d3Xt3r

d3Xt3r, 7 hours ago

Just use Puppy Linux. Puppy creates a r/w overlay file which can be updated with any changes you make, so you can install any programs you like and have a persistent session. It’s also optimised for flash drive usage too - if your system has enough RAM, it can load the entire image into the RAM, making it very fast.

d3Xt3r, 9 hours ago

Here’s a more exhaustive list: github.com/TaKO8Ki/awesome-alternatives-in-rust

d3Xt3r, 11 hours ago

Nice, looks like this could replace a bunch of tools including ncdu, df, exa, bat, feh etc.

d3Xt3r, 22 hours ago

Just wanted to say thanks @jeena for calling it fxsync and not ffsync, I’m glad there’s still at least one person out there who knows what the proper abbreviation for Firefox should be!

d3Xt3r, 23 hours ago

Batman Begins (2005) had an all-star voice cast from the movies:

• Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman
• Michael Caine as Alfred Pennyworth
• Liam Neeson as Henri Ducard/Ra’s al Ghul
• Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes
• Cillian Murphy as Dr. Jonathan Crane/The Scarecrow
• Tom Wilkinson as Carmine Falcone
• Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox
• Tim Booth as Victor Zsasz
• Mark Boone Junior as Detective Arnold Flass
• Ken Watanabe as Ra’s al Ghul (decoy)

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

This is one of those areas where Flatpak shines - install the Flatpak versions of Scribus and Breeze, and keep your system free from unwanted package bloat.

d3Xt3r, 18 hours ago

The point is, it’s all self-contained within Flatpak, and won’t slow down and pollute your regular package manager when you’re doing updates, or say you want to grep some package or whatever. More importantly, fewer dependencies == lesser chances of things breaking. And because it’s sandboxed, you don’t need to worry too much about having an older library or whatever that’s needed to work. And in case you want to uninstall it, it’s a fairly clean process, whereas uninstalls via your package manager may not always be clean.

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

Article is paywalled. :/

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

406 Not Acceptable

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

This worked, thanks!

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

@WestwardWind SwiftKey on Android also supports moving the cursor in all directions.

d3Xt3r, 2 days ago

That looks like something straight out of Star Trek (TOS)!

d3Xt3r, 3 days ago

Solid Explorer. Why? Because I bought it ages ago and it still works fine. Even a decade later, it still gets regular updates, which shows that the dev cares about the app.

More importantly, I like that it jumps straight into my filesystem without any nonsensical abstract views, and I like that it doesn’t come with any bloat (no junk cleaner or RAM booster crap), unlike other file managers. With other file managers these days, you open them and instead of seeing your files you get a bunch of mini apps or collections, which is NOT what I want. I just want a simple file manager, not an ecosystem. Thankfully, Solid isn’t like that.

So even after all these years and all these updates, the app remains true to its original purpose and hasn’t sold out or gone down the enshittification path, which is a refreshing change compared to what we’ve been seeing with other apps.

d3Xt3r, 4 days ago

files, media etc

Sounds like you’re after a file/media server primarily? If so, you should check out TrueNAS. It’s based on FreeBSD, which has lower resource usage and better networking performance compared to Linux, also, it has native support for ZFS, which is one of the best filesystems you can use for file storage.

d3Xt3r, 5 days ago

You’re right, there isn’t any special effort put towards wear leveling, but the bcache FAQ (NOT bcachefs mind you, but the same should be applicable) mentions this:

#I thought SSDs wore out quickly if you did regular writes to them?

For older SSDs, that was true. Newer SSDs will recognize that a given block is getting heavy writes and will actually swap a heavily written block with a more lightly written block (moving the data transparently and using internal pointers to keep track of the move). This is called “wear leveling” and its use can take a drive whose individual blocks might have tens of thousands of writes before failure and produce an SSD that can support up to millions of writes in a given location by moving data around underneath. Also, keep in mind that unlike (most) standard filesystems that treat SSDs as random access devices that can take any number of writes of any size, bcache understands the write issues in SSDs and tunes its write algorithms to minimize the number of erasures needed. As a side note, what we think of as ‘‘write’’ performance problems on SSDs are largely ‘‘erase’’ performance problems.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago

Haven’t used Plank in ages, I highly doubt it works under Wayland. I recommend getting Latte Dock instead, and you could use a macOS icon theme to go with it.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago

Tdrop does not support programs that use Wayland directly

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago

Same here. Work allows BYOD, so I use my Linux laptop for work stuff. I use Edge for accessing all work stuff and running M365 PWAs. I especially like how Teams in Edge runs so much better than the standalone Electron app, which is horrible.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago

And it did :

1. Bran’s Purpose: Bran utilizes his powers as the Three-Eyed Raven more effectively, revealing crucial historical and future events. Instead of becoming king, he serves as the realm’s chief advisor, preserving history and ensuring the kingdom doesn’t repeat past mistakes.
2. Jon & Daenerys: Daenerys’ descent into madness is slowed and more nuanced. She and Jon rule jointly for a time, focusing on uniting the kingdom and breaking the wheel. When it becomes clear that Daenerys can’t escape her Targaryen instincts, a heartbroken Jon is forced to intervene. Instead of exile, Jon chooses to travel north to explore and possibly unite lands beyond the Wall.
3. Sansa & Arya: Sansa is crowned Queen in the North, leading with wisdom and strength. Arya’s adventures in the west are chronicled in a series of notes she sends back to Sansa, creating a connection between the Stark sisters and hinting at a larger world.
4. Tyrion & Jaime: Tyrion remains as Hand, but to a council of leaders instead of one ruler, guiding the Seven Kingdoms with his wit and intelligence. Jaime’s redemption arc culminates in him leaving Cersei and joining Brienne, training the next generation of knights.
5. Cersei: Cersei’s cunning leads her to form unexpected alliances, perhaps with the likes of Dorne, to try and reclaim the throne. Her end comes not from falling rubble, but in a more poetic fashion: perhaps poisoned, paralleling her own actions throughout the series.
6. The Night King: The threat from the Night King is even more dire. Westeros needs to truly unite, with every faction playing a part, to fend off the undead threat. This culminates in a series of battles, not just one at Winterfell. The Night King’s origin and motives are better explained, tying into the history of Westeros and the Children of the Forest.
7. Iron Throne: In the end, the Iron Throne is melted down as a symbol of the old era. Westeros adopts a council-based rule where representatives from each kingdom have a say, embodying Daenerys’ vision of “breaking the wheel.”

d3Xt3r, 7 days ago

To Microsoft, a Song

In praise of Windows and its driver lore,
Since six, with XP, I’ve been at its door.
Each program ending with “.exe” does soar,
But issues, oh Microsoft, hard to ignore.

The automatic updates, without refrain,
Yet, a plea, loud and clear, let me explain,
Uninstalling Edge should be without pain,
Its consumption, like a feast, hard to contain.

Blue screens appear, with that mocking frown,
Error codes hidden, have me run around.
Important tools vanish, with no renown,
How to fix, when the drivers just can’t be found?

MacOS Monterey, a tempting fate,
Your Windows 11, issues to slate.
Notepads lingering, making me wait,
Preinstalled, yet feels it’s second-rate.

Your market share, a towering fame,
Yet sometimes, the OS feels rather tame.
To own our device is the end game,
But it feels like Windows plays its own claim.

Once in '92, Windows was a thrill,
Now, its charm seems like an uphill.
Linux rises, ready for the kill,
In 2022, it’s taking its fill.

In your shadow, Mr. Gates, we see,
Linus Torvalds spoke true, let’s agree,
A PC’s like air-con, clear as can be,
Useless it becomes, when a window is free.

So here I stand, my piece is said,
Hoping for better days ahead.
Non-open source, a path you tread,
In proprietary depths, where angels fear to tread.

d3Xt3r, 7 days ago

Full disclosure: it was generated by a certain program people here love to hate.

d3Xt3r, 7 days ago

This. By default, the locate command does not check whether the files found in the database still exist, so you could use it even if the indexed filesystem or path is offline.

d3Xt3r, 7 days ago

Does this generate code as well? For instance, could I get it to add a function to an existing file, or ask it to prettify my code, or generate comments etc?

d3Xt3r, 7 days ago

I’m new to the container world, but everything I’ve seen and read about so far makes me dislike Docker. I really don’t get why it’s so popular - except for the cross-platform compatibility I guess?

d3Xt3r, 8 days ago

Just a few days ago, I was looking for an obscure copy of an old CD called “Walnut Creek Game Patches CDROM” - I found references to this inside an old DOS game cheats program, so I got curious and wanted to check it out - and was pleasantly surprised to find it on the Internet Archive.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago

And if you like, you can skip and even disable Windows Update completely, and use a PowerShell script to download updates manually and install them whenever you like. This is a good option if you don’t trust Microsoft and decide to block all their IPs via a hosts file or a firewall or something, so you could download the updates from a trustworthy computer (like a Linux machine) and install the updates offline.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Speaking as a Linux fanboy (since '98), I actually like PowerShell (the language/scripting part of it, not the shell part). I use it for work primarily, and love the object-oriented approach. It may not shine when you’re dealing with plain-text-output binaries (say, if you’re running some cross-platform cli tool), but when you’re working with PowerShell’s built-in cmdlets, or you’re processing structured data like JSON or CSV, that’s when it’s object-oriented nature really shines. Once you load up your data into a variable, you can just use the object.property syntax to access various properies, or even use some built-in methods to perform actions on the object

Also, if you want to filter and format the output text, there’s various ways you can mess around with it to display the data however you want to - whereas in traditional nix shells you’d have to mess around with a different grep/sed/awk expressions every time - and in doing that, you’d lose the information as the text goes thur the pipeline.

One of my favorite features is Out-GridView, which displays a graphical table containing whatever you piped into it, which allows you to do a live filtering of data, or a graphical selection for input - say I pipe a CSV file into it and selected a few rows from the table, I could pass the selection onto the next command in the pipeline.

Here’s a one-liner that illustrates how powerful this can be:

Get-Process | Out-GridView -PassThru | Export-Csv -Path .ProcessLog.csv

This above lets you select multiple processes from the Out-GridView window. The processes that you select are passed to the Export-Csv command and written to the ProcessLog.csv file. I can’t even begin to imagine how you’d archive this natively in a standard Linux environment without relying on a third-party tool, or writing an overly complicated script that may depend on other languages like Python.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago

MS Word, I reckon Libre’s fine but YMMV, there’s office 365 anyway.

OnlyOffice has a much better compatibility with MSO formats compared to LO. But even then, it lacks VBA support, so a better option for folks who actually need Office for work, would be to run it in a VM. Maybe use something like WinApps for seamless Linux integration.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago

In addition to the other replies, you can also buy developer laptops from some companies which comes with Linux preloaded - for instance, Dell has the XPS 13 Developer Edition, and HP have the Dev One. Lenovo also generally have good Linux compatibility - some of their laptops officially support Linux (eg Thinkpad Z13) and they generally have an option to buy a laptop with FreeDOS on it (or even no OS).

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

You could use ffmpeg or python to split the video into a sequence of images and an audio file, then AI upscale the images using Upscayl, and finally combine the upscaled images and audio back into a video, using ffmpeg.

I’ve seen issues in the past where the audio would be out-of-sync when recombining the frames because ffmpeg wouldn’t output the right number of frames, so someone wrote a python script to split the video into frames and apparently it works correctly.

Also see: superuser.com/…/how-can-i-split-a-video-into-fram…

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

Not really, because you can output to png so decoding is lossless, and since your AI upscaled images are of a much higher quality, the resultant video would be a higher quality video as well.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

This is a neat write up, but I’m curious what gaming inside a Distrobox container would be like. For starters, is there any performance impact or potential glitches like screen tearing, and second, could I say, install a more recent mesa package in the container (assuming this is Fedora Silverblue), and have the game use it?

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

My issue with flatpaks is that having too many flatpaks becomes a chore to manage. I did not have a fun time with Steam in a flatpak (required some mucking around to get the DPI and cursor size right) and same with Chromium a while back (took me a long time to figure out how to pass on the flags to enable Wayland support). IMO, having a single container (or a container for a particular activity, like gaming) would be a much more cleaner approach, while offering the flexibility akin to a mutable OS (so no weird flatpak quirks to deal with… in theory). This would also make things like backups easier, I could just save my “gaming” container to one tar and not worry about whether I missed any dependencies etc.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

Even that transcript was a bit too long, so here’s a < 150 word summary by ChatGPT:

Unity Technologies, known for its Unity game engine, has been facing severe backlash for its recent decisions. Unity adjusted its fee structure, now charging game developers per install with retroactive terms of service changes. This move is expected to negatively impact numerous game projects. In addition, Unity removed their transparency GitHub repo and reversed previous community-centric commitments, leading to widespread industry anger. The CEO’s past decisions to maximize revenue raise eyebrows. Unity rejected a $20 billion acquisition offer from AppLovin in favor of a $4.4 billion merger with Iron Source, a mobile game development monetization company. Tomar Bar Ziv, CEO of Iron Source and a Unity board member, has notably sold around $20 million in Unity stock following the merger. Recent aggressive pricing models seem to mirror those adopted by Twitter and Reddit. Unity’s shift seems aimed at promoting Iron Source’s Level Play service and could significantly harm developers, especially in the mobile sector. Companies like Azur, Voodoo, and Century Games have retaliated by disabling Unity and Iron Source ad monetization. Unity’s recent closure of two offices due to threats from its own employee underscores the depth of its internal and external crises.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

Unity Technologies, known for its Unity game engine, has been facing severe backlash for its recent decisions. Unity adjusted its fee structure, now charging game developers per install with retroactive terms of service changes. This move is expected to negatively impact numerous game projects. In addition, Unity removed their transparency GitHub repo and reversed previous community-centric commitments, leading to widespread industry anger. The CEO’s past decisions to maximize revenue raise eyebrows. Unity rejected a $20 billion acquisition offer from AppLovin in favor of a $4.4 billion merger with Iron Source, a mobile game development monetization company. Tomar Bar Ziv, CEO of Iron Source and a Unity board member, has notably sold around $20 million in Unity stock following the merger. Recent aggressive pricing models seem to mirror those adopted by Twitter and Reddit. Unity’s shift seems aimed at promoting Iron Source’s Level Play service and could significantly harm developers, especially in the mobile sector. Companies like Azur, Voodoo, and Century Games have retaliated by disabling Unity and Iron Source ad monetization. Unity’s recent closure of two offices due to threats from its own employee underscores the depth of its internal and external crises.

d3Xt3r, 11 days ago

I just wrote a script to do all my updates in one go:

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo dnf upgrade -y --refresh
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo dnf check
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo dnf autoremove
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">flatpak update -y --force-remove
</span><span style="color:#323232;">flatpak remove --unused --delete-data -y
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pip-review --user --auto --continue-on-fail
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cargo install-update -a
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo fwupdmgr get-devices
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo fwupdmgr refresh --force
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo fwupdmgr get-updates
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo fwupdmgr update
</span>

d3Xt3r, 11 days ago (edited 11 days ago)

It’s not that difficult do virtual > physical migrations in Linux. Linux is inherently portable, thanks to the kernel, you don’t need to worry about stuff like drivers, at least for drivers which are part of the kernel (so not counting proprietary nVidia drivers - which you wouldn’t be using in a VM anyways.)

Roughly, the process would go like this:

1. Use qemu-img convert to convert your virtual disk to a raw image format
2. Use dd to write the image to your physical disk
3. Use gparted to resize/expand partitions on the disk as required
4. Examine the disk using fdisk/blkid to see which device node your disk is using (eg /dev/nvme0n2 etc), then mount the new root volume and edit the fstab to the correct disk paths if required
5. Chroot into the disk and reinstall your bootloader (GRUB or systemd-boot etc). The process for this will vary based on your bootloader, and your distro. Usually most distros should have some wiki or documentation on how to repair GRUB or w/e from chroot.
6. Boot from the new disk and test. You may need to manually add an entry to your UEFI boot entries, if it’s not showing up as an option in your UEFI boot menu.
7. You may need to potentially install some extra stuff, for instance, you may need to install the Vulkan driver package for your GPU, maybe the CPU microcode package etc.

This is all of course, assuming you’re migrating to a dedicated hard drive and you’re only going to be using a single OS. On the other hand, if you’re migrating on to an existing disk (dual-booting) the process would be a bit different - instead of dding the entire image, you’d use losetup and mount your raw disk image as a loop device, then use something like clonezilla or GParted to copy over only specific partitions excluding the ESP. After that, the rest of the process should be similar to the above, except you won’t need to reinstall your bootloader - but you may need to update it’s config to detect the new OS.

I’ve not accounted for complex setups btw, such as using LUKS or LVM. But the process still remains roughly the same, you’ll just need a few additional commands to decrypt the partition before you copy them over.

In saying that, it may be easier to just reinstall the distro fresh on your real hardware. There are scripts out there to export your dotfiles and package lists, to make the migration easier.

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

Is this something that needs to happen manually?

Yes, sort of. It needs to be initiated manually, but you should get an update notification, and the actual upgrade itself is automatic once you initiate it. Clicking on the notification will take you to the Software app > Updates section, from where you can do the upgrade.

If I solely update through the updater software, I’m not getting the whole “38”?

No, you will get the whole 38 (what makes you think you won’t?). Everything will get updated. The key thing to remember is to update all other applications/kernel etc and restart your system first, before you do the actual OS upgrade. This is documented here: docs.fedoraproject.org/…/upgrading-fedora-new-rel…

Some folks recommend disabling third-party repos before you do the actual upgrade, like copr, RPMFusion etc, but personally I haven’t had any issues leaving them enabled - as long as you install all applicable updates and reboot prior to the upgrade, you should be fine.

If you want more control over the process though, you can always upgrade manually using dnf. Although there’s not much benefit doing to this via the commandline (except for power users/admins who need the control/visibility), it’s worth reading the post-upgrade tasks section to run some cleanup tasks (not a 100% sure if the GUI updater tool does this).

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

I thought there was yet another WinRAR vulnerability, but turns out this is old news - why did you repost an article from last month?

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

First of all, this was already posted in Lemmy several times in several places. Just because it’s a critical vulnerability doesn’t mean you keep reposting it every month - just how long will you keep reposting it?

Also, hardly anyone uses WinRAR these days, so this isn’t really as important as you make of it. Your post may have been relevant when the zero-day came out, but a month later - no one cares.

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

You didn’t, but it was posted by others. Posting about a critical vulnerability a whole month later is pointless. If this was acceptable then we’d see people constantly posting outdated news stories for critical vulnerabilities in other apps weeks or months after it’s been published, which doesn’t make sense. Admit it, you made a mistake in posting this - you didn’t check the date and thought it was a new article, right? Otherwise why would you post about this a month later?

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

because the potential of users getting affected is massive.

Except, it’s not actually popular these days, and therefore, it doesn’t really warrant reposting such old and irrelevant news. And my earlier point still stands - what you posted is basically a repost. Just because you missed it doesn’t mean others have, nor does it justify it.

You probably won’t believe me that WinRAR isn’t popular, so I made a poll just for this - you can see for yourself that not many people here actually use WinRAR.

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

Do you realise WinRAR has over half a billion users

Citation needed. But regardless, these users are clearly not on Lemmy. This is about relevance to Lemmy users, and the poll reflects how relevant WinRAR is for them.

No matter what large software downloading website you check (Softpedia, Majorgeeks, Techspot, Filehorse, Filehippo), the most popular downloaded software will have these at the top.

That’s not really a valid metric, because these sites only show the total downloads, and don’t display recent numbers. WinRAR may have been popular 10 years ago, but they don’t show how many users downloaded it in the last year or whatever, so those numbers are meaningless.

You have no idea about general user security and popular software demographics.

I’ve been a Windows sysadmin for 11+ years and used computers since the days of MSDOS, so don’t tell me I don’t know software demographics. It’s you who is out of touch. Besides pirates, I’ve haven’t seen anyone still actually use WinRAR in the wild. The average user just doesn’t have a need for WinRAR - Windows already creates and opens zip files, and that’s all they need, because everyone else uses mainly zip files these days. And in offices, where they may need to transfer password protected files, they may ocassionaly use 7zip (due to its more secure encryption). But that’s all. Excluding Linux and Mac users, Windows users mainly only use .zip and .7zip these days (once again, excluding pirates).

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago)

I bought a ThinkPad Z13 Gen 1 last year (with 32GB RAM) and it’s been excellent for hobby dev work and light gaming. Lenovo officially list Linux as one of the supported operating systems. I run Fedora on it and everything worked out of the box. If it’s not urgent, I’d recommend waiting for the Gen 2 which should come out next month. Gen 2 features the AMD Zen 4 CPUs, which is a decent upgrade from the Zen 3+ CPU in the Gen 1.

d3Xt3r, 14 days ago

It is usually pretty seamless, but unfortunately some laptops may have some weird quirks or certain things which may not work and may require manual steps. Most common issues you might come across is with suspend/resume - it’s either broken, or it may not resume properly or may crash etc. Other issues could include audio issues, or wifi issues.

This isn’t generally a problem though with popular / “good” models, as these get picked up and fixed pretty quickly. The problem usually is with less popular models, or brand new models which haven’t been tested yet by the wider Linux community.

Good models/brands include Thinkpads, mainstream Dells (especially the XPS series), mainstream HP (especially the EliteBook series) and Framework. Plus there are laptops which come with Linux out-of-the-box, as the ones by System76 and Star Labs. HP also have the Dev One, and Dell have the XPS Developer Edition.

In general, I’d recommend going for a full AMD system (CPU+GPU) because of their better integrated GPU performance, particularly on Linux. Unlike nVidia, you don’t need to install any proprietary drivers for AMD GPUs, which increases system stability and reliability - especially when you update your system.

d3Xt3r, 15 days ago

but I think they just are lazy to find out ways to provide this support

It’s not that they’re lazy, it’s a combination of not getting paid enough, and not having a reason to care.

If you were a high-level executive, I can bet you they’d at least make an effort to deliver something. Believe it or not, most people only do what’s needed of them as per their job description (and that too, the bare minimum to meet the quota/standards), unless their boss tells them otherwise, or some exec shouts at them, or that they’re actually passionate about something. If no one in IT is passionate about Linux, you’ll never get them to accept it, regardless of how technically superior it is on paper.