Just some Internet guy

He/him/them 🏳️‍🌈

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  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • It’ll depend a lot on your experience. I can just install Arch without reading the wiki at all in about 5 minutes for something fairly vanilla. If you’re comfortable with Linux then following the wiki won’t be too hard, took me maybe 2-3 hours on my first install before I had my DE and everything all set up (12 years ago). If you’ve never used Linux before and take the deep dive then it could take hours and days depending on how fast you can absorb all that information.

    “Easy” is very subjective, there’s stuff that’s so dumbed down for the sake of “easy” that it makes my life harder when I need to do more complex stuff. I know people for whom linear algebra in 11 dimensions is easy for them to do and solve. Easy is relative to your own personal experience level and what you’re trying to accomplish.

    Install it in a VM as a test run, you’ll see by yourself.


  • And since when have you known any computer to be problem-free?

    Software that’s not made from overworked engineers working 80 hours a week pressured to work even faster to complete this week’s sprint.

    I’m so tired of “computers are buggy and everyone accepts that”. No! Computers don’t have to be buggy, you just have to not shove trash software on it made by morons doing the bare minimum.

    I have software that’s been running on servers for literal years, not a single bug. The hardware’s been sized appropriately and I wrote good, sustainable and maintainable code. My computers all can easily do weeks and months of uptime. I pick up my laptop and open the lid and 100% of the time it wakes up from sleep and it’s ready to go.

    The overwhelming majority of “production” and “enterprise quality” code I work with is total garbage that should never have been written and its author never hired in the tech space. We repeatedly get reports on how X car manufacturer was pwned for not following best practices that are a decade or two old.

    Corporate greed makes EVs suck because it’s developed for as cheap as possible and the target is “good enough customers tolerate it”. Shit barely works properly when going through the happy path and the error path just… usually crashes your car.

    I’ve had to reboot my car at red lights way too fucking often and it’s not even an EV. 2020 model and the infotainment reliably crashes if I have a Slack or Zoom call going because it tries to read the phone number off my phone over Bluetooth and doesn’t know how to handle a null phone number = the radio crashes.

    It’s not fucking rocket science.




  • It doesn’t need it, but it does allow it to be more like the Play Store. No need to download then tap install which pops an Android prompt to allow install/update nor any need to allow from unknown sources in settings.

    With the privileged extension it’s exactly like the Play Store: you tap install and it downloads, installs and updates the apps in the background for you without any prompts. It’s technically possible unrooted with some adb hacks, but the privileged extension is the technically proper way to be a store. Without it, it needs that user interaction with the app install popup window to let it through. That’s not F-Droid being nice and confirming, that’s enforced by Android.

    In the context of the article, allowing the user to allow this for any store app, puts every other store on exactly the same ground as Google. The Play Store is not special in any way other than that it has that special store app permission that can only be granted via an XML file on the system partition.


  • Can’t you just… Install the Epic Store separately from Google Play, like we already do with F-Droid?

    Installing a store through Google Play sounds pretty stupid when you can easily just install any store’s APK independently via the web browser.

    They just need a way to let users grant that store the necessary permissions to install and manage apps, which currently requires root but is already doable. They just need to make a UI for it with plenty of warnings about the power this grants. F-Droid happily does its duties and updates my apps in the background and everything like it should, after flashing the privileged extension.

    This seems intentionally done by Google to make it look more ridiculous than it needs to be. It doesn’t need Google’s involvement past adding a permission screen to Android, which is completely independent of Google Play. The ROM communities would get that done under a week most likely.


  • The problem with Fedora and especially the atomic versions is that when you Google “how to do X on Linux” you pretty much always get information for Ubuntu and Debian derivatives. The atomic versions have it mildly harder because now you also have to learn how immutable distros work, and you can’t just make install something from GitHub (not that it’s recommended to do so, but if you just want your WiFi to work and that’s all you could find, it’s your best option).

    It’s not as bad as it used to be thanks to Flatpak and stuff, but if you’re really a complete noob the best experience will be the one you can Google and get a working answer as easily as possible.

    Once you’re familiar and ready to upgrade then it makes sense to go to other distros like Fedora, Nobara, Bazzite, Kionite and whatnot.

    I don’t like Ubuntu, I feel like Mint is to Ubuntu what Manjaro is to Arch, Pop_OS is okay when it doesn’t uninstall your DE when installing Steam. But I still recommend those 3 to noobs because everyone knows how to get things working on those, and the guides are mostly interchangeable as well. Purely because it’s easy to search for help with those. I just tell them when you’re tired of the bugs and comfortable enough with Linux then go start distrohopping a bit to find your more permanent home.


  • Because humans don’t also take inspiration from other’s work they’ve heard and unconsciously repeat part of other songs they’ve heard before, possibly decades ago. Never happens. Never. Humans don’t profit from books they’ve read and apply to their career. Humans don’t profit from watching other humans do the thing and then learn to do it themselves.

    All AI does is do the same thing but at ridiculous scale and ridiculous speeds. We shouldn’t hold progress because capitalism dictates that we shouldn’t put people out of jobs. We need to prepare for the future where there is no jobs and AI replaced all of them.



  • They most likely sent you a new board which happens to have an older BIOS on it. I don’t think they try to upgrade them at all, they pick a boxed new board from the warehouse and ship it to you. You can probably just upgrade it again, there’s no way this one’s newer. Also I guess double-check you got the same model of board back, that could also explain the old BIOS.

    RMA’d an MSI board for which they released a BIOS update specifically for the bug I encountered which can get the system completely unbootable even with a CMOS reset, and it didn’t even come with the updated BIOS either. I imagine they expect it’ll eventually get updated through Windows.


  • Yeah mine’s doing that too, and my dmesg is flooded with USB disconnect and reconnects.

    The thing probably is overheating and shutting off. I believe I’ve seen videos of them catching fire too, not sure if it’s that one or another webcam that looks similar.

    Mine’s on a USB hub with buttons for each port so I just leave its port off until I need the camera and only turn it on when needed.






  • What kind of filename do they have? How big are they?

    My guess would be that they’re Android thumbnail files or some sort of hidden metadata file. Possibly some raw jpeg because all the parameters are expected to be fixed size so they didn’t bother with the header. Or it’s a custom header.

    But even then, that’s a lot of zeros for an image format.

    Does it seem to have a JPEG header later in the file? It could be a header followed by a normal JPEG file too.