https://youtube.com/watch?v=KRnno9VIZx0For whatever reason Louis is constantly subjected to the horrors of licensed paid proprietary software and his conclusion is never "maybe we should look for ethical free software alternatives"
In absolute fairness to Rossmann: he does utilise free software extensively; he wrote the FUTO self-hosted sovereign cloud guide, and it's almost entirely free software. Louis also spent tons of time specifically acquainting himself with regulation because he took it upon himself to stand up for Right to Repair. @Hey Johnny Bravo can personally attest to Rossmann being the reason why Massachusetts has any Right to Repair laws on the books at all. The issue is that after working with hammers for so long, every problem starts to look like a nail.
i forgot if i ever wrote about this on here but i have a particularly strange issue on artix linux where the mouse feels...off. i'll move it around but it feels like its lagging behind...
initially i believed it was the built in smoothing that most distros have ('acceleration') but turning it off did...nothing. ('off' being 'flat') - thus i've been using regular arch linux for a while now... is there a known fix for this? searching it up provided nothing.
for details:
gpu is an rx 9060xt 8gb,
cpu is an amd ryzen 5 7500f,
16gb ddr5 ram,
iso was xfce openrc stable.
add Option "SWCursor" "true" in /etc/X11/20-amdgpu.conf
restart
You're welcome.
For more info: this started happening to me in mid 2025 I think and pissed me off to no end.
You will notice you will have some SYN_DROPPED events in your X11 log whenever this happens. Dunno why it just appeared as an issue at some point and downgrading didn't even fix it. Beyond me.
In absolute fairness to Rossmann: he does utilise free software extensively; he wrote the FUTO self-hosted sovereign cloud guide, and it's almost entirely free software.
Louis also spent tons of time specifically acquainting himself with regulation because he took it upon himself to stand up for Right to Repair. @Hey Johnny Bravo can personally attest to Rossmann being the reason why Massachusetts has any Right to Repair laws on the books at all.
I understand that is the case. However, it always leaves out the other side of the equation, which is the consumer/user of these products and services. Quite often consumers will be hostile when asked why they didn't do their due diligence.
e.g. When I heard about John Deere tractors being difficult to repair, I knew they weren't the only tractor manufacturer. Why didn't farmers buy from another company that doesn't pull this BS? Nobody forced them to buy a particular model of tractor. These things are expensive. Why didn't they investigate this before purchase?
I understand that is the case. However, it always leaves out the other side of the equation, which is the consumer/user of these products and services. Quite often consumers will be hostile when asked why they didn't do their due diligence.
e.g. When I heard about John Deere tractors being difficult to repair, I knew they weren't the only tractor manufacturer. Why didn't farmers buy from another company that doesn't pull this BS? Nobody forced them to buy a particular model of tractor. These things are expensive. Why didn't they investigate this before purchase?
Chicken-egg problem. John Deere wasn't the only manufacturer of tractors like 20-30 years back, but industry consolidation is a bitch, and federal antitrust statutes haven't been touched since Standard Oil's dissolution.
It's not hard if you know the right path, the issue is the current documentation is just bad. I imagine Bluray rippers want to keep this hush-hush to justify selling 4K rips or hosting streaming sites that are raped by ads
I haven't had any issues with the documentation when I'm watching 4K Blurays, but I've never ripped 4K so I wouldn't know. I used Windows to flash the 4K firmware onto my blu-ray drive. I've talked about it in the Piracy thread. It's nice knowing there's a Linux flasher as well, though.
I was editing my last post for around 4 hours straight, making sure all the things I link actually work. While writing this, I was actively following the steps myself to see if any errors occured. (Sans the BD drive flashing, because I only have one BD drive).
Ripping/Burning
Directly from the source, for personal archiving only, of course!
CDs
Probably the most ripped media format in existence, and most OS' already come with software pre-installed to rip CDs to digital file formats....
This is correct. Louis actually did a video about this, but the only messaging that the opposition to Right to Repair in Massachusetts could muster was a creepy ad implying that women will get raped in empty parking garages if Right to Repair passes. They played it over and over.
This is correct. Louis actually did a video about this, but the only messaging that the opposition to Right to Repair in Massachusetts could muster was a creepy ad implying that women will get raped in empty parking garages if Right to Repair passes. They played it over and over.
Chicken-egg problem. John Deere wasn't the only manufacturer of tractors like 20-30 years back, but industry consolidation is a bitch, and federal antitrust statutes haven't been touched since Standard Oil's dissolution.
Maybe the tractors were a bad example, but take something more relevant to this discussion, like laptops or desktop computers.
There are machines offered with Linux or no OS options. There were options available all the way back in the mid-2000s that I was aware of and probably earlier, but I had people say to me, "Well, they are too expensive to buy," or "I can't get it in my country." (often untrue). When you are buying a niche product, the availability and price are obviously not going to be as good as mass-market options.
What they really mean is "I am not willing to put in the effort or spend the extra money to support the things I want to see." Which means it didn't matter that much to them in the first place.
i forgot if i ever wrote about this on here but i have a particularly strange issue on artix linux where the mouse feels...off. i'll move it around but it feels like its lagging behind...
initially i believed it was the built in smoothing that most distros have ('acceleration') but turning it off did...nothing. ('off' being 'flat') - thus i've been using regular arch linux for a while now... is there a known fix for this? searching it up provided nothing.
for details:
gpu is an rx 9060xt 8gb,
cpu is an amd ryzen 5 7500f,
16gb ddr5 ram,
iso was xfce openrc stable.
Is there a Linux or bad distribution that is basically designed for you to use emacs for everything? Like it’ll literally boot into emacs and you do all installation and computer maintenance through emacs?
Is there a Linux or bad distribution that is basically designed for you to use emacs for everything? Like it’ll literally boot into emacs and you do all installation and computer maintenance through emacs?
I know (hope?) you're joking, but yes, there is. "Emacs X Window Manager (EXWM)." I'm not insane or autistic enough to attempt it personally, so I leaned on Grok a bit for details. It suggests Arch, Debian, Ubuntu and NixOS all have comprehensive tutorials, with Arch being the most-frequently recommended.
Not quite "boot straight into EMACS" but it's basically "log into EMACS and do literally fucking everything in/with it anyway, including window management," which is about as close as you can get without reimplementing literally everything from scratch ... which a few batshit insane people have also done:
Is there a Linux or bad distribution that is basically designed for you to use emacs for everything? Like it’ll literally boot into emacs and you do all installation and computer maintenance through emacs?
GNU guix seems to be the answer for that
Basically your OS configuration is nix but it uses scheme which makes configuring your OS a lot like configurint Emacs.
it comes with emacs preinstalled and the repos have Emacs equivalents for many things so you can manage your Emacs packages through guix kind of like on Gentoo.
Two of the de options for guix during install is exwm and ratpoison which are both wms designed around Emacs
I did some ai search too and there's also Wayland Emacs compositor called ewm but it's rust, though if you're using Wayland I'd imagine you're not a rust hater
GNU guix seems to be the answer for that
Basically your OS configuration is nix but it uses scheme which makes configuring your OS a lot like configurint Emacs.
it comes with emacs preinstalled and the repos have Emacs equivalents for many things so you can manage your Emacs packages through guix kind of like on Gentoo.
Two of the de options for guix during install is exwm and ratpoison which are both wms designed around Emacs
I did some ai search too and there's also Wayland Emacs compositor called ewm but it's rust, though if you're using Wayland I'd imagine you're not a rust hater
Absolutely go for it dawg. EXWM works with frameworks like Doom or Spacemacs if you want vim keybinds and a more "complete" experience out of the box, which I can highly recommend as a starting point for Emacs. Getting to shed the framework later on and move to an Emacs config that is truly yours, especially on Guix where you have a bunch of Guix Home services that can extent Emacs even further, is really, really fun. I took a look at the Wayland EWM version and it looks pretty neat, its kind of like Niri's entire backend wearing EXWM for a face.
Absolutely go for it dawg. EXWM works with frameworks like Doom or Spacemacs if you want vim keybinds and a more "complete" experience out of the box, which I can highly recommend as a starting point for Emacs. Getting to shed the framework later on and move to an Emacs config that is truly yours, especially on Guix where you have a bunch of Guix Home services that can extent Emacs even further, is really, really fun. I took a look at the Wayland EWM version and it looks pretty neat, its kind of like Niri's entire backend wearing EXWM for a face.
One question that bothered me for a while on Linux was why there seemed to be such an inconsistency in how the taskbar displayed feedback of various progression that the software was doing. Before I looked into it, it seemed very random as to which apps did it, like Firefox when downloading and Elisa for music playback, and which apps did not (i.e most others). I decided to fetch the source for Elisa and look into it so I could patch Audacity and Audacious to do the same thing.
Turns out Elisa does this by using D-Bus to emit progress like playback through an API and then Plasma uses that information to render it onto the taskbar via the protocols borrowed from the old Unity Launcher API of all things. For Audacious implementing this was pretty simple, as it shares a D-Bus interface called MPRIS with Elisa which exposes various media controls of the software itself, including playback. So all I had to do was largely copy what Elisa did. Audacity on the other hand was different, as it does not have MPRIS. Because of that I decided to use the GIO D-Bus and then emit the playback progress based on Audacity's existing PlaybackScroller::OnTimer() callback instead.
The ability to both learn from & modify any project to suit your own needs is increasingly one of the things I like the most about using free software.
One thing I want to recommend for anyone in the thread that want to build, modify, and compile software is to use ccache. It's a a compiler wrapper that stores on disk the compiled binaries and offers them back to speed up any eventual recompilation of the same code. Before I wrote patches I thought recompiling software all the time would be a PITA but I've found that with ccache it really isn't. After the first build every subsequent build only takes a few seconds, the only caveat being that anything new/edited that you've patched needs to be compiled for the first time again, but everything else is often cached so its not a big deal. My build of Audacity for example took a few seconds despite adding a whole new feature. This has made this type of patch workflow much more convenient for me. - I know that some caution against ccache, particularily the Gentoo wiki, but I haven't had any issues with it yet.
x 8 
