Just an explorer in the threadiverse.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • Like helping to find a bug, discussing about how to setup an application for a certain use case or anything like that? Answering questions on Stack overflow is an example but is that the best way?

    Generally the best way to help out is to do a thing that’s needed and that you can figure out how to do. Your list includes a bunch of good options, and I’ve been thanked for doing all those things at one point or another. Some common growth paths include:

    1. Using the software
    2. Encountering bugs, problems, or small opportunities for improvement.
    3. Discussing those informally in forums and helping people find workarounds.
    4. Identifying some of those issues as common things other things experience as well, so filing bugs for them with clear explanations and links to related forum discussions.
    5. Reading source code to better understand bugs.
    6. Discussing potential fixes in developer bug threads (or in GitHub or whatever).
    7. Submitting small fixes for simple bugs as pull requests.

    Another path might be:

    1. Using the software and reading forums/docs for help.
    2. Answering basic questions on forums, looking to old threads and relevant docs.
    3. Learning about common questions.
    4. Writing blogs or forum posts about common questions.
    5. Submitting improvements to official docs to clarify common areas of confusion.

    There are other paths as well, the main thing is to use a thing so you learn about it and then use that knowledge to make it a little easier for the next person. Good luck!


  • I don’t think titles directly transfer between companies, and yet the industry allows it. It’s a very useful tool for advancement.

    This may be true on some corners of the industry, but at the more competitive end (both in terms of competitive pay, and a competitive pool of candidates)… I believe it’s common to relevel on hire. I’ve seen folks go from director to senior and from senior to junior at my org. The candidates being offered those seemingly big “demotions” often seem to be somewhere between unphased and enthusiastic about the change, presumably because the compensation package we offer at the lower level beats what they were getting with an inflated title and because they know their inflated title is nonsense and they’re frustrated with the other aspects of organizational dysfunction that accompany title inflation at their current company.

    What you say is real, and sometimes a promotion in one org can help bridge you into an org that would have been hard to get hired into as a junior, or harder to get promoted in. It’s not without risk though. All things being equal, I’d much rather spend my time working on a strong team and learning a lot and being challenged than to be in a weaker org that’s handing out inflated titles. Getting gud isn’t a guarantee of advancement, but it’s at least as reliable over the long haul as title inflation.


  • My take echoes this. If one puts any stock in streamer recommendations, Baalorlord who has at various times held spire world record winstreaks, has recently cited Monster Train as his current favorite spirelike (other than spire itself), and also cited Griftlands as a playthrough a highlight.

    Baalor probably doesn’t have an opinion on Inscryption as he tends to avoid things with even a slight horror theme. I enjoyed what I played of Inscryption a lot, but very little about playing it evoked the vibe of playing spire. Monster Train is quite adjacent though, the mechanics are different enough to feel fresh but it slots into the same gameplay mood for me whereas Inscryption is just a different (and still very good) thing.

    Neither has the tight balance of Spire or feels quite as deep strategically to me (though in all honesty I’m probably not a strong enough player to be trusted in this regard), but both are fun.


  • That’s an interesting report but it’s possible to “work” at different latencies. And unless you have specialized audio capture/playback hardware and have done some tuning and testing to determine the lowest stable latency that your system is capable of achieving… “works” for you is likely to mean something very different than it does to someone who does a lot of music production.

    It remains an interesting question to some users whether Wayland changes the minimum stable latency relative to X and if so whether it does so for better or worse.


  • I’d consider asking in a Linux audio or music production community (I’m not aware of any on Lemmy that are big enough to have a likely answer though). If music production is a primary use case and audio latency matters to you, almost no general users are going to be able to comment on the difference between X and Wayland from a latency perspective. There may not be a difference, but there might and you won’t be likely to learn about it outside of an audio-focused discussion.


  • It may seem kinda stupid to consider that an accomplishment, but I feel quite genuinely proud of myself for actually succeeding at this instead of just throwing in the towel…

    Way to go. I’ve been at this a decent while and do some pretty esoteric stuff at work and at home… but this loop of feeling stupid, doing the work, and feeling good about a success has been a constant throughout. I spent a week struggling to port some advanced container setups to podman a month or so ago, same feeling of pride when I got them humming.

    It’s not stupid to be proud of an accomplishment even if it’s a fundamental one that’s early in a bigger learning curve. Soak it in, then on to the next high. Good luck.


  • I’m mostly in the pro-written word camp myself, but I have sought out video tutorials in cases where written docs seem to assume something I don’t know. When I’m learning something new, a written doc might have a 3-word throwaway clause like “… add a user and then…”. But I’ve never added a user and don’t know how. If it’s niche open-source software with a small dev team, this may not be covered in the docs either. I’ll go fishing for videos and just seeing that they go to a web-ui or config-file or whatever sets me on the path to figure out the rest myself.

    That is to say, video content that shows someone doing a thing successfully often includes unspoken visual information that the author doesn’t necessarily value or even realize is being communicated. But the need to do the thing successfully on-screen involves documenting many small/easy factoids that can easily trip someone inexperienced up for hours.

    I’m as annoyed as anyone when I want reference material and find only videos, and I generally prefer written tutorials as well. But sometimes a video tutorial is the thing that gets me oriented enough to understand the written worthy I wasn’t ready to process previously.

    Edit: The ubiquity of video material probably has little to do with it’s usefulness though, and everything to do with how easy it is to monetize on YouTube.


  • I wouldn’t say that my partner “doesn’t care”, but they take a much more pragmatic view than I which results in more exposure. In general, we do the following:

    1. To a first approximation, they decide what apps and services they use. It’s not a monarchy. They’ll ask for feedback when comparison shopping, but often the answer is “every dominant ecosystem in this space is terrible, the privacy respecting options don’t meet your requirements, this option is 5% worse and this one is 5% better… glhf”.
    2. For social media accounts that share posts about our nuclear family, we come to broad consensus on the privacy settings and practices. There’s give and take here, but I make space to use dominant sharing apps and they make space to limit our collective exposure within reason. If I have a desire to “harden” the privacy settings on a service, it’s on me to put in the effort to craft the proposed settings changes and get their buy in on the implications.
    3. I have many fewer privacy raiding accounts than they do. I both benefit from transitive access to the junk they sign up for, and pay a cost in my own privacy by association. This just is what it is. The market for partners that align with my own views perfectly is basically zero though, and honestly I probably wouldn’t put up with my shit even if I could find one.
    4. If I can self-host a competitive option for a use-case that I’m happier with… they’ll give it the old college try. But it has to actually be competitive or they’ll fail out of the system and fall back to whatever works for them. If we can figure out what’s not working we’ll sometimes iterate together, but sometimes it’s just not good enough and we go back to something I like worse.

    It’s basically like navigating any other conflict in values. You each have to articulate what your goals are, and make meaningful compromise on how to achieve something that preserves the essentials on both sides. As a privacy outlier, sometimes one also needs to be able to hear “I want to do normal shit and not feel bad about it” and accept it. But if we do want to reach for outlier privacy practices in some specific area, it’s on us to break that desire down into actionable steps in realistic directions at a sustainable pace and to not ignore the impacts to our partners of the various tradeoffs we’re proposing. Privacy is often uncomfortable and we need to acknowledge the totality of what we’re asking for when we ask our partners to accommodate our goals there.





  • Two tips:

    I have not tried running WINE yet but I plan on doing so soon.

    Steam “just works” on Linux, you can install it via flatpak (which I use) or from their deb repo. It includes “Proton”, which is a fancy bundle of wine and some extra open source valve sauce to make it nice and easy to use. Any game that runs on the steam deck also runs on Linux via proton, and there’s no messing around at all. It looks and feels just like steam on Windows, and thousands of games just work with no setup or config beyond clicking the big blue and green buttons to install and run. Not EVERY games works, but tons do. I’d heavily recommend this over raw wine to a beginner.

    The second tip is not to ask what you can do on Linux. The answer, to a first approximation, is that you can do everything on Linux that you can do on Windows or OSX. I daily drive all three, and mostly do the same stuff on them. Instead, ask YOURSELF what you WANT to do on Linux. Then Google and ask us HOW to do it… or what the nearest approximation is if the precise thing you want to do doesn’t work on Linux.



  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlSnapless Ubuntu
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    1 year ago

    Very true and good points, and when it comes to snap I mostly agree with you. I would guess the “war on Ubuntu” going on is more due to Ubuntu’s history of making controversial decisions that go against the grain of what most other distros are doing at the time (creating and dropping Mir, creating Unity instead of using GNOME and then switching back to GNOME when they finally got Unity working well, installing an Amazon app out of the box in one version), many of which angered a lot of Linux community members before who are still angry despite Ubuntu rolling back most of those decisions, and they’ve found snap a great current scapegoat issue to use to vent their long-standing frustrations with Ubuntu at.

    I agree with just about every word here. I lived through all this stuff. Mir and Unity were hugely disruptive to the OSS desktop community beyond Ubuntu and I was as salty about them as anyone. If someone is aware of this history and just fucking done with Ubuntu’s bullshit they’ll get no flak from me. I rarely see this coherent an argument made though, it’s much more often “snap bad, use this other distro that’s downstream of Ubuntu and shares all the same foundations but has a different default desktop and disables snap by default”, which I think is pretty nonsense and is rampant in the comments of this post.

    But I’ve done my share of distro hopping and if someone wants to use something else for any reason or no reason… more power to them. I will make the counterpoint that no one has to care about snap specifically and if you just pretend it doesn’t exist then your life will be no different. And if history is any indicator, snap has about 2y left before they abandon it anyway.


  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlSnapless Ubuntu
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    1 year ago

    Tell me more about why I care that snap is setting up loop devices and not that docker is setting up virtual ethernet devices and nftables chains. System tools do system things, news at 11.

    I say again, this impacts my life not at all and there is nothing easier to ignore than snap.


  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlSnapless Ubuntu
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    1 year ago

    … those “pending update, close the app to avoid disruptions” popups are kind of disrupting.

    I don’t exactly disagree that it’s slightly irritating but:

    1. No one declares war on an operating system the way snap haters have over a “restart to update” message. It’s an irritation, but it’s not an irritation proportional to the response snap gets out of people.
    2. Restarting to enable an update or complete an update is not something unique to snap. Except for a tiny number of very advanced live-patching systems like the one some kernel updaters use, every updater either nags you to shutdown to do the update, nags you to restart to finish the update, or doesn’t nag you and the update just doesn’t take effect till you restart (apt falls in this category and it’s not unambiguously better than nagging because you’re silently vulnerable when security patches are shipped until you restart). So again, this is just an extremely unremarkable thing that tons of updaters deal with similarly.

  • PriorProject@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlSnapless Ubuntu
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    1 year ago

    I do nothing.

    • I use the Firefox snap. It takes like 800 extra milliseconds to start up on my 10y old laptop and it moves my profile dir. It otherwise impacts my life not at all and is just fine. If it ever bothers me, there PPAs, flatpak, or a dozen other ways to install Firefox that are all perfectly simple.
    • I install other stuff from flatpaks or PPAs or using docker.

    The angst around snap is inscrutable to me. There are 30 million easy ways to install software and they all work on Ubuntu. There is nothing in my life that’s easier to ignore than snap.


  • I haven’t used Tuxedo, but on apt-based distros it’s pretty common for an auto-update daemon of some kind to run in the background on startup to either download updates, or at least download package metadata so some UI component can start nagging you to install the updates that are available.

    If you wait a few minutes, the download should complete and you can do what you want. You can probably get away with killing it, especially if you use a gentle signal like HUP. I wouldn’t risk it though… if you corrupt your package metadata or worse… and actual important package… it can be a significant hassle to clean up the mess. And the cost of waiting 30s-5m and trying again is so low it’s hard to beat that as an approach.

    If its happening a ton you can probably find and disable the auto-update thing but I don’t know what it would be on Tuxedo.