I never knew about this (using Linux) but when I plugged my mouse onto a friend’s laptop and suddenly a big banner animated onscreen, my heart sank lol. No idea how this works but it was pretty unexpected.

The “immutable” type of distros could be worth a shot. They don’t let you break the system and if anything does break, you can undo it with a reboot, so they tend to be pretty stable. My family runs a few flavors of Universal Blue, which are based on Fedora and hasn’t broken for them, but I don’t know the exact hardware. I’ve been running NixOS (also immutable) on a Framework 16 since the laptop came out, I can’t count a single hardware issue I encountered. However, NixOS does come with a steep learning curve, so it’s hard to recommend, and it also has trouble running software that hasn’t been already packaged for it.

Genuinely curious, how do they update? My server (ubuntu) yells at me every time I ssh in to reboot “as soon as possible” because “livepatch has fixed vulnerabilities”. So if you don’t reboot, you don’t get kernel updates, and your server becomes vulnerable?

So tired of hearing about this platform that, afaiu, is barely even federated and not really decentralized. Why the hype when fedi exists?

My parents run a business, and besides having me install it and do the initial setup, they both use Linux fine and have adjusted great from their previous machines. I moved them to it mainly because of performance and being tired of fixing printers on Windows. LibreOffice runs, Firefox runs, a video editor works, and OBS runs, so it’s enough for their use. They’re both on Wayland, one on EndeavourOS (w/ a graphical app store set up ofc) and the other on Fedora Kinoite, w/ nouveau drivers and no issues so far!

My cybersecurity course uses Linux… in a VM. We boot into Windows 10, then start Kali in VMware and do everything inside of it. I still don’t know why, I just bring my own laptop with NixOS and add whichever package we are using to my shell.nix for that course.

My Ubuntu server (which has been working for a few years now) recently asked me in a full-screen prompt while updating something about GRUB. There was a list of partitions with just one element, which is the partition that GRUB os on. I was focused on something else so I just hit enter, but now I am really scared to reboot it. Is there any way to pull this back up or to double-check that everything is ok with the machine?

I tried this and was able to set a colorscheme in qt5/6ct that stuck in nheko (with QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct), but it still has the same icons issue in Dolphin. pcmanfm-qt also has the icons missing.

Is there a way to set catppuccin as the qt5ct theme? I tried manually adding the files but using qt5ct breaks all icons in Dolphin (it displays alt text or nothing), and kind-of applies in nheko but leaves the main window background fully white.

Agreed! I wonder how it will work if I have to reinstall, I guess I git clone my flake from the install CD and use that instead.

For Qt themes, I had Catppuccin working on Arch but I haven’t found a way to apply it. I tried Stylix (kde.enable = true does nothing for Dolphin or nheko), the official Catppuccin flake (dropped GTK support, sets QT_STYLE_OVERRIDE which breaks nheko). I know it’s possible to theme Qt apps because I’ve had it working before, but I can’t find any info on how to do it with NixOS that works…

Yeah, I did find the page, but it assumes you’re doing a command line install whilst I was using the graphical installer. Now that I know more about Nix I think I should’ve gone for a CLI install, but I don’t know if I will stick with it due to the themeing issues.

Honestly I saw btrfs in the arch install guide and read about it because I thought the name sounded funny. I used it until I distro hopped to NixOS couldn’t figure out how to install it with btrfs, so I’m back on ext4.

Maybe I’ll give it another try next hop, which is likely soon since Qt theming seems impossible on Nix. :/

I wore a Pinetime for a while, sadly the touchscreen can’t beat the Pebble’s buttons. I’d buy a Pinetime with buttons and a non-touch reflective LCD in a heartbeat though! I was looking at BangleJS or Watchy as replacements but I’m really unsure about the durability and how usable they’d be (I need just the time and notifications, maps/navigation is a big plus tho).

A good 90% I’d say. All my devices run Linux (NixOS laptop, Ubuntu server, LineageOS phone).

Non-FOSS stuff:

• AMD GPU in my Framework 16 laptop means the only unfree package on my laptop is Steam.
• The proprietary apps I do run on my phone are TooGoodToGo and my bank as I’m not aware of alternatives.
• I wear a Pebble Time Steel smartwatch, also not aware of any alternatives.
• PS5 controller firmware has no replacement.

I don’t browse the surface web a lot and when I do I tend to disable JS, so I avoid most of the nonfree JS. I have no social media accounts besides Mastodon, Matrix, and Lemmy, which are all free :)

As an extension, all my close family runs Linux on their computers, as it ended up being lower maintenance than setting them up with Windows when time came to upgrade.

Thanks, I can’t think of it as anything but duke nukem forever now. Your comment made my day.

Wow yeah, your position sounds awesome. I guess if I were in an indie studio I could be in charge of the engine or like, dev environments. I’ve found such benefit in doing gamedev on Linux, even if targeting Windows via cross-compiling, it’s so much faster and nicer. But what company would be willing to hire an intern to move over their whole workflow… not happening lol.

I am very serious about using Linux exclusively. I have ported/rewritten all of my university’s course materials in my past two years of gamedev studies and made them available for others. But the time has come to do an internship and I have yet to find a single studio I could be at while still using Linux. I feel like I reached a dead end tbh

Thank you so much :D I had a lot of fun with that one; happy you liked it.

Yep! You can just paste the URL of the blog into your reader (or try https://blog.allpurposem.at/feed/ if that doesn’t work).

Can’t hurt to do a little self-promotion ey? I recently started writing https://blog.allpurposem.at/minecraft-qr about FOSS stuff I work on and ways I’ve managed to survive my gamedev degree on Linux. Aiming for one post per month, though my next one is taking a bit longer.