Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Grapheme OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.

I recently got fitgirl’s Cyberpunk 2077 repack working on Artix Linux with Lutris by following this guide:

It doesn’t take into account you also need to use GEProton as well (for Cyberpunk at least), but its easy enough to install GEProton via ProtonUp, and then just configuring the game to use GEProton in the settings via lutris.

I got mangohud working as well, that was relatively simple.

I also noticed that I needed to install and setup dxvk as an overlay for Vulkan.

Yeah, it was a lot of setup and you need plenty of hard drive space as both the repack and the installed game are huge (have double the space available listed on the repack site).

I have the game on Steam, but wanted to know how to do this, and it was not as bad as I thought it would be.

🥲

Heavy Edit: Just finished watching this documentary after reading this article. Truly a heartwarming story, but is definitely a tearjerker at times. Great watch.

Yep. I’ve had mine for 6 years and it’s still incredible. Luckily compatible sealing rings are still available from 3rd party vendors. Makes great Greek Yogurt, Chicken Soup, and Steel Cut Oats. And of course , it can make so much more.

It sucks that when you make something this good, you’re destined to put yourself out of business, meanwhile planned obsolescence works…

It’s a lot of work. I’m in a similar boat. I’ve been self teaching myself how to program in various languages and working as a Fullstack developer at a very small startup.

While I’ve learned alot, there’s always more to learn and finding direction is a challenge you’ll hit many times over if you stick with it.

Right now I’m reviewing various Open Source Projects I could contribute to as I know ultimately this will make me a much better developer. There are so many CLI and web development tools I use that I’d like to expand on but will require a marginal jump in my skills. Here are a few examples:

• Add a feature to the rTorrent client that would allow it to torrent over i2p
• Expand the amount of tools available within the SolidJS framework ecosystem to be competitive with React’s ecosystem.
• Create a HTTP server in Rust that has feature parity with Golang’s Caddy
• Add a feature to AntennaPod akin to YouTube Sponsor block that would allow for user contributed timestamps to facilitate auto skipping of ad mentions in podcast episodes.

I also am slowly working out plans to learn enough about Rust and browsers to recreate the terminal based browser Links in Rust.

But these are all just me spitballing. In truth, my skills aren’t quite there yet and the amount of time to get there for each one of these is a lot. So I have to choose wisely and dive in deep on the project’s codebase, probably for at least a year or more to make headway. But this is the mindset I think might help you. Look into the software you use a lot or like the concept of. Figure out how you’d like to improve it or add to it. Reach out to the developers of said software however you can, either make your case for the improvements you want to make or just help out on something they want to do with the software. Learn, listen. Rinse and repeat.

Hope this helps a bit.

As a Jr Developer, I found this very helpful. Thanks.

Nice writeup. One note: I don’t think the Fossify projects are abandoned. The creator has commits on the project as recent as 21 hours ago at the time of this writing. They just haven’t pushed updates to FDroid for a couple months.

Magnificent creature, 😊.

I recently stepped outside my front door to find a preying mantis hanging out. I left it alone. When I came back a few hours later it was still there, but it was headless. Took me a second to realize it was missing it’s head. Guess he got laid while I was gone, lol.

Lol. 🤣 This genuinely had me lmao. Thank you.

Xenogears for the PS1 had one of the best combat systems I’ve ever played. Tied with Star Ocean 2 for the PS1. There’s a remake which I think they overhauled the combat system, so I’m not sure if it still is as good as the first edition, but the customizability was amazing.

After that Grandia was fun, but I played it far less than the aforementioned, so have less to say. Chrono Trigger was very good for what it was, and IMHO was only matched by FF6 in that category (heavy turn based combat systems). Chrono Cross is an honorable mention in that category as well.

Lastly, very recently the Sea of Stars game had a very good combat system.

Ultimately these games have great stories, and that’s all I really cared about, but the combat systems could either make or break the monotonous grind to get to the plot points, so they had to be at least decent to make the games playable.

I highly recommend any of these games. Chrono Trigger in particular is highly regarded as possibly the greatest JRPG of all time, and personally I’d put Xenogears at 2nd place, with Star Ocean 2 at 3rd. But I might just be nostalgic.

This kind of happened with the xz hack already. I didn’t look into it heavily, so this is anecdotal, but accordingly the xz hack relied on systemd to execute the backdoor, so if you didn’t have systemd on your machine, the backdoor was essentially inert.

I use the AUR all the time, the only thing I have to do is look for systemd as a dependency and avoid that.

The Artix team generally provides init scripts for commonly used packages that rely on init. So for example, if you want to install openvpn, you’d have to install it alongside its script so:

sudo pacman -S openvpn openvpn-runit

Installs the runit init script. It does let you know that (for runit) to initialize it you have to create a soft link to the service directory so after installation:

sudo ln -s /etc/runit/sv/openvpn /run/runit/service/

And then initialize using runit’s service manager, sv:

sudo sv start openvpn

Anyways, that’s just one instance. I have only had one issue where I had to heavily troubleshoot for an obscure piece of software that relied on systemd as a dependency and there wasn’t any alternative…so I simply modified the source code, recompiled the binary and did it myself. But I’ve been using Artix for nearly 5 years and that is one out of thousands of packages.

Artix Linux. Basically Arch without systemd. It has four options for alternative init systems, so you get to see how it compared to systemd (ultimately it shows how a more minimal init approach is all you need in place of systemd, and where systemd has stepped outside of init into what should be part of the OS space, like elogind, etc.)

The Artix team have done an amazing job of writing various init scripts to keep the distro comparable with Arch, have written alternatives to systemd modules, like replacing elogind with their own implementation, seatd, and IMHO is the defacto standard for how you implement a non systemd distro.

Working without systemd, even if you like it from a sys admin standpoint, teaches you what you lose without systemd, which for the average user isn’t much. I game, code, administer web servers, etc., all without missing a beat on Artix Linux, and it honestly has taught me so much about Linux after I switched from Arch.

I would consider jumping to Gentoo or Void out of curiosity, but Artix is where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.

This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.

On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.

Cool blog. Good code.

Check your location by Searching ”whats my IP address?" Search engines should show it at the top of the results along with your ISP location. If using a VPN, that should show the different location you set it to.

If ONLY Google is showing your true location and your search is showing a different one, then yeah, Google is possibly using a previously known location.

I’m a beginner in both (heavily leaning towards putting more time into learning Rust though). Could you please elaborate a bit?

Gotta say, I’m liking the logo. The fact that the devs let you choose to keep one or the other is a really nice touch. I look forward to the release!

God I love that episode and that line. It’s so sad how that observation somehow became even more relevant today than it was back when that episode released.

Thank you.