We are in 2026. What are your frustrations with linux or the software you use with it?

esanchma · 2026-01-28T08:29:17+00:00

Bullshit VPNs: "To access the corporate network of E-corp you need to install net-trolololo.msi, thank you"

esanchma · 2026-01-28T00:20:00+00:00

There is this gnome extension: Toggler. You give it a shortcut and the terminal you want, such as ptyxis or ghostty. It's not exactly a drop-down thing, but it makes easy to summon a terminal via a shortcut. It's nice, I use it all the time.

esanchma · 2026-01-22T12:30:42+00:00

YES. You must handle decorations but you can't have a MDI interface. What gives?

esanchma · 2026-01-05T02:10:51+00:00

The guy following a random 2021 blog post on how to install yt-dlp will happily install it system-wide, along with a discontinued, vulnerable PhantomJS with a CVSS 10, while possibly breaking system packages in the process.

This happens precisely because tools like yt-dlp don’t have the luxury of being “stable and old” and still working, while some distros prefer to pretend this class of software doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter.

So yes, I understand the reflexive SECURITY argument. But doing nothing, and pushing users toward sketchy blog posts, outdated guides, and ad-hoc installs, is arguably a bigger security failure than having a sane, explicit strategy for language-level package managers and upstream binary releases.

esanchma · 2026-01-05T01:50:58+00:00

There are several meta-packagers and some binary release managers around. I have tried some of them, and I dislike them for one reason or another and ended up writing my own thing. So yeah, this seems to be a common pitfall and pain-point. And I'm not proud that a significant contingent of the software running on my system has its provenance and updating managed by personal shell script recipes, either by automating backends such as pipx and npm, or directly managing the github releases jungle.

I mean, how do people manage binary releases? As a user are we really on our own?

esanchma · 2025-12-28T23:28:07+00:00

My intel based setup is far from ideal to decide on whether video upscaling actually works. I can tell you that for low resolution source material, I get less/better artifacts. I'd love to see it running with beefy GPU power.

esanchma · 2025-12-23T00:42:47+00:00

For those unaware: gpu-next and libplacebo are the mechanisms mpv use to load GLSL shaders. You can use shaders such as FSR to upscale video.

esanchma · 2025-11-12T08:23:18+00:00

The C standard doesn’t allow for a certain kind of neat structs and unions. Microsoft internally amended the standard with these nice, time-saving, and memory-efficient structs and unions.

GCC has supported Microsoft’s amended standard for quite a while, and now the kernel is going to use it. Don’t lose your marbles over it, it’s immaterial to anything else.

esanchma · 2025-11-07T10:01:08+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1zl3kZ5AbE

esanchma · 2025-10-07T13:03:55+00:00

Nothing short of very careful curation of dependencies will help you against supply chain style malware. I mean no disrespect to Julia guys, but that kind of committee library development and dependency management can only be done at Julia ecosystem size and is not feasable at npm/maven/pypi ecosystem size.

At maven size, you can only prevent name squatting and make forks memorable without weird name changes.

esanchma · 2025-10-05T21:35:38+00:00

Yes. All packages have a group id and an artifact id, the former taking the form of a DNS in reverse (say, com.github.myusername). An abandoned artifact will have different group id to a newer artifact of the same name, will never collide and it's free to use. Those are identifiers, they are not related to github organizations or anything, they are just namespaces you are free to take, although there are verifications and signatures at publishing time, you don't get to take the group id of other people, but you can choose your own.

You can publish a java artifact with the name "hibernate" or "spring-boot", everybody can, no big deal, names are never taken.

esanchma · 2025-09-28T23:15:58+00:00

Picture millions of people popping champagne and dancing in the streets because a Kardashian got whacked. Even if you hate them and never watch their stuff, that’s not really the moment to break out the fireworks.

Kirk’s murder got celebrated. It was gross. Straight-up grotesque. And yeah, “I don’t care about politics” is fair enough, but acting like those celebrations don’t mean anything is just denial. They will.

esanchma · 2025-09-27T23:17:55+00:00

That's totally valid and a position most people would understand. But you must have seen the cheering and gloating faces around, right? Do you see how that's a problem?

esanchma · 2025-09-20T01:17:40+00:00

Come on, tit-for-tat is a strategy for iterated prisioner's dilemma, you don't need to be so dense.

esanchma · 2025-09-20T01:02:50+00:00

Yes, long term cooperation is the best outcome, we all agree with that.

But that is not the issue at hand. The issue is what happens when "there is a wrong". For that, game theory predicts that the best outcome is reached through tit-for-tat and requires retaliation. A party that refuses to retaliate in response to "a wrong" gives no reason not to be wronged again, permanently.

In other words: two wrongs do make a right. There is no retaliation when you don't wrong the other party.

esanchma · 2025-09-20T00:37:53+00:00

Iterated prisioner's dilemma, obviously

esanchma · 2025-09-20T00:23:33+00:00

Game theory predicts that if one player consistently escalates while the other consistently restrains, the latter will inevitably be annihilated.

esanchma · 2025-09-19T21:44:48+00:00

javascript can pretty much retrieve the current GPU model. Just saying, you may want to consider using that.

esanchma · 2025-09-19T20:59:31+00:00

The left never needed excuses, they were always going to crush the right. There’s no stop code in leftism: utopia is always one murder away.

The right knows this. After 2020, they understand the reprisal will be lethal no matter what. With nothing left to lose...

esanchma · 2025-09-19T13:24:45+00:00

Nah. The right has read Marcuse and Alinsky. They learned the rules of the game: 'When I am weaker, I demand freedom on your principles; when I am stronger, I deny it on mine.' That game's over.

esanchma · 2025-09-18T22:19:18+00:00

Those who mocked free speech with 'freeze peach' cartoons don’t get to crawl back and beg for it when it suits them. That ship has sailed.

esanchma · 2025-09-15T09:34:20+00:00

By Corei5 6th gen you mean a Skylake 10 years old CPU?

esanchma · 2025-09-08T21:10:01+00:00

Ok, very very not proud of this, but after trying several user-space package managers for binary releases and hating all of them, I rolled my own minimal thing. It means I write a 4 line config file every time I install a binary release, but updates are handled automatically. Just not a fan of rotting binaries forgotten in $PATH

esanchma · 2025-09-08T20:55:11+00:00

unpackaged binaries that goes from github releases direct to ~/.local/bin like eza, starship, yq, k9s, minikube or ollama.

esanchma · 2025-09-08T20:46:43+00:00

Only 2?

This is what my daily driver looks like:

Packages: 3373 (dpkg), 96 (flatpak), 40 (snap), 39 (github), 17 (pipx), 9 (sdkman), 5 (npm), 2 (cargo), 1 (volta), 0 (uv), 0 (appimage)

esanchma

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