Hmm, I’ll have to double-check it on my build. Pretty sure it was working, but it’s possible I was only getting OpenCL or Vulkan acceleration. Out of curiosity, what’s your GPU model? I think only the 7900XT[X] is officially supported for ROCm.

I recently tried Bazzite, and I have to agree. Switching from a traditional Linux distro to an immutable distro is harder than switching from Windows to Linux. I’m not kidding. When it comes to immutability, my experience can be split into two general cases:

1. I don’t notice any difference at all.
2. It’s a giant pain in the ass.

I have yet to encounter a scenario where immutability offered a tangible benefit. The supposed advantages seem rather abstract. I can’t break my system? Okay…but…well, I already had snapper for the rare occasions when something got royally borked. This is a problem that has already been solved without major compromises, so why are we now compromising so much to solve it again?

It comes with 4 different package management systems (or 6 if you count Distrobox and Waydroid), and they all come with big caveats. I’ve had to reboot more in the past week than I previously had in the past year on Debian, because every time I need to install something from the main Fedora repo with rpm-ostree (which has been many times already), it needs to reboot. They recommend against using rpm-ostree, but there is no reasonable alternative for a rather wide array of software. It’s either rpm-ostree or build a whole mess of things from source and manage them manually. Both options suck very hard.

Still, overall, Bazzite delivers. Everything you see on their web site works out of the box. It’s hard to recommend, but it’s also hard to criticize. I’ve never had a smoother gaming experience, and this is the first time I’ve ever had to spend zero minutes configuring my GPU drivers (outside of macOS, anyway). You get CUDA and ROCm out of the box. You get the latest drivers. It’s awesome.

If you’re wondering if an immutable distro is right for you, the answer is probably “no”. But if you’re up for the, erm, “adventure” of learning this new paradigm, Bazzite removeding rocks.

I forget the exact terminology but I tried putting it into the most permissive mode available. Is still could not work with external hard drives. This was several years ago so I can’t say what might have changed since then, but I did spend some time troubleshooting and at the time that functionality did not work. I’d read that it was possible in the previous version (maybe 18.04?)

Edit: Come to think of it, it might not have been as simple as “couldn’t access external drives”. It might have had something to do with how my disks were mounted and their permissions and mount points. I remember that I hit a wall at some point and further troubleshooting would have required more surgery on my system than I was willing to attempt.

Yeah, this kind of things drove me batty on Ubuntu. So many things were delivered as Snaps when they just don’t work that way. The funniest one to me was Filebot. It’s a media file naming/organizing tool…that doesn’t have disk access. Are you kidding me, Canonical?

Flatpak is easier to work with, but has similar issues. Great for simple things, but I’m always worried that at some point I’m going to need some features that just won’t work, and then it’s going to be a hassle to migrate to a native installation. And it has no CLI support.

And yeah, the bloat is wild. Deduplication on btrfs (or similar) helps but there’s no getting past the bandwidth bloat.

I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.

So probably there will be some systems other than Linux that do use Rust

There’s one called Redox that is entirely written in Rust. Still in fairly early stages, though. https://www.redox-os.org/

Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?

The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.

Installing Linux after Windows should be fine without disconnecting drives.

The reverse is troublesome. Microsoft’s installer is all too happy to removed on your drives, even the ones you’re not using for installation. But Linux installers are much more friendly to dual-booting and all kinds of complex setups.

What part of this is misinformation, exactly? Seems pretty well-supported.

Haven’t heard of Hiren’s BootCD in like 15 years. Good to see it’s still around!

I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.

I agree completely.

I understand the motivation here — apps that lack location permission shouldn’t be able to get backdoor access to your location via your camera roll. That makes sense, because you know damn well every spyware social media company would be doing that if they could.

But the reverse is also true: apps that legitimately need to read photos and access all their metadata shouldn’t need to be granted full location access.

Yeah, I had to disconnect all my SATA HDs to stop the Windows installer from removedting all over them.

I’d be worried about Windows updates doing the same thing now, after the the recent glitch that broke bootloaders.

It was bought out and cleaned up a few years ago. It’s legit again now, though I don’t think it’ll ever really recover from that fiasco.

Chromium itself will. Other Chromium-based browser vendors have confirmed that they will maintain v2 support for as long as they can. So perhaps try something like Vivaldi. I haven’t tried PWAs in Vivaldi myself, but it supports them according to the docs.

Debian still supports Pentium IIs. They axed support for the i586 architecture (original Pentium) a few years back, but Debian 12 (current stable, AKA Bookworm) still supports i686 chips like the P2.

Not sure how the rest of the hardware in that Compaq will work.

See: https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch02s01.en.html

Probably ~15TB through file-level syncing tools (rsync or similar; I forget exactly what I used), just copying up my internal RAID array to an external HDD. I’ve done this a few times, either for backup purposes or to prepare to reformat my array. I originally used ZFS on the array, but converted it to something with built-in kernel support a while back because it got troublesome when switching distros. Might switch it to bcachefs at some point.

With dd specifically, maybe 1TB? I’ve used it to temporarily back up my boot drive on occasion, on the assumption that restoring my entire system that way would be simpler in case whatever I was planning blew up in my face. Fortunately never needed to restore it that way.

It’s worth mentioning that with a large generational gap, the newer low-end CPU will often outperform the older high-end. An i3-1115G4 (11th gen) should outperform an i7-4790 (4th gen), at least in single-core performance. And it’ll do it while using a lot less power.

Interesting. I’m not sure that’s a Lemmy thing per se, maybe specific to your client, or some extension or something altering CSS?

I just checked in my browser’s inspector, and the italicized text’s <em> tag has the same calculated font setting as the main comment’s <div> tag.

FWIW, I’m using Firefox with my instance’s default Lemmy web UI.

YES.

And not just the cloud, but internet connectivity and automatic updates on local machines, too. There are basically a hundred “arbitrary code execution” mechanisms built into every production machine.

If it doesn’t truly need to be online, it probably shouldn’t be. Figure out another way to install security patches. If it’s offline, you won’t need to worry about them half as much anyway.