“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
Reminds me of when a client walked in to the help desk I work at the other day with a 2015 Macbook Pro still running El Capitan. I upgraded her to Monterrey - it’s been EOL for a year, but it’s better than sending her away with El Capitan. Monterrey is the best I can do since OCLP would be outside our policy.
Personally, Super Star Trek is my favorite terminal game.
s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.
Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.
2 things:
I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:
Of course, there’s a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I’d rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).
Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don’t like Apple, but I’m unfortunately stuck on it right now), I’m a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I’m building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.
For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.
Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don’t have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.
It for a fact uses CEF: https://www.spotify.com/us/opensource/
Chromium Embedded Framework literally describes itself as follows on its Git repos: “Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). A simple framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications.”
The Spotify “app” is mostly just web app code running on top of a single page Chromium instance, meaning for the most part, it isn’t truly native.
MIPS I get, but armel feels a little weird; I’d wager there’s more production users of Debian on armel than RV64 - not a huge use case, but one that merits a bit more consideration.
I think ~2030 would have been a more realistic date, since most of the last devices with ARMv6 would be about 20 years old by then.
Though I am a Debian fan, I don’t think trying another distro will help too much.
Not necessarily. In the case of this specific GPU, both 12 and 13 support that model quite well. I can’t tell if Trixie supported RDNA4 out of box, but if it doesn’t, I’m sure Backports does just fine.
Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?
From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).
Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.
Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.
As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.
If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.
If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.
If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.
It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.
I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.
Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:
Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.
Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.
My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.
If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?
I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM1 to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.
1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).
What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.
However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.
Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”
As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.
Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.
Personally, I believe there barely is such a thing as “good AI” - I have a dislike of image and audio generation; while I avoid LLMs, I admit they have their occasional uses.
I mean, at least it’s not an AI slop Tux on a clickbait article that says, “Forget Windows 11 - [INSERT OBSCURE, BORDLINE USELESS DISTRO THAT WON’T LAST TWO YEARS] cured my cancer”.
Like, I love Linux, and obscure distros have their place (I’d be cool with a review), but then there’s those horrible articles that mirror the overall devolution into soullessness that the internet has become.
On another note, those same sites with articles like, “Forget Windows 11 - Windows XP 2025 Classic Edition Ultimate is what we need”, with UI mockups where I’d rather cut off my right hand with a circle saw than use them if they were real.
I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.
I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.
Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.
I think I have a bit more nuanced feelings on the MIT license. If I actually write something useful, GPL all the way, baby!
However, I don’t necessarily think the MIT license is the embodiment of evil; I find GPL a bit overkill for hobby projects. I’m not talking things that have the potential to become critical pieces of infrastructure like a kernel or something; I’m more talking about emoji pickers or hacky little Python scripts that would be pretty useless to a Fortune 500. In the minute chance someone actually cares about my silly little toy to fork it, I see very little point in encumbering it with the full heft of a copyleft license and stopping them from doing whatever the heck they want.