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friendica (DFRN) - Collegamento all'originale

On Unix and gaming and SIGINFO


I used #Linux a bit in the days when Slackware was recent, then a friend of mine suggested #FreeBSD (4.7 at the time) and it was love at first sight. After that day, I used FreeBSD on all the servers I am the admin of, and also on my office desktop PC. Still very happy about my choice.

At home, on the other hand, I always needed to keep Windows to cater my gaming habit (no, I don't like dual booting at all, as I often game for a short time while keeping tens of other programs open and ready to use afterwards). Resorting to CygWin to have Unix tools, which I later substituted with WSL 1 (WSL 2 doesn't properly support IPv6 and also it occupies Hyper-V and thus forces VirtualBox in "turtle mode", so it is a no go for me), happily enough for a couple of decades.

Enter Steam creating Proton (out of Wine), making gaming on Linux a common and accessible thing almost overnight (of course it was possible for a long time already, but mostly retro-gaming and via emulators).
So, as an experiment, in the desktop PC I keep at my significant other's home I decided to try and avoid Windows… I tried FreeBSD for a couple of days, but running Proton on my nVidia 1070 card was very difficult (if at all possilble, I wonder) so, contrary to my convictions, I tried Arch Linux (mainly because it is the one Steam Deck is based on, and the fact that AUR is very similar to the FreeBSD Ports I love and use daily) and… even if #ZFS (I filesystem I cannot do without, ever) is not officially supported and using it via DKMS is a bit of an hack, that only took me 2 hours to conquer and from there it was all much smooth and easier that I dared dream. In only a couple more hours I had everything working at first try, all "by default" and with no need for extra configuration, including things like: nVidia with 3D and CUDA support, USB webcam, Wi-Fi printer/scanner, Bluetooth USB dongle.

I am impressed. 2024 might really be the "Linux on desktop year" as some say, for sure it was for me (at least in this PC, I'm still not migrating the existing Windows setup for now — but someday I will).

Now, ironically, the thing I feel absence mostly is control-T support in the terminal, which on BSD sends a SIGINFO which makes most programs print a status report on stderr. It is something that on Linux wasn't included "mostly out of laziness" as reported by Theodore Ts'o in 2014, but is still missing.

I am of course using FreeBSD on all the servers and hoping that FreeBSD will catch up on ease of use on the desktop to change to it again, but right now… I like using Linux better than Windows+WSL. ;-)

Tech Cyborg reshared this.

in reply to Lapo Luchini

it's amazing that you "started" with modern Linux distros on Arch Linux. Did your experience with FreeBSD help in any way in that regard?


I had a wild weekend trip down the rabbit hole of #tlog Transparency Logs (a theme I also use at work, but the urge was too much to wait for an off-time at work), resulting in having installed a Trillian Tessera server, an OmniWitness server, and creating a PR for the latter to let them understand each other… which might be totally unuseful, as the main author of both projects seems to be the same, and he certainly doesn't need help from me to let those understand each other, but you know… I had to see it working now!
#tlog
in reply to Lapo Luchini

PS: well it was merged, and it was a bit of a learning experience in Go too. So yay!


Future of Mozilla (and) Firefox


Please someone in here re-assure me #Firefox has a future, as I'm really cozy with my setup and really wouldn't want to migrate again. 🤣
… but I am also more and more worried each and every time a new article about #Mozilla hits the news. 😞
(I look forward to #Servo too, but that's a partly different issue)

Matteꙮ Italia reshared this.



Just in case you need a NodeJS script to sort extended #ZSH history which doesn't break on multi-line entries:

#! /usr/bin/env node
const fs = require('fs');
const lines = fs.readFileSync(process.argv[2], 'utf8').split(/(?<=[^\\])\n/);
lines.sort((a, b) => a.split(/:/)[1] - b.split(/:/)[1]);
fs.writeFileSync(process.argv[2], lines.join('\n'), 'utf8');
#ZSH


A short history about keeping your #ssh daemons up-to-date by checking their banners, unexpectedly short debugs, happenstance, #hpn, and #RFC definitions.
#ssh #RFC #hpn


#golang Fediverse please help a Go-noob: is it possible to get the `git describe` string from a `go install github.com…@latest` type installation?
In order to use for `--version` output, that in various projects report no version when installed that way.

E.g.:

% go install github.com/walles/moar@latest
% moar --version
Should be set when building, please use build.sh to build
in reply to Filippo Valsorda

Nice! I'll try to create a PR for moar --version to use that.