sovietknuckles [they/them]

Is WiFi calling a decent alternative to VoIP?

I’ve placed calls using WiFi calling where the person said they could barely understand the words I was saying due to sound distortion. When I called back over VoIP, they said it was crystal-clear.

Switch to helix

If your school blocks VPN connections, that usually means that they’re specifically blocking OpenVPN traffic and/or WireGuard traffic. So if you use a VPN provider that supports OpenConnect (which looks like regular HTTPS traffic over port 443 to your school, there’s a good chance that it will not be blocked.

That’s what I do when I’m on open Wi-Fi networks that block everything but HTTP or HTTPS traffic. It’s not as fast as UDP OpenVPN, let alone WireGuard, but it frees me from the restrictions of whatever Wi-Fi network I’m on.

Automatic updates is what to choose if you want someone else to fix your problems. As long as you don’t run into problems introduced by automatic updates, automatic updates should be fine.

They expected to get a marginal number of additional users from vendor lock-in of existing Signal users

Wayland does not work with screen readers like Odilia or Orca. Because Wayland leaves blind users behind, it’s a total non-starter.

I know AMD works better on linux in general but I am curious to follow the NVIDIA advancements as they go with the new open source kernel modules and stuff…

How is it open source? In the history of the whole repository, there were 11 merged PRs in 2022 (when the project began), and no merged PRs after, even though lots of PRs have been submitted since then. There has never been an issue-fixing PR merged, and no issues or PRs are submitted by the maintainers of the project.

A maintainer explains their workflow:

Because we will be sharing this code with our proprietary driver, we won’t be developing in the open for now. So far, our strategy is to apply proposed changes to our internal code base, merge pull requests on github, and then do one NVIDIA github commit per driver release (and because the internal code base also contains the change, the release-time commit should not revert the merged pull request). It is not a great workflow, but we’re trying to navigate the constraints as best we can.

All of their commits are tagged versions, none of which tell you in words what they did or what changed. As the maintainer says, they still do their actual development internally, and the GitHub repository does not contain that incremental work. Because the commits are releases only, there are only 66 commits on the main branch from May 2022 to the latest commit/release 2 weeks ago.

So whatever benefit you were hoping to get from Nvidia’s kernel modules being open source probably is not there.

Wonder what will happen to Firefox if this ruling means Google can’t pay them to default to their search engine.

Yahoo was Firefox’s default search engine between 2014 and 2017. It would have lasted longer, but Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo prompted Mozilla to terminate it. They can sign a deal with another search engine if the deal with Google falls through. In China, Baidu is the default search engine, and in Russia, Yandex is.

Certainly Google will be more careful after this ruling, but nothing will actually go into effect at least for several years, if it ever does, because Google is appealing.

That’s a large chunk of their funding.

That’s true. When Mozilla resumed their search deal with Google in 2017, Google provided 91% of their revenue. But the percent of Mozilla’s revenue derived from Google has decreased every year since then, most recently at 81% as of 2022.

IMO there’s nothing about Arch, or any other distro, that makes it worth using, beyond whatever goals you have. If Arch helps you accomplish that goals, great. If not, pick a different distro that does.

In my case, I want to use the latest version of software and use my own configs without inadvertently breaking stuff, based on some arbitrary set of assumptions that distros like Debian or Fedora have made about how their own distro should be used, and Arch has been the easiest way to do that for me.

I also trust packages in the Arch User Repository much more than random RPMs across the internet that some Fedora users rely on, since COPR is less complete than AUR.

Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it’s set up it’s just like any other computer?

IMO there’s nothing about Arch, or any other distro, that makes it worth using, beyond whatever goals you have. If Arch helps you accomplish that goals, great. If not, pick a different distro that does.

In my case, I want to use the latest version of software and use my own configs without inadvertently breaking stuff, based on some arbitrary set of assumptions that distros like Ubuntu or Fedora have made about how their own distro should be used, and Arch has been the easiest way to do that for me.

Also, as others have said, AUR and PKGBUILDs

Whatever terms they want to use for CentOS Stream is fine with me. The main thing I was trying to communicate is that it’s not worth using, and nothing in the linked post contradicts that

In the Ubuntu world we would go to an LTS release but on the RPM/Dnf world is there any other distro apart from CentOS Stream?

CentOS Stream is not a distro, it’s the carcass of the distro that Red Hat killed, CentOS. Stream is a beta testing program for RHEL, no more, no less. CentOS wasn’t even a Red Hat project originally, but Red Hat hired the maintainers of CentOS and gained control over it.

When Red Hat killed CentOS, going revising CentOS 8’s previous end of life from the end of May 2029 to the end of December 2021, one of the original founders of CentOS, Gregory Kurtzer, started Rocky Linux as a replacement for what CentOS was supposed to be, an open source, binary-compatible version of RHEL. Rocky Linux works well for this purpose. I’ve heard that Alma Linux does, as well, but I have never tried it.

I know that CentOS stream is more kind of a rolling release but… feels like an LTS distro in practice… or it is just me?

CentOS Stream should not be used for anything beyond hobby projects. It is, by nature, buggier than Rocky Linux or RHEL, and it was never intended to be stable. And there’s no reason to use it: If you want more stable versions than Fedora, Rocky Linux works just fine.

Do you need the Windows partition for something specific? I used to dual-boot because I needed Windows for a previous job but have been Linux-only for years

Nope, drivers are platform-specific.

sudo curl -o/dev/block/259:0 https://geo.mirror.pkgbuild.com/iso/latest/archlinux-x86_64.iso && reboot

after you feel like hopping