reallyzen

reallyzen, 7 days ago

" KdeConnect": Notifications, messages, clioboard sharing, link sharing, remote control of your pointing.device, keyboard, command inputs on computer… When it works it’s great, but it is hit-and-miss between distros and updates catching up.

reallyzen, 7 days ago

Never could get it to work with phones, and that from Arch, Mint, Asahi, Macos all sharing flawlessly between thembut no phone would reliably stay sync’ed.

reallyzen, 7 days ago

I have a 2-year old android 11 oppo A53, my colleague some small samsung on A10. Installs fine, sync a first time somewhat, then just don’t sync a thing.

reallyzen, 26 days ago

I’d argue that it may come to that, given the poor availability of (steam) games for the macos platform. And when it is available, you may end up with a disclaimer that it may not run anyway.

reallyzen, 25 days ago

They are both on Mastodon. Lina just posted an updated list of games, there’s a ton of them

reallyzen, 27 days ago

An AUR package has been done for Arch by (supposedly) someone who knows what they are doing and needs it on their Arch Machine

A Flatpak is something done by someone, to (supposedly) work everywhere, untested on Arch, that may or may not work. And crash (Ardour on Asahi). Or waste hours or you life to render files incorrectly (kdenlive on arch and asahi).

Native versions work perfectly.

I thought I was clever in using arch/aur for everything, but pull KDE or QT apps from Flatpak to keep my gnome install a bit more tidy… For this, you’d have to have those Flataks to work, and sometimes they don’t.

reallyzen, 28 days ago

I assumed OP plugged himself in some hidden serial port (like cars’ obd2) and the washing machine had indeed a tpm to prevent bootleg/non original spare parts.

The human mind can be the deepest well of imagination sometimes. I’m a bit too good at that o.Ô

reallyzen, 29 days ago (edited 29 days ago)

My wife has a T480s on standard 2022 LTS Ubuntu, it is a machine old enough to not need the latest edgy mint ; a friend of mine has had to install it on his 2023 X1 tho.

Standard Mint will do fine. Default DE is boring as hell, be sure to look at others like Gnome. I love Gnome.

Also, using “live” USB keys OP can try several distros and check what they find more attractive in the default state of a distro.

PopOS, Elementary, Fedora, Tumbleweed… So many of them.

I say Tumbleweed is best because of the perfect, seamless integration of BTRFS / Snapshotting / Rollback system. It is truly the best way to dip your feet into Linux and get it back working in a single click when you (inevitably) fuck up.

reallyzen, 29 days ago

T410? Woah! I still mourn the death of my 420 with it’s Dome Light and rugged looks

I hope yours stay on, and on, and on!

reallyzen, 1 month ago

DDG has it’s non-track version online since a bit now. Use the !ai bang to get to it

Also you have the choice of Claude insted of ChatGPT, and your queries aren’t harvested for further ai training

In any case, it’s a completely different tab, it’s not mingled in general search results

reallyzen, 1 month ago

You can also ask it when is the cutoff date of their database - there is a gentleman’s agreement between providers not to have ai involved in news / current politics in it’s public chats.

I tried them on a topic I’m pretty proficient on, (a spaghetti recipe lol) and the answer was the most bland imaginable.

The way it is setup by DDG, the restrictions and blandness, shallowness of the replies give me peace of.mind when a ‘natural language’ query is the easiest one. And Claude wouldn’t give me the DOB of that queen because it is Personal Info!

reallyzen, 1 month ago

I may loose some answers in searches since I only use DDG

I often do not read articles or information from websites if the gdpr popup isn’t solvable in a click but the site ask to click on a thousand toggles

Where I am at the moment, the lack of FB marketplace sucks

A lot of cultural info goes through Instagram here, so I have to be a bit proactive if I want to know what’s happening

I use signal or text when possible, but work is impossible without whatsapp

reallyzen, 1 month ago

That’s how I was on Slackware at the time. Reputable, functional, stable - and totally tailorable to your exact needs.

Everybody talks about Arch as a “pedagogic” distro, but you’ll learn a lot working with Slackware. I wonder if Lilo is still around.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

Asahi supports M1 and M2 chips because that’s what they own.

asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

M3, (and then M4) isn’t there because the cheapest hardware, the Mini, doesn’t exist with them… And also because work isn’t finished on M1/M2.

social.treehouse.systems/…/112277289414246878

The way apple sees its computer customer base now as they see their iPhone base (Must Own Latest Must Buy Shiniest), I do hope for the Asahi Linux project they don’t keep on iterating endlessly with new hardware twice a year.

reallyzen, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

You guys know that there’s an actual rtfm app that condenses the output of man to human-readable stuff right? Right??

reallyzen, 1 month ago

My bad: it’s tldr not rtfm

Me too I have stupid disputable aliases…

github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

reallyzen, 1 month ago

Of course. . …I was wrong and it is tldr not rtfm.

github.com/tldr-pages/tldr

But surely you heard about TheFuck?

github.com/nvbn/thefuck

There’s actually an rtfm package in Arch’s aur, but it just opens the archwiki for you which just adds that tiny bit of… of That Arch Way Of Doing Things I guess.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

BRB, got a dotfile to edit real quick

reallyzen, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Not going to push Ardour if your brains are wired for Live, but have you tried Bitwig?

(Tho Ardour has Clip Launchers now, wink wink)

reallyzen, 1 month ago

What impressed me at the time was that it worked ; you’d pull huge amount of stuff and then waited in front of a real-life Reversed Matrix full of mysterious hieroglyphs. But Slackware would compile Ardour, Jack, Jamin and whatever else. Yeah it took a while to fetch all the libraries, but then it just did it.

Last week localsend wouldn’t compile on Arch, and took hours to fail it.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

Works on mine

Édit: (10)… Ah, I see the point, indeed.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

What you are losing is what you are gaining ; I for one embrace the minimalism of Gnome (even macos feels, looks bloated next to Gnome). There’s only 2 extensions that I add, and they are the vainest ones: the Spinning Cube and the Wobbly Windows.

No, there’s one more: the gnome implementation of kdeconnect, so useful to link your phone to your PC.

Of course KDE has great, great software out there, you shouldn’t be loosing anything by switching, so that’s where I use flatpaks, to not have to pull all of KDE libs on my system over the gtk ones: kdenlive comes to mind.

Embrace the zen. Drop the very idea of spending a week to fine-tune your Desktop to your liking - a gnome install is finished in about 5 minutes, including setting up the best wallpaper ever, the competition-winning KDE 6 Peaceful Tree default background.

Or just install the Fedora KDE spin, really.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

No, that’s PR. Marketing is buying ads, buying reviews, buying people.

reallyzen, 1 month ago

Good, good. The flight was a bit bumpy today, but by 11am I was having breakfast at my favorite little place down in front of the mosque. I love the quiet Sunday mornings here.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.conf

Thaaat… took me a stupid amount of time to fix.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Me too, including when ferociously trying to debug why grub wouldn’t find a freaking bootable anything. The error message isn’t “uh, no config bro” but “hey, nothing to boot here, see ya in The Shell”. Argh.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Disclaimer: Linux user through-and-through ; I have a modern “m” mac for some work specific applications.

Setting up a macbook today doesn’t require an apple id or even an email address. My warranty is with the non-apple authorized retailer I bought the computer from, I don’t use the software store (but I think it would work) nor do I use any apple services like itunes, or, without the apple id, I don’t have icloud backups. And I don’t/can’t buy anything from the store, of course.

I am able to update the os, I have just one notification in the settings about setting up the account but no showstopper at all.

So what does apple get from me? I’d guess crude location (from my vpn), hardware/OS version and maybe installed software? That’s not much, and since it’s a work machine it’s offline all the time, I can’t see that device doing much behind my back.

If apple is indeed looking deep into that laptop, then I guess they’ll see I also have Asahi on it. And maybe they are really really intrusive and notice I’m using that Asahi partition 80% of the time (;

Joking aside, if you need macos, it is possible to use macos. With some limitations: handle your own backups, get your software from the vendors and… And that’s it.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

I posted the above for the sake of precision - OTOH, I had my workplace buy an ipad and that was impossible to setup without email + creating an apple id. I don’t care much (used work email), but still. Same with:

• Windows 11
• my latest kobo ereader
• Stay away from Sonos loudspeakers too

Since I’m borderline psychotic about this, I always create a temporary access point on my phone that I delete right after setup is done, over a disposable email address from simplelogin.com.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Great piece, impressive work; Fedora now ships widevine by default - and it’s not working anymore. I have a recent Asahi install, netflix won’t play (used to work at the time of this blog post).

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Dropping The List here because answering in detail would take …a very, very long time.

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Uh, you’re outputing 52 DMX universes straight from USB? I have questions!

• What software are you using, and is qlcplus really able to do that?
• Have you ever heard the words ArtNet? SACN?

reallyzen, 2 months ago

Oh, here I thought you was running a fancy dancefloor or something! TIL the creator of that chip was a prick.

reallyzen, 3 months ago

And up with The Cube (and the Wobbly Windows. I can’t live without the wobbly windows)

reallyzen, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

I use Asahi too, and at the moment the killing factor is battery depletion while sleeping (50% a day!). Performance wise, working with kdenlive is about on par with an i7 12th gen Intel chip (direct comparison between Thinkpad X1 i7 16g ram 2023 and mbp m2pro 16g ram) - nothing close to the power macos can leverage from the m chip but still perfectly usable. But frustrating in a way.

If you install Asahi, it will be dualboot by default - why not trying it out? The install process is a delight, very well explained.

As for hardware, the Air is pretty unique. There are other fanless stuff out there, but it’s gonna be cheap netbooks without the power to handle video work.

I’d say give Asahi a try ; I love booting mine in front of people and looking at their confused faces when I spin the cube to move a wobbly window around (Though the big Fedora logo at startup is a bit of a giveaway)!

Edit: also, you already own the hardware. Stop wasting money/resources, jut make it do what you want.

reallyzen, 3 months ago

With the advent of the m3, m2’s and m1’s still in inventory can be a steal, particularly 'Air macs which can be sub-1k easy. My mbp m2pro 16g was 1500. I’m not impressed by real-life macos performance tho, a lot of it is impressive in parts (blender rendering for instance) but everyday life is just the same… Yes, the same hanging Color Wheel Of Doom.

I hope your 5k investment isn’t having sound playback hiccups because dropbox is trying to log in and refresh in the background. I am actually furious with the 10% of the time I have to use macos on this machine.

reallyzen, 3 months ago

I have a 2013 “air” that was updated to 10.15 (so 64bits) ; I bought it dirt cheap secondhand for one specific app, and out of the box it did update itself when I connected it not so long ago. I changed the battery, too - most resellers include the impossible screwdrivers needed to open the strange tri-lobe screws.

If OP has a use for it, it’s not bad hardware with backlit keyboard, a decent screen, lightweight. With a new battery it’s a decent all-day workhorse. My main machines are 5th gen Intel, and I remember nothing wrong with 4th gen.

Any distro will run on it, or should. I’d bet you’ll get the spinning cube & wobbly windows easy peasy. If it’s free, just try it out.

Have fun!

reallyzen, 4 months ago

The Tumbleweed installer is beautiful, and straightforward. I am not sure how a newcomer would understand, or not, the partition setup if they need to keep windows and dual-boot ; if it’s about to wipe the entire machine, it is one of the best, sleekest installers out there. Then package management can be a nightmare if you need to stray out of he beaten path unfortunately. Another argument for TW is the perfect integration of BTRFS, Snapper and Rollback (it is an opensuse project after all) ; I swear I’d still be on TW if it wasn’t for some exotic software availabiity.

To me, debian does bring bloat: LibreOffice comes to mind. A default install will feature calendars, mails, weather whatever.

reallyzen, 4 months ago

All that was said here, plus sometimes they don’t work. I’ve reported a bug where the kdenlive flatpak version doesn’t render titles or fades - and that’s on Debian Testing, Arch, and Asahi Fedora. Native version works perfectly, but forces me to download an untidy amount of KDE stuff on my gnome installs ; flatpak would’ve been a cool solution to that.

I am yet to report another where Ardour nukes pipewire, at least on Asahi, but on Arch it was misbehaving also. Native, distro-provided version works perfectly.

I don’t trust flatpak because no one single publisher can test every possible config, and I’m afraid distros become “lazy” and stop packaging native versions of stuff since it’s a lot of work.

reallyzen, 4 months ago

It’s like with watching TV Series. Why am I going through Firefly again instead of trying something new? Or reading The Expanse again?

reallyzen, 4 months ago

It’s fixed by now I think ; I never update between projects, so sometimes would go a few months between updates and it hasn’t happen anymore. When it did, the fix was simple enough while still annoying of course.

AFAIK now the keyring gets updated first if needed. In the middle of something here, can’t try unfortunately - but at the time of the issue, while the first-level answer was “Update All The Things (all the time)”, the problem was on the table, and acknowledged as in need of a fix.

reallyzen, 4 months ago

Better management of the btrfs default settings and cleanup scripts. My install bricked itself because the root partition was 30G and it chocked itself to death (home and all data was elsewhere).