Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.

The first time I heard about programming being obsolete was when I was taught UML in university. That was over almost 15 years ago and it didn’t happen, if anything programmers now also had to know UML, which isn’t all that bad but it definitely didn’t replace anything, it’s just useful for designing and documenting projects.

I also heard from colleagues that in the 80s and 90s people said that SQL was supposed to be used by users directly, making (some) programming obsolete.

Now AI bullshit claims to be making programming obsolete. I won’t hold my breath.

When they were installing the alarm at my house I noticed that the main guy had nextcloud on his phone and it sparked a nice conversation about privacy. He has no technical background but managed to self-host it on his old laptop with one of those distros that have an easy UI for self-hosting (don’t remember which one exactly). He’s a pretty cool guy.

I already had a script on the router that I used to notify me of network outages, IP changes, keep the DDNS updated, etc. and I thought it was easier to just add a couple lines to that

The jitsi user is a system user so it can’t login even if you set a key for it. Besides, I wouldn’t risk it anyway since that user is in the docker group, if it gets compromised somehow, the attacker would have very high privileges.

I think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

I switched for good in 2019, when I realized that I was wasting more time getting windows into a usable state than the average arch user.

Privacy and usability were the biggest reasons for me.

Good idea, I’ll add it to the to-do list for the next major release.

Occasionally some cloud providers or ISPs chime in and offer their servers to the public. If you have an LS server, you can submit it here: https://librespeed.org/submit

I’m the author of the project. The servers are simply overloaded af unfortunately. It’s a fairly popular project and we don’t have enough servers to support this many concurrent users.

It doesn’t need javascript from “20 different domains”, only a file called empty.php is fetched from those servers to measure the ping. The javascript is hosted on librespeed.org, which is under my control.

Hi, I’m the original author of LibreSpeed. When you load the website it downloads a list of servers and tries all of them to see which one has the lowest ping, that’s what you’re seeing.

I’d say ffmpeg is a good example, it’s used by almost every piece of software that has to manipulate audio or video (including messaging applications), yet not many people know about its existance.

Framework is not a FOSS project, it’s not a charity or a non-profit organization, it’s a company. Would you volunteer to work for free at your job?

I tried using VS Code but the fact that it’s not fully open source (VSCodium has limitations) bothers me a lot, as does the presence of telemetry.

I like some of the convenience features, like having a file picker when you’re writing paths, my students use it a lot, but I’m sticking with Kate.

Nah mate, 2022 was when it started getting really good, GPL got rid of shader compilation stuttering (as well as dxvk-async related glitches), compatibility improved massively with improvements to both dxvk and vkd3d, and ray tracing finally started working

I’ve seen this happen after switching to wayland. Changing the cursor size and then changing it back solved the issue for me.

I know, I know :)

I reported the bugs I’ve encountered but I don’t have time to install another distro right now. I’ve seen some of those bugs (scaling) on the KDE neon live iso though.

I’ve been using it since Plasma 6 came out so about 3-4 weeks.

Overall, it’s been a very negative experience for me. The main problems have been:

• Random scaling issues in apps: some apps show a slightly smaller cursor, other show a poorly upscaled one, others have random rendering issues like lines remaining on the screen after an option is no longer highlighted (gimp, libreoffice, many others), some apps have random flickering of parts of the UI, some apps no longer scale at all or are scaled twice. Plasmashell itself has blurry icons on the desktop but all other KDE apps don’t. I know fractional scaling has always been problematic, but it has gotten worse to the point of being almost unusable
• Random crashes of GTK apps when using the wayland backend. Some GTK apps don’t even start and segfault immediately with a wayland error in the terminal
• Some apps like okular and libreoffice lag like crazy or outright freeze when scrolling
• Some games not capturing the cursor properly (Proton)
• Inconsistent font rendering, some fonts look fine in some apps and atrocious in others
• Issues when resizing or moving windows, some times they “jerk” off the screen or resize to a very tiny window and I’m forced to use key combinations to resize them again
• Random issues with window decoration not appearing in some apps but randomy appearing for things like context menus

This is on a full AMD system with Arch Linux, the latest kernel and mesa-git. I hope for KDE’s sake that there’s something broken in my installation because I can’t believe the KDE team released Plasma 6 in this sorry state.

People think I can hack anything ever created, from some niche 90s CD software to online services