nyan

@nyan@sh.itjust.works

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nyan ,

Delete all the code. Then you'll have no bugs.

nyan ,

Rolling-release Linux distros such as Arch, Gentoo, and OpenSUSE Tumbleweed constantly release the latest updates, but they’re not used in businesses.

So some businesses decided that monolithic releases were more important than being able to get the latest upstream vanilla kernel version, and somehow that's the fault of "all Linux kernel vendors" (including rolling-release distros, since there was no attempt to qualify "all") and not the businesses' decisions about tradeoffs?

nyan ,

should still already choose their sexuality

Sexuality is not a choice, any more than your skin colour is a choice.

nyan ,

To echo others here, you really need to kill the driver. There are a couple of different kernel modules that might be involved, depending on exactly how your touch panel is connected to the rest of the system. Software that has no specific touch support will likely treat your renegade hardware as a mouse, rather than ignoring it.

You may be able to unbind the driver from the device, see this discussion on stackexchange.

nyan ,

Dude. I actually have sources for most of my installed packages lying around, because Gentoo. Do you know how much space that source code takes up?

Just under 70GB. And pretty much everything but maybe the 10GB of direct git pulls is compressed, one way or another.

That means that even if your distro is big and has 100 people on development, they would each have to read 1GB or more of decompressed source just to cover the subset of packages installed on my system.

How fast do you read?

nyan ,

Does a WinNT clone count as "truly different", though? Maybe Haiku would have been a better choice for that.

nyan ,

You don't have a cat, do you?

CAD Software Suggestion

I am currently on win10 but have been toying with mint and liking it. I intend on fully switching over soon. I have also been toying with the idea of some simple 3D modeling, like making custom parts for projects around my house. Maybe using a CAD software to generate stls for a 3D print or using it to spec out parts for a...

nyan ,

The only thing I miss about fusion 360 is an easy way to add fillets to parts, that can be tricky in openscad. I use chamfers for the most part though, so I don’t miss it much.

There's an OpenSCAD add-on lib called BOSL that offers primitives with built-in fillet options (plus a wide array of other stuff, like premodeled metric bolts). Admittedly it spends a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but I've found it useful from time to time.

nyan ,

A minimal Gentoo install contains less than 30 packages and fits in 1GB of disk (no GUI, though). If you more than double either of those numbers, you're not "minimal".

nyan ,

It stopped being secret a couple of years ago.

nyan ,

sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don't have it installed). Don't want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd's.

systemd's feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.

nyan ,

The problem is that those modules are packaged by the developers as opt-out rather than opt-in. It's a variation on Microsoft's old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook, only the "extinguish" part hasn't worked so well because there are some stubborn distros whose needs don't align with what systemd provides and have maintainers that go out of their way to provide alternatives.

(By contrast, although we may joke about emacs, it's the myriad of third-party extensions that cause it to just about be its own operating system—it doesn't all ship with the core.)

nyan ,

Granted, in a true multiuser environment with an admin who's carefully tailoring /etc/sudoers to make sure everyone has the least possible privileges that will allow them to still do what they need, sudo is more secure. There's no doubt of that.

On a machine that has only one human user who's also the admin, and retains the default sudo-with-user-passwords configuration, su vs sudo is pretty much a wash, security-wise. su requires a second password to get root access, but sudo times out and requires the password to be re-entered while a shell created by su can stay open indefinitely. Which is more easily broken will depend on other details of your situation.

(If you're running an incorrectly configured ssh server that allows direct root login with only password authentification, having a root password could contribute to problems, but the correct fix there is to reconfigure the ssh server not to do something so stupid. I hope there's no distro that still ships that way out of the box.)

nyan ,

Early true BIOSen were stored on EPROM, which couldn't be rewritten while on the board, so those were read-only.

Later BIOSen were often on EEPROM or other chips that could be reflashed while on the board. According to Wikipedia, that started in the mid-1990s. However, you usually needed physical access and/or special software tools to do an overwrite—you couldn't mount these as a filesystem.

UEFI is quite different from legacy BIOSen and can be mounted as a filesystem, but how much it can be tampered with varies between implementations and devices.

So you would have been correct up until about 30 years ago, but not for modern systems.

nyan ,

Gentoo specifically switches off the telemetry (-Daudacity_has_sentry_reporting=off,-Daudacity_has_crashreports=off). The cloud saving facility is also off by default, but can be added to the build by enabling the audiocom USE flag.

Why is folder sharing between host and guest in KVM so hard?

I'm having the hardest tine setting up a shared folder between a Linux host and Win11guest. I want to get rid of dual boot, but there are a few programs that I use which are Win only. I have set up a VB VM, but I want a fine tuned KVM VM. On VB sharing is trivial, but I can't get it to work in KVM. I have the host sharing the...

nyan ,

The method of last resort would be to place the files you want shared on a virtual drive that you pass to the Windows guest, then mount that virtual drive as a loopback device under Linux. I have only done this for very old versions of Windows that can't talk to normally configured current versions of Samba, so I don't know how it will behave with 11—simultaneous access doesn't really work with my Win 98SE guest, but the method is adequate for passing files back and forth.

(The person who suggested wsdd2 is likely right on the money, though—a Samba share won't be browsable without it from modern Windows, although you may still be able to connect to it blind if you know the address. Problem is, in my experiences with Samba, the address was usually not quite what I expected . . .)

nyan ,

What I've always wondered about that one is: why bother forbidding Google but not 'man tar'? 🤨

nyan ,

Surely the bomb isn't the only computer in the immediate area.

nyan ,

If I recall correctly, ext3 is ext2 with journalling on top, so they can't really get rid of ext2 without also ditching ext3.

nyan ,

ext4 is still solid for most use cases (I also use it). It's not innovative, and possibly not as performant as the newer file systems, but if you're okay with that there's nothing wrong with using it. I intend to look into xfs and btrfs the next time I spin up a new drive or a new machine, but there's no hurry (and I may not switch even then).

There's an unfortunate tendency for people who like to have the newest and greatest software to assume that the old code their new-shiny is supposed to replace is broken. That's seldom actually the case: if the old software has been performing correctly all this time, it's usually still good for its original use case and within the scope of its original limitations and environment. It only becomes truly broken when the appropriate environment can't be easily reproduced or one of the limitations becomes a significant security hole.

That doesn't mean that shiny new software with new features is bad, or that there isn't some old software that has never quite performed properly, just that if it ain't broke, it's okay to set a conservative upgrade schedule.

nyan ,

Reading between the lines on the gentoo-dev mailing list, I gather that the old system just was not working very well, with friction between the Foundation and the technical side of the distro.

Help with HDD

I have a 4TB HDD that I use to store music, films, images, and text files. I have a 250GB SDD that I use to install my OS and video games. So far I didn't have any problem with this setup, obviously it's a bit slower when it reads the HDD but nothing too serious, but lately it's gotten way worse, where it just lags too much when...

nyan ,

I've got a 6TB SATA HDD (also formatted ext4) and while files on it don't always open instantaneously, the pause is only a fraction of a second at most (barely enough to notice). So I'll join the chorus suggesting you check for hardware issues—bad drive, bad or loose cables, or a bad controller on the mobo.

nyan ,

Simply put, no one with the necessary skills has come forward and demonstrated the willingness to do the work. No programmer I've ever met enjoys wrestling with other people's crufty old code. It isn't fun, it isn't creative, and it's often an exercise in, "What the unholy fsck was whoever wrote this thinking, and where did I put the 'Bang head here' mousepad?" So getting volunteers to mop out the bilges only happens when someone really wants to keep a particular piece of software working. It's actually more difficult than getting people to contribute to a new project.

So getting rid of X's accumulated legacy cruft isn't impossible, but I suspect someone would need to set up the "Clean up X" foundation and offer money for it to actually happen. (I'm no happier about that than you, by the way.)

nyan ,

Wayland has better support for some newer in-demand features, like multiple monitors, very high resolutions, and scaling. It's also carrying less technical debt around, and has more people actively working on it. However, it still has issues with nvidia video cards, and there are still a few pieces of uncommon software that won't work with it.

The only alternative is X. Its main advantage over Wayland is network transparency (essentially it can be its own remote client/server system), which is important for some use cases. And it has no particular issues with nvidia. However, it's essentially in maintenance mode—bugs are patched, but no new features are being added—and the code is old and crufty.

If you want the network transparency, have an nvidia card (for now), or want to use one of the rare pieces of software that doesn't work with Wayland/XWayland, use X. Otherwise, use whatever your distro provides, which is Wayland for most of the large newbie-friendly distros.

nyan ,

My first step is usually to figure out whether the package should exist as a separate entity under Gentoo (which, for instance, doesn't have separate dev packages). Then I check the overlay masterlist to see if there's an unofficial package (which there often is).

If there is no package, I can package it myself (since I've been working with the same distro for years and can handle the basic packaging cases), install from source, get the .deb and apply alien or deb2targz and proceed from there, or give the whole thing up as a bad job.

nyan ,

You sometimes can build software that will work with more than one version of a C library, but less and less software is being written that binds only to C libraries. The key topic you want to look up is probably "ABI stability".

nyan ,

Start with a minimalist distro that ships without any desktop environment, of which there are many.

nyan ,

Which is why Electron reminds me of a little kid who's just done some extremely difficult but utterlly pointless thing.

Websites belong in a browser. If it doesn't work in any random standards-compliant browser, then you should be delivering it as a true native application, not some horrific fiji-mermaid-esque hybrid.

nyan ,

Sometimes raising the barrier to entry is a good thing.

Many Electron applications I've run across don't make even a try at loading system settings. For me, that causes accessibility issues related to photosensitivity. For some reason, feeling like I've been stabbed in the eyeball when I try to open a program does not endear me to it or its framework.

No application at all is actually better than something built on Electron, as far as I'm concerned, because then there's a chance that someone, somewhere, might fill in the gap with software I can actually use.

Electron needs to either actually provide the basics of native functionality, or go away.

Will antivirus be more significant on Linux desktop after this xz-util backdoor?

I understand that no Operating System is 100% safe. Although this backdoor is likely only affects certain Linux desktop users, particularly those running unstable Debian or testing builds of Fedora (like versions 40 or 41), **Could this be a sign that antivirus software should be more widely used on Linux desktops?...

nyan ,

In the specific case of xz-utils, many lazy people would never have been at risk because the issue is limited to xz-utils 5.6.x (a quite recent version). Not updating provided (unusually) a mitigation in this case.

nyan ,

Well, I can still boot my system without an initram (although that isn't just due to the kernel config)—does that count?

Other than that, custom kernels free up a small amount of disk space that would otherwise be taken up by modules for driving things like CANbus, and taught me a whole lot about the existence of hardware and protocols that I will never use.

nyan ,

Gentoo + OpenRC + TDE (therefore X) on both a first-gen Threadripper desktop with 96GB RAM and a laptop from 2008 with an Athlon64x2 processor and 2GB RAM. Updating gcc on the laptop can take a while, but it still serves well enough. Plus a couple of headless Pis that are also running Gentoo. Not overly unusual, but I may well have the only Threadripper of that gen running that specific distro and DE combination anywhere in the world, since each individual item is kind of low probability.

nyan ,

It may help to know a bit of history: KDE3 themes could include a bespoke widget style, and QT3 widget styles were always implemented as executables (you can look at modified versions of the C++ code in the TDE git repository, if you're really bored). So keeping code out of the themes hasn't been important to KDE for at least the past 20 years. If I'm not mistaken, far more things are stylable in current versions of KDE. That doesn't mean that every theme will style all of them, though—you can have codeless styles like the one you found, that make use of the built-ins rather than trying to change All The Things.

nyan ,

Well, you do have to feed, er, update it at least every six months if you don't want to be left with an unholy mess to clean up.

nyan ,

Six months is the max that's supposed to be supported. (Longest no-update period I've ever sorted out was twelve months. Possible, but time-consuming.)

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