The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

The M1 Macs improved the keyboard and fixed the thermals since they stopped using Intel. My work HP Z-Book laptop likes to get very hot and noisy, so I'm willing to give Apple the benefit of doubt on why the Intel Macs got too hot (All my HP work laptops since 2015 have been hot garbage).
I have no experience with the M1. But since those run fanless I guess that's one way to fix Apple's piss poor thermal management.
I think the aluminum body is fairly sturdy just I would never use a MacBook Air since they are fragile.
They got zero liquid resistance, they already got sued for cracking screens, and they seem to use the same shitty hinges of the former models. Plus the shitty repairability so when something breaks you can't even fix it easily.

I'll spin the question on you, what would you think is closer to ThinkPad quality?
P series Chinkpads?
It's hard to find a decent workstation laptop these days. They all follow all the retarded Apple trends, like having to be very thin (= less sturdy, less ports, worse thermals), a trackpad that takes up more space than the keyboard, non-replaceable everything, soda can casing, etc..
 
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P series Chinkpads?
It's hard to find a decent workstation laptop these days. They all follow all the retarded Apple trends, like having to be very thin (= less sturdy, less ports, worse thermals), a trackpad that takes up more space than the keyboard, non-replaceable everything, soda can casing, etc..
I've been buying gaming laptops. If you're careful you can get non-ugly or at least less-ugly ones with good specs, expandability, etc. Not fully rugged but at least somewhat designed for, well, gamers.
 
Why would I want something designed for gamers?
Sadly there's a pretty large overlap in hardware specs between nerds who want high performance portable computing and gamers who want high performance portable computing. The main difference is nerds don't want fucking RGB and glowing stuff.
 
My favorite example is the Lenovo Legion which actually charges more for the models without homosexual lighting.
I ended up with this one. The lid is a little 'Rainbowy' but it's not lighted, just a pattern. But it has all the ports, 2 NVMe slots and 40GB RAM. Of course they couldn't make both SO-DIMMS removable so I couldn't have 64GB, oh well, maybe the next one.

6451627cv1d.jpg6451627cv10d.jpg
 
I wouldn't torture myself with an old Thinkpad and don't understand the boner people have for it. In 2022 a mobile device for general usage (everything non-gaming basically) shouldn't and doesn't need to have a fan, (and the noise and point-of-failure that comes with that, hell a SoC/CPU *requiring* active cooling because of it's TDP really is a problem in itself these days) for starters. I have this celeron crapbook and besides the kinda bad screen it's a great computer that can do a lot with a slim Linux, also I got it up to 14 hours of real battery life. If it isn't fast enough, especially if you are a Linux, there are so many ways to harness the computing power of another system somewhere on the network and make it seamless with scripting, there's no reason to lug around your main computer if you aren't a literal hobo. (for the prices people pay for sometimes busted Thinkpads, I don't think they're usually hobos)

There's a good point to be made that an old SoC/CPU is still good enough and if you knew me, you'd also know I'd be the first to say it, I'm by no means a member of the "buy-it-all-new-every-six-months" club, but especially power efficiency -which is one of the most if not the most important metric for a mobile IMO- is always improved in newer models and the watts-to-ips ratio always only gets better, not to even speak about more modern peripherals. Old Notebooks just aren't worth it if you have a choice.

But well, I have very specific and low computing requirements and YMMV.
 
I wouldn't torture myself with an old Thinkpad and don't understand the boner people have for it. In 2022 a mobile device for general usage (everything non-gaming basically) shouldn't and doesn't need to have a fan, (and the noise and point-of-failure that comes with that, hell a SoC/CPU *requiring* active cooling because of it's TDP really is a problem in itself these days) for starters. I have this celeron crapbook and besides the kinda bad screen it's a great computer that can do a lot with a slim Linux, also I got it up to 14 hours of real battery life. If it isn't fast enough, especially if you are a Linux, there are so many ways to harness the computing power of another system somewhere on the network and make it seamless with scripting, there's no reason to lug around your main computer if you aren't a literal hobo. (for the prices people pay for sometimes busted Thinkpads, I don't think they're usually hobos)

There's a good point to be made that an old SoC/CPU is still good enough and if you knew me, you'd also know I'd be the first to say it, I'm by no means a member of the "buy-it-all-new-every-six-months" club, but especially power efficiency -which is one of the most if not the most important metric for a mobile IMO- is always improved in newer models and the watts-to-ips ratio always only gets better, not to even speak about more modern peripherals. Old Notebooks just aren't worth it if you have a choice.

But well, I have very specific and low computing requirements and YMMV.
The entire point of thinkpads isn't that they're even decent hardware. It's that they're fully usable without any proprietary software. Though "usable" becomes less and less true every day as they continue to age.
 
That makes it even worse imo if you have two different repositories for the same program because you know one is going to lag behind. I can imagine them backpedaling on this, though, if the snap version is really bad. It just sounds like putting more work in it than it needs to be. I can’t wrap my head around this dumb logic.
Supposedly one of the reasons is sandboxing, but the Firefox snap obviously has access to your home directory. If someone gets remote write access to your home directory you're completely fucked anyway.

If they had Firefox locked to one subdirectory then maaybe it would be useful.
 
Maybe what's going on here is that the system cannot decide which card is the one with direct output and tries to load both at once with the same priority. I think if I were to prove this I would need to first update grub with the card iommu info, reboot, install the nvidia drivers, create the vfio.conf file in modprobe, rebuild initramfs and reboot in that order (Writing this here just to remember), I think I will have a single shot at this or else the PC will be bricked in a different way. I'll give it a shot tomorrow, I'm too drunk today.
So, I did this random spurt of autism correctly and the persistence daemon still got stuck. By chance Amazon was restocking 6600's (Most likely clearing stock to make space for the 6650 XTs) and I sniped one at MSRP, so back to the plan of ditching Nvidia it is, it's gonna arrive in 20 days though.

Now on the subject of Thinkpads I think my disdain for them comes from the fact that I don't see the point of them? As Papa pizzeria points out the point of them was to use "free" hardware, specifically, I remember they started to get popular and preferred by some people due to the lack of Intel ME and AMD PSP on them. However as the older models have become scarce and expensive the models that I see everyone get are Thinkpads made by Lenovo with Intel core 2 duo or another processors of that era which not only have Intel ME 1.0 built into them but they also are vulnerable to Meltdown, Spectre and other shit like an undisclosed vulnerability with a rating of 10 in CVE.

These days I think it's better to get an ARM laptop or PC like the LIVA ECS models with rockchip or x86/x64 systems that don't have any apparent vulnerabilities or backdoors like my aforementioned wyse thin client or some atom processors. Given how old the IBM's without intel ME are you're likely gonna get the same performance on about a third of the space and cost you less than half brand new over an old thinkpad.
 
Jesus Christ.

Now, every new language — Rust, for example — comes with its own tools to manage these, and they don’t work nicely together with our old way. The sheer scale is overwhelming — for Rust alone, as I checked just now there are 81,541 such libraries. We can’t keep up with repackaging all of that into our own format, let alone that plus all of the other languages. We need to approach this differently in order to still provide a good solution to software developers.

I think a lot of that will need machine learning and automation … we’ll need to keep adjusting so we can provide the value that Linux distributions give users in trust, security and coherent integration at an exponential scale.

Don't worry folks, as long as cutting-edge technology expands just a little faster than our retardation, it's all good!

April 2025:
"Now Rust has over 100 billion libraries. We're going to need quantum computing to handle this."
 
Jesus Christ.



Don't worry folks, as long as cutting-edge technology expands just a little faster than our retardation, it's all good!

April 2025:
"Now Rust has over 100 billion libraries. We're going to need quantum computing to handle this."
Automation? Fine, every OS is sorely lacking test and people willing to automate and maintain them, especially Linux. Where the fuck does machine learning come from? I'm not trusting some fucking ML algorithm to patch the packages that come to my system.

Unfortunately the ship on packaging everything neatly for your distro has long sailed. Thank you, Python, Node and Rust trannies.
 
Any fellow Ubuntu users ever have an issue where your computer completely freezes but you can still move the mouse? Even the keyboard didn't work and I had to reboot twice.
 
I now finished my setup with a very basic but functional KISS linux install and everything more complicated shoved into root directories of various distros and ran sandboxed. No dockers, no flatpacks, just bwrap, sh scripts and onboard tools. If I wanna get rid of one of these containers, rm -r. bwrap doesn't even need suid, just user namespaces. I think that's the only way at this point. The downside is mostly HDD space and redundancy but we're talking here about a few GB extra at the very most, it really doesn't matter. Gentoo has become such a headache to maintain with these complicated softwares if you really wanted to keep control of what you actually had installed, and then there was a permanent fight with the distro maintainers I just couldn't be bothered anymore.

I like to keep on the most recent stable mainline, because that's where the driver improvments are. 5.17 recently introduced a bug where some Dell laptops wouldn't wake up anymore once put to sleep and you basically had to either disconnect the battery or had to wait until they ran out in sleep mode. Admittedly a pretty serious bug, if you are affected but by no means universal to the x86 experience of 5.17 and it also was fixed fairly quickly. What was the gentoo jannies solution? Mask all kernels starting from 5.4 for way too long - 5.4 doesn't even support my hardware properly. Of course I could easily revert that and was already past the official gentoo recommendation with 5.17 but shit like that is why I lost trust in them and second-guessed every newly pulled in package and changed use flag and generally enjoyed gentoo less.
 
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Anyone happen to know what the current state of analog video capture/digitization on Linux is?

Everyone who does it for a living seems to be oldheads who keep ancient Windows 7 or even XP systems around, and are still in the mindset that capturing video requires intense ricing, Virtualdub is the only viable capture program, and Windows is the only viable video-capture OS. But that all sounds like "magic beans" to me in Current Year. It seems to me that in theory ffmpeg should work fine assuming your capture device has some minimal level of driver support.
 
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