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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2022

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  • Also self-hosting is not trivial but it got way easier over the years IMHO thanks to Docker/Podman. Also I’d recommend investing time in it because… it will still be worth it in a decade!

    If you are up for it I could write few “challenges” for you and see where it leads.


  • Check my post history if you want as I did post quite a few times about my journey there but basically :

    • used Android a long time ago
    • switched to iOS due to discussions with security experts at Mozilla
    • bought and used sporadically Linux proper phones (PinePhone and PinePhone Pro) with different distributions
    • tired of iOS restrictions as a developer, switched to /e/OS last year

    The main appeal of /e/OS for me wasn’t security or privacy but rather being able to purchase a phone with the OS installed. I wanted to buy a phone, put the SIM in and be pretty much done with it. I also wanted banking apps to keep on working. I bought the cheapest /e/OS phone namely https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-cmf-phone-1/ then and basically I’ve been using daily since.

    Few clarifications that I believe are misunderstandings :

    • on security, yes /e/OS lags behind GrapheneOS for Android updates. If you are worried of 0-days because you are a political dissident you should probably NOT use /e/OS but get your setup reviewed by experts. You should definitely not trust randoms strangers on the Internet on that topic. It’s important to put an emphasis on the fact that even with the latest Android updates, a phone is still not entirely secure, does not matter if it’s with Googled Android, GrapheneOS, iOS or whatever other OS. It’s only the least worst known state, in theory. It’s better to follow best practices but without being either naive or paranoid.
    • on privacy, /e/OS has some defaults you might not like but they are JUST that, namely default settings. If you do not want to use a Murena account, simply do not create one. That’s it. You won’t have any call to any API, even proxied one like OpenAI. AFAICT this is also only for paid accounts so it can’t happen by mistake. Feel free to check my post/comment history on that. Again if your threat model is any information leak, might be better to use GrapheneOS but if you are fine with just avoiding the downside of surveillance capitalism, IMHO /e/OS is good enough, namely you don’t share usage data to Google, even with default settings.



  • company that we can actually choose, unlike our ISP

    Depends on locations but typically in urban areas (which is where most people live now, since the rural flight of the 20th) there are multiple ISPs to chose from. It’s typically a long tail curve with 1 ISP that is a current or historical monopoly everybody knows who laid down the physical lines then multiple large ones and finally dozens of tiny ones that might include some local non-profit. Same goes for SIM operators. Most customers are just too lazy to bother picking anything but the most popular choices.

    TL;DR: most people can actually chose their ISPs.





  • This will not be a fork of OpenRGB. While I plan to take a huge chunk of it (the reversed generiert device protocols)

    How about opening an issue on OpenRGB asking what you need and why, maybe it can be abstracted away, headless, and that architecture change could be useful for them and other projects too then?

    You can do that part yourself and let other use that new tool as their dependency but it means you’ll have to keep it up to date against OpenRGB itself as it supports more devices just because of its popularity.



  • Vibe coders want their “agents” to be able to do more. Started with tools on a computer, VMs, but recently it was payments (x402) and last it was a “social network” so this is actually pretty coherent.

    I do think it’s terrible and I hate the whole hype but it makes sense to want your “system” to have more diverse inputs (e.g. dataset) and outputs (e.g payment to get more inputs, arms or other actuators to “act” on the World and complete tasks, get more data, etc).





  • I’m sorry but I might be totally out of the loop here, do gamers use Mesa? I thought proprietary drives from NVIDIA and AMD, sadly, was what most people actually used nowadays. Again to be clear I’m NOT saying it’s a good thing (it’s not!) just wondering what’s the actual share of users relying on it.

    Edit: oh, looks like Mesa is now the default for AMD “AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst” (via Wikipedia), then yes it’s a big deal. Still makes me wonder what’s the current share but mostly out of curiosity.



  • Newer packages will in theory always be better, that doesn’t really matter which distribution or use case (gaming or not) one has.

    Even if Debian were generating packages the second a pull request was accepted and making it available to everyone and any one it wouldn’t change that the next pull request would, in theory (without regression) be more up to date.

    If people have to wait 1s or 1 year, for gaming or not, they can have fun.

    If hardware is not properly supported though it’s a different issue. It means people need to buy hardware that is well supported. It’s not specific to a distribution.

    I’m playing old and new games on the SteamDeck and it works even if I don’t update it. That’s how things should be, that’s how things already are.

    Anecdotes, even if important personally of course, showing things don’t work in a specific context don’t make a trend. There are plenty of things that don’t work well on Debian but also on Arch, Mint, etc and of course on Windows too. It’s very annoying but I don’t see how that helps.


  • Others mentioned it but I’ll insist on kdenlive.

    Yes it’s intimidating, so much so I initially started it, closed it and went back to ffmpeg, so the CLI.

    What I was lacking wasn’t a good UI or UX but rather the principle of video editing. Once you actually learn the basics :

    • cuts (each file become a track, each file can be sliced in smaller piece and re-arranged)
    • timeline (cuts next to each other or on top of each other, including audio, videos, cards, etc)
    • effects (fade in, fade out, etc)
    • project management (organizing files, designing cards for titles, etc)

    then regardless of which software you use it’s nearly the same.

    So I would actually invest just an hour to try a tutorial, edit a 1min video, get feedback on it from friends then try again. Honestly video as a medium is not going away anytime soon, in fact arguably platform like TikTok (sadly) made it even more popular. Consequently investing a bit of time today would benefit you for decades to come.


  • I’ll be honest : because people is ignorant.

    They tried Debian once few years ago, it didn’t have the exact driver they wanted out of the box, they gave up. They think that’s the normal and current experience.

    Reality is I use Debian every day on my servers, SBCs, laptop but also my desktop. I’ve been gaming on it since the first day of the installation and it just worked. Sure I had to follow https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers and basically follow those steps. It took me maybe 15min and 1 reboot but since then NO tinkering, 0, and I’m gaming nearly daily from indie to AAA, from 2D to 3D to VR. As I mentioned in another reply sure I might not have perfectly optimized all my performance but I don’t give a shit, I’m just gaming!

    Also as I mentioned elsewhere the “cutting edge” is bullshit. You can have a Debian installation, stable, and cherry pick the packages you want. Heck you can even pull from a forge the software you want, built it, run it. That’s how “bleeding edge” it can be. Of course you can use VM (with GPU passthrough), distrobox, AppImage, Nix (different from NixOS), etc so they are many many ways to make sure you use the absolute latest without breaking your system.

    TL;DR: Debian does not position itself as a gaming distribution. A lot of gamers want to optimize everything for gaming and consequently assume a specialized distribution will do better. Meanwhile people who JUST want to play can definitely do so on Debian.