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Cake day: January 23rd, 2022

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  • When does Debian update a package? And how does it decide when to?

    These both can be answered in depth at Debian's releases page, but the short answer is:

    Debian developers work in a repo called "unstable" or "sid," and you can get those packages if you so desire. They will be the most up to date, but also the most likely to introduce breaking changes.

    When the devs decide these packages are "stable enough," (breaking changes are highly unlikely) they get moved into "testing" (the release candidate repo) where users can do QA for the community. Testing is the repo for the next version of debian.

    When the release cycle hits the ~1.5 year mark, debian maintainers introduce a series of incremental "freezes," whereby new versions of packages will slowly stop being accepted into the testing repo. You can see a table that explains each freeze milestone for Trixie (Debian 13) here.

    After all the freezes have gone into effect, Debian migrates the current Testing version (currently Trixie, Debian 13) into the new Stable, and downgrades the current stable version to old-stable. Then the cycle begins again

    As for upgrades to packages in the stable/old-stable repos: see the other comments here. The gist is that they will not accept any changes other than security patches and minor bug fixes, except for business critical software that cannot just be patched (e.g. firefox).





  • BaumGeist@lemmy.mltoComics@lemmy.mlCommunism
    ·
    2 months ago

    Fun Fact: Communism is actually an attainable goal within our lifetimes, but people would actually have to be open to confronting their biases against it (including hate for all its supporters)


  • I don't think we do, but that's a feature, not a bug. Here's why:

    1. There was a great post a few days ago about how Linux is a digital 3rd Space. It's about spending time cultivating the system and building a relationship with it, instead of expecting it to be transparent while you use it. This creates a positive relationship with your computer and OS, seeing it as more a labor of love than an impediment to being as productive as possible (the capitalist mindset).

    2. Nothing "just works." That's a marketing phrase. Windows and Mac only "just work" if the most you ever do is web-browsing and note-taking in notepad. Anything else and you incite cognitive dissonance: hold onto the delusion at the price of doing what you're trying to do, or accept that these systems aren't as good as their marketing? The same thread I mentioned earlier talked about how we give Linux more lenience because of the relationship we have with it, instead of seeing it as just a tool for productivity.

    3. Having a barrier of entry keeps general purpose communities like this from being flooded with off-topic discourse that achieves nothing. And no, I'm not just talking about the Yahoo Answers-level questions like "how to change volume Linux????" Think stuff like "What's the most stargender-friendly Linux distro?" and "How do we make Linux profitable?" and "what Linux distro would Daddy Trump use?" and "where my other Linux simping /pol/t*rds at (socialist Stallman****rs BTFO)???" Even if there is absolutely perfect moderation and you never see these posts directly, these people would still be coming in and finding ways that skirt the rules to inject this discourse into these communities; and instead of being dismissed as trolls, there would be many, many people who think we should hear them out (or at least defend their right to Free Speech).

    4. Finally, it already "just works" for the aforementioned note-taking and web-browsing. The only thing that's stopping more not so tech-savvy people is that it's not the de facto pre-installed OS on the PC you pick up from Best Buy (and not Walmart, because you want people to think you're tech-savvy, so you go to the place with a dedicated "geek squad"). The only way it starts combating Windows in this domain is by marketing agreements with mainstream hardware manufacturers (like Dell and HP); this means that the organization responsible for representing Linux would need the money to make such agreements... Which would mean turning it into a for-profit OS. Which would necessitate closing the source. Which would mean it just becomes another proprietary OS that stands for all that Linux is against.


  • You've defined yourself into an impossible bind: you want something extremely portable, universal but with a small disk imprint, and you want it to be general purpose and versatile.

    The problem is that to be universal and general purpose, you need a lot of libraries to interact with whatever type of systems you might have it on (and the peculiarities of each), and you need libraries that do whatever type of interactions with those systems that you specify.

    E.g. under-the-hood, python's open("<filename>", 'r') is a systemcall to the kernel. But is that Linux? BSD? Windows NT? Android? Mach?

    What if you want your script to run a CLI command in a subshell? Should it call "cmd"? or "sh"? or "powershell"? Okay, okay, now all you need it to do is show the contents of a file... But is the command "cat" or "type" or "Get-FileContents"?

    Or maybe you want to do more than simple read/write to files and string operations. Want to have graphics? That's a library. Want serialization for data? That's a library. Want to read from spreadsheets? That's a library. Want to parse XML? That's a library.

    So you're looking at a single binary that's several GBs in size, either as a standalone or a self-extracting installer.

    Okay, maybe you'll only ever need a small subset of libraries (basic arithmetic, string manipulation, and file ops, all on standard glibc gnu systems ofc), so it's not really "general purpose" anymore. So you find one that's small, but it doesn't completely fit your use case (for example, it can't parse uci config files); you find another that does what you need it to, but also way too much and has a huge footprint; you find that perfect medium and it has a small, niche userbase... so the documentation is meager and it's not easy to learn.

    At this point you realize that any language that's both easy to learn and powerful enough to manage all instances of some vague notion of "computer" will necessarily evolve to being general purpose. And being general purpose requires dependencies. And dependencies reduce portability.

    At this point your options are: make your own language and interpreter that does exactly what you want and nothing more (so all the dependencies can be compiled in), or decide which criteria you are willing to compromise on.


  • I've been running Debian stable on my decade-old desktop for about 3 years, and on my ideapad that's just as old for about 5. During that time I had an update break something only once, and it was the Nvidia driver what did it. A patch was released within a three days.

    Debian epitomizes OS transparency for me. Sure, I can still customize the hell out of it and turn it into a frankenix machine, but if I don't want to, I can be blissfully unaware of how my OS works, and focus only on important computing tasks (like mindlessly scrolling lemmy at 2 am).




  • BaumGeist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlQustions
    ·
    3 months ago

    I suggest reading through multiple answers despite everyone answering all your questions, this way you get the most complete answers. As such, here's my two cents:

    1. Yes, search for "Widgets" at Gnome's official website to see: https://extensions.gnome.org/

    2. Depends on what you mean by "problematic"? My laptop refused to go to sleep because of a setting in the wifi card, but once I changed it I haven't had any issues. You may also find that some of your hardware is nonstandard, and therefore requires extra steps during installation.

    3. What do you mean "minimum"? Because I installed Debian headless, and starting with nothing but a command-line and the system utilities and nothing else installed is what I heard, but maybe in your mind it just means a graphical desktop and nothing more. If you did mean that, you could try something like MATE for your desktop environment, or XFCE if you want to learn by customizing. If you're feeling really adventurous, use SwayWM

    4. Depends on how it came installed, but generally it's easy. Most of the time, starting out it will be as easy as running the uninstall command for whatever package management software installed it.

    5. "Rooting" a device refers to installing untrusted firmware on SoC devices. Unless your laptop is a chromebook, you probably don't need to worry about that. Dual-booting Windows and Linux won't stop Windows from updating, nor stop whatever application manages your firmware from working in Windows, if that's what you're worried about.

    6. It depends on your distro and its package manager(s). In Debian it's as easy as sudo apt install <Desktop Environment> and then logging out, changing which DE you're logging into, and then logging back in. Most are going to be that way

    7. Lazy answer: don't worry about it, and don't worry about it. If you're the type who wants their PC to "just work," it's behind-the-scenes stuff that will never apply to you. If you're prepared to get down in the weeds, occasionally break things, and customize every aspect of your OS, then you'll learn when it's relevant. If you're saying "Lazy question" and not showing that you already did some research on the topics, you're most likely in the former camp; this isn't a value judgment, just an observation.

    But, since we're all still nerds here regardless of what we're nerdy about, and since learning almost never hurts, I'll throw some vocab at you to get you started:

    Wayland is a specification of how software should display things on the screen, it's the generic blueprints of how Display Servers and their Clients should behave; Wayland is seeking to replace the X Window System specification, and specifically the popular Xorg Server implementation.

    Docker is a containerization platform (software ecosystem). Containers are essentially a small subset of Virtual Machines (or VMs) which are Guest operating systems that run within a separated off environment from your Host operating system. On Linux, features like namespaces, cgroups, and chroots are used to achieve this effect. Containers tend to use less hardware than Hypervisor-hosted VMs, but also tend to be single-purpose systems.


  • and when I visited the website, there was an open order for a PS5 with delivery to:

    After logging into Macy’s I got 43 emails at once to seven different services

    Did you manually navigate to Macys.com, or did you click a link in the email to "Macys.com"? Because it's a common phishing technique, they may have used your macys email and password to password spray every other website they could find it associated with when you "logged in." It's usually a page that's spoofed to look like a legitimate login page, which redirects you to the actual page once it records a login attempt.

    Also check HaveIBeenPwned.com, your email may show up in a few major beaches, which is enough for script kiddies to spray it across the entire net.







  • I'm a big fan of the idea of efficient computing, and I think we'd see more power savings at the End Users based on hardware. I don't need an intel i9-nteen50 and a Geforce 4090 to mindlessly ingest videos or browse lemmy. In fact, I could get away with that using less power than my phone uses; we really should move to the ARM model of low power cores suitable for most tasks and performance cores that only turn on when necessary. Pair that with less bloatware and you're getting maximum performance per instruction run.

    SoCs also have the benefit of power efficient GPU and memory, while standardizing hardware so programmers can optimize to the platform again instead of getting lost in APIs and driver bloat.

    The only downside is the difficulty of upgrading hardware, but CPUs (and GPUs) are basically blackboxes to the End User already and no one complains about not being able to upgrade just the L1 cache (or vram).

    Imagine a future where most end user MOBOs are essentially just a socket for a socketed-SoC standard, some m.2 ports, and of course the PCI slots (with the usual hardwired ports for peripherals). Desktops/laptops would generate less waste heat, computers would use less electricity, graphical software developement would be less of a fustercluck (imagine the manhours saved), there'd be less e-waste (imagine not needing a new mobo for the new chipset if you want to upgrade your cpu after 5 years), you'd be able to upgrade laptop PUs.

    Of course the actual implementation of such a standard would necessarily get fuckered by competing interests and people who only want to see the numbers go up (both profit-wise and performance-wise) and we'd be back where we are now... But a gal can dream.


  • Currently virt-manager on top of qemu/kvm on Debian 12. It was the easiest to get to emulate a TPM on my ancient hardware (9ish years old, but still powerful).

    I'm learning enough about the backend that I'm hoping to get off the Redhat maintained software and only use the qemu cli, maybe write my own monitor with rust-vmm when I learn enough rust to do so.


  • Take the passive-aggressive nerd approach:

    1. Start a niche online movement that only cares about one aspect of computing and convinces people all their problems are caused by your pet peeve

    2. let the company dig its grave

    3. create a FOSS alternative

    4. sell a premium version for businesses (it includes phone support and management-friendly marketing matetials)

    5. congrats, you are now the de facto standard software in your field




  • how do I install rpm fusion repos on debian? I only found instructions for fedora and rhel https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration

    Stop. You do not want to do this.. While resources published on other sites may be full of information, that information is not always relevant to you. Don't blindly follow bad advice.

    The "rpm" in "rpmfusion" refers to the filetype that Fedora's built-in package management system, dnf, uses.

    You want to use Debian's builtin package management system, apt, which uses the "deb" filetype.

    Here is an explanation of how to add Debian's "non-free" repository


    Do not follow information for other distros unless you know how to extract the bits that are relevant to your distro.

    In general, I recommend following the advice from Debian's wiki or website, then debian's forums if you can't find anything there, then debian specific forums elsewhere, then other distro's wikis, then any other site in a last-ditch effort.


    Now that you understand the "why," here's the "how": go back to Debian's download website and download the appropriate installation image from the bullet point that says

    A larger complete installation image:

    Reason being: the smaller "netinst" images are made to work generally for most people who can plug their computer into ethernet. It's made to only use the bare minimum of disk space and get the rest of the files it needs from the internet (the "net" in "netinst").

    You need the installation image that come with the "drivers" (firmware) for your WiFi card already on disk, which should automatically detect your device, find the correct firmware for it, and set up the non-free-firmware repository for you.

    If that doesn't work out for you, you can try manually installing using the guide on Debian's own wiki, which I found by searching for your wifi card BCM4360