[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 20 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For non political content, not bad, of course a lot smaller than reddit, but it's a good start.

But the left wing populism echochamber is a bit annoying. It's ok to have an opinion, but all the silly so easy to refute things that get repeated here over & over again because it sounds nice & fits the agenda is just annoying... "Why do billionaires need more money?" because they're addicted to ego & power, it's not about the money. "The right wing are so violent, we are the good guys", every other thread: eat the rich, prepare the guillotines. -insert a not so common incident that supports an agenda- 'see, this happens all the time, we should do -insert short sighted measure that will just cause different problems-. etc...

I'd love all those topics to be actually seriously discussed here, but so far it feels like it's just edgy teens shouting whatever fits the popular narratatives...

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 10 months ago

It's probably a silly question, but how exactly does one join lemmy.world? I tried making an account here yesterday, got the mail to confirm my email address, confirmed it, and now... nothing. Can't login with the credentials i made, if i do recover password, it says my email address it sent the confirmation mail to is unknown. Or do i just need to wait longer until some admin approves my account?

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 11 months ago

Yeah, the policy causes more cars to be sold, which is also an important thing to take into account.

But you initially said "If most people replace their cars every three years they’re not getting to 80,000 km before they buy a new one.", and that is plain wrong, the car is not scrapped after those 3 years, so when it changes owner for the first time is irrelevant. And that 80k km is worst case scenario, that assuming all electricity is generated in the least environmental way possible, in practice it's often <40k km that there is already a break even because not all electricity is generated by coal.

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 18 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I kind of get these kind of comics, but isn't the reality that all of humanity is still in a competition with eachother, and doing all the wrong things gives you more power than doing all the right things, so that's what continues happening.

In these climate debates the reality is that it's a global chicken on the road, we all go toward self annihilation at a steady pace, and the first who flinches and tries to take action will get taken advantage of and ruined. So it's slooooooow talks about doing tiny things and kind of maybe a bit cooperating while noone really wants to, because any advantage they can get over another country will be taken advantage of...

Maybe i'm a bit too pessimistic, but it's my assumption that things work like that, and then all this bullshit suddenly makes sense >_<...

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 5 points 11 months ago

Sadly i recently learned VLC doesn't just always work.

About a year ago i had an issue with playing FLAC files on VLC, where there would be short periods of no audio. I had recently made some upgrades to my audio hardware, so i was looking at my new hardware/cables/config.... but in the end i realized it always happened at the same point in the same files, so a software issue was more likely:

https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/27696

Nice quote from this issue: VLC is broken since months Use their nightly version, it has a nice new interface too, and no bugs. I don't get how they can keep a huge breaking bug like this in vlc from MONTHS.

And neither can i... until a year ago VLC was for me the pinnacle of "it just works". Now after them leaving a bug causing audio playback issues into their stable version for months, they broke my trust in them... they're probably still the best option out there, but now i'll just say probably, not for sure, and there is room for improvement...

And if it were some obscure format, sure, but FLAC? ....

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 11 months ago

I love his reply, but i'm afraid history so far has shown that supporting open platforms is not a competitive advantage. The number of hackers like us in the smart home market is negligable. Proper closed platforms rake in the big money, and the public loves it.... Add on some cloud integration & a subscription to functionalities that would take a home assistant user not much time to set up, and you've got something the average customer seems to want...

Still a shit (and probably without any real legal basis) attempt by Haier, but if they're actually aiming at a walled smart home system, from an economical perspective they're probably right... And i hate that they're right....

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the suggestions :). I think in about 50 replies you're the first that's like "hey, maybe there is some way to get VRR working on linux", and not be like "why would you want that? just ignore the stuff that doesn't work on linux".

I'm probably going to stick with windows a bit longer for now, and i'll give it another try when i read that wayland is a bit further along since it sounds like what i need, but is still in its infancy.

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago

Unlike on Windows, errors here are usually informative, and “something like …” is useless. We can’t trust you to determine if it’s vague or not.

Yeah, i'm a developer, the error i got was about as helpful as "nullreference exception". I found the issue was the SMBv1 default by googling the exact error. Here it is for you "Failed to retrieve share list invalid argument". Really helpful message :).

The article advises you to install GDebi from repositories (with a nice GUI) to do that. Have you done that?

Yes, and then got stuck since that tool failed to find something called gconf2 that is a dependency. Then i followed command line install instructions that also gave errors. Which the instructions found perfectly normal and expected, they said to then run an apt command to fix it, but then apt would just uninstall the application again (which i guess 'fixes' a botched installation).

But you find it normal that the application normally handling .deb files on linux just disappears on a popular beginner distro, and to install something i have to start googling and avoid all the links telling me to use the built in application that suddenly disappeared, to then find that one link that tells me "yeah, ubuntu made a huge mistake here, here's how you fix it".

Sorry, but this is just abysmal user experience. And yeah, i'm a developer, i can find my way around command line tools, but for something this basic? for real?

Your fault is treating it wrong. If others don’t need it and you need it, why cry that desktop Linux sucks? Maybe it sucks for you, well, sorry.

So i should expect every little thing to be a minor or major struggle, with the rich ecosystem of linux apps be so fragmented to mostly just work on the distro the developer uses, which you have to guess since they might still mention your distro on their website, even if they don't really properly support it.

If treating it wrong means not making linux my hobby, and just wanting to use it like i can with my headless servers, then it's indeed not for me. And yeah, i've head my moments of frustration with my synology/raspberries. But most of the things i want to do on them do work from the first try, and if a gui is offered, it just works. If that's too high of an expectation, then you just come across as delusional for me. I don't expect everything to be perfect, but for it to be this bad in 2023 just seems ridiculous. And maybe i just happened to land in a perfect storm of things that don't work on ubuntu being the first things i try. But then being like "maybe linux isn't for you". I'm a professional developer running multiple headless linux machines and a dozen docker containers for various things. If it isn't for me, who is it for O_O...

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 3 points 1 year ago

Maybe the refreshrate issue could be driver related, but hardware decoding works. And intel 13th gen is 2 years old now, it's not as if i'm on bleeding edge hardware. The other 2 issues (SMB & installer) aren't even hardware related at all.

And from what i've read the past years, hasn't linux support for newer things improved a lot? Ok, if a new cpu/gpu releases, maybe wait a couple of months for linux to be stable, but 2 years should be fine these days right? I don't think any of my issues are related to hardware support.

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ahh the favourite pasttime of the linux community: blaming the user.

See, i install ubuntu. It has this files application to brows your files in a gui. I click other sources, it detects my SMB shares, i click on one of those, and i get some vague error, i no longer have the exact error text but it was something like "item not found in list". You feel that on a fresh desktop install clicking the files tab, and then clicking the discovered network share, and expect it being able to handle a protocol that got exploited in 2017 being disabled, and then throwing an error "item not found in list" is me just randomly clicking around expecting a windows experience and me not being able to read error messages? You're so far off the mark that it's not even funny anymore. Yeah, i've got a dozen containers on my synology with proper permission management and shared users between those containers, properly exposing some to the internet, and having set up watchtower to automatically update everything to keep it secure since i'm such a windows user that doesn't know anything else...

Ubuntu does still have a GUI to install software from .deb packages, I think.

dude, CLICK THE LINK I GAVE, IT DOESN'T. and what do you mean install a package for another distribution. https://dockstation.io, see the link "download for ubuntu/debian". I'm just doing what the first application i thought of trying tells me. Or do the developers of linux apps themselves have no clue how to support the most popular distro? According to you that may be the case, but that's not my fault then.

And why did i google software? i entered "docker" in the package manager but didn't find much, so i thought i'd give google a try. also to get some reviews/experience of people trying the applications, i could blindly try packages, but reading some user experiences makes the choice easier.

32

Every so often i start believing all the posts about how Linux really made a lot of progress, and the desktop experience is so much better now, and everything is supported, and i give it another try.

I've got a small intel 13th gen NUC i use as a small server, and for playing movies from. It runs windows 11, but as i want to run some docker containers on it, i thought, why not give Linux a try again, how bad can it be. (after all, i've got multiple raspberry pi's running, and a synology diskstation, and i'm no stranger to ssh'ing into them to manage some stuff)

Downloaded the latest Ubuntu Desktop (23.10), since it's still a highly recommended distro, and started my journey.

First obvious task: connect to my SMB shares on my synology to get access to any media. Tough luck, whatever tool Ubuntu uses for that always tries SMBv1 protocol first, which is disabled on my synology due to security reasons. If i enable it on my synology i get a nice warning that SMBv1 is vulnurable and has been used to perform ransomware attacks, so maybe i'd rather leave it disabled (although i assume that's mostly the case if the port were accessible from the internet, but still). Then i thought "it's probably some setting somewhere to change this", but after further googling, i found an issue that whatever ubuntu is using for SMB needs a patch to not default to SMBv1 to get a list of shares.... Yeah, great start for the oh so secure linux, i'd need to enable a protocol that got used in ransomware attacks over 6 years ago to get everything to work properly... (yeah, i ended up finding how to mount things manually, and then added it to my fstab as a workaround, but wtf)

Then, i installed Kodi, tried to play some content. Noticed that even though i enabled that setting on Kodi, it's not switching to the refreshrate of the video i'm playing. Googling further on that just felt like walking through a tarpit. From the dedicated librelec distro that runs just kodi that has special patches to resolve this, to discussions about X not supporting switching refreshrates, and Kodi having a standalone mode that doesn't use a window manager that should solve it but doesn't, and also finding people with similar woes about HDR. I guess the future of the desktop user is watching stuttering videos with bad color rendition? I'd give more details about what i found if there were any. Try googling it yourself, you'll find so little yet contradictory things...

Not being entirely defeated yet, i thought "i've got this nice GUI on my synology for managing docker containers & images, let's see if i can find something nice on ubuntu", and found dockstation as something i could try. Downloaded the .deb file (since ubuntu is a debian variant it seems), double clicked the file and ... "no app installed for this file"... google around a bit, after some misleading results regarding older ubuntu versions, i found the issue: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/10/install-deb-ubuntu-23-10-no-app-error

Of course Ubuntu just threw out the old installer for debian files, and didn't replace it yet. Wouldn't want a user to just be able to easily install files! what is this, windows?

For real, i see all the Linux love here, and for the headless servers i have here (the raspberries & the synology), i get it. But goddamn this desktop experience is so ridiculous, there has to be better than this right? I'm missing something, or doing something completely wrong, or... right?

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 25 points 1 year ago

I'm willing to engage this discussion with you :).

I don't believe i'm entitled to any labor for free, but i do oppose the mechanic of huge corporations starting with good & free services, and when they then become a monopoly, suddenly i'm "entitled and want labor for free and an idiot" when i don't agree with all the enshittification, money grabbing, privacy violations, and everything else they think they can get away with.

If you start a service with a certain premise (it being free, little ads, ...), and then once you're a monopoly and want some extra money start changing all that, while making sure any competition has as little chance as possible to challenge you... yeah, good luck with that XD.

And i'll make a predition, give it 5 years at most before game passes go through this phase. Currently all the gamers are "wow, these are such good value", once it gives the publishers enough of an excuse to stop allowing you to buy them, watch the same fragmentation & raised prices, enshittification, possibly even advertising getting added to it once you're stuck using such a system.

I don't believe i'm "entitled", but i won't support such tactics & monopoly abuse. They came to power by pretending to be a free site to share videos on, and they'll die that way as far as i'm concerned. Good riddance.

[-] racemaniac@startrek.website 12 points 2 years ago

So you're calling someone a retard, but the point isn't specifically to offend people?

....

Maybe it's time for you to learn that it's not your intentions that count, but your actions. And your action in this case is definitely offending someone because they don't agree with you.

The proper response would be to just say why, in your opinion, both sides are the same isn't the case, and why you think it's a bad take on the situation.

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racemaniac

joined 2 years ago