• 5 Posts
  • 258 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 23rd, 2022

help-circle




  • BaumGeist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlWhat distro do you use and why?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    10
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    18 days ago

    Debian. Because it’s the best about “Just Works” (yes, even moreso than Ubuntu, which I tried). It has broken once on me, and that was fixed by rolling back the kernel, then patched within the week.

    BUT I’m also not a “numbers go up” geek. I don’t give a shit about maxing out the benchmarks, and eking every last drop of performance out of the hardware; to me, that’s just a marketing gimmick so people associate dopamine with marginally improved spec numbers (that say nothing about longevity nor reliability).

    If you wanna waste something watching numbers go up, waste time playing cookie clicker, not money creating more e-waste so your Nvidia 4090 can burn through half a kilowatt of power to watch youtube in 8k.

    (/soapbox)

    My gpu is an nvidia 970 and my cpu is a 4th or 5th generation core i7. I just don’t play the latest games anyway, I’m a PatientGamer, and I don’t do multimedia stuff beyond simple meme edits in GIMP.

    It has plenty of power to run VMs, which I do use for my job and hobby, and I do coding as another hobby in NVIM (so I don’t have to deal with the performance penalty of MS Code or other big GUI IDEs).

    It all works fine, but one day I’ll upgrade (still a generation or two behind to get the best deals on used parts) and still not waste a ton of money on AAA games nor bleeding-edge DAWs




  • false dichotomy. Sometimes people justifiably dislike something for reasons beyond elitism (e.g. Canonical is a for-profit corporation that muddies the waters of FOSS), but it’s also not just playful bants.

    Also, as with every opinionated topic: do your own research and think critically. Don’t hate Ubuntu until you have tried it and have investigated those who maintain it. Don’t praise it until you do so either.

    I don’t care if you come to a different conclusion than me, as long as you didn’t just function on the “wisdom of the crowd”


  • BaumGeist@lemmy.mltoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlI love Rust
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    24
    ·
    edit-2
    18 days ago

    Implementing Equality in Haskell:

        deriving (Eq, Ord)
    

    After learning how easy it was to implement functional programming in Rust (it’s almost like the language requires it sometimes), I decided to go back and learn the one I had heard about the most.

    It opened my mind. Rust takes so many cues from Haskell, I don’t even know where to begin. Strong typing, immutable primitives, derived types, Sum types. Iterating and iterables, closures, and pattern matching are big in Haskell.

    I’m not saying Rust uses these because Graydon Hoare wanted a more C-like Haskell, but it is clear it took a lot of elements from the functional paradigm, and the implementations the designers were familiar with had descended through Haskell at some point.

    Also, deriving is not the same as implementing. One is letting the compiler make an educated guess about what you want to compare, the other is telling it specifically what you want to compare. You’re making, coincidentally, a bad comparison.


  • 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).




  • The point of security isn’t just protecting yourself from the threats you’re aware of. Maybe there’s a compromise in your distro’s password hashing, maybe your password sucks, maybe there’s a kernel compromise. Maybe the torrent client isn’t a direct route to root, but one step in a convoluted chain of attack. Maybe there are “zero days” that are only called such because the clear web hasn’t been made aware yet, but they’re floating around on the dark web already. Maybe your passwords get leaked by a flaw in Lemmy’s security.

    You don’t know how much you don’t know, so you should be implementing as much good security practices as you can. It’s called the “Swiss Cheese” model of security: you layer enough so that the holes in one layer are blocked by a different layer.

    Plus, keeping strong security measures in place for something that’s almost always internet connected is a good idea regardless of how cautious you think you’re being. It’s why modern web-browsers are basically their own VM inside your pc anymore, and it’s why torrent clients shouldn’t have access to anything besides the download/upload folders and whatever minimal set of network perms they need.







  • BaumGeist@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux middle ground?
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    Debian Testing has a lot more current packages, and is generally fairly stable. Debian Unstable is rolling release, and mostly a misnomer (but it is subject to massive changes at a moment’s notice).

    Fedora is like Debian Testing: a good middleground between current and stable.

    I hear lots of good things about Nix, but I still haven’t tried it. It seems to be the perfect blend of non-breaking and most up-to-date.

    I’ll just add to: don’t believe everything you hear. Distrowars result in rhetoric that’s way blown out of proportion. Arch isn’t breaking down more often than a cybertruck, and Debian isn’t so old that it yearns for the performance of Windows Vista.

    Arch breaks, so does anything that tries to push updates at the drop of a hat; it’s unlikely to brick your pc, and you’ll just need to reconfigure some settings.

    Debian is stable as its primary goal, this means the numbers don’t look as big on paper; for that you should be playing cookie clicker, instead of micromanaging the worlds’ most powerful web browser.

    Try things out for yourself and see what fits, anyone who says otherwise is just trying to program you into joining their culture war


  • It will cause a critical error during boot if the device isn’t given the nofail mount option, which is not included in the defaults option, and then fails to mount. For more details, look in the fstab(5) man page, and for even more detail, the mount(8) man page.

    Found that out for myself when not having my external harddrive enclosure turned on with a formatted drive in it caused the pc to boot into recovery mode (it was not the primary drive). I had just copy-pasted the options from my root partition, thinking I could take the shortcut instead of reading documentation.

    There’s probably other ways that a borked fstab can cause a fail to boot, but that’s just the one I know of from experience.