juipeltje

Well good for you, i don’t care if you want to use it, but it’s to be expected you’re gonna rub people the wrong way when you become so combative out of the gate.

Thanks! Yeah i’m sure there has to be another way to get into that overlay with my tv. Kinda weird that they made the remote so minimal in terms of buttons on this newer model

Ah, that’s a problem, i have a C5 and my remote doesn’t have a green button lol

I think the better question to ask is what we stand to lose

Good to know! I’m still waiting for HDMI 2.1 and i’m using a DP to HDMI adapter right now. I’ll probably wait for the new kernel to drop since i haven’t been gaming much on pc lately, but i was wondering since you mentioned LG C series: where did you find that VRR information overlay? Cause i’ve been looking for a way to check if i’m running full RGB because of this HDMI 2.1 stuff, but i don’t think there’s a way to check on the linux side, but i couldn’t find the info on my tv either.

Man, i was actually considering getting some ram cause both my server and desktop still “only” have 16 gigs each. I figured DDR4 wouldn’t be that bad but i just checked and jesus christ that shit’s expensive lol. Guess i’m good with 16 gigs for now

I’ve only been using linux for 5 years now, but yeah i think gaming even on linux was very different ten years ago. Valve and their Proton fork of Wine have made a ton of games perfectly playable, aside from the kernel level anti-cheat games. Some of that progress does seem like it has bled over to FreeBSD, and you can play more and more games there too, but from what i’ve read/seen the catalog of games that work is smaller on FreeBSD, but i guess it depends on what you’re happy with. I think i saw most emulators are available on FreeBSD too, and OpenBSD recently got its own Wine port.

Ah, i think i’ve actually read about NixBSD before, but forgot about it. Haven’t heard of Astarina though. I’ll have to keep an eye on these projects!

In my case the second gpu is just a cheap gt730 for VM usage lol

I need to clean mine out as well at some point, i already noticed a layer if dust laying on the floor of the case. I think i’m gonna wait a bit longer cause i’m thinking of putting in another ssd while i’m at it.

Yeah they do support Hurd! Though i think hardware support is much worse there than it is on BSD and also still marked as experimental. I’m thinking of trying it out in a vm at some point. Regarding the LLM stuff i feel the same way, and even if i’m not planning to switch away anytime soon, i am still looking at BSD content out of curiousity and to also familiarize myself with it if i ever feel like Linux gets to a state where i have to jump ship.

This actually reminds me though. A while back i read an article about how Debian used to have a variant of their distro that used the GNU coreutils combined with the FreeBSD kernel. They don’t support it anymore, but i’m curious if we might see these types of distros pop up again now that more and more people have concerns about the Linux kernel. I don’t know how hard it is to combine those two, but it would be awesome if you could run the FreeBSD kernel with Guix for example. That way you still get to have a declarative system too.

It’s funny cause i was having similar thoughts recently, and pretty much came to the same conclusion, except for me it’s not just gaming. I’m using Guix now and have used NixOS in the past, and i really came to love declaring my entire system through a configuration file, i just love how organized it feels and being able to easily reinstall a very customized system. As far as i’m aware such a thing doesn’t really exist on BSD. I think i read about the Nix package manager having some experimental support for FreeBSD, but it’s not the same as declaring the whole system, so i would have to give that up. It probably wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, since i also really love Void and its simplicity, so BSD probably wouldn’t be too drastic of a move, but then there’s the gaming aspect, and also, i’m not sure how great hardware support is. I’m not sure about NetBSD, but if i understand correctly, both FreeBSD and OpenBSD port their amdgpu drivers over from Linux, so up until pretty recent AMD cards should be supported depending on the release. AMD processors should also be good to go, so i’m guessing it comes down to wifi as a potential blocker maybe.

Something else i’ve been thinking about is: does it really matter at the end of the day? Because code submitted to the kernel is still held to the same standard whether it was created with the help of an LLM or not. Not only that, but on the BSD side of things, even when they are explicitly anti-AI, if someone submits code that was made with the help of an LLM, and the maintainers are not aware of it, but merge it because the quality of the code is good, wouldn’t it put them in the exact same situation as Linux? The only difference at that point would be that one of them is openly saying they accept it, and the other does not, but in reality basically the same thing happens either way. So i feel like at that point i would only be switching for an ideological difference that can’t really hold up practically, so what’s the point?

Ah that makes sense, i was reading that in the wrong way as well and was wondering how that fuckup would even happen

Yeah i was confused by that at first too. Nvidia’s drivers are also proprietary, but the firmware is an issue with both Nvidia and AMD. So far i’ve only experimented with firmware blobs on 2 machines, a desktop and a laptop, but on both of them i need firmware for amdgpu, and wifi/bluetooth. Everything else seems to work without it.

Yeah but that’s just the drivers, most modern cards still need proprietary firmware blobs to function.

So far it has been perfectly usable once you get the hang of it, but i do need nonguix for the kernel on actual hardware. Guix does have a smaller package repo, but they do have a Nix service that you can use to easily get the Nix package manager up and running and install packages through Nix if you need them.

A few months ago there was an issue with the nonguix substitute server that lasted for multiple weeks, so in that time if you wanted to update you had to compile the kernel yourself. I don’t know if this is something that happens more often or if it was an unfortunate incident, but that did suck. Going forward though i’m planning on installing Guix on my server and with something that Guix calls “offloading”, you can configure it so that a stronger machine can build your configuration, so that my poor laptop for example doesn’t have to do the compiling lol.

Since Guix is more obscure it can be a bit more difficult to find answers in communities like Reddit, but on the flip side i feel like their documentation is better organized than Nix, and they provide code snippets in there as well to cover a lot of usecases you might have.

Another thing to keep in mind is the iso, cause since it’s all libre by default without firmware blobs, unless you have a libre compatible system, you won’t be able to render a graphical environment, and wifi on laptops can be an issue too. For my first install i used this old System Crafters iso and followed his guide to install it. At the moment i’m working on a helper script for myself that pulls in my config and runs some of the lengthy Guix commands i need, that i can then run after i install guix with the official iso, which should work cause even without firmware, you should be able to render a tty and the Guix installer also uses ncurses inside the tty. Hope this wasn’t too lengthy of a reply lol, didn’t realize i was going to be typing this much.

Well, that’s why it’s for the purists lol. Depending on the hardware you have/need it really is a pain. I use Guix but i still need the kernel from the nonguix channel. Nonguix does allow you to pick and choose firmware blobs, but on all my machines at the very least i need the amdgpu firmware. Wifi and bluetooth is something you could work around if you really wanted, but getting rid of the gpu firmware requires me to get a different laptop entirely, or in the case of my desktop get a different gpu, but i don’t want to make that compromise cause finding a gpu that doesn’t require that probably cuts into my gaming performance big time.

I didn’t know Luddites were an actual thing back in the day, so i guess i learned something today, but according to wikipedia these days it’s used as a term for people who are against new technologies in general, which isn’t accurate cause i’m not against new technologies in general, i just have an issue with genAI in particular. I don’t see how Amish would apply here either. Amish don’t have a problem with specifically genAI, they just reject most things from modern society, including a lot of technology.

Can’t take anyone seriously that uses the term luddite

Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that’s also bad for the GPL