[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 66 points 2 weeks ago

This board has the StarFive JH7110 SoC. That processor has previously been in very low power single board computers like StarFive VisionFive 2 (2022) and Milk-V Mars (2023), a Raspberry Pi clone that can be bought for as low as $40. Its storage limitations (SD/eMMC rather than NVMe) show how much this isn't meant for laptop use.

Very underpowered for a laptop too, even when considering this is intended for developers and doesn't need to be remotely performance competitive. Consider that this has just 4 RV64GC cores, the cheapest Intel board options Framework offers are 12 cores (4P+8E), and any modern RISC-V core is far simpler with less area than even an Intel E core. These cores also lack the RISC-V vector instructions extension.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 52 points 1 month ago

A standard called SystemReady exists. For the systems that actually follow its standards, you can have a single ARM OS installation image that you copy to a USB drive and can then boot through UEFI and run with no problems on an Ampere server, an NXP device, an Nvidia Jetson system, and more.

Unfortunately it's a pretty new standard, only since 2020, and Qualcomm in particular is a major holdout who hasn't been using it.

Just like x86, you still need the OS to have drivers for the particular device you're installing on, but this standard at least lets you have a unified image, and many ARM vendors have been getting better about upstreaming open-source drivers in the Linux kernel.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 25 points 2 months ago

It is a Linux machine. Runs a Debian derivative, and it's not like Windows or anything else that isn't Linux/BSD can run on a RISC-V laptop.

This isn't the first RISC-V laptop, but the significance of a RISC-V laptop existing is primarily for developers who work on software targeting RISC-V systems. The ability to run RV64 programs without emulation and to natively compile RV64 software without cross-compilers is valuable to some people. Also, China in particular sees value in having computing products that aren't affected by sanctions; the processor in this is designed and manufactured by a Chinese company without licensing any intellectual property from US or UK.

Explaining what RISC-V isRISC-V is a relatively newer CPU instruction set architecture that competes with x86 (Intel, AMD) and ARM (Qualcomm, Ampere, MediaTek, etc.). Its current designs don't really match those two in general-purpose performance yet but has the distinction of being a free, open, and extendable standard. Whereas x86 has only two CPU vendors and ARM has many vendors who all need to pay per-core license fees to ARM Holdings and have limits imposed on what they can do to it, RISC-V processors can be made by any hardware vendor with the means to make a processor and can be custom-designed to better fit specialized use-cases. Its use in general-purpose CPUs is catching on fastest in China but it sees use across the world in academia and in special-purpose processors by companies like Western Digital.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 131 points 2 months ago

In 2014, MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 were released under a Microsoft shared-source license (Microsoft Research License) which forbids redistribution

In 2018, both versions were published to GitHub and relicensed as MIT, making them properly open-source

Today, MS-DOS 4.00 was added to that repo, also under MIT.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 28 points 2 months ago

Stylus/handwriting oriented note taking. Stuff like Samsung Notes or Goodnotes (or OneNote, though it does a lot more) in the Android space, or e-ink options like Remarkable's stock software.

If I just want to use a keyboard for everything I have great FOSS options like Joplin and Standard Notes, but when I want to use a pen instead it feels like no other freedom-respecting option seem to even remotely approach the usability of just sticking with real ink and moleskine-like paper notebooks.

Even someone willing to pay an upfront fee for proprietary apps will struggle to find good options that allow syncing and reading (let alone editing) your notes on other devices/platforms without resorting to a monthly subscription.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The problem with those TV apps is DRM. All the major streaming services require that you either use a locked down platform (probably checking SafetyNet and more on Android TV) or settle for their browser UI which lacks dpad support and gets quality throttled to 1080p or lower.

Circumventing that DRM is possible, but no project at the scale of a platform like those would dare the both legal risk and support headache of making those circumventions (which are very liable to break) a core part of the OS.

Kodi (and distros using it like LibreELEC) exist for people who want a FOSS platform for using non DRM encumbered media with a TV remote interface.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 months ago

Likely reversing a major anti-consumer decision is nice, even if it took seven years.

Knowing that consumer protections repeatedly flip back and forth every time the executive branch switches political party, and even then only if we're lucky, is not so reassuring. What's stopping it from being repealed again in a few years?

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 months ago

You joke, but it really exists: the company that acquired uTorrent 17 years ago now sells an ad-free version of their current torrent client as "BitTorrent Pro" for USD$20/year, or alternatively as part of a VPN service bundle for $70/year.

Needless to say, stick with FOSS clients like qBittorrent/Deluge/etc instead.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 months ago

I just uploaded a mirror of the wiki to https://codeberg.org/zarenki/yuzu-wiki/src/branch/master/Building-for-Linux.md

Downloaded it a week ago, so might not be the most recent change.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 20 points 4 months ago

Ethically, I agree with you. More than that, using a lockpick on a lock you bought shouldn't make you a thief. Unfortunately, DMCA has abysmal anti-circumvention measures that make the legality of using a device you own in ways you should be able to become questionable under US law, in the digital equivalent of Master Lock suing you for picking a lock you bought from them.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 60 points 4 months ago

instructing users how to extract the prod.keys from their own switch

Yuzu's quick start guide links to the old download link for Lockpick RCM from the same repo that is still inaccessible ever since Nintendo's DMCA takedown last year (source: arstechnica). They never updated the page to link to any mirrors of Lockpick RCM or any other options to extract the keys; the guide doesn't even work right now. You can see in Yuzu site's changelog on github that the only changes made to that page in the last year are to minimum/recommended hardware requirements.

It seems even more absurd to argue that instructions are somehow infringing when the allegedly infringing part of them has already been broken for almost a year. Even the standing for taking down Lockpick RCM in the first place seems questionable, and telling users to use it with a broken link seems several layers further detached from that.

[-] zarenki@lemmy.ml 13 points 4 months ago

I would not count on all major distros maintaining support for processors as old as Core 2 forever.

RHEL 9 in particular (and by extension CentOS Steam, Alma, Rocky) already dropped support for all of the processors affected by this breakage since 2022.

Linux systems often group these CPU feature set generations into levels, where "x86-64-v2" requires SSE4 and POPCNT (Nehalem/2008 and newer) and "x86-64-v3" requires AVX2 (Haswell/2013 and newer).

Ubuntu and Fedora are already evaluating optimized package builds for both v2 and v3 but haven't announced any plans to drop baseline x86-64 yet; I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen within the next two years. Debian is a relatively safer bet for old hardware.

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zarenki

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