Semperverus

I just wish bluesky had an app on F-Droid (preferably GPL3)

Where does this put Scott the Woz?

Auxio is excellent. Has the UI I’ve been looking for for ages, can shuffle by genre, great queue system, etc.

Only part i dont like is that it has an unskippable modal at startup where it scans your library instead of doing this as an invisible async step in the background and displaying what it has as it gets it.

For AMD, it’s literally just make sure mesa is installed (it is by default on most distros), make sure radv is installed (it is by default on most distros), and then go.

From there, if you are gaming, you handle whatever your games need like enabling 32-bit libraries for Steam if your distro doesn’t by default, or doing whatever WINE or Lutris wants you to do.

Done.

The story goes that around the time the AMD RX480 came out - or maybe a little after - AMD almost completely opensourced their GPU drivers on Linux.

They gave two offerings: amdgpu (open source) and amdgpu-pro (Closed source, included some extra features most people wouldn’t care about but some really do). Thus retiring the old radeon driver.

At first, the new drivers were decent, if slightly unstable.

AMD also provided a Vulkan driver by the name of amdvlk, which was good but the performance wasn’t very exciting.

Then Valve started contributing. They started providing a Vulkan driver for AMD cards that is better than AMD’s called RADV, which has since become the default and has been mainlined into mesa. Performance went through the roof.

I may be wrong but I think Valve may also contribute back to the amdgpu driver.

Wayland finally became a thing, and between AMD, Nvidia, and Intel, AMD was king in stability and performance in this arena. Especially on KDE, which had very early adoption of many important features long before Gnome had them - Mixed monitor scaling, Variable refresh rate, mixed monitor refresh rate, DRM modesetting for VR headsets, HDR monitor support, etc., in addition to a bunch of extra security features which some appreciate greatly and others find frustrating.

Over in Nvidia land, they were busy doing Nvidia things. And by Nvidia things, I mean doing nothing new.

Nvidia’s drivers mostly remained just as you remember them from 15 years ago, with the Nvidia config tool for X11 and so on. Their closed-source driver performance on Linux was good but not great.

Wayland threw a wrench in Nvidia’s gears. Nvidia tried to control the narrative by trying to force EGLStreams as the standard, several years after the community had settled on GBM as the standard (I won’t dive much into what those are - for now, you only need to know that they’re important in making Wayland work at all and affect performance, stability, and the ability to talk to the Wayland protocol). For a very long time, Nvidia card users were either unable to use Wayland, or had a very poor experience with it; experiencing stuttering, flashing or flickering screens, black boxes, and so on. This whole thing locked Nvidia users to the outdated X11 system which is missing a lot of modern features mentioned previously in the AMD section.

Some time later, Nvidia was hacked by a group called LAPSUS$, who among other things demanded that Nvidia fully open-source their drivers. They essentially got ahold of Nvidia’s code and said “Either you open-source it or we do.”

I forget exactly what Nvidia’s direct response to them was, but interestingly some time later, they opted to “open-source” their drivers by reducing the size of and wrapping the closed proprietary binaries in what the Linux community was calling an “open-source condom.” Effectively, we got drivers that behaved the way the Linux kernel expected, despite not being truly open source. A neat hat trick.

Something else happened, I think maybe more bits got open sourced, but as of recently there are now new open source Nvidia drivers as of driver version 555, called nvidia-open (not to be confused with nouveau open source community drivers), and you can now use Nvidia cards with 80-90% as much ease and performance as AMD users have on Linux. There is still some jank and rough edges that need to be smoothed out, but Nvidia is now part of the 21st century on Linux.

I personally would recommend avoiding Nvidia due to their history and how they treat their Linux customers, but if you already have an Nvidia card and don’t want to or can’t afford to switch, you can now use your card with relatively smooth and high performance on Linux - and use Wayland to boot.

I think it’s still valuable to document these things so that the users who insist on sticking with X11 can receive a healthy dose of this (replace diapers with vulnerabilities) when the proverbial shit hits the fan and it becomes as hackable as Windows XP

“My name, is Inigo Montoya. You kill my father. Prepare to die.”

Similarly, people who write “a 100%” to mean “a hundred percent.”

What they actually wrote winds up being “a one hundred percent.” The “one” doesn’t disappear by putting “a” in front of it. If you want to write a hundred, write “a hundred.” It’s what you’re supposed to do for smaller numbers in the English language anyway.

This isnt even a gay thing, this is a social and privacy/personal space issue. Don’t pick stalls that are far apart because “it’s gay,” do it because other people might feel uncomfortable being near other human beings period (might get stabbed or robbed, might get harassed, or might just have extreme social anxiety - the most likely) while their privates are exposed and they’re in the middle of something.

Unless there are huge dividers between each one. Then it doesnt matter as much.

I’m feeling Randy Pitchford out of 10

Then there are those of us who grew up in an era where usernames either didn’t matter or didn’t exist (depending on the platform), so you quickly became conditioned to just not reading their name let alone clicking into their whole account to see who they are. I am guilty of it, but people looking at your profile is creepy.

I know that on Reddit before I left, the only time I ever took a good hard look at someone else’s account is if they said something that made me so unbelievably angry that I had to look at everything else they said to find something to clap back with. By the time I would get partway through their post history, I would realize that I let a random stranger on the internet tilt me and then I’d calm down and feel stupid for a while before going back to my own business.

We are all strangers on the internet. Let’s keep it that way.

They would need to fix the SMS app first (lots and lots of bugs, not the least of which is that it likes to split MMS group chats up into separate 1 on 1 threads with every single participant as soon as you reply to the group)

winlator can run windows apps on android

Hey that sounds neat!

uses ubuntu as a base

Oh no…

MIT license

oh no

Have to install from github/no F-Droid build

oh no

You are clearly not the target audience then. There is a lot of extremely useful info in those model names.

This+Homeassistant web portal should make for a very nice little tablet-kiosk

We mostly use it like a regular coffee machine though, with the cups you can fill yourself. No DRM used here.

Only if you are a coffee snob who spends entirely too much on coffee machines. Its all relative.

Clean your keurig

It may also be my region. Its always been this way for me for at least the last 15 years or so.

Now, those squarepay terminals that suggest 30% tips or similar can eat rocks.

I dont think there is. There are, however, actual instant hot-water dispensers you can install as an extra sink faucet and they are amazing.