I also remember school Macs being slow and unreliable at times. I wonder how much of that was related to how they were provisioned, with network accounts and stuff to let the IT guy spy on you and lock your computer.
Your link's not loading for me, but I can recommend Guix System to anyone looking for a systemd-free distro similar to NixOS. For something Arch-like, there's Void (but beware it is not actually based on Arch, so no AUR or pacman).
Worse than this issue, but kind of related, sometimes TTY1 (and maybe also the other TTYs) is being spammed by log info on boot, and if you have a TTY login it isn't obvious you can just log in anyway. Had a friend using Arch+i3 with TTY login, pretty new to GNU/Linux in general, so he kinda threw up his hands like "ah dang, can't log in, it's broken". I tried to tell him to just type his credentials anyway, but he didn't get what I was saying at first. Took a bit before we got him logged in and could address the other issues. I've had similar issues on my machines. I once had kernel log verbosity cranked up by accident, copied my config from another machine where I was chasing a GPU bug. Well, the same settings on the other machine were presenting way worse, constant never-ending line-spam, before and after login. Had to get into a graphical environment half-blind to see what I was doing and then turn down the verbosity. IMO there should be an easier way around that.
If you start by hitting backspace a few times and/or typing random characters and deleting them (to make sure the keyboard's working and sending your inputs where you think) it should obscure the length somewhat.
I was not thinking about the length but the actual keypress recognition. If you have enough recording of all kind of keypresses many keys/characters can be recognized from the waveform itself, including the backspace and delete ones.
I doubt this is a super common threat but I would expect it to be already applied by spies or "Jia Tan" like employees.
I have a really long passphrase in keepassxc. I often try to type it, fail 50% of the time, display the password, fix the typo. I would not use a long passphrase otherwise. (I understand there are other risks, such as having spyware that is recording my screen, but my main worry is for the safety of the file itself)
I know sudo-rs will likely not allow viewing the password in the short term, but the benefit to being able to have some visual feedback, is that it lets me use a more complex password.
Other example: if I'm on a ssh link with very high latency (ex: on a phone), I might type one character at the time, make sure they register correctly, and continue. If I can't do that, then I'll type the password in a text editor, then copy-paste it into the password prompt.
Now that you mention i3lock, if sudo showed a symbol changing with each keystroke, it could show it's working (not frozen, accepting input) without revealing the length, similarly to i3lock. I've seen ascii loading spinners from package managers by changing between slashes and hypens and such. Something of that sort would probably do the trick.
I think you gotta actually try to use it as your main OS to hit some of the snags. It can browse the web just fine, but I couldn't get sshfs working. There were strange global keyboard shortcuts, rarely actually used, breaking common shortcuts like ctrl + left/right arrow (fixable, but not super trivially). Homebrew is better than nothing but pretty jank in practice. Repeatedly I'd see graphical stuff installed from there was declared broken and I was pressured to delete it, or I'd have to reapprove some security thing after an update and add it back to the dock. Just lots of friction everywhere. I couldn't seem to consistently keep windows the same size and in the same spots, but they were almost right which made it more maddening. It was like they'd slide around slightly after a reboot or changing monitors. Speaking of monitors, low DPI fonts on macOS look inexcusably horrible. The same monitors I've used for years displaying similar stuff just looked absolutely awful on macOS compared to GNU/Linux. I never was able to fix this. I suspect in their pushing of hidpi and their own hardware they've mangled and abandoned classic resolutions and fonts. This one can barely even be discussed online because everyone's drank the hidpi koolaid and will call you poor or perverse or something. There was also a horribly annoying issue when trying to use a MBP like a desktop. If left inactive too long, I couldn't seem to wake and unlock it with my external keyboard and mouse connected to a dock. I had to open the laptop lid, log in there, re-allow my input devices, then close the lid. I also had to repeatedly go through that wizard that tries to identify your keyboard layout by having you press the key beside each shift key, as if it'd never seen my keyboard before. I have used this same keyboard on GNU/Linux and Windows, there's no equivalent to that needed, I don't really get it.
It's all bad enough that I have a very expensive machine collecting dust until Asahi supports multi-monitors fully. It was a good reminder of how important software and familiarity is, and how much you stand to lose by just chasing after better specs at all costs. I really just wanted my exact usual setup with a spec bump (which I eventually got when I upgraded from my T440p to a T14 Gen 5).
As for positives of macOS... I like the unix-y bits, what's left of them. If I have to retrieve pictures off an old Mac for someone's funeral board, the find command I know and love is there, and a familiar shell as well. I just can't live in macOS full time. It's not good enough for me.
Are you sure? Port may be in the name, but it seemed like people were using it like Proton, random users trying it with various games. Not sure if this is still happening. There was also Whisky, but that's been abandoned. "Wine Supercharged... with the power of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit."
It seemed like you could just play games with it, but that Apple didn't want you using it that way.
I use a docked ThinkPad with the lid closed and two external monitors. Here are my config bits.
set $laptop eDP-1
set $landscape 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT037144C'
set $portrait 'Hewlett Packard HP ZR24w CNT03512JN'
bindswitch --reload --locked lid:on output $laptop disable
bindswitch --reload --locked lid:off output $laptop enable
### Output configuration
output $laptop bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
output $landscape bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/1529004448340.jpg fill
output $portrait bg $HOME/pictures/wallpaper/portrait/DYabJ0FV4AACG69.jpg fill
# pos args are x coords and y coords, transform is degrees of rotation counter-clockwise
# set $portrait as left monitor and rotate it counterclockwise
output $portrait pos 0 1200 transform 270
Pano is also the name of the scrobbler I started using recently. My old one quit working (API changes?) and I found Pano Scrobbler on F-Droid. Weird to see the collision so soon after discovering the other.
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