“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”
- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations
Is there an old AARCH64 laptop (sub-$100, preferably closer to $50) that can be picked up for a song for playing around with crap like this?
From what I can tell, there’s a lot of crappy old ARM Chromebooks; I wonder if they perform sufficiently faster than an RPi and work well enough with a Linux distro to mess with them. I do wonder, though, if any Windows-on-ARM ones are old enough to also be cheap used (and not be some sort of Windows RT terror or something).
To clarify, what I mean is WebKit continued while Blink became its own thing. Factually, Blink is not WebKit anymore.
Replace “WebKit” with Linux and Blink with ELKS.
Honestly had better luck with DOSBOX-X.
For one, it explicitly calls itself a “subset”; a subset is not the whole set.
If we don’t want to go just off the pedantics of language though, then here’s the thing: it was forked a very long time ago, and both have diverged significantly, I think. It’s a bit like saying Blink (the rendering engine of Chromium) is WebKit; sure, Blink is a fork of WebKit, but the two are very different now.
Technically not the Linux kernel.
Just because they existed during the Linux era doesn’t mean they ran Linux; Torvalds was writing for the 386 from the beginning, and Linux has never been written for anything below 32-bit.
Now, it certainly has RAN on that hardware through emulation, such as on a 4 bit Intel 4004, but only for the heck of it.
Rubbing alcohol and a microfiber cloth.
Also, I feel like I’ve had good luck with k3b, though mainly for CDs.
As for drives, as others have said, USB ones tend to be janky; go for an internal. I like my LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray drive.
If it’s a desktop, it should be easy to hook up with SATA, though if you have a newer case, you might need to dangle a cable out the side like I do.
If you have a laptop, though, you’ll probably need a USB adapter, though there might be a hack using an M.2 slot to hook up an SATA PCI-E card.
If you don’t like bog standard Debian, you might really like Debian Testing.
It allows you to get decently new packages; I’d say typical lag is one week to a couple months depending on the popularity and/or complexity of the project.
I’ve been using it on my desktop for over three years just fine. It’s been quite stable while still getting new software versions in a mostly timely fashion.
Do note though that Testing means Testing; it’s not really concerned with being a rolling release distro, but with preparing for the next release, so there’s a few quirks:
Personally, I’ve grown tired of Debian Testing and rolling release in general; while I still using Testing on my desktop, I’ve thrown Debian Stable on most things I’ve owned since then, and if I really need a newer version of software, I’ll just install the Flatpak or use a container.
Persistence should be near impossible; you most likely have a bad habit or other factor that makes you vulnerable. As others have said, check your router settings; make sure your router firmware is the latest to patch any vulnerabilities. Check devices on your network to make sure none are compromised.
My first guess, like others, is you’re doing something horribly wrong with your port forwarding, followed by you’re installing suspect software. Don’t go installing from random Github/Gitlab repositories without at least doing a bit of background research. Also, sometimes even legitimate open source projects get compromised. Ultimately, try to stick to the bare minimum, just stuff from the Debian repos, and see if it still happens.
If you still have the problem, then my last resort is to ask this (and this is really paranoid, hopefully an unlikely scenario for you): do you use your computer in a safe environment where only people you trust can access it?
I mostly ask because if not, maybe someone has physical access to your computer and is pulling an evil maid attack, installing the software when you’re not looking. Maybe it’s a jerk coworker. Maybe it’s a creepy landlord. A login password is not enough to defend against this; it may be possible for the attacker to boot off a USB stick and modify system files. The only way to prevent this is to reinstall and use full disk encryption, which I do on my laptop. You can try to use Secure Boot and TPM1 to add further protection, but honestly, your attacker just sounds like some script kiddie and probably won’t perform a complex attack on your boot partiton.
1: Despite their obnoxious utilization by Microsoft, they can actually be quite useful to a Linux user, making it possible to set up auto-decryption on boot that doesn’t work if the boot partition has been tampered with (in which case you use a backup password).
Honestly, GIMP feels like it’s been getting rapidly more livable as a photo editor recently.
Like, I still wouldn’t call it suitable for professional use, but it’s been causing me noticeably less pain since they finally introduced some non-destructive editing.
ffmpeg can use several different AV1 codecs, with varying levels of performance.
What do you use Photoshop for? I ask because if you’re just having fun with it or making simple edits like saturation or color curves, it’s probably easier to find a replacement. GIMP still has a bit of a clunky interface, but has become much more livable since it got some non-destructive editing in 3.0. Personally, I use a combination of Inkscape and GIMP for a lot of stuff.
However, if you’re using Photoshop in a professional capacity as say, a photographer or a graphic designer, I’m not sure you can effectively abandon Photoshop. As much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is unfortunately an industry standard, and it’s rather difficult to get running reliably under Linux. There are ways, but I wouldn’t call them reliable. I thus can not in good conscience recommend you switch all your machines to Windows, though perhaps you can run Linux on one device and keep a dedicated Photoshop box if that’s possible for you.
Everything else should probably be fine. Depending on what you play, you might lose a few games to kernel-level anticheat, but honestly, my thought is “Why should I give a company access to an important part of my operating system just to play a video game?”
As others have said, you should probably use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice; the latter isn’t really developed anymore, and the former maintains compatibility with your old files while having vastly better maintenance and feature updates.
Spotify and Discord both have native apps for Linux, so you should be good. I don’t really use VPN services (I could rant about why, but that’s best left for another time), but there’s probably ways to get them working.
I wasn’t intending to convey this timeline could be a dream; I was moreso saying I thought my mind had made up this Microcenter to distract me from this dreadful reality.
I could have worded my initial post better.
All I was thinking about watching this video is “I wish they’d open a MicroCenter in Phoenix”; I’d had a blast visiting the Tustin location after seeing TMBG in LA this May.
I then googled it for fun and found out they announced they’re opening one a month ago! I checked national news to see if I was in some jolly alternate timeline (unfortunately, no) or dreaming, and it appears not.
Just curious: which AV1 encoder were you using?
I ask because librav1e and libaom performance is dismal, but libsvtav1 can at least do ~1.00x speed, which is impressive considering how complex the codec is.
That’s not to say I don’t welcome improvements, though I think AV1 Vulkan requires hardware support I don’t have on my RX 580; it wasn’t until the RX 7000 series that AMD cards started getting hardware encoded support for AV1.
Thank you for saying this before people started crying, “Linux is getting encrapified!” without understanding what the article was actually about.
Technically Raspbian Jessie, I think- I was gifted a Pi 3 in ~2016 and fiddled around with it for a while. I also made some cursed choices, at one point running Windows 10 IoT Core on that thing… 
In 2017 or so, I started toying around with Ubuntu in VMs. It wasn’t really until 2020 or so that I started trying other distros; Debian Buster was probably the first non-Ubuntu distro I’d tried (excluding RPi stuff), and I mostly stucked to Debian besides one Arch install.
At a certain point in 2022, I found myself using Unix tools so much I was starting to wonder if I should just use Linux instead of Windows. It was at this time that I tried NixOS in a VM for the first time and thought, “Wow, this is cool… I’m sticking with Debian, though.”
Around that time, I threw Debian Testing (then Bookworm) on a second 256GB drive, ostensibly as a “test run” for daily driving Linux, and by “test run”, I mean I de facto quit using Windows; a few months later, I opted to use dd and copy that “test install” over my Windows install on my bigger 1TB drive (of course with sufficient backups so I could copy my Windows files over). That install is still the one I use on my desktop today and has just transitioned into Debian Testing/Forky*
*A name I quite honestly hate, mostly due to the fact that Forky represents everything wrong with America today the Forky Asks a Question shorts beat out Steven Universe Future for an animation Emmy, though honestly, I don’t know else what I was expecting to happen.
The big 25!
I mostly agree with you. However, I think there are some caveats to upscaling; there are so many lazy “4K AI UPSCALE BEST QUALITY” videos online that just don’t look good and were clearly put there just to get views.
However, I’ve also found they have their uses; for instance, I wanted to laser cut a TMBG Flood logo once, but there were very few good images online that traced well in Inkscape. I ended up doing an AI upscale of the least terrible one with a white background, and that traced pretty well in Inkscape.
If only Apple Music would give Linux users some way to access lossless…
Though honestly, I’m only on Apple Music because my parents pay for it anyway (I’m a college kid), and I’ve already started accumulating a CD/digital audio file collection, which currently covers the first 6 studio albums plus albums 8 and 21 plus 1 B sides compilation, 1 single, half a live album, an album demos compilation, and 1 single.
Although the 256kpbs limitation on the browser isn’t the worst (better than a lot of video streaming services forcing 480p on unapproved devices), it still irks me.