Russ

Primarily I use Arch on my desktop (and by proxy, my Steam Deck which runs SteamOS), which is what I’ve landed on after a ton of distro hopping. The idea of Atomic distros catches my eyes, but for me in its present state there are too many steps needed in order to make deeper changes (for example, installing a kernel module) - but I quite like SteamOS on my Deck since I know it will always be in a “consistent” state, for example.

On servers I run a mix of Rocky Linux and Debian.

That’s quite unfortunate to hear. I use Bitwarden along with Gboard and very rarely run into issues - I believe most password managers have a quick settings toggle that you can add into your notification drawer to maybe get around this? From what I know though, these generally use the Accessibility framework to function, and thus will heavily depend on your password manager - it also gives a lot more access to those apps than the built in autofill framework.

Conversely I remember Bitwarden’s autofill support on iOS being quirky when I last used it (which to be fair, has been a while - I’m sure its improved since then). IIRC it pretty much always worked in Safari (and Safari Web Views within apps), but the actual applications themselves wouldn’t always give me the autofill prompt.

For me though, regardless of the platform it still is far more worth using a password manager and unique passwords per-site than to use a single password (or even a handful) across sites. I hope autofill support improves for those that it doesn’t work well with.

A lot of Rocket League! Additionally I’ve been having a pretty good time with Star Trucker.

Then recently I’ve been streaming Helldivers 2 from my PC to my Deck while it’s connected to the living room TV, which has been fun.

I thought this was a limitation on the carrier you used, rather than the brand of phone? While I’ve not used any Samsung phones (well, none that ran Android), I’ve gone through various carriers and some of them have supported VVM in the Google Phone app, and others don’t seem to.

Jeez, no wonder Infinite has always had such a bad reputation then!

As far as I recall, Infinite has had online co-op, just not local/split screen co-op.

But don’t quote me on that!

Try resetting your Firefox profile. Sometimes a weird setting can break browsers in spectacular ways.

This was a big one for me, for the longest time I could not figure out why I couldn’t get YouTube to play videos over 1080p for me in Firefox on my PC, it ended up being some weird setting that I changed in about:config (I sadly cannot recall which one) a long time ago - but I’d always copied my Firefox profile with me so that bad setting stuck around.

Oh wow, I didn’t expect another release so quickly! Props to the COSMIC team! I can’t recall where the roadmap for the features and their targeted releases went, but I hope we can get Night Light/Blue Light filtering soon.

I also did not know they had a Mastodon account, thanks for the shout so that I could give 'em a follow.

Destiny definitely isn’t in its greatest state right now (and honestly, hasn’t been in a while).

The answer to why they haven’t “ended it yet” is: Because it still makes them money.

Realistically though, if you look at any big discussion for a game you’ll always find people who dislike it (because they tend to be louder than the people who are spending their time playing the game instead).

Not really a fan of the author’s attitude at the start (I’m not quite sure how I’d describe it, but it certainly feels off…) - however I do agree with the premise. Even if Microsoft stops allowing kernel level anti-cheat to happen (and honestly I’ll believe it when I see it), that doesn’t mean that game developers/publishers who are hostile to Linux players are suddenly going to go “Oh! Well in that case…”

I’d be incredibly happy to be wrong in this case, but as of how the current landscape is, I just don’t see it changing. They’ll just find some other BS reason to exclude Linux players.

I stopped purchasing games that weren’t compatible with Linux long ago, and the one holdover I had was Destiny 2 - but the game’s major story has come to an end, which makes it a great time for me to drop it too.

IIRC they also just recently launched a new setting that allows you to permanently set the target resolution for all games (this might still only be in the beta branch though).

Previously you had to go into each game’s settings from Steam, and change the resolution there (which might be how you missed it).

It depends on who you’re referring to as a casual user. My mother for example would certainly have a hard time with it, then figuring out the key to bring up the boot menu (and being faced with a scary dialog that they’ve never seen), then selecting the right device, then likely being faced with GRUB which would also look scary to her, and by then she’d be overwhelmed before even getting to the install portion.

This is what I’ve been playing too, and I’m having an absolute blast with it!

I’d recommend using ROCM through a Distrobox container, personally I use this Distrobox container file and it has suited all of my needs with Stable Diffusion so far.

That is, if you’re still interested in it - I could totally understand writing it off after what happened 😅

I usually just get by with Alacritty and Zellij, pairs pretty well together.

Nowadays I primarily just go with Arch, it works “fine enough” for my use cases (software dev and gaming) and the AUR truly does just about have everything that I’ve ever wanted to install.

That is not to say that it doesn’t have its issues though, a while back ago I was using EndeavourOS and my PC completely locked up (seemed like a kernel panic) in the middle of pacman running a system upgrade and it borked the whole install. I haven’t gotten around to migrating my home folder to its own partition (it is in its own btrfs subvol though), so I just went with installing Arch and choosing to keep the btrfs home subvolume so that the base system was replaced, yet my home folder was preserved. I’m sure that I could’ve fixed the issue in a chroot, but it was easier to just wipe everything outside of my home folder and just start fresh.

I am heavily interested in Atomic systems, the above issue being one of the bigger reasons, but I would continuously run into walls when trying to use non-flatpak software. Most of the Atomic distros have a way to effectively spin your own image, but at the moment I just don’t have the time to learn how to do it. NixOS fell into a similar boat for me, Nixpkgs is quite large but I’d have things randomly break because they’re expecting a FHS compliant layout (such as some of my dev tools) and while I’m sure I could eventually learn how to fix it, Nix’s docs are… not the best, and I ran into time constraints again.

I’ll eventually circle back to reviewing Atomic distros and spinning up my own custom image once things in my life settle down a bit, but there’s just too much chaos for me to justify throwing another wrench into it when Arch for the most part does what I need it to do.

My desktop also used to have a Nvidia GPU in it, and is one of the reasons why I started using Arch in the first place - they were pretty much always the first to get the Nvidia driver updates. Thankfully I switched to AMD (a 6700 XT) about a year ago and that specifically hasn’t been an issue (and allowed me to explore more distros without having to worry about how the Nvidia installation/update process was - its not really complicated on any of the distros, but its an additional step unless you use something like Pop that has the drivers preinstalled).

However I do also use Fedora on my old MacBook, I tend to only use it for lightweight browsing and occasionally SSH’ing into some systems and I’ve quite enjoyed Fedora so far.

I try to keep all of the distros I’ve tried out, with their current versions and previous versions (if it makes sense), such as:

• Arch
• NixOS
• Fedora
• Debian
• Ubuntu
• Pop!_OS
• Bazzite (and their friends Aurora & Bluefin)
• Even Windows 10 >_>

I’ve stopped distro hopping as much as I used to, but I do keep a much smaller partition around for playing with another distro if I want to (such as the latest test version of Pop that includes the COSMIC epoch alpha release). I’d say that you definitely don’t need a 128GB flash drive, but the last 16GB flash drive I was using pretty much died and when I went to get a new one, the difference between 16/32/64/128 was negligible enough that I just decided to get a 128 one and never deal with storage issues on it again. Plus, you can tell the Ventoy installer to leave some free space for a non-ISO partition to keep other stuff on it as well.

I personally use Sleep as Android which comes with a bunch of options to help ensure you’ve actually woken up. I utilize the “captcha” option in which when I go to turn off the alarm, it displays a screen full of sheep and all of them but one are sleeping - you have to click the one that is “awake” in order to dismiss the alarm. I guess the process wakes up my brain just enough so that I don’t go back to sleep, whereas with a regular alarm that has just a simple dismiss button I’ll absolutely either hit dismiss or one of the volume buttons to turn off the alarm before I’ve fully woken up.

I also have it set to buzz on my watch for 90 seconds before playing a sound on my phone (which escalates in volume) - I’ve not had a problem waking up with this in the years that I’ve been using it.

There are other options too, such as answering math questions, scanning a QR code, pressing your phone to an NFC tag, heavily shaking the phone, one called “Say cheese!” that makes you smile as hard as you can and uses the camera to detect it, and one that you have to “laugh out loud”.

Can confirm, Ventoy is fantastic! I just keep one 128GB USB drive with a ton of ISOs on it and that does the trick!

Hmm, gotcha. I just tried out a fresh copy of text-gen-webui and it seems like the latest version is borked with ROCM (I get the CUDA error: invalid device function error).

My next recommendation then would be LM Studio which to my knowledge can still output an OpenAI compatible API endpoint to be used in SillyTavern - I’ve used it in the past before and I didn’t even need to run it within Distrobox (I have all of the ROCM stuff installed locally, but I generally run most of the AI stuff in distrobox since it tends to require an older version of Python than Arch is currently using) - it seems they’ve recently started supporting running GGUF models via Vulkan, which I assume probably doesn’t require the ROCM stuff to be installed perhaps?

Might be worth a shot, I just downloaded the latest version (the UI has definitely changed a bit since I last used it) and just grabbed a copy of the Gemma model and ran it, and it seemed to work without an issue for me directly on the host.

The advanced configuration settings no longer seem to directly mention GPU acceleration like it used to, however I can see it utilizing GPU resources in nvtop currently, and the speed it was generating at (the one in my screenshot was 83 tokens a second) couldn’t have possibly been done on the CPU so it seems to be fine on my side.