The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

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I think that's just how modern browsers are, they're relentless on disk I/O. For example, my system SSD's like to wear out, and usually I thought that it was just Windows being Windows. But then I used NirSoft's AppReadWriteCounter and found out that Vivaldi was being merciless on disk I/O while every other process, including system ones were nowhere near that. After moving the profile folder to the secondary SSD and symlinking it back, I managed to get the first sign of wearout on it ever since I bought it. Hell, if you look at the screenshot of the software, you can see that Chrome and Firefox are the biggest outliers, and trust me when I say that that screenshot only represents maybe a minute of R/W monitoring.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
hey @GNU Abyss, @prollyanotherlurker, and @teriyakiburns

Found exactly what is going on, after I used fatrace in Terminal. That mysterious ~20 MB writing happened, and a bunch of this showed:

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.cache/mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/safebrowsing-updating/google4/goog-phish-proto-1.vlpset

So what is that and how do I stop it? BTW, that "safebrowsing-updating" folder does not show up in that file viewer of the OS somehow.

edit:

Oh yeah, also even with caching disabled, if I watch a YT vid, a bunch of this crap-o-rama shows up in the Terminal output of fatrace:

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/storage/private/[some code].sqlite-wal

and

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/storage/private/[some code]/cache/caches.sqlite-wal

edit again:

It looks like that mysterious ~20 MB of writes are a constantly updating blacklist of bad sites -- which would explain why the free space on the drive doesn't change and why it only happens when online, so disabling it may increase the risks of running into a malware site. That said, disabling that could be with going to about:config, looking up "safebrowsing", and setting the "download" related settings to false. But again -- and especially on Windows -- this could mean the increased risk of going to a bad website.

I still dunno how to stop the YT caching BS though.
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If you really don't want to visit bad websites, you can use DNS blocklists instead of Safe Browsing. Here's an example. As for caching, you likely can't. Youtube makes a lot of requests in the background and keeps shit stored as part of its telemetry.

The Saltening said:
can someone explain to me what the fuck gpgme and gpgmepp are. because I tried to run updates today and those two packages are conflicting but also gpgmepp depends on gpgme....
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Does pacman specifically mention these two conflicting? Try running it in verbose mode and see what else it has to say.
 
GNU Abyss said:
If you really don't want to visit bad websites, you can use DNS blocklists instead of Safe Browsing.
Click to expand...
Does uBlock block malware sites as well?

GNU Abyss said:
As for caching, you likely can't.
Click to expand...
I guess the best solution with YT is to not use YT. At least I got the caching reduced to a few MB at most. Can not imagine how bad YT would be with browser caching enabled.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
hey @GNU Abyss, @prollyanotherlurker, and @teriyakiburns

Found exactly what is going on, after I used fatrace in Terminal. That mysterious ~20 MB writing happened, and a bunch of this showed:

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.cache/mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/safebrowsing-updating/google4/goog-phish-proto-1.vlpset

So what is that and how do I stop it? BTW, that "safebrowsing-updating" folder does not show up in that file viewer of the OS somehow.

edit:

Oh yeah, also even with caching disabled, if I watch a YT vid, a bunch of this crap-o-rama shows up in the Terminal output of fatrace:

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/storage/private/[some code].sqlite-wal

and

/home/[ToroidalBoat]/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/storage/private/[some code]/cache/caches.sqlite-wal

edit again:

It looks like that mysterious ~20 MB of writes are a constantly updating blacklist of bad sites -- which would explain why the free space on the drive doesn't change and why it only happens when online, so disabling it may increase the risks of running into a malware site. That said, disabling that could be with going to about:config, looking up "safebrowsing", and setting the "download" related settings to false. But again -- and especially on Windows -- this could mean the increased risk of going to a bad website.

I still dunno how to stop the YT caching BS though.
Click to expand...
Are you running this on windows? I mean, I assumed it was linux, but maybe you mentioned it a while back and I forgot or didn't notice. I mean, the /home/username is obviously linux/unix. So I really wouldn't worry much about if it is going to effect winows.

Anyway. I usually disable safe browsing anyway. Mostly out of my dislike , and distrust for google.

Definitely not a substitute or really, doing the same thing, but I recommend enabling https only mode. And just using common sense with the actual sites you visit, and links you click.

the dns block lists is also a good idea. You can even skip a bit of extra effort and enable a dns in your browser than does filtering, without having to even edit your /etc/hosts. Though you will obviously get a lot more control if you are actually setting up a blocklist.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Does uBlock block malware sites as well?
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I think you can put entire DNS blocklists in ublock and it will work. Google telemetry and browser caching aside, you may be interested in using a DNS provider that is automatically managed to block malicious domains. For example, you could set your DNS up to be 9.9.9.9 (quad9) and chances are decent your computer would never interact with a known malicious domain.

Your browser may handle DNS independent of the rest of your computer, so check the DNS setting of your browser if you do this.
 
Another ~20 MB write.

Must be some other setting. So I need to know how to disable "safebrowsing" entirely. Not just the mode, but the endless auto-updates.

edit:

I think it may be as simple as going to about:preferences and disabling "Block dangerous and deceptive content"?

(but could also be disabling the download-related preferences mentioned earlier)

ToroidalBoat said:
It looks like that mysterious ~20 MB of writes are a constantly updating blacklist of bad sites -- which would explain why the free space on the drive doesn't change and why it only happens when online, so disabling it may increase the risks of running into a malware site. That said, disabling that could be with going to about:config, looking up "safebrowsing", and setting the "download" related settings to false. But again -- and especially on Windows -- this could mean the increased risk of going to a bad website.
Click to expand...
 
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Betonhaus said:
I'm not sure, how much work would it actually be to implement HDR or whatever the really noteable features of Wayland into X11?
Click to expand...
Basic HDR support isn't hard. It's just reading monitor EDID and setting a linux drm api property value. The harder part is if you aren't playing a game/video in fullscreen and have to tonemap non-hdr content to the same range so it doesn't look weird. Since X11 has external compositors so that would have to be implemented in the compositors.
Fcret said:
Wayland has big money behind it - not just Red Hat/IBM but also Valve, AMD, Intel, and Nvidia now. The speed at which Wayland development has accelerated recently is a pretty good indication that it'll probably outpace X11 within a year or two.

Also I don't think it's really a conspiracy. The creators of the X11 protocol (who were the leads for xorg) have stated that, at the very least, X11 as a protocol is too fragmented and too rooted in 1980s assumptions about computing to really continue development. New functionality is difficult to implement due to the mountains of tech debt that have accrued over the last 30 or so years. Wayland is not a perfect successor, but it's better for 90% of users and ultimately development is always going to go where the users are.

In an ideal world, both X11 and Wayland would continue development but developers are expensive and you have to prioritize what you can get funding and support for.
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I dont know where this meme came from. When you run modern graphical applications X11 works pretty much exactly the same way as Wayland does, even using the same linux drm api and mesa gbm. It's not hard to add new functionality, Xorg code is actually pretty clean.
 
1749211586120.webp




AMDbros are on a roll lately.
 
This guy is great.
1749214043361.webp

EDIT:
1749214387169.webp

Oh I fully expect the FD trannies to start social media gayops now.
 
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They're already raging on reddit, so expect the discord trannies to have fired up the war machine by end of day.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Can you disable caching with that?
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No idea, it's Chromium but the point I was making was that modern browsers, by default, rape your drives.
ToroidalBoat said:
What kind of sign?
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The good ol' CrystalDiskInfo heart attack sound effect. Will it be an SSD wear notification? Or will it be a HDD bad sector notification?
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Every SSD has a set TBW lifespan limit, and the health status percentage represents that. My previous system SSD wore down to the 80's, my current system SSD is at 95%, and what you see here is that secondary SSD I use for games, software and file storage, that before the profile move was still at 100%.
 
Slav Power said:
My previous system SSD wore down to the 80's
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Is this percentage the number of cells that have not yet been been worn out to almost nothing, or does that CrystalDiskInfo thing consider a cell that has only 20% wear bad?

BTW I use a similar tool to CrystalDiskInfo: sudo smartctl -A /dev/[name of drive].

modern browsers, by default, rape your drives
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And that can be quite infuriating.

ToroidalBoat said:
I do not like how Current Year web browsers are designed to wear out SSDs with caching this and updating that. Also, YouTube still caches crap even if you specify no caching in preferences. And preferences which should be in GUI menus -- and back in '00s before Current Year were in GUI menus -- are instead hidden in about:config as cryptic codes.
Click to expand...
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Is this percentage the number of cells that have not yet been been worn out to almost nothing, or does that CrystalDiskInfo thing consider a cell that has only 20% wear bad?
Click to expand...
It's a SMART statistic, on the system SSD it's CA: Lifetime Remaining, and on the secondary it's 05: Percentage Used. CDI just takes it to show the percentage and yell at you if it detects that it changed, so you could probably write a Bash script to throw into Cron to periodically compare the latest value to the last read one to then do whatever you want to do when it changes.
 
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