data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 9 Posts
  • 429 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • AMD GPUs are officially supported in the Linux kernel and Mesa. They pretty much just work out of the box with minimal setup on a fresh distro install.

    NVidia GPUs often require out-of-tree proprietary drivers to work with full performance; these drivers are often a pain to install and update. Supposedly, things are getting less terrible now, but NVidia is still overall more likely to cause you pain than AMD.

    Intel Arc dGPUs, like AMD, have decent native kernel and Mesa support from what I can tell, but tend to have worse performance than AMD. However, I hear they’re ridiculously good for video encoding!


  • What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.

    However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.

    Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”

    As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.

    Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.









  • Technically Raspbian Jessie, I think- I was gifted a Pi 3 in ~2016 and fiddled around with it for a while. I also made some cursed choices, at one point running Windows 10 IoT Core on that thing… WTF though luckily not for long.

    In 2017 or so, I started toying around with Ubuntu in VMs. It wasn’t really until 2020 or so that I started trying other distros; Debian Buster was probably the first non-Ubuntu distro I’d tried (excluding RPi stuff), and I mostly stucked to Debian besides one Arch install.

    At a certain point in 2022, I found myself using Unix tools so much I was starting to wonder if I should just use Linux instead of Windows. It was at this time that I tried NixOS in a VM for the first time and thought, “Wow, this is cool… I’m sticking with Debian, though.”

    Around that time, I threw Debian Testing (then Bookworm) on a second 256GB drive, ostensibly as a “test run” for daily driving Linux, and by “test run”, I mean I de facto quit using Windows; a few months later, I opted to use dd and copy that “test install” over my Windows install on my bigger 1TB drive (of course with sufficient backups so I could copy my Windows files over). That install is still the one I use on my desktop today and has just transitioned into Debian Testing/Forky*

    *A name I quite honestly hate, mostly due to the fact that Forky represents everything wrong with America today the Forky Asks a Question shorts beat out Steven Universe Future for an animation Emmy, though honestly, I don’t know else what I was expecting to happen.






  • You’re right in some ways; Windows is closer to a microkernel than Linux, though it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the philosophy of - there’s supposedly weird things like drawing calls in the Windows kernel that should be in microservice, I’ve heard

    However, I wouldn’t necessarily call microkernels a detriment; in fact, Linux is a bit of an odd duck for going monolithic - modern Apple operating systems also run on a microkernel. Monolithic is an older architecture, and there are worries about the separation between components and system resilience e.g the webcam driver can’t crash the whole kernel.

    In practice, it’s less of an issue, and there really aren’t any open source microkernel operating systems that are practical for production desktop and server use, which has a microkernel though there are certainly solutions for embedded systems.

    QubesOS is built on Xen hypervisor, which uses a microkernel design, but Linux is then run in multiple VMs on top of it, which makes it more of a technicality in my eyes. RedoxOS also runs on a microkernel and is certainly intended as a desktop operating system, but its hardware support is limited; GNU Hurd is even more limited in that respect and not really usable.





  • I think including the word “OpenAI” in the post name is somewhat a misnomer that implies an encrapification not really happening to the FFMPEG project.

    Yes, it is true OpenAI originally developed the Whisper model, and I hate OpenAI; however:

    • Whisper is actually open source, unlike most OpenAI crap.
    • FFmpeg isn’t even directly using the OpenAI version, written in Python - they’re using a port to C++ called Whisper.cpp
    • We’ve been able to use speech recognition for decades, so unlike other AI models, I don’t think a speech recognition model that does it better is problem.
    • You don’t even necessarily have to compile FFmpeg with Whisper support.

    I get the dislike of AI, but the idea of association with OpenAI is overblown and not really reflective of reality. Now I can get not wanting to use open source projects whose developers don’t reflect your principles; however, I think this ethical issue is more indirect than may initially appear and is not a strong reason to quit using what is still the most effective media conversion tool.