• 0 Posts
  • 45 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
cake
Cake day: December 7th, 2023

help-circle


  • Nowadays I primarily just go with Arch, it works “fine enough” for my use cases (software dev and gaming) and the AUR truly does just about have everything that I’ve ever wanted to install.

    That is not to say that it doesn’t have its issues though, a while back ago I was using EndeavourOS and my PC completely locked up (seemed like a kernel panic) in the middle of pacman running a system upgrade and it borked the whole install. I haven’t gotten around to migrating my home folder to its own partition (it is in its own btrfs subvol though), so I just went with installing Arch and choosing to keep the btrfs home subvolume so that the base system was replaced, yet my home folder was preserved. I’m sure that I could’ve fixed the issue in a chroot, but it was easier to just wipe everything outside of my home folder and just start fresh.

    I am heavily interested in Atomic systems, the above issue being one of the bigger reasons, but I would continuously run into walls when trying to use non-flatpak software. Most of the Atomic distros have a way to effectively spin your own image, but at the moment I just don’t have the time to learn how to do it. NixOS fell into a similar boat for me, Nixpkgs is quite large but I’d have things randomly break because they’re expecting a FHS compliant layout (such as some of my dev tools) and while I’m sure I could eventually learn how to fix it, Nix’s docs are… not the best, and I ran into time constraints again.

    I’ll eventually circle back to reviewing Atomic distros and spinning up my own custom image once things in my life settle down a bit, but there’s just too much chaos for me to justify throwing another wrench into it when Arch for the most part does what I need it to do.

    My desktop also used to have a Nvidia GPU in it, and is one of the reasons why I started using Arch in the first place - they were pretty much always the first to get the Nvidia driver updates. Thankfully I switched to AMD (a 6700 XT) about a year ago and that specifically hasn’t been an issue (and allowed me to explore more distros without having to worry about how the Nvidia installation/update process was - its not really complicated on any of the distros, but its an additional step unless you use something like Pop that has the drivers preinstalled).

    However I do also use Fedora on my old MacBook, I tend to only use it for lightweight browsing and occasionally SSH’ing into some systems and I’ve quite enjoyed Fedora so far.


  • I try to keep all of the distros I’ve tried out, with their current versions and previous versions (if it makes sense), such as:

    • Arch
    • NixOS
    • Fedora
    • Debian
    • Ubuntu
    • Pop!_OS
    • Bazzite (and their friends Aurora & Bluefin)
    • Even Windows 10 >_>

    I’ve stopped distro hopping as much as I used to, but I do keep a much smaller partition around for playing with another distro if I want to (such as the latest test version of Pop that includes the COSMIC epoch alpha release). I’d say that you definitely don’t need a 128GB flash drive, but the last 16GB flash drive I was using pretty much died and when I went to get a new one, the difference between 16/32/64/128 was negligible enough that I just decided to get a 128 one and never deal with storage issues on it again. Plus, you can tell the Ventoy installer to leave some free space for a non-ISO partition to keep other stuff on it as well.
















  • You’re thinking of install-time permissions, which technically does still exist, but pretty much most of the permissions you’d actually care about are runtime (or special) permissions - the application must request these from the user.

    There are three main types of permissions on Android:

    • Install-time, these are permissions granted to an application upon installation
      • In this group is also signature-level permissions, which are only granted to applications that are signed by the same party as the OS itself (usually your OEM)
    • Runtime permissions (also known as “Dangerous permissions” within Android internally), which are permissions that the application must request from the user. The system draws the permissions dialog, not the application itself. Permission can also be granted one-time only, or permanently (unless the user revokes the permission)
    • Special permissions, which also need to be requested by the application - except for these the system will not draw a permissions dialog, instead the application must send the user to the “Special App Access” menu within system settings, and the user must turn on the permission there. The best way I can describe these types of permissions is, “permission that the user really must think about before granting” - such as giving an app the ability to bypass DND rules, drawing over other apps, installing APKs from unknown sources, accessing all device files, etc. IIRC, Google also requires that developers provide justification for requesting these permissions when submitting to the Google Play Store as well.

    Runtime permissions were introduced in Android 6.0, which was released in 2015, I am not sure when the special permission system was implemented however.


  • Russ@bitforged.spacetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    2 months ago

    Hate? No, I do not hate Google. I still use a Pixel phone (and photos/assistant on it), my Gmail is still my primary email (I also self-host a few other domains but those are primarily used for automation and a few other one-off things), I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I still utilize my Stadia controller as my primary game controller, I use a Google TV set top box, etc.

    I don’t use Search (I use Kagi instead), I don’t use Chrome (Firefox), I don’t really utilize Gemini all that much (I just run ollama for the few times I want to use an LLM).

    Really I just use their products that work well for me, and don’t use the ones that don’t. There’s no love/hate about it.