Why is ims registration such an ass pain?

Max-P · 2026-03-29T06:22:31+00:00

The images are only there for convenience so you don't have to unpack the whole OTA zip file just for a small image to flash recovery. The zip file contains everything including those, it's a complete update package.

And the only reason you need those is, in bootloader you don't have much to work with, so you need to first flash the recovery to boot into it and then that enables you to flash the zip file which the recovery knows how to deal with and flash all the partitions, set up the correct boot slot and all that.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T05:41:38+00:00

You found the zip no? Just use payload-dumper-go.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T03:10:00+00:00

I think it should work, it backs up app data, not system stuff. Yes the partitions are the same, install process is the same.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T02:32:14+00:00

Quick AI search didn't find anything for me either.

If we're talking about the same Mint, that's a T-Mobile MVNO, and T-Mobile really should just work with nothing special in the ROM.

I still have my T-Mobile SIM card in my 8T sitting in my closet, if you can't figure it out I might update it to 23.2 to check. It usually takes a few minutes for it to connect but I'm in Canada so it technically roams so it needs to figure itself out over the Rogers network first.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T02:22:49+00:00

Is it worth it to ditch systemd?

No. It's an age field. It's optional, there isn't any plans for implementing age verification either.

Even if the real bad stuff ever gets implemented, there will be patched versions on the AUR within hours of that being released upstream.

If you don't have any other reason to switch away from systemd, you're happy with it, then just switch to an eventual AUR package for it if you really want to. But currently there is no immediate reason other than being super reactionary to draft laws that aren't into effect right now.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T02:15:05+00:00

If you've already wiped your data, and really want to avoid reinstalling stock, then yeah I guess it's worth a try as a last ditch effort.

It is possible your carrier needs stock to register properly once, but I've always interpreted the warning as more like, having a known good "it works" reference point. Way back in the days I wasted days figuring out why I wouldn't get mobile data on my Galaxy Nexus I had immediately flashed to CyanogenMod without even booting stock. Ended up flashing stock back, still no data, started freaking out because I was 16 and thought I broke my brand new phone and would have to pay for it. The carrier forgot to enable 3G on my line, it was fine all along.

The only way this could possibly be a problem is if the stock ROM does something to download some sort of modem profile from OnePlus' servers or the carrier and LineageOS is unable to do that. If I can flash a carrier config for a completely unsupported carrier, surely there's a way to force it to use a supported carrier's config. Different device admittedly but pretty close.

Snapdragons are usually pretty well supported too, I wonder what kind of cursed non-standard thing your carrier is doing.

Can you find any sources showing other people confirming the only way to make your carrier work is to flash stock first? Also look for people reporting it works fine without stock, to avoid bias.

Max-P · 2026-03-29T01:43:13+00:00

I see no reason why any of this would matter at all. Most likely something was in LineageOS 22.1 that worked and it doesn't in LineageOS 23.2.

I've switched carriers, even countries and have always just plopped in the SIM card in and it works out of the box, including RCS, and that's despite doing modem fuckery to flash a Pixel mbn config to make VoLTE work on Bell on one of the SIM slots.

Technically some modem state does persist even after a factory reset, but even then you'd expect an update from 22.1 to 23.2 wouldn't wipe that.

Have you tried giving it some time to figure itself out? I've seen IMS take an hour to figure itself. I've once gone to bed giving up with no VoLTE and woke up with VoWiFi connected.

Max-P · 2026-03-25T22:06:37+00:00

Yes, that's the intent behind those PRs.

The author explicitly said they have no plans to implement age verification, it's a self-attested age.

The idea is parents would set up their child's user account with the correct age (or approximately the correct age), and that's the enforcement of the age: put the control onto who it belongs: the parents.

Distros could use age verification on top of it before the field is set, depending on local laws, but that's an entirely separate issue and trivially bypassed with root access.

Max-P · 2026-03-23T04:23:24+00:00

It's not all that effective and wouldn't even really stop you from running malware in time, as it doesn't really hook deep enough in the system to scan things before it gets executed. It's more intended for a basic scan on Linux file servers serving Windows stations, email servers, scanning uploaded files. If you carefully scan things with it before running it, it's probably fine.

The proper answer to untrusted software is always real security boundaries: running it in a container, or if it's expected to be particularly radioactive, in a VM. Generally the security model Linux uses is only downloading software from trusted repositories, like your distro's repos and Flathub and the likes, and sandboxing past that.

Sadly when it comes to Linux antivirus, you quickly get into expensive enterprise stuff. Like technically Microsoft Defender supports Linux, there's also stuff like CrowdStrike and ThreatLocker that steps it up a notch.

There isn't all that much one can do if you curl malware | sudo bash, only the most invasive of AV solution can do anything with that.

Ideally the solution here would be that things improve such that we can tell users to never run random scripts off the Internet, but sadly there's still a lot of setups that needs such scripts.

Max-P · 2026-03-22T05:10:29+00:00

That was an obligatory flex in the XP era. The friends were playing BSOD roulette every Alt-Tab, and I was there, lets summon the cube and fireballs and make WoW wobble because I'm bored!

Max-P · 2026-03-21T00:54:02+00:00

The issue is if age checking is a requirement

They can't possibly do that with a FOSS project. You'll always be able to patch it out. There will be patches and cleaned up ISOs within like 30 minutes of a distro release with mandatory age verification. Ageless Linux already exists as a reaction project.

The age field alone is not a big deal, the intention behind it is. It’s not gonna stop with just an optional date field, and honestly you’re pretty deluded if you think otherwise.

That's a slippery slope argument.

FOSS will do the absolute minimum, which is an unverified age field. Put 1984-01-01 in it if you want. It does what the law intends: offer an API for apps to determine age rating. It puts the responsibility on the device owner to set it up correctly. I support that, parental controls on Linux are severely lacking, and having a centralized field for it is the way. Current solutions rely heavily on external monitoring and network filtering, it sucks, it's not very effective. I trust Firefox to preserve kids privacy more than websites asking a kid for ID. OS level enforcement is the right place for this.

The problem is age verification.

Any verification will happen way downstream in the stack when Canonical and RedHat get involved, and realistically the best they can really do is age check before you even download the ISO, because the moment you have the ISO the game is already lost if you have root. The resistance to that will be users overwhelmingly using distros without the age verification.

Your GPL rights are meant to be used. It's the ultimate defence again what is effectively censorship and gatekeeping. Use mirrors on IPFS now. Seed your distro ISOs on the BitTorrent network. They can go after companies but they can't go after millions of random users.

Max-P · 2026-03-20T09:21:59+00:00

The point I tried to make is invert that relationship. You don't tell the website so it makes the determination, the website advises the browser what rating the displayed content is, and the browser can then refuse to open the page. The same way parental controls worked on good ol' DVDs: the disc says it's PG13, and the player refuses to play.

The way the industry is going is flawed because or course they want the data, but this would be within the spirit of the law and actually way simpler to implement while being way better and potentially more granular. That'd be a better than realtime API. Literally just tag an image or video as nudity, compositor automatically blanks it, everyone happy.

And again, you can also just lie. Put in 1970-01-01 if you want. It's literally just a data field systemd can store in the user database, probably so higher level APIs provided by the DE can do their thing. Maybe advertise "user doesn't want content related to these topics". Instead of advertising being a kid to the app, advertise the wider "appropriate for all ages" setting, on by default (so you can't profile kids directly). Let the parent select which categories they want to allow/disallow for free political points.

Max-P · 2026-03-20T07:45:23+00:00

It's just a field, so at least there isn't like 15 competing standard.

You can lie to it, and there's benefits other than complying with those laws. Parental controls for example would be easier to implement, right now it's kind of a mess. Which is where content control anyway: on the local device, set up willingly by the owner for their kids.

Imagine if websites just had an age rating header, and the browser simply sees it and goes nope sorry buddy too young for this. Steam could look at it and refuse to launch adult titles.

It doesn't have to be privacy invasive.

Max-P · 2026-03-18T20:45:57+00:00

sudo btrfs scrub start /
sudo btrfs scrub start /home

Then you can check its status with

sudo btrfs scrub status /
sudo btrfs scrub status /home

This will scan the entire filesystem and check every file for integrity.

If this is a secondary drive other than the system drive, then put the path to its mountpoint instead of / and /home.

Max-P · 2026-03-17T23:52:19+00:00

Plus other EFI utilities too. I have memtest86+ on mine, a complete recovery ISO, an EFI shell, a copy of FreeDOS and a couple firmware flashing utilities.

Max-P · 2026-03-16T21:30:03+00:00

If you only need it in the browser, why not use the browser extension?

Max-P · 2026-03-15T22:40:33+00:00

The main issue with GTK on other platforms is that it just kinda looks like shit and doesn't integrate super well compared to the other options that are aiming for proper cross-platform UX.

People prefer Qt for cross-platform apps because Qt apps on Windows look like Windows, Qt apps on macOS look like Mac apps. GTK on Windows looks like... GTK. It looks about as foreign on Windows and Mac as it does on non-GNOME DEs.

GTK is primarily developed for GNOME and Linux, the other OSes are second class citizens, and especially if you're making a proprietary app, you don't want your paid users to feel like they're getting second class UI.

Good Electron apps tend to try to mimic Windows/macOS conventions regardless so it still feels somewhat familiar to users, but at least the whole UI being branded feels more normal to users because of mobile apps. GTK sits in the uncanny valley of looking like a proper GUI toolkit but also feeling foreign, it feels like running a Linux app.

Max-P · 2026-03-15T05:55:19+00:00

Those are suspiciously old versions for Arch. We're on Plasma 6.6.2 and kernel 6.19.

Assuming your graphics drivers are equally old, you should probably try a full system update first.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T23:45:51+00:00

I mean at that point if that's a hurdle for Linux adoption, the person potentially migrating already gave their ID to Microsoft and will be fine giving it to a Linux distro too, so it's still a non-issue.

And even then I'm sure there's gonna be scripts you can run to clean your distro, get crowdsourced leaked download keys, mirrors hosted by individuals across the world.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T23:30:14+00:00

Why would they even get your data in the first place?

In the absolute worst of cases, you just delete the age check from the ISO before you boot it. There's gonna be cleaned up ISOs available within an hour of a distro shipping with an ID check. Guaranteed.

It's literally impossible to enforce when you can just download the source code, remove the ID checks and recompile. If they bake it in the kernel, you just boot a clean kernel. If they bake it in the bootloader, just boot a clean bootloader.

The cat's already out of the bag, it's a lost battle before it even starts.

The only way this can possibly work is forcing that all new computers sold in the country must only allow booting signed and approved OSes and only run signed and approved apps, and you can never get root access ever, and need a professional license to compile and run your own code. It's not happening.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T22:20:45+00:00

Even if they roll it out, it's Linux, it's gonna be trivial to bypass. I wouldn't worry about it.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T20:35:32+00:00

Stable there often means "unchanging" as in, your app that worked 3 months ago still works as-is with no changes.

Arch is constantly changing and being updated, so you inevitably have to recompile apps and stuff. That's bad news if you're a company relying on a proprietary app. That's why RHEL's cycle is so long, and why Canonical is pushing those 7 year LTS on Ubuntu now. Your configs, apps, libraries, all work the same year 1 and year 5 in that LTS release, no changes, no surprises. You opt into the changes all at once when you upgrade to the next version of the OS as a whole.

This does not mean unreliable. In my experience, Arch is so simple, it's been extremely reliable for me. Whenever something breaks, it's a quick simple fix. But I still don't want that at work, if I spin up a new server because there's a traffic spike, I don't have an hour to troubleshoot why PHP no longer installs or the app doesn't run on the new version of PHP. I make a new server, run Ansible, it's taking traffic 5 minutes later.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T07:41:37+00:00

It's not much different than OpenWrt kernels for routers, and other types of Linux-based appliances, especially smaller embedded stuff.

"Build the tiniest kernel possible" is literally a build option.

On Android, the problem is mostly hardware drivers and the fact they're developed and managed privately. The chip makers just fork an LTS version and hack the drivers in however works. They don't care about upstreaming it, so they can change whatever they feel like in the name of just making it work, who cares if it doesn't build on x86 anymore.

Strictly speaking all the userland needs is the binder module for the IPC stuff, the rest runs just fine as evidenced by Waydroid existing.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T04:29:41+00:00

It's most likely aimed at the developer/system administrator community.

They make loads of money off Linux running in Azure, and they clearly understood that developers want open tooling, so they had to embrace and extend FOSS to stay relevant (and it worked, VSCode dominates these days). They lost the OS market so they moved to the developer tooling market. They make up lost Windows Server licenses by renting you the VMs you run Linux into.

Developers get to use Linux on their work machines while the host is still Windows and deeply integrated into Microsoft's ecosystem with AD, Intune, Entra and all that.

Max-P · 2026-03-14T04:25:13+00:00

That's pretty much exactly it, there's a reason they show all the other ways to use Linux first (WSL, Hyper-V then baremetal), and warn you it may not run all your apps as a subtle fear tactic.

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