Good point. All these streaming sites are inefficient by design. Even without the DRM the Server will have to encode the video and audio (or possibly even transcode them if the client only supports certain formats) before sending them to the client. And this happens on the fly every time anyone watches anything. If those streaming sites were all just a fancy looking file server that make you download the source video files directly (kind of like GOG does with video games) then that would greatly reduce energy consumption long-term.

It doesn’t help that they keep deprecating and changing standard stuff every other version. It’s like they can’t make up their mind and everything may be subject to change. Updating to the most recent release can suddenly cause 10s or 100s of compiler warnings/errors and things may no longer behave the same. Then you look up the new documentation and realize that you have to refactor a large part of the codebase because the “new way” is for whatever reason vastly different.

On distros w/o systemd there is always syslog-ng. s6 also has its own log system.

It’s not necessary, but a good thing to have if something goes wrong and you want to debug/monitor something. It’s really up to you and your needs.

I think Micro-Kernels are awesome because the actual Kernel is completely stable and only serves as a tiny (or Micro if you will) layer between the hardware and all the software. All Kernel modules run in userspace as daemons. So if something crashes because of a bug, say the Bluetooth driver, you can just restart that process and continue instead of having a hosed system that needs a hard reset. This is awesome for development because you can just run that buggy driver in a debugger and poke around without having to fear a Kernel panic. Also if you update your System and drivers get updated you don’t need to reboot, you just restart those driver daemons.

MINIX was really cool. It had a mechanism that could detect dead driver daemons and restart them automatically. They almost achieved full NetBSD compliance and all it really lacked was 64-bit and better hardware support. It technically still lives on because Intel forked it and baked it into every Intel chip. Except they changed the name to “Intel Management Engine”.

Hurd is GNU’s Micro-Kernel and to my knowledge it’s still being developed but at a sluggish pace. Last I checked they’re still working on full 64-bit support. It is apparently usable enough for Debian and Guix to have a Hurd port though.

Don’t get me wrong though, I still really like classic Monolithic UNIX-like kernels (especially when they’re simple and easy to compile like NetBSD) but I like Micro-Kernels overall a bit more because kernel modules as daemons is a very interesting concept to me that imo. should be explored more.

I might ditch Linux altogether if FreeBSD had better hardware support. There’s only so much I can write and maintain, myself.

I’ve been feeling that way since they decided to introduce that rust crap in the Kernel. I have a second drive in my main PC with FreeBSD 14.1 and the only things that prevent me from using it as a daily driver are the buggy amdgpu drivers and the terrible bluetooth stack. My dream would be a Micro-Kernel system though. Too bad MINIX was dropped. Maybe Hurd will become usable in 20 years from now lol.

Using Linux without systemd really goes to show you how simple Linux actually is and how much crap systemd tries to do. All my machines boot to nothing but a tty with maybe a few other daemons and my entire user startup is contained in a shell script. I really appreciate it that way because I always know exactly what software I’m running.

https://github.com/phkaeser/wlmaker

It’s a private instance. Maybe I’ll open it up, not sure.

mandating a login requirement is what I’ve been afraid of. I would just stop using yt altogether if it came down to that.

Same. Once they go that far I’ll just # zfs destroy Invidious and move on to PeerTube. I hope more people will move as well when that happens.

My instance is running on a Server in my homelab. The dynamic IP is just how my ISP works. I’ve been running this instance since late 2019. So far Google has only ever blocked my IP whenever I hit their Servers with too many API calls too quickly. Last time they blocked me though was probably 1/2 - 2 years ago. The current version of Invidious does try to minimize API calls which helps a lot. Honestly Google changing API calls/value names and patching the source code is more annoying to deal with than IP bans.

The only way I can see them permanently blocking instances with non-static IPs is if they go down the Twitter route where you can’t even view anything unless you’re logged in.

If you host your own invidious instance on a network with a non-static IP then a ban will only ever be temporary. It happened to my private instance many times. I found that setting the channel refresh interval in the config to 2 hours makes it less likely (or basically 0% if you’re the only user) for them to block your IP.

Gallium-Nine also tends to be buggy if used with 32-bit software in particular. All the 32-bit games I’ve tried have problems with it. They usually work fine for the first 30-60 minutes and after that the framerate becomes unstable to the point where the game becomes unplayable. It happens consistently with Gallium-nine but not at all with DXVK.

I didn’t realize how much worse YouTube has gotten since I last used it in 2019. Still, through Invidious I’ve been noticing that the comments on popular videos have gotten weird, especially in recent years. Also it seems like YouTube is deleting any comment that is even remotely negative. Because all I ever see anymore are generic positive praise comments. Meanwhile there are content farms out there that put out videos for “Kids” on a rapid pace that contain borderline sexual content. I wish more people would start using PeerTube because I have a feeling that YouTube won’t be getting any better in the future.

incognito mode in chrome is little more than the illusion of being logged off.

Which shouldn’t be a surprise since Chrome itself is just another one of Google’s spyware products.

I have the same experience. I wrote a simple program with SDL2 to test a software renderer. All it does is create a window then go into an event loop and after each iteration it streams a framebuffer to a texture that gets displayed in the window. In the default mode (X11) my frame timings fluctuate a lot and for a while I tried to massage the code to get it stable because I was convinced that it was just my draw code. Then I eventually forced SDL2 to use Wayland and not only did the draw time per frame go down by 2ms but the fluctuations went away completely.

Kepler cards work “OK” with nouveau. What sucks is that reclocking has to be done manually, video decoding/encoding requires firmware blobs and OpenGL support tends to be meh. Overall it’s an unstable experience. I have a stack of Kepler based cards that would still be usable if Linux/mesa had a decent driver.

Or the buggy Bloom effect in Cities Skylines, Stellaris and Surviving Mars that would cause flicker and a weird black screen. Pretty sure they never bothered to fix that.

Debian is still the better distro overall compared to Ubuntu imo. and it’s much more lightweight too. Canonical has become more and more like Microsoft in recent years.

Firefox does sandbox everything but vulnerabilities exist and sometimes go unnoticed for a while before they’re discovered and patched. If a malicious script does manage to escape the sandbox it will be able to do literally anything to the system since it has root privileges. It would have full access to any device that’s in /dev, it could create, modify and delete udev or iptables rules, it could mess with the BIOS since the kernel exposes EFI variables, if the mainboard has re-writable flash chips for the firmware it could write malicious code to them since they may show up in /dev, etc. If any of this makes you uneasy then you probably should stop running stuff as root in general except for when you really need to.

Also in general you don’t want to run any graphical applications on a Server unless there is a very specific reason for it because it takes up extra resources and therefore makes the machine use more power overall. This is especially bad when the machine in question has no hardware acceleration and renders everything in software. Remote desktop also adds CPU/GPU load and takes up a good bit of I/O and network bandwidth which is not ideal for a NAS server.

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Anyone that thinks X11 is still superior probably runs on a laptop with a single screen.

It really does seem that way. I’ve dealt with many different multi-monitor setups on X11 and only ever had problems. For example, I have an AMD based setup with 3 monitors, 2 are average 1080p60 displays and the third has a higher refresh rate. On X11 this setup always has either screen tearing/flickering, unusually high CPU usage by the compositor or the refresh rate seems noticeably off and hot-plugging additional monitors makes things behave weird or even crash, especially when unplugging monitors. On setups with multiple monitors across multiple GPUs it’s the same but worse. On Wayland it all just works without any problems, no matter the setup. Hot-plugging monitors on Wayland is very seamless. Even X11 software runs better for me on Wayland.