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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: January 31st, 2024

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  • They can be slow to adopt changes. I think the Mozilla foundation getting more funding, staffing, and refocusing on their browser would be the better solution.

    While Chromium is an open source project, it is still developed and maintained by Google. For something as important as a web browser, I think it’s imperative that there’s an option outside of their control.


  • That’d certainly be a good feature, but it feels to me like it’s a fairly niche need. And as per that post, it’s also a big technical effort. I can see why there isn’t anything in the way of development updates.

    That is me being a bit of an apologist for Firefox though. If you consider Firefox unusable because of that, then that’s a pretty valid frustration.

    Still, I’d encourage you to try and find a way to make it work for you because Chrome is evil.




  • Nothing too complex, no. KDE desktop, some stuff from the AUR. LVM on LUKS.

    Perhaps it’s more fair to say that Arch takes more effort to maintain than any other well known distro except Gentoo (or LFS, if one considers that well known).

    I found keeping up to date on a fairly bleeding edge rolling release distro exhausting. I would, too often, come across issues with updates that required manual intervention to solve. And the AUR can be a crapshoot as far maintainers keeping them up to date and applying fixes. Nothing unmanagable, but not an enjoyable experience for me.

    No hate intended on Arch though. I think it’s one of the best distros out there, and the Linux community as a whole is better off for it’s existence. But it’s not something I want as my daily driver, and I suspect from what OP wrote, it might be the same case for them.

    Edit: Reworded AUR bit for clarity.






  • It doesn’t copy data, no. Symlink is short for symbolic link. So it’s a pointer to another location. But it might be useful for you. Taking a guess at your goal, here’s a relevant example.

    Say you moved all of your emulation stuff stored under /media/largehdd/retroarch. You could then symlink that directory to ~/.config/retroarch like so:

    ln -s /media/largehdd/retroarch ~/.config/retroarch

    That data is still stored on the large drive but will now also show under that symlinked directory.







  • This doesn’t fit the question exactly but I feel it’s in the same spirit, and a kind of interesting solution, I think.

    Back in the early days of scryptcoin mining, I had a few gpu mining rigs running Linux. Occasionally they would hard lock and I’d have to power cycle them.

    What I ended up doing is getting some usb to serial adapters, wrote a python script that ran on startup and would send a character over serial at a set interval in a loop. That was hooked up, if I recall correctly, to an attiny85 using softwareserial and some ttl to rs232 conversion. It would listen over serial and if it didn’t receive anything with a reasonable time frame it’d flip a relay that cut mains power to the pc, then flipped it back. A deadman’s switch, of a sort. It worked great!


  • I wouldn’t call ChromeOS Linux anymore than I would call MacOS FreeBSD (oversimplified comparison, but it works for my point).

    It may be based on a Linux kernel but it contains closed source code that’s needed for essential functionality, and we don’t get to choose hardware independently of the OS, nor a different OS for the hardware.

    It’s an ecosystem that’s hostile to user rights and in my opinion doesn’t fit the spirit of what Linux is.

    Edit: I suppose that’s a bit gatekeeperish? But I don’t think Linux adoption should be achieved at the cost of user freedom and choice. It loses what makes it special at that point.


  • Yeah, I see a fair amount of gatekeeping and condescension in Linux communities. I also see a lot of people who truly want to be helpful, but that aspect is there.

    I’ve seen Linux compared to car ownership a number of times, and I think that’s an apt comparison. I have the knowledge to use and perform basic maintenance on a car, and I have no interest in learning more. It’s a tool made for a purpose. Some people love to tinker with cars, and I can understand that. I love Linux and enjoy tinkering with it, but it generally won’t “just work” for most users. Yes, if you’re setting it up for your grandparents and they just need a web browser or something like that it’s probably fine but most users that aren’t Linux savvy are going to run into issues.

    Linux is becoming ever more usable, and I think usage will continue to increase alongside that, but I don’t see it ever becoming a major personal desktop platform. Wouldn’t mind being wrong, but Linux will be fine, regardless.

    That was more ranty than I had expected!