Just some Internet guy

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • And all that forever too. The developers don’t pay a dime after Steam’s cut to keep the game alive and downloadable and playable. Even Steam keys, you can sell as many as you want outside of Steam, for free.

    The devs can just raise the price by 30% if they feel they really need the money. I’ll pay the extra to have it on Steam and just work out of the box in Proton. Unlike Apple, it’s not a monopoly, nothing stopping anyone from just distributing on their own.


  • Epic is anti-consumer and also anti-Linux, they don’t make any effort to support other platforms, the app is shit.

    Meanwhile, Steam is

    • Actively working with the FOSS community to help preserve old games
      • Kernel improvements for better graphics performance
      • Lots of VR and HDR work
      • Many contributions to the open-source AMD drivers
    • Has been supporting Linux gaming for a decade with no signs of backing down
    • They have a portable Linux gaming console experience, and it’s intentionally left wide open for users to mess with
      • They’ve taken several community features and built them into the OS
    • Their DRM is weak and unintrusive
    • Their anticheat is ununtrusive
    • The sales are pretty good
    • They have tons of features for users:
      • Family sharing
      • Remote Play Together
      • Remote Play
      • Streaming
      • Community forums for every game
      • Mod workshop
      • Matchmaking
      • Steam Chat / Voice Chat / Streaming

    The only appealing thing for EGS is, EGS takes a lower cut from the developers who just pockets it and doesn’t even result in lower prices for users. As a Linux user, praise our Lord GabeN for all the good Valve has done for gamers. Even for the developers, most are quite happy with the services they get back from that 30% cut.

    I’d say the dislike is mainly that for the users, EGS doesn’t bring in anything new or interesting or useful that Steam didn’t already do well, and goes directly against a lot of the good Steam has been doing. It’s just a store that makes big developers slightly more happy.






  • Make sure to use machinectl and not sudo or anything else. That’s about the symptoms I’d expect from an incomplete session setup. The use of machinectl there was very deliberate, as it goes through all the PAM, logind, systemd and D-Bus stuff as any normal login. It gets you a clean and properly registered session, and also gets rid of anything tied to your regular user:

    max-p@desktop ~> loginctl list-sessions
    SESSION  UID USER  SEAT  LEADER CLASS   TTY   IDLE SINCE
          2 1000 max-p seat0 3088   user    tty2  no   -    
          3 1000 max-p -     3112   manager -     no   -    
          8 1001 tv    -     589069 user    pts/4 no   -    
          9 1001 tv    -     589073 manager -     no   -    
    

    It basically gets you to a state of having properly logged into the system, as if you logged in from SDDM or in a virtual console. From there, if you actually had just logged in a tty as that user, you could run startplasma-wayland and end up in just as if you had logged in with SDDM, that’s what SDDM eventually launches after logging you in, as per the session file:

    max-p@desktop ~> cat /usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasma.desktop 
    [Desktop Entry]
    Exec=/usr/lib/plasma-dbus-run-session-if-needed /usr/bin/startplasma-wayland
    TryExec=/usr/bin/startplasma-wayland
    DesktopNames=KDE
    Name=Plasma (Wayland)
    # ... and translations in every languages
    

    From there we need one last trick, it’s to get KWin to start nested. That’s what the additional WAYLAND_DISPLAY=/run/user/1000/wayland-0 before is supposed to do. Make sure that this one is ran within the machinectl shell, as that shell and only that shell is the session leader.

    The possible gotcha I see with this, is if startplasma-wayland doesn’t replace that WAYLAND_DISPLAY environment variable with KWin’s, so all the applications from that session ends up using the main user. You can confirm this particular edge case by logging in with the secondary user on a tty, and running the same command including the WAYLAND_DISPLAY part of it. If it starts and all the windows pop up on your primary user’s session, that’s the problem. If it doesn’t, then you have incorrect session setup and stuff from your primary user bled in.

    Like, that part is really important, by using machinectl the process tree for the secondary user starts from PID 1:

    max-p@desktop ~> pstree
    systemd─┬─auditd───{auditd}
            ├─bash─┬─(sd-pam)                 # <--- This is the process machinectl spawned
            │      └─fish───zsh───fish───zsh  # <-- Here I launched a bunch of shells to verify it's my machinectl shell
            ├─systemd─┬─(sd-pam) # <-- And that's my regular user
            │         ├─Discord─┬─Discord───Discord───46*[{Discord}]
            │         ├─DiscoverNotifie───9*[{DiscoverNotifie}]
            │         ├─cool-retro-term─┬─fish───btop───{btop}
            │         ├─dbus-broker-lau───dbus-broker
            │         ├─dconf-service───3*[{dconf-service}]
            │         ├─easyeffects───11*[{easyeffects}]
            │         ├─firefox─┬─3*[Isolated Web Co───30*[{Isolated Web Co}]]
    

    Super weird stuff happens otherwise that I can’t explain other than some systemd PAM voodoo happens. There’s a lot of things that happens when you log in, for example giving your user access to keyboard, mouse and GPU, and the type of session depends on the point of entry. Obviously if you log in over SSH you don’t get the keyboard assigned to you. When you switch TTY, systemd-logind also moves access to peripherals such that user A can’t keylog user B while A’s session is in the background. Make sure the machinectl session is also the only session opened for the secondary user, as it being assigned to a TTY session could also potentially interfere.

    what distro/plasma version are you running? (here it’s opensuse slowroll w/ plasma 6.1.4)

    Arch, Plasma 6.1.5.

    what happens if you just run startplasma-wayland from a terminal as your user? (I see the plasma splash screen and then I’m back to my old session)

    You mean a tty or a terminal emulator like Konsole?

    • In a tty
      • if I’m already logged in it should switch to the current session as multi-instance is not supported
      • if it’s my only graphical session, it should start Plasma normally with the only exception being KWallet not unlocking automatically.
    • In a terminal within my graphical session: nothing at all.


  • Totally possible. It’ll work best with Wayland thanks to nested compositor support, whereas on Xorg you’d need to use Xephyr which doesn’t do hardware acceleration.

    # Give the other user access to your Wayland socket
    setfacl -m u:otheruser:rx $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR
    setfacl -m u:otheruser:rwx $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/wayland-0
    
    # Open a session as the other user (note the trailing @, it's there to login in to the local machine)
    sudo machinectl login otheruser@
    
    # Start your DE!
    WAYLAND_DISPLAY=/run/user/$(id -u yourmainuser)/wayland-0 startplasma-wayland
    

    And tada! Nested Wayland session





  • I would use maybe a Raspberry Pi or old laptop with two drives (preferably different brands/age, HDD or SSD doesn’t really matter) in it using a checksumming filesystem like btrfs or ZFS so that you can do regular scrubs to verify data integrity.

    Then, from that device, pull the data from your main system as needed (that way, the main system has no way of breaking into the backup device so won’t be affected by ransomware), and once it’s done, shut it off or even unplug it completely and store it securely, preferably in a metal box to avoid any magnetic fields from interfering with the drives. Plug it in and boot it up every now and then to perform a scrub to validate that the data is all still intact and repair the data as necessary and resilver a drive if one of them fails.

    The unfortunate reality is most storage mediums will eventually fade out, so the best way to deal with that is an active system that can check data integrity and correct the files, and rewrite all the data once in a while to make sure the data is fresh and strong.

    If you’re really serious about that data, I would opt for both an HDD and an SSD, and have two of those systems at different locations. That way, if something shakes up the HDD and damages the platter, the SSD is probably fine, and if it’s forgotten for a while maybe the SSD’s memory cells will have faded but not the HDD. The strength is in the diversity of the mediums. Maybe burn a Blu-Ray as well just in case, it’ll fade too but hopefully differently than an SSD or an HDD. The more copies, even partial copies, the more likely you can recover the entirety of the data, and you have the checksums to validate which blocks from which medium is correct. (Fun fact, people have been archiving LaserDiscs and repairing them by ripping the same movie from multiple identical discs, as they’re unlikely to fade at exactly the same spots at the same time, so you can merge them all together and cross-reference them and usually get a near perfect rip of it).


  • I don’t understand what’s up with the US and this will to always hand out the harshest punishment in every situation. Locking someone up for 20 years in prison does nothing to reform them, the whole system is designed for them to fail and get locked up again too. Can’t get jobs because you’re forever tagged as a felon, and the conditions are so harsh nobody can employ them anyway because they can barely do a normal 9-5 because they put probation appointments in the middle of the day so you always have to ask for time off, can’t do overtime because you have to be home outside of 9-5. All those institutions are biased towards locking them up again because that’s how they make money, it’s in their financial interest and duty to shareholders to keep a market of criminals to lock up.

    The only option left for those people upon release is to go right back to crime because that’s the only thing that doesn’t discriminate against them forever and allows them to make sufficient money, or jobs that are basically slavery with extra steps.

    And in this case it’s pretty clear they got the biggest possible sentence because they weren’t white.

    Upon Ms. Polk’s release, she earned a doctorate in public policy and administration and is an advocate for the elderly

    That seems like a perfect example of someone that has been reformed and is no longer deserving of punishment. Only someone made out of pure anger would have a problem with that.



  • We’ve been using vector rendering for decades, this isn’t new at all. This just makes it better because supposedly now it can be offloaded to the GPU.

    From the OS’s perspective it doesn’t care: it hands a rectangle to the application to render into along with some metadata like what scaling to render as. Then the application does what it needs to do to get the pixels in there.

    This would be handled entirely in Qt, in this case, but any competing toolkit can also implement something similar and all.