@bertieb nope, not enough storage

@MiG they just stop support

the idea is you throw it in the bin and spend 500 on a new one

i got mine for free

@Burgi wat? can't you install linux on like, a floppy?

if you're going to be getting rid of it it I'd pay for postage to get it tossed into the nearest postbox instead :D

tho I'd recommend using it for something console-mode, or a dashboard of some sort, or a gateway, or any number of other things that don't need much storage or grunt

not without mega-faff

i use it for ordering my food and browser games

@Burgi tbh, I got exactly one atom based tablet, and the performance even for simple stuff is horrible... So it might see a second life as a domotics interface, but that's about it

i'll post a scrreenshot of the performance later

my biggest issue with the chromebook is the lack of storage

This one has a keyboard dock with space for a 2.5" drive

I put a TB in there

everything is soldered on

ah, that sucks

it has an SD card slot but the way chromeos handles filesystems is just awful

I guess it saves cost and reduces warranty returns if you eliminate removable interfaces

Not used ChromeOS yet I'm afraid

its not great

again, lack of storage is the big issue

That would kill a device for me tbh, I need a lot of (offline) storage space

Phone has a 256GB MicroSD for example

its got 8GB local, the install of native linux takes up 4GB

lol, that's not helping

Bit surprised tbh, I'm sure there are linux desktop distros that, including apps and suites, take up less than half of that

i did try it a ycouple of years ago

its performance was just terrible

btw this was a chromebook i got for free FROM GOOGLE

they were trying to convince me to use GCP instead of other platforms

heh, professionally I assume? Or are they trying to convince the general public with free hardware? :P

yeah professionally

the sales pitch was fine, just not for us

the implecation the sales guy used was that chromebooks are perfect for devs

they aren't

If it's terribly slow, then why would they even make that claim?

everything is in the cloud!!!!!

and google would NEVER just kill cloud products on a whim...

hehe

Yeah, that's the polar opposite of what I'd like... All this thing needs is power to operate, apart from a few things that need to borrow licences I have local everything, so I can work from wherever, at least for a while

I mean, an internet connection is great and in many ways quite important these days, but even outlook I leave offline for large parts of the day so I can concentrate if needed

i've just discovered on the web version of outlook there isn't a button to forward emails...

There is

i see it now

uni uses 365, but there's a little pulldown menu in the preview screen

i wonder if it hadn't loaded in the first time

I think for 'forward as attachment' you have to open the message though, contrary to the full client

@Burgi my sarcasm meter just explored. Then the pieces exploded, caught fire and exploded again.

One of these april fools days they're gonna announce replacing google search with something bizarre, entering into effect that day :P

I currently have at least 2-3 self hosted webapps that cover for stuff Google used to do

What kind of things?

RSS

remember the social media platform google reader?

Rss, their music client went from awesome (google play music) to useless unless you pay....

ah, not used either of those :)

i'm still on itunes for music

would love it if apple open sourced it

trim out all the crap

still using an oldfashioned file player here

can you imagine a GOOD mp3 player on android?

decided to try spotify, then found out to play albums like I normally do, you immediately have to fork out without being able to at least assess it

@Burgi musicolet is fine for me

play.google.com/store/apps/…

I used to use another one whose name I currently can't remember, but that suddenly went very heavy on the ads so I switched... This one has zero and does exactly what I want, play local MP3s and flacs

tbh i still use the ipod

never went the separate music player route... Even on my first proper smartphone, a Palm Treo 600 in 2004, I used it to play music already

although i do want to nail the engineer who programmed the shuffle function on my car radio to a tree

:D

how come?

it only shuffles the first 1000 songs

eh? some kind of memory or variable size limit?

who knows

i've got crappy chinese radios with USB in that can shuffle the entire device fine

you'd think ford would have the resources to code round that

especially on the best selling car in europe

maybe they never figured someone would want to carry around more than a THOUSAND!!1one songs

then why bother with ipod connectivity at all?

shit brb

I hope it's not a fire :x

forgot a meeting

heh

@Burgi hmm...

I use foobar2k or koel. I like koel other than not having an offline mode. It will cache, just not run without the internet

the experience has been so bad, i've just gone back to using the ipod

I'd give Musicolet a try tbh, it's lightweight AND ad free, and I can browse through oldfashioned directories as well as artists

@XKCD :D

Love it or hate it, but... reddit.com/r/Gentoo/comments/ujz72k/…

Yes, call me a heretic for preferring the bloated systemd over OpenRC or other simpler init system. But it just works.

/mode #root-access +b bwDraco!*@* heresy

Gentoo is the last place I'd except anyone to prefer systemd...

Although systemd-logind allowing Xorg to run as non-root without breaking VT switching is nice.

The nice thing about Gentoo is that if you really do hate yourself, you can choose to use systemd!

lol

Ultimately, though, Gentoo is about choice. I've configured my system to be fairly similar to modern, mainstream Linux distributions on the frontend, but with a few things different.

You know how syslog-ng writes the log to tty10? I've configured systemd-journald to do that.

If systemd was just an init system, I honestly might consider using it.

The only problem I have with it is that it forces me to use things I don't want to use. Why should I need to have journald with a binary log format? Why do I need dbus? Why does the kernel need cgroups support? For security, I like stripping down my kernel and userspace quite a bit, so requiring a whole bunch of unnecessary features is a deal-breaker for me and makes systemd my poison.

Yeah. The binary journal is a bit puzzling to me.

I get that it might be useful as an optional feature...

But as a default? And if you don't want journald, you still have to use it and just have it forward to a second syslog daemon!

And to be honest, I do agree that systemd has quite a few questionable design decisions. IMO much of the hatred is the result of just, well, change.

Many traditionalists will hate systemd for how it deviates so heavily from Unix norms.

It's a lot more complex than that.

Many people who hate systemd wish there was something like it that was a pure init.

The number of people who hate it only because they prefer shell scripts for an init system are a minority.

Well, good point. If the system were more modular, sure.

I think most people are like me. They see it as feature creep and something violating the Unix philosophy by default. It's more like WinLogon.exe than it is an init system.

And the creator of systemd is on record saying he wishes to undo the Unix philosophy, yet he has a fairly bad understanding of how it even works. He actually wrote an alternative to su just because he didn't realize that the flag he kept passing to su was wrong.

Even as someone who's been using Linux for fifteen years, I never really got into the finer points of administering and configuring Linux systems, editing plain text configuration files, &c. It's only when I started to use Gentoo as a primary distribution in December 2021 that I started to learn this stuff.

Yeah, using Gentoo really does teach you this stuff quickly.

I've been using Gentoo for many years and it's gotten to the point where it just feels natural and doesn't take any more effort than a Debian system (actually takes less because I can tweak anything I want). Of course, at the beginning, it demanded so much maintenance...

It's the built times that really drive you nuts...

I don't mind the build times, but I also have a pretty beefy computer.

I still run openSUSE Leap on my Linode cloud server and I have no plans to switch. I got used to how zypper worked. But I wanted to get serious about learning the innards of Linux and @djsmiley2kStaysInside (a big fan of Gentoo) convinced me to do it.

The value of a source-based distribution exceeds the annoyance of having to compile things.

Good to see that there are other Gentoo fans in here. :P

The machine I'm running Gentoo on has a Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U.

Which is very, very fast as far as low-power laptop chips go.

Nothing compared to a multi-socket server board!

Heh.

Also, you can massively cut down on compilation times by having fewer unnecessary USE flags.

And even more if you don't use a desktop environment and instead just use a light window manager.

I'm using KDE Plasma. This was meant to be a full-featured Linux desktop that I could as an alternative to my Windows systems.

Same with kernel compilation. If you make sure you've turned off most unnecessary features, it'll build much faster. My kernel compiles in under 5 minutes.

Ah... yeah KDE will take a fair amount of time to build.

Kernel builds take a while, but that's mainly because I'm using LLVM with Clang full LTO.

Have you not used a Linux system as a desktop before? Only as server prior to using Gentoo?

Oh yeah, I keep forgetting that the kernel supports clang now. :D

Do you use clang for your entire @world?

I've been running openSUSE in various places for most of that time.

@forest No, that's because there are known issues.

Ah. I used to use it for most of @world so that I could get CFI, but I switched back to GCC for stability.

And GCC does give better performance when using -ftree-vectorize (which I only enable on certain performance-sensitive packages like zlib).

Hopefully either said issues will be fixed, or GCC will get a CFI plugin sometime soon.

I recently rebuilt the entire KDE suite with Clang, full LTO enabled.

@bwDraco I think GCC is slightly better for performance in general. I don't have a need for performance myself though, only security.

So no LTO for me.

Although I hear that, for some use cases, ICC is actually better than GCC or Clang.

brian ~ % emerge --info | head -n1
Portage 3.0.30 (python 3.9.12-final-0, default/linux/amd64/17.1/desktop/plasma/systemd, gcc-11.2.1, glibc-2.34-r10, 5.15.37-gentoo-stolas2-20220501-r01 x86_64)

84 package atoms in the world file.

1,241 packages installed.

A lot of dependencies though, I imagine.

Wow.

Like I said, it's meant to be a full-featured desktop.

I used to use Gentoo for that, but the complexity was too much for what I wanted to do.

I'm not exactly a minimalist when it comes to desktop systems.

It became difficult to strip down components when I wanted a complex graphical shell.

Oh I'm very minimalist. Suckless-style minimalist!

lol

And yes, I do use st and dwm. :D

The upside with systemd is that it let me strip out such things as ntp and cronie.

But it added in much more complex alternatives.

OpenNTPD is so much better than systemd's crap.

Yup. And that's why it's so divisive.

I just wish it was a bit more modular.

The devs are against modularity on principle.

Tight integration is a double-edged sword.

The *nix philosophy is the antithesis of tight integration.

The fact that pipes in the shell are even a thing shows that!

Well, I do like how I can do things like tar c * | xz -z9eT16 > archive.tar.xz to archive everything in a directory...

You can do that with one tar command with XZ_OPTS btw, although internally it still uses a pipe.

Also, I hate xz. You should use lzip. :D

nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html

And since it's Gentoo, you could easily change everything from manpages to portage tarballs to lzip.

But yeah. All these *ctl commands. It's gotten too complicated.

I've never even used them. I know there's like... systemctl and machinectl but that's all I know.

I far prefer the old^Wgood way of doing things.

journalctl, timedatectl, resolvectl, and more...

wow

But one thing that puzzles me... systemd-oomd (oomctl). Why a userspace OOM killer?

wut

That seems like something that would, ya know, kind of defeat the purpose?

Unless it's just a daemon that adjusts the oom_score_adj of various processes based on some extra heuristics?

And systemd-homed (homectl) (disabled by default in Gentoo, homed USE flag). Do we need a new home folder system?

That sounds like a parody...

The OOM service is disabled by default, though.

That's where the scope creep really starts to raise eyebrows.

Why don't you just use OpenRC? Get the genuine Gentoo experience.

I was coming from openSUSE. Tried OpenRC, didn't like it.

What didn't you like about it?

Felt a unintuitive to me. Besides, I tend to prefer cohesion.

huh

I like it because it's simple, fast, easy to debug if things go wrong, and supports optional parallelization.

Sure, it doesn't have the extensive boot profiling or optimized parallelization that systemd does...

But those are features I'd only want in an init system that stops at being an init system.

And in any case, systemd is fully supported, and is on a nearly equal footing with OpenRC in terms of its level of integration with the rest of the Gentoo system.

True.