thinkpads are interesting because they are heavy-duty machines that can be had for cheap on the used market. they are cheap because businesses buy them by the truckload and then offload them after three+ years and switch to Newest & Best. flooded market plus a buncha older models still around from earlier floods plus civilians selling their shit -> low price, otherwise nobody would buy them.
if you haven't got access to such a market, either by being around where they're being dumped directly or by having local businesses importing them in bulk and reselling them locally, then you should look elsewhere for value, as they're only interesting if they can be had for cheap.
e.g. you have similar options from hp (elitebook) and dell (latitude), they are also business-class laptops with durability and serviceability in mind, perhaps you can find those locally.
as an aside, you should skip all AMD platforms up until 5000 series; many issues (power management, GPU performance, etc.) especially if you're going to run linux.
first off, if you plan to scan the storage for bad "sectors", that's gonna take eons if the disk is of any considerable size. what's more likely is you running the SMART self-test and that will work over any medium.
the cables absolutely can and do cause corruption, whether it's plain SATA-SATA cables or the USB-SATA with their own controller on it; however, if you don't have reason to suspect this particular cable/adapter is faulty, it's not a worry vector per se.
looking for "privacy issues" in iOS is like wondering if the sandwich you found in the sewer has healthy and organic salami, as if that's the only issue preventing you from eating it.
you're being spied on from the moment you activate it, including when it's "off", so does it matter if there are seven or actually nine things invading your privacy?
wish they would say what the "old intel CPU" refers to and which ate the modern ones that don't need the hack.
I have no idea what this challenge is (I automatically assume it's some cringe when I read "challenge" also that pic is... what?), but you don't run Mint/Debian/Ubuntu if you have super-fresh hardware, like AMD 7000-series or Intel 14th gen and so on. in that case you have to go with Fedora or one of its derivatives (Nobara, Bazzite, etc.), because they have the newest kernels that allow this hardware to run OOB.
if you have a bit older hardware (like 2-3 years old), Mint or Debian is your best bet; Ubuntu if you have to, and only as a stepping stone. it's a solid base and if you use flatpak for everything (Firefox, Chrome, Lutris, Steam, etc.) you won't have issues with old packages and you'll get the best of both worlds - stability and supported hardware.
what's this "probability" based on?
wine exposes the user's home directory as drive Z: and has full read/write access to it. so, the user's proper fucked.
edit: I misspoke, Z: exposes the entire root file system, whereas only the /home/user/ has full r/w access.
nothing to share about my setup, but I've just checked and I haven't used finamp on my phone since november last year. reason - Innertune. works phenomenally on the shittiest data plan, haven't maxed it out once.
coupla blogs and lemmy subscribed ordered by top day; once I'm done with it, that's it, no doomscrolling no more. all news and sports are filtered out, along with memes and similar stupid shit.
if im really craving something, read a book (thanks Anna!), reinstall one of the cheap laptops I got, go for a run/walk/bike ride etc. works most of the time.
just to confirm, you have the 4K version? latest ATV app and Jellyfin 10.9.6?
it's all directplay, transcoding is disabled server-side and the server logs are the same as when other devices at that location play something. I'll keep digging.
no 4k content, no transcoding (disabled server side), plain ol' 264/265 files, no other devices have issues. worked fine for the first day or two. it's possible there was a system update but I don't know, latest ATV app.
this one also worked as advertised for the first day or two and started glitching by day three. I'd a appreciate if you could ping back in a couple of days whether it's still working.
anyone got Chromecast with Google TV 4K working with Jellyfin? it runs Android TV, gets the Jellyfin app and then stuff starts breaking.
It can't connect to the server intermittently, playback stutters, stops, breaks... the server reports the file is direct play and no issues.
Five other devices have no problems of any kind, only this fucker has spells constantly.
weeell you kinda misrepresented the stated point, creating what's commonly referred to as a strawman.
the subject isn't a random sandwich that might or might not have contaminates in it; the subject is a shit sandwich. therefore it's pointless to argue exactly how much shit is in a shit sandwich, as its essence and genesis preclude it from being considered nourishment.
now there's copious propaganda out there convincing you it isn't that bad, lotsa people do it, memba the sandwich from decades ago you loved... but we're in the wrong community for that.
does it matter how bad it is? does it matter how much shit is in a shit sandwich?
I'm not having it however little there is.
I do without.
no way am I bothering with installing windows, in a VM or elsewhere.
thank you for the elaborate write-up. all them models listed are either way out of my budget, don't support pmOS or are shitty (4 GB RAM, etc). searching GSMArena for 'displayport' nets also 50ish models, all cream of the crop type of deal; I was hoping I'd score a cheap ex-flagship and get myself a nice workstation for experimentation.
in the meantime I've gotten myself a Poco F1 for cheap, I'm now awaiting the week-long bootloader unlock timer to expire and I'll try to use it as a phone only.
anyone managed to attach a monitor to a Poco F1 or Oneplus 6/6T?
can someone explain leverage to me as practised by those RE bullshitters finfluencers. I feel their whole spiel is just bullshit but I don't know enough to be sure about it.
according to them, you "buy" a home - you put X% down and pay your first monthly (and then post on r/firsttimehomebuyer). then you go to (another?) bank and say "look I got this house I wanna use as collateral" and they go "wow you own a house! sure, have this bag of money"... repeat until you "own" like a city block.
like, how does that not crash and burn at the first step, just a cursory glance at the asset's status? how are they not "lol you ain't got no house dumbass come back in 20 years when you actually own it"?
I want to create a minimal install for mpv playback through jellyfin-mpv-shim and macast. this is going to be a base for a FOSS media sink akin to a Chromecast. you attach it to your TV and it plays whatever you send it, like movies from your jellyfin server and youtube/vimeo/piped/etc videos. otherwise, there's no interaction with it, it doesn't handle input (remotes, mice, keyboards, etc.), it's controlled via apps (jellyfin android and allcast).
I've already made a proof-of-concept device running debian 12 with Plasma and it (mostly) works. now I'd like to trim the fat and install only what's absolutely necessary as I currently only have a 2006 macbook with busted screen and GMA950 with a mechanical HD. I'm gonna go with LAN only so I don't have to dick around with broadcom WLAN.
what do I need in terms of DEs and/OR WMs? do I need those at all? I seem to remember that I could run firefox in kiosk mode without anything else but X11, could I run mpv like that? or possibly wayland? what would be the absolute minimum package-wise to achieve this?
to reiterate, it's only going to display full-screen mpv when there's video to play, no menus, navigation, nada. possibly some slideshow-while-idle thingy in the future if it doesn't add too much in terms of software needed, but not right now.
I hate spending money on hardware when there's a software solution. like, I've got a subwoofer from a 2.1 system (without satellites) for free. instead of sourcing speakers for it, however cheap they might be, I'll just utilize the speakers from my monitor. pipewire to the rescue, it creates a combined sink that outputs sound to both DP and analog audio, et voila - a 2.1 sound system. people are like "your monitor sounds like that!?" and usually I play dumb: "yeah, yours doesn't? well that's linux for ya".
so, I have a desktop and a laptop and I'd like to share the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. modern monitors have a KVM switch integrated, you connect your keyboard/mouse/etc. to it, one USB Type-C cable to the laptop, a couple to the desktop and you have a seamless switch; it even charges the laptop, how cool is that!
however, my monitor works just fine and I don't replace my hardware unless I really have to. USB KVMs with similar functions aren't cheap. also, the monitor already has multiple display inputs so I got to thinking, how do I re-create this with no money, or as little as possible, with DIY tech?
first, switching the display; this one took me no time at all. I have a USB Type-C to DP cable (with DP-Alt) and with the power of udev (detect a connection then trigger stuff) and ddcutil (sends commands to the monitor) I got it working as seamless as possible - I connect the laptop and it automagically switches the monitor over. when I disconnect it, the monitor falls back to an active connection, which is the desktop. awesome!
now how about switching the keyboard and mouse over? I'd like to do it in software, like barrier/inputleap does it but without having to move the cursor to the adjacent monitor. also, both machines are on wayland which isn't supported. eventual input lag to the laptop is unimportant, I game on the desktop. no idea if that can be accomplished or if that's even a thing...
that is a thing - it's called USB/IP, i.e. sharing your USB device over TCP/IP; it's a kernel module included by default for a long time now and that thing rocks! not only does the USB keyboard work without any perceivable lag on the laptop, it get's "disconnected" from the host, so your keypresses aren't disturbing the host. since it's a kernel module, no need to convince wayland to play ball! this also works for webcams, scanners, readers, etc., the client system thinks this is a local device and it just works.
so all we have to do is expand the shell script to bring over the keyboard and mouse along with switching over the monitor once the USB-C connection is detected annnd... success!
well, sorta. my wireless mouse is second-hand and I haven't got the USB receiver for it, so it connects over bluetooth. tried sharing with usbip and it works, but the radio connection gets interrupted or something and the mouse doesn't work there. maybe there's a workaround but I don't want to dig further.
also, how do I switch back to the desktop to shoot some peggies? I don't want to disconnect the laptop manually so I could come up with a slew of shell scripts and udev triggers and I'd also need a ssh tunnel, I don't want my keyboard input to travel over the LAN in cleartext, etc... kinda cumbersome. also, once the novelty wears off, the automagicallity gets tired, I'd prefer manually switching between devices with a keyboard combo.
enter rkvm. it's written in rust and as everybody knows that's super awesome. unlike usbip, comms are encrypted, so no sniffing possible, and hotkey switching is a default function, and it also handles the mouse!
now, rkvm currently doesn't support triggers, like "do X when hotkey combo pressed", but Plasma can handle running the monitor switch script on each device separately by listening to the same hotkey combo.
both solutions have their advantages and disadvantages, usbip requires more legwork but is more powerful whereas rkvm is simpler and easier to set up.
the final step, powering the laptop over the same cable. sadly, can't handle that in software, but there are power delivery injectors out there, some as cheap as $7. also, there's this cool project, looks easy enough to source and implement. not sure if I'm going that way or just go with a used dock station, as those can be had for a song for popular business ex-flagships, like the Thinkpad T-series, HP Elitebooks, Dell Latitudes, etc..
are there downsides? sure there are. numero uno, the host (desktop, in my case) has to be on all the time. not a big deal for me, it gets woken in the morning and suspended late at night. there are edge cases when rkvm geeks out, but for a thing that's in its 0.x version, this is more than usable.
so, I've been using this setup for the past week or so and haven't yet found it to break or have any negative side-effects. gaming on the desktop is as snappy (or shitty) as ever and using my mech keyboard and giant screen on the laptop allows me to easily compartmentalize my business and private stuff.
thanks for reading!
edit: edited title to clarify I'm talking about a Keyboard-Video-Mouse switch, not a Kernel-Virtual-Machine.
I'm considering upgrading to a Ryzen 5 5600, they've finally come down to $100 locally (tray version sans cooler).
currently, I have a 1600AF (lower binned 2600, so Zen+) on a B450 board. the upgrade should be straightforward, my board supports it (latest BIOS) and it has the same power rating, so my cheap-ass PSU and stock cooler don't need upgrading.
reason I want to upgrade is I have a number of issues with it under linux so I'd like to check if someone runs a similar setup.
first, I have Cool & Quiet and C-states disabled and Power Idle Control to "Typical Current Idle"; otherwise the machine freezes when waking from suspend after a short while. the second issue is, I have 3600 MT/s Kingston Hyper-X modules that I have to run at 2400 because both XMP profiles (XMP1-3000 and XMP2-3600) are unstable and cause apps to crash (the latter sometimes won't boot at all, can't unlock LUKS).
supposedly, both those issues are fixed in newer gens; old Zen/Zen+ had issues with faster RAM, and the C-state handling is also better in Zen3. also, I can use the new amd-pstate driver.
my PC is plenty fast as is, I'm only considering upgrading to fix them two issues. if it's the same on the other side of the fence, I'd rather skip it.
anyone had first-hand experiences with this?
edit: thanks everyone who took the time to share their setup, I'm way more optimistic about making the jump!
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11999240
> anyone know what the last option does? I want to remove movies that were added by the list but were then taken off it. but the way it's written, it sorta implies that all movies that aren't on a list will be removed, which is what I very much don't want.
anyone know what the last option does? I want to remove movies that were added by the list but were then taken off it. but the way it's written, it sorta implies that all movies that aren't on a list will be removed, which is what I very much don't want.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/10113624
> what's a reliable way to determine my device's battery health? something like Coconutbattery for macOS - charge cycles, health, factory/remaining mAh, etc...
>
> !
>
> tried CPU-Z, says health is "Good". gee, thanks... out of what, "Excellent" through "Shit" or what?
>
> backstory, I got a Samsung Tab S6 used, wiped it and installed LineageOS 20 and I'm using for a couple of months. the battery kinda sucks. granted, I have like 3-4 hours SOT/day but a 7000 mAh battery should last a couple of days; pure guesstimation, I had an iPad some years ago and that thing lasted for eons.
>
> if I leave it overnight with 10ish% battery remaining and battery saver on, it's dead by morning. that sort of drain can't be normal? on the other hand, I don't have google services so every app has its own running service - syncthing, KDE Connect, Allcast, Jellyfin Player, etc.
>
> there's the stuff I can read from /sys/class/power_supply/battery/ but nothing useful in there; like charge_full and charge_full_design are the same (70400) and other promising sounding items are unset or nonsensical.
>
> !
>
> tried the same on my Redmi phone w/LOS, completely different files there and equally useless.
>
> I don't wanna go through sourcing the battery, prying the thing open and replacing it, only to find out that's how it's supposed to work. any ideas?
>
what's a reliable way to determine my device's battery health? something like Coconutbattery for macOS - charge cycles, health, factory/remaining mAh, etc...
tried CPU-Z, says health is "Good". gee, thanks... out of what, "Excellent" through "Shit" or what?
backstory, I got a Samsung Tab S6 used, wiped it and installed LineageOS 20 and I'm using for a couple of months. the battery kinda sucks. granted, I have like 3-4 hours SOT/day but a 7000 mAh battery should last a couple of days; pure guesstimation, I had an iPad some years ago and that thing lasted for eons.
if I leave it overnight with 10ish% battery remaining and battery saver on, it's dead by morning. that sort of drain can't be normal? on the other hand, I don't have google services so every app has its own running service - syncthing, KDE Connect, Allcast, Jellyfin Player, etc.
there's the stuff I can read from /sys/class/power_supply/battery/ but nothing useful in there; like charge_full and charge_full_design are the same (70400) and other promising sounding items are unset or nonsensical.
tried the same on my Redmi phone w/LOS, completely different files there and equally useless.
I don't wanna go through sourcing the battery, prying the thing open and replacing it, only to find out that's how it's supposed to work. any ideas?
so, I have a weird problem with a Dell Latitude 5285, that's a 2-in-1 with a detachable keyboard akin to the MS Surface Pro 5. it has an i5-7300u, 16 GB LPDDR3 (on-board), 500 GB NVMe, 12.3" 1920x1280 3:2 touch screen.
I got it second-hand, unknown history, without a battery. they're stuck at 400 MHz without one, but Thottlestop in Windows and msr-tools in Linux fix the BD_PROCHOT throttling and the machine performed adequately for months.
I've sourced a replacement battery, removed the patch and my problems started. there's weird screen flickering, looks like bad video ram or a flaky connection. it's intermittent, sometimes it runs without issues for hours, sometimes minutes and sometimes it flickers from the start, so troubleshooting and checking if this or that fixed things takes days.
the artefacts are inconsistent with anything that is or isn't happening (load, temps, etc) or power source. the problem is mostly exacerbated when the battery is full and/or when waking from sleep, it's almost always super glitchy then.
would be great if I could try a different battery or try this one in another device, but don't have that option.
at no point are there ANY glitches on the external display (tried DP-Alt over USB Type-C and HDMI over Dell WD19 Dock), regardless if the internal screen is enabled or not.
so, bad luck - faulty screen or backlight or RAM or something, right?
except, when I unplug the battery (but leave it in place) and connect it to power and reenable the BD_PROCHOT patch - zero glitches! it runs for hours - videos, GPU and CPU stress test, not one hiccup, tear, nothing!
if it were a normal laptop, I'd just leave it be and use it as a desktop. it feels like such a waste with the functional touchscreen though.
what I've tried:
- different USB Type-C chargers
- fresh paste on CPU, clean vent
- latest firmware, tried downgrading, no change
- memtest passed twice on thorough, all clear
- internal diagnostics also
- it never froze or crashed
- screenshot during glitches doesn't contain them
- disabling turbo, upping/lowering the max/boost GPU clock, forcing cores offline, limiting max frequencies with TLP
- the battery isn't deformed and doesn't exert pressure on the screen or any cables; also tried running it with the screen slightly lifted from the case, no change
- pressing, jerking, wiggling of the internal display cable/connector, no change
- same issues in Windows 11, Ubuntu 23.04 and Fedora WS 38; rarely but sometimes in BIOS/during boot
- sadly, can't undervolt the CPU/GPU (Throttlestop FIVER says it's locked) but some MSR writes are apparently OK (like disabling BD_PROCHOT works).
at some point, it had both charger and dock with PD attached at the same time to both USB Type-C ports; it's possible this fried something, although I have no evidence of that.
so, I'm sure this is NOT a linux hardware problem, but I would like to use linux to fix the problem. at this point, I am sure it's defective, whether it's age or physical or manufacturing defect or whatever; but since it definitely works perfectly without the battery, I'm looking for some tweaks that makes it perform with the battery the same as without it.
seriously doubt anyone's seen anything similar but are there any ideas what to look at? what to try?
edit: I'm not asking for free hardware troubleshooting, maybe I haven't expressed myself succintly. what I'd like is some sort of snapshot of all relevant registers with battery working. and then one without. and then have somehow the difference between those two computed, so I can see which setting I need to tweak. would this be doable?
I can't resolve (ping, ssh) any computer on my network from a newly installed minimal Gnome Desktop F39 on a laptop; since it's minimal, it's possible something's missing from the installation.
trying from the laptop gives:
$ ping server.local ping: server.local: Temporary failure in name resolution
pinging .box static DNS entries as well as IP addresses works. all other computers can resolve each other and the new laptop (1 debian, 1 fedora, 1 macOS), some have static, some dynamic IPs. they all get the DNS IP of my pi-hole, which resolves everything fine. resolve.conf and all other relevant files are stock. avahi and systemd-resolve are running and report no issues. same behaviour with WiFi and LAN.
I could switch to static IPs and assign e.g. .box suffixes all around via local DNS but I don't want to do that, this setup is/was working on every other PC.
any ideas what I'm missing?
edit: just booted off of a live USB with F39, resolves server.local just fine. so I'm missing something in my installation, right?
edit II: installed it (minimal) on another laptop, same deal - no .local resolution.
I haven't had anything to do with windows in like 5+ years. I need to set up a laptop with it for someone tomorrow, I'm guessing W11 is nowadays recommended? what's currently the best option for a hassle free experience (no ads, no random game installs, no migrations to onedrive, etc)?
last time I did it, I used the W10 ISO from Microsoft, applied the hwidsomething and ran some debloater from github. back then there were some ESR LTSC ISOs available on torrent sites, is that still a thing?
the install is going to use firefox, chrome, skype, libreoffice, etc., they all autoupdate themselves, so it's going to be reasonably secure. what's my best bet for a set & forget situation? thanks.
is there some API or other mechanism that allows me to create a contact form on my site and have the messages delivered to my mastodon inbox?
just added a second cheap NVMe drive to my system and am in the process of moving my games folder to it. the folder has a coupla prefixes and individual game folders. presently it's ext4, my boot drive is btrfs and encrypted LVM, the ext4 drive gets mounted to ~/Games via fstab.
is there a better combination? like, would I benefit from CoW or compression for this use case? or even going with ntfs?
edit: went with btrfs. super easy to convert from ext4, just unmount the 2nd drive, btrfs-convert and change the UUID in fstab. also added the compress=zstd:1 option. looks like everything is working thus far.
that's the sequel to FC 5. tried a couple of times to get it to work with various wine versions, had no luck. apparently, it has some unbreakable protection. not sure if that's correct, I can run both Far Cry 5 and 6 without issues, why would they just protect the interim version?
tried plasma a year back and gave up because I couldn't get the above setup to work (annoying lines appearing while typing) on three different laptops (125, 133, 150%). there was supposedly a fix (increasing line spacing) but that didn't work for me. just checking in to see if some workaround came to light? thanks.
same thing with lemmy clients, manually clicking through 100 check boxes of supported domains... can't the app ask to do it on first launch? or is my setup to blame?
so I found a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite Wifi, one of the few tablets that have official LOS support. the specs aren't too bad either, 10" 2000x1200 screen, 4/64GB, 7000 mAh battery (remains to be seen in what condition); for $120 with some shitty cover/stand and dubious charger, one hell of a deal. only problem is, it can't be reset or it'll lock itself.
thought on passing, but the dude assures me it's not stolen as he has a bunch of these, so most likely scenario is some corporate client dumped these and upgraded to newest and best without unenrolling them from this knox bullshit. either that or there's a crew ripping exclusively gta4xlwifis all over Germany.
although I can endure Samsung's OneUI for basic shit, I happen to know a little bit about Android, bootloaders and stuff and I'm fairly confident I can wipe this crap and install LOS without issues. what is the saying, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing? so let's start.
first off, LOS instructions say you gotta have the latest firmware on the device. this one's on Android 11, so launch software update. update, reboot, hold breath - will it lock itself, annnd... booted just fine, we're done!
except, no we're not. inspecting software properties shows it's on A12 and the update process is already downloading another package. current LOS ROM is 20/A13, so we need A13 and latest patches, looks like it's gonna take a while.
well we're finally done. all in all, FIVE different upgrades, one after another, and then each does some "optimising" shit, took hours. dios mio, you couldn't just ship a cumulative update, it had to be piecemeal?
anyhoo, tried each of the versions for a couple of minutes - sluggish, stuttering, occasional single-digit fps animations, boatloads of G and S services running in the background, each one is sending you Super Important Notifications All The Time, can't wait to be rid of this crap.
alright, A13 and latest patches in the house. now comes the step I'm dreading - according to LOS instructions, I have to boot in download (proprietary fastboot) mode where I should unlock bootloader and thus erase user data. this equates to doing a factory reset which, according to the seller, should lock the device. although I've tried to educate myself on what this knox business actually is, I've come up short (chip busts a fuse when tripped, what?!?) so in lieu of succinct info I guess I'm learning by first-hand experience.
so, power off, disconnect USB cable. press both volume keys and connect the USB cable. one disgusting turquoise screen appears, instructing you to press vol up once for download mode or to longpress vol up for device unlock; not what LOS instructions say.
so press volume up for a couple of seconds and the screen asks for confirmation you really wanna unlock it, calls you a bad person and an even worse user but it acknowledges your intention. reboot and... it stays for eons on the samsung loading screen. I'm fucked, right?
eventually, the system boots up, says it's knox locked and wants access to the wifi. it connects and the onboarding process begins. I've tapped "Skip" everywhere I was allowed and eventually the desktop appears! we're off to settings, re-enable developer mode, USB debugging and check the unlock bootloader switch is on. then we have to turn off this bixby whatever-the-fuck-this-is popping up when we wanna shut the tablet down.
alright, tablet is off, disconnect cable. press both vol keys and connect the USB cable. ugly screen appears. this time, press vol up once and we're in download mode. heimdall detect and... not detected. wtf. different USB port? that works, flash successful! edit: turns out, you have to disconnect the USB cable after ugly screen appears and then reconnect it after launching download mode.
now to rebooting. as this tortured soul found out, LOS instructions are kinda off, so what's needed is keep the tablet connected to your PC the whole time, press vol down and power until the screen turns black, let go for a split second and immediately press and hold power and vol up and don't let go until you see the LOS recovery. you mess up any of these steps, a) you won't get into recovery and b) your recovery will get overwritten by the stock recovery and you have to start over with heimdall.
so, finally in the recovery, we select factory reset and then adb sideload. first comes the LOS zip. when it's done, select adb sideload again and send magisk (you have to rename .apk to .zip before you do). done, reboot. here we go...
and it works! no knox nothing, no google, no samsung crap, I have a beautiful, fast, thin device, bereft of any bloatware. without dicking around with animation scales, the UI is infinitely faster and more responsive.
now getting f-droid and installing essentials.
have to research these questions:
- the annoying nag screens while booting (you're a bad person for unlocking it, press power if you agree, etc.) can't be removed?
- does LOS support the pen? I haven't got it, but might consider getting one if it works.
thanks for reading!