Gnome is trying to do their whole “Macintosh with a concussion” thing, there’s a handful of tiling window managers that are difficult to describe, but…kinda yeah. Most of us also use QWERTY keyboards that date to the 19th century.

My local ham club treats that ultramarathon as an emergency preparedness drill. It requires us to bring radio equipment out into the woods away from power outlets and cell phone coverage and spend a day communicating by VHF FM over rugged wooded terrain. It’s a pretty solid simulation of setting up an ad hoc communications system during a disaster scenario such as a hurricane, no? We’re there so that we can figure out when a runner has gone missing, approximately where on the trail, find them, and maybe call for help if they’re hurt. That’s not dissimilar to our mission when we man the emergency shelters for the purposes of “do you have enough diapers” or “is this missing person at your shelter?”

“Ad hoc disaster communications” can mean anything from keeping in touch with your party if you have to split up to getting news from the outside world to calling for help from the outside world. Frankly I think any of those LoRa networks are next to useless for that. The hardware is kind of pathetic, from my hands-on experience, and in a wooded area it’s almost designed to not work.

For getting news from the outside world, an AM radio receiver as installed in every car can hear for a few hundred miles during the day and a thousand miles at night. Commercial broadcast FM radio has a range of 50 miles or so assuming a receiving antenna at about chest height. I might recommend having and knowing how to use a television antenna. Powering a modern television from a generator and receiving over the air broadcasts might just get you a news conference with the governor or something.

This part is US centric: NOAA operates a network of radio transmitters in the 160MHz range broadcasting weather updates. If you don’t own one of those receivers, get one. They’re cheap, easy and useful.

Communicating with your own group, a family or neighbors or whatever your situation is, GMRS or MURS is a better solution. Both allow 20+ times the power than LoRa. MURS is VHF, just above the 2 meter ham band, it punches through foliage a lot better but is limited to simplex only. GMRS is UHF, just below the amateur 70cm band, not as easy to push through the trees but repeaters are allowed. Depending on your situation and what other folks in your area are doing, those are likely better choices.

Reaching out for help…the problem with something like LoRa for this is you’re relying on a bunch of very cheap, shoddy little radios to relay a message to…someone. CB might be a choice here, it’s a standard in the trucking industry and you might get some propagation, but being or knowing a ham is probably your best bet. Emergency comms is one of the stated purposes for creating the amateur radio service, that’s what the ARES service is for, if you’re really interested in emergency comms you should probably look into it.

systemd would be a fantastic OS if only it had an init system.

Linux has a wide selection of GUIs. For those comfortable with Windows I would recommend either Mint’s Cinnamon or KDE.

Might have something to do with the PC’s origin as a de facto industry standard: How the only actual IP rights IBM had over the 5150 (other than the IBM and Personal Computer trademarks) was the copyright on the BIOS. The rest of the machine was off-the-shelf parts that IBM had no ownership of. Compaq’s compatible but different BIOS won in court and that’s how we got a bunch of random vendors making compatible computers.

Funnily enough that happened during the “DIP switches for amount of RAM” era when the BIOS was pretty much entirely transparent to the user.

I’ve only briefly glanced under USBs hood, and holy shit I’m amazed it works at all.

Allow me to do further psychic damage: at the turn of the century, USB keyboards happened.

Correct. Doctor should have his head put through the wall. Use a stud finder so you don’t miss.

I do find it funny how much people hate our society’s fundamental rights and want to limit them as much as possible. AIN’T NO FUCKIN FREE SPEECH HERE. WE HATE THAT SHIT.

I answered why it’s still debatable. Debating is free speech.

It’s why you can’t stop the debate. It’s not illegal to be wrong.

By “both are terrible for that” I mean both Meshtastic and Meshcore are terrible for emergency comms.

My relevant experience: I’m a General class ham, have been for over a decade now, I’ve used my radio equipment for such things as manning way stations on ultramarathons. These utterly insane strips of sentient beef jerky will go for a casual 40 mile jog through the Uwharries. We kept track of the runners as they ran through the stations so no one got lost for too long, went searching when someone turned up missing, and occasionally called for an ambulance for injuries. The guy who slipped on a rock and hit his head was probably the most important radio call I’ve ever made.

20 watts of VHF punches through the forest no problem. I could reach both stations on either side of me direct, 5 and 3 miles away, I could hear everyone involved on a repeater we designated including folks at the fire department in Troy. It’s also not that hard to use, you push the button and talk.

LoRa uses a couple techniques to stretch the power it has, low power and that chirp modulation thing it does that I don’t fully understand to make it easier to pick out of the noise floor, but you’re still talking a tenth of a watt and a frequency that is strongly absorbed by vegetation. If you live in a forest, LoRa is useless. Even if you do set up Meshcore repeaters high on structures, which a couple of my buddies have done, repeater to repeater you get 30 miles of range, and about half a mile range to companion nodes on the ground. line of sight is VERY particular, I’ve had two identical nodes sitting on top of my car, one could hear a repeater the other couldn’t.

Couple that with most LoRa nodes like that, used for something like Meshcore or Meshtastic, are basically little external modems. The companion node itself isn’t really usable on its own, you need to pair it over bluetooth to a smart phone running the Meshcore app. And then you get the world’s half bakedest text messaging system. In most service, it’s like radio, but text. If your radio didn’t hear a message when it was transmitted because it was in the car or you were standing near a tree or the antenna was touching you…too bad.

I really want to be the ultramarathon jogger who trips on a root and hits his head in the woods at an event where the safety officer’s radio can be 3 feet too far to the left to send or receive any messages.

It might be a fun little toy in a city where you have a dense population and buildings you can put nodes way up high on, maybe it works in the desert where trees are illegal, but I live in a forest. I can shout farther than LoRa.

I haven’t messed with Reticulum. It is my understanding that Reticulum works over several media including but not limited to LoRa so it probably shows more potential.

Oh, a final note about Meshcore: It’s a FOSS project, so the low level packet protocol is very thoroughly documented but there are basically no user instructions.

You want to try training your normie family to use Meshcore? Keep a little walkie talkie they don’t directly interact with in their pocket with their phone, keep both charged, etc? Sure.

But they are allowed to debate.

It’s a Chinese product. You’re going to get cancer from sitting in it. It’ll be full of lead and asbestos just like their baby food.

Both are terrible for that. I hope that it’s a small number of people that get killed relying on LoRa for emergency communications that result in the project(s) being sued out of existence.

Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea: Let’s buy some $15 Arduino-like devices with milliwatts of transmitter power and trust them to life and limb! Even stupider than the people who buy Baofeng radios to put in a “bug out bag” and never use. Those at least mostly work.

Something something first amendment.

I’ve seen enough shit here on Lemmy from Canadians saying “we aren’t friends” so…I agree. We aren’t. I wouldn’t piss on Canada if it was on fire. Which it probably is.

Ah the joys of tech debt.

1970s: Hardware configuration settings? All the chips are soldered down, there’s a port for a floppy drive and a port for a cassette drive. Write your software for the peripherals it needs.

Early 80s: So there are some expansion slots in the case, and a bank of 12 tiny DIP switches on the motherboard to set the configuration. Most of what it needs to know is how much RAM is installed.

Mid 80s: The computer comes with a diskette that has a program on it that will allow you to set the configuration in software, it’ll be stored in battery backed RAM in the RTC circuit.

Late 80s: We’re building that configuration UI into the firmware itself so you don’t need separate software. You can enter the BIOS config menu by pressing the F11 key before the OS boots.

Early 90s: F11? I thought it was F12!

Mid 90s: The company I bought my desktop from also makes compact laptops that don’t have a hardware F11 or F12 key, Those are Fn+F1 and Fn+F2, and the Fn key doesn’t work in the BIOS because it was implemented as an OS feature. So they use F2, and they use it on all the computers they make so they don’t have to maintain a special branch of the BIOS.

Late 90s: Okay so this is getting more important because we don’t just have two floppies and a hard drive now; “Try booting from A, Try booting from B, Try booting from C” starts to break when computers might have more than one hard drive and possibly more than one optical drive. We’re going to need to make that configurable.

Early 2000s: The old BIOS standard is starting to get long in the tooth, we’re basically shipping firmware designed 20 years ago. It needs a refresh called UEFI.

Mid 2000s: As part of that new standard, we’re going to standardize the key to enter the firmware config menu right? Right?!

Late 2000s: Our multimedia PC maps the function keys to media keys by default and you have to hold the fn key to actually throw an F1 through F12 keypress. Again that doesn’t work outside of Windows so we use the Delete key.

Early 10s: Booting from USB flash drives is a thing now, the whole drive is removable so there’s no realistic way to put “boot from USB drive” permanently ahead of the hard drive in the boot order, it would be handy to have a separate menu just to temporarily choose which drive to boot from. Since we use F11 for the settings menu, we’ll use F2 for the boot menu.

Mid 10s: We use F8 for that.

Late 10s: Hey, we could speed up boot times if we significantly shortened the duration during boot when its waiting for the user to do that, and print the instructions to the screen for less time than it takes to read.

Early 20s: What if we let you disable that menu entirely from within that menu, for the sake of skipping that delay entirely? Which also means you can’t get back into the menu to re-enable it?

Mid 20s: What if nobody could ever afford computers again? Wouldn’t that be fun?

Raspberry Pis have CEC support. I’ve used it with OSMC (formerly either LibreElec or RaspBMC, one of those? It’s Debian Kodi). It was much better without. So, if you turned the TV off with the TV’s power button, the Pi would turn the TV back on.

The Pi has a 3.5mm audio jack. I have a set of desktop PC speakers that are hell and gone better than anything built into a television in the last 20 years. Not only is it not straightforward to get it to control the Pi’s audio output level with the TV’s remote via CEC, OSMC absolutely did not want to do this. Not only would that setting get revered to HDMI audio out, it would disable the analog out option, and you’d have to SSH in and change a config file to re-enable that option in the first place. That would happen either during updates or even just power cycles. I swear the phraseology of the line you’d have to put in that config file would change; the same line I’d put in there would still be in there and not working.

The thing with open source software is, it’s always going to have the UX of a sinus infection, especially since the manufacturers of hardware gimp their devices to not work well outside of the walled garden.

You haven’t banned Chinese cars. I know enough to want to mine the 49th parallel like the Korean penninsula.