I get conventional mail marked up like it is from the manufacturer claiming my warranty is expiring.

With the added fun bonus that all the things they claim to cover are engine related, and my car is an EV with no engine.

“This hardware works fine and even has compatible software that it works great with. But I’m going to prefer the broken software for other reasons. And that means it’s the hardware’s fault.”

Software that is built to be compatible with a wide variety of hardware should be compatible with a wide variety of hardware.

If software can’t handle a 16.5:16 aspect ratio, then that’s bad software. I don’t care how weird of a niche thing that is… just make your software abstract enough to handle those cases.

It’s 2024, any resolution/aspect ratio/DPI combo should be supportable. There’s enough variety of monitors out there that we should have a solution for handling things on the fly without needing to have a predefined solution.

The archinstall script has a list of “profiles” that you can select from (custom, desktop, minimal, server, tailored, xorg)… And if you select “desktop” it will prompt you which DE or WM you want to install. (awesome, bspwm, budgie, cinnamon, cosmic, cutiefish, deepin, enlightment, gnome, hyprland, i3, lxqt, mate, plasma, qtile, sway, xfce4).

By the time you’re done with the archinstall script, you basically have a fully functioning arch (ive never used the script seriously, so I have no idea what all remains not set up doing this).

The main difference between Arch and Ubuntu in this regard, is that if you want to run KDE Plasma, you download the common Arch ISO, and select Plasma at installation time. Compared to Ubuntu where you would download the “Kubuntu” spin, so you are selecting Plasma when you acquire the ISO in the first place.

There is no “default” arch DE, so when you install Arch, there is a lot of decisions to make (and you may not know how to make those decisions if its your first distro), whereas Ubuntu makes a lot of decisions for you, so you have to answer no questions to get set up (but you may be set up in a way you weren’t expecting). In this regard, Arch really does just feel like building a PC from parts, you just have to pick all the parts. Ubuntu is more like buying a pre-built.

The “start button” is the kde plasma logo. So this would be Linux of some sort (makes sense given the community and what OP has said) and not windows

The question is just whether OP is using steamOS that comes on the deck (and uses KDE plasma for desktop mode) or if they have installed a different distro that fits the desktop use case a bit better.

Should they? Yes. They should also be searching for previous bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people do. But if you have enough users, even if 1% of people don’t use good reporting behaviors, you wind up with a lot of duplicate or bad reports.

There are plenty of blog posts out there that basically can be summarized as talking about how grueling open source work can be because users are often aggressive in their demands.

But this is a prime example of debian “stable” doesn’t mean “no crashes” but instead it means “unchanging, which means any bugs and crashes will remain for the whole release”

Except this isn’t true at all.

https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/CVE-2024-6387

Regresshion impacted bookworm and trixie both. Buster was too old.

With the downside of me doing an apt update and seeing that openssh-server was on 1:9.2p1-2+deb12u3 and I had no idea at a glance if this included the fix or not (qualys’s page states version 8.5p1-9.8p1 were vulnerable).

If you are running debian bookworm or trixie, you absolutely should update your openssh-server package.

Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.

They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying “this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year”. Debian didn’t want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.

my rant was not about your meme. But people actually use this argument seriously, and that frustrates me.

And I will admit that learning a new system has a time cost, but once you reach experience parity, the time cost per problem is less, and the number of problems is less. In that way, the “time spent” is an investment rather than wasted.

So A+ meme, it triggered me in all the ways it was supposed to.

Don’t have to spend time troubleshooting if you just never fix the BSOD and just kinda live with it. Point for windows

The thing I hate about the “value your time” argument is that windows is shit.

Let’s be generous for a minute and assume that windows and linux have the same amount of problems. Someone who is on windows for the past 30 years has 30 years of acquired knowledge and will probably know quickly how to solve it on windows, but not linux. Someone who is on linux for the past 30 years has 30 years of acquired knowledge and will probably know quickly how to solve it on linux, but not windows.

So the entire argument is just “but I have muscle memory tied to windows, and I already know how to solve those problems, but I dont know how to solve the linux ones, so they take me a lot of research and time to solve, therefore all linux problems always take a lot more time to solve”

On windows, I have to spend time fighting BSODs and finding out where to download software from that isn’t just bloated up with viruses, and how to run registry hacks to get rid of start menu ads and to stop microsoft from phoning home. None of those things i have to do on linux.

On linux, today my biggest issue was figuring out how to change the keybinding for taking a screenshot… And that was an easy issue, but it’s also not even possible on windows.

So I guess different types of problems. My “wasted” time is customizing my OS/environment so it works the way I want it to, not trying to fight back any ounce of control.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/8/24152137/xbox-hi-fi-rush-tango-gameworks-matt-booty

Oh i know. microsoft should buy tango gameworks! Brilliant. solved their problems for them.

All Microsoft needs is a few award winning small dev studios…

I have a few cheap TLDs because as an individual I didn’t want to pay a lot of money for the dot com versions. But I’m not a company.

You’re right. There are multiple definitions of the word stable, and “unchanging” is a valid one of them.

It’s just that every where else I’ve seen it in computing, it refers to a build of something being not-crashy enough to actually ship. “Can’t be knocked over” sort of stability. And everyone I’ve ever talked to outside of Lemmy has assumed that was what “stable” meant to Debian. but it doesn’t. It just means “versions won’t change so you won’t have version compatibility issues, but you’ll also be left with several month to year old software that wasn’t even up to date when this version released, but at least you don’t have to think about the compatibility issues!”

Debian aims for rock solid stability

To be clear, Debian “stability” refers to “unchanging packages”, not “doesn’t crash.” Debian would rather ship a known bug for a year than update the package if it’s not explicitly a security bug (and then only certain packages).

So if you have a crash in Debian, you will always have that crash until the next version of debian a year or so from now. That’s not what I’d consider “stable” but rather “consistent”

IMO it doesn’t matter. People don’t read news on updates. Should they? Yes. Do they? No. Should they have to? Also no.

Linus’s point is to never blame the end user for something the kernel changed. If you want software to have widespread adoption, adding homework to simple updates isn’t how you do it. People don’t want a hobby or something to babysit, they want an operating system. Debian will go out of their way to make in-release updates go as smooth as possible, but are willing to through out entire parts of functioning packages between releases.

But this isn’t even about breaking things for the end user. This will create excessive amounts of noise on the upstream repo. People will say “Hey! My keepassxc broke!” and they report it to keepassxc, and not to Debian. To which keepassxc just has to constantly reply “no, debian changed this on you, this is not a bug.” If Debian had to deal with the fall out of their own decisions, I would say “yeah, im not sure if i agree with the decision, but oh well”… But they are increasing the workload for other teams.

It is already happening. The debian dev’s stance is “This will be painful for a year.” But it will be painful for keepassxc, NOT debian. The keepassxc devs asked them to not do this. Debian’s response might as well be “Im inflicting this pain on you, even though you’ve asked me not to. But on the plus side, it won’t hurt me at all and it will only last a year for you.” If they really have that much disdain for the project, they should just stop packaging it altogether.

So yeah, debian has the legal right to do whatever they want because keepassxc is open source. but “just because I can, and you cant legally stop me, and its extra work for you, not me” is kind of a jerk move. This is what drives FOSS contributors to get burnt out and abandon otherwise good projects.

It’ll also break all your keepassxc plugins soon. Because debian version to version compatibility is not a priority. They also don’t care if them breaking something triggers a ton of upstream bug reports, because it will only “be painful for a year”

Linus for the kernel has a strict “don’t break userspace” policy, and Debian has a “break things whenever you want, and just blame the user for not reading the news file” policy.

Definitely make sure you think through all the physical security implications of having your house automatically unlock in any scenario.

Have the house auto unlock when getting home on a bicycle, sounds convenient until, as you point out, they could get stolen and now the thief has a convenient way to unlock your house. So you would not want that.

You would definitely not want the house to STAY unlocked when something like a tag is in range. If your kid is home alone, you want them to be able to re-lock the house (or in general, you want to be able to lock your house while the kid is home).

Whatever solution you wind up with, you are going to be trading physical security for ease of use (and complicated fun task). Be safe. Make sure the tradeoffs are actually thought through and worth it.

Hard to unlock the house based on media playing if the kid is outside though.

Oh look. Debian changed the keepassxc package and now the keepassxc repo is getting all the bug reports for it. Their stance is “it will go away in a year or so”

Regardless of whether or not it is a good idea, it’s undeniable that Debian makes a lot of decisions that negatively impact their upstream. And since it’s someone else’s problem, oh well.

There is a reason upstream repo maintainers wind up angry about problems that someone else caused.