That video came up in my youtube recommendations last night, and I watched it. Pretty good, although if you’ve used Windows in the past ten years there aren’t going to be any real surprises in there. It sucks for all the reasons people usually complain about, and it’s all getting worse lately.

For me the X11 era continues for now (until the next version of xfce I expect) and the era of GNOME ended 23 years ago.

Linux loads the “firmware” into the GPU on boot. It does need to be updated from time to time, separately from the driver and everything else. On my system it’s kept in /usr/lib/firmware/amdgpu. And bios updates can often fix weird bugs, usually worth doing.

I don’t know, but one possibility to consider is that running amdgpu-pro (or its non-pro counterpart) might’ve done something that stops mesa from working if you didn’t completely undo everything it did.

amdgpu fails to load

If you’re referring to the old “amdgpu pro” software, you probably don’t want to be using that. It isn’t necessary for the stuff you want to do, and I’m surprised to learn that it still exists at all — it’s still talked about as if it’s current on the arch wiki. Get rid of that, update the firmware package, run a recent kernel, and then figure out whatever specific thing you actually need for the AI stuff you’re trying to do such as rocm-related things.

Whichever kernel debian bookworm has, the patch for this has most likely been applied to it. The larger risk is to organizations running ancient versions of RHEL or something that never get updated, e.g. because some hardware they need uses a shitty proprietary driver that supports only very specific kernel versions.

Edit: You can confirm that it’s been fixed in Debian here. Looks like it was patched for bullseye systems still running kernel 5.10 in June 2024.

“Hacktivist” apparently now means “for-hire saboteurs working for Russia.”

Yeah by “do whatever you like” I mean install MO2, edit the registry, run dyndolod, mess around with system dlls, whatever. One thing I’ve just learned about that might be useful: https://github.com/SulfurNitride/NaK

The “immutable” thing shouldn’t be a problem I’d think. Games installed through e.g. steam aren’t affected by that — it just does its own thing creating a wine prefix for the game somewhere in your home directory. You should be free to do whatever you like in there.

date -r reports current date instead of date specified by reference file

Seems like it was not simply a “difference compared to GNU coreutils” — it was just giving completely the wrong date.

Reading more carefully I see that the real reason is "the /run directory is created as a tmpfs filesystem specifically for run-time files by systemd-tmpfiles.

I forgot that systemd had been allowed to take over /tmp and /run.

Why on earth would the permissions on /var/lock be something for systemd to decide?

Generate Random Numbers

I prefer to generate random words (mostly for generating passwords):

alias randword='head -$[$SRANDOM % `wc -l /usr/share/dict/words | cut -f1 -d" "`] /usr/share/dict/words | tail -1'

You can adjust the dpi setting in winecfg to fix the font size, but in recent beta versions of proton I find it necessary to set it back to the default (and restart wine) to actually play the game.

There was one fairly popular fo4 mod that didn’t work for me, but the only skyrim one I found that seemed to have a problem with linux was nemesis, and that has now been replaced with pandora. All the other thousand or so mods I tried (currently using 600 or so) seem to work about as well as they do for anyone else.

MO2 runs just fine for me. I don’t actually use it for Skyrim — I do that all manually — but it worked for e.g. Fallout 4 without me doing anything special. I just ran its installer the same way I’d run skse64_loader.exe using the same prefix as the game.

Not bad considering it’s only been around for a couple of years.

I got to install Mint for a couple of people, which was fun. Haven’t done much of that since the heyday of the Linux User Group circa 2002.

https://fedia.io/media/7a/1a/7a1a6e904a4945e28cc81e76f8913aba3a84538bf9169cd0ef7ff39fa4a58957.jpg

They bought into the “age verification” scam.

That one is not at all unclear to regular readers of phoronix. Would you expect them to spell out what a “GPU” is as well? No harm in explaining it for others, but don’t blame the author.