Cura’s a fantastic slicer, but kindof a terrible program. They gave up on ARM support a while ago. And their dependency situation is majorly out of control. To the point that Gentoo has literally given up on supporting it and maintaining a working package.

Honestly, I’m starting to think in terms of what really would it look like to not use a (Firefox- or Webkit-based) browser any more.

Aside from random one-off things I wouldn’t know I wanted to use until I wanted to use it, a few things I’d want to be able to use on my desktop Gentoo machine:

• Discord (without installing the proprietary dedicated app, though I don’t currently give a fuck about video or audio – just chat)
• Lemmy (I might literally write my own client if necessary, but I’m curious about Neon Modem)
• YouTube (Minitube’s not terrible)
• Wikipedia (Dillo would probably work ok for Wikipedia, though I’d definitely lose features like link hovering previous and such)
• Twitch (No idea how to do that yet)
• Gmail (Mutt, maybe? Though, honestly, I should quit Gmail and get another provider anyway.)
• Various relatively-mainstream news sites and blogs (Dillo? RSS readers?)

There are probably plenty of things I’m not thinking of. We’ll see if I ever do that or not.

It’s wild to meet Any Austin fans in the wild. I was watching his stuff and supporting him on Patreon when he was really obscure. Now that he’s really popular, it’s a whole different thing.

Point Crow or Summoning Salt? Either way, I hadn’t heard anything.

I do know Point Crow used to do a lot of content of games like Breath of the Wild with mods that would do things like multiplayer mode or “the floor is lava”. And Nintendo recently got YouTube to mass delete lots of modded Nintendo game content. (I don’t think mods of Nintendo games are even illegal, but Nintendo is known for calling the perfectly legal illegal.) And Point Crow’s channel was pretty hard hit because that made up a lot of his content.

Man. Maybe I should consider boycotting YouTube. Heh.

Edit: Oh. Speedrunner historian guy. You’re asking about Summoning Salt. I can’t read. Yeah, I don’t know anything, but I’ll look into it. You’re not thinking of Karl Jobst, are you? He was sued by Billy Mitchell, but Mitchell is 100% provably in the wrong. And a liar. And a scammer. And a cheating cheater who cheats. (If you aren’t familiar with Mitchell, I recommend starting with the documentary “King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters”.) Also, unless you’ve heard something I haven’t, I would recommend Jobst’s channel. It’s mostly about cheaters in e-sports and speedrunning.

• I wouldn’t want to encourage others to patronize WotC. (And, if I’m running a 5e campaign - which I did for a short time - players who want to play are going to want books even if only the PHB.) So I wouldn’t want to run 5e. I might play 5e as a player if invited. But I’m kindof a “forever GM.”
• Yeah, I’m good with acquiring stuff in ways that doesn’t support WotC. I don’t consider buying used to be permissable, however. If I buy used, that’s one used copy that won’t be available to someone else who may instead resort to buying new from WotC. And WotC profits directly from DM’s Guild. Piracy is the only way I’d be ok with it. (And if I don’t want to run 5e, and given that I already have all the core books, the only WotC content I’d be interested in pirating would be Eberron stuff. If I wanted to support Keith Baker without supporting WotC/DM’s Guild, I could just pirate and join Baker’s Patreon. Assuming I can find a good place to pirate that stuff from, of course.)
• I specifically do want to participate in TTRPG ecosystems that are more explicitly dedicated to more sane licensing schemes and have very explicitly Ulysses Pact’ed themselves in no-takebacksies ways. Like maybe Paizo/Pathfinder 2e for instance. (I’m currently between groups… and have yet to acquire the PF2e books… and honestly am enjoying a bit of a hiatus from GMing… but when I get back to it, I’d love to do either PF2e or… I dunno. Something not 5e. Even though the 5e system is pretty decent, I think.)
• There was a short period of time during which I thought WotC was backing down after the OGL 2.0 debacle, and if they hadn’t immediately proved themselves 100% evil with the Pinkerton fiasco, I would have ended my boycott. But they did, so my boycott remains.
• I haven’t seen the D&D movie, nor do I intend to. And I’m not just boycotting WotC. I’m boycotting Hasbro. So, no Transformers movies either.

Well, I guess just to list off who I watch frequently, kinda sorted into categories:

TTRPG:

• Critical Role - Really famous. Live-play of TTRPGs. It’s really a huge investment of time to keep up with it, though.

Just people I have parasocial relarionships with:

• Any Austin - Kinda “philosophy of gaming” is how I’d describe his latest content. I’ve been a huge fan of his for many many years and am way more invested in him than the content he currently makes. But he’s really fascinating. His alternate channel “The Excellent Man From Minneapolis” is music he writes/records. Good stuff as well IMO.
• Memoria - Gaming entertainment content. Found her when she was featured on Austin’s channel.
• gl;hf - A podcast that Austin and Memoria do together. It’s about everything and nothing.

Long form deep dive investigative and social commentary stuff:

• OKI’s Weird Stories - Cool expos on things like conspiracy theories and cults.
• Fredrik Knudson - Similar cool expos on things like gaming communities, fandoms, niche infamous figures, scientific experiments, etc.
• Folding Ideas - Somewhere between expos and social commentary. Does stuff about flat earthers, gold, cryptocurrency, etc.
• Contrapoints - Insightful and really well-edited/highly-prodiced left-wing social commentary stuff.
• Philosophy Tube - Quite similar to Contrapoints but different. I’d imagine if you like one, you’d like both.
• Munecat - Also similar to Contrapoints and Philosophy tube.
• Innuendo Studios - Maybe discontinued, but really really good source for info on how the alt-right “works” and how to fix (particularly American) fascism.

Tech/hacking:

• Ben Jordan - Stuff about privacy, police tech, fighting scraping for gen-ai training, etc. Informative.
• Marcin Plaza - Hobbyist mobile computing device prototyping. Quite entertaining as well.
• James Channel - Fucking hillarious. Mostly game system modding content, but way funnier than that makes him sound.

Satanism:

• The Satanic Grotto - A small satanist group based in Kansas that made the national news big time not too long ago holding a “black mass” at the state capitol. I’m just fascinated by all the legal fallout of the whole thing. And… I think the Satanic Grotto is the good guys. “Part of the solution” if you will.
• Behemoth X - Just really dark and atmospheric content about rituals to commune with demons. Dude 100% believes demons are real and powerful and he does blood sacrifices to them and talks about what wisdom he claims they’ve shared with him. Also life advice. Lol. Really interesting. Only major downside to the guy: he’s really leaned into using AI art in his videos lately. It’s pretty cringe.

Other creepy stuff:

• Tales From The Trip! - Substance use trip reports. Only bad trip reports.
• Night Mind - Essays on horror media. Mostly video games and ARGs.
• Nexpo - Similar to Night Mind, but occasionally does stories about grisly murders or creepy cults.
• blameitonjorge - Similar to the above, but with a lot of focus on lost media.
• Nick Crowley - Mostly creepy internet and TV history rabbit holes.

Vidja gaming content:

• Summoning Salt: History of speedrun world records. Way more interesting than it sounds.
• Pointcrow - Bit of a guilty pleasure. Popular Twitch streamer who does speedruns and challenge runs and stuff. Quite entertaining, but a bit sophmoric.

I’m sure I could think of more if I thought for a bit. I should mention that I don’t usually log in to YouTube. I keep my subscribed-to list in NewPipe on my phone. But I also do a fair amount of just searching by topic or happening across YouTube content on Lemmy or Hackaday.

Quitting Reddit was hard in several ways.

Quitting D&D (because of WotC being assholes) sucked because I was an Eberron/Keith Baker fan and have a lot of money sunk into D&D.

But I don’t know if I could quit YouTube. If that happened, I’d try to find ways to hack my way around it. I might ask my favorite creators to migrate to other platforms. But if I had no options to get their content but to give YouTube my ID, I might honestly have to do it.

I can’t imagine you’re the only one in this situation. If I were in your shoes, I’d search for similar stories online and see if I could get a sense of how friendly the company is to swapping OSs. For some companies, changing the OS is a complete deal breaker. Other companies are pretty willing to assume the issue was indeed strictly hardware and had nothing to do with changing the OS, and thus will go ahead and do the repair.

If you find that company is more like the former, install Windows. If not, just start the warranty repair process.

Did Herbie get reincarnated as a cat?

American here. Clearly it’s not a “culturally expected” thing in my neighborhood.

Or is it purely just that I whispered the word ai

Speaking for myself: yup, that.

That and using the term “alignment” like some kind of longtermist weirdo.

Just my guess here, but…

The desktop/laptop sort of form factor is associated in people’s minds with unlocked bootloaders. People expect to be able to install Linux on them if they want to. Tablets, game systems, and other sorts of consumer electronics, not so much. I’m thinking Microsoft will do what it can to push hardware manufacturers and the software industry as a whole more in the direction of the kinds of devices that consumers already expect to be locked down like tablets or game systems that are “streaming” game systems. And that way, the bootloader will prevent folks from switching to Linux.

“Nee Jabba no badda.”

I just got this too. Using old Reddit (the realest Reddit (which still isn’t saying much)) got rid of the banner and allowed loading all the content.

Be careful with Fourier transforms, people.

I’m a big fan of jq. It’s a domain-specific language for manipulating JSON data.

ImageMagick is like ffmpeg but for images.

inotify-tools has command-line utilities that can be used in a Bash script or a Bash one-liner to make arbitrary things “happen” when something “happens” to a file or directory. (Then the file is opened or written to or renamed or whatever.)

I probably should mention rsync. It’s like a swiss army knife for copying files from one place to another. And it supports “keeping files syncronized” between two locations.

Of course, there’s tons of stuff that you pretty much can’t talk about Bash scripting without mentioning. Sed, awk, grep, find, etc.

Also, I totally relate about the terminal giving more dopamine. I kinda just hate going on a point-and-click adventure to do things like image editing or whatever. To the point that I’ve written a whole-ass domain-specific-language to do what I want rather than use Gimp. (And I’m working on another whole-ass domain-specific-language to do a traditionally-GUI-app sort of task.)

Two episodes at the same time. That’s what you have two eyes for. It’s simple.

Anyone else read the post title in Contrapoints’ voice?

So, I’ve been using Arch Linux ARM on Raspberry Pis for some “desktop systems” as well as for a janky-ass NAS solution, but that project is kindof dying. They go many months in a row sometimes without any package updates. It’s wild. And when people ask WTF is going on and offer beg to be allowed to help in some way, the admins lock the thread.

So, I’ve been looking to switch my Raspberry Pi’s to something that doesn’t depend so much on some “project” out there to be able to continue to use.

The main Gentoo project fully supports ARM. And even if it didn’t, it’d be a lot easier to use Gentoo without support than Arch.

Switching my main box (not a Raspberry Pi – it’s an x86_64 system) to Gentoo was basically for the purpose of trying out Gentoo again and evaluating whether I want to take the plunge and switch everything to Gentoo.

Aside from that, there’s SystemD which is yucky. (Yes, I know about Artix, but when last I tried it, it didn’t really feel “ready for prime time”. It depends a lot on the main Arch repos.)

Plus, I do kindof like the idea of “more control over my system(s)”. Configuring/compiling my own kernel (yes, you can do that on Arch, it’s much less “in the spirit of” Arch) to make it as minimal as possible and disable everything I don’t need. And of course USE flags are a plus if you want a light system.

Anyway, those are my main reasons.

Me too!

I used Gentoo almost exlusively from like 2003 to maybe 2012 or 2013. I switched to Arch about then. But quite recently I made the switch back to Gentoo on my primary box and I’m happy I did.

Only thing I still need to do to really make it long-term sustainable for my particular use is to set up a build server on my network. My “primary box” is in the room where I sleep and I need it dark and quiet when I’m sleeping. Can’t have MOBO color-shifting LEDs and fan sounds overnight. And I can’t compile something like Chromium in less than the 15-to-16-ish hours I’m awake in a given day. (And I’d prefer to compile it myself rather than using a binary package.) Hence the need for a build server.