• 0 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

help-circle
  • Generally speaking, xz provides higher compression.

    None of these are well optimized for images. Depending on your image format, you might be better off leaving those files alone or converting them to a more modern format like JPEG-XL. Supposedly JPEG-XL can further compress JPEG files with no additional loss of quality, and it also has an efficient lossless mode.

    Do any of them have the ability to recover from a bit flip or at the very least detect with certainty whether the data is corrupted or not when extracting?

    As far as I know, no common compression algorithms feature built-in error correction, nor does tar. This is something you can do with external tools, instead.

    For validation, you can save a hash of the compressed output. md5 is a bad hashing algorithm but it’s still generally fine (and widely used) for this purpose. SHA256 is much more robust if you are worried about dedicated malicious forgery, and not just random corruption.

    Usually, you’d just put hash files alongside your archive files with appropriate names, so you can manually check them later. Note that this will not provide you with information about which parts of the archive are corrupt, only that it is corrupt.

    For error correction, consider par2. Same idea: you give it a file, and it creates a secondary file that can be used alongside the original for error correction later.

    I also want the files to be extractable with just the Linux/Unix standard binutils

    That is a key advantage of this method. Adding a hash file or par file does not change the basic archive, so you don’t need any special tools to work with it.

    You should also consider your file system and media. Some file systems offer built-in error correction. And some media types are less susceptible to corruption than others, either due to physical durability or to baked-in error correction.





  • I’m on Bazzite now. It certainly made my life easier as far as GPU drivers go.

    However, be aware that it comes with its own learning curve. It’s an “immutable” distro, and it has like half a dozen different ways to install software. You can’t use dnf like you would on regular Fedora. The idea is to get apps from Flatpak, or use Distrobox, or use Homebrew — all things that run on top of the base OS so you can use a monolithic “immutable” OS image. There are pros and cons to this approach.

    Once I familiarized myself with Distrobox (BoxBuddy makes this a lot easier) and using Flatseal to grant Flatpak apps direct access to the folders they need to operate (like my music library on an external drive, in the case of my music player), it’s been pretty smooth sailing. But I do miss just being able to run sudo apt install <whatever>.




  • On further investigation, it looks like you’d need to do an in-between upgrade to 24.10 before going to 25.04. I didn’t realize that before. It’s been a long time since I upgraded an Ubuntu system.

    Here is the relevant documentation you’d need for upgrades:

    From 24.04 to 24.10: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OracularUpgrades/#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_24.10

    And then basically the same thing again to go from 24.10 to 25.04: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PluckyUpgrades#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_25.04

    In case you’re not familiar with Ubuntu’s naming and update conventions, I’ll explain briefly, because it’s confusing for beginners: Each release has a name and number. The names loop through the alphabet in the format “Adjective Animal”, and the numbers are the release date in format “year.month”, with new releases every six months, in April and October. Then there are the “Long Term Support” (LTS) releases that are released every two years, matching the April “xx.04” main releases. You’re currently on “Noble Numbat” (24.04), which is followed by “Oracular Oriole” (24.10) and “Plucky Puffin” (25.04). Totally intuitive, right?! -_-

    OR you could back up your stuff and install a clean 25.04. I’m not sure if the installer has an option to retain an existing home folder. Again, it’s been a long time since I used Ubuntu specifically. Perhaps someone with more recent experience can chime in.


  • You didn’t mention which version of Ubuntu Studio you’re running. Is it 24.04 LTS by any chance?

    My initial thought is that you are probably running Wayland, and that your version of Ubuntu has KDE Plasma 5 instead of 6 and/or outdated Nvidia drivers that don’t work super well with Wayland.

    A quick search shows that this is all default on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, which is the first version you’ll find at ubuntustudio.org. :(

    Ubuntu 25.04 (non-LTS) has Plasma 6, which is a very important upgrade if you are using Wayland, especially with Nvidia GPUs.

    Just a guess. If I’m right, you have a few choices:

    1. Upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.04 (non-LTS). It has newer stuff like Plasma 6 that fixes a LOT of problems like this.

    2. Switch to X11 instead of Wayland. This will likely introduce a new set of problems though. X11 has no future.

    3. Switch to a different DE than KDE. I am not sure what is best in this situation.

    4. Install the latest Nvidia drivers manually instead of getting them from the Ubuntu repo.

    Option 1 is by far the simplest choice.

    The Linux desktop is in a big transitional phase these past few years, as more distros default to Wayland even before a lot of their packages are updated to fully support it. It’s a terrible time to be stuck with outdated “LTS” distros. This is why I hopped away from Debian 12 (13 is out now so yay, but it was a year too late for me).




  • Seems like most mods work fine on Linux, but I’m sure it depends on the game. For games with built-in mod managers like Baldur’s Gate 3, it all just works. For games with manual mods that involve replacing or editing game files, they should generally work since you’re running the same game files to begin with.

    I haven’t had any big compatibility problems recently, though again, I’m sure it depends on that game. Proton (built into Steam) works very very well nowadays.

    Just a few years ago I found the experience frustrating. It seemed like everything had something wrong with it, even if it wasn’t big. Lots of games had glitchy input, whether using a controller or keyboard/mouse. But somewhere down the line it totally flipped, and everything I play runs great now. I still have a bootable Windows 10 system, but I haven’t actually booted it in…two years, maybe?





  • I mean that an individual folder will always look the same (consistent), and also look distinctly different from any other folder (unique) if that’s how you arranged it. So you could identify a folder instantly.

    Everything in list view looks the same at a glance, and most file managers don’t retain a folder window’s size and placement. Modern macOS kiiiind of does but you have to fight it if you don’t want a single-window browsing UI.


  • The last time I found icon view useful was in Mac OS 9. There were three main characteristics that made it useful that no current systems have AFAIK:

    1. The icon grid was tight (32 pixels) and you could either snap items to that grid or place them freely.

    2. Window sizes and places were directly associated with folders. (There was no “browser-style” single-window mode.)

    3. File names used dynamic spacing. Longer names would occupy multiple grid spaces as needed.

    These factors meant that every folder had a consistent and potentially unique size, placment, and layout.

    OS X took the Finder and either ruined or neglected everything good about it. Windows explorer has always been garbage. Never found a Linux file manager with a compelling icon view either (though to be fair, I’ve never looked all that hard). The lack of system-level metadata for layout kind of mandates an abstraction between a directory and its display.




  • 20 years ago I would have taken this as satire. Today, reality is far more absurd.

    They clearly don’t understand what pride is about, or why it’s needed in the first place. I don’t go around showing my “straight pride” because there is literally nobody out there trying to make me ashamed of being straight. Never in my entire life have I felt unsafe because I was straight. I never had to worry about my family rejecting me if they learned I was straight. Being straight has never affected my housing security. I have not been subjected to verbal and physical assault because I am straight. Nobody has ever, to the best of my knowledge, been sent a brainwashing camp for being straight. There is not a single country on earth where it is illegal to be straight, and there never has been.

    You cannot say any of those things about being gay. That’s why gay pride matters. These are not problems of the past. They are all problems today.