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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 2nd, 2025

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  • I don’t validate emails, I test them.

    Hooray! You get a gold star.

    OK, maybe I do some light validation first,

    I hope your “validation” does nothing more than show a warning that the user is allowed to ignore.

    I have seen too many systems built by people who think they know what’s valid or not before and after the @ sign*, and they are almost always dead wrong. In the worst cases, such systems accept an unusual-looking address and claim to send the expected verification message, but never actually send it. Of course, these systems won’t work for some people, and since none of their online docs or support staff know why, those people will be locked out of using the system and funneled into bottomless pit of misery if they try. Please don’t build broken garbage like this.

    *Fun fact: Not so terribly long ago, even the @ sign didn’t have to be present. Some email addresses were bang paths. I’m not sure if any of these are still in use, but it wouldn’t shock me to learn that they are.




  • Debian in general is not meant to run on the latest hardware.

    When I see someone on social media claiming Debian is unsuitable for gaming, I know immediately that they don’t know what they’re talking about. I’ve been gaming on different distros since before Steam ran on Linux at all, and on Debian Stable for nearly a decade. This includes my current system, which was built a few months after the GPU was released.

    In general, Debian can run just fine on new (Linux-compatible) hardware. If you’re talking about Debian Stable and hardware that was released less than a year ago, then you might have to pull in a newer kernel and/or firmware, but it’s not hard. In most cases, it’s as simple as enabling Debian’s Backports repository and installing the couple of new packages that you need. (You might not even have to do that, since Flatpak and Steam provide updates to much of what games need, but it would be wise to remember Backports anyway just in case you need them some day.)

    The main thing to consider is that it’s not completely effortless. It will probably require a little more setup than a game-focused distro would, so if you’re considering Debian for a gaming system, you should know why you want it. For example, maybe you want a very low-maintenance system once it’s up and running. Or maybe Debian’s focus on Free software appeals to you. In such cases, a few extra steps when getting started might be worthwhile. But if you don’t have a specific need that Debian fills, then another distro might be more convenient.

    Debian 13 is not going to get the latest versions of Nvidia drivers and there are better distros for us.

    I don’t know if that’s true or not. Nvidia has a well-deserved reputation for making their hardware painful on Linux, and although the situation is less bad today than it once was, it’s still not great. If you’re determined to stick with them, then sure, a distro that does the extra work of packaging all of Nvidia’s driver releases might be a better choice for you.

    (For what it’s worth, I finally ditched Nvidia in favor of AMD GPUs, and have been very happy with the results.)










  • I didn’t think I would have to spell this out, but when I wrote “as much as possible”, I was acknowledging that some libraries are either too complex or too security-sensitive to be reasonably homebrewed by the unqualified. (Perhaps “as much as reasonably possible” would have been better phrasing.) Where the line lies will depend on the person/team, of course, but the vast majority of libraries do not fall into that category. I was generalizing.

    And yes, some third-party libs might get so much public scrutiny as to be considered safer than what someone would create in-house, depending on their skills. But safety in numbers sometimes turns out to be a false assumption, and at the end of the day, choosing this approach still pushes external risks (attack surface) onto users. Good luck. It hardly matters to the general point, though, because most libs do not have this level of scrutiny.

    Let’s also remember that pinning dependencies is not a silver bullet. If I didn’t trust someone to follow “best practices”, I don’t think I would trust their certification of a third-party library hash any more than I would trust their own code.

    With all that said, let me re-state my approach for clarity:

    • I minimize dependencies first. Standard libraries are great for this.
    • When something more cannot reasonably be avoided, I choose very carefully, prioritizing the safety of my users over my own convenience.
    • Sometimes that means changing my original design, or spending my time learning or building things that I hadn’t planned to. I find the results to be worth it.




  • I’ve been gaming exclusively on desktop Linux for more than a decade.

    All my games work, either natively or (more often) using some variant of Wine. Most Steam games work with very little tweaking or none at all.

    I occasionally have to apply workarounds for broken Battle.net updates (I run Blizzard games without Steam) but this doesn’t happen very often and usually only takes a couple days for the community to figure out a workaround. The last few updates haven’t broken anything new.

    Games with certain anti-cheat systems, especially kernel-mode ones, are known not to work. I don’t care, because I wouldn’t allow such invasive and dangerous things to run on my hardware anyway.

    Welcome to the party!





  • who@feddit.orgtoTechnology@beehaw.orgCan magnet damage hard disk?
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    17 days ago

    It’s always possible, but in my experience, the magnets in those graphics card stands aren’t strong enough to hurt the data in a hard drive slotted below them. (Let’s also remember that fans containing magnets are often placed near hard drives.)

    If you’re concerned, you could always replace the magnet with a rubber foot, or replace the whole stand with nonmagnetic cylinder like a cut-down paper towel spool. The graphics card’s weight will probably hold it in place.

    In any case, I recommend regularly making incremental backups of your data. Hard drives occasionally corrupt data and eventually die even when no magnets are around.