The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[GoysGoneWild]

Some pretty exciting news for Linux:

Massive ~2.3k Patch Series Would Improve Linux Build Times 50~80% & Fix "Dependency Hell", continuation: Fast Kernel Headers v2 Posted - Speeds Up Clang-Built Linux Kernel Build By ~88% (no idea how many years it will take to get merged honestly)

Damn, looks like I'm gonna have to give gentoo a real shot now

 

[Kosher Dill]

energy cost

You mention this a lot and I just have to ask. How much does electricity cost in your location?

 

[AmpleApricots]

You mention this a lot and I just have to ask. How much does electricity cost in your location?

I live in germany, the country that has decided to get out of nuclear in the middle of an energy crisis. the average for the killowatt hour in germany right now is 37 cents but in general, depending on where you live, good luck actually getting that, I pay more. (In some places it's as high as 45-80 ct) It's not enough that you'd "feel" an average desktop computer but it is enough that you'd feel it in the electricity bill if you do graphics intense gaming with a highend graphics card on the regular.

In generally though, I just find it very interesting to use as little energy as possible. I'll take my puzzle pieces but there's something bizarre about a desktop computer eating magnitudes more than e.g. some small ARM in a phone doing the same thing just because of software and architecture differences. Rubs me the wrong way.

 

[Dick Justice]

I'll take my puzzle pieces but there's something bizarre about a desktop computer eating magnitudes more than e.g. some small ARM in a phone doing the same thing just because of software and architecture differences. Rubs me the wrong way.

>computer nerds are autists bothered by inefficiency
stop the presses

E: Then again I guess for the G*rm*n excessive autism is a legitimate concern.

 

[Frail Snail]

I live in germany, the country that has decided to get out of nuclear in the middle of an energy crisis. the average for the killowatt hour in germany right now is 37 cents but in general, depending on where you live, good luck actually getting that, I pay more. (In some places it's as high as 45-80 ct) It's not enough that you'd "feel" an average desktop computer but it is enough that you'd feel it in the electricity bill if you do graphics intense gaming with a highend graphics card on the regular.

In generally though, I just find it very interesting to use as little energy as possible. I'll take my puzzle pieces but there's something bizarre about a desktop computer eating magnitudes more than e.g. some small ARM in a phone doing the same thing just because of software and architecture differences. Rubs me the wrong way.

There is a strange discrepancy in minimalist autism, where package choice and optimization, resource load of user interfaces, etc. get a lot of discussion but power draw is rarely mentioned. Being able to daily drive a system on a low end spec machine means most of the software installed on it is futureproofed for the foreseeable future.

It doesn't really pass beyond 60C, even under prolonged full load. Maybe if it's 40C in the room and the device is sitting in the sun, I don't know.

I probably fucked my laptop with years of abuse. It's passed a decade of exploitation some time ago and no amount of fan cleaning and thermal paste replacement seems to drop temperatures below 90C during full throttle compilation.

 

[Ahriman]

Slackware is still around, interesting.

Fri Jan 14 05:24:07 UTC 2022
a/cryptsetup-2.4.3-i586-1.txz: Upgraded.
This update addresses a multi-step attack on LUKS2 format by orchestrating
LUKS2 reencryption metadata in existing LUKS2 header. An attacker is able to
trigger permanent data decryption (ciphertext->plaintext transformation) on
part of data device on next LUKS2 device activation. Attacker does _not_
have to know passphrase or decrypted volume encryption key.
cryptsetup versions older than 2.2.0 are not affected by this, because they
do not support online LUKS2 reencryption.
For more information, see:
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2021-4122
(* Security fix *)

http://www.slackware.com/changelog/current.php?cpu=i386

Also,

https://schollz.com/blog/radio/

Shout-out to the guys over at SomaFM, those guys have been around since the late '90s, it warms my boomer heart to see them still thriving. I'd bet this is how they run their radio stations now.

 

[Knight of the Rope]

Slackware is still around, interesting.

Yep. They've got Slackware 15 coming out pretty soon too. Yup, any day now.





Any day now.

 

[Ahriman]

Related to my previous post: didn't know you can stream to Twitch via FFMPEG.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/54273291/streaming-a-stream-from-website-to-twitch-with-ffmpeg

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/StreamingGuide

 

[AmpleApricots]

There is a strange discrepancy in minimalist autism, where package choice and optimization, resource load of user interfaces, etc. get a lot of discussion but power draw is rarely mentioned. Being able to daily drive a system on a low end spec machine means most of the software installed on it is futureproofed for the foreseeable future.

In these you also have to consider the instructions/watts ratio. How much computing do you get per watt? Sometimes a slightly more "hungry" system might be more energy efficient because it'll finish the work sooner (will be able to go back to idle quicker) sometimes it might make more sense to let a slower system do something for a day instead of having the more powerful system finish it in three hours. That's also why it does not always make sense to limit a processor in an enviroment where there are constraints; it might actually consume more overall when it's clocked down because it is forced to be active longer. It's not a very straightforward topic but I'm very convinced that a lot of electricity is wasted in computing in general. It used to get no attention whatsoever and I know many an old system that idles at 100W.

It's more thought experiments in my case though, not serious savings considerations. The biggest energy waste I do is compiling my own stuff. Pulling binary packages from a binary distro would save a lot of electricity. It's basically redoing work that has already been done and the ratio at which these self-compiled packages might consume less processing power because they're more optimized to the hardware will never be even close in relation to the energy spent when compiling.

I probably fucked my laptop with years of abuse. It's passed a decade of exploitation some time ago and no amount of fan cleaning and thermal paste replacement seems to drop temperatures below 90C during full throttle compilation.

Such old hardware could probably be easily replaced by something in the low-end, 14nm range. Fans are usually optional with these systems, they're a blast and I'm planning to get such a small 11" Netbook soon.

 

[419]

The great thing about Linux is that the update process unlike on Windows is as painless as it gets, and you can probably do it as rarely as once a month or less often if you so please.

That is, unless you have an NVIDIA GPU in which case "lmao eat shit retard, wait another week for our crap driver to work properly on the new 5.16 kernel release instead of forcing your laptop's Intel GPU back on". Fuck NVIDIA.

 

[PFM]

Shout-out to the guys over at SomaFM, those guys have been around since the late '90s, it warms my boomer heart to see them still thriving. I'd bet this is how they run their radio stations now.

I rep SomaFM every opportunity I get. Been listening to them since they first started. I still listen to their streams every day.

 

[Spasticus Autisticus]

Yep. They've got Slackware 15 coming out pretty soon too. Yup, any day now.
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Any day now.

Slackware may be a living relic from the 90s, but if you're into that sort of thing, Slackware -current has been pretty well usable for the last few years with only some minor hiccups. That's more than you can say for Arch. Even Slackware has been getting faster updates for some packages than Arch lately. Not bad for a distro maintained by basically one guy and a few volunteers.

 

[mugmaface]

At the moment I am on debian with Fluxbox as a window manager and Xfce as Desktop

 

[AnOminous]

That is, unless you have an NVIDIA GPU in which case "lmao eat shit retard, wait another week for our crap driver to work properly on the new 5.16 kernel release instead of forcing your laptop's Intel GPU back on". Fuck NVIDIA.

Which sucks because while their hardware is generally near top-notch, their skill with drivers is laughably baffling. And of course they're always these dumb fucking black box binary blobs, so the community can't fix it either. You have to wait for those goombas at NVIDIA.

 

[Groserr]

Does anyone know how to successfully hide a kvm from getting detected. Already tried things like patching kernel/RDTS/...

 

[Ahriman]

At the moment I am on debian with Fluxbox as a window manager and Xfce as Desktop

How did you get Fluxbox working? I wanna do some testing on a VirtualBox VM but after installing Alpine, their Fluxbox instructions don't seem to work, startx does nothing. Not quite sure if it's VirtualBox fucking things over or what, since I've done the same with XFCE and it runs.

 

[Dick Justice]

Does anyone know how to successfully hide a kvm from getting detected. Already tried things like patching kernel/RDTS/...

Nice try, FBI.

 

[Ahriman]

 

[Blue Miaplacidus]

Slackware may be a living relic from the 90s, but if you're into that sort of thing, Slackware -current has been pretty well usable for the last few years with only some minor hiccups. That's more than you can say for Arch. Even Slackware has been getting faster updates for some packages than Arch lately. Not bad for a distro maintained by basically one guy and a few volunteers.

been using slackware as my main OS for nearly 2 decades now and I have had few problems that I didn't personally cause myself. It's very stable. I still have slackware 4.0 on CD that a friend from germany sent me in snail mail in 1999 and was my introduction to linux. So I may have some bias but it works well for me.

 

[eternal dog mongler]

I ran Slack for a long time and I'm surprised it's still around. It's a good distro.

In other old relic news, I still wonder who's paying the bills to keep the Stampede Linux website up though.