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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • You don’t have to trust Drew, though. Vaxry is pretty clear on his stance on the subject.

    if I run a discord server around cultivating tomatoes, I should not exclude people based on their political beliefs, unless they use my discord server to spread those views.

    which means even if they are literally adolf hitler, I shouldn’t care, as long as they don’t post about gassing people on my server

    that is inclusivity

    Source: https://blog.vaxry.net/articles/2023-inclusiveActivists

    Note how this article is not where he first stated the above. This article is where he doubles down on the above statement in the face of criticism. In the rest of the article he presents nazism as an opinion people might have that you disagree with. He argues that his silent acceptance of nazis is the morally correct stance while inclusive communities are toxic actually.

    This means that it’s not just Drew or the FDO who are arguing that Vaxry’s complete lack of political stance is creating safe spaces for fascists. It’s Vaxry himself that explicitly states this is happening and that it’s intentional on his part.


  • Right, so this is exactly the sort of “benefit” I never expect to see. This is not something that has happened to me in ~25 years of computer use, and if it does happen there are better ways to deal with it. Btrfs and zfs have quotas for this, but even if they didn’t it would not be worth the tradeoff for me. Mispredicting the partition sizes I’ll end up needing after years of use is both more likely to happen and more tedious to fix.


  • Are you going to dual boot? Do you have some other special requirement? If not, there’s no reason to overthink partitioning in my opinion. I did this for my main NVME:

    • Partition table: GPT
    • /boot : 1GB fat32 partition. Depending on your needs (number of kernels, initramfs’s, other OSs) you might be fine with 500MB or even less. But because resizing can be a pain and I have the space to spare, I would much rather overprovision.
    • / : LUKS2 partition containing a btrfs filesystem with all the remaining space

    I use a swap file so I don’t use a swap partition. If you want more control over specific parts of the filesystem, eg a separate /home that you can snapshot or keep when reinstalling the system, then use btrfs subvolumes. This gives you a lot of the features a partition would give you without committing to a specific size.

    This is the only partitioning scheme I have never regretted. When I’ve tried to do separate partitions I find myself always regretting the sizes I’ve allocated. On the other hand, I have not actually seen any benefit of the separation in practice.


  • The problem with any excuse you make for Elon is that Elon is too stupid to keep his mouth shut and give the excuse any plausibility. After the nazi salute he went on Twitter to make nazi puns about it. It is certain beyond reasonable doubt that he knows exactly what the salute was. Even if you give him the insane benefit of the doubt that it was really “his heart going out” and accidentally looked like the salute, his having shown he knows what it looks like but never stating he does not actually believe in the ideology or want present himself as an ally to nazis is just as damning.


  • Maybe in some cases. But I’ve been requested by Google support to provide a video for a very simple and clear issue we were having. We have a contract with them and we personally brought up the issue to a Google employee during a call. There was no concern of AI generated bullshit, but they still wouldn’t respond without a video. So maybe there’s more to this trend than what you’re theorizing.



  • The latter is I think aiming for Linux ABI compatibility.

    I had never hard of Asterinas, but this sounds like a the best approach to me. I believe alternative OS’s need to act as (near) drop-in replacements if they want to be used as daily drivers. ABI-incompatible alternatives might be fine for narrower use cases, but most people wouldn’t even try out a desktop OS that doesn’t support most of the hardware and software they already use.


  • I’m not sure why they feel it’s Linus’ responsibility to make Rust happen in the kernel.

    That’s not what’s being said here, as far as I can tell. Linus is not expected to somehow “make Rust happen”. But as a leader, he is expected to call out maintainers who block the R4L project and harass its members just because they feel like it. Christoph Hellwig’s behavior should not be allowed.

    I’m not saying Marcan is necessarily correct, to be clear. It might well be that Linus chose to handle the issue in a quieter way. We can’t know whether Linus was planning on some kind of action that didn’t involve him jumping into the middle of the mailing list fight, eg contacting Christoph Hellwig privately. I’m merely pointing out that maybe you misunderstood what Marcan is saying.

    Or fork it and make a Rust Linux with blackjack and hookers, and boy, will everyone left behind feel silly that they didn’t jump on the bandwagon.

    That’s what they’re doing. But if you read the entire post carefully, he explains why maintaining a fork without eventually upstreaming it is problematic. And it’s not like they’re forcing their dream on the linux project, because the discussions have already been had and rust has officially been accepted into the kernel. So in the wider context, this is about individual maintainers causing friction against an agreed-upon project they don’t like.



  • Most of Proton code is Wine. So basically if you have Wine in your system, library dependencies are not an issue anymore, apart from DLLs that some games require

    If I have wine on my system and try to run steam-managed proton without any sort of runtime or container, then I’m running proton on different versions of libraries than the ones it was compiled for and tested on. Proton also has additional components which might mean additional dependencies, so your statement is false to begin with.

    Why are they doing a fork instead of contributing?

    The fork is open source. As far as I know, some contributions do get merged into wine. Valve is also funding work from Collabora which is contributed directly into wine. They cannot contribute the entirety of proton to wine because wine does not want all their contributions. This is a very common situation to arise when someone wants to use an open source project but their goals don’t align.

    But I expect it will be easier to push back on using containerization in Proton, than making Valve allow us such control

    Valve is never going to rip out a solution that is working great for them and risk causing issues for customers for no good reason. Thinking that Valve are more likely to remove containerization than they are to allow you to modify the container is, frankly, delusional. It’s also completely irrelevant, as I’ve already said. If Valve wants to “fuck us up” then they’re going to do it. Steam is a proprietary piece of software that supports DRM for all your (also proprietary) games, which are stored on the cloud. You have no control over your games, but containers have nothing to do with it. And if they did, and Valve really wanted to pull a trick on us, asking them to remove the containers would make even less sense…


  • We are going through more or less Wine anyway, the libraries on the system don’t matter as long as Wine compiles

    Which wine though?

    The one pre-packaged by your distro? That doesn’t work because Valve needs to control the version you use and to provide additional stuff not part of vanilla wine.

    The one part of proton that is built and delivered to your system by Valve? They would have to compile and support it for every set of dependency versions out there.

    One of the core features of containers is process and process memory separation from host.

    As far as container technology is concerned, the isolation is configurable. pressure-vessel is most likely using (possibly indirectly) namespaces and/or cgroups to achieve the isolation. I don’t see a technical reason that you can’t disable the isolation of shared memory or any other resource. The issue is whether you are given access to disable it.

    According to the docs the runtime is based on flatpak and uses bubblewrap and libcapsule. I don’t know about libcapsule, but I recall that bubblewrap has granular control over what resources it isolates.

    We have no control over what they put in those containers.

    Apparently, you can modify the container as shown here. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to install custom containers alongside the default ones in the same way that you can install custom proton versions. Steam just doesn’t provide the interface for it.

    Once they disable the PRESSURE_VESSEL_SHELL=instead we will have no insight into what’s inside.

    There already exists an alternative that is “more likely to be extended in future” rather than being removed as shown here. But I believe you would always be able to gain access to the container because it remains a chroot + namespace + cgroup isolation, all of which you can control on your system.

    and app developers neither have!

    App developers don’t control what’s on your system either. The container is a huge improvement for them because it at least gives them a known target to build for. They can still bundle dependencies in any way that they would on a non-containerized system. There’s no loss of control from their perspective.

    if it doesn’t work for some reason (with Wine I don’t really see it happening as what we run doesn’t rely on our OS libraries directly), you can create chroot, additional library packages with old versions, etc.

    That’s what pressure-vessel is and as shown above you can modify it. And if you couldn’t it would be a tooling issue, not an inherent container disadvantage.

    Worst case scenario, Linux community will figure something out

    No, they won’t. Compatibility significantly increased after Valve got involved. In fact, the linux community is porting pressure-vessel outside of Steam to use it across different launchers as umu. The community is headed towards using pressure-vessel for everything.

    Now I replied to each claim individually, but it’s not really about any specific point you’re making. The general idea is that there’s nothing inherent to container technology that prevents you from tinkering with it. Anything that you can’t do currently is because Steam is not designed to allow you to do it. It’s got nothing to do with whether Steam uses containers or not. Any control that you’ve lost over your system is because you’re using a proprietary app. They could remove the containers and still prevent tinkering, eg by using a bundled wine with no way for you to modify it or its launch options. It’s not about what Steam does, but about how it does it.


  • No way. Containers are absolutely necessary to provide reliability across a wide range of distros and to keep games working in the future.

    It makes running additional programs harder (opentrack for example)

    Then we need better tooling and documentation to interact with the container, not to get rid of them. I don’t see any technical limitation that would prevent your use case. It’s just not implemented or maybe simply undocumented.

    our computers less ours

    How so? The end result is probably the opposite. Without the containers Steam would be less reliable on unsupported distros, which might mean your only choice would be to use Ubuntu LTS. That would be a much bigger loss of control.



  • My question: How do I actually physically notice the difference between these kernels?

    Generally, you don’t. You can look for some benchmark to try and find a difference between them, but if you don’t notice a difference in your day to day tasks, then it’s all the same. In my experience you should pick a kernel based on your desired experience. For my needs this is how the kernels differ:

    • Generic kernel: a sane default for most regular users
    • LTS: only makes sense if you’re worried about regressions in the generic kernel causing issues, and only viable if you can afford to stay behind on hardware driver updates, ie you use old hardware and/or optimal performance is not required
    • Zen: sometimes better for gaming, but often indistinguishable from the generic kernel
    • Realtime: rarely what you want, it sounds “faster” but it’s basically optimized for very specific use cases and if you’re not among them you’ll see the same or worse performance