I think it’s just that Mastodon posts in Lemmy are weird.

Toots don’t have titles so it just duplicates the content, and then you have a mess of @ and # tags that don’t make sense in Lemmy.

Cross-ecosystem federation is cool but also leaves a lot to be desired.

Debian Stable staying true to form!

Thanks for the writeup. Good stuff.

I’m a software developer first and a gamer second. Being a “gaming” distro does not detract from anything else, really. It just means that getting proper GPU acceleration is easy, and you’re likely to want that for development too. That was actually why I chose Bazzite. I was tired of wrestling with CUDA and ROCm.

It’s not “gaming” vs “developing”. That’s a false dichotomy.

The real choice is immutable vs traditional. And I’ll admit, immutable distros have a big learning curve. But it forces you to learn techniques that will make your life easier no matter where you go. The time I spent wrestling with dependencies on Debian or Ubuntu or OpenSuse just because I didn’t know about Distrobox…

Unless your needs are very narrow and unchanging, you’re likely to run into something that’s a giant pain in the ass no matter which distro you choose. I used to use Ubuntu LTSR so I could install a few big things in easy mode, but it made everything else harder because it was so outdated. Switched to OpenSuse Tumbleweed and everything was modern but those few vendors don’t support it so I had to wrestle with dependencies.

The answer to this problem is Distrobox. It’s the answer on Ubuntu, it’s the answer on OpenSuse, and it’s the answer on Bazzite. I’m never going back to dependency hell because I can just run everything the environment it is specifically designed for.

If you’re wondering “should I use distro X, Y, or Z”, the answer is simply “yes”. :D

On bazzite, your search order for apps/packages should be something like:

1. Flathub
2. ujust. This is more for general configs than specific apps, but take a look at what it offers.
3. Homebrew
4. Distrobox
5. Podman/Docker images
6. rpm-ostree

rpm-ostree is a last resort because it compromises the “atomic” principle of the system, but in a pinch it will give you access to anything you could get with dnf on a regular Fedora install.

Don’t sleep on Distrobox. I have a Debian box so I can run Signal from its official repo and install Geany with both GUI and CLI support. Once you export applications from distrobox they behave like first-class citizens within your desktop.

I strongly recommend trying Distrobox. If you instead hop distros, you’re going to find yourself in a similar situation eventually, where something is unreasonably difficult. That’s why Distrobox exists; so you can get the best of all worlds.

I use Wayland now but there are still apps I run in X mode. Notably mpv and Firefox, because I cannot for the life of me configure them sensibly in Wayland, and I don’t want to write arcane KWin scripts just to get widow sizing/positioning to stay the way I want them on launch. I tried; it was extremely frustrating and still not quite functional.

Perhaps there are other window managers that would make my life easier. I haven’t tried many, but in principle, there is no way for the widow manager to know the correct size and location of new windows for arbitrary applications, so I doubt it. I consider this a user-hostile design choice in Wayland and I pray it will change in the future.

Does it do that even if you set it to “use device MAC” for the wi-fi network you’re on?

The exact location might depend on brand/OS, but in stock Android it’s in Settings > Network & Internet > Internet > gear icon next to active wi-fi network > Privacy.

It’s been a while since I ran a full-fat VM. What’s the go-to these days?

I can believe this.

Every time I need to use a system with no protection, I am shocked by how many ads are fucking everywhere.

6 seconds is more time that it takes to go through a Google search, or to scroll through a screenful or two of social media. You can see a dozen ads in 6 seconds if you’re not using any kind of ad blockers.

Alien meaning “external”.

Electrical interference can come from all kinds of places, near and far. I guess technically you might get interference from other planets but I don’t think that’s what they meant. :) Solar flares are a possibility, though.

Thanks for posting the solution!

If you happen to be using a BTRFS or XFS file system, you might want to try duperemove. It will help you reclaim usable disk space without deleting any files, by using those filesystems’ built-in support for data deduplication and copy-on-write. In other words, it will make duplicate files point to the same data on disk, but still work as individual files. Files will appear and function exactly the same, and editing one copy will not change another (unlike with hard links, for example). That way it won’t interfere with cases like Flatpak or Python virtual environments where you really need multiple copies of the same files.

I think all it does is install the virt-manager Flatpak and then set a bunch of kernel arguments with rpm-ostree kargs ... depending on various hardware detections.

Gotcha. Yeah, that’s been a pain point for me on previous distros. On Bazzite they make it easy with ujust setup-virtualization. I’m not sure if that’s a one-size-fits-all solution but it suits my needs, at least.

I’m running Bazzite on my “everything” PC. Do you feel like Aurora has notable advantages? Seems to me that “gaming” distros like Bazzite are just ordinary distros with correct GPU drivers and a couple other niceties. I don’t see anything that detracts from productivity.

I have a bookmarklet to enable text selection on any web page that tries to block it that way.

Here it is for your convenience. Bookmark it and give a try on the linked blog post:

javascript:document.styleSheets[0].insertRule("* { user-select:text !important }", 1);

Can’t remember where I swiped that from. Probably some ancient StackOverflow thread.

Generally speaking, xz provides higher compression.

None of these are well optimized for images. Depending on your image format, you might be better off leaving those files alone or converting them to a more modern format like JPEG-XL. Supposedly JPEG-XL can further compress JPEG files with no additional loss of quality, and it also has an efficient lossless mode.

Do any of them have the ability to recover from a bit flip or at the very least detect with certainty whether the data is corrupted or not when extracting?

As far as I know, no common compression algorithms feature built-in error correction, nor does tar. This is something you can do with external tools, instead.

For validation, you can save a hash of the compressed output. md5 is a bad hashing algorithm but it’s still generally fine (and widely used) for this purpose. SHA256 is much more robust if you are worried about dedicated malicious forgery, and not just random corruption.

Usually, you’d just put hash files alongside your archive files with appropriate names, so you can manually check them later. Note that this will not provide you with information about which parts of the archive are corrupt, only that it is corrupt.

For error correction, consider par2. Same idea: you give it a file, and it creates a secondary file that can be used alongside the original for error correction later.

I also want the files to be extractable with just the Linux/Unix standard binutils

That is a key advantage of this method. Adding a hash file or par file does not change the basic archive, so you don’t need any special tools to work with it.

You should also consider your file system and media. Some file systems offer built-in error correction. And some media types are less susceptible to corruption than others, either due to physical durability or to baked-in error correction.

I actually did this a lot on classic Mac OS. Intentionally.

The reason was that you could put a carriage return as the first character of a file, and it would sort above everything else by name while otherwise being invisible. You just had to copy the carriage return from a text editor and then paste it into the rename field in the Finder.

Since OS X / macOS can still read classic Mac HFS+ volumes, you can indeed still have carriage returns in file names on modern Macs. I don’t think you can create them on modern macOS, though. At least not in the Finder or with common Terminal commands.

Good to hear. For context, I made the switch late last year, so my experience may be outdated.

I use Koreader on Android (available on F-Droid or Google Play).

It works. Configuring fonts is a bit confusing — every time I start a new book that uses custom fonts, I need to remind myself how to override it so it uses my prefs. But aside from that, it does what I need. Displaying text is not rocket science, after all.

I used to like Librera, but I had to ditch it because its memory usage was out of control with very large files. Some of my epubs are hundreds of megabytes (insane, yes, but that’s reality) and Librera would lag for several seconds with every page turn. Android would kill it if I ever switched apps because it used so much memory. I had a great experience with it with “normal” ebooks though. It was just the big 'uns that caused issues.

Apple owns the entire 17.0.0.0/8 block (they made out like bandits on that one back in the 80s!).

Amazon publishes the IP ranges of AWS here: https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json . That doesn’t include other Amazon services or inactive IPs, though.

This Github tracks Amazon’s IP blocks: https://gist.github.com/atoonk/0ee3f5bebcea874f6032215f16c3c30a . Not sure how up to date or accurate it is. Interestingly, they say Amazon owns the entire 3.0.0.0/8 block, which is news to me. If true, someone should update Wikipedia’s List of assigned /8 IPv4 address blocks.

Not sure about the others. There are some well-maintained block lists for Google and Meta/Facebook domains, and I suppose you could dig through those like /u/Dataprolet@discuss.tchncs.de suggested. e.g. for Google, there’s this one: https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google. This will be difficult since domains are rapidly moving targets. They can come and go at a moment’s notice, and the IPs can be reassigned just as easily. IP addresses are also moving targets but since there’s a limited supply there’s less turnover.

Better yet, use borg to back up. Managing your own tars is a burden. Borg does duduplication, encryption, compression, and incrementals. It’s as easy to use as rsync but it’s a proper backup tool, rather than a syncing tool.

Not the only option, but it’s open source, and a lot of hosts support it directly. Also works great for local backups to external media. Check out Vorta if you want a GUI.