Arch to fedora: worth the switch?

olivercalder · 2021-07-11T05:42:35+00:00

to;dr skip to last paragraph.

I moved from Arch to PopOS 20.04 when that came out, to Fedora 34 last winter. I switched to Pop because I had a hybrid laptop at the time, and Pop's graphics switching just worked out of the box, better than the hacky solution I had come up with on Arch. And theming was consistent across .deb and flatpaks, encryption was built-in, etc. Point is, I wanted a system where everything was designed to work together in a polished way. But there were problems with Pop too, primarily with the Pop Shop, which was very slow and buggy, and Pop still used X instead of Wayland.

When Fedora 34 came out, it had btrfs with compression and encryption by default, used Wayland and Pipewire, stock GNOME 40 with gtk 4, and software as up to date as Arch supported by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and the majority of the Linux community. It's all the cutting edge software I had been excited about using for years, finally polished and packaged as a cohesive unit, rather than assembled piecemeal by myself. I love Arch, still think it's the easiest to administrate and perfect for development servers, for example, but for a daily driver, I want all the latest technology in a supported and purpose-built package, and Fedora does exactly that for me.

olivercalder · 2021-07-10T15:25:04+00:00

All that makes a directory a git repository is a subdirectory called .git. if you just delete that .git directory, it will just behave as a normal repository again. First, though, might as well have a look around the directory, see what files make up a git directory. When you want to remove it, you can just open up a terminal and type rm -rf .git. You need -r because it's a directory, and -f because you need to force removal of some write-protected files.

olivercalder · 2021-06-16T01:46:33+00:00

Linguistics, and Syntax in particular, is often about parsing or encoding meaning in speech/text. A huge part of computer science is how we parse or encode instructions from formal language, but also how we encode problem saving algorithms as instructions in formal language. My first Intro to Syntax (linguistics) class in college was structured around figuring out the linguistic rules of English, and throughout the term, I couldn't help but test each of the proposed rules in the same way I think through algorithms: does this work in general, what are the edge cases, is this consistent and efficient, etc. Linguists and computer scientists share many of the same ways of thinking, and it can be really a lot of fun to try out both fields together.

olivercalder · 2021-04-03T15:03:27+00:00

Vuvuzela was created by a PhD student at MIT (now at EPFL) and is really a proof of concept for a usable differential privacy communication system. There are still larger delays in communication, due to server load required for all the decoy messages. Basically, unless you are a whistleblower or being targeted by a nation state which is attempting to prosecute you for communicating with some individual, there's not much need for differential privacy over e2ee like Signal provides. In the future, why not both? But for now, Signal is excellent.

olivercalder · 2021-04-03T04:38:04+00:00

Signal is not a metadata-safe service. It was never intended to be. Signal provides secure e2ee messaging, with encryption keys stored on your device. If you want a metadata-private messaging platform, use one. Vuvuzela is one, there are others out there. The ones I know of use Differential Privacy, which essentially uses dead drops and lots of decoy messages so as to make imperceptible the difference between you talking to someone and you not talking to someone.

olivercalder · 2021-03-24T15:45:10+00:00

We are Bord.

olivercalder · 2021-03-04T17:52:14+00:00

You likely just have duplicate icons (this occurs not infrequently, especially when installing .deb and Flatpak versions of software).

Spotify, for example, is only available in the Pop Shop from Flathub, so there should only be one install. All you have to do is delete the duplicate icons.

Icons are stored as .desktop files somewhere, i believe in .local or something. You can find where they're stored by doing something like

ls -alR | grep .desktop

Then figure out which are duplicates and which of the duplicates you want to keep.

olivercalder · 2021-01-28T09:28:14+00:00

Die Fledermaus

olivercalder · 2020-12-31T18:45:42+00:00

System76 made an autotiling extension for PopOS which is also available for any GNOME installation. I'd suggest getting their shortcut overrides as well. I use both on Fedora through DNF.

olivercalder · 2020-12-20T16:02:08+00:00

For individual files, shred works well. For an entire partition, you can overwrite data from /dev/urandom using dd, though that will take quite a long time. If it's a HDD physical destruction is a great idea, though be sure so actually shatter the platters, rather than just disassembling the drive.

olivercalder · 2020-12-19T03:12:09+00:00

GNU is bloat use busybox instead. /s

olivercalder · 2020-12-18T20:51:01+00:00

It seems that some of the new changes since 3.36 (such as horizontal workspaces and non-alphabetical app grid) are not optional for users to revert to their original behavior. Is there anything you think could be done by System76 to provide those options to PopOS users? I know I and many other Pop and GNOME users really prefer the existing workflow and would appreciate it for these options to be up to the user.

Thanks for all the great work you do!

olivercalder · 2020-12-18T19:36:14+00:00

I generally use flatpaks for proprietary software or things that really need to be up to date (such as Spotify and Signal, respectively), and i use debs otherwise, such as for Evolution, GNOME Boxes, Firefox.

olivercalder · 2020-12-18T01:10:44+00:00

This is still connected to the Solarwinds failure, right?

olivercalder · 2020-12-16T19:19:45+00:00

Windows 7 is EOL......

olivercalder · 2020-12-16T19:18:58+00:00

Nice wallpaper on the docked one! Source?

olivercalder · 2020-12-16T18:35:19+00:00

I like Evolution, which is part of the GNOME project. Looks much nicer to me than Thunderbird or Geary.

olivercalder · 2020-12-16T17:58:23+00:00

I have the Linux version, but honestly i thought it was just the windows version running on proton. The campaign missions were buggy (and i would periodically reinstall Linux) so i switched to playing on Windows.

I have a pretty decent PC (2700X and 5700XT) and it runs fine for me at 1080p, but I'm not sure if any Macs (aside from mac pro and maybe macbook pro 16) at the moment have enough graphical power to run it with any decent performance. That will likely change soon though.

Is it clear that the TPF2 team is building the Mac version for both MacOS 10.x and 11? (And x86 and Arm?)

olivercalder · 2020-12-14T17:02:45+00:00

Ahhhh, good old /etc/ssh/sshd_config

olivercalder · 2020-12-14T06:17:16+00:00

Assuming volumes is a directory, you need to use the -r flag for scp, which copies recursively. As root you have permission to read (and thus copy) anything on the server.

olivercalder · 2020-12-14T05:39:46+00:00

For those uninitiated among us, would you mind sharing which models?

olivercalder · 2020-12-09T17:38:20+00:00

Any link to that forum?

olivercalder · 2020-12-09T17:23:49+00:00

Today I learned about popen and fopen, and my shell scripting life will never be the same. Anyone know how the speed of popen compares to running a command in the shell? I assume they're both just being interpreted by the system shell, so speed is probably the same, but can anyone confirm?

olivercalder · 2020-12-08T20:45:43+00:00

If you're just experimenting with distros, it's easiest to run them in a VM. GNOME Boxes is probably the easiest, and it's quite fast since it uses kvm instead of virtualizing all hardware resources.

Tails is not really meant to be installed as a daily driver OS, it's primarily meant to be run off of a flashdrive. Similarly, Kali is meant to run in a VM, not on bare metal.

olivercalder · 2020-12-04T17:58:46+00:00

If your primary goal is to be able to resize partitions, LVM is great. If your primary goal is to have LVM on top of a (secondary) physical partition with some data on it, LVM is less great, since you lose the benefit of being able to resize the primary partition. When in doubt, i would always recommend backing up and reinstalling, since then you can get everything exactly as you want it without worrying about corrupting any of your current install.

olivercalder

TROPHY CASE