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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I’ve certainly had the feeling that things aren’t improving as quickly anymore. I guess, it’s a matter of the IT field not being as young anymore.

    We’ve hit some boundaries of diminishing returns, for example:

    • A phone from 5 years ago is still easily powerful enough to run the apps of today. We have to pretend that progress is still happening, by plastering yet another camera lens on the back, and removing yet another micrometer of bezel.
    • Resolutions beyond HD are not nearly as noticeable of an upgrade. It often feels like we’re just doing 2K and 4K resolutions, because bigger number = better.
    • Games went from looking hyperrealistic to looking hyperrealistic with a few more shrubs in the background.

    Many markets are now saturated. Most people have a phone, they don’t need a second one. Heck, the youngest generation often only has a phone, and no PC/laptop. As a result, investors are less willing to bring in money.
    I feel like that’s why the IT industry is so horny for market changes, like VR, blockchain, COVID, LLMs etc… As soon as a new opportunity arises, there’s potential for an unsaturated market. What if everyone rushes to buy a new “AI PC”, whatever the fuck that even means…?

    Well, and finally, because everyone and their mum now spends a large chunk of their lives online, this isn’t the World Wide West anymore. Suddenly, you’ve got to fulfill regulations, like the GDPR, and you have to be equipped against security attacks. Well, unless you find one of those new markets, of course, then you can rob everyone blind of their copyright and later claim you didn’t think regulations would apply.








  • In Rust, as far as I understand anyway, traits define shared behavior.

    They’re certainly the concept closest to e.g. C#/Java interfaces. But you can also define shared behaviour with enums, as Rust’s enums are on steroids.

    Basically, let’s say you’ve got two existing types TypeA and TypeB for which you want to define shared behaviour.

    Then you can define an enum like so:

    enum SharedBehaviour {
        A(TypeA),
        B(TypeB),
    }
    

    And then you can define the shared behavior with an impl block on the enum:

    impl SharedBehaviour {
        pub fn greet(&self) {
            match self {
                SharedBehaviour::A(type_a) => println!("Hi there, {}!", type_a.name),
                SharedBehaviour::B(type_b) => println!("Hello, {}!", type_b.metadata.forename),
            }
        }
    }
    

    On the flipside, Rust doesn’t have superclasses/inheritance for defining shared behaviour.



  • For me, the biggest red flag is that they decided to create their own protocol when the Fediverse is well on its way with the ActivityPub protocol. They claimed, they decided against ActivityPub, because they expect to be able to come up with something technologically better.

    I don’t doubt for a second that some of their techies might have wet dreams about that, but it wouldn’t get financed, if their management and investors didn’t see an angle for making money off of it.

    Which is ultimately what this is. Yet another venture-capital-backed company trying to get enough users on board, to the point where network effects prevent the users from leaving, and then the investors will want their money back manifold.

    If they open up the protocol too much, the network isn’t under their exclusive control anymore and they lose the ability to squeeze users for money, so I cannot see them following through with their promises of actually making it decentralized.


  • There’s a slider to apply a global scale multiplier in the System Settings under “Display & Monitor”. So, if you set it to 200%, everything will be twice as big.

    As for making a distro gaming-ready, honestly I think that’s a bit overpronounced on the webpages of Bazzite and Garuda. It’s one of their distinguishing features, so that’s what they’ll talk about, but I’d be surprised if we’re talking 5 FPS more compared to a general purpose distro.
    They generally use the same software and both of them are tuned for performance, with only a slightly different focus when they’ll perform the most optimal.

    Yeah, I don’t know what concrete difference zstd makes. The Arch Wiki (great resource, generally applicable independent of distro) tells me that compression may speed up some workloads while slowing down others: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Compression
    Maybe Garuda found out that it mostly helps with gaming when openSUSE decided to not make use of it, because openSUSE is more general-purpose.

    But yeah, I don’t know, if you’re feeling Garuda, then go for it. At this point, you could tell me that you merely like the theme of Garuda better and I’d support that decision, because what I’ve read about it does sound reasonable, and it sounds like you’ll be fine either way.

    And on linux, i should be able to edit custom shortcuts, macros and stuff, right?

    Not entirely sure what you mean by macros, but: Yes.
    The whole OS is built from the ground up to be scriptable and configurable. It’s very likely better than you can imagine.


  • It’s so dumb, too. It really didn’t take long for TikTok to start skyrocketing after they made that change. But of course, they don’t realize their fuckup and roll it back, no no, short videos are a completely different offering. So, instead they glue YouTube Shorts onto the side and I guess, to convince themselves that it’s different, they restrict videos to 60 seconds.

    Now you’ve got videos that are less than a minute long, which basically don’t ever contain useful infirmation, because they’re so short.
    And you’ve got the 5+ minute videos, which try to insert enough padding to make it movie-length, so you essentially won’t find useful information in them either.





  • Oof, so I came to Linux also with a history of Android Custom ROMs. And well, I had quite a bit of frustration, because my phone was so much more capable and customizable than my (Windows) desktop.
    In that regard, Linux has been an absolute fucking delight. And it kind of took Android’s place, in that I now prefer tinkering with my desktop and am frustrated with how incapable Android is.

    If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, I have one recommendation to make:
    You want something with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. It’s extremely customizable, extremely feature-rich. Other desktops, as well as more minimal GUIs (“window managers”), can be fun, too, but for starting out, I would recommend KDE.

    If your Tumbleweed looked like this, that was KDE:

    Well, kind of the default for both Bazzite and Garuda is KDE, so this doesn’t tell you terribly much. 😅
    But I’m coming at it in this roundabout way to tell you that I’m on Tumbleweed and well, therefore I’m probably biased, but I don’t really see why you’re looking for something else, if you liked Tumbleweed.

    openSUSE has the best implementation of KDE (by some fine details, but still). It’s got a really nice snapshotting system (btrfs for the filesystem + Snapper).
    Garuda seems to have adopted that from openSUSE, although I don’t know, if it’s quite as fully integrated in Garuda.

    Those snapshots will save you, if your system should ever break.
    Basically, if your filesystem and bootloader are still intact, there’s a pretty easy way to rollback: https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book-reference/cha-snapper.html#sec-snapper-snapshot-boot (should work the same on Garuda)

    But yeah, I would kind of recommend against Bazzite due to it being a relatively new concept (with the caveat that I haven’t dabbled around with it yet; I simply wouldn’t know, if it’s actually already very mature).

    I should also say that I actually lied, I’m not on Tumbleweed, but rather Slowroll, which is a semi-official flavor of openSUSE. It’s essentially Tumbleweed, but you get one big upgrade once per month and only security updates in between. While the snapshots can easily rollback the breakages, eventually I got mildly annoyed at having to do so once or twice per year on Tumbleweed, when a bad update made it through, so I’m trying out Slowroll. Might be an option for you, too.

    And finally, if you feel like I’m coddling you a lot less in this comment than in the last: Yep.
    Since you’re dicking around with Android Custom ROMs, you’ll be fine, no matter what you choose. I mean, Linux will still be a humbling experience, because it has no qualms showing you how much you don’t yet know about computers, but it also loves to teach you. The most important ‘skill’ is having fun when tinkering with technology, which you’ve got.

    A lot of the newbie recommendations, and that people tell you Tumbleweed is hard to use, are like that, because we just don’t know who’s asking these questions. Some people want to get away from Windows, but have no interest in learning. And then, yeah, I’ll also sometimes recommend Linux Mint, because its keyboard shortcuts are exactly like Windows, even though it actively got in the way of my desire to tinker, when I initially switched to it…


  • They’re certainly somewhat more exotic choices.

    Bazzite is currently seeing a hype wave, because it’s strongly inspired by what the Steam Deck does. But that also means, it’s somewhat built like an OS for a console (or in fact like Android), in that it’s a transactional/atomic distribution.
    This means, you can’t easily make changes to the OS itself, only to the applications you install and of course your personal files.
    It certainly makes it more difficult to break, but it’s still a relatively new thing in the Linux world and particularly you might still run into some limitations when trying to use it as a full-fledged desktop (depending on what you’re looking to do with your PC).

    Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux, which is what we refer to as “bleeding edge” (as opposed to “cutting edge”), because you get the newest version of all the software on your PC just a few days after it got released by the respective developers. Sometimes, those newest versions will have bugs.
    You’ll find folks who’ll tell you they’ve been running Arch since they were two years old and never had a problem, but ultimately, why risk it?

    And yeah, Trisquel is also getting basically a hard no from me. It’s a distribution for purists. For people who want nothing to do with the corporate world, who’d rather not be able to do something than rely on proprietary software.
    If you’re coming from Windows, the chances of you even really knowing what that means are basically non-existent, so I doubt it’s what you want…