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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2024

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  • The previous person was worried that Valve wouldn’t be able to convince “a sizable chunk of users” to move to Linux because all of the software they sell is written for Windows. If we apply a little bit of critical thinking, we realize that Valve has actually already thought of this(!) and applied a different(!) solution that solves the same problem(!) without requiring “everyone to write software for something that’s not the platform nearly all users are running”. If you want to see Valve’s attempt at getting everyone to switch to Linux without using compatibility tools you should look into how successful their Steam Machine campaign was.


  • They’ve more or less already done that with Proton and DXVK. Nearly all Windows games “just work” on Linux without developers needing to change anything. TBH whenever big studios develop Linux versions of games they’re usually not well-done anyway; for now it’s better if people develop with their comfy Windows tools and let compatibility tools take care of the translation. When the balance shifts to Linux dominance we can start pressing on them to learn how to use Linux SDKs.


  • There’s an unnerving lack of substance over on reddit. Recently I decided to look at reddit for the first time since last June, and every post’s comments had 1k people saying absolutely nothing worth reading. It feels like I’m reading AI-written posts that are in the uncanny valley of almost making sense and almost being on-topic. News articles have people that literally only talk about the exact words that were in the headline. Every single post’s top comments must be lame “jokes” or one-liners, and those must have several replies that riff off the joke in decreasingly-funny ways.

    I’ve picked up a strong habit of immediately looking in comment sections for good discussion and TL;DR’s on Lemmy posts and it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t actually reading anything in reddit comment sections. The words pass through my brain and nothing of value is absorbed, over and over. It feels like low-hanging fruit to say “reddit is all bots now” but there’s something seriously wrong about how it feels over there. You only really need ~10-20 top-level replies on a post to get a broad spectrum of answers, and Lemmy comment sections feel solid for the content that’s here. I wish there were more communities here (especially niche ones), but I’m grateful for what we have.



  • I recommend a dead man’s switch like Healthchecks.io, which can be selfhosted for free. Whenever you have something that’s regularly occurring, add an extra callout to your unique Healthchecks callout UUID as part of the automation, and Healthchecks will send you a notification if something misses its callout schedule. You can also attach whatever data (e.g. a log) to the callout so you can look back through the run history. IIRC Borg will give you a non-zero return code if it detects problems, so you can send e.g. https://hc-ping.com/your-uuid-here/$? and a non-zero code will signal a notification as well (more examples here).

    Also, Borgmatic is really easy to use for managing Borg repos. There’s a lot of configuration options (including Healthchecks.io integration) but you can delete like 90% of it for normal usecases.


  • For me personally, this is just the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m not a fan of the languages it’s written in, its license, its immaturity, and that it’s mostly being developed by one person. Additional minor strike for communicating through discord. Now we learn that the most influential person on the project has some real bad vibes and it’s probably best to give this a pass as a whole.

    In my eyes the whole selling point of the browser is being an independent underdog with a clean slate, but what’s the point if we’re starting with a list of IOUs for things that are already bad out of the gate.


  • The Ladybird browser, which is highly related to this project, just did a PR event yesterday. That’s why it’s coming up years later, right after people were alerted to the project and it got more scrutiny. I appreciate knowing about this, as opposed to not knowing about it. It gives me the chance to evaluate whether I want to dedicate energy into supporting a browser primarily being developed by a sexist who thinks not being a cis male == politics.



  • I used Proxmox for a couple years and it’s good if you run a lot of VMs or LXCs, but I found that I’m not really the target audience. I ended up only running one Debian VM for my Docker containers. It was fine, but I eventually felt that Proxmox added no value for me, and the end result was sacrificing some memory and performance from using virtio emulations for CPU/GPU/RAM/filesystems. If your machines only have 8-16GB of RAM I don’t think it would be a good idea, as I’ve seen the rule of thumb is to dedicate 2GB for Proxmox’s usage, which is in addition to any guest OS’s requirements. Meanwhile I have a Debian install on a VPS that takes about 450MB of RAM.

    For me, pros:

    • Native ZFS support - invaluable, ZFS is terrific. MergerFS+SnapRAID is a decent replacement but the dodgy tooling and laundry list of footguns makes me nervous to use it on important data. ZFS is idiot-proof, as long as you know what you’re doing during the initial setup. RAIDZ expansion is coming this year and you can still use mixed-size disks in a RAIDZ as long as you accept that all disks are equivalent to the smallest one, so I personally feel ZFS is acceptable for grab-bag disk usage now
    • Separation of bare metal and server environment, which means you can spin up another server VM from scratch without impacting the previous one, then switch with zero downtime. In the end, I replaced Proxmox with Debian on ZFS root (ZFSBootMenu) and wrote a few hundred lines of bash to automate the installation, so when I switched it only took about 30 minutes of downtime start to finish.
    • Isolation of different environments. If my VM gets hacked, it will have a harder time reaching my Proxmox host etc. I run all services in isolated Docker environments anyway so this isn’t that big of a perk for my threat profile.

    Cons:

    • Partitioning RAM for ZFS ARC, Proxmox, and VM leads to inherent inefficiencies at the margins.
    • I usually give my VM n-1 CPU cores, which is still less power than if I had just used the CPU natively.
    • GPU passthroughs to VM can be less efficient, depending on the GPU and how it handles it. My iGPU is less performant when using its ~SR-IOV feature
    • Learning requirement - not a huge learning curve but it’s a lot of knowledge that I will not use now that I’ve stopped using Proxmox
    • Hosting your data pool on the Proxmox host or a dedicated data VM means that your server VM needs to use NFS to access its data, which lacks a handful of features (e.g. inotify) and is a pain
    • Need to maintain two systems for updates, downtimes, etc
    • More points of failure
    • Extra startup time
    • Run by a company that thinks it’s okay to use winrar-style nag popups every time you load the console, and requires you to manually dig through the source to disable that. I understand it’s their business model, it doesn’t change how it affects me the end user who lacks $120/year to spend on disabling a popup