patatahooligan

joined 2 years ago
[–] patatahooligan 26 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My question: How do I actually physically notice the difference between these kernels?

Generally, you don't. You can look for some benchmark to try and find a difference between them, but if you don't notice a difference in your day to day tasks, then it's all the same. In my experience you should pick a kernel based on your desired experience. For my needs this is how the kernels differ:

  • Generic kernel: a sane default for most regular users
  • LTS: only makes sense if you're worried about regressions in the generic kernel causing issues, and only viable if you can afford to stay behind on hardware driver updates, ie you use old hardware and/or optimal performance is not required
  • Zen: sometimes better for gaming, but often indistinguishable from the generic kernel
  • Realtime: rarely what you want, it sounds "faster" but it's basically optimized for very specific use cases and if you're not among them you'll see the same or worse performance
[–] patatahooligan 5 points 1 month ago

I encrypt all my filesystems, boot partitions excluded. I started with my work laptop. It made the most sense because there is a real possibility that it gets lost or stolen at some point. But once I learned how simple encryption is, I just started doing it everywhere. It's probably not gonna come into play ever for my desktop, but it also doesn't really cost me anything to be extra safe.

[–] patatahooligan 58 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Who's gonna come at me with a $5 wrench because they really want my data, though? The attack I'm most likely to experience is someone stealing my laptop while I'm out traveling. That's what full filesystem encryption solves best.

[–] patatahooligan 1 points 1 month ago

Yes, Proton is primarily a Steam thing, but it's free software and it's being actively ported to other launchers as umu (not by Valve). The project is very new and I'm not sure it perfectly matches Proton behavior yet, at least as far as game-specific tweaks are concerned.

Personally, for a non-Steam game I would just try to run it via Lutris. Lutris tries to automatically setup everything so you don't need to tinker with anything in the best case. It even automatically downloads the game installer and wine, and you can configure it to use the aforementioned umu instead of vanilla wine. In the ideal case, you get the game installed and running with minimal effort all from within the Lutris client. The problem is that the Lutris scripts are maintained by the project itself with recommended corrections from the community. So it's possible that a game could run with tinkering, but it hasn't been automated yet.

[–] patatahooligan 13 points 1 month ago (3 children)

This wouldn't appear like this when upgrading the system with pacman. pacman does not automatically remove orphaned dependencies during upgrades. You have to query for them and remove them explicitly as a separate operation afterwards. So in the OP what we're seeing is the new versions of packages themselves getting smaller.

[–] patatahooligan 5 points 1 month ago

These are valid concerns but to me they sound more like lack of tooling rather than inherent disadvantages of immutable distros. Linux distros have not historically been designed from the ground up for immutability and it makes sense that there are issues that aren't handled optimally. Surely we can come up with clean and simple solutions to basic problems like setting up daemons and drivers if we work on it!

[–] patatahooligan 6 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Interesting. Mind sharing which compression algorithms you compare and how?

[–] patatahooligan 32 points 1 month ago (11 children)

Maybe it was good 10-20 years ago. What's it got to offer today? Why should we use a proprietary format when there are faster and more space-efficient open formats widely available today?

[–] patatahooligan 6 points 1 month ago

I'm using pipewire with easyeffects and they both work great.

For pipewire I've installed all the available compatibility layers: pipewire-pulse, pipewire-alsa, pipewire-jack, as well as every lib32 variant. Without all of these some apps would not work via pipewire.

As for easyeffects, depending on your distro and how you install it, you might need to install the plugins separately. Otherwise the app will open but it won't be able to actually apply any effects. First time I tried to use it I was confused about this.

[–] patatahooligan 3 points 1 month ago

SteamOS seems to not be counted at all in the first page. Apparently, it's not just "All OSs combined" vs "Linux only" but there are additional filters applied. Perhaps the first page is desktop-only. The article either also cares about desktop gaming specifically or is uncritically parroting the survey page. I think both Valve and the article writer should be clearer about what they're talking about.

[–] patatahooligan 68 points 1 month ago (5 children)

This is very obviously false. With the default filters with all OSs shown, Arch has 0.20% marketshare and Linux has a total of 2.29%. That means Arch is about 8.73% of all Linux systems in the survey. If you select the Linux only results, then SteamOS appears as its own entry, alongside a few others like Flatpak. We can see two things here:

  • SteamOS Holo is 36.47%. This was very clearly not counted as a part of Arch Linux in the all OSs tab.
  • Under these filters, Arch is even higher at 9.7%.

What's impressive here is not just the confidence with which you called the article dishonest and uninformed while not spending half a minute to check your false assumption, but also how many people upvoted you. This was trivial to prove wrong and in fact people have already done that below. Why are people so eager to believe the article is wrong that they will jump to agree with a blatantly wrong comment while having no knowledge of the situation themselves?

[–] patatahooligan 1 points 1 month ago

That's only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I'm having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

But even if you're right, that doesn't change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

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