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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • “Desktop publishing” is the category of software you want. I’ve not used it, but I believe Scribus is the standard FOSS tool for this. If you want a simple graphical way to make your album, this is the way.

    Many people have metnioned LaTex - I would not recommend it for this purpose. LaTex, while powerful, will have a steep learning curve, and isn’t really made for artistic tasks - its purpose is for writing technical papers. From literally the first two sentences on the project site:

    LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.

    It’s probably possible to make a beautiful photo album with LaTex, but without a lot of work, it’s more likely to come out looking like a calculator manual.


  • Considering that you are not using their software, was the laptop worth the premium you paid for it, vs buying from Clevo directly?

    I figured the hardware and software coming from the same vendor would yield the best results, and wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and Linux in general. But ultimately I found Pop!_OS buggy and had performance issues, so I’m not using their OS, and their firmware is causing issues with my SSD, so I’d like to be off of it as well (but was told "there’s no process for reverting to the proprietary firmware“ for the specific model I have). I could have bought a Clevo directly, saving hundreds of dollars, and probably had a better working machine.


  • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlDell is so frustrating
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    3 months ago

    Would not recommend System76. I’ve had many issues with my machine (primarily software, related to their buggy custom firmware, and Pop!_OS, until I ditched that for stock Ubuntu). Their support has been terrible - rather similar to OP’s, actually. I’ve had the laptop for about 2.5 years, and I’m checking practically daily for something to replace it.



  • My usb-c ports can be a little touchy, too. The SD card slot is also really bad - the card has to be positioned perfectly to slide in, or it jams. I’m also upset that the usb-c port can only be used for charging after a full boot. It cannot be used to perform firmware updates, or even to do a ram test. This means day-to-day, usb-c can be used, but I have to keep track of the barrel charger, just in case. This, of course, was not specified on the product details page (nor, I think, that only one of the two usb-c ports could be used for charging - it’s possible I overlooked that, but still frustrating on an expensive laptop that lists usb-c charging as a feature).


  • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLaptop companies: which one?
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    5 months ago

    I currently have a System76 laptop, and sincerely regret my purchase. When I purchased it, the Framework was not out yet - I wanted to support a company that supports right-to-repair, and figured since they controlled the hardware, firmware, and software (Pop!_OS), it would be a good, stable experience. It has not been, and support has generally been poor. I know other people have had better experiences than I have, but personally, I won’t be buying from them again.

    I haven’t personally used Purism, but former co-workers spoke really poorly of them. They were trying to buy a big batch for work, and said the build quality was awful. Additionally: https://youtu.be/wKegmu0V75s


  • grep -r string .

    The flag should go before the pattern.

    -r to search recursively, . refers to the current directory.

    Why use . instead of *? Because on it’s own, * will (typically) not match hidden files. See the last paragraph of the ‘Origin’ section of: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming). Technically your ls command (lacking the -a) flag would also skip hidden files, but since your comment mentions finding the string in ‘any files,’ I figured hidden files should also be covered (the find commands listed would also find the hidden files).

    EDIT: Should have mentioned that -R is also recursive, but will follow symlinks, where -r will ignore them.


  • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlNew laptop
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    6 months ago

    The battery life and speakers will certainly be model dependent. The quality of the machine I received and the lackluster support, given the price I paid, are what I find most frustrating. The computer would be fine for ~$600, but I paid over $1000. I paid a premium expecting System76 to hold themselves to a high standard, and so far, they’ve let me down in multiple ways.

    I do recognize with a different model, the experience could be 180°, but if buying from them is a roll-of-the-dice, for me personally, that’s enough to buy from someone else next time.


  • JoeyJoeJoeJr@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlNew laptop
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    6 months ago

    I would not recommend them. I bought a Galago Pro in 2020, and it’s been a huge disappointment. Pop!_OS was very buggy, and their support was not helpful. I ultimately installed Ubuntu, and it’s now significantly more stable, but I’m left asking the question “why did I pay a premium for a clevo, when I’m not getting anything out of the custom software or support?”

    Even with Ubuntu, it’s not a good laptop. The speakers are worse than my phone, a fully charged battery will die completely in less than a day when the laptop is suspended, it runs unbelievably hot. As a developer who depends on this machine for daily work, it’s been intensely frustrating.


  • It’s possible to hit issues, especially if different distros are using different major versions of desktop environments or applications, but in practice, I don’t think it’s something that really needs to be worried about.

    If you were to upgrade/fresh install, and copy your home folder over, you’d have the same experience - it’s not much safer than sharing the home partition, except that you’re (hopefully) doing that less. You could still easily go from distro A using version 2 of something, to distro B using version 3, and then decide you don’t like it and try to roll back to distro A. If in the process your config was upgraded in place (as opposed to a new, versioned config being made*), you could have problems rolling back.

    With configs, you can usually just delete them (or, less destructively, rename them, in case you decide you want them back), and let the application make a new default one for you. With other files (e.g. databases), you might be in more trouble. But a good application will tell you before doing an upgrade like that, and give you a chance to backup the original before upgrading in place. When asked, it’s probably a good idea to take a backup (and not just for this distro hoping case).

    *For any developers reading this, this is the correct way to upgrade a config. Don’t be destructive. Don’t upgrade in place. Make a copy, upgrade the copy, and include a version in the file name. You can always tell the user, so they can remove the file if they want, but let them make the choice. If you can’t (e.g. the database scenario, which could be large), tell the user before doing anything, so they can choose whether or not to backup.



  • When you install, whatever you install, partition your drive so that /home is it’s own partition. Then if/when you reinstall, distrohop, whatever, you don’t have to worry about copying over your data. Just use the same /home partition, and format the others. You can actually use this to try multiple distros at the same time - you can install them in different partitions, but have every install use the same /home partition. This is a nice way to test new distros without blowing away your stable install.

    Now, for my distro recommendation - Ubuntu gets a lot of hate, but honestly, after 15+ years of Linux, and having tried Mint, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, and many others, I always end up back on Ubuntu. It’s easy, it’s stable, and it stays out of my way.

    The defaults are good, but you can customize as much as you want, and they offer a minimal install (as of 23.10, it is the default) which comes with very few applications, so you can start clean and choose all the applications you want.

    Unless you are excited to tinker, I’d really recommend starting simple. Personality, I just want the OS to facilitate my other activities, and I otherwise want to forget about it. Ubuntu is pretty good for that.





  • You might be referring to this? That’s what I found from a quick search, at least.

    If I understand correctly, this is a little different - from what I recall reading a few years ago, the speculation was that Netflix (and similar apps) rendered the content directly, bypassing the normal rendering stack. It would be the equivalent of, on a Linux system, bypassing the compositor (e.g. Mutter or KWin), and directly rendering the content (I believe SurfaceFlinger is the Android compositor). This means that when something like scrcpy uses the competitor API to capture the content, the content is literally not there, because it bypassed that system altogether.

    By contrast, the secure flag just allows app developers to ask the OS to disallow screenshots, to prevent data leakage (e.g. of your banking details). It’s all rendered in the standard way, though.

    This may not be accurate - it’s based on assumptions, and forum posts I read years ago, but it’s the best explanation I have right now. If anyone knows better, please feel free to correct me.


  • It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, and won’t be as seamless, but you might be able to leverage scrcpy.

    It uses adb (you may need a fullfat distro for this - lineage may not support it), and allows you to view and control your Android device from a computer. It can also handle audio, and can be used wirelessly. The one caveat is protected content will probably not show up in the mirror - e.g. if you cast your screen and try to stream Netflix, it will likely be unable to send the Netflix video over. The last time I tested, it depended on the specific app, and which APIs they used under the hood (at the time, YouTube worked, Netflix did not).


  • This is approximately what I do as well, and would highly recommend. The one caveat I would add is while you are researching things you might want to do, take note of the subset of things you most want to do, and make sure you know what days/times they are open, if you need to book in advance, etc. I am very against having a hard schedule, but I also don’t want to travel somewhere only to miss the one thing I was really looking forward to because I decided “I’ll do that tomorrow,” only to find out it was closed the next day.

    An additional pro-tip: Make your first list of things you might want to do ahead of time, and name it after the place you are going, e.g. “New York.” Then while you’re traveling, make a second list of “favorites”, e.g. “New York Favorites.” Keep track of all the restaurants, activities, view points, etc that you enjoyed using that second list. Then whenever someone asks for recommendations for a particular location, you can just send them your favorites list.