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renzev

@renzev@lemmy.world

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Props to Alpine and Kali for disabling this bullshit out of the box (lemmy.world)

Context for newbies: Linux refers to network adapters (wifi cards, ethernet cards, etc.) by so called "interfaces". For the longest time, the interface names were assigned based on the type of device and the order in which the system discovered it. So, eth0, eth1, wlan0, and wwan0 are all possible interface names. This, however,...

renzev OP ,

Thanks, glad you like it! I spent quite some time re-making the template from scratch in inkscape, because the original meme din't have enough space for the text

renzev OP ,

"reddit makes a linux distro" would be hilarious and terrifying

renzev OP , (edited )

No, the "old scheme" is the one that assigns wlan0, wlan1, eth0, eth1, and so on by default. I would say these names are pretty usable.

The part you quoted is what you need to do if you specifically need to be sure that a specific card gets a specifc name 100% of the time. You don't have to bother with it unless you have a reason to.

renzev OP ,

What I really don't understand is why distro maintainers feel the need to actually go along with these changes. Like, sure, if this predictable interface naming thing worked as intended, I can definitely see how it can be useful for server administrators. You could just hardcode the automatic interface names instead of assigning them manually in /etc/mactab. But why would the rest of us ever need this? Most personal machines have at most one wifi card and one ethernet device, so wlan0 and eth0 are perfectly predictable. And even if you have multiple wifi or ethernet adapters, your networking is probably handled by network-manager, so you never actually have to put interface names into config files. Why force enterprise-grade bloat on users who just want a simple desktop experience?

renzev OP ,

Thanks! I love this format so much. I can't find it now, but one of my favourite memes in this genre was something like this:

STOP DOING

  • Tasks were never meant to be completed
  • Years of working, but there's STILL MORE SHIT TO DO
  • Wanted to get some work done anyway, for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called SIMULATION GAMES
  • "Please let me sacrifice a third of my life to justify my existence. Please let me spend eight hours a day working just to be able to do it again the next day" - statements dreamt up by the utterly deranged

Look at what people have been demanding our respect for all this time, with all the schedules and todo lists we have built for them:

These are REAL things done by REAL people

<Pictures of gmail, microsoft outlook, and some TODO list app>

They have played us for absolute fools

renzev OP ,

I'd do away with network-manager on a stationary system too, but I'm on a laptop, and unless there's some trick I don't know about, configuring wifi by hand for every new network I come across sounds like a bit of a pain. Especially for corporate/institution network that use fancy things like PEAP

renzev OP ,

I can think of a single instance where a Redhat-ism is better

I don't know if it would be accurate to call it a redhat-ism, but btrfs is pretty amazing. Transparent compression? Copy-on-write? Yes please! I've been using it for so long now that it's spoiled me lol. Whenever I'm on an ext4 system I have to keep reminding myself that copying a huge file or directory will... you know... actually copy it instead of just making reflinks

renzev OP ,

Thanks! Memes as education material / propaganda FTW

renzev OP ,

I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations

Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it's the most disgusting and overly verbose code you've ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could've exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.

Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!

I'll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you're describing. I've been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there's not much to break on such a minimal system.

...well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.

renzev OP ,

Ooh, I've never heard of bcachefs, sounds exciting! I see it supports encryption natively, which btrfs doesn't. Pretty cool!

Personally I've never had any issues with btrfs, but I did start using it only a couple years ago, when it was already stable. Makes sense that you'd stick with zfs tho, if that's what you're used to.

renzev OP ,

idk man I use /dev/sdX when running commands interactively and PARTLABELs in my /etc/fstab. All those letters and numbers in UUIDs are too much for my monkey brain to handle lol

renzev OP ,

systemd-regedit

That's just dconf lol. It sounds great in theory -- after all, isn't bringing standardization to a chaotic battlefield of different formats a good thing? But in practice it's absolute garbage. I would much rather just edit a config file. Heck, even if you program uses some obscure config format like xml or something language-specific like .lua or .py, I would much rather take a few minutes to learn the specifics of your format than fuck around with dconf. Fuck dconf.

renzev OP ,

"everything is a file" is such a godsend. It makes absolutely everything so much easier and intuitive. I remember trying to get an old dot matrix printer to work using a parallel-to-usb adaptor cable. Without reading any documentation or having any prior experience I tried echo testing12345 > /dev/lp0 and it just worked lol. Meanwhile my friend spent like half an hour digging in windows gui settings trying to figure out how to print to a parallel printer.

I also posted about this before, but a while back I had to configure my system so that a non-root user could start and stop a root daemon without sudo. On a runit system all you have to do is change the permissions of some control files and it works. On systemd? When I looked it up, the simplest solution involved writing a polkit policy in javascript 🤮

renzev , (edited )

Oh man are we sharing mpd scripts? I have this one that lets me search through music directory and add anything to the play queue (so I can add a single track or an entire album or whatever):

#!/bin/bash

MUSIC_DIR=$(grep -m 1 -E '^\s*music_directory\s+' "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mpd/mpd.conf" | awk '{printf $2}' | tr -d \" | tr -d \')
MUSIC_DIR="${MUSIC_DIR/#\~/$HOME}"

cd "$MUSIC_DIR"
CHOICE="$(find . | cut -c 3- | dmenu)" || exit 1;

mpc insert "$CHOICE"
mpc play

There's also this one that lets me save the currently playing song to a playlist of my choice. It's good if I'm listening to a new album or a new artist and suddenly think "yeah, this song really fits with the mood of X playlist":

#!/bin/bash

MUSIC_DIR=$(grep -m 1 -E '^\s*playlist_directory\s+' "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mpd/mpd.conf" | awk '{printf $2}' | tr -d \" | tr -d \')

choice="$(mpc lsplaylists | dmenu)" || { echo "No choice." ; exit 1; }
MUSIC_DIR="${MUSIC_DIR/#\~/$HOME}"

mpc current -f '%file%' >> "$MUSIC_DIR/$choice.m3u"

Here's my script to shuffle play an existing playlist as well:

#!/bin/sh

choice="$(mpc lsplaylists | dmenu)"
mpc clear
sleep 0.1
mpc load "$choice"
sleep 0.1
mpc shuffle
sleep 0.1
mpc play

The sleeps are to prevent Cantata (graphical mpd client) from shitting itself if I run this script while it's open. Also notice mpc shuffle instead of mpc random on. It shuffles the current playlist, but keeps the linear play order, so that I can add songs to play right after the current one.

Debian used to be so good. What happened!? (lemmy.world)

Firefox on Debian stable is so old that websites yell at you to upgrade to a newer browser. And last time I tried installing Debian testing (or was it debian unstable?), the installer shat itself trying to make the bootloader. After I got it to boot, apt refused to work because of a missing symlink to busybox. Why on earth do...

renzev OP ,

Flatpak is awesome, I love it so much. It lets users pick a distro based on the unique features that distro provides, without having to worry about whether their favourite apps are packaged. Since you're considering switching to debian+flatpak, here is a list of pitfalls I've run into in flatpak so far, maybe this can save you some troubleshooting:

  • You need to have a thing called an "xdg dekstop portal" installed. Otherwise filepickers will be broken. On Debian this should be a dependency of flatpak, so it should be installed by default tho.
  • If you're manually restarting Xorg without using a display manager, make sure the xdg desktop portal process doesn't get started twice. Otherwise it will be broken
  • As far as I understand, there's no way to use xdg desktop portal to forward an entire directory through to a flatpak'd app, unless the app itself asks specifically for a directory. So stuff like opening a .html file that references a .css file in the same directory with a flatpak'd browser will be broken, unless you manually make an exception using Flatseal or flatpak override.
  • Make sure your root filesystem is mounted with "shared" propagation, otherwise umount commands won't propagate into flatpak's sandbox, and drives will get stuck in a weird state where they're mounted in some namespaces, but not others. This should be the default in Debian tho.
  • If flatpak'd Firefox has ugly bitmap fonts, follow this workaround

Anyway, this is just my experience running Flatapk in Void, hopefully it works smoother for you on Debian.

renzev OP ,

No idea why busybox is needed. Is this is your emergency boot environment like initramfs?

I cannot for the life of me find the particular fix I followed, but I swear it was a missing symlink to busybox. Not in initramfs, but in the full booted environment. That's why I was so confused haha. I can't find anything about it right now, so maybe I'm misremembering something...

renzev ,

Well, see, the thing is, minimalist distros like Arch or Void are more stable than "fully-featured" distros like ubuntu, just by virtue of having less software that could break. The reason I wouldn't suggest them to newbies is because having less software installed by default means that the user is expected to know what software they need, and to know what program to debug if things do go wrong, which isn't a reasonable thing to expect from someone coming from mac or windows or bsd.

renzev ,

I'm so confused, why does there need to be a daemon that creates /home? Can't you just make it at install time and assume it's always there? Is this made for ramdisk / immutable distros or something?

renzev , (edited )

Things like this are why I don't put systemd on my machines. It's too complicated for me. Too many things going on. I've moved away from mac os to linux specifically to avoid weird over-engineered solutions, I want to be able to understand my system, not just use it!

EDIT:

SystemD/Linux

We're not there yet with systemd, but I would argue that Alpine Linux qualifies as "busybox/Linux" lol. It's literally just the kernel, busybox, openrc, and a package manager stapled together. It's so minimalist that it barely even exists! I love that distro so much!

renzev ,

Gentoo seems fun, I wanna try it some day. I would also recommend Void if you're looking for a distro with a boring old binary package manager (it's what I use on my laptop). Although the package list in Void is rather barren, I would recommend installing Flatpak to help fill in the gaps for some of the missing packages. There's also Alpine if you wanna go balls deep into the minimalism rabbithole. What makes Alpine so difficult is that it's a musl libc distro, so anything that needs glibc (i.e. any "serious" gui application) needs to run through a compatibility layer like gcompat or flatpak. Void is available in both glibc and musl libc flavours.

The community aspect can definitely be a big hurdle. Most of the time if you search for something like "<description of your issue> ubuntu", you can more or less blindly copy-paste the commands from the first result and it will work. With niche distros, you have to be able to interpolate instructions aimed at other distros and actually understand what you're doing. That why I would never recommend a non-systemd distro to someone who's new to linux.

By the way, what's your network issue? I'm no expert, but maybe I can try to help?

renzev ,

So switching to a slower wifi AP causes packets destined for outside of your network to not be dropped? That sounds like one of those cursed issues that's a complete nightmare to track down lol. Maybe the faster speed of the 5.8ghz network is causing your router to get overwhelmed or something? Does the same issue happen if you connect via ethernet? I don't really know what else can cause this, I hope you can get it fixed!

renzev OP ,

They’re free to change the licence of future versions.

Why do you act like I don't know that? The issue here is that once you realize that the license you chose does not reflect your intentions, the damage has likely already been done. From the article I linked:

I didn't have the foresight to see this coming. I didn't think people so lacked in the spirit of open source. I wanted to promote community contributions, not to have them monetized by other people who don't even provide the source to their modifications. I wanted to grow the tools as a community, not have closed source forks of them overtake my own open source versions.

renzev OP ,

How does it work with contributors? Does absolutely everyone have to consent to having the license changed? If one of the contributors doesn't consent, can the maintainer "cut out" their contributions into a separate program and redistribute it as a plugin with the original license?

renzev OP ,

I agree that permissive licenses have their place for smaller projects (I personally use CC0 from small programs). The FSF suggests Apache license for programs with less than 300 lines (approximately) in order to avoid the overhead that you mentioned. The LGPL was also created in cases where allowing your free code to be used in nonfree contexts can help advance free software as a movement (e.g. writing a free replacement for a proprietary codec). But I also believe that if you really want to support free software, you have a moral duty to release anything "big" that you make under a copyleft license.

renzev OP ,

That's a good point! The FSF also developed LGPL for this reason (their particular example was something like OGG that is meant to displace the proprietary (back then) MP3), but you example with game engines is also a good one!

renzev OP ,

I think the confusion here is selling software vs distributing source code. Free software can be sold, as long as you provide the source code and don't try to stop others from redistributing copies for free. The busybox GPL lawsuits were about companies that redistributed busybox (or software built on top of busybox) without providing the source code. Whether or not they charged money for it isn't relevant.

renzev OP ,

That is true

renzev ,

yeah, that's the point of the joke. You'd think that the "default state" should be "select all" -- I want to edit the entire layer, so I should select all of it. But no, "select all" has a bunch of weird obscure behaviour, "select none" is what you want most of the time, even though it gets the shortcut with more keys.

renzev , (edited )

good circles and eclipse

I assume "eclipse" is a typo of ellipse? Anyway, just use the ellipse select tool (keybind: e) to make a selection in the shape that you want, then fill it in with the bucket tool (b). Hold shift while using the bucket tool to fill in the entire selection, ignoring anything that's drawn inside it. If you want to draw a ring rather than a completely filled circle, use the "border" command from the "select" dropdown menu to replace the ellipse/circle selection with its border.

how to resize selection by corner

I'm curious, what is your usecase for this? I've never had to do it myself. But if I had to, here's how I would do it: first, convert the seleciton to a path. Make sure the path is visible from the "Paths" dialog (you have to explicitly show the paths dialog using the "window > dockable dialogs" option. From then on, you can use any of the usual transform tools (perspective, resize, roate, etc) on the path. You just have to select the path icon under "Transform: " in the "tool properties" dialog to make sure you're transforming the path, not a pixel layer. Once you've transformed the path to your liking, you can turn it back to a selection, fill it with color, or stroke it with a brush by right-clicking on it in the "layers" dialog.

Also, bonus tip: never use the dropdown menus, it's a huge waste of time. Just press / to pull up for the command palette and search for the tool you need.

EDIT: I love lovingly ranting about gimp, I can do it four hours on end. I'm not some sort of gimp guru, but I know a thing or two. If anyone has any more questions, feel free to reply to this comment and I'll do my best to give advice.

renzev ,

Combination of both I guess? Like for the second one I found out that you can convert between selections and paths a long time ago just by stumbling upon the menu entry for it, but I had to look up how to apply transformations to paths

renzev ,

Selections are ways to restrict yourself from editing parts of the image. For example, if your select a rectangle, you will only be able to draw on that rectangle, nowhere else. "Select all" and "select none" both allow you to draw on the entire layer. The difference is how some tools such as as Scale, Rotate, Perspective Transform, etc. work.

So, for example, if you Select None, and then use the scale tool to make the layer twice as big, it will scale the pixels contained in the layer, and grow the layer boundaries to accommodate the new pixels. This is what you want most of the time.

If, on the other hand, you Select All, and then use the scale tool, it will cut out all of the pixels into a new Floating Selection, leaving the original layer empty and with the same size. This is a very confusing behavior. Actually, pretty much anything that involves Floating Selection is confusing.

renzev ,

Maybe they dislike the filepicker because it doesn't support icon view, only list view (just like the standard gtk filepicker)? I remember a while back lots of people were getting their panties in a twist over it, it was a huge meme in the gnome hater community.

renzev ,

Everything else is dreamy.

Gimp spolied me. Now every time I'm forced to use a GUI app with lots of dropdown menu items, I get irrationally angry that I can't just hit / to search through them like I can in gimp lol.

renzev ,

That's because you know that "select none" is the correct tool to use in gimp most of the time. For lots of new users, "select all" seems like the more obvious option as opposed to "select none". The reasoning is something like "I want to be able to edit the entire picture, so I should select all". It doesn't help that "select all" has the simpler keyboard shortcut of the two. So they press "select all", then use a transformation tool like Scale or Rotate, and instead of simply transforming the layer like they would expect, it funnels them into the lovecraftian abomination of confusing UI design that is Floating Selection.

renzev ,

Honestly filepickers are kinda cringe, no matter what display mode it uses. I just have a shortcut that basically does find ~ | dmenu | xargs dragon-drop (well, the script itself is a little more complicated, but that's the gist of it) so I can just search for files and drop them into the filepicker directly. Hopefully once everything switches to xdg-portal, someone can make a "filepicker" implementation that just does something like that directly.

renzev ,

So that means I get a working webcam! It's a win-win! /j

renzev ,

the one for AMD

It's called PSP (Platform Security Processor), iirc

And to answer your question:

  • Old-ass thinkpad as daily driver: Acquired
  • RPI Pico: Acquired
  • SOIC Chip programming clip: Acquired
  • Motivation to get off my ass and actually flash libreboot and me-cleaner: In progress...
renzev ,

I think it's a joke about how people from Poland have a lot of consonant letters in their name, particularly the letter Z. This appears strange to non-poles, and thus became the subject of many jokes. So ZSTD looks a little bit like a Polish name in the sense that it's made up of many consonant letters, including a Z.

More examples of people making fun of Polish names:

renzev ,

For just $12.99 you can disable this https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blueharvest/id739483376

renzev ,

Voicebanks for Utau (free (as in beer, iirc) clone of Vocaloid) are primarily distributed as SHIFT-JIS encoded zips. For example, try downloading Yufu Sekka's voicebank: http://sekkayufu.web.fc2.com/ . If I try to unzip the "full set" zip, it produces a folder called РсЙ╠ГЖГtТPУ╞Й╣ГtГЛГZГbГgБi111025Бj. But unar detects the encoding and properly extracts it as 雪歌ユフ単独音フルセット（111025). I'm sure there's some flag you can pass to unzip to specify the encoding, but I like having unar handle it for me automatically.

renzev ,

Looks cool, I'll check it out

renzev ,

I know inabakumori! Their music is so cool! When I first listened to rainy boots and lagtrain, it made me feel emotions I thought I had forgotten a long time ago... I wish my japanese was good enough to understand the lyrics without looking them up ._. I'm also a huge fan of Kikuo. His music is just something completely unique, not to mention his insane tuning. He makes Miku sing in ways I didn't think were possible lol

renzev ,

I suppose you could check the previous screenshot and if it’s the same

Hmmm... this gives me an idea... maybe we could even write a special algorithm that checks whether only certain parts of picture have changed, and store only those, while re-using the parts that haven't changed. It would be a specialized compression algorithm for Moving Pictures. But that sounds difficult, it would probably need a whole Group of Experts to implement. Maybe we can call it something like Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG for short : )

renzev ,

You still play games?

renzev ,

I've seen pirated games distributed for linux as an enormous shell script containing a 30GB binary blob that bundles the game along with wine. If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid...

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