Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Arch Linux lately reported about DDOS attacks to their sites (read about it on their homepage in case you can reach it), and it seems that of now, their user repository (known as the AUR) is affected:
That means no yay -Syu (or other AUR helper) updates at the moment. I wonder which weirdos gain anything from attacking sites like Arch? The world is definitely a strange place by now…
Anyway, and as always, thanks for reading.
Just took this with indirect flash (over a wall), plus with natural light from outside:
Also available on the Fediverse. Like always, thanks for viewing.
… way too early for it is the first reason.
Other than that, it’s too big, too expensive, and the headphone jack is missing. In the US, even the SIM tray is missing. I want a phone the size of a Pixel 4a, with headphone jacks please, and best with a user-replaceable battery. Oh, and Google show reopen its device tress of course, to make their hardware the premium development platform again.
That would sell phones, I think… oh, and btw – if phones were a reasonable size (maximum around 5.8 inches or so) again, then that would also sell 8″ tablets. Who wants a phablet if they don’t fit into pockets? Such nonsense…
Calvin Wankhede wrote an article about the duress PIN of GrapheneOS in AndroidAuthority, and I even logged in with a one-time generated code to comment and to congratulate him on it. We need more quality journalism like this instead of the many many articles about new features, colours, or whatever is not really relevant. Bravo!
Here is another good article about GrapheneOS by the same author. And another one.
I can reproduce that with a fresh install of Arch in a virtual machine. Gnome desktop and conky, with conky being put into autostart using the tweaks tool of the Gnome desktop. Have a look:
As the output of ‘ps’ shows, conky is definitely running, but it is not being displayed. Changing anything in its config, and then changing it back and saving that config makes it reload, and being displayed – same as if you ‘killall conky’ and reload it using the meta key and its icon.
Does not happen in Debian Trixie, but even with ps and pstree as well as Gnome Mutter’s ‘Looking Glass’ debugger I can’t figure out where the differences are. Happens only in Wayland, not when logging in using X.
Hints, anyone? Thanks 🙂
Update, from Wed 6 Aug, 2025: filed a bug in Arch concerning this…
The Independent has excerpts of an interview with Matt Groening, maker of “The Simpsons”. In it, he said things like:
“The Simpsons predicts kids across America will liberate their Republican parents from the cult of MAGA. And here’s how you do it. Grab the TV remote, go to menu, go to controls, vertical controls, look for channel list and delete Fox News.”
Sadly, there’s no button (yet) to delete printed garbage like Bild… 😉 But maybe banning hate speech echo chambers like Twitter/X from our phones, and everything Bytedance as well would help? Not to forget all sites and apps by Zuckerberg?
Oh, and while we’re at it: calling Windows 11 ‘malware’ is just the right word for it. But the solutions aren’t workarounds, but simply to abandon it for good.
Found here.
Meet Trixie:
Ooops – not *this* Trixie 😉 Although, as is well known, the Debian developers name their releases after characters from Toy Story, so this *is* Trixie. Enchanté 🙂
Well, as you can probably guess, I did it – approximately 3 weeks before the planned release date, and this time even one week before the planned deep freeze, I updated and upgraded my system according to the link in my last post which leads to the installation manual. Or, to make it a bit shorter, I did the following:
Done. Simple as that. Oh, and after the reboot I also performed a sudo apt autoremove to get rid of some old stuff which isn’t needed anymore.
I had to exchange a Gnome extension for the weather to a newer one afterwards, but that was about it. Runs perfectly fine – but what else would you expect from Debian?
So here’s the output from fastfetch:
Still a happy user of Debian, after all those years… and thanks for reading.
A user from Indonesia who calls himself “Fosslicious” has a nice video on YT showing how to make KDE on EndeavourOS look really good. I especially liked that analog clock à la Google of the “Utterly Sweet” theme he’s using in Plasma. Have a look:
Really a nice one – you’ll probably have to stop it a few times, as he’s going really fast through all these settings. But I never thought KDE could look that good 😉
As always, thanks for reading & viewing.
Quick (TL:DR) answer: because both are great, both have their strengths and weaknesses, and both might be perfect for wholly different purposes.
So let me explain.
The upcoming Debian “Trixie” will have a kernel 6.12.something, while Arch has 6.15.7 while I’m writing this – might change real soon in a rolling release distribution. Likewise, Debian will have the ESR versions of Thunderbird and Firefox, while Arch will have the latest. Or let’s have a look at something for, say, composers – let’s choose musescore:
This was Arch, now let’s see Debian:
Ok, this is still “Bookworm”, so let’s see the packages site in a browser – same, musescore3. Same with other programs like Ardour, or for photographers, RawTherapee or Darktable.
So Debian packages are old, yes. That’s what makes Debian great for its stability, and this is something people like me often want. But on the other hand, creatives often want the latest and greatest, they might need the new features of the latest program versions…
… which is why I installed both. Simple. And free as in beer *and* as in free speech. 🙂
Oh, and in case you’re a creative: what’s the “pro-audio” group in Arch is the “multimedia-all” in Debian, called the Debian Multimedia Pure Blend. Easy, and without any 3rd party repositories (like the very good kx.studio).
And like always, thanks for reading.
Debian plans to release its version 13 aka “Trixie” on August 9th – and in case you want to upgrade from version 12 “Bookworm”, have a look at the instructions on how to do that. Found via Phoronix.
P.S.: my late brother Willi first used Ubuntu Linux, like many others, and he also installed that for friends and family. Once I showed him Debian, he never looked back. And who brought *me* to Debian, you might ask? That was my former colleague Peter from Austria. And although I now use both Arch Linux *and* Debian, I’m still thankful for that 🙂