[-] polygon@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the Tumbleweed shout out. I'm always curious about Arch people's opinion of Tumbleweed. Arch seems to cast a large shadow over it. But man do I swear by Tumbleweed. There is nothing in Tumbleweed that you can't do in Arch, but I guess my main question is why would you want to? TW has all the benefits of Arch without the problems. Rather than updating each package individually, TW bundles all the new versions into a snapshot and tests that snapshot to ensure everything works within it. This way no random rogue update conflicts with anything else within that specific snapshot. As a user, when you update you just move from snapshot to snapshot. With Arch you can set up snapper rollback, but you better make sure you've partitioned everything correctly or you need to reinstall, TW will just enable rollback by default.

Some people can't seem to live without AUR, but I feel like distrobox is a much safer way to install software that isn't available on your distro. If you need something that only comes as a .deb, you can do something like:

distrobox create --image unbuntu:\

And now you have a super minimal version of Ubuntu you can run your software inside of using the official packages instead of something someone else has hacked together/compiled. It also makes setting up custom dev environments trivial without littering your install with dependencies. I get the allure of AUR but I'd rather use distrobox or, if I must, flatpak.

The main defense I see of Arch is "it's not Arch's fault, I did ". I guess with TW I don't ever really worry about \ because the OS really just sort of takes care of itself. And even if I did do a stupid \ rollback is there to reverse my boneheaded idea instantly. I say all this after having experimented with Arch for a little bit now. It felt like taking a vacation: everything was new and different and you start thinking about how cool it would be to live here, but then you start to notice the little things, and after a while you just want to go home and sleep in your own bed.

I have nothing against Arch but the constant defense of "Arch broke, but it's not Arch's fault" seems like a meme. Just read this comment section and take a shot for every person who says it. Meanwhile I'm over here on TW running the same versions of everything as Arch has and all I ever did was "zypper dup" and maybe 1-2 times a year "snapper rollback". I don't know if I sound defensive, maybe I do, but I feel like Tumbleweed is criminally underrated and a large portion of people on Arch would probably be better served by something like Tumbleweed judging by the forums/Reddit.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

Yeah I get that. I'm running it as we speak. I suppose my expectations were set more by the community than the distro itself. Arch users, by and large (and perhaps not you specifically), talk about Arch as if Jesus Christ himself built pacman. I didn't find it hard to install, but as you say I've been using Linux for nearly 30 years and I know exactly what I want. I got caught up the hype and the DIY aspect I suppose, and I was evangelized to pretty hard to try it. Maybe it's people new to Linux using fdisk for the first time thinking they did something cool? They talk about "getting through the install" like it's some rite of passage.

I think I probably still prefer Tumbleweed but I'm not going to bother changing again any time soon unless Arch gives me a reason to because it's not worth the hassle. Arch and Tumbleweed are pretty similar but I think Tumbleweed has a few extra touches that I appreciate.

Just to reiterate my position, I'm not saying anything is wrong with Arch but the hype is enormous and I'm not fully convinced it's deserved. Something like NixOS on the other hand is starting to gain a lot of buzz and I think that's warranted because it's so radically different it deserves to be talked about. So far Nix is my "learning in a VM" distro.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 19 points 1 year ago

I know you're making a joke but I was convinced recently to try out Arch. I'm running it right now. I was told it's a DIY distro for advanced users and you really have to know what you're doing, etc etc. I had the system up and running in 20 minutes, and about an hour to copy my backup to /home and configure a few things. I coped the various pacman commands to a text file to use as a cheat sheet until muscle memory kicked in.

..and that was it. What is so advanced about Arch? It's literally the same as every other distro. "pacman -Syu" is no different from "zypper dup" in Tumbleweed. I don't get the hype. I mean it's fine. I don't have any overwhelming desire to use something else at the moment because it's annoying to change distros. It's working and everything is fine. As I would expect it to be. But people talk about Arch like its something to be proud of? I guess the relentless "arch btw" attitude made me think it would be something special.

I guess the install is hard for some people? But you just create some partitions, install a boot loader, and then an automated system installs your DE. That's DIY? You want DIY go install NixOS or Void, or hell, go OG with Slackware. Arch is way overrated. That doesn't mean it's bad, but it's just Linux and it's no different from anything else. KDE is KDE no matter who packages it.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 31 points 1 year ago

The bill has bipartisan support. Who do you vote for when both sides are in on it?

[-] polygon@kbin.social 15 points 1 year ago

I don't know about glasses but the various Night Mode applications help my eyes a lot at night. I use a soft white bulb (4200k) and match my screens to the same temp and I have noticed much less eye strain/pain. Whether that helps sleep or not I have no idea, but it's certainly more comfortable on my 4k tv/monitor that wants to blast 800 nits into my face at 11:00pm. I use an application called Iris on both macOS (when connected to the tv) and Linux (always connected to the tv) to adjust the color temp and also the brightness because this tv simply doesn't get dark enough on it's own without messing with color or contrast. You can offset the reddish hue by increasing the green tint, which is a color that doesn't mess with your eyes or ruin your night vision.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago

Simply referencing Christianity isn't propaganda. Like it or not, it's a touchstone most everyone can relate to and so it gets used in plenty of plots, from sci-fi to horror. Would you call Kevin Smith's Dogma Christian propaganda because it references Christianity? Bruh. Actual God showed up there too. I don't get upset when religion is referenced, so long as it isn't used to beat me over the head with. I mean Marvel has a literal Norse god as a main character. Why would it be any different to have a Christian god as a main character?

Anyway, even if you map this movie 1:1 with Christian tradition it has nothing good to say about it. That is the opposite of propaganda.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 45 points 1 year ago

I think you're missing the point. Oracle and SUSE have quite successful commercial offerings already. They don't need to sell a RHEL clone as their core business. I don't know why you think SUSE is unable to "create or maintain a Linux distribution," they're one of the oldest distros out there. SLES and SLED are extremely well regarded, and SUSE is doing further work/research into immutable server distros for the future. They certainly can "create a Linux distribution". Oracle has a mixed history but certainly anyone could view them as successful overall.

No, what they're actually doing is creating a clone for the downstream packagers so they aren't suddenly cutoff by Red Hat's (IBM's) decision. They're trying to give the community back what was lost. A collaborative effort to mitigate the damage done by commercial interests. They're not really doing anything other than restoring things to the way they were. Anyone who was using a distro that was downstream of RHEL wasn't looking for enterprise-level support in the first place so I don't really understand your complaint there.

I mean, really, the whole Linux ethos is community. These two companies coming together to give back what the community lost, for free, is what FOSS is all about. Somehow I feel like that has gone right over your head.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

I feel like JRPGs completely changed what an RPG video game is. They are watered down compared to the original cRPGs from the 80s and 90s. Then the "westernized" version of JRPGs watered it down even more. The old cRPGs were so big and so complex. OG Baldur's Gate, yes, but also Wizardry and Ultima too. I enjoyed Dragon Age because I liked the story, but I'd say Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 are more direct descendants of the old cRPG days (DA 2 & 3 bear no resemblance to cRPGs at all). I think Dragon Age games are good modern RPGs everyone should play but Baldur's Gate 3, imo, is a proper cRPG straight out of the 80s with 2023 graphics.

I'm so thankful this game is proving to be so popular. Maybe people are discovering (re-discovering) what RPGs used to be, and what makes them so great.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I feel a little lame quoting myself, but I was just having this discussion elsewhere so I'm just going to copy/pate my thoughts rather then thinking of a different way to say it this time.

Say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!

If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they'd have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn't on board with this, it'll cause a huge fracture to form.

Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they've unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.

Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.

I'll just add that Meta will state that anything on their server is their property, and Federation will put your data directly on their server, even if you're not a member of their platform.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

The problem is that the blocking will have to be layers deep. If your instance has defederated from Meta, but is federated with an instance that does federate with Meta, then Meta still has access to all your data through that mutual server. So not only would people have to defederate from Meta, they'd have to defederate with anyone who does federate with Meta. If everyone isn't on board with this, it'll cause a huge fracture to form.

Make no mistake: Meta wants to sell your data. They know all it takes is one server to federate with them and they've unlocked the entire fediverse to be harvested. I would not be shocked to see large amounts of cash flowing in exchange for federation rights.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 21 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Well, the big issue here is that we sort of don't have the power you think we do.

What I mean is, say you have 10 servers. 7 are Lemmy, 3 are kbin. Great, each admin has control over those servers. Then you have Meta. They'll run 1 huge server. When the 10 other servers enable Federation, Meta now has 10 servers of content that isn't even on their own platform that they can sell. Your data will literally exist on the Meta server because your data is not contained within your instance/platform once it's Federated. Meta can then harvest the entire Fediverse for data like this. It's like an absolute wet dream for them. They don't even have to coax people to use their own platform!

Meta must be defederated the second they so much as dip a toe into the Fediverse or everything you've ever done, or do, on any ActivityHub platform will be scooped up and sold.

Edit: And it's even worse because all it takes is 1 server to Federate with Meta. If server A is Federated with your sever B, Meta can sill pull your data from server A they Federated with, even if your local server B has Defederated with Meta. This is a huge problem.

[-] polygon@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

Not sure what I make of that. He quoted a guy, rather than giving his own opinion. We can make a lot of assumptions about why he quoted the guy, but without stating an opinion it can only ever be speculation. In a massive list of essays, which I admittedly haven't read all of, one quote seems to be the big uproar about fascists running Lemmy?

And then being like "Hey maybe don't delete posts just because they're about China? That doesn't break any rules," suddenly makes them in love with the CCP? I don't have any context to judge the quote and posts regarding China literally do not break any rule. "Orientalism" is a ridiculous reason to delete a post.

This all seems completely blown out of proportion like typical Twitter drama.

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polygon

joined 1 year ago