data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • 8 Posts
  • 76 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • I think your Adobe comment isn’t quite right. I have two family members who are professional photographers and use Photoshop; Photoshop is so important to their workflow they can’t give it up just to use Linux. They thus stick with Windows (though one’s work had them using Macs for a bit, so they see it as acceptable).

    In contrast, although I sometimes used Photoshop in hobbies (a euphemism for memes), I never used any features so specific to Photoshop that I couldn’t just replace it with a combination of Inkscape and GIMP.

    I think the truth is as much as I hate Adobe, Photoshop is the best at what it does right now compared to competitors; GIMP 3.0 has a dismal UI and a weaker feature set, and the latter is largely true of a lot of the web-based editors as well.




  • The KMS timeouts almost make me wonder if the graphics chip is snorting some sort of crack.

    Just to be safe, maybe try booting a live USB and see what happens. To be very sure, you could even try multiple distro/DE combos on the live disk.

    If it’s RAM, it should be easily replaceable on a laptop of that age. If it’s the graphics chip, then it’s probably time to find some other laptop. You can probably still press this to service in a homelab, though.




  • Old isn’t necessarily bad. Also, as far as I can tell, distros are still patching 1.32. Based on my personal usage of LightDM and the fact that the project is still developed (based on commits to main), I’d say it’s more of an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” dynamic. As for security, the active development suggests the developers would respond if there was a vulnerability - a big if, considering its last CVE was in 2017.

    Personally, I love LightDM - it has just enough features while mostly sticking to its name (I mean, you’re probably using GTK anyway).


  • I wouldn’t call 4K mainstream in 2014 - I feel like it was still high end.

    I didn’t have a 4K TV until early 2019 or so when unfortunately, the 1080p Samsung one got damaged during a move. Quite sad - it had very good color despite not having the newest tech, and we’d gotten it second-hand for free. Best of all, it was still a “dumb” TV.

    Of course, my definition of mainstream is warped, as we were a bit behind the times - the living room had a CRT until 2012, and I’m almost positive all of the bedroom ones were still CRTs in 2014.




  • Honestly, rather than reinstalling, I’d suggest you boot into a live disk and use dd to copy your old disk over to the new one, then use Gpsrted or something to expand your partition. This worked very well when I upgraded the drives for my Debian install - I think it’s been two years since at thid point without any issues.

    If you don’t have an extra drive slot, you might need to get an external adapter.





  • iPhone, mostly because of family.

    I eventually want to jump to Lineage on Pixel, but that’s not an option for me currently.

    My Thinkpad has the factory Windows install on its factory-installed drive, but I only booted it once and otherwise never use it. As the laptop has 2 M.2 slots, I just installed a 2 TB SSD in its secondary slot and installed Debian 12 on it right after I opened the box. I nearly always use that install.

    I recently had an exam where the spyware test monitoring Chrome extension was mad about me using Linux (I only use Chromium when I have an exam - otherwise I just use Firefox), so I had to use one of the Windows machines in the lab. This was weird, because I’ve taken other tests (including after this incident) that didn’t have a problem.

    Back in high school, I had to use a Chromebook and the occasional iMac, though the Chromebook is technically a Linux device.






  • I don’t know about the hub specifically, but I have a One Touch portable external HDD that touts some of the same features. I’ve never had any particular problems with it - it’s just a normal USB mass storage device. The “special features” provided by the Seagate Toolkit (not available on Linux) seem like they’re done at the filesystem level.

    If you don’t care about encryption, it will most likely just work - format it however you like. If you care about encryption, there’s ways like LUKS or filesystems with FS-level support, depending on how much you care about interoperability with non-Linux systems. You might also be able to do something kooky like format it with Bitlocker on Windows, which I think can still be mounted on a Linux system; I was able to access my encrypted Windows partition from my Linux install on my Surface if I entered the key - I’m sure there’s a way to automate that part.