Then you might be hitting some bugs in the router, and there’s not much to do :/

It seems strange that it only happens when you run the updates, but I did see some cheap routers randomly restarting before when under heavy load, so it’s not impossible. You should have been hitting the same problem with other downloads or steam though.

I’m unsure on what it could be, ans I don’t have many other suggestions other than “try a new router”, unfortunately :(

Is the connection with the router that drops only on your pc, or is it the whole router going down? You can check this by having your phone connected to the wifi, without 4G/5G data enabled, while your pc is running updates. Try browsing the internet on your phone while the updates are running and see if the pages load. If your phone loses internet at that point too, then your router actually crashes and likely has a problem. Not much to do here except changing the router.

If it’s just the wifi of your pc that drops the connection it might be that the wireless card has some compatibility issues (I have an old macbook air with the same problem - I workarounded it by buying a USB wifi adapter…).

Of all terrible proposals coming up in this period, I’m still more-or-less ok with this system because the administrator is still in full control to set whatever date they want, and the field is entirely optional.

They call it “age verification” in the aricle, but there’s no 3rd party “verification” whatsoever. It’s just a field for the user birth date saved in the user metadata. This is IMHO acceptable because it doesn’t force anybody to provide IDs or personal information to some random shady company.

I think calling it “age verification” is a bit confusing and will make people unhappy by default, but might be a smart move to make it compliant with the new laws coming out in this period (the user age was “verified” by the system administrator, after all).

I 100% agree with you. I think atomic distros are great for people like my parents, where they just need a browser and maybe libreoffice, and it’s valuable to have something that “just works” (now I need to just convince them to give linux it a try…)

If you start getting into coding or customization then it quickly becomes clunky to use and requires knowledge beyond what a beginner would have, especially because most guides will tell you to use the traditional package manager, but that won’t work with immutable root.

Containers, installing software to /home, changing advanced settings is in my experience way too much for most people.

I hope though that this might be solvable in the future with flatpak. Maybe by creating some special category for “CLI tools” with less/no sandboxing but still installable and runnable from a normal user account, and shipping the whole dependency tree.

https://downloadmoreram.com/ for those who miss the reference (and btw, it’s safe to click the download button, it doesn’t do anything, it’s just a good old school joke website)

I’m curious to see how they will handle immutability and what will it set apart from other distros like fedora atomic.

Most immutable distros have limitations on installing CLI tools because they are designed to have flatpak as the main package manager. It’d be cool if they had some tricks for installing software in the user/data partition like you can do with homebrew in bazzite, but better integrated into the system package manager (I’m imagining a gentoo prefix integrated into a unified package manager)

IMHO the power of gentoo is the customization, not the optimizations you can do when compiling. You can change the dependencies and config of software to get exactly what you want instead of a config somebody else has chosen for you.

I used Sabayon back in the days for a few years and you are expected to accept the defaults for most packages and use it as a mostly binary distro, but you also have the option to use emerge(gentoo’s package manager) to customize only some packages via USE flags. It was working quite well as far as I remember.

It might be nice to use in some very specific cases (e.g. addition-operation is a binary-operation AST node which is an AST node).

In most of the cases it just creates noise though, and you can usually do something different anyway to implement the same feature. For example in rust, just use enums and list all the possible cases and it’s even nicer to use than inheritance.

And dependency injection!

Every class needs to use DI for calling other classes, even though we’ll have anyway just a single implementation for all of them, and we won’t be using this flexibility at all (not even for tests where it might be useful for mocking dependencies).

Oh wow I was not aware of the drama behind Bazzite.

Years ago I installed manjaro and I want to rebuild the system soon, I use that computer for gaming so Bazzite seemed the most suited to that, but when I tried it in a VM it gave me the feeling of being unpolished compared to Kinoite (the documentation of how to use fedora silverblue is excellent, and bazzite deviates quite a bit from that and adds a lot of custom tools and utilities).

I think I’ll go with Kinoite after reading this, hoping that it works relatively well on nvidia…

I like zram! It has pretty low overhead and usually compresses data quite well (~2/3x). I have it set to the size of my total ram and I can’t notice when it starts to kick in.

Some small amount of swap is also nice to have, but it gets rarely used for me, because zram gets used first.

One trick that might be useful is that you can create a normal swap file and enable swap to it in cases where you want more. For example recently I needed to load 64GB of data on a 32GB laptop, so I created a 64GB swap file on the filesystem and used swapon to enable it. (just disable it before hybernation if you use it!)

It just takes a bit longer to run, but if you don’t need all the data loaded at once it’s much faster than moving the code on a more powerful pc (or fixing it)…

I use a raspberry pi 3b for running home assistant. even though it’s not officially supported it runs quite well for my uses.

In the past when I had a public ip I had it run a small personal website and a wireguard vpn server to allow me to always ssh into my desktop at home (it was joining the vpn-connected device into the LAN, to the point where it was even getting the IP from my router’s DHCP server…).

If it changed the frequency of crashes depending on the usb port it’s connected to it might be struggling with the power supply. If you have some external, powered USB hub or a docking station you can try to connect it there and it might fully solve the issue.

The worst is when you get promoted, and people start to recognize you as an expert. At that point you realize how everybody is sort of winging it, including the people in all other professions that you’d really prefer not to (doctors, pilots, politicians …).

If you have some malicious code running on your computer, you have already lost. Nothing stops it from impersonating another app and asking the permissions to see your screen, accessing local secrets from the files or doing who knows what.

You can still download a tar file with an static executable inside, and double clicking that exe will happily run it unsandboxed, and it’ll be able to do whatever with your secrets or files of other apps, unlike firefox, which is not able to share your screen easily. If you get a really malicious app, it could probably also exploit debugging tools to inject itself into the memory of processes that do have the permission to access the screen without asking…

Preventing apps from accessing what you see on screen or sending keypresses, or stealing your focus, is not going to protect you against anything, but it’s just going to make it impossible to use legacy tools, autohotkey-equivalents (look up how to send a key programmatically to a wayland app… wayland provides no interface for that. You have to create virtual evdev devices and run your app with root permissions…) or making it clunky to have a calendar appointment notification pop up right in front of the screen (grand theft focus luckily fixes that on gnome…).

Performance on 3d games is also much better on X for me.

I really don’t get all this attention to focus prevention. I personally can’t remember the last time I had a window popping up without it being something I want and expect. IMHO It looks like a theorethical attack vector (steal focus right when typing a password), but in practice I’ve never heard of it happening, not even on windows were focus stealing is fully allowed and expected.

If I had any app stealing focus randomly, the app would be nuked out of existance in no time.

I did experience though focus stealing prevention breaking apps (for example the open folder dialog in vscode not appearing in the front). It also breaks some interruptions that I really really want, like the evolution calendar notification window popping up on top of everything telling me I really should be in a meeting right now (and no, a slowly fading notification on the corner of the second screen I’m not looking at right now won’t work)

A big thank you to the authot of grand theft focus for bringing a bit of sanity back.

The problem with the “it’ll go away at some point” is that the “at some point” might be much longer than what a few years.

This period feels to me like some “calm before the storm” or a “slow motion car crash”. We have AI possibly disrupting a lot of the service economy, while automation is slowly eating away the manual workers jobs, possibly resulting in mass unemployment. People are really fed up with politics and electing more and more nationalistic/extremist politicians because they don’t feel represented. The economical crysis and this dissatisfaction is an environment very similar to when hitler got elected. Last time we had millions of people dying and europe being destroyed, what will it take today to remove a dictatorship in the biggest military spender of the world? Who is going to save the US if it slides into dictatorship?

For splitting the app in the taskbar I found it useful to “install” the PWA (you got to find the hidden option in chrome for that…), if it’s supported by the website… It still uses the same cookies and addons, but at least it doesn’t easily get merged with the main browser window and behaves like a proper desktop application. I mainly use firefox though and it doesn’t support PWAs (easily, at least). It’s a shame it’s not more common, because it’s a much better way to run software than the many electron apps, each having their own chromium installation (no download, no long installation process, full sandboxing, and you can have addons & adblockers affect the pwa!)

Also let’s represent all numbers in scientific notation, I’m sure that’s going to make it easier to read…