• 2 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • you are vulnerable during pairing which is for like a minute.

    I said this twice on the PSA: it’s hard to tell if your device is in discoverable mode, and it’s easy to forget it in that state, or start it accidentally. I’ve caught my devices accidentally in discoverable mode many times. You could have your PC a whole week in discoverable mode and never notice it, just by having a settings window left open.

    It’s more risk than most people should take, hence the warning.

    Still, if you’re comfortable with the risk, you’re free to change the config and allow insecure devices.




  • Wayland and X11 are protocols, they are essentially just documentation. You need an implementation to be able to actually run programs on it, called a compositor. People tend to think of X11 as a single software because historically Xorg became dominant as the main implementation of the specification, so most of us have only ever used Xorg (but Xorg is not the only implementation of X11, there are many others). Wayland, as a newer protocol, hasn’t undergone such consolidation yet, there are many competing compositors implementing the protocol in their own way. GNOME has one such compositor, and KDE has their own, and there are many others. So it’s not about “Desktop Environments” all running over the same compositor, as it was on Linux in the Xorg days. Instead, the Wayland features you get are the ones your choice of compositor has already implemented, and can vary between different compositors.



  • gog galaxy through wine is not an option…

    That’s the primary way I install and play GOG games. It’s easy to set up using Bottles. Galaxy used to run horribly on Wine, but it has improved recently. I help maintain the Galaxy installer in Bottles, and earlier this year we increased its grade from silver to gold, meaning all functions work with minimal glitches now.

    It isn’t perfect yet, it lags for about a minute right after launch, and I’d recommend going into settings and disabling the “Cloud saves” and “Overlay” features as these can cause crashes sometimes. Other than that, everything works well and performance is good.



  • This article lacks focus and mixes unrelated security concepts in questionable ways. It ends like just an ad for Wolfi. Don’t get me wrong, Wolfi is neat, it’s probably deserving of being talked up. But it doesn’t solve the supply-chain issues pointed out by the article (it doesn’t even try). Supply-chain attacks are currently not a major issue in Linux distributions, and enterprises are already tackling the issue of provenance elsewhere, and the article itself notes that. Dependency management for enterprise software is NOT the responsibility of Linux distros. So what is the point of the article? To me, this article is security mumble jumbo.


  • I believe the platform power profiles are standard nowadays and coded in the bios, so Linux should have access to them just like Windows does. You can use the powerprofilesctl command to list and change power profiles. Gnome also has a Power Mode switcher on the top menu, it’s the same thing.

    I can talk of my experience with the 2021 Asus ROG Strix G15, I have 3 power profiles:

    • performance: Power limits to max; Aggressive fan curve with speed limit to max. Generally loud fans. I need this to play demanding games in the summer.
    • balanced: Power limits to max; Moderate fan curve with a medium limit. Great perf (under sane ambient temp), while not too loud.
    • power-saver: Lowered power limits; Quiet fans.

    Those seem to correlate exactly with the power profiles in Armoury Crate: Turbo, Balanced and Silent respectively. I don’t think there’s any performance being left on the table.

    Gaming laptops with AMD CPU + AMD dGPU are a great suit for Linux gaming.

    Also, AMD GPUs benefit a lot from undervolting, which is safe to do. It’s free performance. I’ve made a simple systemd service to keep the undervolt always active: https://codeberg.org/jntesteves/amdgpu-tune





  • I hear you, I have a Legion laptop with a GTX 1060 mobile and I keep the dGPU as primary all the time because I just can’t be bothered by NVIDIA optimus anymore. That’s the reason I decided to upgrade to AMD, even though the performance of the 1060 was still appropriate for me and I wouldn’t have upgraded yet otherwise.

    I don’t have any issues with the Strix G15 on Fedora Silverblue. Talking to other owners of the same model and also other Asus AMD laptops on Reddit, I didn’t hear any complaints about that.

    The G15 has the HDMI port connected to the iGPU, and the USB-C (DisplayPort Alt Mode) connected directly to the dGPU. I’ve only used HDMI to connect to a TV, I haven’t tested the USB-C output because I don’t have a monitor with DisplayPort. So I can’t really answer your question.

    Tell you what, I’ve just ordered a USB-C to HDMI adapter, as soon as it arrives I’ll test the output that’s connected directly to the dGPU and update you on that. I’d bet on it being plug-and-play, but we’ll see. 😉