z3rOR0ne

Ive been running Linux for close to a decade now and one thing that I’ve noticed is rarely brought up in Linux circles is that Linux Kernel Development is heavily funded by major big tech corpos. Examples include Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM.

There is a vested corporate interest in keeping Linux well maintained as it is the OS that underpins the vast majority of corporate server architecture and infrastructure.

I’m not saying Linux development wouldn’t exist without them, but imho, Linux certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today without this corporate backing. Thusly, it is worth noting that in many ways, we Linux users have not escaped corporate influence simply from switching from Windows or MacOS to Linux.

We’ve maybe lessened it to some degree, but to think we are somehow immune to the misguided mandates from state governments, like the latest recent age verification laws, is misguided.

Usually your distro’s forums are good enough, and even searching not your distro’s forums can lead to some insights into your issues/questions.

Otherwise Arch Wiki, Gentoo Wiki, Arch Forums, Gentoo Forums, Debian User Forums, Ask Ubuntu, Linux Questions, Linux Mint Forums, even Manjaro Forums can be helpful. Always do as much search and research you can before asking your question on a forum and mention what you’ve done already. A lot of the times, your issue has already been raised and already has an answer. If not, ask away and mention what you’ve done already.

I’m a self taught web dev whose only had a single fullstack job under their belt, some charity coding at a nonprofit, and plenty of group and solo projects.

I’ve used ChatGPT mainly to code and also teach myself Calculus as I get ready to go back to school and get a CS degree to hopefully help my chances at getting some work. I’m not saying as a tool on its own, LLMs aren’t useful.

But I do use these LLMs with a severe sense of guilt considering:

• The plight of Kenyan workers who got paid almost nothing to have their mental health absolutely violated while setting up initial training parameters around abusive/sensitive training material

• The many teens who have committed suicide while being influenced by LLM advice

• The massive amount of land, water, and power that is being utilized to put it all together

• The massive amount of carbon emissions that the data centers that power these LLMs releases into the atmosphere, exacerbating an already dire climate crisis

• The massive amount of scraped data that was stolen without anyone’s consent in order to train it

• The fact that our entire world economy seems to now rely solely on AI companies and NVIDIA’s stock price going up ad infinitum even if their economic metrics make no sense at all

• The exacerbation of the already existing education crisis where both students and teachers are offloading critical thinking skills

• The destruction of the useful search engine, which honestly feels preordained by the ensuing enshittification of search due to invasive advertisement/marketing strategies

And honestly that isn’t even scratching the surface.

So yeah…I got some guilt using this crap. But hey, at least I got to live another day in the torment nexus.

EDIT: Removal of massive doomerism rant towards the end there.

It depends on where you got the game and how familiar you are with Wine, Proton, DXVK, etc. And yeah, the command line is kind of helpful for most things Linux, including running pirated games.

I got a pirated version of Cyberpunk 2077 running on Linux. I had purchased the game on Steam, but hated that when I was offline I couldn’t play and even though Steam has an offline version, I figured fuck it, I’m tech savvy, how hard can it be? It was…not easy, but not the hardest thing I’ve done on Linux. I pretty much followed this reddit guide.

I’d look for a different launcher than Lutris these days since the Dev started introducing AI code into his source, but there’s options in that regard and really, the big thing is understanding Wine, Wine prefixes, and Proton.

I haven’t done this for most games as I just like to purchase my games these days, but it was a fun challenge. I have no idea how difficult this is on Windows as its been almost a decade for me Windows free, but hey, if you’ve got the gumption, its not too hard.

For cases where you just want to install it once and then update only once a month or even a couple months, and not worry about the distro not being maintained, I’d highly recommend installing Debian. You will eventually have to reinstall years down the line when a new major release happens, but it is many many years down the line and even that can be put off for quite a long time. The only drawback is that the latest releases of the software you like aren’t always available in the official repos, as Debian’s MO is to vet every package for stability before releasing it via their repos.

If you want a slightly less stable distro that has almost all the packages in the world and is up to date and is going to be around for a long time, go with Arch Linux. It’s a rolling release model so packages are updated as soon as they are made available by the distribution maintainers. Things do break occassionally on Arch and a familiarity with the command line and where to go research/ask questions (the Arch Wiki and Arch Linux Forums) is very much needed in those situations. But Arch is very widely used and established nowadays and is a fine option if you’re okay with the rare package that breaks.

Gentoo is a great option if you simply want to customize every aspect of your system, but it’s considered an “advanced” distro and usually some familiarity with a different distro is recommended before using Gentoo, though some do end up using Gentoo as their first and only Linux distro. Gentoo, like Arch, is rolling release. Unlike Arch and Debian, packages are compiled from source, giving you granular control over which features of every piece of software you want to have and the ability to omit those features you don’t want/need. Gentoo is as stable as you make it. Like Arch and Debian, Gentoo isn’t going anywhere. That said, imho, Gentoo requires more maintenance than Arch or Debian, and potentially a little bit more knowledge of Operating Systems.

Other distributions like OpenSuse and Slackware are fine options as well as they have a very long established history in the Linux Distro ecosystem, but I am unfamiliar with them, so will leave it to others to make their comments/recommendations regarding them.

Microsoft generally doesn’t worry about losing market share to Linux over games. They don’t even worry about losing desktop share for the public sector. Only businesses matter, and they have heavy vendor lock in there as Microsoft Office, Teams, and to a lesser extent, Azure, keep them subscribed/enslaved.

Microsoft also gives a shit ton of money to the Linux Foundation,along with the rest of MMAANG and many other companies. All these companies know Linux runs the back end servers, and its free for them to use however they want, and they have a vested interest in Linux being around for servers as even they are aware it’s superior for that specific purpose.

Microsoft runs the Desktop, Apple runs the phone, Google and Amazon compete for cloud, and Meta owns marketing. Sure, they sometimes compete in other spaces like Android and Azure, but those are generally the established fiefdoms.

And Linux is all of their removed, but also all of their main support beam without which nothing works.

The true underdog is BSD.

I’ve been using Links for years. I rarely meet another Links user, as TUI web browser use is rare in and of itself, and most go to w3m or lynx from what I’ve seen.

TUI browsers are surprisingly capable of getting you around the web even with more limited features, as long as you mainly are focused on accessing public text documents and communications.

I know one of the main uses I saw some utilizing Links for was when it was recommended during the Gentoo installation process when you had to download a stage 3 tarball. Most just had another browser or used a different Linux iso during installation, but if you were installing via the tty, and had no other device with a web browser on it, that was (and still is) a solid choice for finding and downloading the needed tarball.

Anyways, just a bit of lore. My only complaint with Links is it doesn’t let you change the keybindings and they default to emacs. No shade to emacs, but I am and probably always will be a vim user, so there’s that. Other than that I’ll always be a big fan of Links.

I was not aware of these. Thank you for making me aware of them.

I haven’t used spreadsheet software in decades, but I have helped some convert to Windows to Linux. Some of them did use Excel, and therefore had to learn to use LibreOffice Calc, and while they had some expected difficulties during the initial learning curve, they did say a few months later to me that they were eventually satisfied with the software.

Nevertheless, I’m sure much like the GIMP/Photoshop comparison, Excel simply has features that Calc doesn’t.

I am mildly curious. Could you give an example of a feature that its likely many businesses and/or individuals use in Excel that simply doesn’t exist in, or is too difficult to implement in Calc?

Most of the Anubis encounters I have are to redlib instances that are shuffled around, go down all the time, and generally are more ephemeral than other sites. Because I use another extension called Libredirect to shuffle which redlib instance I visit when clicking on a reddit link, I don’t bother whitelisting them permanently.

I already have solved this on my desktop by self hosting my own redlib instance via localhost and using libredirect to just point there, but on my phone I still do the whole nojs temp unblock random redlib instance. Eventually I plan on using wireguard to host a private redlib instance on a vps so I can just not deal with this.

This is a weird case I know, but its honestly not that bad.

Yeah I actually use the noscript extension and i refuse to just whitelist certain sites unless I’m very certain I trust them.

I run into Anubis checks all the time and while I appreciate the software, having to consistently temporarily whitelist these sites does get cumbersome at times. I hope they make this noJS implementation the default soon.

Yeah, Gates never was a good guy, not then and not now. Evil is a spectrum and all that, but Bill Gates’s philanthropy is a scam, and Bill Gates fucked over the US Education system.

So yeah, nah, fuck Bill Gates.

Been using this for years. Followed them from Github to Gitlab to now GitFlic. There are ways you can get the filter list to work with Ublock Origin, but this extension is more consistent. Bless magnolia1234 for continually keeping this gem up to date.

I’ve used espanso for about 4, maybe 5 years and haven’t encountered this issue. I even have to compile it myself because it’s daemon mode uses systemd on Linux and I dont run a distro that uses systemd and had to modify the source code slightly. I do run it in managed mode, essentially invoking it from a startup script when my window manager starts up.

Long story short, what you encountered might have been related to how it integrates with the init system and you might try and run it directly from a startup script. Simple test is to just try and install the latest version and see if you have the same issue.

Espanso Text Expander. Its not Linux specific but its got so many uses. You can even use it with bash scripts to have essentially alises/text shortcuts for short or massive amounts of text. I use it for so many code snippets and template texts in Neovim and other applications that involve typing.

I use zsh, but my old Bash prompt looks almost the same as my Zsh prompt. Sorry, no screenshot, but here’s the code:

export PS1='\[\033[01;34m\][\[\033[01;37m\] \W\[\033[01;34m\]]\$\033[01;34m\] $(git branch 2>/dev/null | grep '^*' | colrm 1 2)\n\033[01;34m└─>\033[37m '

I knew dudemanguy would eventually make a post like this. I use the distro(Artix Linux) he’s a maintainer on Artix, and he’s a solid dude that is always willing to help and gives solid help.

I have both riverwm and bspwm along with Wayland and X on my system and honestly have stuck on X because getting my workflow exactly the same on Wayland has been a technical hurdle of learning Zig (riverwm is written in Zig), and so far, with the exception of the occasional race condition, X just works.

I want to convert to Wayland, and will probably get around to making my own custom scripts in zig for working with riverwm. But until then, X/bspwm is where I live.

This, and take physical notes, or at least make notes in something you can refer to on a screen that is not your phone, ideally another desktop or a laptop computer with internet access in case something unexpected comes up during the physical install and you need to search the archwiki or the wider internet.

Most applications can do just fine with SQLite, but if you need something with a lot more write speed, go with PostgreSQL.

Its a command line multimedia player. It’s implementation is ideal for minimalists, and easily understood by reading the man pages.

It works very well imo.