Bob Smith

I’ve been having fun with VoxeLibre lately on single-player mode. Nothing too fancy, gameplay is eerily similar to vanilla Minecraft. I’m looking forward to trying other games built on the engine that offer a bit more variation.

One nice thing is that the android version of Minetest is compatible with the PC version, so it is possible to sync save files and play on the go. It also seems to load faster than Minecraft does.

I owe myself a fresh install of freebsd on decent, well-supported hardware sometime. I end up shoving it on niche, constrained or old hardware to see if I can get better results than linux. One day, I’ll give it a real rundown on modern hardware.

When I played around with FreeBSD I was fascinated by Securelevels and file flags. I don’t have any real use for that functionality on the systems that I run, but I probably would’ve thought of something by now if it was a Linux feature.

I agree.

A part of me misses the days of dual-using a rock solid professional server OS for business and a cobbled-together similar OS for home computers and older hardware.

Cobbled-together became good enough. Then it became better in some cases. Then it became better in most cases. Now I haven’t bothered with a non-Linux for over half a decade.

I always assumed that a lot of this boils down to semantics and trademark law.

OpenIndiana is a direct code-line descendant of Unix System V through OpenSolaris via Solaris. Thank you for that, Sun Microsystems. I understand (but haven’t looked) that a lot of code these days is simply ported over from BSD or Linux. If you compare the source code to an old copy of the Lions book, you’re probably not going to see any line-by-line overlap. Thank goodness - we shouldn’t be literally running old operating systems from the '80s. I don’t think that OpenIndiana is Unix-certified by the Open Group (Trademark).

The BSDs started out as a sort of ‘Ship of Theseus’ rebuild of an academic-licensed copy of Unix around the time that AT&T was getting litigious and corporate Unixes (Unices?) were starting to Balkanize.

GNU/Linux started out as a work-alike (functions the same but with totally different code) inspired by MINIX, which in turn was an education-licensed Unix work-alike designed to show basic operating system principles to students. I think that one or more linux-based operating systems have obtained UNIX certification from the Open Group, just like Apple did for MacOS (paying money and passing some tests). It doesn’t seem like any of them are still paying to keep up the certification. Does it matter if they did at one point?

Going back to proprietary corporate Unixes, I believe that IBM AIX and HP-UX still exist as products. They started out as UNIX and have been developed continuously since then. They are both Certified Unix. By now, their codebases probably diverge substantially both from one another and from all of the Unix-likes. IBM also has a mainframe OS with a fascinating history that has nothing to do with UNIX. It is Certified Unix because it passes the right tests and IBM paid for certification. It is not UNIX code and doesn’t descend from UNIX code.

Simple as.

Realistically? For mainstream search? In anything like the top-level results that most people bother to read?

Nowadays, you need to pay Google more than the SEO companies do. Either that, or hope that people specifically search for lemmy posts as part of their search request.

I didn’t, but only because my solution wasn’t novel or generalized for other people. I made a script to fire up tmux on a ‘primary’ computer with key-based access to my other computers, load up a set of windows and panes, and ssh into each computer. One window would be computers in one section of my home, another window would be computers elsewhere. The only challenge was getting a baseline grasp of the tmux scripting syntax.

I initially set it up to run htop on each computer (dashboard goal, plus easy ability to terminate programs), but the basic setup was flexible. I could set other programs to run by default or and send terminal command updates to each computer from any device that could ssh into the primary computer. Automating updates on a computer-by-computer basis is a better solution, but the setup let me quickly oversee and interactively start multiple system updates at once, from a phone, tablet, or laptop.

About 90% of what I know about ssh, terminal multiplexing, scripting, and diagnostic programs grew from an optimization project.

I had a vague desire to build a one-stop dashboard where I could monitor, update, and control a half-dozen linux computers at once. It was just for fun, but it kept me reading through the manpages for weeks.

Something a bit more out-of-the-box: I used to run 64-bit linux on a 2,1 Macbook Pro. Similar specs, including the same RAM ceiling. The isos are a bit out of date, but you can always install one and then upgrade from there. https://mattgadient.com/linux-dvd-images-and-how-to-for-32-bit-efi-macs-late-2006-models/

At that price range, be sure to carefully check compatibility for your favorite distribution and for any hardware that you intend to use.

For what it’s worth, I have an old HP Stream 7 that currently runs Debian Bookworm. I think that it cost about $100 new. I can use it as a pdf reader and to sync files, but there are plenty of tradeoffs due to the 1gb of RAM, the weak Atom processor, the small amount of built-in storage, the mediocre touchscreen, and the general poor quality of touchscreen interfaces among low-resource window managers. Neither camera works and several distributions can’t support the built-in audio. Screen rotation is a crapshoot. Forget about low-power standby. Some of these issues are unique to my tablet, but some of them are problems that people tend to run into when they try to shoehorn linux into a tablet that wasn’t built with linux in mind. Something like a Pinetab would be a better bet.

I saw another person suggest an aftermarket Surface. If you go this route, carefully research the exact model number to verify that the hardware supports linux and that there is a clean way of installing your preferred distribution.

Another thing worth mentioning. Installing linux can be a special kind of hell. Most distributions don’t have a touchscreen-friendly installer. For my cheap tablet, this meant cobbling together a flash drive, a powered USB hub, a USB keyboard, a USB ethernet adapter, and a USB-OTG cable for the single micro-usb port on the tablet. Then, I had to race the decade-old tablet battery to the finish line during the install process. Plus something about a 32-bit EFI bootloader combined with a 64-bit processor.

I use a tiling WM for everything. Libreoffice, games, Firefox/Chromium, file managers, etc. It all works and it is a great way to handle multiple monitors.

One option is to convert to txt for any text-only epubs that you have. There are a ton of lightweight options if you’re willing to use format-shifted copies on your computer.

I use linux to run my law office, so it can be done. Most of what I use is web-based these days, so headaches are minor. That being typed, I’ve been using linux off and on since the 1990s, and there was a fair amount of learning involved. A few notes:

-Libreoffice is good enough for document drafting, unless you’re extremely reliant on templates generated in Word. Even then, that’s a few hours of clerical work that you can farm out with, presumably, no confidentiality issues to flag. Also bear in mind that if you end up using different Linux distributions on more than one computer, then you may run into minor formatting differences between different versions of your word processing software. Microsoft Office will be a reliable option unless you run windows as a virtual machine. There are workarounds, but they aren’t business ready.

-Some aspects of PDF authoring can be tricky if you’re doing discovery prep, redaction, and related tasks in-house. This is very workflow-specific, so if you’re not a litigator or your jurisdiction doesn’t have a lot of specific requirements for pdf submissions, it might not be something that you need to worry about. If it becomes a problem, then a Windows virtual machine might be a solution.

-Video support depends greatly on the linux distribution, so you may want to do a bit of research and avoid distributions like Fedora, where certain mainstream AV formats are not supported by default for philosophical/licensing reasons.

-Compatibility with co-counsel and clients will be hit or miss. I don’t let anything leave my office that hasn’t been converted to PDF and I only do collaboration when there is a special request to do so. I can fall back on a computer that I have which runs Office. It sounds like you have more than one computer, so you can have a backup plan.

-Hardware support is critical. If you need to videoconference and it turns out that your webcam doesn’t have a linux driver, then you may be hosed. Research and test on the front-end so that you don’t find yourself in an embarrassing situation of your own making.

-Learning curves cost money. If you’re using an entirely new set of user software AND you’re hopping between different distributions to find the version of linux that works for you, you’ll waste a LOT of time that you could be using to generate billable work.

I’ve used Ardour to capture keyboard midi input before. Not beginner-friendly, but it works if you want to play something, pick a soundfile, edit a flubbed note or two, and add it to a project.

Part of it is the same reason that Debian users bash Ubuntu or Mint users. Why use a derivative when the original works well?

That is a bit superficial, though. Debian isn’t ideal for everybody and neither is Arch. I’ve used Manjaro before. I like the installation process for general desktop use. Easy and straightforward. People who are used to graphical OS installers may be put off by Arch’s approach. I don’t distrohop personally and stick with Arch (btw), so OS installation is a one time headache for every device and archinstall is doable. I think the Arch installation process can be a sort of insider shibboleth for self-identifying linux badasses and a graphical install (for them) is missing the point of Arch. Whatever.

I saw a few posts on edditRay that critiqued the Manjaro team for failing to renew SSL certificates one or more times. That may have led to a perception that the team is not competent to run a distro, which seems like a very harsh position to take.

Also, Manjaro holds back updates from time to time for further testing/stability. This goes against the point of a rolling release distro to an extent, since you aren’t technically getting the very latest software. The tradeoff may make sense for you, though.

You can try copying over your dotfiles if you switch to Arch or Arco. That might be a good start for the overall layout. You might need to install any extra packages used by manjaro in addition to sway for icons, menus, power management, backgrounds, etc.

You could functionally accomplish something like this by setting the second drive as your /home partition. An advantage of this is that you can preserve your user files even if you end up wiping and reinstalling your OS, since your home directory would be on a totally different drive.

A few enemy tears are just fine in a gin martini, either directly or as an olive brine additive.

Getting the proot distro to output an x11 display to the vnc server seems to be a bit more challenging that I was hoping. If I can find a guide that helps me figure this out, I’ll post a link here.

Imteresting. I’ll give arch a try when I get a chance for a second data point.

Just be sure to install it from the F-Droid store. My understanding is that the google play version is no longer updated.