The Trump administration in the USA has refused to grant visas to Cuban athletes who need to compete in various events in the upcoming months in order to qualify for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The #Trump administration in the #USA has refused to grant visas to Cuban athletes who need to compete in various events in the upcoming months in order to qualify for the 2028 #OlympicGames in #LosAngeles.
The Trump administration in the USA has refused to grant visas to Cuban athletes who need to compete in various events in the upcoming months in order to qualify for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.
The #Trump administration in the #USA has refused to grant visas to Cuban athletes who need to compete in various events in the upcoming months in order to qualify for the 2028 #OlympicGames in #LosAngeles.
You are going to need to run a rescue system to get this sorted, for example from an USB stick. Usually you can enter UEFI setup by just spamming the button on boot (F2, F12, F10, Del, look up what your system uses). If that doesn't work you can either reset the BIOS settings, using the jumper or button (see manual again, removing the battery is internet lore and almost never required, just use the jumper). Another option is to remove your boot drive, that will prevent fastboot from working, so the next boot will be a regular one.
Do you have GRUB? If yes you can edit your kernel command line and append "init=/bin/bash", see if at least this gives you a prompt, this has saved me a couple of time in the past. Else booting on a USB and mounting your boot partition may help to fix it.
BTW I also have LUKS and I'm using TPM, using tpm2-initramfs-tool, first, it failed because I forgot the tpm modules in initrd, but I always have 2 kernels installed and only modify one initrd at a time to have a safe boot if I have a problem, like I had!
I tested tpm2-initramfs-tool with proper tpm2 modules and it worked.
I also tested with clevis-initramfs and clevis-tpm2 and it's even easier, no messing with crypttab.
Also, as long as you can break GRUB and append "init=/bin/bash" it is not secure of course, you can then prevent grub editing or not using grub at all.
I had this same error a few months ago when a drive was failing to mount because (unbeknownst to me) it was overheating. I turned the system off for a few hours before troubleshooting (I had errands to run). When I came back, the system booted without issue.
If you're looking for an easy troubleshooting step, have you tried turning off the system for several minutes (and unplugging it) and then powering it back on?
I had this issue and it was because I told grub to support dual booting from two different disk drives (one of them USB) and then I removed the USB drive. Linux-boi still tried to enforce booting from the now not-connected drive.
I can't remember exactly what I did, but there may be something about a systemd unit which can be removed/disabled - or maybe I did some fishing around in fstab to remove the drive it thought should exist but wouldn't always (and then probably did an update-initramfs -u or similar.
Assuming this is an ATX or ITX PC, there's likely a way to reset UEFI so you can disable fastboot and change your settings, or at least boot from a recovery USB.
There's usually something like a button or 2 pins you can short on your motherboard to reset the settings. If your machine has dual BIOS, there will be a switch you can flip, though you'll probably need to update the UEFI again once you do that.
In the worst case (and this should work on almost any device), remove the CMOS battery, let the device sit for a few minutes, then put that battery in. That should clear all settings, including fastboot, and allow you to do recovery stuff - just make sure you fix the time before going on the internet.
The Netherlands Gambling Authority (Ksa) has fined Optdeck Service Limited, the firm behind Unibet, €4m (~£3.51m) due to lapses in player protection duties from July-2022 until July-2024.
During that period, the Dutch gambling operator was required to implement protections for players to avoid excessive gambling and possible addiction. Ksa found failures in the operator’s monitoring system that allowed players to bet significant amounts without adequate interventions.
Michel Groothuizen, Chairman of the Ksa Board, noted: “When there are signs of excessive gambling behaviour, and someone wagers a large amount of money in a short period of time, a provider must promptly investigate the source of the money.
I set up NUT on my server to monitor the status of 2 UPS's connected via USB, an eaton and a cyberpower. Nut fires up fine when I tell systemd to run all the pieces, but when I reboot, they are active but dead. they dont wake up and work until I manually load them again.
Theres no error anywhere. it just wont load itself on boot. why?
1) You need to enable debug logging for NUT 2) Run systemctl --failed and see if you get anything there 3) Make sure you run the journal back all the way through boot and see if anything during boot time is obvious 4) Post your systems units here
As of Fedora 42, at least, bootstrapping nut is a little different. For starters, the service template, /usr/lib/systemd/system/nut-driver@.service is broken.
Its common, it's called the refractory period. Younger men can sometimes go a couple minutes after a "reboot" but as you get older it takes longer and longer.
I'm too scared to start calculating it myself, but I sometimes wonder how much electricity, drive space, and bandwidth we'd save if we cut all this nonsense analytics and forced ads
You can try this out by metering your usage with Rethink. It measures how much each app uses on and off of wifi in addition to its myriad other functions.
Nice! I was thinking about jmp before but read about issues with 2fa texts. My credit card still relies on 2fa texts so I am not sure if jmp would work for me.
Do you have any issues with texts from short numbers (5digit) and 2fa texts in general?
haven't had any issues so far! but I ported my existing number and haven't tried creating any new accounts which is where I suspect most of the issues arise. most carriers give out your name and address to banks so I think jmp is targeted when you are a new customer and they want to verify you through your carrier. i have switched to a local credit union for my cards so if an issue arises I can always talk to a real human to verify my identity
Since switching my FP6 to /e/OS i get at least double the battery life (not heavily using it, just messaging, listening to podcasts, outertune and some browsing). Especially when the screen is off, there is almost no battery usage.
Crazy...also, you made me remember how i had this cheap ass phone who battery life was like 2 days with screen off, i removed the google stuff and it became a full week (and i was hosting a discord bot on that guy btw)
Yeah i still remember my Redmi Notes fondly. Great battery life, good custom rom support, everything i needed from a smartphone. Very unfortunate, that xiaomi restricts custom ROMs as much as they do...
Wow! That's much more that I would have thought. Can't wait to liberate my dad's phone over the holidays, he's on board with me getting GrapheneOS on it. Will have to see what I can do to their home network as well though since mom's stuck on a carrier-locked phone.
Just as likely that red sliver at the end was the traffic created by his intentional usage of the phone all-along. Telemetry and ads are just that gross, but what do I know?
Depends on both what the adblocker responds and how a given program handles failures.
Pi-Hole and similar adblockers can pretend that the domain is on the device itself (A 127.0.0.1), is an invalid IP (A 0.0.0.0) or that the domain doesn't exist at all (NXDOMAIN). Each one has its own implications, with the latter (usually the default afaik) being the most likely to have software generate a hard error and give up.
This is probably not an easy question to answer, since, as another comment pointed out, WordPress is both an open source software option to selfhost your website, and also a non-free managed hosting option that you can use to host your website.
For the former, you fully control what plugins are installed, and if you don't want social media tracking pixels on your site then don't install one.
For the latter, you also mostly control what gets installed on your hosted website, but not entirely. It's running on their servers so in theory they could be injecting tracking. I believe they do have some plugins like Jetpack that are always installed on managed websites, with some anti-features included that can be turned on (but don't have to be).
I always recommend going the self hosted route with WordPress, if you are even the tiniest bit technical minded. It's very easy to deploy on something like DigitalOcean or your own home server, and then you don't need to worry about tracking from WordPress.com.
If you are trying to get the Wordpress software and install it on a server you own or web hosting account you pay for, yes.
If you're trying to do something else, like sign up for blog hosting from a privacy-respecting service provider without having to administer software yourself, then no. If you want recommendations for services like that, you should probably make a separate post asking for that, with as much detail about what you want to do and whether you're willing to pay for it as possible.
Edit: I see you did make such a post. If you're "not tech savvy" as your post says, I don't recommend administering Wordpress yourself. While it's something nearly anyone can learn if sufficiently motivated, it's much more effort for someone without a technical background.
If I keep all incoming connections blocked, but also all outgoing connections blocked except my browser (no MS/Win service is communicating with anything online), would my attack surface be just the browser? So it wouldn't matter if Win is not updated?
The malware doesn't usually attack windows through windows communications. They usually enter through browser traffic and effect other operations from there. That is where the risk is coming from using windows after its end date. Any new exploits found will not be fixed (except for business licenses I think they're still doing those for a little while longer). I recommend doing what I did. Find a user friendly Linux version and take the plunge. I'm using Mint right now and it's almost indistinguishable from my windows 10 console.
There are going to be more services you need than http and https. You'll also need to allow DNS queries and a way to keep your time updated, for instance.
The advantage of blocking incoming connections is that each potentially vulnerable network service isn't automatically exposed to the internet. Blocking outgoing connections isn't going to improve your security much, considering that any compromised service trying to phone home could just use http, the same protocol your browser uses.
It would still matter that your OS isn't up to date. For instance, if there is ever a vulnerability in the way Windows 10 renders an image format that allows remote code execution, Microsoft will not give you a patch.
If you must remain on Windows 10, the best way to reduce attack surface is going to be to uninstall as much software as possible that you don't use.
If you only use a browser, then you could have a quite seemless transition to Linux. That way you can have an up-to-date system. The vast majority of browsers support it natively, including Chrome and Edge.
the browser has historically been one of the most suceptsble vectors of hacking.
theres a reason why most older consoles often have an exploit related to getting access to protected regions of memory via corruption using the browser, and why modern Nintendo and PlayStation consoles do not have a built in browser for consumer use.
it wouldn't prevent all vulnerabilities so theoretically you can still be pwned but practically that's going to work for most cases imo. I've done this in the past, block everything except for some proxy port then configure the browser to use that proxy, and use nuTensor/uBlock Origin on the browser to only allow essential things.
If you're talking about Windows 10, install Win10 Enterprise IoT LTSC 21H2 and disable all the telemetry craps. That gives you a clean(?) Windows setup with support until 2032.
It would definitely reduce the attack surface. And even though Windows has "security" issues patched all the time, rarely are they ones so severe that you can just roll up to a machine and send it a weird HTTP reply and get admin access. Usually it's stuff like if you have a shortcut file on disk it gets to run code when you look in the folder, or something. Not great for working with downloads, but hard to exploit unless at least one other thing happens (like visiting a malicious page, which then starts a download that the browser accepts).
But the browser calls out to the OS to do a lot of stuff (render images, render fonts, play sounds, etc.). It mostly assumes the OS can do those things without popping open a remote shell because too many emojis were rendered in a row or something. That is not always true, and when it isn't you want an OS patch to fix it before you go on a site where someone can post the Magic Emoji That Hacks You.
But you are right that you can browse around trustworthy websites on an unpatched system behind a decent firewall for quite a while before you notice something bad happening. But also, a lot of bad things can have been happening for quite a while before you notice.
No, also the browser is the thing that gets breached. It would be like bricking up all your windows so no one could break them and get in your house but only having a screen door in front.
Yes technically the browser alone is a “reduced attack surface”, but it’s reduced by .001%.
If the leaders of the European Union want to overcome the global wave of populism threatening their democracies, they need to revive an economy that has long failed to deliver prosperity. To do so, they must first get out of their own way.
Israel announces it will open the Rafah border crossing but only for Palestinians leaving. Hamas to hand over the body of another Israeli captive. Over 200 prominent cultural figures sign a letter calling for the release of Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti. ICE begins targeting Somali Americans in Minnesota. President Donald Trump gives this new antagonism rhetorical support, calling Ilhan Omar and Somalis in general “garbage.” Trump Department of Justice official Harmeet Dillon slanders Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as an “antisemitic demagogue,” and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames youth solidarity with Palestine on TikTok. Israel launders its talking points through actress Noa Tishby and her foundation, a new report alleges, and may have violated FARA in the process. Trump admin threatens to cut off SNAP funding in blue states. ICE moves toward a “mega-warehouse” detention facility. Ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is released from prison after a Trump pardon. Centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla takes a slim lead in Honduras’ elections. More violence in Pakistan’s northwest. The Ukrainian military disputes Russian claims of gains in the Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to cut off Ukrainian access to the sea. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are systematically holding trapped residents for ransom in El-Fasher. Venezuela resumes repatriation flights. The Philippine military is using U.S. hardware in its counter-insurgency efforts, a new Drop Site report shows. As the feds closed in on Jeffrey Epstein, he estimated in a private email that there might be as many as 20 underage victims, Saagar Enjeti reports for Drop Site.
Israel to open Rafah crossing for exits only; RSF holding trapped El-Fasher residents for ransom; ICE plans for mega warehouse detention centers
Israel announces it will open the Rafah border crossing but only for Palestinians leaving. Hamas to hand over the body of another Israeli captive. Over 200 prominent cultural figures sign a letter calling for the release of Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti. ICE begins targeting Somali Americans in Minnesota. President Donald Trump gives this new antagonism rhetorical support, calling Ilhan Omar and Somalis in general “garbage.” Trump Department of Justice official Harmeet Dillon slanders Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as an “antisemitic demagogue,” and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames youth solidarity with Palestine on TikTok. Israel launders its talking points through actress Noa Tishby and her foundation, a new report alleges, and may have violated FARA in the process. Trump admin threatens to cut off SNAP funding in blue states. ICE moves toward a “mega-warehouse” detention facility. Ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is released from prison after a Trump pardon. Centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla takes a slim lead in Honduras’ elections. More violence in Pakistan’s northwest. The Ukrainian military disputes Russian claims of gains in the Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to cut off Ukrainian access to the sea. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are systematically holding trapped residents for ransom in El-Fasher. Venezuela resumes repatriation flights. The Philippine military is using U.S. hardware in its counter-insurgency efforts, a new Drop Site report shows. As the feds closed in on Jeffrey Epstein, he estimated in a private email that there might be as many as 20 underage victims, Saagar Enjeti reports for Drop Site.
Israel announces it will open the Rafah border crossing but only for Palestinians leaving. Hamas to hand over the body of another Israeli captive. Over 200 prominent cultural figures sign a letter calling for the release of Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti. ICE begins targeting Somali Americans in Minnesota. President Donald Trump gives this new antagonism rhetorical support, calling Ilhan Omar and Somalis in general “garbage.” Trump Department of Justice official Harmeet Dillon slanders Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as an “antisemitic demagogue,” and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames youth solidarity with Palestine on TikTok. Israel launders its talking points through actress Noa Tishby and her foundation, a new report alleges, and may have violated FARA in the process. Trump admin threatens to cut off SNAP funding in blue states. ICE moves toward a “mega-warehouse” detention facility. Ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is released from prison after a Trump pardon. Centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla takes a slim lead in Honduras’ elections. More violence in Pakistan’s northwest. The Ukrainian military disputes Russian claims of gains in the Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to cut off Ukrainian access to the sea. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are systematically holding trapped residents for ransom in El-Fasher. Venezuela resumes repatriation flights. The Philippine military is using U.S. hardware in its counter-insurgency efforts, a new Drop Site report shows. As the feds closed in on Jeffrey Epstein, he estimated in a private email that there might be as many as 20 underage victims, Saagar Enjeti reports for Drop Site.
Israel to open Rafah crossing for exits only; RSF holding trapped El-Fasher residents for ransom; ICE plans for mega warehouse detention centers
Israel announces it will open the Rafah border crossing but only for Palestinians leaving. Hamas to hand over the body of another Israeli captive. Over 200 prominent cultural figures sign a letter calling for the release of Palestinian political prisoner Marwan Barghouti. ICE begins targeting Somali Americans in Minnesota. President Donald Trump gives this new antagonism rhetorical support, calling Ilhan Omar and Somalis in general “garbage.” Trump Department of Justice official Harmeet Dillon slanders Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as an “antisemitic demagogue,” and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton blames youth solidarity with Palestine on TikTok. Israel launders its talking points through actress Noa Tishby and her foundation, a new report alleges, and may have violated FARA in the process. Trump admin threatens to cut off SNAP funding in blue states. ICE moves toward a “mega-warehouse” detention facility. Ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández is released from prison after a Trump pardon. Centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla takes a slim lead in Honduras’ elections. More violence in Pakistan’s northwest. The Ukrainian military disputes Russian claims of gains in the Donbas. Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to cut off Ukrainian access to the sea. Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces are systematically holding trapped residents for ransom in El-Fasher. Venezuela resumes repatriation flights. The Philippine military is using U.S. hardware in its counter-insurgency efforts, a new Drop Site report shows. As the feds closed in on Jeffrey Epstein, he estimated in a private email that there might be as many as 20 underage victims, Saagar Enjeti reports for Drop Site.
BAGGAO, Philippines—Black Hawk and ATAK helicopters swooped overhead and began firing into the mountains on an early February afternoon. Farmers tilling crops and tending their water buffalo ran for cover, taking shelter as the helicopters strafed the area. In a nearby town square, onlookers recorded with their phones, gasping as explosions ripped across the horizon. A Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter later made rounds in the area, witnesses said, as soldiers sequestered farmers in shelters. They were kept from their farms for weeks as their harvest wilted and died.
It’s a scene that has become a monthly occurrence in the rural Philippines, beginning in early 2023 and continuing today. The military said it was pursuing rebels from the communist New People’s Army (NPA), a designated terrorist group active since 1969, when Jose Maria Sison founded the New People’s Army—a Maoist group waging an armed rebellion primarily based in rural areas. The military and NPA have been in conflict ever since, despite several rounds of failed peace talks, most recently in 2023.
But since 2023, the Philippine military has started using advanced attack helicopters and fighter jets supplied wholly, or in part, by the United States, in a rapid escalation of counterinsurgency operations that have tormented rural communities and led to numerous potential international humanitarian law violations that could trigger policies preventing U.S. military aid, according to dozens of witnesses and experts who spoke to Drop Site News.
Washington says it is arming its ally to defend against Chinese aggression, but the U.S.-manufactured helicopters have so far been used solely on domestic targets.
The Philippines is accused of recklessly using U.S. weapons in operations against its own civilians whose use could trigger legal restrictions on arms transfers.
BAGGAO, Philippines—Black Hawk and ATAK helicopters swooped overhead and began firing into the mountains on an early February afternoon. Farmers tilling crops and tending their water buffalo ran for cover, taking shelter as the helicopters strafed the area. In a nearby town square, onlookers recorded with their phones, gasping as explosions ripped across the horizon. A Bell AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter later made rounds in the area, witnesses said, as soldiers sequestered farmers in shelters. They were kept from their farms for weeks as their harvest wilted and died.
It’s a scene that has become a monthly occurrence in the rural Philippines, beginning in early 2023 and continuing today. The military said it was pursuing rebels from the communist New People’s Army (NPA), a designated terrorist group active since 1969, when Jose Maria Sison founded the New People’s Army—a Maoist group waging an armed rebellion primarily based in rural areas. The military and NPA have been in conflict ever since, despite several rounds of failed peace talks, most recently in 2023.
But since 2023, the Philippine military has started using advanced attack helicopters and fighter jets supplied wholly, or in part, by the United States, in a rapid escalation of counterinsurgency operations that have tormented rural communities and led to numerous potential international humanitarian law violations that could trigger policies preventing U.S. military aid, according to dozens of witnesses and experts who spoke to Drop Site News.
Washington says it is arming its ally to defend against Chinese aggression, but the U.S.-manufactured helicopters have so far been used solely on domestic targets.
The Philippines is accused of recklessly using U.S. weapons in operations against its own civilians whose use could trigger legal restrictions on arms transfers.
These violations could trigger provisions in U.S. law that should block military assistance to individual units of the Philippine military who can be credibly accused of committing gross violations of human rights.
The “Leahy law,” a term for two such provisions that came into focus during Israel’s war [edit genocide not war] in Gaza, ensures that no foreign military unit guilty of human rights violations receives U.S. assistance until it has taken prescribed remediation efforts. Its namesake, former U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy, was banned from the Philippines in 2019 after supporting a critic of Duterte.
“A major goal of the Leahy law is accountability,” said John Ramming Chappell, the advocacy and legal advisor at the U.S. program of the Center for Civilians in Conflict. “This is a cornerstone law when it comes to human rights and security assistance in the United States.” Chappell said that, while the white phosphorus incident would not fall under the auspices of the Leahy law, it “raises questions about how security forces in question are identifying civilians and determining civilian status,” a duty of allied militaries under international humanitarian law.
The Leahy law has had little effect in stemming human rights abuses within the Philippine military, despite a history of U.S. government concerns with its behavior. Charles Blaha, who served as director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights from 2016 to 2023, said his department focused on the Philippine police, who killed thousands in Duterte’s deadly drug war, and did not recall the law being applied to military units involved in the counterinsurgency
...
“Human rights can get outweighed by other factors,” Blaha said.........
The latest efforts to strengthen state secularism, dubbed "secularism 2.0", are part of a new bill introduced by the governing Coalition Avenir Quebec (CAQ) on Thursday, expanding on a 2019 religious symbols law that has fuelled fierce debate throughout the country.
The original law prevents judges, police officers, teachers and public servants from wearing symbols such as the kippah, turban or hijab while at work. The measures proposed in Bill 9 would:
extend the ban on wearing religious symbols to staff in subsidised daycares
bar "collective religious practices" like prayer in public spaces, such as parks, without prior authorisation from municipalities
prevent students and staff from wearing face coverings in daycare all the way through to post-secondary education
Roberge said the limits on public prayer were in reaction to recent protests in the province, where there has been debate over groups praying at pro-Palestinian demonstrations.
A new bill introduced in the Canadian province expands on a 2019 religious symbols law with new measures including a ban on face coverings in daycares.
The German military says the first elements of the Israeli system – radar, launchers and trained personnel – are now operational and can begin protective operations on a limited scale.
The system, which was procured in Israel, is reportedly a response to the threat posed by Russia and is expected to give Germany, for the first time, the ability to detect and intercept incoming ballistic missiles outside the Earth’s atmosphere.
The German armed forces are investing $4.2bn in the system, which is being deployed outside of Israel for the first time.
It is not just about your pc hardware. I much prefer running the latest software on it as I regularly use features from tools added in the last version of something. I would hate to have to wait 6 months to a year to be able to use new features that make my life easier. That might not be every bit of software I use but enough core things that I would notice.
Agreed. That is why I think Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a better desktop than Debian Stable. The DE and everyday GUI tools stay fresh even if most of the distro is a time capsule.
I like having the upstream versions of software instead of it being patched by package maintainers.
I like having up to date software. It means that issue trackers for software I use are relevant
Doing distro upgrades when they end support never works gracefully and i have to completely reinstall. I'd rather just use a rolling release which in practice works and is supported indefinitely
I do like bleeding edge updates. For wine for instance
Yeah, Point 1 here is exactly why I moved from Ubuntu to Arch ~10 years ago.
I was trying to get something working and found that the bug / feature had been fixed ~1 year earlier, but that version wasn't in the repos... I couldn't move forwards.
With Arch, all is well. And, I'm either reporting new bugs and helping to get things fixed, or I'm updating the wiki with any changes I notice.
CPUs are usually fine. It's the GPUs that need updates faster, especially Nvidia. However I generally love to have new features as soon as possible too. On the other hand, I like the slowest updates as possible on my home server.
With a rolling release distro you get the most recent upstream stable releases of all your software packages. There is really no blood involved. If you want the risk of blood, you need to install the bloody versions of upstream, i.e. newest git master.
Ubuntu et all on the other hand give you months to years old software. If you're fine with that 🤷. And on big upgrade, they break install different software and tend to break stuff.
my hardware is pretty new, support for it is shaky on slower distros
i prefer to do small, generally reliable updates frequently rather than large, failure prone updates infrequently
although rare, i have run into the wall once or twice on slow release distros, where a program i want to use needs a newer version of a package than my distro supported
Rolling release means that you won't be forced to reinstall the whole system when the number after the name flips. And you won't be locked out of some newer version of a package because the distro you use decided they're cutting off the updates to "old" versions
This...is not accurate. Not being pedantic, just correcting the misunderstanding so you know the difference.
LTS releases are built to be stable on pinned versions of point release kernel and packages. This ensures that a team can expect to not have to worry about major changes or updates for X years.
Rolling Releases are simply updating new packages to whatever versions become available when released. Pretty much the opposite of an expected stable release for any period of time.
Doesn't have anything to with "forced reinstall" of anything. If you've been having to fully reinstall your OS every time a new LTS is released, you are kind of doing extra unnecessary work.
I like getting updates and new features? My computer isn't new by any means. But I tinker with stuff, sometimes bleeding edge technology. Other than that I don't really care. Rolling release, Debian Stable... I'm fine as long as it does the job. And for half the stuff it doesn't even matter. I can write a letter with a 5yo LibreOffice or answer mails with any version of the mail client. Just give me modern, up-to-date tools when developing software, and it doesn't hurt if the slicer knows about my new 3d printer from this year.
What exactly is the point of stable release? I don't need everything pinned to specific versions—I'm not running a major corporate web service that needs a 99.9999% uptime guarantee—and Internet security is a moving target that requires constant updates.
Security and bug fixes—especially bug fixes, in my experience—are a good enough reason to go rolling-release even if you don't usually need bleeding-edge features in your software.
Yep, it is helpful for corporate applications, where nothing can introduce possible behavioural changes, that affect users, program function or the application development.
That's a very odd example to choose given how trivially interchangable kernels are.
At NixOS, we ship the same set of kernels on stable and rolling; the only potential difference being the default choice. I'm pretty sure most other stable distros optionally ship newer kernels too. There isn't really a technical reason why they couldn't.
To be able to predict when something you depend on breaks.
This "something" could be as "insignificant" as a UI change that breaks your workflow. For instance, GNOME desktop threw out X11 session support with the latest release (good riddance!) but you might for example depend on GNOME's X11 session for a workflow you've used for many years.
With rolling, those breaking changes happen unpredictably at any time. It is absolutely possible for that update to come out while you're in a stressful phase of the year where you need to finish some work to hit a deadline. Needing to re-adjust your workflow during that time would be awful and could potentially have you miss the deadline. You could simply not update but that would also make you miss out on security/bug fixes.
With stable, you accumulate all those breaking changes and have them applied at a pre-determined time, while still receiving security/bug fixes in the mean time. In our example that could mean that the update might even be in a newer point release immediately but, because your point release is still supported for some time, you can hold on on changing any workflows and focus on hitting your deadline.
You need to adjust your workflow in either case (change is inevitable) but with stable/point releases, you have more options to choose when you need to do that and not every point in time is equally convenient as any other.
I'd just roll back the problem package to the last acceptable version until I have the time to address whatever the issue is (or block the new version of just that package if I have advance notification). That way, I get the fixes for everything else without breaking my workflow. If a rolling-release distro has a package manager that doesn't allow that, I'd contend that said package manager is broken.
So far I've encountered the smoothest OS experience with Arch-based EndeavourOS. Perhaps twice a year something breaks for which the forum or Arch Wiki usually provided the fix within a day. The other 363 days I simply update in the morning/evening and all is well—sudo pacman -Syu --noconfirm and yay --noconfirm.
Conversely, on Debian, it drives me nuts that one is prevented from updating even if one public key from one unimportant repository is missing or something. This troubleshooting is way harder for beginners than most things I've needed to do to fix my EndeavourOS install.
I've got a complete Linux beginner to start off with EndeavourOS without problems. She's even troubleshooting and fixing suddenly non-working Steam games by herself.
In any case, any Linux is better than Windoze. Try different distributions if you've got a spare PC to test with and see what fits you. For the greatest peace of mind, always have two or more hard drives or have a directory that instantly syncs to a cloud to separate the OS from crucial data one cannot lose in case something goes awry. As for desktop environments (DE), I started off with Xfce about ten years ago, used that most of the time. Then fell for the KDE Plasma hype for about year—they're doing great stuff, but a bit too bloated and buggy for my liking, as well as trying to have a KDE app for everything instead of acknowledging some other software is simply better. One can't be the best at everything. Anyway, then I tested multiple DEs because all of them have exclusively useful features, and the perfect mix between the most prominent ones (Xfce, Plasma, Gnome) I've found to be Cinnamon, the default on Linux Mint. For me that's the perfect beginner friendly DE that also remains highly configurable/extensible to suit experienced users, without being overwhelming/bloated to anyone.
Have fun and build whatever you want in your new awesome sandbox. Screw M$ without restraint nor compassion.
Minimal delay between a program releasing new features or bugfixes and you getting to use them. Even as an avid Debian user, sometimes I get bummed out when they freeze a package for release right before a feature I would have really liked makes it in.
As for security, there's not a huge difference I'm aware of. On Debian, features stay where they are, but maintainers will backport just the security fixes of each package to the current stable release.
This is admittedly anecdotal, but my experience with point releases is that things still break, and when they do, you're often stuck with the broken thing until a new release comes out. For this reason, among others, dist-upgrades tend to be extremely nervewracking.
With a rolling release, not only are fixes for broken things likely to release faster - if something does break, you can pin that package, and only that package, to an older version in the meantime. Then again, I've been using Arch almost exclusively on my desktop for about 7 years and I've never had to do this. I don't doubt that things have broken for people, but as far as I'm concerned, Arch just works.
As far as security goes, I don't think there's much, if any, advantage. Debian, the stablest of them all, still gets security updates in a timely fashion.
Dist upgrade is only dangerous for the people who do it. Wait a few weeks before upgrading to the new release and most broken things will be fixed already. I used arch a lot, and I do like the idea of rolling releases, but at this point for the couple programs I need new features in, I just build them from source.
Rolling vs. point release is not about whether a breaking change happens or not but when.
With rolling, breaking changes could happen at any time (even when inconvenient) but are smaller and spread out. With point release, you get a big chunk of breaking changes all at once but at predictable points in time, usually with migration windows.
I follow linux news I like hearing about new features and have them come to my system quickly. I'd hate to have to wait years for anything new. I'm not worried about stability, i run nothing critical and if I have an issue I'll just fix it.
Less chance of an update breaking things. Lots of small and frequent updates, instead of rare and large update packs/stacks.
I would say a rolling distro update has a higher chance of it breaking something. Each one might bring in a new major version of something that has breaking changes in it. But that breakage is typically easier to fix and less of a problem.
Point release distros tend to bundle up all their breakages between major versions so breaks loads of things at once. And that IMO can be more of a hassle then dealing with them one at a time as they come out.
I tended to find I needed to reinstall point release distros instead of upgrading them as it was less hassle. Which is still more disruptive then fixing small issues over time as the crop up.
Good point. Yes. Small breakage means it's easier to fix. Although, the years I've run my rolling release system, I've had it break maybe one of two times. Easily fixed. Both of those was because there was a change that needed a manual intervention, which I did not read about until after, so those were my own fault.
Upgrades is any security or big fix as well. Those tend to be quite safe in point release distros. Upgrading to a new point release version is has all the same problems the rolling release had over the same period all bundle in one messy upgrade (which makes them a huge pain to deal with as they often compound). But between those, the patch upgrades tend to be quite smooth.
I would say the over a longer time period rolling release break in bigger way less often. But they tend to have more but smaller breakages that are easy to trivial to fix.
You'll need to update to a point release sooner or later.
Are you the kind of person who lives to peel off the band-aid or pull it off in one go?
I prefer to peel mine. I've learned from pulling stitches by ripping it off.
On a more serious note: btrfs and timeshift are 👌. If there ever is a botched package, I'll just roll back to this morning and keep working. It'll probably be fixed by tomorrow.
I tend to use rolling release because I tend to update my hardware with some regularity. Also I hate opening an app or a desktop environment and when I go looking for newly announced features they aren't there within a day or two. Considering current hardware prices the latter has been my primary motivation last couple years.
For me its security patches. I frequently lock app versions manually.
I do have an old laptop that uses a fixed release, because it sees infrequent use.
One needs to adjust whats needed per usecase. For me that means daily drivers get semi-rolling or rolling. Where stability is neede/older systems, fixed releases.
I have a relatively new PC and eventually I decided at Debian Stable.
Granted, I was already somewhat familiar with APT and Debian based systems, but I also was thinking to choose something different or even a rolling release distribution...
...but at the end of the day, I wanted a stable, useable, tested and functional system that I can't easily fuck up or can restore if needed, because, well, it won't be a first time I bork a Linux system with misconfiguring stuff or doing something straight out stupid. But this is irrelevant this case.
I ain't that super familiar with Linux world, so I deliberately chose the safe way. My hardwares are working fine, I have the drivers that work for everything, games running amazingly well... in the past 2 years I use Linux as main OS, I had no problems not being bleeding edge. I kinda had some minor FOMO when Plasma 6 came out and I was "stuck" on 5 with Debian 12, but didn't had to wait too much for Debian 13 that has Plasma 6 by default. Though, I reinstalled everything when 13 came out - but only because I wanted some changes on my partition table, I added a new disk and... I wasn't quite happy how I managed some things with it so I wanted a fresh start - so wasn't upgrading to 13, but I assume it wouldn't be a problem either, not too long ago I upgraded my server from Debian 10 to 12, without issues. (From 10 to 11 and to 12. First I tried from 10 to 12, that was a disaster though. However, the documentation explicitly said not to do such thing, so it was on me.)
I was tinkering with my tech stuff all my life, I now really just want a stable, working OS. But it's just personal preference, I have nothing against rolling release and I can imagine that there are scenarios where rolling release is the better choice.
It is funny. You and I landed in different places but for almost the same reasons.
I use a rolling release because I want my system to work. “Tinkering with my tech stuff” is an activity I want to do when I want and not something I want thrust upon me.
On “stable” distros, I was always working around gaps in the repo or dealing with issues that others had already fixed. And everything I did myself was something I had to maintain and, since I did not really, my systems became less and less stable and more bloated over time.
With a rolling distro, I leave everything to the package manager. When I run my software, most of the issues I read other people complaining about have already been fixed.
And updates on “stable” distros are stressful because they are fragile. On my rolling distro, I can update every day and never have to tinker with anything beyond the update command itself. On the rare occasion that something additional needs to be done, it is localized to a few packages at most and easy to understand.
Anyway, there is no right or wrong as long as it works for you.
I use ancient hardware (as old as 2008 iMacs) and I greatly prefer rolling releases.
Open Source software is always improving and I like to have the best available as it makes my life easier.
In my experience, things just work better. I have spent years now reading complaints online about how Wayland does not work, the bugs in certain software, and features that are missing. Almost always I wonder what versions they are running because I have none of those problems. Lots of Wayland complaints from people using systems that freeze software versions for years. They have no idea what they are missing. This is just an example of software that is rapidly evolving. There are many more.
Next is performance. Performance improvements can really be felt on old hardware. Improvements in scheduling, network, and memory handling really stand out. It is surprising how often improvements appear for even very old hardware. Old Intel GPUs get updates for example. Webcams get better support, etc.
Some kinds of software see dramatic improvements. I work with the AV1 video codec. New releases can bring 20% speed improvements that translate to saving many minutes or even hours on certain jobs. I want those on the next job I run.
I work on my computer every day and, on any given day, I may want or enjoy a feature that was just added. This has happened to me many times with software like GIMP where a job is dramatically easier (for example text improvements tag appeared in GIMP 3).
If you do software development, it is common to need or want some recently developed component. It is common for these to require support from fairly recent libraries. Doing dev on distros like Debian or RHEL was always a nightmare of the installed versions being too old.
And that brings me to stability.
On systems that update infrequently, I find myself working against the software repos. I may install third-party repos. I may build things myself. I may use Flatpak or AppImage. And all of that makes my system a house of cards that is LESS stable. Over time, stuff my distro does not maintain gets strewn everywhere. Eventually, it makes sense to just wipe it all and start fresh. From what I see online, a lot of people have this experience.
On of the biggest reasons I prefer rolling releases with large repos is because, in my experience, they result in much more stable systems in practice. And if everything comes from the repo, everything stays much more manageable and sustainable.
I use Debian Stable on servers and in containers all the time. But, to single it out, I find that actually using it as a desktop is a disaster for all of the above reasons but especially that it becomes an unstable mess of software cobbled together from dozens of sources. Rolling releases are easier to manage. This is the opposite of what some others say, I realize.
In fact, if I do have to use a “more stable” distro, I usually install an Arch Linux Distrobox and use that to get access to a larger repo of more frequently updated packages.
Where did the idea come from that rolling releases are about hardware?
Hardware support is almost entirely about the kernel.
Many distros, even non-rolling ones like Mint and Ubuntu, offer alternative kernels with support for newer hardware. These are often updated frequently. Even incredibly “stable” distros like Red Hat Enterprise Linux regularly release kernels with updated hardware support.
And you can compile the kernel yourself to whatever version you want or even use a kernel from a different distro.
Rolling releases are more about the other 80,000 packages that are not the kernel.
I was just experimenting with arch for my first time last week and I encountered an issue with sunshine (screen streaming software) requiring CUDA for encoding with my GPU but nvidia no longer supports GTX1080 for CUDA, which means I would have to resort to software encoding. Or I can stay on an older version of CUDA but then it will eventually become or maybe already has become incompatible with the rest of the rolling packages. Are there solid workarounds for these types of scenarios?
For software developers, it is better to have frequent tiny changes that can break things, than a big mess of breakage.
Do you hate distractions? Do you love steady improvements? This will affect your preference and judgement about rolling release.
The same can be true for desktop users. It also depends on how stable your software is. If you use mainly vim, dwm, and LaTeX, very few changes will break your flow.
As much as I love google hate, the bigger problem is people thinking work devices are private. They are not. Your messages/thoughts/ideas belong to the organization.
Yup! Just cuz your employer isn’t physically there looking over your shoulder while using the device doesn’t mean they are oblivious to what you are doing on it.
You would be mistaken if you think that every work phone is paid for by the employer. A lot of companies have a BYOD policy and still require loading their restrictive bullshit onto it. I have worked at two places like this and I refused to let them do it, but most went along with it. The funniest part if that they still wanted me on the on call rotation, but wouldn't pay for a decent device so they dug out an ancient Nextel phone for me to use. I have no idea how it still worked.
Good! That’s exactly how you should react to that request. BYOD is only okay if the company is subsidizing your monthly bill, even then it’s a grey area to me.
In fairness, that is a different situation than this.
This is google basically providing a mechanism for employers and parents to pull text messages on devices on their plans. That wouldn't impact BYOD as that is still not on their plan.
But all the management software and spyware already have those capabilities. Which... is the other aspect of this karma-bate post.
Every work phone, BYOD or not, has had the corporate profile stuff installed which already let them see most of everything. I just assumed this was more of the same. Shame on me for not reading the article.
I'm glad to hear that the BYOD trend didn't take off in every country. Many of the companies would act like they were doing you a favor so you didn't have the "hassle" of carrying two phones around. Oh that is a hassle, but this was just them shoveling their costs onto the worker.
My old boss logged onto her private investment bank account on the work computers/network and bought and sold stock, for example. God knows what else she did. She got fired for using the company card for private purchases. Good fucking riddance. 😁
Yeah this is the bigger issue here really. Fuck Google and their invasive bullshit, absolutely, but work devices should never be used for personal/private use, and vice versa. Keep that shit completely separate as much as possible.
GrapheneOS. Use a work profile. Segregate your work from your personal information. As far as the employer is concerned, they have full control over your device. They can even send a wipe command to it and it would only affect the work partition, leaving your personal data alone.
My favorite tool for managing this is an app called Shelter. Graphene has robust profiling support, but I don't want to have to swap in and out of something to see info. Shelter allows you to clone apps from your main profile to your work profile. You don't even have to set up Google Play Services with an account if you don't want.
Yeah... having to reprovision a phone because it just got reformatted is going to raise a red flag. And if you are installing a rogue OS on your work phone to prevent your employer from seeing what you are doing... I actually side with them when they fire your ass.
Your nonsense makes sense if it is a personal device that you are using for work purposes. Which... I strongly oppose for a range of reasons. If your work wants you "on call" then they can provide a device. Otherwise you can never be off call.
Ah. So graphene DOES have a system where it takes your entire existing OS, shrinks all the partitions on disk, installs itself around that, AND prevents the monitoring software from reporting that your 512 GB device is now actually a 128 GB one?
Well color me surprised.
Or, you know, more likely you end up wiping the existing OS by effectively factory resetting it. And then you ping the management software server saying "I need to reinstall your spyware" which triggers a flag that IT may or may not care about. Similarly, said spyware now wonders why your phone's storage shrunk so massively and raises another flag.
Considering I have to deal with these kinds of security concerns on the regular as part of my professional life... kind of.
But you are just switching to ad hominem because your non sequitor "gimme updoots" response to a thread title is nonsense and you can't admit that. So... I strongly encourage you to wipe your work phone and install graphene with an isolated partition for google/work android and see what happens.
Inform yourself before making these statements. It's a more secure, hardened version of the official OS. It is not rooted nor is it displayed to the employer as anything other than Android.
This has nothing to do with the way the OS works, and everything to do with corporate policy. This would be against the IT policy at most companies, and circumventing their ability to remotely manage the device could easily get you fired.
I'm just being realistic. Some companies will fire you over this, at it will be "for cause" so you won't even be eligible for unemployment. If you can afford to lose your job, you can afford to buy your own phone for personal use. But if you want to take that risk, I won't stop you.
Would be fine if the person is having to BYOD as the phone is already theirs (which is how I took it at least). Obviously flashing a custom ROM of any sort without approval on a device that you don't own, and would have to give back to the company is a bad idea. The same would apply to installing a different OS on a work PC (which tend to have the BIOS locked to prevent changing things or being able to simply boot an install USB). But I think managed phones with the level of being able to wipe the device remotely would also already be blocking access to developer options. Along with other stuff needed to unlock the needed stuff for flashing other ROMs (though I haven't flashed a ROM in a while and never had a work phone so I might be wrong).
But if the company tries to take "ownership" of your personal device that you pay/paid for without providing a company owned device. Then it would be best to try and find a different employer, and/or use an old phone you don't use or get a low-end/cheap phone while working for them. But only go with that option if they provide a SIM/eSIM for service that they are paying for.
A work phone is a perk because it means you don't have to install Teams, Slack, and a bunch of proprietary nonsense you've never heard of onto your personal phone.
OpenAI made a deal to secure 40% of the global supply of wafers from both SK Hynix and Samsung (2 of the 3 large providers of RAM) ostensibly for project Stargate server farms. But it gets so much worse, they made both deals on the same day without advising the other company, and have not provisioned any way to actually use (make chips from) the wafers. It looks more like they’re just trying to keep RAM out of the hands of their competitors.
From there the laws of supply and demand and panic buying by everyone else took over, RAM prices are going to the moon, and Micron (the third big provider) dropped out of the consumer market because they’re gonna make bank in the server market as the only unencumbered company. Consumer general purpose computer customers are royally boned. This will flow through into the SSD market as well.
In short, Fsck the AI industry in general and Fsck ‘OpenAI’ and Sam Altman in particular. If you pray, pray that this deal gets a legal injunction in South Korea, coz you know the US will just applaud this fsckery.
They've done studies on people's ability to distinguish a human-made Photoshop from "AI slop". It's impossible. People think they can tell but they can't, so they just assume everything is AI because they want other people online to think they're cool and anti-capitalist
The UK government closed the final day of the judicial review into Palestine Action by presenting secret evidence, hidden from both the group’s lawyers and the public, to justify its ban on the direct-action organisation.
Following brief open-court submissions from government lawyers on Tuesday, the court asked lawyers representing Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, as well as members of the public and journalists, to leave.
A portion of Tuesday’s hearing was held in closed session to allow the government to present material it says cannot be disclosed on national security grounds. It means that if Ammori loses her case based on the secret evidence, neither she nor her team will know what the government argued against her or Palestine Action.
The UK government closed the final day of the judicial review into Palestine Action by presenting secret evidence, hidden from both the group’s lawyers and the public, to justify its ban on the direct-action organisation.
Following brief open-court submissions from government lawyers on Tuesday, the court asked lawyers representing Palestine Action co-founder Huda Ammori, as well as members of the public and journalists, to leave.
A portion of Tuesday’s hearing was held in closed session to allow the government to present material it says cannot be disclosed on national security grounds. It means that if Ammori loses her case based on the secret evidence, neither she nor her team will know what the government argued against her or Palestine Action.
The study by the Israel Democracy Institute was conducted in April among 720 Jewish respondents and 187 Arab respondents. It found that a larger percentage of Arab Israelis (30%) are considering leaving than Jewish Israelis (26%). Among Jews, the less individuals identified as religious, the more likely they were to say they were considering emigration, and respondents identifying as left-wing were more likely to say so than those on the right.
Among younger secular Jewish Israelis, 60% said they would consider leaving, and among those with a high income and a foreign passport, the figure jumped to 80%. In both Arabs and Jews, the more educated were more likely to consider leaving, and high and medium-high incomes created a higher likelihood as well.
In the same vein, people with jobs that enabled more global mobility, such as high-tech, medicine, and finance, were most likely to consider leaving. The poll was conducted after some 18 months of war on multiple fronts — before Israel’s 12-day war with Iran in June
US factory activity shrank in November by the most in four months as orders weakened, indicating manufacturers are struggling to break free from an extended period of malaise.
Do NOT throw bricks at cops. Cops will literally put piles of bricks near protests to tempt stupid people to give them a reason to shoot them in the face.
Why don't you cry more about memes. You fucking people and your pearl clutching about stupid jokes is incredible. Sign out before you give yourself hypertension, child.
What violence has actually sprung from leftist internet memes? You give them way too much credit.
You know that claims of a rising tide of “far-left violence” are fake news, yeah? This bullshit narrative is pumped out by the far-right and by corporate media (otherwise known as the bourgeois press) and by NGOs who get their funding from the bourgeoisie.
Bad-jacketing is a term for planting doubt on the authenticity of an individual's bona fides or identity. An example would be creating suspicion through spreading false rumors, manufacturing evidence, etc., that falsely portray someone in a community organization as an informant, or member of law enforcement, or guilty of malfeasance such as skimming organization funds.
Fed-jacketing, and Snitch-jacketing are variants of bad-jacketing that specifically aim to present the target as an informer.
Bullshit. Show me one admin who claims Lemmy has a “troll farm” problem. Only non-admins make such claims, usually ones suffering Russiagate derangement syndrome.
3½ years of anti-China & anti-Russia news posts by several similar Lemmy accounts
What they seem to have in common is: - Way more posts than comments. - Almost exclusively posting news articles. - The vast majority of the articles are critical of Russia or China. - Virtually always posting to the same few communities. Often there’s overlap in the communities the accounts target. - Consistent weekly output.
Who threw the first brick at Stonewall? Depending on who you ask, the answers range from Stonewall trailblazer Marsha P Johnson to Lady Gaga's ponytail.
Rebellion involves guns. Until we're ready for that, inflatable chicken suits are the meta.
The current battlefield is in the minds of the non-radicalized. Bricks only hurt us in that battle. Watching inflatable chickens being shot with rubber bullets helps us win.
Government officials, law enforcement, billionaires, or antifa groups nefariously placed pallets of bricks at protest sites in U.S. cities to stoke violence during June 2020 demonstrations against police brutality.
(a) The police ordered seven tons of bricks to be delivered to a location where a protest might occur sometime in the near future, in the hopes that they would be thrown at them by protestors, so that they could arrest them.
(b) Construction site brick piles are a common occurrence in urban areas.
They must've misunderstood something, people in this community would never advocate violence against police, who are definitely fellow human beings worthy of praise.
Jokes aside, guys I know they were human beings, but so are iof soldiers, cops aren't that bad but I think throwing bricks AS SELF DEFENSE is a little justified since Cops generally have five power to just hit and massacre people. Here in Italy they hit someone so hard he died of internal injuries. Cops aren't innocent.
I have found two old macbooks in the house me and my family live in. They are a MacBookair 2011 and a MacBook pro from 2008. I don't want to throw them away cause they are usable. I daily drive another 2013 MacBook air, very small and great for what I do with it, Wich I'm still looking to put Linux on it. For the 2011 MacBookair I put MX in it and I'm pretty good with it(but I want to use it as backup for the 2013), but with the 2008 MacBook pro there Is a problem: there is no battery to be found and it works only connected to power. Since here there are kinda frequent power outages for a minute or so I still can't use it for something that requires it running all the time. Do you have any suggestions on what to do with it or any distro? (For the 2013, 2011and 2008)
Sorry for the trouble
Have a great day (and I hope this is relevant to the community)
Technical specifications for the MacBook Air "Core i5" 1.3 13" (Mid-2013). Dates sold, processor type, memory info, hard drive details, price and more.
I have 4 Apple laptops running Linux, so I have some experience with it all.
The Macbook Air 2011 has wifi driver bugs, on large downloads/updates you will experience crashes (complete lockups). This happens with either of the two drivers available for it (foss linux and broadcomm). I suggest you get a tiny usb wifi for it for $6. You blacklist the internal driver first.
For the 2008 macbook, consider if it has 4 gb of ram or not. If yes, use linux, if not, have it as a toy. Maybe install something Q4OS (with trinity DE), or even Haiku. I personally don't use Linux on less than 4 GB of RAM. Yes, it loads fine on lite distros, but the moment you want to do some web browsing, you'll hit the swap, which destroys the drive. 4 GB RAM is my minimum. Also, the fact that it doesn't have EFI, it will work best with Q4OS (which is Debian based), and Haiku.
For the 2013 one, I'd suggest Linux Mint, it works great. You might, or might not require a usb wifi too. On some newer macbooks the wifi works without crashes during usage, but it doesn't let the machine wake up properly you see. So all that stuff need to be tested by you.
On the 2015+ macbooks, the webcam doesn't work usually (the third party driver doesn't work properly either).
On the 2013 one i already had tried mint in live and it works good. the 2008 one has 2 sticks of ddr2 1gb (2gb total). i have two sticks of ddr3 of 2gb(4gb total) but i dont know if it will work, i think not but mabye trying. yeah btw i can use it as like retro games and lite distros just for the fun. Btw thank you very much ;)
I use EndeavourOS on Mac hardware for very similar years.
Wifi (Broadcom-wl on the older stuff and brcmfmac_wcc on the newest) works well on all of them.
Webcams work well on all of them as well. Most are just USB cams but some use the FaceTimeHD module that builds with DKMS but works very well for me.
I cannot remember if I had to install the FaceTimeHD driver or if it was auto-installed by EOS. Even if not, it is in the repos and one line to install the package.
I have a 2008 iMac, 2015 iMac, 2012 MacBook Pro, 2016 MacBook Pro, 2013 MacBook Air, 2017 MacBook Air, and 2020 MacBook Air all running EOS (last one uses a special kernel because of the T2 chip).
They all run flawlessly including the Broadcom WiFi. The Arch kernel is the only one I have found where these drivers work well and EOS sets them up automatically during install.
CachyOS is also an option but the video is wonky on my older MacBooks. EOS is flawless.
fyi the 2008 macbook probably throttles the processor to around 1ghz when used without battery. on windows i could work around it by using some program to disable BD_PROCHOT(?), but failed to do so on linux.
Got a new disk and reinstalled my system (Fedora 43). Followed my own guide how to compile Opentrack with the Neuralnet tracker plugin: simpit.dev/systems/opentrack/
Worked fine but needs some build dependency updates meanwhile, like qt6 instead of qt5. Still amazed how good the Neuralnet tracker with ONNX runtime is.
I loved how tailored to me was Gentoo. But as time passes and your hardware gets older, the compilation times get longer and longer. That's what made me to do the hop
I've heard some time ago that now Gentoo is offering more pre-compiled packages. But I don't know the extent. libstd, gcc and libreoffice were the worst offenders in my time
If you're going to be compiling your own kernel (or now Gentoo ships with pre-compiled ones too?) my word of advice would be "don't forget to compile in the filesystem support"
When I was trying Gentoo I very much didn't forget, I went I want them all. But I ended at my first attempt. It was bootable, but I was missing network drivers, and on old Core 2 Duo the compilation already took 3 days.
Why do you want switch to Gentoo in the first place? I think its a good idea if you want to customize and build lot of applications yourself. Besides heavy hitters like browsers or the Kernel. So only you can answer if this is a good idea for you.
I thought input and experience from other people would be a gold idea since i dont want to spend a ton of time on my Linux install just to notice that it is unrelyable and bloated.
How is it bloated if you decide what to put on? Gentoo isn't a traditional distribution, its what you make it to. Still you have to answer for yourself why you even want to switch to Gentoo. And if all the extra work for compilation is worth it. Do you even want to compile everything and customize the compilation process? If not, maybe Gentoo is not for you. That's the thing. Only you can answer that.
Keep in mind and i'm sure you already know this but you have to compile everything yourself so it WILL take time. I have it on a sort of hobby machine and I remember just getting Firefox to compile/install took awhile. The benefit of this is you get an extremely custom tailored system for yourself. But like I said it's going to take you awhile to get to that point. If you want something immediate to daily drive and want more of a custom system as opposed to Arch then maybe give NixOS a shot. I switched from Arch to NixOS on my main machine and I love it, won't use anything else. But if you're patient and have the time to dedicate to Gentoo then go for it, it's fun to play around with on a Saturday afternoon.
If you want something immediate to daily drive and want more of a custom system as opposed to Arch then maybe give NixOS a shot
IMO the main customization part of Gentoo is that you can compile the world without the libs you don't want to have. With NixOS (AFAIK) being also package-based, how can it offer more custom system than Arch?
Are you looking to learn linux more or have a easy living experience, or what is the goal? If you want to get to know linux, learn how to compile a kernel, make your own initramfs and such, then: absolutely! If you want a stable easily maintainable system, then... maybe not. Like it is possible, and Gentoo is very stable, but if you are just starting, then you may make choices that do break when you upgrade. With some experience, this will go away, but expect some downtime in the beginning.
I'd probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more "yourself" and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I'd say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.
Im not, arch is a nightmare for me. I try to installiert something over pacman: ERROR. I try to fix the error, doesnt work because it needs certain shared library files... That i can not find.
But thats not the only thing, somehow the Servers are allways down and its not a nice little challange anymore. More like a piece of code designed to make me miserable.
Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don't want to compile everything yourself, I'd recommend Void Linux. It's a lovely little distro; I only don't daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn't be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don't remember their servers ever being down when I used it.
That's...an opinion that is not backed by any facts at all. What in the world are you talking about with "bloat" 🤣
So you're a newbie, and making lots of wild claims and taking awfully opinionated positions in this thread all over the place. I don't think you want help, so just be on your way 👍
Because they occupy so small disk size that they don't matter and it's easier to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. I wouldn't call hardware support bloat ware.
Also, just so you know, Arch has Bluetooth and wifi compatibility even if you don't install the packages, Gentoo does not. You would need to recompile your kernel with the correct configuration to enable those for your specific card.
Arch is just as bloated as Fedora, Mint or Bazzite. Hell, my Arch is a lot more bloated than any of those. This is Linux, the system is as bloated as you want it to be, but also having stuff installed doesn't necessarily causes your computer to be slow, programs only execute when you tell them to.
Sure pal, big security risks. You should learn about cyber security before regurgitating information. Having the chip is not a security risk, having the open source driver isn't either, the security risk is 99% between the screen and the chair.
I dont care how bloated your os is. Also BLAOT IS WHY IM SWITCHING
My point is that Arch is not inherently unbloated, any distro can be bloated, any distro can be unbloated, you decide what's bloat and what's not.
Do you know about limited disk space? Cuz that doesnt seem to be a problem for you, maybe it is for tho? Who knows?
We're talking less than 100MB here, if your disk space is that limited you should really consider upgrading. Especially if you're going to try Gentoo, because not only it requires more disk space but if you can't afford a cheap 1TB drive chances are your CPU will take a week to install Gentoo since you need to compile everything.
Any CPU under 100 will take forever to install Gentoo, plus if 100MB is an issue Gentoo will not work for you either. Also you don't need 1TB, and 1TB HDDs are way cheaper if you're that tight for space. I have systems with less than 100GB dedicated to the OS and they run great, so you can get a $30 SSD and not worry about disk space for your system ever again.
I'm sorry for being blunt, but Arch is very easy and plug-and-play like, if you're having these sorts of issues my guess is that you're not familiar with Linux and are doing stuff "wrong" (e.g. installing drivers from a website). Gentoo is a LOT more complicated and will hold your hand a lot less than Arch, I recommend you try something more beginning friendly like Mint, Fedora or Bazzite, learn the basics, learn the "Linux way" of doing stuff, then try Arch again, then, when you have a better reason than because I broke it, you can try Gentoo.
This is not a "you're too dumb to do it" answer, but imagine someone who's having issues driving a shift stick car asking how it's like to rebuild the engine. You're capable of rebuilding the engine yourself, you're able to use Gentoo, just not now, learn to walk before you try to bungee jump.
What the FUCK? are you saying i should switch from an os i can customize to a god damn terrabyte oft blaot? I know that i COULD fix it. I know how. But i just want an os i can tell what to do and then it does that, and ONLY THAT
Why do you think Mint/Ubuntu/Fedora/Bazzite are not that though? It seems you don't know how to ask your system to do stuff because otherwise your Arch install wouldn't break. Plus I bet that the default installation of any of those distros occupies around the same disk space than what you have now.
Honestly you read like an angsty teen who read Arch is advanced and wants to be 1337 by using it, a few years back you would have been using Kali. Let me tell you a secret, Arch is not advanced, it's a very easy straightforward distro, it just starts from a mostly clean slate, but if you're using gnome/kde/cinnamon or any DE that distros come prepacked with its just as bloated with extra steps.
I used Gentoo for a few years. I don't recommend it at all!
first off, there are no tangible advantages. it's not faster. it is more customizable (by use flags), but the only tangible advantage of those is bragging rights saying you kept a certain library off your system and saved 100kb. just enabling all features is more practical.
there are tangible disadvantages. a big system upgrade can take days. and often fails. and, the manual time you spend merging config files with dispatch-config is large.
I switched from Gentoo to debian after 3y of using Gentoo. i switched from debian to arch after about 10y later. been on arch for about 6y now. would not recommend Gentoo
Those things you listed are part of the fact, not all. Like saving 100kB. It does not matter in your 1TB hard drive, but it's night and day in embedded systems. No benefit for you isn't the same to no benefit.
the 100kb u save from the right use flags is nullified by the hundreds of mb needed to have the entire build tool chain on your system. there are dedicated distros for embedded systems that are much better suited. like alpine Linux. or LFS. (IIRC with LFS u can get the entire system installed 2 or 3 MB)
I mean, you can cross-compile to generate a Gentoo rootfs for the embedded system.
I worked on embedded systems for audio devices. I of course endorsed Alpine as well, but with musl as the C library I got weird bugs of stuttering audio output.
With Gentoo I get the option to build my entire system with musl as well, but I would rather have that bug not in my system. That's what Gentoo offers: options.
By "LFS", I think you mean Buildroot, practically. Buildroot is also highly customisable, but Buildroot isn't a distro. Like LFS, there is no way yo update a system, only rebuilding with latest packages. It also does not have flags for the whole system, so you're on your own if you want to disable, say IPv6, in the whole system.
All Gentoo users remember the pain of compiling QtWebEngine ;)
I used to run Gentoo on my old computer. Installing it was quite the experience. That was where I learnt about most of how Linux works thanks to the wiki.
I heard compiling your own packages with use flags can improve performance, but honestly it was not worth it for the compile time.
When I switched to my new PC, the Nvidia GPU doesn't work and I could not figure out why. I also don't have the time at that moment so I installed Endeavour instead, which I'm still using.
Seeing how you take great pride in mentioning the distro you use (by the way) I fully recommend using Gentoo so you can one-up those Arch peasants. That is about all the practical use you're going to get out of it though.
Its fun to learn how the system works, but after the 4-5th time trying to install something real quick, and there's an error in your package.use or something, it gets a lot less fun.
If you have the time and patience, its really cool. But I just want a web browser without having to edit 3+ text files to allow it to work.
Comments complaining how everything takes time to compile in Gentoo are kind of funny, do you really need everything to be installed asap?
That being said, Gentoo indeed is not for everyone. I've been using it for +15 years and am really happy with it - almost zero maintenance and it's super stable. The crux is the time it takes to be installed and people hold a weird grudge against it just for that.
But at the same time there are more distros oferring pretty much the same, i.e. your own arch.
It's thanks to Gentoo that I've been a Linux sysadmin for over 20 years. That being said, I've since moved to Arch and then Debian.
Some points: On modern systems you won't really notice any speed improvements from custom compiling the packages. Apart from maybe some numbers in articial benchmarks. On old systems with very limited resources, you can eke out a bit of more performance. Back when I was still using Gentoo, my proudest moment was getting a Pentium 1 with 96MB Ram (Yes, MB!), which was a gift of a colleague to his broke brother, into quite a useable little machine. Browsing, listening to MP3s, email, some simple games.
I also noticed a noticable improvment in performance in a 400mhz Athlon I had setup for my mom.
That being said, I was only able to do this, because I was using distCC to distribute compiling across several machines to keep compile times to a somewhat sane level. Also, I was doing a unpaid internship at the time, so I basically had all the time in the world, so compile times didn't really bother me.
I had tried to use linux before. After Windows XP crashed one too many times. I decided to see how things work on Linux. I initially chose a "easy to use" desktop distro. (Mandrake Linux). Got everything setup. Even 3D Accelaration worked. Everything was really nice and fun. Then I tried to tinker under the hood and I broke something that I couldn't figure out how to fix. So I thought, maybe I need to find something even easier, so I chose Suse Linux. Same story. Set everything up. Desktop working, 3D working, etc... start to tinker, break something, back to square zero.
Then I decided to change my approach and choose the hardest distro. The choice was between Linux from Scratch and Gentoo. Linux from Scratch sounded waay to painful, so I chose Gentoo.
It took me 3 days until I had a somewhat working system without a desktop. Then another 3 days until I had a desktop running Fluxbox.
But the learning experience was invaluable. Being forced to use the CLI and not only that, but more or less configure everything by hand. It takes aways the fear of the CLI and you get a feel for where everything is located in the filesystem, which config files do what, etc... It demystifies the whole thing substantially.
You suddenly realize that nothing is hidden from you. You are not prevented from accessing anything or tinkering with it.
The downside is that Gentoo takes a lot of time and effort to maintain. But the learning potential is invaluable. Especially if you use it to also start doing little projects in linux. e.g. File server, router, firewall, etc...
Me knowing Gentoo, got my first real job as Linux Sysadmin and before long I was training rookie Admins. And the first thing I always did with them was to run them through the Gentoo bootcamp.
Once they go to grips with that, everything else wasn't that difficult.
Take your time with the install process. It's possible that you may breeze through it. It's also possible that you may discover that, say, there's something wrong with the EFI implementation of the system you're installing to that you need to do some research to resolve. I've had both experiences.
Once installed, Gentoo is pretty much rock-solid, and almost any issue you have can be fixed if you're willing to put the effort in. Portage is a remarkably capable piece of software and it's worth learning about its more esoteric abilities, like automatic user patch application.
Do take the time to set up a binary package host. This will allow you to install precompiled versions of packages where you've kept the default USE flags. Do everything you possibly can to avoid changing the flags on webkit-gtk, because it is quite possibly the worst monster compile in the tree at the moment and will take hours even on a capable eight-core processor. (Seriously, it takes an order of magnitude more time than compiling the kernel does.)
Install the gentoolkit package—equery is a very useful command. If you find config file management with etc-update difficult to deal with, install and configure cfg-update—it's more friendly.
If you're not gung-ho about Free Software, setting ACCEPT_LICENSE="* -@EULA" (which used to be the default up until a few years ago) in make.conf may make your life easier. Currently, the default is to accept only explicitly certified Free Software licenses (@FREE); the version I've given accepts everything except corporate EULAs. It's really a matter of taste and convenience.
Lastly, it's often worthwhile to run major system upgrades overnight (make sure you --pretend first to sort out any potential issues). If you do want to run updates while you're at the computer, reduce the value of -j and other relevant compiler and linker options to leave a core free—it'll slow down the compile a bit, but it'll also vastly improve your experience in using the computer.
Gentoo is very much like an manual transmission. If you ask anybody that drives manual they will say 1 of 2 things "i like it because it gives me control" or "i use manual because i always have"
I love gentoo as playing around and trying stuff out. My personal recommendation is use ZFS or btrfs for a file system and have subvolumes. So if you get so lost in the rabbit hole you can climb back up.
If your philosophy is" stable and mine!" Gentoo is for you. You can build a distro, with all the packages you want and once your done if you decide to update every month and dont care a whole lot about bleeding edge. It will work really well, it you want bleeding edge, you can have portage use ustable packages with a stable system. But you really must know what your doing or you WILL BREAK STUFF.
I ran gentoo for 6 months then went to debian, its a great learning tool for understanding how linux works under the hood. I would also recommended systemd over openrc. Its not that openrc is bad, its just alot of extra work for simple things to work.
Gentoo to me is more a messing around on a spare computer distro, than a production computer. Not that it cant be production, but im personally very lazy when i just want to use my personal pc.
The most consistent and long time solid distro, IMHO.
I use it everywhere I can, from servers to laptops. It's so flexible and predictable that I simply love it.
Nowadays emerging stuff is so fast that I wonder why bother with binary packages at all. Once, when compiling Firefox took DAYS well.... But in today's hardware, meh.
It's a great distro. You don't have to compile; lots of packages are available as binaries, but having the option to compile the latest version of things is cool. Definitely worth a try, especially if you were using arch before.
As a noob to Linux, reading Gentoo Handbook & Arch Wiki has made me not only understand a PC better in terms of software management of hardware but understand Linux. I am nowhere near being able to actually use Gentoo. I installed Arch once, that been far enough for me with Linux. I know the people that wrote those guides need to be funny for Presidency because this is how we need to run the world. LOL
I've been a hardcore gentoo user/fan for 20+ years, I thought I'd never be able to use anything else till I started playing with Nix this year. The granular configurability of each individual package has yet been unmatched for me in any other distro till Nix. For #gentoo though, I'd highly recommend taking great care in tailoring your /etc/portage/make.conf, setup /etc/portage/repos.conf/gentoo.conf with sync-type = git, and use /etc/portage/package.{use,mask,unmask,accept_keywords} as directories for individual packages. I tend to keep a /etc/portage/package.mask/failed file for upgrade blockages fer me to unfuck after a emerge -avuDUN @world succeeds.
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Thorry
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •Magister
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •Do you have GRUB? If yes you can edit your kernel command line and append "init=/bin/bash", see if at least this gives you a prompt, this has saved me a couple of time in the past. Else booting on a USB and mounting your boot partition may help to fix it.
BTW I also have LUKS and I'm using TPM, using tpm2-initramfs-tool, first, it failed because I forgot the tpm modules in initrd, but I always have 2 kernels installed and only modify one initrd at a time to have a safe boot if I have a problem, like I had!
I tested tpm2-initramfs-tool with proper tpm2 modules and it worked.
I also tested with clevis-initramfs and clevis-tpm2 and it's even easier, no messing with crypttab.
Also, as long as you can break GRUB and append "init=/bin/bash" it is not secure of course, you can then prevent grub editing or not using grub at all.
rudyharrelson
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •I had this same error a few months ago when a drive was failing to mount because (unbeknownst to me) it was overheating. I turned the system off for a few hours before troubleshooting (I had errands to run). When I came back, the system booted without issue.
If you're looking for an easy troubleshooting step, have you tried turning off the system for several minutes (and unplugging it) and then powering it back on?
sixty
in reply to rudyharrelson • • •horn_e4_beaver
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •I had this issue and it was because I told grub to support dual booting from two different disk drives (one of them USB) and then I removed the USB drive. Linux-boi still tried to enforce booting from the now not-connected drive.
I can't remember exactly what I did, but there may be something about a systemd unit which can be removed/disabled - or maybe I did some fishing around in fstab to remove the drive it thought should exist but wouldn't always (and then probably did an
update-initramfs -uor similar.erebion
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •foremanguy
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •data1701d (He/Him)
in reply to mypasswordis1234 • • •Assuming this is an ATX or ITX PC, there's likely a way to reset UEFI so you can disable fastboot and change your settings, or at least boot from a recovery USB.
There's usually something like a button or 2 pins you can short on your motherboard to reset the settings. If your machine has dual BIOS, there will be a switch you can flip, though you'll probably need to update the UEFI again once you do that.
In the worst case (and this should work on almost any device), remove the CMOS battery, let the device sit for a few minutes, then put that battery in. That should clear all settings, including fastboot, and allow you to do recovery stuff - just make sure you fix the time before going on the internet.