monovergent

joined 2 years ago
[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Check out pinta, I've been using it as my paint.net substitute when I just need to go in and make a few quick edits.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago

I made a 1:3 peroxide to water mixture in my watering can and in about a month, the fungus gnats were gone for good with no apparent harm to my plant.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago

My desktop text editor has an autosave feature, but it only works after you've manually saved the file. All I wanted is something like the notes app on my phone, where I can jot down random thoughts without worrying about naming a new file. So here's the script behind my text editor shortcut, which creates a new text file in ~/.drafts, names it with the current date, adds a suffix if the file already exists, and finally opens the editor:

#!/bin/bash

name=/home/defacto/.drafts/"`date +"%Y%m%d"`"_text
if [[ -e "$name" || -L "$name" ]] ; then
    i=1
    while [[ -e "$name"_$i || -L "$name"_$i ]] ; do
        let i++
    done
    name="$name"_$i
fi
touch -- "$name"
pluma "$name" #replace pluma with your editor of choice
[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Why? (Just curious; I'm not familiar with the Linux phone scene)

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 week ago

It was in 7 as well, but only the 32-bit edition. edit.com stopped shipping with 64-bit editions.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Aw man, I was about to praise the first two.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

As others have suggested, QubesOS is a good one to have on your list. I'd probably use if it weren't for its crippling effects on battery life.

Immutable distros are much friendlier to laptops and, as I understand, update in a way not unlike an Android device would. But I insist on some system-level customizations and I haven't been motivated to learn how such customizations can be made to survive updates and the like.

I've also been eyeing NixOS, but with everything up and running on Debian smoothly for a few years, I haven't found the excuse to switch yet. Along with customizing it to be a comfortable daily driver, I've also been trying to see how secure I can make my system as a fun exercise. While it's not immutable, Debian is a good base considering the team behind it and how much is riding on its security, including internet-facing servers.

What I've done to harden Debian, if anyone's interested:

  • Apply Madaidan's hardening guide judiciously. Roughly 2/3 of the measures made sense for my use case and it's almost unnoticeable in my daily workflow.
  • Have as few closed-source components as possible. In my case, intel-microcode is the only non-free package on my system.
  • Install the hardening-runtime package, but remove its included slub_debug=FPZ kernel argument, which in recent kernels forces less secure unhashed pointers.
  • XFCE is still not fully ported to Wayland, so I use slock, the X11 screen locker with fewest lines of code.
  • Install the ufw firewall and default to deny
  • Enable unattended-upgrades
  • Everything including the /boot partition is encrypted. I have built coreboot with just the GRUB2 payload, which I configured to immediately bring up the LUKS password prompt. All other options are behind a password.

I also put together and maintain a ~16 GB clean system image of Debian set up exactly to my taste, which I clone to my machines as needed. This probably wouldn't have been a thing if I knew about NixOS earlier, and it certainly hasn't helped me switch over either.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Is the automatic scaling a recently-introduced feature to KDE? I have Plasma 5 on Debian 12, could that be the missing link, or is my configuration just wonky? Hoping to avoid editing every affected shortcut to include Gamescope.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

I've sketched out ideas for something like the MNT Reform, but with a Framework motherboard, and it's surprisingly hard to whittle down the form factor any more without sacrificing unique and useful features, like the user-replaceable battery cells and modular mechanical keyboard. Those were the main attractions for me, and it is indeed very weak hardware for the price. Tallying up the component prices, it's about as good as it gets without economies of scale while insisting on libre firmware.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago

No, but I do try to keep prep and cleanup times to under 1 hour for breakfast and lunch combined and 1 hour for dinner.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 8 points 2 weeks ago

Librewolf, Ungoogled Chromium flatpak for anything that doesn't work in Librewolf, and Fennec on Android

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago

Whatever comes with your distro or desktop environment ought to be enough for anybody.

Unless you have a minimal window manager that comes with only xterm. Then I'd install xfce4-terminal to get tabs and more reasonably sized text. If for some reason the distro or OS only has sh, I'll also go ahead and install bash, but nothing fancier than that.

 

Decided to uninstall my display manager and use startx instead. But now when I resume from suspend, the brightness keys cease to work until I log out and back in. Backlight does still respond when echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness. But what kind of magic does a display manager do to keep brightness controls working after suspend and resume?

Using xfce on tty1 on an X230 if it matters.

 

UPDATE: After flashing coreboot with the option to "Enable ECC if supported", ECC RAM still does not work. The screen and lights come on and the speakers emit a continuous high tone. The memory tested was an 8GB stick of 2Rx8 EP3L-12800E from SK Hynix. It is unbuffered ECC to the best of my knowledge. I'll write up my thoughts on corebooting this particular board when I have used it for some more time.

After learning that the 3612QE itself supports ECC RAM in contrast to the stock CPU options and that the QM77 chipset also does, I purchased a DDR3 SODIMM with unbuffered ECC. I have not been aware of any other attempts to test this combination.

The machine did not POST and did not produce any beep codes. Absolutely no response to any input aside from shutting down when briefly holding the power button. Everything returned to normal upon putting the original RAM back.

I suspect the BIOS lacks support, but whether this changes with coreboot remains unknown to me, at least until I learn how to prepare and flash coreboot.

This is purely an exercise in curiosity.

 

In an effort to keep my X230 snappy for a few more years until I find/make a newer laptop to my liking, I finally caved in and bought an i7-3612QE board. Posting some observations and thoughts based on the questions I had prior to buying. Previous CPU was the i5-3320M.

Setup

  • Debian 12
  • XFCE
  • 16GB DDR3L
  • Two SSDs
  • Hyper-threading disabled
  • 1vyrain BIOS with classic keyboard EC patch

Performance

  • Not literally twice as fast, but the improvement is quite noticeable
  • CPU no longer seems to struggle while loading Javascript-laden websites
  • Rarely hits 100% CPU usage, even on Youtube (sadly bloated enough to be a sort of benchmark)
  • Single-core tasks are only slightly better than before

Thermals

  • High 40s at idle to mid 60s when busy
  • Feels cooler compared to previous CPU, which I assume is due to the CPU usage being lower across all tasks.
  • Did not upgrade to the AVC cooler. Toshiba cooler works well and is quiet as ever.

Battery

  • About 4.5 hours of office tasks and light browsing from full to empty with an aftermarket 55 Wh 6-cell at 98% health
  • Wattage in the mid 9's at idle with brightness at a comfortable level for a well-lit room. Increase from low 8's with the i5-3320M.
  • When doing actual work, wattage hovers from 11 to 15 watts
  • 16 to 18 watts watching Youtube videos
  • SLT1 IPS display does consume ~1 W more than TN. I installed tlp but left it on default settings.
  • 65W Lenovo charger only works when in sleep mode or shut down. In normal use, however, it will not draw the full 65 W. A 90 W charger or a 65 W GaN charger that the X230 believes is 90 W will both work (my 65 W GaN charger worked well and did not overheat, YMMV)

Other

  • Make sure to enlarge the cutout on the black sticker on the underside of the cooler since the 3612QE die is larger
  • EC flashing will require a 90 W charger or a 65 W GaN that the X230 believes is 90 W.
  • Factory CPUs have BGA package underfill. I have not checked for myself, but it is likely that the upgraded CPU does not have underfill. This should not affect day-to-day use, but the lack of underfill will make the BGA solder joints more susceptible to fall and vibrational damage. Liquid may get trapped underneath in the event of a spill.

Value

  • With shipping and taxes, the upgrade costs about 200 USD and takes 2 hours. The total cost-to-date on my X230 built from parts is around 500 USD.
  • Do not think of this upgrade in terms of how much performance you get for the price. Think of it like upgrading and daily-driving a classic car. If it brings you joy to daily drive an X230 as it does for me, then it may be worth it.
 

I like my Linux installs heavily customized and security hardened, to the extent that copying over /home won't cut it, but not so much that it breaks when updating Debian. Whenever someone mentions reinstalling Linux, I am instinctively nervous thinking about the work it would take for me to get from a vanilla install to my current configuration.

It started a couple of years ago, when dreading the work of configuring Debian to my taste on a new laptop, I decided to instead just shrink my existing install to match the new laptop's drive and dd it over. I later made a VM from my install, stripped out personal files and obvious junk, and condensed it to a 30 GB raw disk image, which I then deployed on the rest of my machines.

That was still a bit too janky, so once my configuration and installed packages stabilized, I bit the bullet, spun up a new VM, and painstakingly replicated my configuration from a fresh copy of Debian. I finished with a 24 GB raw disk image, which I can now deploy as a "fresh" yet pre-configured install, whether to prepare new machines, make new VMs, fix broken installs, or just because I want to.

All that needs to be done after dd'ing the image to a new disk is:

  • Some machines: boot grubx64.efi/shimx64.efi from Ventoy and "bless" the new install with grub-install and update-grub
  • Reencrypt LUKS root partition with new password
  • Configure user and GRUB passwords
  • Set hostname
  • Install updates and drivers as needed
  • Configure for high DPI if needed

I'm interested to hear if any of you have a similar workflow or any feedback on mine.

 

Anyone here use an X230 with the quad-core mod? I'm looking into it and was wondering about the reliability and battery life compared to the stock i5-3320M.

 

Been using searx.be for a bit now and they had many results in Dutch and German, which can be expected for a site based in Belgium. But does anyone notice an influx of results in Russian? Did they change the server location or are users in Russia catching on to it? Yandex isn't toggled on in the settings either.

Not trying to judge security by language. I just kinda liked having results in a mix of languages I could read.

 

Banking apps seem to be a motif among things that don't play well with privacy ROMs. My bank's website does everything I could want out of it. I think I might be ignorant to something.

  • What about banking apps is especially compelling?
  • How often do banks put must-have features behind an app?
  • And should I be concerned that banks might move away from offering services through browsers?
 

I'm about to degoogle my stock Android phone. For the past few years, I've used it to handle the non-open source apps that I don't want running on my main phone. As I've finally weaned off GApps, I realize that I might as well go degoogle the rom as well.

edit: to be clear, I'll be using sandboxed Play services on GOS

But since that phone is my compatibility guinea pig, is it likely I'll still run into an app that demands unmodded Android with no alternatives? In your experience, has any bank or other service required the app on regular Android, with no alternative for the desktop, browser, etc?

 

As I understand it, X11 has many inherent security concerns, including programs being able to read the contents of other windows and intercept keystrokes. Wayland addresses these concerns but at the moment breaks certain functions like screen readers, cursor warping, and the ability of a program to resize its own window.

I am curious as to how the display protocols of MacOS and Windows handle these situations differently. How does a program in those operating systems gain permission to read the contents of other windows, if at all? What is to be done in Wayland for these functions to be more seamless or are there inherent obstacles?

 

Bought a Pixel 4a second hand since it's the last Pixel with a headphone jack that isn't too big for me, and I'm hoping to keep it as long as I can.

Unfortunately, it's about time for me to replace the battery. I tend not to treat my battery too well (can't be bothered to keep it between 20% and 80%, but it's supposed to be consumable, right?) and I'm not sure if replacement batteries will hold up as well over the years. So I'm wondering if it's fine to just replace the battery and pop the whole thing back into my case without gluing the screen, so future repairs are a bit easier and won't involve the risk of breaking the screen while prying it off.

For reference, I'm using one of those cases with an interlocking front and back, so it ought to hold itself together and not fly apart if I drop it. (edit) I guess what I'm looking for is experience as to whether the newly introduced slack between the glass and body tends to make make the screen more fragile or put undue strain on flex cables.

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