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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • utopiah@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlHow bad is my partitioning?
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    12 hours ago

    At some point if they have ridiculous restrictions one might consider … doing the test in person, in a room provided by the actual school or that THEY provide the hardware.

    Anyway IMHO the bigger point is that a lot of my own inaction (I won’t speak for others) came from fear of problems that rarely, if ever, materialized. I would recommend to move on and if the problem does actually arise then consider solutions at that point.

    I uninstalled Windows on my SSD years ago (despite paying for it, forced by OEM deals), didn’t regret it once. In fact, I wear it as a “badge of honor” with pride. When someone tells me I “have” to use Windows for whatever reason, I tell them I can’t and that usually leads to interesting conversations.







  • With pleasure, if you do have questions later on though, even in months, please feel free to ask here again.

    Yes using an older device is nice. If you like to tinker a bit there are even older eInk devices that can be unlocked so maybe finding which one and getting it 2-hand could be an interesting adventure.




  • Great example of why a safety net is required.

    Yes hopefully the “base” setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings… but what happens when it break?

    Windows (despite all the criticism, and I’m one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).

    So… you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it… then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.

    While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.

    IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she’ll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!


  • I definitely recommend it… but I also wouldn’t dare predicting the future.

    So far unofficial hacking on the reMarkable has been great. The Discord is very active, new development e.g. https://github.com/asivery/rm-appload (random pick from Discord) so that’s the sign of a healthy tinkering environment.

    Yet, reMarkable has never pushed for customization either. They also got VC funding in 2019 and 2022 but that seemed to have changed nothing on that front.

    So… I highly doubt they would somehow break the ability to connect to ssh then install applications. They definitely can not even technically do that as long as one does not automatically update. Consequently I can safely say that if you get a reMarkable today, you will be able to do a lot with it.

    All that being said, even though it’s Linux proper, it’s also a rather specialized environment with limited resources. If you do not love to tinker, make sure the application you actually need is already available and working on the right version you want (e.g. might work on rM2 but not on rM Pro).

    If you have a specific need in mind, let me know and I can try to share the right resource, otherwise join the Discord and ask there.



  • That was posted 3hours ago. By now you could have installed at least 1 “normal” distribution (i.e. pretty much anything that allow you to download packages for your architecture, not LFS) and have some of your work files either copied on /home or better mounted as a directory that is safely on another partition or even disk.

    Don’t like whatever you installed? Explain us WHY then we can better help you narrow down what you need.

    Overall software availability and performances are pretty much NOT distribution specific.

    It is rare that a specific feature is not available as driver that can not be installed somehow, same for state of the art software, e.g. something coming right of the repository rather than a built package.


  • Why? I have a hard time imagine a use case where restoring the OS itself would be appropriate.

    I can imagine restoring data, obviously, and services running with their personalization … but the OS is something generic that should be discarded at whim IMHO. You probably chance few basic configuration of some services and most likely that’s stored in /etc but even then 99% is default.

    You can identify what you modified via shell history, e.g. history | grep /etc and potentially save them or you can also use find /etc -type f -newerXY with a date later than the OS installation and you should find what you modified. That’s probably just a few files.

    If you do back up anything beyond /home (which should be on another partition or even disk than the OS anyway) you’ll most likely save garbage like /dev that might actually hinder your ability to restore.

    So… sure, image the OS if you actually have a good reason for it but unless you work on archiving and restoring legacy hardware for a museum then I doubt you do need that.


  • Check using e.g. top for your CPU (nvidia-smi or amd-smi for your GPU) or System Monitor on KDE if any of your resource is being maxed out. If so then most likely you found the culprit.

    Regarding what the actual codec is being used you can use ffprobe but anyway what matters if resource bottleneck and thus if you can have hardware acceleration for it.

    It’s probably worth investigating so that you don’t keep on getting video files too big for your computer to handle. I imagine it’s something very high resolution with very recent compression. If so, look for something less demanding, e.g. x265 720p and if that’s still leading to performance hiccups the older x264 720p or even 480p.

    It’s rare that the media player itself, e.g. VLC or mpv, actually is the bottleneck.




  • The excitement of features from the cutting edge

    I don’t understand how Debian limits that. You can use Debian for your distribution BUT for whatever you want to be cutting edge, use whatever alternative method you want. It can be alternative package managers, e.g. am but if you want the absolute bleeding edge, go on the repository of the project, get a specific branch, build, install, use. That’s absolutely no problem with even Debian stable.

    I’m genuinely confused at comments implying that have a stable distribution means having outdated software.


  • I guess it depends what you mean by “chip production”.

    AFAICT mostly via Chip War (2022) and reading a bit on the topic there are few bottlenecks, e.g chip design IP like ARM (UK) or lithography machines like ASML (NL) or high efficiency chip production like TSMC (Taiwan) but overall the grip from the US is mostly on democratization and scale with AMD, NVIDIA, Broadcom or even Intel, namely making a LOT of chips, not necessarily high end (some are) or mobile (also some), for a relatively low price. What I mean is that China is already claiming that they are producing about on-par IPS with e.g. Loongson.

    So yes there are for sure incumbents based in the US that do not want RISCV and overall open architectures to make significant progress but is it fair to call them “the US” I’m not sure. Are they heavily leaning on US lawmakers to get their positions strengthened? Maybe. Maybe they do not yet do so simply because they don’t believe it’s a threat yet, nor it might be ever be.

    I believe that in chip production you can lock production via innovation but also, like in other sectors, solely with the supply chain. ASML is powerful because they basically own their markets but also because who would contract with newcomers versus a very well established company that can provide all the insurances imaginable that they will indeed deliver on time a specific amount? Why risk it when you are already contracting with the leader?

    Sure there is a potential innovator dilemma but what could prevent e.g. NVIDIA or Intel to switch to RISC-V if somehow they can dominate there too thanks to both their existing expertise but also supply chain stronghold?