• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • My favorite is Debian, with systemd uninstalled. At this point, you can’t install Debian without systemd, but you can uninstall systemd after OS installation.

    It used to be that most desktop environments in Debian depended on libpam-systemd, which depended on systemd and systemd-sysv. More recently, desktop environments just depend on libpam-elogind and elogind which is only part of systemd, and allows you to use sysvinit.

    I prefer sysvinit mainly because I find it easier to create custom services out of my own programs. My success rate at doing this in systemd is 1/3, and in sysvinit about 10/10.

    I also had a problem where a Debian-based embedded system had some kind of broken NTP client running on startup, and due to systemd, I couldn’t figure out how to disable it. It would set the time to several years into the future, as soon as it first got a network connection on each startup.











  • This article seems like a lot of FUD written from an anti-FOSS perspective. In their second point, they say that F-droid’s inclusion policy is “ridiculous” for requiring programs exclude proprietary software. I think the author is ridiculous for asking for this. This is what F-droid is for. I don’t want any proprietary apps or libraries on my phone. If developers only want to work on their proprietary software, they don’t get into F-droid. If they make a modified FOSS version and put it in F-droid, and let it bitrot and go unpatched when vulnerabilities are discovered, and F-droid issues a security advisory for that program, that’s not F-droid’s fault.





  • ydotool is missing a lot of features. It emulates an input device, so it can only send inputs to the active window. xdotool can send keystrokes to non-active windows, and has features for searching for a window to send to. xdotool can minimize, dismiss, or move windows around.

    I’m aware of newton. It’s a work in progress, though, and doesn’t have as many features as X11 accessibility has. Although it might have enough features eventually, I worry that X11 will be deprecated by operating system vendors before that.




  • I’ve done this with Debian before, and it works fine. Linux usually mounts the root filesystem based on its UUID, so it doesn’t matter if changing the motherboard caused a change from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb .

    If you use the proprietary Nvidia driver, make sure to update it to a version that supports the new video card. If you use the open source Nvidia driver, you should be fine even if it’s old, because it will at least support starting up in an unaccelerated mode.