This article has been updated for Fedora 42: /archives/14050/ But this article is still worth reading — check out the ideas in here first, then go look at the updated steps Longtime readers of my blog probably know I used to be a loyal Ubuntu user, running GNOME Shell, and I enjoyed poking fun at irrational KDE and Arch Linux users. Of course, back in 2021 I actually started migrating my main distro from Ubuntu to Fedora — at first it was just “let’s try it out,” but one thing led to another and I’ve been using it ever since. So here’s this guide/manual thing. Its main purpose is to help people who have no idea how to install, use, or configure Fedora, to clear up their confusion, and to share some of my own experience in the hope it helps more people. Of course I’ve got a selfish reason too: recording my own configuration process so I can look it up later.

Recently I was asked to download some online stream videos, and judging by their source code, most of them were m3u8 links. As the name suggests, m3u8 is really just a playlist. Open it and you get a bunch of ts files, and the conventional approach means downloading them in bulk and then merging them. But flip the thinking around: if you just have ffmpeg decode the stream and save it, things get a lot simpler.

First, download the Sunlogin installer, the rpm one https://sunlogin.oray.com/download

I used to figure Flatpak was the same garbage as Snappy, cut from the same cloth. Then yesterday I ran into a piece of software that was Flathub-only, gave it a try, and used it for about five minutes. Holy shit. I’m a convert.

The old router at work has been feeling its age lately. It’s been solid for a long time, honestly, but I’ve decided it’s washed. So I grabbed an “old and busted” PC to build a new soft router. Specs below: After almost two weeks of messing with it, it finally feels stable. I’ve got “load balancing,” “circumventing the GFW,” “ad filtering” and the like running on this thing, but I hit a ton of pitfalls. Here’s the summary.

Ubuntu 20.04 is a GNOME distro, running the GNOME 3.26.1 stack, but Canonical always has to do something different. To fight Flatpak they cooked up a thing called Snappy, which these days seems to be called Snap. I’m not saying Snap is a bad idea. I’m saying Snap as it exists now is bad, and Canonical has gone back to its old tricks: Force-bundling and pushing it while the ecosystem is immature and the performance and features are both mediocre. Remember Unity? Late-stage Unity was actually pretty decent, but the early forced push still earned it a mountain of hate.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS finally dropped, and I’ve finished upgrading (read: wiped Fedora 32 and reinstalled). Overall this release is well worth using, and the bugs are few. It’s way less of a hassle than previous setups, but there’s still stuff to do. Here’s the rundown.

As usual, every time the Linux kernel gets an update, VMware Workstation’s vmmon and vmnet modules fail to compile. No exception this time either. The fix is blunt: just use a patch.

Yep, another kernel update just landed in the Ubuntu repos.

Firefox doesn’t seem to support acceleration yet, so Chrome it is. At least it uses less battery after acceleration?