Awesome. Thanks so much for the tips! ❤️

That’s a really nice alternative interface for desktop! I wonder if other instances implement it other than lemmy.world? It’s cool that that that instance admin has, though. It looks superb.

Its default purple theme matches my overall browser theme completely by accident, lol.

I moved to KBin for a time when Lemmy had various issues such as auto-updating timelines that were hard to deal with and hugely broken algorithms for “Hot” posts, etc.

Somewhere around release 0.18.3 a lot of these issues were fixed and I ditched KBin. I figured in the long term, it was likely that Lemmy would have more development attention. It also used more straightforward terms like “communities” instead what KBin terms them (“magazines”), which just seemed to be unnecessary and confusing terminology for the sake of being different rather than because it made sense.

The KBin interface looks polished, but it hides a lot of fundamental issues with the software under the hood. I hope the project receives more dev attention and thrives in the long-term, however. It’s good for the Fediverse that choices exist.

This thread is about KeePass and my comments relate to that. If you pull KeePass2 from the repos in Debian, for example, it’s going to pull the Mono runtime to execute it as well because it’s been built, like most C# apps, for JIT compilation. I doubt it’s even possible to compile KeePass2 using AOT compilation.

This is what the C# KeePass application looks like using the Mono runtime in Debian:

This is KeePassXC:

You can see which has better native integration into the desktop out of the box.

Microsoft doesn’t own the standard. It’s actually an open standard maintained and contributed to by a whole host of technology companies. This is contrary to the old BIOS method which was originally proprietary to IBM.

The fact they have such wide authority in signing is a product of how wide-reaching their market share it. They essentially mandate that OEMs include their signing keys in the signature database if their systems are to ship with Windows, thus making them a de facto authority on what gets signed. This was a point that made a lot of people in the FOSS community uncomfortable and still does to this day, although if one wants they can actually take full control of the Secure Boot process by replacing the Platform Key (PK) with their own. This gives ultimate control to the owner of the machine as they can then replace the Key Exchange Keys to allow them to replace Microsoft’s keys within the signature database (db). This completely removes reliance on any third party signatures and enables ditching the first-stage Shim bootloader from the boot flow entirely, since the owner could just sign whichever bootloader they wanted to use directly with their own key in the database. As it would require manually signing everything from the bootloader to the kernel and its modules though, including re-signing them after updates, this is definitely a much more involved way of doing things although arguably even more secure as the system would be entirely locked down to only binaries signed by its owner at that point.

As to why they don’t sign GRUB, it’s about licensing. Since GRUB is GPLv3, there are provisions in the license that Microsoft interprets as potentially mandating them to disclose their private key to facilitate users installing modified versions of it. Ubuntu came to the same conclusion when contemplating how to deal with Secure Boot back in the day, where they wanted to provide an alternative to the Microsoft keys by having Canonical’s keys also shipped with firmware, although proliferation of their keys is a lot less widespread and in some peoples’ eyes not all that much different than just using VeriSign’s service for the Microsoft keys anyway.

Booting the kernel directly via EFIStub from the firmware is certainly an interesting idea, although it sounds like a potential pain to manage updates. Will definitely take a look down that rabbit hole though. =)

Good question! There’s a few reasons, I guess:

• There’s a large element of “because I can” to this, just to explore how stupid the scope of systemd is as a suite.
• There’s a small practical element. GRUB itself is quite a hefty tool to accommodate all kinds of boot setups, and it works well. If you have a simple boot setup though you could probably shave a couple of seconds off of the boot time just by using the simplified sd-boot and loading the kernel via its EFIStub.
• A learning exercise in self-signing EFI binaries, enrolling a MOK (if I use Shim), and setting up scripts to handle updates.

All boils down to my enjoyment of doing weird nerdy things though, ultimately. =)

I prefer the KeePassXC fork as it’s written in C++ and not C# so it has better native integration with OSes like Linux, but yeah these are really good solutions with no subscription requirements or necessity to upload to any cloud service.

Turned out, this model was hard coded to only allow a boot entry named “Windows Boot Manager” to be loaded by default.

Holy moly that’s absolutely shocking. Yeah I didn’t quite realize how scuffed various UEFI implementations were until I encountered this issue and started looking around. Wild.

The lack of proper search has been a defining barrier between Mastodon and similar services. I’m glad it has finally been added. A great improvement alone.

Coincidentally, the last time I opened WordPad was probably 28 years ago.

I am absolutely not, but this may have changed as I don’t have access to real-time information as my knowledge was last updated in September 2021.

Eh, I used to think this way until I actually tried GNOME for a bit. I’ve grown quite fond of its workflow. There’s definitely extensions that I feel I need for it to be fully usable from my perspective, but in some ways I see it as a positive to start out with a good foundation and then allow users to extend the functionality they feel they need onto that base. Not every user is going to want the same thing, so keeping the core minimalist makes sense.

If I wanted something like Windows, I’d use KDE. If I really wanted a GNOME Windows-like experience similar to the old GNOME2 behavior I’d use something like MATE or Cinnamon. I guess my point is that there’s plenty of DEs out there that are essentially copies of the same workflow. I respect the desire to innovate in GNOME3.

Coconut water. So refreshing.

I still use Slackware and it’s a great distro. I very much enjoy its batteries-included approach (a full install comes with pretty much everything pre-installed) and I enjoy its simplicity and ease of configuration and use. There’s a learning curve to get there, but once you understand how everything works it’s a distro that gets completely out of your way. The bonus is that if you understand Slackware, generally, your knowledge of GNU/Linux broadly will mean you’re never lost on any other distro either. Most of my frustrations with other distros actually stem from them patching something/doing something weird with config defaults, whereas Slackware ships stuff as it is from vendors with vendor defaults which I find a lot more palatable and predictable.

Philosophically, I like how Slackware is independent and beholden to no corporate entity. Controversies that have hit other distros in the past as a result of that just aren’t a thing with Slackware.

Slackware is a very rewarding distro to use even in 2023. It’s not for everyone, but I imagine there’s a fair amount of people like me who’ve probably been using it for ages and have had absolutely no reason to ever consider using anything else. Once you’ve got everything you want and configured stuff to your liking, it’ll just work forever fantastically.

The Lemmy experience has improved immeasurably since the pre-population-boom days, where I saw Kbin as a slightly more attractive option as the UI was more polished at the time. After Lemmy 0.18.2 hit and fixed the issues with the annoying auto-updating timelines, improved the sorting algorithms, and improved database performance I’ve used it exclusively.

The Lemmy software seems to have more people working on the code and things are being addressed and improved rapidly. This extends to more 3rd party app support too. It feels like the better supported platform and that seems like it’ll be the case moving into the future as well.

As a personal note I also don’t like some of the terminology used on the Kbin platform. “Magazine” is a confusing term that seems to have been chosen purely to be different. Sometimes it’s just best to stick to common terms to reduce the complexity and learning curve of a platform.

It’s very trivial to sideload EPUBs on a Kobo using Calibre. I think it is similarly easy on a Kindle. You’re not really locked into any ecosystem you don’t want to be with either, tbh.

I used to use Moon+ Reader on Android before I switched to a dedicated e-ink book reader in the Kobo Clara HD.

If you’re going to be doing anything more than very casual reading, do yourself a favor and get an e-ink reader like a Kobo or a Kindle or something. You really won’t regret it; they’re amazing.

Debian. I always come back to Debian.

It’s just a rock solid, multipurpose distro that has everything. If you have an issue with some older software versions, you can just track testing or sid and treat it as rolling release or use flatpaks for GUI apps.

To me, Debian is almost perfect.

The one built into the Vivaldi web browser.