sga

i guess the answer is yes, if your mouse stores the changes in mouse itself. essentially they are running windows in a vm, and store changes in mouse, and that works even after you closed the vm

not to downplay your issue, but if you would even go like 5-10 years back, and ask for biggest issue on linux, and this was your issue, people woud genuinely think you are joking. linux/foss has progressed greatly.

as others have said, major thing is federation, which is rolling out. other than that, the are mostly complete.

not really. it is more of, “i am not really motivated enough right now, can you please motivate me a bit?”

other than the think pad recommendations, if you buy a laptop from almost any “mainstream” brand (lets say a company with a million sales or above a year), which is 2-3 years old, you will have a great experience. even 1 year is enough for like 90+% cases.

if you want to buy a chromebook, check https://docs.chrultrabook.com/docs/getting-started/prerequisites.html - only buy supported models.

in my experience, battery life has always been better than windows (but that requires some experience and knowledge about governors and other stuff, check tlp docs if you want to, and also buying mainstream intel/amd stuff (that has not a fancy architecture like hetrogenous cores))

there used to be more, but now news is the main thing.

in olden times (of 2021), distro reviews/why linux is better/software showcase were the main things.

there were folks like luke smith (not going to his political shit) would do demos for things like groff/troff (imagine a latex alternative, now it is pretty much only used for man pages). but you get the idea - they would demo software, use it, compare it.

there is tle, who did lots of lists (like x amount of tools from elementary os which are great), linux cast would do file manager reviews, brodie would cover commandline stuff.

now pretty much all 3 of them do news. I still watch brodie because his news at times is niche and kinda fun, but i really do not want to hear lkml drama (which is non existent).

one of the youtubers which got me into linux was mental outlaw. he made tonnes of privacy/security/anonymity related videos back then, and occasional covered hacking news. i started trying to make windows more private (it truly started from try to make wwindows leaner), and then he, and tle got me into linux.

now i do not watch almost any of them. (except brodie, and occasional tle and tlc)

why all went to news - it is easier to make.

either voyager or webview have the issue. sorry i can not help, but maybe try filing a issue to voyager team

no, it’s svg. but it all the lines are not hard encoded for colors, so your browser is doing something incoreect probably. maybe try opening in a new tab or something. (my guess is that your browser is also setting text color to be black, so you see black on black)

as a end user - if project is very simple or small (say < 1000 LoC), i sometimes have a look.

I almost always read the readme/man page, and if their is wiki, that too.

Most of the comment section is hating on it being a chrome based browser, and not really answering the question, so let me try.

(partially unrelevant bit, you can skip it if you want to) I have been using it for about a week. before this, i was using qutebrowser (qt-webengine, which is essentially older lts chromium) for nearly a year and discussing with someone how i definitely should not be using such a old browser. So I am trying out “mainstream browsers” again. I went with helium, because the “someone” also recommended it. I was using librewolf for more than a year before qute, and did not like the performance (especially in my case, ha ving keyboard navigation, with something like vimium or tridactyl). Another reason is that i wanted to try something chromium (proper) after a long time.

What it is - if you have heard of ungoogled chromium project, this project builds from that, and they add some ui/ux features. for example, in ungoogled chromium, you can not download extensions from chromestore, you have to use a separate extension, and you essentially “sideload” them. They (helium) have made a middle man service (open, you can host your own instance), which you can use to get a nearly chrome like experience. They also ship with ublock origin (the proper manifest v2 version which is now deprecated in other chromium browsers). Other than that, it is almost stock chromium.

trustworthiness?? - can not really comment on that. I know the devs behind this browser have also made “cobalt.tools” website (imagine yt-dlp, but written from scratch and based in web tech (js)). So they have some cred from that. other than that, team is likely very small, and your proper trustworthiness essentially boils down to - do you trust their work? you can check their patches on github. if you want to, you can try to build from source and patches (building chrome is nightmarishly long). if you use their binary packages (which i am currently doing) then you are putting trust on them (remember xz situation?). in case they are using stuff like github action to generate their builds, then you can check the build files and artifacts as well.

unbiased ad-blocking

in this case, this just means they are using ublock origin with default filter lists. my guess for their wording is that they are not doing something like brave (you partially see ads) or like edge and other chromes which use some very light form of adblocking, which ofcourse does not work on their websites.

I’d prefer it be an extension

it is. they are shipping the manifest v2 (the full version) of ublock oob.

Isn’t BSD a sharealike license? So they can’t not

no. bsd (i think chrome is 3 clause, but not sure) is a just as open license like mit or gpl (minus the copyleft in gpl). and the core(ish) bits of chrome are lgpl (not sure. i am taliking about blink).

I do not like this attitude towards uutils. phoronix makes a very click baity title, and comments shit on uutils, rust and ubuntu.

last time it was “extremely slow” (17x), and by the time most people reported it, a pull request had been made and merged which brought the sha function within 2x of gnu version. not ideal, but definitely not reporting worthy.

then it was sort function can not sort big files, which came from a artificial benchmark of a 4 gigabyte file with single line all consisting of character ‘a’ (not sure if it was a or 0 or something, but that is not relevant). gnu version finished in ~1 sec, and the rust version could not. you can not sort a single line, it is already sorted. so there is some check which uutils is missing, which could be easily added, but no, we must shit on uutils and rust because they are trying.

In this case, some md5 errors happen, but apparently problematic part is not md5, but dd (actual bug report - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/makeself/+bug/2125535).

I am not saying uutils is a perfect project, but gnu coreutils are nearly 4 decades old, where as uutils are less than 1 decade (yes the project did not start last year). There are bugs which need to be ironed out, and testing it in a non lts distribution is the best way to do that.

it feels like a xy problem. if i am not wrong, single bit corruption leaving file unextractable is a bit wild, and my guess is that it’s headers were blown.

As for general stuff, use a file system which does parity calc and such. or use something like raid to have redundant drives. (you can set something like 1 in 5 breaks, or 2 in 5, but more you allow to break, less actual space usable you would have). Or have really simple backups.

As to physical media - do not go flash based (ssd/sd cards/usb pen drives) if you want to leave them unpowered. they expect to be powered once every few months. they are effectively ram disks but like much more stable. Hard disk drives are better, but handle physical shocks much worse. you can drop a ssd and expect it to work. for a hard disk it is almost game over. Magnetic tape are better, they are much less data dense, but they are cheap.

I would assume it’s lossless

yes. these are lossless algorithms.

Now coming to compression - no compression practically deals with bit corruption. practically all compression formats aim for small size and or fast (de)/compression. Saving parity bits is wasteful.

If you can install some thing, try, for eg, https://github.com/Parchive/par2cmdline. You give whatever file (compressed or not), and it will generate parity bits so you can repair stuff. now use whatever compression you want, and prepare parity bits for worst case.

As to what compression algorithm, zip or gzip (deflate), bzip2 (or newer 3), xz (lzma in general), and zstandard (or older lz4), brotli are practically not going anywhere. most distros use them, they are used on web, and many other places. My favorite is zstadard as it gives great compression and extremely fast.

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?

no and no.

You should also consider file archive format. for example zip (the format, not algo) or tar are effictively standards and stable, and practically here forever. there are mountable ones like squashfs (also fairly common. most linux distros use it for live images) and dwarfs (not yet a standard, imagine squashfs but also deduplicating).

do compression formats exist (or can they exist) which correct for bit flop - yes

If your goal is that a single bit flip should not ruin it, you should probably not look into deduplicating ones (they are reducing the number of bits stored, so in case a bit flip happens, less files would be corrupted).

Now coming to another part - do you want to compress data ? if so, why?

when you compress data, you literally reducing number of bits. now imagine if all bits on your disc are equally likely to undergo bitrot. if so, compressing makes your files less likely to rot.

but as you have also said, it is possible that if they corrupt, the corruption is more catastrophic (in a plane text file, this may just mean a character mutated, or in a image, some color changed. hardly problematic).

So you should also check - is compression worth it? come up with a number, lets say 90%. if compression algorithm reduces file size to 0.93 the original, do not go for compression. if it does, do compress. I am not saying pick 90%, but like decide on one you seem content with.

here is a stupid idea. if compression reduces file size by 2x, then compress, and make yet another copy. now even if one is corrupted, you have a pristine copy.