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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • I manually triggered it, and didn’t read the logs when it said it failed. That was my fault. If it fails, it will tell you. You still have the machine working until you reboot, so if you read the logs, you can clear /tmp and retry again, and the machine should be bootable again.

    Linux lets you do anything, including stupid things. I’d say doing stupid things is the fastest way to learn about it, though.

    The same issue would have happened even on Ubuntu, as it uses the same tools as Arch for generating the initramfs. I don’t consider it an Arch or Linux issue, just a user mistake. It won’t happen normally, unless you manually trigger it.


  • My record with Arch is longer than 6 months without updates, and it completed the updates fine.

    My oldest install is 4 years old, and it’s true, it became unbootable once. But it was my fault, for generating an initramfs without free space in /tmp, which caused it to fail. It was a quick fix once I figured it out.

    All of this isn’t to say rolling is as stable as Debian, of course. Rolling is inherently gonna be more unstable, and that’s by design.

    But if you take some care, you can actually make these rolling distros pretty stable. Hell, my servers run Arch (I’m working on migrating them to Gentoo to get rid of systemd, but I haven’t yet commited to it). And I haven’t had any serious breakages, even on Arch Linux ARM.






  • Everyone knows it by that name, even in non english speaking countries.

    They themselves gave a good explanation. They’d lose brand recognition, they’d expose the name to scammers using it to sell or distribute their own software, and years of tutorials, guides and books would instantly be harder to find and outdated.

    It makes no sense to give up all that, and to force such a change on the whole world, just because some speakers of a single language don’t like it.



  • Back when I used Windows, many years ago, I used to have the setting that drew a ring around the cursor when you pressed ctrl. It was annoying when you used ctrl for anything else, and it was also visually ugly. You also had to remember about it when you lost the mouse, which is more difficult than it sounds like.

    Needless to say, I love this feature from KDE. Not only is it way more intuitive to use and more unlikely to accidentally happen, but it also looks way better. And the fact that it keeps growing indefinitely is such a nice and fun addition.



  • black0ut@pawb.socialtomemes@lemmy.worldWell respected man
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    28 days ago

    Rar is proprietary, so you can’t freely implement it. Only the decompression code is freeware, and you have to implement it as is. The license includes clauses against reverse engineering and rewriting the code.

    Microsoft could totally pay the fees, but you know how scummy they are.


  • Afaik (and I may be wrong), RAR is a proprietary format created by the guy who made winrar. Because of it, the compression/decompression libraries are licensed, and cannot be freely written. However, in order for the format to catch on, the developer released a freeware (free as in beer, not as in freedom) decompression library. That way, anyone can easily incorporate decompression code in their software, and thus, anyone can decompress a rar.

    However, the code isn’t free to rewrite, so rar decompressors (at least those that don’t make a deal and pay money to winrar) are stuck with the same implementation of the rar decompressor. If that freeware code is slower than what winrar uses, winrar will always be faster.

    Imho that’s a bit anti-competitive, and is what has kept me from ever using the RAR format. Especially now that we have way better formats (both in compression and features), like 7z.





  • Because the reason webp/webm is trash is that it uses proprietary codecs, which some software companies don’t want to include support for. It’s google’s attempt to control every format used on the web.

    We already have JXL, which is better than webp at everything it does, it’s not proprietary, and the main reason it’s still not widely supported is because google spent years trying to bury it and intentionally not offering support for it and prioritizing its own webp.


  • Be careful with WD reds and CMR/SMR. Even though every WD Red Plus should be CMR, WD is known for selling SMR drives marketed as CMR. The whole Red Plus line exists because, before that, the WD Reds were supposed to be CMR, but they started mixing them with SMR drives. People found out and lawsuits were filed, so WD’s answer was to say that the WD Red line didn’t guarantee CMR, and people needed to pay extra for the WD Red Plus line.

    WD is forever off my list of trustworthy manufacturers. But there aren’t many options, and I understand that in these times it may be difficult to pass on a good offer. Read customer reviews and, upon arrival, make sure they’re CMR.