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lemmy - Link to source

Physical Install to QEMU VM, is it possible?

Hello everyone!

I have been learning QEMU for the past day and so I've almost finished building my perfect VM from the qemu cli, and I was wondering if there is any method to say, copy a partition(+bootloader) of a physically installed system (in this case, Windows) over a hard disk image and run it with QEMU

Unfortunately I've had no luck searching online about it and I'm unsure how to proceed myself since I've never done any disk-cloning or anything like that

My best guess would be to dump the contents of the partitions into a shared folder with the VM, then use a live media to copy those contents over into the hard disk image and finally install a bootloader to work with the Windows boot manager, but I'm all ears for what anyone has to say about it.

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you know!

in reply to Coki91

lemmy - Link to source

enumerator4829

Here be dragons. But basically:

  • Run a VM from contents of a physical disk: use ’dd’ to create disk image. If on linux, try to boot and fix all the errors, hopefully few.
  • Run VM as physical machine: other way around.

You won’t find this in a tutorial. You need to understand concepts, read manuals, fit everything together, execute, fail and retry until it works.

For Windows, I have no idea. Conceptually, I figure it’s similar.

lemmy - Link to source

Alternative to PicCollage

My partner is looking for an alternative to PicCollage, there doesn't seem to be a simple collage builder for digital scrapbooking on Linux.

It needs to be able to scale, rotate and place images (video nice but not required) and add text that can be put into various "fun" fonts.

I don't know what the "ideal" would be other than the above.

Note: she is running Linux Mint 21.3


PicCollage - Photo and Video Greetings App

Make all your memories last forever. Create holiday greetings, wedding invitations, birthday cards, and more. Download the app and start creating now!
PicCollage
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Could not upvote on another instance [please explain for noob]

I've joined Lemmy.ml. Someone sent me a link to a video posted on Feddit.nl - I thought I could log in and upvote/comment using my Lemmy.ml credentials. Wrong!

Why is this? Sorry for my ignorance, I'm relatively new to the fediverse. But I thought that they were all federated so you can interact with all instances??!

in reply to queermunist she/her

lemmy - Link to source

zonnewin

When instances become instruments of propaganda for Putin/Xi/Kim and ban people who expose such propaganda, they fully deserve to be blocked. They've become instruments of the enemies of civil society.

It's the moderation practices of those instances that put them in the corner of "sectarian shit". The rest of us don't need to tolerate such toxicity.

in reply to zonnewin

lemmy - Link to source

queermunist she/her

But when instances become instruments of propaganda for NATO/US/EU and ban people who expose such propaganda, that's fine.

I tolerate the toxicity of .world and other liberal instances, but maybe I shouldn't. Maybe this is self harm. Maybe I should just join lemmygrad so I never have to get attacked again for disagreeing with the liberal consensus. I'd probably hit myself less.

don't like this

lemmy - Link to source

Why can't I block rule 34 community?
Hi, I am able to block other communities but rule 34 at lemmynsfw does not let me block it at all. The side bar does not always load and when I can get it to load the block button does not work. Anyone else have issues blocking communities?

don't like this

lemmy - Link to source

Can I use BTRFS to keep seperate root and home while being able to format root while keeping home intact?
I want to be able to format my system without formatting my home, I know I can keep them seperate partitions but I would prefer if I can have dynamic sizes of each, can I achieve that by creating a sub volume for each? Would I be able to distrohop without removing my home while keeping the sizes dynamic? I never sat up a BTRFS before so I'm clueless

lemmy - Link to source

[Solved] How can I run a command without being logged in as a user?

XY: I installed bazzite and goofed up. The username is wrong and my home is /home/bazzite instead of /home/ludrol

I am trying to run usermod -l ludrol bazzite in tty3 with sudo su - but the bazzite user is logged.

Solution:
Added password to root with passwd
Logged in as root
Ran required usermod commands
Disabled root with passwd -l

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to gnuhaut

lemmy - Link to source

LainTrain

Another way to do this is sudo su -c 'this is my command'

E.g. change a fan setting on a ThinkPad with:

sudo su -c 'echo "level full-speed" > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan'

So to run a shell you could do all sorts of tricks like:

sudo su -c '/bin/bash -i' and such.

Never know when it comes in handy.

EDIT: Damn, downvoted, any reason why? It works on my machine with a locked root user or one without a PW and I made sure to test it before posting, but I'd love an explanation of why it wouldn't work if that's the reason for the downvote. Was just hoping it would be useful to somebody :/

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

The best thing you can do for the fediverse is just be kind

The fediverse is small, and thats both a blessing and a curse - one of its several blessings is that in a smaller space we all individually have a bigger impact on what the culture of this space is like.

On this comm (and on lemmy broadly) there's a lot of discussion about how to grow the fediverse, what to improve, but an easy thing you can do for the fediverse is right in front of us-

  • Be kind
  • Ask people what they think, and why
  • Approach folks you disagree with with curiosity rather than hostility (EDIT: no, this is not specifically referring to Nazis. I get it, they're the first thing that comes to mind. I'm not telling you to approve of Nazis I'm just saying be kind to your fellow lemmites)
  • Engage sincerely
  • Ask yourself if there's something nice you can say
  • Make this small space worth being in

A platform lives or dies by what's available on said platform and often we have this conversation in the context of "content" or posts - and we may never have as much content as reddit does. But content and posts aren't the only thing this kind of platform offers- it also offers people. It offers community, and human interaction.

Culture and community is lemmy and the fediverse's biggest differentiator, and we all have a role to play in shaping the culture of this space.

***The biggest thing you can do to help the fediverse *is make it a place worth being.****

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Cris

friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@Cris A lot of people mistake kind for being fake and not ever expressing disagreement, but doing so neuters what is in my view one of the most valuable aspects of these federated social media, the potential for opposing view points to be expressed and then discussed and hopefully some mutually beneficial solutions that accommodate both sides of an opposing viewpoint can be arrived at. That can't happen unless an environment is safe and inviting and people can act in a civilized manner.

lemmy - Link to source

How do Boosts / Retoots Show on Your Home Server?

I am a prolific retweeter. I also see many instances prohibit nsfw, or some prohibit nsfw without a cw, or without a specific cw. Many servers have 5 or 10 categories of content that must be CWd. If I boost/retoot a post from another mastodon instance, what does that look like for other users of my instance? Does it show up in the local feed? If I boost an untagged nsfw or otherwise 'bad' content under the local rules, is that moderate-able (bad for the retooter)?

I intend to mark my profile as sensitive and put every post of mine behind a CW.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

don't like this

in reply to maxint

lemmy - Link to source

ertai

I don't know, nothing struck me as new, the only difference is the presentation and the mouse (but I prefer keyboard). the example given for animated indicators already exists using ASCII escape codes. my zsh already has syntax highlighting on the prompt indicating mistyped commands, and suggest possible completions with a tui (with vim bindings). I could go on but anyway my point is everything they show is already possible with a tui, the only reason a clicky clicky solution doesn't exist is because keyboard are freakin better and faster.
They are right that we need a terminal evolution/revolution, but it's not the mouse.
in reply to ertai

lemmy - Link to source

Oinks

GUIs do have advantages in things like discoverability. Honestly the 1983s Apple Lisa nailed this with the idea of having clickable menus annotated with keyboard shortcuts, so users could do the same thing faster next time. For some reason we stopped doing this (especially in web apps), but that's a reason to make better GUIs, not to RETVRN to the feature set of a VT100.

I don't know why we have to go on nonsensical diatribes about "UNIX wizards" though when we're fundamentally talking about a handful of minor UI improvements to things that already exist.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

What second hand laptop to buy

I would like to buy myself a second hand and install Linux on it. I was looking into ThinkPad T14 gen1 or gen2 devices because of their maintainability and repairability. I found one where I live with a Ryzen processor but it has the wrong keyboard. How easy and expensive would it be to swap this with US English? Are there any good alternatives to the ThinkPads? I fancy the X1 but don't like the fact that I cannot change or swap anything on it. The T14 looks very bulky and unattractive but at least can have the RAM upgraded and the battery changed.

I fancy the Framework laptops, but don't want to spend so much on a laptop. Especially the latest 16 inch with Ryzen AI CPUs.

The T14 G1 is at least cheap, like 350€ with the 400 nits low power display and the battery is at 99%. I guess with tlp installed and autocpugfreq I can get 5-6 hours out of it.

lemmy - Link to source

FediAI - Demo
You post through the UI to a Fediverse hashtag, on which AI bots listen to, which replies are then displayed in the UI. In the future, the main app should have some kind of ranking only to show the best replies. Through hashtags, AI bots can specialize in certain areas. It would also be possible to partially process a task (for example translate it) and then repost it to another hashtag (I call that "prompt routing). This way, you can have chains of AI bots working together on public, shared message queues.

FediAI - First Look

Repo: https://github.com/bluebbberry/FediAI
MakerTube
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Great ATProto blog post on the reasoning behind their design architecture

Atproto Ethos - AT Protocol

A deep dive into the philosophical and aesthetic principles underlying the design of AT Protocol.
AT Protocol
in reply to flamingos-cant

lemmy - Link to source

aeshna_cyanea

This is false, they support did:web which ties your identity to ownership of a DNS name (which is its own can of worms, but not controlled by bluesky like PLC).

Unless you mean that you still have to register your pds it to get indexed by the relay, so people can read your posts without querying your server directly (which is possible but discouraged). This is actually an advantage over mastodon/activitypub however, your personal pds will not crash if a post goes viral (unlike a personal mastodon instance).

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Ibis-Wiki (A federated encyclopaedia)

Introducing IBIS-Wiki

A federated encyclopedia which uses the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon or Lemmy.
ibis.wiki/

Ibis-Wiki

Main Page — ibis.wiki

ibis.wiki
in reply to ZeroOne

lemmy - Link to source

ShellMonkey

This sounds like a way to have 13 different 'realities' for any given topic, depending on which instance it was hosted on.
in reply to Avid Amoeba

lemmy - Link to source

ShellMonkey

Missing an /s?

Take a look at the 'news' on various instances like hexbear vs world and it's night and day. An encyclopedia is meant to be factually reliable, but if this works like it does here you would have the equivalent of conservapedia and prolewiki sitting side by side as 'true'.

in reply to Avid Amoeba

lemmy - Link to source

ShellMonkey

That could be, I was thinking if the pages were more like the communities. I would have to think they need to be for any kind of moderation, otherwise who approves edits or has edit permissions? If someone else doesn't agree with the vision on the existing page/thread what stops someone from putting up an alternate version?
in reply to ShellMonkey

lemmy - Link to source

Avid Amoeba

Moderation, voting, there are options. My point is whatever the version is of a community or a thread on Lemmy on its host instance, nearly the same the version is on another Lemmy instance that federates with most of the same instances. If we consider just 2 instances federating with each other, and users have no blocklists, and all federation updates are perfectly transferred (no networking issues), then a community in one instance would look identical on the other. So would a thread. After moderation actions and all.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to ShellMonkey

lemmy - Link to source

quickenparalysespunk

Agree.

I also think a federated wiki is a great idea.

I think the way to do that is: instead of having separate realities/universes linked together by search and federation, try to unite those universes into a shared multiverse, to the greatest possible.

In other words
- ❌ merely give all federated users access to the same articles
- ✅ automatically link and embed similar articles into each other by default (collapsed, but expandable). similarity can be determined by authors'/contributors' intentional citations, by instance owners' filter rules, by LLM, etc.

of course, there may be attempts to obfuscate relatedness, astroturfing, brigading, whatnot. I wonder if its possible to visualize voting results for each duplicated/linked article along with the originating instance. I think this would function as a pseudo version of 'community fact-checking'. Maybe a better name would be 'reality-checking' or 'sanity-checking' or whatever.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

World on warcraft on Linux

Hello everybody!
I want to escape Microsoft and windows, and I am looking for a Linux distro. I have some experience with Unix and a very old Ubuntu distro. But that's quite some years ago. I am looking for a Linux distribution where i can play World of Warcraft on. I mainly use Nvidia graphics (RTX 3070).

I have found some distributions that are supposed to be good for gaming. I suppose, as i am still a Linux Noob, I am also looking for a distribution which is easy to get into. Especially for an older gamer ;)

I came with these distro's myself. What does the Linux community say?

Bazzite
- Based on Fedora Atomic
- Pre Installed Steam
- Nvidia drivers and support
bazzite.gg/
docs.bazzite.gg/Gaming/index.h…

Developer: Universal Blue (US?)

Drauger OS
- Based on Ubuntu LTS using KDE Plasma
- Pre for AMD
draugeros.org/

Pop!_OS
- based on Ubuntu
- Optimized for gaming on Nvidia GPU's
system76.com/pop/

Developer: system76 (Denver, US)

SteamOS
-based on Debian 8 (Jessie)
-designed to run steam and steam games
-set to auto update their OS from Valve repo's
store.steampowered.com/steamos

Developer: Valve (US)

Manjaro
-based on Arch (rolling release model for latest software/drivers)
-KDE plasma desktop
(Pro-tip: enable flatpak and install ProtonUp-QT)
manjaro.org/products

Developer: Majaro (EU - Austria, France, Germany)

Ubuntu:
-the go-to linux distro for millions of users, incl gamers
-best for beginners and gamers who want stable well supported distro
-works seamlesssly with steam, lutris, wine
(pro-tip: install the gamemode package (sudo apt install gamemode))
ubuntu.com/download

Developer: Canonical ltd. (UK)

Nobara
-based on Fedora
-optimized for gaming on newer Nvidia graphics (drivers come installed)
nobaraproject.org/download-nob…

Developer: Thomas Crider (Denver, US)

Mint
-based on debian and Ubuntu
-friendly OS, works out of the box, extremely easy to use
linuxmint.com/download.php

Developer : Linuxmint (French, Dutch, UK)


Bazzite - The next generation of Linux gaming

Bazzite is a custom Fedora Atomic image built with cloud native technology that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld..
bazzite.gg

lemmy - Link to source

rEFInd doesn't show BTRFS snapshots.

What I want:


To boot into a BTRFS snapshots from rEFind boot manager. But rEFInd doesn't show the snapshots.

Additional Info:


  1. So, apparently, to restore the BTRFS snapshot of a root subvolume, I shouldn't do it with the root partition being actively used.
    >
    >
  2. So, I need to boot into the desired snapshot from the boot manager itself.
    >
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  3. GRUB has grub-btrfs, which lets you boot into snapshot from OS selection screen itself.
    >
    >
  4. rEFInd has refind-btrfs, which should do the same as grub-btrfs. But it didn't in my case. I am not seeing any way to boot into a snapshot from rEFInd.
    >
    >
  5. I use BTRFS Assistant with snapper to manage snapshots.
    >
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  6. I am not seeing any way to restore the snapshot from live environment too.
    >
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  7. I am using CachyOS (Arch) with Plasma DE.
    >
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  8. I suspect the reason is my unusual /efi /boot partition layout. (attached below)
    >
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  9. I did my partition this way because, my initial EFI partition had less storage (as seen on image), so , I created another boot partition and mounted my pre-existing EFI partition to /boot/efi. I did this by referring a Youtube video (I know, I should've known better)
    >
    >
  10. I also encrypted my BTRFS / partition
    >
    >
  11. If you need any other info, please ask.
    >
    >

I know this is a general community, but this is the 7th community that I'm asking this 🥲

Some people suggested Limine bootloader, but I like rEFInd for its versatile theme support.

GitHub - Venom1991/refind-btrfs: Generate rEFInd manual boot stanzas from Btrfs snapshots

Generate rEFInd manual boot stanzas from Btrfs snapshots - Venom1991/refind-btrfs
GitHub
in reply to Leaflet

lemmy - Link to source

Quack Doc

This makes a numerous amounts of incorrect assumptions.

For one it assumes all sRGB monitors utilize gamma2.2 for decoding images. This is bluntly put, completely wrong. A large amount of displays utilize the inverse OETF (the peicewise srgb transform) for decoding sRGB. (for some more information from a somewhat authoritative body, filmlight's "srgb we need to talk" video on youtube goes more indepth but TLDR is 25-50% of displays use the inverse sRGB oetf)

this is why windows HDR uses the inverse oetf. Decoding content graded on a pure 2.2 display with the inverse oetf is way better then decoding content graded on an inverse oetf display with a pure 2.2. Windows took the safe route of making sure most content looks at least OK. I would not say that windows HDR is wrong, it's not right, but it's not wrong either. this is just the mess that sRGB gave us.

Another time you should be using the inverse sRGB OETF to linearize content when the original content was encoded using the sRGB oetf and you want to go back to that working data, but this applies less to compositors and more to authoring workflows.

Another wrong assumption

When you use Windows 11 on a desktop monitor and enable HDR, you get an “SDR content brightness” slider in the settings - treating HDR content as something completely separate that’s somehow independent of the viewing environment, and that you cannot adjust the brightness of. With laptop displays however, you get a normal brightness slider, which applies to both SDR and HDR content.


People have been adjusting monitor brightness for ages. Sometimes manually, sometimes with DDC etc.

Another issue that is brought up is "graphics white" BT.2408 is a suggestion, not a hard coded spec, many different specs or suggestions use a different "graphics white" value. A good example of this is JXL. 2408 also very explicitly says 'The signal level of “HDR Reference White” is not directly related to the signal level of SDR “peak white”.'

this is important to note because this directly contradicts the some of the seemingly core assumptions made in the article, and even some of the bullet points like "a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white" and "SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too"

if your application has some need to differentiate between “SDR” and “HDR” displays (to change the buffer format for example), you can do so by checking if the maximum mastering luminance is greater than the reference luminance


This needs to be expanded upon that this does NOT correlate to what the general user understands HDR and SDR to be. HDR and SDR in the terms of video content is no more then a marketing term and without context it can be hard to define what it is, However it is abundantly clear from this quote here that how they are interpreting HDR and SDR (which is a very valid technically inclined way of interpreting it) does NOT fall inline with general user expectation.

Anyone reading this article should be made aware of this.

in reply to Quack Doc

lemmy - Link to source

Zamundaaa

For one it assumes all sRGB monitors utilize gamma2.2 for decoding images


Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no.
There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.

That a certain percentage of displays don't behave like expected is annoying, but doesn't really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).

this is why windows HDR uses the inverse oetf. Decoding content graded on a pure 2.2 display with the inverse oetf is way better then decoding content graded on an inverse oetf display with a pure 2.2. Windows took the safe route of making sure most content looks at least OK. I would not say that windows HDR is wrong, it’s not right, but it’s not wrong either. this is just the mess that sRGB gave us.


The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.

Another time you should be using the inverse sRGB OETF to linearize content when the original content was encoded using the sRGB oetf and you want to go back to that working data, but this applies less to compositors and more to authoring workflows.


Makes sense.

People have been adjusting monitor brightness for ages. Sometimes manually, sometimes with DDC etc.


That's a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment.

With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can't properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above "PQ absolute".

Another issue that is brought up is “graphics white” BT.2408 is a suggestion, not a hard coded spec, many different specs or suggestions use a different “graphics white” value.


I didn't claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn't dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that's irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.

A good example of this is JXL.


Can you expand on what you mean with that?

2408 also very explicitly says ‘The signal level of “HDR Reference White” is not directly related to the signal level of SDR “peak white”.’


That "directly" is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.

Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won't rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.

this is important to note because this directly contradicts the some of the seemingly core assumptions made in the article, and even some of the bullet points like “a reference luminance, also known as HDR reference white, graphics white or SDR white” and “SDR things, like user interfaces in games, should use the reference luminance too”


No contradictions at all. The Wayland protocol defines these things to be the same, so for application developers they just are the same, end of story.

This needs to be expanded upon that this does NOT correlate to what the general user understands HDR and SDR to be. HDR and SDR in the terms of video content is no more then a marketing term and without context it can be hard to define what it is, However it is abundantly clear from this quote here that how they are interpreting HDR and SDR (which is a very valid technically inclined way of interpreting it) does NOT fall inline with general user expectation.


That's just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.

And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Zamundaaa

lemmy - Link to source

Quack Doc

Assuming that all monitors do anything specific at all would be a folly, no. There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.

That a certain percentage of displays don’t behave like expected is annoying, but doesn’t really change anything (beyond allowing the user to change the assumed transfer function in SDR mode).


the video goes more indepth, but it's a very true statement to say that "some displays decode with the inverse oetf and some don't" this issue has been plaguing displays for decades now.

There are no assumptions there, the sRGB spec has no ambiguity when it comes to the transfer function of the display.


You are 100% right in saying "the reference display is gamma 2.2" however, we can only wish this is what displays do, Color.org themselves got this wrong!!! color.org/srgb.pdf and leads people astray.

The most likely actual reason Window uses the piece-wise transfer function for HDR is that it did that in SDR mode too - where however the default ICC profile was also piece-wise sRGB, so it canceled out on 99% of PCs, and had no negative effects.


I don't actually believe this to be the case, if it was people who use custom ICCs would get extremely wonky results that don't typically happen. On the other hand it is very true that colors when doing it the way they do, you get the "least offensive" results. Though IMO the best solution would be to simply be to default to the pure 2.2 and allow users to override the transfer. the Color protocol allows for explicit peicewise sRGB anyways, so doing this should fit right into a fleshed out colormanaged setup.

That’s a very different thing. Pushing viewing environment adjustments to the display side makes some amount of sense with SDR monitors - when you get an SDR display with increased luminance capabilities vs. the old one, you change the monitor to display the content comfortably in your environment


I think I am a bit confused on the laptop analogy then, could you elaborate on it?

With HDR though, if the operating system considers PQ content to be absolute in luminance, you can’t properly adjust that on the monitor side anymore, because a lot of monitors completely lock you out of brightness controls in HDR mode, and the vast majority of the ones that do allow you to adjust it, only allow you to reduce luminance, not increase it above “PQ absolute”.


How monitors typically handle this is beyond me I will admit, But I have seen some really bonkers ways of handling it so I couldn't really comment on whether or not this holds true one way or another. Just so I am not misinterpeting you, are you saying that "if you feed 300nits of PQ, the monitor will not allow it to go above it's 300nits"? IF so this is not the case on what happens on my TV unless I am in "creator/PC" mode. In other modes it will allow it to go brighter or dimmer.

My current monitor is only a 380nit display so I can't really verify on that (nor do I have the hardware to atm)

I didn’t claim that PQ had only one specification that uses it, I split up SMPTE ST 2084, rec.2100 and BT.2408 for a reason. I didn’t dive into it further because a hundred pages of diving into every detail that’s irrelevant in practice is counter productive to people actually learning useful things.


ah I see, I was a bit confused on what you had meant then. My apologies.

Can you expand on what you mean with that?


Keep in mind this was based on the above misinterpretation of what I thought you meant.

With libjxl it doesn't really default to the "SDR white == 203" reference from the "reference white == SDR white" common... choice? not sure how to word it... Anyways, libjxl defaults to "SDR white = 255" or something along those lines, I can't quite remember. The reasoning for this was simple, that was what they were tuning butteraugli on.

That “directly” is very important, as it does very much make both these signal levels the same. As I wrote in the blog post, the spec is all about broadcasts and video.

Other systems do sometimes split these two things up, but that nearly always just results in a bad user experience. I won’t rant anymore about the crapshow that is HDR on Windows, but my LG TV cranks up brightness of its UI to the absolute maximum while an HDR video is playing. If they would adhere to the recommendations of BT.2408, they would work much better.


I think this is an issue of terminology and stuff, reference white is something the colourist often decides. When you assume that HDR graphics white == SDR white this actually causes more problems then it solves. I would say that it is a "good default", but not a safe value to assume. This is something the user may often need to override. I know personally even when just watching movies on MPV this is something I very often need to play with to get a good experience, and this is not even counting professionally done work.

That’s just absolute nonsense. The very very vast majority of users do not have any clue whatsoever what transfer function content is using, or even what a transfer function, buffer encoding or even buffers are, the only difference they can see is that HDR gets brighter than SDR.

And again, this too is about how applications should use the Wayland protocol. This is the only way to define it that makes any sense.


this actually isn't really that true. It is indeed the case that users wont know what transfer function content is using. but they absolutely do see a difference other then "HDR gets brighter then SDR" and that is "it's more smooth in the dark areas" because that is also equally true.

Users have a lot of different assumptions about HDR, but they all follow some sort of trend "it makes the content look more smooth at a greater range of luminance" and if I were to give a "technical definition that follows general user expectations" the definition would be something along the lines of "A transfer that provides perceptually smooth steps of luminance at a given bit depth up to at least 1000 nits in a given reference environment" which is bad for sure, but at the very least, it more closely aligns with general expectations of HDR given it's use in marketing.

(I really hate the terms HDR and SDR btw, I wish they would die in a fire for any technical discussion and really wish we could dissuade people from using the term)


Colour Online: sRGB... We Need To Talk

Colour Online: sRGB... We Need To Talkwith FilmLight’s Daniele SiragusanoIn times where we base our visual decisions increasingly on remote grading and remot...
YouTube
in reply to Quack Doc

lemmy - Link to source

Zamundaaa

I don’t actually believe this to be the case, if it was people who use custom ICCs would get extremely wonky results that don’t typically happen


They wouldn't, because applying ICC profiles is opt-in for each application. Games and at least many video players don't apply ICC profiles, so they do not see negative side effects of it being handled wrong (unless they calibrate the VCGT to follow the piece-wise TF).

With Windows Advanced Color of course, that may change.

I think I am a bit confused on the laptop analogy then, could you elaborate on it?


What analogy?

How monitors typically handle this is beyond me I will admit, But I have seen some really bonkers ways of handling it so I couldn’t really comment on whether or not this holds true one way or another. Just so I am not misinterpeting you, are you saying that “if you feed 300nits of PQ, the monitor will not allow it to go above it’s 300nits”? IF so this is not the case on what happens on my TV unless I am in “creator/PC” mode. In other modes it will allow it to go brighter or dimmer.


Yes, that's exactly what happens. TVs do random nonsense to make the image look "better", and one of those image optimizations is to boost brightness. In this case it's far from always nonsense of course (on my TV it was though, it made the normal desktop waaay too bright).

unless I am in “creator/PC” mode


Almost certainly just trying to copy what monitors do.

With libjxl it doesn’t really default to the “SDR white == 203” reference from the “reference white == SDR white” common… choice? not sure how to word it… Anyways, libjxl defaults to “SDR white = 255” or something along those lines, I can’t quite remember. The reasoning for this was simple, that was what they were tuning butteraugli on.


Heh, when it came to merging the Wayland protocol and we needed implementations for all the features, I was searching for a video or image standard that did exactly that. The protocol has a feature where you can specify a non-default reference luminance to handle these cases.

It is indeed the case that users wont know what transfer function content is using. but they absolutely do see a difference other then “HDR gets brighter then SDR” and that is “it’s more smooth in the dark areas” because that is also equally true.


That is technically speaking true, but noone actually sees that. People do often get confused about bit depth vs. HDR, but that's more to do with marketing conflating the two than people actually noticing a lack of banding with HDR content. With the terrible bitrates videos often use nowadays, you can even get banding in HDR videos too :/

When you play an HDR and an SDR video on a desktop OS side by side, the only normally visible differences are that the HDR video sometimes gets a lot brighter than the SDR one, and that (with a color managed video player...) the colors may be more intense.

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Quack Doc

lemmy - Link to source

Quack Doc

I should elaborate on why the "Peak white" stuff is wrong, they give this math here for mapping linear luminance. This can be really confusing, "what do we map the references to" well if PQ "graphics white" is 203, should we map sRGB to 203? clearly not, at least not always as implied by BT.2408.

the question as to what we map SDR content to in an HDR space is complex, and in many cases almost certainly not some number that we can do 1:1 mapping with, which is why specifications for inverse tonemapping exist. for instance BT.2446 defines multiple tone mapping algorithms to go from SDR->HDR->SDR or HDR->SDR->HDR or any step inbetween with minimal content loss and fidelity loss.

we cannot do a simple one size fits all function and expect everything to be hunky dory

in reply to Quack Doc

lemmy - Link to source

Zamundaaa

Again, the reference luminance mapping is all about how applications should use the Wayland protocol.

How to map SDR to HDR can indeed be made much more complicated, from simple gamma adjustments to some full blown ITM meant for images or videos, like what BT.2446 suggests, but as far as applications are concerned, those are edge cases that they don't really need to be prepared for.

It's not like they have a different choice - unless the compositor supports custom reference luminance levels (which KWin does, but not all others do), and they support custom reference luminance themselves, then they need some logic to calculate peak luminance levels. If the compositor steps outside of those common expectations for reference luminance mapping, then the result may not be ideal, but there is no way for the application to do better.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

GUI Programming Recommendations

Hello all,

I'm trying to get into GUI programming, but am hesitating on using a Python library to make my first barebones program. My goal is to code basic buttons and understand how operating systems implement the way they draw windows for applications.

I have coded mostly in scientific libraries or high-level languages that are fairly simple (Python, Matlab, Julia)... Also am familiar with basic concepts and syntax from C.

Looking for recommendations to start. I am happy to learn a new PL. Interested in writing code for legacy hardware and mobile. Bonus if the codes are general enough to be written for most displays one could interact with.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to gronjo45

lemmy - Link to source

ikidd

I've been using Flutter, I like how it's cross-platform, mostly. I've generally built things for Android, but the desktop (Linux and Windows) and web versions usually compile fine with no tweaking. Couldn't speak to the iOS versions as I can't be arsed to jump through Apple's hoops. You can make a nice looking app with it for whichever platform you're targeting.

It's very well supported, lots of examples, well documented. Not as much out there as Python for examples and troubleshooting, but not bad.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

What features are missing from piefed, or, why aren't we reccommending piefed instead of lemmy?

Every time I go to the piefed frontpage I'm blown away by how much more polished it is. It has all the bells and whistles that lemmy is sometimes missing.

Whats the catch? Why aren't we recommending everyone goes to piefed instead of lemmy?

App support is one thing I can think of.

don't like this

in reply to irelephant [he/him]🍭

lemmy - Link to source

FarraigePlaisteach

I never knew what it was because I'm a bit desensitised to new apps / app names.

Edit: using phtn.app/ has made Lemmy extremely pleasant to use too. I haven't had a better experience on any platform.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to irelephant [he/him]🍭

lemmy - Link to source

BagOfHeavyStones

For me..

Because the PWA font is too small and can't be enlarged.

Because there's no 'back to top' button so have to kill the app to refresh.

Because there's no app.

But sometimes I use it anyway because the combining of articles is so much better than seeing the same article three or four times in a row in Voyager.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Life After Microsoft Windows: Linux Rises
This just warms my heart. The year of the Linux desktop isn't here, but the decade of it is.

Life After Microsoft Windows: Linux Rises

Life After Microsoft Windows Cutting The Cord Series: A tech revolution is shaking up governments worldwide—Windows 10’s looming end of life, increasing Micr...
YouTube
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Qt 6.9 released
Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.

Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include:
* Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available!
* Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance.
* Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience.
* XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.


Qt 6.9 Released

Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
Volker Hilsheimer (The Qt Company Oy)
in reply to cm0002

lemmy - Link to source

mox

Qt is still the only excellent cross-platform desktop GUI framework.

It's a pity that it's current custodian's commercial licenses:

  • are subscriptions
  • are painfully expensive for a solo developer or small group
  • have a reputation for triggering legal threats and badgering from The Qt Company if one ever wants to end their subscription or (separately) use the open-source license for a FOSS project

This situation makes me afraid to use their commercial offerings, which in turn means they won't get any money from me at all; I feel that I can safely use their libs only in open-source code. Their business model is their decision, of course, but I can't help wondering if their whale-hunting approach actually nets them more money than a more accessible, lower-cost, one-time (or one-major-version) license option would. In many other industries, high sales volume reaps more profits than high price.

Thank goodness for the KDE Free Qt Foundation.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

friendica - Link to source

Q&A profile page options

v.01
@Friendica Support @Tutorial

Hi there!

A question about the different page option settings of accounts (friendica 2024.03).
/settings/account/basic

Screen of the account type options in the advanced account page type settings.

Right now this page want's to merge from a standard personal profile page to kinda community profile page where only specific defined profiles can publish thru it's wall to the rest of the followers.

First thought was to stay as a single profile page, allow mutual friend relations to publish/write to this wall, and change all contacts that do not belong to the inner circle of profiles to followers only. Apparently this setting doesn't work, or doesn't work as expected.
Security and privacy settings in:
/settings
Screen of the setting that allows friends to post to the profile page wall of a personal page.

Is this a known issue or some kind of misinterpretation of this option?

Next possible option would be to choose to become a public community group page.
Screen of the community group options in the advanced account page type settings.

This option would imply a continuous attention to change every new contact to followers only, if in fact this would mean that the followers would not be able to publish to the group but receive publications. Also this setting would include the risk of being exposed to unexpected posts into the community of followers whenever the administration of the profile lags behind for some reason.

The option private group looks more promising in this regard and actually would be the same than being a personal profile page that checks new follow requests and than could change the setting to allow mutual friendship to post to the profiles wall or simply define a follower relationship. The [Experimental] notice, that actually exists like lot's of years already is a little bit confusing, or creates a certain reluctance to try this option. How experimental is this still as of now or could we perhaps ask the community to run a general test on all the options of the account settings in general together with a general feed back to sum this up and come to some definite setup, wording and explanations on the matter?

lemmy - Link to source

[✅Fixed]Monitor drops to 30% brightness after suspend

Hey, I hope someone can help me.

Problem:

When I wake my PC from suspend, my monitor is always set down to 30% brightness for some reason.

These are the brightness settings of the monitor itself, which can only be accessed via the monitor settings using the buttons on the monitor. I do not mean the brightness settings of my desktop environment.
These are still set to 100%, even though the monitor is darker.

The problem also arises in a second case. When I lower the brightness in the brightness control of my DE, my monitor brightness is also lowered in the monitor settings down to 30% again. I can then no longer increase the brightness in the DE settings, because 100% in the DE now equals 30% in the monitor. So if I set the brightness to 50% in the DE for example, this is 50% of the 30% set in the monitor. So actually only 15% in real terms

I hope I was able to explain the problem clearly. Please ask if you don't understand something. It's really annoying because I need to turn up my screen brightness with the Buttons on the Monitor every single time I wake up my PC.

Technical data:

  • Nobara Linux 41 (Based on Fedora)
  • KDE Plasma 6.3.3
  • Wayland
  • Desktop PC. So a external monitor. Not a laptop monitor.
  • I have a 2nd monitor on which this does not happen.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

A new security fund opens up to help protect the fediverse

A new security fund opens up to help protect the fediverse | TechCrunch

A new security fund aims to help apps in the fediverse — like Mastodon, Threads, and Pixelfed — to pay researchers for disclosing security bugs.
Sarah Perez (TechCrunch)

don't like this

in reply to maduncle

lemmy - Link to source

MonkderVierte

I'm currently trying seatd+turnstile+greetd on dinit. s6 usersv would be alternative for turnstile+dinit but i see s6 more on server, personally.

This reminds me, i wanted to try mdev for a long time (there's mdev like a boss).


GitHub - fff7d1bc/mdev-like-a-boss: This repo is a stash for notes, scripts and configs for the system running with mdev as a udev replacement.

This repo is a stash for notes, scripts and configs for the system running with mdev as a udev replacement. - fff7d1bc/mdev-like-a-boss
GitHub
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

[solved] How to backup a bunch of blu-rays?

Seeing that DVD are slowly going end-of-live and that you can't buy a lot of my childhood favorites in german anymore and streams are compressed-to-death (and DRMed), i had a streak of preservia. Which is why i rip a bunch of discs from the library on Linux (yes, legally not ok, but morally just ease of access, i wouldn't sell them). Since it's only to watch them when nostalgia hits, i want them in a ready-to-watch format, chose AV1 webm for small size. My burner is LibreDrive-ok ootb, meaning makemkv goes automatically in that mode.

I have the discs for a limited time, so i used to use dvdbackup for DVD and later feed the folder to handbrake for conversion. Now i got a bunch of blu-ray:

  • ripping one takes even longer; whole 25 hours; i don't have the time for the whole LotR series with bonus disks.
  • makemkvcon backup needs only about 2 hours per disk, but the resulting folder is 80 GB big; i have only about 250 GB free space
    ** and the makemkv backup somehow has no audio streams, while handbrake does

While i write this, handbrake is loading the chapters (that alone needs more than 1 hour for blu-ray); i'm trying if a lossless FFV1 mkv conversion (for later re-conversion) takes less long.

Now:

  • Any better approach?
  • Any way to fix makemkv having no audio? (i could juggle with external disks) I think i have all libraries and the KEYDB.cfg.

Edit: nope, handbrake suddenly has unable to decrypt unit (AACS)

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Lemmyvision 2 song contest - Voting is now live!

cross-posted from: jlai.lu/post/17384631

Hey everyone, thank you again for participating, and for your submissions!

I'm glad to announce that the voting form is completed, and you can now cast your votes and select your favourite songs. Everyone is welcome to vote, even if your instance or community did not participate! This is a great opportunity to discover new music, cultures, and bridge the lemmyverse together.

**The voting form is available here: tally.so/r/wvzg8d**

I created a playlist so that you can easily listen to the submitted songs, it's available at the following links:

The form will be available until around the 8th of April, I will then collect the results and publish them shortly after. I hope you'll have a lot of fun listening to the 11 songs submitted for this edition. Don't hesitate if you have any question!

Cheers!

Lemmyvision 2 Voting

Made with Tally, the simplest way to create forms.
Tally Forms

lemmy - Link to source

Lemmyvision 2 song contest - Voting is now live!

cross-posted from: jlai.lu/post/17384635

cross-posted from: jlai.lu/post/17384631
Hey everyone, thank you again for participating, and for your submissions!

I'm glad to announce that the voting form is completed, and you can now cast your votes and select your favourite songs. Everyone is welcome to vote, even if your instance or community did not participate! This is a great opportunity to discover new music, cultures, and bridge the lemmyverse together.

**The voting form is available here: tally.so/r/wvzg8d**

I created a playlist so that you can easily listen to the submitted songs, it's available at the following links:

The form will be available until around the 8th of April, I will then collect the results and publish them shortly after. I hope you'll have a lot of fun listening to the 11 songs submitted for this edition. Don't hesitate if you have any question!

Cheers!

Lemmyvision 2 Voting

Made with Tally, the simplest way to create forms.
Tally Forms

don't like this

lemmy - Link to source

Federated Blogging Options
What are all the federated blogging options available? I know of a few that are mostly clunky in my eyes.

lemmy - Link to source

Qt 6.9 released

Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.

Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include:
* Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available!
* Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance.
* Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience.
* XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.


Qt 6.9 Released

Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
Volker Hilsheimer (The Qt Company Oy)

lemmy - Link to source

Qt 6.9 released

cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/28018658

Qt 6.9 is here! This release brings exciting innovations, enhanced graphics performance, and new platform capabilities to help you build exceptional applications.

Highlighted improvements in Qt 6.9 include:
* Qt Graphs: Interactive 2D panning, zooming, and dynamic 3D graph injection. Printing support now available!
* Qt Quick: GPU-accelerated SVG animations and Variable Rate Shading for improved graphics performance.
* Qt Quick Controls: New context menu support enhances desktop integration and user experience.
* XR Enhancements: Haptic feedback added for creating richter immersive virtual interactions.


Qt 6.9 Released

Qt 6.9 is now available, highlighting emojis, Graphs, OIT, better OAuth2, and many more new improvements for application developers and device creators!
Volker Hilsheimer (The Qt Company Oy)
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Linux Kernel Plan To Commit Web3 Integration

There has been discussions with-in the development circles regarding a potential integration of Web3 functionalities into the mainline kernel. Exploring the feasibility of incorporating features like decentralised application (dApp) support and smart contract execution directly into the kernel.

Early proposals suggest leveraging the NPUs in new processor families for secure on chain data validation within the kernel space. This means better fraud protection by validating signatures while booting up using the zk-SNARK cryptographic proof.

The developers at Linux Fundaytion notes that this plan requires extensive re-architecture of the codebase. They say that after this, Linux would only run supported systems with dedicated NPU and will simply refuse to boot on other systems, making a significant breakthrough in system security.

The timeline for the proposed changes have already been laid out. With chip manufactures already including dedicated NPUs, developers now have more freedom than ever. Linux communities have always welcomed Web3 technologies like NFT, dApp games etc. and with the kernel integration, Linux will be making a huge leap into the future. One developer put it aptly, "Imagine running my own ETH node directly within Linux kernel."

source

common random string shared between the prover and the verifier is enough to achieve computational zero-knowledge without requiring interaction

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)

lemmy - Link to source

Need advice on my setup: msata and 2.5 ssd.

I have an x220, yes it is old but I prefer the keyboard and the repairability. Anyway, it has 1 x msata SSD (2TB Orico) and 1 x 2.5 inch SSD (2TB Samsung).

What I want:

  • to take advantage of 2 drives.
  • no windows. I go full Linux now.
  • some forms of backup if system fails.

What I managed to do:

  • /, swap and all system directories on the msata
  • /home is dedicated to the entire 2.5 ssd.
  • fully encrypted. I.e the msata has a LUKS partition that mounts /, swap and others. The 2.5 inch also has a LUKS partiton for /home. My /home is on its own, so if system fails or I need to distro hop, I can keep all of my data.

System runs fine but is this a good idea in the long run?

Should I have it the other way? Root and swap and systems on faster 2.5inch SSD. Home in the smaller msata?

What about everything on the faster 2.5 drive, then use the slower msata for backups? Since I have 2TB, I'm thinking partition the msata into 2 so I can do: Timeshift backup on one, and Borg backup for my personal files on the other?

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Ram in use after suspend issue

So I recently built a new computer to replace my 7 year old one but I have noticed a strange problem with it.

When I boot up the computer and use it as normal it sits around 8-10 GiB of ram in use plus about another 9 GiB committed.

But when I suspend the computer then un-suspend it later the in use ram starts creeping up even if I have less running than I did when I originally booted the computer.

Last time this happened it went from 10 GiB all the way up to about 43 GiB in the space of a few hours.

If I reboot then things go back to normal behavior.

Anyone have any ideas about what I could look for to fix it?

Specs:

  • Manjaro XFCE 25.0.0 Zetar
  • 6.13.8-2 Kernel
  • Gigabyte B860I AORUS PRO ICE ITX Motherboard
  • Intel Core Ultra 5 245KF CPU
  • 64GB DDR5 RAM
  • 2TB M.2 NVMe
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Dr Jekell

lemmy - Link to source

Markaos

xfwm is XFCE's window manager, and it's eating almost 30% of the total system memory, so that's the prime suspect (I'm not exactly sure how much it interacts with other apps, so it's possible something else is forcing xfwm to use all that memory, but that is IMHO unlikely).

An ugly "fix" is to log out and log back in (yes, not much better than just rebooting), or you could try to somehow restart xfwm - running xfvm --replace in terminal might work.

Edit: there's an issue on the Manjaro forums that might be related: forum.manjaro.org/t/xfwm4-memo…

Xfwm4 memory leak since 4.20?

Option --replace suggests that xfwm4 is replacing another window manager Option would be needed to run xfwm4 on another DE (e.g.
Manjaro Linux Forum
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Building native packages is complicated | Packaging Anubis as native packages

Anubis provides protection against bots scraping websites and DDoSing projects.

This blog post is about Xe's reasoning for originally only providing docker packages and their work to provide native packages.


Building native packages is complicated

Especially if you want a UX as good as Docker images give you.
xeiaso.net
in reply to Leaflet

lemmy - Link to source

onlinepersona

There must be a tool that allows you to build packages for multiple systems in multiple formats (deb, rpm, nix, flatpak, snap, etc.). Does that not exist? After 20 years of these systems existing, somebody must've tried...

Also, it's clear that once again, open source needs some kind of funding model, because it's a little crazy that a project like this can get so popular so fast, the dev flooded with praise, thanks, and issues but not money to maintain and develop it.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Deed - Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International - Creative Commons

creativecommons.org
in reply to onlinepersona

lemmy - Link to source

corsicanguppy

a tool that allows you to build packages for multiple systems in multiple formats (deb, rpm, nix, flatpak, snap, etc.).


Given flatpaks and snaps are toxic, the other ones - deb, rpm, pkg - can be packaged relatively easily. It's all a separate effort with files and meta-info that doesn't often intersect, but it's manageable. It lends itself incredibly well to the trivial 'automation' that gitlab, forgejo and other major git suites provide.

Source: did this for the entirety I built and maintained a software suite for linux and unix, for like 15 years. I built some code, I packaged it. Because anything less isn't really ISO27002.

TL;DR - the 'tool' is a simple script and your brain. the biggest hurdle is the unknown itself and, once you get to it, the work can be pretty straightforward.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Resources for discovery across the open social web/fediverse

This is a more focused revision of a post I made a few months ago, with an aim to help with discovery across the fediverse.

:::spoiler List of various directory/index-style sites to help find people/communities of interest
Software overview
* Fediverse Party

Finding instances/software-agnostic
* FediDB
* Fediverse Observer

Microblog specific
* Fedi Directory
* Fediverse Info - Note: also includes Pixelfed people.
* Trunk
* Guppe Groups - Workaround to post to groups across microblogging sites, useful to push posts to remote instances.

Forum/link aggregator specific
* Lemmyverse
* !wowthislemmyexists@lemmy.ca
* !newcommunities@lemmy.world
* !communitypromo@lemmy.ca
* !lemmy411@lemmy.ca

Video/Streaming specific
* Sepia Search
* Owncast Directory
:::

Searching and Following methods
This will vary across software, and may change as it changes, so take note of when this was written (end of March 2025).

By default, ActivityPub sites don't know of other, remote sites. Any remote site stuff you're seeing is because somehow the site your on was made aware of the other's stuff. Typically this may be that a user learns of a remote site's stuff in some way and decides to follow from their home site by looking it up via their site's search then subscribing/following.

All of the above format-specific links I've provided above are means of finding some remote sites' stuff to follow on one's home site. Below are some additional tools and methods to further help when using some of these different sites.

:::spoiler Microblog Tools and Methods
Tools
* StreetPass for Mastodon - detects Mastodon accounts on websites visited.
* Graze for Mastodon - Firefox Add-on - enables remote instance interactions for when viewing another instance.
* Graze - Chrome Extension - for those using Chrome variants.
* Phanpy frontend for Mastodon - has a variety of features that may help find what the default interface doesn't help to find.

Methods
* On Mastodon: follow hashtags to surface other accounts you might want to follow.
* Also make use of its keyword/hashtag filters to cut down on the sorts of posts you don't want to see by going to account preferences, filters.
* On Misskey & forks: create custom feeds via the "antenna" feature by choosing keywords and hashtags to track while using the same to exclude/filter out posts with other keywords/hashtags.
* Also make use of its mute/block settings to cut down on the sorts of posts you don't want to see by going to settings, under other settings, mutes and blocks.
* Post with hashtags more to help others searching by or following them find your posts. Even if it's just someone else on your home instance, if they share (boost/repost) your post and they have remote followers, it may help increase your visibility across the network.
:::

:::spoiler Forum/link aggregator Tools and Methods
Tools
* Lemmyverse Communities
* Piefed Feeds - if you're not on Piefed, these may still be helpful for finding different communities by viewing a feed's collected communities.
* Quiblr frontend for Lemmy - a unique frontend with a privacy-respecting recommendation engine.

Methods
* Follow the aforementioned communities under Forum/link aggregator specific above, or ask in !lemmy411@lemmy.ca or !communitypromo@lemmy.ca about communities.
* On Piefed/Mbin sites, use the keyword filtering feature to filter out posts you're uninterested in.
* On Lemmy sites use clients (e.g. Interstellar - Mobile/Desktop, Thunder - Mobile, Voyager - Mobile/Web) that provide keyword filtering, as default UI lacks this useful feature.
* Browse Local or All with sort set to New to see if any unfamiliar communities show up that you may want to follow.
* Block communities/instances you're uninterested in to help improve potential communities of interest visibility as you browse.
:::

If you're aware of other resources, tools, or methods that I've not mentioned here, please mention them in the comments! There's undoubtedly more to add that I've not come across.


Graze for Mastodon – Get this Extension for 🦊 Firefox (en-US)

Download Graze for Mastodon for Firefox. Graze is 1-click follow, favorite, boost, bookmark, reply for Mastodon, no matter what instance you call home.
addons.mozilla.org

lemmy - Link to source

[Solved - VSYNC/screen tearing] Stuttering on Nobara with 3080 Ti

SOLVED - "Allow screen tearing" was ON and caused this issue.

I have some constant stuttering on my current setup. Every 4-5 seconds, almost like a hiccup, I drop about 100 ms worth of frames.

Video:
picoshare.jau.nz/-VnpPP8z6xR

Full specs:

5600X

3080 Ti on 570.124.04

Nobara with KDE

Wayland

This has been persistent through several GPU driver updates and I'm tired of trying to troubleshoot it. I don't know what the exact cause is. Any ideas?

Also, related note, how easy is it to migrate from one distro to another? I am thinking about trying something else - maybe base Fedora or Arch - to hopefully have better performance.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

FediForum Has Been Canceled
In light of recent controversy and its handling, the twice-a-year FediForum unconference for April 1st and 2nd has been canceled by its organizer.

FediForum Has Been Canceled

FediForum is a virtual "unconference" that meets twice a year to showcase new developments, hold community discussions across a variety of important subjects, and give members of the wider Fediverse a
Sean Tilley (We Distribute)

don't like this

in reply to GrumpyDuckling

mbin - Link to source

atro_city

That's great. Since when and does everybody take psych 101?

And just to give a wider perspective (regardless of her origins), not every language makes the distinction and some up until recently did not. Look at the translations on (wiktionary). Many of them are transliterations of the English word. Which is not a surprise since the concept of gender is quite recent (1950-1960s) and was most likely very US-centric.

social concept which distinguish the different gender categories

Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)

anthropomorphized doesn't like this.

lemmy - Link to source

want to clone my debian install so i can test updating to trixie
i want to test debian trixie (13) so i can report bugs and troubleshoot before the release later this year. i thought about simply installing trixie alongside my current bookwork installation, but that won't be my scenario when the time comes, since i've been updating my system instead of reinstalling it since debian jessie (8) and this time it won't be different. how can i clone my current system so i can simulate an update to trixie? do i simply create a new partition and copy my files over, then chroot to it and install grub?
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to rc__buggy

lemmy - Link to source

rice

Yea that's their new project they just "started funding". Synergy used to be open source and it went closed source 10? 15? years ago.

Since then several forks have existed. Most notably github.com/debauchee/barrier which died a few years ago and was forked to github.com/input-leap/input-le… which while getting plenty of updates, and merges from the other project.. never released a version for years. I think at that point synergy felt sorry for them and so they changed their repo name from synergy to deskflow github.com/deskflow/deskflow and now they have their open source version lol

I have to assume usage got so stagnant when close sourcing it (it's so insanely niche software, is it not?) that they felt the need to bring it alive again.


GitHub - debauchee/barrier: Open-source KVM software

Open-source KVM software. Contribute to debauchee/barrier development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Linus Torvalds admits 'pure incompetence' for missing the new Linux 6.14 kernel deadline but all is forgiven as the update is great news for non-Windows gaming
And it's all down to an improved NTsync driver.

Linus Torvalds admits 'pure incompetence' for missing the new Linux 6.14 kernel deadline but all is forgiven as the update is great news for non-Windows gaming

Nick Evanson (PC Gamer)

lemmy - Link to source

Linus Torvalds admits 'pure incompetence' for missing the new Linux 6.14 kernel deadline but all is forgiven as the update is great news for non-Windows gaming

cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/35294960

And it's all down to an improved NTsync driver.



Linus Torvalds admits 'pure incompetence' for missing the new Linux 6.14 kernel deadline but all is forgiven as the update is great news for non-Windows gaming

Nick Evanson (PC Gamer)
in reply to Blaze

lemmy - Link to source

TwilightKiddy

It's a bit sad how everybody talk about the new NTsync. Most games, like, 90% of them, are not bound by sync. You would get exactly no performance benefit in them. What's better about it is the correctness of the implementation, more programs will work under WINE as a result of switching to NTsync. It's a good thing, but media clearly seems to miss the point and only focus on a few cases where it would give an impressive performance benefit.

lemmy - Link to source

Recommend a distro for a 13-year-old gamer

Couldn't find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it's ok to ask here.

A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend's kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can't play Factorio.

For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can't easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don't spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn't seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.

  • Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
  • Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
  • Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn't need to be "kid proof", I don't think he touches any stuff he doesn't know what it does.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Wi-fi not working on Pop os 24.04 cosmic desktop

Hii to all linux users, hope you can help me.

I updated my system a couple of days ago, pop os 24.04 LTS and wifi stoped working.
The problem is i dont have wire so wifi is only connection to the internet curently.
And i managed to lose it..
So i tryed to fix the problem by switching to older kernel but it didnt fix the problem unfortinetly.

I gave up and reinstalled whole system thinking it will fix it.
And since i do it i decided to try new cosmic alpha system.
So i downloaded that and i like it despite its not finished and it has bugs and missing features.
But that didnt fix my wifi problem! Its still not working.

I have two ssd-s, so on my main one 1TB i have linux and thats what im using, but on second one 500GB i have windows 10 for some games that doesnt work on linux.
So i was using that to download latest pop os and my wifi card works so its obviusly not dead or anything.

I plan to get wire but i have some drilling to do for that and i would like to fix wifi card before that if possinble.

Almost forgot, my wifi card is Asus pcie card, with two antenas, its red and wery beautifull.
Tryed to uploud picture of it but my acount is new so that wasnt possible.
I dont know exact model number but this one looks exactly like mine so meabu its that one.

duckduckgo.com/?q=asus+wifi+pc…

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to MickeyMice

lemmy - Link to source

MickeyMice

I was enough of it and i called one friend to drill the hole and make cable connection finaly so its all good now. But i want to have wifi just in case because you newer know. So the list of well suported wifi cards will be of great help.
And i was curios what was the problem at first place anyway..
Thank you all for hel, you are the best. ❤
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Linux Mobile OS experience 2025?

Has anybody attempted to daily drive linux on their smartphone? like sailfish os, postmarket, librem, etc. I've been getting more interested in them as my pixel 4a is starting to look real old

How was it it? Were you able to run banking apps? battery life? experience with using CJK keyboards?

As far as I can tell, RCS messages are not supported anywhere, in addition to NFC payments (no surprise there). 5G seems also iffy

in reply to Sinfaen

lemmy - Link to source

FriendBesto

Was in the market for a new phone and was thinking of getting the latest Pine phone, and upon research, I found that like others have stated, it is more of a piece of kit to tinker with and not a daily driver. The OS is still being baked and at the current rate it might take a few years before it is as responsive and as useful as Android is day in, and day out. There is just no contest. Which was a bit disappointing as I actually though the OS was far more developed.

I do hope that progress is made, but, if you need a phone that works well, then stick with Android for now. Hardware on latest Pine is better than on the first phone but still Mid, at best, and it is not cheap for the hardware you get.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

How do I discover the Pixelfed content that is out there when so many big instances block exploration?

I realized that I haven't spent time on Pixelfed in a while, and that it would be great to find more content to add to my feed! So I logged in to my instance (social.photo) and then... hit a wall.

With Lemmy and Mastadon, it is super easy to peek at what is going on at other instances and find communities to subscribe to, but it looks like Pixelfed does not make this easy. The biggest issue I have run into is that many of the largest servers do not seem to let you explore what is on them unless you first create an account, and the main Pixelfed Server Directory at https://pixelfed.org/servers does not indicate which servers can be explored or not, so you have to click a few times (since the link takes you to the registration page) to even find this out for a given server. It also does not help that navigating to an instance does not show you the content for that instance, like it does for Lemmy or Mastadon, but for a login page that may or may not have an "Explore" tab at the top.

Am I missing something here? I just logged into Tumblr for the first time in years and my immediate next thought was, "Gee, I should be using Pixelfed instead!" But if in practice it is simply not possible to find content I am interested in without a great deal of hassle then it is not a realistic replacement. In particular, it seems like the way Pixelfed is set up requires me to register on particular instances to get a better view of what content is available (not just locally, but pulled in from other instances). This seems contrary to me to one of the biggest advantages of the Fediverse, which is that you are able and encouraged to pick an instance that best suits you rather than the one where all of the content lives; in particular I could not imagine self-hosting a Pixelfed instance without being left out of most of the content available.

And just to be clear, I am willing to put up with some degree of hassle resulting from the inherently decentralized model of the Fediverse, since I switched completely over to Lemmy from Reddit about a year and a half ago after the API fiasco (and the only reason why I do not use Mastadon more is because I was never that into Twitter-style content to begin with). But having to go out of my way to get through artificially constructed walls to even find content to subscribe is a bit much.

However, again, maybe I am missing here. If someone is willing to point me to a resource that solves this problem problem and makes this entire rant sound completely ignorant then that would be great! 😀

Edit: Fixed silly typo.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

don't like this

in reply to ocean

lemmy - Link to source

Elevator7009

Kind of surprised this is the take. Algorithms in general, just sorting by highest to lowest or whatever common problem that needs to be solved, aren't bad. "Algorithm" has become a dirty word mostly because of the stuff pushing short-form content over long-form content, outrage that generates engagement over something you would enjoy that doesn't enrage you enough to make you type fifty paragraphs and keep coming back to fight in the comments, etc. So I agree with the literal statement that algorithms aren't always bad.

But as for what you meant, I'm super surprised at all the people who want an algorithm to feed them content and aren't satisfied. I looked for the stuff I was interested in, subscribed, and am happy. When I run out of content I either log off and do something else or go seek out stuff I'm kind of interested in. In my most charitable possible assumption, people who want algorithms are probably a lot less suspectible to getting pulled in by outrage and scrolling all day, and just want to be able to discover cool stuff fast, and the algorithms somehow worked to show them the cool stuff. In my experience I had to strictly stick to my Home feed with just stuff I subscribed to on Reddit to not see outrage porn, could never poke my head into Popular or anything without seeing some outrage sub like r/noahgettheboat or /iamatotalpieceofshit. And then they started forcibly sorting my Home feed by Controversial… yep. Stopped regularly browsing there really fast.

I am just really wary of asking for algorithms back because I really don't want the Fediverse to become another place catered towards outrage porn for max engagement. I really want users to have options if this is implemented, so as not to force this algorithm on users like myself who like the "chronological order of stuff you purposely followed only" algorithm. And for that option to not be taken away from me in an effort to "drive growth!" and all that.

I don't want to refuse others a good thing just because it's not for me, but I also have been burned by social media algorithms that were once nice chronological, and later became catered towards outrage and showing you content you never signed up to see without having an option to switch back to chronological and opt out of having RandomInfluencerYouDontFollow in your feed. Looking at you, Instagram. I signed up with my elementary school classmates, liked chronological feed, liked having Explore just be friends of friends… I still only follow people I know in real life but now Explore is a bunch of controversial memes, people selling stuff, and influencers who want me to form a parasocial relationship with them. This is also what my feed turns to once I scroll past maybe 7 posts my friends made. Have not fully deleted but also haven't touched the app in months now.

I guess the real solution is giving people options and not taking them away because you decided to go public and need maximum eye-on-advertisement time. Hopefully Lemmy stays open source and different instances stay popular, so in case someone does try to take it public we can all flee to different servers and keep talking.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Introducing Roost: Robust Open Online Safety Tools
Although this is a talk an ATProto-related conference, this has direct applicability to Mastodon and Lemmy instances.

Introducing Roost: Robust Open Online Safety Tools, Christopher DiBona, ATmosphereConf

Chris DiBona https://bsky.app/profile/cdibona.bsky.socialROOST https://roost.tools, profile https://bsky.app/profile/roost.toolsATmosphereConf Seattle 2025 h...
YouTube
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

catloaf doesn't like this.

lemmy - Link to source

Autocomplete custom scripts?

As my time with linux, I created a lot of scripts. Some of them have input parameters and sometimes I just forget this parameters.

So I wonder if there is some way to create autocomplete parameters, like i autocomplete a path by pressing the tab key?

For example a script. ./test.sh can be completed with parameter-one, eg. ./test.sh parameter-one or ./test.sh parameter-two. If i type now ./test.sh followed by tab it should add parameter-one if i press tab again it should change to parameter-two.

How can I do that? I'm on bash…

in reply to Flagstaff

lemmy - Link to source

trevor (he/they)

It took me a while to get around to this so I could sanitize some of the highly-personal stuff there (mostly just a bunch of URLs because I don't use browser bookmarks lol), but here's a condensed version of what I like to use Espanso for.

The second half is ...interesting. I wanted a way to autofill passwords from my password manager in any application, not just a browser. It's a very homebrewed solution, and it only works on Windows and Linux because macOS blocks tools like Espanso from viewing or modifying login input fields.

Did you put in a request for this?


For a Wayland Flatpak or RPM? I haven't looked in a long time, but I believe there's an open issue for a Wayland RPM.

Edit:
Found them: Flatpak issue and RPM issue.


RPM support (Red Hat Distributions) · Issue #1948 · espanso/espanso

Description I would like to improve support to the Red Hat distributions. Among the tasks: to have an RPM package to release in every new version of espanso. There has been some works, but to my kn...
GitHub
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Which areas of Linux would benefit most from further standardization?
The diversity of Linux distributions is one of its strengths, but it can also be challenging for app and game development. Where do we need more standards? For example, package management, graphics APIs, or other aspects of the ecosystem? Would such increased standards encourage broader adoption of the Linux ecosystem by developers?
in reply to muusemuuse

lemmy - Link to source

steeznson

There is a separate kernel which is being written entirely in rust from scratch that might interest you. I'm not sure if this is the main one github.com/asterinas/asterinas but it is the first one that came up when I searched.

By the tone of your post you might just want to watch the world burn in which case I'd raise an issue in that repo saying "Rewrite in C++ for compatibility with wider variety of CPU archs" ;)


GitHub - asterinas/asterinas: Asterinas is a secure, fast, and general-purpose OS kernel, written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI.

Asterinas is a secure, fast, and general-purpose OS kernel, written in Rust and providing Linux-compatible ABI. - asterinas/asterinas
GitHub
in reply to steeznson

lemmy - Link to source

muusemuuse

I'm of the opinion that a full rewrite in rust will eventually happen, but they need to be cautious and not risk alienating developers ala windows mobile so right now it's still done in pieces. I'm also aware that many of the devs who sharpened their teeth on the kernel C code like it as it is, resist all change, and this causes lots of arguments.

Looking at that link, I'm not liking the MPL.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Is Ctrl+D really like Enter?

Response to a recent claim that Ctrl+D in the terminal is like pressing Enter. It kind of is but it’s also misleading to say so without further explanation.

Is Ctrl+D really like Enter? — mina86.com

mina86.com

tuna

2025-03-20 03:05:22

lemmy - Link to source

Linux Terminal: CTRL+D is like pressing ENTER


Honestly I had no idea what ctrl+d even did, I just knew it was a convenient way for me to close all the REPL programs I use. The fact that it is similar to pressing enter really surprised me, so I wanted to share this knowledge with you :)


https://hackarcana.com/article/ctrl-d-is-like-enter

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Leaflet

lemmy - Link to source

moonpiedumplings

I despise the way Canonical pretends discourse forum posts by their team members* are documentation.

I've noticed they have been a bit better lately, and have migrated much of the posts to their documentation, but it seems they are doing it again.

As this is developed, we will update this post to link to the new documentation and feature release notes.


Pro tip: You could have just made the documentation directly, with the content of this post. Or maybe a blog post. But please stop with the forum posts. They are very confusing for people not used to these... unique locations.

*Not that people are easily able to find this out when they don't give any indication that the forum post is something other than just another post by a rando. Actually, I'm just guessing here, based on the quoted reply, for all I know this could be a post by someone unrelated to Canonical. The account is 3 months, and the post itself is identical to a regular forum post from a regular forum member...

lemmy - Link to source

Benchmarking a distribution (and some \-O3 results) | Why Ubuntu reverted move to -O3 compiler flag

Benchmarking a distribution (and some \-O3 results)

In our previous Foundations update @mclemenceau shared an update on some of the experiments we conducted during the Plucky Puffin cycle, in particular about our decision to revert the change to the -O3 optimization level by default on amd64.
Ubuntu Community Hub

lemmy - Link to source

Pidgin 3.0 Experimental 1 released

Pidgin 3.0 Experimental 1 Has been released!

We are ecstatic to announce that we have released the first experimental version of Pidgin 3.0!!! This is a pre alpha release with an official version number of 2.90.0. We will continue releasing in this fashion until we are ready for 3.0.
Instant Messaging Freedom's Discourse
This entry was edited (5 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

I wrote an ebook on GNU awk with hundreds of examples and exercises

Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my CLI text processing with GNU awk ebook. This book will dive deep into field processing, show examples for filtering features, multiple file processing, how to construct solutions that depend on multiple records, how to compare records and fields between two or more files, how to identify duplicates while maintaining input order and so on. Regular expressions will also be discussed in detail.

Book links


To celebrate the new release, you can download the PDF/EPUB versions for free till 06-April-2025.

Or, you can read it online at learnbyexample.github.io/learn…

Interactive TUI apps



Feedback


I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on.

Happy learning :)


TUI-apps/AwkExercises at main · learnbyexample/TUI-apps

Terminal User Interface (TUI) apps. Contribute to learnbyexample/TUI-apps development by creating an account on GitHub.
GitHub
in reply to learnbyexample

lemmy - Link to source

enkers

Could someone perhaps explain the major use cases or give a real life example of a time you've needed to use awk? I've been using Linux casually for quite a long time now, and although I learned the basics of the tool, I can't recall having ever felt I had a need for it. If I want to glue a bunch of cli stuff together and need to do some text processing, it generally seems like it'd be easier to just use a simple python script.

Is it more for situations that need to be compatible with most *nix systems and you might not necessarily have access to a higher level scripting language?

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to enkers

lemmy - Link to source

learnbyexample

Well, if you are comfortable with Python scripts, there's not much reason to switch to awk. Unless perhaps you are equating awk to Python as scripting languages instead of CLI usage (like grep, sed, cut, etc) as my ebook focuses on. For example, if you have space separated columns of data, awk '{print $2}' will give you just the second column (no need to write a script when a simple one-liner will do). This of course also allows you to integrate with shell features (like globs).

As a practical example, I use awk to filter and process particular entries from financial data (which is in csv format). Just a case of easily arriving at a solution in a single line of code (which I then save it for future use).

lemmy - Link to source

New refugee from Windows / Need advices about image system backup, excel, vscode

Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied.
I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.

Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows :
- is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong.
My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it's not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it's a good idea to do so.
I also found rsync. Didn't explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ?
- for vscode it's easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can't develop and test them on linux
- at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it's ok for basic usage but it's far behind if you're using it professionally. Please don't turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)

For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it's a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?

Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts.
I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.

Thanks for your advice !

in reply to Matth78

lemmy - Link to source

zygo_histo_morpheus

If you want to test windows programs on linux, you're probably going to want to do that in a virtual machine, or even a spare computer just for testing on windows. Depending on how much you need to use excel, a virtual machine could be a good option for that as well, but if using Microsoft Excel™ is a big part of your job, maybe it makes more sense to just stay on Windows for work at least
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Matth78

lemmy - Link to source

MentalEdge

I haven't found anything that is quite like Macrium. Mostly, because something that works the same way is a bad idea on linux. Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.

Macrium creates restorable images of your entire boot partition or disk, as-is, which can then be restored onto the same, or an entirely different, disk.

This isn't really something you can do in linux, with a system that is live. Hence, partition images should be done offline, when the given partition isn't booted.

That said, everything that matters can be backed up simply by copying the relevant files. For this, I use Kopia.

As for making sure you always have a bootable system, for this I use Timeshift on btrfs.

For MS office, you might try winapps. Sounds like what you're hoping for.


GitHub - winapps-org/winapps: Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. Hard fork of github.com/Fmstrat/winapps/

Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration. Hard fork of https://github.com/Fmst...
GitHub
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to MentalEdge

lemmy - Link to source

WhyJiffie

Because as you suspect, an image backup cannot be done while the partition being imaged is live.


can't it, though?

macrium reflect's normal operation is to run when the ststem is running normally. it creates a volume shadowcopy of your filesystem, and backs that up. a BTRFS/ZFS snapshot is basically what a volume shadowcopy is on windows, but with a less fancy name. if you make a snapshot, you can back that up, either with zfs send, btrfs send, rsync, borg backup, whatever. the difference is that on linux it's not possible to notify programs that a snapshot will happen please sanitize your databases, while windows does that too, so if you restore on linux that's like if your computer crashed because power went off

sure, it can't be done with other filesystems, but OP said they have BTRFS. I think the boot partition can be safely imaged too: remount as read only and make a normal image.

lemmy - Link to source

look for symlinks pointing at the contents of directory?

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

in reply to IsoKiero

lemmy - Link to source

mina86

~~You want readlink -f rather than ls -l.~~ ++OK, actually not exactly. readlink won’t print path to the symlink so it’s not as straightforward.++

Also, you want + in find ... -exec ... + rather than ;.

At this point I feel committed to making readlink work. ;) Here’s the
script you want:

\#!/bin/sh

want=$1
shift
readlink -f -- "$@" | while read got; do
    if [ "$got" = "$want" ]; then
        echo "$1"
    fi
    shift
done

and execute it as:
find ~ -type l -exec /bin/sh /path/to/the/script /path/to/target/dir {} +
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

ActivityPub - Link to source

Google Input Tools on Linux

So I want to type in my native language, and the easiest tool i know of is this:

google.com/inputtools/try/

It's not available offline for Linux though.
I have tried running some windows executable from archive.org under wine, this didn't work. I also tried some random alternative (Varnam), but it was way too complex of a setup for me. (It kept telling me to compile libraries, and none of it worked in the end)

I want something that can take in english character input and turn it into proper devnagari typeface. If I type in "namaste", it has to come out as नमस्ते. And It has to be Offline.

I haven't found anything that fits to all these categories

Turns out Google Input is my best bet. Is there a way I can get it working?

Try Google Input Tools online – Google Input Tools

www.google.com
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Laptop for Linux

Hey all.

I've booted Linux Mint Debian Edition and Arch on to a couple old machines including my old laptops. The performance is still rather brutal because these machines are so old and their battery lives are rough. They are also bulky and uncomfortable to carry around.

So, I've been thinking about getting a more modern laptop and putting Linux on it but I've been out of the laptop market for so long now I have no idea what's good and what's not anymore. Any recommendations?

I think I've heard decent things about Chromebooks but how's the hardware of those? Are they relatively locked down and don't play nice with Linux? I'm just looking for a machine for daily use (browser, light coding, remote connecting to my desktop for heavier stuff)

Thanks in advance

EDIT: Thank you to everyone for responding, I did not expect so much discussion! I've certainly changed my mind on Chromebooks and will look into the options recommended below in the coming months. Thanks!

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to mina86

lemmy - Link to source

hydraulic_elliptical

Gonna have to anti-recommend tuxedo unfortunately. Never had a "Linux" laptop before and never had any issues, but two of the newest Infinitybooks have a number of issues with fan control, clock sometimes stuck at 800MHz, weird-ass Ethernet NIC with no upstreamed drivers and so on. It's like a trip to 15 years ago in terms of weird little issues popping up every now and the .

The tuxedo kernel modules are a mess and not currently upstreamable, their interfaces are inconsistent across lineups/generations which they solve by building a unified Electron monstrosity "control center" on top.

The idea is nice but any mainstream manufacturer works pretty well these days, and the Schenker laptops with tuxedo software not up to par :/

in reply to hydraulic_elliptical

lemmy - Link to source

Mike

I 100% agree. Whenever these companies start with their own projects I immediately get suspicious that their goal is to enshittify down the line with vendor lock-in.

The only reasons why I'm seriously considering a Tuxedo are 1. European brand and 2. Double SSD.

Not a lot of laptops seem to be offering double SSD while being Linux compatible, so my hands are kinda tied.

in reply to Mike

lemmy - Link to source

hydraulic_elliptical

My primary needs were a big HiDPI screen, lots of memory, good CPU and it meets all of those. The only other devices meeting those are the high end ThinkPads that are no doubt nicer, but also double the price sooo it's all good.

But someone who buys primarily for great Linux support might be disappointed.

I also have to say I haven't spent much time investigating the issues I faced for time reasons, maybe some of them can be fixed easily.

in reply to bonsai

lemmy - Link to source

data1701d (He/Him)

I've been enjoying my Thinkpad E16 1st gen AMD on Debian 12. You do have to run a newer kernel to get it working. I ran into a bit of Wi-Fi trouble because I accidentally got a Realtek model, but I've long since fixed the issue entirely - I've posted the solution elsewhere here.

On another note, maybe we should just have a yearly hardware recommendations post pinned on this forum - it feels like we get a question like this every week or so and they sort of clutter the forum, no offense intended to OP.

Edit: Here's my Linux Hardware probe from when I first got the laptop linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50…


HW probe of Lenovo ThinkPad E16 Gen 1 2... #1e50fb1862

A database of all the hardware that works under linux
linux-hardware.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Looking for YouTube Tutorials on Arch

I'm moderately experienced with linux. Been using it as my daily driver since 2018. Mostly using Fedora but also have a Debian server. I'm pretty comfortable with systemd but don't love the bloat.

Anyway, I've decided that I'd like to try Arch. So I'm looking for tutorials to help me learn or get familiar with Arch instead of just diving in head first like a madlad.

So what Arch tutorials do you like and are there any that you'd recommend that I watch?

Edit: lmao you guys are brutal. yeah i know about the arch wiki, rtfm and all that. I know i'll be spending a lot of time with the wiki. I just wanted to get a rough intro first. Well, I guess I'm off to read the fkin wiki now.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to tkw8

lemmy - Link to source

www-gem

As others said, the Arch wiki is so well made that it should be the only source you need. Videos will not bring you anything given your background. The main difference with other distros will be the package manager.

A video about the install process will just be someone reading the wiki to you, and a video to "explain" pacman to you will be overkill ;)

Installation guide - ArchWiki

wiki.archlinux.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

If you have to pick only one Desktop Environment and use it till your computer breaks, what would you choose?

I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it's Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)...etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.

Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the "Flagship Manjaro version". I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.

After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.

What about you guys?

lemmy - Link to source

A good e-mail client for linux?

I have been using KDE for a while, while I like many features I am looking for suggestions to the default email client:

Kmail - completely unusable for me and the only one which could maybe be integrated with kontacts, it could not receive mails from IMAP or pop or would receive only sometimes

Geary - good but too minimal, I need at least some kind of contact list and mailing lists feature, maybe this integrates with gnome contacts? I couldn't find anything in settings

in reply to blackghost1st

lemmy - Link to source

Sundray

Sadly no, according to their wiki:

Mac computers with Apple silicon processors are not currently capable of running Zorin OS natively. However, you may be able to use an app called UTM to run Zorin OS in a virtual machine on Mac computers with Apple silicon processors.

System Requirements

Find out if your computer is capable of running Zorin OS and which edition is better suited for your computer.
Zorin Group (Zorin Help)
in reply to Sundray

lemmy - Link to source

trevor (he/they)

Running x86_64 emulation on an ARM CPU is a miserable experience and should be avoided. I've done this on an M-series Mac with UTM, and you're looking at ~10-minute boot times just to get the VM booted, and ~3 minutes for it to render a response to whatever you click.

It's honestly wild that they seriously suggest doing this on their Wiki.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Radarr, Sonarr, SABnzbd and Permissions

I'm trying, and struggling a little bit with getting the three items in the title setup the way that I want.

Running Arch.

I would like to run Radarr, Sonarr and SABnzbd all under the same user/group. My reasoning is that I (am just being overly particular) want any of the files created by those services to fall under the same owner/group. This is easy enough to accomplish by running systemctl edit service.service and adding the appropriate lines in the configuration for each one and saving it so the services run using the specified user/group.

The issue that I'm having is that the correlating folders in /var/lib/ have the ownership of the original users. I can manually change that ownership to the user/group I want but if I reboot the computer the SABnzbd folder ownership reverts back to default (the other two were doing the same thing but suddenly stopped and I'm not 100% sure why) or if the services get updated, the folders will also revert back to their default user/group.

Is there a way for me to enforce the ownership of those folders to the user/group that I have set to run the services regardless of them getting updated or the machine rebooting?

in reply to non_burglar

lemmy - Link to source

skizzles

Interesting, was there anything in particular that you did with the services other than editing the service to run as those particular users?

Side note, I just tried to chown the sabnzbd folder and everything inside updated but the main folder itself refuses to change. Even after stopping the service.

Edit: scratch that. I closed and re-opened Dolphin and checked the properties of the folder and now it's showing correctly.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to skizzles

lemmy - Link to source

non_burglar

I just vi the systemd/system/fancyname.service files father than use systemd edit, but I think the result is the same.

There are two configs you can add to the [service] directive:

user=someuser

This should allow you to run the service under the credentials of your choosing.

Remember to systemctl daemon-reload after making changes to unit files.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Which Distribution and Desktop Environment should I use?

Background: I am a lifelong Windows user who is planning to move to Linux in October, once Microsoft drops support for Windows 10. I use a particularly bad laptop (Intel Celeron N3060, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 64 GB eMMC storage).

I do have some degree of terminal experience in Windows, but I would not count on it. If there are defaults that are sensible enough, I'd appreciate it. I can also configure through mouse-based text editors, as long as there is reliable, concise documentation on that app.

So, here's what I want in a distro and desktop environment:
- Easy to install, maintain (graphical installation and, preferably, package management too + auto-updating for non-critical applications)
- Lightwight and snappy (around 800 MB idle RAM usage, 10-16 GB storage usage in a base install)
- Secure (using Wayland, granular GUI-based permission control)

I have narrowed down the distributions and desktop environments that seem promising, but want y'all's opinions on them.

Distributions:
- Linux Mint Xfce: Easy to install, not prone to randomly break (problems: high OOTB storage usage, RAM consumption seems a little too high, kind of outdated packages, not on Wayland yet)
- Fedora: Secure, the main DEs use Wayland (problems: similar to above except for the outdated packages; also hard to install and maintain, from what I have heard)
- antiX Linux (problems: outdated packages, no Wayland)

Desktop Environments:
- Xfce: Lightweight, fast, seems like it'd work how I want (problems: not on Wayland yet, that's it)
- labwc + other Wayland stuff: Lightweight, fast, secure (problems: likely harder to install, especially since I have no Linux terminal experience, cannot configure through a GUI)

In advance, I thank you all for helping me!

I appreciate any help, especially in things like:
- Neofetch screenshots, to showcase idle RAM usage on some DEs
- Experiences with some distributions

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to thatonecoder

lemmy - Link to source

notanapple

Try Fedora LXQT too, it ll default to wayland in the next fedora release (~4th april i think). Its very lightweight.

Fedora LXQt Spin

Fedora LXQt provides a lightweight, well-integrated LXQt desktop environment. In addition to LXQt itself it provides a small, well selected collection of applications like the Falkon browser, which combines Chromium's rendering engine with a nice Qt …
fedoraproject.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

[Solved] How can I free space in BTRFS?

Edit 2: Through all of my shenanigans I ended up on a read-only snapshot for root. The error I got just seemed similar to previous out-of-space errors. I went to a later snapshot as default and everything is working great!

My OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is wonky since I last did a dist-upgrade with about 4000 packages. Midway through it errord out with an error that indicated that the filesystem was full althou df showed plenty of free space.

BTRFS seemed to be the culprit. Removing snapshots let me continue the upgrade until it errored out again. Rinse and repeat until it was done.

Edit: My root subvolume is read only. So there must be some error in that. The other subvolumes work correctly. So I guess it isn't about free space after all.

But now the BTRFS seems to be almost full and I cannot update anymore.

...
Checking for file conflicts: .....................[done]error: can't create transaction lock on /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/.rpm.lock (Read-only file system)                 ( 1/40) Removing: ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.202412[error]Removal of (76899)ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.20241216~git0.a08b2fd_k6.13.7_1-2.2.x86_64(@System) failed:          Error: Subprocess failed. Error: RPM failed: Command exited with status 1.                                      Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i] (a):                      Problem occurred during or after installation or removal of packages:                                           Installation has been aborted as directed.              Please see the above error message for a hint.

I've tried a full balance but that didn't even seem to help. So I suspect that the space is caught up in snapshots, but I can't delete them.
# snapper list

# │ Type   │ Pre # │ Date                             │ User │ Used Space │ Cleanup │ Description           │ Userdata                                               ─────┼────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────┼──────┼────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────                                             0  │ single │       │                                  │ root │            │         │ current               │  1  │ single │       │ Thu 18 Apr 2024 05:58:31 PM CEST │ root │  12.51 GiB │ number  │ first root filesystem │365* │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 04:28:33 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no                                           366  │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:28:09 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no                                           367  │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:36:53 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no
# snapper rm 1

Deleting snapshot failed.
# snapper rm 365

Cannot delete snapshot 365 since it is the currently mounted snapshot.
# btrfs filesystem usage /

Overall:                                                    Device size:                 476.44GiB                  Device allocated:            389.06GiB                  Device unallocated:           87.37GiB                  Device missing:                  0.00B                  Device slack:                  3.50KiB                  Used:                        382.53GiB                  Free (estimated):             90.80GiB      (min: 47.12GiB)                                                     Free (statfs, df):            90.80GiB                  Data ratio:                       1.00                  Metadata ratio:                   2.00                  Global reserve:              512.00MiB      (used: 0.00B)                                                       Multiple profiles:                  no                                                                      Data,single: Size:381.00GiB, Used:377.57GiB (99.10%)       /dev/mapper/cr_root   381.00GiB                                                                              Metadata,DUP: Size:4.00GiB, Used:2.48GiB (61.97%)          /dev/mapper/cr_root     8.00GiB                                                                              System,DUP: Size:32.00MiB, Used:80.00KiB (0.24%)           /dev/mapper/cr_root    64.00MiB                                                                              Unallocated:                                               /dev/mapper/cr_root    87.37GiB
# btrfs qgroup show /

Qgroupid    Referenced    Exclusive   Path              --------    ----------    ---------   ----              0/5           16.00KiB     16.00KiB   <toplevel>        0/256         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @                 0/257         14.25GiB     14.25GiB   @/var             0/258         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/usr/local       0/259         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/srv             0/260         54.32MiB     54.32MiB   @/root            0/261         24.09GiB     24.09GiB   @/opt             0/262        289.02GiB    288.95GiB   @/home            0/263         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/boot/grub2/x86_64-efi                                                   0/264         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/boot/grub2/i386-pc                                                      0/265         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots      0/266         24.00GiB     12.51GiB   @/.snapshots/1/snapshot                                                   0/473         16.00GiB     16.00GiB   @/.snapshots/1/snapshot/swap                                              0/657         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/365/snapshot                                                 0/661         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/366/snapshot                                                 0/662         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/367/snapshot                                                 1/0           36.19GiB     36.12GiB   <0 member qgroups>

Any tips?
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to ikidd

lemmy - Link to source

Xanza

The performance you're dealing with here is in the tens of milliseconds possibly hundreds if you're lucky. Anyone seriously pursuing this issue from the angle of performance genuinely doesn't understand the deep rooted issues here.

If you're so incredibly hard up for compute time that it's critical for you to squeeze out the extra 1/10 of a second from your system utilities then you need to shut your fucking computer down and go touch grass.

I mean even if this saves you 30 seconds a day 50 weeks a year 5 days a week that's 2 hours per year it's saving you.... I'd rather slow fuck the two hours and get an extra 2 hours of pay.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Warning: Gnome file manager (Nautilus) can make remote requests when previewing files

I just found this out recently. So this isn't actually Nautilus itself but it's the file previewer (Gnome Sushi) that comes with it. If you select a file and press the spacebar, it will automatically preview the file if it supported. If the file is an audio file, it will automatically fetch album art from the web, and if the file is an HTML file, it can make third-party requests. IMHO this is a huge privacy issue. For example if you were browsing the web using Tor Browser and saved a page to view offline, and then later accidentally opened it using the file previewer, any third-party requests will leak out the clearnet.

This is an open issue and I don't expect it to be fixed anytime soon, so the easiest solution is to simply uninstall Gnome Sushi (on Fedora, it is the sushi package). On atomic distros if Gnome Sushi is installed as a flatpak you might be able to revoke internet permissions for it using Flatseal, though I have not tested this.

Edit: I'm aware that KDE also has file previewers, but I'm not sure if they have the same issue. If anybody else knows please leave a comment letting us know


Add an option to disable metadata retrieval / make it opt in (#113) · Issues · GNOME / sushi · GitLab

Music album art appears to be pulled from remote locations, without any warning or ability to disable. It could be considered a privacy issue, since it likely requests...
GitLab
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

ActivityPub - Link to source

Is there a way to connect multiple desktops and treat them as one system?

I have some desktops (the tower kind) lying around and I'm wondering if there's a way that I can connect them all to one display and combine their computational power or at least make them all accessible in one place. I want to get into server hosting but only have one monitor. They're currently running LMDE.

Any ideas?

lemmy - Link to source

Those who use DWM, how do you get the autostart scripts to work?

I'm talking about this patch:

dwm.suckless.org/patches/autos…

Now, the notes seem simple: after apply the patch, dwm will look for the autostart script in ~/.dwm/autostart.sh.

But if you read it carefully, the file is:

~/.dwm/autostart.sh &

Wth does a "&" have to do with file name? I tried to just use the normal file: autostart.sh with exec dunst. It doesnt work..

I tried to create in the Thunar this weird file name, "autostop.sh &". The system does not recognize it as sh script anymore. .

Any help is welcome.

dwm - dynamic window manager | suckless.org software that sucks less

dwm.suckless.org
in reply to mazzilius_marsti

lemmy - Link to source

vvv

The & is an indicator to most shells to run this command in "the background". Try and run ( sleep 10; echo hi ) & - you'll see you get your shell prompt back, where you can run more commands, but 10 second later you'll see that 'hi' come through. 'blocking' is the default behavior, if you don't add the & you're still going get the hi in ten seconds, but you don't get a prompt because your shell's execution is blocked until your command is done.

The doc here is indicating that you havea choice between autostart_blocking.sh and autostart.sh, the latter of which would be run with a &. They could have expressed this better.

As for why your script didn't work, I'd try executing it in a terminal to see what error message comes up.

in reply to mazzilius_marsti

lemmy - Link to source

Ferk

But, whichever command I put in autostart.sh will run as if I run in terminal with the & sign. E.g: dunst & to run in the background.


Well, only if it's one single command, if you have multiple commands inside of the script, they will still run sequentially (the next command will only run after the previous one completely closes) unless you add & to them as well.

The difference is that dwm itself will not have to wait for the autostart.sh to complete before launching itself (thanks to it being run in the background with &)

However, autostart_blocking.sh (which isn't run with a &) will stop dwm from fully launching until the script completes.. I guess this is useful if you need certain things to be set up before dwm actually starts.. but it would potentially add a delay on dwm startup.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Gentoo help: sys-kernel/Installkernel

Im following the handbook, and I'm up to configuring the kernel. (In a vm. Skipping the optional installing firmware/microcode for now)

Trying for an OpenRC system, but it looks like all the steps need systemd.

All the videos I watched seems to skip this step and just go to Kernel configuration and compilation, but I dont want to a) mix old videos and up-to-date handbook, and b) blindly copy commands.
I understood mostly everything untill now. Just this kernel step where I got lost the first time I tried to install gentoo.

Configuring the Linux kernel - Gentoo wiki

wiki.gentoo.org
in reply to MidsizedSedan

lemmy - Link to source

bodaciousFern

So if you want to use systemd-boot as the bootloader you have to (apparently) install the systemd-utils package. Or you can just use GRUB / efistub.

Edit: looks like groche beat me to it 😁

It's probably been 4 years since I last had to rebuild my Gentoo, but I would be very surprised if there weren't good OpenRC instructions. I built mine with systemd and Gentoo handbook instructions always felt like 'Are you sure you don't want to use OpenRC? Ok, here are the systemd steps I guess'

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to MidsizedSedan

lemmy - Link to source

mkwt

Within section 2.1 choose only one subsection to follow. Those are all alternative bootloader options.

The bootloader subsection chosen in 2.1 on this page should match what is done in Configuring the Bootloader. The default path on that page is GRUB, which does not require any systemd components.

If following the GRUB path, follow instructions in 2.1.1 and skip the rest of 2.1. This is not at all clear in the handbook.

I believe that sys-kernel/installkernel is a utility script internal to the Gentoo project that can be configured to work with various bootloader solutions, including (optionally) systemd, and that is what this section 2.1 is talking about.

This appears to be an out of order dependency in the handbook

Configuring the bootloader - Gentoo wiki

wiki.gentoo.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Karna

lemmy - Link to source

Peffse

Funny, I just saw an article saying don't get too excited about Linux gaming boosts because apparently Wine doesn't use ntsync yet, and Valve already worked around ntsync by implementing the faster fsync in SteamOS.

Linux kernel 6.14 out late due to 'pure incompetence' - don't get too excited about Linux gaming boosts

Linux kernel 6.14 has arrived today, and a day later than it was expected. As usual there's lots new from supported hardware to various improvements.
Liam Dawe (GamingOnLinux)
in reply to Peffse

lemmy - Link to source

Laser

fsync isn't faster than ntsync, it's merely a workaround to match Linux to Windows synchronization primitives. From ntsync's official description:

It exists because implementation in user-space, using existing tools, cannot match Windows performance while offering accurate semantics.


So without this, you either have a huge perfomance hit in case of an accurate implementation or you have good performance, but might run into edge cases where software doesn't work well or at all because it's not accurate (see github.com/ValveSoftware/Proto… for examples)


fsync issues · Issue #2922 · ValveSoftware/Proton

If you can reproduce a crash or performance regression with Proton 4.11 that consistently goes away with PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1, please post it here.
GitHub
in reply to Peffse

lemmy - Link to source

Laser

I don't think his statement is true though. If reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comm… is not manipulated in any way, games with lots of these calls still get big improvements with ntsync over fsync (about 30% in this particular case, which is a massive boost). So while nobody can rule out that his statement may be true on average or in general, there are still cases where ntsync offers a tangible advantage – be it improved FPS or the fact that the game runs at all.

Edit: in the video that the thread is about, fsync didn't beat ntsync in a single one (or I missed it when jumping through it). In the best one, they were exactly tied. Sure, the difference wasn't really big, but again there are titles not working with fsync.

However, I want to stress that I'm not trying to talk about fsync. It's a good solution that significantly improved performance. But ntsync is, from everything I've seen, almost always better; how much depends on the case, and it never seems to be worse.

Reddit - The heart of the internet

www.reddit.com
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Was anybody else just burned by the Tor Browser flatpak?

And by burned, I mean "realize they have been burning for over a year". I'm referring to a bug in the Tor Browser flatpak that prevented the launcher from updating the actual browser, despite the launcher itself updating every week or so. The fix requires manual intervention, and this was never communicated to users. The browser itself also doesn't alert the user that it is outdated. The only reason I found out today was because the NoScript extension broke due to the browser being so old.

To make matters worse, the outdated version of the browser that I had, differs from the outdated version reported in the Github thread. In other words, if you were hoping that at least everybody affected by the bug would be stuck at the same version (and thus have the same fingerprint), that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is an extreme fingerprinting vulnerability. In fact I checked my fingerprint on multiple websites, and I had a unique fingerprint even with javascript disabled. So in other words, despite following the best privacy and security advice of:

  1. using Tor Browser
  2. disabling javascript
  3. keeping software updated

My online habits have been tracked for over a year. Even if Duckduckgo or Startpage doesn't fingerprint users, Reddit sure does (to detect ban evasions, etc), and we all know 90% of searches lead to Reddit, and that Reddit sells data to Google. So I have been browsing the web for over a year with a false sense of security, all the while most of my browsing was linked to a single identity, and that much data is more than enough to link it to my real identity.

How was I supposed to catch this? Manually check the About page of my browser to make sure the number keeps incrementing? Browse the Github issue tracker before bed? Is all this privacy and security advice actually good, or does it just give people a false sense of security, when in reality the software isn't maintained enough for those recommendations to make a difference? Sorry for the rant, it's just all so tiring.

Edit: I want to clarify that this is not an attack on the lone dev maintaining the Tor Browser flatpak. They mention in the issue that they were fairly busy last year. I just wanted to know how other people handled this issue.

Update: I just noticed that based on this comment, the flatpak was only verified by Tor Project after this particular issue had been fixed. So perhaps I should have waited before installing the flatpak. Sigh...


Older Tor Browsers Breaking, Update Now! | Tor Project

The expiration on March 14 2025 of a root certificate can cause breakages Tor Browser version 13.0 and below. Users should updgrade immediately.
blog.torproject.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Was anybody else just burned by the Tor Browser flatpak?

cross-posted from: futurology.today/post/4000823

And by burned, I mean "realize they have been burning for over a year". I'm referring to a bug in the Tor Browser flatpak that prevented the launcher from updating the actual browser, despite the launcher itself updating every week or so. The fix requires manual intervention, and this was never communicated to users. The browser itself also doesn't alert the user that it is outdated. The only reason I found out today was because the NoScript extension broke due to the browser being so old.

To make matters worse, the outdated version of the browser that I had, differs from the outdated version reported in the Github thread. In other words, if you were hoping that at least everybody affected by the bug would be stuck at the same version (and thus have the same fingerprint), that doesn't seem to be the case.

This is an extreme fingerprinting vulnerability. In fact I checked my fingerprint on multiple websites, and I had a unique fingerprint even with javascript disabled. So in other words, despite following the best privacy and security advice of:

  1. using Tor Browser
  2. disabling javascript
  3. keeping software updated

My online habits have been tracked for over a year. Even if Duckduckgo or Startpage doesn't fingerprint users, Reddit sure does (to detect ban evasions, etc), and we all know 90% of searches lead to Reddit, and that Reddit sells data to Google. So I have been browsing the web for over a year with a false sense of security, all the while most of my browsing was linked to a single identity, and that much data is more than enough to link it to my real identity.

How was I supposed to catch this? Manually check the About page of my browser to make sure the number keeps incrementing? Browse the Github issue tracker before bed? Is all this privacy and security advice actually good, or does it just give people a false sense of security, when in reality the software isn't maintained enough for those recommendations to make a difference? Sorry for the rant, it's just all so tiring.

Edit: I want to clarify that this is not an attack on the lone dev maintaining the Tor Browser flatpak. They mention in the issue that they were fairly busy last year. I just wanted to know how other people handled this issue.


Older Tor Browsers Breaking, Update Now! | Tor Project

The expiration on March 14 2025 of a root certificate can cause breakages Tor Browser version 13.0 and below. Users should updgrade immediately.
blog.torproject.org
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to nikqwxq550

lemmy - Link to source

TheChickenOfDoom

So the notification that is in the browser that directs you to update it wasn't enough? Because that totally works with the flatpak version of tor, because all the flatpak version of tor does is download a copy of the browser to your home directory and run it. There's a little notification dot on the hamburger menu of tor that directs you to the about page where you can download and update.

Because that's what I've been doing.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to TheChickenOfDoom

lemmy - Link to source

nikqwxq550

Afaik the notification was suppressed, see the linked github issue in the post, or this one. I can guarantee the notification wasn't there on my end or else I would have noticed it

Tor Browser (Flatpak) Auto update doesn't work anymore after i think 13.0 update · Issue #721 · torproject/torbrowser-launcher

Before the Tor Browser would just update normally together when a new update dropped and in settings you could fine an update search button said button is now missing in the torbrowser launched by ...
GitHub
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Why do we hate SELinux?

This is not a troll post. I'm genuinely confused as to why SELinux gets so much of hate. I have to say, I feel that it's a fairly robust system. The times when I had issues with it, I created a custom policy in the relevant directory and things were fixed. Maybe a couple of modules here and there at the most. It took me about 15 minutes max to figure out what permissions were being blocked and copy the commands from. Red Hat's guide.

So yeah, why do we hate SELinux?

lemmy - Link to source

(help) How to disable a laptop's internal keyboard on Fedora?

Hey folks, thanks for all of your recommendations for distros a while back. I ended up settling on Fedora KDE, and have been futzing around with it on my old laptop just for funsies.

I've re-encountered an old problem though. The laptop's Caps Lock and F1 keys are busted, sending in dozens of keypresses per second even when unpressed. I solved this on windows with a bit of a headache (using a program to disable those keys), but I have no idea how to solve it in this environment. I've tried futzing with keyd with little success, and my search powers are really failing me here.

Any advice?

lemmy - Link to source

What's the best way to create dedicated devices with Linux?

Let's say I want to build a GPS module for my car, which is only a GPS, doesn't hold anything else.
Or a recipe tablet for my kitchen which only hold a recipe app.

Is this kind of purposes common? What would be the best way to do this kind of stuff? How do I choose the hardware? How do I "lockdown" certain aspects I don't need about software?

These kind of devices could be convenient because, by only holding what's needed, they would use less resources, they would be completely distraction free and they would be suitable to be used by non tech savy user which would need to use only one or two programs without messing with the system in any way.

I know KDE ha some kind of multi app kiosk settings, GNOME also can achieve something similar tho it's more confusing.. There are some kiosk distros which only give you a browser. But I don't see anything that can be set up, customized, and locked like that.

But would that be the best way of achieving something like that? I mean to use a GPS I don't need a terminal, nor video codecs, nor a browser.. Maybe I can add the possibility to send Osmand google maps links.. Or I can decide to make it hold Spotify too to make it a radio as well.. But a full distro would be wasted!

But how do I prevent every other use except the intended ones? Is there an easy way to achieve a "one purpose device" using Linux? Should I simply use whichever distro I like and uninstall everything which is not needed (I see use case for arch)?

I feel like we have the total freedom of Linux distros on one side, and companies using managed devices on the other by setting complicated policies, but I don't know any options in between!

Maybe the focus here is the desktop environment more than distros! Are there desktop environment purposed to give the user a set of limited apps, or a single app (which isn't only a browser)?

in reply to dontblink

lemmy - Link to source

GustavoM

Dietpi user here. I've got a orange pi zero 3 w/ 1GiB of ram serving me nextdns under docker + playing a live stream 24/7 (via yt-dlp/ffplay) and it does its job just nicely.

Lightweight justice for your SBC!

Optimised | Simplified | For everyone - Backed by community, DietPi is a minimal OS image for SBCs - Raspberry Pi, Odroid, PINE64 etc. Install software optimised for you!
DietPi
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to dontblink

lemmy - Link to source

Björn Tantau

Small tangent, I didn't have the energy to read your whole post, so you might have addressed that. But often it's cheaper to go with an established multi purpose device instead of building something new.

I used to build and sell Raspberry Pi gaming handhelds that were as cheap as possible and literally just held together by some string. My purpose was to get enough money through the sales to be able to build one for myself. Sure, the building process was fun. But when I crunched the numbers just buying a cheap smartphone and controller was much cheaper and more performant and versatile than the self-built solution.

Just buying a cheap phone or tablet is often the cheaper solution.

Heck, even Valve just bought off the shelve tablet displays and turned the image in software for the Steam Deck.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Ubuntu explores replacing gnu utils with rust based uutils

At first I was sceptical, but after a few thought, I came to the solution that, if uutils can do the same stuff, is/stays actively maintained and more secure/safe (like memory bugs), this is a good change.

What are your thoughts abouth this?

https://www.cyberciti.biz/linux-news/ubuntu-to-explore-rust-based-uutils-as-potential-gnu-core-utilities-replacement/

in reply to joel_feila

lemmy - Link to source

atzanteol

This is one of the old-time original arguments in the OSS community.

The crux of the matter is that the GNU licenses require that modifications be released back to the community. Other "more permissible" licenses like MIT do not.

So if you want to make a commercial version of X, and X is under a GPL, then any changes you make need to be released under the GPL. The idea being "I shared this code with the community with the intent that you can use it for free and modify it as you like, but you need to share back what you do." Also called "Share and share alike".

This defends against "embrace, extend, extinguish" tactics that companies like Microsoft has loved to do. They can't take your code, modify it for their own purposes and re-sell it possibly making a more popular version that is now proprietary.

lemmy - Link to source

Is there a downside to sticking to iptables over ufw?

In short, sell me on ufw.

I learned recently that yfw is basically replacing iptables "everywhere", and as I'm getting old and crusty, this means that I have to learn something new when I'd much rather practice yelling at kids to get off my lawn.

To me, iptables is fine, and I like its flexibility. I've been using it ever since it de facto replaced ipchains, so ease of use isn'treally a factor in this equation.

So my more pointed question is: Can I just stick to iptables, or am I missing out on something that can only be done with ufw?

in reply to dan

lemmy - Link to source

wvstolzing

I was about to say the same -- and also: nftables syntax is a lot cleaner compared to iptables, and the whole configuration can be loaded from a single file just like pf, without doing the dump/reload cycle that iptables required. Unless UFW does features like defining zones which a user might need (like firewalld), then it's not a huge improvement on bare nftables usability-wise.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

What's with the move to MIT over AGPL for utilities?
I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don't see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It's like they're painting their faces with "here, take my stuff and don't contribute anything back, that's totally fine"
in reply to marauding_gibberish142

lemmy - Link to source

ipkpjersi

For me, my personal projects are generally MIT licensed. I generally don't like "restrictions" on licenses, even if those "restrictions" are requiring others to provide their source and I want as many people to use my projects as possible, I don't like to restrict who uses it, even if it's just small/home businesses who don't want to publish the updated source code. Although, I admit, I'm not a huge fan of large corporations potentially using my code to generate a profit and do evil things with it, but I also think that's not going to be very common versus the amount of use others could get from it by having it using MIT who might not be able to use it otherwise with AGPL.

With that said, though, I have been starting to come around more to AGPL these days.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

ReakDuck

In my Company, we do use such code. But its mainly because we distribute our own Propriatary Linux OS.

We sometimes need to change such code, so we just put it on Github as a fork.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Gnome Customizations - is it possible to use custom image in application view?

Hello all,

If this is not the right community for this question, I would be happy to be redirected elsewhere, so just let me know.

I recently configured my terminal emulator to an aesthetic that I like (custom font, coloring, shell prompt, etc) and it has made me wonder about customization in gnome.

One of the biggest things that I wish I could change in gnome is the grey-ness of the application view.

In this screenshot, you can see the familiar application view. In between the organizing folders, the desktops, and the dock, there is just so much nothing.

I am wondering if it is possible to customize this relatively easily. I would much prefer an image of my own choosing in place of this, or at least a different color from time to time.

Is anyone aware if this is configurable? I can't seem to find an extension for this, or any real information on how you would do such a thing.

Thanks

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

How to have a boring and low-maintenance system?

Those who don't have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?

Context:

I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.

I've had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to really touch anything for a couple of years. I don't need the latest software at all times.

I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.

Do you have any other recommendations?

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to GustavoM

lemmy - Link to source

F04118F

No it is

pandasecurity.com/en/mediacent…

And:

You're allowing for more attack vectors that would not be there if the system were to be patched. Depending on the severity of the vulnerability, this can result in something like crashes or something as bad as remote code execution, which means attackers can essentially do whatever they want with the pwned machine, such as dropping malware and such. If you wanna try this in action, just spin up a old EOL Windows machine and throw a bunch of metasploit payloads at it and see what you can get.

While nothing sensitive may be going to or on the machine (which may seem to be the case but rarely is the case), this acts as an initial foothold in your environment and can be used as a jumpbox of sorts for the attacker to enumerate the rest of your network.


And:

Not having vulnerability fixes that are already public. Once a patch/update is released, it inherently exposes to a wider audience that a vulnerability exists (assuming we’re only talking about security updates). That then sets a target on all devices running that software that they are vulnerable until updated.

There’s a reason after windows Patch Tuesday there is Exploit Wednesday.

Yes, a computer with vulnerabilities can allow access to others on the network. That’s what it means to step through a network. If computer A is compromised, computer B doesn’t know that so it will still have the same permissions as pre-compromise. If computer A was allowed admin access to computer B, now there are 2 compromised computers.


From reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/com…


The consequences of not applying patches

Many recent cyberincidents in have shared one characteristic: they have been possible thanks to a vulnerability in an IT system that needed patches.
Panda Security (Panda Security Mediacenter)
in reply to F04118F

lemmy - Link to source

GustavoM

Nice cherry picking/moving the goalpost, but that is not how refuting works. A PC at NASA has a much higher "threat level" than my Orange pi zero 3, just chilling on the background. Which means, a potential "security hole" may prove harmful for these pcs... but it'll definitely not hurt me in the slightest.

And before you parrot with other links and/or excuses... yes, I'm not negating their existence. I'm just saying they are there... but, well... "who cares"? If anything, its much faster to set up my distro back up "just like never happened before" than performing any "maintenance" whatsoever. Again, "Common sense antivirus" reigns supreme here -- know what you are doing, and none of these things will matter.

in reply to GustavoM

lemmy - Link to source

F04118F

You keep using the word "maintenance". All I'm worried about is not installing any security patches for months.

The problem that I tried to highlight with my "cherry picking" is:

  • Running a machine with open vulnerabilities for which patches exist also "paints a target on your back": even if your data is worthless, you are essentially offering free cloud compute.
  • But mostly, a single compromised machine can be an entrypoint towards your entire home network.

So unless you have separated this Orange Pi into its own VLAN or done some other advanced router magic, the Orange Pi can reach, and thus more easily attack all your other devices on the network.

Unless you treat your entire home network as untrusted and have everything shut off on the computers where you do keep private data, the Orange Pi will still be a security risk to your entire home network, regardless of what can be found on the little machine itself.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to truthfultemporarily

lemmy - Link to source

d00phy

This really is the answer. The more services you add, the more of your attention they will require. Granted, for most services already integrated into the distro’s repo, the added admin overhead will likely be minimal, but it can add up. That’s not to say the admin overhead can’t be addressed. That’s why scripting and crons, among some other utilities, exist!

lemmy - Link to source

Thinking on switching to linux

Approaching the end of window 10 and have no plans on upgrading to 11.

I am trying to find alternatives to applications I regularly use before jumping ship (it is mostly a gaming focused pc) any suggestions?

There’s oculus software for my vr but don’t know what I’m going to do with that

Small update: probably going to do Linux mint as that appears to be the most beginner friendly

Update two: that's a lot of comments, and Thanks for all the info

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to MonkeMischief

lemmy - Link to source

DFX4509B

I'd recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.

Also, at least for DOS games where you don't have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.

Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris' favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it's always downloaded from scratch.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to DFX4509B

lemmy - Link to source

MonkeMischief

Hey, points for Lutris! Thanks for sharing!

I've had issues in the past installing stuff with Lutris, although for advanced scenarios like using community engines and stuff, that's really cool. I definitely have both installed on my machine for different reasons. Lutris handles EA / Origin stuff pretty well. (Titanfall 2 and Sims 2 Ultimate (not the Steam one) run beautifully on Linux, truly glorious!)

Electron annoys me as well, but I will say that I appreciate how Heroic hooks into GoG APIs.
It handles auto-updates, cloud saving, play time logging, that kinda stuff that made Galaxy decent and had a degree of convenience-parity with Steam.

(Maybe Lutris does this too now?)

For a complete newbie , I'd say Heroic has a bit of a smoother and expected ramp to just "Download game and run." But if you want more control, Lutris definitely has more options!

I also can't recommend Bottles enough for other games that aren't from distribution platforms. Shockingly simple.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Emtity_13

lemmy - Link to source

deadcade

  • AMD Drivers: Good news! They work even better on Linux. Bad news, you're probably referring to the AMD "control panel" type application instead of the drivers themselves, which doesn't have a direct equivalent. The drivers should come pre-installed, though depening on distro you may need to select/install "radv" or "vulkan-radeon" manually. Most of the control panel functionality can be found in other applications, like OBS for recording or CoreCtrl for clock speeds.
  • Chrome: Although Firefox is pre-installed in most cases, you have full freedom of choice here. Most people find that Firefox works basically the same after using it for a bit, but if it doesn't fit you, there's other options. Google Chrome is most likely available in your distros app store, but there's also less "spying" options like ungoogled-chromium.
  • Gmail: You can access this on the website, or through a mail client like thunderbird. You can switch if you want to, you're not limited by any means here.
  • Office 360: Though LibreOffice is a great alternative, some find themselves forced to use MS office for compatibility reasons. This is still possible, buy only in a webbrowser.
  • ITunes: This is a hard one to find alternatives for, depending on what you use it for. For managing iPhones from a PC, you essentially need Windows or macOS. For playing music, there's plenty of options.
  • JBL: I'm unsure as I don't use any of their products, but assuming you mean audio related "control panels", there's many options available. Though they may need a bit of tweaking and searching around to get things to sound the way you want.
  • Musescore: I also don't use this, but it's available on Flathub, meaning you can (and probably should) use your distros "App Store" to install this.
  • Norton AV: Not many AVs targeting Linux exist, and they're not the greatest quality. Though it's doable to go without one, as long as you don't download and run random files off the internet. Stick to the app store, and you should be totally fine.
  • PyCharm: This is available on Linux, also in the "app store". There's other IDEs available too, like vscode.
  • Remote Desktop to iOS: I haven't owned an iOS device since 2019, so I don't know which protocol they use. It's possible this isn't supported at all.
  • Star Citizen: It looks like this is playable through Proton. You can use Steam (add non-steam game), Lutris, or Bottles to launch non-steam Windows apps/games.
  • Steam: Works great
  • VPN: As you didn't put a previous VPN provider here, I'm not able to tell you if it works on Linux. Personally I have a hard time recommending any VPN service, but Mullvad stands out as being the least untrustworthy. Almost all others like Nord, Express, etc. share some common traits that make them very untrustworthy to me.
  • Windows Games: This is a bit more complicated. Games from the Microsoft Store are very unlikely to run, and require messing about to even try in the first place. Other games made for Windows likely work (even outside Steam), using management tools like Lutris or Bottles is often easier than manually using Wine.

If a tool (or distro) works well for you, it's a good option. Everyone has different opinions on the "best" distro, but since it's very subjective, there is no single "best" distro. There's only 2 distros I recommend against, that's Ubuntu (and close spin-offs) and Manjaro, because they have major objective downsides compared to equivalents like Mint or Endeavour. The distros I generally recommend to new users are Mint and Fedora, but feel free to look around, you're not forced to pick a specific one.

You noted you were likely going to choose Linux Mint, great! It's a "stable" distro, as in, it doesn't change much with small updates. Instead, new release versions (23, 24, 25, etc) come with new changes. Linux Mint comes with an App Store that can install from Flathub, which should be the first place to check for installing new applications.

As for VR, it depends heavily on which exact headset you have, and is not always a great experience on Linux right now (speaking from experience with an Index). The LVRA wiki is a great starting place: lvra.gitlab.io/. If you're on a Quest, WiVRN and ALVR exist, though they both have their own downsides. If you're on a PCVR headset from Oculus, your options are more limited. You might also want to consider a different distro, as VR development is moving very fast. Many VR users choose to go with a "harder" rolling release distribution, like EndeavourOS, to receive feature updates quicker.

Also of note, if you have the storage space, you can choose to "dual boot" (even with just one drive). This will give you a menu to choose between Windows and Linux when starting your computer, and will give you time to move stuff over. I generally recommend this, as it provides an option to immediately do a task you know how to do on Windows, when it's absolutely required to do the task asap.

Home

Welcome to the LVRA Wiki # A collection of links, useful resources and guides for the amazing world of VR on Linux. Feel free to contribute to this wiki yourself if you find anything useful that you might want to share with others.
Linux VR Adventures Wiki

lemmy - Link to source

Has anyone else questioned their choice of computers for running Linux?

3 years ago I needed a new computer and decided on an 16 inch M1 Macbook Pro, but did lots of overthinking about if I wanted to stick to it. I tried Asahi Linux didn't have any reasons at the time to use linux over macOS (but there was always the chance I might later), the build quality is 2nd to none, none of my Windows laptops lasted more than a few years.

3 years later, I've really been itching to switch to Linux. Two of several reasons: because its DEs are more customizable, it has better documented accessibility APIs if you want to make keyboard navigation software. I reinstalled Asahi Linux and really tried to make it my daily driver, but the lacks of apps would require me to dual boot: Photoshop and Roblox.

I researching again for computers closest to Macbook Pros but none of them come close to its build quality. I think it would be best for me to make my own desktop PC for linux. I don't think I'd fare well with another windows laptop brand.

in reply to TheTwelveYearOld

lemmy - Link to source

Kazumara

9 years and 4 months ago I bought an Acer laptop with a 4 core Intel Skylake with hyperthreading (i7-6700HQ) and a Nvidia GTX 960M, because the laptop I had was slow for compiling in my classes at Uni, and I wanted a discrete GPU for the occasional game when away from my Desktop PC (winter break and such (still use it for that btw)). I regretted that three times:

  • First when I wanted to install Linux instead of just using VMs. In early 2016 the kernels on live system ISOs didn't properly support Skylake yet, so I fucked around with Arch a bunch, but didn't end up keeping it installed. Don't remember why, probably got busy with schoolwork.
  • Then a while later, after I had installed Ubuntu or Fedora at some point, the next issue was that cooperative mode of Bluetooth and Wifi on the included Intel wireless chip wasn't well supported (even found an Intel Bluetooth dev saying as much on a mailing list), and it hung sometimes, so I had to make a script to turn the chip off and then rescan the PCI bus, that worked as a workaround but was still annoying.
  • Finally when we had Machine Learning classes I thought I might be able to use CUDA locally, so I tried installing the proprietary Nvidia driver and was greeted by a black screen on the next boot. Had to boot from a live system and chroot in to remove the proprietary crap again.

On my Desktop PC I have used AMD GPUs for quite a while and dual booting Windows and Linux has always been a breeze.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to TheTwelveYearOld

lemmy - Link to source

LiveLM

To be fair, your issue seems more to be software based than hardware.
I should warn you that even if you do get a x86 laptop, Photoshop is rather janky under Wine and Roblox could find a way to kill the Vinegar client in the future.
I'd recommend you borrow a friend's machine and give it a spin, you might unfortunately not be off the dual-booting hook just yet...
This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

EU push for open source, GIMP3 is out, Firefox gets webapps back_ Linux & Open Source News

EU push for open source, GIMP3 is out, Firefox gets webapps back_ Linux & Open Source News

Try out Proton Mail, the secure email that protects your privacy: https://proton.me/mail/TheLinuxEXP Grab a brand new laptop or desktop running Linux: https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en# https://ww...
PeerTube.wtf

lemmy - Link to source

Looking for a "set it and forget it" distro

Hi all,
Relatively long time Linux user (2017 to be precise), and about two 3rds of that time has been on Arch and its derivatives.

Been running Endeavour OS for at least 2.5 years now. It's a solid distro until it's not. I'd go for months without a single issue then an update comes out of nowhere and just ruins everything to either no return, or just causes me to chase after a fix for hours, and sometimes days. I'm kinda getting tired of this trend of sudden and uncalled for issues.

It's like a hammer drops on you without you seeing it. I wish they were smaller issues, no, they're always major. Most of the time I'd just reinstall, and I hate that. It's so much work for me.

I set things the way I like them and then they're ruined, and the hunt begins. I have been wanting to switch for a long time, and I honestly have even been looking into some of those immutable distros (that's how much I don't want to be fixing my system.

I'm tired, I just want to use my system to get work done). I was also told that Nobara is really good (is it? Never tried it). My only hold back — and it's probably silly to some of you— is the AUR. I love it.

It's the most convenient thing ever, and possibly the main reason why I have stuck with Arch and its kids. Everything is there.

So, what do y'all recommend? I was once told by some kind soul to use an immutable distro and setup "distrobox" on it if I wanted the AUR.

I've never tried this "distrobox" thing (I can research it, no problem). I also game here and there and would like to squeeze as much performance as I can out of my PC (all AMD, BTW, and I only play single player games).

So, I don't know what to do. I need y'all's suggestions, please. I'll aggregate all of the suggestions and go through them and (hopefully) come up with something good for my sanity. Please suggest anything you think fits my situation. I don't care, I will 100% appreciate every single suggestion and look into it.

I'm planning to take it slow on the switch, and do a lot of research before switching. Unless my system shits the bed more than now then I don't know. I currently can't upgrade my system, as I wouldn't be able to log in after the update. It just fails to log in.

I had to restore a 10 days old snapshot to be able to get back into my damn desktop. I have already copied my whole home directory into another drive I have on my PC, so if shit hits the fan, I'll at least have my data. Help a tired brother out, please ❤. Thank you so much in advance.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Custom refresh rate on KDE wayland
I'm running KDE wayland with proprietary Nvidia drivers on CachyOS, so far I haven't found a way to set a custom monitor refresh rate, on windows I could use the Nvidia control panel to make one (going from 60hz to 75hz). kscreen-doctor doesn't let you set "unsupported" modes, the kernel launch option of video=1920x1080@75 didn't work, somehow. So how would I do it?
in reply to levzzz

lemmy - Link to source

MentalEdge

That is what xrandr allows you to do on X11, create and set display modes that aren't reported by the monitor.

EDID editing is basically replacing the data reported by the monitor, which also allows you to add display modes it doesn't report itself. This is the only way to do what you are looking for on wayland.

You can either switch to X11, and use xrandr, or create an EDID file with the display mode you want, and have it load on boot. Doing that is unfortunately not simple.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)

lemmy - Link to source

Krita is so KOOL, but how do i Verify the current AppImage?

don't know if this is of any help to anyone except maybe past me, but i had a hard time finding the correct Public Key to verify the current Krita AppImage: So what finally worked was gpg --import this Public Key here files.kde.org/krita/dmitry_kaz… and gpg --verify krita-5.2.9-x86_64.AppImage.sig then gpg says Good signature (fingerprint: E9FB 29E7 4ADE ACC5 E303 5B8A B69E B4CF 7468 332F). Anyway (>' v ')> here is a drawing i made using my laptops wonky touchpad.

KOOL
Cool Drawing!!!
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
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