[X] My Assistant

Happy new year to all. Hope that 2023 is very prosperous.

The vendor AMD used for the vapor chambers for their newest cards screwed up or the vapor chamber was insufficient for their design.

Many users are getting the dryout effect, where the vapor chamber stops working

Meanwhile here I am with nothing in my computer running hotter than 35°C at idle and 55°C at full load.

Happy new year to all. Hope that 2023 is very prosperous.

Not sure how that's tech related, but okay.

Meanwhile here I am with nothing in my computer running hotter than 35°C at idle and 55°C at full load.

My main PC runs pretty cool. My laptop runs hot as heck though. Its super annoying as the bios is ultra locked down, so I can't do anything except maybe try to tweak throttle stop.

The solution is just lowering the turbo down a step but it can't be done with my bios. There was a guy that did unlocked bios but now he partners with specific vendors.

Some Russian found a way to mod a regular bios but it could brick the laptop.

Another year.
Time goes by.

It's mostly that you are used to windows already, and linux/unix does things very differently. You are judging difficulty by the metric of 'similarity to windows.'

Depending on what you want to do it could be easier or harder. If you can write scripts, definitely easier. If you want to run <windows program> rather than find an equivalent, then it'd be harder.

If you have specific questions about things you're trying to do, and you can give me some details, then maybe I could help point you in the right direction. I vaguely remember my first encounter with that learning curve coming from a DOS/Windows background.

answer and thought =)

yeah you are right, maybe i need to think different... i will try again using linux mint, ppl say is the best for windows users, maybe is the right choice for me too.

Linux Mint isn't really 'better for windows users' in my experience; it's just better in general than regular Ubuntu (assuming that's what you were using before). And thus better for everyone.

It still is Linux under everything else, so you are going to have to learn a little about Linux/Unix if you want to get into the nitty-gritty of things.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 4 2023, 03:59

I think it's more that Cinnamon and their default Mate config has more UI similarities to Windows than most other DEs/vanilla installs.

nothing

I think it's more that Cinnamon and their default Mate config has more UI similarities to Windows than most other DEs/vanilla installs.

It's true, same for GNOME 2 / MATE. But if you ever want to dig deeper at all, you can't avoid the differences.

• Executable bits.
• Things that mysteriously don't fucking work if you're using Wayland (I don't know if Mint does this stupidity yet... I believe Ubuntu does?).
• Config files in /etc/ instead of the registry.
• More reliance on environment variables to change behaviour.
• A far better (and very different) scripting environment.
• Better disk management, too (cat /dev/sda > /path/to/disk/backup.img... no extra software required)
• Different ways to go about adjusting hardware settings (not "download this vendor specific binary," more often than not it's "write to this value in sysfs").
• Even if using Windows software, you have WINEPREFIX'es and DLL overrides (okay, DLL overriding pretty much exists in Windows, too, but it's still different here).
• Newline differences (so if running a .bat script in Wine, be sure it uses CRLF), package repositories that aren't retarded and super locked down (in most 'distros' there are package managers, at least).
• File path names are different, the way you access partitions is different (no drive letters, mount points instead), different ways to diagnose problems (booting with init=/bin/sh or using nomodeset, for instance).
• Actually being able to tell what's going wrong most of the time by reading log files instead of just blindly reinstalling.
• Unicode in UTF-8 (vs. UTF-16 little-endian).
• More kinds of allowable characters in file names.
• Multiple scheduling algorithms to choose from for CPU and I/O
• DIfferent ways to do trivial things like configure mouse speed/mouse acceleration (even beyond what's in the UI in some desktop managers, there are things like xorg-xinput-evdev if you don't feel that libinput is giving you enough customizability).
• Most hardware has built-in drivers (I guess that's a little better in windows these days, but not if the hardware is more than a few years old). I can use USB video capture cards in Linux that haven't had Windows drivers in eight years or more.
• Almost inevitably, you'll have to compile something some day (or want to run something that requires compiling). That's a rite of passage IMO.
• Wireless card firmware annoyances (oftentimes).
• Toolkit quirks, different ways to set up input method editors (IME's, like for typing in 日本語), often with different shortcuts.
• Generally, a lot of the configurability/flexibility is best exposed via a command line.
• Most software that people say to use in windows isn't going to be the same on Unix/Linux, and there's usually a better alternative that may behave differently than you're used to.
• Dot files being 'hidden' on Unix/Linux.
• Better (IMO) keybinding (caps lock -> ctrl for instance is IMO easier than in windows).
• The goddamn compose key.
• To me, most desktop environments/window managers, paired with a shell and maybe something like xdotool, form a better basis for clear and legible scripts than AutoHotKey does.
• In most desktop environments, there's less software to install to support whatever kind of image, video, etc. you want to access/use.
• More codecs built into most normie distros like Mint (technically it's just libavcodec plus some wrapper or another, usually).
• On my laptop, at least, the intel graphics drivers support a higher OpenGL version in Linux than in Windows.
• The Alsa/OSS/Jack/Pipewire/OSS clusterfuck for sound. I have mine all just the way I like it now, but it took me a solid amount of time using linux distros before I really got the hang of ripping Pulseaudio out, configuring alsamixer, and compiling Firefox - because Mozilla in its infinite wisdom decided we can't have nice things like 'functioning sound' in Linux, and FF doesn't even tell you that the reason you have no sound is because you are smart enough not to use Pulseaudio if you launch it. Mint comes with Pulseaudio of course, as does Ubuntu, but you will eventually find a program that Pulse doesn't play nice with and you'll learn to hate it... especially if you do anything at all with MIDI at any point ever, or ever want to play vanilla Quake with sound.
• Case-sensitive file names.
• File extensions basically not mattering at all for almost anything.
• Usually better performance.
• Less spyware (hopefully... not my fault if you install cancer like Discord or MS Teams, though).
• NVidia suckage.
• Weird little hardware gotchas: there's a bug (actually an implementation flaw) in my Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS which means that anyone with permission to load soundfonts can make my system hang by simply loading a font larger than about 16 megabytes into it (IIRC). That's apparently because the PCI card actually doesn't connect to the topmost (32nd) address pin, since the Windows kernel apparently never tries to do anything with drivers above that point. To be fair, this card is now nearing twenty-one years old and uses a conventional PCI slot, and timidity is a better software midi synth anyway, but there are still little things like that that might get you if you're unlucky. There are kernel patches you can make to work around this, but they're ugly hacks with negative consequences for some other use cases.

Still, even if you just use the point-n'-drool interface, you still might have to deal with executable bits for Windows programs (to launch them using wine-binfmt on a mouse click), line endings (possibly), sound (probably, eventually), and the file name/path differences (almost definitely).

There's also USB permissions for things like udev rules (if you want to connect, say, a TI calculator, or some other esoteric piece of hardware... maybe even an Arduino).

And if you're a normie who uses Bluetooth, have fun. I guess it's better than it used to be, but I still had to recompile Bluez to get Wiimote support.

Thought of all of that in around ten to twenty minutes. Some points might be more noob applicable than others, but things like executable bits and configuring Wine bit me a lot when I was starting out a little over a decade ago. I also ran into software I wanted to run that I had to compile pretty quickly, although I suppose things like RetroArch existing now ostensibly makes it a little easier to avoid having to compile a bunch of emulators these days.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 4 2023, 06:43

Switched VPN providers since my subscription for my last one ran out and I was eager to be rid of it.

This new one acknowledges that there exist individuals who might prefer using a generic command line utility like 'openvpn' or 'wireguard' instead of their service's special secret sauce graphical Electron-based program. Which is a marked improvement over the last one.

For the last one, I had to fight them every step of the way to get a comprehensive set of openvpn config files.

Scraping the site for configs one by one for each server in each country...
Looking up those servers in an undocumented JSON file that their software looks for to get more meaningful names for the files...
Generating javascript code using a shell script to parse that JSON that ran in the duktape interpreter...
Adding and removing some config options using sed in a shell script...
etc., etc..

So glad that's behind me for now. This one is one that offers a zip file with all the vpn configs. Made sure it was before buying this time around since I discovered i apparently couldn't take it for granted.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 6 2023, 09:03

For the last one, I had to fight them every step of the way to get a comprehensive set of openvpn config files.

Sounds like a pain in the ass. I've used a couple of VPN providers and they've all not only had config files readily available, but also had guides for setting up the tunnels outside of their apps should someone be interested but not know how beforehand.

Work.

Sounds like a pain in the ass. I've used a couple of VPN providers and they've all not only had config files readily available, but also had guides for setting up the tunnels outside of their apps should someone be interested but not know how beforehand.

It was a massive pain. The provider I had come from before I used them had provided the zip files, so I just assumed that pretty much any VPN provider would.

This one did ostensibly support using openvpn/wireguard directly for the router usecase, but support's script seemed to ignore the possibility that someone was actually using that.

But the more I dug into this one the more I realized it was web 3.0 hipster garbage for normies (was very cheap though, like under $50 a year, and the speeds were decent).

And then they hiked the annual price up by $20 since last year, so it was definitely time to switch.

So far my current provider seems much better in basically every respect. Not messed with port forwarding too much on this one yet, though.

Oh yeah there was another hilarious™ thing that my previous provider did for the first three weeks after I'd purchased it where they'd drop any connection that went longer than 90 seconds (they were dropping keep-alives). I complained on day two and it took them three weeks for someone to actually answer my questions and tell me what was going wrong.

I'd previously been given the run-around and being told "try to do (X) in our App™ that you don't use/send us this log file that our App™ creates"

If someone calls their program an "App," I instantly know I don't want to use it and that it probably uses Electron.

No, motherfucker, I'm using OpenVPN (or wireguard; they both did it) on the command line (something that they ostensibly supported, since it's basically the only way to run it on a router); here's the logs, here's the invocation, here's the config file with sensitive info scrubbed. Here's a wireshark log of what happens.

I was met with radio silence until I started making a ton of noise about it on Social Media™. The whole experience stank of silicon valley startups and customers in Palo Alto coffee shops with their heads so far up their asses that they could drink their own stomach acid.

They said they'd do an "investigation" into how it had stayed broken for over two months (other people had talked about it online for a month or so in various places before I started complaining; it turned out it had to do with a cryptically named option that basically didn't do what it said it did but was checked by default and was called "enable streaming" or something like that), but of course I never heard anything else come of it. Serves me right for not doing research beyond making sure they supported port forwarding. The price was good, the speed was okay, but I am happy to pay more to avoid that cancer again. Their official stance on providing an archive of all config files was that "no one should need to have that." Because they know better than you do.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jan 7 2023, 08:34

Their official stance on providing an archive of all config files was that "no one should need to have that." Because they know better than you do.

I hate everything that tech culture has become.

The price was good, the speed was okay, but I am happy to pay more to avoid that cancer again.

I had that problem in the distant past where they were effectively gimping their cheaper offerings with bad configs or poor support.

I had that problem in the distant past where they were effectively gimping their cheaper offerings with bad configs or poor support.

I'm paying a different company more.

Not them. I'd not pay them more.

RIP Limited Run Games.

I am out of the loop.

What is LRG, what happened, and why should I care?

The new kind of mosquito killer plugged on power outlet smell more toxic to humans than the previous one to me, and possibly less toxic to mosquitoes (IMG:[invalid] style_emoticons/default/dry.gif)

I am out of the loop.

What is LRG, what happened, and why should I care?

They used to be a good publisher that published limited releases of special editions or older console game re-releases or new releases of retro console games.

Though they started getting political on twitter as they started running into problems with production quality and meeting delivery dates.

I think they still have one game I ordered more than a year ago yet to be delivered. I got the digital version and forgot.