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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.mlTimeshift
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    2 days ago

    Looking at your error it’s because Rsync is erroring.

    I’d starr by testing Rsync with an individual text file saving to /dev/dm-0 and see what error is returned.

    Timeshift is good but it basically is just a tool to use Rsync to save a copy of your system folders (or other folders if you wish).

    Rsync needs to be able to read the source and write to the destination, so I’d start with testing that Rsync is able to do that.

    Given you’re using an encrypted partition it’s possible you’re trying to read/write to the wrong locations. You’ve provided device UUIDs but you’d probably actually need to be backing up the mounted decrypted locations? I.e. the root file system / will actually be a mounted location in your Linux set up, probably under /run, with symlinka pointing to it for all the different system folder. Similar for /home/ if you want to back up personal files.

    The device UUID would point to the filesystem containing the encrypted file (managed by LUKS) which will have very limited read/write permissions, rather than directly to the decryoted contents / or /home partitions as you’d expect in a normal system. In particular if /dev/dm-0 (looks to be an nvme drive) is an encrypted destination then really you also want to be pointing directly to it’s decrypted mounted location to write your files into, not the whole device.

    Edit: think of it like this, you don’t want to back up the encrypted container with Timeshift, you want to back up the decryoted contents (your filesystem) into amother location in your filesystem (encrypted or decrypted). If the destination is also an encrypted location you need to back up into its file system, not the device where the encrypted file sits. So use more specific filesystem paths not UUIDs. That would be something like /mnt/folder or /run/folder not /dev/anything as that’s hardware location, and not directly mounted in an encrypted filesystem unlike how it can be in a non-encryoted system.


  • Any points and click adventure game, there are loads including old classics and modern good games.

    Monkey Island remasters are fun and can be played with mouse. Broken Sword games are also good.

    Rusty Lake games are great if you prefer more puzzle games than narrative ones. Still has a great somewhat surreal plot just not like a point and click narrative game.

    Also If you havent played dwarf fortress now is the time to learn, the siege update came out this week. Mouse or keyboard, or both, but definitely can be done one handed.

    Vampire Survivor that others have suggested is a good shout, one hand on the keyboard is enough and its very addictive.


  • 100% CPU use doesnt make sense. RAM would be the main constraint not the CPU. Worth looking into - maybe a bug or broken piece of software.

    Also the DE may he more the issue than the distro itself. You could install an even more lightweight desktop environment like Open box. Also worth checking whether youre using x11 or Wayland. Its easy to imagine Wayland has not been optimised or extensively tested on something like your device, and could. Easily be a random bug if the DE is pushing your CPU to 100%

    There are super lightweight distros like Puppy linux.


  • Also separate from my long response, thanks for sharing that link. Very interesting read and the GNOME window decoration issue is rediculous.

    For me, I’m sorry to say, GNOME is the epitome of asshole design. This one of many examples of its rigid design philosophy having negative consequences for users and devs. And devs are protecting GNOME from its own users bad experiences because the user blames the game for not conforming, not the DE for being rediculous.


  • Worth saying the 3% market share is very new, and previously the share has been way way below this. At 3% that is millions of users but even that is hard to justify a linux release; many games dont even get MacOS versions even now and it has higher desktop share.

    The other problem for linux is version control - libraries are different across distros of different ages, and also constantly update. If you build software on a dependency and it changes in a few years, your game may break. As bad as windows is, when games are distributed a lot of the dependencies are distributed with the game as DLLs and installers for Microsoft tools. But for linux you previously could not guarentee the same version of the same dependency will be available on two distros still actively supported.

    It can be surprisingly hard to get old Linux software to run on new Linux distros. People are not generally aware of this as generally its old windows and dos games that people try to get working (so wine or dosbox are used), not old Linux software like Open Office from 2005 or an old version of Firefox. Most linux software continually evolves or its niche and just stops working (unless youre willing to go back and compile from source, and that can get nightmarish if it doesnt compile)

    Proton is part of the solution but developing “for” proton is not efficient long term. It is great for enabling windows games to work on linux, but linux native games would be more optimal. We’re just lucky we’re now in a time where there is a lot of CPU and GPU resource available to support the overhead and windows is also so bloated making linux + proton comparatively better.

    I suspect Flatpak may be another part of the solution - Flatpak can essentially be a way of ensuring a game can have a fixed set of dependencies which install on any Linux and should just work. Its not that far off the windows model of packaging DLLs, but is much cleaner and contained.

    Nix is another potential approach to this.

    But developing for Linux wouldn’t take off until the market share is substantially higher. The SteamDeck and tge rumours Steam console may help with that, but for now I think devs relying on Proton makes sense.


  • It had to happen eventually. Seems reasonable time to make the moce. It’ll be beneficial for all Linux users, and probably a huge relief for Gnome devs to be be able to focus purely on wayland.

    It just will suck a bit for those on rolling release distros who still experience major issues with Wayland, particularly when its not Gnome or Wayland projects that need to make a fox - looking at you Nvidia.

    I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11. I’m one of the 30% of KDE users still using X11 - for me it was Nvidia issues, and I do remain anxious about being reliant on drivers from a notoriously bad manufacturer. Having said the drivers have improved massively over the past 18-24 months for me at least, and maybe everyone moving over to Wayland is what’s needed to force Nvidia to act.


  • In terms of KDE dependencies, you’re talking basically about QT. The amount of packages you download shouldnt be too much and likely used for other QT programs which are common.

    However there is also GSconnect which is a Gnome extension and uses the KDE connect protocol.

    I would say that your concerns regarding the KDE Connect dependencies should be balanced against the good Android and iOS support, and the wide use of KDE connect means it is well maintained, supported and responsive to security updates. These considerations may outweigh the installation of packages that you otherwise won’t be using? It may be better to go mainstream and accept the dependencies than hunt down a lesser supported alternative and deal woth the associated shortcomings.


  • Interesting question, I’d imagine that one major limit would be the number of cores your CPU has available. Once you got to more VMs than cores, I’d guess things would quickly grind to a halt?

    But I wonder if you could even anywhere near to that point as on searching only L2 VM is mentioned on various sites and that is with warnings of severe performance limitations and for development testing only. While L3 might work the problems may get too bad you can’t practically go beyond that level?


  • And Women wouldn’t trust a man has taken it because, ultimately, they’re the ones who become pregnant not men.

    While companies have looked into male drug-based contraceptives, ultimately even if it were 100% effective, it would never beat female drug-based contraceptives. It’d have a market sure - but it wouldn’t stop women taking birth-control because it’d remain the only way for them to be sure.


  • The key is getting out at the right time, and that is weighed massively against small investors. The big investors and institions control the market and can move quickly while small investors cannot.

    Tesla is not doing well - look at its falling sales. It’s a risky stock to hold. The AI companies are also highly risky stocks to hold.

    That doesn’t mean don’t hold them - all anyone is saying really is that these are high risk investments, and at some point they are going to probably crash because it’s a bubble.

    That doesn’t necessarily mean “don’t invest”. It does certainly mean be prepared to get out fast and also only use money you can afford to lose when investing with such high risk stocks.


  • Xwayland is an X11 server that runs under Wayland. It acts as a compatibility layer so that programs that are native X11 programs that don’t support Wayland can still be run. The system largely determines when to use Xwayland; it’s not generally something the user does.

    Wine, and it’s derivative for gaming Proton are normally run as X11 applications. There is a Wayland driver for wine - it’s not perfect, and not widely used by default yet, but it does generally work. Still, at the moment usually wine and Proton are by default running with X11 (and so xwayland) even on Wayland.

    When there are issues under Wayland it’s generally to do with Nvidia drivers rather than xwayland or x11. But the wine Wayland.drv can still give a performance boost. It can also causes its own issues so is best used on a case by case basis.

    Some people do set wine or proton to use the Wayland drivers when using Wayland; for example with Steam and Proton-GE just add PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 into the games launch options and it’ll run directly under Wayland.

    It may be a way for OP to switch to Wayland and see if they can get good gaming performance in wine/Proton. However it’s more likely the Nvidia drivers are the cause of the performance issues under Wayland.


  • So to be clear Wayland + Pantheon resolves the issue but with a performance hit in games? X11 + Pantheon has the issue but with otherwise good performance in games?

    Presumably all the system packages and software is up to date. If not then do a update.

    Starting with the basics, what kind of mouse and keyboard do you have? If they are wireless, how are they connecting to your device? Note some manufacturers don’t provide drivers for Linux so it’s worth seeing if your brand and device is supported (E.g. Logitech and it’s wireless dongle; you need Solaar to get basic support and switching to Bluetooth may be best if available).

    If they are wired, have you tried plugging the keyboard and mouse into different ports on your PC? If they’re on the same USB Bus that could be contributing to the problem. Although that really shouldn’t be an issue at all with modern devicss, it might be enough to get round whatever the issue is if one of your devices is conflicting.

    Presumably if there is a power profile in Pantheon, and if so you’ve set it to performance, not something like balanced? This ensures that everything is running at full capacity. There are rare polling issues with wine and some USB devices, and one solution is ensuring the CPU is in performance rather balanced power settings to prevent a bottleneck.

    If the issue is still persisting then I would next install a different Desktop Environment to see if the issue persists. This may help check if it’s an issue with Pantheon itself. Install a lightweight desktop environment such as XFCE. Try out XFCE in both X11 and Wayland, and see if the problem persists. If it doesn’t then submit a bug report to the Pantheon makers and consider switching to another DE (such as KDE or Gnome). If not then it at least helps seemingly exclude pantheon as the cause. It can be messy installing another DE and difficult to remove cleanly so one method is create a backup of your system using Timeshift, and then restore it after trying XFCE to bring your system back to its original state.

    If the issue persists you could also try switching to an older version of the Nvidia drivers or the open Noevaeu drivers. If it resolves it that helps narrow the problem although if it doesn’t resolve it you still can’t entirely exclude the graphics drivers as the cause.

    I think assuming all the basics make no difference, the most telling test will be if switching from Pantheon to another DE helps - in X11 and Wayland. Pantheon is relatively niche and DEs are also important factors in themselves when it comes to performance and also bugs. If it persists beyond a DE test, then I’d be most suspicious it’s a driver issue either with the devices themselves or the graphics drivers.

    Not much more I can think of beyond that at the moment sorry.


  • It’s about short term vs long term costs, and AWS has priced itself to make it cheaper short term but a bit more expensive long term.

    Companies are more focused on the short term - even if something like AWS is more expensive long term, if it saves money in the short term that money can be used for something else.

    Also many companies don’t have the money upfront to build out their own infrastructure quickly in the short term, but can afford longer term gradual costs. The hope would be even though it’s more expensive, they reach a scale faster where they make bigger profits and it was worth the extra expense to AWS.

    This is how a lot of outsourcing works. And it’s exacerbated by many companies being very short term and stock price focused. Companies could invest in their own infrastructure for long term gain, but they often favour short term profit boosts and cost reduction to boost their share price or pay out to share holders.

    Companies frequently so things not in their long term interests for this reason. For example, companies that own their own land and buildings sell them off and rent them back. Short term it gives them a financial boost, long term it’s a permanent cost and loss of assets.

    In Signals case it’s less of a choice; it’s funded by donations and just doesn’t have the money to build out it’s own data centre network. Donations will support ongoing gradual and scaling costs, but it’s unlikely they’d ever get a huge tranch of cash to be able to build data centres world wide. They should still be using multiple providers and they should also look to buildup some Infrastructure of their own for resilience and lower long term costs.


  • It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

    So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

    AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

    However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

    Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.



  • Rust or mold, it doesn’t really matter. As other have said it’s on the outer part of the circle - the bit contacting the outer glass thread. The inner circle is the plug that contacts the contents and is clear.

    If it feels scratch with a finger nail its rust, if it’s soft and scrapes off its mold. But as I said it’s not in contact with the contents so it doesn’t matter.

    Also the contents of the jar are pickled. That means brine or vinegar, which is highly acidic and is what keeps the food fresh/prevents mould and bacteria. So if the pickles themselves look fine then they’ll be fine to eat. If the pickling had failed the contents would be mouldy.

    Rust would make sense as the content of the jar is acidic and acids accelerate rust. There could be small pockets of air left at that location when you seal the jar and some fluid inevitably gets forced out as it is sealed; air plus acid is perfect for rust. But the jars internally themselves were otherwise well sealed as there is no rust in the inner bit of the circle, suggesting it plugged the jar contacting the fluid directly and no gas was left.

    This likely reflects the jar lids are not quite perfect for the jar or possibly not screwed on to their perfect max tightness leaving air behind at those locations. But they were screwed on well enough to seal the content.


  • So in terms of hardware, I use a Raspberry Pi 5 to host my server stack, including Jellyfin with 4k content. I have a nvme module with a 500gb stick and an external HDD with 4tb of space via USB. The pi5 is headless and accessed directly via SSH or RDC.

    The Raspberry Pi 5 has H.265 hardware decoding and if you’re serving 1 video at a time to any 1 client you shouldn’t have any issues, including up to 4k. It will of course use resources to transcode if the client can’t support that content directly but the experience should be smooth for 1 user.

    For more clients it will depend on how much heavy lifting the clients do. I my case I have a mini PC plugged into my TV, I stream content from my pi5 to the mini PC and the mini PC is doing the heavy lifting in terms of decoding. The hardware on the pi5 is not; it just transfer the video and the client does the hard work. If all your clients are capable then such a set up would work with the pi5.

    An issue would come if you wanted to stream your content to multiple devices at the same time and the clients don’t directly support H.265 content. In that case, the pi5 would have to transcode the content to another format bit by but as it streams it to the client. It’d cope with 1 user for sure but I don’t know how many simultanous clients it could support at 1440p.

    The other consideration is what other tools are being use on the sever at the same time. Again for me I live alone so I’m generally the only user of my pi5 servers services. Many services are low powered but I do find things like importing a stack of PDFs into Paperless NGX is surprisingly CPU intense and in that case the device could struggle if also expected to transcode content.

    I think from what you describe the pi5 could work but you may also want to look at higher powered mini PC as your budget would allow that.

    For reference I use dietpi as the distro on my server, and I use a mix of dietpi packages (which are very well made for easy install and configuration) and docker. I am using quite a few docker stacks now due to the convenience of deploying. Dietpi is debian based, and has a focus on providing pre configured packages to make set up easy, but it is still a full debian system and anything can be deployed on it.

    Obviously the other consideration in the pi5 is an ARM device and a mini PC would be X86_64. But so far I’ve not found any tools or software I’ve wanted that aren’t compiled and available for the Pi5 either via dietpi or docker; ARM devices are popular in this realm. I have come across a bug in docker on ARM devices which broke my VPN set up - that was very frustrating and I had to downgrade docker a few months ago while awaiting the fix. That may be worth noting given docker is very important in this realm and most servers globally are still x86.

    If I were in your position and I had $200 I’d buy the maximum CPU and GPU capability I could in 1 device, so I’d actually lean to a mini PC. If you want to save money then the Pi5 is reasonabkr value but you’d need to include a case and may want to consider a nvme or ssd companion board. Those costs add up and the value of the mini PC may compare better as an all in one device; particularly if you can get a good one second hand. There are also other SBC that may offer even better value or more power than a pi5.

    Also bear in mind for me I have a mini PC and pi5; they do different things with the pi5 is the server but the mini PC is a versatile device and I play games on it for example. If you will only have 1 server device and pre exisiting smart tvs etc you’ll be more reliant on the servers capabilities so again may want to opt for the most powerful device you can afford at your price point.