• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 10th, 2023

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  • I honestly don’t know how this could turn out.

    It could be an amazing change that results in much more progress for hardware acceleration on guests of various types (since that is what vmware is good at) in kvm…

    Or it could mean that they are dropping that feature from vmware altogether.

    Regardless, I like this change because it means I would be able to run vmware machines and libvirt kvm machines at the same time, at least when I am forced to use vmware workstation.

    I also dislike proprietary software in general, so I think less proprietary software and more FOSS is a good thing.



  • I disagree, because they are not the same thing.

    Immutable means read only root.

    Atomic means that updates are done in a snapshotted manner somehow. It usually means that if an update fails, your system is not in a half working state, but instead will be reverted to the last working state, and that updates are all or nothing.

    I create a btrfs snapshot before updates on my Arch Linux system. This is atomic, but not immutable.*

    There is also “image based” which distros like ublue (immutable, atomic) are, but Nixos (also immutable and atomic) are not.

    *only really before big updates tbh, but I know people do configure snapshits before all updates.


  • Is installing a package as simple as $ nix install vscode ? And would it “just work”?

    You fool. You absolute buffoon. You’re doing it wrong. That’s the wrong command, and even if it was the right command, this method could cause issues down the road. It goes against the declarative philosophy of nix. You’re supposed to refer to packages by their attribute, rather than name. If you launch the installed app that way, it won’t have any hardware accererated graphics becuase hardware accelerated graphics are impure, don’t you know this?

    You need to read the nonexistent documentation to find all of this out, and then select a declarative solution, like home manager or nix-shell or nix develop, to install software, and nixgl to get hardware accelerated graphics for nix packages on non nix systems.

    (/s (ish) over)

    Yeah. Nix has some issues. If you just want more packages available, I would recommend distrobox.

    It’s a very powerful tool, and I use nix to manage all of my development environments, but it has some severe limitations that only have hacky workarounds. I could not get hardware accelerated nix packages to have a working dekstop entry. So instead, I have to type nixGLIntel gzdoom in my terminal when I want to play doom.

    In addition to that, the documentation is very poor.

    The other comments in this thread elaborate on these, and a few other issues.


  • I don’t really get how this question pertains to F-droid specifically.

    But, in networks that are more locked down, they can use stuff like deep packet inspection to figure out what traffic is happening, and automatically block it. Socks is a protocol explicitly for proxying, and runs over TCP. Depending on the setup, deep packet inspection can catch it.

    On the other hand, disguising traffic as HTTP/HTTPS makes it very, very hard to detect that someone is doing something other than visiting an innocuous website.

    At the high school I went to, they had Deep Packet Inspection set up to such a level that they could automatically detect and block VPN connections. Wireguard and OpenVPN would be caught basically instantly, and then you would be kicked off of the internet for 10 minutes. Although very extreme, a “10 minutes no internet” punishment is nothing in comparison to prison time or any number of extreme punishments authoritarian countries can come up with.

    To get around the school firewall, I set up a web proxy called Metallic: https://github.com/cognetwork-dev/Metallic/ . This is basically a website, that lets me access other websites from within that website, and it’s very, very difficult to block because of that nature.




  • Is it possible to allow DRM content for just 1 website ( Netflix ) , while other websites on the same browsers are not allowed to do it?

    I would use multiple firefox profiles for this. If you go to about:profiles or use the command firefox -P to launch firefox, you can view and create other firefox profiles. Each firefox profile is essentially it’s own instance of firefox, complete with different history, extensions, and setting. You could have a “Netflix” profile and a regular browsing profile.








  • As a someone who has used both Arch, and Debian, neither has less or more bugs.

    Debian has the same bugs, over the period of their stable release, and Arch has changing bugs (like a new set every update lol).

    Yes, Arch is going to get a lot more features. But it comes at the cost of “instability”. Which is not so much a lack of reliability but instead, how much the software changes. I remember a firefox bug that caused a crash when I attempt to drag bookmarks in my bookmarks bar around, which lasted for like a week — then it went away.

    The idea behind projects like Debian, is that for an entity that needs stability, you can simply work around the bugs, since you always know what and where they are. (Well, the actual intent is that entities write patches and submit them to Debian to fix the bugs but no one does that).

    Another thing: Debian Stable has more up to date packages than Ubuntu 20.04, and Ubuntu 22.04. This happens because Ubuntu “freezes” a Sid version, and those packages don’t get major updates for a while. So often, the latest Debian stable has newer packages than the older Ubuntu releases.


  • Termux recently got moved off of the play store (kinda), and is now only available on f-droid/github, because Google was further locking down what they allowed on their store.

    And in addition to that, they recently added a restriction in later versions of Android: “Child process limit”. Although this limit used to not there, when enabled, it prevents users from truly running arbitrary linux programs, like via termux.

    Although the child process limit can still be disabled in developer options, it doesn’t bode well for how flexible base android in the future will be, since many times corpos like Google move stuff into the “secret” options before eventually removing that dial all together.

    TLDR: Termux has been, and is a thing… for now.

    Also, I want to shout out winlator. It uses a linux proot, similator to termux, and has box64 and wine inside that proot that people can use to play games. I tested with Gungeon, and it even has controller support and performance, which is really impressive.