Mastodawn

Bram Diederik aka daft_dutch Feb 11

@ianonymous3000 senior user. But i have a question.

There is still a 32bit debian system i maintain. Its lended to a friend who really wants a nice laptop and this still works.

What distro to use. Comming from debian because debian drops 32support next release.

Magitian Feb 12

@bdiederik @ianonymous3000 you could try @VoidLinux or @gentoo

Porter Feb 11

@ianonymous3000 I use Linux when I can, but honestly the biggest reason for not switching entirely comes down to two things: proprietary Windows tools I need to use for work. And hardware support causing big loss of performance in games. I have installed Mint on my laptop though (not my main PC) and it's been excellent. Though I don't game on it.

ttoocs Feb 11

@plym @ianonymous3000
Nvidia does have proprietary drivers for linux, though their lifetime is more limited.

Otherwise game performance for me has always been better on linux.

Main issue is anti-cheats, but as any anticheat can be circumvented by: Havig another different computer to do the hacking/cheating... I hope they eventually kill the habit of bricking peoples computers in claiming it helps.

quixote Feb 12

@ianonymous3000 Way back when (late 1990s, early 00s) what helped me were installfests. People who looked like Kernighan and Ritchie would hang around and help you over your personal rough spots to get whatever distro you wanted installed on your own quirky machine.

We need to run those again.

Plus they were a barrel of fun.

(Possibly even more convenient, though, is offering to help over social media 😂 . Nobody has to travel anywhere.)

Psyhackological Feb 12

@ianonymous3000
'Please stop supporting an insecure and privacy-intrusive operating system."
I know Windows is worse but isn't this also a MacOS thing too? You can't even use Mac without an account, no customisation, encapsulated in their ecosystems. So it's privacy intrusive and instructive but I guess it's more secure than Windows.

Sooraj Sathyanarayanan Feb 14

@psyhackological macOS does not strictly require an Apple ID to use the system. During initial setup, you can skip signing into an Apple account and still create a local user account to access the Mac.

ZeStig

Feb 14

@ianonymous3000 @psyhackological it's quite weird Apple does this. Don't they want to milk their users? What has Apple got to gain by allowing local account creation?

Psyhackological Feb 14

@ianonymous3000 really? Maybe I assumed the same as I've seen iOS pop up that log in or register into your account. However I don't think you can activate the device without the Internet.

@psyhackological
You can "use it" just not install anything from the app store, even if the app costs zero dollars. You can't have updates across major versions either because those upgrades are in the app store too.

You might not even be able to "side load" apps (aka install software) anymore, they were pushing that pretty hard when I last looked.

You also need an account for any repairs, warranty info and to order the computer from their site.

@ianonymous3000

Psyhackological Feb 23

@EndlessMason @ianonymous3000 so it's usable but you're getting punished for not doing what they wanted.

@psyhackological
Edit: oops, I was complaining about a different product that was punishing me for not creating an account. never mind.

@ianonymous3000

@psyhackological
It depends if you consider having to right-click > Run every program you download from the internet to be "usable"

You also get regular "There's an update" notifications that take you to a "you have to log in" on the app store... and you just have to click "maybe tomorrow" every day.

I'm just not sure the main thing i use throughout the day, that I have to pay months worth of my income to have in my house to be pestering me about bullshit every day and deliberately making my life less convenient

@ianonymous3000

Psyhackological Feb 23

@EndlessMason @ianonymous3000 so either way you're in the end forced to log in otherwise you are shamed every time you're trying to use the thing productively that you paid for. Shame Apple. Thanks for explanation.

I think when you have an iPhone the first they will ask you to do is connect to Internet. What if I'm right now at the area where there isn't any connection? But I've seen the same practice with stock bloated Androids.

@psyhackological @ianonymous3000 LG had a migration tool that worked via usb-c, i managed to get my stuff onto it without network... but within a couple of weeks i dropped it on a concrete floor and a couple of weeks later LG closed their whole telephone division.

I'm using a 7 year old phone at this point.

Jim Gardner Feb 23

@psyhackological @ianonymous3000 I use macOS professionally and have never signed in with apple ID or needed to use the App store. Most everything is installable by using an installer from the product’s website, or by one of the unofficial package managers, like homebrew.

Psyhackological Feb 23

@jimgar @ianonymous3000 yeah I forgot about homebrew but it's unofficial and most likely to be used by technical people like you.

@ianonymous3000 Simple. The commitment to #accessibility is NOT there, period. Stuff does not get tested, it can take years for accessibility services to catch up when a big change is made, and there's zero guarantee stuff will continue working from one day to the next where this is concerned. I need my computer to work for me, not the other way around.. Sooo ... would love to switch, but can't in good conscience do so.

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 What features specifically are missing? that's kinda a broad term, maybe someone here can help.

Your complaints also basically mirror mine about windows on my work pc, everything is always locking up/crashing, nothing seems tested, even the damned applications menu never works right, theres no options for proper layering of windows which makes things extremely difficult/have to move the mouse 10x as much for simple tasks where Id normally just lock them in place/etc.

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 I'm a fully blind developer/gamer/content creator. I need screen readers to read the screen, and I need those screen readers to not fail to read the screen when:

- The application it's trying to read has a higher level of privilege
- The new windowing system (wayland) screws up the accessibility APIs
- There's some kind of audio permissions issue
- The audio doesn't randomly stutter for some kind of deeply internal reason I as a casual user don't want to know how to fix
- the desktop environment screws something up
- A dependency of a dependency of a dependency of the desktop environment screws something up and is stuck in a multi-year "no you" back-and--forth on issue comments about who should be fixing said screw-up.

Not saying blind people can't use Linux, they absolutely can provided they know all the ancient rituals to fix stuff when it inevitably breaks, but I'd say at this point using it as a driver == anxiety

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 I'm curious, what distro was this? most of these are general issues, not specifically related to a screen reader, I wonder if the distro is doing something odd that's breaking things.

I can't say I have great recommendations as I don't have the same condition but I've heard good things about orca. Debian LTS with XFCE should provide an out-of-the box screenreader environement that's guaranteed to be stable for years.

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 It is all general issues, yes. It's an overall snapshot of the general state of things. Debian LTS probably will work up to a point, but then if a new feature comes out for the screen reader it's generally tied to a bunch of upstream dependencies that Debian LTS wouldn't necessarily let you easily grab given it's rather conservative about updating stuff, so yes, it'd probably keep working but you might also fall behind, and while Orca works, I wouldn't call it a very ... full-featured experience. It works, you can get stuff done, but it's a serious step down from what's available on other platforms and that's no dig at the developers, they're doing fantastic work, they're just not where I need them to be yet to be productive and when I DO use Linux it's usually more specialized distros for , say, security engagements etc.

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 as long as the reader is in repo grabbing dependencies should be automatic, if you're experiencing otherwise that's definitely a bug. Aside from that I'm far more concerned about the audio issues, you're the second person this week I've had say they've experienced crackling/bad audio. I'd love to help open bug reports for these if there's more information available and get them fixed, do you know what type of card it is?

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 From what I understand this mostly happens within Vmware-based machines that run distros that are using Pipewire. I noticed this, for example, on Kalilinux 2024.2. Their speech-assisted install works fine but once the user loads into the GUI the audio stutters so bad the screen reader can no longer be understood. I honestly don't know if this has been fixed yet but it's essentially par for the course that something audio goes wonky. Another common one, at least on PulseAudio, is that when Orca has audio within the GUI, that same user can now not have audio within a seperate TTY unless you jump through hoops, a la https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-speakup/msg63445.html

Linux Speakup — My guide to setting up espeakup on Linux

Linux Speakup: My guide to setting up espeakup on Linux

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 interesting, i looked in the knowledge base for vmware and unfortunately it looks like it's a known bug, but it's not on the linux driver side but on the VMware host itself, apparently it doesn't pass the device correctly to either linux or windows and needs custom settings to prevent audio crackling on either.

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 For the issue you linked, the solution is pretty out of date unless using an incompatible distro, almost every WM you can simply uncheck pulse/pipewire from startup in the graphical settings, and select the "systemwide" install option for pulse/pipewire to accomplish the same thing, haven't needed to edit the files to do that in a long time, and honestly I wouldn't recommended people mess with them on a modern pipewire setup unless absolutely needed.

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 generally i would advise against a systemwide setup for pipewire tbh but i can see how in the case of a screenreader it might be useful to be able to pipe audio from other users. I can definitely see that being something that falls a bit under the radar since it's such an uncommon setup.

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 Kinda what I mean bi rituals though. For a common user that'd require knowing what pulseaudio/pipewire even are, what the difference is between user/system--wide, why speech doesn't "Just work""®(tm) like it does on everything else, etc.
It's all fixable, it's all possible with the exact right settings but the very fact that this WAS the way to fix it way back when is a great example of how you sometimes really need to dig into the weeds to get something seemingly very simple done. Here's another one of those examples: https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/470
In particularly pay attention to how LONG this issue has been open. If for whateverreason you need this to work, you've been out of luck for almost a decade

Calamares is not accessible by screen reader (orca) . · Issue #470 · calamares/calamares

Jira issue originally created by user libregeekingkid: Screen reader Orca can not read the text in the Calamares Installer. Orca seems to read the text with Ubiquity fine but is failing to do so wi...

GitHub

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 yes, it could be made more clear what a systemwide install is for, but lets be clear, this is NOT something a normal user needs, and I HIGHLY recommend not doing this, it is not required to run a screenreader, that setup is more for multi-user remote login, or account isolation.

They don't need to know what these things are just like they don't need to know what regedit or powershell are, even though you commonly need to use those in windows for advanced settings.

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 Some tools work better in an isoalted shell/tty, so require Speakup, so if you want/need to use those tools, you effectively need to be logged into both a GUI AND a TTY. So uhh ... yeah, a 'normal' user actually does need to worry about this as soon as anything terminal comes up. Orca can do it, sure, but the experience is much better, by several orders of magnitude, using Speakup. Take anyone who's doing a Linux fundamentals course and they are going to need this setup at some point

Florian Mar 6

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 Do you happen to have the link to that article handy? I can't really seem to find it, was curious to see if I could replicate it in latest Kali

https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-cloud-foundation/discussion/poor-audio-crackling-from-workstation-windows-client-1752

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 sorry, i could have been more clear, broadcom themselves have no article posted (they rarely do), the community has tons of threads documenting it on their forum though, you can find it through variations of "pop" "crackle" "audio" etc, their forums unfortunately have pretty bad search functionality, here's one example.

(splitting this into two parts)

Poor audio (crackling) from Workstation Windows client (17.5.2) | VMware Workstation

I am seeking suggestions, help or updated drivers for resolving the crackling sounds of VMWare Workstation audio that seem to go back to Windows 98 clients.I ha

@zersiax @ianonymous3000
The general consensus through most of these in the end is that the problem is host side, generally solved in most of the threads by running as admin, disabling hyper-v, or using a linux host instead of windows. I'm trying to find one I found last time but I'm not seeing it now but it also had a list of properties they found were not being automatically set for audio that should have been that caused the host audio to run at the wrong rate.

Florian Mar 6

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 Interesting. I think I'm particularly amazed about the fact this happened in one version of a particular distro, but not the version after, suggesting some kind of incompatibility between the Windows host and a shift within that version's audio handling, perhaps a pulse-to-pipewire shift, or an x11-to-wayland shift. I haven't tried this with latest, nor with another hypervisor so my data is flawed, but these are some things to do. I have noticed incredible slowdowns when hyperV is enabled for different scenarios so that I can absolutely confirm being responsible for all sorts of unrelated issues, mostly way longer boot times and disk IO

https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/290421-my-guide-to-getting-better-soundvideo-playback-in-vmware/

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 I found this thread on a non broadcom forum that seems to reflect what i remember seeing in the other one, that a lot of it is just broken settings vmware puts on certain hosts by default.

I don't use vmware but the VM system that I use (libvirt/kvm) has auto settings it applies when it detects different OSs, i wonder if vmware has some broken defualts it's sticking you with when it detects that distro.

My Guide to Getting Better Sound/Video Playback in vmWare

Distorted, crackling video and audio playback in vmWare? I did too... Here's how I fixed it... --- Step 1) Update the host audio driver to most stable/updated version. Step 2) Shut down your VM, edit your VMX configuration file to add these entries: sound.virtualDev = "es1371" pciSound.playBuffer...

InsanelyMac

Florian Mar 6

@raptor85 @ianonymous3000 very possible. ALso not against trying other hypervisors such as KVM if that turns out to give a better experience. I'll take al ook at latest with these resources in mind, gonna need it for a Twitch stream I'm planning soon, thanks for the resources!

@zersiax @ianonymous3000 I'm quite happy with libvirt/kvm, my only real gripe is that the gui still doesn't have settings for passing through event devices and hardware passthrough isn't as straightforward as it should be, you still need to edit the xml config file directly (thankfully you can do it IN the gui, as it has an edit mode, but it should just be an option). Not needed unless you run VMs on a dedicated video card/monitor but it can't be THAT uncommon of a setup to not include gui opts