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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • You will always need some sort of oom killer unless you have endless memory (or swap space, which comes with its own problems in the form of grinding your system to an almost halt). Imagine all memory is in use, then some system critical task (or even the kernel itself) needs memory as well. If the kernel can’t kill a less important process to free memory in such a situation you might just crash your system.


  • Hearing Snow by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers while my mom is folding clothes (thats a very specific one). I have no idea how old I was exactly but I remember it vividly. The funny thing is that I didn’t understand a word of the song as german is my native language. Recently I stumbled across the song again and suddenly, as if struck by lightning, I remembered this weird mundane situation as if it was yesterday. The human mind is so weird.








  • I use a quartz64 from pine. Back when it came out it was beefier than the rpi4. With the 5 that has now changed but it still is a great little machine.

    My instance runs on it aswell as my other webservices (A Homepage, cgit instance and a small blog). Handles everything really well with the 8GiB of RAM.

    Setup is a bit of a pain, especially because I had the urge to run gentoo on it. Compile times are actually acceptable.

    It costs 80 bucks, which is really acceptable.

    Edit: Forgot to mention energy efficiancy, ARM is unbeaten by x86 in that department. People on here recommend old PCs a lot, which, depending on your local energy prices could quiet quickly void the savings made by buying it. Also it has a SATA port, which requires some tinkering with the Devicetree to get running but allowed me to use an old 1TB SSD i had in the house.





  • I had the absolute pleasure to sit in BOTH of these Panthers at Innsbruck airport last year.

    They even startet the engines and drove out of the hangar with us inside and gave us a little water salute. Absolute pleasure, I felt like a little kid!

    I do have a video of the spray, sadly there were many people around and I don’t want to show their faces. Needless to say these things shoot water like a rocket!



  • Well we’ve had binary packages for ages for big builds like firerox and default is still to use source packages.

    Still I’m really excited for this, having the whole, or big parts of the package tree, will speed up initial installations by a lot on weak arm systems for example. Now initial installation can be done quick and later you could still compile stuff yourself for the full gentoo experience.




  • Also I find their Zorin OS Pro offer a bit scummy. Now the themes do look nice, but few would spend 50$ for a few themes. So they advertise having 5000$ worth of professional creative alternatives bundled. In screenshots you’ll then see Kdenlive, Blender and Inkscape. I don’t know what to think about the fact they want 50$ for bundling a few themes and free software. If they had just kept the stupid 5000$ part out I would have been fine with it, professional support can be great for people switching over from windows, but this seems a bit scummy to me.


  • Wayland is a Display Server Protocol, meaning it is a specification of how a program wanting to display something like a window communicates with another program, the display server, which handles drawing to the screen.

    It matters because it vastly simplifies and modernizes display server infrastructure.

    X is huge, with many parts from the 80s and 90s that were simply not needed today, creating a fully compliant X Server with all extensions was pretty much impossible, which is the reason pretty much only X.org existed as a full implementation.

    Some benefits for users are no screen tearing, VRR and support for more complicated setups like having multiple monitors all with a different refresh rate, which was a pain in the ass on X but is no problem on wayland.

    X is going to die, especially with the fact that frredesktop and the two big DEs, GNOME and KDE are working on it. Some distros come with wayland by default already.


  • If I develop anything with a GUI I use GTK4. It has a bit of a learning curve to it but honestly I’ve come to like it.

    I am currently creating a program for simulating networks and the drawing area is great for drawing the actual simulation because it basically allows you to have a cairo area as a widget so your possibilities there are basically unlimited and cairo is just a great drawing API.

    Also gtk is basically the only modern GUI toolkit that can be used with C, which is great because it is pretty much the only language I know well enough to program a big application with. (But GObject still feels like black magic to me)