mat

Can't hurt to do a little self-promotion ey? I recently started writing https://blog.allpurposem.at/minecraft-qr about FOSS stuff I work on and ways I've managed to survive my gamedev degree on Linux. Aiming for one post per month, though my next one is taking a bit longer.

I set up Arch manually, following the ArchWiki guide. Over time using it though, I must have made some customizations that were incorrect and caused it to break.

I ran my own Mastodon for a while. While it does work, it takes up a ton of storage (every image and video you see is cached by your own server). It also doesn't work great for viewing stuff like replies and older posts, since backfilling is still not a thing. I ended up just browsing on remote servers instead. A great blog post about this: https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/08/11/some-notes-on-mastodon/

A Hat in Time!!! That's awesome, I remember having crashes with the proprietary drivers. Looking forward to playing this wonderful game on NVK.

I use this and love it! I can't remember whether it was a "FairEmail Pro" feature though (one-time donation to unlock pro features). Regardless it works great.

Cool! Might make me reconsider the next laptop I get. The all-AMD Zephyrus G14 I currently run has been an awful experience (overheating after 15min of gaming, random iGPU freezes, fTPM stuttering, no video accel on Wayland, HDMI is broken, wifi randomly stops working, and mic disappears on 99% of boots), and I was looking to replace it with an Nvidia laptop, but maybe Tuxedo can fix these issues on their own hardware and make AMD viable.

I self host Whoogle and it's a really nice interface. However, recently is has started to take longer and longer to load, sometimes giving up and returning a 502 error. If you don't run into that however, it's super nice!

I use Bitwarden and, though all the features are very nice (self hosted Vaultwarden), the clients are really bad. The autofill is super inconsistent on Android. The app takes 20s+ to load on my Pixel 3a. You can't trigger a sync from the quick autofill menu, you have to open the full app. The "desktop app" is just an embedded browser. I really want to like it, but it doesn't make it easy.

I don't understand where and how I need to file complaints. I live in France and Belgium, and have encountered several large and popular websites which enforce a "cookie wall". This does not appear to respect the cookie law.

I'm seeing others recommend the G14 2022 all-AMD one. I have owned this model since it released and use it nearly every day. Despite the performance being pretty okay, it does have its share of deal-breakers which, if I knew them at the time, I would not have bought it:

• random freezing, this affects some units most zen3 amd laptops and it seems I got unlucky. ASUS has been ignoring the issue for a year despite the crashes being reproducible on Windows (Windows recovers from it while Linux just freezes)
• short stutters due to fTPM. Hopefully once Arch updates the kernel to include the recent patch that blacklists all AMD fTPMs fixes this, for now you have to email ASUS to get a secret BIOS that allows disabling it
• nonfunctional vfio (code 43) without patching BIOS variables with a sketchy script (have to disable rebar), rebinding after shutting down the vm still does not work at all for me
• overheating while gaming, even with fans forced to max
• wifi constantly disconnects. I mostly fixed it by buying a AX210 card from Intel
• bottom shell is super brittle and cracked when unscrewing it

The laptop itself would be the best Linux experience I've had if not for these issues. The trackpad is excellent and great for Wayland 1:1 gestures, the display and speakers are great, and the battery lasts a good 2-3h with light web browsing.

I've really enjoyed using PINE64 products. I use the excellent Pinecil soldering iron which is fully open source. I used a PineTime smartwatch until I got it water damaged (rip) which was a ton of fun to use. I have a pair of PineBuds wireless earbuds (default firmware is not open because of proprietary ANC, but last time I checked this is being worked on). I can't speak for their laptops or phones, but I can definitely recommend the devices I do use if you're willing to get involved in the community to work through and fix some of the existing issues.

Any keyboard with no internet permission should be "privacy-respecting", as it can't (as I understand it) send any data back to the developers. I'm personally a big fan of Unexpected Keyboard, though it's definitely something to get used to.