Never seen one I’d actually trust for the mic, but I’ve seen a lot of Lenovos that have sliding covers for the camera.
I’m a little reluctant to put an adhesive slider on my MacBook because it closes pretty tight and I’m afraid the extra thickness would create a pressure point and cause damage over time.
It ranges from “automatic” to “infuriating”.
If you have Secure Boot enabled, there are some hoops to jump through. Read the docs and follow the steps for DKMS.
Depending on your distro and your requirements, you might want to install the drivers manually from Nvidia rather than using older drivers from your distro.
If you need CUDA, god help you. Choose a distro that makes this easy and use containers to avoid dependency hell. Note that this is not any easier on Windows (at least not last I checked, which was a few years ago).
Ebooks.com has a ton of DRM-free ebooks. They have a whole DRM-free section, plus a search filter, and they clearly display all available formats before purchase. That’s my first stop for ebooks.
Also interested in this. The ideal solution would stream to a private server for storage in real-time, with access control so you can grant trusted individuals access.
This would allow retention of evidence in a scenario where your phone is seized/destroyed/lost or you are detained, and would give you (and whoever you choose to grant access) the ability to control distribution, unlike a livestream to Twitch or YouTube or whatever.
FOSS projects are often labors of love.
Nobody who isn’t completely deranged loves marketing.
I’ve been using cryptpad.fr (the “flagship instance” of CryptPad) for years. It’s…fine. Really, it’s fine. I’m not thrilled with the experience, but it is functional and I’m not aware of any viable alternatives that are end-to-end encrypted.
It’s based on OnlyOffice, which is basically a heavyweight web-first Microsoft Office clone. Set your expectations accordingly.
No mobile apps, and the web UI is not optimized for mobile. I mean, it works, but does using the desktop MS Office UI on a smartphone sound like fun to you?
Performance is tolerable but if you’re used to Google Sheets, it’s a big downgrade. Some of this is just the necessary overhead involved in an end-to-end encrypted cloud service. Some of it is because, again, this is a heavyweight desktop UI running in a web browser. It’s functional, but it’s not fast and it’s not pretty.
DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).
DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn’t use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.
And that’s the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!
Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it’s “fine” but it doesn’t solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.
Honestly, that sounds great.
My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it’s not always easy to tell what’s official and what’s just from some rando. I don’t want a repo full of “unverified” packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.
Distros can and should curate packages. That’s half the point of a distro.
And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can’t simply patch a library once at the system level.
I’m running a Fedora derivative and I wasn’t even aware of this option. I’m going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.
Hi! Please consider offering downloads in epub format as well as PDF. PDF is difficult to work with, particularly when it has a hardcoded dark background like the Meteorina files. I am not able to read these comfortably on my e-reader, for example.
If you have source files in some other form you might be able to convert them easily to epub with something like Pandoc. I’d be willing to help figure out the process if you can send me a source sample to work with.
The only possible silver lining to all this is that perhaps “normal” people will finally start to care about the problems techies have been screaming about for 20+ years now.
It was inevitable that a bad actor would gain access eventually, because there is no such a thing as an organization that you can trust in perpetuity. That obviously doesn’t excuse the actual bad actors that now have access.
In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I’m as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.
If you’re willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.
This is my plan going forward. I’m going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.
Kids these days and their “Plasma”. BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!
I’m not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it’s because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.
But also, from that link:
We will use “KDE” exclusively in two meanings:
- KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
- As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community
So I don’t feel like it’s wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.
But any 50 watt chip will get absolutely destroyed by a 500 watt gpu
If you are memory-bound (and since OP’s talking about 192GB, it’s pretty safe to assume they are), then it’s hard to make a direct comparison here.
You’d need 8 high-end consumer GPUs to get 192GB. Not only is that insanely expensive to buy and run, but you won’t even be able to support it on a standard residential electrical circuit, or any consumer-level motherboard. Even 4 GPUs (which would be great for 70B models) would cost more than a Mac.
The speed advantage you get from discrete GPUs rapidly disappears as your memory requirements exceed VRAM capacity. Partial offloading to GPU is better than nothing, but if we’re talking about standard PC hardware, it’s not going to be as fast as Apple Silicon for anything that requires a lot of memory.
This might change in the near future as AMD and Intel catch up to Apple Silicon in terms of memory bandwidth and integrated NPU performance. Then you can sidestep the Apple tax, and perhaps you will be able to pair a discrete GPU and get a meaningful performance boost even with larger models.
Are we so desperate that we want what is basically malware ported to Linux? Ew. I didn’t tolerate that shit when I was running Windows, and I’m sure not going to start now.
I’ll just keep on voting with my wallet, and not pay money for such user-hostile products.
Also works on Twitch with the added benefit of NOT playing ads (you still get breaks, just with a placeholder screen instead of the commercial).
mpv has yt-dlp support built in, so it can just play the streams directly.
vd (VisiData) is a wonderful TUI spreadsheet program. It can read lots of formats, like csv, sqlite, and even nested formats like json. It supports Python expressions and replayable commands.
I find it most useful for large CSV files from various sources. Logs and reports from a lot of the tools I use can easily be tens of thousands of rows, and it can take many minutes just to open them in GUI apps like Excel or LibreOffice.
I frequently need to re-export fresh data, so I find myself needing to re-process and re-arrange it every time, which visidata makes easy (well, easier) with its replayable command files. So e.g. I can write a script to open a raw csv, add a formula column, resize all columns to fit their content, set the column types as appropriate, and sort it the way I need it. So I can do direct from exporting the data to reading it with no preprocessing in between.
My experience might be a bit outdated, but I remember finding the default Mac OS X Terminal extremely slow. A few years back I ran an output-heavy command, and the speed difference between displaying the output in terminal vs outputting it to a file was orders of magnitude. The same thing on my Linux system was much, much faster. I’m not sure how much of that was due specifically to rendering, vs memory management or something else, though.
I might see if I can still reproduce this in Sequoia and if Ghostty is faster on Mac.
There are two potential show-stoppers.
Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.
Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.