• 0 Posts
  • 25 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle






  • It’s a bit disheartening that VR is still not a good experience on Linux. I was wrestling with my Vive several years ago now, but I just got sick of dealing with it (literally and figuratively) due to the jitter, randomly breaking features (even mid-session), crashes, and other random things. It was a coin toss every time whether it was going to even launch at all.

    It just wasn’t worth it, so it has been collecting dust now for a few years. Was hoping that one day I’d be able to just plug it in and have an ok time.


  • I don’t remember encountering the particular bug they’re describing. I was hoping it was about the behaviour of drag-and-dropping something into the browser, such as with those “drop a file here to upload”. I am often simply unable to make that work because instead of the thing being dropped into the webpage’s element, it opens the file in the browser instead, which is not really something I ever want to do.





  • I think the Xorg vs Wayland situation is not too dissimilar to that of Windows vs Linux. Lots of people are waiting for all of their games/software work (just as well or better) on Linux before switching. I believe that in most cases, switching to Linux requires that a person goes out of their way to either find alternatives to the software they use or altogether change the way they use their computer. It’s a hard sell for people who only use their computer to get their work done, and that’s why it is almost exclusively developers, tech-curious, idealists, government workers, and grandparents who switch to Linux (thanks to a family member who falls into any subset of the former categories). It may require another generation (of people) for X11 to be fully deprecated, because even amongst Linux users there are those who are not interested in changing their established workflow.

    I do think it’s unreasonable to expect everything to work the same when a major component is being replaced. Some applications that are built with X11 in mind will never be ported/adapted to work on Wayland. It’s likely that for some things, no alternatives are ever going to exist.

    Good news is that we humans are complex adaptive systems! Technology is always changing - that’s just the way of it. Sometimes that will lead to perceived loss of functionality, reduction in quality, or impeded workflow in the name of security, resource efficiency, moral/political reasons, or other considerations. Hopefully we can learn to accept such change, because that’ll be a virtue in times to come.

    (This isn’t to say that it’s acceptable for userspace to be suddenly broken because contributors thought of a more elegant way to write underlying software. Luckily, X11 isn’t being deprecated anytime soon for just this reason.)

    Ok I’m done rambling.


  • As soon as it works. A recent update included Plasma 6.0.2 (on NixOS unstable/24.05) which apparently defaults to wayland, but it just exits to login right away. I’m not in a mood to tinker, so for now I plan to simply wait for things to Just Work. When I select “wayland” and things work and look the same (or better) is when I’m happy to rid myself of the horror that is X11, because as horrible as X11 is, it simply isn’t giving me trouble these days - my system is stable and I like keeping it that way.

    Edit: perhaps important to mention that I’m using a GTX 1070.

    Edit 2: I realise that I’m sort of contradicting myself with how I worded the above. I don’t mean to imply that I’m not willing to sacrifice anything to embrace Wayland; just that as it stands I don’t think the benefits of Wayland outweighs my ability to use this computer the way I need to.



  • While all of it is doable, be aware that it takes time and effort to learn Nix and NixOS. It can be difficult to figure out how to get a particular environment set up properly. There is a lot of documentation, but it doesn’t always give easy answers if you have specific requirements for a particular dev environment and such.

    It’s been a few years since I worked with Unity3D professionally, but I did so in NixOS with very little trouble. Rust has very good Nix infrastructure and so do many other languages. I can’t tell you anything about UE5 or the other proprietary tools, but there are FHS-compatibility helpers (steam-run usually works fine when I need to run arbitrary binaries made for ‘normal’ distros).

    If you’re willing to figure things out sometimes (and especially in the beginning) and are motivated to take your OS to the next level, NixOS is definitely worth it. Been using it for many years and I can’t imagine ever using a mutable OS again as a daily driver (unless the way I use my computer drastically changes). I configured everything just the way I want it; it’s magical to have almost everything in one place and being able to try different things without fear of breaking something.


  • That seems like it should work in theory, but having used Perplexity for a while now, it doesn’t quite solve the problem.

    The biggest fundamental problem is that it doesn’t understand in any meaningful capacity what it is saying. It can try to restate something it sourced from a real website, but because it doesn’t understand the content it doesn’t always preserve the essence of what the source said. It will also frequently repeat or contradict itself in as little as two paragraphs based on two sources without acknowledging it, which further confirms the severe lack of understanding. No amount of grounding can overcome this.

    Then there is the problem of how LLMs don’t understand negation. You can’t reliably reason with it using negated statements. You also can’t ask it to tell you about things that do not have a particular property. It can’t filter based on statements like “the first game in the series, not the sequel”, or “Game, not Game II: Sequel” (however you put it, you will often get results pertaining to the sequel snucked in).