Clearly you know of lot about this.

Nah, that is the problem. It all got so dynamic and easy I don’t really know how the hundreds of active modules on my desktop are loaded, why or in what order anymore. The days when I could list a handful of modules to load at boot are long gone I think unless its an embedded device or perhaps a simple server.

Setting modules_disabled might be viable for a relatively static system. I have seen that one when looking at hardening servers in the past but thought it was a bit extreme. Perhaps not.

In the 90s I compiled all my kernels at home from source with just the drivers I needed. Only installed the packages I needed. Only enabled the services I needed. The Unix way. When the kernel added modules I was still only compiling a subset and generally loading them manually.

Obviously that doesn’t work for most users and distros sensibly started shipping with modules compiled for practically every need. Usually when I view distro security alerts they are for packages I don’t install. But I have all these damn kernel modules just waiting to automatically load. I know I can blacklist them individually but I wonder if there is a way to profile the modules I use and use a deny all/whitelist approach instead?

I always used my retired PCs and parts but then my kids all wanted gaming rigs so spare PCs and parts do not exist in my world anymore and they tended to be too big, noisy and inefficient.

I would go for used ex-corporate desktop mini PCs from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo. Perhaps don’t go for the smallest ones if you want to be able to get into them and add stuff. They tend to have reasonably good idle power and noise and its common to find ones supporting two nvme ssds. Intel cpu with quicksync for jellyfin video decode if you aren’t adding discrete gpu - check supported codecs. Codec support varies across generations I think.

I would stay well away from laptops: bad thermals, power limits, limited expandability and SBCs like RPi which have poor io for servers.

I picked up an old HP Elitedesk off ebay a few years ago. I added a few TB of SSD and another stick of DDR4 when that stuff was cheap. It supports two nvme ssds as well as space for sata drives. Apart from media storage I can’t see any compelling reason to want to upgrade it.

Yeah, Its is sickening and goes against the spirit of open source. We work around restrictions in creative way to give people the freedom to control their software and have access to the source. We don’t deny people trapped in shitholes with bad laws access to open computing. Force them onto Windows and Apple. I don’t get what is wrong with people these days. They have lost all reason.

Yes, many people can work around the laws in various ways. And some of them can’t. Its not for us to judge. We offer possibilities. Everyone knows many distros will patch this field out. Many will just ignore it like we do the GECOS fields. And where it is unfortunately required it is still going to be better than running Windows. Its completely orthogonal to political participation and fighting these laws.

A lot of open source software is kind of ridiculous to many people. Why would you want to reverse engineer some proprietary device? Just choose one that is more open. It isn’t just about the challenge. It is also about extending freedom to do stuff as many places as possible. I might not want age verification in my operating system as its just another way to fingerprint me by big tech. And I probably won’t have it enabled or exposed. But having the option allows people to participate in the shitty, spying. predatory, manipulative, commercial hellscape version of the Internet which is increasingly facing regulation around the world. That is a freedom. Not a freedom I want but a freedom someone wants. It means they are not legally forced to use Microsoft or Apple to give all their data to the NSA and big predatory businesses.

Shit started to go wrong as far back as the 50s most places, perhaps earlier in the US. Light rail, tram networks were ripped up all over the world in favour of private motor vehicles and US style real estate development with their car centric dead burbs and no local life.

Once you go all in on car centric planning it is difficult to go back. Housing development is a long way from quality entertainment, shopping, food, culture, work so people need to travel long distances but everything is so distributed and low density that its hostile to public transport networks.

Americans are correct. You can’t simply swap to bikes and public transport on top of 70+ years of insane urban planning. Some older inner cities and very small towns can be fixed. The rest is a problem.

I can see the pragmatic appeal. Maintaining a lot of code for an open source project is thankless. Go is designed for idiots like me so it makes sense that an llm should be able to emit code that mostly works. There are classes of errors that are less likely in Go and the compiler and linting will prevent some foot guns and then it would have been tested.

Ethically I hate anything to do with the llm industry and all it represents. I hate the environmental impacts. The social impacts. The disregard for intellectual property. The devaluing of human effort. The scam economics. I won’t use anything touched by it on principle and if that means walking away from a dead Internet so be it. There is enough pre-2020s books, audiobooks, movies, music and code to keep me interested for the rest of my life.

My kids have used Linux from birth. One of them is voting age now. A Chromebook is Linux. They mostly just open steam.

Never liked the look of KDE. It is nothing to do with the tech or features. I think qt is a very solid foundation and my current desktop is built on Qt/QML. KDE just feels Windows-ish somehow and that’s probably part of what makes it great for a lot of people. That is a huge win for Linux adoption. Just not for me.

I always liked Gnome. It was simple and felt fresh even though I hate gtk/gobject etc. And I still keep Gnome as a backup but it think development is being held back by being built on layers of shit.

After a long time going back and forth I think I am all in on Niri now. Regular tilers never worked for me but somehow scrollers do. It is weird how much of a difference it makes for me. It is possible to build a complete desktop now with Quickshell and a bit of a backend for some services which makes the Gnome desktop and Plasma look crazy over engineered and I don’t know why the Cosmic people even bothered. I don’t see how Gnome can keep up as its is such a horrible system to program. DankMaterialShell is reasonably usable for starters but I might even start working on something. It looks like fun.

SteamOS is an immutable Arch. Valves aim is to reduce support costs by ensuring everyone has the same build and to only support a hardware subset (AMD APUs) so it’s less general purpose than a regular Linux distro intentionally. A steam deck is just a PC though and it is usable for non gaming tasks the same way a gaming focussed immutable system like Bazzite is. I even did development on a Chromebook for a month or more years ago as a challenge. It’s possible. It wasn’t ideal. The further you get from steam hardware and use case the more hoops you will need to jump through.

Games generally run more or less the same on any Linux system if they have the same kernel , steam runtime, mesa and proton in my experience. CachyOS might get a few more FPS until the patches they use get more widely distributed. Some compositors will get a little more performance than others.

Some games have detection for Steam deck that works around bugs they haven’t bothered fixing for proton users in general. I have one game I had to set an environment variable so it would behave like on steam deck.

I think SteamOS on a mini amd apu system hooked up to a tv as a gaming system would make a lot of sense. Running it on a regular desktop for non gaming taks is more of a novelty thing. It’s less practical than using a more general distro.

As an Australian who has lived with compulsory helmets for decades I think wearing a helmet and high vis is probably bare minimum if you have to share with cars and not nearly enough if you have to use door lanes and deal with Ford Rangers and garbage trucks.

Unfortunately once you go down this route cycling partipation drops and its a net fail for public health.

Sedate cycling on seperated pathways and through parks gets lumped in with high risk road cycling. It ends up being completely inappropriate for the type of cycling most people would like to do (not high risk vehicular cycling).

Why bother building expensive dedicated safe infrastructure when people have a magical inch of styrofoam on their noggins and a yellow shirt to protect them from 2 tonnes of murder machine.

Star Trek, at least before Roddenberry’s vision was corrupted, was a fictional post scarcity socialist utopia. The AI served the crew and society. It wasn’t there to exploit and replace them on behalf of a handful of Ferengi billionaires.

Star Trek’s ship AI is nothing like the huge financial scams, exploitation and concentration of power, wealth and political influence we are currently seeing. AI hate mostly isn’t about machine learning and its applications. It’s about the people behind it.

When we have warp drives, fusion, replicators, universal basic income and free universal health care we may have a different view.

For someone who subbed to self hosted almost as soon as they joined Lemmy I am really conservative about what I host. I have tried to keep all media in jellyfin to keep things sinple. But recently I expanded to audiobookshelf and wow!

Ripped some of my audiobooks and added some podcasts and now we have a family library and everyone has their own progress and settings working across devices. I am still spending a lot of time consuming media but I think it’s a much healthier balance.

Invade them. Drag the fucker off in chains and parade him to the press. Oh, no wait he is politically protected. Nice society they have over there where they pardon criminals and don’t prosecute fraudsters and pedos because of political connections. Must make people proud. Greatest democracy on Earth. Very Christian of them. Punish the poor, reward immorality, just like it said in the bible? Fucking weirdos.

Why do people complain about using nazi social media despite the option of non nazi social media or not using social media at all. Like grow a fucking brain people.

We are just getting into this. One kid has been heavily using lmms the last couple of months. It is very limited but perfect for him composiing game music.

Other family just do basic editing with ardour. We want to level up a bit. Just bought a reaper licence and have been playing with it and a midi controller and some plugins.

Bitwig also looks very nice and seems easy to use.

We are newbs with this stuff. Normally I like to only use free and open source only but both reaper and bitwig feel like pretty good value.

A lot of people seem to feel like this. It’s obviously a valid viewpoint. Gnome certainly has some flaws.I think KDE has better technical foundations and is probably much more appealing to Windows refugees.

And it’s always fun to customise a window manager setup. I usually have another setup or two for playing around. Currently niri as I got bored with regular tilers.

I always find it a little surprising how much some people dislike gnome. We are all on holiday here and the whole family got up early today and logged into gnome sessions and started recording and editing videos,.composing music and gaming. They don’t tell me their desktop sucks like people do online.

No regulation. Robber barons own all the media and politicians. How it got to this in more functional democracies under the rule of law I can’t explain. If this shit had come from Russia or China or North Korea it would be shitcanned instantly. I don’t know why we put up with it. The influence of US bots on the voting public internationally is frightening. They are driving people insane.

It isn’t any trouble. Rarely an upgraded service requires user intervention. This is usually documented and if not it is easy to search for a fix. I find arch faithfully follows upstream packages and provides a very pure linux experience. As much as I love the Debian community, their maintainers tend to add lots of patches, sometimes exposing huge security flaws. Most other distros are too small to be worthwhile or corporate controlled or change the experience too much.

I think it is because US bacon is streaked with huge amounts of fat that they render down until it goes crispy. Elsewhere bacon is often more meaty and less fatty and cooking the shit out of it doesn’t do anything for it.