I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

Make it two: emerge firefox (Gentoo users only)

Not yet. It can lead to that point, but this is just the kernel handling an “out of memory” situation. The kernel in the screenshot is configured to run its OOM reaper / OOM killer.

The OOM reaper checks all running processes and looks for the one that causes the least disruption when killed. It does that by calculating a score which is based on the amount of memory a process uses, how recently it was launched and so on. Ideally, a Linux desktop user would simply see their video game, browser or media player close.

This smart TV is in real trouble, though, it probably already killed its OSD, still didn’t even have enough memory to spawn a login shell and is now making short work of strange VLC instances that probably got left behind by a poorly written app store app :)

I think you’re mistaken there.

Wine is a vanilla Linux executable that runs as the user who launched it. The Windows program it runs thus also runs under that user. That’s possible because Wine doesn’t do anything system-wide (like intercepting calls or anything), it already gave the process its own version of i.e. LoadLibrary() (the Windows API function to load a DLL) and can happily remap any loaded DLL to Wine’s reimplementation of said DLL as needed.

Here are, for example, the processes created when I run Paint Shop Pro on my system (the leftmost column indicates the user each process is running as):

Also, some advice from WineHQ:

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

• Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: “Reds” welcome, “Blues” not, “Anti-Blue Propaganda” on public view screens)
• Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone’s lives completely
• Claims current capitalism is only bad because it’s “woke capitalism” which he claims the “ruling class” is pushing
• Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

What would be missing from VS Code or VS Codium that an IDE needs?

I’m an ex Visual Studio user, now writing all my code in VS Codium. I organize my project tree in VS Codium, I build from it and, like a Visual Studio user, I press F5 to debug, set breakpoints and inspect variables.

And that’s just the default install using the vanilla C/C++ extension it ships with, not some complicated setup that takes any time to get working.

I am a Gentoo user and most of that is already a reality on Gentoo systems. Get the stage3 tarball set up, slap your /etc/portage/make.conf and /var/lib/portage/world files in there and build.

Obviously, depending on whether it should be a blank system with the same apps installed or a clone of a previous system, configuration in /etc and one’s home directory may need to be copied, too.

I love that example. Microsoft’s Copilot (based on GTP-4) immediately doesn’t disappoint:

It’s annoying that for many things, like basic programming tasks, it manages to generate reasonable output that is good enough to goat people into trusting it, yet hallucinates very obviously wrong stuff or follows completely insane approaches on anything off the beaten path. Every other day, I have to spend an hour to justify to a coworker why I wrote code this way when the AI has given him another “great” suggestion, like opening a hidden window with an UI control to query a database instead of going through our ORM.

I assume that Twitter still has tons of managers and team leads that allowed this and have their own part of the responsibility. However, Musk is known to be a choleric with a mercurial temper, someone who makes grand public announcements and then pushes his companies to release stuff that isn’t nearly ready for production. Often it’s “do or get fired”.

So… an unshackled AI generating official posts, no human hired to curate the front page, headlines controlled through up-voting by trolls and foreign influence campaigns, all running unchecked in the name of “free speech” – that’s very much on brand for a Musk-run business, I’d say.

Vox is a reputable and very thorough news source, though, usually worth the read.

This two-pager, for example, highlights false Twitter journalists popping in Baltimore to politically spin the recent bridge collapse.

That might be it for me, too.

I run a distro with OpenRC instead of systemd, so I had to gain some understanding of udev permissions for USB devices and come up with my own udev rules for Steam because I couldn’t follow Valve’s setup guide.

Considering the teams tasked with containing political opinion manipulation campaigns were the first to go, I think that is exactly what the acquisition boils down to. A license to manipulate and meddle in public discussion for anyone rich or powerful enough (and of a political disposition agreeable to Musk’s increasingly GOP/Russia-indoctrinated mind).

It’s a “public town square” where the major approvingly smiles as groups of paid shills and remote-controlled opinion pushers insert themselves into discussions and roughen up people they notice going against the opinions they push.

I usually compile with --quiet-build=y, it doesn’t have to be configures and makefiles blasting into a shell window the whole time. On the rare occasions where a build fails there’s still the log in /var/tmp/portage/....

I have a Windows VM that runs Visual Studio and a small number of developer tools so I can test my code on Windows. And another windows VM that runs Daz3D, Clip Studio Paint and the Epic Launcher (to download stuff from the Unreal Engine Marketplace).

Sometimes I misuse either VM by creating a snapshot and installing Garmin Connect so I can update the music library on my watch :)

SuSE Linux (a German distribution), some niche, single CD distrubution, Debian for a while and, finally, since ~2006, Gentoo on my servers and since ~2015 Gentoo as my desktop.

Debian and its derivatives never felt right for me. I find too many drawbacks with binary packages (non-configurable build options, therefore dependencies that can’t be disabled, relying on humans to keep ABI compatiblity, trouble integrating my own packages or unstable versions) and I just don’t like systemd.

It’s weird, I’ve seen more than enough of those “Install Gentoo” memes, but I find it the most pleasant system to run in the long term.

I’m a little put off by the inconvenient command line and the mandatory bells and whistles (flathub is nice and all, but must it be baked into the main executable rather than having the package manager as an optional thing on top?).

So far, AppImage just looks superior to me. Works without installing a runtime into my system, no need to become root and integrate an app into a system-wide managed package repository, I can just run it.

For my taste, framing CCC as a “Washington/Brussels” project is a far too close to what Russian smearbots do (link everything unpopular back to their current hate objects, i.e. foster resentment against the EU, liberals, etc.).

It looks very much like the CCC is an international organization funded and controlled by the far right.

Their website states:

Which countries is CCC active in?

The CCC works currently with tens of thousands of consumers and partner organizations in North America, Europe, South America, South Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and many more.

Their colorful funding history:

Big Tobacco and right-wing US billionaires funding anti-regulation hardliners in the EU

Oh my, thank you very much for pointing that out!

I might have to give it another chance, then, perhaps I’ll shift my games partition back to NTFS once I can free up enough space.

I’m in the same boat. I’ve ended up using Paragon’s commercial ext4 drivers ($20) and while they absolutely work, they’re case sensitive and many Windows apps (especially Bethesda games) open their files with random upper/lowercase spellings that don’t match the files.

I’ve done this (shared 3 NTFS partition in a dual boot setup) from 2017 to the end of 2023 without issues.

The trick was to disable “fast startup” and hibernation. Otherwise Windows happily shuts down with the file systems in an inconsistent state. It’s just a question whether one can live with that in their Windows install.