Media codecs and formats

Got burned by this recently, was trying to use MPV for playing a YT vid, and it had no video but had audio. Turns out Fedora comes with an open-source or smth version of H264 encoders, so I had to uninstall those packages for the official Cisco ones. But I was on atomic and it wasn’t fun so I ran to forums for help.

Driver availability

Not sure if it’s the driver or the kernel (maybe dual-booting? But it worked on both partitions originally…) but my Bluetooth is nuked on my Linux partition. I tried to do rfkill, btusb, systemctl, etc. and the only solution I got was to rollback to an older release of Fedora atomic because it’s most likely a kernel issue. That just sucks man, having to be stuck on an older version to get my earbuds to work lol. I didn’t like atomic and now I’m on reg KDE Fedora, so I’m truly fucked as that’s not a rollback distro.

I still love using Fedora (every time I boot into Windows I cry) and it just makes me love my laptop like it’s brand-new. Tinkering is fun to me, I’ll literally sit at my desk and starve myself while trying to get something to work. But some days, I want my stuff to work with minimal tinkering, and not have to worry if it’ll break when I really need it down the line.

“It just works” only works for very basic normie stuff.

I think that was @Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world’s main point. Apple is great if you’re a normie, but if you even think about tinkering with things, have an unusual issue on your system, or creatures forbid… want to play games, you’re fucked.

My mom is an Apple diehard who has used Android and Windows in the past (2000s), but got burned by Window’s shitty security and really only switched to iPhone due to iMessage being more reliable than SMS at the time. She knows a little bit of tech stuff (I guess I get it from her), but overall, she’s a “normie” compared to me, so Apple (90% of the time) does what she needs.

It simplifies a lot of things

If this was me about 3 weeks ago, I wouldn’t have debated this as hard. But recently my grandma had to call my mom and I to help her get her iPhone pictures to work on her Windows laptop, and she almost thought she downloaded a virus when trying to get an HEIC app. Apple’s asinine proprietary file format is a plague on society, and I hated when I had to send pictures from my iPhone to my Google drive for school in HS. That’s not simple, and now we have to help grandparents understand that they need to screenshot their camera pictures or else literally no website will take their damn photos.

The little things add-up for me, and so yeah, it’s nice having something that “just works”, but only if you literally accept everything and never complain about any of their choices.

I recently decided to switch from using Atomic Fedora to reg KDE Fedora (cause tinkering and bypassing atomic features got on my nerves), and I almost went through with wiping everything and only having Linux installed. And then I realized I probably wouldn’t be able to do some tests for college cause they use anti-cheating software (lockdown browser) which they probably wouldn’t like if I ran it in a VM or wine…

But man, once I’m out of college, I’m probably wiping Windows for good! Also gonna factory reset that partition so it at least takes way less space on my drive.

(Side note: the other hesitation is that I’m 90% kernel updates nuked Bluetooth for me around March (It worked when I rolled back to January/February releases) and I do have zoom classes sometimes. Like, do I just have to buy a Bluetooth dongle to deal with this?)

Mullvad did remove port forwarding, and it’s the only thing stopping me from cancelling my Proton subscription early. I don’t torrent often, but I wonder about getting a seedbox one day, and I’d need Proton.

I honestly don’t love them after the idiot board member’s Trump praise.

+1 on Aegis, love it, it’s FOSS and on F-droid. Can make auto backups/exports (encrypted/not), can register codes from a screenshot of a QR code (love that feature when I’m on my phone), it’s a simple and clean design overall.

Libreddit died when Reddit made the APi change a couple years back, RedLib which is a fork is maintained

Originally, I was confused why people were saying that Libreddit is dead, cause I thought I was using it up until about a month ago, but now I realize I was using RedLib. I’m not sure why, but recently LibRedirect defaulted to Libreddit instances and I was dumb and didn’t check which service I was using, so I thought all Reddit proxies were dead. Thank you for helping me to notice this difference! I can finally stop having to go to the actual Reddit page 🥹

I also host a Redlib instance at https://lib.halstead.host/ again geo-restricted to Canadian IP’s.

I can totally verify that it’s restricted to Canada, had to switch VPN location to access the site. I’ll keep geo-restricting in mind if a sever supposedly won’t let me connect.

Yeah, nadeko is one of the few that works, but like I said, they get mad at me for using Chameleon.

Man 90% of Invidious instances are dead/not working for me, and of the few that do, they get mad at me for using an agent switcher (which I turn off but still). Freetube is slightly better, but will also break every few days and either require VPN switching or waiting for a fix from the devs.

Sidenote: LibRedirect users, are all LibReddit instances dead or is it just me?

No, she absolutely hates right-wing content and is definitely left. Asmongold is a grifter piece of shit human being who attracts alt-right viewers. It’s not about her not being interested, she quite literally gets upset at the awful ideas and hate that those channels spread and doesn’t want to see them. She never watches their videos on purpose, she’s only ever clicked on them by accident, she always either clicks away immediately or dislikes the video, and never comments on them. She has repeatedly tried to block those channels. YT continues to show them.

I block content I’m not interested in and it goes away.

I agree with this idea, but unfortunately YT and other engagement social media sites don’t want that to happen. For me, I’m almost never shown videos I hate, but when I say “not interested/don’t show me this channel” it USUALLY works. Not at the time though. I’ve definitely gotten channels recommended to me that I already said I don’t want to see.

This is especially true for my mom, who is frequently getting upset by the fact that YT keeps showing her Fox News and Asmongold clips in her recommendations. I think changing the VPN to Canada helped to reduce the Fox News recommendations, but the Asmongold clips can’t be escaped.

Do you think this potential list is appropriate? Other people suggested a minimum of 16 GB RAM.

Green bubble shaming is real and I felt it in middle school but more so in highschool from my own softball team. Hated that shit, but I loved my Moto g7 play so those bitches can fuck themselves.

So one pihole would be on the router, while the other runs on another piece of dedicated hardware?

Not sure now, as I stopped using it months ago, but no, they give you annoying teasers and force you to make an account to see more than the cropped pic. So people are actually signing up for this.

Sorry, corrected my post as I have confused several people lol. Proton has killswitch on mobile and PC, just not Fire TVs.

Yeah, definitely could be making faster improvements, and it’s disheartening considering Pixelfed hasn’t had major improvements either. But I’m not a coder, so other than the fact that I donated to the spring Kickstarter, I can’t complain much.

Didn’t realize you just wanted to scroll. Yeah, almost no instance requires registration to scroll. Once again, I think Loops is just requiring registrations now because the project is unfinished, and probably can’t handle a large amount of users. They also need easy feedback from users.

But the virus will be removed when you install proxmox

Oh yeah, if I do use it I was gonna fully wipe windows into oblivion

I currently have 3 laptops in various degrees of old and broken being used as a proxmox cluster.

Oh so you can cluster multiple devices? I’ll have to check that out.

I definitely plan to used RAID for my drives.

To follow 3-2-1, have the working copy, a copy on a SD, and a copy on cloud (encrypted of course). Depending on the size of the snapshot it will go to Proton or Google Drive (Sticking to Google is silly, I know, but I don’t have a second location to have secure my data lol). 2 is met by having it on SD and Cloud. 1 is met by saving encrypted snapshot on cloud.

Interesting article, and I feel that it’s pretty fair. At first, I thought they were talking about this checklist, but I see they’re different. The version I followed doesn’t seem to have the same issues (lists jurisdiction but doesn’t give it a rating, doesn’t list or rate encryption methods at all, no summary at the beginning, etc.).

I think checklists/matrices still have their place, as listing all the branches/options might get too cluttered for a diagram, but I do understand why flowcharts (or the neat venn diagrams that get posted here often) can express information better. I don’t think checklists are inherently biased, I just think you need a good decision maker behind the list.