who’s doing the gunning? we dont have that many combat robots yet, and i still have hope that communication is open enough and most people aren’t too brainwashed to realize firing on your own countrypeople is bad.

but we better do sonething before these change.

light. used to struggle hard to wake up even with several loud alarms, but a bright light turning on before my alarm made it so much easier. especially nice is a smart bulb that brightens slowly.

I know stuff is missing from it and it doesn’t have reviews, but when i’m on my own i just check organic maps first, if i find something that looks decent i just try it.

when traveling with others i often have to turn to tripadvisor or google maps to make sure to find something they like, not everyone is as happy to just try as me.

if it’s free, you’re the product.

signal seems really good right now, with open source clients, but they already show that they’d like to keep the ecosystem locked down by not allowing 3rd party clients. at some point they will need a way to pay for their datacenters, and even if they claim the foundation or whatever is doing well, i can see the pestering for donations getting much worse in the future.

that said, threema is far from optimal too, im still waiting for matrix servers to become solid options. last time i wanted to set up synapse, the only captcha they supported was fucking Google captcha :|

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

i’m thinking long term - sure, right now google knowing everything about me isn’t dangerous. but if a massive political slide to the right happens in countries that host services, suddenly all the saved data from many years ago can be used against me. and don’t fall for the “end to end encrypted” bullshit either - all these services can flip a switch and have your encryption keys instantly. (or, if its an open source app that ACTUALLY keeps keys on the device only, which is extremely rare, it’s one update away from happening, and you better read the whole diff every update and compile the app yourself.)

that’s why i choose to self host everything. yes there’s a risk of being hacked, or installing something malicious because i don’t read every diff on every update. but i feel more confortable with it being my own responsibility, and my services are also all on seperate virtual machines to hopefully isolate any breaches.

i loved mine but 2 years from launch they stopped all updates. can’t recommend asus at all just for that reason. i havent tried custom roms because a couple years ago when i tried they all had weird issues

use arch btw ;)

mostly kidding, but shit like this is exactly why i love arch so much. set up the entire system from ground up - no bullshit on it, and you know how (almost) every part works and what it does.

it definitely taught me about how linux works, at least the parts that are relevant for most users. starting from a clean install without any kind of gui (or common networking tools) really made me understand all the building blocks modern desktop linux uses. sure, installing a full blown desktop environment skips most things, but going with just a window manager and adding required features package by package really does help with understanding, and if a problem does pop up later you’ll know exactly where to look, instead of having to search super generic terms.

I’ve downloaded the occasional weird archive that refused to unpack with 7z, but worked just fine with winrar. Very rare cases though, but that’s why i kept it installed about 2 years ago. since switching to linux i haven’t encountered a file like that, so i haven’t needed it since then.

most games have never had flicker issues for me on arch/sway with a rtx2070. Steam itself used to be unusable and last i checked was still a bit glitchy, Discord also sucked, but the games always worked fine.

apart from some issues with recognizing the mouse cursor in a few games.

agreed with debian, it’s by far the most stable and no bullshit system i’ve ever used. however, BIG condition: do NOT install .deb files manually. that’s an extremely easy way to break your system. use what’s in the repos, and if it’s not in the repos, use something like flatpak (not sure how well it works for debian since i haven’t used it).

in general though, if you want a stable linux system, just don’t try to install stuff that isn’t packaged in official repos.

that said, i did end up finding open source alternatives for all the software i use often, and don’t use bottles much.

honestly, wine has seemed unreasonably complex to me in the past and i haven’t tried since. but Bottles offers a nice easy to use GUI, i do recommend giving it a shot. at least on arch linux it’s super easy to install via the AUR.

the only issue is some apps need additional dependencies which can take some searching to figure out what exactly is needed. the arch wiki lists a bunch of them though, and often the error messages bottles shows will point you the right way.

i’ve gotten almost every .exe to work with it, most immediately, some after a short bit of tinkering.

since we’re sharing anecdotes… i have a desktop pc with an rtx2070 and ALL my issues are due to the gpu.

recently installed wlroots-nvidia from the AUR and it fixed the worst of it for now, but still getting glitches. i don’t recommend Sway when you’re on nvidia.