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Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

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Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#81

Post by ubercow13 »

savolai wrote: post #17
jeroenhd wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who can't be bothered to pay the Apple tax, what does the Macbook trackpad do that others don't? My experience with different mouse acceleration configs (Windows, Synaptics, Linux) has only been negative.

You need to experience it to understand just how much more calibrated it is to the human experience, feels natural, like air. :) How about visiting a store that sells macbooks?

I went to an Apple store to try just this and came away unimpressed. Apart from the much better integration of gestures with the OS, I didn't feel anything special about the touchpad or its acceleration curve. In fact the touchpad was quite annoying to use because there was a kind of block on movement after a click that was far to long, making it difficult to click multiple different things quickly in a row. Overall I preferred my own laptop using libinput at the time :)

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#82

Post by lwh »

These sound like things that used to be regular part of install/setup on BSD and Linux. It's so much nicer now not having to setup the network, GUI or disks. Nevermind the week of downloading all the floppy images.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#83

Post by ygra »

lstamour wrote: post #77
matheusmoreira wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My laptop has a Synaptics trackpad and came with Windows pre-installed. Trackpad acceleration was really comfortable on Windows. It all changed when I installed Linux. Tried adjusting the Synaptics driver settings but couldn't get it to match the Windows experience. So what causes this difference? Is the Windows driver just better than the Linux driver?

Possibly relevant: Windows “Precision Touchpad” specs, including https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com... and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/com... It’s hard to find other details, at least in public...

Haven't had a new laptop in a while, but as far as I'm aware, most touchpads are not Precision Touchpads and instead continue to emulate stuff in the driver without Windows knowing, so you're still at the mercy of the (usually shoddy) driver implementation.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#84

Post by cb22 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #53
willvarfar wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have a clue about _why_, but I know from using macOS and Linux on mbp that whereas the touchpad basically works in macOS, it totally doesn’t function in Linux! :( In Linux, wrists keep triggering touch events as you type. Screens start scrolling, focus goes to random things, and everyone swears. You end up having to hold your hands right over the keyboard in a very unnatural way to avoid accidental mouse inte…

The trackpad in my laptop (Synaptics branded) has never had trouble like that in my experience. Then again, I'm pretty sure Synaptics has wrist detection built into the firmware of the trackpad itself. I suppose Apple and Windows do this in software for models that don't support this and that's why it's going wrong. I'm not saying that people don't use Linux on laptops by the way, I meant that the overlap between peo…

> I'm not saying that people don't use Linux on laptops by the way, I meant that the overlap between people who run Linux and use a MBP isn't very large (because Linux on Apple can be anything from annoying to install to near impossible).

Maybe I'm in the tiny minority here, but I much prefer the way touchpad handling on Linux behaves compared to both Windows and macOS. At least on sway, it feels more 'accurate' than either of those two - you move your finger and the cursor actually goes to where you want it.

> But, as far as I know, Apple still releases the source code for Darwin, right? So shouldn't it be possible to port the trackpad functionality from there?

Unfortunately not! I worked on reverse engineering a driver for the SPI touchpad found in newer (but not too new) Macbooks and based most of it on packet captures from Windows' Event Log [1]

[1] https://github.com/cb22/macbook12-spi-driver/issues/3#issuec...

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#85

Post by lwh »

tom_mellior wrote: post #80
pests wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This amuses me too. We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I think many have never learned the history or started from first principals.

> We had to bootstrap from nothing originally too. I doubt that the original Unix was written without an editor, using only cat. Of course some earlier interactive system at one point did have to come up without an interactive editor... but still I'd think it's much more likely that the editor was written off-line and fed into the system on punched cards or tape rather than cat'ed from the terminal. The original post…

it had 'ed' the precursor to ex and vi editors. The terminal they used was paper so not quite ready for a visually oriented editor! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33) If you're stuck on a basic system or rescue shell, cat and echo are considerably more straightforward if you don't know how to use ed already.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#86

Post by m463 »

A similar sort of exercise might be to just install Arch Linux to a working desktop or some other use case.

Arch Linux puts responsibility for the install on your shoulders based on your needs and decisions.

In the end, you get a VERY up-to-date installation of linux, without needless bloat, and it stays that way due to rolling updates.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#87

Post by tiborsaas »

INTPenis wrote: post #30

This is how I used to live my life. Sort of. I mean early 2000s when I had left home and moved to a far away city for a job in IT. All I had was a stolen 256M RAM laptop with FreeBSD. No internet and no TV at home because I lived in a shitty apartment building. At work I had all the bandwidth and resources I could use. So I downloaded all I could during the weekdays and during evenings and weekends I'd just browse ma…

That's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#88

Post by datenwolf »

ilaksh wrote: post #40
rootlocus wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I realized a few years later that this was just an exercise in flexing the fact that I could probably bootstrap my way up from this with the C compiler to write a terrible editor, then write a terrible TCP client, find my way out to ftp.gnu.org, get wget, and keep going from there. I assume by "a terrible TCP client" she means a TCP stack, so you don't have a TCP stack yet, so `/dev/tcp` wouldn't exist. Otherwise j…

It is unclear to me whether the C libs include TCP. If not then that seems like the main part of the work because once you have that then you can download everything else. Unless it was already in BIOS or some network hardware remote admin Intel thing and there was a way to hack into that to use it. Then you would not have to implement TCP IP. To me the question is what is the minimal part of TCP /IP that you would n…

> It is unclear to me whether the C libs include TCP.

The exercise states that you have a Linux kernel and there is a network connection. If the kernel does not have TCP, but only offers a raw socket, well, then you have to write down a very simple TCP stack.

But if the kernel does have TCP, the exercise boils down to writing a very simple HTTP client, a very simple DNS resolver and a bare bones XZ decompressor and tar reader. From there I'd grab myself https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/static/xbps-static-lates... then execute

./xbps-install -S --repository=https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/current -r / base-system

and call it a day.

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#89

Post by DeathArrow »

>" About 15 years ago, I mused about the idea of having a "desert island machine". This is where I'd put someone in a room with a box that has a couple of hard drives and a working network connection. HD #1 is blank. HD #2 has a few scraps of a (Linux) OS on it: bootloader, kernel, C library and compiler, that sort of thing. There's a network connection of some sort, and that's about it.

There are no editors and nothing more advanced than 'cat' to read files. You don't have jed, joe, emacs, pico, vi, or ed (eat flaming death). Don't even think about X. telnet, nc, ftp, ncftp, lftp, wget, curl, lynx, links? Luxury! Gone. Perl, Python and Ruby? Nope.

There's your situation. What do you do? "

I would swim, do some sunbathing, eat coconuts, do some fishing and generally enjoy the situation. No work, no stress, nobody to bother. :)

Re: Bored? How about trying a Linux speed run?

#90

Post by DeathArrow »

>" So here's the pitch: Linux speedruns. By that, I don't mean "speedrunning a game on a Linux box" (like emulation, or something). Nope.

I mean speedrunning the Linux situation itself. Start with a minimal system and get yourself to the point where you can do something meaningful (like reading cat pictures on Reddit). "

I'd rather do something useful or at least pleasant. I don't have an infinite amount of time and I don't like to waste it.

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