𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬

Somewhere between Linux woes, gaming, open source, 3D printing, recreational coding, and occasional ranting.

🔗 Me, but elsewhere

🇬🇧 / 🇩🇪

  • 5 Posts
  • 521 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 9th, 2023
  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•Linux distro recommendations
    4·
    2 months ago

    You summarize it quite well. But I would still recommend Arch (but as an Arch user since 2008 I am biased on this). Why?

    • Lightweight, ideal for gaming. My full-featured Wayland-setup with labwc runs with ca. 2 gigabytes of RAM, including Firefox, which on it’s own currently takes up 800 megabytes. Not that RAM would be an actual issue on modern gaming setups, but still, this shows how little resources the system needs for itself.
    • Gaming on Linux is pretty much solved nowadays thanks to Valve (Steam, Proton, etc.) and Flatpaks. Games that do not work are intentionally made to not work on other platforms than Windows due the games using ring0 spyware as DRM and for anti-cheat.
    • Privacy by concept – while there are no specific measures taken regarding privacy, the default installation just does nothing except initializing the hardware and allowing the user to sign in. Everything else is up to you.
    • Software development is – like gaming – a no-brainer. All common tools work on Linux. Even more: Dependency handling, setting up the environment, using different compilers – all this feels much smoother than on Windows.
    • Maintainability is great. Since there are no package changes from upstream, you can be sure that bugs are typically bugs in the software and not coming from Arch packaging.Thanks to rolling release you get much less updates at the same time compared to fixed release distribution – ganted you update regularly. I check the news and update every 1-2 weeks at the weekend.

    And since you’re coming from Windows, you have to learn new stuff anyways. So why not dive head first into Arch?

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•App Image or AUR package
    3·
    2 months ago

    Why do you consider AppImages as last resort?

    Mainly because you cannot manage them properly.

    Installing from the repos I have pacman, from the AUR I can use one of the various AUR helpers (most of them can forward repo package updates to pacman, so I really have just one command to update the system and all AUR packages).

    When making my own packages I usually also put them in the AUR (plus, it is super easy to do make an own package and put in in the AUR) – and from there an aUR helper takes care about updates. Flatpaks can also be updated very easy by just running one command.

    So: All of those have a specific location where they install and allow me to start them easily because they put a script/link somewhere in $PATH. All of those can be easily maintained and updated.

    Last time I checked, AppImages had none of those. Neither could I easily update all of them on my system, nor is there a dedicated location to place them, nor is there an “unified” (i.e. something in $PATH) way of starting them. I have to manually check for updates, re-download the whole thing, replace the current AppImage file in an arbitrary location.

    This is just how I do not want to maintain my programs.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mltoAI@lemmy.ml•How are companies SO bad at seeeling AI to us? (And how to fix it)
    2·
    3 months ago

    Actually at one point I was pondering making a LLM assisted news website that would be very clear about what is generated, what is not, what were the prompts, what was the process.

    I am pretty sure that this is already the case for most of those “online journalism” sites, minus being clear about using AI.

    Most of those sites likely take news ticker messages (Reuters, DPA, AP, etc.) and have an AI write a 4 paragraphs article and then their system links certain keyword to advertisements and place advertisement banners around and in between those paragraphs.

    If you know that a text has been generated by an LLM, you read it differently

    Personally I prefer not to ready any AI generated context except I entered a prompt by and for myself.

  • 𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml•Help me like desktop linux
    4·
    3 months ago

    Navigating a combination of the distro’s native package manager (apt, pacman, rpm, whatever), snap, flatpack and still having to set up the maintainers’ custom repositories to get stuff that’s even remotely up-to-date somehow

    This sounds like a you problem, to be honest. If you want the most up-to-date software, just use a distribution that updates very often or uses a rolling-release concept.

    The different UI toolkits, desktop environment, window manager and compositor seem to be fighting each other.

    If you use one of them, not that much. If you start mixing them it becomes a huge mess. At one point in time I had Ubuntu installed, running Gnome, but having Openbox as window manager set. It was an absolute mess. Nowadays I think it’s even more of a mess, especially with gnome and this stupid Adwaita library with the stupid CSM.

    But I happily ran pure Openbox on X11 for a decade and run labwc on Wayland since ca. 2 years now.

    I do a lot of .NET programming and photo editing. I could probably replace VS with VScode or Ryder but it’s an additional hurdle. For photo editing, I haven’t found a single thing that fits my workflow the way Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop do.

    Then stick with Windows. Or run this software in VM with GPU pass-through and KVM. I really don’t see an issue here. Use the tool that best fits your needs.