BrianTheeBiscuiteer

At the risk of jinxing myself I just wanted to share how happy I am with my latest installation.

For over a year my Dell XPS has run Ubuntu. It's been, by far, the worst experience I've ever had with any computer and my very first computer had only 256 MB of RAM! Among the long list of issues I've had we're freezing, unresponsive keyboard and touchpad, glitchy video, multicolor flashing screens, piss poor battery life, piss poor Wi-Fi stability, failure to properly suspend or hibernate, and battery levels suddenly going from 40% to 5%. I figured either Dell put some kind of poison pill into there laptop so you'd spring for one of their Linux preinstalled laptops or I just got a lemon (I did have to get the mobo replaced within a month of buying it).

I've been in the process of getting all of my personal files off of it and getting ready to reinstall Windows and sell it, but I figured it was worth one last shot with a new installation. My desktop has been running Bazzite and I've been really happy with it so I thought I'd try another spin-off (Bluefin, because my laptop isn't well suited for gaming). Installation took a few tries but it's been about 72 hours and I haven't noticed any major issues! Battery life and Wi-Fi still seem a bit sad but I suppose that's the hardware.

So anyway, I just wanted to say that one Linux OS can be wildly different from another in user experience. If you have the patience, go ahead and try out something new if you're just not feeling the OS that you're on. It could make a world of difference!

Unless I'm using the wrong terms in my search it really seems like there's no tool for Linux that can tell me what processes used the most CPU (typically this has a high correlation with energy usage) in the last hour or 24 hours.

Basically I want something like the Android battery usage app but for Linux.

It seems kind of insane how hard it's been to find a good TTS app. I have TTS Util and that's worked sporadically but if I get it to start it will stop in the middle of reading. I can't even seem to find a basic app to let me paste in text and have it read.

Any recommendations? I'm mostly trying to have web articles read aloud and I don't care about robotic voices that much.

I thought one of the advantages of the Fediverse was to have one account but access to many services. Is this possible just not common? I already have a Lemmy account and Mastodon and I didn't want to start making more just to try out the other services.

OpenSecrets.org is there for your disposal. Use it! Think about businesses you use regularly, products you buy, artists you watch or support. Chances are likely they have a profile on OpenSecrets and you can see who they support. I for one am planning to move my brokerage out of Schwab who donated overwhelming to Republican campaigns and maybe move my insurance to Progressive (not just because of the name, their employees donate significantly more to Democrats).

The weight of billionaires is behind Trump but at the end of the day money will drive his decisions. Taking money away from his donors takes money away from him.

The vote of the electors is on Dec 17th. Their refusal to vote for Donald Trump, while potentially illegal, would actually be binding. The incoming Congress could still flip the result back, but that would also be illegal. The states choose electors and the electors choose the President. Full stop.

So how would we convince electors that are almost always party loyalists? Give them a preview of a Trump presidency. Deport immigrants NOW (or preferably they GTFO on their own), raise tariffs NOW, stop enforcing regulations NOW, start Trump policies right NOW! Make this the worst Thanksgiving in a decades and make Christmas look just as bleak. Once he's in the only way Trump will leave is voluntarily (ha!) or if one of his hirelings stands up to him.

I guess the other post was removed so I couldn't continue the convo there. A few people said Sunshine worked great for them with their Nvidia cards and I've actually lost sleep over my issues.

I'm running Bazzite on a fairly new custom build with a RTX 2060S. Someone else said they used a RTX 40 series GPU so maybe my hardware is just too old. Still everything worked great in Windows (same machine) including streaming. I'm willing to try another OS but I don't know if I can deal with another new GPU because it'd be my 3rd and I hate the hassle of selling stuff online.

A key thing I've seen is that the vainfo command reports no encoding capabilities at all. I've never seen any other reports online where someone showed an Nvidia card that could encode according to vainfo. I can absolutely encode using ffmpeg though which is why I'm even more frustrated.

Hoping this can be a way to make people think more critically about their choice for US President, maybe even bring opposing sides together to fix the problems we ALL face.

So if you support Trump try to list 3 things you dislike about him and 3 things you like about Harris. Please keep answers serious. Plenty of other places on Lemmy for you to post snappy putdowns.

My answers in a reply.

I had a vague recollection the other day of a comedy bit but not sure where I saw it.

The bit was basically two people sitting down at a table playing an overly simplified version of Chess or checkers. One person moved the piece and said "check" and the other moved it back and said "checkmate".

I want to say it was either Mork and Mindy, 3rd Rock from the Sun, or Red Dwarf.

I'm incredibly close to pulling the trigger to make WattOS my new distro for my netbook. I've been using antiX for a while and it's really great overall but the lack of systemd has worn me down I feel. A few programs I want to use just don't work properly without systemd and I don't have the patience to fill in the gaps myself.

My only real concern with WattOS is the fact it seems so mysterious. There's very little info on their site and NO LICENSE OR SOURCE CODE OR REPOSITORY! I highly doubt Russia or China are trying to weasel their way into old AF computers to create a botnet but I've never seen a Linux project be so secretive.

Anyone else have some light to shed on this project?

I usually avoid sentinels unless I need pugneum but this last encounter I had was ridiculous. I killed 3-4 of them after stealing some Gravitino balls then of course reinforcements were inbound. I get in my ship and fly off and 10 seconds later an interceptor wa on me. My ship didn't have a good combat loadout and I couldn't escape it so I landed. Of course more ground units came so I started running. 7 minutes later they're still chasing me and I don't even see them. I was even running underground for at least 30s. A message kept coming up saying to destroy them to get a chance to escape so I waited for them to catch up and destroyed them. More reinforcements arrived in like 15s and spawned right next to me. How the hell could I escape that? So I got back to my ship and started looking for shelter because another interceptor was on my tail. I found one quickly before taking any hits and got in. Well, no timer came up, they were still just there, albeit really far away. I pretty much had to stand outside, wait for them to come into visual range, then run back to the shelter and THEN the search timer started. Oh, and more than once my alert level went up without shooting anything, just running around and hiding. Is this how it normally works? Any better way to approach this so I don't waste 20 mins of game time?

Edit: more details about the chase

Update: Having a run-in with more sentinels it seems like behavior has changed (again, maybe bugged). Going underground they didn't follow or attack but also never dispersed. Running into a building without a door (Abandoned Building) doesn't disperse them but they don't attack. I was able to shake them once by transitioning from ship to on-foot (a timer starts every time you transition it seems) then jumping into water before the sentinels arrived. I'm sure it also works to pop out of a hole and defeat every wave but I'm not very into that kind of thing.

Couldn't find the project in my browser history or Lemmy saves. I'm pretty sure it was Lemmy though that led me to find a GitHub project similar to OSTree. It sounded like it was maintained by one person and it hasn't been updated in a long time because the author thought it was "done" and they used it frequently.

It was a tool that let them basically create images that could be booted from and it was easy to layer software on top of a base image and I think there were config files similar to Containerfiles but didn't look the same. Don't think it be was "goldboot" either but that might be a little closer to what the project does. I don't think it was something Fedora specific either like bootc.

Update: Found it! It was in the history of a laptop I rarely use (of course). The project is https://github.com/godarch/darch and it does appear to be those things I said: layered, docker-like, bare metal, and OS agnostic.