d3Xt3r

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (8 children)

I've been an Arch user for over a decade, and I wouldn't recommend it for newbies. It's not about the installation, in fact, installation is the easy part now, what with the official install script, pre-configured dot files, and the likes of EndeavourOS etc which provide a friendly GUI installer; the problem isn't installing Arch, it's what comes after.

For starters, because you've cheated and skipped installing the hard way aka "the arch way", you know little to nothing about how your system is setup and works, particularly around the bootloader, what goes into your initramfs, the DM config, and most importantly: how to deal with pacman issues. pacman isn't exactly newbie friendly:

  • You'll need to know how to deal with pacnew files and merge new parameters into your existing config files
  • Ocassionally you'll run into issues like the PGP signature not being accepted (which requires a manual import), or issues where you may need to update the keyring and pacman first before you upgrade anything else, or there may be a dependency issue where you may need to hold or rollback a package etc.

Obviously, none of the above requires you to have a rocket scientist-level IQ to figure it out, a couple of Google searches or the Arch wiki can sort you out - but the point is, it shows that you need to have some basic understanding of your OS internals, package mangement, and most importantly you'll need to be comfortable with using the terminal and CLI apps.

As a seasoned Linux user, the terminal is home for many of us, but believe it or not, it actually scares away many newbies - and pushing Arch onto these newbies only perpetrates the misconception that you have to use the terminal and punch in some hackerman™ style commands to use Linux. And we know that's NOT the experience at all with actual newbie friendly distros such as Zorin, Pop!_OS, Elementary etc, where you don't need to touch the terminal at all, you don't need to babysit the package manager or know any special commands or OS internals.

So please, please do not recommend Arch or any Arch-derivatives to newbies: you'd be doing them a massive disservice and potentially put them off Linux forever. Unless of course, you know that person well, and you know for a fact that they're tech savvy and won't shy away from using the terminal and getting their hands dirty.

[–] [email protected] 273 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (6 children)

matching other programs and platforms

Actually, Ctrl+C is the interrupt hotkey for pretty much every CLI app/terminal on every platform. Try it within the Command Prompt/PowerShell/Windows Terminal, or the macOS terminal - they'll all behave the same.

The use of Ctrl+C as an interrupt/termination signal has a very long history even predating the old UNIX days and DEC - it goes back to the days of early telecommunications, where control characters were used for controlling the follow of data through telecommunication lines. These control characters, along with regular characters, were transmitted by being encoded in binary, and this encoding scheme was defined by ASCII (American Stanard Code for Information Interchange), published in 1963.

In ASCII, the control character ETX (meaning end-of-text; represented by the hex code 0x03) was used to indicate "this segment of input is over", or "stop the current processing".

Now what does all this have to do with with Ctrl+C you ask?

For that, you'll need to go back to the days of early keyboards. Keyboards back then generated ASCII codes directly, and when a modifier key (Ctrl/Shift/Meta) on a keyboard was pressed in combination with another key, it modified the signal sent by the keyboard to produce a control character.

Specifically, pressing Ctrl with a letter key made the keyboard clear (set to zero) the upper three bits of the binary code of the letter, thus effectively mapping the letter keys to control characters (0x00 - 0x1F: the first 32 characters on the ASCII table).

  • The ASCII code for 'C' is 0x43 (binary 01000011).
  • Pressing Ctrl+C clears the upper three bits, resulting in 00000011, which is 0x03 in hex.

And would you look at that, 0x03 is the code which represents the control character ETX.

The use of ETX to interrupt a program in digital computers was first adopted by the TOPS-10 OS, which ran on DEC's PDP-10 computer, back in the late 60s. It's successor, TOPS-20 also included it, followed by the RSX-11 (on the PDP-11), and VMS (on the VAX-11).

RSX-11 was a very influential OS, created by a team that included David Cutler. It influenced the design of several OSes that followed, such as VMS and Windows NT. Cutler later moved to Microsoft and became the father of Windows NT. Early NT did not include a GUI, so it was natural to adopt existing terminal operation standards, including the use of ETX. In fact, NT's internals were so similar to VMS that a lawsuit was in the works, but instead, MS agreed to pay off DEC millions of $$$.

Also, when UNIX first came out (1969), it ran on DEC hardware, and so they followed the tradition of using the ETX signal to stop programs. This convention flowed to BSD (1978) which was based on UNIX, and NeXTSTEP (1989), which was based on BSD. NeXTSTEP was developed by NeXT Computers, which was founded by Steve Jobs... and the rest is history.

Therefore, Ctrl+C is something that's deeply rooted in history. You don't just simply change something like that. Sure, you may be able to remap the keybindings, but it's actually hardcoded into many programs so you'll run into inconsistencies - that is, if you used the standard remapping tools built into GNOME/KDE etc.

If you want to truly remap Ctrl+C, you'll want to do so at a lower level (evdev layer) so that it's not intercepted by other programs, eg using tools like evremap or keyd. But even then, it's not guaranteed to work everywhere, for instance, if you're inside a VM or using a different OS, or in a remote session. So it's best to remap the keys at the keyboard layer itself, which is possible on many popular mechanical keyboards using customisable firmware like QMK/VIA.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Despite it being one of the most popular [...]

It's only popular among people who download frequently from filesharing websites. Most Linux users don't, hence why it's not available on any of the default distro repos.

In fact, I'd say the act of downloading regularly from filesharing websites, has largely gone out of fashion among the general public (obviously I'm ignoring the underground/illegal/niche scenes here).

For the most common types of large files which Linux users might manually download - eg ISOs, movies, TV shows - torrents are generally preferred, and torrents have very capable native clients already, such as qBittorrent.

For other general large files manually downloaded via http (eg Linux ISOs, tarballs of packages etc), these are already hosted on legitimate websites (like github) which don't impose any artificial download restrictions, so your browser, or any "normal" download manager can handle them just fine. For these sort of downloads, aria2 is the most popular third-party downloader in Linux. aria2 is a command-line program, but there are many GUI frontends for it too, such as uGet and AriaNg. There are also browser addons that integrate with aria2. Aria2 is also native and very lightweight, so again, there's no need for JDownloader here.

TL;DR: Most distros don't offer JDownloader because most Linux users don't actually need it.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago (4 children)

It does build on Linux distros as well. There's already a package on the AUR for instance: https://aur.archlinux.org/ladybird-git.git

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Anakin eventually finds a suitable seat:

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

this would allow you to use the virtualbox GUI and configuration utilities, but run the VM under KVM virtualization, correct?

Yes but from the looks of it, this isn't using the libvirt backend, so you won't be able to use/configure your Box VMs with virt-manager/Cockpit, in case you were planning on doing that - aka it's not going to turn VBox into yet another fronted for libvirt. But it does indeed use KVM.

Is there much advantage to this over using virt-manager, or cockpit to configure your VM's?

Putting aside the easier-to-use GUI, it has certain unique features not found in other opensource hypervisors, such as seamless mode. Also, it may have better compatibility or performance with certain operating systems - for instance, when I wanted to test GhostBSD on virt-manager, I ran into lot of issues, such as not being able to install it in UEFI mode, mouse not working etc; whereas it ran and installed without any issues at all using VirtualBox.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

why would anyone improve VBox

VirtualBox has it's own advantages, for starters some people may find it's GUI easier to use. It also has certain unique features not found in other opensource hypervisors, such as seamless mode. Finally, VirtualBox may have better compatibility or performance with certain operating systems. For instance, in my case when I wanted to get GhostBSD working on virt-manager, I ran into lot of issues, such as not being able to install it in UEFI mode, mouse not working etc, whereas it ran and installed without any issues at all using VirtualBox.

I have heard of Oracle looking at IP addresses and if they notice a trend they try to collect a license off it. Same crap they do with Java. Do people use VBox and not concerned of Oracle looking over them?

Yes that is indeed a thing Oracle is notorious for, but with VirtualBox the only concern is with their proprietary extension pack. VirtualBox itself is licensed under GPLv2, so there's no issues using it in a commercial environment. However, the extension pack is for personal use only. Luckily, the extension pack isn't really a necessity any more - back in the day, it was needed for USB 3.0 support, but now it's only needed for VirtualBox's built-in RDP, disk encryption, Intel PXE boot ROM, and webcam passthru. If you don't need these features - which most people don't - then you can use the main VirtualBox package without any worries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago

Does it also intelligently merge/hide duplicate articles from different sources?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Could you post your full (relevant/redacted) journalct logs prior to the crash? Would be interesting to see if there was something else going on at the time which could've triggered it.

journalctl -b -1 will show all messages from the previous boot.

Also, what's your /etc/fstab like? Just wondering whether changing any of the mount options could help (eg commit=, discard etc).

Finally, have you checked fwupdmgr for firmware updates for your NVMe controller/drives? You should also check the respective manufacturer's website, since not everyone publishes their firmware to the LVFS.

Also, I found this thread where someone with a similar issue solved it by swapping out their PSU, so might be worth swapping it out if you can and see if it makes a difference.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

What does surprise me is that people actually pay their own subscription for these platforms. Netflix had a win in profit/revenue. I’m surprised that these people did not go for the Piracy method even though, they complain about:

Most people don't like change. Maybe they have a habit of switching on Netflix daily during dinner or something. There's also a big "Netflix" button on their remotes and their TV's homescreen, which serves as a constant reminder. They probably even have the app on their phones. All of this leads to mental conditioning and addiction, it's now a part of their daily lives. Humans are a creature of habit, and it's hard to break out of a routine ingrained over several years.

Piracy could be a option for some people, but it's still either too technical, or not as convenient, for the average Joe. Sure, there are even websites you could simply go to without installing any app, but most people won't bother with that - they just want to hit a single button on their remote/TV and watch something, without needing to go to some website, a website which may eventually stop working.

You'll find that most people would prefer to take the path of least resistance, even if it means paying (more) money. Don't forget that even pirates may sometimes pay money to make things easier - eg usenet/seedbox/debrid users - and that's simply because they too would prefer to take the path of least resistance, even if it means being in the ironic situation of paying to watch pirated content. So it's not too hard to imagine why normal people would just prefer to cough up the extra cash for Netflix and continue with their lives, routines unchanged.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (4 children)

I mean, if it's a corporate device then it's really a policy IT should be setting - this can be easily be done via a GPO or Intune policy, where an elevated script can prompt the end-user for a password.

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