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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I am not afraid of some tech journey, but even though arch seems the coolest, with Wayland, kde, hyperland customization, i am not confident enough to use it for work.

    The only way you will gain confidence in it is to try it out. But also, most distros use wayland these days and it is more up to the desktop environment you use rather than the distro you use. hyperland is a wayland compositor and is in the repos of most if not all major distros. You should be able to install it on anything really. You can replace the desktop environment or install multiple ones side by side if you want to on just about any distro. The biggest difference between them is which ones they come with by default. But really if you are looking for a highly customized experience then Arch tends to be the way to do as you have less extra fluff you have to remove or work around when getting the system exactly as you want it. The hardest part of Arch is installing it the first time. Really after that it is not any harder to use or maintain. IMO it is easier to maintain as you have a much better understanding of how you set up your system as you are the one that set it up to start with.

    I heard it can completely crash your system if your a noob.

    You can break any distro if you mess with things. The only big difference is Arch encourages/requires more messing around at the start then other distros. And IMO is easier to fix if you do mess things up - you can always just boot a live USB and reinstall broken packages or reconfigure things without needing a full reinstall again. You can basically follow the install guides again for the bits that are broken to fix just about anything. And that is only if you break something critical in booting. In my early days I broke (requiring a full reinstall) way more ubuntu installs then I have ever broken my Arch ones later on. It is really just about how much you want to tinker with things and how much you know about what you are tinkering with as to if they will break or not rather then what base distro you use.

    And you can always try the install process and play around with different distros in a VM to get a feel for them and learn what they are like. So don’t be afraid to try out various different ones and find the one you like the most. Your choice is never set in stone either. Just ensure you have good backups of everything you care about and the worst that will happen is you need to reinstall and restore your backups every once in a while.


  • but my main needs are not really discussed

    So in essence i need something stable that is relatively easy to use and has great ue5 and gaming perf.

    That is probably the most common set of requirements people ask for. In reality, with a few exceptions, there is really not that much difference between distros given those requirements. UE5 is newer so the biggest change there would be that you might find distros that ship newer versions of stuff might run it slightly better then distros that ship older software. In practice I think it has been out for long enough that you wont see much difference unless you want to play something new on the day of release (but these days those are all buggy messes anyway… not sure your choice of distro will make as big a difference as waiting a few weeks/months for the initial patches to rollout).

    Remember, all distros are essentially based off the same software, the biggest difference being what desktop environment they ship with and what versions of software there ship (and how how long they stay on that version). By far the biggest difference you will see if what desktop environment they use and all distros essentially package the same set of desktop environments - each might come with different ones by default but they typically contain all the popular ones in their repos.

    i need something stable… great gaming perf

    In particular these two points. Do you know what you are asking for here? These are the most bland and wishy washy requirements. Everyone wants something stable and fast, never seen anyone ask for something that crashes all the time and is slow. But worst these tend to be on the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of requirements, if you optimize for one you tend to trade off the other.

    Even stability has multiple meanings. In terms of crash stability you will find all distros to be about the same. No one distro wants to ship buggy crashy software. But at times they do. And it is really just the luck of the draw as to when this might happen to you based on what software you use, how you configure your system and what hardware you have. Some combinations just don’t work for some weird reason and you wont know until you hit it. This is why you hear some people claim one distro is a buggy mess while some other one is rock solid while someone else argues the exact opposite. All main stream distros are just as good as any other in terms of this and you are just unlucky if you ever do run into that type of issue. The biggest problems in this regard tends to be when a new major version of something comes out - but like with gaming it can be beneficial to wait a few months for any issues to be patched before jumping to the latest big distro version.

    The other side of stability is API stability - or the lack of things changing over time as new versions of stuff get released. There are two main types of distros in this regard, point release distros which freeze major versions of packages between their major releases so you wont get any new features during the release cycle that version of the distro. Then you have to deal with all the breaking changes from newer versions of software once every so often when a new distro version comes out. Vs rolling release distros that upgrade major versions constantly and so generally follow a lot closer to the latest versions of things than point release distros. Really the big trade off here is not if you encounter breaking changes.

    Any distro will need to deal with them at some point, the choice is how often you deal with them. You can wait years on the same version of a point release distro and only need to deal with all the breaking changes once every few years, or once every 6 months. Or you can deal with things as they come out with a rolling release distro. But while it might sound nice to only deal with it every few years it also means you need to deal with all the changes at once. Which can be much more disruptive when you do decide to. Quite often I find the slower upgrading distros are better off with just a full reinstall on the latest version than upgrading from one to the next. Personally I prefer dealing with small things frequently as they tend to be easier to fix and less disruptive over longer periods of time. When I was running kubuntu I used to end up reinstalling it ever 6 months as the upgrades never worked for me (though this was a long time ago), but my oldest arch install lasted probably probably 5-10 years or so.

    And at the same time how frequently you get the latest versions of things means you get any performance optimizations and support for newer hardware or newer games as well. But also any bugs or regressions. It is a double edged sword. Which is why stability and performance tend to be a leaver you can tune between rather than two separate things to can achieve. Just like overclocking, the more performance you can get out of a system tends to result in the system becoming less stable overall. Everyone wants the most stable and fastest system, but in reality everyone has a different limit on how much or what types of stability they are willing to give up on to achieve different levels of performance.

    But out the box, you will find most distros to be very much within a couple of % of each other and which is fastest will vary depending on which games you want to play and what hardware you have. But they all tend to have quite a bit of head room to optimizes for specific use cases as they all are optimizing for the general use case which is typically just trading off performance in one thing for another. But again, we are talking about tiny difference overall.




  • Random programming certificates are generally worthless. The course to get them might teach you a lot and be worth while, but the certificate at the end is worthless. If it is free then it does not matter too much either way, might be a good way to test yourself. But I would not rely on it to get you a job at all. For that you need other ways to prove you can do the job - typically with the ability to talk about stuff and having written some real world like application. Which a course might help you do to.



  • The only things not linked to cancer are the things not yet been studied. Seems like everything at some point has been linked to cancer.

    The data showed that people who ate as little as one hot dog a day when it comes to processed meats had an 11% greater risk of type 2 diabetes and a 7% increased risk of colorectal cancer than those who didn’t eat any. And drinking the equivalent of about a 12-ounce soda per day was associated with an 8% increase in type 2 diabetes risk and a 2% increased risk of ischemic heart disease.

    Sounds like a correlation… someone who eats one hot dog and drinks one soda per day is probably doing a lot of unhealthy things.

    It’s also important to note that the studies included in the analysis were observational, meaning that the data can only show an association between eating habits and disease –– not prove that what people ate caused the disease.

    Yup, that is what it is. A correlation. So overall not really worth the effort involved IMO. Not eating any processed meats at all is not likely a big issue, but your overall diet and amount of exercise/lifestyle. I would highly suspect that even if you did eat one hotdog per day, but had a otherwise perfect diet for the rest of the day and did plenty of exercise, got good sleep and all the other things we know are good for you then these negative effects would likely becomes negligible. But who the hell is going to do that? That’s the problem with these observational studies - you cannot really tease out the effect of one thing out of a whole bad lifestyle.

    I hate headlines like this as it makes it sounds like you can just do thins one simple thing and get massive beneficial effects. You cannot. You need to change a whole bunch of things to see the types of reduction in risk they always talk about. Instead they always make it sounds like if you have even one hot dog YOU ARE GOING TO DIE.





  • Never said it had to be a text file. There are many binary serialization formats that could be used. But is a lot of situations the overhead you save is not worth the debugging effort of working with binary data. For something like this that is likely not going to be more then a GB or so, probably much less it really does not matter that much if you use binary or text formats. This is an export format that will likely just have one batch processing layer on. This type of thing is generally easiest for more people to work with in a plain text format. If you really need efficient querying of the data then it is trivial and quick to load it into a DB of your choice rather then being stuck with sqlite.


  • export tracking data to analyze later on

    That is essentially log data or essentially equivalent. Log data does not have to be human readable, it is just a series of events that happen over time. Most log data, even what you would think of as traditional messages from a program, is not parsed by humans manually but analyzed by code later on. It is really not that hard to slow to process log data line by line. I have done this with TB of data before which does require a lot more effort to do. A simple file like this would take seconds to process at most, even if you were not very efficient about it. I also never said it needed to be stored as text, just a simple file is enough - no need for a full database. That file could be binary if you really need it to be but text serialization would also be good enough. Most of the web world is processed via text serialization.

    The biggest problem with yaml like in OP is the need to decode the whole file at once since it is a single list. Line by line processing would be a lot easier to work with. But even then if it is only a few 100 MBs loading it all in memory once and analyzing it all in memory would not take long at all - it just does not scale very well.



  • There is in this case, and why Linus did accept the patch in the end. Previous cases less so though which is why Linus is so pissed at this one.

    The reason for this new feature is to help fix data loss on users systems - which is a fine line between a bug and a new feature really. There is precedent for this type on thing in RC releases from other filesystems as well. So the issue in this instance is a lot less black and white.

    That doesn’t excuse previous behaviour though.




  • There is not really one best distro out there - or else there would only be one distro. But for someone new you will find basically any mainstream/popular distro good enough for your usecase. The best one for you will come down to personal preference and will likely - at least at the start - be centered on which desktop environment you like the most. KDE will probably feel more like Windows. Though gnome I think tends to be the default on most distros. You will find popular distros have multiple flavors with various desktop environments as well. Your best bet is to download a few and put them on a usb and try them out before installing. That will give you a better idea of what you want.Or just pick one and go for it if you don’t care that much - it will probably be good enough.


  • It is not a full replacement - but they are aiming for

    Our current target is to build a drop-in replacement for all common use cases of sudo.

    They are dropping support for some of the older/niche features/settings and now ignore some of the config you used to be able to do.

    Some parts of the original sudo are explicitly not in scope. Sudo has a large and rich history and some of the features available in the original sudo implementation are largely unused or only available for legacy platforms. In order to determine which features make it we both consider whether the feature is relevant for modern systems, and whether it will receive at very least decent usage. Finally, of course, a feature should not compromise the safety of the whole program.

    But generally for all common use cases it should just be a drop in replacement.