CrabAndBroom

@CrabAndBroom@lemmy.ml

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CrabAndBroom ,

I like it, I think it's a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is these days, if you know what I mean. And I'm really interested to see how the COSMIC desktop environment works out.

Also I really like their laptops. I want to get a Pangolin one day lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I just leave Mullvad on 24/7, and set QBittorrent to only download through the VPN connection and just leave it at that.

CrabAndBroom ,

I've been tempted for a while to switch from good old reliable Arch (btw) to NixOS, but now I'm glad I procrastinated and just ran it in a little VM specimen jar instead.

CrabAndBroom ,

Also, I wouldn't trust Kaspersky with anything important personally. It's from an older interview but...

If you had the power to change up to three things in the world today that are related to IT security, what would they be?

Internet design--that's enough.

That's it? What's wrong with the design of the Internet?

There's anonymity. Everyone should and must have an identification, or Internet passport. The Internet was designed not for public use, but for American scientists and the U.S. military. That was just a limited group of people--hundreds, or maybe thousands. Then it was introduced to the public and it was wrong…to introduce it in the same way.

I'd like to change the design of the Internet by introducing regulation--Internet passports, Internet police and international agreement--about following Internet standards. And if some countries don't agree with or don't pay attention to the agreement, just cut them off.

Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat ( canonical.com )

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS delivers the latest Linux 6.8 kernel with improved syscall performance, nested KVM support on ppc64el, and access to the newly landed bcachefs filesystem. In addition to upstream improvements, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has merged low-latency kernel features into the default kernel, reducing kernel task scheduling delays....

CrabAndBroom ,

For me personally, I don't hate Ubuntu but eventually I found it a bit frustrating. IMO they have a habit of picking a thing they think is shiny (eg: Unity Desktop, trying to converge desktop and phones, Mir, currently Snaps) and just going ALL-IN trying to force it to be a thing, regardless of whether people want it or if it makes any sense. Then they keep pushing until it's almost actually decent, then drop it like a hot potato and chase after some other thing. So for me it always felt like important things were being neglected for the sake of whatever they think is cool at any given moment.

From Windows to about 6 recommended distros for gaming.

I am not bad with computers and have a beginner+, maybe intermediate level knowledge of Linux and I kept running into some problems here and there with different distros. Most claimed to work out of the box (which may be the case for some users, but I have a shit ass Nvidia 1060 and that was not at all the case, until I...

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah IIRC with Pop!OS it just asks you if you have an Nvidia card during install, and then it takes care of it all for you. I run it on my desktop machine and have had no issues so far.

Although word of caution, they're supposed to be transitioning to the brand new COSMIC desktop environment sometime this year, so I don't know if that will cause any instability.

CrabAndBroom ,

I really feel like we need to have a huge overhaul of copyright law in general, it seems like it's all a mish-mash of old laws from before the internet existed, patched over with half-assed rules that we've just been making up as we go along since then.

Some of it is absurd to me, like the way something can be online but geographically restricted. I've had the situation in the past where I want to watch a movie trailer, but I can't because I'm in Canada and not the US, even though the movie is also out in Canada. It's so pointless and easily circumvented, and all it does is annoy people. Or that something can still be copyrighted almost a century after the author is dead.

And to get back to the point, we also really need to make some kind of exemption for archival purposes. So much information, art and cultural heritage is lost because copyright holders don't look after the stuff they own and don't want to pay to preserve it properly. The internet could be one of the best archival tools we've ever had, if we'd just let it do its thing IMO.

How do you know if a book you pirated is complete/original/full etc ?

I downloaded a certain epub from Anna's archive but as i have never read it before and i don't know if it is a bad/incomplete copy or the real thing . I don't think I'm allowed to say which book it is but do feel free to correct me and i'll edit it in . So how do you solve this issue ? Like if it was a movie or tv episode i can...

CrabAndBroom ,

I haven't tested this but Calibre has a plugin that will give you the word count of an epub, so I'd assume if you got a few copies and the word counts were pretty much the same it should be a fairly safe bet. There might be some variation for dedications, forewords etc. though depending on the version.

CrabAndBroom ,

I had to update my laptop about two years ago and decided to go full AMD and it's been awesome. I've been running Wayland as a daily driver the whole time and and I don't even really notice it anymore.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah basically, people are using AI to write applications and cover letters, and recruiters are using AI to read and filter them, so it's just robots talking to each other.

I'm heard some other horror stories too, like companies requesting a "one way remote interview" which basically means they send you a list of questions, and you're supposed to record a video of yourself answering them as if you were in a proper interview and then send it to them.

At which point I'd rather be homeless personally, but that's maybe just me lol

CrabAndBroom ,

My main ones are:

  • Pretty much any software or games. Not really for moral reasons especially, but I mostly run Linux so most of them aren't available anyway, and if I do get something it's usually such a pain in the ass to actually get it working (and keep it working whenever there's an update) that it's usually not worth it when there's often a FOSS alternative. Also no pirating indie games.

  • Books, with a few exceptions. I don't want to screw over authors so I don't download books, but there have been a couple of old ones where the author is long dead and I already paid for a paper copy, so I snagged the eBook just for convenience. I figure that's not hurting anyone except the publishing company so whatever.

Also with games I'm one of those extremely patient people who can wait years for something to go on sale, so what I usually do is set a price in my head for what I think something's worth, and then ignore it until it ends up at that price. So like: Baldur's Gate 3 - they did a good job and released a proper working game = full price. Cyberpunk - looks alright but it was a big mess on release and had a bunch of stuff missing = wait until it's all fixed and has all the add-ons in a bundle, $25. Last Of Us PC = it's one of my favourite games but it's 10+ years old now and was also a bit of a mess on release so they can fuck off with the $70 price tag = $10 tops. No Man's Sky - Might be decent now but they really bullshitted that one on release = wait until it shows up for free on Epic or PSPlus. And so on. There's a lot of them lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

The quality is often terrible too. I've literally been watching Netflix and the pixellation/stuttering has been so bad that I've shut off the film, spent 2 minutes downloading it, then just carried on watching the downloaded version from where I left off.

CrabAndBroom ,

A lot of people seem to complain about them, but I really like them. I've even started using them over the AUR for some things now. I like that they keep certain things like Steam a lot tidier, and I like being able to see and control permissions and settings for everything all in Flatseal. The main downside I guess is that they use up more space by downloading dependencies for each app individually which is kind of redundant, but for me I've got a pretty big SSD in my laptop so it's never caused me any trouble. I could see how it could be a problem for someone with limited space on their system though.

Generally I tend to go Flatpak/AUR as a first choice, Appimage if I really need to, and Snaps never lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I'm not a huge fan of Appimages because I don't like that to update it you usually have to go find and download the file again, instead of just getting it from a repository. They feel too Windows-y to me in that way.

Is there a community list of VG company not to buy from? ( feddit.it )

After reading today EA's takes on AI and strategies about boosting user monetization promoting and exploitation of user's gambling addiction, I asked myself "How can someone defend those company agains boycotting and piracy?"....

CrabAndBroom ,

I have a bunch, but off the top of my head: Ubisoft, EA, Microsoft, Tencent, anything that's Epic exclusive. I should really have Take-Two on there as well but realistically I'm never not going to play Civilization so my principles fail me there.

CrabAndBroom ,

Pretty much lol

[Rant] A few days ago, I asked if Mint would run okay on a Lenovo T460 (I appreciate all the advice). I got it working, but the installation was a big pain and I totally blame Lenovo.

I got the T460 refurbished and I really didn't want to run Windows 10 on it. I last used Linux for any real length of time a good 20 years ago, so I'm pretty inexperienced with it at this point and I had to figure out how to install it myself....

CrabAndBroom ,

I'm not a secure boot expert, but it sounds like Mint should be supported anyway, according to Wikipedia:

Secure Boot is supported by Windows 8 and 8.1, Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, 2019, and 2022, and Windows 11, VMware vSphere 6.5 and a number of Linux distributions including Fedora (since version 18), openSUSE (since version 12.3), RHEL (since version 7), CentOS (since version 7), Debian (since version 10), Ubuntu (since version 12.04.2) and Linux Mint (since version 21.3). As of January 2024, FreeBSD support is in a planning stage.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I had a similar experience, it forgot my wifi login for some reason and there were a couple of minor theme/widget glitches, which was fully expected because my system is pretty customized, but other than that it was completely smooth. Maybe half an hour or so of tinkering from updating to being back to normal.

Can Linux be dual booted on a computer with Windows?

I have a Lenovo Yoga running Windows 10 on a 1TB SSD and at some point will probably have to upgrade it to Windows 11. I use it for school and have to keep Windows on it for now because of what I'm currently doing. I want to start getting into Linux in hopes of making the switch sometime down the line. Is partitioning the disk...

CrabAndBroom ,

To add to what others have said, I'd recommend installing Windows first, then Linux. Windows tends to assume it's the only OS that exists, so if there's anything else on the boot sector (eg. your fresh new Linux install), it'll just overwrite it without even checking lol.

CrabAndBroom , (edited )

Not sure about Fedora, but it's already in extra-testing in Arch and has already been merged into master in NixOS apparently, so it should be hitting the general channels pretty soon hopefully.

Edit: apparently the Fedora 40 beta has Plasma 6 but I didn't check that myself, I just saw someone mention it.

Are there any Windows-exclusive programs you use?

I had to test/fix something at work and I set up a Windows VM because it was a bug specific to Windows users. Once I was done, I thought, “Maybe I should keep this VM for something.” but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a game (which probably wouldn’t work well in a VM anyway) or some super specific enterprise...

CrabAndBroom ,

I run Scrivener, which is a writing software that's only for Mac & Windows (well, there is a Linux version but it's ancient), but I just run that through Wine rather than a VM. That's about the only thing I haven't found a good equivalent for on Linux though.

KDE Plasma 6.0, and KDE Gear 24.02 released ( kde.org )

Today the KDE Community is announcing a new najor release of Plasma 6.0, and Gear 24.02. KDE Plasma is a modern, feature-rich desktop environment for Linux-based operating systems. Known for its sleek design, customizable interface, and extensive set of applications, it is also open source, devoid of ads, and makes protecting...

CrabAndBroom ,

I look forward to the havoc this will cause with all my themes and widgets in the coming weeks lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

TBH I've been using Linux for over a decade, can install & set up Arch from scratch etc. and I still don't understand Docker.

CrabAndBroom ,

Not sure if this works with drive encryption since it comes before the OS, but could this maybe be done with a YubiKey or something like that?

That way, you can plug it in and not worry about typing the password every time, but then it's also secure if someone takes your PC? As long as you remove the key when it's off of course.

Piracy as a quality of service issue

I am one of those suckers (:sigh) who paid for Youtube since it bundled Youtube Music with it. However, today I used the latter's Revanced version and it was so much customizable. Right from removing menu items to the stupid cast button Google has forced on us; it seems a billion dollar company can't compete with these folks who...

CrabAndBroom ,

I agree fully. I basically never download music anymore, because I can get all the music I can think of on Spotify for a few bucks a month. And when everything was on Steam I just got everything from there. Now that all the games companies are bringing out their own stores and launchers, that's starting to change again.

This is a lesson that the movie & TV industry seems hell-bent on not learning.

CrabAndBroom ,

I admittedly don't have many conversation about Linux with people, but yeah the ones I do have are usually me trying to convince people that it's less techy and scary than they think it is. One person asked me how I do everything if it's only text. They thought Linux was literally just the terminal with no UI at all. I had to be like "no dude, it's like everything else. You can just install Firefox or Chrome or whatever you want."

CrabAndBroom ,

Single-click and the little plus icons on everything in Dolphin are the first things I switch off after install for sure.

CrabAndBroom ,

I never thought I'd see the day

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah Lenovo have always been really good for me with Linux. I think if I had the money I'd still go either Framework or System76, but my current laptop is just a mid-range Lenovo Ideapad and it seems to run any Linux thing I chuck at it quite happily.

CrabAndBroom ,

It can sort of depend on the distro, there are a lot of Debian-based ones such as Debian (obviously), Kali, Ubuntu, and then ones based on Ubuntu like Mint and Pop!OS, those all largely work the same under the hood, ie you'd use .deb files and something like sudo apt-get install to install something.

Then there are Arch-based ones like Arch and Manjaro, which are a bit more different, you'd use pacman or yay or paru to install things instead, and they have things like the AUR, which is a big user-maintained repository or software that has just about everything on it.

Then you have the Fedora based ones and SUSE based ones, which are different again in other ways. And some more unique and weirder ones like NixOS which is having a bit of a moment, whereby you sort of configure the entire system in one single config file and rebuild it each time (as I understand it, that might be a bit off 'cause I'm still learning.)

So yeah it sort of depends. And then you have desktop environments like GNOME and KDE which aren't distros, but do affect how the whole system looks (and functions, to an extent.) And these are largely agnostic of the underlying distro, so you could have say a machine running Debian with GNOME next to a machine running NixOS with GNOME which would look very similar from the desktop but would be hugely different under the hood, and two machines running Arch, one with GNOME and one with KDE which would look totally different but be functionally the same.

I won't even start on Display Managers lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

What I tend to do that scratches the distro-hopping itch is I keep an external drive with a bunch of virtual machines on it that I can spin up and tinker around with as needed, like little specimen jars lol. I think I have about 5-6 on the go at the moment. So like my actual computer runs Arch (btw), but I have VMs for NixOS, OpenSUSE, Mint and so on, as well as another one that's as close to my main system as possible so if I want to try a weird experiment I can try it on there first to see what breaks. Just today I tried upgrading it to Plasma 6 to see what broke and the answer was everything lol.

I used to keep ones for Mac and Windows on the go too, but they tend to eat up a lot of drive space.

CrabAndBroom ,

I've read so many things that try to explain what flakes are, and for the life of me I still don't understand what they are or what they're for lol.

(Constructively) What is your least favorite distro & why?

I’ve been distrohopping for a while now, and eventually I landed on Arch. Part of the reason I have stuck with it is I think I had a balanced introduction, since I was exposed to both praise and criticism. We often discuss our favorite distros, but I think it’s equally important to talk about the ones that didn’t quite hit...

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I was gonna say Manjaro too. I used it for a while while I was heading towards Arch but wasn't feeling fully confident to go full Arch as a daily driver yet, and it was nothing but trouble for me. I found that it tried to prevent me from breaking things, which is not necessarily bad, but it would also break things by itself and then this feature would prevent me from going in and fixing them.

I much prefer it when the OS just gets out of my way and lets me do what I want, even if it's dumb lol

CrabAndBroom ,

Someone already said Manjaro, so my second pick would be ElementaryOS. In the past they've had this weird attitude about open source things being free (I get supporting devs for projects you like of course, but I don't agree that it's "cheating" to not pay for every single piece of open source software you use), and they seem to get a lot of hype and praise for what's essentially just Ubuntu painted up to look like MacOS IMO.

voxel , (edited ) to Linux
@voxel@infosec.exchange avatar

Hey 👋 dear Linux Community,

I'm still kinda new to Linux (started using this year 😅) I already made it to my main OS, even if I still missing some things which I used on Windows, anyway. What I wanted to ask you guys, what recommendations do you have for Linux Mint (Cinnamon)? In terms of security, optimization, (a way to make the UI looking modern ;-;) and privacy? I would be very interested in what you do guys to optimize your Linux setup :) I'm pretty technical, so there is nothing which could overwhelm me (probaly).

Thx! 🤍

@linux

CrabAndBroom ,

In terms of security, IMO just using Linux, having a regular firewall setup and using common sense online and not clicking on anything overtly sketchy probably puts you in ahead of 90% of people on the internet lol. I'm also quite partial to running OpenSnitch just to make sure nothing's connecting to the internet without my say-so.

For privacy, I think it depends on your threat model but for the average person I'd say a VPN of some sort and mainly just being cautious about how much personal info you post on social media will cover a big chunk of it. Maybe a more privacy conscious email provider like Proton or Tuta over something like Gmail would help too, but none of that is strictly a Linux thing.

Kind of boring answers, sorry! But IMO the boring fundamentals do tend to cover the majority of stuff. Also there are places like privacyguides.org if you want to rabbit-hole it, but be warned that you might end up becoming one of those people who only goes on onion sites and pays for everything with Monero lol.

Also no idea about customizing Cinnamon, apologies.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah same here, at some point I ended up settling on Kitty and now I'm used to it and there's no reason to change, but pretty much any terminal emulator will do the job just fine.

Steam Deck Switch emulation

Hey so I installed Yuzu (and many other emulators) via emu deck so the installation is taken care of I think except for the product keys and title keys I have a switch but dont want to fuck with getting the keys out of it and all that so Im trying to just download them I found a website called "theprodkeys.com" is this legit?...

CrabAndBroom ,

Reddit has started getting a bit fucky with VPNs lately so maybe that's the cause? I mean you could obviously go there without the VPN on, but also fuck them lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

October 14, 2025 apparently.

Edit: could also affect as many as 240 million machines that don't have TPM.

CrabAndBroom ,

The only thing I would maybe hesitate about with POP! OS is the big upcoming switch to the COSMIC desktop, which is is brand-new and a bit untested. But also System76 are a really solid company and seem to know what they're doing so it'll probably be fine.

CrabAndBroom ,

I find sometimes installing a bunch of different DEs can cause weird cross-issues, so I tend to just make VMs to try out new things. I have a bunch of them on an external drive like little specimen jars lol.

Also as a side note, I keep a VM that's as close to my current setup as possible, so if I get the urge to try something weird I can do it there first and see if it breaks anything.

CrabAndBroom ,

I'm currently using Arch (btw), but I have been hearing the distant call of NixOS lately...

CrabAndBroom ,

I have a Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS and I can never get it to find any other devices in KDE connect for some reason. Syncthing works fine though so I just use that instead.

CrabAndBroom ,

Yeah I do have Mullvad as well but it doesn't seem to be that. I tried split tunneling KDE connect and also just turning the VPN off altogether and it made no difference.

My current guess is either some hidden security thing in GrapheneOS that I haven't discovered yet, or maybe some router setting that's filtering it out? The investigation is ongoing!

CrabAndBroom ,

K I kind of solved it! Turns out there wasn't a setting within the Mullvad app for "always require VPN", but there was one in the Android system settings under VPN. If I turn that off and then split tunnel KDE connect only on the phone (not on my laptop for some unknown reason) then they can see each other.

One to file under "I don't know why that works but I'll take it" lol.

CrabAndBroom ,

Doesn't QBittorrent already have its own setting for that? Like you can set the network interface to wg-mullvad or whatever and then it won't work outside of that? Or is the docker thing just for an extra layer of protection on top of that?

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