Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
Trump could drag a 14 year old by her hair into central park in broad daylight and fuck her brains out, to a sold-out audience and claim it as fake without any repercussions.
Not really. His base will excuse authoritarian power grabs, blatantly racist policies, sexual assault, etc but this one might be the one that breaks him. The Q-anon stuff was all about a bunch of elite politicians having secret pedophile rings. They thought Trump was sent by God to expose that. The phrase "Epstein didn't kill himself" is probably more unifying than any flag. Pam Bondi made a big deal about releasing the Epstein files. His base was frothing at the mouth to finally let the world know. With the administration's sudden course shift, even his supporters are wanting answers.
On the 16th of July, at around 8pm UTC+2, a malicious AUR package was uploaded to the AUR. Two other malicious packages were uploaded by the same user a few hours later. These packages were installing a script coming from the same GitHub repository that was identified as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).
The affected malicious packages are:
librewolf-fix-bin
firefox-patch-bin
zen-browser-patched-bin
The Arch Linux team addressed the issue as soon as they became aware of the situation. As of today, 18th of July, at around 6pm UTC+2, the offending packages have been deleted from the AUR.
We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary measures in order to ensure they were not compromised.
Follow up
There are more packages with this malware found.
minecraft-cracked
ttf-ms-fonts-all
vesktop-bin-patched
ttf-all-ms-fonts
What to do
If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).
Coming about three weeks after DXVK 2.6.2, the DXVK 2.7 release adds support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer Vulkan extension by default on newer AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to significantly reduce CPU overhead in games like Final Fantasy XIV, God of War, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Watch Dogs 2, and others.
Good for them. F-Droid's argumentation is solid and they don't violate freedom 0, because this decision doesn't affect Gab's freedom to run their own software.
what even was that about freedom zero? as if freedom zero meant all free software must be accepted in all repositories?? you are still free to run it regardless
It's the social platform that takes the people that Parlor and "Truth" Social won't take. Genuine Nazis and conspiracy nuts every which way. It's bonkers shit.
We respect Tusky’s decision to block mentioned website; it’s their right to introduce restrictions like these into their software. We also respect Fedilab’s decision not to hardcode a login block; instead they are actively working on making it easier to block certain domains in the app itself and thus giving users more power to moderate which content they’ll see. If people disagree with F-Droid’s decision not to flag Fedilab, a idea is to develop a decentralized tag system based on package IDs which allow third-party servers to share their own warnings with their community.
They're not blocking any fediverse apps that you can use to connect to any server.
Feel free to use any Lemmy or Mastodon client to connect to any hate-filled instances your hateful little heart desires. If you don't like that some apps have built-in blocklists, use different apps, or modify them. That's the beauty of open source.
Do what you want, just don't expect the rest of the world to amorally do it for you. This is perfectly in keeping with open-source philosophy.
trixie (aka debian 13) is about to get released with plasma 6.3. it seems that finally x11 is being left behind, which is good, but it worried me a little bit because
my nvidia graphics card is old: the 470 driver is the latest version that supports it (so no wayland support from nvidia proprietary drivers ever)
on bookworm (debian 12, the current stable version), nouveau works pretty well, but it crashed more or less daily when i tried to daily drive it at work
x11 is still very well supported by plasma 6, but the near future has no place to it and i worry i would eventually get stuck without updates to my system as the newer versions lose x11 support. i decided to try wayland+nouveau again on trixie to see if i had better luck this time
it all worked way better than i expected. performance is seemingly on par with the proprietary driver, i've had no crashes so far and i've been using it for a week and even screensharing, one of the most problematic aspects of the experience last time i tried, worked well. the one problem i had was with the slack flatpak, which didn't support wayland for some reason, so it had to run on xwayland. screen sharing wayland applications from x11 apps is possible through the xwaylandvideobridge, which kinda works, but it crashed xwayland entirely at one point, killing both x11 applications i had running. i won't blame that on the system itself and installing the slack deb package fixed the problem anyway
all in all, it seems like i can safely switch to plasma 6+wayland+nouveau at work
Could someone explain what's going on with this comment and why its upvoted so much? It's a genuine question. What's wrong with his phone (and how do you know what he uses)?
I've got some great Linux swag from Ubuntu Korea, but I've been looking to buy new clothes lately and would love to rock more FOSS.
I see a couple websites that sell FOSS branded clothing, but does anyone have good experience buying high quality hats/tshirts/sweaters/active wear from any of these online retailers? Bonus points if the retailers donate proceeds to development
If only they sold coffee mugs! Every time I look somewhere for swag, even if they do have coffee mugs, they're just these diddly little 10 oz things--not big enough for this coffee achiever!
Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it's growing fast.
I tested Gnome and KDE Plasma5 in the last year. KDE Plasma is in my opinion the first DE which is comparable with Win/MacOS. It looks modern, is pretty much feature complete and as an average user its nice to have useful apps preinstalled (calculator, libreoffice, firefox and so on), but no bloatware.
Its just a bit more customizable than windows, which is perfect and also not fiddly and a pain. It certainly has a handful of quirks, like Windows does, but you get used to them.
If I have to set up elderly relatives with a computer, I'd strongly consider a KDE Plasma Desktop
Well as someone who's been using gnome since about 3.10 I might be able to explain my view: Before that I've used plasma and Unity and a whole lot of Mate but then I started using Gnome for a pretty and smooth experience right out of the Box. Now I've simply been using it for so long that it's muscle memory all the way. I don't agree with everything the gnome devs decide and I definitely am annoyed that I have to use extension for small things that should just be a toogle in the settings but I've realized some time ago that if I did switch to plasma I would use all the customizability to make it work like Gnome ... so I stay on Gnome.
SteamOS and Bazzite are certainly contributing among gamers, but there also seem to be a lot of casual users moving to Mint and pop!_os. I've seen quite a few people using them to extend the life of older hardware.
The 5% story was published yesterday. This new article from today says that they trust the government site figures more than StatCounter which was cited on yesterday's story.
I know! This article kind of addresses that with this line: "although we can't be certain of the exact numbers, Linux is clearly growing".
Interestingly enough, reading through again, the 6% figure is from US government sites, but the growth numbers in the line I quoted in the post is actually global. Here's the graph they're referring to:
I hadn't noticed that dip in 2025 until I looked at this graph more closely!
Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.
Average users aren't installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
I only installed it once for fun in a VM but didn't really use it. It's different to Linux but you could get used to it. As far as I know however the hardware that it properly runs on is quite limited, mainly older stuff. So I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver but I would recommend to try it out.
But Norway's Linux spiked up to almost 30% in July 2024 as well. So I don't really trust these sites. My guess is that it's due to Tesla's web browser or something? Tesla is the most popular electric car brand in Norway: 77k Model Y and 50k Model 3 are registered, and the only model with higher numbers is the Nissan Leaf with 81k, but that'll be taken over very shortly (so far in 2025, there have been over 11k Model Y registrations, with the next runner-up being the Toyota BZ4X with 4,6k)
A king once summoned a wise man who had done him a great service and said, “Name your reward.” The wise man replied, “Your Majesty, I ask for a simple thing. Give me one percent Linux desktop market share for the first square of the chessboard, two percent for the second square, four percent for the third square, and so on, doubling the amount for each of the 64 squares.” The king, thinking this was a modest request, said, “Surely you jest! Such a small reward for such a great service? Ask for gold, land, or jewels instead.” But the wise man insisted, and the king agreed. The king ordered his treasurer to calculate the total. Starting with 1% for the first square, 2% for the second, 4% for the third, 8% for the fourth… by the time they reached the tenth square, they needed 512% of the desktop market. The treasurer, pale with realization, informed the king that by the 64th square, they would need more market share than could possibly exist in the entire universe of computing devices. The king then understood that what seemed like a humble request was actually impossible to fulfill, and he gained a new respect for the power of exponential growth.
The device in question is the USB dongle for my 2.4 GHz wireless headset. Everything works fine except for volume control, so it is stuck at max volume, regardless of where the volume slider in pavucontrol is. Volume controls within individual websites and programs work, but it seems that the system volume control is delegated to the USB device, which itself has no concept of volume control. This is the case with both pulseaudio and pipewire. Is there a way to limit the system-wide volume before it reaches the dongle?
I am using a laptop, with a cheaper monitor that only has one hdmi input. I have two devices that I want to use on this monitor, My laptop and my xbox series, so I got an hdmi switcher.
The xbox handles switching to and from it's input without a hitch, but my laptop can takes up to a minute to recognize the switch and display to the monitor, sometimes not recognizing it at all.
I was thinking that having the laptop continue to output the display whether or not it recognizes the monitor as disconnected would help make switching between them more seamless. Is there a way to achieve this?
I am using KDE and I have the "Do Nothing" option selected under close lid in power options.
I think what you want is an EDID emulator with passthrough or whatever it's called. EDID is how a monitor tells a device what resolution to send and other info. Some cheap HDMI splitters, adapters, audio extractors, etc will let you emulate a specific EDID. One of my audio extractors lets you fake stereo vs surround support to trick the source into sending surround - I think that's also through EDID - since if you're trying to extract surround, it might be because your real TVs EDID is for stereo I assume. So you probably want something like that in before the switch so that the laptop always thinks something is plugged in. Your switch seems to be too smart in actually passing through the real monitor's EDID so the laptop is able to see when it switches.
Just use the linux equivalent of github.com/VirtualDrivers/Virt… When the wayland people stop pretending you don't need it in 3 to 5 years, sometime around when they realize that network transparency is really important actually
Add virtual monitors to your windows 10/11 device! Works with VR, OBS, Sunshine, and/or any desktop sharing software. - VirtualDrivers/Virtual-Display-Driver
My local organic maps started to download the whole world. Every single map it could find. I tried stopping it but the only way to achieve that is to turn the application off. On starting it again, it resumes downloading.
Why?
The android based version found on f-droid is easier to use. I wanted to use the desktop based one because I work from home more often than elsewhere.
The desktop version feels more like a prototype to help with development/debugging then an actual user-facing app. (especially given how all the debugging stuff is right there in the main toolbar)
💥 USF operators dodged a missile and struck an enemy SAM system
In Donetsk Oblast, operators of the 413th “Raid” Battalion of the Unmanned Systems Forces detected and struck a Strela-10 surface-to-air missile system.
During a reconnaissance mission, the “Raid” UAV was spotted by the enemy, who immediately launched a missile. However, the pilot maneuvered and successfully evaded the strike. After the failed attempt, the SAM crew tried to hide the system in a forest belt.
Thanks to the drone's survival and the operators' skill, the Strela was tracked during repositioning and hit with a precise strike. The air defense system was destroyed along with its crew.
🇺🇦 USF: One step ahead!
Subscribe to the official Telegram channel of the Unmanned Systems Forces
💥 Оператори СБС ухилилися від ракети та уразили ЗРК противника
На Донеччині оператори 413-го батальйону «Рейд» Сил безпілотних систем виявили та уразили зенітно-ракетний комплекс «Стріла-10».
Linux has surpassed 5% desktop market share in the US (5.03% in June 2025), per StatCounter, driven by privacy concerns, rising costs of Windows/macOS, and user-friendly distros like Ubuntu.
My computer just freezes and needs to be manually restarted, happens during boot when the terminal screen and flags pop up usually, could be a cachyos issue tho, happens primarily after I sudo pacman -Syu before shutdown
Close Trump allies like Steve Bannon say "the president is pissed every time he looks at the BRICS dedollarization effort". The US fears the Global South challenge to the dollar's exorbitant privilege
Brics is basically an alignment against the west, rather than for something. Each of the members has ambitions that are, at best, completely different from one another, and in some cases, contradictory. It reminds me of the cold war era non-aligned movement.
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
obligatory I know this is not a linux question, but you provide good information and alternatives
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
are qr codes and pkpass files the same? what other formats do transportation authorities use?
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
Exactly. No matter the y dimension. Barcode data is only stored in x. Whereas QR uses x and y for data.
They also use the corner squares and a few specific dots to allow scanning from greater angles. Basically allowing the data to be read in 3d space. Even though only 2d is used to store that data.
This is why QR can work well with cameras. Whereas bar codes are designed for very short range laser reflection.
PS lots of info on QR online including open source programs to make your own.
The same goes for bar codes. But readers involve some very simple maker skills. Making simple barcode readers was a common school science project in the early 90s.
Your generic "barcode" for something like a UPC is considered a 1D barcode and uses things like the spacing of the lines and thickness to encode data. Although some 1D barcodes can detect the barcode is damaged they cannot do error recovery.
Your 2D barcodes, like QR or Data Matrix, store data in both directions and depending on format can have varying levels of error correction (duplicate data) built into the barcode. They also obviously can take up less room and hold the same or more data as well. You do need a scanner that can do 2D barcodes though, as not all scanners will read them.
ESWIN Computing is launching a new SBC running RISC-V. In a joint statement with Canonical, they have announced first-party support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the new device. Good news for anyone wanting to diversify away from ARM SBC's.
Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer
According to my statistics that I look at, my second largest group are those who are on some Linux distribution (it just shows up as "Linux" there for me). Why did I write this? Because this group of people indirectly start their system through something called initramfs. Let's take a look at what it is and how to use it to our advantage.
Use the translator in the sidebar to translate the page.
This is a bit of a rant; feel free to skip it if you’re here for the KDE content. This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and …
Yeah I opted for the Framework 13, even with the less than perfect keyboard and lack of touch. My hope is that touch will be an option in the future. otherwise its a near perfect option.
No but on my 3 in 1 I find the touch screen and pen very useful as a big tablet for consumption, laptop for productivity and gaming, and writing and drawing pad.
I'm constantly trying to touch the screen on my work provided laptop, and my FW13. I spent a long time with a fancy Chromebook for my couch computing needs, when away from the desktop.
I’ve been daily driving a framework 13 for like 9 months now. I’m pretty happy with it as a Linux machine.I can and will nitpick here to some of the points made in the article - but I’d buy another / recommended it regardless.
the touchpad. It’s a diving board style. It’s also got a good amount of play in it prior to clicking. The diving board style means it’s tough to click at the top. Tapping works great. The extra play takes a little getting used to. It’s 1000% functional and works well - but if you’re snobby about trackpads, you won’t like it. It’s way worse than an Apple touchpad, but an upper end windows touchpad. The trackpads play also tends to allow “crap” and dirt to fall in there. I’ve had to take it apart once to clean it out (which is super easy to do on a framework, but it’d be nicer if I didn’t have to do it at all)
the price - it’s a bit high for the specs. But that comes with the territory of a non glued laptop
battery life is ok
speakers are kind of crappy. They are fine, but they ain’t wowing anyone.
the keyboard is ok
That’s it. 9 months of daily use, I love it, that’s my complaints list. The idea here is that someday, a better trackpad, or keyboard, or speakers will become available-and it’ll take me 5 minutes to upgrade. It’s a desktop laptop. And for me, everything “just works” on fedora 42.
Framework are nowhere near the scale of any of the large manufacturers, and they've had to spend a huge amount of time and money on R&D, so their laptops are probably always going to cost more. IMO it's worth the price though, given you can keep updating it over time.
I'm curious about this as well. The keyboard flex was always brought up by early reviewers for the Framework 16, and I think Framework said they would make a more sturdy keyboard for it later, but I haven't heard any updates about that.
Thanks, that's good to know. I heard the Framework 13 wad solid; I thought I was replying to a comment about the Framework 16, though. That must have been a different comment. I heard the 16 has a little flex.
Literally zero flex on the keyboard. I just pulled it out and pressed hard on it. No flex of the keys pushing down through the metal (like a gasket mounted mechanical keyboard would do), and zero flex of the aluminum.
I've been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I've tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that's what I've gathered from all the threads about it. It's bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.
(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)
I've had mine about 4 months, minimal issues. I got a 7840U slightly on sale when the new AI 300 series came out.
I'm also running fedora 42, but it's Bluefin, based on silverblue. Everything works out of the box.
My biggest complaint is the sleep battery drain, iirc it's something like a few percent per hour, so I just get in the habit of turning it completely off if I'm not home with it plugged in. Otherwise it's dead when I need it, which sucks.
Also the fan can be a little loud and overzealous under barely moderate load, though I've found keeping it in power saving mode helps keep things cooler. Though I've been using it for note taking during some schooling this week, and it's been stone cold and silent, lasts all day on a single charge. So it definitely depends on your load. I appreciate having the power available when I need it, but wish it was better at keeping itself underclocked (or whatever it needs to do).
And finally the stock Wi-Fi 6 card in it gives some people problems with certain routers. Though I've only ever had problems with my parents starlink router 🤷♂️ That's a quick $20 upgrade though, to Wi-Fi 7, I just haven't needed to 🤷♂️
But still I'd buy another in a heartbeat.
Keyboard is great. Screen (2.8k) looks great to my eyes, though others say it has issues. No flex in the body. Touchpad is a little funky, but still great.
Plus when I want to upgrade the platform in a few years, or any component breaks before then, I can just fix it or upgrade it.
Anyone here have a StarLabs laptop (briefly mentioned in the article) and am opinion on it? I'm thinking about replacing my crappy System76 laptop and looking for something with good build quality.
I think it's (one of) the best laptop brands in regards to coreboot support. The build quality of my starbook is great. The biggest + for me is how helpful, polite and friendly the support staff is.
I have a Pangolin 12. While it has great specs and software support, the build quality is horrible, and over the course of two years now, I have had to screw it open and bend the laptop case in position more often then I'm comfortable with. It is the far, far opposite of rugged, which is the main reason I want to replace it. Twice now, it has just randomly decided to not boot for one or two weeks...
Hmm I have Serval WS which quality is top notch. The keyboard feels nice. The screen is 4K 144Hz. All of the elements are aluminium so there is no bending. (Except some parts like probably keycaps of the keyboard and so on).
Sorry to hear that you have this experience. However I think you can count on System76 because they give for their laptops lifetime support.
The Serval WS is also more than twice the price of my Pangolin... and I had a one year warranty, so I'm not sure what you mean with lifetime support. As for the specs (i.e. the screen etc.), yeah, they are great. But the case is very poorly designed on my pang12, and gets bent out of shape, which can cause mechanical failure in the hinge, quite frequently, despite the aluminum chassis. My complaint is just that it is far from rugged, which is problematic for me, as I travel a lot with it. But your mileage may vary.
PS: one more thing that really bothers me is the known problem with the touchepad on the pang12, which regularly fails. Mine also came with a faulty motherboard, which suggest bad quality control. Over all, these issues have caused me to lose faith in System76 hardware.
Regrading warranty I meant lifetime support for problems related to your System76 laptop. The warranty for a hardware is gone I think but I guess when you describe your issues correctly and they won't resolve it maybe they will suggest you something friendly.
And I get your point with the case. Tbh looked like it.
Hmm do you have up-to-date firmware? I had similar issue resolved by it.
Also faulty motherboard sounds like manufacturer issue not yours.
It seems to be getting a little better lately, but historically they just didn't give firmware updates. I went 3 years without a stable bios update for my 12th gen Intel mainboard on linux despite known vulnerabilities since launch (just got its first update last month).
I actually upgraded my mainboard within that time, so I went the full lifetime of the product with an insecure BIOS and none of the firmware improvements that were promised at launch like thunderbolt 4 certification. For all practical purposes, firmware support ended when it left the factory until just last month.
That said, my new ryzen ai 350 main board just got its first update to patch some vulns that were disclosed a month ago. So still not in time for the coordinated disclosure, but a month is way better than 3 years so I'll take what I can get.
Fine, then "more ugly and cumbersome" than it needs to be. I frequently have to hook up laptops to devices that simply don't have wifi (think unconfigured network devices like routers and the like), so connecting via cable is the only option. Having a gigantic, plastic, snag-prone wart sticking out of my laptop certainly wouldn't help matters.
Most companies still change their laptops’ keyboard layouts in random negative ways every year; ship with stupid screen resolutions, woefully bad speakers, and disappointing touchpads; and stuff the most powerful processor and GPU in there and don’t focus enough on tuning the cooling, power usage, and fan profiles.
I don't really get these nitpicks. If you're planning to use the laptop as your daily driver, do what every other power user does and get a set of good peripherals.
The perfect laptop is one that works well with external gpu, then you just max out cpu and everything else positive about a laptop without worrying about cramming a gpu in there while still getting a thin and light laptop with a good batterylife and nice screen
It is even worse when you are on the secondary market. The company's product pages are broken. Trying to compare across different release years is way harder.
I assumed the reason for this had to do with the production systems and supply chains. They can get a certain number of x parts at y price from a factory located in a given location. You get enough parts in proximity to each other and you make it a model.
Its one thing for a small company to have enough components to have only a few models but with the volume dell or HP moves, they would need to really invest in suppliers or actually make the components themselves.
I dont imagine the marketing people have come up with all the options, they're just the ones who have to try to sell want they're given.
Thankfully I have some requirements for laptops that very significantly narrow my options: - It must have a good, ergonomic keyboard - It must have a good pointing stick
It's not what you would normally call an ergo keyboard with a curved / split key bed, but I think they're superior to the majority of recent laptop keyboards, especially compared to the flat square chiclets of MacBooks and the others who blindly copied them. The keys are curved so you get tactile feedback of where your fingers are and the action also feels good to type on.
You seriously can't go wrong with the lenovo thinkpads on eBay. I Got a thinkpad E14 ryzen 7 (7th gen), 48gb ram, 1tb ssd for $400 on ebay with a small hair crack on the hinge.
At the end of the day, a laptop is a laptop, and the cost difference between a $2000 brand new laptop and a $400 used laptop there really is no argument/justification to be made to buy a $2000 laptop in less-intensive tasks. Here's a better instance of your money: find a $400 laptop with semi-good performance (ryzen 3 or intel equivalent) put $1600 to a gaming computer and setup a virtual environment with a radeon or rtx gpu at your fingertips.
Well I say it's no wonder people gravitate towards it but I don't actually like it myself. It sucks that they make it basically impossible to upgrade snything. And that there storage and RAM upgrades cost several times more than they should.
I have a Macbool air (not by choice) and I installed asahi linux a couple of weeks ago. Main take away is that it's really good except for software support. I've had a bit of trouble finding programs that work well on arm even open source projects often don't compile there programs to work on arm.
Here is a quick series of frequently asked questions about the X11 session kissing us goodbye. Shoutout to Nate from which I copied the format of the post. Is Xorg unmaintained and abandoned? No,...
Hello there! Here's the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.
now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?
How do you plan to restore if the whole drive dies?
good point: I guess if the problem is that I messed something up I may just run the backup script in reverse? if the problem is HW then I'd have to reinstall and then restore the backupped directory probably is there a "standard" way?
I usually only keep documents and media. Programs can be redownloaded and reinstalled (and it might be better to reinstall them in case you move to a new OS anyway to ensure compatibility).
For docker specifically, only keep stuff that's specific for your instance; which you normally setup as an external volume anyway. Docker is designed such that you should be able to nuke the container, and all persistent data is restored via an external volume on the host. If you're not doing that, you should immediately go and set that up now (to get the data out safely, setup a volume connection such that the container path is new - that way you don't accidentally destroy what's there, copy the stuff you need out, then readjust the path so it's correct)
thanks for the reply! Yes for sure I'm backing up all the /home directory, but I'd like to preserve also important configurations like ssh, cronjob etc, but I don't really know which directories are important for this and which are not
Don't forget to grab any /etc configurations you've made to adapt the system to your hardware or services. You don't need all of /etc, just whatever you've changed to not be default.
I back up all user data, for me that's some folders in /var, all of /etc (don't need everything, but it's small enough), mysqldumps and pgsqldumps of my databases and the output of dpkg --get-selections. And the backup script itself.
Everything is rsynced to a server in another location.
I want to switch to Borg backup but haven't found the time yet.
I recommend Borgmatic, a declarative way to set up borg backups. I find it much nicer than a having a backup.sh script and the configuration is really straight-forward.
I want to switch to Borg backup but haven’t found the time yet.
Since you haven't switched yet, perhaps consider restic too. I looked into Borg when I was trying to decide which backup software to use, but ended up deciding on restic instead and using resticprofile to ease implementation.
Only the first backup, after that with most backup software it will do incremental backups with delta transfer, so will only send the data that has changed since the last backup.
Why? I have a hard time imagine a use case where restoring the OS itself would be appropriate.
I can imagine restoring data, obviously, and services running with their personalization ... but the OS is something generic that should be discarded at whim IMHO. You probably chance few basic configuration of some services and most likely that's stored in /etc but even then 99% is default.
You can identify what you modified via shell history, e.g. history | grep /etc and potentially save them or you can also use find /etc -type f -newerXY with a date later than the OS installation and you should find what you modified. That's probably just a few files.
If you do back up anything beyond /home (which should be on another partition or even disk than the OS anyway) you'll most likely save garbage like /dev that might actually hinder your ability to restore.
So... sure, image the OS if you actually have a good reason for it but unless you work on archiving and restoring legacy hardware for a museum then I doubt you do need that.
You need to make your own plan about what's important to you. Don't waste time backing up stuff you can quickly download again - like docker images. Just know where the stuff is that you care about (such as any mounted volumes in docker with your own data on) and back that up, and make everything automated. If you do it manually, chances are you'll gradually stop doing them.
I wrote some things about properly backing up data that may be of use.
Backing up your important data is essential. I’ve built many systems over the years, and this is one system that I’m currently using, having thought a great deal about it.
I have used a combination of rsync and borg to backup to an external drive. Then I was feeling adventurous and tried borgbackup2. It was a mistake. Then I learned of rdiff-backup. Easy to setup, but even incremental backups of my home dir took many hours to complete. This is no solution to have regular backups for me.
I decided to go with btrfssnapshots instead. I recently reinstalled everything and I have finally btrfs. I bought a new external NVME drive for my backups where all the snapshots will go. Btrfs has even a parent-option to copy incremental snapshots to another filesystem (the parent snapshots being on both filesystems).
I did not finish my setup, so I cannot share any scripts yet.
It is a question I've spent a lot of time trying to work out. Can't speak to docker.
Some of the specifics of Keeps and Dontkeeps depend on details of your system. You have to find out where the distro, DM and other apps keep the following:
Dontkeeps: - trashes - temp files - file indexes .. IMHO these dont backup properly if you leave them in and will prevent you from completing the task - device files
Keeps: - list of installed packages --- explicit and deps separate if possible - config files: /etc, ~/.config, ~/.* on a case by case basis... I say remove the obvious large temp dirs and keep the rest by default for simplicity - for the system configs I've had a tool called etckeeper running for a while because it was highly recommended but I've never actually restored from it... - personal documents and other files such as typically kept in the home directory - /root occasionally has something you need
Ways to investigate: - use a disk usage utility to find out where your storage is being used up ... It'll help you find large Dontkeeps - watch for recently modified files - dirs and files that are modified all the time are usually temp dirs. But sometimes they have something useful like your firefox profile.
Most backup solutions are ONE of the following:
User files
System files
Don't spend too much time crying about needing two solutions. Just make your backup today and reach perfection later.
Remember: sync isn't backup. Test your backup if you can (but its not as easy as it sounds). Off site your most precious files.
I think most options have been covered here, but I'd like to consider some other bits...
User accounts & file permissions:- if you have >1 account, note that the UserID is internally numbered (starting from 1000, so Bob=1000, Sue=1001) and your file system is probably setup using the numerical UserID... so re-creating the users in a different order would give Sue access to Bob's files and vice versa.
Similarly, backing up /etc /var etc... you should check if any applications (ie databases) need specific chmod and chown settings
Rsync, tar, etc can cover some of this, you just need to check you rebuild users in the correct order.
Maybe Ansible is another approach? So your disaster recovery would be: 1. Install plain OS on new drive 2. Get Ansible access to it (ie basic netwroking) 3. Rebuild OS and instsll applicstions automatically with Ansible 4. Restore application & home folders (again with Ansible)
When you get this working, it's amazing to watch an entire system being rebuilt
I now reside in Germany and my current employer pays 50% of this so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. There is no physical card but travel information you download to an android wallet, but apparently google wallet is the only available option. See the picture:
Google is a company I don’t trust with my data, neither do I expect your regular public transportation authority employee to care about his privacy (he looked at me as I was asking if 2 + 2 equal 4). I am not aware of non google based wallets where I can download the travel information.
I tried some f-droid and droidify options but it turns out they’re pure crap.
The site: abo.ride-ticketing.de/app/ I log in with my username and password, get my travel information and on the bottom the picture I uploaded.
Any workarounds?
This being Germany, shouldn’t there be an alternative to those who refuse google? Don’t I have that right as a consumer?
Another question: I screenshot my logged in session on the link I provided where you see my qr code and my billing data. The public transportation employee told me that’s not allowed (wtf?). Can anyone here provide a rationale?
I know android is minimally related to linux and the question doesn't resemble a typical question for a linux forum but each time I've asked here you've provided valuable information:
I now reside in Germany and my current employer pays 50% of this so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. There is no physical card but travel information you download to an android wallet, but apparently google wallet is the only available option. See the picture:
Google is a company I don’t trust with my data, neither do I expect your regular public transportation authority employee to care about his privacy (he looked at me as I was asking if 2 + 2 equal 4). I am not aware of non google based wallets where I can download the travel information.
I tried some f-droid and droidify options but it turns out they’re pure crap.
The site: abo.ride-ticketing.de/app/ I log in with my username and password, get my travel information and on the bottom the picture I uploaded.
Any workarounds?
This being Germany, shouldn’t there be an alternative to those who refuse google? Don’t I have that right as a consumer?
Another question: I screenshot my logged in session on the link I provided where you see my qr code and my billing data. The public transportation employee told me that’s not allowed (wtf?). Can anyone here provide a rationale?
I had a similar issue in my city. I had to talk to the human resources division at my organization, and they were able to work directly with the local transit agency to get me a physical card, but it was a pain, and it certainly wasn't advertised as possible anywhere. It may be worth trying to call people and ask.
Do you trust any other provider? Amex used to have a payment type app but I'm not sure I'd call it a wallet. From what I remember Amex wasn't well used in Germany.
You're better of looking in the degoogle communities. Sorry, I still haven't learned to cite the communities here properly (there seem to be two forms). Type degoogle into a community search box (all one word, no hyphens)
As far as I remember, things other than credit/debit cards in Google Wallet are pretty much images that you can scan like you would a paper ticket. Maybe download that ticket somehow — if some other app provides the same android "activity" as Google Wallet (so it shows up in "Open WIth" menu when you clicj that button), you can use it to avoid Google completely. If it's hardcoded to use Google Wallet, make a separate account just for this ticket. Then just open the ticket in the app, take a screenshot, and use your favorite gallery app to scan it in at ticket gates.
Israeli forces killed more than 130 Palestinians in Gaza in a single day, including several children who were attempting to collect water for their hungry families in the besieged enclave.
Israeli forces killed more than 130 Palestinians in Gaza in a single day, including several children who were attempting to collect water for their hungry families in the besieged enclave.
Immediately after Trump announced what he called the “final proposal” for a Gaza deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu undermined the negotiating process, repeatedly announcing—in public—his intent to continue the war after securing the release of ten living Israeli captives in a temporary 60-day truce and to forge ahead with his ethnic cleansing campaign to force the surviving Palestinians out of Gaza. “After the pause, we will transfer the population in the Strip southward and impose a siege [on the rest of Gaza],” Netanyahu told far-right cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich recently, according to Israel’s Channel 12.
Immediately after Trump announced what he called the “final proposal” for a Gaza deal, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu undermined the negotiating process, repeatedly announcing—in public—his intent to continue the war after securing the release of ten living Israeli captives in a temporary 60-day truce and to forge ahead with his ethnic cleansing campaign to force the surviving Palestinians out of Gaza. “After the pause, we will transfer the population in the Strip southward and impose a siege [on the rest of Gaza],” Netanyahu told far-right cabinet minister Bezalel Smotrich recently, according to Israel’s Channel 12.
I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it's my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won't announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that's not enough.
I've been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I've decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?
Sorry for not answering your questions, I haven't used arch before. But dang that sucks I've been wanting to try arch for a little while but I didn't know they would happily push updates they know will break certain programs.
It's more like they expect you to do more reading than I would like to do. If I had been reading more of what they would like, I would have known I was expected to make a decision before updating and install an additional package. So from that view, they didn't push a breaking update.
I'd like to be able to take it all in but I can go weeks without the energy or interest to read a wall of text. Other times I'll start an update and lose interest while it downloads. I realize these are personal problems but that's why I value custom tools like Linux I can adapt to my needs and shortfalls.
It is an experimental distro, that's what was the original purpose. That's coming from what their website stated toward the beginning of the project. They may not call it that now, but not much has fundamentally changed in arch since that time besides the introduction of systemd.
Someone should inform whoever made that change. If a package is split in a new release, the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically. (Although I'm not sure why they'd want to split everything out like that anyway; no other VLC distribution does that, so splitting is itself a violation.)
Maybe Manjaro might be an alternative? I haven't personally used it. I don't like this kind of surprise, so I stick to boring distros like Debian. I used to use CentOS but it was too boring.
You just gave me words for something that was previously just vague internal grumbling and emotions.
Manjaro knows how to aesthetically please me with their color choices and background art. I've got a negative impression from various podcasts and forum posts but I'm realizing I need to look into that more because I can't recall specifics besides something about a past issue with package distribution.
i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.
arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.
i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.
i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.
when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… its kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.
Manjaro is significantly worse with updates breaking.
I used for a little while in 2018 and again in 2019, both times ended because it once became stuck in a boot loop after updates, and another time couldn’t boot after updates.
the initial state should match the final as closely as possible, in this case by installing the new optional dependencies automatically
Sometimes. Some of us out there have use cases where we really, really don't want our systems making choices for us and would rather read the notes every time. One could equally well argue that an OS whose entire purpose is letting the user make the choice suddenly doing something automatically without asking for input is the break in state that users would find astonishing.
Maybe it's me, but while you have outlined the events that got you to this point, I don't understand either the 'attitude' you find problematic or what it is about Arch you would hope to find elsewhere. Hard to make a recommendation without those.
You're right, I was leaning heavily on the events to give context for defining the attitude (maybe policy would be a less loaded word for me to use). I don't like the expectation that I would have to look for information in multiple places before updating. I'd prefer to be able to update often without needing to take in a lot of information.
If your upgrade says anything out of the ordinary, which it most definitely did here, that should probably trigger something in you. This is the case for any distro.
Debians testing branch might be a good shout. Packages stay pretty up-to-date and usually stuff doesn't break. Worst case you can pull a package from unstable when needed.
I second Debian Testing. The only issues I have are updates slow down during package freezes and sometimes, a package you are using becomes a victim of a package transition. Both are symptoms of Testing being exactly what it says, so I can't blame them, but still a valid annoyance.
The worst example was FreeCAD had a dependency being transitioned, so FreeCAD disappeared from Testing for a while, meaning my system wouldn't update if I wanted to keep FreeCAD. In the end, I just gave up and used the Flatpak. (I probably could have installed from Unstable, but whatever.)
Truth be told, I kind of wish there was a project to keep some new packages flowing to Testing users during freezes. I get why Debian themselves doesn't do it - it would be a nightmare to maintain - but an outside community project would be amazing. It wouldn't exactly be easy, but such a project wouldn't need to necessarily do every package (just desired ones), and they would only need to maintain them a couple months until new versions start flowing into Testing again. I think the biggest difficulty is not going too far ahead of what will end up in Testing post-freeze.
There is a way to "pin" package versions isn't there?
I wonder if that would prevent this kind of thing from uninstalling a package that is in transition. Ofc, it wouldn't get any updates, but I'd take that over just not having the package.
Yeh. Also, Debian tends to hold back packages like that automatically. It’s just a really obnoxious thing to deal with for me, and Flatpak allows me to circumvent that.
Though truth be told, I’m thinking of just staying on Trixie once it hits stable. While Testing certainly has its uses and I rather love it, there’s simply times where I don’t want to deal with the odd system maintenance ordeals, as comparatively rare as they are relative to other rolling release distros. I’ve been rather enjoying Bookworm on my laptop for a year now, which makes me think I would enjoy it on desktop.
Arch is really for those who like to troubleshoot and actively maintain things when they break.
I’m pretty decent with linux and for the most part, I can fix arch when it breaks, but I don’t have the time for that. For that reason, I use Fedora and recommend mint.
Yup, OP has done his time in Arch meaning now competent, probably, time to go to Fedora and relax, close enough to the edge but not bleeding, good QA, For extra chill go atomic, check out uBlue...
Can you install an app with GUI in a distrobox that then shows up on the app list? That'd be amazing but I doubt it since it's using containerization, I wonder what "tightly integrated" really means. Anyway, I'll look it up, thanks!
I don’t understand this, I’ve been using arch for 3 years, I update every couple of days and I’ve never had anything break, is it an aur thing? I tend to stay away it
I did break my endevaourOS after I was unlucky enough to upgrade when grub got a huge non-bootable bug and probably there may have been some app bugs since which are minor tbh. Like currently I can't run the bauh app, because it misses "bauh" in the python packages (lol).
Good for you that EOS now runs on systemd-boot, not grub lol. It grabs the EFI lines automatically from the boot partition and it just works. Personally, booting should be as simple as possible, as little personalisation as possible, make it just work.
Yeah no hate towards grub, because it doesn't get too much breakful versions, but it's a bootloader after all. Systemd boot works just fine for me, although I miss the customization aspect of it, but that's what rEFInd is for.
I sometimes forget or delay updates because of life and have over 500 updates. Skim through them if they are patches, minors or majors, and just run. In any case, my disk's are brtfs and I have timeshift for backups. If anything breaks horribly a live USB can restore it, if anything is weird I can restore it via UI. It autoruns every time I run Pacman and stores 5 copies of the "before" state. It also creates a daily copy for the last 5 days so 10 copies in total.
It's more than enough that if something fails I'll have something to go back to, and since it internally works with something akin to hardlinks snapshots don't take that much space.
I've not had issues since setting it up, so, great.
Honestly NIXos. Run it impermanent or traditional OS style. If your coming from Arch and want less breakage and more declarative configuration. Immutable or not. Pick almost any DE and all you maintain is your nix config. Nix config is your master file its not huge and the machine runs from it as you tell it. The machine does the rest. No system drift, no cruft. Just works and if you break it. Select your previous generation at boot and your back exactly as you were before.
I don't mind trading upfront effort for stability. I enjoyed setting up Arch and I'm still benefiting from insights gained from choosing my setup packages there.
Having nearly latest versions of packages is important to me because I can get into a flow after the initial excitement of a new feature being released but if I have to wait long to get my hands on it that won't happen. In this case, a smaller loss of my excitement to watch a video happened in the time it took me to figure out what was up with VLC.
I like having Timeshift in place for if I can't figure out what went wrong.
In this case, I didn't use VLC until days after I had updated so my mind didn't go to an issue from updating right away. I make a high amount of accidental inputs while using laptops and I don't always notice so a lot of my issues end up being unintentional configuration changes from weeks or months ago.
I've been using Ubuntu/Kubuntu since 2004 and I've always been happy and had very little problems.
It's a good, no hassle distro that works and is fairly up to date, especially if you use the non-LTS ones. I prefer staying with LTS though. At least my OS is stable and I don't have to spend my free time troubleshooting anything.
My first experience with Linux was Ubuntu back in 2007! I thought it was interesting but didn't become a Linux user until 12 years later when I realized gaming was possible without dual booting.
Something I experience a lot is getting excited for new features. It gives me an energy I can use to start a project I wouldn't have done otherwise. I need to be able to start soon after hearing about the new feature or I risk losing the excitement and missing out on the energy it would have provided.
I used to be like that. I just get so tied from work, seeing computers and software all day and having to constantly learn new technology that at home I'm just looking for something that doesn't change too much and is familiar.
I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. Codecs can be a little weird, so I recommend installing a flatpak for VLC and your browser. Otherwise, I've found it to be a very similar experience.
If it is the rolling aspect OP likes about arch. Then absolutely. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is amazing. But I do think something like Gentoo is more arch like in the sense that you got to do most things your self.
I've been enjoying Guix for the last 8 days. You declare your OS and home config in a file and you can check them into source control. It was originally a fork of NixOS, but has diverged a lot.
The CLIs and APIs are pretty nice. They have a concept of "channels", which are git repos you can download software from. The default official channel only hosts FOSS software, but you can trivially add non-FOSS channels and they work just as well as the first-party channels.
Each channel update and package install, removal, update get put on a log, which you can trivially jump between. guix package --switch-genereation=28 and boom you're at that generation (it's like a git commit). The software and config changes get saved in the generation so the jump is clean and atomic. I actually bisected my OS yesterday to track a bug! That was cool. You can also create and share isolated, reproducible environments.
Guix works with Flatpak and distrobox as well, in case some software isn't available in existing channels. I got HiDPI, Zoom, Logseq, Syncthing, and Tailscale working.
The biggest drawback for me so far is that it doesn't use systemd. Not sure if it's a dealbreaker for me yet. Systemd does way more than just manage system services, so GNU Shepherd (which Guix uses) isn't a real replacement.
Guix is a distribution of the GNU operating system.
Guix is technology that respects the freedom of computer users.
You are free to run the system for any purpose, study how it
works, improve it, and share it with the whole world.
I've been an Arch user for about 15 years now, and I've never posted to the forums. Not because I'm great at this and don't break things. I constantly break things and need to fix them. I don't ask questions there because before you'll get any help you are going to get sat down and explained (in great detail sometimes) how you are the stupidest piece of shit on Earth.
Interesting. Been an Arch user for about 12 years now. Your posts made me curious to check my forum post history. I have 4 Topics I started where I never got any reply or the only reply is from myself stating that I found a solution and what it is. Then I have 3 Topics where people actually engaged with me, asked for some more info gave some tips and pushed me in the right direction.
I enjoyed getting to pick out a lot of the small details by choosing what was going on my system. Something about having the minimum amount needed to meet my needs eases a variety of my computing related anxieties.
I've always managed to solve issues I've encountered but reading that forum post made me realize I may have been attributing issues from updates to Linux in general instead of my distro choice.
yeah, it is pretty fun, i used arch for a long time years ago and i liked it. but it's a huge commitment and you can't ever forget the system exists (which sometimes you need to do if you have a life)
What does this even mean? I had more problems with Fedora on my Notebook in the last few months (wouldn't randomly boot anymore?!) than I had with Arch Linux in 10 years.
i believe you. also, my great uncle has smoked since he was 13 and he's now 86 and is still alive
seriously, though, if you do everything right, arch is a great system. it is really well put together and very stable all things considered. the problem is the "doing everything right" part. what happened to op is pretty common if you stop reviewing your updates one by one for a week or two. if you're used to that, then arch is perfect. otherwise, it's a chore
that's a little besides the point. my point is that you have to always be ready, even if an actual intervention event takes a while to happen. you're used to it and/or got lucky, but the op is not the first person i see having issues like this and getting blamed for them because they should know better
arch only works if you think maintaining every detail of a linux system is fun, because you have to constantly know what you're doing and that's a huge commitment. stuff like what the op described is bound to happen if you ever get bored of it and decide not to pay much attention to the system one particular week
i really don't think that's true about arch, but in general i get that there is a spectrum of how much ppl want to be active in the maintenance of their computer.
i use EndeavourOS, but for my wife i give her Kalpa, which is atomic and much more "less fuss, just use computer."
maybe @makeitwonder would like an immutable distro.
What's your point of comparison, Ubuntu LTS? Arch does not require nearly as much upkeep or attention as you're claiming. Try setting up a Gentoo or NixOS system, or better yet just do Linux From Scratch, and come back to us.
I have been on Arch , and I'm now running NixOS as my daily driver... IMO NixOS is less of a hassle to set up, and nearly maintenance free compared to Arch... Twice a year when the channel updates there's a bit of stuff, but every change I need to make is usually explained in the output of my nixos-rebuild... If something suddenly breaks in an update, I just boot into my previous generation, roll back my flake.lock and wait a few days for a fix to be available...
Having dailied both as well, I only agree once you're over the very significant learning curve. And even then, I'd say initial setup is pretty similar, if not a bit easier on Arch.
Arch and NixOS are kind of like C and Rust. Arch/C give you the power and flexibility to do pretty much whatever you want, but also will let you do it in very stupid ways that will come back to bite you. NixOS and Rust give you the same amount of power, but with a higher barrier to entry that ensures you have a pretty good idea of what you're doing, which results in a much more stable experience.
I have dailied Arch and Debian unstable and they both took about as much effort. Arch is really not that complex, it just gives you access to some potential footguns. Also, Arch absolutely makes it clear that it's a more advanced distro -- that's the entire reason for the meme, although these days it's a lot simpler thanks mostly to the installers.
You're probably right, this is a issue that isn't unique to Arch. In this case, I would have been fine if a default had been chosen for people who didn't do the reading. Something like installing a plugin that will keep basic functionally of the app working.
I agree that reviewing terminal output is a valuable skill. I'm often lacking the attention or energy to pay attention to every update. I wish that wasn't the case because I believe I have higher than average emotional reactions when things go unexpectedly but the lack of attention -> unexpected event -> emotional reaction loop is a pattern of my life I've come to accept.
Please note that I wasn't passing judgement with my comment, I'm just stating that it will happen with pretty much all Linux distributions.
For example, when upgrading major Debian versions, the same will happen - but you'll usually get thrown into a full screen TUI with interactive buttons asking you how to proceed. So it isn't really possible to leave the system in a non-functional state.
Definitely check out a different, stability first distro. However, note that you will then have the problem of software being old when you want a new feature!
Rule of Thumb: if your use case is not satisfied by your current Distro, then move to the one that does.
Arch or rolling release distros are great if you want latest version of software/packages as soon as possible. Downside is you need to put more effort/time to maintain it by yourself.
On the other hand, fixed release distros (e.g. Debian) doesn't offer latest packages immediately. But, given that packages are tested for distro release, so you will have a more stable (in relative term) system for yourself with minimal effort.
I used to like rolling release distros on my college days as I had plenty of time back then. Now, I'm settled on fixed release ditro as it suits my current use case.
Would a flatpak would survive this update? I do use arch on some computers but with several flatpaks for some applications that I feel will be safer - but i don't really know.
The whole point of the update is to avoid the silly Windows-like mentality of flatpack. It splits the package up so you can choose what you want instead of installing a bunch of crap you won't ever use. If OP had been awake while doing a full upgrade on his bleeding edge system, he would have noticed.
The general advice is that handpicking updates from main repos is a big no-no. There are only a couple of reasons you would ever need that, like updating archlinux-keyring on a very outdated system.
Even on my 13 year old install with many thousands of packages, it's not hard to spot if anything is out of the ordinary when doing huge upgrades. You should pay attention.
That being said, I often just do pacman -Syu --noconfirm && poweroff these days. It's so rare that anything breaks and I can very easily fix it if it does.
I don't understand how Debian limits that. You can use Debian for your distribution BUT for whatever you want to be cutting edge, use whatever alternative method you want. It can be alternative package managers, e.g. am but if you want the absolute bleeding edge, go on the repository of the project, get a specific branch, build, install, use. That's absolutely no problem with even Debian stable.
I'm genuinely confused at comments implying that have a stable distribution means having outdated software.
For me, at least, that feeling is because I just like knowing my software is up to date. Only rarely do I come across an issue that is solved by a newer version, but that's just me I'm sure. I definitely see the appeal to not having to think about your desktop applications individually.
Sure, but that's kind of the old Windows way isn't it? Package managers are super nice in that everything is grouped together, and gets updated automatically.
The closest to Arch, a rolling cutting edge distro, is probably openSUSE Tumbleweed. openSUSE has excellent snapper integration that takes a snapshot before and after you touch zypper, so it's easy to undo changes that might ruin your system. CachyOS also has that same great snapper integration, but that's still Arch.
I can totally understand that. In case you still want to give it a chance, I can highly recommend EndeavorOS. It's basically pre-styled, pure Arch. But it has a welcome dialog, where you have a warning banner at the top if you need to be careful regarding an update. This directly links you to their Gitlab and forum with the steps you'd need to take to not break anything. This saved me multiple times already and I never broke my system, despite not even reading the Arch RSS feed or changelogs.
Besides the EndeavorOS forum is waaaay friendlier compared to the Arch one.
Endeavour forums helped when I upgraded during the 24 hours when Arch removed Amdgpu firmware. It did kind of make me wonder how many issues like that were present but that I've just dodged by random upgrade timing.
I prefer Debian-Testing. Basically, a rolling release, but not unstable. Arch is akin to Debian -Sid, which is unstable. The latest packages are brought in to -Sid after some rudimentary testing on -experimental. But only the stuff that make it and are solid on -sid, make it to -testing. Basically, Debian has 2 layers of siphoning bugs before they even make it to -testing. And that's why the -stable branch is so solid, because whatever makes it there, has to go through the 3 branches.
So if you like rolling releases with much newer packages, consider -testing. The easiest way is to wait for the Trixie release, and then do the manual update to -testing by changing the repository names (there are online tutorials about it). The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people "upgrade" their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I've been using -testing for over a year now with 0 problems. Even Google is using -testing internally! I also have had Arch installed and endeavouros, and have had 3 problems that I had to fix in 5 months.
Only after they meet the requirements to be moved from unstable.
From the wiki:
It is a good idea to install security updates from unstable since they take extra time to reach testing and the security team only releases updates to unstable.
and
Compared to stable and unstable, next-stable testing has the worst security update speed. Don't prefer testing if security is a concern.
There is some advice on that page about how to deal with security updates for testing and I'm wondering how people who use testing take that advice, and what changes they make to get security updates. Or maybe you don't bother. That's what I mean.
The other way is to get a -testing iso, but these usually are broken because most people “upgrade” their installed distro to testing instead of just install it outright.
I’ve installed Debian testing from ISO a handful of times and never had any issues.
Can definitely recommend Fedora too. Software updates are at a good pace, and the system has a lot of polish all around. For example, all you need to do for updates is to press "update" in Discover and it'll do everything for you, applying on reboot for stability. Most things "just work".
that's exactly how updates should work in every desktop distro. as an option of course.
systemd made it possible to install updates on shutdown. packagekit enabled kde software to automatically obtain and prepare the updates. plasma does the final touch nowadays to ask you on the reboot/shutdown dialog whether you want to install them.
Basically all the system is in place, with code from widely used parties. packagekit can even integrate with your filesystem to make a snapshot before install. It's wonderful. yet, it seems as if only fedora supports this full setup right now? or is there anything else?
I've tried quite a few distros (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Solus, Arch, so on) and none seem to offer this feature. It's a shame, as it's quite useful to have since updating a live system can sometimes cause some trouble. Even just the updating from Discover can be broken on some systems (I know openSUSE at the very least acts a bit funny when it comes to PackageKit, I think Arch as well).
The only issue is that you provide free testing for IBM, so it's a no go if you try to boycott/avoid US companies. If you don't it's indeed a great choice.
As long as they're not for the core Fedora projects why not? Bugs for those should be scarce and there are many other users to report them anyway.
Using and contributing to FOSS is hardly scabbing regardless. Unless you're donating to the project I wouldn't consider even bug reporting as directly supporting IBM. The tangible profit to them is pennies if that.
Telemetry, but I don't know if many Linux user doesn't turn it off. But I also don't know if many Linux user doesn't fill bug reports.
Also, if you use Fedora you may recommend it to people that will leave telemetry and/or file bug report. And you also contribute to make the red hat ecosystem relevant, potentially bringing paid customers for RHEL. It's a drop in the ocean of course, but personally I don't want to contribute to it.
vlc was already like this on arch for a long time, literally took just a moment to look at the optional dependencies and grab the latest "actually give me everything lmao" package group
I had the same problem, i did start with arch ,but man i remember doing a update after 4 days(4Gb of new updates) and my system faild to boot. From that moment i went debian route.
Based on what you describe, I would strongly recommend going with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's just as bleeding-edge as Arch, but all packages go through automatic testing to ensure they won't break anything, and if some manual actions are required, it will offer options right before update. Moreover, snapper in enabled by default on btrfs partitions, and it makes snapshots automatically before updates, so even if something breaks somehow, reverting takes a few seconds.
One small footnote is that you'll need to add separate VLC repo or Packman for VLC to have full functionality - proprietary codecs are one of the rare things official repos don't feature for legal reasons.
On Arch rant: I've always been weirded out by this "Arch is actually stable, you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often" attitude.
Like, no, this is not called stable or even usable for general audience. Updating your system and praying for it not to break while studying everything you need to know is antithetical to stability and makes for an awful daily driver.
you just have to watch every news post for manual interventions before every update, oh, and you better update very often
You have to watch the factory mailing list and make any manual interventions for Tumbleweed, and frankly, you should be watching the news and taking any action required no matter the os.
This is not really true for fixed release distros. I can’t remember when was the last time I had to read through the release note before Ubuntu version upgrade, or upgrading any package.
I used to think that, then I learnt the truth. Now-a-days, I say that you may as well use a rolling release because it's not really any more work that a fixed release and you have up to date software.
in fixed release, a package version is not released until all known issues are resolved.
That's not really true. It's more important that the issues are known. Sometimes they actually wait longer to fix issues since it would introduce changes
My bad, I meant "known major issues". If minor issues are not fixed, they document it on release note. But, at no point any fixed release distro ever released breaking changes "knowingly".
Ubuntu was by far the worst experience I have had in terms of updates destroying things. The number of times my post update reboot brought me back to a GRUB prompt, I'll never go back.
A decent daily driver distro for regular user should not break on blind update - at most, it should warn the user automatically before applying updates. If user is expected to check news every time they want to update their system - it is not a good fit for anyone but enthusiasts.
Anyone who is not curious enough to type yay -Pw before typing yay should probably stick with something like Windows. And even then, you should watch out for the rare manual intervention.
FFS dude. It's not lazy want updates to be as simple and pain free as possible. The entire point of these universal machines is to automate shit so we don't have to think about it so much. We have different distros to run them because people prefer different ways of doing things. The one you pick doesn't make you better or worse in any way. OP found out Arch is more work than they want to put up with for their daily driver and the benefits aren't worth the cost. That's a pretty big fucking club to be calling everyone in it lazy.
This kind of elitism is the most unnecessary, useless, vacuous, tedious horseshit and hurts Linux by pushing people away for nothing. Stop it.
I don't think it makes sense to gatekeep Linux only to those who has time, energy, and dedication to continuously check for necessary interventions and to familiarize themselves with all the terminal utilities in the first place.
That is a sort of elitism we need to carefully avoid - one, because otherwise it would halven the desktop Linux community, and two, because there's a huge group of people out there who need what Linux offers, but cannot dedicate themselves to it in the way enthusiasts do.
For them, there must be an option to push the button and get a smooth update, with everything resolved automatically or prompted in a user-friendly way. Arch is not that.
You feel comfy doing this - alright, no one stops you, Arch is great and has a purpose. But we should never put blame on users for not using their system The Arch Way™, because it's too technical, too engaged, and is just a poor fit for most. People will not and should not accommodate for this just to use their system. There's no need to.
If someone chose Arch and complains that it breaks things, it could be useful to point out Arch doesn't have required guardrails to make it operable in a way they expect, and direct the user to other distributions that have them and potentially least painful ways to migrate.
Having tried Arch and its derivatives, and recognizing their strong points, I can absolutely tell the person needs another distribution, and that's alright! Whatever fits anybody is up to them. And for stable rolling release experience without the need for manual checking (but also without some of the power features of Arch mainly geared toward enthusiasts) there's OpenSUSE Tumbleweed.
I don't use Arch, I use Endeavour because they took Arch and made it better. As to why I used yay as my example, there are two reasons:
It's what I use
It's nice to show how easy and simple it is when it's done properly and it normally takes 5 seconds, more when you have to do something. No wading through busy mailing lists hoping to spot an issue. I'm looking at you Debian and Tumbleweed!
I do, in fact, use Endeavour on my desktop as well, simply because I like snappiness and choice of Arch and similarly don't wanna bother with the pure one (and also EndeavourOS forums are more friendly in my experience). I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (an experimental Tumbleweed build, same idea as Manjaro, but actually done right) on my other laptop, so can speak from the experience on both ends.
With Slowroll (and my gf's Tumbleweed) I've only once faced the need for manual intervention, and it was simply to resolve a dependency change by choosing which package to leave - literally enter one number, and then it went on peacefully and correctly installing 1460 updates (yeah, they pushed a big Tumbleweed dump, 3.5 gigs total). On Arch and EndeavourOS, the last intervention was just recently, that's the one OP talks about, and they do happen more often and are more complicated than I'd like.
I used Tumbleweed for eight or so years before switching to Endeavour and it only really bit me hard once. Update, reboot, and sudo no longer worked! If I had spent a bit more time going through the mailing list, I could have made a simple configuration change before rebooting and saved a lot of stress! It affected nearly everybody who installed that particular image.
I'd say one issue in 8 years is a stellar track record!
But I agree they should have warned users a better way.
Anyway, I like how btrfs is treated within Tumbleweed - snapper is fully configured and enabled by default, and you can load a snapshot and rollback into it from the boot menu - all that would take you less than a minute, and any faulty update will be gone for good. With ext4, though, you might need Timeshift. But then, all that can be done within Arch with just a few more tweaks!
I’d say one issue in 8 years is a stellar track record!
Yeah, it's a pretty good track record. It was definitely a failure of communication in that instance, but iirc, they ended up rolling the change back a couple of days later.
Well… not really. My current installation of Tumbleweed is three and a half years old, and back in 2022 the only reason I re-installed it was changing the NVMe drive. I’ve never read factory mailing list and don’t ever recall having made manual interventions. I’ve just booted it, updated (zypper ref; zypper dup), rebooted and continued working.
I'm running Arch for a very long time. I agree this is not a distro for general audience. I disagree, however, that it is not stable. When I'm doing work I don't update my system. I enjoy my stable configuration and when I have time, I do update, I curiously watch which amazing foss software had an update. And I try them. I check my new firefox. I check gimp's new features. etc.. or if I have to do something I easily fix it, like in no time because I know my OS. Then I enjoy my stable system again.
Do you want to know what's unstable? When I had my new AMD GPU that I built my own kernel for, because the driver wasn't in mainline. And it randomly crashed the system. That's unstable.
Or when I installed my 3rd DE in ubuntu and apt couldn't deal with it, it somehow removed X.org. And I couldn't fix it. That's also something I don't want. Arch updates are much better than this.
Guess we simply apply different meaning to the word "stable". (you do you, though, and if it's alright with your workflow, yay!)
To me, stable means reliably working without any special maintenance. Arch requires you to update once in a while (otherwise your next update might get borked), and when you update, you may have to resolve conflicts and do manual interventions.
Right now, I run OpenSUSE Slowroll (beta, not released yet) on one of my machines and EndeavourOS on the other. The former recently had to update 1460 elements, and one intervention was required - package manager asked me if I want to hold one package for a while to avoid potential dependency issues. Later, it was fixed, and otherwise it went without a hitch. This is the worst behavior I've seen on this distribution, and so to me it renders "acceptably unstable" for general use (although I wouldn't give that to my grandma).
The VLC thing can be solved relatively easily by installing opi with zypper, and then running opi codecs, which will add all the necessary repos and install everything. After that VLC (and h.264 etc) will work like a charm.
Although, as another commenter pointed out, this will use Packman repo which is not official and apps there are not going through the same testing as in official repos.
So Flatpak is generally a better option. Still, if you want VLC as a native package, opi is indeed an easy and reliable way of providing it.
+1 for Garuda. It's nice that they have their own way of updating (garuda-update), which also handles situations like this one. It was very satisfying to not have to do anything when the linux-firmware change happened a couple of weeks back.
i used arco linux and they just linked the word update to the arch command to update and that made it very easy to update i don't remember the correct name for this. i do not know if garuda does the same or if they have there own program to do this.
I'd recommend opensuse tumbleweed. It's still a rolling distribution, it still has more bleeding edge software, but its package manager, zypper, does atomic updates, so if something doesn't install right it rolls it back.
That's the real thing for me: how painless is it to live with long term? After I've installed a couple of weird things, and configured some stuff custom - is this a distro that keeps rolling into the future, or is it one that makes me wish I had the time to re-install from scratch every 6 months?
I also noticed vlc has broken (installed last week apparently)
Using the pacman syntax:
pacman -Q -i -d vlc
showed a conflict with the vlc-plugin (which appeared to be uninstalled already) and no vlc-plugin-#### installed.
The dependencies were fully explained in the list, including the vlc-plugins-all dependency. I'm lazy so that's the dependency I installed on my EndeavourOS.
After having a similar feeling as yours I went for NixOS.
My thoughts then : if it breaks I can rollback, and the unstable channel is quite comparable to what arch offers.
Now : I've moved to stable channel, because it's updated enough and allows me to only deal with breaking changes twice a year. Moving to NixOS was time consuming (but fun) because it required to rewrite all my dotfiles and learn something new.
What issues did you have? One of the many awesome things about NixOS is that you can write overrides for any particular package if you need an older version, or even to change some options.
I've been an Arch user for more than a decade and I'll usually be first in line to defend it from dodgy claims about unreliability.
But that forum response is bizarre. Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware). VLC is an officially supported package, and surely this change would impact almost every VLC user?
New opt-depends is a nice pacman feature, but it hardly implies that things have been removed from the base package.
Literally the last two RSS items right now are about how splitting packages will require intervention for some users (plasma and Linux firmware).
Maybe a nitpick, but the linux-firmware situation is different, it's not about needing to install extra packages (they turned the existing package into a meta package or whatever it's called), but about that coinciding with some changes that can break the upgrade process and require you to force uninstall a package before proceeding.
But yeah, good point about plasma, the only differences I can even think of are that plasma is probably more popular, and definitely more important to have working.
Manjaro has been pretty quiet for a long time. There's gotta be a point where we forgive and forget. I like Manjaro and used it as my entry point to Arch. It sets a lot more up for you out of the box and has manjaro-specific package bundles that just work on install.
According to Manjarno, its been just under three years since their last mistake, and that was just forgetting to renew the SSL cert for their archived forums. Probably about time we let it back into the Arch family.
I got burned by something like this on Manjaro when a rolling update completely borked my graphics card. The devs reacted in a similar way and it made me realise that my priority is stability over bleeding edge and tinkering.
On that day I moved to Fedora. Stable as hell, no fuss. My main OS should just work and not kill itself.
I still love it but jumped over to Bazzite Gnome recently, which is like Fedora with a few bells on top, coupled with having a read-only root-filesystem (stability, man!). It also comes with distrobox, which will let you run arch natively in a container if you need the AUR.
I had a similar moment of clarity after troubles with Manjaro and a couple other Arch based distros.
I really like the idea of a rolling release, but definitely nedd stability first.
I swung back the other way, and jumped on Ubuntu LTS. And gradually over time I ended up having to get updates from external repos etc, and ended up in the same position where updates broke things or didn't work.
Currently running Ubuntu, and I just do an upgrade to the latest release each 6 months - after waiting a month after release date for everything to settle down. The upgrades to new releases have gone smoothly, I get updates to newer versions of software, and it's been very rare anything breaks. Being a popular distro also means a big community to help with any issues as well.
yeah i had that happen to me too, didn't look in the update screen because updates before went with a breeze but i took another look after VLC wouldn't play anything, it was something with the VLC plugins and i needed to reinstall those, just had to do sudo pacamn -S vlc-plugins-all to get VLC to play video files back, but man, that should have been in the news imo.
So to be clear, you are willing to upend your entire system and potentially your workflow because a single package update was mishandled and because somebody was a little too direct on a forum?
Have you considered Mac OS? Yes, I'm being snarky, but the Linux world isn't fully user friendly. If you're unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
EDIT: I guess tough love from somebody who ran slackware from a stack of physical representations of save buttons is unwelcome. Noted.
I’m being snarky, but the Linux world isn’t fully user friendly. If you’re unwilling to roll with the punches, it may not actually be for you.
I guess you're an Arch user, but this is exactly the wrong thinking. Yes, stuff sometimes break for pretty much every distro, but that doesn't mean we should dismiss people who want stuff to "just work" (which OP went above and beyond). We should absolutely strive to not break stuff, and if it does be humble and polite. Unless you literally want Linux to never become mainstream...
And btw I've been using Fedora for ages now, don't have to follow anything, and when stuff breaks they are generally apologetic about it and try to fix stuff.
Yes, I'm an arch user. But that's not the point. Even using something like mint, you still have to pay attention. Someone who's not willing to do that needs a curated operating system. Simple as that.
I also like to watch locally hosted videos from time to time. I also had the problem with VLC. 10 minutes later I had my answer, the problem was fixed, and I went on with my day. I didn't need to whine about the attitude of someone providing free tech support to someone else, and I didn't whine about a simple package adjustment.
I'll say it again. Linux isn't for everybody. Not yet. It still takes a little bit of grit.
I don't think the answer OP got falls under "tech support" (there would have had to be support for that). Additionally I don't think anyone should be subjected to whims of authority figures, regardless of project. Being nice is free
Then you and OP might consider spinning up your own distribution from scratch, because one of the basic facts of life in this world is this: As long as you're taking advantage of the fruits of somebody else's labor, you're also subject to their "whims".
i don't really care about being rude. but just saying Linux isn't for everybody seems stupid to me because this has nothing to do with Linux itself. its about the people you depend on to get your information and no Linux user benefits from making Linux smaller because of attitude on a forum i never got this. i liked arco linux because you had a video for every problem you don't need a forum moderator to tell you anything if you can see the problem and the solution. seems the best way for everybody to learn and that should be the whole point the rest is just people sniffing there own farts. youtube.com/@ErikDubois
ArcoLinux is like going to the University.
We take you on a journey in the Linux world.
After a few years you will have become pro Linux user with ease and comfort.
Struggling with a problem, look on the websites, look on Youtube...
You've got it right. I appreciate the directiness of the forum moderator because it was a clear signal to me that the Arch community doesn't value my experience at the level I would like.
Supporting iMacs for 8 years taught me Apple doesn't value my experience either. I'm happy to upend my system and workflow if it means I'm a step closer to living in the world I want to exist. Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I'm truly sorry that's the takeaway you got from all this. My (attempted) point was along the lines of "Linux is still the wild west." If you're looking for appreciation from random people on the internet, you might be in the wrong place.
Most of my life is chosen for me so I want the decisions I have control over to be meaningful to me.
I get it, probably more than most (my handle isn't random). But from that very perspective, IMO you have to be able to withstand a few assholes and pick your battles. An asshole in a forum that isn't even replying to me specifically doesn't exceed that threshold.
I’ve only once had a broken firmware update in years and it was an easy fix.
I’m not sure how people can recommend other distributions when they all have issues of one sort or another and you just have to do the bare minimum sometimes to fix them.
Judging from how hasty you are to dismiss a distribution based on a singular event, I would say it will be hard to find other distributions that can be what you wish them to be.
Not gate keeping here, but even in Windows/Mac there are issues which require some research to fix, sometimes even harder than linux ones.
If that happened to me I'd not want to deal with that again either.
What has made arch work for me is BTRFS filesystem with the grub module grub-btrfs. It gives you BTRFS snapshots you can load into at grub and with snapper and auto snap it will automatically create a restore point before updating.
It's worked flawlessly and thanks to BTRFS black magic the snapshots don't take up much storage space. I also recommend BTRFS assistant in the aur if you don't mind using a gui.
If you want an easy arch setup + friendly community forums + easy BTRFS setup I can't recommended EndevourOS enough.
This is not a support forum, this is not tech support, this is lemmy and other then giving a great example of what the OP is getting at what does your comment address?
It is most certainly not. (He says, as he comes fuming out of yet another meeting about a ticket that could have been solved at Tier 2 if support would learn how to read a log)
Oh pebkac is alive and well, no doubt about it. But expecting any level of expertise from an non commercial end user while simultaneously shooting down their questions is not going to help.
I absolutely agree, but here's the problem in this context: * OP isn't non-commercial. By their own words, they'd been doing desktop support for MacOS - plastic-wrapped and glittery, but still a *nix. Five years in, one's search-fu and tolerance for reading docs should be well developed. * Their question was answered by the page they found. OP's argument is they didn't like the tone used to reply to THAT post's OP and concluded from that tone that their expertise wouldn't be valued "in the way they would like". There's room to develop some grit here. * Arch isn't intended for inexperienced users, and that is made clear in the docs. "It is targeted at the proficient GNU/Linux user, or anyone with a do-it-yourself attitude who is willing to read the documentation, and solve their own problems." (wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_…) Getting this upset over a single package readjustment, no matter how badly it was communicated, tells me OP doesn't have a ton of experience with bare metal linux. There's just no way to sugarcoat that.
Arch gatekeeps on occasion, yes, but this isn't that. This is the simple rules of that particular distro. OP is free to find something that better fits their needs; and it appears they have.
I see no problems with someone showing frustration, and in this case I don't think arch should be proud of this example.
This is very much that, and why arch has the reputation it does. It will always be a fringe distro with the way the people (you included) shame and gatekeep.
Sure, but when I am looking for an answer toxic positivity and RTFM are often the same thing. The number of times people jump up to defend the manual and glaze the program without even checking if the info is in the manual (or if the manual even makes sense at all) is way too high.
I used to have to work on new stuff all the time and would have to read whitepapers or engineering change docs on the daily, and no the tangled mess most Linux documentation is in does not count as a functioning source of information.
The part that still grinds my gears is why bother to type out nothing of value like RTFM at all? Forums are filled with terrible posts belittleing the question instead of just answering the question. Its not helping anyone and at least to me makes little sense.
IMHO the actual problem here is the Arch moderator being an ass.
This happens in all operating systems from time to time. An update kills an app. Usually, the app is wildly out of date and hanging on to the last vestiges of a deprecated call that finally gets removed. I recently experienced this with V4L (for OBS virtual camera) and a kernel update in NixOS. Had one hell of a time tracking it down. It was one of the twice-yearly OS upgrades. Luckily, I had only updated one of my devices, and it still worked on the old one. After tearing apart the changes, I was finally able to specify V4L and a Linux kernel version. Immediately, the problem popped right out. The new kernel now needs a specific value passed for the expected video stream, where it used to use a default if it wasn't specified.
Apple breaks apps all the time. Windows does, but less so. The difference is usually before an update happens, Windows and Apple have had TONs of people testing on their own teams and their insiders people.
In the end, I just needed to roll back the kernel one revision until the V4L guys make the change, or I needed to recompile V4L myself with the option defaulted to something useful.
I don't think you can safely get away from this kind of issue. (app incompatibility on upgrade, not mods being an ass)
Debian or Mint seem to be pretty welcoming and easy going to get rid of the asshole issues, but chances are, you're going to break something eventually, and it's going to be super hard to figure out why and how to get around it.
Off-topic: A meta-analysis if you will, but I'm just astonished by the engagement this post has received. I wonder what this tells us about the Linux community on Lemmy.
On-topic: OP, honestly, others have chimed in and left very good answers already. So perhaps you won't find anything within my comment that hasn't been said. But, as I'm a latecomer to this thread, I might have an advantage that some didn't (try to capitalize on). To be blunt, the original post didn't reveal much about what you liked and didn't like about Arch. As such, my initial impression would have been to suggest Gentoo. But, you've since provided the engaging community crucial insights that help us in grasping the full picture. Below you may find my own notes on your distro preferences based on what you said: - care-free updates - repo packages receive updates shortly after upstream - rewards effort put into initial setup
Furthermore, I'll take the liberty to assume that (native) package availability is expected to be vast. And that you wish for the process of updating to be snappy.
Based on the above, I recommend NixOS.
If jumping ship to NixOS seems too daunting, then consider installing Nix^[To be clear, I meant the package manager. Determinate System's installer is probably your best option.] on Arch. Consider to slowly but surely expand its usage within your system. And, then, when you're comfortable, embrace NixOS as a worthy successor to your Arch installation.
the x264 av1 file plays only audio on vlc but works with flaws on mpv: on mpv I get audio and video, but every 5 to 6 seconds it's like instead of getting 24 fps I get 22, the user noticing the missing frames.
Is it x264 or AV1? They are two completely different codecs. If it's AV1, you may not have hardware acceleration since it's fairly new. It takes a lot of power to software decode AV1 and you will get dropped frames if the CPU can't keep up.
If it's AV1, you need both the hardware that can decode it, and the right libraries for it. x264 is not the same as AV1. AV1 requires lots of processing power, that's why you see the slow down. But with the right gfx card (and libs), it can decode it fine. What's your gfx card model exactly?
Check using e.g. top for your CPU (nvidia-smi or amd-smi for your GPU) or System Monitor on KDE if any of your resource is being maxed out. If so then most likely you found the culprit.
Regarding what the actual codec is being used you can use ffprobe but anyway what matters if resource bottleneck and thus if you can have hardware acceleration for it.
It's probably worth investigating so that you don't keep on getting video files too big for your computer to handle. I imagine it's something very high resolution with very recent compression. If so, look for something less demanding, e.g. x265 720p and if that's still leading to performance hiccups the older x264 720p or even 480p.
It's rate that the media player itself, e.g. VLC or mpv, actually is the bottleneck.
Hi, I recently finished setting up my Asustor NAS, and I found the snapshotting setup in it a bit confusing, so I'm writing this as a quick reference that might be hopefully useful to others.
For context, my device is a AS1102TL, and it's running ADM 4.3.3, but I imagine it should apply to all recent Asustor devices.
First of all, the reason I picked Asustor instead of e.g. Synology... it's because it was not clear if the latter actually supported LUKS full disk encryption on an external usb hd. In Asustor you have to ssh into your NAS, but you can definitely do it.
The only gotcha: If you created the LUKS volume recently on another system, it's likely that it'll be using Argon2 for key stretching. A memory-intensive algorithm, for which the 1GB of memory provided by my AS1102TL is not enough. The solution is simply to add another key with a different algo, e.g. PBKDF2, or just create the volume on your Asustor. Either way, you're going to be able to read and write it both from the NAS and another Linux on your pc.
$ sudo $(which cryptsetup) luksOpen /dev/sdb1 encrypted # "encrypted" is just the name that I gave to the device, pick anything... remember the `-S` flag if you need to select a key in a different slot
$ sudo mount /dev/mapper/encrypted /mnt/USB1
... do what you want ...
$ sudo umount /mnt/USB1/
$ sudo $(which cryptsetup) luksClose encrypted
Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that once mounted, the disk will be integrated in the ADM ui (you're not going to be able to see it in the "External Devices" ui, nor be able to select it as a destination in the "Backup & Restore" ui).
Normally, mounted external drives are available on paths like /share/USB0, /share/USB1. Maybe it could be possible to mount (or symlink your mount point for) your disk there, to make it usable to ADM, but by default /share is an immutable loop mount of /volume0/.@system/sharebase.loop
$ lsattr -d /share/
-----i------- /share/
Trying to workaround that with chattr and maybe manually modifying sharebase.loop felt a bit more risky than needed, so I didn't attempt that (the ADM ui doesn't provide a btrfs send functionality, so it's not very interesting for our purposes anyhow).
Now, you have two different approaches to accomplish incremental backups of btrfs snapshots, one where you just create them yourself from the CLI, and one where you can try to reuse the snapshots created in ADM.
I'm using the same naming convention, and same location that is used for snapshots created by ADM (you wouldn't get conflicts anyhow, unless you're creating another one in the exact same minute).
I recommend the -v verbose flag for btrfs receive, otherwise you're not going to see progress while the operation is ongoing.
That's it! Of course, the first send will have to happen without specifying a parent with -p, to do a full clone.
Reuse snapshots created in ADM
There are two problems with this: the snapshots created by ADM are not read-only and they are mounted right under the toplevel.
To address these issues:
sudo mount /dev/md1 -o subvol=/ /mnt/rootvol
sudo btrfs property set /mnt/rootvol/v2025079-2324/ ro true
then pick a parent snapshot, and send the incremental changes:
As above, use the -p and -v flags as needed. That's it!
If you're wondering why did we have to mount the / subvol, you can try without:
You can mount the snapshots directly in ADM's Snapshot Center, by toggling the Preview toggle for a snapshot. In that case, they are still going to be RW, though mounted as RO. You can deal with that by remounting: sudo mount -o remount,rw /volume1/.@snapshots/v2025079-2324/ && sudo btrfs property set /volume1/.@snapshots/v2025079-2324/ ro true,
You can then try to send the changes, but what you're going to get is:
$ sudo btrfs send -p /volume1/.@snapshots/v2025079-0824/ /volume1/.@snapshots/v2025079-2324
ERROR: not on mount point: /volume1/.@snapshots/v2025079-2324
The error is a bit confusing (you have mounted the volume! why is that not good enough?), but you can get a bit of clarity with btrfs subvolume list.
$ sudo btrfs subvolume list /volume1 -qua
ID 256 gen 159842 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 path <FS_TREE>/base
ID 258 gen 151914 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid 5039c206-1a89-dc45-a9fe-43f8959cb672 path <FS_TREE>/.iscsi
ID 259 gen 159840 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid 06d46207-9aa2-2944-ba38-e5736963ec12 path <FS_TREE>/.@plugins
ID 2758 gen 157876 top level 5 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 256c36c5-7033-a945-a2db-b6a334a8419f path <FS_TREE>/v2025079-0824
ID 2759 gen 157859 top level 5 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 88942ee6-8b52-3d4d-b972-5de2d6764728 path <FS_TREE>/v2025079-2324
ID 2762 gen 159833 top level 256 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 6d636914-35a0-3f42-9486-bf5d673b94c5 path base/.@snapshots/v20250710-0936
ID 2763 gen 159836 top level 256 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid e99df217-4946-a740-bba9-99f64f1a0d69 path base/.@snapshots/v20250710-0951
Now, compare with the output when listing /mnt/rootvol:
$ sudo btrfs subvolume list /mnt/rootvol/ -qua
ID 256 gen 159867 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 path base
ID 258 gen 151914 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid 5039c206-1a89-dc45-a9fe-43f8959cb672 path .iscsi
ID 259 gen 159840 top level 5 parent_uuid - uuid 06d46207-9aa2-2944-ba38-e5736963ec12 path .@plugins
ID 2758 gen 157876 top level 5 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 256c36c5-7033-a945-a2db-b6a334a8419f path v2025079-0824
ID 2759 gen 157859 top level 5 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 88942ee6-8b52-3d4d-b972-5de2d6764728 path v2025079-2324
ID 2762 gen 159833 top level 256 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid 6d636914-35a0-3f42-9486-bf5d673b94c5 path <FS_TREE>/base/.@snapshots/v20250710-0936
ID 2763 gen 159836 top level 256 parent_uuid cbc37b20-901f-b043-8cf1-59b814814140 uuid e99df217-4946-a740-bba9-99f64f1a0d69 path <FS_TREE>/base/.@snapshots/v20250710-0951
as you can see, the snapshots created in ADM are directly under top level 5 and if you list them under /volume1 (which is just the mount point for the /base subvolume), they are not found directly underneath (despite them being mounted there), which is why you see them being under their own <FS_TREE>.
Conversely, the ones that you can create directly from the cli under volume1, appear as top level 256 and they are under /base if you list the subvolumes under /mnt/rootvol.
PS, while I was closing the dozens of tabs that I opened to investigate how everything fits together, a note on what I wrote earlier:
this doesn’t mean that once mounted, the disk will be integrated in the ADM ui (you’re not going to be able to see it in the “External Devices” ui, nor be able to select it as a destination in the “Backup & Restore” ui).
mounting the disk on a path already accessible by ADM file explorer doesn't work because of permission issues, similar to the immutable flag that you can see with lsattr... but someone on Reddit had another workaround:
I mounted the opened device to another path already accessible by ADM file explorer. I don't think it will matter where really. But in my case I made two partitions on an external USB drive. The first partition is a small exFat formatted (10GB). The second partition takes up the rest of the drive and is formatted with cryptsetup (LUKS). Finally, to use this I open the LUKS device and mount it to a location in the first partition (which is automatically mounted by ADM)
The Linux community seems like it's filled with so much drama! How do we make sense of it all? Is Fedora going to kill my games? Did you hear the latest thing Linus said? Is GNOME really blocking a...
It really doesn't. I highly doubt there isn't office politics going on inside Microsoft, Apple and Google, but unlike them, Linux development is all public. If anything, that's likely to curtail a lot of bad behavior rather than encourage it.
Because there is choice. There is very little choice on Windows or Mac, so there's not really anything to argue about 😅 Champagne problems, if ya ask me.
Newish desktop - i7-13700K - 64Gb DDR5 6000Mhz - RTX 3070Ti - MSI PRO Z790-P (WiFi is not a factor, permanent ethernet connection.)
Needs: - Gaming - Music composing - Coding (Mostly python) - Video editing
I've been using Linux on and off throughout the years, but lately I've fallen out of the loop somewhat. Started with Slackware around 1998, Kubuntu in the 2000's, Ubuntu 2010's, Kali and Mandrake 2020's -> on my laptop, Ubuntu server on my RasPi. At work, we have a few Fedora servers I have to maintain. So not a complete novice, but somewhat obsolete info.
I have been looking at the immutable distros, like Bazzite and Pop!_OS as I've done the whole song and dance of constantly repairing my distro because of various issues, and I'd like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance, I get to fix linux servers at work enough already, I don't want to bring that home.
With gaming, I've understood that linux has come a loooooong way since I last tried sometime around TBC Launch for WoW when Wine barely worked with it.
Music composing is a little annoying, since apparently both Ableton and FL studio are not an option. I've heard good things about Reaper, but I'll have to do some more research. Feel free to educate me on this topic if you have some insider info. I don't play live sets, just compose and mix.
Video editing, currently I use Davinci Resolve, and apparently it works fine on Linux, just some limitations and shenanigans with codecs. Alternatives are welcome, I don't need 90% of what resolve offers, I can make do with a simpler software as well.
Thank you kindly in advance for departing thine wisdom.
EDIT: Ended up installing Bazzite, and KVM virtualizing OpenSuse Tumbleweed and vanilla Fedora, keeping my backups for now on the NAS so I will be able to easily nuke & go with Tumbleweed (I think) next, since so many people seem to swear by it. Thank you everyone for the great advice!
Cheers mate, never even heard of Kinoite, I was looking at KDE Plasma, but had some annoyance about it, can't remember what. I'll look into it for sure.
I would say, that Fedora and Debian are mostly care-free if you go with the defaults. Fedora can enable Flatpak as part of the installation and for Debian the installation guide can be found on Flathub. In both cases you can then install packages using gnome-software.
I have edited videos with Blender, it has a video editor built-in which is very intuitive. And you can explore compositing with it later. Text and graphics for videos I created with Inkscape (export them to PNGs). The graphics are just linked, so if you need to correct a spelling mistake in Inkscape you can overwrite the original PNG and Blender will pick it up. I think with Blender you can use all video codecs that are supported by ffmpeg.
For music you can have a look at Ardour. I did not use it in a long time, but previous version were enough for me to master a track.
Games: Just install Steam through Flatpak (gnome-software). But it depends mostly on the game whether it will be playable on Linux; check protondb.
Thanks for the alternative take. Good to know that Fedora supports Flatpak that easily.
Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn't even cross my mind for videos. Inkscape is a great idea!
Had a couple of recommendations for Ardour from other folks as well, will have to give it a go. Free is free after all.
Games fortunately I have the most experience with lately, was in another country with my ancient T530, and was bored, so did some gaming on Ubuntu, got mostly everything working pretty quickly.
Blender has a video editor?! Geez, used it back in the day for 3D rendering, but didn’t even cross my mind for videos.
it is surprisingly good, when i first found out about it i was kinda blown away with how competitive it is with stuff like Kdenlive and the ancient version of sony vegas i used to use
For the music stuff, there's also Bitwig and Ardour for good DAWs, Ardour's free so that's what I use. There's yabridge for VSTs, though it's hit and miss, and might be more tinkering than you want as you have to use an older version of wine. I've also heard about using carla for this purpose, but I haven't messed around with that so I can't attest to it's usefulness. I use Arch for all this, so ymmv on Kinoite, I didn't try any of it out when I was on Bazzite, but I can tell you that Bazzite was great for gaming!
Cheers for the music points. I got some pointers, that Nobara is great for music stuff, and Bazzite can be optimized for it, but takes some effort and fiddling. I gotta take a look at Ardour and Bitwig, see if I vibe with them. How are they with older (my keyboard is around 2010 I believe) MIDI devices, do you happen to have experience?
I don't, unfortunately, I'm a guitarist primarily. I did see some MIDI stuff in the menus though, so I think it'd be fine? I think it'd probably depend on drivers, so you'd probably have to check if your device has Linux support, if it's not just taken care of by the generic drivers. You might ask on linuxmusicians.com, they're a great resource!
If your primary usecase is going to be music (so a need for realtime capabilities for stuff like recording, VSTs and DAWs) then I do not reccomend immutable distros for a simple reason: you will probably/eventually need to hack something up to get it to work and at that moment, the immutability is just extra work.
As far as I have tried fiddling with the music stack on Linux (which is not that much), the whole pipewire/JACK/carla stack is a bit messy and I can't imagine it working with flatpacks due to the sandboxing/permissions.
Throw a dart, pick a distro. My God these "help me pick a distro" posts are irritating. You're not special. Your usecase is not special. Distros are "similar but different".
What always gets me is recommendations for what seem like weird obscure distros that I've never heard of.
What should I use for gaming? Well, for that you need Fizzlegit! It was released in 2025, is a derivative of a derivative of a derivative, and uses the same repos, but it has Steam preinstalled. Its totally next-gen!
Does the dickish attitude come with the package or is it extra? So sorry for asking questions after being out the scene for a bit, glad to see nothing's changed in the past 20 years.
Nvidia can be an ass to work with on a lot of distros, but Bazzite delivers the right drivers OOTB.
Needs: - Gaming
Bazzite is setup for gaming OOTB; it's bundled with Steam and Lutris, makes use of custom kernels/schedulers to optimize performance for gaming and contains many other goodies like excellent controller/peripheral support.
Has a built-in just script that downloads, installs and sets up Davinci Resolve for ya: ujust install-resolve
Music composing
This is the only I'm not 100% sure yet because you haven't provided explicitly yet what you'd like to use. But, I can't image it would be harder to get this running on Bazzite compared to other distros.
And last, but not least:
I'd like my main recreational machine & distro to be low maintenance
Through utilizing the bootc model, Bazzite is as low maintenance as they come.
I'd advocate for Bazzite too as you mentioned you just want a start and go machine. With DAWS you've also got Ardour and Bitwig both have great compatibility and flathub. There's also vcv and a few other great tools for music creation.
I'll suggest opensuse tumbleweed, CachyOS or Fedora Everything works on them but you should know that there are lot of cool tools are coming up recently on Linux. Like LACT and alot more.
I've got your exact hardware configuration and use case. Pop_OS broke on me after 18 months due to GNOME extensions I think. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma works really well for gaming/coding and general use, though I'm dual booting for Ableton Live on windows and the occasional VR.
Another useful property is that while jujutsu does have worktrees, like git, in many cases where one would use git worktrees (for example when writing accompanying documentation ) it is just easier to use another line of changes (what is a branch in git).
Alas, that jujutsu does not store local change sets automatically on a remote git repo (this happens only when you update and push a git branch), means that still-mutable local changes are not automatically transferred to another computer you work on. And unpublished changes are naturally mutable in jujutsu. But you can safely copy a jj repo via rsync, as changes in jj metadata are thread-safe and atomic. The other way is of course to push a work-in-progress ("WIP") git branch which can mutate and is therefore not allowed to be merged by other people.
That’s not really how one would use worktrees in git. Worktrees are useful in the case when e.g. you are working on version 0.15 of your software that has many breaking changes to version 0.14 (perhaps even on a build system level) and you need to release a 0.14.1 patch. Worktrees separate directories which means you don’t need to stash or do a wip commit, nor clear you 0.15 build artefacts. Just cd to a different worktree, checkout the 0.14 branch, create and checkout the 0.14.1 branch, clear build artifacts in a different directory from your main development one, and start working.
When done, just cd back and keep working again without switching branches, clearing artifacts, or doing full rebuilds of the in-development 0.15 version.
Plus, git does not store change sets or branches or anything on any remote unless you push them either, so if you’re having that problem just stop pushing things you don’t want to push. You can totally rsync a git repo, just ensure it’s at rest. Otherwise do what you should be doing anyway: set the repo on another machine as a remote of the other repo, so you can git pull my_private_machine feature/my_private_branch without needing to push to a central repo.
I’m sure jujutsu has many advantages, but it also reads to me like you’re misunderstanding the git model. Which can be a fair critique of git to be fair, but then we would need to talk about what about the git model people have trouble with, why, and how to address those issues, and so far I haven’t seen any kind of research in that direction from jujutsu (not that I’ve been looking particularly hard)
One difference between using worktrees and branches in git is that in git you usually have uncommited stuff that's not finished, and worktrees are a way to avoid committing this. And you want to avoid committing early because it is hard to clean-up later. This hesistsnce to commit is not necessary at all in jujutsu - any change to the source files is already captured and will be restored once you go back to that changeset. There are other cases where you use worktrees in git e.g. to isolate a build and an hour-long integration test running it in parallel to your ongoing work, and in thar cases, you'd use workspaces in jujutsu like you'd in git.
but then we would need to talk about what about the git model people have trouble with, why
Too many commands that do subtly and irreversivly things on the repo, with potentially messed-up interim states, only to do the conceptually much simpler task to edit and manipulate the directed acyclic graph of commits.
In short, jujutsu is a commit graph editor and does the same with perhaps 10% of the complexity of git. The man pages on the git reset, branch and merge commands are already larger than the whole - and detailed!- documentation of jujutsu.
Steve Klabnik explains this much better than I can here in his blog that I posted.
It is simply not my experience that cleaning up commits after committing early is difficult in git. Amending a commit is a single -a flag away from the git commit command. The opposite problem is when you do too much work and want to split it into multiple commit rather than a huge one, in which case git add -p is again a single flag away from git add.
In general, git’s entire model is to allow you to work first, and do administrative tasks (including tidying up your commit history etc) later.
And almost nothing is truly destructive in git, the vast majority of cases can be fixed by judicious use of git reflog.
The only cases I’ve ran into where git repos became corrupted were caused by external tools, mainly GUIs that label buttons with git commands that do something different when clicked (like the button labeled push actually doing git push —all for no good reason, and such things) with users that have no idea how git works that have been trained just by telling them “click this to save your work, click this to get the last version of the code”
I have to admit that in spite of having used git for about 20 years, I never used reflog. And even with magit I did stuff like rebase rarely. I found it costing too much time to read the man pages again every time and meditate what would happen with "reset xyz".
Fair, git’s documentation can definitely be too terse despite being very extensive and could really benefit from examples and common use cases sections. I only use a fraction of what git offers, but what I do use I use often, which definitely contributes to my happiness with git: I seldomly need to look things up
Technically true - but it looks like jj does a lot of history re-writing which would require a lot of care to be taken when working on a shared codebase.
We need the --allow-backwards flag to set the trunk branch to the previous commit because it is a dangerous operation: if we had pushed trunk, things would get weird when we try and push now. We've kept it all local, so there's no issues with doing this.
Hrm... It looks interesting but it seems too dedicated to crafting "the perfect commit".
Changing our description changed the commit ID! This is why we have both IDs: the change ID has not changed, but the commit ID has. This allows us to evolve our commit over time, but still have a stable way to refer to all versions of it.
I don't want to "evolve a commit" - I want to capture my changes over time. If I decide later that I want to prepare the commit for merging I will.
I hate it because it's different - but even trying to give it a "benefit of the doubt" I really can't see this as better. It's not like it's difficult to create a "tidy" commit with git as is.
And as far as "easier to use goes"... well... Here's how you get a list of anonymous branches
jj log -r 'heads(all())'
And since they eschew branches with names you get to memorize hash strings instead of branch names that describe the thing you were doing?
jj new pzoqtwuv yykpmnuq -m "merge better documentation"
# vs.
git merge my_branch_Name
I'm unconvinced. Though jj undo looks neat (and also crazy dangerous unless you can undo an undo?).
And since they eschew branches with names you get to memorize hash strings instead of branch names that describe the thing you were doing?
No trouble, you can still name branches if you want. And no, you don't have to type the whole changeset hash, the first one to three letters are usually sufficient.
Also, branch names are not a permanent thing, they disappear after you merged them.
If you want, to can put an empty commit with the description of what you want to do at the top of your changes, and then use "jj split" to move changes to different commits before it. There are several common work flows which are explained in Klabnik's blog post.
Yeah you can undo undo and also resurrect undone states.
If the readability of the commit history really does not matter to you - for exsmple, nobody needs to read this code again - it's possible that jj does not give you enough advantage. Everyone works different.
If the readability of the commit history really does not matter to you - for exsmple, nobody needs to read this code again - it’s possible that jj does not give you enough advantage. Everyone works different.
I mean... It does and I will use git to manage commit histories as necessary. I don't see jj as solving that problem or even making it easier. Doing a single squash-commit or a rebase -i when I merge a branch is relatively trivial.
And from what I can tell it's much easier to do a git pull upstream master than to do jj new skdfsld dskfjas since you'll likely have to lookup those hashes? I mean I wouldn't remember them.
And from what I can tell it's much easier to do a git pull upstream master than to do jj new skdfsld dskfjas since you'll likely have to lookup those hashes? I mean I wouldn't remember them.
One takes them from the last commit log and uses the first few letters. Steve Klabnik shows how they are used in practice. It makes no sense to repeat it here.
One takes them from the last commit log and uses the first few letters
So - it's not the length of the random garbage that is the issue it's the fact that it's random garbage that I have no chance of remembering after 5 seconds and switching between branches. All my branches are instead random hashes that I'll need to lookup or remember.
I've read through the blog. It sounds like they've taken the minor inconvenience of doing a git merge --squash and distributed that pain across every-single-commit you're ever going to make instead. All to get "tidy commits" which were possible before anyway.
I was actually rather interested in the idea of jj being something that made history-rewriting easier (e.g. for removing bad commits with passwords and the like). But the fact that it almost completely throws out the entire concept of working on named branches (yes you can have them - but "One interesting thing about branches in jj that's different than branches in git is that branches do not automatically move." - genius) is just ridiculous. And to claim that it's now simpler just seems like gaslighting.
I'm looking for a music player on Pop!_OS that supports playlists, repeating a single track while still being able to swap tracks in the playlist, and also supports fading between songs and when stopping playback. And ideas on what to try?
So far I've tried VLC, Audacious, and Rhythmbox, but none of those seem to support all of those requirements. (Rhythmbox was close but the repeat one from the toolbar plugin doesn't work.)
Edit: Got it working in Rhythmbox after toggling the repeat options a few more times. Still curious if there are other options out there though.
The Nullobsi fork of Cantata or many other mpd-backed music players are something I can recommend seems to fit what you're looking for. It supports being able to edit the play queue whilst running a single-track on repeat within it. It does also support fade out and crossfade. The easiest way to obtain it is via its flatpak on Flathub. Cantata can either run an integrated or connect to a system-level mpd server for its backend.
Even with all those incentive dollars, tax breaks, and innumerable concessions this will always be what happens. Governments are captured by corporate money, power and influence and then governments give away the people's wealth and corporations take.
You don’t need to use the vesa mounts. But you can put in a few screws into the wall and “anchor” your standalone tv with some wire, to prevent exactly this kind of thing.
Well mine were already wall mounted lol but you can just do like jaybone said and use wire to make it as far from the wall as you want. I just used some leftover speaker wire and some eyelets, but you can buy purpose made "picture hanging wire" that is good for 20-30 pounds or so if you want to be extra sure.
Plasma Bigscreen is a Plasma-based shell (desktop environment) for TVs and other large displays. It is designed to be used with arrow navigation using remotes or controllers.
I have been a long time Plasma Mobile contributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, the Plasma Bigscreen project has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but t…
it means being free from all the liberal elites and fake news media who just want to control us and take away our freedom and tell me what to think and how to live my life and whats safe to eat
trump and jesus DO NOT COUNT
theyre not part of the establishment and theyre not trying to control me okay trump is a rebel and a fighter and jesus is the ultimate rebel and free thinker he went against the establishment and challenged the powers that be like his dad and stuff
i believe in being free and independent and not being controlled by anyone or anything that isnt on my side like for example the mcdonalds corporation what do you think
a guy on linkedin taught me you can get peoples attention and make them alarmed by using caps so im just experimenting no need to worry about it but the question mark was a cry for help though
When you buy crisps sometimes there's just.... hardly any seasoning on them?? I'm talking crisps like Doritos or BBQ Beef Hula Hoops. There can be a massive difference with the amount of seasoning between batches and I'm sure they do it on purpose to make you buy more of them so you can get that really well seasoned batch you loved again lol. i don't actually believe this but I'd be interested to know why
As a teen: Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego the animated series (which was once interrupted by the news to show a plane crashing into a building).
I would prefer it if only my decisions affected my life, and not the decisions of other people. Want a well-paying job you're already good at? Better hope that another person decides you deserve it. Same with getting a place to live. It was quite a shock when I learned you had to fucking interview to rent an apartment, and may not be approved even if you have the money.
Same with getting a place to live. It was quite a shock when I learned you had to fucking interview to rent an apartment, and may not be approved even if you have the money.
Wait what? I've never heard of such a thing in any of the places I've lived. BS like needing 3x the rent or 1st, 2nd and last months rent + deposit yea
The Handala, operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, left the port of Syracuse shortly after 12:00 pm local time, according to a journalist of the French press agency AFP, carrying about fifteen activists.
Several dozen people, some holding Palestinian flags and others wearing keffiyeh scarves, gathered at the port to cheer the boat's departure with cries of "Free Palestine".
The former Norwegian trawler, loaded with medical supplies, food, children's equipment and medicine, will sail for about a week in the Mediterranean, covering roughly 1,800 kilometres, in the hope of reaching Gaza's coast. Palestinians inspect the wreckage of a gas station destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
A Gaza-bound boat carrying pro-Palestinian activists, including members of France's hard-left LFI party, and humanitarian aid left Sicily on Sunday, over a month after Israel detained and deported people aboard a previous vessel.
The Handala, operated by the Freedom Flotilla Coalition, left the port of Syracuse shortly after 12:00 pm local time, according to a journalist of the French press agency AFP, carrying about fifteen activists.
Several dozen people, some holding Palestinian flags and others wearing keffiyeh scarves, gathered at the port to cheer the boat's departure with cries of "Free Palestine".
The former Norwegian trawler, loaded with medical supplies, food, children's equipment and medicine, will sail for about a week in the Mediterranean, covering roughly 1,800 kilometres, in the hope of reaching Gaza's coast. Palestinians inspect the wreckage of a gas station destroyed in an Israeli airstrike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
A Gaza-bound boat carrying pro-Palestinian activists, including members of France's hard-left LFI party, and humanitarian aid left Sicily on Sunday, over a month after Israel detained and deported people aboard a previous vessel.
Magnesium frame and such. I had an older and heavier one and was always joking it would come handy as a blunt weapon if there was a sudden monster attack. It once fell from my desk to the floor and didn't even had a scratch.
Plus if you are on budget it is really best value for the money.
Check ThinkWiki and Thinkpad wiki sites for details. You do not need high specs to run Linux.
don't know if a refurbished thinkpad is good if you're on a budget, by the time you realise you might have a couple dozen of them on your desk all running linux
The generic answer for this is to get a refurbished thinkpad. Pretty much any T-series fit your needs and there's plenty of pre-leased corporate machines around which are refurbished and often have even a some kind of warranty.
I think what just_another_person means that Lenovo, specially at the beginning when they got the Think-brand from IBM years ago, tried to ride the brand and released sub-par laptops under ThinkPad -brand. At least some of the L-series were closer to what you could get from your local supermarket than actual work machines.
The brand-riding is now greatly less and the crappy ones generally aren't the models you can find refurbished from 3rd party retailer. I'm currently using T495 and it was ~300€ from a sale couple years ago, now you apparently can get L13 for less than that. And of course, when you buy used units do your homework and only make deal with a reputable seller, there's always an option that previous owner didn't treat the thing nicely.
loving my recently acquired T480. not the fastest by any means, but solid and great keyboard. plus non-soldered memory allows for upgrades. got mine off craigslist for 120, a steal.
Instead of just throwing random preferences out there, I'll help clarify the field of comments:
1) Thinkpads USED to be a safe choice, but Lenovo has been tainting that model line for a few years. Search and find specific models, and don't just buy because it has the Thinkpad brand. 2) Framework is 100% ready to go. They have a Refurb store where everything is cheap, but if you find one cheaper, get it. 3) Dell had a ton of Linux ready laptops under the XPS brand not long ago. Search and find out which to make sure, but they shipped with Linux installed. 4) I hate to say it, but HP Probooks were solid and shipped with Linux also. Terrible company, but they make decent enterprise products. They'll sell for cheap on eBay.
If you're in the US, refurbished thinkpads are probably the best option. Not so much here in Australia (but you mentioned GBP so perhaps you're in UK). Whatever. I bought a refurb Dell Latitude 3120 for AU$229
mfg yr 2021 Intel(R) Pentium(R) Silver N6000 @ 1.10GHz 8Gb RAM Intel UHD graphics Intel Wi-Fi 5 9560 (160 MHz) Bluetooth 5.0 Display: 1366 x 768 11.6" touchscreen 2-in-1 Disc: M.2 256Gb PCIe NVME Class 35 SSD 1.35kg
Runs voidlinux like it was born to it. It's my travel laptop.
If you're able to code from a terminal, and care about longer battery life (my main concern when working from a coffee shop or elsewhere), I'd recommend getting a used android tablet, pry something from xiaomi or oneplus. You can find a decent model used for around that price with > 8 hour battery life easily.
Get a good stand, a solid bluetooth keyboard (logitech makes some great portable ones), and put termux on it (can probably handle light python locally).
If you need it to do CPU powerful tasks, use termux to remote into a VPS or your home server, and let a plugged in linux machine do the work so you can save your device's battery life. This is how I code at least.
I'm in the UK, and I've had decent laptops from rapidIT and ITZoo, both .co.uk as far as I remember. I can't remember which laptop I got from Rapid as it was a few years ago, but the first one had a faulty motherboard, and they swapped the laptop with no issues.
I had a Stonebook branded Clevo N750BU from ITZoo, which is an i7 based laptop, and Mint works perfectly on it. It's quite old now, so you'll probably get a newer one for your budget, but with a RAM upgrade it runs everything I throw at it. I use it for designing and editing logos in Inkscape and Krita, and for editing a website in html, css, and javascript, so anything newer should do it even better 😀
This sub is obsessed with Thinkpads, but when you're looking for a secondhand bargain then you pick up what comes opportunistically. The market is flooded with Dells because businesses change machines long before they go out of date and generally keep them in very very good condition.
Used DELL 5310. Intel 10th-gen, 60Whr battery (goes 8+ working hours on a charge) often 16GB RAM and at least a 256GB SSD at that price range. Upgradeable (DDR4, NVMe) too.
Thinkpad Thinkpad T480. Can find many within your price range. Great quality, most of it is replaceable including keyboard and display. Aside from actual hardware failure or damage, the one thing that gets hit long term with laptops, the battery, is super easy to replace and there is both an internal and external if you want really long life
I have recently bought 2 dirt cheap thinkpads, one for me and one for the wife.
T490s - i5 intel T14s - Ryzen 5 AMD
Both are tick all your requirements except for the numbpad, the T14s is definitely worth the extra money, though. It can even handle some medium gaming. Both have upgradeable nvme ssds. However the ram is soldered on the "s" versions of these laptops so find one with 16gb or more.
I've had great results with various refurbished Dell Latitudes from eBay over the years. I have a stack of about 5 or 6 of 'em and they've all run many mainstream Linux distros with fantastic out-of-the-box support. I pass 'em out to members of the household whenever a laptop is needed and they'll usually get the job done.
I'd just type in "Dell Latitude" on eBay and filter by price and such. I suspect any model with an i5 and 8GB RAM oughta be fine for light programming work. I've found sellers with high ratings (like 97% or higher) and thousands of sales are pretty reliable (and tend to have return policies in case you get a lemon). Just test all the hardware (webcam, microphone, headphone jack, USB ports, ethernet, etc) as soon as you get it.
I've saved a lot of money over the years buying secondhand, and these machines have been running without a hiccup for years of casual use.
I have both a 2014 MacBook Pro and the listed device. The T14 has a trash tier trackpad and display when compared to a MacBook, but if I was buying it to do any type of programming, I'd choose the T14 everytime if I'm comparing it to a MacBook with 8 GB of ram and a dual core processor. (when compared to a T14 that has the 8 core AMD 4750U)
Good Condition. Small scratch here or there. Keyboard and Screen area look good. Tested and Fully Functional. Properly erased and ready for a new user. We will take care of any problems that may arise.
Under 140, latitude 5290 (from 2018, 8350u). I bought it ~2y ago. Small, 12 inch, decent keyboard, very upgradable, decent build quality, but the LCD is horrendous. Edit: used, could probably be found under 100€.
Do they sell ASUS in your area? I bought a 2nd hand 14" Vivobook with a Ryzen 5 GPU and it runs Fedora 42 like a champ. First laptop I've ever owned that I don't worry about overheating. It's been my chuck-it-in-a-backpack travel machine for two years with no problems.
Several people were hurt in a second night of anti-migrant unrest in the town of Torre Pacheco in south-east Spain after a pensioner was beaten up, authorities said.
Despite a major police presence, groups armed with batons roamed the streets looking for people with foreign origins, the regional newspaper La Opinión de Murcia reported.
The regional government did not say how many people were injured but stated that at least one person had been arrested over the violence.
The unrest erupted after a 68-year-old man told Spanish media he was beaten up in the street on Wednesday by three young people of north African origin. The attack was filmed and put on social media.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has called on the EU to “defend European interests resolutely” after Donald Trump threatened to impose 30% tariffs on nearly all imports from the EU.
It came as the EU moved to de-escalate tensions after the blunt move by Trump on Saturday. The bloc declared a further pause on €21bn of retaliatory tariffs until 1 August, dovetailing with the US president’s new deal deadline.
At the same time, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto, announced a “political agreement” on a free trade deal on Sunday, ending nine years of negotiations.
A familiar breed of British pundit has resurfaced - loud, self-declared feminists whose outrage is as selective as it is performative, and whose moral compass somehow always aligns with western state power.
They remain silent as Gaza burns, but are quick to find their voice to cheer on Israel and its allies as they threaten to flatten Iran - civilian casualties be damned.
During Israel's recent strikes on Iran, the radical feminist journalist and co‑founder of Justice for Women, Julie Bindel, branded leftist anti-war feminists "Team Iran" sympathisers. It was a disingenuous, grotesquely misleading and dangerously ideological accusation, but not a surprising one.
While women in Gaza bleed in silence, these pundits reserve their fury for pro-Palestine protesters - smearing them as extremists, branding solidarity as terrorism, twisting every act of dissent into an endorsement of "jihad" and weaponising antisemitism to crush critique.
The UK's most prominent 'feminists' ignore women in Gaza under bombs and siege, but speak up to manufacture consent for western wars or attack the anti-war left
It's time for another 68k Mac repair. I thought it would be a quick and easy fix, but this turned out to be a but more mysterious. -- InfoMicrobug:DM (dump m...
By Fayha Shalash in Ramallah, occupied Palestine Published date: 12 July 2025 15:49 BST
"The attack began when a large group of settlers targeted dozens of #Palestinians attempting to access their land between the villages of Sinjil and al-Mazra'a al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah.
Such assaults have become a regular occurrence, taking place almost every Friday, as part of efforts to intimidate villagers and drive them off land targeted for settlement."
"'Musalat owned a home in the area and died trying to defend it' - Abdul Samad Abdul Aziz, al-Mazra'a al-Sharqiya municipality member"
Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American man to death and fatally shot another during a coordinated assault on villagers in the occupied West Bank on Friday.
By Fayha Shalash in Ramallah, occupied Palestine Published date: 12 July 2025 15:49 BST
"The attack began when a large group of settlers targeted dozens of #Palestinians attempting to access their land between the villages of Sinjil and al-Mazra'a al-Sharqiya, east of Ramallah.
Such assaults have become a regular occurrence, taking place almost every Friday, as part of efforts to intimidate villagers and drive them off land targeted for settlement."
"'Musalat owned a home in the area and died trying to defend it' - Abdul Samad Abdul Aziz, al-Mazra'a al-Sharqiya municipality member"
Israeli settlers beat a Palestinian-American man to death and fatally shot another during a coordinated assault on villagers in the occupied West Bank on Friday.
For people who want it to be, I'm sure it's a resounding YES. For actual medical Science and reasonings, no...there's nothing that's going to prolong your life in that way just by consuming it lolz.
Okay, just from the pictures, let me say what I think is happening:
1) You're growing too many different kinds of plants in a small space. 2) You're growing Cannabis, which draws literally every sweet-sensing pest. 3) Those things on the underside of the leaves you posted are Ladybug larvae, and they are GOOD.
You clear this up in about a week with a few simple things:
1) Get a clutch of ladybugs from your local nursery or plant stores. This should be available almost everywhere in the US. 2) Although I don't want to advocate for this because I love local pollinators, get a pheromone trap for the stinging insects. They cost about $10, and don't lure honeybees, but WILL kill local carpenter bees and yellow jackets. 3) For the aphids, get a soap-based spray, or make it yourself. It's pretty much just dish soap and water, but there are guides online. Spray EVERY MORNING AND AFTER SUNSET. This plus the ladybug clutch will make quick work of the aphids. 4) I see you have Basil in containers, move that AWAY from the plants that are infested with scale or aphids. 5) Depending on where you live, your nursery's may sell Mantids. Get them. They are beneficial, but ruthless in eating and killing anything in their grasp, including wasps. 6) If you have wasps around, there is a nest nearby. Inspect your building awnings, trees, or under anything shaded and find that nest. It's not two doors over, it's within 100ft of where you got stung. Find it, set a pheromone trap around your plants (not where you think the nest is), then after a lot of them are dead, go find and remove the nests next.
Don't leave standing water around, and make sure that you stay on schedule with the soap spray. Most of this will be cleared in just a week.
Edit: also for the slugs and stuff, you're growing a lot of stuff in a mostly shaded area, so you're just asking for slugs. Line a general area around your plants with Diatomaceous Earth. It's cheap, easy to use, and doesn't harm anything that doesn't crawl. Also, organic.
Double edit: DO NOT spray this black bugs with the striped butts. Those will be ladybugs soon that eat all the aphids. They are good.
You're growing Cannabis, which draws literally every sweet-sensing pest.
Funnily enough, my weed is pretty much the only thing (and chillis) that isn't much affected. The willow is the worst one, and the pepino second.
Those things on the underside of the leaves you posted are Ladybug larvae, and they are GOOD.
Those larvae pictures are already a bit older, maybe two weeks? They probably got killed by the ants or wasps, because I rarely see them around anymore. I also rarely see any other aphid eating insects anymore, only ants and ants carrying carcasses 🙁
Wasps fly a rather straight pattern back to their nest. Find the nest by using some food they like, such as a sugar drink, and see where they fly to when they leave. Move the container closer until you find the nest.
It's a small thing, but I'd been feeling kinda gross about myself lately, and I started setting aside some time to just wear some cute lingerie around the house for no real reason once a week. My husband has started commenting unprompted how much he's looking forward to "Sexy Sunday" and I kinda love it.
Same! Got a wicked pair of boots and a new vest from the thrift yesterday. Cut my hair in the mirror, got decked out and my wife's eye popped. Even my 12-yo was looking at me, uh, funny. Don't think she knew daddy could dress like that! (She lives with her mom far away. Mostly sees me dressed up in "hiking with a shotgun" chic, not "metrosexual" chic.)
Anyway, I dress up for silly things just because it makes me feel good. Hell, I'll use any excuse to wear one of my tuxes.
imo sugar makes the bitter in coffee, overwhelming. I prefer it black or with a little oat milk. Oat milk has a pleasant mild sweetness that makes coffee just the right balance
my wife likes the sweater called Ez-Sweets and it's ok but I only ever have a drop or two in tea
if you just sugar it, there's a threshold between way too bitter and just sweet enough. I don't get it right so I just have something sweet to eat while enjoying the coffee
I randomly went full vegan after eating a Costco frozen lasagna one night. At the time I was drinking heavily, eating very poorly and pretty stressed out but something about the nasty beef crumbles getting stuck between my teeth set me off.
It’s been nearly six years and I wouldn’t go back to eating meat for the world. I wasn’t really an animal person but after marrying my wife and becoming very attached to her two chihuahuas my heart breaks that people can’t be bothered to stop eating meat. Animals are innocent and what we do to them isn’t right.
I went vegetarian 13 years ago. I lost a little weight in the beginning, then immediately gained it all back once I figured out what I liked. If being vegetarian makes you healthier, that's a skill issue, considering pizza and ice cream can be vegetarian.
Around December my doctor told me my cholesterol and blood pressure was dangerously high. I have cut out about 95% of animal products out of my diet. I'm down to basically non fat greek yogurt. I refer to myself as an involuntary vegan.
I can't stress enough how much this isn't about will power but exploiting my depression for health benefits. It's easy to get rid of things if all it does is make me happy.
Edit: Same philosophy applied to quitting cigarettes by going cold turkey a decade ago.
Conservationist hunters (humans) endeavor to manage herd sizes in order to keep illness and age from devastating the health of target groups. For example, if a herd of deer is allowed to grow beyond the size its available food sources can sustain, the older, injured, and/or less-capable (ie. fast, agile, alert, etc) young members will eat the food that otherwise healthy and capable ones need and thus decreasing (starvation, infection, etc.) the number of healthy individuals among them available to maintain the herd for the future... 🙇🏼♂️
You'll notice that I prominently included the word "conservationist", friend. Please adjust your argument to avoid diluting or destabilizing your understanding of the specific topic.
Learned Japanese on a whim so I could watch anime without subtitles. Now by complete coincidence I'm in Japan and not banging my head against the nearly insurmountable language barrier (Japanese people are really bad at English).
I decided to start learning French last year and have been essentially speed running it. Learning another language makes my brain happy (I'm fluent in 2 already).
When I was in high school, I convinced my parents to sign me up for Japanese classes on the weekend because the sequel to my favorite game didn't get translated. Didn't end up getting all that far in it, my ADHD/autistic ass had a hard time paying attention in class and I had too much actual schoolwork to keep up with so I kinda just didn't do the homework.
But last year I started getting back into it just for fun, and I am having a lot of fun learning. Helps that I can go at my own pace without any pressure from being in school anymore. Still a long way from 日本語上手, but I passed a N4 mock exam and I just ordered a shipment of books and manga to try and see how far I can get. Saving up to travel in a few years too.
I live in the pedestrian zone of a semi large city. I feed them from my window and there are no other birds in the area that they could drown out. Except crows maybe but those are much louder.
when my wife and I first moved to Seattle, we picked an apartment on the 3rd floor. The day after we moved in, we noticed a bird nest on the balcony. Turned out to be rock doves. It's was fun watching them. They had two babies and we left them alone until they all stopped coming back before we cleaned up their mess.
An excerpt from his lecture at Western Case University (2004)."We Are Here On This Earth To Fart Around.": https://youtu.be/nxpITF8fswE Full Lecture: https:/...
My data plan on my phone expired rather suddenly (my phone was too old), and I just didn't get a new phone number/data plan (wifi + wifi calling still worked).
I started taking magnesium. Instantly the majority of my mental health issues evaporated but they come back if I go for more than about 3 days without it.
I wouldn't say really positive. But it changed a daily slightly negative into a daily slightly positive.
At work I regularly need to take short notes. I like to fill the page to the full. But it gets messier and more complicated aa the day goes on. So I'd strike through and cross out notes I don't need anymore. The thing is, crossing things out triggers a feeling of making mistakes. So instead of crossing out I started using check-marks (Dutch-style)., which feels like a succes and is also a quick fun flourish to draw. So small annoyances have turned into small victories.
I found a slightly different system online once. You mark your todo list with a dash (-) in front. If it's done, cross it to make a plus sign (+). If it's something that you postponed or moved to another list/page, turn the dash into an arrow (->). I adapted it from the dash-plus system years ago: patrickrhone.net/the-dash-plus…
"ICE was conducting a raid using disproportionate displays of force against local farmworkers and our agricultural community," said U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal, who was denied entry to one farm where he was attempting to provide oversight.
The speaker of the house and Zionist-first Mike Johnson will probably kill this. It would be nice to see if the democrats would vote this through if they gain the house in 2026. My guess, they would not. Epstein had "friends" on both sides of the aisle.
Why are the Epstein files still hidden? Who are the rich & powerful being protected?
On Tuesday, I'm introducing an amendment to force a vote demanding the FULL Epstein files be released to the public.
ETH Zurich researchers have developed a groundbreaking "living material" that actively captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through two mechanisms: biomass production and mineral formation[^1][^2].
The material combines cyanobacteria (photosynthetic bacteria) embedded within a printable hydrogel matrix. The cyanobacteria convert CO2 into biomass through photosynthesis while simultaneously triggering the formation of solid carbonate minerals - a process called microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP)[^1].
Key achievements of the material include:
Sequestered 2.2 mg of CO2 per gram of hydrogel over 30 days
Captured 26 mg of CO2 per gram over 400 days in mineral form
Maintained viability for over one year
Required only sunlight and artificial seawater to function
Can be 3D printed into various structures[^1]
The research team demonstrated practical applications by creating:
A 3-meter high tree-trunk structure at the Venice Architecture Biennale that can bind 18kg of CO2 annually
Building facade coatings that could capture carbon throughout a building's lifecycle
Lattice structures that passively transport nutrients through capillary action[^2]
"As a building material, it could help to store CO2 directly in buildings in the future," said Mark Tibbitt, Professor of Macromolecular Engineering at ETH Zurich[^2].
The material represents a low-maintenance, environmentally friendly approach to carbon capture that operates at ambient conditions using atmospheric CO2, contrasting with industrial methods requiring concentrated CO2 sources and controlled conditions[^1].
Researchers are developing a living material that actively extracts carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Photosynthetic cyanobacteria grow inside it, forming biomass and solid minerals and thus binding CO2 in two different manners.
A groundbreaking study published in July 2025 demonstrates that African savannah elephants use intentional gestures to communicate their goals, similar to great apes[^1]. The research team presented semi-captive elephants with desired and undesired items, recording their communication attempts when experimenters met, partially met, or failed to meet their goals[^1].
The study identified 38 different gesture types that elephants used almost exclusively when a visually attentive experimenter was present[^1]. The elephants showed three key criteria for intentional communication:
Audience directedness - signaling only when someone was watching
Persistence - continuing to gesture when goals were partially met
Elaboration - using new signals when communication failed
The research was conducted at the Jafuta Reserve in Zimbabwe, where elephants combined specific vocalizations with gestures in greeting behaviors[^6]. They used different types of signals including:
Silent-visual gestures
Audible gestures
Tactile gestures
Rumble vocalizations
The findings reveal that elephants, like apes, assess the communicative effectiveness of their gesturing and adjust their signals based on the audience's visual attention[^6]. This expands understanding of intentional communication beyond the primate lineage[^9].
A crucial feature of language is the ability to communicate cognitive goals to a specific audience, i.e. goal-directed intentionality. Core criteria for...
>> This week, more than 25 states from around the world will gather in Bogotá, Colombia, for the “Emergency Conference” to halt the Gaza genocide: the most ambitious multilateral response since Israel began its campaign of devastation two years ago.
>> “The Bogotá conference will go down as the moment in history that states finally stood up to do the right thing,” said UN Special Rapporteur #FrancescaAlbanese, calling the formation of The Hague Group the “most significant political development of the last 20 months.”
>> Jointly convened by Colombia and South Africa, The Hague Group’s Co-Chairs, the conference brings together states far beyond the boundaries of the Group — from Algeria to Brazil, China to Spain, Indonesia to Qatar — “to move from condemnation to collective action,” in the words of Colombian President Gustavo Petro…
Convened by Colombia and South Africa as co-chairs of The Hague Group, the Emergency Ministerial Conference marks the boldest stand yet against the Gaza genocide and the collapse of the multilateral order.
Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the
universe, ...
Does this explain the spooky redshift stuff that seems to say we're much closer to the outer expanse than previously thought? Seems like it confuses that even more.
Because they are not, in fact, older than the universe. That is literally, definitionally impossible.
The age of objects are derrived from simplified equations that proximate real-world phenomina. They're mathematical models, not absolute facts. When an object appears to be "older than the universe", it can mean many specific things, like the acceleration of the expansion of the universe changes over time when most mathematical models do not account for that. It could mean the object is simply further away than we expect to be able to see. It could mean it's simply traveling away from us in some uniquely fast way.
Basically, it means the mathematical model used to derive how "old" the object is, is likely wrong in some way, or that the measurements taken may have inaccurate results, both of which are absolutely and wholly normal for science. Again, they're mathematical models, based on measured observation, not absolute universal truths. There are many, many, many ways data can both be gathered incorrectly or analyzed incorrectly, not even requiring anyone to make a mistake. Science at the fringe of knowledge is very difficult, and requires rigerous testing and validation before it should be trusted. NEVER trust clickbait BS, especially if it's not directly from a scientist's mouth.
We already know our mathematical models are inaccurate in several ways (see dark matter and dark energy for the obvious ones). We just need to figure out how and why they are wrong.
1) this report seems to have evidence of a void 2) redshift observation would be impacted if true 3) ge er gravitational relationships between galaxies would be kind of a huge thing considering our limited view of their
So you're saying this article is all bullshit, or what?
Blender is getting HDR on Linux via Wayland before Windows! This isn't by accident, but shows how creating a system with a different design creates better results for users and application developers.
Firefox is in this same boat too. It will get HDR support on Linux* sooner than Windows. Firefox currently only supports HDR on MacOS.
The latest alpha of the upcoming Blender 5.0 release comes with High Dynamic Range (HDR) support for Linux on Wayland which will, if everything works out, make it into the final Blender 5.0 release on October 1, 2025.
protist
in reply to ByteOnBikes • • •Vanilla_PuddinFudge
in reply to protist • • •Trump could drag a 14 year old by her hair into central park in broad daylight and fuck her brains out, to a sold-out audience and claim it as fake without any repercussions.
This is all just a waste of time.
JillyB
in reply to Vanilla_PuddinFudge • • •