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Treczoks , in Canonical's Steam Snap is Causing Headaches for Valve

Snap is crap. It has been from the start, and it's only getting worse since then. It basically goes against anything thousands of developers worked for for decades: to save resources by making them shared and reusable.

dual_sport_dork , in Looking for a shop computer/tablet that probably doesn't exist
@dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world avatar

Why does it have to be ARM? You are going to have a much easier time installing whatever you want on an x86 ruggedized/waterproof tablet or Toughbook. ARM devices tend to run Android and have locked bootloaders and other challenges to installing the custom OS you want.

And does it have to be a tablet? Because if not, what you're looking for is an "industrial computer," and while these are shockingly expensive to buy new, you can often find outdated ones used on eBay and similar for not much money. They're designed for use in factories. These are generally sealed, dustproof, and waterproof.

There are two ways to go, you can get a sealed fanless PC box and attach your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Or you can get a panel mount machine which will obviously have to be mounted somewhere, but as a woodworker I'm sure you can find a way to build a stand or otherwise attach one to something. These usually have horrible rubber or membrane keyboards if they come with a keyboard at all but can be literally hosed down, vacuumed, knocked, baked, and otherwise abused. Most are touch screens, although they are usually single point resistive ones rather than multi-touch like a consumer tablet.

Fully sealed waterproof rubber membrane keyboards are not hard to find, but I will warn you that the typing experience on them is horrible.

yojimbo ,

Lenovo Ideapad Duo 3 - x86 tablet, 4core no hyperthread CPU and 8Gb ram, no fans, detachable bt keyboard, runs Fedora 39out of the box, everything works even autorotation. I love mine.

captain_aggravated OP ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

I might just go this way. I've heard pretty dire things about non-Thinkpad Lenovos regarding their screen hinges but that's not a factor with a detachable keyboard. I'd prefer ARM architecture but it seems that's just not a thing.

So it's "just" an x86 laptop? Normal PC BIOS? USB-C Charger?

yojimbo ,

Pretty much regular x86 laptop:

  • regular BIOS (press F2)
  • two usb-c ports, both will charge, both can be used to charge other device. I haven't done it extensively, but it will support additional QHD resolution dispaly if it mattered...
  • has a SIM card slot
  • I honestly don't know about the battery, I use it mostly around my home, I use it for watching movies and youtube around kitchen - It can do two movies definitely - 3-4 hours screaming at full blast - more - i'd have to try. But i recall that when I got it I was impressed by its battery life. I have the 10IGL5 version. The CPU has 6W TDP.
  • I don't expect that you would be using the included keyboard very much - way too flimsy for your application - but I can imagine suitable rugged bluetooth or wired keyboard / mouse combo would do ...
  • There are no "holes" on the device used for heat exchange and there is (AFAIK - haven't opened it) any fan. There are some holes for speaker on top left & right corner, but if those get cloged can't be critical. The whole chasis is sturdy you can press on it hard and it doesn't give, it can resist a bit of twisting but yeah - it's an Ideapad - not a Thinkpad w/ magnesium rollcage. It definitely doesn't mind being splashed with liquids around kitchen.

I am a hardcore thinkpad / debian / xfce aficionado, I wouldn't go and search for a device like this myself. A colleague of mine was trying to get rid of his, he bought it for his kid but running windows 10 the thing was bloody useless. I've googled somewhere that it does linux good and after limited success with Ubuntu i've tried Fedora. I recall trying a touch interface with linux long time ago (around 1st iPads) and it was a laughably misserable experience. This was amazing - IMO deffinitely better than what windows had to offer even though I understand the bar is low here. Better interface, at least as reliable (more). I've bought it off my colleague for cca 200 USD / 5000 CZK. I can imagine I would be confident enough bringing it with me on a holiday instead of full 14" thinkpad for mobility & battery life.

captain_aggravated OP ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

The vision I have for this device is to mainly use it as a viewer. I would do the vast majority of my drawing at my desktop PC with my fancy mechanical keyboard and trackball and space mouse etc. and then use the tablet to view and maybe make light revisions/edits out in the shop. I could see doing that 100% with the touch screen.

If I were doing something like measuring a thing to design for (say I was going to build a stand for a strangely shaped flower pot) I might use it to key the dimensions into FreeCAD (which has a built-in spreadsheet module) then go in the house to do the actual drafting on my main PC.

Would it be too much to ask you to try running FreeCAD on it? See how it performs?

yojimbo ,

Not at all 😉.

I've installed FlatHub originating FreeCAD 0.21.2 from "Software" app (very AppleStore like experience minus the signing in). It spinns up in cca 10 seconds. I've opened the "ArchDetail" demo example it offers, after discovering the "Gesture" option in the bottom right corner I can rotate and zoom the model freely using fingers with no impact on performance - no matter how quickly I "twich" with the model I can't get more than 30% CPU load spike, maybe 25% ( Fedora39 default Gnome3 windowing, CPU scaling on "power saver").

The CPU/performance IMO feels really good and not what I would expect from Intel CPUs. 1.1 GHz Base Freqency, 3.1Ghz Burst (single core I believe), some Intel graphics that can take Gnome 3 "zooming windows" with perfect fluency and all that in cca 5 Watts and no fan. The performance feels an order of magnitude better than what RPi3 would provide IMO.

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/4dc6ff31-7875-4bea-a3a1-8f97237f146f.webp

captain_aggravated OP ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

Thanks @yojimbo ! Absolutely perfect.

At first I didn't know whether to be more impressed with how light FreeCAD is or how far low-end CPUs have come. So then I looked up a comparison between that Pentium Silver N5030 and my 2014 era Dell's i7-4510U. And they're actually pretty close. That's six years of progress for you I guess.

Yeah I think I'll pick one up, several are available.

I've seen some folks have some issues with suspend and such running Ubuntu on the thing, all good in Fedora? I've been a Mint guy for 10 years now and I have no experience with Fedora.

yojimbo ,

Damned, now I am afraid that I've oversold the thing. I'd hate if it came in the mail and you ended up disappointed.

There is actually one significant glitch with the picture jerking up and down on the display.

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/64d2b95c-9709-45a8-80e7-85d2b733b280.webp

I believe it is a software glitch because I can fix it by maximizing a window on the screen or tilting window left / right. I never get to see it really, because right after login Mattermost client fills half of my screen.

Now i believe this has actually worsened since before. On previous versions (not sure 37/38) this has happened only seldomly, you had to play with the device a bit to replicate. But I believe it happened both in landscape and portrait mode.

On Fedora 39 it is absolutely unavoidable in landscape mode - it starts immediately sometimes "jumping up/down" angrily, but does not happen at all in portrait mode.

I've tried to replicate by booting Fedora 38 workstation live from flash drive - but I don't thing that was a good method looking into it - the "autorotate" didn't work whitch I am sure works after installation and I couldn't replicate the jerking at all and I am sure it was there already before. I haven't done full reinstall since I got it, it is possible it has already gone throught 37 upgrade 38 upgrade 39 and this is something I've picked up along the way but I'd be surprised. (Also don't use Unetbootin to create Fedora boot drive - I keep learning that over and over again.)

When you mention susped - I've never bloody noticed - it does not suspend automatically! My xfce systems have "presentation mode" always activated so I thought it is something i've switched on - but if so - I don't see obvious way to switch it off. I may have seen some error messages about suspend in the past? I press the power button shortly and it suspends light blinking, i press it again and it goes on again. This feels fixable but I don't mind atm. It suspends reliably when the keyboard folio closes over it too.

Finally when the keyboard is away on BT for long it runs out of juice. You have to reconnect it to charge up for few seconds and then disconnect/reconnect again to make it work.

The chasis feels sturdy enough to me, but it ain't as sturdy as a tablet (iPad / Boox ) with one piece metal backplate. Bottom half of the device back connecting kickstand is made of metal (I suspect that is where the heat exchange happens) and that is where a lot of it robustness comes from.

I am an admin by trade so I may not be objective. I have heard about but have never used Mint - I love my "xface". I do exist in deb based environment like you though and I do know default Ubuntu. I've played with Fedora before because curiosity and I think the switch is painless. Pretty much same systemd, same Gnome 3, just watch out dnf update upgrades packages unlike apt. Installing this thing I haven't done a single "smart" thing. Out of the box it was better user experience than installing windows and everything except that jerking whitch before I had to notice over time worked marvelously. I think I recall looking for activation of hw acceleration in firefox and finding out it was already on. I may have used nmcli to set my wireguard vpn profile but that may have been the total I've done in shell except using dnf for speed and using ssh / tmux.

I recall trying Ubuntu on it but while not useless it was far from Fedora. On Ubuntu I kept oscilating between x11 where everything worked but the touch interface was jerky and somewhat useless or wayland where touch was fine but not everything worked as I wanted. Under both scenarious the bluetooth keyboard didn't work over bluetooth - only connected, and the auto rotation was a no-go. (No "jerking" if I remember correctly!). Fedora provides the best Wayland experiece I've seen. IMO well worth learning to deal w/ dnf - even though it's only one device.

captain_aggravated OP ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

I'll try a few different distros on it, see what works best.

I've never actually used Wayland; between my Nvidia GPU in my desktop and preference for Cinnamon, I've only ever used x11.

Once the machine arrives I'll make another post about it, see what I land on.

casey ,
@casey@mander.xyz avatar

How did this turn out??

captain_aggravated OP ,
@captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works avatar

jury is still out.

WhatsHerBucket , in Is there a good screensaver program for linux?
@WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world avatar

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/download.html

Get the source, compile, profit

mox , in Is there a good screensaver program for linux?

I see some relatively recent Xscreensaver releases, so that forum post might be wrong.

In any case, Xscreensaver's animations (called "hacks") are the best such collection for Linux that I know of.

I think they're also supported by gnome-screensaver and mate-screensaver, in case those appeal to you. I haven't checked KDE for compatibility (but maybe I should, since I prefer KDE).

Edit: By the way, Kodi is a media player/manager, not a screensaver.

catloaf ,

Any program can be a screensaver if it changes the screen when the computer is idle.

entropicdrift , in Swap causing very slow boot (and systemd says the swap partition became active after 500k years)
@entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Just speculation on my end but it could be because you've got an encrypted home partition on a different partition of the same physical device. If you've got enough RAM and ZRAM for swap, why not try disabling the swap partition entirely?

gregorum ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Second this because:

  1. Ideally, a swap partition should always be on a secondary physical device than your home directory. Or anything else, if possible, as there will be high i/o during times of high memory activity and memory/swap maintenance.
  2. Your bottleneck is exacerbated more by the excessive overhead of on-the-fly decryption activity on the same physical device
  3. All of this can be avoided by eliminating swap, which isn’t necessary if you have sufficient RAM.
entropicdrift ,
@entropicdrift@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

Exactly. That's the same theoretical underpinning I had for my guess.

Thanks for laying it out so concisely.

ndr OP ,

Yeah, I might actually end up disabling swap in the end.
I wanted to update that apparently I “fixed” the problem (not sure if permanently) by turning off the pc, unplugging the PSU, and holding down the power button for 30 seconds. Normal reboots weren’t enough. I’ll take it for now.

Linkerbaan OP , in Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat
@Linkerbaan@lemmy.world avatar
Endmaker ,

What's wrong with using Ubuntu?

SpaceNoodle , in Creating a self-contained binary

Just statically link the libraries

profdc9 OP ,

The problem is that I don't have static versions of most of the libraries available.

SpaceNoodle ,

Not with that attitude.

d_k_bo , in Setup ideas with an old AV receiver

There are bluetooth to AV "adapters", basically a small device that can be controlled from your phone like a bluetooth speaker and can be connected to your audio system.

ericjmorey , in NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community
@ericjmorey@programming.dev avatar

Active discussion under way on !nix

victorz , in GNU nano 8.0 Released with New Options and Various Improvements

😄 Nice! I never use Nano, and thought it was a pretty cemented piece of software in the sense that nothing will ever change about it. Like vi or ed or something. But this is fun to see. 👍

refalo , in NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community

I do not like distributed, community-driven leadership. The more leadership is shared, the more arguments there are, and the less gets done.

I would rather have a strong dictatorship focused on technical merit, to be deposed in the future for another dictator, again, based on technical merit.

exu OP ,
@exu@feditown.com avatar

I think Debian might be a successful democracy in open source.

WeLoveCastingSpellz ,

go use pripertiary software then

refalo ,

I do, thanks

warmaster , in NixOS Foundation board: Giving power to the community

TLDR: Sorry, we love you, we are doing good things now.

Brujones , in First day using Linux Mint instead of Windows 11

I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but found your post instead. I just made the jump this week. I'm running a Legion 5 Pro with 2 SSD's, so I left Win11 on its drive and installed Mint on the other. They seem to be playing well together - no conflicts so far.

I'm pumped on how simple it actually was! I wish I'd have done it sooner...MS has been really irritating me lately so I finally went for it. Loving it so far!

catloaf , in Force DNF to automatically update from all repos without confirming each of them?

I've never had it do this. What exactly is the prompt?

Forester ,
@Forester@yiffit.net avatar

Have you tried running your command with the argument -y Or -Y

iturnedintoanewt OP ,
@iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee avatar

Damn...Since dnf seems to be refreshed recently now, it seems not wanting to ask again, even when I run dnf update --refresh. Now it refreshes all repos without concern. But I know after a few days, it will ask again about all those repos...And I'm not sure why it does that.

catloaf ,

You can do a dnf clean all, or see if it shows up in the logs from previous runs.

oktoberpaard ,

What you might be referring to is the question whether you’d like to import the GPG key for that repository. That happens when you first install a package from that repository. Could that be the one? I’m not aware of any other prompts.

iturnedintoanewt OP ,
@iturnedintoanewt@lemm.ee avatar

Yes, i feel it's that one. i think there are similar prompts on debian-based distros. Thing is, I'm being prompted repeatedly for all of them.

WeLoveCastingSpellz , in Force DNF to automatically update from all repos without confirming each of them?

I am on nobara, I never got that prompt

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