• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • i prefer google maps yet i still don’t want google and make do with OSM

    Do you see the important difference between your example of preference and mine? My preference is a specific set of features, yours is a specific product.

    fork it

    Hah, I felt I already poked a dozen holes in that position. If you’d like to actually back up your position, I welcome it.

    and an active discord

    You keep bringing up their discord like that’s relevant to me. It’s not.

    im going to overlook the problematic maintainer im going to give clout to

    Yeah, I’m fully convinced you didn’t read my previous comment. For the record, I’m not downvoting you because I disagree with you, I think it’s valid to criticize others in the community for their behaviour, and I respect that. I’m going to downvote you because you’re not contributing to the discussion.


  • I agree they’re restrictive and arbitrary reasons and they’re also the reasons every single hyprland user has for chosing it. You have a different set of arbitrary reasons for setting your system up the way you like. It’s called a “preference”.

    In order to fulfill this preference, is it ok for me to fork hyprland and call it something else? Or do I need to rewrite hyprland’s functionality from scratch and pretend it was all my idea? Can I reference hyprland during the rewrite or does it need to be clean room? Should i make a fork available for people who disapprove of the hyprland devs? But what if I’m not a good enough person? Oof, just noticing, i forgot to check the ideologies of each maintainer of the thousands of packages in my system.

    I think it’s possible that the boycott idea makes more sense in a capitalist setting than a communist one. The reason we stop supporting JK Rowling or Chick-Fil-A is because being a customer directly translates to their success and thus the success of their ideology. But no one is making a profit from developing and maintaining a Linux package. In fact, typically the more people use your package, the more thankless work falls on you.

    I’m simply interested in having control over my PC, and the FOSS community exists to exchange learnings and code to enable each other to do that. And like all of science throughout history, there are problematic people who contribute useful ideas, and I think we would be cutting off our own noses to reject those ideas just because they come from people we otherwise disagree with.




  • Heh, I’m probably in the minority, but I like the idea of different windows “modes”. I’ve long wanted msft to make versions of windows for different users rather than a one-size-fits-all product. I just wanted it because I’m a power user who wanted something more stripped down and configurable, not a boomer who wants something that won’t act as a conduit between my ignorance and scammers.

    But it’s cool, they can do whatever they want with windows now, they’ve made it clear they don’t want me as a user.








  • When you implement the functionality of a piece of hardware in software, the software is said to “emulate” the hardware. The emulators you are used to are emulators, not because they are emulating a console (ex. N64), but because they’re emulating the hardware that was used to build that console (ex. a MIPS processor). That said, oftentimes console emulators need to account for specific quirks/bugs that were introduced specifically because of choices the console designers made. Ex. maybe the specific processor and memory they used for the N64 have a weird interaction that game devs at the time abused, and if your emulation doesn’t ensure that quirk works the same way, then some games won’t run.

    At the risk of adding unnecessary detail, a VM might use emulation or it might not. The QEMU package is often used for virtualization, but despite its name (Quick Emulator) if the system you’re virtualizing matches the architecture of the system you’re running on, no emulation is needed.

    \1a) In this case, it is risc-v hardware running software (built for risc-v) that emulates x86_64 hardware so that it can run an x86_64 binary.

    \1b) A compatibility layer is less well defined, but in general refers to: whatever environment is needed to get a binary running that was originally built for a different environment. This usually includes a set of libraries that the binary is going to assume are loaded, as well as accounting for any other possible unique attributes in the structure of the executable. But if the binary, the compatibility layer, and the CPU are all x86_64, then there’s no emulation involved.

    \2) to get a binary built for x86_64 windows running on risc-v Linux, you will need both emulation and a compatibility layer. In theory those two don’t need to be developed in tandem, or even know about each other at runtime, but i expect that there may be performance optimizations possible if they are aware if each other.

    I mentioned QEMU because my first thought when reading this was, isn’t this a prime usecase for QEMU?


  • And IMO if one of those students can get Roblox working on Linux, they have solved a harder problem than any homework they would be given 😆.

    I’m curious how ootb mint works out for this usecase. Any chance we could get a 6mo update later? I’m particularly curious how well it holds up against non-admin users who may constantly be trying to get root-level access. There’s almost certainly going to be one student who figures out a local privilege escalation.



  • IMO bazzite is too focused on gaming for people to be daily driving it for everything, but hey whatever works. Just hope they’re not upset when something breaks and the response from bazzite is “well yeah, that’s not something we bother testing for”.

    (I have bazzite on a HTPC in my living room, and I think it’s perfectly suited for that usecase)

    IMO Mint, Fedora, or OpenSUSE is going to offer the more stable, user-friendly experience long term. Install Lutris through the distro’s package manager, launch it, install bnet through lutris, launch it, install wow through bnet, launch it, Thrall’s your uncle 😉.

    Edit: to answer your other question, yes Lutris runs as an app similar to how battle.net or steam works on windows. It’s just that instead of having a storefront and downloading data directly from a central “lutris” server, it’s basically a bunch of community-written scripts to automate the installation and configuration of games from all sorts of places. So when you tell lutris to install bnet, it’s running a script that goes and downloads it from blizzard, then locally creates a wine environment, launches the installer in that environment, you install it like on windows, and then it creates a lutris launcher entry for the bnet executable so that when you click play on it in lutris, it will automatically launch it in a wine environment each time.

    And it should all work in KDE plasma, gnome, cinnamon, or whatever window manager you’re using (the window manager on msft windows is called dwm and it’s responsible for the same job).



  • Package managers tend to assume they are the only ones touching files in /usr/share. You will find if you try to change any files there, the next update may delete or download a new version of the file, stomping your changes. Instead your local changes should go in /usr/local (if you want something system-wide) or ~/.local (if it only applies to a specific user).

    Ex. If you made a custom .desktop file to show up in your app launcher, or a custom .xsession file to show up in a login manager.


  • As a technical user, I think of WSL as almost exclusively for technical users. It’s not really intended to enable normal users to run Linux programs, and more as an excuse to convince companies to keep developing on Windows. If the devs say “we need to write backend code for Linux servers, so we need our dev machines to run Linux” then management sets them up with linux, while the rest of the company uses windows. But if MSFT says “hey look, you can develop code for Linux in windows, and you can even deploy it in windows on our azure servers” then management says “great, everyone can use windows” and keeps buying those licences.