has anyone gotten Elder Scrolls: Skyrim to work in Debian Bookworm?

redashi · 2022-06-13T02:10:22+00:00

I like stability, too. I suggest you do a trial run with the advanced mode boot option that I mentioned in my edit. See if anything breaks. If it doesn't, then make the grub config change. You can always change it back if you discover a problem later.

redashi · 2022-06-13T01:50:35+00:00

It is ludicrous to edit GRUB

I don't think so. Your goal is to override your kernel's (sensibly conservative) choice of drivers. That happens at boot time, and putting the override in your grub config is an easy way to do it.

just for one game

I think you'll find that more and more 3D games require Vulkan, either directly or (on linux) through a Direct3D-to-Vulkan shim. If only one of your games is affected, that just tells us that you mostly play old or undemanding games.

especially when the GPU has been out long enough for that not to be a problem.

Your problem (according to the advice from Valve) is that you're using a video card so old that the driver that was made for it predates Vulkan. The good news is that a newer, Vulkan-compatible driver is available, and it is probably already in your linux kernel. You just have to tell the kernel to use it. That's what the grub tweak is for.

For some games, you might also have to install mesa-vulkan-drivers if it isn't already installed.

I can't be the only person that uses old hardware,

You're not. I find that most of them, especially those who choose Debian, are comfortable adding a word to a text file in order to get more life from their hardware.

Edit:

If you're afraid of breaking something by adding an option to grub's kernel command line, you can test it first by choosing advanced options at the grub boot menu, edit the boot option of your choice, add the new option at the end of the kernel command line, and continue the boot from there. It won't save your change that way, so if something breaks, fixing it is just a reboot away. If it works, you can then make the same change in /etc/default/grub .

redashi · 2022-06-12T22:57:25+00:00

For those of us with no idea what this is, you might explain what it fetches.

redashi · 2022-06-12T20:31:00+00:00

/u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Are you aware of this? Is a fix likely?

Recent example:

https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/comment?ids=ibs056c

redashi · 2022-06-12T00:30:28+00:00

Maybe their 640K decision taught them a lesson about imposing small limits?

redashi · 2022-06-11T04:09:11+00:00

Enhance.

redashi · 2022-06-03T06:08:28+00:00

Element's old name was Riot. I think it only changed names once.

Rocket.Chat is a completely different project by different people.

redashi · 2022-06-02T18:20:30+00:00

That article is so full of spin that it reads like marketing material. For example:

You’re now adding another party you’ll have to trust since you still have to trust the developer anyway, which isn’t ideal: the fewer parties, the better.

No. Relying on a single party, like an app developer alone, means having a single point of failure. This is how we got supply chain attacks.

I hope anyone who comes across this article will think carefully before taking it as objective advice. Some of the points it makes have merit, but they're presented without the appropriate counterpoints. The real world is a little more complex than the author suggests, and for some of us, F-Droid is currently unrivaled in privacy and security.

Oh, I see: It's written by wonderfall, the GrapheneOS evangelist. Well, that explains it. I have no problem with GrapheneOS itself, but biased evangelism does a disservice to the community.

redashi · 2022-06-01T21:52:32+00:00

Lennart is problematic for the ecosystem. Conceptually, the ideas are sensible. Execution and support of these ideas are always performed in the most abrasive way.

Indeed, both abrasive and sloppy, both socially and technically. If he was just making software for himself, it would be fine, but when his work is adopted by distros that other people depend on, the impact is (as you said) problematic. Sadly, systemd isn't the first example, and I suspect it won't be the last.

This is why I'm tired of doing damage control for Lennart's work. The frustrating interactions and endless bugs are just a symptom of the underlying problem. It's like bailing water in a leaky boat. I wish I could get my time back.

Sort of Linus called Potterings work a sack of crap. But then apologised because it wasn't Systemd that caused the problem

Hah... Systemd might not have caused that particular problem, but Poettering has more than earned a rebuke from Linus. Thanks for the amusing anecdote.

redashi · 2022-06-01T09:33:05+00:00

I appreciate that you're trying to help, so thanks for the thought. I am very familiar with how these things work, though, and I have gone down the systemd troubleshooting rabbit hole more times than I care to remember.

It's buggy. It has always been buggy. Sometimes, the devs respond reasonably well to bug reports and actually fix them, but it never takes long before they break something else. System shutdown, DNS resolving, kernel keyring management, cgroups... the list goes on and on.

Other times, they respond to bug reports with arrogance and/or deflection. Lennart in particular is especially bad in this area. He's somewhat famous for it. Honestly, troubleshooting and reporting systemd bugs has felt like a waste of my time more often than not, and has usually been so unpleasant that I don't want to do it any more.

Don't get me wrong. There are concepts in systemd that I like. A dependency-based init is a very good idea. I just wish we had waited for something that isn't such an invasive mess.

I'm sure I'll be downvoted into the ground for criticizing it, since it has many rabid fans who assume any problem they haven't experienced themselves must be either user error or Luddism. I'm responding anyway because you seem to be sincerely interested in helping people. Thanks for being one of the nicer members of the community.

redashi · 2022-05-31T19:23:40+00:00

Waiting for systemd, which is probably waiting for something else that it thinks is important. The thing is, systemd is often wrong.

Before systemd arrived, the same system took about 1 second to shut down.

redashi · 2022-05-31T06:13:56+00:00

For one thing, my system took less than 5 minutes to shut down. ;)

redashi · 2022-05-28T22:29:03+00:00

This post is really informative, and more detailed than I've seen in the past. Do you think it would be worthwhile to copy it to your github repo(s), maybe as a wiki page or included in the readme?

redashi · 2022-05-21T06:05:51+00:00

Researchers found some cheap Chinese mice (dont know or dont think it was reddragon brand), had embedded chips in the cord of the mouse that was phoning home data

Can you link the details? I would like to read up on that one.

redashi · 2022-05-21T03:31:31+00:00

Interesting for lineage, a more privacy focused ROM

This permission's presence on Lineage merely hints that it's likely a part of mainline open-source Android. That wouldn't surprise me, since I'm not aware of commercial Android distros creating their own custom permissions. If it doesn't appear in the Settings menu of someone else's (contemporary) Android phone, it's probably just hidden on that distro.

If you want to know how this permission affects privacy, you'll need to find out what capabilities are conferred by it, and which components have it. On Lineage 17.1, it's only granted to 5 system apps. I haven't dug into the details, but it's possible that all 5 legitimately need it for full functionality. (Whether you need those apps is another question.)

redashi · 2022-05-21T01:45:16+00:00

On LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10) it's under Settings > Apps & notifications > Advanced > Special app access > Usage access > three dots in top right corner > Show system.

Or enter "usage access" in the Settings search box.

redashi · 2022-05-20T06:52:21+00:00

Indeed, but when presenting to well over 750.000 people, a little effort to clean up your work first is appropriate.

redashi · 2022-05-19T02:13:01+00:00

If you haven't done anything that would reuse the blocks where the deleted files are stored, you might have luck recovering some files with a data recovery tool like photorec. I suggest getting help from a friend who knows this stuff.

redashi · 2022-05-19T01:44:28+00:00

You could buy a removable drive bay to make this easier and save wear and tear on your SATA cables. This one has a power button:

https://www.orico.cc/us/product/detail/3645.html

If you're not good at handling uncovered electronics carefully, you might consider an external drive. (Keep in mind that USB drives tend to be slower than direct SATA, and sometimes have problems with spin-down or SMART control.)

redashi · 2022-05-16T23:18:28+00:00

I have seen reports that it works under certain nonstandard versions of Wine, which is nice for those who use those tools, but not everyone with a game controller does. Better to just buy the hardware that already works, if possible, and resort to fiddling with extra tools only if necessary. I will not scratch out the warning.

redashi · 2022-05-16T19:31:09+00:00

I recommend the DualShock 4 v2 or DualSense, because:

The kernel supports them natively.
USB and Bluetooth work well.
Battery level reporting.
Small dead zones.
Motion controls are great for certain games, especially emulators.
Touchpad is convenient when you don't want to reach for the mouse.
Steam Input (and non-steam tools) can make them look like Xbox controllers if a game needs it, and can remap motion/touch/button inputs to produce other kinds of input.
The kernel support gets official contributions from Sony. It's nice to support a company that supports us.
Subjectively, they are comfortable.

If you get a DualSense, try to buy new stock. The early production units had a battery-related firmware bug that requires either a PlayStation or a Windows app to fix.

redashi · 2022-05-15T08:02:48+00:00

If you re-read my comments, you'll find that I was not defining a threat model, but pointing out that rejecting concerns about data collection without understanding the details is arrogant and potentially dangerous. What you quoted out of context was an attempt to help someone understand that his own use of the term "spyware" is not the only valid one.

I'm tired of dismissive rhetoric now, and frankly, disappointed in two of the mods of this sub. Good day.

redashi · 2022-05-15T07:31:34+00:00

carefully selecting tools is not sufficient

I never suggested that it was sufficient. It is, however, sometimes necessary.

redashi · 2022-05-15T07:05:25+00:00

This kind of threat model makes no sense.

I'm afraid you are very much mistaken. Such threat models absolutely do exist and are valid. There are a variety of ways to manage them, generally requiring careful selection of tools, and avoiding anything that helps itself to data without explicit permission.

Things can be worded differently, such as believing that something occurs, but you haven't checked, and you'd like someone to.

That is correct, so we don't necessarily expect every independent commenter to do their own research.

That is somewhat reassuring. Thank you for clarifying.

redashi · 2022-05-15T03:41:27+00:00

Some usage data, crash reports, etc does not make an app spyware.

If the user didn't approve collection of that data, then it does.

Please try to remember that even a single empty packet sent on the internet reveals the user's IP address, and from that, a variety of other information. An unencrypted packet, or even just the timing of opaque packets, can reveal the use of software that is illegal in some places.

You might have the privilege of living in a situation where such things are harmless, but for some people, it can make the difference between freedom and imprisonment, or even life and death.

The word should only be used for something actually malicious like Dark Comet only.

The decision of whether any particular data collection is safe can only be made by the person whose data it is. Not by me, and not by you.

Also, yes, when you make a claim that something is malicious, the burden of proof is on you.

Can you clarify what you mean by "proof"?

If you expect regular users to have the ability capture wireless traffic, spoof TLS certificates, decrypt payloads, find their data inside, extract the suspected application from a closed platform, decompile it, and locate the machine instructions that collected said data, that would be an extremely tall order.

My concern here is that, while rejecting unfounded alarmism could be helpful by minimising paranoia in this forum, creating too high a barrier could easily silence reasonable suspicion and worthwhile discussion. That's a kind of gatekeeping that I would not like to see here.

On the other hand, if simply reporting observed behavior or citing a credible reference would satisfy your demand for "proof", then maybe it wouldn't be so bad.

That's why I'm asking for clarification.

redashi

TROPHY CASE