Arch Linux. Everyone said it was hard to use, unstable, etc. but my experience with it has been the exact opposite.

Yes, the install process is needlessly complicated (although it got a lot simpler now that we have archinstall), but the OS itself is rock solid and rarely has any issues that require more than a reboot or a package reinstall to solve. The AUR is a godsend too if you don’t want or don’t know how to compile stuff from source.

I already had a script on the router that I used to notify me of network outages, IP changes, keep the DDNS updated, etc. and I thought it was easier to just add a couple lines to that

The jitsi user is a system user so it can’t login even if you set a key for it. Besides, I wouldn’t risk it anyway since that user is in the docker group, if it gets compromised somehow, the attacker would have very high privileges.

I think this one beats them all.

My home server keeps a few services up, including an instance of Jitsi Meet. The server runs nixos and the nixos package for jitsi is incomplete to say the least and doesn’t even support authentication, so I use the docker-compose version and I have a script that runs periodically to keep it updated. So far so good, right? Well, no.

Because the server is at home, I have a dynamic external IP address, so I have to use a DDNS provider, but jitsi doesn’t expect this and uses a stun server at startup to determine the public IP of the server once, so if my connection goes down or is restarted and the IP changes, jitsi needs to be restarted or it won’t work anymore.

The solution?

• My router runs OpenWrt, so I am able to run a script that checks for external IP changes. When a change is detected, it uses SSH to connect to my server to restart jitsi
• Because I don’t want the router to just be able to run any command, I created a jitsi-restart user that has no shell
• When the router tries to log in with its pubkey, sshd creates a file called restartasap in the jitsi folder and closes the connection
• On the server, there’s a systemd unit running a script as the jitsi user that periodically checks for that file, and if it exists it deletes it and restarts jitsi

I’ve been running this setup since mid 2020 and I expect this to continue until IPv6 becomes the norm.

I switched for good in 2019, when I realized that I was wasting more time getting windows into a usable state than the average arch user.

Privacy and usability were the biggest reasons for me.

Good idea, I’ll add it to the to-do list for the next major release.

Occasionally some cloud providers or ISPs chime in and offer their servers to the public. If you have an LS server, you can submit it here: https://librespeed.org/submit

I’m the author of the project. The servers are simply overloaded af unfortunately. It’s a fairly popular project and we don’t have enough servers to support this many concurrent users.

It doesn’t need javascript from “20 different domains”, only a file called empty.php is fetched from those servers to measure the ping. The javascript is hosted on librespeed.org, which is under my control.

Hi, I’m the original author of LibreSpeed. When you load the website it downloads a list of servers and tries all of them to see which one has the lowest ping, that’s what you’re seeing.

It means it’s what we in the trade call “a nothingburger”. On Windows you need to explicitly install a malicious driver (which in turn requires to you to disable signature verification), on Linux you’d have to load a malicious kernel module (which requires pasting commands as root, and it would probably be proprietary since it has malware to hide and as every nvidia user knows, proprietary kernel modules break with kernel updates)

Framework is not a FOSS project, it’s not a charity or a non-profit organization, it’s a company. Would you volunteer to work for free at your job?

Nah mate, 2022 was when it started getting really good, GPL got rid of shader compilation stuttering (as well as dxvk-async related glitches), compatibility improved massively with improvements to both dxvk and vkd3d, and ray tracing finally started working

Ok, I had no idea they were the first to do that lootbox shite, I’m not into multiplayer games. That could be considered worse than allowing third party DRMs, since it pretty much introduced kids to gambling.

That has to be one of the dumbest articles I’ve read in a while.

While I personally use Steam very rarely (I prefer to use DRM-free versions of games), Steam has done very little to be considered on its way towards enshittification.

The macos situation is completely irrelevant because at this point its market share on steam is lower than linux and it makes no sense for them to invest only to be constantly screwed over by apple changing things on their platforms. My guess is it will be dropped within the next 3-5 years.

The author points out the deprecation of Steam on older platforms, but fails to mention the fact that this wasn’t always their choice, for instance the recent drop of Windows 7 support was caused by the fact that there’s an embedded chromium browser in it and google dropped support for Windows 7 around that time. A similar situation happened for Windows XP, which was dropped in 2019, a full FIVE years after Microsoft dropped support for it, and at this time Steam on XP was only used for retrogaming, it made no sense to keep supporting it, there are better ways to get old games on XP.

There’s barely a mention of all the good things that Valve has done for Linux gaming, but the article complains about Steam being 32 bit (which is still a requirement for wine to run, at least until the new wow64 mode becomes stable, and steam comes with its steam runtime specifically to avoid distro compatibility issues); they could have made proton only work with steam, they could have made their dxvk and vkd3d forks proprietary like nvidia did, but instead it’s all open source and very easy to build on all platforms and I use my own fork every day to play games without steam. Heck, there are even competitors for the steam deck that run proton.

Also, can we mention the fact that Steam has not turned into yet another subscription service like some of its competitors?

If I had to point at something that Steam absolutely did wrong, I’d say it’s allowing third party DRMs on the store, it’s a consistent source of issues, especially for old games. I understand that when they made the choice we didn’t have cancer like kernel level anticheat and denuvo, but still, Steam launching a launcher launching another launcher that launches the game is a trashy gaming experience and adds points of failure as we’ve already seen several times when big titles launch and their DRM servers go down, or when games get old and the DRM servers are shut down permanently.

While I’m sure Steam will eventually become enshittified, I don’t see that happening any time soon, maybe after Gabe retires, and that’s why you should keep a collection of DRM free games on your drives and not rely solely on Steam and other stores.

Just my opinion of course, feel free to disagree.

I know, I know :)

I reported the bugs I’ve encountered but I don’t have time to install another distro right now. I’ve seen some of those bugs (scaling) on the KDE neon live iso though.

I’ve been using it since Plasma 6 came out so about 3-4 weeks.

Overall, it’s been a very negative experience for me. The main problems have been:

• Random scaling issues in apps: some apps show a slightly smaller cursor, other show a poorly upscaled one, others have random rendering issues like lines remaining on the screen after an option is no longer highlighted (gimp, libreoffice, many others), some apps have random flickering of parts of the UI, some apps no longer scale at all or are scaled twice. Plasmashell itself has blurry icons on the desktop but all other KDE apps don’t. I know fractional scaling has always been problematic, but it has gotten worse to the point of being almost unusable
• Random crashes of GTK apps when using the wayland backend. Some GTK apps don’t even start and segfault immediately with a wayland error in the terminal
• Some apps like okular and libreoffice lag like crazy or outright freeze when scrolling
• Some games not capturing the cursor properly (Proton)
• Inconsistent font rendering, some fonts look fine in some apps and atrocious in others
• Issues when resizing or moving windows, some times they “jerk” off the screen or resize to a very tiny window and I’m forced to use key combinations to resize them again
• Random issues with window decoration not appearing in some apps but randomy appearing for things like context menus

This is on a full AMD system with Arch Linux, the latest kernel and mesa-git. I hope for KDE’s sake that there’s something broken in my installation because I can’t believe the KDE team released Plasma 6 in this sorry state.

Before I understood how to properly build and test mesa (graphics driver), I compiled it and then procedeed to manually symlink the files in the lib and lib32 directories. When I pressed enter on that ln command, the UI immediately crashed and X would no longer start after rebooting the computer. Reinstalling mesa from a virtual terminal wouldn’t fix it so I just reinstalled the system. Good times :)

It makes sense actually, the compositor is disabled while games are running so unless the DE is causing lag, the latency is going to be the same.

I just use mpv