someone else can probably give a more comprehensive/correct answer but here is how I understand it. i believe chromium is open source and chrome is mostly chromium but also some proprietary (and therefor unknown) bits are included. whereas firefox is entirely open source, meaning you could compile it yourself and still end up with the same package.

the above comment was written by a person who’s lack of understanding of consent suggests they are almost certainly guilty of sex crimes.

But where do you start to look? Most distros have their config published in two places: /boot/config-<kernel version>, for any installed kernel, or /proc/config.gz (cat /proc/config.gz | gunzip to read), for your running kernel.

Thanks for understanding the question and providing a concrete answer of a place to look! I will do this. :)

license issues of propietary drivers,

kernel or modules being slightly older and the driver is only in the newest kernel / modules bundle that didn’t make it into all distros yet

how do I find out about both of these?

Linux distros I have tried include: ubuntus, debians, fedoras, opensuse, manjaro, endeavour, mint. No slackware, redhat, centos, gentoo, nix, kali, steam.

Every device I currently own is a refurb originally manufactured 5-15 years ago. It’s based on some combination of cheapness and hoping that things will be supported by them time I get my hands on them. I don’t have any requirement for blazing hardware.

Some of them are unsurprisingly annoying, like netbooks I picked up only because they were cheap and were reported to have linux successfully installed by people online. With these things, it seems that most of the features work just not all at the same time. I can choose between a smoothly-functioning trackpad in one distribution and bluetooth in another. But why? How do I compare them.

No to wayland.

I have used arch-based distros. They tend towards better support but not universally.

I’ve had the issue on laptops and desktops but I have more experience with laptops. Also you are correct that arch-based tend to work pretty well. But I don’t want to run arch on some devices because I do not plan update them regularly enough. I want a longer-term support distro. So in many cases I want to see what arch is doing that another isn’t.

Only noting to be fair: in some cases arch-type does worse. I have an old HP desktop which is the case that arch couldn’t see the ethernet connection. I could only use a USB-to-ethernet converter as PC doesn’t even have wifi. But then I installed Debian and the ethernet works fine through the card. I do not need to solve this specifically as I plan to keep debian. Just one of the many mysteries.

I could find a specific issue that I do want to solve but it’s such an ongoing thing I am hoping to learn the general principals rather than being spoon fed the answer. I’ll only be back next week with another one.

• distros can have different kernel parameters

• unloaded kernel modules

• different kernel parameters

• older kernel/packages

• missing packages

how do I find out about these?

Are they specific to my system? Some kind of decision the installer makes? So I would investigate locally on the device?

Or will it be a general distro thing? Am I looking on their website to find out?

try to find what kernel version support was added.

how to do this?

There’s exceptions however like proprietary drivers. While those drivers are becoming exceedingly rare, some distros will only ship with FOSS software,

don’t expect debian to ever work out of the box with nvidia

good news is I don’t think I have ever in my life owned anything nvidia.

You didn’t mentioned your component specifically but if your hardware doesn’t have mainline kernel support, is pretty good assumption it’s proprietary and will need to be handled separately with something like dkms. Check the distros documentation for their recommended approach.

thanks, I never heard of dkms before. I read the arch wiki, wikipedia, and made an attempt at the github repo (very long and over my head). The arch wiki only mentions nvidia. Is this something I need if I am certain nvidia is not the problem? Or is it a general thing?

Off the top of my head some components I’ve had problems with: touchpads, touch screens, wifi, ethernet, bluetooth, audio in, audio out, media keys. I have suspected others also like (onboard intel) GPUs but it’s a little harder for me to even pin those problems down to the hardware.

is there a way to find out for a given component? where to look?

filesystem, release notes, repositories? terminal tool will give me some clues?

I think maybe if there are license issues the distros have different policies? You might need to do some kind of extra step to include certain drivers.

That’s what I’m thinking!

I am asking a really basic question here. How do I find out about the drivers in the distro?

oh of course there are abbreviated forms. I just used the long versions so that people who aren’t framiliar can follow what I am doing without having to spend 10 mins cross referencing the man page.

Likewise in the examples I used options that created a fairly very simple screenshot to clearly illustrate an answer to the question of what eza does that ls doesn’t.

I tend to use eza via a couple of aliases with sets of common preferences. Like in a git dir I want to sort by date. usually don’t need to see the user column, the size or permissions (except when I do). I do want to see the dotfiles. So I have an appropriate line as eg (eza git). A great companion to gs.

It’s taken me forever to reply because (a) I feel guilty about short replies to long messages, (b) I had to think about this a bit, and © I almost exclusively access Lemmy on my phone and I hate typing long messages on my phone. Not an excuse, just an explanation. There are no good Lemmy desktop clients, but I’ve finally logged in to my instance’s web interface to respond to this. 3 months later.

well I appreciate the time and tbh and in no hurry for any of this. I’m glad it was on an account I actively monitor. I also don’t have a perfect system set up to keep track of lemmy stuff so probably I miss things sometimes.

The argument that because the currency isn’t endorsed or backed by a government means it’s not real seems debatable, at best.

So as to the nature of crypto vs fiat. Fiat is not only backed by The State, it is created and controlled by The State. I have never done a deep dive but superficially I find the ideas of MMT as explained by Cory Doctow compelling in the context of capitalism

MMT’s core precept is that governments first spend money into existence and then tax it out of existence (contrast this with the standard account that says that governments must tax citizens to pay for programs, which raises the question, “How did the citizens get the money to pay for their taxes unless the government first spent that money into existence, given that governments are the sole source of currency?”).

I first encountered it on some podcast he was on, it might have been this one but not totally sure tbh.

So in terms of whether it’s “real” that is one difference.

People have been scamming people using regular money for far longer than cryptocurrency has existed.

It is an interesting point, and I’m compelled to agree that lots of scams have been conducted with fiat currency. If it were possible to count it all up, way, way more value has been scammed out of people via fiat.

Just to disclose my priors: To be honest, I am not too interested in “fortunes” being scammed because I don’t think anyone comes by massive quantities of money by means which are defensible. An old saying: “if one man has a dollar he didn’t work for, it means another man worked for a dollar he didn’t get.” It is clumsy and imprecise but summarizes how I feel about wealthy individuals.

But crypto has been extensively marketed to people without fortunes. Small people like you (I assume) and me and our families and communities. These people will never get redress for their lost money and it can be devastating. It has specifically targets for example racialized communities who have been systematically excluded from systems that would allow them to accumulate fiat and property.

Unlike fiat, which is created and required by the state, crypto is more like an MLM (pyramid scheme). It is only valuable while new people are buying into it with fiat. If the money pump stops or even slow down, there is a crash. Fiat doesn’t need people to buy into it with crypto and it never will.

Back to the topic of chat apps.

I think it feels sleezy to you because the devs are also interested in integrating cryptocurrency into the Session ecosystem, and you believe cryptocurrency=bad.

Disagree. I wouldn’t use a chat app that was run by Wells Fargo or PayPal or Visa or a local credit union or any other such organization. That would be weird. My use case for a chat app is 100% in social communication and I see no reason for that to be entangled in financials unless I was directly choosing to contribute money to the development costs of the app.

However I can see different use cases where integration of financial exchange into the platform would be of benefit. Those would be for conducting relationships with a significant transactional nature. Platforms like ebay and aliexpress have chat/mail features and that makes sense. And think of facebook marketplace; also combines chat and transactions. People do business on instagram and whatsapp. It appears that the primary application of something like session would be as an adjunct or replacement for those kinds of conversations.

The question is: Is this a chat app that also has a way to send money, or a financial transaction app with a chat feature? I think it is the latter.

I will admit I don’t deeply understand the inners of blockchains. But we know they are unstable so I still find it strange to mix up other unrelated features so intimately. For example aliexpress has a chat feature, and ultimately the stability of the chat is reliant on the business continuity of the organization. But on a day to day level, the reliability of the infrastructure isn’t changing according to how much business is being conducted, how popular aliexpress is. I also wouldn’t use aliexpress chat to conduct my personal relationships. If I made a friend on aliexpress somehow, I would move that to a more appropriate platform.

You’ve correctly compared crypto to the stock market. It is very apt as they share a lot of structural elements; only the stock market is older, more entrenched. My opinion: stock market is completely indefensible; get rid of it. Same premise different conclusion. :D I wouldn’t use a chat app that was relying on some penny stock for it’s technical viability.

further reading if this wasn’t enough:

Molly White follows and explains crypto et al; her website: Web3 is Going Just Great is updated frequently. If you are a podcast weirdo like me, she appears on them from time to time, search through your app.

Thanks! I always appreciate another tool for this. I tried to run it but have dep issues.

What is gwc? I can’t find a package by that name nor is it included that I can see.

Websearch finds GeoWebCache, Gnome Wave Cleaner, GtkWaveCleaner, several IT companies… nothing that looks relevant.

edit: also stumped looking for gsort. it seems to be associated with something called STATA which is statistical analysis software. Is that something you are involved with maybe running some special stuff on your system?

PS you missed a newline at the end before closing the code block which is why the image was showing up as markdown instead of displaying properly.

Change:

    }```

to:

    }
    ```

Nice! I’m sure they will appreciate your thorough report.

I wonder if they also plan to make an option about crossing filesystem boundaries. I have seen it commonly in this sort of use case.

Maybe all this complexity this is the reason why total dir size has not previously been integrated into this kind of tool. (Notable exception: lsd if you are interested.) I really hope the development persists though because being able to easily manipulate so many different kinds of information about the filesystem without spending hours/days/weeks/years creating bespoke shell scripts is super handy.

I am inclined to agree with you. See my comment in cross post of this thread.

I’m just a home admin of my own local systems and while I try to avoid doing stuff that’s too wacky, in the context I don’t mind playing a bit fast n loose. If I screw it up, the consequences are my own.

At work, I am an end user of systems with much higher grade of importance to lots of people. I would not be impressed to learn there was a bunch of novel bleeding edge stuff running on those systems. Administering them has a higher burden of care and responsibility and I expect the people in charge to apply more scrutiny. If it’s screwed up, the consequences are on a lot of people with no agency over the situation.

Just like other things done at small vs large scale. Most people with long hair don’t wear a hairnet when cooking at home, although it is a requirement in some industrial food prep situations. Most home fridges don’t have strict rules about how to store different kinds of foods to avoid cross contamination, nor do they have a thermometer which is checked regularly and logged to show the food is being stored appropriately. Although this needs to be done in a professional context. Pressures, risks and consequences are different.

To summarize: I certainly hope sysadmins aren’t on here installing every doohicky some dumbass like me suggests on their production systems. :D

Some of the distros actually just included an alias from exa to eza when the project forked. I didn’t even realize I was using eza for a long time!

ooops you commented similar/same twice. I think this one was a draft. :)

For my part I think all this troublefinding and troublesolving is a great use of a thread. :D Especially if it gets turned into a bug report and eventually PR. I had a quick look in the repo and I don’t see anything relevant but it could be hidden where I can’t see it. Since you’ve already gone and found the problem it would be a shame to leave it here where it’ll never be found or seen. Hope you will send to them.

I also reproduce the bug by moving an ISO file into a directory then hardlinking it in the same dir. Each file is counted individually and the dir is 2x the size it should be! I can’t find any way to fix it.

The best I can come up with is to show the links but it only works when you look at the linked file itself:

$ eza --long -h --total-size --sort=oldest --no-permissions --no-user --no-time --tree --links LinuxISOs
Links Size Name
    1 3.1G LinuxISOs
    2 1.5G ├── linux.iso
    2 1.5G └── morelinux.iso

If you look further up the filetree you could never guess. (I will say again that my distro is not up to date with the latest release and it is possible this is already fixed.)

This should be an option. In dua-cli, another one of the other rust terminal tools I love, you can choose:

$ dua  LinuxISOs
      0   B morelinux.iso
   1.43 GiB linux.iso
   1.43 GiB total

$ dua --count-hard-links LinuxISOs
   1.43 GiB linux.iso
   1.43 GiB morelinux.iso
   2.86 GiB total