monsieur_jean

Same. i3wm first, or XFCE for a “real” DE.

I am currently running a debloated i3wm rig based on EndeavourOS/Arch and I really enjoy the low mental load of a truly minimal desktop. Only luxury I’ve allowed myself is CLI colors. I’m not ready for B&W yet.

Speaking of thwarting piracy, how about Japan stops slaughtering whales and respecting the treaties they have signed first?

The 90s are calling, they want their UX back.

I’m pretty happy with Linux actually. I’ve used a few distros and DMs over the years and honestly we’re at a point in time where it’s pretty nice. A more user friendly and robust connectivity management would be nice, and a few of the file browsers could benefit from a UX revamp. DMs could also enforce stricter design choices by default to gently guide developers towards a consistent UI/UX. But overall it’s quite solid.

The same can’t be said about most of the OSS that goes with it. Most of the apps available for Linux are garbage. I mean, they do some things well obvioulsy, but are overall terrible to use. With their crap UX and a UI stuck in the last century the only reason people use them is they have no other choice and are desperate…

Well not that many, let me think…

• One stainless steel pan
• A grill and/or carbon steel pan
• One large pot for boiling pasta and big stuff
• One medium pot
• One small pot for sauces
• One pressure cooker
• One dutch oven (or two)
• A collection of non-stick pans in various conditions

I mean we’re looking at what, only 8 or 10 cooking vessels, that’s not a lot is it?

That’s a great setup. Until someone breaks in and steal all the hardware, of the house burns down.

I would add regular backups from the NAS to an archiving cloud like Backblaze, Amazon Glacier, Azure Archive… Doesn’t eat too much bandwidth and it cost very little (until you need to recover the data, but hopefully you won’t). :)

You’re a senior CS person and you are asking if you should have a backup system in place? o_O

Sorry if this sounds like a personal attack but it’s something you should have though of a long, long time ago, as a CS person. Even when still using Windows.

Assuming you are serious, then yes there are ways to save your data under Linux, with different levels of complexity and privacy.

The bare minimum is some basic cloud backup. Not ideal for privacy, but at least if your drive dies you won’t lose your files.

Local backup in the form of a NAS or home server is also an option, and allows different systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) to save a copy of their files. Way better from a privacy perspective if setup properly BUT your are one fire or one burglary away from losing everything.

If you want to reconcile privacy AND safe storage then to me there are a few options :

• End to end encrypted cloud storage if you trust the third party (Proton drive, Tresorit, etc)
• End to end encrypted cloud storage that you control (requires very high skills and a lot of work and money. And a lot of maintenance)
• Local network storage (NAS/homeserver) with an encrypted backup regularly sent to the cloud
• Hybrid end-to-end encrypted cloud using a non encrypted cloud solution (like Google Drive) with Cryptomator or equivalent (if you trust them).

So many options, depending on your sensibility to privacy and your technical knowledge. You can also mix. For example most of my personal files are hosted on Microsoft OneCloud because it’s stable and fast enough. I mean almost my entire home folder (excluding configuration) is replicated there. But some of the sensitive files, mostly scans of official documents like tax returns, healthcare receipts, etc, are end to end encrypted using Cryptomator. Also my passwords are saved in an shared encrypted Keepass database. And all my drives are encrypted (with LUKS) including my external drives.

Anybody who has dug that topic long enough knows that total privacy and total security are a myth. It simple doesn’t exist. You need to find the balance between privacy, security and practicality that suits you. If you are paranoid, then getting to a reasonable level of all three is going to be a LOT of work and money. If you are just cautious, and are willing to trust reputable third parties, then it’s quite possible to have a working solution without spending too much time and money. And the very bare minimum is to chose between a backup with little privacy, or more privacy with the acceptance that you may lose everything.

And why are GPUs shipped with so little VRAM?!

Everything you say is what past me would have answered ten years ago, thinking current me is an idiot. Yet here we are. ;)

You are right and make good points. But you are not 99% of computer users. Just considering installing a linux distro puts you in the top 1% most competent.

(Speaking of which, I still have a laptop running EndeavourOS + i3. Three months in my system is half broken because of infrequent updates. I could fix it, I just don’t have the motivation to do so. Or the time. I’ll probably just reinstall Mint.)

It’s a bit more complex than that (and you probably know it).

When you enter the Apple ecosystem you basically sign a contract with them : they sell you overpriced goods, but in exchange you get a consistent, coherent and well thought-out experience across the board. Their UX is excellent. Their support is good. Things work well, applications are easy to use and pretty stable and well built. And if they violate your privacy like the others, at least they don’t make the open-bar sale of your data their fucking business model (wink wink Google).

Of course you there’s a price to pay. Overpriced products, limited UI/UX options, no interoperability, little control over your data. And when there’s that one thing that doesn’t work, no luck. But your day to day life within the Apple ecosystem IS enjoyable. It’s a nice golden cage with soft pillows.

I used to be a hardcore PC/Linux/Android user. Over the last few years I gradually switched to a full Apple environment : MacBook, iPhone, iPad… I just don’t have time to “manage” my hardware anymore. Nor the urge to do it. I need things to work out of the box in a predictable way. I don’t want a digital mental load. Just a simple UX, consistency across my devices and good apps (and no Google, fuck Google). Something I wouldn’t have with an Android + PC setup. :)

The whole “special club” argument is bullshit, and I hope we grow out of it. Neither the Apple nor the Google/Microsoft environments are satisfactory. Not even speaking of Linux and FOSS. We must aim higher.

Thanks for the clarification. I wonder if/when Microsoft is going to hop on the RISC train. They did a crap job trying themselves at a ARM version a few years back and gave up. A RISC Surface with a compatible Windows 13 and proper binary translator (like Apple did with Rosetta) would shake the PC market real good!

Not even soldered, it’s part of the CPU/GPU die now.

Interesting, I thought they had ditched the ARM license completely, my mistake.

If I wasn’t so broke, my 8GB MBP would enter the frisbee competition…

The Apple M series is not ARM based. It’s Apple’s own RISC architecture. They get their performance in part from the proximity of the RAM to the GPU, yes. But not only. Contrary to ARM that has become quite bloated after decades of building upon the same instruction set (and adding new instructions to drive adoption even if that’s contrary to RISC’s philosophy), the M series has started anew with no technological debt. Also Apple controls both the hardware to the software, as well as the languages and frameworks used by third party developers for their platform. They therefore have 100% compatibility between their chips’ instruction set, their system and third party apps. That allows them to make CPUs with excellent efficiency. Not to mention that speculative execution, a big driver of performance nowadays, works better on RISC where all the instructions have the same size.

You are right that they do not cater to power users who need a LOT of power though. But 95% of the users don’t care, they want long battery life, light and silent devices. Sales of desktop PCs have been falling for more than a decade now, as have the investments made in CISC architectures. People don’t want them anymore. With the growing number of manufacturers announcing their adoption of the new open-source RISC-V architecture I am curious to see what the future of Intel and AMD is. Especially with China pouring billions into building their own silicon supply chain. The next decade is going to be very interesting. :)

Sorry just saw the answer.

Virtualbox is very easy to use out of the box, even if you have very little experience with virtualization. Everything is in one place and pretty much self explanatory.

Hyper-V is more complicated and requires that you have a Enterprise, Pro or Education license. It cannot be activated on the Windows 10 or 11 home edition.

Probably a mix up of sorts and the responsibility lies with the contractor that installed it. I don’t believe the Bored Apes crew organized everything themselves down to the lights, it’s not their job. They just paid a company to do it for them.

Asia is much, much more serious than the West regarding sanitation, especially since COVID. UV door frames at the entrance of public transportation is a thing. Where I live, before entering a pharmacy during COVID I had to step in a pond of sanitizer, then was sprayed with the same, then had to wash my hands.

I’m not surprised the contractor had a stockpile of UV tubes to be used specifically for sanitation purpose. Now, did they just confused them with regular black light tubes or did they use them on purpose, or a mix of the two? I guess there’s going to be an investigation to sort that out. Wouldn’t like to be them, the Hong Kong judicial system is not known for being lenient, quite the opposite.

Makes me think, how many fediverse accounts has awkwardtheturtle created yet? How many instances are run on his servers? :D

You just want to get a feel for it, so I suggest what I’ve used with success in the past :

• Windows host
• Virtualbox
• Linux Mint with the XFCE desktop environment.

All free, Linux mint is newbies friendly and XFCE is light enough to run well in a VM. It is Ubuntu based so it’s very well documented (basically 99% of the tutorials for Ubuntu work with Mint) but it comes with less bloatware and a more ethics.

Of course no single Linux distribution is perfect or we would all be using it but I suggest you don’t lose time looking for a distro. Just pick one and install it. If you don’t like the look and feel, then try another. You can distro hop through several of them to taste the variations. But the general principles are pretty much the same across the board.

Keep it simple, stupid. Can’t agree more. And that’s a central concept in computer systems and procedures when human lives are involved.