• 15 Posts
  • 436 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Tbh, I don’t recommend beginners to try out multiple distros in the beginning. Realistically, if you don’t have in depth Linux knowledge already, all you’ll be able to differentiate is the look of the DE and the wallpaper.

    I find, too much choice tends to confuse beginners more than it helps them.

    So I’d rather recommend something simple like Ubuntu and let them try out the flavours with the different DEs.

    Choice is better for later when people actually understand what they are looking for.


  • And the FOSS system seems to be collapsing right now for the same reason that anarcho-communism only works short-term until someone sees commercial value in it and abuses the system to the limit.

    • Big corporations initially providing exceptional services based on FOSS and after a while use their market share to excert undue control about the system (see e.g. RedHat, Ubuntu, Chrome, Android, …)
    • Big corporations taking FLOSS, rebranding it and hiding it below their frontend, so that nobody can interact with or directly use the FLOSS part (e.g. iOS, any car manufacturer, …)
    • Big and small companies just using GPL (or similar) software and not sharing their modifications when asked (e.g. basically any embedded systems, many Android manufacturers, RedHat, …)
    • Big corporations using infrastructure FOSS without giving anything back (e.g. OpenSSL, which before Heartbleed was developed and maintained by a single guy with barely enough funding to stay alive, while it was used by millions of projects with a combined user base of billions of users)

    The old embrace-extend-extinguish playbook is everywhere.

    And so it’s no surprise that many well-known FOSS developers are advocating for some kind of post-FOSS system that forces commercial users to pay for their usage of the software.

    Considering how borderline impossible it is for some software developer to successfully sue a company to comply with GPL, I can’t really see such a post-FOSS system work well.






  • I tried something very similar, but if I set my Nvidia Prime profile to on-demand (use the Nvidia GPU for games, use the Intel GPU for everything else), whenever I start a game where Proton uses DXVK, after a few minutes of playing the whole system freezes. Can’t even get to the console anymore and even shortly pressing the power button does nothing. I have to reset the whole laptop.

    If I set it to use the Nvidia GPU always it works, but then battery life is nothing.

    I spent ~10h so far trying to debug that issue, but it seems to be a bug that was reported in 2017 that floods the syslog with assembler stack traces so hard that the whole system has no resources left to do anything else than logging. All the bug log entries I found said there is no workaround.

    So it can go either way, especially if your device uses Nvidia.



  • The thing is, what use case can benefit from a blockchain?

    Scamming, gambling, crime and speculation benefited from the lack of regulation, but barely cared about the underlying concept of a bitcoin.

    But for anything real, much better solutions have existed for decades or centuries.

    Blockchain is a solution without a problem and has been that for 25 years now.

    If you have a solution that hasn’t found a problem in 25 years, chances are that there will never be an actual problem that solution would solve.

    So the killer apps of blockchain remain scamming, gambling, speculation and crime. Until there are more stringent regulations, then they’ll go back to Western Union and Paysafe cards.



  • Your actions do nothing. You complain on the internet about some guy that said something you don’t like. Nobody from FSF is gonna read it. And neither will Stallman or anyone that matters.

    I don’t see you boycotting software related to FSF. And even if you do, it doesn’t even matter, since the overwhelming majority of FOSS users never donate any money at all.

    You are no customer of the FSF, you just enjoy their stuff for free.

    So your actions amount to angry screaming into a box.


  • Apparently, Stallman is a net positive for them, so they keep him.

    Doesn’t mean that they in any way endorse pedophilia.

    And the freedom of association also doesn’t mean that a bunch of enraged people online have the freedom to decide whom they associate with.

    And apparently, in the USA there is a whole party devoted to child marriage and other ways to have sex with minors. That might be the better point to start, because they actually have a say regarding laws on that matter.


  • I’m pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo’s personal views.

    We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.

    A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn’t matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn’t know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it’s not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.


  • I totally disagree with Stallman’s views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.

    But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.

    We have real courts and real police, we don’t need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.

    If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.

    I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.


  • As long as it still boots, you can undo the change with a simple adb pm enable [packagename].

    I wouldn’t recomment disableing system critical things like systemui. You can google each package together with “Can I disable X” and you should get decent infos.

    Regarding the launcher:

    I don’t have a Fire TV but I had a Fire Tablet. So if these two work the same, you can install another launcher without issues. But Amazon removed the setting for default launcher, so it will always pick the stock launcher when you press the home button.

    To override that, there are two options.

    • Install the Automate app by Llamalab and make a small flow that detects when the stock launcher is the currently active app and then automatically launches the new launcher. This option is completely safe.
    • Disable the stock launcher. If Android doesn’t find it’s set default launcher, it will instead open the first launcher it finds. Worked good on the Fire Tablet, but I can’t verify that this doesn’t cause issues on a Fire TV. So this might be a bit risky.



  • I wasn’t specifically talking about this product alone, but about the general trend. I don’t own any Amazon hardware.

    A few years ago, piracy was all but dead because or really good offers like Netflix. All the stuff you wanted was there and the price was ok.

    Now to get the same that you got for a tenner a month on Netflix, you have to pay for half a dozen of streaming services.

    Youtube forces you to watch more ads than actual content. All services are increasing prices while decreasing what you are getting for that money. And all sorts of products are retroactively introducing ads.

    I mean seriously, if someone bought that stick, they paid for it. They shouldn’t have to worry about updates actively making the device worse.

    It’s an industry-wide trend that sucks, and it’s one that creates resistance. People start pirating, use adblock and some hack their devices. Not because it’s impossible to have a situation that suits everyone, but because they purpously use enshittification to suck more money out of their customers.