• 23 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • I’m in a similar boat. I use old computers for spare parts and hobby projects (e.g. I did Linux From Scratch on an old second-hand Thinkpad I picked up on a whim). I think cheap second hand computers are great for tinkerers e.g. you can flash custom firmware without worrying about bricking the mobo.

    You could also use them as servers if you have any services you want to host.

    Also if you truly have no use for them, fix them up, install something like Linux Mint on them, and give them away.





  • I switched from Proton to Mullvad and I would highly recommend switching in that direction, not vice versa. Proton was unreliable for me for starters. And Mullvad requires no personal info—not even an email address—and you can pay in cash. Mullvad “just works” for me, whereas I had connectivity issues with Proton semi-regularly. You may also have more privacy/political concerns with Proton e.g. them handing over a French climate activist to the police, or some people take issue with the CEO’s comments on Trump. Mullvad has no such incidents like the former, and I’m not aware of Mullvad involving itself in politics beyond privacy politics.

    But for piracy specifically, you may want port forwarding. I’ve heard AirVPN recommended for that reason, so if you’re looking to switch, you might want to look into that instead of Mullvad.



  • Why do you like Arch? If you want the minimalism but you don’t want to compile everything yourself, I’d recommend Void Linux. It’s a lovely little distro; I only don’t daily drive it because of less package availability than Arch+AUR, and I couldn’t be bothered to package so many things myself. But I don’t remember their servers ever being down when I used it.


  • I’d probably recommend LFS over Gentoo for that—you do more “yourself” and I found the LFS instructions easier to follow than the Gentoo install guide. And I’d say I learned more about Linux from LFS than from installing Gentoo. But LFS was done over about a month or so for me (not nonstop ofc, just in my free time) whereas Gentoo was 1 or 2 days.


  • I think maybe I’m sensitive to some bad smells other people don’t get. One time someone was demonstrating to a group (including me) making chocolate and it smelled like vomit to me and I had to leave. The others weren’t bothered.

    This might be a personal preference thing rather than a sensing-something-undetectable thing but I’ve always hated the flavour of dairy—can’t stomach dairy milk, dairy cheese, dairy butter, etc. The vegan versions of these things are fine to me though because they don’t have that distinct “dairy” flavour whilst still having the other qualities of the product.




  • I imagine it’d be a jurisdiction issue for what you propose. If, say, the UK mandates that websites block VPN nodes, that will affect websites served from the UK (creating a Great Firewall of Britain). But what about websites served outside the UK? Those websites can’t possibly tell if a user is from the UK and using a VPN, vs outside the UK and using a VPN, so they can’t only block UK visitors—they’d have to block all VPN traffic, which is probably not worth it from a business point of view. I suppose the UK could then deem that website illegal in the UK and block them, but then that’d only block the website for non-VPN users in the UK… But if the website owner is outside the UK they can’t be punished for violating that law.

    More probable (though I still think unlikely) is that a country could sniff for e.g. Wireguard packets and block those. But again that’s unlikely because of businesses using VPNs to let employees access company intranets at home.


  • As others have said, no for the Linux partition; it’s the same arch, socket type, etc. CachyOS’s kernel probably contains everything you need.

    For the Windows partition you might have problems though. Iirc Windows connects licences to motherboards, to prevent disk cloning to circumvent buying licences, so Windows may think you’ve cloned your drive to pirate Windows. I’ve never tried secure boot but I know W11 requires TPM too so if you’ve got secure boot you should look into how to switch to a new motherboard on Windows.



  • Outdated how? I use it for my daily driver and it works fine for me. It’s a fairly simple program and the 0.3.x river protocol is fairly stable so I would doubt it’s become outdated, but if it is, you should be able to patch it yourself given the simplicity of the program.


  • Also I remember seeing screenshots where PDFs looked transparent or matched the terminal colors. Is that actually a feature of some of these viewers ?

    Zathura lets you recolour and theme pdfs, yes. See zathurarc(5). You can set alpha using "rgba(r, g, b, a)" when setting a colour, e.g. set to 0.8 for 0.8 opacity.




  • It’s been around for ages and is made of the same stuff as cast iron, but instead of being poured into a mould, it’s sheets that get stamped into shape. So it has similar properties eg you can season it, you take care of it the same way, but it has a smoother surface and tends to be a lot thinner. I don’t have one but I got gifted a Teflon wok for free; once I need to replace that, I plan to look for a carbon steel wok.