lemmyvore

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

Why are you even considering Manjaro?

Because it’s an excellent distribution which is also in the top of the Steam Survey (alongside Arch, Ubuntu, Mint and PopOS) (and Flatpak, and Steam Deck’s SteamOS).

It’s a rolling distro but mitigates the risks of bleeding edge with a curated stable branch, offers LTS kernels going back to 4.19 but you can choose LTS or newer versions or RT patches, it does not force you to switch kernel version if you don’t want to, has visual management tools for packages, kernel management and driver installation, does a great job installing drivers during install, comes with extra safety features (update rollback built-in if you use BTRFS for root), Steam works great, you can use AUR and Flatpak etc.

lemmyvore, 4 days ago (edited 3 days ago)

Most of the Manjaro criticism is pure nonsense. It’s one of the most used distros in the Steam Survey. Anybody who’s willing to recommend Arch or Pop or Mint (who are also in the top of the Survey) but not Manjaro needs a reality check.

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

Manjaro has been nothing but perfect to me, starting with doing everything perfectly when I first tried its live ISO (recognized all hardware, played everything, saw everything on the LAN, connected to everything etc.) and in the years I’ve been using it.

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

Manjaro has several legit criticism.

That page is not legit criticism, it’s a bunch of nonsense. It misrepresents what Manjaro does, outright lying in some cases, it fails to understand how package updates and AUR work, it glosses over the fact that Manjaro helped the AUR infrastructure. It’s prejudiced information made out specifically to make it look bad.

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

It’s not nonsense, just concerns that you don’t seem to have.

There is not one pertinent criticism in there. It’s all meaningless drivel presented as legit concerns.

Which one is a concern you share?

I personally don’t like Manjaro holding out on package updates

Then you don’t use it and that’s fine. The whole point of Manjaro is to mitigate the bleeding edge risk. There’s tons of people who see value in that. Not every distro has to do the exact same thing Arch does. There is something of value in every Arch-derived distro.

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

How do I bury my head? I’m the one who’s been using it for years and speak from experience. Do you use it? What are your problems with it?

lemmyvore, 4 days ago

Every single large enough distro (and any organization) has at some point forgot to renew a certificate. How were you impacted by the expiration?

You say they helped the AUR but they actually DDOS’d it several times due to problems in pamac the software store they developed.

The AUR was not originally designed to whitstand any meaningful traffic. What you call “DDOS” was simply the AUR being used by an actually popular distro, where enabling the AUR is a simple UI toggle, whose developers never imagined that the AUR doesn’t have any traffic mitigation methods.

So Manjaro went out of its way to look for contributors to sponsor an AUR CDN and several caching layers, improving things for everybody.

The second “DDOS” happened after Manjaro implemented all of the above so it couldn’t have come from Manjaro machines. All the “proof” is that whoever hit the AUR used a “pamac” user agent… which anybody can do.

I don’t see the Manjaro devs as having more competence to judge such things than the Arch community and the software devs.

Manjaro’s extra testing and vetting of Arch “stable” packages has avoided several problems so far.

This is a pointless discussion anyway, I’m not changing my mind and neither are you but all least now you know where I’m coming from. Cheers.

Yes well the difference is that I’ve used both and can explain their pros and cons and why one suits me better. I don’t just read a page called “archno” and then parrot it.

lemmyvore, 5 days ago

apps written explicitly for libadwaita will not be usable on generic GTK.

When an app targets a platform-specific library like Adwaita it explicitly forgoes supporting generic, cross-platform GTK.

Will an app dependent on libadwaita be usable on linux without gnome? Like xfce, or xmonad?

Depends what you mean by “usable”.

Will it run, yes, most likely. But the UI will be full of Gnome-y things that make little sense on other DE’s, among which the theme is just one. Could be other stuff, like accessibility, features etc.

As long as none of the shortcomings are deal-breakers for you I guess you can call it “usable”.

At the end of the day there’s always going to be DE’s that expand their UI features, and apps that take advantage of those. Cosmic, Plasma, Granite etc. are all examples of such platform-specific UI libs. Even in a cross-platform library like GTK or Qt there’s no guarantee that they’re compatible with each other. Bottom line is, when you mix and match apps made for different toolkits there’s always going to be variations.

It was nice for a while having common themes that could target both GTK and Qt and having unified-looking desktops. I guess that era is over. Back to each app having its own incompatible theming and the only common point being that they’re all “light-ish” or “dark-ish”.

lemmyvore, 6 days ago

We’ve seen it before, it’s not idle speculation. Windows machines have been the hosts of the largest botnets in the world. Whenever a company does something stupid like this it invariably gets into the wrong hands. It’s not even a question of if it will happen just when it will happen.

Oh and it’s not “Linux users” saying it, it’s everybody with an ounce of technical common sense. We’re all here shouting at Microsoft “it’s a bad idea” and they won’t care and it will go exactly as badly as predicted.

lemmyvore, 6 days ago

But Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake have the same hardware codecs.

lemmyvore, 6 days ago

But I mean that was the whole point of opening the Doom code wasn’t it? So it would evolve and expand beyond the state of the art at the time.

lemmyvore, 7 days ago

Ubuntu

lemmyvore, 7 days ago

Even Debian stable has already patched it.

lemmyvore, 7 days ago

Lol was it written for DOS?

lemmyvore, 8 days ago

I wouldn’t call it normal. It’s the norm because the market is flooded with crappy drives using JMicron chips. Buy something with a Realtek or Asmedia chip and it will work fine without getting hot.

lemmyvore, 7 days ago

Which reminds me, do you wear pants for the zoom exit interview if you never usually wore pants for work?

lemmyvore, 8 days ago

What do you recommend I do about disk partitions?

I usually put the OS on a separate partition from /home/user, so if I want to reinstall I can do it without losing my home stuff. Once you’ve settled into a distro you may want to keep /var separate too, in case it ever gets filled up it won’t affect your root.

A desktop distro will take up more disk space than a server one, where you can typically fit a server into 20 GB you might want to set aside at least 50-60 GB for a desktop. And that’s just software and package caches, not counting games and such. If you split root and /var then 30/30GB would do.

Yes Windows can occasionally mess with your bootloaders if it’s installed on the same drive.

Linux distros will typically recognize each other and add each other to the grub boot menu. Also typically you get a choice of whether you want them to do this during install so you should be able to refuse this from secondary distros and re-generate the menu on your main distro to pick up the others.

Is cloud storage sync straightforward?

I think Dropbox is the only one that has an actively maintained desktop client. But rclone will deal with almost anything else.

Should I just use apt to install software?

No, but be careful what you use, and about apt too. The dependency tree can develop issues if you add 3rd party .deb repos that overwrite native packages. Some repos are curteous (Docker is one of them) and publish packages under distinct names, most are not.

Debian native packages can grow long in the tooth because Debian only releases stuff once every two years (next one in 2025). This is where something like Flatpak comes in; the Flathub offer is tiny (under 3k packages) but it’s chock-full of useful desktop apps, in case you need a more recent version of anything. Steam or Firefox will be a strong candidates for Flatpak installation, for example.

I use the normal Firefox btw. Never saw a compelling enough argument for the clones and all kinds of downsides.

If you want a package manager learn to use aptitude on the CLI. It has a menu and everything, just takes a bit getting used to. It’s the best there is.

Any other pearls of wisdom?

If you want to keep things tidy I would strongly recommend sticking to native packages for all important stuff like system things, desktop environments, drivers. Avoid 3rd party repos if not well-behaved. For anything you’re missing or not new enough try Flatpak first. For CLI, programming languages, servers etc. I would strongly recommend installing Docker from their official repo (it’s well-behaved) and installing stuff in Docker containers.

You need a swap but it doesn’t have to be a partition. You can make it a file on /. You can also use zram and make it a compressed, dynamically sized piece of RAM and then forget about it. Check out the package systemd-zram-generator.

lemmyvore, 8 days ago

There’s one additional problem with Picard and bands with a long history that have released the same song on multiple albums and compilations, it won’t make much of an effort to group them in as few albums as possible. You will end up with songs spread across many distinct albums. Sometimes it’s not even an album of the original artist but multi-artist compilations like “The sound of the 90s” and so on.

lemmyvore, 9 days ago

It feels like the AI bubble won’t last another 6 months.

lemmyvore, 9 days ago

Why not keep the working files local, use a sync tool to get copies to the server, and backup/snapshot on the server as needed?

lemmyvore, 9 days ago

It’s been dead for a decade, even if it were forked it would still be 10 year old code. There’s plenty of good CLI clients like irssi and weechat still under active development.

lemmyvore, 9 days ago

IRC keeps evolving constantly. In fact it’s one of the few protocols without a fixed spec.

lemmyvore, 10 days ago

I know that it doesn’t matter that much at the end of the day but why not spend a minute and get something you’re happy with.

IMHO an .org or .com would send the wrong message. It sort of makes people expect an established non-profit entity or a company, respectively.

From the established TLDs I think .net would work well in this case.

How much do you care about the privacy of your personal data in the TLD’s registry? What about the cost of the domain, going forward? And what about long term stability of the TLD registry?

lemmyvore, 10 days ago

You can use Titanium on anything if you can get root in a normal fashion (standard superuser) and if it has a decent BusyBox installed.

But you might also be able to freeze (disable) an app from terminal, the command IIRC is pm disable-user + parameters.

lemmyvore, 10 days ago

If you have root than Titanium is still the best around for things like app backup and restore, and if you have Titanium you might as well freeze apps with it because it’s very easy.

But what Titanium calls freeze is actually a native function of Android (“disabling” an app), it just takes more steps. Normally it’s available in the app’s system info screen but preinstalled apps will bitch about it and may ask you to uninstall updates before allowing you to disable them. Some preinstalled apps won’t let you disable them at all and you have to resort to terminal commands. It’s just easier to use Titanium.

I think there’s other apps around that specialize in disabling stuff and may or may not require root. I don’t know, I’ve always used Titanium and never looked back.