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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Share pictures of yourself, or your children, only with actual friends and not for the whole world to find

    Good advice but let’s be real: in practice, this means having no social media profile, and even that is a half-measure.

    Even if I carefully curate my friends list (most people don’t), and share my photos with only my inner circle (most people won’t), I have no control over what my friends do. If my cousin posts a photo he took at Thanksgiving, it’s probably going to be visible to all his friends, and even friends-of-friends. That’s thousands of people I’ve never met and there’s not much I can do about it.

    There are pictures of me on Facebook, and I do not use Facebook. The social cost of getting on everyone’s ass about taking/posting pictures with me is too high even for a grumpy old fart like me. At least I’m not tagged (since I don’t have a profile), so it’s not neatly pre-sorted for potential attackers. But that’s at best security through obscurity, and it isn’t even very obscure. Anyone targeting me specifically would have no trouble finding pictures of me, and none of that is realistically within my control.

    It’s more like “beater bike security”. Any bike lock can be thwarted by a dedicated thief, so the best strategy is simply to be a less attractive target than the other bikes around.

    This is a systemic problem. It goes beyond individual choices and even beyond social media policies.



  • There is certainly a very big amount of fuckery going on right now with nvidia drivers.

    “Right now” meaning every year for the past decade or two.

    It’s always something with Nvidia drivers. Performance+stability is more the exception than the rule.

    That said, AMD drivers have a bad rep too. Personally I’ve had zero issues since I switched to AMD but experiences seen to vary a lot from what I’ve read.

    Before that, I don’t think I ever got through a full year without at least one weekend lost to troubleshooting Nvidia bullshit. CUDA is a pain in the ass even on Windows.



  • Hmm, maybe I’m thinking more iPhone 3G era than original iPhone era? I recall a time when there weren’t many apps yet and you could put out anything marginally-functional for 99¢ on the app store and get some quick cash from it. I don’t remember $10-20 being the norm but maybe that was before I was onboard.

    I’ve certainly been burned by apps either breaking with iOS updates or no longer being available to download on the App Store (so you could keep using them, but only on existing devices that already had them installed).






  • 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.


  • It makes sense to me IF it actually works.

    Having extra capacity when a device is brand-new isn’t a huge boon, but having stable capacity over the long term would be. At least for me.

    Of course this will depend on your habits. If you replace your phone every year, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re a light user and only go through a couple charge cycles per week, it’ll matter less than if you go through 1-2 cycles per day.

    Personally I’m at around 1 cycle per day on my current phone, and after nearly 3 years (over 1000 charge cycles now) the battery life is shit — much worse than just 80% of its original battery life. Performance also suffers. With my last phone, I replaced the battery after 3 years and I was amazed at how much faster it was. I didn’t realize throttling was such a big problem.

    I might replace my current battery, but it’s such a pain, and it costs more than my phone is realistically worth.



  • 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.



  • They announced that they’re working with an OEM to support new non-pixel phones (perhaps even shipped with GOS).

    The Pixel 9 series will be supported for another 6 years, and GOS support for the Pixel 10 is probably coming after Google releases QPR1 source. Hopefully there will be viable replacements by then.

    Google is obviously going to keep making this more difficult but the rest of the world isn’t going to just sit still.