Does KDE also use UserDB?

Any way to not have Systemd on NixOS?

No. There used to be some nice things on Windows, but Windows 11 has thoroughly ruined them.

He’s also aggressively liberal. Watching him discuss politics (which he loves to shoehorn into math/physics videos) as someone significantly left of liberalism is infuriating.

No the true nerds know full well this is bullshit. Nerds need to bully wannabe fake nerds trying to use the nerd name to peddle their snake oil.

I wouldn’t recommend dual booting anything with Windows, especially if you’re not familiar with installing multiple operating systems. Windows will pretty frequently fuck up your boot settings when it updates because it doesn’t respect not being the only OS on your system and will cause way more problems than it solves.

My recommendation if you really want to stay on Linux is to run Linux as your only OS and then run Windows from a VM for the apps you absolutely need to use. VirtualBox or GNOME Boxes are good options if you want a regular Windows VM with little to no integration with the host Linux instance. There are also software that will create an experience like Parallels on Mac with Windows apps that appear as regular windows in your Linux desktop (I’ve heard about WinBoat but don’t personally use it so can’t say if I recommend it or not). For most games, Proton should have you covered.

If you want distro recommendations, I’d say Fedora or Linux Mint are good options for general users getting into Linux. If you do a lot of gaming, I’ve heard good things about Bazzite.

The easiest way would be to boot a live USB of a distro that uses the latest kernel (like Arch or Arch-based distros, OpenSuse Tumbleweed, etc). That way it’s temporary and won’t modify your current install. If you find that the latest kernel does solve your issue you can always install the distro you were testing with.

It’s significantly easier to make a third party GUI for a command line tool than to make a third party CLI for a GUI only tool because you’ll be working with an opaque binary that doesn’t have any public APIs.

CLI: Welcome back my friend, forgot a command or argument? Just type --help and read the super terse and bullshit free txt file in less time it takes for the GUI startup animations to finish. Too long? Type | grep to directly search for it in less time than it takes for the search button to expand and let you start typing! Realize you keep doing the same few steps? Just write a script instead of memorizing what specific sequence of buttons to click or hope that the GUI remembers where you left off! Need to tell a team member how to do something? Just send them the commands or a full script in chat instead of jumping on a video call and walking them through which of these abstract, indescribable icons they need to click which they’ll definitely get wrong and open some weird submenu you then have to tell them how to leave!

GUI: Ooh a GPU and gigabytes of VRAM just for my animations? You shouldn’t have! Ooh you mouseovered something for one millisecond while moving it to the actual thing you want? Let me lag the entire window and cover up the thing you wanted with this popup that takes longer to disappear the more irrelevant it is! Also none of the text in mouseover popups is selectable so you can’t copy from it even if you did need it (Visual Studio static analysis messages I’m looking at you). Still need help? Well you first have to find where the help button is if there even is one! We’re increasingly not including help files because it “should” “just” be intuitive. Or just watch a 10 minute video walking through how to do something that could have been two lines in the terminal, stupid! Want to automate something that takes like ten clicks because we hid everything in nested submenus to “avoid clutter”? Go ahead and install a third party macro suite and record your mouse clicks and movements that will break as soon as the next update drops and slightly shift the margins around!

Pff, you’re using one of those newfangled CRTs? I use a mechanical teletype that makes my computing sound like hammering nails.

CLI designers: “Here are the commands and arguments in a txt file, they’ll only change when absolutely necessary and we’ll be sure to inform you both in the docs and as a warning in the CLI itself.”

GUI designers: “go fuck yourself and re-learn where we hid all the buttons this time, after waiting for our two second fly-in animation for every submenu of course. Don’t worry though, here’s a condescending popup tour that only shows you the most basic features you could already see with your eyes. If you’re still confused, here’s an AI chatbot that will just repeat the contents of the popup tour and then act like you’re an idiot. Hey, HEY! STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING THIS INSTANT AND READ ABOUT OUR NEW BUZZWORD FEATURE YOU NEVER ASKED FOR! TRY IT RIGHT NOW OR ELSE! Also we’re keylogging you and recording your mouse movements as “analytics” for “”“improving””" our UI (even though it’s only getting worse with each new version), you understand. "

I’m annoying

Like, in general.

My dream Linux gaming setup would be a fully configured isolated container that can be run on any host OS. Games are the prime candidates for containerization because they’re all proprietary, and there’s absolutely no reason a game needs user level permissions or to interact with any other program on the system.

Imagine if you could just pull the OGC container from a public registry on your distro of choice, run your game, and then just shut it down when you’re done.

I suspect the biggest barrier would be sufficiently low overhead GPU access though.

News flash: the things the Linux (open source in general) community fight about are also fought between developers of proprietary software. But you only see some of those fights because the others are either “trade secrets” you have to sign in blood not to reveal, or are in the form of corporate competition, sabotage, and lock-in instead of heated but usually still civil discussion where bridges and compatibility layers can still be built between even completely opposing camps.

Broke (cause you have to pay): Win11

Woke: Wine11

I think having a TPM enables a number of worthwhile security features.

But most of those security features place the TPM at the root of trust, something that is SEVERELY undermined by the fact that it is not open source, meaning it is inherently untrustworthy.

Is it not the one chip we should demand and accept nothing less than complete openness in its implementation and complete control by the person who owns the device? I also think the types of protections it grants in theory are very good, but the fact that it’s proprietary means it’s terrible at actually granting you those protections.

Hmm, basically make a container with the VPN client and proxy server, and expose the proxy port through it? Not sure how to route the host server’s traffic through that but I suppose I can just point all the important stuff to the local container’s proxy port. I’ll see if that’s more reliable than modifying the host network configurations. Thanks!

I’ve also been thinking of switching to Nix so I can just configure it once and rebuild the entire system with all the condigurations at any time without going through manually setting everything back up with individual commands/file edits. Though I’m not sure if that’d be more reliable given it’s broken randomly on Fedora when I didn’t even change any network configurations.

I don’t have custom firmware on my router and frankly don’t trust the stock one to handle VPN connections securely without sending “analytics” back to the manufacturer.

I’m thinking about seeing if I can get OpenWrt on it though, but I’m worried it won’t be reliable enough and I really don’t want to be in a situation where I have no internet period after my experiences with just the proxy server breaking. The only reason I’ve been able to troubleshoot it is because the internet itself still works.

TIL companies have Mac fleets

My biggest issue with Windows is the lack of control I have of the actual hardware I own. I don’t own my work computer to begin with nor am I entitled to have full control over it so it doesn’t matter.

I do use WSL, but mainly because I’m more familiar with Bash than Powershell and don’t have to constantly figure out how Powershell does things I already know how to do.

It’s the same reason I have no problem using my company’s OneDrive for work files when I go out of my way to avoid putting any of my personal data on the cloud. It’s their data and they don’t care so I don’t care either.

It’s also nice because I can set up a Linux-only file server at home with things like SSHFS and the Windows computer can’t even see it since it has no SSH access doesn’t even support the network share protocol. If I had an SMB share it would show up on my work computer because it autodetects it.