That’s pretty slick.

It looks like they’re ‘just’ creating 2d planes and attaching Wayland Surface or TopLevel (Desktop, App, respectively).

I use XSOverlay and you can attach individual windows to the overlay (VR Smartwatch, kinda). This seems like a much more in-depth extension of that.

Attaching individual applications is way better than the whole desktop in my experience. The desktop experience works well with a high resolution monitor… but in VR headsets you’re still resolution limited, so having JUST the application window can make it much easier to read/navigate.

The only feature that I would like is the ability to pin windows to specific locations. I’d like to be able to pin a HomeAssistant application window over my thermostat, or have a monitor displaying the feed from my security camera next to my front door, etc.

There are already virtual desktop applications that can do the desktop/windows trick, but they all seem to be anchored on you instead of being aware of the space that you’re in.

Only when you’re drunk

I was trained on Stack Overflow, OBVIOUSLY

It looks like you’re blaming the technology and not the corporations.

OpenAI didn’t invent machine learning, nor did they invent the Transformer model.

AI is not more responsible for OpenAI’s poor decisions than the electricity or the IP protocol, despite their also being key technologies required for the growth of OpenAI and all of the other AI companies.

If a person is driving a car wrecklessly, you go after that person… you don’t outlaw automobiles.

This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’

You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.

Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.

If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.

The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.

People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.

Once Wine made about 50% of my games playable I was dual booting because I liked the environment and customization.

Once Valve started contributing to the WINE project and released Proton most of my games were working and I was only swapping back to Windows to play a few games.

Now, I don’t have a game that doesn’t work on Proton(-GE-10) and exclusively use Linux. HDR was really the last item that I was missing and with the newest KDE/Wayland/Wine changes, it works with little fuss.

I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Windows if you’re even moderately technical. The problems you’ll have with Linux are different than the ones you’ll have with Windows but the big difference is that they are not happening in a black box and so you can troubleshoot some issues A LOT easier.

A crash happens in DirectX? You don’t have the symbols, nothing you can realistically do.

If you have a crash in Wine, not only do you have access to the full source code and the ability to write the patch and compile it yourself. You also have access to developers that are not bound by NDAs, a public issue tracker and the ability to use fixes made by other users without their risking prison time for copyright law violations.

There is no privacy destroying ‘telemetry’, no advertisements disguised as system messages, your data isn’t automatically uploaded to the cloud where you have to rent access to it, your encryption keys are not stored in on someone else’s computer, there are not mystery closed-source modules running in kernel space, the developers cannot force your system to update or deny you the ability to, and they do not force you to buy a new computer who’s only new feature is the ability to more strictly enforce IP laws and further tie your technological dependence to one of the 5 tech companies.

But, you can’t play Valorant, have to learn GIMP and you may one day have to type a terminal command… so, I mean, there’s that too

We don’t talk anymore, he’s a Red Hat now.

My father used startx and his father before him, so I reckon I’ll use startx too (aliased to systemctl start sddm)

print variablename

DDoS is cheap to buy on the dark web it could be anybody with a grudge and a few thousand USD. It often costs more to mitigate the attacks than to launch them.

firewalld is also a decent choice.

The biggest problem I faced was <today’s problem>. Had to <solution from the wiki>… this was admittedly a huge pain in the ass but it’s a niche problem and it was solved.

As a Linux user, this is basically your life now.

But you don’t have every advertising agency on the planet rifling through the contents of your computer… so there’s that.

The best biggest problem was the video drivers. My resolution maxed out at 32:9 1080@119.97hz and the screen would not wake from sleep. I ran two commands to download and install the Nvidia drivers and it worked - 1440&240hz with HDR and it wakes properly

You will run into some issues with HDR, it’s still pretty new in Plasma and Wine so some games will not recognize that you have HDR support (Path of Exile 2, for example). You can run the games in gamescope (The arch wiki has a good article bout it, btw), which will have a small bit of performance overhead but hasn’t failed me yet at enabling HDR in stubborn games. You also need Proton 10 or better.

Your best bet is to install protonup-qt and use it to download and install GE-Proton10-27. GloriousEggroll maintains a community build of Proton which includes more current versions of the software and some extra community tweaks. protonup-qt just gives you a GUI to install/update. It works with the flatpak version of steam as well.

Don’t be afraid to check other distros wikis. Often the solutions will work on your system or at least give you an idea of what to look for. The Arch and Gentoo wikis are excellent sources of information.

Clear Key is an excellent example of usability completely neutering security.

Your drive encryption keys (FVEK) are protected by the VMK which is then encrypted and written to the drive on suspend and then the key that was used to encrypt it is also written to the drive in plaintext.

It’s like a lock that comes with a key that’s chained to it, completely worthless but they can say, like Microsoft here, that it is technically locked.

It does lead to some interesting sentences when combined with other kernel terms:

Generally killing the parent also kills the child.

Once you’ve leveled up and had Arch Linux installed for 1 years (in Unix time) you’ll be sent a jar of Ovaltine and the secret decoder ring which reveals the secrets.

A major reason these kinds of things are happening is the EU move toward digital sovereignty.

Since there isn’t exactly a non-US commercial OS available and Linux is good enough for most everything, we’re starting to see a lot of interest in the open source world and moving towards open and standards-based software.

Commercial companies recognize that the EU governments represent a huge potential source of income. Some categories of software have essentially no Linux support… this leaves a huge vacuum to be filled by a company who can create professional image editing/CAD software which also works on Linux.

If Affinity is the only large, commercially supported professional publishing software available then they become the defacto winner of all of these new EU Digital Sovereignty contracts.

But the equivalent would be to take tutorials, examples and small open source projects and tinkering with them, rather than asking a machine to do it for you, no? I

I’ve found that using LLMs to research/summarize eases the friction of entering a new hobby and having to learn the tools, techniques, vocabulary, etc. You can just use Google (As an aside, nobody worries about how dependent we are on search) but the answer may not be in a answered in a way that is understandable to you or that fits into the context that you’re working with.

I’m going to RTFM eventually, but right now I need to figure out what the hell ‘Hello World’ means, who is World? Where do I type this text? What does compile mean?

Of course, none of this changes anything about the fact that it requires actual mental effort and problem solving in order to learn. LLM agents provide a new tool for people to use to avoid making that effort which can injure their own education, I can agree there. However, if deployed intelligently, they’re a useful tool/tutor if you can’t afford a, fairly incompetent, human expert in every field to be on call 24/7.

Using LLMs as a semi-incompetent tutor is a good use. They know the basics well enough to explain it to you and have an idea of how to do the more complex stuff… but if you actually needed the thing done, you’d hire a professional.

It gets weirder the longer you look at it.

Sure, let’s just say the guy was overzealous with the (silicone caulk? lol) adhesive compound. Maybe the white cord is DC power, replacing the battery… but the red wire that’s right beside the ‘power’ wire is a USB cable plugged into the phone’s USB port.

What is plugged into the other end? It’s Zalgo isn̴̝̂’̶̯̾ṭ̷̆ ̶̫̈i̷̹̚t̴̩̉?̶͊͜