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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I recently tried Bazzite, and I have to agree. Switching from a traditional Linux distro to an immutable distro is harder than switching from Windows to Linux. I’m not kidding. When it comes to immutability, my experience can be split into two general cases:

    1. I don’t notice any difference at all.
    2. It’s a giant pain in the ass.

    I have yet to encounter a scenario where immutability offered a tangible benefit. The supposed advantages seem rather abstract. I can’t break my system? Okay…but…well, I already had snapper for the rare occasions when something got royally borked. This is a problem that has already been solved without major compromises, so why are we now compromising so much to solve it again?

    It comes with 4 different package management systems (or 6 if you count Distrobox and Waydroid), and they all come with big caveats. I’ve had to reboot more in the past week than I previously had in the past year on Debian, because every time I need to install something from the main Fedora repo with rpm-ostree (which has been many times already), it needs to reboot. They recommend against using rpm-ostree, but there is no reasonable alternative for a rather wide array of software. It’s either rpm-ostree or build a whole mess of things from source and manage them manually. Both options suck very hard.

    Still, overall, Bazzite delivers. Everything you see on their web site works out of the box. It’s hard to recommend, but it’s also hard to criticize. I’ve never had a smoother gaming experience, and this is the first time I’ve ever had to spend zero minutes configuring my GPU drivers (outside of macOS, anyway). You get CUDA and ROCm out of the box. You get the latest drivers. It’s awesome.

    If you’re wondering if an immutable distro is right for you, the answer is probably “no”. But if you’re up for the, erm, “adventure” of learning this new paradigm, Bazzite fucking rocks.


  • I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic

    I’d assume bad actors (or at least chaotic neutral actors) are slurping up the entire fediverse already. It is trivial to do, and nobody would know.

    I mean, the whole point is that anyone can spin up a server and federate with others. I could start my own server, which would by default federate with almost all other servers. That means I wouldn’t even need to write a scraper. All that data would be sent straight to my server. All I need is access to my own database at that point. With Lemmy, I’d even get users’ upvote/downvote history, which is not visible in any clients AFAIK. The only barrier would be to subscribe to communities on different servers to kickstart federation.

    As long as you don’t run obvious spam/bot accounts, nobody would block your instance.

    Alternatively, if you want to write a scraper, that’s also pretty easy. Most servers are publicly accessible. Every community has an RSS feed. You don’t even need an account in general. Again, the whole point is to be open and accessible, in contrast to closed-off data-misers like Facebook, Reddit, and X.

    The fediverse is friendly to users, with very little regard for what those users might do. I believe this is the correct philosophy, but I won’t pretend that it doesn’t leave us open to bad behavior.





  • I keep seeing this claim, but never with any independent verification or technical explanation.

    What exactly is listening to you? How? When?

    Android and iOS both make it visible to the user when an app accesses the microphone, and they require that the user grant microphone permission to the app. It’s not supposed to be possible for apps to surreptitiously record you. This would require exploiting an unpatched security vulnerability and would surely violate the App Store and Play Store policies.

    If you can prove this is happening, then please do so. Both Apple and Google have a vested interest in stopping this; they do not want their competitors to have this data, and they would be happy to smack down a clear violation of policy.





  • Apple tried to allow clones, but ran into the same problem because the clone makers could make cheaper machines by slapping together parts.

    Yeah, this is exactly what happened, although some of the clone brands were perfectly high-quality (Power Computing in particular made great machines, usually the fastest on the market). In the Mac community at the time, a lot of people (myself included) wished Apple would just exit the hardware business and focus on what they were good at: software.

    Then Steve Jobs came back and did exactly the opposite of that. First order of business was to kill cloning. Then came the iPod.

    To be fair, the next generation of Power Macs after that were about half the price of the previous gen.


  • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.orgtoMemes@lemmy.mlCosts Less? When That Happened?
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    2 months ago

    Most of Apple’s history, actually.

    Macs have a reputation for being expensive because people compare the cheapest Mac to the cheapest PC, or to a custom-built PC. That’s reasonable if the cheapest PC meets your needs or if you’re into building your own PC, but if you compare a similarly-equipped name-brand PC, the numbers shift a LOT.

    From the G3-G5 era ('97-2006) through most of the Intel era (2006-2020), if you went to Dell or HP and configured a machine to match Apple’s specs as closely as possible, you’d find the Macs were almost never much more expensive, and often cheaper. I say this as someone who routinely did such comparisons as part of their job. There were some notable exceptions, like most of the Intel MacBook Air models (they ranged from “okay” to “so bad it feels like a personal insult”), but that was never the rule. Even in the early-mid 90s, while Apple’s own hardware was grossly overpriced, you could by Mac clones for much cheaper (clones were licensed third-parties who made Macs, and they were far and away the best value in the pre-G3 PowerPC era).

    Macs also historically have a lower total cost of ownership, factoring in lifespan (cheap PCs fail frequently), support costs, etc. One of the most recent and extensive analyses of this I know if comes from IBM. See https://www.computerworld.com/article/1666267/ibm-mac-users-are-happier-and-more-productive.html

    Toward the tail end of the Intel era, let’s say around 2016-2020, Apple put out some real garbage. e.g. butterfly keyboards and the aforementioned craptastic Airs. But historically those are the exceptions, not the rule.

    As for the “does more”, well, that’s debatable. Considering this is using Apple’s 90s logo, I think it’s pretty fair. Compare System 7 (released in '91) to Windows 3.1 (released in '92), and there is no contest. Windows was shit. This was generally true up until the 2000s, when the first few versions of OS X were half-baked and Apple was only just exiting its “beleaguered” period, and the mainstream press kept ringing the death knell. Windows lagged behind its competition by at least a few years up until Microsoft successfully killed or sufficiently hampered all that competition. I don’t think you can make an honest argument in favor of Windows compared to any of its contemporaries in the 90s (e.g. Macintosh, OS/2, BeOS) that doesn’t boil down to “we’re used to it” or “we’re locked in”.