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Cake day: July 24th, 2024

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  • While i would generally agree I’ve fiddle with htpc and stuff for solo long. Then I broke down a few years ago and bought a cheap TV with GoogleTV (version 10 or something) on it. I removed some bloat via ADB but it still is GoogleTV do I get some ads on the home screen. However I installed SmartTube, Kodi, Jellyfin but also Netflix and Amazon Prime since those are the two services I still subscribed to. And I have to admit I’m a happy camper. I got used to ignoring the ads on the home screen and being able to directly play Netflix/YouTube … whatever without setting up a browser or something on top of Kodi or whatever is just such a breeze.



  • Let me tell you:

    I’ve been using Linux exclusively since ~2010 and moved my mum over back when XP got canned. Printers always have been and still are the bane of my existence. From what I know from other people working in IT printers are always bad, however of course the driver support situation in Linux is so much worse. My mum used to have a Samsung mfp that would print in Linux (most of the time) but I could not for the life of me figure out how to get it to scan reliably. In the end I’ve set her up with a dual boot with a simple “click here to switch to Windows” button so she could scan in there (saving the scans to a NAS)

    From my experience printers mostly either work or don’t work in Linux. If you are looking for a new printer I’ve only had food experiences with Brother. If you already have a printer and it’s not working right I can recommend sxouring through forums for that one wisdom of the ancients that can help (and possibly sacrificing a goat)

    I bow also have a Canon printer (it was a gift) and with the official Linux drivers it worked for years. Recently it just wouldn’t print from Linux anymore till I switched the drivers to the generic “Guteprint” now it’s printing fine again …

    Tl;dr: printers are evil and Linux drivers are sometimes making them worse



  • As someone who’s installed arch manually back in the day way before archinstall was a thing I tend to agree. Putting together your own install and seeing how everything fits together, to me, is the point of arch. If anything breaks I know what too lol at since I put it together myself and now how it goes together.

    However sometimes we might need to reflect on gatekeeping and just because “back in my day we didn’t have a fancy script to help you” we might still let people use it for their first install (or let them use a arch based distro to get started)



  • Well as someone who’s been using gnome since about 3.10 I might be able to explain my view:
    Before that I’ve used plasma and Unity and a whole lot of Mate but then I started using Gnome for a pretty and smooth experience right out of the Box.
    Now I’ve simply been using it for so long that it’s muscle memory all the way.
    I don’t agree with everything the gnome devs decide and I definitely am annoyed that I have to use extension for small things that should just be a toogle in the settings but I’ve realized some time ago that if I did switch to plasma I would use all the customizability to make it work like Gnome … so I stay on Gnome.










  • I was like batch 5 of the AMD framework 13 running Arch and Gnome on it.

    I did have some problems with suspend/nvme drive that was fixed by replacing the nvme. If you go with their drive you’ll probably be fine (I just grabbed one I had laying around). Ever since then the laptop is perfect. If you do get it check out the Archwiki article that has a lot of helpful tips for tuning your OS to the Hardware


  • I had an external HDD that I was using for years. Some of that time it was attached to a Server basically running 24/7 definitely dropped that thing a couple of times. That HDD has been out of use for years now but I’m sure I could just plug it in tomorrow and it would spin up fine. HDDs can last forever untill they don’t.

    So Backups! And don’t worry about the rest.

    Also as others said if you’re interested how long and hard it’s actually been working check out the smart data if there are any fail criteria you might wanna get a new one just to avoid restoring from Backup but if all’s green just let it keep chugging until it doesn’t and remember Backups!