Absolutely classic music player. The iTunes 1.0 UI pattern, which was pre-enshittification. To my eyes, I still don’t think I’ve ever seen a more overall efficient and descriptive way of browsing a local music library.

I pretty much just want a functioning vanilla Gnome desktop, remap caps lock to control, and I’m happy.

Yes indeed. Well: 0x0007.

I’m on trixie, since recent Mesa has many fixes for very old Radeon GPUs, and it appears to be on by default! At least, I didn’t intentionally turn it on and it’s on.

I think I did go with LZ4 after looking at benchmarks; I figured on a weak CPU speed would be more valuable than another few percent of compression. I’ll have to look into the RAM page read-ahead.

Did you need to compile a kernel to enable it? I’ve just done the project of installing Debian on a 20 year old iMac with 2.5 GB of RAM, and while zram definitely seems to help, I’d love to try this as well.

Probably to run Minecraft, I’m guessing.

Well I was going to try Hyprland this weekend, but I think instead I will very much not do that.

I hope someone forks it from a good commit just before they replaced wlroots. I don’t know the specifics of compositor code at all, but I bet It’s going to cost them quite a bit of velocity to maintain their replacement.

I like it much better when Republicans stick to pushing for things that are just useless rather than destructive.

They just had to make it look like a Geth.

I’m a happy btrfs user, but it’s most definitely a great thing to see what seems like a really clean implementation like this that is able to learn from the many years of collective experience with ZFS and btrfs.

For a software RAID like this, you don’t want a hardware RAID controller, per se – you just want a bunch of ports. After my recent controller failure, I decided to try one of these. It’s slick as hell, sitting close to the motherboard, and seems rock solid so far. We’ll see!

I’m not sure I know enough to be giving out advice, but I can tell you what I do. I do have a cron job to run scrub, to keep the bitrot away. I also tend to replace my drives proactively when they get REALLY old — the flexibility of btrfs raid1 lets me do that one drive at a time instead of two, making it much more affordable. You can plan out your storage with the btrfs calculator.

This right here is what has made it so flexible for me to reuse salvaged equipment. You can just chuck a bunch of randomly sized drives at it, and it will give you as much storage as it can while guaranteeing you can lose any one drive. Fantastic.

This somehow gives me hope for humanity

The PowerPC laptops felt absolutely bulletproof in this way — you could yank out a bunch of USB / Firewire cables and slam the lid shut and you just KNEW it would wake up fine every time.

It hasn’t really felt that way to me since the Intel transition. Now that we’re back on Apple silicon…we shall see. I haven’t gotten one yet.

A long time ago, when I was broke and decided I couldn’t afford Photoshop, I decided to invest the time in learning GIMP.

Even though I’m a UX professional, and the barely okay UX does bother me, that has turned out to be a wise investment because no matter what, GIMP is always there for me. Always!

The price never goes up. It never gets paywalled by a subscription. It never has shady license changes. It changes slowly and deliberately. I never have to convince a new boss to pay for it. I never have to wonder if it will be available for a project.

That was like 20 years ago. I don’t how much value I’ve gotten out of that initial investment, but I bet it’s a LOT.