• 7 Posts
  • 219 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • the Gecko engine is open source so it can be stuck with even if Mozilla goes away

    Good luck finding people both capable and willing to maintain it if Mozilla abandons it.

    The idea though that we need to switch to a new browser engine because we lost faith in Mozilla is a bit silly

    I am saying the opposite. I explicitly said I don’t think that would achieve anything. Just because something constitutes a boycott (i.e. using a different browser engine) doesn’t mean that there’s a point to it.








  • I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.

    You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.

    Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.


  • Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.


  • I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.



  • As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

    For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.


  • Outdated how? I use it for my daily driver and it works fine for me. It’s a fairly simple program and the 0.3.x river protocol is fairly stable so I would doubt it’s become outdated, but if it is, you should be able to patch it yourself given the simplicity of the program.


  • Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

    Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.




  • The commenter talking about xdg desktop portal is correct for the file picker; you need to install a portal for that.

    I can’t get links to open from discord

    Are you using dbus? Display managers normally will launch graphical sessions with dbus for you, but if you’re manually launching from the tty, use dbus-run-session sway (or the name of the executable you want to run). dbus is used for applications to communicate with each other, e.g. Discord to communicate with your browser. And you need dbus installed and the daemon running, of course.


  • I think that’s a misunderstanding of how software works. More features != better. I’m aware that many users think that, but it’s not a common view in the foss community. People in the foss community largely hate corporate enshittified bloated software and won’t use a proprietary fork that some company has added an LLM to. A project doesn’t need mainstream appeal; think about all the foss utilities written for Linux and BSDs where the target audience is “nerds”/enthusiasts/etc. These projects maintain themselves and their popularity just fine with a limited target audience. Besides, most foss isn’t for the average computer user. There’s a lot of foss that isn’t user software (libraries and OS/kernelspace software), and then there’s software like curl which can be for end users but is mostly used as a library, and the end users who use curl directly are a more technical crowd who most likely care about foss. The mainstream crowd that wants their iPhones and copilots are not making decisions between a foss option and a proprietary option.