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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • My mother uses some software that runs in the browser for her shop. It can print out receipts and scan items. To do these things it has a small “sattelite” application that runs on the system and interacts with the printer and scanner. This software only runs on Windows and Linux doesn’t have drivers for the scanner.

    When I switched her over to Linux and found this out in the process I wanted to stop, give up and install windows.

    But then I had a stupid idea. I could run the sattelite program in a Windows VM and pass through the USB devices for receipt printer and scanner. The webapp uses requests to localhost:9998 to communicate with the sattelite so I set up a apache server that proxies these requests into the VM. I also prevented the VM from acessing the Interner so Windows doesn’t update and screw everything up.

    And it works. It has been in use for a week now and I’ve heard no complaints. I’m just praying to god it doesn’t break






  • Yeah it’s alright. I’ve been using Tumbleweed on my Desktop PC for the last few months and I gotta say it’s mid. They do hard drive unlocking in Grub instead of in the initfs which means that only LUKS 1 and with that only the not-so-secure PDKDF is supported, instead of argon2id which is the modern KDF you want to use. This is a small and annoying oversight in the distros security which is why I will not be using it in the future


  • I’m not an anti-systemd extremist. I use Void because it is a simple distro that doesn’t break as often as Arch does, while also being very up-to-date.

    I do have some things I dislike about systemd though which is why I will continue avoiding it in the future.

    • It doesn’t follow the Unix Philosophy. This is a big problem for me, I want to be able to switch out different parts of my system as I please. Systemd is a collection of projects that are all so deeply integrated that you can’t use them without also running the Systemd init system. And now Desktop Environments are starting to depend on Logind for example and there’s no alternative for non-systemd users. (Except Elogind but that’s just Logind ripped out of SystemD)
    • It’s bloated and has many features I don’t use. I just need an init system to start all my services at boot and restart them if they fail. Nothing more

    Also using a Distro without Systemd is not really that hard






  • This is a problem. Computers got faster over time and one would assume apps would also open faster. But no, developers that don’t care about their application’s performance (or companies, most of the time it’s not the developer’s fault) cause us to wait longer. Microsoft recently tweeted that they managed to get Microsoft Teams startup time down to 9 seconds from 18. I mean what the fuck.