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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • I use Arch personally, and as mentioned you should restart every update - but you can just not update everyday (updates don’t even come at a scheduled time, it’s just packages getting new versions whenever, so by the time you finish updating there could be another updated package for you)

    I think updating weekly and as necessary is a good schedule, though if you don’t update frequently and try to install something new, the version pacman will try to install will be based on your local repository information, matched to your other packages, and might no longer be available in mirrors. And you shouldn’t install an updated version of just one package, because if it pulls in the wrong updated dependencies you could break your install.




  • People looking up alternatives doesn’t mean they actually want to use them. Switching to an alternative necessarily means some pains, in terms of changed interface, functionality, and community. You can’t just magically switch between platforms and have all the people follow you there, and that’s a dealbreaker for many.

    As far as I know, the fediverse is growing, just not explosively. We can hope that at some point it reaches a threshold that convinces a lot of people to move over, cementing it as a “proper” platform.



  • I don’t remember what the shell and terminal emulator situation looked like, but I do remember that the installer specifically asks you to choose how you want to partition, so it seems unfair to me to complain about it being the “default”.

    I put it on my laptop, which I barely use, and just had it still running Win10 until the SSD died. It seems really nice for that purpose, to just get a quick and easy install for a secondary device, while keeping access to everything else I like about Arch.






  • We never needed more.

    I might be wrong, but I think that’s too early for me - I’d like 120fps at 1440p in a game like Portal 2 as a regular mid-to-high end experience, and I’d like to have room for funky stuff (portals will already have some funky cost).

    The issue to me is that it’s a nonsensical competition for better graphics, without considering the actual experience, and instead of solving the root causes people are treating performance as the issue to attack by reducing fidelity, framerate and resolution, and filling in the gaps.

    It’s funny, thinking about it. Back when hardware was weak game developers figured out they can keep textures at low resolution and layer them with differently scaled textures, or straight up noise, to make them look more detailed up close. Now we’re basically doing the equivalent of that on the whole screen, cutting down on the image and filling in the gaps, and it’s become a competition of who can do it better.


  • That all sounds reasonably fair, but it seems like my point still stands, since nowhere do you actually put the blame with GNOME - it’s the distros choosing it.

    I’m also not sure if I’d agree with you in general, it might not be worth bothering too much with users who will immediately dismiss Linux because the distro they chose ships with a DE that has a slightly nonstandard workflow. That sounds like a person that refuses to try or research anything and will probably either make a nuisance of themselves or leave for other weird reasons anyways.


  • they doubled down and said, “You’ll use your computer our way, and you’ll like it!”

    I think that’s a dumb way of looking at it, because you’re not forced to use GNOME on Linux. Just because tiling window managers exist, or scrolling ones, and some even more specific ones (like gamescope, which doesn’t even display multiple windows), doesn’t mean they’re trying to force you to use your computer their way.

    Having diverse options is good, it doesn’t lock you into doing things a specific way, it gives you more options of how things work. The only thing that sucks is that they made the change as an update, so previous users might be excluded, but even then it’s opensource, the developers can (and should) change the software to fit their vision, and if you don’t like it you can fork it (which people have done with gnome).






  • How do we know they don’t store copies of the keys?

    I don’t know how Signal is built, but you can establish a secure communication channel through a channel that’s being listened in on, meaning the server doesn’t need to ever see the keys. Look up Diffie-Hellman for an example, an algorithm that lets two actors establish a shared secret without communicating enough information to reconstruct the secret.

    So if the client uses a secure key exchange algorithm (or straight up asymmetrical encryption) the server can’t just grab your keys - you just need a secure way to verify that your keys actually match, because what they could do is a man in the middle attack where they establish a secure channel with you and the person you’re messaging, and decrypt and reencrypt messages going both ways, being able to listen in and modify messages.