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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • That may be, but buying a Mac Mini is like buying a device made from the ground up for Windows, where any other operating system has to reverse engineer 100% of the things to work well, or you have to emulate another OS on it (which comes with its own pitfalls), and it’s 200+€ more expensive than its nearest equivalent.

    Every single company I’ve worked at which introduced Apple Silicon to its developers has had headaches with compatibility. The worst I’ve seen was it taking a developer a month to get up and running because the specific component we used didn’t have a build for the specific ARM architecture. Multipass, UTM, podman, docker desktop, all didn’t work until colima and forcing the VM to emulate x86 + forcing docker in the VM to use the x86 image worked. There was a persistent problem with disk IO since it used 9p or whatever. Installing dependencies from scratch meant waiting 30 minutes on the M2.

    Why pay a premium for less compatibility and worse specs? Just get yourself something that works, which is cheaper, maybe even supports a company that invests in Linux and its ecosystem, and be able to ask an existing developer community instead of asking the subsection of linux users that run your specific app on however you’re running linux on Appe hardware.

    Anti Commercial-AI license


  • The problem with Mac hardware is that it’s ARM and vertically integrated with everything Apple. Not all hardware is supported by Linux because Apple won’t write any linux drivers and everything is reverse engineered. You’re better off buying something non-Apple which linux properly supports.

    If power consumption is an issue for you get, a R9 7950X consumes as much and at times less power than an M1/M2 (I think even M3). Check out GamerNexus’s charts. IINM AMD in W/Ghz performs better than Intel across the board.

    No idea where you are, but you can get a small factor PC from one of the vendors that preload linux, or configure a small form factor PC of your liking for cheap and put linux on it. You’ll get more out of your money for the same or better performance with about the same energy consumption (or a bit more).
    Somebody I know who happens to live in Hungary got himself this cheap beauty. They deliver all over Europe, but if you live elsewhere on this planet, there probably is something similar like this out there.

    Anti Commercial-AI license






  • Dino has an intentionally simplistic design, but it doesn’t look “dated” at all.

    That’s highly subjective, but I’ve shown some Gtk3 apps to people at work and the most expressive first reaction I got was “ew”. Dino and others getting that exact reaction wouldn’t be surprising.

    it just doesn’t have a major centralized provider of them that in exchange siphons up all your personal data like Element & Beeper does. But you can easily self-host the available bridges for XMPP

    And this is another reason why it isn’t prominent. “Grandma, all you need to do is host an XMPP server. It’s incredibly easy”.

    Anti Commercial-AI license







  • Why? What would be the problem?

    On linux, you’re probably using LUKS. That has a header with the keys at the beginning of each encrypted volume. If those keys (or key if you only have one) is corrupted and you don’t have a backup of that, you’re fucked.

    The next problem is that data recovery tools mostly don’t support decryption. They scan regions or the entire drive for recognizable things like partition headers, partition tables, file types, etc. if those are encrypted, well…

    If you are able to decrypt a partition, then it might work as it will show up like any other device in /dev/mapper/ and you could do recovery /dev/mapper/HDD. However, I have no idea what data corruption does to encryption algorithms. If one part of what is being decrypted is faulty, what does that do to the entire thing?
    This mostly comes from a lack of knowledge on my part. IIRC encryption depends on hashsums -> if you change what’s being decrypted/encrypted, the entire hashsum is incorrect and thus all the data shouldn’t be able to be decrypted. But I might be wrong - I’ll gladly be wrong on this.

    Anti Commercial-AI license


  • I want to, but haven’t found the time to make a strategy on how to move over the data. It would take a bunch of shuffling as all drives are in use. The next problem is decrypting at boot and securely storing the decryption key - if I choose to use a decryption key at all. Maybe it’ll be a usb key that I have to plug into the server when starting it, or I have to setup decryption of the system over SSH, but that means automated restarts are… difficult.

    Not sure how to tackle the problem yet…