Lords Of Tech

So I bought a new laptop for 200€

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 11:41:49 +0000

It’s amazing that ChromeOS can provide a desktop environment that doesn’t freeze on such low specs… and also delivers an almost complete Debian experience.

Linux Application Summit 2023 - A view from the sidelines...

Thu, 25 May 2023 20:04:39 +0000

Let’s start from the beginning - what Is Linux Application Summit? Like the name suggests, it’s a conference, or rather a meet-up of a variety of Linux software groups, teams and individual creators. Most important of all, it’s a joint effort by two large projects - KDE and GNOME. It represents a truth, not many Linux blogs and media properly represent - that we are part of a large family that shares values, customs and love. A lot of people seem to assume, that there is this great rivalry and fragmentation in the Linux community. That for one to prevail, the others must fall into oblivion. That there can only be one packaging format, one distro to rule them all. Linux App Summit is the proof that our differences are not our weakness, but actually our strength. Events such as this, where people from Canonical, Red Hat and various other projects and communities meet, eat, drink and bond together show that the open source world is a gorgeous tapestry, rather than a vicious battlefield. If you haven’t been able to join us in person, let me at least show you a glimpse of what I’ve seen and experienced in one of my favorite cities in the Central Europe, the city of Brno in Czech Republic.

Lords of Tech 4: Resurrections

Mon, 01 May 2023 21:54:48 +0000

If you’ve visited this blog in the past, you may have noticed that we are two guys writing about very different topics. Dugi usually writes about his C++ expertise, while I used to do more general-oriented posts, distro reviews mostly. I also haven’t been feeling like writing much in the past two years, as I was getting burned out both by trying to start a career as a freelancer, while finishing up my PhD and starting the process of building a house. Fortunately, since then I was able to finish my degree, get the house construction on the way (now in the final finishing touches phase) and since the beginning of this year, get a nice and cozy job as a Java backend developer. As I obviously do not like the feeling of boredom, I decided to try and resurrect this dreaming blog of ours by both starting my distro-hopping once again, writing longer, more involved reviews of both hardware and software that I daily drive and also write a few words here and there about Java and quite possibly some other languages that I started learning in the mean time.

Emergency recovery of a shared web and mail hosting VPS [Case Study]

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 20:34:25 +0000

A small side-effect of my community and blogging work is, that I occassionaly (a few times per month) have people reach out to me asking for advice on a variety of topics, or for help if they are in a pickle. The lastest case was a guy from Czechia (Let’s call him Mr. D), asking for help with his pwnd web/mail server. It had a multiple glaring issues and even after my intervention is probably a minefield of vulnerabilities and backdoor. Since I am in the last year (hopefully) of my PhD studies and am currently swamped by my regular job as well, I didn’t have time to spend properly investigating and fixing all the issues in a manner that I would feel comfortable getting paid for, I’ve decided to perform the bare minimum to get the site up and running “pro bono”.

Setting up a VPS for several small e-commerce businesses (part 1)

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 20:13:43 +0000

Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to set up a few websites, both static and dynamically generated. A few years ago, I’ve settled on Wordpress as my default choice, initially simply building up sites from themes and plugins, until I bit the bullet and started adding my own snippets of PHP and later building a full, albeit simple, custom theme. This series will hopefully prove to you that setting up a web server, mail server and other neat services is not as hard as you might assume and you can even serve several small businesses using a reasonably priced VPS. In this initial article, we’ll deal with initial setup of our Ubuntu 20.04 server and turning it into a nice little LEMP server. I am expecting you to know at least the bare minimum about terminal, ssh and how to install packages in Debian-based distributions. You should also already own a domain and know how to set up A-records.

ElementaryOS 6 Odin

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 18:00:00 +0000

Since I haven’t written anything in a while, much less a comprehensive distribution review, a little updated background info is in order. In past years, I’ve toned down my “Linux on everything” push and went slightly more practical in my day-to-day life. I probably will write a short story on my transformation from an obsessed FOSS-only zealot to a privacy-minded, practicality-inclined user of whatever tool fits the best. I still use Ubuntu 20.04 on my workstation at the office, various Ubuntu LTS releases on my servers and a few months ago, I installed Fedora 34 on my home-office workstation (long-term review coming), but I’ve switched from a Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 3 with a distro-du-jour to an M1 Macbook Air running unsurprisingly macOS Big Sur. I’ve also had the unfortune to support a bunch of Windows 10 desktop, so I think I can at least compare various desktop operating systems and measure their merit. That being said, I must admit, I haven’t felt the need to write anything about new releases for the past year or so, since apart from Gnome 40 in Fedora 34, nothing really tickled my interest, and I’m holding on my review of that huge upgrade until I can try it out in a reasonably stable beta of Ubuntu 21.10. Anyways, back to the distro at hand.

The Sisyphean task of enabling Adobe Flash Player in a modern QT/Chromium based web browser

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 01:11:42 +0000

Prologue and motivation

A part of my PhD. research deals with computer science as a source of innovative ways to improve education in Slovakia. My approach is mostly throwing eye-tracking at every problem and see where it sticks. The trouble with eye-tracking as a research method is, you often find yourself spending much more time changing the form of the content, rather than conducting actual experiments and getting some data out of it. While researching the readability of the study materials at our university I had to move around the paragraphs, trim out excess stuff, play with the image size and, in case of using headset-based eye-tracker apparatus, also surround the pages with chessboard markers to “ground” the generated heatmaps around the text itself. These changes made the eye-tracking possible, however they were time consuming and also may have tampered with the data to some degree.

Adding OpenCV libraries to a QT5 project in Ubuntu 20.04

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 15:55:39 +0000

I’ve recently gained interest in OpenCV. The problem with this is, that in most modern tutorials and walkthroughs it seems like the go-to language for working with this C-library is Python. I have an unreasonable antipathy towards this snake of a language and although I intend to fight through it some day in the future, at the moment I have more important stuff to deal with, so I intend to experiment with OpenCV in my own way - with a blend of noobie C++ and QT. In this quick note I’ll document for my (and whomever happens to land on this blog…) benefit the process of building a recent version of OpenCV on Ubuntu 20.04 and what arcane line to insert into the dark lord of K-prefixed apps - QtCreator.

Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa Mega Review - A complex look at the state of Ubuntu

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:32:27 +0000

As somebody who’s always had Ubuntu in his daily life for the past 13 years, I sometimes find it hard to differentiate between all the versions. I do appreciate the progress though, albeit I’ve felt like the direction Ubuntu was taking was going to force me to abandon it eventually. Lately, though, I’ve enjoyed the increased polish and speed improvements of Gnome 3.36 dabbled with snap packaging, understood its “raison d’etre” and had the opportunity of participating in an Canonical hosted webinar for press to pose some questions.

elementary OS 5.1 Hera

Tue, 03 Dec 2019 17:00:00 +0000

When I received the newsletter letting me know that in just a few days, there would be a new point release of elementary OS, I’ve had mixed feelings. I was happy that the project I find very endearing is chugging along nicely, but I knew it would be a tough review to write. The problem with elementary OS is, that in this last release, the team behind it has been trickling down bug fixes and new features (such as the new login greeter). For this reason, it is very hard for me, as a daily user of this Linux distro, to make a clear distinction between the previous version, Juno, and this new version - codenamed Hera. I guess I’ll have to try to approach this review as if I was a completely new user, seeing the OS for the very first time.

Fedora 31 Review

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 19:20:39 +0000

Most people know me as a long-time Gnome hater. I admit, I’ve been hard on it, but once in a while, I do try to challenge my own views by diving into stuff I didn’t appreciate at first. For this reason, I’ve decided to give Fedora 31 some time to shine on my primary laptop. Of course, as a long-time Linux (usually Ubuntu) user, I wasn’t unfamiliar with Gnome, but I’ve never tried to use it without pulling down dozens of extensions, themes and performing a plethora of modifications and fine-tuning. This time, I’ve decided to try and see things as Gnome devs want us to. After more than a month of use, I admit I’ve warmed up to it, but I still see some glaring issues with their choices.

About us

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:46:11 +0000

We are just (currently) two guys from Slovakia who occasionally have some random experiences (we believe are) worth sharing. We are not offering any services except picking items dropped by clumsy people and giving it back to them.

The intended goal of this blog is to be a small repository of more or less useful knowledge so that we can trace back our steps in case of eventual screw-ups, share interesting technical tidbits, review distributions and interesting projects, etc.

Contact

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 09:46:11 +0000

The best way to contact us is by attaching messages to sushi or hamburger packages sent to our addresses. We may occasionally respond to comments under blog posts, but it has to be related to the topic. Otherwise, send treats first.

Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine Review

Thu, 24 Oct 2019 08:17:32 +0000

If you’ve read any of my previous reviews, you know that I have a difficult relationship with Gnome. I love the aesthetics, but I despise the number of desktop crashing bugs, dropped frames and the number of extra clicks you need to make to get anything done. That being said, Gnome 3.34 in Ubuntu 19.10 is a giant leap forward and if the core Gnome team supported by Canonical’s renewed efforts keep tweaking the performance and stability in subsequent releases, I may be tempted to stop distrohopping and stay with vanilla Ubuntu until something exciting happens in the Linux distributions land.

Manjaro 18.10 (KDE Edition) Non-Review (2019)

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 23:56:11 +0000

Manjaro is a strange beast. It’s a distribution based upon the memetic Arch Linux. That doesn’t mean it’s BFU-hostile, though, or that you have to set it all up from scratch. In fact, Manjaro is an easy to setup distro you could install for your grandparents and sleep soundly knowing they will always have the (almost) bleeding edge software, with a eye-catching minty theme on top. Of course, you’d have to first instruct them to install the upgrades whenever the Octopi Pamac software manager pops up with a notification, otherwise it could fall victim to the classic rolling-release death trap of updating after too much time has passed. So what’s the difference between Manjaro and other user-friendly distros?

Ubuntu Budgie 19.04 Review

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 03:00:00 +0000

This review is one of the longest in the making ever since starting this blog. I’ve been using Ubuntu Budgie on my desktop workstation even before I’ve installed Xubuntu 19.04 on my main laptop for it’s review. From day one, I kinda liked it, making in my eyes a ton more sense than Gnome Shell and thus entering the ranks of superior GTK3 desktop implementations. Pantheon. please make room for your new roommate!

Xubuntu 19.04

Wed, 19 Jun 2019 17:34:00 +0000

If there is a desktop environment that I always somehow evaded, it’s XFCE. I’ve always thought that I had my DEs well categorized – Unity was awesome, but misunderstood and limited to Ubuntu, Gnome 2 / MATE was/is featureful, but it’s widgets and applets crash constantly, LXDE brought new life for computers with less than 512MB RAM, KDE was bloated and Gnome 3 was meant for the weird unfulfilled future, where all laptops sport a touchscreen and GNU/Linux has great drivers. In the last couple of years, these categories got mixed up and often switched entirely and we’ve got a bunch of new and exciting DEs waiting just a few keystrokes away from our computers.

Ubuntu MATE 19.04 Review

Sat, 04 May 2019 21:58:00 +0000

A biased review of the light-weight, yet incredibly easy to customize flavor of Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo.

KDE Neon (18.04) Review

Thu, 21 Mar 2019 00:17:14 +0000

My very first experience with KDE was back in the day of Ubuntu 7.10, with KDE 3. I quickly got overwhelmed by the breadth of settings, it’s modularity and default look similar to Windows platform, from which I had just escaped.

Source: By Rbuj – Own work, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7014393

It only took me a few days, before I switched back to Gnome 2 and haven’t looked back until a couple years ago, when Canonical, much to my dismay, announced they were dropping Unity for Gnome 3. That was when I first installed KDE Neon based upon Ubuntu 16.04 and used it for several months. A few months ago, I have decided to give KDE another go and I kept using it to this day on my main laptop computer. What is KDE anyways? It is a Linux desktop environment, based on Qt Framework, as opposed to GTK Framework, used in most other DEs – Gnome, Pantheon, Cinnamon, Mate, etc. In it’s current incarnation, the KDE Plasma 5, it is very lightweight, snappy and clean-looking. It is inherently very modular and can be reshaped to pretty much any look and feel you’d like. However, because of this customizability, it is often looked at as hard to set up and is less widespread than it’s younger cousin.

Chinese wristphones

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 23:30:00 +0000

I am a guy who doesn’t use smartphones much. I prefer cheap Android phones because I occasionally need to use some apps that are available only for Android and iOS. I never cared for large screen sizes because it only made the phone harder to fit into a pocket. Then I saw the opportunity. A phone fitted into a watch, with Android and everything. Such products by large companies currently use cellular network only for emergency calls or through LTE, but some shady Chinese companies offer fully featured ones. Because I have always worn a watch, it meant one less electronic device to care about. So I decided to try them out.

Buying a fridge the geeky way!

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 23:19:00 +0000

If you are new to my blog and to knowing me in general, you might wonder, why would anyone write a blog post about buying such a pedestrian piece of electronic machinery. You might ask yourself “Is Michal such a fridge afficionado, that he has something of value to add to the thriving fridge-reviewing scene?” If so, then I will dissapoint you. I know next to nothing about fridges and I don’t care either way. For all I care my fridge runs on liquified unicorn farts and increases the size of the tachyon hole in the aurasphere of the Multi-Earth. I do care about picking the best value for money, though, and I like to learn more about anything and everything, so that I may some day blow someone’s mind by my expertize in fridge-picking. So how I went around picking the fridge for my family and how shitty well, did it go?

ElementaryOS Juno Review

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 23:39:38 +0000

Desktop

I’ve spent a long while thinking about the right words to start off this review. It has been long time coming and you might say, it’s been coming since the first time I’ve heard about this distro. Considering all that, I decided that the best way to start would be with the eyecatching first look of this flawed beauty. It is a strange thing though, because even though I really dislike MacOS look and feel, I find ElementaryOS UX very appealing. Even so, that it made me forgive the OS some shortcomings I may have harder time biting through otherwise.