. In that case the BIOS boot order will decide which one to use. Either way, you only need one boot partition.

It is safe to delete all partitions on your hard drive if and only if you have backed up any important data on them. It’s basically the same as installing a new hard drive. The installer for your distro will be able to re-create all of them.

I have personally never used a shared /home between multiple distros, but based on my experience switching desktop environments, there are likely to be conflicts between files that lead to bugs. Arch and Pop!_OS will have vastly different versions of most software, and it’s possible that changes to a config file in one distro may break the program in the other. Shared /home is better for if you have just one OS installed, and reinstall it occasionally.

ipacialsection, 3 months ago

And because of that, custom configurations are wonderfully easy to make, technical issues are rare, and the few issues you do experience are quite possible to solve. Which is why I settled on Debian.

ipacialsection, 4 months ago

It’s a good thing that KDE 6 is coming out soon because holy cow, that’s a big secondary version number.