• 5 Posts
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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: April 26th, 2025

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  • glitching@lemmy.mltoLinux@programming.devBest distro for me?
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    5 days ago

    here’s why you’re doing beginners a disservice with Mint.

    it’s an X11 distro. no big deal if you’re installing it on a 10-year old optiplex with a 1080p monitor, works same as wayland on that setup.

    if it’s a laptop, you get shitty scaling and hidpi support. worse touchpad gestures. dock/undock issues with multiple displays, not to mention - more scaling issues. even if there is some feature parity with a modern Gnome/Plasma desktop, the predominant development effort isn’t in Cinnamon’s camp.

    if it’s a modern desktop you also face issues with spotty support as Mint lags with kernel versions. finally if you got both, muscle memory is a problem if you got Cinnamon/X on desktop and Gnome/Wayland on laptop.

    if you’re an experienced user, yes, I am sure you can make it work. for a beginner, we need an onboarding path with the least possible issues and when there are any, ample documentation on how to fix it.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoLinux@programming.devBest distro for me?
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    5 days ago

    there’s basically two types of dudes (gender not inferred): the ones that faced with a problem go “hmm, that’s interesting. let’s try…” regardless if it’s a lazy afternoon or they’re under heavy artillery fire… and then there are those that invariably go “oh what the fuck now!?”

    if you’re in the latter camp, you have one option and that’s Ubuntu. for an experienced user it does suck in some ways, but it “just works” in so many others. you will have ample challenges making the transition and you don’t need additional ones.

    when you’ve been around the block a few times, survived a crash or two, know what’s what and have at least a passable understanding of the OS, then you can travel farther and explore options, as your switching costs to something like Fedora WS are essentially zero and 99% of what you learned applies.

    but, right now, you can stop looking - this is your only option.


  • the first time I installed arch on my T420s, I was blown away! a minimalistic install, done in no time. no cruft of any kind, latest software versions, and the speed - the thing booted more than twice as fast as Fedora! I was ecstatic, how come everybody’s not using this!?

    but then I needed a piece of software that wasn’t available and flatpak wouldn’t work in that scenario. rpm and deb available but nothing for arch. OK, so there’s this AUR thingy - cool, so like a repo, right? one copy/paste and I’m done…

    not fucking so. what this does is fetch the source code and then compiles and builds it on your puny dual-core…I can’t imagine what a full system upgrade looks like, compiling tons of stuff for hours. that’s 1998 linux, I thought we were done with this.

    not a week later, a normal system update with no errors made the thing unbootable. yeah, said one laconic reply, you really should keep up with breaking changes by way of the mailing list. do what now? the what now? dude, this just became a job.

    so that was it for me. thanks to btrfs subvolumes, all my stuff was already there and ready to go for the new OS.



  • why would swiping away an app not kill it? why would you do that? leave it be until it’s done wtf

    how much RAM you got? on my two A15 phones with 6 and 8 GB RAM nothing extraordinary happens in that regard, whereas my A15 4 GB RAM tablet can’t handle a lot of open apps and OOM kills some in the background.

    edit: you seem to be trying to run android apps like desktop apps. that doesn’t work here. how things work is most apps are dormant when they don’t have focus and when they receive a push message e.g. “you have a new message”, their handler wakes up, fetches stuff from the server and updates local state (and then optionally displays the notification).

    so you either need to install unified push and get apps that support it or have e.g. microG implement a subset of Play services so that GCM/FCM works with “normal” apps. the third option, what you may be doing, is having every app excluded from sleep and doing their own updates checking.

    the example where you close an app and then go “why app closed” is unrelated.


  • glitching@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.worldNeed help saving an old laptop
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    6 days ago

    off to recycling with that thing, that SSD is worth more than the whole machine. get a skylake or newer laptop with busted screen or malfunctioning keyboard or whatever that’s not a hindrance for your use case and it’ll have full hardware acceleration and consume WAY less power and be future proof.

    if you’re adamant about running it, try mpv without DE/WM by way of framebuffer. I think Arch has some mpv build that enables that.


  • gOS threat model is “everything everywhere all at once” - nation state actors et al - and from that standpoint, yeah, eOS and lOS and whoever else is lacking.

    but the vast majority of users have a threat model that can be boiled down to two things:

    1. a lost/stolen device doesn’t compromise me - the fucker can’t get at my stuff and/or impersonate me, and
    2. free from apple’s/google’s reign - I control what stuff runs on my phone

    both easily accomplished with lineageOS and derivatives running on a $50 phone. if you truly want to spend four digits annually on Newest & Best, you do you, I’m good.


  • “rebooting” is not a thing ova here. yeah, you can accomplish that but that’s not what you want. utilising something like InputRemapper + e.g. Plasma shortcuts, you can launch a big-picture UI, like steam or plama-bigscreen when it’s ready or somesuch, when you press a key combo on the controller or mouse or keyboard or any combination thereof.




  • ubuntu because everything works.

    in case you can’t stand the snap business go fedora, add rpmfusion and poke around. if everything works, you’re set.

    two possible issues with resume from sleep. if your wifi won’t come back, use the script from t2linux. if your laptop won’t wake up expeditiously (takes a while), come back here and ping me and I’ll dig up the the script.

    stay away from mints and xfces and friends as you need wayland (so, Plasma or Gnome) for fractional scaling, gestures, seamless dock/undock, etc.




  • to each his own, but I can’t stand this clown. he desperately wants to come off as this wise, cranky, tell-it-like-it-is one-of-the-guys, but the often cretinous takes permeating his works are off-putting. the evil elites in charge of opensource not thinking about people with mech drives in 2024, the abject “horror” that’s systemd, his “helpful” notes on bugs in five year old software, for my money the dude can get bent.

    so when he likes something it immediately prompts me to do the inverse; not that it’s needed in the case of MX.






  • I used enpass for years and was a happy user. one day it prompted me for some re-authentication bullshit security theater. although in that instant it was an easy task, took me all of 10 seconds, it demonstrated a scary amount of power they had as I couldn’t bypass it and access my data. from that point on, its days were numbered.

    the second issue is the export functionality that was seriously lacking and I had to resort to 3rd party converter tools to convert it to keepassXC; no way that flew by their QC, it had to be intentional.



  • you’re fine using lineageOS with microG and utilising it for cloud messaging, i.e. notifications. the actual content of the notfication doesn’t go through google (or apple), a push message just signals the telegram client there’s activity. then the telegram client wakes up, fetches the message from telegram servers, constructs the notification in-app and then displays it.

    google doesn’t have access to the contents of it, but harvests lotsa metadata that microG (as opposed to full-featured play store services) somewhat ameliorates.

    having said that, you should make every effort to ditch telegram as well, for a buncha reasons.