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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’m looking at how many of the bugs and security issues are due to memory unsafe code - it’s A LOT and new ones come up almost daily. Humans are just bad at writing safe code because we are so fallible. So if we can eliminate a significant percentage of these bugs from the ground up that suddenly becomes very interesting. Besides personally after two decades of C and C++ (and debugging them) I find Rust much more pleasant and “ergonomic” to use.

    If we want an OS to be more secure by design we really have to begin at the most basic level. It might never be perfect but we can greatly reduce the attack surface. This is also why Microsoft is rewriting a number of vulnerable system components of Windows in Rust.

    So why is it important to the end-user? Well, if that’s Average Joe, maybe not but Redox OS right now is not mainstream, it is for us nerds who are interested in a safer OS and to see what can be done in that space. Maybe you don’t care and that’s fine, but some of us do and just like any post here, people can chose to skip over it or dive into the discussion, we can’t guarantee that all posts or projects are interesting to everyone :)




  • Well, they’re an Arch Linux user which is a special case. On Arch and derivatives it’s the user’s responsibility to manage the system so this doesn’t happen, configure cleanup daemons, flush package managers, etc., alternatively it could also be a misbehaving application which would have to be reported. Arch is for hobbyists who likes to do this.

    On other Linux distributions, Windows or macOS if this happens it’s usually an application not properly managing its cache.



  • I got that problem on a ROG Strix G733ZM. The solution was to install “hdajackretask” (sometimes in an ALSA tools package, sometimes elsewhere), select “ALC285” and “show unconnected pins” and map pin 0x14 to “Internal Speaker” and pin 0x1e to "Internal speaker (LFE), then install boot override and reboot.

    Oh and after reboot I went to Configure Audio in KDE and selected a profile.

    It looks like this.

    I found it randomly online, don’t remember where. I wish I knew how those pins were discovered in the first place because it may well be different for different laptops and also I really want to know…

    Oh BTW, in case you need to know: My microphone was having an awful lot of static noise. The trick was to 1) reduce microphone volume to 50% and 2) enable the ladspa-rnnoise noise filter in pipewire (it was already in my distributions repo). I checked in Windows and it sends the mic through an “ASUS AI noise filter” - so they’ve basically saved money on the hardware and are doing the same thing.


  • I don’t get the issue with “maintaining Xorg”.

    I think he explains it pretty well, he even gives some examples and mentions there are many others. For a company to support such a large component for its commercial customers has a lot of work and verification we wouldn’t consider as end users. His comment also explains why you can’t just maintain a status quo with it and make an automatic build and forget…



  • I don’t use Ubuntu on my desktop but in my experience it performs on par with other distributions and it is not a RAM hog either.

    I thing “bloat” is a big mythical monster people like to throw around because it’s difficult to argue against and scares everybody.

    I think snaps were slow to load to begin with but I also read that it was much improved recently, one can also install Flatpak.

    So I think Ubuntu is a great distro, performant and stable.


  • Tumbleweed. I’ve used Linux since the nineties so I know my way around but I appreciate a sane default desktop install so I don’t have to waste time fiddling too much.

    People always talk about lean/fast/customizing, in reality most distros are performant and fairly lean/bloat free, it’s just how Linux is. TW is no exception and like all the others it’s easy to customize. I don’t use YAST.

    I can get comfortable almost any distro, though I prefer those with systemD+Wayland and Nvidia drivers in a repo so they update with the rest. I like rolling release, also considering the pace of Wayland and KDE development.

    For new users I always recommend Mint.



  • Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.

    Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.

    One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don’t know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly “rot” without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc…

    I also recommend Mint to new users. I don’t use Mint, nor do I use Arch.