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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • It seems I didn’t communicate my reason for having Instagram well enough. I don’t have access to the “feed” or following people (it won’t load unless I accept some terms, which I won’t). I have an account with the messaging function bridged to my Matrix account, which lets me receive messages and (when it works) reply to them to organize moving to a better platform.

    It’s the best solution I found if I want to keep contact with people I meet when going out or traveling. Phone numbers barely work (I still can’t call or message any German numbers, never found out why), and everyone I meet has Instagram. I just give them my username, they can add me easily, and then later over Instagram direct messages we figure out how to get them signed up for Matrix or Signal.


  • I’m personally trapped on Discord and Instagram.

    Discord is required by my workplace, so no way of getting rid of it until everyone decides to move to something better. I have some friends on it too, but most of them also made Matrix accounts when I explained I won’t be very reachable on Discord (I only open it when necessary; and it doesn’r run on my phone since they rewrote the app in JS). I have Instagram as a way to people I meet during travel or events to “add me” easily, and then we can figure out a good way to communicate afterward. I’m not too bothered by having it as I don’t use it daily or anything.


  • I work at a game studio that provides Linux-native builds of our game. I don’t speak for them but in my opinion this gives us an opportunity to take advantage of Linux features such as better input systems, performance, dev tooling, and in the future maybe APIs like Wayland. While the Windows build does work via Proton, it’s limited to what Microsoft allows us to do with the Windows API. We also have to use a non-standard-compliant compiler (msvc) and overall maintaining a Windows build damages code quality, performance, dev speed, and end user experience. Our Linux userbase is already small enough, imagine if all our players started using the Proton version. It’d become impossible to justify spending as much time on the Linux builds as we do, and they would probably stop being available. So, although I see WINE and Proton as a net positive, I fear it will slowly kill Linux development and eventually all games will be limited 100% by what MS decides, despite technically playing them on a free platform.




  • While degoogling is accessible right now, what worries me is that all of these projects are 100% dependent on Google’s whims because they use Android as the upstream. Same reason why I don’t use Chromium browsers: yes, they can patch over things, but they can’t fight the direction of the upstream project and they are powerless if the upstream stops publishing commits / source, like Google seems to be moving toward. Additionally, what “the big distros” aka stock ROMs do to prevent FOSS apps being installed means a much much smaller potential userbase for them. I develop an Android app, and (while I don’t have analytics) I don’t find it unlikely that at least half my users are on stock roms that would lose access to my app with this policy. It’s much less motivating to develop something when I know less people will benefit, and especially knowing I’m supporting only custom roms that are 100% beholden to Google. Degoogling is a good first step. I’ve been on Lineage for many years now. But I believe that the step that will truly make us independent is moving to Linux phones.








  • I had a ROG Zephyrus G14 “AMD Advantage” laptop with a AMD GPU in it that suffered from these “ring” crashes (according to dmesg). They came and went every few months sometimes with several weeks between crashes. When it would happen, audio kept playing but the display was frozen (can’t even go to tty) and I had to force poweroff. The crash could also happen on Windows (I installed it just to test repro) but Windows handled restarting the GPU so it wouldn’t freeze unlike Linux. The conclusion, at least in the community of people with that laptop, is that it was a hardware defect and the laptop needed to be RMA’d. ASUS wouldn’t do anything for mine though despite explaining the issue to them and showing it happening on Windows.

    Either way, I now own a Framework 16 with a 7000 series GPU and am very happy :)