[-] nyan 2 points 1 day ago

I think that's the old locolor icon theme. The version I have around is modified for TDE, but the original should exist somewhere out there (if OpenSUSE is still offering KDE3, then they probably have it).

[-] nyan 4 points 2 days ago

TDE's CDE window decoration style pretty much matches the screenshot. There's also a matching widget style (Motif). I'd guess that the icon set exists Somewhere Out There On The Internet. So you can get this look if you want it badly enough to install a non-default DE that's currently limited to X11.

[-] nyan 19 points 1 week ago

"WM8650" seems to indicate a VIA WonderMedia WM8650 armv5te chipset, used by a lot of anemic Android laptops circa 2011 (sold under various brandnames, but apparently all made in the same factory). People have installed Linux on them in the past (there seems to have been a fad for Arch on these for a while, given the search results), but you might have trouble getting a device tree that will work with a modern kernel.

Honestly, though, it has less processor than a Raspberry Pi 3. Unless you've already thought of a specific use for this, I'd dump it back in the junk drawer.

[-] nyan 23 points 2 weeks ago

The Gentoo news post is not about having /bin and /usr/bin as separate directories, which continues to work well to this day (I should know, since that's the setup I have). That configuration is still supported.

The cited post is about having /bin and /usr on separate partitions without using an iniramfs, which is no longer guaranteed to work and had already been awfully iffy for a while before January. Basically, Gentoo is no longer jumping through hoops to make sure that certain files land outside /usr, because it was an awful lot of work to support a very rare configuration.

[-] nyan 11 points 2 weeks ago

Because distros from the Debian family are more popular, any random help article aimed at beginners is likely to assume one of those distros. (If you know how to map from apt to rpm, you're probably not a beginner.) Plus, I don't trust Red Hat, who have a strong influence on Fedora.

(Note that I don't generally recommend my own distro—Gentoo—to newcomers either, unless they have specific needs best served by it.)

[-] nyan 23 points 1 month ago

Gnome and other desktops need to start working on integrating FOSS

In addition to everything everyone else has already said, why does this have anything to do with desktop environments at all? Remember, most open-source software comes from one or two individual programmers scratching a personal itch—not all of it is part of your DE, nor should it be. If someone writes an open-source LLM-driven program that does something useful to a significant segment of the Linux community, it will get packaged by at least some distros, accrete various front-ends in different toolkits, and so on.

However, I don't think that day is coming soon. Most of the things "Apple Intelligence" seems to be intended to fuel are either useless or downright offputting to me, and I doubt I'm the only one—for instance, I don't talk to my computer unless I'm cussing it out, and I'd rather it not understand that. My guess is that the first desktop-directed offering we see in Linux is going to be an image generator frontend, which I don't need but can see use cases for even if usage of the generated images is restricted (see below).

Anyway, if this is your particular itch, you can scratch it—by paying someone to write the code for you (or starting a crowdfunding campaign for same), if you don't know how to do it yourself. If this isn't worth money or time to you, why should it be to anyone else? Linux isn't in competition with the proprietary OSs in the way you seem to think.

As for why LLMs are so heavily disliked in the open-source community? There are three reasons:

  1. The fact that they give inaccurate responses, which can be hilarious, dangerous, or tedious depending on the question asked, but a lot of nontechnical people, including management at companies trying to incorporate "AI" into their products, don't realize the answers can be dangerously innacurate.
  2. Disputes over the legality and morality of using scraped data in training sets.
  3. Disputes over who owns the copyright of LLM-generated code (and other materials, but especiallly code).

Item 1 can theoretically be solved by bigger and better AI models, but 2 and 3 can't be. They have to be decided by the courts, and at an international level, too. We might even be talking treaty negotiations. I'd be surprised if that takes less than ten years. In the meanwhile, for instance, it's very, very dangerous for any open-source project to accept a code patch written with the aid of an LLM—depending on the conclusion the courts come to, it might have to be torn out down the line, along with everything built on top of it. The inability to use LLM output for open source or commercial purposes without taking a big legal risk kneecaps the value of the applications. Unlike Apple or Microsoft, the Linux community can't bribe enough judges to make the problems disappear.

[-] nyan 13 points 1 month ago

Delete all the code. Then you'll have no bugs.

[-] nyan 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

To echo others here, you really need to kill the driver. There are a couple of different kernel modules that might be involved, depending on exactly how your touch panel is connected to the rest of the system. Software that has no specific touch support will likely treat your renegade hardware as a mouse, rather than ignoring it.

You may be able to unbind the driver from the device, see this discussion on stackexchange.

[-] nyan 23 points 2 months ago

Dude. I actually have sources for most of my installed packages lying around, because Gentoo. Do you know how much space that source code takes up?

Just under 70GB. And pretty much everything but maybe the 10GB of direct git pulls is compressed, one way or another.

That means that even if your distro is big and has 100 people on development, they would each have to read 1GB or more of decompressed source just to cover the subset of packages installed on my system.

How fast do you read?

[-] nyan 44 points 2 months ago

sudo is already an optional component (yes, really—I don't have it installed). Don't want its attack surface? You can stick with su and its attack surface instead. Either is going to be smaller than systemd's.

systemd's feature creep is only surpassed by that of emacs.

[-] nyan 17 points 3 months ago

If I recall correctly, ext3 is ext2 with journalling on top, so they can't really get rid of ext2 without also ditching ext3.

[-] nyan 15 points 3 months ago

Well, I can still boot my system without an initram (although that isn't just due to the kernel config)—does that count?

Other than that, custom kernels free up a small amount of disk space that would otherwise be taken up by modules for driving things like CANbus, and taught me a whole lot about the existence of hardware and protocols that I will never use.

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nyan

joined 3 months ago