And surprisingly it’s going pretty well. I’m late to the fad I think, but only a few weeks ago I thought it was bananas to not have arrow keys. Then I learned about the whole tiny-keyboard world, and decided to go for it.

The keyboard I’m using is a Ferris Sweep, which as free and open hardware you may produce yourself.

At the moment I have 9 layers, 7 of them in frequent use. The learning process has been surprisingly not bad. And using QMK I have tweaked the key map a lot already.

If you use a computer a lot, say for your job, it’s worth optimizing how you interact with it.

It is the opinion of the Board that Large Language Models (LLMs), herein referred to as Slop Generators, are unsuitable for use as software engineering tools, particularly in the Free and Open Source Software movement.

The use of Slop Generators in any contribution to the Asahi Linux project is expressly forbidden.

The Asahi Linux team have cited 3 main points in forbidding LLM use:

• Illegal Output

  • "All of the popular Slop Generators are trained on an incomprehensibly large corpus of text. There is ample evidence across the Web of this training material including copyrighted material, brazenly stolen by the Slop Generator proprietors with impunity"
  • "FOSS projects like Asahi Linux cannot afford costly intellectual property lawsuits in US courts."

• Waste of resources

  • "Slop Generators consume an unfathomable amount of resources we can scarcely afford to waste."
  • "All parts of the Slop Generator supply chain are environmentally intensive. These resources are better used on quite literally anything else."

• LMGTFY (Let Me Google That For You)

  • "An emerging trend we have observed is people copying user questions or posts into a Slop Generator, then replying to the post with the generated slop."
  • "If this is you, please realise that others also have access to the same models as you do, and if they wanted an answer from one, they could have asked it themselves."

• It's just matmul (matrix multiplication)

It is very easy to get caught up in the hype that bad actors have built around Slop Generators. The anthropomorphic presentation of Slop Generators as "agents" or "assistants" is a very deliberate attempt to manufacture consent for their integration into workforces at the expense of human interaction. The implication of some higher degree intelligence or sentience is very much deliberate, and it is very much false.

Make no mistake, they cannot think. They cannot reason. They cannot take into account context. They don't "know" things or have a sense of humour or any of the other human-centric qualities bad actors would have you believe of them. Slop Generators are a chain of matrices in a stochastic system. The output of a Slop Generator is nothing more than a statistical calculation, where the next word to be generated is decided by an opaque probabilistic function dependent on previously generated words. This is fundamentally the same mathematics that is used to predict the weather.

A Slop Generator cannot assess the veracity of its claims, nor can it ever tell you that it simply does not know something. Slop Generators are often confidently incorrect as a result, and require brow-beating to admit a mistake. They are therefore highly inappropriate tools in contexts where truth and correctness are of utmost importance, and when the user is not already highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area. This presents a bit of an issue for Slop Generators; if the user is already highly knowledgeable and confident in the problem area, then why ask the Slop Generator in the first place?

A short post describing some tips and tricks to working with RSS feeds in the modern context.

It's written with the reader/aggregator freshRSS in mind but useful even without that.

Like fuck off, to think I ever liked these guys.

"A such simpler time"

I love having Amazon dot com glued onto my screen

Love having the power button be so small, it helps my clicking reflexes

context

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, the last release with Canonical's unity desktop on top of xserver before they came to their senses and went with GNOME.

Linux is still for nerds but I hate windows 11 more than I hate being uncool so I'm just going to have to step down my rizz and learn more computer stuff.

1. My 3 concerns are, in order, gaming (mostly through steam or fitgirl), playing TTRPGs through Foundry Virtual Tabletop and Discord, and image editing (but really simple image editing. more paint.net than GIMP). What distro would be best for this? What are the actual differences in distros beyond appearances? Is it worth installing the Steam OS, or is that still really only useable with handhelds?

2. Can I just shove all the data I want to save on an external drive, install my chosen distro, and transfer stuff back on? Will the external drive need to be formatted in a specific way first? can I just slot stuff like program settings back in the new system or will I have to convert them to a different file format?

3. Do I have to buy the thigh highs or do they just appear? Will it still work if I don't wear them? I don't like wearing socks so I'd prefer a distro without them if possible.

If it helps I'm running a Ryzen 5 2600 and RX 7600, and my favourite colour is purple.

Edit: Thanks for the answers everyone, I'm going to do a bit more reading on distros before choosing one, but I have a better idea what I'm looking at now.

What do virtue-signalers and privileged people without disabilities who share content about accessibility on Linux being trash without contributing anything to the software have in common? They don’t actually really care about the group they’re defending; they just exploit these victims’ unfortunate situation to fuel hate against groups and projects actually trying to make the world a better place.
...
Number 5 [making sure that all the accessibility-related work is in the public, and stays in the public.] is especially important to me. I personally go as far as to refuse to contribute to projects under a permissive license, and/or that utilize a contributor license agreement, and/or that utilize anything riskily similar to these two, because I am of the opinion that no amount of code for accessibility should either be put under a paywall or be obscured and proprietary.
...
KDE hired a legally blind contractor to work on accessibility throughout the KDE ecosystem, including complying with the EU Directive to allow selling hardware with Plasma.

GNOME’s new executive director, Steven Deobald, is partially blind.

The GNOME Foundation has been investing a lot of money to improve accessibility on Linux, for example funding Newton, a Wayland accessibility project and AccessKit integration into GNOME technologies. Around 250,000€ (1/4) of the STF budget was spent solely on accessibility. And get this: literally everybody managing these contracts and communication with funders are volunteers; they’re ensuring people with disabilities earn a living, but aren’t receiving anything in return. These are the real heroes who deserve endless praise.
...
To summarize the table: those three merge requests that I worked on for free were worth 9,393.60$ CAD (6,921.36$ USD) in total at a minimum.
...
Any content related to accessibility that doesn’t dunk on GNOME doesn’t foresee as many engagement, activity, and reaction as content that actively attacks GNOME, regardless of whether the criticism is fair. Many of these people don’t even use these accessibility features; they’re just looking for every opportunity to say “GNOME bad” and will 🪄 magically 🪄 start caring about accessibility.

In short, stop making your shitty "rice" [sic] and suckless-style gadgets and then go on to slander organizations like GNOME and KDE. What we need in freedesktop are people who care deeply about solving problems and raising up others.

Even if you're not a programmer with the required expertise, keep the conversation around accessibility going. Fund development by word of mouth or direct monetary support. Keep following these developments and be informed rather than spreading vague folk wisdom.

And speaking personally here (rant), if you don't use KDE, GNOME or intended-equivalent (cinnamon, mate, etc) on up-to-date, widely-used distributions, you don't inhabit the same community as us who do.

There's a tendency to name drop "Linux" community as if it's a catch all. Well RMS's writing was right, not in the pedantic way that people interpreted it to be (or that RMS may have intended), but in the fact that the all-consuming "Linux OS" does not exist. Android is not "Linux," WSL is not "Linux," they are Android and WSL. Fedora is not Linux, Ubuntu is not Linux, they are Fedora and Ubuntu.

The thing that holds this thing together is GNU or in other words, libre computing and copyleft, a way to use computers that stands against coercive control, malware, abandonment, waste and of course, capitalism which is the root cause of these issues.

The fact that there are people using "Linux" who are uninformed about GNU's history, free software, or who say that GNOME looks like a MacOS clone or that KDE is like a "Linux windows" will frustrate me to no end.

(end-rant)

As the sun continues to set on the X11 display protocol, X.Org - the premier implementation - has been forked by a former developer who accuses its maintainers of "abandoning the project, and letting it rot forever."

He's not exactly wrong. X.Org is essentially mothballed. It is an enormous, complicated piece of deprecated infrastructure, with a very limited amount of resources and experienced maintainers. The corporations which sponsor Free Software development don't particularly care about desktop end-users, and the resources which are being spent on desktop experience are largely being spent on Wayland compositors. On the other hand, it appears many of his commits on X.Org were reverted for sloppy management of licensing / attribution, as well as some regressions which were introduced.

It is worth noting that when Wayland was introduced in 2008, X.Org developers were among its biggest advocates and contributors. The writing has been on the wall for a long time now, and the work of building an alternative is mostly complete.

That said, Wayland is not at all a 1 to 1 replacement for X, and like with the introduction of Systemd, there are a lot of people with strong feelings about this, a lot of conspiracy mongers cranking out YouTube slop. People throwing out accusations about how "they" are trying to ruin Linux yet again.

I personally have fond memories of X. Especially in the later days when the whole "unix porn" phenomenon bloomed and there was a sort of renaissance of customization. I miss herbstluftwm terribly. That said, I've been running Wayland for something like 6 years now and I do not really get why people hate it. It works fine, and it actually has a future.

Update:

It's also worth noting the author of this fork is a chud. Some excerpts from the README

This fork was necessary since toxic elements within Xorg projects, moles from BigTech, are boycotting any substantial work on Xorg, in order to destroy the project, to eliminate competition of their own products. Classic "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics.

This is an independent project, not at all affiliated with BigTech or any of their subsidiaries or tax evasion tools, nor any political activists groups, state actors, etc. It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.

Together we'll make X great again!

This started as a post to ask a question I was stumped with. But in the process of writing the question, I solved the problem. rubber ducked myself without realizing it.

Anyway, GNU Emacs is cool, and I'm deep in the hole now. I might be able to make the transition to using it as my IDE at some point, but that seems to be involved, with language servers and all that.

One thing that was driving me a little crazy was the window behavior. I was able to solve that with a plugin called window-purpose which allows you to assign modes and buffers to a specific "purpose" and then lock the window into only showing new buffers based on that information. So I can have a main editing window where all editable file buffers appear, and a sidebar with some specific buffers locked into place. It can also save that window configuration and load it later. Which I use to standardize the window configuration every time I open Emacs.

Sadly, the Emacs community on Reddit is rife with AI content for some reason, and thus it is a pretty useless source of information. I don't really understand the subs fascination with running LLMs inside of Emacs. But I digress.

Org-Mode is pretty dope, and Org-Roam is even doper. I've used things like Logseq pretty extensively, but I eventually stopped using it as much, mainly because you're locked into using their interface/editor for the whole thing. It's nice being able to use Emacs for other text editing, and then jumping into an Org file and gaining all that functionality automatically.

I also wasn't a huge fan of the way the markdown files were generated in Logseq, where every file is just a massive unordered list on the backend. Now, I get that Org-Mode and Org-Roam are effectively the same thing, using a header hierarchy, but it feels a lot more deliberate, and you can enter text outside that hierarchy since you get to decide when to use the hierarchy or not.

In Logseq you're always working inside the hierarchy, which can be annoying when working externally and creating markdown files outside the Logseq application, intending them to be loaded by the system. What makes Emacs different is that I have access to all the underlying functions right inside the editor. I could use Emacs to extend Emacs' own functionality, life, while I'm using Emacs.

If I wanted to interact with an API endpoint and take it's output and feed it through an Org-Mode capture template, it likely wouldn't hard. Doing that in Logseq requires writing a plugin using its Javascript API in an external editor, and packaging it up, loading it into the software, testing within the software in developer mode, then going back to my code editor to address errors and refine the tool. The development loop is just way more cumbersome.

Anyway, I could go on and on. Is anyone else using Emacs here?

I haven't tried this yet but I hope it's good. I've been wanting to find a way to sync saved posts and comments to a file and this could be a good way. If the API is good, you could pull saved comments and posts into org-roam cards, using communities, users, and instances as tags or other properties.

I have a Microsoft Surface 7 laptop and reaaaally want to try Linux, but everywhere I've looked seems to say that Linux just isn't there yet, with maybe the exception of Arch. I've also seen that Ubuntu is working on it but a ton of stuff still doesn't work (keyboard, volume, Bluetooth).

Can someone tell me I'm wrong and that there is something out there that will work for my laptop? Im not a programmer and know pretty much nothing about coding so....I am terrified of Arch.

I didn't realise just how much better it would be. Like holy shit everything works. I have had very few problems that weren't very easily fixed.

Everything that windows did, this thing can usually do better. And the things it can't do better, it can do just as good.

Things I've noticed:

Mint and Linux in general use a logic that gels with me way more than modern Windows. Even though Mint is technically a very simple distro, it's still waaaay better than what I was used to. Terminal commands are easy to learn and the way Mint is organised is great for example (how do I word this?) if I want to do something I don't have to guess which submenu the OS is hiding it behind like in Windows. Like if I want to look at the health of my disc, it's right there under "discs" and it tells me everything about it from the temperature to how many bad partitions it has. If I want to flash something to a USB its a fucking built in option when you right click, something I had to download a program for in Windows. If I want to use a printer, Mint just connects and prints, on windows HP or whatever company will ask you to download their personal software suite and do it that way. There are soooo many unnecessary programs companies push on Windows owners.

What brought this home is recently I bought my parents a new mouse as a gift because they complained theirs wasn't working well anymore. I got them a blutooth Logitech mouse, nothing crazy, and I try to connect it to their laptop for them. Windows makes you go though a couple of menus to do this but whatever it's not too bad. A popup comes up after like 10 minutes after I was about to walk away because this is a slow old computer. Logitech wants me to download and log into their software suite for a fucking mouse. Lmao. So anyway, after week I get a call from the parent that owns the laptop, the mouse isn't working anymore. I take a look at it next time I visit and sure enough it doesn't work. I take out my laptop. I right click the Bluetooth icon and click search. It finds the mouse, I tell it to connect. It works fine.

Now I disconnect it from my Bluetooth try to reconnect it to the parents Windows laptop, no Bluetooth icon in the system tray, weird. Also if you hover over the system tray Windows now slides up a bunch of clickbait articles for some reason, lol. I go into settings, look for blutooth, it's not there. Remember that Windows 10 hides its blutooth shit under a devices submenu. Go to that submenu. It says the mouse is connected and the little tab to turn on or off Bluetooth is missing. I restart the computer. No change. I look up if anyone else has had this problem. I find a Reddit post complaining about the same thing. For some reason the solution is restart the laptop with its actual power chord unplugged. Confusing, but I try it. It works for some reason. I am suddenly way more thankful than ever that I no longer use Windows. When something goes wrong on Linux, it makes sense, as opposed to this where I have no idea what Windows did to cause this.

I'm just so surprised at how much better Linux is. It absolutely destroys the idea that profit motive makes for better products, or that the richest companies are rich and popular because they're better. Here this thing is, funded by collaboration and donations, and it's leagues better than something produced by one of the richest companies in the world that has near infinite funding.

There is no way in hell am ever going back.

So, Im currently on Windows 10, on my desktop but Im seriously considering switching to Linux instead of upgrading to Windows 11. I already have Kubuntu (the customization looked cool ^^) installed on my laptop, which I want to experiment with as soon as I have more time.

The distros Im looking into for my desktop are Nobara and Pop! OS. I own a modern NVIDIA GPU and mostly care about gaming. Other than that, I will just be using the desktop to browse the internet and watch some videos.

I have a friend who does IT and he swears by the mainline distros like Fedora. Im not as technically savvy and just want something that does the couple of things I need it to do which are gaming and watching funny cat videos on YouTube. I assume one advantage of big distros is that you have large comms that can help you if you run into a problem....

I would be especially interested to hear from folks that used Nobara or Pop OS but also those who do modern gaming on Linux.

Thanks. Any input is appreciated.

A great writeup on the experience of blind users navigating GNU/Linux and the many pitfalls that prevent them from being able to use their machine.

Linux “just works”—if you can see.

If you’re blind? You boot into a live image and get nothing. No speech. No braille. No login prompt feedback. Maybe Orca starts, maybe not. Maybe you know the shortcut (Alt+Super+S?) but does that even work in this session type? Is it Wayland? Is it X11? Is the screen reader bound to a key combo that doesn’t exist on your keyboard?

You open the installer?

“Next. Button. Button. Button. Button.” That’s all Orca says.

Ubuntu MATE 12.04 had a working, labeled, navigable installer. Ubuntu MATE 24.04? It’s garbage.

No headings. No structure. No sense of where you are. Just unlabeled buttons and blank space.

This isn’t a bug. This is neglect.

I think a great takeaway from this is that a11y finds itself at the end of the pipeline, as the last thing that needs to be done.

I figure it's probably fine but I want to double check and I can't find anybody else who's asked this question.

Reasons to switch:

1. It's waaaaay cheaper
   • A new laptop costs a lot of money. Repair cafes will often help you for free. Software updates are also free, forever. You can of course show your support for both with donations!
2. No ads, no spying
   • Windows comes with lots of ads and spyware nowadays, slowing down your computer and increasing your energy bill.
3. Good for the planet
   • Production of a computer accounts for 75+% of carbon emissions over its lifecycle. Keeping a functioning device longer is a hugely effective way to reduce emissions.
4. Community support
   • If you have any issues with your computer, the local repair cafe and independent computer shop are there for you. You can find community support in online forums, too.
5. User control
   • You are in control of the software, not companies. Use your computer how you want, for as long as you want.

Hexbear-related reasons to switch:

1. Still can use hexbear
   • Hexbear requires a web browser (firefox) to use.
2. Don't have to pay for it.
   • You'll receive updates and features for your operating system free of any personal charge to you till the end of time. You can donate directly to volunteers and workers to make your computer better (better yet non computer related things)
3. using Windows for Windows's sake or Apple for Apple's sake is liberalism and supports USA/piSSrael
   • TBH they copied from us (KDE, GNOME) anyway. Their innovation is being a monopoly and advertising to you.
4. Makes you smarter (it's like reading theory but with computers)
   • Using Linux makes you big brain because you'll learn you can do a lot of things for free that you'd have to waste your soul on.

After getting a new laptop with win 11 installed, and having to run all the tweaks to make it less obnoxious and disable all the annoyances, I started getting adds pop up in the corner after an update and decided enough was enough. I was forced to pay for that shit and it's serving me ads? Fuck off.

So I just installed Bluefin and it's been absolutely awesome. The things they have set up by default are pretty wonderful. Gnome is up with useful extentions to start with so I didn't have to bother tweaking it to my liking. There is also a KDE based version called Aurora, and the famous gaming spin called Bazzite has both KDE and Gnome versions. There is even a command that lets you easily switch between all the different ublue flavors.

It's an immutible distro, so it has a base you can't easily change, but it relies on flatpaks, appimages, homebrew, podman/docker, and distrobox for all the user apps you want, all set up to work by default. The gnome software center is populated by flatpaks, for example. Almost all of the sensible default apps are flatpaks that you can easily uninstall if you don't want them. And it keeps all of this up-to-date in the background, it checks weekly, and you just restart when convenient to upgrade. The last successful linux distro I installed and stuck with was debian with flatpaks, so I could have a stable base with more up-to-date apps, so it's a paradigm I like.

There is no traditional package manager unless you install one via distrobox, but flatpak and homebrew cover almost everything most people could want, really.

Want to install jellyfin media server or the ARR stack? Just open up podman-desktop and look for a docker images and then follow a set up guide. Want some command line bling? They have a custom command that installs a bunch of useful terminal apps from homebrew. The bluefin team basically listens to the userbase and then adds whatever they ask for by default if they can get it working, which includes a lot of peripheral support. The results are fantastic.

Previously I was messing around with NixOS, and I like how that works, but I quickly ran out of time to set up my own computer and kind of lost steam messing with it. The ublue distros offer similar functionality: you can create your own custom setup and make it wasy to clone, but you don't have to bother with that to get a usable experience. It's usable by default.

It doesn't support dual booting, because they are a small team and don't want to have to do tech support whenver windows screws up the boot manager, so if you want to install it and don't want to wipe your windows install you'll need a install on a seperate drive (an external drive works) and switch between installs when you boot up. It's a little more annoying, but it's a cleaner way to do things.

I've never had a linux install be this trouble free and sensibly set up by default. I'm very impressed and would recommend to anyone thinking of switching.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/363723

Comments

EDIT - I SOLVED THE PROBLEM LOL

i had a timeshift snapshot that was like 500GB because i had been including /home in my backups. fixed.

So, my system has been complaining that my main OS drive is almost completely full. However, I just deleted like 250GB of games off it to fix the problem. It's a 2TB SSD.

output of df says i only have 52GB free:

Dolphin file manager agrees. However, using Filelight, and my own reckoning, I can only account for 660GB of space used up.

even doing du -sh */ from / only seems to show about 1TB of space used on the disk. Where is my other ~800GB of space?

I've been digging up some of my own old programming projects, polishing them for the public releases I'd always intended. The first is Notable, a pastebin server clone. It's under the AGPLv3. It has a few design principles in mind:

• Must work over Tor unmodified, no javascript, light page loads, fits within the standard window size.
• Must be as easy as possible to run. No outside database needed, it uses sqlite3.
• Control over if notes expire, and custom time limits.
• Notes can be updated or delete with the randomized per-note password given when creating a note.
• Understands Markdown.
• Written to be portable. If Go and CGo compile to your server's OS, Notable will work.

The README has further details.

I don't want to install the "logi" software just so I can rebind what the thumb button does on my mouse... Anyone have any suggestions?