take a look at macast, you can send it videos from e.g. your phone (youtube, jellyfin, .mp4/mkv, etc) and it uses mpv under the hood and plays it full screen. I imagine that’s what chromecast does (?) but have no experience with it as I wouldn’t let the stinky fucker on my LAN.

what you describe would be an ardous journey… if the mentioned macbooks cost like $500. or $1000. truly, that sorta thing is nothing short of masochistic and no sane person should bother with that.

you’re making broad statements based on very shitty hardware - 4 gig dual-core laptop isn’t a very representative experience when you can get solid workstations for pocket change.

the macbooks I get are in the $20 region and for that kinda “money” I get absolute top-notch quality hardware, that, although dated, is more than adequate for the vast majority of uses. spending a coupla minutes to tweak it post-install isn’t a huge price to pay.

here’s my headless 2014 MBP (i7-4770HQ with 16 GB, Intel Iris) doing its thing. was sold “for parts” due to busted screen for $25 ($40 asking).

so, yeah, dicking around with broadcom’s stack is a thing, but it’s a thing that you do once and then it just works. I’m as bleeding edge as reasonably possible (F43) on all models I run and I haven’t got any issues, akmod builds the driver on every kernel install, which if you’re doing actual work on the thing isn’t something you’re doing often.

as to how to install without LAN, you use your Android phone and tether its Wifi via USB. after five minutes (full system upgrade, install broadcom-wl via rpmfusion for e.g. Fedora) you’re done. or, use the netinstall thing the same way. there’s also a buncha stuff needed to make the experience better (undervolt, LID0 wake events, etc)

not sure about Airs but MBP 2015 models (possibly 2013/14 as well) can be retrofitted with a $5 adapter board that lets you fit a regular Intel M.2 NGFF in there, eliminating the tainted kernel issue.

zorin woulda been a solid contender if it weren’t for the crew involved and its murky path forward. but as a first, “see it ain’t that bad” step, sure.

can’t give the thing out as-is, there’s a buncha stuff in there pertaining to our infra. restructuring and refactoring it (the thing doesn’t even use roles, just a gargantuan yml file with tasks) is long overdue and I thought your query would be the thing that pushes me over the line to finally do it, but after an hour with it I gave up it’s just too big of a mess.

I had the same path as you, was irritated that maintaining idempotency of the existing bash scripts was such a huge task, so started piece by piece, one task, test, add another, etc. mainly by following jeff geerling’s guides and then venturing out on my own by reading the official docs. tried utilizing bullshitgpt on a coupla occasions, but the thing constantly made up shit that doesn’t exist costing me time I ain’t got, so I gave up on it.

400+ installs in the past four years - discarded/donated business laptops that get fixed, cleaned, upgraded with cheapest SSDs and donated to predominantly tech illiterate users.

99% is ubuntu lts + ansible playbook that removes snap, disables A TON of update naggings, installs flatpak, coupla apps and systemd timer to autoupdate all flatpaks. this is the only thing that has low support requests, everything else we tried (mint, debian, fedora) has a disproportionately higher support request frequency (reinstalls, wifi, fix this, remove that, etc).

I totally could adapt debian to be as good or even better (fedora with the bi-annual versions is right out), but one of the important caveats is the user being able to install it with minimum hassle if needed and that just would not be doable.

I’d urge everyone ITT to look at the thing through the user’s eyes and not get lost in “no true scottsman” fallacies. the goal is to convert a user over, not to demonstrate how cool you are. once they know what’s what, you can sell them on fedora and atomic and whatnot, but not as a first step.

I don’t use ubuntu, have it on none of my stuff, and wouldn’t go out with you if you do. but it’s presently the only option for beginners for use on laptops that has a semblance of a modern desktop OS.

I mean, just imagine you’re spitting game at cutie at the bar and things are cooking and you go “hit me up on hkmbljurgh” and all of a sudden fire and brimstone all around kthulu cthulhu appears wondering why you summoned him them you scream sorry bro wrong number bro kthulu goes its aight but he they missed a dentist’s appointment because of this the barkeep is now pissed who’s gonna clean this up cutie is nowhere to be found…

shoulda gone with signal is what I’m saying

thank you! I am also one of the dozens of people who can read, what are the odds we come across one another on lemmy of all places, huh?

while I have you here, would you say that giving unpronounceable welsh names to new entrants attempting to challenge established players with a decade+ strong foothold in this space is a) a prudent decision or b) hella stupid?

we got issues switching normies to signal which has been around forever, how’s tongue-breaker gonna make any progress?

my old guy is on the case:

that’s 2011 tech, works like it came off the line yesterday. here’s to many more versions!

rectangle app

what/how do you run LLM on a RX 580? I thought ROCM was for RX 6xxx and newer?

ugh… having been involved with a coupla hardware businesses, asking the public what they think about a future product is hella stupid and then basing your decision on that is hella stupid. especially when you’re a minor player with few options available and a history of scamming clients not being china-supply-chain-savvy. out of all them questions, the only ones I’d find useful is the geo distribution.

as to the product itself, jolla is on my shit list on account of taking from the FOSS world and giving dick back; their “community version” for xperias exclusively and paid licenses can get fucked.

no, I mean the drive is encrypted and I don’t gotta bother with shred.

I’ve recently upgraded my hard drives used for storage. and because I ain’t made of money, I wanted to sell the old drives. shredding those things took ages (4 TB drives). lesson learned, new drives are btrfs + LUKS that gets unlocked via key file. so when the time comes to sell those, I won’t bother with shredding, just sell them as is.

to answer your question - if you wanna eventually talk to normies. like cute boy/girl you meet at a bar or a business contact from a random meet. even Signal has dogshit penetration compared to the big players, so XMPP/Matrix/Briar/etc aren’t even a blip on the dradis.

also, you sorta sidestepped the UX. if you’re coming off the hyper-polished world of Telelgram and iMessage, all those things have dogshit UX. yes, you’ll eventually find your way around them but you have to be motivated to endure them ugly and slow and unrealiable apps (comparatively speaking); you got that shit covered, your contacts do not.

the situation is kinda like with The Linux Desktop - it’s competing with gargantuan corpos with unlimited resources, and to add to that the miniscule dev teams aren’t working together, they’re competing, pulling in different direction (Gnome, Plasma, Cinnamon, etc.) with duplicated efforts and tons of abandoned paths. can you imagine where we’d be if all that dev effort went towards one goal?

same thing with the messenger space, it’s doubtful any of them will become mainstream, but they have their uses.

that’s a… mature, measured, and well thought-out reply. good job!

I mean this is certainly something somebody wrote, but the content is a joke.

first off, it’s from the 80s, so it might as well be from the 1800s, that’s how much it has to do with our everyday lives. second, it’s rife and overflowing with prepper-adjacent gas and fantasies. the writer’s style is lacking, to be overly generous and the whole thing gives off vibes from the days or alt.* newsgroups. finally, the “advice” in there is laughably naive and sometimes just plain wrong.

so thanks OP, had a few laughs browsing it but this got deleted almost instantly.

another option that works for me is macast. that’s a DLNA sink that you can send youtube (and other) videos to and it plays it via mpv, in full screen if you so desire. it also accepts jellyfin, you can control it remotely (via AllCast).

so I’m browsing videos in newtube on my phone, send them to allcast, and that one sends them to macast. sounds convoluted but its like three taps and an alternative to chromecast.

yeah! r u a mexican? or a mexican’t?!

stole it off jwz

pre-2010 macbooks can be had for like $10 nowadays. those had the touchpads (and webcam, keyboard, etc) connected via USB to the system. pinouts are available on the net and with a little bit of effort and maybe 3D printing you can have your bespoke rig.