data1701d (He/Him)

I’ve never even owned a Mac; I know about it because I’ve Hackintoshed a few times, so I’m familiar with OpenCore.

Really? I thought the last version for those was Monterrey and that that went EOL in 2024.

That reminds me; the other day a client walked up to the help desk I work at with a 2015 MBP still running El Capitan.

I’m confused. How did you save your parent’s Masters in Business Administration? /s

(Sorry. I can’t help but think that every time someone acronym’s Macbook Air.)

OCLP?

I will point out that the card support for ROCm has improved; AMD explicitly supports most RDNA3 or later consumer GPUs, and I think support might go back to RDNA2, maybe RDNA1.

Supposedly it’s technically possible to use Polaris, but it’s very broken at this point.

The Arch Wiki is probably the sungle most useful documentation for any Linux user; I don’t even use Arch and it’s still extremely helpful.

I could see the benefits of using Arch just so almost every function my system has is near-perfectly documented in Arch Wiki.

As for the distro itself, it has the newest packages, and often good repos with interesting packages that Debian and others may lack. It also expects you to choose and install the components you want, whereas the Debian installer will usually just install defaults; you can use Debootstrap for a minimal Debian install, but that’s not as well supported for installing Debian due to the way tools as set up on the install medium.

The reason I choose Debian over Arch is because if I don’t use a device for several months and have to install updates (like my school laptop over the summer), Debian Stable is more likely to survive that than Arch; I’ve destroyed several Arch VMs by trying to update them after not using them for months. I’m sure I could have salvaged them if I tried, but I’d rather just make a new VM.

That’s precisely why secure boot and TPMs exist - the TPM can store the keys to decrypt the drives and won’t give them unless the signed shim executable can be verified; the shim executable then checks the kernel images, options, and DKMS drivers’ signatures as well. If the boot partition has been tampered with, the drive won’t decrypt except by manual override.

The big problem is Microsoft controls the main secure boot certificate authority, rather than a standards body. This means that either a bad actor stealing the key or Microsoft itself could use a signed malicious binary used to exploit systems.

Still, it’s at least useful against petty theft.

TPM sniffing attacks seem possible, but it looks like the kernel uses parameter and session encryption by default to mitigate that: https://docs.kernel.org/security/tpm/tpm-security.html

It looks like NetBSD and OpenBSD might be good OSs for 32-bit; the next FreeBSD version is dropping support. I don’t use any BSDs, but I think a BSD is probably the best-supported modern Unix operating system for this kind of hardware as the last of the major distros drop i386.

Linux distro support is really thinning out for x86_32, so for this use case; I’m sure the distros still exist, but they’re often niche projects. Gentoo may do the trick if you want to; I can’t tell if they compile their newfangled precompiled packages for i386 though, so if they don’t, you’ll probably have to set up a cross compiling setup from a more powerful x86_64 machine, which you’d need to use every time you update.

That joke’s so funny, it’s making me a bit wheezy…

Didn’t Debian drop i386? Are you running Debian Bookworm?

Personally, Super Star Trek is my favorite terminal game.

Wasn’t necessarily suggesting 11 LTSC; just my personal choice.

Not really.

Ampere’s for servers; if you have the cash to blow, you can get a fancy workstation, but not a laptop. It’s really a shame; I think Ampere might be able to do well in the consumer CPU market if they wanted to face Qualcomm (and assuming they can get their single core performance up). A lot of their hardware seems to follow standards pretty well.

Graviton is only used internally inside Amazon and not sold to customers.

The only semi-decent ARM laptops you can get right now are Snapdragon ones, some of which kind of support Linux but with a lot of caveats and obnoxious quarks.

I have to have Windows for my university’s test-taking spyware, so I just have a barebones 11 LTSC installed on a secondary drive.

I just looked it up, and it seems a lot of the pre-Apple Silicon MacBook had swappable airport cards that used a completely standard mini PCIE slot. From a cursory google search, it looks completely possible to swap in something like an Intel Wi-Fi card that is supported natively by the kernel.

A mini-PCIE Wi-Fi modem can be had for not too expensive, around the $30 range; in fact, if you have a good stack of old Wintel laptops, one of those might have a card that works well. In fact, I did that with my sister‘s laptop (although she was using Windowd) – her Realtek Wi-Fi card was causing endless misery, so I ripped the Intel modem out of an ultra book from circa 2016 and put it in her laptop. No more issues.

Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.

I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.

s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.

Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.

I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:

1. Before you hope on SoulSeek (with an application like Nicotine+), please study up on the etiquette - downloading someone’s shared files without sharing any files that they can choose to download for their collection is called leeching, and while some people don’t really care, a lot of SoulSeek users will get really angry if you do this because they’re giving you their internet bandwidth for nothing in return.
2. To share files, you have to port-forward; be sure to check your ISP’s terms of service. I hear that as long as you’re not using a huge amount of bandwidth, even stricter ISPs can be pretty lax on enforcing their anti-p2p rules, so you may be able to get away with the risk of breaking the terms of service. However, to truly reduce the risk, you should probably use a VPN.

Of course, there’s a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I’d rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).

Yes, but these are my two thoughts:

1. That’s basically just piracy, and my feelings are that while sometimes it’s ethical*, a lot of musical artists have made a good faith attempt to allow you to acquire it in a legal, DRM-free format at a reasonable price, meaning in a lot of cases it’s not ethical, especiallyf with streaming basically eliminating record sale revenue and tour profit margins getting thinner and thinner.¹
2. When I want to pirate, I would at least do it right; why extract lossy audio from YouTube with yt-dlp when you can easily get a lossless FLAC on SoulSeek or another peer-to-peer network?

*: if the media isn’t easily legally accessible, if it’s stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it’s much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it’s often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.

1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.