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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • Lets go through the summary and see if anything is wrong or misleading:

    Linutil is a distro-agnostic toolbox designed to simplify everyday Linux tasks. It helps you set up applications and optimize your system for specific use cases. The utility is actively developed in Rust 🦀, providing performance and reliability.

    • It is not distro agnostic. There is Arch and Fedora specific code, which are not separated into modules, but part of other scripts. Outside of the package manager, it also relies heavily on systemd.
    • Installing “Diablo II Resurrected loot filters” is not an “everyday task”. A lot of other scripts are similar, very specific, “one time use” things, not “everyday tasks”.
    • helps you set up applications, maybe, but only if you count running sudo pacman -S networkmanager as “helping”, even when it ignores existing network configuration.
    • “optimize your system for specific use cases”, it does nothing of the sort. There’s no kernel parameter tweaking, no other cpu scheduler, no IO options being changed, or anything remotely similar.
    • “The utility is actively developed in Rust” except for the ~70% that is shell scripts. (according to GitHub)
    • “Providing performance and reliability”, which is not something that’s determined by the programming language.

    So lets revise the short description, to exclude any incorrect/misleading statements:

    Linutil is a toolbox. The utility is actively developed.

    Alongside all that, the “installation instructions” include the biggest sin of all:

    curl -fsSL https://christitus.com/linux | sh

    TL;DR Never trust Chris Titus, or any “Linux YouTuber”, with your Linux machine. They do not know what the hell they’re doing.




  • Despite the downsides of F-Droid, there’s one thing they provide that other stores like Accrescent simply can’t. F-Droid provides APK builds with the exact source used for the build available. There’s a lot of trust involved, but this trust is in a single entity, rather than random developers. F-Droid has existed for a long time without adding malicious code to builds, so when they say “this source code produces this APK”, they have years of history doing exactly that to back their claim.

    A random app developer has no such trust built up. Stores like Accrescent, even if you download only FOSS apps, trust the app developer with building apps. It’s less prone to one massive takeover, but APKs built by random devs are much harder to verify and check for malicious code than the source code. If F-Droid is taken over, it should be noticed relatively quickly, but affects everyone using F-Droid. If an app on Accrescent bundles malware, only users of that app are affected, but it may go unnoticed for a much longer time.







  • I can personally vouch for how toxic the Discord server and its moderators/admins are. Went there for support (Hyprland was crashing on startup on AMD, sway worked fine), and was told something along the lines of “if you can’t figure this out you’re stupid and you should stop using Linux”. Figured out the issue on my own and stopped using and recommending Hyprland after that.



  • The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.

    The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.

    As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.



  • The source code for a decompilation of a game can only be available legally because someone who isn’t the original dev created the decomp and decided to share it publicly. All assets in the game were still created by the original developers, and can’t be freely shared. This means the open source decompilation will need a way to load assets from the original game to remain legal to redistribute. This includes things like textures, 3d models, and music.

    Chances are, once this project is completed, you’ll need an original copy of the game to play, and it’ll use the cars, maps, and music from the original game.



  • For a distribution like Fedora, it’s usually not required to turn off secure boot. You’ll know if it’s needed when booting the install USB, as it’ll give a “security policy” (or similar) warning.

    Other things of note when dual booting are Windows “Fast Boot” and “Hibernation” features, which can put hardware in a state where it is unusable from Linux. Turning those off in Windows can fix things like your network interface not working. Windows also stores the time in a different way than Linux, if you are in a non-utc timezone, setting up NTP (automatically syncing date and time) on both Windows and Linux can help.