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The Affinity Suite is great, but I’m suspicious of its acquisition by Canva—I’m afraid their solution to “bringing the suite to Linux” will be turning it into a web service.
Basically the forced shift to the enshittified Windows 11 in october has me eyeing the fence a lot. But all I know about Linux is 1: it's a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that's apparently not true any more? Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me, though I'm pretty much a fairly casual PC-user, I don't do much more than play games. So I wrote down some questions I had about Linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Your questions will have different answers depending on which flavour of Linux you choose.
A good chunk of windows programs can be run using a program called “WINE”. WINE is just a command line program but you can get a GUI version easily.
Updates depend on your flavour but Debian based Linux (like Ubuntu) you just type “sudo apt get update” and then “sudo apt get upgrade” and bam everything is updated. No restart required.
If a program doesn’t work in Linux there can be workarounds or alternatives but that really depends on what program you are talking about.
You can play almost every game that exists on steam on Linux with the exception of games that have kernel level anti cheat like some competitive multiplayer games.
You’re arguably safer security-wise on Linux. Most people are on windows so that’s the majority of all viruses. Your security updates are included in system updates. No antivirus required.
I have never heard of Linux damaging hardware. I don’t think you need to worry about this.
Recommendation: get Bazzite. It’s a special type of Linux that is closest to a windows experience than anything else. It won’t let you do dumb things and mess up your install. It has all NVIDIA drivers preinstalled as well as gamepad drivers and everything you’d need for gaming (including dock support). It’s a no configuration needed OS. Linux on easy mode. You don’t even need to use the command line ever. Updates and apps are installed through the Linux equivalent of the Microsoft App Store (except this time it is great and doesn’t suck). And I say this as someone who only used windows until 15 years ago I messed around with Ubuntu and other Debian based Linux distributions.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows? Not significantly as long as you are on the right distro for it. Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows? no. mod managers can work but its definitely not as easy. If you use steam workshop it works great usually, but something like vortex is gonna be a pain in the ass. If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds? You can run windows programs with wine. It's not that difficult to do. Its how games work on Linux that dont have linux support. Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries? Usually you can get it to work. I have run across some specific programs for my job that simply wont work with wine, but they barely work on windows as it is. It may need fiddling with tho. How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has? Sometimes. It depends on the distro. Mint has an updater where you click update and ur done basically. Others you go in and do a terminal command which changes by package manager. For like OS version jumps if your not on a rolling release distro then it can be a bit of a bigger job. I recently updated my computer from Debian Bookworm to Debian Trixie. I went into the sources replaced bookworm with trixie, and ran the full upgrade command. Then rebooted and had to ctl alt f4 into terminal nuke gnome and reinstall that. Which is expected in that case. It can be a bit techy at times for something like that but for a normal update on a distro with a GUI updater its a button click. Usually no reboot needed either.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself? Dont download shit you shouldnt download. If your not sure if something has a virus or not you can get tools to scan for them, but windows is similar in that your main protection is just not doing something dumb. You can keep regular backups and if somehow you mess something up or get a virus just restore from it. PikaBackup works well.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
AMD is flawless usually. Nvidia i dont use but hear it can be more of a hassle. With AMD the drivers will come preinstalled with your distro usually. Some do Nvidia too some dont. There is an open source and proprietary nvidia driver you have to pick which one you want. Id research it for your specific card.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware? No more than windows can. If you try to overclock without proper cooling or something for example. Thats BIOS stuff usually tho not an OS thing.
And also, what distro might be best for me? Maybe Nobara since you like gaming? Or Linux Mint its beginner friendly.
A lot of great questions. I think many details are already out there but I'll try to answer some to my best ability.
Answering the easier questions: Most games work check protondb.com for your specific games. There is a "Linux update" button on some popular mainstream linux distros - and it will never force you! Its also possible to update without rebooting for most updates (how great right?) No antivirus needed and it's more secure (but of course not invulnerable!)
Some of the other questions have a "It depends..up until a point" answers.
There are work arounds for non Linux programs....except for specific examples like some games. Valorant for example.
I'm not a modder or .NET expert but there's something called Wine which should help with that ...so answer is probably Yes-with caveats.
I'd recommend thinking about what are you "must work" deal breakers for work/hobbies (more specific than these more general questions) and considering if linux is for you. The distros that might work for you are Pop OS! and Linux Mint.
The neat thing is you can try these for free and hop around. I dual booted windows and Linux for a while before making the full time switch.
On the GPU thing. NVIDIA: stable but need to do some work to install.
AMD: don't need to do anything.
And also, you are highly unlikely to damage your hardware through misconfiguration. Imagine if it was easy to do that, I doubt Linux would be used for servers powering the Internet and phones around the world if that were the case
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
No. Thanks to Steam Deck, most popular windows games also work on Linux. See protondb.com/ for a complete list of 18,000 titles.. Someone already mentioned that kernel level anti-cheat is the big, obvious blocker.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
~~Im guessing that most moders target Windows users therefore, don't think mods would be AS easy. Not saying modding wouldn't exist or work at all.~~ Edit: see sp3ctr4l's reply to this comment. They know more than me
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
There are workarounds. Linux has some great alternative software to popular paid stuff. See LibreOffice or Krita.
There are also more advanced options to run Windows apps under Linux, see Wine or Virtual Machines
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Yes. Similar to the above answer/ similar to aforementioned Proton. For .NET specifically, there is a Linux runtime.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
This can depend a lot on what distribution you're running, but definitely, there are ones with easy buttons for whole-system updates.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
It's different and probably overall better than windows. Most distros are much better out of the box than windows.
Open source is ususually a security advantage because (long story short) security mistakes can be caught by more people.
I don't have a good answer for you on anti virus. I am very privacy and security conscious and I dont use one on linux. My personal opinion is that you don't need one and shouldn't need one if you're not downloading sketch stuff.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Totally. GPU drivers are much, much better than they used to be.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Theoretically. You would have to try really hard, but for normal use, no. More likely, you could lose data or access to the system if you misconfigure stuff (just like with Windows)
Distro recommendations. My personal opinions, don't flame me. * Bazzite. hard to mess up, gamer focused, super simple updates, and targeted support for gamer hardware. Feels like a cross between steam deck and windows. Less support for tinkering but if you never want to touch the terminal, this is my choice.
Pop!OS. Simplified Linux with great driver and steam support with easy updates. More tinkering support than Bazzite
Linux Mint. Easy to start on but more traditional back-end. Much more support (forum posts) than the previous two. A lot of what works on Debian or Ubuntu works the same on Mint, so you'll be able to do all kinds of fiddling
Limo is a universal mod manager that is linux native.
And I do mean universal. It'll work with literally any game, you just have to take a bit of extra time to configure things for games that do not yet have a supported preset configuration out of the box... but at this point, that includes most games that are generally reliant on some kind of mod manager type program on Windows, to keep track of 10s or 100s of simultaneous mods.
It works very much along the same lines as something like Mod Organizer 2, though there are some differences, read the wiki.
It sets up a virtual file system that allows mods to be set up outside of the main game directory itself, and will override them such that the mods actually load, but they can be 'undeployed' to revert back to vanilla, you can set up different profiles of different mod configurations and deploy/undeploy what you like.
It can also manage load orders, supports formats such as fomod and similar for games like Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, you can set up tags and category groupings, and it also shows you conflicts between mods down to the specific files, showing you a chain of overwrites to the final file from the final loaded mod.
~~It doesn't support things like LOOT, which purport to autogenerate correct load orders... but frankly, thats fine, because shit like that doesn't even work properly in situations you'd use it in on Windows 90% of the time.~~
EDIT: Wow, apparently it does support LOOT now, it did not a few updates ago.
...
I have successfully gotten FONV working using Limo to set up uh... there's a variant of the Viva New Vegas mod setup guide aimed at Steam Deck users, but it tells you to set up Mod Organizer 2 on the Deck... which you can do, but its rather input laggy and there are other inconveniences...
I had to alter a few steps from this to get it working with Limo, but they were basically just... set up Limo instead of MO2, and you have to handle NVSE a bit differently, because it literally replaces/overrides the entire main game exe.
...
I have also used Limo to mod Cyberpunk 2077, works with more in depth frameworks like CET, RedExt, etc, as well as using the Decky Framegen plugin to insert FSR 3.1 Upscaling and Framegen into CP77, which gives better quality and fps than the official FSR 2 and 3 implementations that come with the vanilla game and are vanilla supported on a Deck.
You basically just have to launch the vanilla game via the normal launcher first, check the 'enable mods' switch, fully load the game...
Then you can set up the Framegen mod, which adds a custom command in steam to the launch parameters... and then you can also setup the 'skip intro' mod, which is reliant on both the mod being present, as well as additional command line parameters...
There are a bunch of reddit posts complaining that the FrameGen mod doesn't allow other additional launch arguments, but they are wrong.
All you have to do is append those additional launch args ... at the end of the FrameGen mod's launch arg. This just doesn't seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, by anyone... I may have been the first person to figure this out?
Anyway, after that bit of silliness, setting up other mods for CP 77 using Limo is fairly straightforward.
...
... I am doing all this on Bazzite on a Deck, but you could do it on... presumably any linux distro that supports flatpaks and proton (the translation layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux).
There will always be a few 'weird' mods that are just totally reliant on a whole bunch of Windows specific things to work, or just cannot be made to work without actually overwriting some core game files in the main, real directory itself...
And, some of these mods will require a windows component dependency, like vc_2017 or vc_2022, you set those up with something like ProtonTricks or SteamTinkerLaunch to modify the proton config per game, instead of trying to install the exe system wide as 99% of the windows oriented mods will tell you to do...
But so far, I have found either my own solutions for these cases, or someone else already has, or someone has just made basically a linux compatible equivalent for such a windows reliant mod.
... You can also just choose to run MO2 on Linux, it will work, its just... buggy, and overlycomplicated, imo, you've got to set up a custom wineprefix for the MO2 UI to not do dumbshit, give it thr dependencies it needs, and then you've got to do this for each different game you want to mod with MO2.
I found that Limo is sufficiently capable and much less hassle to use once you take the time to understand its differences from MO2.
EDIT:
Also, for anti virus, ClamAV exists. I... think it is literally the only AV for linux?
Ooh, Limo has a Flatpak? Nice. I'm running Bazzite on my laptop and have been wanting to play FNV for the first time but I've got it on Epic through Heroic Launcher. I'm guessing the file paths will be different but it should otherwise mod more or less the same as you said, I'll have to try it. What kind of weird stuff did you have to do to get NVSE working?
The are plenty answers already, but also I will respond in order to give you more opinions, so, you can have a more open view about what users do think about linux.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Yes. In windows you put the .exe in some folder and then double click to play it, easy. Nowadays games come with a client, like Rockstar Social Club, or the Ubisoft launcher that handles your account and manages game updates. In linux, even if you had only the .exe you still had to make an uncertain number of tweaks to achieve running the game, but, with the clients, you need to do both, find the correct tweaks to run the client and do the correct tweaks to run the game next. Even with modern solutions, like Proton, we strugle with games running in Linux. See there are no silver bullets.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
If you find trouble modding games on Windows, you also will have a bad time in linux.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
You can use WINE to give it a shot. There is a probability that works very well. But, like games, you will need to make tweaks to work properly. I had this problem with Rufus, there is not linux version, so you can run it with WINE, the problem is that Rufus under WINE doesn't reconogize your usb pendrives. Till this day I do not know how to fix that.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Thankfully we have dotnet core now, the thing is that the library or software must have been compiled with it to work in linux. There is also Mono.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
If you use a distro, like Linux Mint, there will be a job that will check for updates and then warn you. Normally, updates are done manuallly (sudo apt-get update, for example). The other thing is doing your own update script job that runs automatically weekly or monthly.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
This is a computers knowledge concern, most linux distribution have this disabled by default. Your resposability as linux administrator is set up your own security metrics. I use fail2ban, ufw, clamav and openssh. Very basic, if you ask me.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
With AMD hell yes. But, since I have never used Nvidia before my answer here could not be the most valuable, empirically speaking.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
The most probably thing that can happen to you is break your boot system. Hardware will be fine and you can always reinstall Linux/Windows with its default boot.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
As you want to play games, and, I do imagine that you also want linux as you main PC, I would recommend Linux Mint to start, all the documentation avaible for debian easily apply for Linux Mint, I mean, if you can't find some specific solution in the Linux Mint documentation.
My last two cents are the next ones: if you can, use windows just to play things and use linux for everything else. It works for me and may work with you. Cheers.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
If you play competitive multiplayer online games, yes. Otherwise, no.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
Depends on how you mod games. But probably yes. The NexusMods app is newly available for Linux but with very minimal support at this point.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
It depends. Sometimes you can run them through WINE/Bottles. The main place you may run into problems is in peripherals.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Through WINE/Proton, yes.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
Depends on your distro. I use Bazzite and updates take place seamlessly in the background so you don't need to do anything.
How does digital security work on Linux?
Kind of a vague question. Keep in mind pretty much every server on the planet runs Linux, including incredibly sensitive ones.
Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?
Quite the opposite.
Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Every modern OS has antivirus built in, and third party solutions should be avoided like the plague.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
As long as you're not using Nvidia.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Not anymore than any other OS can.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
That is an eternal argument in the space. There are 2 recommendations that come up most often for beginners: Linux Mint and Pop!_OS. Although I don't like either of those visually, so I can heartily recommend Bazzite for beginners. I won't go into too many details as to why but it comes with lots of goodies and configurations "out of the box" that enhance and simplify the experience, especially for gamers.
All your concerns are valid and Linux handles all these well except:
If you play competitive games with kernel anti cheat it will simply not work on Linux courtesy of the game developers.
Linux is fully capable of running the game and the anti cheat but the game developers restrict it. Notable games are cod, fortnite, apex legends.
A notable competitive game that works on Linux is cs2 although you won't be able to run 3rd party anti cheat like FACEIT as far as I know.
You can use the proton site to tell you how many of your games on your steam library are playable on Linux.
I'm on my 8th month or so using Linux to game and I've had no issues, most popular games will work. Most niche games use very simple tech like SDL and will just work.
Wine essentially creates a fake windows environment and handles a lot of internal API calls by kind of redirecting them to existing Linux services, so a lot of windows stuff will just work.
As for security. You realize most of the Internet runs on Linux ? Practically the majority of the internet is hosted on Linux machines.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
It will be affected, but not significantly. Almost every Windows game works well on Linux. The notable exceptions are games that use anticheat software. They can detect that they are running in Linux and generally disallow it.
Many games perform better in Linux. A few perform worse. The vast majority perform exactly the same.
If you run games through Steam, everything should just work. You might need to enable the option “Enable Steam Play for all titles” in the settings. Honestly, if a game has a Linux version, I usually set the compatibility option in Steam to use Proton instead, because it just works, really well.
If you run other games, I recommend using Heroic Launcher for the game stores it supports, and Lutris for anything else. (Oh, and Prism Launcher if you play Minecraft.)
Something to note is that Windows games run through a compatibility layer called Proton, which is based on Wine. You can kind of use the terms Proton and Wine interchangeably, because Proton is just Wine + some enhancements for games. To the game’s perspective, it’s just running in Windows and making Windows system calls. Proton translates those calls to Linux system calls. It doesn’t emulate anything though, it just provides a Windows compatible API.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
Maybe. Probably. If it’s running in Proton, then mods should work fine. You may need to add some launch parameters in Steam to load the mods first. You’ll also need to figure out the “Wine prefix” of the game to install the mod. The prefix is just the directory that Proton presents to the game as the C: drive, so it’s like having a specific drive for each game.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
This depends. Most programs will run through Wine. You can use Lutris to install them. I do this to run WinSCP on Linux. Some programs (notably, Adobe Creative Suite) don’t work with Wine. It’s usually better to find a Linux native alternative instead, but this isn’t always an option, so it’s nice to have some Wine once in a while. ;)
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Yes. Steam, Heroic, and Lutris will automatically install them for you.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
OS upgrades are a lot easier in Linux. There’s one program that updates all your system software and apps at once. On Gnome, it’s Gnome Software, and on KDE, it’s Discover. This is also where you go to install apps. Don’t ever download anything from a website to install it (with the exception of Windows installers that you will be installing with Wine), just find it in these apps. It’s safer.
System software is installed through the package manager. Apps can be installed through Flatpak to make it easier.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Security is generally better than Windows. Most Linux users don’t bother with antivirus for two reasons, viruses are really uncommon in Linux, and software isn’t installed from random websites, but package managers instead. A lot of things in Linux, like Flatpaks, are run in a sandbox too, so access controls are granular and permission based.
That being said, if you’re installing Windows software with Wine, then you’re at risk of installing a Windows virus on your Linux machine. Just like most Windows programs work well in Linux through Wine, most Windows viruses work well in Linux through Wine.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Very. If you’re using an Nvidia GPU, install the Nvidia driver through your package manager. If you’re using anything else, they’re already installed.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Probably not. Technically, yes, but it’s extremely unlikely and isn’t something you should worry about. Windows can too, btw.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
Fedora, Mint, or Pop OS should be your starting points. Steer clear of Ubuntu. Ubuntu used to be very user friendly, but lately it’s been atrocious. Fedora has always been awesome, and it’s very user friendly. Same with Mint.
More importantly, what desktop environment should you use. Fedora Workstation offers both Gnome and KDE, the two big ones. Either one will work great for you, but KDE is more similar to a Windows layout by default. Mint uses Cinnamon, which is very user friendly and similar to a Windows layout. Pop OS uses Cosmic, which is new, and in development. It’s promising though.
Some final thoughts I want to share with you:
Linux uses a Unix like file structure, so you don’t have drive letters. Instead, you have a root file system, and other file systems are mounted within it. Your root file system is just a slash /. It’s like your C: drive. Directories are separated by forward slashes, not backslashes. Not something you should worry about, just something to know.
Linux is a diverse field of operating systems, and some work very differently than others. They range from super easy and approachable, to wildly difficult to learn. Some are specialized for gaming, like Bazzite, while others are general purpose, like the ones I mentioned above. Technically, “Linux” is just the kernel, like “NT” on Windows, but most people mean a complete operating system when they say Linux.
You should learn about the difference between Wayland and X11. Just some basic overview of them. You don’t really need to know, but it might be worth it. Basically, Wayland is new and more secure, X11 is old and less secure. Wayland can run X11 apps just fine, so it really shouldn’t matter to you. Wayland is also the default nowadays.
You probably won’t need to use the terminal, but if you do, don’t be scared of it. It’s just a way to launch programs that generally don’t have a UI.
Lastly, Linux is free and easy to install, so don’t be afraid to try out a bunch of different distros and desktop environments and see which works best for you. Once you find one you like, you can always switch to something else in the future if it stops working for what you need. Also, backup early and often. I use Pika Backup. It’ll help if you forget to grab something before you reformat your drive.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
It depends on how often you play games with aggressive anti cheat, or games on non-steam platforms. Games like Valorant and Fortnite probably won't work at all. But I do a ton of non-competative multiplayer (and single player) gaming that is not inhibited at all.
Heroic launcher is your best bet for non-steam platforms (GoG, Epic, Amazon), and lutris/bottles should probably be your 3rd option (I've used both for battle.net). But steam games running through proton should "just work".
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
The actual modding should be arguably more accessible. You technically have control over the entire kernel, so nothing is going to stop you from doing whatever you want. The only problem you may run into is if you're dependent on modding tools that were only made for windows. Some of those tools are basically spyware anyway (ex. Curse), and often times the open source community has made its own alternative you should be using instead.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
YMMV. Valve has done a lot of heavy lifting to get proton to be a one-stop-shop for running windows games on Linux but you can add a program as a non-steam game, launch it through steam, and it often just works.
Wine is your other option. Sometimes the community has gotten windows apps running reliably in wine or proton, other times no one has ever tried it or it's too much of a headache to get working. protondb.com has user reports for how various games run.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
The short version is yes. The long version is the same as the previous answer.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
Most distros come with some form of package manager that works similarly to an app store on your phone (an app store is basically a package manager with purchases). Ideally, everything you want to run can be installed through the distro's package manager, and then you use the package manager to update everything. But sometimes the software doesn't exist in the package manager, and you have to download, run, update, and sometimes even build from source, your own programs. Those programs usually have a guide on the best way to run it on popular distros.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
It is actually more secure due to being open source. Source code can be audited by anyone rather than relying on "security by obscurity". There are antivirus programs, but I don't know much about them. Generally, don't run programs from shady sources, don't expose your machine to the open internet, and don't run everything as root and you should be fine.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Yes, though historically AMD has better support for the newer features asked for by Linux compositors (namely Wayland). Nvidia's drivers are still not fully open source, but otherwise work fine. Driver bugs are rare in my experience.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
To the same extent that windows can, yes. But if your concern is YOU misconfiguring something to cause Linux to do that, you shouldn't have to worry about it. It is unlikely you will be interfacing directly with the kernel at all. Most distros configure the kernel in some specific way they want and you never worry about it. And still, a proper kernel-level driver should ensure that it will never send commands that could damage something, even if the config vars are incorrect.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
First off, install Ventoy to a USB drive. Then take advantage of Linux's ability to "live boot" by downloading several .iso's for several different distros onto the USB. Then boot off the USB, and you should be presented with a handy menu of ISOs to pick from. This will make trying out a bunch of different options really easy, without actually installing anything to your hard drive.
I'd say try grabbing mint, fedora, Pop!Os, and opensuse to start. Maybe also try Zorin. These are all geared toward new Linux users.
People have answered most questions. The gaming thing is a total lie though.
Some specific games will work kinda okay. The vast majority will work worse. And a good chunk of super popular games won’t work at all. Just dual boot and keep gaming on windows.
People in here straight up lie to push for Linux when it’s really not necessary. It’s great at what it does. And it’s improving in what it doesn’t.
What are you talking about? Out of the 248 games in my Steam library, 190 of them are rated as working on Linux (Steam Deck Verified and Steam Deck Playable). 21 of them are untested, which means only 37 of them are rated as unplayable. Of those most are unplayable because they’re either VR games or they have restrictive anticheat. Some of them, like Medium, say they’re unplayable but work fine for me. I’m assuming that’s because the Steam Deck isn’t powerful enough to play Medium at more than 15 fps, but on my PC, it runs around 100 fps. Others, like GTA V, say they’re unplayable, even though I’ve fully played through them with no issue, even on the Steam Deck. I’m guessing that’s because GTA Online has anticheat, but I’ve played the single player and online and both have worked fine for me. (I just looked it up. They added BattleEye to GTA Online late last year, so yeah, GTA V is rated unplayable, even though the Story Mode is fully playable.)
I’ve even gotten games that refuse to work on Windows (like the original American Mcgee’s Alice and the original Journeyman Project) running great in Linux.
After running through a few of the untested games, some of them are untested, even though they have native Linux ports that run just fine. I’m assuming that’s because they haven’t been tested specifically on the Steam Deck.
Other than the ones with restrictive anticheat, everything I’ve tried from my Epic Games library works great too.
Of the games I play, almost none of them have worked worse on Linux than they do on Windows. Most work exactly the same, and a few work better. One (exactly one) has worked worse, for about a month, then a new version of Proton fixed the missing cutscenes.
Note here, a lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix.
It runs x11, the wayland port is going insanely slow, x11 has the following problems every time:
Every single app can read all of your keyboard input without asking
Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
That would've been true 5 years ago. Wayland is plenty tested these days, give me some data indicating the rate of issues is significantly higher and I'll agree, elsewise I think the most secure well supported option is the best one. X11 is being deprecated left and right for a reason.
gnome is wayland by default, kde is wayland by default, even XFCE is transitioning to wayland at this point... that's just not a valid argument in the modern era.
I thought you were referring to having to install ancient drivers that are no longer properly supported, that is still a problem on x.org, but if we use nouveau, the problems go away for the most part.
it appears the only real issue with nvidia drivers from back then on wayland is accelerated xwayland according to the arch wiki. I don't think we shouldn't be recommending wayland because over 10 year old gpus have a relatively minor issue but still work.
Sure, if you have ancient hardware, I actually recommend XFCE, but outside of this one niche case, it's not wise to be recommending it.
And it still is. Being expected to use slightly different software when you're using a 10+ year old hardware setup is not weird. Furthermore, this is an issue with the nvidia driver support, which is proprietary, the open source drivers have no such problems. And again, this will be nearly completely solved once steam/proton stop needing xwayland.
We shouldn't be recommending things for a tiny niche, we should be recommending what's best on average, and as we learn about the specific needs of a user, then recommend things specifically for that user.
...you mean western countries where nvidia gpu's are the most common?
If we're including beginners in developing countries this is even less common of an issue, when I was in india, not a single person I helped with tech had a graphics card, why would they have a 470 series in an and not an integrated system? It's not even the cheapest choice.
i mean, look at these stats, it's such a minority it's hardly worth mention. And by the way, if they're not using steam/proton... they probably aren't using xwayland anyway so this doesn't apply to them in the first place.
compare that to the list on the hardware survey and you'll see how unbelievably rare this problem actually is. They don't even make the list, it's less than a 1% issue.
My source is a survey with thousands of respondants, your source is dude just trust me. It's a fact, you can cover your ears and go lalala but it changes nothing
…you mean western countries where nvidia gpu’s are the most common?
If we’re including beginners in developing countries this is even less common of an issue, when I was in india, not a single person I helped with tech had a graphics card, why would they have a 470xx series driver gpu and not an integrated system? It’s not even the cheapest choice. I recently built a PC in india, coincidentally, and we ended up going with an integrated system for a gaming PC.
i mean, look at these stats, it’s such a minority it’s hardly worth mention. You’ll probably say “these are just the steam stats, most of them aren’t on steam anyway!” But if they’re not using steam/proton… they almost definitely aren’t using xwayland anyway so the issues don’t apply to them in the first place.
compare that to the list on the hardware survey and you’ll see how unbelievably rare this problem actually is. They don’t even make the list, it’s less than a 1% issue.
I disagree. Obviously the most ideal solution would be the have immutable Mint, but beginners need stability more than they do immutability. I've used mint and my only issue with Mint was that I didn't like how it looked. I'm currently on Bazzite and these are the issues I've ran into:
Every time I start Firefox it asks to be made into the default browser. Even if I click yes it will still ask again next time I start Firefox.
When using the default audio sometimes the audio signal to my monitor cuts off which means I no audio comes from the speakers. If I tell the system to send the audio to my other monitor and back to the one I have hooked on the speakers then it instantly works again. It's almost like the system forgets it has to send out audio. I don't remember what I did to fix it but it definitely wasn't beginner friendly.
Sometimes one of the monitors freezes and only one. The second monitor keeps working just fine. So far haven't found a permanent solution for this issue.
There have also been some minor artifacting that I personally don't consider an issue but someone else might.
Overall I can put up with the issues because I've pretty much conceded that I'm going to have issues. But I don't think new users should be using a system where they're going to run into problems they're most likely not equipped to fix. That why I recommend Mint to newcomers because all the fancy bells and whistles don't matter if the system doesn't work. Mint doesn't have bells and whistles, but it just works.
Here's the problem: what you just did can be done with literally any distro. There are anecdotal stories of every single distro on earth being broken. Even non-linux distros, windows and macos have such stories.
Do you have any actual statistical evidence that fedora works less often than mint?
I've given it to quite a few people and nobody has had any issues. There are anecdotal stories of literally every single distro failing for somebody, them going to another distro and it just working.
"UPDATE 2: Ok, Fedora seems waaaay more stable than Ubuntu (and Mint). No strangeness like before…"
less up to date software is a double edged sword, if you don't have statistics I don't think you can really make the claim that mint just works when fedora/bazzite don't.
Then there's the things that are objectively broken in mint for everyone until cinnamon properly supports wayland:
Every single app can read your keyboard input without asking
Every single app can see what every single other app is doing without asking
Apps can fullscreen themselves and go over everything else, because they can control their own window placement to any degree they want, again, without asking.
HDR
mixed refresh rate and dpi display configurations.
Simple, it was the best choice for a long time and hasn't done anything to piss people off.
it's no longer the best choice but mint people are still happy so they still recommend it even though it is objectively the wrong choice to start with for a beginner.
Back then ubuntu had pretty much all of linux cornered, the vast majority of distros were ubuntu based or ubuntu adjacent, and ubuntu was beloved, however, it came with a number of flaws, mint just rectified those flaws and was otherwise basically just ubuntu.
By being ubuntu based and getting rid of the stuff that made people angry, you ended up with a highly supported, beloved distro. These days things have changed, however, fedora is just as if not more well supported than ubuntu, same with arch based distros.
The only reason Mint is suggested to beginners is because it's "a highly supported, beloved distro"? A reason that has very little to do with beginners?
That does NOT have very little to do with beginners, being a highly supported distro is one of the most important things for beginners, having guides for how to do things written specifically for your distro is fantastic for new people.
It being beloved is why it's recommended, yes, and that doesn't benefit new people, but that's an obvious reason why one might recommend it...
There's also the fact that it's designed to be easy to use, but that also applies to fedora, and fedora is significantly more well-developed, so it's not really relevant here.
That does NOT have very little to do with beginners, being a highly supported distro is one of the most important things for beginners
Beingly highly supported is a prerequisite to being a good beginner distro, but it's not a reason to recommend a distro. If we take it as a reason then Mint having a GUI is also a reason to recommend to beginners.
having guides for how to do things written specifically for your distro is fantastic for new people.
This is where we're going to completely disagree. Guides in general are good, but I doubt any beginner actually cares about guides, unless it's a guide telling you what to click where on the GUI. A good beginner distro has to work for the user without the need of any guides.
It being beloved is why it's recommended, yes, and that doesn't benefit new people, but that's an obvious reason why one might recommend it...
Instead of playing the prying game where I keep prying until you give straight answers (because people don't love Mint just because it's an Ubuntu fork) I'm just going to conclude that either you deliberately don't want to say why people recommend Mint to beginners or you actually don't know why people recommend Mint. I don't care which it is because both invalidate your opinion of the Mint suggestion being outdated.
There's also the fact that it's designed to be easy to use, but that also applies to fedora, and fedora is significantly more well-developed, so it's not really relevant here.
Somehow you think the ease of use isn't relevant because it also applies to Fedora, but support is relevant despite it also applying to Fedora? How about some consistency in your arguments.
Beingly highly supported is a prerequisite to being a good beginner distro, but it’s not a reason to recommend a distro. If we take it as a reason then Mint having a GUI is also a reason to recommend to beginners.
Mint having a GUI IS a good reason to recommend it to beginners... Arch for example has terrible GUI support, which is why it's not a good choice for beginners (don't get me started on manjaro...)
Guides in general are good, but I doubt any beginner actually cares about guides, unless it’s a guide telling you what to click where on the GUI.
This is simply not true, i've given linux to countless people, people always google how to do things and end up with guides for a different distro, i've seen this happen countless times because I specialize in giving beginners linux. They absolutely do care about this, and it's extremely commonly cited as one of the reasons to go with mint.
Instead of playing the prying game where I keep prying until you give straight answers (because people don’t love Mint just because it’s an Ubuntu fork) I’m just going to conclude that either you deliberately don’t want to say why people recommend Mint to beginners or you actually don’t know why people recommend Mint. I don’t care which it is because both invalidate your opinion of the Mint suggestion being outdated.
I think it's a bad recommendation mainly made for legacy reasons rather than current ones, that was very clear. Give me reasons it's a good one, I used to use mint, I gave plenty of reasons for why it's a bad choice.
Somehow you think the ease of use isn’t relevant because it also applies to Fedora, but support is relevant despite it also applying to Fedora? How about some consistency in your arguments.
Are you deliberately misinterpreting me? Are you actually trolling here?
My point was obvious, fedora and mint are both equally easy to use, so, ease of use is not a factor when deciding between them... in fact, fedora is EASIER to use (flatpak meaning completely gui updates, kde being hugely standardized and well-developed), so, if it is a factor, it makes fedora a better choice than mint.
It's obvious that ease of use is a massive factor for recommending a distro to a beginner, it's just that ease of use doesn't favor mint.
Specializes in giving beginners Linux, can't name a single good reason why people recommend Mint to beginners (now or in the past), except for it having a GUI and guides. I don't know about the beginners you're "helping" but based on this conversation I wouldn't trust a single recommendation, suggestion or opinion from you.
You were also unable to. Sorry, it's just not a good choice. And I gave legitimate reasons for why it was great in the past, you just didn't like them!
Mint focuses on stability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it's base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more stable and reliable.
And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there's a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more stable. I'm the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very stable, extremely stable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.
Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.
And the reason people recommend Mint is in those first two points. Mint deliberately sacrifices fancy bells and whistles to be as stable as possible. You not knowing that shows how little you know about Mint.
Mint focuses on stability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it’s base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more stable and reliable.
Stability is essential for industry applications, but is actually TERRIBLE for beginners, especially ones that want to game. I could go into the reasons why, but I doubt you care. I don't agree that this is a selling point for beginners in the first place, which is why I didn't mention it. Stability does not mean "does not crash" in a linux context, it means UNCHANGING. Extremely old software is not good for beginners who want things to just work.
And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there’s a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more stable. I’m the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very stable, extremely stable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.
Give me evidence that there are more issues with wayland than X11 and i'll believe you.
Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.
Bazzite fixes this and is why I recommend it over fedora kinoite. Irrelevant point, not actually true.
And the reason people recommend Mint is in those first two points. Mint deliberately sacrifices fancy bells and whistles to be as stable as possible. You not knowing that shows how little you know about Mint.
Okay, this has turned into a complete waste of time. It's impossible to talk to a person who makes up their own definition for words and demands proof of something most of the Linux community is in agreement. You're the Linux equivalent of a flat earther.
Or, the fact that the same term is understood in two different and sometimes conflicting ways may indicate that the term is not an ideal one in the first place.
I'm sorry that English is not my first language and I'm not aware of the subtle difference in meaning you're after, but really all you've proven is that you're a pedantic little troll who understood what I said and still chose to be obtuse about it. Another example how of this discussion is a waste of time.
...but that still means everything I said is correct and you were a jerk to me for being correct, no?
is it my fault you don't know these things and instead of having a learning attitude, you say I have no idea what I'm talking about and am a flat earther when you don't even know what defines a stable distro?
even if I use your uninformed definition it's still wrong... there is no evidence fedora crashes more than mint, or is less reliable...
Mint focuses on ~~stability~~ reliability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it’s base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more reliable.
And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there’s a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more ~~stable~~ reliable. I’m the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very ~~stable~~ reliable, extremely ~~stable~~ reliable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.
Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.
Mint focuses on stability reliability as evident from its decision to use Ubuntu LTS versions as it’s base. In case I need to spell it out, LTS versions are generally more reliable.
This is false, they're just less likely to change. They can crash more frequently.
And you brought up X11 as a negative, but there’s a good reason Mint is staying on X11. Yes, Wayland is the future and eventually Mint will adopt Wayland as well, when Wayland becomes more stable reliable. I’m the mean time Mint stays on X11 because X11 is very stable reliable, extremely stable reliable compared to Wayland if you have an Nvidia card.
There's no evidence that X11 is less reliable than wayland, and the reason mint stays on x11 has NOTHING to do with this, and everything to do with cinnamon not yet supporting it...
Mint also has better out the box support. For example to my knowledge for Nvidia Fedora comes with Nouvuea drivers which means for gaming you need to go through an extra process to get proprietary drivers. Mint has out the box support for Nvidia drivers. This is less of a thing when compared to Bazzite, but still a reason why to pick Mint as a beginner distro.
This is still false, stable distros have worse support out of the box because they use an older kernel version and the kernel ships the drivers.
That set of fixes still left everything being wrong or unsupported by any evidence.
and the reason mint stays on x11 has NOTHING to do with this
source?
stable distros have worse support out of the box because they use an older kernel version and the kernel ships the drivers.
At this point I don't even know what that means because maybe you have some other weird definition to pull out of your ass. Give me that in 5th grader level.
lts kernels should not be used with newer hardware... because they don't have modern software support, anyone that uses modern hardware risks being unable to boot with them. I shouldn't have said crashes but the issues are numerous.
The second thing doesn't require a source, they don't have the manpower to implement it in cinnamon, look at the github pulse: github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/…
wiki.debian.org/Wayland debian, notorious for being the most stable distro by far already uses it by default...
At this point I don't even know what that means because maybe you have some other weird definition to pull out of your ass. Give me that in 5th grader level.
i have only used industry standard terminology and what I said is straightforward... kernel has drivers, old kernel no has new drivers, new drivers needed for hardware support, lts kernel old.
A Linux desktop featuring a traditional layout, built from modern technology and introducing brand new innovative features. - Pulse · linuxmint/cinnamon
lts kernels should not be used with newer hardware… because they don’t have modern software support, anyone that uses modern hardware risks being unable to boot with them. I shouldn’t have said crashes but the issues are numerous.
So you don't have stats you have anecdotal evidence.
The second thing doesn’t require a source, they don’t have the manpower to implement it in cinnamon, look at the github pulse: github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon/…
wiki.debian.org/Wayland debian, notorious for being the most stable distro by far already uses it by default…
For Gnome. You've been pretty much talking about KDE (unless you're now magically going to do a 180 and start saying how Windows users would have a better time learning GNOME), which if you bothered to actually check what you're saying would have noticed the
however you are recommended to read the detailed wiki section for KDE on Wayland, especially if you are using an NVIDIA GPU.
Clearly implying you should expect running into issues.
i have only used industry standard terminology and what I said is straightforward…
Somehow the things you say are straight-forward seem to be nothing but.
kernel has drivers, old kernel no has new drivers, new drivers needed for hardware support, lts kernel old.
In theory. Except in practice we're not talking about kernels that are 5+ years old. Latest Mint version is running on Ubuntu Noble which is using Kernel version 6.8 which supports all the latest CPU-s and GPU-s. Just because it's not using the very latest kernel version doesn't mean it's not capable of supporting the latest hardware.
A Linux desktop featuring a traditional layout, built from modern technology and introducing brand new innovative features. - Pulse · linuxmint/cinnamon
So you don’t have stats you have anecdotal evidence.
Actually, these are appeals to authority, a major distro is telling you not to use LTS kernel versions... people who y'know, have stats
"Recently we have had a number of issues with hardware regressions on the LTS kernels, rendering systems with newer hardware unbootable."
Directly from the source of a major distro... I don't think you actually read my sources.
It clearly requires a source because Cinnamon 6.0 has Wayland as an experimental support and Mint team has said they are planning to eventually move to Wayland[5].
that's exactly what i've said... nothing i've said contradicts that, just that it's going to take forever for that to get good. Gnome and KDE already have full proper support and have for ages. Cinnamon will take FOREVER.
Clearly implying you should expect running into issues.
The hilarity of this is that those issues are BECAUSE of their choice to be insanely stable... modern KDE versions have minimal such issues.
In theory. Except in practice we’re not talking about kernels that are 5+ years old. Latest Mint version is running on Ubuntu Noble which is using Kernel version 6.8 which supports all the latest CPU-s and GPU-s. Just because it’s not using the very latest kernel version doesn’t mean it’s not capable of supporting the latest hardware.
And maybe it supports the hardware, but there are performance and instability issues that can't or haven't been backported... honestly, don't you think all stable distros would only be using LTS kernels if there weren't issues with them?
I agree I honestly don't like immutable distro's at all because you can't install packages the way everyone else does: via package managers. You either have to use the gui software center and if that doesn't have to app your looking for you have to use distrobox or box buddy which still doesn't work half the time. That's just been my experience with bazzite as a person fairly knew to linux.
I agree I honestly don’t like immutable distro’s at all because you can’t install packages the way everyone else does: via package managers.
this is false, rpm-ostree exists and works for this exactly. There's nothing you can't do on bazzite that you can do on a non-immutable distro.
Even if that wasn't true... package management is just done through flatpak, it's just an abstraction layer, I don't see why that would be important to you at all, and comes with numerous benefits:
You cannot break your system with these, ever.
Significantly less burden on package maintainers
You can have many versions of software installed
These applications are sandboxed and thus more secure.
This enables complete graphical management of software, no longer requiring the terminal.
It not having packages you may need applies to any package management solution, other distros do not package everything either. In fact, the distro with the most packages is an immutable one, nixos.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Isn't .NET open source and cross platform now? Isn't there an official Linux runtime? Or is it just the most basic subset of .NET without any of the GUI libraries or other things Windows .NET apps routinely depend on?
There are differences. Most modern apps use .NET Core, which in itself is cross platform. Most of the time, they use a UI framework that is be cross platform as well (AvaloniaUI).
Of course newer apps and older apps made with .Net-Framework that may use Windows specific libraries (eg. System.Windows.Forms, System.Drawing) and lose their cross platform compatibility. They might work with Wine.
just get an extra ssd, install mint or pop (or both on separate partitions) and try
there is a learning curve, and there's always new stuff, more depth, but imo the above two are fairly easy to understand. pop is more osx-like both in looks but also, it's somewhat locked down, which can feel limiting but it keeps things simple. i've been using it in the last few years daily. i was using mint before that, i started daily driving linux with it, but i managed to mess it up enough that every game was struggling to run lol, but i played hl:alyx on there without an issue for example
nvidia doesn't make the best linux drivers, but some think they are completely unusable but actually it just means that there are some games that are glitchy or slow, for instance forza horizon runs better on my steam deck than my rtx 2080. although recently it went from 20-30 fps to 30-40, so it will get better at some point edit: actually, the above was last week, there were some updates and it's a sputtery 60 fps now
next build will have an amd card for sure, but nvidia is mostly usable too. the "anti-cheat" blockade is more frustrating imo
Imagine an OS for the software developer, maker and computer science professional who uses their computer as a tool to discover and create. Welcome to Pop!_OS
But all I know about Linux is 1: it's a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills and 2: that's apparently not true any more?
It is indeed not true anymore. In the year 2025 Linux is easier to use than Windows, and even not too tech savvy 60-year-olds manage just fine. Though you should know 'Linux' is not an operating system. When saying 'Linux', people most often refer to it as a family of operating systems. Many of which are incredibly user friendly and ready out of the box. And many of which aren't.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Short answer: no. Long answer: only for a handful of online games, e.g. League. If using Steam, there's virtually nothing you have to do. Epic and GOG are easy to use, but theough third party launchers. Other storefronts/launchers are harder to set up, but all of them work. It should be noted Steam is the only platform with official Linux support. Here is a database of Steam games with info on Linux and Steam Deck compatibility.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
Depends on the game. Overall definitely not 'as freely and as easily' as on Windows. For Steam Workshop games, it works just as it does on Windows. For the rest sometimes you need to do a little work, sometimes a lot. Bethesda titles seem to be the most problematic on Linux when it comes to modding.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Most of the time it is fairly straightforward and works nicely. Some are particularly difficult to get working on Linux, e.g. MS Office, so you might as well forget that.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Yes. There is software specifically for compatibility with Windows' libraries. While .NET framework you can simply install like you would on Windows. This is in fact needed in order to mod some games.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
As mentioned at the start, Linux isn't a single OS, so it highly depends on the specific distribution (OS from the Linux family, in simple terms). Usually you just go to your app store and click on updates. Of course, there are other ways of updating the system and the choice is yours.
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Linux is extremely more secure than Windows. The whole 'open source leads to vulnerability' is a myth. There are antiviruses for Linux, but nobody uses them. There is barely any malware targetting Linux, and when you encounter it, most of the time you'll have to mess up and run it yourself giving it permissions. There are also more security-focused Linux distributions.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Nvidia: not really. AMD and Intel: yes, incredibly reliable. For AMD and Intel you don't need any additional drivers, other than the generic drivers that come with the OS. They work perfectly and you can play games right away. For Nvidia you would have to go through the not-so-pleasant process of installing their drivers.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
No. This sounds like something somebody who's never used Linux would say on Reddit. While technically it is possible, just as it is possible on Windows, this is not something you will likely encounter at any point.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
Personally I'd go with Fedora. It's very easy to use. It looks nice too, kind of like MacOS. By default, that is, since you always have complete freedom to customize how your system looks. My gf, who doesn't know what a Shift key is, is able to use Fedora just fine. For both gaming and web browsing. This is how simple Linux has gotten in the last years.
Most people will probably recommend Linux Mint. Another great choice for beginners. The UI/UX is very similar to that of Windows. Personally it's not my favorite, but it's up to user preference. You definitely can't go wrong with it.
There is also Pop!_OS, which is similar to Fedora. However, it does include an ISO for systems with Nvidia GPUs, so you don't have to go through the trouble of installing the drivers.
I'd highly recommend trying one of these. If you like any of them, then just stick to it, and you'll have a great experience.
I wont reply point by point because others have already done a fantastic job at that.
Install virtualbox, get some linux images from mint, bazzite or what ever other distro you might want or was recomended and install them as VMs in windows.
Set up a list of things in 3 tiers:
must have functionalities/workflows (crucial functionality)
nice to have (important to have)
optional (can live without)
Then in the installed VMs, test out this list, something like "can I change the volume per app, can I change the audio device per app" or what ever is important to you, according to your list.
This way you can test out if its for you or not, you wouldn't even have to leave windows for it.
One thing regarding gaming, as I game quite a bit too - games with intrusive anticheats dont work, most of everything else works with steam proton. Check potondb.com for your games, you will see what works and what not.
1: it’s a cantankerous beast that can smell your fear and lack of computer skills
This can either be true, or not true. It depends on which distro you go with, IMO. There are linux distros specifically designed for new user experiences, and then there are "basic" distros which don't do unnecessary hand-holding for those who are used to the *nix desktop experience.
Making the change has slowly become a more real possibility for me
There has never been a better time to try linux.
I’m pretty much a fairly casual PC-user
If you do light computing, then linux is the best case scenario for you. You won't be changing much about the OS, so not much can go wrong. I installed linux for my 65 year old mother 12 years ago or so, and it's never had an issue. So frankly, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
As with all things when it comes to linux, it depends. Some of my favorite games have anti-cheat which has no linux client, so therefore even if you can get the game to work in theory, it won't function because no anti-cheat.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
You would be hard pressed to find something which is windows only these days, but even if you do there are virtualization options like WINE or bottles which simulate a windows environment for the application and force it to run under linux anyways.
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a “Linux Update” program like what Windows has?
Generally, most people use the command line for updating the system itself, but a lot of distributions come with a "Microsoft Store" type application to give you a GUI to update your OS and applications.
How does digital security work on Linux?
Linux works off a multi-user environment which lends security to the OS. You have a root user, which is your super administrative user, and then normal user accounts which can be added as "administrators" which can then run commands and edit files/settings which are reserved for administrative accounts.
Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?
The security is stronger because we know what's in it. Security through obscurity is generally frowned upon, even by NIST.
Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Generally no, but there still are anti-virus available, like ClamWin.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
My heart says yes, but my fingers won't let me type it.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
It's technically possible, but you would have to meet a laundry list of conditions for that to happen.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
New users seem to really like Mint. But it's exceptionally easy to test different distributions, even directly under Windows using Hyper-V. Test a few out and see if you like em.
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Depends. Single player games are basically a non-issue. Multiplayer games however? The major anti-cheat systems support linux but it's up to the Devs. They can (and many do) disable support for it regardless if it runs well on linux.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
I'm not going to say "yes", because modding can be dodgy, but in my experience I have never had any difference.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Could you narrow it down to some programs? The only answer here is "It depends".
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Depends on the framework, but .NET is open source and supported on Linux
How does digital security work on Linux? Is it more vulnerable due to being open source? Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Ehhhhhh.....yes but no. OpenSource does mean you loose security through obscurity. But it also means you have a large community of people auditing the code for said vulnerabilities. The decentralized nature of the Linux ecosystem also means bugs can be fixed faster.
Ultimately it doesn't matter. The same rules apply as Windows. Keep your system updated, don't be an idiot, and you've solved most security issues.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
AMD? Generally yes.
NVIDIA? .....better than it was a few years ago. Best to ask around about your specific model
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Theoretically but that's true of all software (including windows). You'll be fine, don't sweat this.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
You click the "Update" button in your Distros "App Store" (it's not an app store but....essentially the same thing) or type in the upgrade command into a Command Line. Then you walk away for a few minutes, brew a cuppa, comment on the weather, and then get back to it. Occasionally you might need to restart but it's not too common.
Now....there's a lot more complexity here that I almost wrote up, but for someone new? This is all you need to know.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
"Just tell me what to use": That would be Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It's simple, it has everything you'll want, it looks nice.
If you want some other options that are popular with beginners you can look at:
Ubuntu
Kubuntu
PopOS!
ZorinOS
Watch some videos on them and decide which one looks like the one you would like to use. Just focus on the UI because that's the only real important thing you'd need to worry about right now. You can go into the more advanced options when you have a good foundation.
I'm a newcomer to Linux (only about a year in), but here's what I've got so far:
Will my ability to play games be significantly affected compared to Windows?
Mine wasn't at all. Valve has done a lot of work to make this seamless so that more games can be played on the Steam Deck. Check the Proton DB to see what your games look like.
Can I mod games as freely and as easily as I do on Windows?
I have very little experience with this, but probably. Linux users tend to be tinkerers.
If a program has no Linux version, is it unusable, or are there workarounds?
Can Linux run programs that rely on frameworks like .NET or other Windows-specific libraries?
Same answer for both: There's Wine, and a whole bunch of setup scripts that can get even stuff like Adobe Creative Suite working with it. Worst case scenario, there's VirtualBox for the one or two apps you might need to run Windows for. But I find that the open source options, while they might have a learning curve, tend to be substantially better than either of those options.
How do OS updates work in Linux? Is there a "Linux Update" program like what Windows has?
More or less, but you can pick and choose what updates you want to install and when. Most distros have a package manager that'll let you update the kernel, the drivers, the middleware, the desktop environment, all your apps, and even the package manager itself on your schedule, from one interface. You can also just ignore it and never update anything, though I wouldn't recommend that.
How does digital security work on Linux?
Very well. It's much more locked-down by default, for one thing.
Is it more vulnerable due to being open source?
Quite the opposite. Open source projects are well known for being less vulnerable out of the box; Linux in particular is used by huge companies as a lightweight server OS, so it has a lot of highly-paid people committing security fixes back down to the open source project.
Is there integrated antivirus software, or will I have to source that myself?
Antivirus is a bandaid on Windows, provided because the OS was written with certain naive assumptions that let attackers get access they shouldn't have. On Linux, those assumptions were not made. No application can be installed without your root password, for instance; downloaded files can't even be executed without specifically making them executable; and access to edit system files is restricted by a very robust permissions system.
All of that, plus Linux's much lower market share, also means that no malware authors are really wasting their time trying to write Linux malware. The attack vector just isn't worth the extra effort.
So no, there's no integrated antivirus; but for most users in most situations, it's not needed at all.
Are GPU drivers reliable on Linux?
Your mileage may vary significantly, but anecdotally it seems like most architectures from AMD and Nvidia have good support.
Can Linux (in the case of a misconfiguration or serious failure) potentially damage hardware?
Maybe, but like with Windows, I assume you have to really go out of your way to do so.
And also, what distro might be best for me?
I've only used Ubuntu and Mint. Mint has so far been the easiest and most user-friendly of the two. It's also regularly touted as the best for newcomers.
I tried running a 2nd instance of Roblox simultaneously on macos 15 with another account but this shows up, if my mac can handle it then why can't it just let me do it? If I have two copies of an app like Roblox in separate User/Applications folders, macos moves them to the /Applications/ folder.
Sometimes it won't run apps claiming to be corrupted, so I then have to do sudo xattr -cr /Applications/someapp.app in the terminal and they run perfectly fine. It always nags me if I download apps from anywhere but mac app store. Some of these messages can only be gotten rid of by disabling system integrity protection, but then macos blocks you from running MAS apps due to having "permissive security".
I don't daily drive macOS anymore, I switched to Linux on my M1 mac where I can do whatever the hell I want.
NGL that smiley face from Finder looks so condescending lmao. My wife's laptop is a Mac and it's hilarious every time how it shows up so often. Like Clippy from Word lol.
Honestly, instead of playing shitty clones of games made with child labor through roblox, just play the original games they're cloning.
Couple of weeks ago I was at a friends place for dinner and the son was playing Roblox. Everyone in the room except him knew he was playing a WoW clone. His dad even told him, "you know I'll buy you a subscription if you wanna play the real game instead of a shitty clone"
Don't play Roblox. Its just cheap imitations made with child labor.
You don't know how the known behavior that takes advantage of everyone, in a game popular with and marketed towards children, is taking advantage of children?
They’re taking advantage of everyone with their shitty “dev exchange rates”
Also, it’s a bit light to say that they’re stricly saying taking advantage of people because only because of their fees.
I'm honestly not sure what you're trying to say. I didn't say the transfer fees were the only way they were taking advantage of people, I just wanted to use the thing you already admitted was predatory and use it to give an example of how roblox is taking advantage of children.
Yea sure I understand, but I just think that saying "taking advantage of children" implies something way more evil in my head than just having something predatory for everyone. Like something being waaaaay more evil when done on children, an so I don't really agree that we could say this example is enough to state that roblox takes advantage of children
There are many different signals the OS sends to applications which are kinda like "Can you kill yourself?" or "Please kill yourself" or "I will kill you" to close it. In computer teminology, there is "close", "terminate" and "kill" types of signals. These are used so that applications can have time to perform closing tasks (like saving) when neceassary and if they misbehave, just "kill" it.
Now both windows and linux have these types of signals. In fact every OS has it.
I beleive this is the reason this meme exists: When the user tries to shut a app in windows (throught close button or task manager) windows will wait and not give any option to immediately kill the app. Hence some apps don't close even after using end task. Only if the app freezes for some time will it give the option for force quit, ~~no other way~~ (edit: it exists). In linux, its the same as windows and limux waits for app to close. But the difference is that option to kill is available anytime in linux and basically gives the user full control. Although kill option in linux may be hidden as a way for users not to use it unless necassary as applications may not like it.
Shutdown process of both OS is same, they wait for all apps to shut by semding "please close" signal and if they misbehave, option to "shutdown anyways" will be shown to the user, basically killing all apps.
The meme is not correct and is just a steorotype of different OSes. This steorotype comes from how people normally experinece different OS culture and practices. Both OSes have same process of managing apps. Both OSes will wait for process to close if it freezes and give option to user to force quit. SIGKILL in the meme is coreect only for the right panel of the meme and the left panel is actually a SIGTERM (or something else which means "please close", don't remember)
The only thing the meme should emphasis is how the user is given full control to do in linux (even deleting the kernel) while windows is careful to not let users do something stupid.
Edit: Killing apps in windows can be done on demand through cmd using taskkill command
Happy Easter holidays! we made fruitful use of this time to provide you a nice surprise.
The independent, community controlled distribution OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 fixed point release (as opposed to the rolling release branch), is out right now.
Happy Easter holidays! we made fruitful use of this time to provide you a nice surprise. The independent, community controlled distribution OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 fixed point release (as opposed to the…
Mandriva is gone, but there's a couple of projects carrying its legacy. OpenMandriva is one of them, obviously. Mandrake was my first distro too, so I have a soft spot for it.
From my perspective, OpenMandriva's biggest strengths are that it's independent, non-derivative, community driven, and based in Europe. Unfortunately it's also small, but the people behind it seemingly do a lot with very little, so the community is passionate about the project.
Personally I'm just happy that there are smaller, non-corporate distros still out there providing alternatives. And OMLx seems like a pretty solid distro at that.
I first started using Manjaro after being on Debian/Ubuntu derivatives for years. Mint used to be my daily driver, then LMDE for a while. After struggling with Endeavour OS, through 2 or 3 breaking updates requiring a reinstall I made Manjaro with KDE Plasma my home for several years.
Manjaro was stable and, I thought blazing fast, compared to Mint. Everything just worked and was cutting edge. I thought my distro hopping days were over and I found the one that works for me.
Recently I've been reading about Cachy OS and decided to give it a whirl on my test Dell Latitude. Turns out that, I had no idea how fast and lean Linux could be on that off-lease business laptop! I know have it installed on my main Laptop and it's leaps and bounds faster than Manjaro, has none of the bloat and just works! I know it's early, but I think I have found a new home! I have timeshift set up just in case, so I'll see how stable it is over the next few months, but so far I am impressed.
Highly recommend everyone who's into Arch and rolling release to try it.
While I don't have much in a way of hard data, it feels much snappier. Also, it seems to utilize less ram. I believe the difference lies in the Cachy's repo. A lot of the apps I use daily are not installable from Manjaro repos and so I had to use flatpaks and AppImages. AUR was also a hit or miss for me. Catchy, on the other hand had most of the apps I use in it's repo. Things like Tutanota desktop client and Zen browser as an example.
i get a little annoyed at posts that start with broad statements like "is linux actually ready for the average user?" but then it's just someone asking for help to fix a problem they have with their sources.list or whatever. it's not a massive problem, but it's misleading and it feels borderline inflammatory sometimes
I feel you and that's the main reason why I eventually give up on Linux discussion groups. "Is Linux ready"? Yeah, it's been ready for decades now. I sometimes wonder if these annoying posts are just FUD coming from Apple and Microsoft.
A revolution is supposed to change things. Looking at things today, the only revolutionary idea left is to make society reflect the best of us instead of the worst. Most people prefer kindness and love. But lacking these values allows others to thrive in our world. They spend their time deceiving and exploiting the rest of us, people trying to enjoy life and things that bring joy and love. We can't do that by spending all our time dealing with the sad creepy weirdos ruining everyone's lives. So they're been able to shape the world. The only revolution left is to build something to undo what they've done. We need a force for love in the world.
This begins with anyone who thinks it's silly to to expect love to play a major role in society and our future. They have to question who taught them how the world works. They have to wonder why they think that way – because the power of love is not a revolutionary concept. Something else convinced them.
Education is designed by politicians also responsible for war; news comes from corporations whose purpose is exploitation of anyone and thing possible. No wonder people think a more loving world seems like fantasy. Everything seems designed to make us think so.
The internet makes it undeniable that knowledge and tech are fueling hate, greed, ignorance in every heart, every family, community, country. What's not so obvious is how to teach people what's wrong: that knowledge should not be controlled by politicians and the rich.
If we want a revolution to actually change things, it means we need to liberate knowledge from politicians and the rich. A goal like that depends on people understanding why people don't understand it. So instead, we could hope the state of the world's enough to convince people what's wrong.
To literally free knowledge, we have to free the people responsible for it, every individual and group, all the research universities, all focused globally on the same goal: to save the future. What's more loving than that?
The key to a revolution based on love in the world is to build something free of the people who disagree, the hateful, greedy, ignorant, whatever. That's possible with the internet, where we can work together to organize ourselves, our knowledge, our resources.
The first, most important step in the only revolution we have left is to create our own democratic corporation. The only way we can confront the multinationals exploiting us is with our own. The concept of democorporation coordinates all people and groups worldwide, anyone free to share their knowledge how to build this future. It begins with whatever individuals, corporations, institutions of knowledge who don't require liberating to help. They can help free the others, they can set the foundation so Democorporation can challenge the multinational corporations pillaging the planet and threatening the future.
Democorporation can only begin in as a social network because that's how the people can best support it. Participation, data, advertising can help funding. But more importantly is to be democratic. People need this network to vote and express how to build their future. With online users, volunteers, donors, employees and investors all expressing their perspectives, they offer the most balanced democracy and leadership possible.
When we have a social network that we own, uniting the world in our own democracy, we achieve the goal of any great revolution: we establish our own republic. Interepublic has the benefit of a corporation being able to limit, exclude and fire people who don't want it to succeed. That overcomes the problem of real world countries: we're all stuck with people who want our governments to fail, who want others to suffer. As antidotes to the hate in society, Interepublic and Democorporation become outlets of love for the world. That's what we're missing, and it's all we need to change history.
This revolution is global resistance against everything dividing us and everyone exploiting us. It is the “rebellion of people coming together”. Interepublic and Democorporation use the internet to create leverage that's never been available before. But only if people agree love is necessary to fix what's wrong. Nothing else will bring us together.
That sounds good until you remember there is no planning how to capture love. You just express it and hope your love is reciprocated...but this isn't a teenager working up the courage to call his first love. This is the world, and all these ideas and plans that express my love only work if people understand the love I've already poured into it.
To make this revolution truly new, truly revolutionary, it begins with something as intimate and personal as love, one stranger to another. So when I profess my love for the world, I risk the worst kind of heartbreak imaginable. Maybe that risk is proof enough? To trust who I am, my motivation, I have to be honest even it's humiliating for me. That's how to explain what it took for me to do this. No one happy with the world would.
Because here's the thing...I do not want to do this. I think it's inhuman and inhumane to be put in a position like this. It is a constant fight against myself, doing what's right while ruining my life. I'm losing because the world keeps getting worse, so I feel sick with guilt and torture more ideas out of myself.
And I can't describe this inner conflict without describing my the kind of sad life that makes someone do this. If I loved myself enough, I would never be in this position. It is a living nightmare. Doing this means I love the world more than myself...too bad it feels like such an abusive relationship.
Think about it: someone's not gonna spend their life on this, decades of trial and error, if they've experienced the best of the world, love, family. My life began in stress. Now that I accomplished my goal, I'm left psychologically devastated by it. I'm in a place of responsibility no one should be. And worst of all it seems to piss people off that I even tried?
Your reaction decides if this love is reciprocated. If it is we create a love story like no other. And if not, I can hope failure and tragedy might do a better job of finding help than if I'm alive. A win-win for the world, just not for me...what's more loving than that?
For me personally, my love for the world would be reciprocated by freeing me from this stress and responsibility. Maybe the most revolutionary thing here is that I want nothing to do with politics or business. This is a first step in an ongoing process to remove myself from this insanely stressful situation, and it's quite elaborate.
The most genius thing I did was to create a story/fantasy/metaphor/game that lets me help without being directly involved. Two birds, one stone. If I can make it entertaining, I can earn money and raise attention. Four birds, one stone.
To put this in context, I've set up a political-economic-societal plan, but I also imagined a metaphorical story to promote knowledge the way religions promotes belief. It's a modern mythology, and it's for people how can't understand the liberation of knowledge. The goals for the real world and the fantasy story are the same: a search for a more loving world. And they begin the same: with your choice what happens to me.
Our world is built on the same choice we make whether to help others or not. If people form this bond with me and help me survive what's coming, those bonds, the knot of love and connection form the foundation for this revolution and the loving world it would create.
Love would be the seed for everything that grows from here, so Interepublic and Democorporation are literally born and grow shaped by love. And the world gains what it's missing most, a force to fight for the best of us against the worst.
Please rewrite this or at least add a tl;dr and change the thread title to something more descriptive. I'm sure you have a great idea somewhere in there but I've had to stop reading after a couple of paragraphs that just sounded preachy and got nowhere.
I've been using evince to open PDFs. But for larger PDFs it is quite laggy, for selecting the text and stuff like that. Is this just a limitation of my computer, or are there faster alternatives to evince?
I should add that Zathura comes with a minimal graphical interface and you sort of need to learn the vi-like keyboard controls (or look them up with man zathura). But boy is it fast!
you should try papers. it's a new app that'll replace evince as the default document viewer for gnome in a future version. it's still in development but i've been using it for a long time and it's really good.
Hopefully this kind of post isn't too tired, but I figure it's my turn:
Finally decided to, after absolutely refusing to upgrade to 11, make the jump from Win10 to Linux! Been hopping around distros a bit and landed on EndeavourOS last night and I'm really enjoying it so far.
It's definitely tinkery and took me like 2 hours just to get my push to talk working in Discord (mostly due to my own lack of knowledge), but I love the level of control of everything you have (was on Pop!_OS before ~~🤮~~, edit: no hate, just wasn't for me!)
There's definitely never been a better time to switch and I'm very excited for when I inevitably brick my shit and come back here for help, so thanks in advance everyone! 😀
Archfi and Archdi are bash scripts for installing Arch Linux.Please subscribe to my channel by clicking here http://bit.ly/364epTfGithub page for archfi http...
EndeavourOS is great. It's as bare as you can get without opting for straight Arch. I bit the bullet on vanilla Arch a couple weeks ago, though, and am amazed at how easy it is to set up now.
Bonus: I can follow the Arch Wiki word for word without having to cross check things.
But I loved my time with EOS. I would probably still be using it if I hadn't decided to fuck around with topgrade while having no idea what I was doing. The lesson of the day was just update normally... its built in for a reason.
Edit: Look up Timeshift and ALWAYS back up personal files to external. There's a reason Arch is notorious for being unstable. Sometimes just an update can bork everything (still very rare, though).
Yea im about to switch myself. Been looking at suggestions and stuff, probably gonna start with Mint myself.
Many different sources advise putting it on a flashdrive first and loading from there, to start. Make sure I like it.
But the end goal, eventually, would be to remove windows from the comp entirely, right? Eventually installing my chosen distro as the OS on the computer itself? Does that sound about right?
For me, I've been throwing distros on a spare SSD so I could test run in a proper install, but I'm sure a thumbdrive would be fine. Just keep in mind that you might get some hangs and things will be slower due to the speed of the drive, rather than the inefficiencies of the OS you end up on. If you want to test out specific programs or games or something, you can always do what I did and put them on a separate faster storage drive (I'm on SATA SSD for my OS right now, but am putting other things on NVME).
As I mentioned elsewhere, I still have my Windows on another drive so I can boot to it if I need to, but I honestly haven't needed to even once since switching, so I'll probably end up just switching to VM only for anything that requires Windows fairly soon here.
The transition has been much simpler and smoother than I ever had imagined.
Deploying and developing royalty-free open standards for 3D graphics, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Parallel Computing, Neural Networks, and Vision Processing
It doesn't say anything about performance. But they now support Vulkan with Nouveau, so it can now be used even if OpenGL is not available or broken.
The blog post only me tioned that the driver now supports the GPUs, which I think should be believable, as the GPUs are listed as conformant on Khronos' website.
If you have had problems with a Wayland compositor when using Nouveau with one of the cards, it is possible that it might work now, if the compositor supports Vulkan.
Vulkan is normally faster than OpenGL, but I don't know much about the state of NVK & Nouveau's OpenGL driver for the cards. I just know the API versions they support and that NVK cannot reclock them if Nouveau can't, so I can't say anything about performance.
They'll still be slow, as I really doubt that anyone will manage to reclock the cards, ever. Hopefully, now that they're supported by the NVK driver, which is likely getting a lot more attention than Nouveau's OpenGL driver and supports Vullan, performance might improve.
According to Collabora (main developers of NVK, I think) & a few other sources (I haven't run any benchmarks myself), NVK + Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) is a bit faster than Nouveau on newer cards, for which it is now the default. The older cards still default to Nouveau, but as I understand it, it's just in case there are issues with them.
So, they are a bit nore compatible now. They should also be a bit more performant now (if you use Vulkan instead of OpenGL & NVK works) or soon(er or later) (when NVK gets faster or the cards switch to Zink on NVK).
Nvidia drivers are a bit confusing on linux, so I'll list them here, just in case (at leas as far as I understand them): Kernel drivers: Closed source official driver Open source official driver Nouveau Nova (WIP)
Userspace drivers: Official driver (supports both officiql kernel drivers) Nouveau (OpenGL only, supports the Nouveau kernel driver) NVK (Vulkan only, OpenGL via Zink, supports the Nouveau kernel driver, will support Nova)
Kernel drivers run in the kernel & talk with the GPU, while userspace drivers talk with the kernel drivers, as far as I understand.
Both NVK & Nouveau's userspace driver are part of Mesa.
All the Nouveau drivers are often just called "Nouveau", but they're all located in different places. (Nouveau also has a Xorg driver, which isn't important here.) Also, the package for NVK is (at least on some distributions) called vulkan-nouveau (Arch) or similiar.
TL;DR: The situation should be at least a bit better now and it should be easier to improve. Also, Nvidia drivers on Linux are confusing.
P.S. I have a device with an intel integrated GPU & one with a Nvidia 2000 series GPU. Everything works with the intel one (and I would assume AMD), but Nvidia sometimes causes problems on the other device.
It was some time since I tried NVK on it, but performance was much better with the official drivers. It's probably much better now, and I'll probably have time & motivation to test it in a week or few, after getting a few other things out of the way first.
Depending on your card, luck, setup, needs & distribution, Nvidia could just be a minor annoyance (enabling non-free repositories and/or some manual configuration with the official drivers, or not quite enough performance with Nouveau) to larger problems (broken greeter/DE/WM/etc., problems with secure boot signing or something else with the official driver or horrible performance or lack of support for extensions with Nouveau).
If you're looking for a GPU, I'd recommend avoiding Nvidia. Official drivers work pretty well now (most of the time), but can cause headaches and the amount of time I've spent troubleshooting is not completely insignificant. There are still a few (pretty small) problems I haven't been able to resolve. This is in contrast to the intel iGPU, with which I don't remember any problems.
Thanks for such a detailed explanations. That's what I meant, I would love to avoid official drivers headache that causes you to avoid recommend Nvidia. Still there are some things that you cannot avoid it. Things I have in mind are better than AMD / Intel GPU with Mesa: - Blender - ML / AI / CUDA and so on - DaVinci Resolve (and other creative stuff like Blender above) - RayTracing - DLSS (FSR is catching up but this is #1) I would love the Nvidia support just to be stable.
for the encoding and decoding I would choose Intel. For gaming AMD as I'm currently right now with Bazzite.
Nouveau's kernel driver is a horrible mess, so I'm looking forward to Nova, if it ever gets ready.
For older (pre-about-RTX 2000-series) cards, the kernel driver had to do a lot, and Nouveau had to reverse engineer most things. Now, Nvidia has moved most of the proprietary magic into something called the GSP (GPU System Processor), which is a small processor (RISC-V, IIRC) which does many things the kernel driver did previously, like reclocking. This, in addition to the official open kernel drivers should make developing a new FOSS Nvidia driver a lot easier. RedHat's Nova (and I think Nvidia's open driver) only support cards with a GSP for this reason.
NVK is very impressive for such a new unofficia Nvidia driver in my opinion. If I remember correctly, they said that they'll focus more on optimization now that it's conformant.
When/if Nova is ready, it will finally be possible to use a Rust graphics driver stack on Linux outside of Asahi.
If you have any questions remaining, just ask.
Edit: So the closed source GSP firmware blob has 3 "good" points: 1. The closed source parts are limited to inside the GPU. 2. It moves a lot of work away from the kernel driver. 3. It allows open source drivers to support HDMI 2.1 & later.
The HDMI Forum decided some time ago that HDMI was too open. Now, for the newer versions, the license doesn't allow open source implementations. Nvidia gets around this with proprietary GSP firmware inside the GPU (even with official open source drivers, not sure about Nouveau) and Intel with GPU firmware or an internal adapter, depending on the GPU (if I've understood correctly). Only AMD doesn't support the newest HDMI version.
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🔵 Bluesky
Top Provider User Share: bsky.social ≈ 99% → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Nearly all content on bsky.social → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: PDS hosting possible but very niche and poorly documented → Score: 4/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Mostly official client; some 3rd party → Score: 10/20
Total: 14/100
🟠 Reddit
Top Provider User Share: Reddit hosts 100% of user accounts → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Reddit hosts all user-generated content → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Not self-hostable (proprietary platform) → Score: 0/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Some unofficial clients available → Score: 3/20
Total: 3/100
How Scores are Calculated
🧑🤝🧑 How User/Content Share Scores Work
This measures how many users are on the largest provider (or instance).
No provider > 20%: If no provider has more than 20%, it gets full 30 points.
Between 20% and 80%: Anything in between is scored on a linear scale.
> 80%: If a provider has more than 80%, it gets 0 points.
📊 Formula:
Score = 30 × (1 - (TopProviderShare - 20) / 60) …but only if TopProviderShare is between 20% and 80%. If below 20%, full 30. If above 80%, zero.
📌 Example:
If one provider has 40% of all users: → Score = 30 × (1 - (40 - 20) / 60) = 30 × (1 - 0.43) = 17.1 points
🖥️ How Ease of Self-Hosting Scores Work
These scores measure how easy it is for individuals or communities to run their own servers or use clients.
This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server) or User Interface (e.g., web-interface or mobile-app)
Very Easy: One-command or setup wizard, great documentation → 18–20 points
Moderate: Docker or manual setup, some config, active community support → 13–17 points
Having set up a couple of mail servers myself, I wouldn't call it easy. Most solutions boil down to a tangled web of dovecot, postfix, ldap and amavis. There are preconfigured docker containers which make setup easier than a couple of years ago but if your use case is even just slightly different than the maintainers', you'll have to dive deep into a few dozen different config files. And of course, you'll have to find out how to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC to have even a remote chance of your mails getting through to the big providers. I'd probably give email somewhere in the range of 8-12 points in that category.
The scoring system is basically there to put a number on "How free are users and hosts of a platform to move around?" Or "How much power is in the hands of the people and not a few companies?"
For me Email scores very high in this regard.
As far as I know most Lemmy instances leverages paid-for or freemium services to have their instances work easily/properly
Then please update your category name to reflect that. Right now it says "Self-Hosting" which to the majority of readers means hosting it yourself, whatever the reason may be: privacy, configurability or just being safe from future enshittification.
As far as I know most Lemmy instances leverages paid-for or freemium services to have their instances work easily/properly
Yes but you can't compare a whole lemmy instance to an account on an email server that you share with others. The fair comparison would be hosting a lemmy instance to hosting your own email server and creating an account on Proton Mail to creating an account (or a community) on lemmy.world.
I'd like to add to suggest a couple of things regarding Mastodon and user onboarding/retention.
The Server Selection Problem^TM^
The single biggest problem with Mastodon adoption is the fact people see talk about a server and give up. As such, servers need to be removed from the conversation and onboarding process. A server still needs to be selected for a new user, however, which raises the question: How should we select a server for a new user?
The obvious solution is to simply direct users to mastodon.social, which is actually what Mastodon already does to a certain extent. The issue with this is that the Fediverse is meant to be decentralized. As such, it's counterproductive to funnel people towards a single server. This causes maintenance bottlenecks and privacy/data-protection concerns.
As such, there needs to be some sort of method that ranks servers based on a few factors in order to select the optimal server for any given user, while keeping the decentralized nature of the Fediverse in mind.
Why any server?
First, it's important to answer the question of why would any given user pick any given server.
Generally speaking, the server isn't a big deal, as in, any server allows users to interact with the whole of the network in its full capacity.
All servers are Mastodon, after all.
However, there are differences. The most significant ones are, I'd say: location, uptime, and language.
A user benefits from being registered to a server that's geographically close to them, as that leads to a better connection. Additionally, servers with high uptime and stability are preferred, as users may have different times they use the server and nobody likes to try and access a server and see that it's down for any number of reasons. Finally, users need to be able to understand the language the server is in (obviously).
I believe these three factors should be at the forefront of the decision-making process for deciding what server to be suggested to any given user on sign-up.
Auto-selector
With that, comes the solution: a server auto-selector. A game I play, DCSS, actually does something similar for online play.
(I have my location turned off and there are very few servers, as you can see, so listing them is trivial.)
This isn't exactly a novel scientific breakthrough, but I think it's a significant notion for helping the onboarding process for new Mastodon users.
A server auto-selector should filter servers to suggest by following these steps: - Detect the user's system language. - Detect the user's location. - Calculate the server's uptime score. - Pseudo-rank user-count.
I believe the first two points are self-explanatory. Being that Mastodon (and the Fediverse, in general) stands firmly against data-harvesting, location data should probably not be mandatorily collected. It should be easy to either ask the user for some vague information or simply allow them to skip this step entirely, even if it might affect the user experience. Additionally, there's the issue that many servers don't make it known where they're hosted. Ideally, this could change to facilitate server selection for the users, but there's always the point that, if a server doesn't say where it's hosted, it gets pulled down by the algorithm, which in turn encourages divulging that kind of information; this might a problem solved by the solution, if you get my meaning.
What I mean by uptime score is simply an evaluation of the server's uptime history. For example, it's not good policy to direct users towards servers that are often unavailable, it might be disadvantageous to direct users to servers with too-frequent downtime for maintenance, and so on. As such, the server auto-selector should calculate a sort of "score" for any server that fits the first two points. I can't say how this should be calculated, exactly, but I'm sure some computer-knowers out there can come up with a less-than-terrible methodology for this.
The last point is something that I think should be taken into account as well, regarding the user-count of the servers. As I mentioned, we can't funnel users towards a single server, but another issue is that we should actually encourage user dispersion over many servers. The outlined method might already do this to a sufficient extent, but I suggest doing some sort of randomization of filtered servers based on user-count. I think it's wrong to simply plug a new user into the least-populated server around, but I do think that over-populated servers, in a relative sense, should be discouraged by the server-selector.
Worst case scenario, a random server that passes the uptime score point can be selected for any new user.
The onboarding experience
Basically, this should be as simple as possible. The more questions need to be answered, the worse.
I think a simple "Join Mastodon" button is the best. Just a big blue button in the middle of the homepage.
Server selection should start as soon as the new user accesses the joinmastodon website, and clicking the button simply redirects the user to the sign-up process for that server.
I believe this approach would increase adoption of Mastodon by streamlining the server selection process, as well as help the continuous decentralization of the Fediverse.
The Feed Problem
Another significant issue with Mastodon is the feed and community/discovery aspects.
Creating a new Mastodon account yields... Nothing. An empty feed!
This is absolutely terrible and ruins user retention. I've had several people tell me that this first-experience emptiness completely turned them off from Mastodon. It's not intuitive, and it needs to be corrected.
A simple solution
Mastodon does have feeds, but they're all tucked away in the Explore and Live Feeds tabs.
I think the single biggest change that Mastodon can make, as far as this goes, is to shift the Explore->Posts feed to the Home tab. Just do it like Twitter or Bluesky, make the discovery feed the first thing a new user encounters.
That, by itself, should make a difference in terms of user retention.
Maybe I'm delusional and severely underestimating how doable this is, but I really believe Mastodon needs to change the way it deals with new users if we want it to actually grow into a strong social media, keyword social (it needs people).
There's a new server planned relatively locally to me and it's capitalising on the terrifying plunge into fascism that all the Big Socials now have as their badge of dishonour. People have never been "happy" to be on Facebook but the local focus in a pretty leftie inner city area is a good idea. If people know people irl on Fedi they will maybe have an easier time.
Hello folks. I use many distro from Debian to Fedora to OpenSuse and Arch. I also use many window managers like i3, dwm and qtile. On desktop environment, I use XFCE the most. Currently, I am looking to try something new, hence KDE.
I am looking for something with a beautiful UI and works out of the box. So, something on the same spectrum as XFCE but more pretty.
So, I tried out the distros with preinstalled KDE: Fedora KDE, Manjaro KDE, Kubuntu.
The good: KDE is beautiful and very easy to use. I actually enjoy using my computer more.
The bad: it crashes.. a lot even when I turn off all the animations. My system is not that slow: AMD 7 Pro with 64 GB of RAM. Some examples:
Logging in, KDE hangs for 30 seconds. Even when I finally see the desktop, I would need to wait a further 10 seconds to finally able to interact, i.e. click and open stuff.
After resume suspend, system would hang and there is nothing I can do except for a forced reboot.
Browsing the web with only 3 tabs opened, KDE also hang.
As much as I hate GNOME, everything just works. I installed the GNOME flavors of above distros and never experience any hiccups.
If KDE works for you, do you use a preinstalled distro and which one? How about if you install KDE from scratch, like Arch?
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it's done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it's actually still copying.
Send some files, whatever the size, even 10Mb, to the trash and it takes a minute per file.
Stumbled upon some github issues saying that it's a longstanding problem (since 2009 even), but I can't believe that people put up with it for so long.
I'm not even thinking of changing DE but this is annoying to say the least.
Copy 1Gb movie to flash drive, says it's done in 10 seconds. Try to remove the flash drive, still in use. Turns out it's actually still copying.
This ia not distro related but GNU/Linux and a known "issue" for over a decade ! Everything gets into you ram memory and gets dumped from there into your USB storage device.
watch grep -e Dirty: -e Writeback: /proc/meminfo
A long term solution would like to write a udev rule something like here:
Sadly the issue reported and described here: Pernicious USB-stick stall problem. Reverting workaround fix? and Is "writeback throttling" a solution to the "USB-stick stall problem&qu...
The question marks are because I read somethere that Linus himself doesn't see it like an issue by itself but more like a feature? And that's why it hasn't been resolved for soo long ! I can't exactly remember what he said but that's the gist !
But I do agree, I also see it as an issue :/ and most people who aren't aware probably fucked up some USB sticks that way...
Because it's not an issue. This is the system functioning as intended. Changing this behaviour would cause dramatic performance degradation for the 99.999% of the time when the device you are writing to isn't removable media that you want to eject right away.
It's an issue according to any UX pattern. If something says that it's done when it's not, it's misrepresenting the state of the action.
Hard to believe that modifying the counter to include the necessary time for actual writing to the flash drive would break everything. Target flash drives only etc.
System functioning as intended doesn't mean that it's a good UX.
Been using Tumbleweed as well. May I ask if you encountered these 2 issues:
Haven't experienced either of those issues. Have you tried to isolate KDE in those cases? Not sure how you'd do it with the deletion because there's no Trash for the terminal, but you could try the copy operation and see if your device is still blocked when it's finished in the terminal?
Those are both file operations so they don't strike me as strictly DE-related.
Look at the reddit called "unixporn" and search for Xfce. You ll see what's possible with Xfce. For me the KDE crashes are a dealbreaker. My Xfce setup is so simplified, that nothing can be ugly. I use Bspwm for the windows and stripped down Xfce panel (dont touch third party status bars, such as polybar, its waste of time if you already have Xfce). No menu such as Whisker menu, but Rofi instead. I got Xfce stability without the old looking.
I don't like it, too much desk space wasted on useless crapola. I use Mate, a nice clean desktop with a simple pull-down menu leaving the majority of the space free for work.
Give Cinnamon/Budgie a shot, (I recommend in a vm and see which one you like)both are based on gnome(cinnamon personally its like a combination between gnome 3 ane xfce). I have the same experience with kde personally(Like it crashes sometimes,looks dated,etc), and I decided to desktop hop to Cinnamon.
KDE Manjaro running on 4 or 5 of my machines, pure stability. It sounds like a hardware issue.
Here are my suggestions to diagnose this.
Option 1. Setup an ssh server, connect from a second computer (or phone via Termux), execute $journalctl -fe, and observe the journal from your second device when the crash occurs. That should help pinpoint the issue.
Option 2. If you don't have a second device, use a non-gui tty, access via Ctrl+Alt+F1. (Usually terminals are available F1 thru F6). Once again execute $journalctl -fe and observe it during the crash.
Tbh option 2 may just be easier especially if you have minimal knowledge of ssh. Good luck, ping me back if you find this helpful and would like more perspective, and apologies if this doesn't help you.
If the entire computer crashes, boot into a terminal and browse journalctl history of previous boots, sorry I don't have these commands off the top of my head but if you need them and ask I will get them for you.
KDE just works on my machine, which is lower specs than yours. I've never had it crash. I use Endeavor OS, so it came with it by default (which was part of the reason I chose it).
Edit: I don't do much tweaking of the KDE settings other than the main color scheme. I also have never had an issue with waking from sleep on Endeavor (but I recall in years past that was an issue with most distros I tried and unrelated to KDE since I was less a fan of its style back then and didn't use KDE). My set up is a normal desktop PC that I use daily for everything, including gaming.
I've been using Linux for over a quarter of a century. Initially I spent hours attempting to come up with the best partitioning scheme but these days I pick LVM and use the defaults.
If I run out of space, I add a drive (or grow the virtual one) and grow the filesystem into the extra space.
Sometimes I need temporary space and use sshfs to mount a directory from another machine.
In other words, today you have infinite options to adjust according to need, partition schemes are not nearly as important.
Even swap space can live as a file on a normal partition if required.
That said. If you have specific use cases, check what's required. Specifically because different uses need different attributes, it pays to check.
with the majority here, I just use distro default / automatic setup in installer
LONG ago, I did the whole hand-crafted thing, obsessing over exactly how large each partition had to be, but with increasing speed and lowering prices of storage, this attention to detail now seems pretty irrelevant: - hda split into /boot, /tmp, (swap), /, /opt, /usr, /var - hdb split into (swap) and /home
I've tried some weird and wonderful partition schemes in the past, but I think I've settled down and just go for simplicity. Half a gig for /boot, and the rest for / (in ext4). I've tried btrfs, but I've never been in the position where I needed snapshots, and ext4 is a lot more simple.
I also like having the flexibility of not having a separate home partition. I back up my super important files, so it doesn't matter if I lose home (not that I distrohop much anymore, anyway). And I don't have to stress about whether I've made my root partition big enough. For the same reason I use a swapfile rather than a swap partition (though I do need to look in to zram and zswap) - I like knowing that I can resize it easily, even if I don't really plan on doing so.
@DigDoug @sparkle_matrix_x0x I have differing partition schemes on different machines depending upon their function. On my workstation I have four partitions, a root partition which is on SSD and all the system binaries and files reside there, a /home partition which is on rotary media because speed is less critical space more so, and a backup drive which keeps compressed copies of the /home and /root partitions. On my servers mostly everything is RAID and it's much more complex and varies according to the function of a particular server.
This is just for /dev/sda or so, and implies non-redundant root disks because mirroring is done by the hypervisor. I've been 20 years doing virtualization, and I'm really starting to forget the last vestiges of my mdadm fdisk layout.
So many people in this thread have no idea why you'd want separate allocation for /home and /tmp and others. Are we missing proper mentorship?
The article is talking about storage, not about access to files in any particular filesystem.
Previous versions of Android 15 Terminal app only allowed 16GB of space to be used by the guest system. The article mentions it.
So even if you had 128GB in your phone, previously you could only use 16GB of them in the environment Google set up for the Linux Terminal subsystem. What the article says is that now they are removing that limitation.
Open XSDL app again, you should see XFCE desktop environment with mouse cursor, and you should be able to launch Synaptic and install other Linux packages.
It tells me it is not compatible with my phone. Is it on fdroid? Can I sideload it from somewhere? I have a OnePlus 12 phone and it is running Android 15
Google's bullshit strikes again! All apps must be built for Android 13 or they are removed from Play Store, apparently because Google could not do the Android security correctly for the first 12 versions. Now they can emulate Linux on Android, but cannot emulate an older version of Android on Android. And I last updated my app in 2021, during Android 11 era.
Ok, the app doesn't have any place to enter those commands. It opens up this msdos like blue terminal and it's stuck there. I can't type anything. And the keyboard shows when I press the back button on the phone. I can't exit the app,I can only exit with the home button
You need to enter these commands in the Linux terminal app, not in the X server app. Once the two apps connect, it should be possible to launch another terminal inside the X server.
Go to your phone Settings > About Phone and tap "Build number" seven times. You will receive notification that your phone now has developer options enabled.
Settings > System > Developer Options > Linux development environment. On that page, tap the On/Off slider.
You will find an icon for the new Terminal app on your home screen. It's going to download 500 MB of data when you open it.
Long-press the Terminal app icon, tap Info > Mobile data, and enable Unrestricted data usage.
Now you can download more packages inside your Linux virtual machine using apt-get command, as described in my previous post.
Hi, I've just replaced my "HTPC" and done a fresh install of Debian on it. There's a strange issue with Kodi and the focus under Wayland: after some time Kodi (running in full screen) loses focus so I cannot navigate it with the TV remote anymore, but I have to switch back to Kodi using ALT+TAB on the keyboard. I'm not sure of when this happens, basically I power on the TV on the next day and Kodi has lost focus, the PC is always on. Since something like this had never happened before on the old PC (running Mint), I tried switching to xorg instead of Wayland and the problem disappeared. Desktop environment is KDE, Kodi is installed via official flatpak. No standard keyboard or mouse are connected to the PC, only a wireless keyboard with touchpad which is pratically always powered off, so it is impossible that someone is switching focus by mistake. Does anyone have any clue?
That document seems to use communities in the normal English sense and spaces in the "collection of Matrix rooms" sense. I would say spaces are what they're called and a community is just an informal group of like-minded people who can be better-organized using spaces.
You ran into the trap of taking "fediverse" at face value. It neither invented nor monopolizes federation. E-Mail is federated and has nothing to do with the fediverse. Wikipedia's page on federation lists the very internet itself as the prime example.
Not implementing ActivityPub doesn't mean Matrix isn't federated.
Activitypub and the matrix protocol are different things, they aren't supposed to interact with each other. Matrix servers using matrix implementations (synapse, tuwunel, conduit, etc) can interact with each other, since they are all based on the same protocol. Same way we do it, how AP servers with mbin,piefed,lemmy interact all with each other, since they are all based on the same protocol, too.
Revolt doesn't federate at all. They even admit this. I stand corrected on rocket.chat, they actually implemented the matrix protocol, so it's interoperable with matrix.
I think your last point is flawed, since even with multiple revolt instances; they don't interact at all. Which, is not federation. Matrix is federated, there's no other way to look at it and they're not comparable, and not meant to be compared at all.
Rocket.chat implements the matrix protocol (or something else from matrix, check the other replies) to federate with other rocket.chat instances. It also had a different federation protocol before implementing matrix.
it's only rooms instead of servers with channels..
Literally the same thing but with different names. I use Matrix with Element, and it is exactly the same as Discord. Laid out the same, functionally the same (actually better since it encrypts everything), and even the UI is identical.
From a chat standpoint, the two are near identical - yes - but Matrix lacks the "voice/video calls as persistent rooms" feature that Discord has. This was planned a while back, but has recently been pushed on the backburner^[1]^ as they work on Element Call.
Early on Matrix was sort of being built up as an IRC/Discord alternative, but recently they've pivoted more towards a WA/Telegram/Slack alternative as most of their financial support comes from European governments and companies looking for strong and secure internal communication solutions they can manage themselves.
So, TL;DR you probably won't see the exact Discord like features you want land in the spec any time soon as they're not being funded.
So that means, right now:
No persistent voice/video rooms (but they are on the roadmap!)
No push-to-talk or "game friendly" settings like voice auto-detection (also not really on the roadmap)
Having said all that, Matrix is brilliant and I highly encourage people to check it out. I use a Matrix <-> Signal bridge for most of my comms with my friends, and we voice chat on Mumble. Not ideal, but you get to avoid Discord and you get a very similar experience! Bonus points for Mumble as it's super lightweight.
~[1] It's not really on the backburner so much as it's something that will have to be worked on after the new VOIP stack - Element Call - is integrated in the wider Matrix ecosystem.~
So I’ve completed the cosine similarity function, which means the script is now recommending videos in a raw way. Below is just a ranking of videos that match my watch history (all three are most likely videos I’ve already watched):
Getting to this point made me realize: there’s no such thing as a simple algorithm—just simple ways to collect data. The code currently has issues with collecting data properly, so that’s something that needs fixing. Hopefully, once the data collection in this script is improved, it can be reused for future Fediverse algorithms.
There are countless ways to process the data. Cosine similarity is a simple concept and easy to implement in code, but it has a flaw: content you’ve already watched tends to rank higher than anything new. So a basic "pick the highest cosine similarity" approach probably isn’t ideal. It either needs logic to remove already-watched videos, or to bias toward videos lower down in the ranking. But filtering out watched videos isn’t perfect either—people do like to rewatch things.
The algorithm currently just looks at how much time you spent watching unique segments of a video, then assigns a value in seconds to all the words in the title, description, and tags, and sums that over all videos.
The algorithm is actually okay—subjectively, it’s better than just sorting by date. I picked a few videos at random from the top 300 ranked by cosine similarity , and there was content interesting enough to watch for more than 30 seconds, and some that was just too weird for me. Here are a few examples:
Some of these links are across different instances because no single PeerTube instance has all the videos. I loaded metadata for over 6,000 videos across five instances during testing.
The question is: should the algorithm be scoped to a single instance (only looking at content on the user’s home instance), or should it recommend from any instance and take you there?
funny thing to note is that there might be a linux pipeline in this algo
currently just a browser extension that monitors your the peertube videos your watch and stores them locally - solidheron/peertube_recomendation_algorythm
I think it needs to work across instances, since we're concerned wit the Fediverse and federation is one of the defining mechanics. Also when I have a look at my subscriptions, they come from a variety of instances. So I don't think a single instance feature would be of any use for me.
Sure. And with the cosine similarity, you'd obviously need to suppress already watched videos. Obviously I watched them and the algorithm knows, but I'd like it to recommend new videos to me.
First off all, it's a legitimate way. He just goes through the install instructions from here (github.com/termux/termux-x11).
The one thing I would do differently is choosing the right package for your architecture or going with the universal package instead of the arm64 package as he proposes.
Lastly I want to add that that depending on what you want to do a graphical session is sometimes not necessary. Example: For tools like mov-cli for watching movie in the terminal, termux alone is enough, because they integrate with the android mpv app and don't need a xorg session to display graphics.
LineageOS 22.2 (on FP4) does not seem to have that option yet. At least, it is not listed in the developer options. You can find it if you tap on the search button within developer options (or just general settings, as that also includes results from developer options) and type "terminal" or "linux". The (Experimental) Run Linux terminal on Android result shows up. But after you tap on that, you see that toggle is greyed out. Can't be enabled.
I am interested in getting that to work, so any help is appreciated. There is hopefully some ADB command or something that forcefully enables Linux environment.
Linux mint 22.1 and jackett is hogging 200+GB of virtual memory. I do have a couple -arrs running, and calibre server, but it seems a ludicrous amount of memory. Reading on the webs it seems people think 20GB is crazy.
Any help/thoughts where to look? Not using Docker.
I would not worry about virtual memory usage. Virtual memory can include memory mapped files and does not indicate actual ram usage - only the address space that the program has opened at some point. There is little point in worrying about it.
Swap memory is used when you run out of physical memory, so the memory is extended to your storage.
Virtual memory is an abstraction that lies between programs using memory and the physical memory in the device. It can be something like compression and memory-mapped files, like mentioned.
And yes, some swap is still useful, up to something like 4G for larger systems.
And if you want to hibernate to disk, you may need as much swap as your physical memory. But maybe that’s changed. I haven’t done that in years.
So, im IP banned from lemmy.world? Or is this cloudflare or smth locking me out? How do I proceed?
I have wanted to leave .world for a while, probably in favour of dbzero, but I would still at least like to delete my account and/or download some data beforehand?
I don't think I did anything wrong, and believe it is a cloudflare thing, but how will I contact the mods, if I cant open their front page to find their emails? Anyways. Any help is appreciated.
Also, sorry if this is the wrong community, but its the only one I know that maybe can help?
Edit 1: I can access the instance if I use a VPN, but I still dont know what to do. This kinda confirms it is cloudflare, but how can I get off their "naughty list"?
Edit the last: it seems to have solved itself after some time. I just used tgis instance for a while, and now its working again.
UPDATE: After hours and dozens of fixes it simple does not work. The Boss Katana Mini X seems to be completely incompatible with Linux. I'm gonna install Windows again on my Surface. W11 works like dogshit on it but at least I can use it to connect to my guitar amp.
Leaving the thread open in case a solution does eventually appear.
OP:
I'm having an issue with a BT speaker, well Guitar amp. actually. (BOSS Katana Mini X)
Device is a Microsoft Surface Pro 7.
It connects, but it wont play any sound at all. I'm now at the point where I'm considering installing W11 on that Surface again just so I can connect it to my amp to play some guitar with backing tracks and whatnot. I hate using my phone for this.
Speaker is chosen as the output device.
Tried to switch to PipeWire
Installed Blueman and a Pulse Audio interface
Also tried this on Fedora 41(GNOME)
Bluetooth earbuds from JBL works fine and get normal sound
I have installed the kernel for Surface devices, but I also tested this BEFORE installing that and there has been no difference on both Ubuntu and Fedora.
What I notice is there's only two configs I can chose from on the settings for the amp as an output device, instead of the long list I have on other devices. Possible cause?
This is the only federated software that I use because it is the only one in a format I enjoy using. I liked reddit for the threaded forum kinda format, so lemmy was an easy transition.
Never liked facebook/twitter/instagram or those formats so no interest in a federated version of them. There could be something out there I would also like, but thst would require trying more things and I gave up after bouncing off a few.
In addition to Mastodon and Pixelfed, I have a Friendica, Hubzilla, Yacy, and Nextcloud.
Federated Services
Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.
We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.
There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.
Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.
Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.
Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.
Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.
Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.
We offer the following federated services:
Friendica.Eskimo.Com Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.
Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.
Mastodon.Eskimo.Com Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.
NextCloud.Eskimo.Com If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.
Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.
Yacy.Eskimo.Com Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to support@eskimo.com and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.
If you enjoy these services, please consider supporting us by taking advantage of our paid services: https://www.eskimo.com/
Excluding email, nope. Seeing as no one else in my friend group uses Federated services, and they're all still too small to cover most niches, there isn't really anything for me.
Mastodon is my go-to "shout in the void about my goings-on" platform.
Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.
Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.
Edit: Oh and I have a Matrix account but despite the fact that I mentioned it to literally all of my friends, nobody uses it. I keep it around in case someone actually wants to send me private messages because Mastodon is kinda badly suited for that.
@Rose @ALostInquirer On the Subject of pixelfed, I recently (about a month ago) brought up pixelfed.eskimo.com/, but I seem not to be able to get it to federate. Any tips?
Hi, I'm looking to switch to Linux full-time on my desktop. Aside from my NAS, I'm pretty unfamiliar with Linux in general.
On Windows, I have apps pinned to the Start menu grid, with apps in groups/folders for easy access. I don't pin anything to the taskbar or leave icons on the desktop. For the apps I care about most - and there's around 40 of them - they're available with just 3 clicks maximum. I can reorder them and put them in groups (or pull them out of groups) anytime.
On Zorin OS (Ubuntu-based) via Gnome, I haven't had any such luck. ArcMenu is great but offers no app group support. This also a feature that doesn't seem to be in very strong demand in general. I can use the Gnome menu editor (Alacarte, rebranded as "Main Menu" in Zorin) to hide the default categories & make my own. This would be a perfectly suitable solution... but doing so requires multiple steps per app - no copying & pasting, no drag & drop, each one has to be created on a per-category basis. The amount of effort is considerable. I don't mind doing it once of course, but if I decide to reorganize, it'll require all of that effort all over again.
I'm fully happy with Gnome, I'm looking for a productivity-first DE and the only issue is this app menu situation which is a hard deal breaker. I guess I just have three questions:
Are there alternative menus I can check out which might be able to solve this?
I doubt this, but: Is there an easier menu-category editor I could use? Something that allows for at least moving/copying between categories, so I can grab an app from All Apps or something and put it where I want it. Choosing a unique name, finding an icon, copying the terminal command, etc. is a ton of work just to stay organized.
Would using a different DE offer the flexibility I'm looking for in this situation? I'm willing to switch DEs or even distros to fix this - it's seriously the crux of my workflow.
If this is the wrong community to post this, please point me in the right direction and I'll post there. Thanks in advance, I've been trying to find a fix for this for several hours and I'm not sure where to look for an answer.
With Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster) now officially available, you can give the Applications Overview a helping hand in the efficiency department. Folders make this easy.
Sorry im a bit confused. Gnome does allow app grouping in little bubbles similar to on a phone. Do you mean in the ~~activities menu~~ i meant the applications menu extension. having custom categories? I basically never use that when i use gnome i just hit the super key or do a 3 finger swipe up twice on the trackpad to open the app menu. For desktop ive recently switched to gnome too and have been using the dash to panel extension so i can click the app menu button on it.
On Linux, using Gnome and ArcMenu, I can get close to accomplishing a similar result using the Enterprise layout: i.imgur.com/btNKjtj.png
I can edit those categories on the left of the menu using Alacarte... but I can't just drag & drop app commands, or even copy & paste them. So for every app I want in a specific category, the process is:
Create a section, if it doesn't exist already
Name the section
Give the section a description
Give the section an icon (required) and save it
Create a new item in the section
Either figure out the launch command or copy it from an existing entry elsewhere
Give it a unique name (required)
Give it an icon (required), which means hunting for it if I don't already know where it is
And then it'll work. But, steps 5-8 are required for every single app... so if I want to put an app in a category, I have to perform those 4 steps every time. It's a solution but it requires a notable amount of time and effort.
Thanks for the info! I'm already using ArcMenu, which is great - but as mentioned, it lacks app grouping support of any kind... not unless I want to go through the effort of editing categories. Doing that is a solution, but requires so much time and effort that it isn't really the solution.
A friend is recommending switching DEs or distros, would Plasma get the job done?
You can group Gnome Apps in their launching tool. (Same as you group and name apps on Android, just drag one onto another) Its a different idea right. Hit super key and start typing or select the app. Maybe Plasma is more what you want where everything is customizable.
Has anyone successfully typed either European accented characters or Japanese Kanas on their physical keyboard?
For the longest time, I've been trying to get non-English characters to appear on my system. Specifically European accented characters. I've read about the compose key, but I could never make it work somehow.
I've also tried to make the Kanas to appear using the Japanese keyboard, but that too doesn't work.
I'm using mostly KDE system, on many different distros. As for the keyboard, it's almost always standard US QWERTY without the numpad, varying between various laptops (mostly Thinkpads) and USB keyboards. For the Japanese, it's a Thinkpad W530 (should also apply to X230, T430, and T530).
I've been using Linux for quite a while now. I'm familiar with most inner working of the system, but this the one thing I can never wrap my head around!
Has anyone successfully typed either European accented characters or Japanese Kanas on their physical keyboard?
For the Latin extended characters, I've used AltGr, Compose, probably at some point the GTK control-shift-u thing. I've also used various emacs text input methods to do so. I don't speak Japanese.
I don't use KDE, but it looks like you can set it up to bind Compose at a per-user level once you've logged into your account.
EDIT: "Motörhead" --- that was typed using the Compose key, which on this laptop I have replacing the Right Alt key. On this system, which is Debian, I do it systemwide by editing /etc/default/keyboard, and adding:
That swaps Left Control and Caps Lock, sets Right Alt to be Compose and...hmm, actually, I should check whether Control-Alt-Backspace still functions to kill Wayland, or if that stopped working when I moved off X11.
Then I ran # dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration.
But if you're on a non-Debian-based distro, things may work differently.
We're pleased to announce the release of BotKit 0.2.0! For those new to our project, BotKit is a TypeScript framework for creating standalone ActivityPub bots that can interact with Mastodon, Missk...
Maybe you mean "bots using the ad-hoc APIs from the servers"? AFAIK, there is no server implementing C2S ActivityPub, so it would be hard to have bots making use of them?
C2S has a very specific usage, and if you meant "regular clients", you'd do better by qualifying the API you were talking about by specifying the application - i.e, Mastodon, Lemmy - than by throwing a meaningless term.
Or is there maybe a way to set the pager for all help related queries to some command? I'm using bat and would like to pipe all --help through | bat --language=help by default for the syntax highlighting and colored output... Or if you know a lower effort way to color the output of --help let me know.
There has to be a hook somewhere for every command that executes. I'm not sure, but something in the chain after using set -x then running any terminal command likely is on the right path to doing this. (If you try set -x, you can turn it off with set +x). set -o options are another I'm not very familiar with but might be related.
You'd be intercepting all commands just to verify if they have a help flag and then if not executing them as they were intended. If the intercept got broke, then the shell would be completely broken.
The --help output must be getting passed through groff at some point to create the layout with tabbing. Wherever that is happening must have a point of entry. Perhaps it only requires modifying groff with a filter function or something like that?
Not everything uses groff. A lot will have their own function or another.
Edit: I think for what you indicting you are wanting to try you'd need to either patch your shell of choice or write your own.
Edit2: If you did patch it, the best way I can think of to get something upstreamed would be to patch bash to use CTRL-Enter to automatically pipe the output to the default pager defined in BASHPAGER followed by PAGER if it doesn't exist. Then set the BASHPAGER to your "bat" command.
At this point, someone has to have already made a prettier shell or terminal that is configured like this by default. Hideous 1950s monocolor --help output can't be a novel issue in 2025.
16 Color terminals didn't really start getting used until the 90s and early 2000s. And 256 after that. A lot of software was written back then and it would take a lot to add something that might not display well because of the terminal's color scheme and now we have color theming.
I am getting the feeling the you are mis-understanding than each project has their own independent implementing function and that each one would need to be rewritten. There a 10 of thousands of projects. This is not some simple, change 1 project task.
Why are you confrontational? I'm just casually tossing out ideas and learning. Of course I understand what you are saying. However, busybox covers the core of a POSIX system and with the size constraints, it is likely standardising something like this. On Gentoo, such a change might be more straight forward instead of some sloppy hack with a wrapper.
I imagine you must be good at memorizing a lot of information. I am not. I am good at abstraction and must explore in abstraction to understand heuristically. I understand heuristic connections better than most people. Neither method is better or worse. Being toxic about interchanges of information is useless nonsense. I know far more than I let on, but I'm well aware that I am a jack of all trades and expert of none. All the projects don't matter relative to those that are used the most. If most projects can be colorized, it will motivate others to fall in line or prompt rewrites assuming such a change was popular. Colorized manpages and help pages should be standard and should have been a decade ago. No one is using an IDE without syntax highlighting. The terminal is an extension of the abstracted language of Linux. Without universal syntax highlighting for new users in these spaces, Linux is presenting an outdated language format ripe for deprecation. These details have long term consequences.
I wasn't intending to come off confrontational, I apologize for that. I was looking at this from it sounding like you wanted any command on a system. I did find that you can colorize man. see script below for an example. As for busybox, it is a small project, so colorizing just it would be relatively easy and easy to add as a patch to a system. Not sure if that would upstream though as it is intended to work well on low memory systems among others.
There's no particularly smart way to accomplish this in the exact way that you want. I don't like the solution which searches your $PATH because now you're adding latency to search your entire $PATH for every command to add this functionality. It's a singularly better solution to tell the CLI what you want versus the CLI attempting (using logic) to figure it out.
The easiest solution here is to create your own command which calls the target application with --help;
\#!/bin/bash
$1 --help | bat --language=help
Then run it;
$ script_name docker
and it will run docker --help | bat --language=help. If you use this solution a lot you can try to use bash function which you call at the end of commands if they error;
any command which honors a --help will get listed. I suppose you could add a >> /tmp/output after the echo $i to log it. run it in /bin, /usr/bin, usr/local/bin
Strava is an absolute nightmare to use. My feed is absolutely chock full of ads and dog-walkers. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy they're taking a 0.2 mile walk around their block and logging their progress, but I don't need to see it. Nike, TrainerRoad, Zwift, Peloton all have giant ads every time their users upload an activity. And I don't understand it because it's not an ad-supported network. Like I would happily pay to have all this shit hidden. It would be extremely simple for Strava to fix this, which would just be to provide me with a simple filter for what type of activities I'd like to see. The fact that they haven't done so, a long time ago, leads me to believe that they simply don't want to, for whatever reason. Plus they've already begun to enshittify by breaking integrations with third parties.
Are there any good options for this?
E: to be clear, I'm asking about the social aspect of Strava.
You can directly upload there with StreetComplete or Vespucci. Or exports from any tracking app that gives you a GPX file (including Strava I think). Otherwise, don't really expect FOSS-minded people to share their trips.
That's the neat part, there isn't. Post about your trips where you want, you can then refer to the OSM trace.
People have given consent for you to improve OSM with that data though. For example, one GPS trace can be pretty inaccurate (especially under a canopy where aerial imagery also doesn't work) but you can compile a dozen (get them with a location-specific query) and get a very good average. You can message people about those edits, and add notes.
Also, StreetComplete gives you achievements for completing quests and uploading traces. They are automated but it makes it look like actual people are grateful. Of course most people who use OSM will never actually thank the contributors but you're still doing a great service by improving the map around you.
The map is a community effort and the lack of social features, which caters to introverts, keeps focus on the end goal - an accurate map of the world. Other platforms are suitable for social activities and you can link to your OSM trace from there.
Yes, seeing the trace geometry only with no map is a letdown. That's why I suggested the visualizer in another comment. It would certainly improve the shareability of traces.
OSM doesn't produce any hardware. They are a wiki-based world mapping effort. In addition, they run a PNG tile provider (so you can embed their map on a website), an article wiki for how to edit the map etc. and the trace repository.
You can use OSM and record traces using various apps mentioned on their wiki.
Good bike computers like Garmin's allow GPX export so HW compatibility is there. It's a few manual steps but you can make the process automatic for example by syncing your HW tracker to Tapiriik (15+ brands supported), which then can auto-download GPX files to your computer via Dropbox (or without Dropbox if you run it locally), and then you can auto-upload those to OSM with one of these scripts running on your machine.
I started working on a federated implementation of this this week actually.
Would love to read what functionalities you'd see for such service.
For now I'm implementing activity logging, sharing of activities in groups (kinda like Lemmy communities), public or private as well as a statistics and the ability to post traces and create challenges to share.
Try integrating with OpenStreetMap Traces and Tapiriik for ease-of-use. Recommend running your own instance for the latter. Not necessarily for the minimum viable product but consider this into the future.
I simply use the fitness-tracking features that came with my watch. They're more than adequate, and the close integration with the watch means that I don't even have to do anything. I just live my life and check the stats later. Modern smartwatches are good like that.
Mere days after the announcement of acquisition by an Italian tech firm, the route-planning platform laid off 80% of its staff, and former employees fear for its future.
...yes, exactly. The brand of tool used is not relevant to the activity. Users are not adding those photos, they're added by Peloton. Not to mention the activity names.
You don't see Garmin or Wahoo adding in giant ads for their products when syncing rides.
I'm going to switch to arch for my general-purpose laptop, since I feel like kubuntu is not enough for me, I want to try a tiling WM and do some ricing. I'm still undecided between plain arch or CachyOS, because that optimisation looks promising and I also game on my laptop. The fact is that CachyOS seems more "bloated" with some unnecessary packages, so what do you suggest me? A simple arch installation, arch using the cachy-linux kernel and its optimisations or a debloated CachyOS install? Thank you all in advance.
I don't use either but IMO people are far too worried about bloat, it's not some monster that'll drag you down. Unless you're extremely space constrained some extra packages on disk won't make any difference. And even on the slimmest install there'll be stuff you never use anyway.
I understand, but less packages means it's easier to manage my system. One of the reasons I'm leaning towards arch is because of its minimal approach, so that I can install only what I need.
Less packages really doesn't mean much in terms of how easy the system will be to manage. If anything, I'd say a distro with more, but pre installed packages is easier to manage because the maintainers will make sure that those packages will be as easy to work with and upgrade as possible.
That said, I'm definitely not going to stop you from trying Arch though. You can even get similar (or better) optimizations by using the ALHP repos and a kernel like linux-tkg or linux-cachyos for example, although the difference really is negligible in most cases.
MIPS seems to be quite widely supported (about as much as PPC64LE) despite that I'm not able to find anything that uses MIPSLE/MIPS64LE. Are they only supported for QEMU or is there anything that still uses it? Do you know of anything to play around with Linux for MIPSLE/MIPS64LE that isn't emulation?
And now that I have made the post I got some search results: 1. Routers apparently still use MIPS 2. linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/MIPS-HOWTO-… has some MIPS systems you can run Linux on.
If you want to share anything about MIPS though please feel free to comment, I would interest me greatly what the rest of you have to say.
macOS has a bunch of apps which can do so, including SketchyVim. Basically you would have all the vim modes motions and operators, inside any text box in the OS / in any app. I just did some looking up and asked LLMs, but didn't find any linux equivalents of that. Ideally they would work on wayland and have app or window class exceptions.
If I remember correctly, Wayland forbids to listen to keyboard inputs for security reasons. Each software receives its input, but there is no global listening.
So, in my understanding, this could mean that it's not possible.
macOS has a bunch of apps which can do so, including SketchyVim. Basically you would have all the vim modes motions and operators, inside any text box in the OS / in any app. I just did some looking up and asked LLMs, but didn't find any linux equivalents of that. Ideally they would work on wayland and have app or window class exceptions.
Hi, so I want to building a pc for a home server (?) or NAS. I dont really know whats the most appropriate term but what I intend to build is a one pc for my household. currently my requirement is one work 'pc' capable of heavy 3d modeling one light work pc. two 4k gaming tvs. (they most likely wont be used at the same time)
my knowledge of technical stuff is bretty basic so please be patient with me.
before, i used my steam deck to stream my work pc using parsec but i thought i just want to jump all in on linux and using vm to use more niche 3d softwares.
my budget is flexible as long as i dont need to use enterprise hardware. also i heard nvidia is not good for linux so i'd like to confirm if that is still the case as im thinking of using 5090 if not, i hope amd releases an equivalent capable card or if any according my quick research suggest.
as for linux, the only distro (?) i ever used is the steam deck one and i love it. im not a programmer or even remotely capable one so i'd like to avoid anything that has to be manually typing commands at terminal but im open to surface level tinkering.
I think I'd recommend having at least 2 PCs. Your gaming PC is going to be terribly inefficient and draw 10x as much power at idle as a server with a mobile processor. Leaving it running 24/7 will get expensive to the extent that buying a dedicated server makes more sense. Plus if your gaming/work PC ever crashes while you're working, your server will crash as well.
Also if you ever work outside the home you probably want to have something that doesn't require a network connection.
You can get Yunohost set up with a single command.
It's certainly doable and something like that was my setup for a few years. There isn't much in the way of distros or software packages that provide such a 'personal multiseat' configuration out of the box.
::: spoiler I wanted bare metal GUI access, so instead of using Proxmox, I went about configuring Debian to the task. This might not directly answer any questions, but here's an idea of what it looked like.
Hardware - i7, 48 GB RAM, 500 W PSU - GTX 1650 (passed through to VM), Radeon R5 340X (basic bare metal output) - 60 GB SSD boot disk - 1 TB SSD for VM images - 2 x 4 TB HDD for NAS - 1 TB HDD for testing, "overflow", etc.
Boot disk - Debian stable with XFCE - Virtual machines set up through virt-manager and each port forwarded to LAN - unattended-upgrades, ufw / iptables firewall - GUI more for ease of management, software on bare metal kept to a minimum
Virtual machines / (RAM allotment) - Desktop (10 GB): I would use this VM while seated at the machine for productivity and web browsing. - NAS / media server (4 GB): both 4 TB HDDs passed through to this VM, which hosted a Samba file server and Jellyfin. Also served as file storage for a couple other VMs via internal connections. 4 TB of usable capacity since I set it to rsync to the second drive at 02:30 every morning. - Misc. services (4 GB): second Samba file server for devices I wanted to sync but didn't trust with access to my full 4 TB library. Also an Apache server to host a couple of HTML pages on LAN. Various other services tested here as well. - Windows (8 GB) - GPU access (16 GB): GTX 1650 forwarded here. Intended for gaming, but ended up using it for Stable Diffusion and LLMs for reasons below.
:::
I'd suggest starting with anything graphically intensive running on bare metal and setting up a VM with virt-manager / Virtualbox / etc. for the NAS part. Get a couple of disks specifically to pass through to the NAS VM, forward its ports to LAN, and connect to them on the host as you would any other machine. For a desk further away, you may be able to get away with a KVM extender, but I can't say I've any experience with them.
If you try to virtualize everything like I did, there's a couple of hurdles: - Much time and manual configuration in the command line is needed - Atrocious graphical and input latency on remote connections - Very high RAM usage - Input glitches and general slowness on the VM with GPU passthrough, remained unresolved despite scouring tutorials from people who somehow managed to get buttery-smooth gaming in a VM - Lots of bandwidth used while updating all of the VMs. Probably optimizable, but not out of the box.
Go for AMD if you can, but NVIDIA hasn't given me much trouble either. Make sure to install the driver from your distro's repo, not NVIDIA's website. IMO, this is less of an issue if you decide to pass through the GPU to a VM since any NVIDIA driver shenanigans will be contained to the VM.
However, I haven't run into some of the issues you had. With the proxmox host on wired ethernet and my laptop on 5GHz wifi from about 10ft away from the access point I can easily play Rocket League with no noticeable latency, 1440p 120Hz. I'm using sunshine on a windows VM and moonlight on Fedora. It did, indeed, take a crapload of fiddling and I consider myself pretty adept at these things, but it can be done. 😁
I also swap the GPU between two VMs. I have a Ubuntu VM I use for AI workloads for fiddling around. On that one, I just ssh in and the GPU is 100% utilized for AI. Planning to add another GPU in the future (or a few).
Can't speak to remote connections, but my previous experience with cloud providers tells me it might be good enough for slow paced games, but it will fail horribly on anything really latency dependent. Best case scenario is the latency is off by just enough to make you lose your mind, or worse, you get use to the weird remote latency and then get all screwed up when you play at home.
For the multi-seating aspect, I've just set up something similar using something called a KVM Extender (I got this one). I have my PC set up in my office and another seat set up in my bedroom.
The KVM essentially just transports HDMI and USB a long distance through an ethernet cable, so the bedroom monitor just appears as a second monitor. I've set up a keyboard combination to switch between enabled monitors so only one is turned on at once.
Not sure how many seats you could push with this, since you would need a set of KVM extender boxes per seat with its own HDMI/Display and USB ports in the PC. Might be something to look into in case it fits!
AV Access 4KEX100-KVM is a 4K KVM extender over HDBaseT. It can transmit 4K@60Hz HDMI signal over a single Cat6 cable up to 330ft/100m with zero loss or delay.
Adding onto this a bit as I also use a KVM to stream games from my bedroom PC to the living room 4k TV.
Hyprland has been great for this. I used to use KDE, then i3. KDE was a PITA for this setup, no fault of their own it is just fundamentally a different one, and i3 worked to some extent but I was still constantly fiddling with stuff to get audio and video exactly how I wanted to (and to do it easily).
Hyprland just works for me and I love it. I press a keybind and run a script I wrote to turn off my desk monitors, set audio, and launch the emulator front end (emulationstation-DE). Which can also launch all my steam and lutris games, as well as emulators all the way up to PS3 and switch games.
I even mounted a remote start button on the wall and turn my PC on from the other room
monitors-off is basically same thing but reversed:
#! /bin/bash
hyprctl keyword monitor DP-1, disable
hyprctl keyword monitor DP-3, disable
hyprctl keyword monitor HDMI-A-1, 0x0@60, 1
es-de
I'm still working out some kinks with audio so I don't wanna go down the rabbit hole hell that is pactl and pavucontrol in this post. But that's more of a universal Linux gripe I have than distro specific.
Obviously you'll need to tweak the script to what your specific setup is. The first numbers are x & y axis and the second is refresh rate. This is just an example. It's also Wayland only but you can do this in x11 no problem
As far as "remotely" switching, I just assigned the scripts to keybinds in the hyprland config file. Super easy.
After hours of trying understand how to set up VSCodium with Java extension, i found a solution so here it is, idiotproof (i hope) tutorial for future me and others like me ;)
Flatpak VSCodium with java extension
Via Terminal
Install VSCodium:
flatpak install com.vscodium.codium
Install "Extension Pack for Java" extension for VSCodium:
flatpak run com.vscodium.codium --install-extension vscjava.vscode-java-pack
Install flatpak openjdk extension. (In this case openjdk21):
4. Install "Flatseal": 1. Go to app store and search for "Flatseal". 2. Click Install button and after downloading open the app. 5. Allow VSCodium to use flatpak openjdk extension: 1. Search for "VSCodium" in Flatseal. 2. Go to Environment. 3. Click + button (to the right from Variables) and paste:
PATH=/usr/lib/sdk/openjdk21/bin:/app/bin:/usr/bin
4. Click `+` once again and paste:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/sdk/openjdk21
Restart VSCodium
PS
There is formatting issue with markdown but it's on lemmy side i think
Note this works for all other SDKs too. It works especially well for programming languages like Rust that have their own package manager.
Doesn't work so well for languages like C/C++ where you use your distro package manager to install dependencies. In those cases it's easier to install VSCodium inside a container where you do have access to a distro package manager.
edit: nvm, this post is being "boosted" by lemmy.world, but comments and upvotes from lemmy.ml will be blocked by infosec, because this is a one-way block not mutual
I really wish that I was born early so I've could witness the early years of Linux. What was it like being there when a kernel was released that would power multiple OSes and, best of all, for free?
I want know about everything: software, hardware, games, early community, etc.
You got it from a friend on a pile of slackware and floppies labeled various letters. It felt amazing and fresh, everything you could need was just a floppy away.
Then we got Gentoo and suddenly it was fun to wait 4 days to compile your kernel.
Honestly, it sucked. Like most computing at the time. Everything came on a ton of floppy disks, it was impossible to update online unless you had a good connection (which nobody did), and you had to do everything by hand, including compiling a lot of stuff which took forever. I mean, I’m glad I got the experience, but I would never wanna go back to that. It sucked.
Remember when packages like RPM were first introduced, and it was like, “cool, I don’t have to compile everything!” Then you were introduced to Red Hat’s version of DLL-Hell when the RPM couldn’t find some obsure library! Before YUM, rpmfind.net was sooo useful!
No audio, no WiFI, no well-established communities, sparse software selection, but total freedom on an alternate OS. I tried it out in the late 90s with Red Hat, left, came back about 5 years later in the early 2000s and stayed forever. SuSE 9.2 was amazing.
Well, I was an Amiga user. That was already unix-like, preemptive multitasking, etc. It was fading fast in the early nineties, and while i was already working in I.T., I was not interrsted in using Windows 3.11 and 95, so I began playing with Slackware Linux. I figured it was a good way to get comfortable with "real" I.T..
I learned Bash and had to compile most of the software i wanted to try. Since, like all programmers, I'm lazy, I wrote some simple scripts to build the code and make them into packages (tgz) for Slackware. This took tedium out of the work, and i could use the packkage manager to install and remove them.
Those were rough days for desktop users, though. I really had to use windows when i needed to pass output to "normies". I tried several window manager and desktops, and eventually landed on Ubuntu.
Based. But on a serious note, what machine did you have/use? Could you install Linux on the classic Amiga machines? I've always thought about buying an Amiga 1200.
My first experience was with two floppy images I found on "So much shareware! Vol.2".
It was labeled Linux 0.99b, no distro. It was not of much use to me at the time.
A couple of years later I got my hands on Slackware 2.0 on CD. So much time spent compiling your own kernel, because no modules and the whole thing had to fit in main memory (640kB). So much time spent fiddling with xf86config hoping you wouldn't fry your CRT.
Good times.
Then came gentoo, which had package management. No more did you have to browse sourceforge for endless dependencies to install something. No more did you have to re-install slackware on your root partition to update. So user-friendly in comparison.
We spent a lot of time on IRC.
MUDs kind of bridged the gap between IRC and games.
I remember spending a lot of time playing abuse, snes9x, quake + team fortress and quake2 + action quake.
Why not just install an old version in a VM and find out?
But remember, no search engines for troubleshooting, forums and printed matter only. (And mailing lists and IRC, but they'd probably tell you to Google it, which is off limits for this exercise.)
My friend wanted to get me to install it, but he had a 2nd machine to run Windows on. So we figured out how to dual boot.
And then we learned how to fix windows boot issues 😮💨
We mostly did it for the challenge. Those Linux Magazine CDs with new distros and software were a monthly challenge of "How can I install this and also not destroy my ability to play Diablo?"
I definitely have lost at least one install to getting stuck in vim, flailing the keyboard and writing garbage data into a critical config file before rebooting.
Modern Linux is amazing in comparison, you can use it for essentially any task and it still has a capacity for customization that is astonishing.
The early days were interesting if you like getting lost in the terminal and figuring things out without a search engine. Lots of trial and error, finding documentation, reading documentation, etc.
It was interesting, but be glad you have access to modern Linux. There's more to explore, better documentation, and the capabilities that you can pull in are still astonishing.
Looking through music and budget software CDs at a computer store or a college vendor table, there would be one with a penguin or BSD mascot. It wasn't like the other discs that had DOS shareware games or utilities. The CD rom drives were 1x speed, attached to a card on the ISA bus, without plug and play, so it needed an interrupt number that didn't collide with other cards. The install process was curses based, with no mouse. There would be much time spent figuring out how to partition the drive, usually after buying a book. Back then, computer book sections were huge. The software install dialog had one line description per package, and it wasn't easy to tell what they did. Then there was setting up X Server and choosing a window manager. Not all video modes were supported, so it took a lot of trial and error with editing config files and resolutions before the the window environment would work. This was before home internet so it would take a weekend or all week to figure out. The only accessible communities in many parts were dialup bulletin boards, unless there was access to a college computer lab with a mosaic or netscape browser. At this point it was realized that I lived in a tech desert, quit my retail job, and moved.
+++ath0 is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I've never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.
This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.
Encryption would prevent it - that's what I meant 😀
I think the trick is to convince someone to send that string, so the modem sees it coming from the computer. Similar to tricking someone into pressing Alt+F4, or Ctrl+Alt+Del twice on Windows 9x (instantly reboots without prompting).
encryption would prevent the modem from seeing it when someone sends it, but such a short string will inevitably appear once in a while in ciphertext too. so, it would actually make it disconnect at random times instead 😀
(edit: actually at seven bytes i guess it would only occur once in every 72PB on average...)
94-95 school year for me. Prior to win 95. Honestly OS2 warp was the tits then, blew windows and linux away. But the cool thing about linux was that you could pull a session from the college mainframe and then run all the software off campus. Over a modem. Pro E, maple, matlab, gopher, Netscape, ftp/fsp, irc, on and on. Once you had X going on your 486, you were good to go.
But honestly, it was nerd sh$t. Dos was king until win95. And then nobody looked back until win8 made us realize Microsoft had started sucking.
Bruh you were late. Vista sucked, 7 sucked, they were shit since XP. Sure, I kept using it until 10 because I was afraid linux still didn't work, but XP was the last time I was happy with computers until I installed Fedora.
Nah, 7 was pretty good, although it was the last good one.
Anything past that was garbage but frankly I tolerated it as as a teenager I was too busy being horny all the time to notice how my computer was increasingly antagonistic towards me.
I tolerated all the way to windows 10 but windows 11 was the last nail in the coffin for me. I probably am indeed late to the party but tbh Linux didn't inspire me until recently when I saw its became way more user-friendly than it was in 2015 when I first tried it.
I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.
The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.
I spent what felt like many moons trying to compile Gentoo when I was a kid. There was only the wiki and a gritty forum for getting answers, nothing in real-time. I didn't have very much knowledge of the kernel or messing with modules, and was certainly lost on getting a desktop environment going even after I got past the kernel part.
It was such an experience, I decided to become a janitor.
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by BeOS, Haiku is fast and easy to learn but very powerful.
Stuff needed tweaking more wine worked almost never even for basically window's programs. Configuring Xfree86 was black magic. Running Startx at the terminal prompt was like rolling the dice. Distro choice was smaller and it was really a choice. Since the child distros were less of a thing. You had Debian , Redhat, Slackware, and SUSE. All were very different at a fundamental level with packaging and philosophy. Also it was way more common to buy boxed copies of Linux distros with big thick manuals that helped you get it installed and take your first steps with Linux. It reminded me of when I first got my TI 83 calculator an it had that massive manual with it.
Also Lugs and spending a lot of time on IRC getting and helping people on freenode (don't go there now) was a must.
Contrary to other OSes, the information about it was mainly on the internet, no books or magazines. With only one computer at most homes, and no other internet-connected devices, that posed a problem when something didn't work.
It took me weeks to write a working X11 config on my computer, finding all the hsync/vsync values that worked by rebooting back and forth. And the result was very underwhelming, just a terminal in an immovable window. I think I figured out how to install a window manager but lost all patience before getting to a working DE. Days and days of fiddling and learning.
I had an old laptop, and my WiFi required some kind of cutter driver that wrapped broadcom, my Intel graphics didn't work on newer kernels. It booted in 7 seconds on a 5400rpm disk though.
What a lot of people forget is that in the early days of Linux there was no software that targeted it. Everything you would want to run on Linux was intended to run on something else like Solaris, BSD, AT&T Sytem V, SCO, AIX or something else. As a result, Linux APIs were the most generic flavor of Unix possible. Almost every thing meant for a Unix would compile and run on it and there was rarely a dependency problem.
A real pain in the ass. It was still worth it to use for the experience, especially if you had an actual reason to use it. Other than that it was just an exercise in futility most of the time..and I think that's why we loved it. It was still kinda new. Interesting. And it didn't spoon feed you. Was quite exhilarating.
I want to create a USB gadget with a raspberry pi zero 2W. I'm starting with imitating a webcam I already have to see how much of this I can figure out. I've used the online documentation and a couple AI bots to get this far quickly, but I'm hung up on a ln command. It's telling me "ln: failed to create symbolic link 'configs/c.1/uvc.usb0': No such file or directory" when trying to create the link. This makes no sense to me though. I'm trying to create the link, of course it doesn't exist yet. That's what that command is supposed to do.
I've confirmed this problem in alpine linux and raspbian lite.
Below is the little script I have so far just to create the device:
ln: failed to create symbolic link 'configs/c.1/uvc.usb0': No such file or directory
./fauxcam-gadget.sh: line 19: echo: write error: Device or resource busy
Hmm, not sure then. It seems correct to me. Check out this repo, it has systemd services for all the USB gadgets, you can run uvc very easily with this: github.com/BigfootACA/systemd-…
I can write specific instructions how to get this working later today, if you'll need them.
Once I crack this, I think it could be fun to create a script that could spoof devices plugged into it with the gadget framework. Could save me a lot of trouble creating known-working usb configs down the road. Instead of starting from scratch each time, I would just have to tweak an existing profile.
Honestly it’s just an idea to suck up time at this point. I do NOT have the skills for this shit, as we can see here. I can correct what ChatGPT gets wrong though and just run with that.
You should definitely try with the systemd-gadgets I linked earlier. It makes all the configuration really easy, you just need to enable the relevant services, so in your case usbgadget-func-uvc.service and gadget-start.service. You also need to copy them beforehand to /etc/systemd/system, including gadget-init.service, and you need to copy gadget to /etc/default/gadget, and the scripts gadget-start.sh and gadget-init.sh to /etc/systemd/scripts. Edit /etc/default/gadget to edit the configs and names of the gadget, and then start gadget-start.service. No need to enable gadget-init.service, it's called as a dependency from other services.
There's an install script in the repo that you can use as well.
IDK how all that works but I will say that the result of this would (in a normal filesystem) create a link named configs/c.1/uvc.usb0 yes, but that link would point to functions/uvc.usb0relative to its own dir. This doesn't exist and your symlink would be broken, presumably the special file system there doesn't like that.
Edit: Apparently that's not the problem and you're totally supposed to run an ln command that should logically result in a broken symlink, thanks to kernel driver sysfs abuse.
Normally, you'd be right, but this special filesystem doesn't care about that. I've done similar with different gadgets so many times, always with relativr symlinks, sometimes directly from the root of the special filesystem, sometimes from the gadgets own subdirectory, and it just works.
Edit: OK, I looked at the docs, and they sure do make a broken symlink there. I still think it's worth a try to create a non-broken link, maybe the docs are wrong. I would expect they would put a little note there, that yes, you really do want to create a broken symlink (if so, why not a regular file?), but then again its kernel docs and those aren't the most friendly.
I also thought you were OP for some reason, sorry.
Edit2: If you look at the file listing later in the docs, you can see this:
Which does look like a real non-broken symlink, so I maintain the docs are wrong and you're not supposed to make a broken symlink.
Original comment, silightly edited:
You misunderstand. I suspect OP cannot create the symlink, because it would be a broken symlink, not because the symlink is relative. Maybe you cannot create broken symlinks in the sysfs for some reason.
I was just trying to explain that a relative symlink is relative to the directory in which it resides. The target to the symlink should point to ../../functions/uvc.usb0 if you want it to point to something that exists. The ln command in OP's listing would result in a broken symlink, since the specified path is not relative to the c.1 directory. It is relative to the working directory, but that's wrong, that's not what ln expects you to put there.
Maybe it needs to be a correct symlink, maybe that will solve the problem.
You can use this kitten to draw a GPU accelerated panel on the edge of your screen or as the desktop wallpaper, that shows the output from an arbitrary terminal program. It is useful for showing st...
Fuck this project for stealing the name from KiTTy, a PuTTy fork. Years ago it was brought to the devs attention and he doubled down on the name. The way they handled it deserves no respect.
KiTTY is a fork of PuTTY - you can find it at http://kitty.9bis.net/ You may want to differentiate your product from KiTTY so that google knows the difference...
When I click the download button, it looks like it's downloading multiple files since the progress bar goes from 0 to 100 several times, and then it gets up to 95% then suddenly returns to the download button. This happens in about 30 seconds.
Using the CLI method, I run the following command:
rpm-ostree rebase fedora:fedora/42/x86_64/silverblue
and get the following errors:
error: Could not depsolve transaction; 1 problem detected: Problem: conflicting requests - package dnf5-plugin-automatic-5.2.12.0-2.fc42.x86_64 from updates requires libcurl-full(x86-64), but none of the providers can be installed - package dnf5-plugin-automatic-5.2.12.0-1.fc42.x86_64 from fedora requires libcurl-full(x86-64), but none of the providers can be installed - package dnf5-plugin-automatic-5.2.12.0-2.fc42.x86_64 from updates-archive requires libcurl-full(x86-64), but none of the providers can be installed - package libcurl-minimal-8.11.1-4.fc42.x86_64 from @System conflicts with libcurl(x86-64) provided by libcurl-8.11.1-4.fc42.x86_64 from fedora
SOLUTION: Uninstalled layered packages in dnf-automatic, libreoffice, and rpmfusion and then restarted. Rebase command successfully completed thereafter.
Most of my machines seem to be working fine, but I have one critical one where I have the notification for Fedora 42 in the gnome-software updates window, but when I click the Download button, the progress bar shows up to about 4% and then quits with…
I have two entries each with a different BaseCommit. One has dnf-automatic, libreoffice, vpn app. The other has the same three plus rpmfusion-free-release and rpmfusion-nonfree-release.
I just recently installed the rpmfusion packages but I didn't know what I was doing. Just found something online suggesting an alternative update method for Silverblue.
dnf-automatic looks a like a package designed for non-Atomic versions of Fedora.
libreoffice is available as a flatpak. You should avoid layering packages as much as possible.
A VPN app makes sense to have layered. I assume it comes from a third-party repository added to /etc/yum.repos.d. It is possible this package does not support Fedora 42 yet. You can try removing it to see if the update succeeds.
rpmfusion is a repository providing packages that often cannot be pre-installed due to some legal reasons. Unless you need/installed a package from there, uninstall it.
So basically it's not allowing me to update because of these layered packages and every time I want to update, I have to uninstall them and reinstall after I update?
Thank you again for all of the help with the dual boot and repartition a few weeks back. I am running Linux Mint.
I repartitioned the Linux side to about 25 GB and over the last few weeks just downloading updates, I guess it has filled up. It tells me there is only 75 MB left. Is that normal or can I free up room again?
Also, the printer no longer prints. It just hangs when I try to print. It shows up correctly as the HP Deskjet 3510 but won’t print. Any tips on how to fix?
You can use this kitten to draw a GPU accelerated panel on the edge of your screen or as the desktop wallpaper, that shows the output from an arbitrary terminal program. It is useful for showing st...
On one hand, kitty is doing a very aggressive job of advancing the terminal world.
Providing protocol extensions to permit terminal software to use more modifier keys than were available in the past, which is something that I really wanted to see.
Providing a newer graphics protocol than the ancient Sixel --- which kitty also supports. Terminal software can render images --- mpv can even (slowly) play movies in-terminal using said protocol.
It can leverage the GPU for acceleration.
On the other hand, it's got some things that I don't like:
It keeps attracting new functionality at a very rapid rate, much of which is on by default, and many of which I don't know if I want. There are a bunch of modules ("kittens"), and a lot of functionality (including aiming to be tmux-like) that I don't know if I want in a virtual terminal program. This increases the attack surface, which is something I'm kind of sensitive about for a program that's intended to sandbox content from remote systems. xterm has a lot of cruft related to older protocols and features too, but at least that's pretty mature code...and it still has had a bit of a security history.
The startup time isn't great. urxvt can run a daemon, urxvtd. foot just starts up quickly on its own. Kitty can do kitty -1, which makes subsequent windows open quickly, but close all open terminal windows, and you're back to the window taking a noticeable amount of time to come up.
I'm not sure about the merits of another extension, its ability to render differently-sized fonts in-terminal. That seems like it might fragment terminal software into being able to run on a grid-based set of characters and not.
I spent a while using it and then went back to foot. There's just very little that I actually want to do and would take advantage of that foot can't do (though to be fair, I might make more use of the graphics protocol if tmux supported it --- the closest one can get graphics-wise there is a non-mainline tmux fork with experimental Sixel support).
If tmux supported the kitty graphics protocol and then some emacs packages also added support --- a lot of those have the ability to use graphics, but will only do so in a non-terminal environment --- that could take me back to kitty, though.
Update notifications are an antifeature. Firstly, from just a straight usability standpoint, it does the job of a package manager, but worse. Imagine also a system in which every tool like kitty ca...
I have --- at one point or another, I'm pretty sure that I've tried every Linux virtual terminal program out there that's been packaged for major distros in the past twenty years --- but it was some time back, and I don't remember specifics. For me, time to start and text throughput was a pretty dominant factor, and urxvt (for X11) or foot (for Wayland) ranked highly there.
As users flee from Twitter/X, two visions of social media's future compete: Mastodon's community-controlled network versus Bluesky's venture-backed promises.
All true. And yet sadly until mastodon or better say another fediverse instance do have algorithms and a brain dead stupid onboarding and hyper cool phone apps, that will not do for 99% of the people.
I was told something like this about an article I was pointing out wasn't on page 1 of google, but was on virtually all other engines. "Unless it's page 1 of google nobody cares"
And all I can say is "who cares? those aren't the people it's for"
I agree, I do the same. But the second part of your reply « who cares those aren’t the guys », years and years watching the fediverse trying to kickstart the whole thing proves it wrong . We, fediverse users, do need those people onboard
What "kickstart"? The fediverse isn't a commercial venture. If we can connect with our friends and interests, it's already "working". I find fantastic new people here all the time, doing really niche stuff I'd never find on a platform focused on appealing to everyone.
If "99%" of people aren't on it, that's perfectly acceptable, and just makes it easier for the ones on it to find and talk to their friends. I don't think we need or want the vast torrent of spammers, downvote bots, and "influencer" types who use whatever gives them clicks.
Fediverse can't sustain many niche communities with its level of activity. Even gaming communities on lemmy don't have enough traffic to constitute communities for individual games. I can't do after-episode TV discussions on Lemmy because there wouldn't be enough people commenting to warrant it. If I wanted to search for a D&D game in my local community (a huge US city), I couldn't do it via Lemmy.
I can do all this on reddit, which I intend for Lemmy to replace, but I can't do that yet. So I still crawl reddit for the needs Lemmy can't replace, but I'd rather never have to open reddit in the first place.
Same is true for every alternative platform on Fediverse. I'm still using all the mainstream apps I intend to replace.
There will always be two types of users: people looking to connect and people looking to be entertained. Fedi is better at the former and commercial better at the latter.
People prefer to drown than pick option which is not corporate bullshit. Bluesky won because it's centralized, and people don't have to decide over instance.
As a user of both Mastodon and Lemmy, I think there are inherit differences between the formats that make Lemmy easily a capable replacement for Reddit, but Mastodon not at all a replacement for Twitter.
To get into specifics, Lemmy is more meme and news based, and as long as there are a few thousand users using it and some percentage of those posting content...it largely scratches the same itch.
Twitter was very much an active global conversation forum. It was nicknamed the hell site for a reason because if someone took issue with or was very amused by something you posted and you became "the main character" of Twitter for even an instant (something I experienced only very slightly) it was electrifying and even sort of scary at times.
In addition, the people that were active on there were very active, and it felt at times like you could talk to anyone who had been twitterized...which was a lot of people including prominent politicians, celebrities, and even experts of certain fields.
It was just an entirely different thing altogether. Mastodon is like many of the Twitter alternatives that have popped up from time to time. It's largely kinda the same with regards to functionality (though not having quote tweets is completely ridiculous IMO) but the engagement of it is very low, and the place largely feels very inactive. It feels like you're talking to dead feeds posted in syndication and there's nobody on the other end.
It's not the same as Twitter, and I doubt that Bluesky will even be the same as Twitter. Honestly, maybe all of that's a good thing. But the virality and the engagement and the discovery and everything on Mastodon is way turned down versus Twitter. Twitter was like the crack cocaine of social media...fast, cheap, addictive, and terrible for you. Mastodon is like a cup of tea by comparison.
I agree on the global forum aspect of Twitter being the reason it was exciting for public figures and journalists, but you get waaay more genuine interactions from normal (techy) people on Mastodon. It may feel a bit dead when you start out because there is no algorithm to feed you content, but after a while of using it you get a lot of interesting opinions and feedback on things you post.
It's different from Twitter and that's fine. I have no real drive to join bluesky to see if it's similar because Twitter felt deeply unhealthy anyway. Crack cocaine isn't good for you.
Nobody needs to know about the existence of, for instance, "bean dad".
Lemmy is barely a thing. Lets not get ahead of ourselves.
People do prefer centralized platforms with shiny front-faces and easy-to-navigate corporate bullshit. The reason why that stuff is so successful is because it works.
People fled to Bluesky because advertisers moved to Bluesky.
There are brands moving there, that's how a place starts generating value or the perception of value. I saw the same shit happen with twitter and reddit back in the day, this is just the same cycle repeating.
I think it's "the algorithm", people basically just want to be force-fed "content" – look how successful TikTok is, largely because it has an algorithm that very quickly narrows down user habits and provides endless distraction.
Mastodon and fediverse alternatives by comparison have very simple feeds and ways to surface content, it simply doesn't "hook" people the same way, and that's competition.
On one hand we should probably be doing away with "the algorithm" for reasons not enumerated here for brevity, but on the other hand maybe the fediverse should build something to accommodate this demand, otherwise the non-fedi sites will.
Solution: When I formatted all my drives to install Linux on one and Windows on the other, I kept both connected and they share EFI boot partition as a result. Every time I reinstall Linux it formats the drive and therefore deletes the Windows's EFI Boot as well. One way is to fix this is to reinstall Windows while disconnecting the drive you have Linux on. Or you can move the boot files if you don't want to do that.
Currently dual booting as I need Windows for a few tasks and ganes Linux just won’t do. Since setting everything up I’ve reinstalled Linux twice, both times I’ve lost the ability to boot into windows and have needed to reinstall it.
Disk doesn’t show at all in Grub, tried all kinds of things but it just doesn’t show as a bootable OS. It doesn’t show in the boot options in the BIOS or the boot menu for my motherboard. Drive shows up and all the files are still on it. So my guess is the Windows bootloader somehow installs on the same disk that I have Linux on.
I run Linux(Fedora) and Windows on two separate drives.
Windows take forever to install. Anything I can do now to prevent this from happening if I need to reinstall Linux or if I wanna to some distro hopping?
Just to be clear, everything is working right now. But I want to prevent having to reinstall Windows every time I change distro or reinstall my Linux OS
I've recently installed Windows 10 on my new m.2 but when I unplugged my old HDD to perform an easier format on a different HDD, I only reached BIOS as the m.2 does have the OS on it but not the...
Yeah, I have to do that after reinstalling Windows again. Just did and that solves the issue of getting it into Grub so that I wont have tot go through the BIOS.
But when I install Linux, the Windows boot disappears from the BIOS too. Even tried to find it trough the «Repair» options when booting from a Windows USB, but it’s just gone.
Is it possible that Windows and Linux shares UEFI partitions even if they’re on different drives?
I was doing some quick research and saw someone suggest installing each OS with the other drive disconnected. That way you can first get each one working individually and there's no chance of one messing with the other's bootloader.
I was hoping to avoid that, but that’s gonna be my next move.
Unless I forget and break windows again. Words can’t describe how tired I am of choosing the 37 different options during the install, updating the OS 4 times and installing my apps and deleting bloat. 😂 Windows 11 is great and all, but Microsoft loves to make it unbearable to use.
Install Windows, but leave drive open or a partial space on windows drive. When you install Linux, don't let it install the EFI boot into the Windows EFI boot partition. Instead have the partition manager build a new boot partition+root home etc. Grub will install on its own partition, OS prober should find the Windows drive too, and it will add a chainloader entry to grub. Set your machine to always boot from Linux grub, if you want windows you select it in grub and it hands boot over to windows boot. This way they are isolated and Windows never knows that Linux grub exists and will leave it alone.
I've had Windows and Linux installed on the SAME drive for decades and don't have this issue. Install Windows first because it WILL fuck up the EFI boot partition, that's inevitable because Windows sucks, then install Linux, use the manual partition option and simply select the existing EFI System partition for the EFI and DO NOT mark format, Linux will then install and leave the Windows boot loader in the EFI partition undisturbed.
Linux WILL overwrite the boot block to start grub instead of the Windows boot loader, but most Linux distros will automatically add a chain boot loader entry to the grub menu to allow you to boot Windows, at least Debian and Redhat derived distros will do this, probably a more manual process in Arch derived distros.
If it does become necessary to install Whendoze after Linux, you can use boot-repair to automatically fix the EFI System partition Windows fucked up or you can boot off of a flash drive, and fix it manually.
First of all: You don't have to reinstall Windows to get it's bootmgr EFI and supporting files back into the ESP. Installing those from the CLI in from a booted install media is possible, I did it before. You can even install all of Windows manually if you ever need to, it's just annoying to do with the windows command line tools.
Secondly: I'm not familiar with all distro installers, but surely you can just not format the ESP? Worst case scenario you'd have to use manual disk formatting I guess, but it's not that difficult.
Thirdly: You said Grub doesn't show the disk. If you mean the Grub command interface didn't show the disk, then the issue is deeper, at a UEFI or hardware level. If you mean there are no boot entries for a Windows install to be selected, then it could be that they were not generated because the Windows bootmgr EFI was not found when Grub got installed. Sometimes just booting back into Linux and running os-prober again might be enough, if the Windows bootmgr EFI is still around. On my distro the os-proper is automatically run when I run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
I've always used a shared ESP for my dual boot systems and I certainly don't reinstall one OS as the result of a change with the other.
Fucking hell that’s a real pain in the arse solution you have there.
If you have two drives then one will be sda and the other will be sdb. Install Windows first on sda (which will mean the boot sector is on sda) then install linux to sdb.
When you get to the part in the Linux installation process where it asks where you want the boot partition tell it to install on sda.
Then anytime you want to install and try a different distro just install to sdb with the boot sector on sda and grub will always detect and add Windows to the boot menu.
What Linux distro are you using? To make it not erase the Windows boot manager from the EFI partition simply manually partition, and do NOT mark the EFI partition for formatting, then Linux will add it's own but NOT erase Windows.
I prefer to just move the Windows boot loader so that I don’t have to even think about it. Having Windows’ EFI completely separated is a much better solution in my opinion. But both solutions work all the same.
Not sure what you mean here. This issue is related to moving Windows’s boot files to a different drive. Only relevant if you want to use the automatic partition option while installing a distro.
Booting in BIOS won’t make any difference whatsoever if the boot loader is gone.
As I wrote earlier. Windows doesn’t make a new EFI boot partition if there’s one on your system already. Regardless which drive it’s on and which drive you choose to install Windows to. It’s always been that way, I just forgot when I installed Linux on my old Windows drive and reinstalled Windows on a new drive. So when you do install Linux again after this, and choose automatic partitioning, it formats the EFI partition Windows used.
My solution is just how you move the Windows EFI partition and it’s files to a different drive, effectively isolating the Windows boot loader completely from the Linux drive.
I can chose which OS to boot into either by changing boot order in the BIOS, selecting it in the BIOS boot menu or in Linux’s Grub menu.
This method shouldn’t have anything to do with what distro you’re gonna be using as the fix itself happens in Windows.
It’s a Windows fix relevant for dual booting Linux.
Edit: I used this exact method when I had two Windows installs on different drives and wanted to remove the original one from my system. Back in the Windows 7 days.
Hello ladies and gentlemen as a brand new user (installed yesterday on new computer) of Linux in general and Bazzite specifically. I had a bootable USB I was going to use for a different distro before I decided on using Bazzite with another USB.
I decided to use the first one to move my meme collection to the new computer but when I deleted the partition and reallocated it with the highlighted option (the one that is not ms-dos I can not remember the specific name) the drive now seems to have disappeared. When I plug it in now it does not auto detect anything and for the life of me I can not find any drives through Dolphin.
If anyone can tell me how I fucked it up and/or how to find it/ fix it I would be grateful. I can always do it in Windows since I have to set up the old one to access the memes anyway but I would like to know how to do it here for the future. Thanks in advance.
So I’ve tried Mastodon, Pixelfed and didn’t like them. Mastodon is nice if you wanna ”tweet”, but that’s not for me. Pixelfed was dead.
I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks, and the conversations there seem mostly friendly and constructive, but I decided I don’t want to have anything to do with social media corporations. Besides, I noticed I could scroll endlessly. And that’s not good for me.
Lemmy seems nice. There are still some topics I’m interested in that don’t have active communities, and I’m still learning on how to have my feed from multiple instances. But still, this is the way to go for me.
Against algorithms, against fascism, for free internet. Thanks for coming to my boring Ted talk and have a nice day.
Pixelfed has more than 100,000 active users, about 5 times what it was 6 months ago, so I wouldn't really call it dead. And with the fediverse, pixelfed and mastodon can talk to each other, so even on less active platforms you can connect with millions of other people. Most of the accounts I follow on pixelfed are from mastodon.
I'm constantly arguing with liberals, the whole reason I'm on .ml and not one of the defederated instances is because I want to talk to y'all instead of stay in an echo chamber of people that agree with me.
Your ideology doesn't have any allies then. It's used in Cuba and in North Korea. That's all.
In Cuba, they are losing ground because the people don't want the government to have a monopoly on labour.
North Korea is kim's paradise
Your only hope is to brand china communist. But are they?
"The private sector already accounts for over 60% of GDP, 70% of technological innovation, and, more potently, employs over 80% of the workforce across the country's urban cities."
Chinese capitalists own majority stakes everywhere in the world. They control the cobalt in Congo for example.
In both Cuba and the DPRK they've been under a brutal siege war from the United States since the revolution, don't pretend like they struggle for no reason. There are certainly problems, but they can be laid firmly at the feet of the US empire and its proxies.
But the US won't be around forever and BRICS is opening the world economy to them. They endured a near century of humiliation and its finally coming to an end, I'm excited to see how they develop without a US boot on their necks! Aren't you?
As for China, I was skeptical about the Dengist reforms. It's like you said, they boosted private sector development and investment. The created billionaires. They allowed for heightened exploitation of workers. They suppressed Maoists.
They proved politics are still in command with Zero COVID, though. Ever since China's heroic pandemic response I am optimistic that the private sector is subordinate. They're willing and able to tell their billionaires "no" and force them to obey.
See, the purpose of the Dengist reforms was to develop China's economy as fast as possible while avoiding Western retaliation, like what happens to every other communist country that becomes the subject of endless siege and proxy warfare, and it worked. Unlike under capitalism where the anarchy of the market dictates production, China has its productive capacity firmly under the control of the government. They still issue marching orders to the private sector and they centrally plan their development.
China is now a world leader in technological innovation and is critical to the global supply chain as a key node of production. As much as Trump wants to do a trade war he's more likely to hurt the US than to actually hurt China. China is still dominated by the capitalist mode of production, like you said, but since the Party remains in command they'll be able to abolish the market entirely without fear of Western retaliation. Capitalism is just a stage of development, after all.
Also, don't ignore Vietnam. They have been on a similar trajectory as China, developing their economy and integrating themselves into the supply chain, and now they're growing closer with China with every new idiot tariff imposed by Trump.
I find that """social democrats""" are just pessimists. You think revolution never works and communism always fails, and so you retreat into reformism and liberalism. I still have revolutionary optimism, though, which means I don't even need to win this argument. I'm certain that you'll see that I'm right soon enough. ☺️
So you agree that capitalism is the best way to develop a country. So, capitalism is good? It relocates everytime to a poorer country. Developing that country.
At the end, the whole world will be developed. I'm not an anarchist, so I'm quite fond of governments creating stability in their region. (Not a revolutionary indeed).
North Korea and Cuba joining globalist trade is fine by me. Cuba already sends out their doctors abroad.
Cuba trades a lot with Spain and China.
Problem though. Their doctors would earn more money in other Latin American countries. Which they often do. They emigrate to one of those countries and then have their family live a luxurious life in Havana.
This is because in those other countries, even though same level of wealth, they are self employed as doctors. They get the entire fruits of their labour 😀
Competition is very important. Just like you don't want Elon musk to be a monopolist, you don't want a government to be a monopolist either. Competition is necessary.
I don't know much about Vietnam, so I didn't talk about them. Their language makes me go insane not gonna lie 🥲
I did watch documentaries about Cuba though, so talking a bit more about that.
I'm not a fan of revolutions. Look at Libya and Syria. Revolutions aren't good.
If you want to do a revolution, you better accept to live a full generation in pure poverty in the hope that your children will have it better.
Then compare it to a place that has been having stability in the same period.
The place with stability will be stronger on the global scene most likely. Such as Switzerland Vs the rest of Europe that were involved in world war 2.
Stability means growth.
You view me as a pessimist and I view you as a pessimist. You see no other way out than revolution.
I can assure you, in my day to day life I am the optimist. My wife's rather pessimistic aha.
Like when trump crashed the market and I pumped it full. My wife was like "you're having a baby, you need to be careful".
Right now the stocks look green af.
I'm saying I'mma take a 100k euros mortgage.
She's like "we're having a baby, can you even afford that?"
Tsk tsk tsk 🌝
Edit: let's ask my best buddy the cat from mistral AI 😤
Estimating the percentage of revolutions that bring prosperity is challenging due to the varied nature of revolutions and their outcomes. However, based on historical observations, it's clear that while some revolutions have led to significant improvements in economic and political conditions, many others have resulted in instability, conflict, or the rise of new repressive regimes.
Factors that influence the success of a revolution in bringing prosperity include:
Goals and Leadership: Revolutions with clear goals and competent leadership are more likely to achieve positive outcomes.
Popular Support: Broad-based support from the population can help stabilize the post-revolutionary period.
International Context: Support or interference from other countries can significantly impact the revolution's outcome.
Economic Conditions: The state of the economy before, during, and after the revolution plays a crucial role in determining prosperity.
Institutional Strength: The ability to establish strong and fair institutions post-revolution is vital for long-term prosperity.
Given these factors, a rough estimate might be that a minority of revolutions—perhaps around 20-30%—lead to sustained economic prosperity and political stability. This estimate is speculative and based on the general understanding that successful revolutions are relatively rare and often face significant challenges in achieving their goals.
You should read How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, capitalism didn't help them at all. They were intentionally deprived of industrial and intellectual property that would allow them to build up their own means of production -- underdeveloped by capitalism --- and intentionally kept at a lower stage of development to superexploit the workers and extract superprofits.
Flag independence and so-called decolonization didn't mean freedom to develop either, now under neocolonialism the same underdevelopment takes place. Libya and Syria are just more examples of the same neocolonial agenda, to underdevelop nations and force them to be subservient to the imperial core. Those weren't revolutions, they were Western dirty wars: coup the government, pour in weapons to fuel whatever terrorist groups are willing to work with the West, sanction the people to make the economy scream, etc. etc.
So, no, capitalism wasn't the best way to develop any of those countries.
The reason China needed to use capitalism to develop was solely to fool the West into doing business. There's a saying attributed to Lenin; "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them." That's all China has done. Not only did the capitalists sell them the rope, the capitalists also sold them the rope factories and outsourced every step of rope production.
China was never capitalist. They're communists wearing the flayed skin of capitalism to trick it into lowering its guard.
Capitalism also isn't developing the imperial core anymore. We have reached a stage of deindustrialization, where now instead of building up infrastructure and production capacity we're letting capital strip the wiring from the walls to maximize cost cutting without actually developing anything. There is some development that still happens thanks to government grants and public institutions, but now neoliberalism is cutting those too to "save money". Thanks to rampant privatization and austerity everything is worse.
And of course there's no popular support here in the West, this is the imperial core. We grew fat and rich off of the superprofits from imperialism, revolution would mean a redistribution of wealth from the imperial core to the periphery. That means Europe and Canada and the US will have to pay repairations for what they have done to the world. I don't expect that to be popular here!
South Africa however is a whole different story. They are the most inequal country in the world.
Africa has a median net wealth per adult of 1250 USD. Mean is 8400 USD.
For South Africa this is 5200 USD median and 25000 usd average.
The approach in Congo was a lot more revolutionary while in South Africa it was reformist. In Congo, any Belgian was forcibly deported and many were murdered. In South Africa there are still a lot of descendants from dutchies.
I believe that China's investment in Congo will be good for Congo, as most investments are.
The Belgian investments were to extract raw resources from the country. But these railroads and trains are still being used today.
Nobody really wants to help Congo unless they get financially rewarded for it. Congo is quite a scary place too, for business. All that instability?
Revolutions = instability = capital flight = poverty
We'll see what happens. The west developed China. Now it's China's turn to develop Africa. About time too, fucking hell, we're so close to Africa. Become developed so that we can do meaningful trade.
The investments in china have been tremendously rewarding.
You and I view China very different. You might view them as Buddhism and the west as Christian.
But I view Europe as Judaism. America as Christianity and china as islam. 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0
The same thing, just different branding. It's all capitalism.
Due to a video being widely circulated showing a Chinese manager beating African workers with a whip, claims of racism towards Chinese have resurfaced.
Oh yeah, after Congo got independence from Belgium. Their purchasing power reduced to not even 10% of what it was at 1960 at the time of 1979.
Yes, and that was revenge. Countries were punished for winning independence.
But these railroads and trains are still being used today.
Those railroads are just supply lines that ship from resource extraction points to seaports. The railroads don't connect cities or provide infrastructure for actual people or act as part of the supply chain for internal production. They were built to be purely extractive. That's not real development, that's underdevelopment. The railroads ship out cobalt and ground nuts and the people of the DRC are deprived of access for their own civilian or industrial uses.
Colonizers did not develop Africa. This is a lie spread by colonizers to hide their crimes against humanity.
In Congo, any Belgian was forcibly deported and many were murdered.
Yeah, because Belgians raped and tortured and murdered so many Congolese people. The sick shit colonizers did in Africa rivals the Nazis.
The west developed China.
No no no, China developed itself by fooling the West (into selling them the rope, get it?) because the West never develops anything by choice.
Look, if revolution can be avoided that's great! Venezuela managed to do it and they'd be doing quite well if it weren't for imperialist meddling from the US. I'm not saying that revolution is the only option, only that the abolition of capitalism must be the end goal. I say "end goal" because it's not realistic to just abolish markets and commodity production and wage labor instantly and expect it to work. The abolition of capitalism will take time.
But if your goal is to keep capitalism alive forever you are not a leftist. Deal with it.
Aight but can you also talk about china on Congo and the video I showed you? I'm saying china is just the same as Europe and America.
I find that normal. China is new to having power, their government has a lot of power in their own region. People their opinions are suppressed in china. They have the great firewall of china.
What you are doing here, is not allowed in China. You'd be seen as a traitor and dealt with by the government.
You're critical of your government. You're a product of the west.
That's a specific incident, I don't think it shows some kind of widespread colonialism from China. This doesn't compare to Belgium at all, their colonial behavior was well documented and systematic.
As for China's firewall and their regulation of criticism, they have to protect themselves from propaganda that gets endlessly pumped out by Western billionaires and governments. There's a material reason for these laws, they aren't just evil totalitarians that hate freedom.
This sometimes results in people getting caught in the crossfire, and that's not good, but what else can China do? If they just allow endless Western meddling they'll have unrest and terrorism as people get radicalized by billionaires, far right factions, and the US State Department.
It's a country of 1,4 billion people. With a massive controlling government that is powerful enough to bring stability to such a huge amount of people.
Do you know how easy it is to find bad things about any country and any government?
You can always criticise governments. Their one decision will always help a certain amount of people and put another amount of people in a disadvantage.
Yes, their decision helps their government stay stable and in control and it puts Western-backed counter-revolutionaries at a disadvantage. They have to do this or, again, they're going to have to deal with political violence as people get radicalized by Western governments and billionaires.
I generally agree with China's firewall, of course I'm not going to criticize it that much. I like it when my enemies are silenced, because I'm not a liberal and I don't believe my enemies should have a right to speak. 😊
That puts you at a disadvantage though. You live in the west. If we take this approach. You get executed.
Literally, we drag you out of your home in front of your family and put a bullet in your brain.
Why don't you fear this? Why aren't you going to china? It's easy, a plane ticket costs 350 euros for me to Shanghai. You're western and thus you have enough money most likely, as you've been extracting money within the imperial core.
So, immigrating in china should be quite easy.
My boss worked in Beijing and Shanghai, if he can do that, so can you.
Why are you still not within the great firewall of china?
Liberals are socially leftist. LGBTQ stuff, women empowerment, environment stuff, pro universal healthcare, ...
Personally I view american politics as right wingers compared to west Europe, but oh well.
They still are viewed as a hundred million people on this planet that vote for the left side of their country's politicians.
It's not that easy with USA. Bernie Sanders is likely the most left wing there. AOC likely the same.
Joe Biden was less left wing, but he still helped people out during the pandemic compared to what republican's would have done.
Here in Belgium you have more choice. You can choose between anti immigration, regionalists, liberals, Christian centrists, environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.
Broader choice. Here in Belgium the left wing is considered environmentalists, social democrats and Marxists.
While liberals, although socially left wing, are economically right wing. Basically the party for the small entrepreneurs. The other right wing party is more for the multinationals. While the anti immigration party actually is quite socialist economically, but the same old "own people first" shit. It just so happens that being a conservative in Belgium means being somewhat of a socialist economically.
Pretty funny, there's not much difference between extreme right and extreme left here. Basically just.. is the socialist a racist or not lol
Syrians have been thrown from high buildings and beheaded by ISIS because of their perceived sexual orientation. Arwa Damon documents some of the cases.
Because I find it amusing that you're talking about a pro LGBTQ country as if they are IS.
Maybe you should be the one talking about IS if you care about LGBTQ
In Europe we have lots of refugees that are LGBTQ because they'd be suffering great consequences in their home country. Those people aren't from the US.
In Europe we have lots of refugees that are LGBTQ because they’d be suffering great consequences in their home country. Those people aren’t from the US.
Then they are welcome, easy to integrate them. They speak a language we speak. Hell, it has never been as easy as now. Thanks to English being spoken by a billion people now.
Then it would be smart of her to go more right wing, right?
How far to the right did you want her to go? How many more genocides would it take? Maybe you would prefer if she campaigned on lopping off children's hands for not producing enough rubber?
Due to a video being widely circulated showing a Chinese manager beating African workers with a whip, claims of racism towards Chinese have resurfaced.
Nah not really, I just said kill Elon musk for impacting German politics. Not because of anything he said, but because he's not an elected European.
Impacting EU legislation, tsk tsk tsk.
Me being extreme right to extreme left depends on the topic.
Most people are politically, economically and financially illiterate.
They just have their brand (insert your preferred ideology) and just question themselves: is this what my brand wants? Then they do ☺️ or 😡
I vote for social democrats (freedom of expression is important to them). But clearly not everything I say is viewed as leftist.
There's a lot I say that would get me to vote for other parties. I just vote what I find most important in society. But I still will heavily criticise it.
You're not a Belgian if you don't criticise the government (every single political ideology). It's our national sport. We complain. A lot. Like the Italians, but without the passionate gestures and intonation.
As I said, most people are politically, economically and financially illiterate. That's why I can have a job providing such services. Which is a good thing. Even though it seems really easy to me. I like money, so keep it coming.
But you gave little to no content. All you said is that Elon isn't right wing enough for me. What does that even mean? Only if you give enough clarification, then I can communicate to you that you're correct or mistaken
And what did you see, exactly? I'm a staunch supporter of transparency. It's literally my job.
I haven't been hiding anything, just tell me which part of the massive amount of information I give available to you has led you to believe I'm further right wing than Elon musk.
What does Elon musk do and why is what he does less right wing than what I have done?
This is an EXERCISE for you. Critical thinking. I'm giving you an opportunity to become better.
And what did you see, exactly? I’m a staunch supporter of transparency. It’s literally my job.
I'm an astronaut, doctor, lawyer and actor. But what I really want to do is direct. I can lie about my job too.
I haven’t been hiding anything, just tell me which part of the massive amount of information I give available to you has led you to believe I’m further right wing than Elon musk.
The very first sentence:
Lemmy is just left wing politics in an echo chamber
To a rightwinger, I suppose it might look that way.
It's easy to be condescending when I am better (if you take this serious, you make my day)
You could lie about your profession, but let's say you're a doctor. Then you're quite great at everything that the human body is about. Viruses, medicine, etc. You also need to be quite good against stress and be able to withhold a lot of information. Likely take drugs while doing exams.
Lawyer, that's great. You're a bureaucrat that does the work of the governments. You make it so that national and international law is utilised correctly.
Astronaut.. idk shit bout that
Actor. Oi, you're the opposite of transparency, bad.. bad
Ah so because I say Lemmy is a left wing echo chamber, I cannot be a leftist?
Is it not allowed for leftists to criticise their own?
When you try to validate an institution's information might be correct. A good question to pose is: what were you wrong about?
If they give you an immense amount of info, then that's brilliant.
If they say that they never were wrong (hello .LM), then well... I'd take my distance.
I mean, don't worry, being an accountant isn't really that difficult. Nobody really wants to do it. Boring to a lot of people. But I find it interesting, as you can see.
Bro I am using Lemmy for the same reason. And honestly here people won't understand your concerns either
I was IP banned in reddit for saying that gender neutral laws should be implemented in my country. And here I'm banned in a community for saying communism won't save my country.
There is no difference as such between these two platforms. The only good thing about reddit is that it had more relevant subs and users
Fediverse is a great step forward. But it really creates echo chambers, even more so than on Reddit I feel.
But the difference is that you can create your own instances too if you don't like their ideologies. Or even make your community. So it's slightly better
Btw have you gotten any better alternative of Reddit?
I quit Meta because of tech bro fascism, and hated Twitter even before it was X because, let’s face it - nobody has ever changed their opinion on anything because of a Twitter conversation (I know I’m exaggerating, to get my point across). I was in Reddit for a few weeks [...]
I'm assuming you previously used Facebook mostly, right? If so, there's also a Facebook alternative called Friendica, with pretty much the same core functionality as Facebook (sans Marketplace). Besides that, you can also format your posts and comments, add titles to them, get a dislike button and customize your experience more than you could do there. Check out friendica.world to try it out.
I've already settled on making lemmy my new home a long while ago. I like it here and there is more than enough engagement.
What i can't really find an alternative for is discord... it's going through the "enshittification fascism techbro" phase.
I tried matrix but honestly it sucks, Its so incredibly buggy it's barely even usable. I'm still willing to give it a try since it seems very promising but the instability is a big downside.
I manage a community on discord and see it going down the aggressive monetization route day by day. Also looked at Matrix, but the basic tools to support my community just aren't there. I'm hoping the next two or so years produces an alternative rich chat/voice/video platform.
The problem with Matrix to me is that it is simply too unstable. I can open it up on any device and half the messages won't load or are corrupted. Media won't show at all. In contrast Lemmy has been super reliable and "just works", so going from reddit to lemmy was no problem at all. And the communities are great too.
I just want working voice chat and group chats.
The entire streaming i don't really care about. There are other apps for that.
But yeah as it is I'm probably better off using discord until the enshittification is so bad no one wants to use it anymore.
EDIT: This has worked, thanks for help: LD_PRELOAD="" VK_LOADER_LAYERS_ENABLE=VK_LAYER_MANGOHUD_overlay_x86_64 %command% --skip-launcher --vulkan
Hi, so I've been using Fedora 41 GNOME since release with no issues at all and I've decided to do a new fresh install of Fedora 42 yesterday.
Everything seemed to run well but I've encountered this issue in games that after around 30min I get this weird stutter. Until then everything runs smoothly.
As you can see in the video the stutter only occurs during mouse movement or during camera movement with keyboard. Once the camera moves on it's own and just tracks the character the frametimes are perfectly flat so it does not seem like the fault is on the game but somethings off with the system compositor?
This happens with or without VSync, I've tried with and without VRR, I've tried chaning game settings and also different Proton versions... only thing that helps is to restart the game but then I'll have to do it once again in about 30min.
My suspicion is on the new triple buffering in new GNOME 48 but I have no idea how to turn it off to test.
I don't use Fedora, but do you know if your kernel or GPU drivers have been updated to a newer version? If so, there could be some kind of bug causing it, and you could try downgrading your packages. I would also check to make sure the refresh rate on your monitor matches your OS. The Steam logs would also be a good place to start, if you haven't checked them yet.
Had the exact same stuttering on Arch Linux with BG3 - only when moving the mouse/camera after an hour or so of gameplay. Resolved it completely when I disabled the new Steam background recording feature and Steam overlay (on BG3 only). Not sure if it was just one of those things or both, but it hasn't happened since turning them off. Might be worth a try for you too~
Edit: Oh, also I have these launch options, I think the LD_PRELOAD="" might have been related to this issue too~
Is this launching games through Steam? I had a similar issue launching games through Steam using gamescope and had to set some launch options. Unfortunately I am at work and can't remember what those launch options are but when I get back home I will add them.
Update: Issue disappeared without doing anything. After just letting my computer sit turned off for a few hours I started it back up to troubleshoot. Now it works again. Something happened to break it and then to unfuck it again without any input from me. Something is unstable and I’m gonna try to figure it out.
Started my PC up today, logged in like normal, but my keyboard wont work after logging in. Except for the calculator button. None of the keys will actually do anything. But logging in works normally.
Worked fine last night, no updates have run or anything. Where to start diagnosing this? In a way where I won’t need a keyboard?
Fedora 42 KDE
Edit: Keyboard works fine in a live environment on the USB I used to install yesterday. Tried a different keyboard on my main install, and that didn’t work either. So it’s not the keyboard itself at least
This scoring system evaluates how decentralized and self-hostable a platform is, based on four core metrics.
📊 Scoring Metrics (Total: 100 Points)
Top Provider User Share (30 points): Measures how many users are on the largest instance. Full points if <10%; 0 if >80%. Top Provider Content Share (30 points): Measures how much content is hosted by the largest instance. Full points if <10%; 0 if >80%. Ease of Self-Hosting: Server (20 points): Technical ease of running your own backend. Full points for Docker/simple setup with good docs. Ease of Self-Hosting: User Interface (20 points): Availability and usability of clients. Full points for accessible, FOSS, multi-platform clients.
📋 Example Breakdown (Estimates)
📧 Email (2025)
Top Provider User Share: Apple ≈ 53.67% → Score: 4.5/30
Top Provider Content Share: Apple likely handles >50% of mail → Score: 4.5/30
Top Provider User Share: bsky.social ≈ ~90%+ (very centralized) → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Nearly all content on bsky.social → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: PDS hosting possible but very niche → Score: 4/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Mostly official client; some 3rd party → Score: 10/20
Total: 14/100
🟥 Reddit (2025)
Top Provider User Share: Reddit ≈ 48.4% → Score: 0/30
Top Provider Content Share: Reddit hosts a significant portion of user-generated content → Score: 0/30
Self-Hosting: Server: Not self-hostable (proprietary platform) → Score: 0/20
Self-Hosting: Client: Some unofficial clients available → Score: 3/20
Total: 3/100
How Scores are Calculated
🧑🤝🧑 How User/Content Share Scores Work
This measures how many users are on the largest provider (or instance).
100% (one provider): If one provider has all the users, it gets 0 points.
No provider > 10%: If no provider has more than 10%, it gets full 30 points.
Between 10% and 80%: Anything in between is scored on a linear scale.
> 80%: If a provider has more than 80%, it gets 0 points.
📊 Formula:
Score = 30 × (1 - (TopProviderShare - 10%) / 70%) …but only if TopProviderShare is between 10% and 80%. If below 10%, full 30. If above 80%, zero.
📌 Example:
If one provider has 40% of all users: → Score = 30 × (1 - (40 - 10) / 70) = 30 × (1 - 0.43) = 17.1 points
🖥️ How Ease of Self-Hosting Scores Work
These scores measure how easy it is for individuals or communities to run their own servers or use clients.
This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server) or User Interface (e.g., web-interface or mobile-app)
Very Easy: One-command Docker, low resources, great documentation → 18–20 points
Moderate: Docker or manual setup, some config, active community support → 13–17 points
Very Hard or Proprietary: Little to no self-hosting support, undocumented → 0–5 points
PS.
This is Version 1.0 so there are likely flaws and mistakes in it, feel free to help create the best version we can I've put it on github.com/NoBadDays/decentral…
No data I'm afraid but it just doesn't ring true to me, unless there are vast regional differences. It sticks out to me as much as if you'd said that Bing is the largest search engine; I've barely heard of Apple email but almost everyone I know uses Gmail except me, including Apple users I know.
One metric you might want to add is the network effect: how much of a difference does it make to the user experience to join a large instance (or the same instance most of your friends are on) compared to a small or self-hosted one? (Or in other words—does the nature of the platform software potentially incentivize consolidation?)
My laptop does support this feature since it was working on Fedora KDE. But jumping over to arch, it seems not to work at all.
1. power-profiles-daemon.service is enabled and running.
● power-profiles-daemon.service - Power Profiles daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/power-profiles-daemon.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since <time>; 12min ago
Invocation: 4f20b3d144584a759b4a6c5ea14aa739
Main PID: 608 (power-profiles-)
Tasks: 4 (limit: 6850)
Memory: 1.6M (peak: 2.8M)
CPU: 81ms
CGroup: /system.slice/power-profiles-daemon.service
└─608 /usr/lib/power-profiles-daemon
Apr 18 11:14:52 berserk-arch systemd[1]: Starting Power Profiles daemon...
Apr 18 11:14:52 berserk-arch systemd[1]: Started Power Profiles daemon.
2. plasma-powerdevil.service is static and running.
● plasma-powerdevil.service - Powerdevil
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/plasma-powerdevil.service; static)
Active: active (running) since <time>; 12min ago
Invocation: 7d72f24a0e5e4a74889a3895b91eb51c
Main PID: 1074 (org_kde_powerde)
Tasks: 9 (limit: 6850)
Memory: 10.6M (peak: 11.4M)
CPU: 1.391s
CGroup: /user.slice/user-1000.slice/user@1000.service/background.slice/plasma-powerdevil.service
└─1074 /usr/lib/org_kde_powerdevil
3. upower.service is enabled and running.
● upower.service - Daemon for power management
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/upower.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) since <time>; 12min ago
Invocation: 7aa43a43146346e383c961ce12cc9ded
Docs: man:upowerd(8)
Main PID: 540 (upowerd)
Tasks: 4 (limit: 6850)
Memory: 5.1M (peak: 5.9M)
CPU: 251ms
CGroup: /system.slice/upower.service
└─540 /usr/lib/upowerd
I've already tried to to put
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="amd_pstate=active"
as a kernel argument that doesn't seem to do anything as well. I can't figure it out. The power management settings work tho. Any idea what's wrong? Thanks.
Here's what I did, from here. I've slightly modified the commands since that guide is from when tuneD was still on the AUR.
1. Uninstall power-profiles-daemon
sudo pacman -Rns power-profiles-daemon
2. Check that power-profiles-daemon.service is gone
systemctl status power-profiles-daemon
The output should be : Unit power-profiles-daemon.service could not be found.
3. Install tuneD:
sudo pacman -S tuned
4. Enable and start tuneD:
systemctl enable tuned
systemctl start tuned
5. Check that tuneD is running correctly:
● tuned.service - Dynamic System Tuning Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/tuned.service; enabled; preset: disabled)
Active: active (running) ....
6. Check the active profile:
tuned-adm active
Now, you can use tuned-adm to switch to profiles, but since I am using a DE, I won't be doing that. Now reboot and the power profile slider should be working!
As some of you have heard, Fedora 41 will be switching from power-profiles-daemon to Redhat tuneD for power profiling. Below are my notes on how to make the switch using the AUR package (if you want to experiment).
The latest interim release of Ubuntu introduces “devpacks” for popular frameworks like Spring, along with performance enhancements across a broad range of hardware. 17 April 2025 Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 25.
Title is quite self-explanatory, reason I wonder is because every now and then I think to myself "maybe distro X is good, maybe I should try it at some point", but then I think a bit more and realise it kind of doesn't make a difference - the only thing I feel kinda matters is rolling vs non-rolling release patterns.
My guiding principles when choosing distro are that I run arch on my desktop because it's what I'm used to (and AUR is nice to have), and Debian on servers because some people said it's good and I the non-rolling release gives me peace of mind that I don't have to update very often. But I could switch both of these out and I really don't think it would make a difference at all.
Ran Ubuntu and Ubuntu server first then switched to desktop fedora and liked it so I switched all my servers to fedora. Tried TrueNas Scale in the past and disliked it except for SMB shares. Also have an unraid server but hate it.
I guess I’m pretty superficial about just liking the base fedora DE. Idk beyond that.
Debian for everything since it's one of the few distros that has always been there. It's one of the second distros to come after after SLS. Distros come and go, but Debian marches on.
I used the big ones, ubuntu, arch, opensuse and (atomic) fedora. Fedora had the nicest out of box experience. Morover, I moved to podman, systemd, selinux, etc. And the atomic version showed me a new workflow with flatpak and distrobox (nowadays, I use nix oftentimes).
The best part about it is that I do not care about the system anymore. I do not even interact with it. I don't install packages (besides the base layer and minimal modifications that are long lasting like installing openssl for GNOME iirc)
I use mainly flatpaks, if I need aur, I fire up distrobox, or use nix if I want to. And the best part is, I'd have the exact same workflow even without the atomic version. Even on another distro. I do not interact with it much.
Moreover, I am happy with all the choices fedora made with the base package and images. I do not have to do an informed choice like on arch. It just updates whenever I boot my pc. I do not need to read updates, they are just there, somewhere. I do not need to disable snaps or work around weird choices. I just start firefox, vscodium, a terminal and do whatever I want to do.
Edit: I actually wanted to switch back to opensuse just to support it but I guess I'd rather move to nix some day. Maybe with niri and cosmic.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it's very up to date yet reliable, package management doesn't require me to get my head around anything complicated, automatic btrfs snapshots allow me to rollback if I mess anything up, and I like KDE Plasma and the YaST utilities.
Void for desktop/laptop. These are the things I like about it. - Rolling release - Initial installation is minimal, and doesn't foist a specific DE or other unessential software on me. - No systemd - Nothing similar to Arch's AUR. I know a lot of people love it, but I do not. I mention as the distros are similar.
Debian for my server. But I plan to migrate to Devuan. - Stable and well tested - Huge package selection - Pretty ubiquitously supported. If for whatever reason what you want to run isn't in the repo, .deb packages and apt repos are often available. - Minimal installation available.
I use NixOS, it appealed to me because i got to a point where i liked minimal distros like arch and void and i could build them up exactly the way i like them to be, however i didn't like how i would have to go through that whole process again if i wanted to do a reinstall. With NixOS i can still craft my OS the way i like it, with the benefit of it being saved as a config, and easy to restore. I did make my own post-install script for void but NixOS is a more solid solution compared to my own janky script. I'm hoping to finally settle down on this distro. I guess the upside to the huge learning curve with nix is that it's a good motivator to not abandon it because it would feel like my efforts to learn it would go to waste lol.
Besides everything else you said, I especially love how you can store entire bash scripts in the nix configs, and even populate pieces of said scripts with variables if you so desire.
It's for deployments and managing many environments/machines from a single CLI interface. You can do all sorts of things like push configs based on labels/groups, gather real-time data/logs, scale up/down. It's great when you have a lot of VPS/VDS/VMs to manage and you're not using a platform's specific management tools.
I mainly use NixOS as a barebones backend, keep it as minimal and hardened as I can, then most of the projects/apps that run are done through something like Docker or k8s. So for me, it's all about managing the underlying servers that provide the tools needed for a project to operate.
The tool itself is undergoing a pretty big redesign at the moment, but you can get the gist of it from the overview in the manual of the commands.
NixOS. My primary reason for switching was wanting a single list of programs that I had installed. After using ubuntu for 5 years I just lost track of all the tools and versions of software that I had installed...and that didnt even count my laptop. Now all my machines have a single list of applications, and they are all in sync.
NixOS configuration is done entirely through code, so all of your packages are in a list (although that list can be spread across multiple files; it's a bit to explain)
I've found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go "oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore"
I appreciate the way things are configured a lot, but I would not recommend it unless you really like coding and you have time to tinker. It's not too hard to get simple config setup, but I spiraled down a deep rabbit hole really quickly.
EDIT: If my comment for some reason persuaded you to use NixOS, I recommend you get a basic config setup before installing it. I'd also recommend you look at how annoying it can be to run dynamically-linked applications (i.e. you download a random executable off the Internet and try to run it, or you try to run something you downloaded with npm)
I've found it can be easier to manage what you have installed, since you can just look at that list and go "oh, why do I still have xyz installed, idek what that does anymore"
While it sounds sexy and attractive... Not sure the amount of time needed to configure your NixOS is worthwhile. (Except if you have time to spare and want that learning experience !)
Just put everyhting In your personal notes and you have a similar "feature"?
Perhaps, but when I accidentally nuked my system by dd'ing to one of the hard drives, being able to install the exact same system back into it by pointing the installer to my git repository was an excellent experience.
Is the restoration method mentioned here really only achievable via nixos? How can you be so confident that you are truly reobtaining an "exact same system"?
Nixos consistently intrigues me because of what it seems to be accomplishing but I can never dive in because there seems to also be many warnings about the investment required and the potential for other more complicated and really nuanced drawbacks to arise.
Give it to me straight--is it offering a new approach of stability with the emphasis on reproducibility? If I'm a gentoo enjoyer hardset in my ways, what could I stand to gain in the nixos/guix realm?
Your personal files e.g. ~/Documents are not recreated, you'll still need backups of those.
caveats are you've got to use: - home-manager to generate your dotfiles. - something akin to sops to generate and securely store your private keys and secrets.
But all this can be written in the one flake, so yes nixos-install --flake <GIT URL>#<HOSTNAME> Is sufficient for me to rebuild my desktop, laptop or server from the same repository.
I've never used Gentoo, and I'm sure there are other methods of achieving the same level of reproducibility but I don't know what they are.
Nixos can be as modifiable as Gentoo with the caveat being it's a massive pain in the ass to do some things. I have a flake for making aarch64-musl systems which has been an endeavour, and... It works? I have a running system that works on 2 different SoCs. I do have to compile everything quite often though.
There are efforts to recreate Nixos without systemd, but that's a huge effort; because it's very "infrastructure as code", you have to change a lot of code where editing a build script would've sufficed on arch/Gentoo.
As for nix vs guix, guix was described to me as "if you only ever want to write in scheme", whereas nix feels much more like a means to an end with practical compromises spattered throughout.
NixOS is a declarative distro. Meaning it you can declare pretty much every aspect of it from what software is installed to how the system is configured from a config file.
Using your calandar example, you can list Thunderbird (or whatever) as a package you want in the configuration and it will be installed. You can also use that same configuration on another machine and produce the same environment.
Relevant to the original point, since all your software is listed in a text file, you can easily see exactly what's installed.
Ubuntu at work since it's well supported and we can expect any IT people to be able to deploy our packages.
Pop 24.04 because I think it'd be cool to see how performant and maintainable and customizable a desktop that isn't GTK or QT based. Something sparkly without the legacy choices of the past to consider in the codebase. Plus even though I've never touched Rust, it's so hyped that I'm interested to see how it all works out. It's my gaming desktop that also has a Windows VM for occasional trying something out. Also process RAW photos with Darktable. Every now and then use Alpaca to try out free LLMs, handbrake, ffmpeg, image magick, compile something
Fedora, stable to me and it goes on my minipc. I run Jellyfin on it and occasionally SAMBA or whatever. I like to see how GNOME changes.
On a Legion Go, Bazzite with KDE. Steam and seeing how KDE Plasma progresses over years. Bazzite introduced me to distrobox and boxbuddy which I now use on the gaming pop_os machine too.
An old laptop with Linux Mint on it. I like to see how Cinnamon is. Used to favor it when I first tried Linux from Windows.
It's been a long time but I also used to really like Budgie but I feel like everything is pretty solid at this point and I no longer care to chase modern GNOME 2 or Windows XP/7 UI design
Void linux. Both on wayland + labwc desktop and radpberrypi 4 server with multiple dockers, and a bootable usb for my work laptop. Why? Its lightweight, rolling, rock stable, and easily extendable. I love runit for its simplicity. Love xbps package manager for its speed, and love the good and clear documentation.
EndeavourOS on my laptop and Ubuntu on my home server. Still new to linux thought endeavour was a good choice to really get my feet wet with lessening the chance to screw things up too badly. Ubuntu because it looks like it just works.
I used a bunch of distributions (like Gentoo, Arch, Slackware, Debian etc.). Then I created a distribution-like system with LFS -BLFS and now using itbecause I want to see how Linux works in a detailed way. It's a little painful but it's not a problem if you are a masochist person who doesn't have to do anything else.
Bazzite because I get an immutable install that won’t let me accidentally fuck it up. It just works. All necessary drivers for my dock and peripherals are already installed and configured. It’s the very first time in my decades long Linux excursion that I have a user experience that is similar to windows in that sense, but without the enshittifcation of windows.
I genuinely enjoy video editing, gaming, and surfing the web on my laptop when it’s running Bazzite.
I haven't tried Bazzite yet, but I feel the same about the other ublue flavours.
I'm the most productive I've ever been. Tweaking everything was fun for a few years, but now I just need a distro I can trust, that comes with the tools to do anything.
I see rebases to Bazzite DX are available now. I might give that a go today.
I'm loving bluefin and I really want to go all in on the immutable stuff, but I'm having a hard time being productive on it. The devcontainers experience has been miserable (probably because I refuse to use VSCode and every other editor having poor or no support for it); I also had SElinux fuck me up when trying to build some complex dockerfile from a project at work (something that was supposed to just work took me two whole days of debugging - and I even managed to break bluefin's boot process when I tried to mess with the SElinux configuration. This one was mostly due to my own inexperience with SElinux, combined with there being a lot less content on the internet about fixing stuff on immutable distros compared to traditional ones).
Yep, I'm with you. Project Bluefin is exactly what I want from an OS. My previous Linux experiences had all been awful UX, having to diagnose obscure issues and copy pasting decipherable terminal commands. Until Bluefin, nothing ever worked straight out of the box.
Bluefin's main issue right now is a lack of good documentation. Like you, I've tried to get devcontainers working and they just don't.
Honestly, even with VSCode, devcontainers are kind of just ok, at best.
They are very fiddly. The containers keep running when you close VSCode (which makes sense, and sure the resource usage is minimal, but it’s damned annoying) and you have to stop them manually. Meanwhile the commands in VSCode to work with/activate the containers are not super clear in terms of what they actually do.
Oh, what’s that? Need a shell inside the container you’re working in for testing things out, installing dependencies, etc.? Well, I hope you pick the right one of VSCode’s crappy built in terminals! Because if you want to use a real terminal, you are stuck with the crappy devcontainer CLI to exec into the container. A CLI that is NOT up to date with, or even includes, all the commands for devcontainers in the editor (which is what makes working with them in other IDE/editors such a pain in the butt…).
And this gets me…. What? A container I can share with other developers, sure, but it’s very likely NOT the container we are actually going to deploy in. So…
Yeah, I’ve also had a lot of frustrations with devcontainers in Bluefin. I really like what the Bluefin project is doing. The reasoning behind it makes a lot of sense to me. But devcontainers are kind of pushed as the way you “should” be writing code on Bluefin and it’s…. not great.
They do have Homebrew and Distrobox though, which helps a lot. I have ended up doing most of my development work on Bluefin on the host system with tools installed via brew, which is kept separate enough from the rest of the file system to still keep things tidy.
Overall, I think Bluefin is great and it, or something like it, may very well be the future of Linux… but the future isn’t here just yet and there are some growing pains, for sure.
Not exactly a product from ublue but something in the same line:
Secureblue because of the reasons aforementioned for the ublue images where things are really darn rock solid out of the box AND because Linux is fundamentally behind in security and this project is trying to mitigate some of the big flaws.
I started on Ubuntu, tried 8.04 and went back to windows XP, tried 10.04 and stayed.
20.04 was my last Ubuntu, bounced around for a while, but I have settled on Mint. Been running it for 3 years now.
Mint isn't too fancy, it is just there and lets me get my work done, very much the way Ubuntu used to be.
I'm running the 6.14.2 kernel, to get the latest drivers for my RX 9070, I'm playing around with local AI.... Mint isn't fancy, but you can do almost anything you want.
I used to always recommend people use Linux Mint as their first distro, but then it hit me, how can I recommend something I only installed for five minutes? So I got myself Linux Mint, it was 21.3 Virginia at that time, now I have more important things to do in my system and it has stayed.
I used Arch in my old laptop for 2 and half years, learned alot of things from Arch, also got to know some people in the Arch unofficial Matrix Room. But I have a new laptop and this is the story.
PC: Cachyos love the aur and the compiler optimizations + they compile or put aur packages in their repos which saves time by not making you compile anything
The amount of software available in the package manager, without adding external repositories, exceeds that I've seen in any other distro I've used. Even with epel, I feel like others fall short.
The ability to modify the build time flags of software while still using the package manager is also huge. I hate when ffmpeg doesn't have speex support because some upstream dev figured it was a corner use case.
It's me, I'm the target demographic. I'm the one asshole who wants to build ffmpeg with speex support, clamav without milter support and rxvt WITHOUT blink support.
There are some pretty great userspace helpers too. Things to ensure your kernel is always built with the same options. Things to upgrade all your python or perl modules to the new interpreter version for you. Tools for rebuilding all the things based on a reverse dependency search.
Slotted installs are handled in a sane, approachable, and manageable way.
The filesystem layout is standards compliant.
I recall someone on /r/Gentoo saying something like "Gentoo is linux crack, when you get a handle on it, nothing compares."
When I boot my laptop into fedora/arch/mint/etc (or really any non-bsd based distro), I feel like I'm using someone else's laptop. There are a bunch of git repos under /usr/src for the software I wanted that wasn't in the package manager. I need to manage their updates separately. Someone else has decided which options are in this very short list of GUIs. I'm using whatever cron daemon they chose, not the one I want. Why is there a flat text log file under /var/db/? Why won't you just let me exist without any swap mounted?
I've been using Garuda for... Two or three years? I've done a lot of distro-hopping looking for something that won't just break on me. I used Ubuntu for a long time but kept running into situations where it would break, such as boot loops. Eventually I settled on Garuda because it ships with newer software and Nvidia drivers, which is helpful because I use my PC for gaming. I have stuck around because it's garuda-update command automatically makes a backup of your system out of the box, and you can select to boot into a backup in grub then restore it really easily. There have been a couple times where something has broken on an update, but when that happens I can immediately restore the backup, and I don't even need to remember to run a backup manually. I do feel that the default theme is a bit gaudy so I swapped it to a default KDE, but other than that I've had pretty much only good experiences with Garuda.
Debian/KDE because I like the way I can customize (1 panel on the left with everything) No features removed just as one gets used to them. (looking at you gnome) No breaking changes to the desktop gadget api every update (you gnome again) Nice big repo.
I tend to use Debian stable. At least for the last 15 or so.
The reason is simple. I use it as my main PC and the stability is my main priority.
The only negative is software in the repos is often out of date.
But honestly while that was a pain in the past. Now for the vast majority of things I use. I find flat pack or appimage downloads work perfect ally.
The only exception is ham radio software. Here I tend to compile later versions if I need/want them.
Other negatives
I'm really not hugely into gaming. But use blender a lot. Due to this I use Nvidia cards as they are far better supported by blender.
Installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers is a bit of a pain on Debian for newbies. But once you know the process its simple enough. Just not obvious for beginners.
Same, I've been using Debian only for the last 15 or so years. I love the stability, and the old software isn't hard to work around when newer versions are needed.
I hate the lack of support from Nvidia. I prefer AMD cards though, and they give zero trouble.
How does the nvidia card fare on linux in general ? on a Wayland session ? I have a 4070Ti running Windows atm, I use Blender professionally and I know it runs the best on Linux because of compiler shenanigans I can't be arsed to understand, but this is one reason I'd like to switch to Linux (...again!). I'm interested to know if you run multiple color-managed monitors by any chance
Wanted to try out wayland and fedora was recommended as the best experience for that during those years. Discovered the most polished, stable and smooth Linux experience I'd had to date. Mostly used ubuntu distros and arch before. Never looked back. Upgraded to Silverblue to try out the future of linux. Haven't changed anything since. Been about 3 years now on Silverblue.
Geez, I haven’t heard of someone running Slackware in at least 15 years. I mean, I know it’s still around, I just haven’t heard anyone say they were running it.
Yeah, I did that a while back on endeavourOS. That's how I first learned about Cachy OS. I decided it's not worth the extra time spent troubleshooting for me.
I currently use Bazzite on my old laptop, just wanted to try out immutable distros and I like to stream games from my rig to it sometimes so completely functional steam was a nice addition. Plus learning about flatpaks and app images over installed packages has been interesting.
Then on my servers Debian/Proxmox and usually Ubuntu server in LXCs for more updated APTs then Debian, though I mostly run docker for my web apps rather then native APTs.
I work for a company that has a java program that functions on Linux but is nowhere near the level of support provided for mac/Windows, so I'm the Linux guy for our dept and when a customer is running into issues on a distro I'll spin up a vm on my homelab and see if I can rum through an install and get it functional.
So far the only one I literally couldn't get installed was Slackware lol
I recently moved to Fedora KDE Plasma after years on W10, simply because I don't want to use W11 and its AI bullshit. So far, it's been a great time, and I haven't noticed any major performance issues, so I'm happy with it. Having to update everything every few days is pretty novel though, and 'sudo dnf update -y' makes me feel like Hackerman, king of all Hackers. I think I like the customization options most though. I get way more control over what happens on my PC than W10 ever gave me, and it's all wrapped in a very user-friendly GUI. Overall 8.5-9/10.
yay I want to install Fedora Plasma when I get a new drive, see if I can gradually switch (for real this time)... Plasma has a new pen tablet utility for Wayland, and since I use my tablet exclusively... when my Windows 10 is EOL I will switch for sure. Good to know it runs well for you
I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it focuses more on KDE than GNOME, is quite stable, and has snapshots to roll back to in case something does go wrong. I don't want to mess with my OS, I just want it to work reliably. I do use Debian on some devices (like my server) but the software (especially in terms of GUI apps) is very outdated and it doesn't come with the other features of OpenSUSE out of the box.
I wanted a mainstream but not Ubuntu, and one that was preferably offered with KDE Plasma pre-packaged.
So I ended up deciding between Debian and Fedora, and what tipped me to Fedora was thinking: Well SELinux sounds neat, quite close to what I learned about Mandatory Access Control in the lectures, and besides, maybe it will be useful in my work knowing one that is close to RHEL.
Now I work in a network team that has been using Debian for 30 years, lol. Kind of ironic, but I don't regret it, now I just know both.
And fighting SELinux was kind of fun too. I modified my local policies so that systemd can run screen because I wanted to create a Minecraft service to which I could connect as admin, even if it was started by systemd.
So, I live on a bus. We travel around, it's pretty great. I don't have a laptop or a mailing address that works, so getting certain things done is difficult, and I have two things I need help with.
I installed a solar system a while back, with an older charge controller a friend recommended. I more recently upgraded the batteries to lithium irons. So now this controller requires reprogramming, and to do so you have to plug an RJ45 (pretty sure that's the name) into it, and probably download some shitty chinese spyware program to fiddle with it. Their newer models bluetooth and require an app of course.
The other thing is either much trickier or impossible, and while I've booted up dumpstered laptops with thumbdrive linux before (and found the homemade blowjob video, heh) I've no idea how to even go about fiddling with this.
It's a (shitty chinese) dash/backup/security camera system. It's been referred to as a 'pizza box' system by someone who hates money. It might have a wifi chip onboard, but I can't figure out it does or not.
I'd like to flash it to run linux, if possible, and put some actually useable video monitoring/porting/editing maybe programs on there. The current UI is unusable even when it's cooperating. Like if there were an accident, I'd just basically be bluffing. Sure the data's probably there, but it's in a format that won't register on any device I've plugged the SD card into. I need it to export to filetype I can use with an ipad, which is the only computer we have aboard.
If any of this sounds like a fun or interesting challenge, I can throw some dollars at you. Or trade work! We do auto/diesel/bicycle mechanic work, welding, sewing, leather and general handy shit.
Sell it and get something with an existing FOSS firmware. And a laptop (dumpster ones work too). What you're asking for is $1000 upfront, at minimum, with no satisfaction guarantee.
If you're willing to do most of the work yourself, I'd suggest finding an official firmware update and running binwalk on it. Also take good photos of the PCB and look for datasheets of every chip. Then you'll be able to pose specific questions and maybe get decent help.
Still, it's probably best to set up ONVIF client software or something.
Hardware enablement highlights Canonical continues to enable Ubuntu across a broad range of hardware. The introduction of a new ARM64 Desktop ISO makes it easier for early adopters to install Ubuntu Desktop on ARM64 virtual machines and laptops.
Qualcomm Technologies is proud to collaborate with Canonical and is fully committed to enabling a seamless Ubuntu experience on devices powered by Snapdragon®. *Ubuntu’s new ARM64 ISO paves the way for future Snapdragon enablement, enabling us to drive AI innovation and adoption together.
Leendert van Doorn, SVP, Engineering at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.*
The latest interim release of Ubuntu introduces “devpacks” for popular frameworks like Spring, along with performance enhancements across a broad range of hardware. 17 April 2025 Today Canonical announced the release of Ubuntu 25.
EDIT: The bad solution is to unblock UDP port 5353 but the port has to be source port, not destination port. (--sport flag) See the now modified rules. The issue is that this is very insecure (see this stackexchange question and comments) but obviously better than no firewall at all because at least I'm blocking TCP traffic.
The proper solution (other than using glibc and installing nss-mdns package) is to open a port with netcat (nc) in the background (using &) and then listen with dig on that port using the -b flag.
Then we need to remember to kill the background process. The DNS reply will now be sent to port 42069, so we can just open it with this iptables rule:
-A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 42069 -j ACCEPT
---->END OF EDIT.
I want to setup iptables firewall but if I do that, it blocks multicast DNS which I need. I am using command
dig "somehostname.local" @224.0.0.251 -p 5353
to get the IP through mDNS and these are my iptables rules (from superuser.com):
*filter
# drop forwarded traffic. you only need it of you are running a router
:FORWARD DROP [0:0]
# Accept all outgoing traffic
:OUTPUT ACCEPT [623107326:1392470726908]
# Block all incoming traffic, all protocols (tcp, udp, icmp, ...) everything.
# This is the base rule we can define exceptions from.
:INPUT DROP [11486:513044]
# do not block already running connections (important for outgoing)
-A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT
# do not block localhost
-A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
# do not block icmp for ping and network diagnostics. Remove if you do not want this
# note that -p icmp has no effect on ipv6, so we need an extra ipv6 rule
-4 -A INPUT -p icmp -j ACCEPT
-6 -A INPUT -p ipv6-icmp -j ACCEPT
# allow some incoming ports for services that should be public available
# -A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
# -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --dport 5353 -j ACCEPT # does not help
-A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 5353 -j ACCEPT # SOLVES THE ISSUE BUT IS INSECURE - not recommended
# commit changes
COMMIT
Recently I came across avahi-daemon and mdns....
Do I need a mDNS client in my system to connect with mDNS server?
Or is there any other way to connect a computer without mDNS client to a mDNS se...
Huh weird. For me the first one works but the second one fails and returns an empty string.
I guess I should have specified that I'm on Void-musl. The reason why I'm doing this is because there is no NSS library on musl, so as far as I know you cannot automagically query hostnames on the network.
My hunch on what's going on: Dig opens up a different udp port (it has to, there would be avahi-daemon listening on 5353). So it sends out to the multicast address on 5353, but the answer comes back from the actual IP of whoever is answering, to whatever port dig is listening on, and the connection tracking is not smart enough to figure out this should be let through?
You should look at the traffic with wireshark.
Also maybe that's fine in practice? Do applications actually run their own mDNS queries? Maybe it all goes through avahi-daemon? That uses port 5353 so that would get an answer if it did the mDNS query instead of dig. But I'm not sure how this works, so that's just a guess.
Still, dig won’t be listening on port 5353 for the answer, it’ll open some random port, so the firewall rule for 5353 will not apply. And the conntrack rule, is my guess, also doesn’t apply, because what I think the conntrack module does is:
Remembers about the outgoing connection (i.e. when dig sends its udp packet out): source port, destination IP and port
Check incoming packets against this info, and lets them through if they appear to be an answer
Since the outgoing packet is going to multicast, and the incoming packet (I suspect) is coming from the IP of the machine that answers (a different IP therefore), conntrack wouldn’t be able to figure that out. The answer doesn’t match the outgoing packet that dig sends. Since this is just a hunch, I would try to confirm this by looking at the traffic in e.g. wireshark.
Edit 2: Actually dig picks a random port to send the mDNS request from and sends it to 224.0.0.251:5353 (multicast IP). The correct host then replies from port 5353 to the previously picked random port from dig. But I found that you can specify the port with dig -b IP#port so I think that should help. I kinda don't have the time to try it out currently though.
end of edit2.
well I randomly solved it by adding
-A OUTPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 5353 -j ACCEPT
Which basically means you are right. The destination port is just some randomly picked number (checked wireshark), so I have to filter based on source port, which is 5353.
Hi all. This is an update on my script extracting CRC32 checksum from the 7z commandline tool. The output should be similar to how the md5sum tool outputs, the checksum and the file name/path.
The initial version of this script was actually broken. It would not output all files if a directory was included (wrong counting of files through argument number). Also filenames that contained a space would only output the first part until the space character. All of this rookie mistakes are solved. Plus there is a progress bar showing what files are processed at the moment, instead showing a blank screen until command is finished. This is useful if there are a lot of files or some big files to process.
Yes, I'm aware there are other ways to accomplish this task. I would be happy to see your solution too. And if you encounter a problem, please report.
(Note: Beehaw does not like the "less than" character and breaks the post completley. So replace the line cat %%EOF with or copy it from the Github Gist link below:)
\#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ "${#}" -eq 0 ]] || [[ "${1}" == '-h' ]]; then
self="${0##*/}"
cat %%EOF
usage: ${self} files...
Calculate CRC32 for each file.
positional arguments:
file or dir one or multiple file names or paths, if this is a directory
then traverse it recursively to find all files
EOF
exit 0
fi
7z h -bsp2 -- "${@}" |
\grep -v -E '^[ \t]+.*/' |
\sed -n -e '/^-------- ------------- ------------$/,$p' |
\sed '1d' |
\grep --before-context "9999999" '^-------- ------------- ------------$' |
\head -n -1 |
\awk '$2=""; {print $0}'
I was actually looking for something like this a few days ago. This is pretty useful as there's no crc32sum readily available on linux. Thanks for that!
I would personally change a few things, mostly small nitpicks to be fair. 1. Prefer [[ ]] over [ ] for tests. Source: shellcheck.net/wiki/SC2292 2. Use $0 instead of hardcoding crc32sum in the help messages. That way it will work even if someone names the script differently 3. You could exit 0 after the help and end the if there instead of having the whole work being done in an else.
Agreed on your points and usually I do 2. (name) and 3. (exit instead else) sometimes. For the [[ over [, it usually matters only for word splitting and globbing behavior, if you do not enclose the variables between quotes I believe. But looking into the shellcheck entry, looks like there is no disadvantage. I may start doing this by default in the future too.
So thanks for the suggestions, I will update the script in a minute.
Edit: I always forget that Beehaw will break if I use the "lower than" character like in , so I replaced it in the post with cat %%EOF which requires to change that line. And the example usage is gone for the moment.
Edit2 (21 hours later): I totally forgot to remove the indentation and else-branch. While doing so I also added a special option -h, in case someone tries that. Not a big deal, but thought this should be.
(I have added a new version of the script. The old one is renamed to 'toarchive-old'. The new script has some guard rails and more checks. Also original files can be removed automatically on success, like gzip does. But an option -r must be explicitly given here, like toarchive zip -r file.txt. Directories can be removed too, but the option uppercase -R is required here, as in toarchive zip -R my_dir. Have in mind this will use rm -r system command. Although some guard rails are in place to prevent massive fail, you should be very careful. Note that no file is removed, if -r or -R are not used at all.)
I always write little scripts and aliases that help me from time to time. I just wanted to share some of my newest simple scripts. There are probably better or easier ways to do, but writing and testing them is fun too. Both make use of the 7z command, a commandline archive tool. Posting it here, so anyone can steal them. They are freshly written, so maybe there are edge cases.
\#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Create one archive for each file or folder.
if [ "${#}" -eq -1 ]; then
echo "toarchive ext files..."
echo "toarchive zip *.smc"
else
ext="${1}"
shift
opt=()
stop_parse=false
for arg in "${@}"; do
if [ ! "${stop_parse}" == true ]; then
if [ "${arg}" == "--" ]; then
stop_parse=true
opt+=(--)
continue
elif [[ "${arg}" =~ ^- ]]; then
opt+=("${arg}")
continue
fi
fi
file="${arg}"
7z a "${opt[@]}" "${file}.${ext}" "${file}"
done
fi
I'll bring you straight into my mind: I was scrolling throught the n-th depressing post of the ~~day~~ hour and I thought "If I answer that post/comment by #negativity, will other people be able to filter out this content using my answer?" If not, how could we build some sort of blocklist for people to curate there experience on the fediverse.
I know I can block key word like "politics" "Trump" "Elon" but sometimes it doesn't have a precised word yet use human can categorise it easily.
I don’t agree with this particular usecase. Because I’ve personally experienced, people who shun “negativity” meaning they just completely ignore people’s suffering which often adds a devastating layer of invisibility to oppression. But probably hopefully this isn’t your case and it’s more about “doom and gloom” than people’s reality of suffering.
But anyways, I do agree that blocklists are probably a feature that lemmy needs.
I'm leaving text editors like vscode/codium behind to learn something more modular, like Helix. I really wanna get used to. What advices can you give me to practice? I know that there is a :tutor command, I'm almost done with it. Do anyone know if there are exercices to practice? Im looking something similar to Ruby koans, a list of excersices to solve like "puzzles" but to Helix.
It's quite good for letting you know about things you didn't know you could do, but sometimes it tells me I'm wrong because I'd do it a different way - e.g. I'd go to line 13 by :13 but it wants 13G.
Also, from within helix you can do space ? to get the list of commands and any bindings they're on.
I've been working on a phone tethering router so might have some insight here for you. Android can use CDC or RNDIS to tether. It depends on your phone which ones gonna be used. Try to figure out which one its using (can do this by watching logs when plugging in usb usually itll say there which type of device is connecting). When i was doing the router i had to make sure cdc_ether and rndis_host kernel modules were both loaded to ensure compatibility. It might be as simple as manually loading a module in the new kernel version. Although I'm not exactly sure how it'll work on fedora i was doing this all on OPNsense.
What i was doing was tethering the phone to a router (old thinkpad running router OS) then passing that connection on to its network and connecting to the Access Point on the network with my laptop. I still havent fully worked out the kinks yet but its going pretty well. Sorry i can't be more specific for your case, but hopefully it gives you some terms you can use to google more effectively at the least.
Below are the kernel logs for when I connect the USB on F42 (new kernel)
::: spoiler new(the one that doesn't work)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: USB disconnect, device number 6
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: rndis_host 5-8:1.0 wwp0s29f7u8: unregister 'rndis_host' usb-0000:00:1d.7-8, Mobile Broadband RNDIS device
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora systemd-networkd[2818]: wwp0s29f7u8: Link DOWN
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1092]: Interface wwp0s29f7u8.IPv6 no longer relevant for mDNS.
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora systemd-networkd[2818]: wwp0s29f7u8: Lost carrier
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1092]: Leaving mDNS multicast group on interface wwp0s29f7u8.IPv6 with address fe80::acfa:54ff:fee2:5884.
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1092]: Withdrawing address record for fe80::acfa:54ff:fee2:5884 on wwp0s29f7u8.
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: New USB device found, idVendor=2717, idProduct=ff88, bcdDevice= 4.19
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: Product: Redmi Note 11
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: Manufacturer: Xiaomi
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: SerialNumber: 2ce0eff1
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: rndis_host 5-8:1.0 wwan0: register 'rndis_host' at usb-0000:00:1d.7-8, Mobile Broadband RNDIS device, 7a:03:3c:1e:05:d2
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora mtp-probe[3287]: checking bus 5, device 7: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb5/5-8"
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora mtp-probe[3287]: bus: 5, device: 7 was not an MTP device
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora kernel: rndis_host 5-8:1.0 wwp0s29f7u8: renamed from wwan0
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora systemd-networkd[2818]: wwan0: Interface name change detected, renamed to wwp0s29f7u8.
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora mtp-probe[3291]: checking bus 5, device 7: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb5/5-8"
Apr 17 hh:mm:20 fedora mtp-probe[3291]: bus: 5, device: 7 was not an MTP device
Apr 17 hh:mm:24 fedora ModemManager[1186]: <msg> [base-manager] couldn't check support for device '/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb5/5-8': not supported by any plugin
:::
And these are the logs on the old kernel that still works:
::: spoiler old(the one that works)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci-pci
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: New USB device found, idVendor=2717, idProduct=ff88, bcdDevice= 4.19
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: Product: Redmi Note 11
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: Manufacturer: Xiaomi
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: usb 5-8: SerialNumber: 2ce0eff1
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: rndis_host 5-8:1.0 usb0: register 'rndis_host' at usb-0000:00:1d.7-8, RNDIS device, 82:1c:ae:65:4a:34
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2127] manager: (usb0): new Ethernet device (/org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Devices/7)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora mtp-probe[4001]: checking bus 5, device 5: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb5/5-8"
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora mtp-probe[4001]: bus: 5, device: 5 was not an MTP device
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora kernel: rndis_host 5-8:1.0 enp0s29f7u8: renamed from usb0
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2356] device (usb0): interface index 7 renamed iface from 'usb0' to 'enp0s29f7u8'
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2456] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: unmanaged -> unavailable (reason 'managed', managed-type: 'external')
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2479] device (enp0s29f7u8): carrier: link connected
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2484] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: unavailable -> disconnected (reason 'carrier-changed', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2497] policy: auto-activating connection 'Wired connection 2' (1cd60103-249a-3a35-b7e8-c2ac149f67ab)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2501] device (enp0s29f7u8): Activation: starting connection 'Wired connection 2' (1cd60103-249a-3a35-b7e8-c2ac149f67ab)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2502] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: disconnected -> prepare (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2505] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: prepare -> config (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2566] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: config -> ip-config (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877835.2579] dhcp4 (enp0s29f7u8): activation: beginning transaction (timeout in 45 seconds)
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface enp0s29f7u8.IPv6 with address fe80::78eb:ce85:f0d8:dda6.
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: New relevant interface enp0s29f7u8.IPv6 for mDNS.
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: Registering new address record for fe80::78eb:ce85:f0d8:dda6 on enp0s29f7u8.*.
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora mtp-probe[4003]: checking bus 5, device 5: "/sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.7/usb5/5-8"
Apr 17 hh:mm:15 fedora mtp-probe[4003]: bus: 5, device: 5 was not an MTP device
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.2676] dhcp4 (enp0s29f7u8): state changed new lease, address=192.168.244.164, acd pending
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4372] dhcp4 (enp0s29f7u8): state changed new lease, address=192.168.244.164
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: Joining mDNS multicast group on interface enp0s29f7u8.IPv4 with address 192.168.244.164.
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: New relevant interface enp0s29f7u8.IPv4 for mDNS.
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora avahi-daemon[1380]: Registering new address record for 192.168.244.164 on enp0s29f7u8.IPv4.
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4400] policy: set 'Wired connection 2' (enp0s29f7u8) as default for IPv4 routing and DNS
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora systemd-resolved[1315]: enp0s29f7u8: Bus client set default route setting: no
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4676] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: ip-config -> ip-check (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4739] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: ip-check -> secondaries (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4771] device (enp0s29f7u8): state change: secondaries -> activated (reason 'none', managed-type: 'full')
Apr 17 hh:mm:17 fedora NetworkManager[1495]: <info> [1744877837.4790] device (enp0s29f7u8): Activation: successful, device activated.
:::
{clock details changed to hh:mm for privacy}
One thing I notice is the new upgrade trying to use ModemManager rather than NetworkManager. The device is also defined as "Mobile Broadband", instead of "Ethernet".
Loading the kernel module with modprobe, as another commenter suggested, didn't make any change.
rndis_host: Flag RNDIS modems as WWAN devices
[ Upstream commit 67d1a8956d2d62fe6b4c13ebabb57806098511d8 ]
Set FLAG_WWAN instead of FLAG_ETHERNET for RNDIS interfaces on Mobile
Broadband Modems, as opposed to regular Ethernet adapters.
Otherwise NetworkManager gets confused, misjudges the device type,
and wouldn't know it should connect a modem to get the device to work.
What would be the result depends on ModemManager version -- older
ModemManager would end up disconnecting a device after an unsuccessful
probe attempt (if it connected without needing to unlock a SIM), while
a newer one might spawn a separate PPP connection over a tty interface
instead, resulting in a general confusion and no end of chaos.
The only way to get this work reliably is to fix the device type
and have good enough version ModemManager (or equivalent).
Tethering worked on my Moto G7 Plus on Fedora 41, but stopped working on Fedora 42. I did see similar thread, but I did not see any instructions on how should I report a bug for this thing.
The situation: I'm trying out Bitwig on my geriatric computer, which is running Linux Mint. It seems that I can't do very much without spiking the DSP, leading to awful glitchiness in playback. However, according to btop, the CPU (i7 4770) load isn't breaking 30%, spread evenly across the cores.
Things I have tried: - uninstalling speech dispatcher, which helped - tweaking the pipewire config, which doesn't seem to have helped much
So... what is the bottleneck here?
EDIT: the (main) issue was that my user didn't have real time priority permissions. An edit to /etc/security/limits.conf has improved things immeasurably.
One of the things you run into with audio production software is that in order to maintain accuracy with respect to phasing between channels, they require very accurate timing, this usually comes at the expense of very high interrupt rates and context switching and under the best of circumstances this is hardware intensive, more so with older processors that don't have single instructions for storing the entire register set or restoring the entire register set to the stack with one instruction as many modern CPUs do. So hate to say it but you may need to upgrade to something less geriatric. You might also try a real-time kernel, it might allow the application to keep things sync'd up with less hardware interrupts though it will rely more on software interrupts do do the same. Unfortunately, I have found that while I can get the performance I require on my six year old processor using a realtime kernel, it has come with a sacrifice of stability, that is to say real time on my hardware at least has not been terribly stable.
Technological platforms are not neutral. If we truly want to resist the digital coup that is currently under way, we need to normalize the use of free, open source solutions.
Advertising RSS feeds is also a good way to reach back and replace substack. People have forgotten them but they still work just as much as before. I've dug up Reeder that is still kicking after all these years.
How is it dead tech if everything still works, apps are still being made and websites still publish feeds? Literally every Substack and such has an rss it's so easy that most websites have it without knowing and don't link it but it works anyway
Considering it's shipped by default on the fedi, on ghost, discourse, bsky and loads of other very hot upcoming and established tools, it's very much alive. Just because xitter and facebook and google failed to find a way to monetize it and therefore tried to kill it doesn't make it dead.
She touches on the aspect of monetization and claims that "you could save money by being on the Fediverse".
Yes, in theory it is possible. In practice this is something that only is available for the already-famous journalists who have enough pull to move their audience from Substack to their own property.
For everyone else, the Fediverse is (a) too small and (b) too "anti-money" to encourage professionals to even try making a living here. They stay on Substack for the same reason that video creators stay on YouTube: it's a horrible master, but at least it lets them pay their bills.
I'm going back to Linux after ~8 years of maining Windows. I was a Linux desktop and server user back in college and did all my dev on there. When I got my first job, I bought a better laptop and started maining Windows.
I am going back to Linux for three main reasons: I hate the Windows 11 UI, I'm increasingly paranoid about privacy/security, and the development experience for native software has sucked for a long time.
Besides the obvious downward spiral in UI since Windows 7, it's also become unreliable and slow. Some days, File explorer just won't open. Others, it takes a full minute to load my "home" view, and some others I get weird bugs where the color settings are broken or I can't actually click on folders anymore. The start menu is slow to open when pressing the Windows key, windows search is slow to index and sometimes looks stuff up on Bing instead of opening a file. The default apps (calculator, image viewer, media player) have been getting replaced with slower UWP versions with flatter and flatter UI. Finally, Windows is increasingly pushing AI stuff onto the platform, which leads me to privacy/security
I am increasingly paranoid these days about privacy and security. While I don't have any outstanding issues with security at large, I don't trust Microsoft's telemetry collection and I especially don't trust anything that gets sucked up into Windows Recall's AI Black hole. This hasn't been an issue, but I've always wondered why Microsoft hasn't made it simpler to create containerized applications with AppX/Windows SDK. It seems like it should be way easier to create a flatpak-like sandboxed application with any API (Win32, WinForms, WPF, or any language really).
Believe it or not, Windows is a good development platform, these days, unless you're trying to write Windows software. Microsoft, under Satya Nadella, has been taking care of its developer community and making a lot of tools free and some open source. vcpkg has revolutionized my C++ development and I've always been fond of many MSVC extensions such as SAL. There's a lot of pros and cons, but I generally prefer NT API calls over POSIX API calls (which are far more long in the tooth than NT at this point). That said, I tend to just write cross-platform "modern" C++ and don't make too many system calls anymore. I will miss Visual Studio (and the ease of SLN/Vcxproj files), and it seems like the only comparable C++ IDE available for Linux is CLion. I'm actually a fan of DirectX and HLSL over OpenGL and Vulkan: Microsoft has made a lot of really great first party libraries/tools available for DirectX that make it a really fun API to work with when you include DirectXTK. I am one of the rare few users who actually enjoys PowerShell; I prefer piping typed, structured data over piping streams of bytes. I also really hate sh/zsh/bash syntax.
That said: Microsoft has utterly lost the plot on native windows application development. They release a new UI Framework for C# and Whatever the latest managed C++ framework is every 3 or so years, and then immediately fail to support it, subtly changing XAML syntax or .Net namespaces so that your old UWP or WPF code is strangely not compatible anymore. To me, what is most telling about Microsoft's level of commitment to its newest frameworks is the fact that they are still supporting WinForms with modern, cross platform .Net builds, meaning that you can use modern C# and .Net features in a runtime that is supposed to have been replaced by their XAML products a long time ago. The only really viable way to write a DirectX application, and the only way that has any official documentation on it, is STILL to use the original Win32 APIs to create a window and manage IO.
So anyways, I'm not as zealous about Linux as most people on the internet are; I still think Windows is a good software development platform and maybe Microsoft can turn the ship around some day, but I doubt it.
I am one of the rare few users who actually enjoys PowerShell; I prefer piping typed, structured data over piping streams of bytes. I also really hate sh/zsh/bash syntax.
the development experience for native software has sucked for a long time.
For as long as Windows has existed, I have found its APIs to be noisy, awkward, and generally unpleasant to use. It was a major part of why I switched my development focus to Unix a long time ago. I guess this is a matter of personal taste; I wonder how you'll feel about the APIs more commonly used on Linux after five or ten years of using them full-time.
Despite a few niggles (I don't care for Bourne-style shell syntax or Windows shell syntax) I have found my productivity to be better and more enjoyable since the switch. Nowadays, benefits include everything that comes with an open-source ecosystem, like the software install/update model of Linux distros, and the ability to solve or work around library/OS problems myself if I can't wait for someone else to fix something.
And, of course, having a privacy-respecting platform for myself and my users is important to me.
In short, I'm happier here. Welcome.
By the way, if you do cross-platform desktop app development in native code, give Qt a try. It does an excellent job overall.
they are still supporting WinForms with modern, cross platform .Net builds, meaning that you can use modern C# and .Net features in a runtime that is supposed to have been replaced by their XAML products a long time ago.
Microsoft is all about corporate clients, that's why their Windows is backwards compatible down to Windows 95, because there is some big corporation that buys the corporate license in bulk and runs some corporate Windows 95 accounting application on it.
I have seen the EU-OS/Suse discussions for some months now. However, Ubuntu/Arch/Fedora are extremely mature projects. So competing against them will be hard.
I want to know how realistic the scenario (described by the question) is.
Honestly have no idea. In current times we're seeing the law do all sorts of things that I would have told you months ago weren't possible. I'm realizing that most of what held up our current system was nothing more than good faith.
But Redhat, Rocky, Alma are all owned by US legal entities and can absolutely be legally forced to do as you describe.
Technically blocked is something else, mind. We're clever, resourceful and motivated people and US laws wouldn't directly affect us.
However - you're thinking small. US influence of IT is massive. Routers, servers, hardware of all levels. The most enterprise level software is US led. All of these things can be restricted, or tarriffed heavily, or sanctioned entirely. If the US wants to hurt the rest of the world, it just has to tell Broadcom to turn off vmware outside of America. Ditto Cisco, Ditto Dell, Ditto... etc etc. Sure, it would be illegal, but does the American government care about that?
Anyone telling you that "Y won't happen because it's unthinkable" clearly hasn't been paying attention this year.
Small note. Opensuse Leap is EXTREMELY stable. Just as stable as RHEL and more stable than non-LTS Ubuntu. It’s just less well marketed in the English speaking world.
I can’t remember exactly why I hate SUSE, but I remember it never worked right when I tried it. Weird layers of abstraction, terrible ARM support, blegh.
They can for red hat but canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African
Either way, it doesn't matter, it's open source software so we'll happily download it somewhere else. loads of distress to choose from
Trying to force other countries to comply? Well the US could do that 2 years ago but since Trump utterly obliterated all of its soft power it has no way of enforcing that beyond threatening with tarrics (and we all know how well that has worked) or a full on invasion which will be bad for said country but as soon as the inevitable body bags come crashing back into the country, it would kill this administration
He doesn't give a shit about dead soldiers in body bags. Almost noone in Russia sees that, or if they do they'll be told som lie about it. Its much simpler than in the US
You know what's not simpler? Demographics. As I recently read somewhere, demographics is like a freight train, slow, but all of the sudden you hear this horn bare and you're splattered under it.
Putin lost now about a million men of working age. That is a huge gash that will come back to haunt Russia. Not Putin, mind you, he'll be dead and gone within a few years. Russia, though, is thoroughly fucked for the next decades. It already has low population issues before, and their demographics chart at this point is a fucking rollercoaster. Their population is already relatively old, and with the loss of about a million men, in a country largely dependent on mineral extraction and sale, it will be ugly.
He's losing men over 50 years old that are left out and are garbage of society. They wouldn't be participating in any demographic activities anyway.
I bet there are millions of Americans like this too. Coal miners who lost the job, casino players, heavy drinkers. For a hefty sum of money and a chance to be important again they'd do anything. You really underestimate how quick they can be turned into a cannon fodder and how little the society will miss them.
This post is long and kind of a rant. I don't expect many to read the whole thing, but there's a conclusion at the bottom.
On the surface, recommended security practices are simple: - Store all your credentials in a password manager - Use two factor authentication on all accounts
However, it raises a few questions. - Should you access your 2FA codes on the same device as the password manager? - Should you store them in the password manager itself?
This is the beginning of where a threat model is needed. If your threat model does not include protections against unwanted access to your device, it is safe for you to store access your 2FA codes on the same device as your password manager, or even in the password manager itself.
So, to keep it simple, say you store your 2FA in your password manager. There's a few more questions: - Where do you store the master password for the password manager? - Where do you store 2FA recovery codes?
The master password for the password manager could be written down on a piece of paper and stored in a safe, but that would be inconvenient when you want to access your passwords. So, a better solution is to just remember your password. Passphrases are easier to remember than passwords, so we'll use one of those.
Your 2FA recovery codes are something that are needed if you lose access to your real 2FA codes. Most websites just say "Store this in a secure place". This isn't something you want to store in the same place as those (in this case our password manager), and it's not something you will access often, so it's safe to write it down on a piece of paper and lock it in a safe.
Good so far, you have a fairly simple system to keep your accounts safe from some threats. But, new problems arise: - What happens if you forget your master passphrase? - What happens if others need access to your password manager?
The problem with remembering your passphrase is that it's possible to forget it, no matter how many times you repeat it to yourself. Besides naturally forgetting it, things like injuries can arise which can cause you to forget the passphrase. Easy enough to fix, though. We can just keep a copy of the passphrase in the safe, just in case we forget it.
If someone else needs to access certain credentials in your password manager, for example a wife that needs to verify bank information using your account, storing a copy of the password is a good idea here too. Since she is a trusted party, you can give her access to the safe in case of emergencies.
The system we have is good. If the safe is stolen or destroyed, you still have the master passphrase memorized to change the master passphrase and regenerate the 2FA security codes. The thief who stole the safe doesn't have your password manager's data, so the master passphrase is useless. However, our troubles aren't over yet: - How do you store device credentials? - How do you keep the password manager backed up?
Your password manager has to have some device in order to access it. Whether it's a phone, computer, tablet, laptop, or website, there needs to be some device used to access it. That device needs to be as secure as your password manager, otherwise accessing the password manager becomes a risk. This means using full disk encryption for the device, and a strong login passphrase. However, that means we have 2 more passwords to take care of that can't be stored in the password manager. We access those often, so we can't write them down and store them in the safe, Remembering two more passphrases complicates things and makes forgetting much more likely. Where do we store those passphrases?
One solution is removing the passwords altogether. Using a hardware security key, you can authenticate your disk encryption and user login using it. If you keep a spare copy of the security key stored in the safe, you make sure you aren't locked out if you lose access to your main security key.
Now to keep the password manager backed up. Using the 3-2-1 Backup Strategy. It states that there should be at least 3 copies of the data, stored on 2 different types of storage media, and one copy should be kept offsite, in a remote location (this can include cloud storage). 2 or more different media should be used to eliminate data loss due to similar reasons (for example, optical discs may tolerate being underwater while LTO tapes may not, and SSDs cannot fail due to head crashes or damaged spindle motors since they do not have any moving parts, unlike hard drives). An offsite copy protects against fire, theft of physical media (such as tapes or discs) and natural disasters like floods and earthquakes. Physically protected hard drives are an alternative to an offsite copy, but they have limitations like only being able to resist fire for a limited period of time, so an offsite copy still remains as the ideal choice.
So, our first copy will be on our secure device. It's the copy we access the most. The next copy could be an encrypted hard drive. The encryption passphrase could be stored in our safe. The last copy could be a cloud storage service. Easy, right? Well, more problems arise: - Where do you store the credentials for the cloud storage service? - Where do you store the LUKS backup file and password?
Storing the credentials for the cloud storage service isn't as simple as putting it in the safe. If we did that, then anyone with the safe could login to the cloud storage service and decrypt the password manager backup using the passphrase also stored in the safe. If we protected the cloud storage service with our security key, a copy of that is still in the safe. Maybe we protect it with a 2FA code, and instead of storing the 2FA codes in the password manager, we store it on another device. That solves the problem for now, but there are still problems, such as storing the credentials for that new device.
When using a security key to unlock a LUKS partition, you are given a backup file to store as a backup for emergencies. Plus, LUKS encrypted partitions still require you to setup a passphrase, so storing that still becomes an issue.
Conclusion
I'm going to stop here, because this post is getting long. I could keep going fixing problems and causing new ones, but the point is this: Security is a mess! I didn't even cover alternative ways to authenticate the password manager such as a key file, biometrics, etc. Trying to find "perfect" security is almost impossible, and that's why a threat model is important. If you set hard limits such as "No storing passwords digitally" or "No remembering any passwords" then you can build a security system that fits that threat model, but there's currently no security system that fits all threat model.
However, that doesn't let companies that just say "Store this in a secure place" off the hook either. It's a hand wavy response to security that just says "We don't know how to secure this part of our system, so it's your problem now". We need to have comprehensive security practices that aren't just "Use a password manager and 2FA", because that causes people to just store their master passphrase on a sticky note or a text file on the desktop.
The state of security is an absolute mess, and I'm sick of it. It seems that, right now, security, privacy, convenience, and safety (e.g. backups, other things that remove single points of failure) are all at odds with each other. This post mainly focused on how security, convenience, and safety are at odds, but I could write a whole post about how security and privacy are at odds.
Anyways, I've just outlined one possible security system you can have. If you have one that you think works well, I'd like to hear about it. I use a different security system than what I outline here, and I see problems with it.
as a longtime-Mac user who got used to the typical Mac-keyboard layout and using a Logitech MX Keys (Mac only) I was wondering if there is any chance of adopting the Mac-layout 1:1 on one of my favourite Linux-distros using KDE (desktop PC) without mapping each single key to match the Mac-key?
Is there any base tool I can use for this or any tool I can download to accomplish this?
Does XCode still have Emacs shortcuts? Otherwise I recommend learning the platform specific shortcuts. It gives a much better idea what the platform can do for you.
I use vim; hence the difficulty w remapping the keys and the Mac's belong to my employers.
I would never buy a Mac and I only use Linux so it doesn't make sense to grow accustomed to Mac's quirks; especially so since only every other employer provides Mac's.
Oh I see. Sorry I misunderstood your usecase. Then customising XQuartz (Apples X11 Server) or just running a VM with a shared folder seems to be the best option (if your employer allows them).
Obviously you should relearn everything. Heck, pick up the Dvorak or Colemak keyboard layout while you're at it!
/s
That toshy thing looks like the right way to go. Wild that this is such a complex issue.
I had to go the other direction (Linux -> apple) for a bit and ended up remapping the caps lock key to command so I could approximate "normal" reflexive (pinky-based) shortcuts. It did sort of simplify copy-pasting in terminals.
same here but permanently since i can only chose between mac and windows for work laptops since leaving the few employers that support linux laptops.
i had to remap the globe/fn key to control since it sits in the control space and i struggle daily with copy/paste and i REALLY MISS the scroll-wheel-click/shift-insert copy/paste; i have to use a context menu for both.
Oh that's sad. Last version of MacOS I used was 11 or 12, and things like keyboard shortcuts and mouse behaviour stopped working randomly there too. Guess the detoriation of their GUI hasn't slowed down.
For what it's worth I used some drag and drop shelf tool, closed source, a mix of macboard and dropover, can't find it right now.
Not many people have heard about secureblue, and I want to spread the word about it. secureblue provides hardened images for Fedora Atomic and CoreOS. It's an operating system "for those whose first priority is using linux, and second priority is security."
secureblue provides exploit mitigations and fixes for multiple security holes. This includes the addition of GrapheneOS's hardened_malloc, their own hardened Chromium-based browser called Trivalent, USBGuard to protect against USB peripheral attacks, and plenty more.
secureblue has definitely matured a lot since I first started using it. Since then, it has become something that could reasonably be used as a daily driver. secureblue recognizes the need for usability alongside security.
If you already have Fedora Atomic (e.g. Secureblue, Kinoite, Sericea, etc.) or CoreOS installed on your system, you can easily rebase to secureblue. The install instructions are really easy to follow, and I had no issues installing it on any of my devices.
I'd love more people to know about secureblue, because it is fantastic if you want a secure desktop OS!
Not many people have heard about secureblue, and I want to spread the word about it. secureblue provides hardened images for Fedora Atomic and CoreOS. It's an operating system "for those whose first priority is using linux, and second priority is security."
secureblue provides exploit mitigations and fixes for multiple security holes. This includes the addition of GrapheneOS's hardened_malloc, their own hardened Chromium-based browser called Trivalent, USBGuard to protect against USB peripheral attacks, and plenty more.
secureblue has definitely matured a lot since I first started using it. Since then, it has become something that could reasonably be used as a daily driver. secureblue recognizes the need for usability alongside security.
If you already have Fedora Atomic (e.g. Secureblue, Kinoite, Sericea, etc.) or CoreOS installed on your system, you can easily rebase to secureblue. The install instructions are really easy to follow, and I had no issues installing it on any of my devices.
I'd love more people to know about secureblue, because it is fantastic if you want a secure desktop OS!
I'm making this post to share some interesting less talked about things about privacy, security, and other related topics. This post has no direct goal, it's just an interesting thing to read. Anyways, here we go:
I made a post about secureblue, which is a Linux distro* (I'll talk about the technicality later) designed to be as secure as possible without compromising too much usability. I really like the developers, they're one of the nicest, most responsible developers I've seen. I make a lot of bug reports on a wide variety of projects, so they deserve the recognition.
Anyways, secureblue is a lesser known distro* with a growing community. It's a good contrast to the more well known alternative** Qubes OS, which is not very user friendly at all.
* Neither secureblue, nor Qubes OS are "distros" in the classical sense. secureblue modifies and hardens various Fedora Atomic images. Qubes OS is not a distro either, as they state themselves. It's based on the Xen Hypervisor, and virtualizes different Linux distros on their own.
** Qubes OS and secureblue aren't exactly comparable. They have different goals and deal with security in different ways, just as no threat model can be compared as "better" than any other one. This all is without mentioning secureblue can be run inside of Qubes OS, which is a whole other ballpark.
secureblue has the goal of being the most secure option "for those whose first priority is using Linux, and second priority is security." secureblue "does not claim to be the most secure option available on the desktop." (See here) Many people in my post were confused about that sentence and wondered what the most secure option for desktop is. Qubes OS is one option, however the secureblue team likely had a different option in mind when they wrote that sentence: Android.
However, Madaiden's Insecurities makes no mention of secureblue. Why is that? As it turns out, Madaiden's Insecurities has not been updated in over 3 years. It is still a credible source for some occasions, but some recommendations are outdated.
Many people are strictly anti-Google because of Google's extreme history of privacy violations, however those people end up harming a lot of places of security in the process. The reality is, while Google is terrible with privacy, Google is fantastic with security. As such, many projects such as GrapheneOS use Google-made devices for the operating system. GrapheneOS explains their choice, and makes an important note that it would be willing to support other devices as long as it met their security standards. Currently only Google Pixels do.
For those unfamiliar, GrapheneOS is an open source privacy and security focused custom Android distribution. The Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is an open source project developed by Google. Like the Linux kernel, it provides an open source base for Android, which allows developers to make their own custom distributions of it. GrapheneOS is one such distribution, which "DeGoogles" the device, removing the invasive Google elements of the operating system.
Some Google elements, such as Google Play Services can be optionally installed onto the device in a non-privileged way (see here and here). People may be concerned that Google Pixels can still spy on them at a hardware level even with GrapheneOS installed, but that isn't the case.
With that introduction of secure Android out of the way, let's talk about desktop Android. Android has had a hidden option for Desktop Mode for years now. It's gotten much better since it was first introduced, and with the recent release of Android 15 QPR2, Android has been given a native terminal application that virtualizes Linux distros on the device. GrapheneOS is making vast improvements to the terminal app, and there are many improvements to come.
GrapheneOS will also try to support an upcoming Pixel Laptop from Google, which will run full Android on the desktop. All of these combined means that Android is one of, if not the, most secure option for desktop. Although less usable than some more matured desktop operating systems, it is becoming more and more integrated.
By the way, if you didn't know, Android is based on Linux. It uses the Linux kernel as a base, and builds on top of it. Calling Qubes OS a distro would be like calling Android and Chrome OS distros as well. Just an interesting fact.
So, if Android (or more specifically GrapheneOS) is the most secure option for desktop, what does that mean in the future? If the terminal app is able to virtualize Linux distros, secureblue could be run inside of GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS may start to become a better version of Qubes OS, in some respects, especially with the upcoming App Communication Scopes feature, which further sandboxes apps.
However, there is one bump in the road, which is the potential for Google to be broken up. If that happens, it might put GrapheneOS and a lot of security into a weird place. There might be consequences such as Pixels not being as secure or not supporting alternative Android distributions. Android may suffer some slowdowns or halts in development, possibly putting more work on custom Android distribution maintainers. However, some good may come from it as well. Android may become more open source and less Google invasive. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
Speaking of Google being broken up, what will happen to Chrome? I largely don't care about what happens to Chrome, but instead what happens to Chromium. Like AOSP, Chromium is an open source browser base developed by Google. Many browsers are based on Chromium, including Brave Browser and Vanadium.
Vanadium is a hardened version of Chromium developed by GrapheneOS. Like what GrapheneOS does to Android, Vanadium removes invasive Google elements from the browser and adds some privacy and security fixes. Many users who run browser fingerprinting tests on Vanadium report it having a nearly unique fingerprint. Vanadium does actually include fingerprint protections (see here and here), but not enough users use it for it to be as noticeable as the Tor Browser. "Vanadium will appear the same as any other Vanadium on the same device model, and we don't support a lot of device models." (see here)
There's currently a battle in the browser space between a few different groups, so mentioning any browser is sure to get you involved in a slap fight. The fights usually arise between these groups:
The group that is strictly anti-Google and uses Firefox-based browsers
The security focused group that recognizes that Firefox is insecure and opts for privacy enhanced versions of Chromium
Another interesting Chromium-based browser to look at is secureblue's Trivalent, which was inspired by Vanadium. It's a good option for users that use Linux instead of Android as a desktop.
Also, about crypto, why is there a negativity around it? The reason is largely due to its use in crime, use in scams, and use in investing. However, not all cryptocurrencies are automatically bad. The original purpose behind cryptocurrency was to solve a very interesting problem.
There are some cryptocurrencies with legitimate uses, such as Monero, which is a cryptocurrency designed to be completely anonymous. Whether or not you invest in it is your own business, and unrelated to the topics of this post. Bitcoin themselves even admit that Bitcoin is not anonymous, so there is a need for Monero if you want fully decentralized, anonymous digital transactions.
On the topic of fully decentralized and anonymous things, what about secure messaging apps? Most people, even GrapheneOS and CISA, are quick to recommend Signal as the gold standard. However, another messenger comes up in discussion (and my personal favorite), which is SimpleX Chat.
SimpleX Chat is recommended by GrapheneOS occasionally, as well as other credible places. This spreadsheet is my all time favorite one comparing different messengers, and SimpleX Chat is the only one that gets full marks. Signal is a close second, but it isn't decentralized and it requires a phone number.
Anyways, if you do use Signal on Android, be sure to check out Molly, which is a client (fork) of Signal for Android with lots of hardening and improvements. It is also available to install from Accrescent.
Accrescent is an open source app store for Android focused on privacy and security. It is one of the default app stores available to install directly on GrapheneOS. It plans to be an alternative to the Google Play Store, which means it will support installing proprietary apps. Accrescent is currently in early stages of development, so there are only a handful of apps on there, but once a few issues are fixed you will find that a lot of familiar apps will support it quickly.
Many people have high hopes for Accrescent, and for good reason. Other app stores like F-Droid are insecure, which pose risks such as supply chain attacks. Accrescent is hoped to be (and currently is) one of the most secure app stores for Android.
The only other secure app store recommended by GrapheneOS is the Google Play Store. However, using it can harm user privacy, as it is a Google service like any other. You also need an account to use it.
Users of GrapheneOS recommend making an anonymous Google account by creating it using fake information from a non-suspicious (i.e. not a VPN or Tor) IP address such as a coffee shop, and always use a VPN afterwards. A lot of people aren't satisfied with that response, since the account is still a unique identifier for your device. This leads to another slap fight about Aurora Store, which allows you to (less securely) install Play Store apps using a randomly given Google account.
The difference between the Play Store approach and the Aurora Store approach is that Aurora Store's approach is k-anonymous, rather than... "normal" anonymity. The preference largely comes down to threat models, but if you value security then Aurora Store is not a good option.
Another criticism of the Play Store is that it is proprietary. The view of security between open source software and proprietary software has shifted significantly. It used to be that people viewed open source software as less securebecause the source code is openly available. While technically it's easier to craft an attack for a known exploit if the source code is available, that doesn't make the software itself any less secure.
The view was then shifted to open source software being more secure, because anyone can audit the code and spot vulnerabilities. Sometimes this can help, and many vulnerabilities have been spotted and fixed faster due to the software being open source, but it isn't always the case. Rarely do you see general people looking over every line of code for vulnerabilities.
The reality is that, just because something is open source, doesn't mean it is automatically more or less secure than if it were proprietary. Being open source simply provides integrity in the project (since the developers make it as easy as possible to spot misconduct), and full accountability towards the developers when something goes wrong. Being open source is obviously better than being proprietary, that's why many projects choose to be open source, but it doesn't have to be that way for it to still be secure.
Plus, the workings of proprietary code can technically be viewed, since some code can be decompiled, reverse engineered, or simply read as assembly instructions, but all of those are difficult, time consuming, and might get you sued, so it's rare to see it happen.
I'm not advocating for the use of proprietary software, but I am advocating for less hate regarding proprietary software. Among other things, proprietary software has some security benefits in things like drivers, which is why projects like linux-libre and Libreboot are worse for security than their counterparts (see coreboot).
Those projects still have uses, especially if you value software freedom over security, but for security alone they aren't as recommended.
Disclaimer before this next section: I don't know the difference in terminology between "Atomic", "Immutable", and "Rolling Release", so forgive me for that.
Also, on the topic of software freedom, stop using Debian. Debian is outdated and insecure, and I would argue less stable too. Having used a distro with an Atomic release cycle, I have experienced far less issues than when I used Debian. Not to mention, if you mess anything up on an Atomic distro, you can just rollback to the previous boot like nothing happened, and still keep all your data. That saved me when I almost bricked my computer motifying /etc/fstab/ by hand.
Since fixes are pushed out every day, and all software is kept as up to date as possible, Atomic distros I argue give more stability than having an outdated "tried and tested" system. This is more an opinion rather than factually measured.
Once I realized the stable version of Debian uses Linux kernel 6.1, (which is 3 years old and has had actively exploited vulnerabilities), and the latest stable version of the kernel is 6.13, I switched pretty quick for that reason among others.
Now, many old kernel versions are still maintained, and the latest stable version of Android uses kernels 6.1 and 6.6 (which are still maintained), but it's still not great to use older kernel versions regardless. It isn't the only insecurity about Debian.
I really have nothing more to say. I know I touched on a lot of extremely controversial topics, but I'm sick of privacy being at odds with security, as well as other groups being at odds with each other. This post is sort of a collection of a lot of interesting privacy and security knowledge I've accrued throughout my life, and I wanted to share my perspective. I don't expect everybody to agree with me, but I'm sharing this in case it ever becomes useful to someone else.
Thanks for taking the time to read this whole thing, if you did. I spent hours writing it, so I'm sure it's gotten very long by now.
Is there some sort of comprehensive guide on hardening RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky?
I have read Madaidan's blog, and I plan to go through CIS policies, Alma and Rocky documentation and other general stuff like KSPP, musl, LibreSSL, hardened_malloc etc.
But I feel like this is not enough and I will likely face problems that I cannot solve. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel by myself, I thought I'd ask if anyone has done this before so I can use their guide as a baseline. Maybe there's a community guide on hardening either of these two? I'd contribute to its maintenance if there is one.
Madaidan's Insecurities hasn't been updated in a few years, so some of the information is a bit out of date. It is still decent information, but don't follow it granularly. What you may be looking for instead is secureblue, which essentially does what you are describing but for Fedora Atomic desktops.
secureblue is for those whose first priority is using Linux, and second priority is security. secureblue does not claim to be the most secure option available on the desktop. We are limited in that regard by the current state of desktop Linux standardization, tooling, and upstream security development. What we aim for instead is to be the most secure option for those who already intend to use Linux. As such, if security is your first priority, secureblue may not be the best option for you.
Why do they say that? What limitations does Linux have in terms of security?
That's a more up-to-date article about security issues with Linux.
TL;DR is that Linux (the desktop, not the kernel) is fundamentally insecure, and so the more secure options for desktop are Qubes OS (Qubes OS is not a Linux distro) or (even better) GrapheneOS used in Desktop Mode. secureblue is about as secure as Linux can get, but the most secure option for desktop itself.
Things also get weird when you consider running secureblue inside of Qubes OS. See my post for more thoughts about that.
There is a common misconception among privacy communities that Linux is one of the more secure operating systems, either because it is open-source or because it is widely used in the cloud. However, this is a far cry from reality.
Unless you have an unusual threat model, this statement is utter nonsense. I can run a kconfig stripped kernel with zero kernel modules and one userspace process that is completely audited and trusted, without the ability to spawn even other processes or talk to network (because the kernel lacks support for the IP stack).
Secureblue might offer something significant when compared to other popular and easily usable tools, but if you compare it to the theoretical limit of Linux security, its not even comparable.
I examined Secureblue's kernel parameters and turned multiple of them off because some were mitigations for something that was unnecessary. IE: The kernel would make the analysis that your hardware is not affected by a vulnerability, and thus there is no need to enable a specific mitigation. But they would override this and force the mitigation, so you take a performance hit, for what I understand to be, no gain. Not sure why they did that, a mistake? Or did they simply not trust the kernel's analysis for some reason? Who knows.
Hey, I recognise you now! That was a great post, I had a lot of fun reading it. If I could follow people on Lemmy I'd follow you.
What do you think about Kicksecure (and Kicksecure inside of Qubes)? I know they are criticised for backports but leaving that issue aside, I think they have created a very handy distro. I personally go through CIS benchmarks for most of stuff including Kicksecure but it's definitely nice to have a prey hardened distro (SecureBlue too but I hear SecureBlue isn't a big team, not sure how much time they have to address the broad range of desktop Linux security issues).
Honestly, Qubes is the best at this by far. Their method of compartmentalisation takes away the complexity of reasonable security from the end-user making it a mostly seamless experience. I personally think that if you were to put GrapheneOS and Qubes OS side-by-side on uncompromised hardware, I'd take Qubes. I'd run GrapheneOS inside Qubes with a software/hardware TPM passed through if I could.
That was a great post, I had a lot of fun reading it.
Thank you!
If I could follow people on Lemmy I’d follow you.
The best you can do in regards to that is adding my profile to your preferred RSS reader, so you get notified each time I post. A few good ones for android are Feeder, Read You, or (my favorite) Capy Reader.
What do you think about Kicksecure (and Kicksecure inside of Qubes)?
I'm not sure if you mean actual Kicksecure or if you mean Whonix. Either way, if I were to use Qubes OS, I would do Whonix inside of Qubes (until a secureblue template is made).
SecureBlue too but I hear SecureBlue isn’t a big team, not sure how much time they have to address the broad range of desktop Linux security issues
secureblue backports a lot of fixes from other projects (e.g. their browser, Trivalent, backports fixes from GrapheneOS's Vanadium). Their team is small but mighty.
I personally think that if you were to put GrapheneOS and Qubes OS side-by-side on uncompromised hardware, I’d take Qubes.
GrapheneOS compartmentalizes as well, but in a different fashion. All apps on GrapheneOS are sandboxed, Once GrapheneOS implements App Communication Scopes, apps will be able to be completely* isolated. Without App Communication Scopes, the best way to isolate apps is by setting up separate profiles.
*While APC prevents communication between apps, they are still installed on the same profile, and thus have access to unique profile identifiers. Apps with network access can technically communicate with each other via a third party. Furthermore, apps may be able to directly communicate with each other through a telephone effect (e.g. Pixel Camera tells Google Play Services to tell Google Calendar about the photo you just took). I am massively oversimplifying this, but you get the gist.
I mentioned in my post that security is going to become very interesting with the introduction of the Linux terminal into Android. If GrapheneOS chooses to expand on this, that means, like Qubes OS, GrapheneOS could emulate multiple Linux distros.
Anyways, this is how I would rank them in terms of security (again, oversimplified):
Is desktop linux more insecure than Windows? I know it's less targeted, bit is it technically more insecure? Are secureblue and grapheneos more secure than a hardened OSX / Windows?
A threat model which you don't trust the Linux Foundation and volunteers but do trust Microsoft.
Its all about what you want to protect. If a security breach is worse for you on Linux than it is on Windows because of which party has the data, then for you, Windows might be more secure.
Some people get confused because they think there is some objective measurable security rating one can apply to a system for every person. There isn't. We may use the same systems but have different threat models and thus rate the security different.
What does that even mean? What kind of exploitation are you talking about?
Every use case comes with its own risk, and every risk needs to be handled differently. People jokingly said that if you wanna be sure, don't connect your computer to the network at all; and if you wanna be surer, don't use a computer. While that was a joke, there's truth in that.
If you're just going to use it as a workstation, then firewall to make sure some randos don't ping you should suffice. If you're sharing this workstation with your tech illiterate mates, then perhaps something to prevent executing random stuff like SELinux or AppArmor would do. If executing random stuff is just what you do, then set up VMs or some other ways to isolate that execution environment.
If you're sharing files directly from your computer to the internet (e.g. with SMB or NFS), then you'd need to make sure only the right people have the access, and the auth can't be brute-forced (i.e. with rate-limiting and lock-out policy). Same goes if you allow remote login (i.e. thru SSH). Some people use custom port number to obscure their stuff, and you can do it too, but do keep in mind it could make your life (or your mates' lives) harder.
If you're running other outward facing services like SQL database or HTTP, that would require different ways to address. If you're on such level, you'd want do some serious readings.
You raise a valid point. In which case, I want to try and prevent malicious privilege escalation by a process on this system. I know that's a broad topic and depends on the application being run, but most of the tweaks I've listed work towards that to an extent.
To be precise, I'm asking how to harden the upcoming AlmaLinux based Dom0 by the XCP-NG project. I want my system to be difficult to work with even if someone breaks into it (unlikely because I trust Xen as a hypervisor platform but still).
I admit I was a bit surprised by the question since I've never consciously thought about a reason to harden my OS. I always just want to do it and wonder why OSes aren't hardened more by default.
Privilege escalations always have to be granted by an upper-privilege process to a lower-privilege process.
There is one general way this happens.
Ex: root opens up a line of communication between it and a user, the user sends input to root, root mishandles it, it causes undesired behavior within the root process and can lead to bad things happening.
All privilege escalation is two different privilege levels having some form of interaction. Crossing the security boundary. If you wish to limit this, you need to find the parts of the system that cross that boundary, like sudo[1], and remove those from your system.
[1]: sudo is an SUID binary. That means, when you run it, it runs as root. This is a problem, because you as a process have some influence on code that executes within the program (code running as root).
I'm having a problem with Cider (app for Apple Music). It won't start anymore. The Cider logo appears, but then I get an error "cider is not responding, reload the app?". Obviously I've tried to start it again but it still isn't working.
Run it via the terminal, this will usually give you some more detailed error messages to work with. After doing that, post them here and we can help better.
Has anybody been able to build a statically linked binary that shows a Vulkan surface? I've put some context around this problem in the video. I understand that the vulkan driver has to be loaded dynamically - so it's more of a question whether a statically built app can reliably load and talk with it. I think it should be possible but haven't actually seen anyone make it work. I'm aware of "static-window9" by Andrew Kelley but sadly it doesn't work any more (at least on my Gentoo machine T_T).
(I'm also aware of AppImages but I don't think they're the "proper" solution to this problem - more like a temporary bandaid - better than Docker but still far from perfect)
A battle wast lost but the fight for a better gaming UX will keep on going as long as we keep the hope.We're writing AUTOMAT - a game that plays other games ...
I have no experience with this, but I figured a Rust library might have tried to solve it (static linking is very much the norm here) and I found that ash can statically link the "Vulkan loader". I don't know, what that actually means, for example whether it would still load libxcb at runtime. Might be worth looking into what they do...
Has anybody been able to build a statically linked binary
The question should by why you'd want to. Careful if your reply is something about 'one binary to work on a very diverse arrangement of library pinnings' because the next question would be 'why would you think that's either achievable or valuable as a goal'; and toss in a 'why try to ship the same binary in several different repos anyway' bonus question.
In short, if your biggest problem is how to build a binary that works everywhere, you have a lot of questions about responsible build/release processes to answer, and they will be embarrassing for you.
I think of demoscene, game jams, desktop pets and other sorts of small home-brew software written by & for small groups of people. There is nothing embarrassing about one-off programs. I understand that what you said is just a figure of speech and you don't really think so (and thank you for a well thought comment) but it still makes me kind of sad to see this kind of shaming. It's discouraging people from being creative.
I'd say my bar is already low. A toy GUI program that draws a triangle and plays a sound should work on my friend's machine (with a different set of system libraries) and it shouldn't randomly break when OS update bumps some library version. AFAIK something like that would require a static binary (INTERP is a no-go) and an ability to dlopen stuff at runtime.
Writing software that "just works" shouldn't be as hard as it is.
Not sure how appimages handle it internally, but with flatpaks you can even be storage efficient with layers, whereas 100s of static binaries could contain an awful lot of duplicates.
I'm fairly sure the complexity of flatpak/appimage solutions are far more than the static linking of a binary (at least on non-glibc systems). Its often a single flag (Ex: -static) that builds the DLLs into the binary, not a whole container and namespace.
Hello guys and gals, it's me Mutahar again! I made a bit of an error when updating my system and came across a total break. I spent the last month playing ar...
Mint is a good choice because it has an easy timeshift option, so a problem in an update is just a rollback/recover. Same as Snapper Rollback on distros like OpenSUSE, it means a non savvy Linux user can reboot and have it fixed. That is appealing for a lot of users that don't want to bother with finding the fix
You should go see Gentoo or something if ArchLinux causes you problems.
It's my go-to rescue cum doing-backups cum new-install distribution because it's clean (meaning low cruft), minimalist, and most importantly, rolling. I run it as a console OS. I adore it.
Have I run it as my Workstation OS? Yes. Would I again? No. It was too fragile then.
Pacman is too strange to use with the options reduced to letters and having to include the double dash every time you remember the long form. Gimme dnf, Aptitude or flatpak.
My daily driver is Fedora. Is my heart in my mouth every six months when 4,000 packages all need reinstalling? Yes.
Have I tried Debian Testing&Sid as semi-rolling? Yes, fantastic, until they did something weird with systemd instead of just doing the conf locations as intended like everyone else. And the weak-dependencies lists were unfunny. Did I mention I loved aptitude?!
Have I tried, source distros (exherbo, Gentoo, funtoo)? Yes, never got any work done. I was always compiling something for that 1% corner-case performance gain.
Don't think I'll try anything else save maybe openSUSE or that NixOS. The first seriously, the second for fun - NixOS smells a tiny bit like Gentoo or ArchLinux to me (sorry, not sorry).
Going to do the Talos Linux shuffle sometime soon but that's different isn't it.
As you might have guessed, I don't really do derivative distros like Ubuntu. Function over form for me.
Personally, I think bro needs an immutable Linux OS. Fedora SilverBlue, openSUSE MicroOS, the ArchLinux one. All types of ostree now called libostree, git-like tech.
nothing wrong with Mint, but it isnt some magical distro, and I'm so sick of hearing about it that my ears pretty much [bleed]every single "What distro should I try?" thread: "Mint""I recommend Mint" "Why use x when you could use Mint?""MINT!"... /rant
edit and alas: I have seen the error of my ways, and as such, will, from this day forth, worship at the linux of mint and ye though there are other worthy transitional distros, I shall not see them, for the votes have taught me so. and the people said mint
The future of Linux distributions in many ways seems like immutable may be a good path, and now the Manjaro team want you to test out their own version of it with Manjaro Summit.
Hi all! I have always only used sed with s///, becouse I've never been able to figure out how to properly make use of its full capabilities. Right now, I'm trying to filter the output of df -h --output=avail,source to only get the available space from /dev/dm-2 (let's ignore that I just realized df accepts a device as parameter, which clearly solves my problem).
However, it makes use of grep, and I'd like to get rid of it. So I've tried with a combiantion of t, T, //d and some other stuff, but onestly the output I get makes no sense to me, and I can't figure out what I should do instead.
In short, my question is: given the following output
The easiest way is probably without sed, which you mentioned:
df -h --output=avail /dev/dm-2| tail -n1
But purely with sed it would be something like this:
df -h --output=avail,source | sed -n ‘/\/dev\/dm-2/s!/dev/dm-2!!p’
-n tells sed to not print lines by default
/[regex]/ selects the likes matching regex. We need to escape the slashes inside the regex.
s/// does search-and-replace, and has a special feature: it can use any character, not just a slash. So I used three exclamation points instead , so that I don’t need to escape the slashes. Here we replace the device with the empty string.
This weired me out until I read the explanation. I'm so used to the slashes lol
In the end I've used the first command you wrote, because KISS, but I appreciate your explanation
Check the sed man page for more details
Yes that's been my only source so far, but to be honest it's really cryptic. it might just be that I'm used to syscalls man pages (also sed is kinda complex it can't be easy to write a single man page for it)
Are you opposed to using awk? Printing out a specific column is basically the only thing I actually know how to do with it: df -h --output=avail,source | awk '/dm-2/ {print $1}'
I had to check the syntax because I also don't use it enough to be sure, definitely a bit weird. Basically just grep for a regex and print the specified column.
Just disable printing out with the -n option and add the p modifier to the s/// command to print out lines where substitution has occured. sed -n 's/your-regexp/replacement/p
A new community-led initiative called “EU OS” to develop a Linux distribution initiative looks like a positive development. It is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's (EU) public sector organizations. For me, this initiative stands out for its commitment to the EU's digital sovereignty, reducing reliance on external vendors, and creating a secure, independent digital ecosystem.
A new community-led initiative called “EU OS” to develop a Linux distribution initiative looks like a positive development. It is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's (EU) public sector organizations. For me, this initiative stands out for its commitment to the EU's digital sovereignty, reducing reliance on external vendors, and creating a secure, independent digital ecosystem.
It should be based on suse because it is european. EU wants to push european it solutions. Fedora would be better than microsoft but it is both linux after all. Both can use kde and gnome. They are not so much different.
Moreover, BSI, Secunet and others already work with suse.
Edit: I should install opensuse myself to put my money where my mouth is. The difference between fedora and opensuse isn't too big for me anyway.
Are there suse based distros, like ublue? https:// osinside.github.io/kiwi/overview.html
A new community-led initiative called “EU OS” to develop a Linux distribution initiative looks like a positive development. It is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's (EU) public sector organizations. For me, this initiative stands out for its commitment to the EU's digital sovereignty, reducing reliance on external vendors, and creating a secure, independent digital ecosystem.
A new community-led initiative called “EU OS” to develop a Linux distribution initiative looks like a positive development. It is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's (EU) public sector organizations. For me, this initiative stands out for its commitment to the EU's digital sovereignty, reducing reliance on external vendors, and creating a secure, independent digital ecosystem.
EU OS is not an entirely new operating system and uses a Linux foundation based on Fedora and KDE Plasma as the desktop environment.
The main advantage of EU OS lies in its focus on standardization rather than creating something entirely new. It offers a shared Linux foundation that can be fine-tuned with additional bits, regardless of whether it be for national, regional, sector-specific, or organizational use.
Welcome Fedi Friends to the episode 10 of Fireside Fedi! I'm your host ozoned. Fireside Fedi is a show about folks within the Fediverse. If you're seeing this, you are a part of the Fediverse. I'...
Hi all. I am facing problems with fonts rendering on my 2 different laptops. The only difference is in the OS: one runs Arch and the other runs Fedora. Both run latest i3wm and i3status and use the same config files.
On Fedora, the fonts are rendered beautifully with colors. On Arch, it is just black and white line. You can see them clearly here: imgur.com/a/QtJyRiJ. Top image is Arch and the bottom one is Fedora's.
How do I get Arch to render just like the polybar on Fedora? For the font, on Arch , I installed ttf-font-awesome. In LX Appearance, I would then have: Font Awesome 6, Font Awesome 6 Brands and Font Awesome 4 Compatibility.
On Fedora, I installed a bunch of stuff like fontawesome-6-free-fonts, fontawesome-6-brand-fonts and fontawesome-fonts-all. Here, LX Appearance shows Font Awesome 6 and Font Awesome 4
In i3 config, I just have:
font pango:Font Awesome 12
to set the fonts. But the results are so much difference as you can see from the link.
Best option is to not click on any content related to Musk with the exception of "need to be informed" type news reports. Even adjacent things like SpaceX etc.
We’ve promoted our KDE Plasma Desktop offering to “Edition” status. The Fedora KDE team has been hard at work making sure bugs get fixed and everything is polished just so. We’re confident that this can stand along our other amazing flagship offerings.
I know the naming is a bit confusing, with GNOME-powered “Workstation” using a generic label while KDE Plasma Desktop has the tech right in the name. We’ll get that figured out eventually. If you don’t know where to start, don’t panic. Pick one and see how it goes. They’re both excellent desktop environments with great upstream communities, and the same Fedora system underneath it all.
We also have a new alternative desktop choice: COSMIC. This is a modern, written-all-in-Rust desktop environment from our friends over at System 76.
Perhaps most excitingly, we have a new installation interface! The previous UI was designed to manage a lot of before-you-even-start configuration choices. Over the past decade, though, we’ve gone to “get the full system installed with no fuss, then set up what you need from a complete environment”. That made the “hub and spoke” model more confusing than helpful. The new UI is streamlined and sleek, just like the Heart of Gold.
Of course, there are other big changes, as well as the usual updates to thousands of packages. See the Fedora Linux 42 Release Notes for all of the details, and don’t miss the “What’s New?” posts here on Fedora Magazine.
Looking forward to this. I do have a question for the more seasoned people here: I installed Fedora 41 not too long after its release on a new PC, which has been my daily driver every since. Very happy with it, tweaked everything to my liking. However, by mistake I installed Workstation (with Gnome) and then switched to my preferred KDE Plasma as the DE. This has left some corners of my system with the Gnome look and feel, which is fine, but I prefer if it were more consistent.
My question: 1. Can I/do you recommend that I upgrade Fedora in place? I prefer this if it means I don't have to reinstall everything. 2. Or do you recommend I do a fresh install anyway for a clean upgrade and at the same time clean up my DE? What is the least disruptive way to do this?
Which corners are you referring to, specifically? There are some applications that use GTK components, those are styled seperately in the settings under "GNOME/GTK Application Style". They will never look exactly like a native KDE/QT based application, but you can get them closer.
Likely you had a lot of GTK apps included with Workstation, you could also look into Qt alternatives to replace them - for example Gedit does not conform in KDE, but Kate will.
If you wipe and start fresh with the KDE install, it will prefer Qt applications. So that may be a worth while endeavor.
Thank you for replying, very informative. I think I have most of the actions/types I wanted associated with my preferred ones now. The most noticeable one is Firefox when I open downloads from the menu. I'm not sure if Firefox uses xdg or not? I don't mind GTK or Gnome at all, in fact I probably have spent more time on Gnome, but I do like when things are consistent.
Ah yeah, Firefox is GTK too, and annoyingly hides xdg behind a setting. I apologize in advance as my knowledge here is bit limited, but if firefox is installed with RPM, I think you'll need xdg-desktop-portal-kde installed, then in firefox's about:config set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal = true. I'm not sure how it works with flatpak though.
That's a great tip! It turns out I must have already tried some of that. I found multiple settings in about:config. Anything with a file picker works (open, save as), but the "open folder" from the Downloads dialog must just not use xdg-open, since none of the settings had an effect on that. It's not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have my Dolphin bookmarks and places.
Edit: Adding this here in case someone in the future finds this searching for the problem. It looks like I'm bitten by the bug described in comment 55 (near the bottom) of this Firefox bug report. TL;DR: it works if I have Dolphin open already, but if not, it starts Nautilus. While this isn't great, at least I have a workaround.
If you do a reinstall, I'd recommend going with a Kinoite install. It's like regular Fedora KDE, except that it avoids this risk of traces of past experiments everywhere.
Just upgraded. I think I must have been the only person in the world to like the old Fedora installation UI but everyone complained about it so it must be good news that it's gone, as long as I don't hate the new one.
I guess I'm biased because when I first started using Linux some 20 years ago it was considered user friendly for the time. Plus I must have used it hundreds of times since I had a previous job which involved setting up a lot of CentOS servers, which could have blinded me to the problems. Still, I think it's reassuring do everything from a central overview page for your configuration choices, takes away a bit of self-doubt. I'm not complaining though, as long as the new one does the job.
I really don’t agree with choosing to release with the UEFI bug they found. They describe it as cosmetic but those entries can last the lifetime of your computer, even if you wipe your hard drive. It’s bound to cause some confusion for years to come for Linux tinkerers.
Touch some grass dude. This is not a low prio bug at worst. Anyone "tinkering" will have ended up doing worse, and have had to clean or modify boot records before.
Anyone not tinkering will have carried out with the install, instead of merely live booting Fedora.
ramfetch is a fetch tool which displays memory info using /proc/meminfo i made back in christmas 2022 (i was around 11 years old at the time, currently 13) it got pretty popular on this sub and also some other subs aswell, it got 900 votes on this sub and 797+ votes on another sub too (specifically this post reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments…) ,but i decided to remove it since i kinda thought it was dead, but i brought it back with a new version and config file..
a fetch tool which displays memory info using /proc/meminfo - GitHub - omardotdev/ramfetch: a fetch tool which displays memory info using /proc/meminfo
Oh, I've just noticed it is a singular bash script? I don't think you need to go through the trouble of creating a .deb repo/ppa then. I was just a bit worried about the installation process.
that would be awesome but i can't seem to get ram speed from /proc/meminfo or other files (i tried to look files in /sys and other directories for the ram speed) since they aren't there so i dont think i can really add that.. i tried to look online too but they seem to use lshw/dmidecode which i don't really wanna use
I'm genuinely curious. Other changes are just following modern (and stupid) trends so nothing weird with that. This one though just makes the maximize, minimize and close buttons look smaller than others (new tab in Console etc) which imo creates inconsistency. Also it may not apply to all display resolutions but it does on mine.
All extensions are disabled. I use the adw-gtk3 theme for GTK3 apps but I'm not talking about those (though the latest version of the theme also has smaller buttons that means the GTK devs probably have indeed changed the size of the buttons).
On the screenshot there is a GTK4 app that hasn't been updated to the newest libadwaita version (Pipeline), and on the right there is a default GNOME app that has been updated (Console).
Found this cute little guy. Battery bms seems to either be dead or cell voltage too low. Has anyone in the Linux community revived a BMS before or recharged from zero?
I love netbooks. I regret selling mine after Archlinux went 64bit only. It was beautiful (all pearly white) and small and the keyboard was perfectly usable even for my fat fingers.
What's that apple doing there? That's vile.
If you think the battery isn't just dead dead dead and resetting the on-battery chip somehow can help, I'd like to know how, too.
Yes, there are many ways to install Linux on a Chromebook. In my humble opinion, this is the best way. Maybe you'll like it!In today's thrilling episode of V...
I've revived a Dell Venue battery the laptop reported as dead. Connecting several alkaline batteries in series to provide a voltage slightly higher than the Dell battery's rated voltage and using them charge the Li-ion battery did the trick. After charging the Dell battery for about 10 minutes I reinstalled it, the laptop recognized it and it worked normally from that point on.
One of the coolest things about GoToSocial is support for the Mastodon move command. Allowing you to migrate a Mastodon account to and from GoToSocial. We're going to go through how to do a migrati...
For those like myself who hadn't heard of GoToSocial and are curious what it is but don't want to watch a video, it is as you might guess an ActivityPub based microblogging platform. With a focus on smaller instances capable of running on low end hardware. According to their site, anyway. gotosocial.org/
I think you misunderstood completely, hence the downvotes.
OP is asking what a good distro is for a media center PC, as in the PC's video output will be connected to the TV's video input. At which point Linux does not give two shits.
Sounds like you thought they wanted to stream/cast via some TV app or something, but that just sounds like a nightmare and I'm not sure that anyone would even want to try to do that. Just run Linux and use the TV as a big monitor, be done with smart TV garbage.
@Ulrich @Reygle There are Android televisions, Android uses a Linux kernel, some of them you can jailbreak, once you get access you can install whatever you like and remove what you don't.
@Ulrich I have an android tablet with an termio on it, basically gives me an x-term with an ssh connection. Can also look around locally. Granted they've really screwed up the file system layout, much like Mac fucked up BSD, but it is recognizably Linux.
It was the next sentence after the list of distros referenced in the response to you, and it is still very misleading at best.
But, yeah, the second sentence. There's a huge difference between an HTPC and an Amazon stick, Roku, or "smart" TV.
Those have apps and must be supported by "platforms" because they are limited hardware with a limited OS.
YouTube and Netflix don't need to "support" Linux any more than they need to support Windows for an HTPC.
If that's not what you're saying, you'll probably want to elaborate because I expect there are plenty of readers giving your comment a "wha...?"
"E" - since Buddy is trying to imply I changed my comment after he responded, no. I added clarity within a couple minutes, changing no ideas. Talk about gaslighting with this guy.
I'm... lying? No, it's pretty clear now that you're quite confused about the difference between apps and services.
Your lying has nothing to do with apps and services and everything to do with gaslighting people in this thread into believing you weren't wrong instead of just admitting you made a dumb mistake.
Seriously, how can someone be even a little familiar with Linux and be so wrong about internet services working on Linux?
Jesus, Buddy. It's not gaslighting to explain how I interpreted your comment, and it's starting to sound like your angry responses are to avoid explaining your position.
Please explain to the class exactly what you mean by services not supporting Linux. No "obviously you know and are just pretending to make me look bad" stuff.
It's not gaslighting to explain how I interpreted your comment
Oh good now you're gaslighting me about gaslighting.
and it's starting to sound like your angry responses are to avoid explaining your position.
I'm not angry, and I've already explained my position.
Please explain
In the extremely unlikely case that you're legitimately just bad at counting, I advise you to scroll up and try again. If you cannot do that then I literally cannot help you. Restating my explanation will not help you.
I daily drive NixOS and use it in many other situations. However, I'm also a systems engineer and it's the distro I use for managing all the environments.
I'm sure it was a joke(ish), but definitely not for the light-hearted or fairweather penguins.
I can't tell if you're being serious or facetious 😅
I assure you it isn't all that glorious, though, just a lot of configs. NixOS is just my favorite method of infrastructure-as-code, and in conjunction with nixops I can't imagine going back to anything else unless the project required it for some reason. Disaster recovery is simple, and testing/pushing config changes to hundreds of machines is almost too easy.
I have a clunky set of configs, for self-hosting at home and small side-clients, I slapped together you can look at, but again it's not all that special and I wouldn't necessarily follow this for real production stuffs. It also doesn't utilize any of the fancy NixOS stuff, fairly basic and Docker heavy.
A simple framework that gives a barebones NixOS configuration with native NGINX, Docker, and Gotify modules. Includes a repository of pre-made Docker Compose environments for various popular self-hosted applications.
I am serious. I am a cloud engineer (glorified system admin for cloud + Linux VMs) and I'm still stuck on Ansible + Terraform (stuck isn't the right word, we are a RHEL and Alpine shop for our VMs and Containers and things work well enough). My friends in bigger companies are using Nix though, but I was always scared of the learning curve. I want to see clear benefits of using nix so I can push myself to actually learn it, which is why I asked. Thanks for the link.
In that case, I highly recommend taking a look at some more real-world examples. That link is just something that makes self-hosting and small jobs more or less thoughtless for me.
Imagine all those config management tools built into your OS, and that's NixOS in a nutshell. There's obviously WAY more it can do if you look into creating your own derivations, or getting into the new-ish concept of Flakes.
Again, though, nixops is the thing that makes me continue to use it, besides just already knowing how to throw together a config in nix's syntax. The nixops tool basically allows you to federate all your systems, tag them, group them, and do anything under the sun with each machine (or several in batches). It's hard to get across in a simple text blurb.
In my case (SaaS), imagine having 10 devs that all want their own dev environment that mirrors production within our VPN, then you need a beta and production environment for each client that licenses the app. Each environment has a couple databases, a few different APIs, some background scraper-type applications, and front-ends for everything. Some of that stuff can live on one machine, some needs to be alone and redundant. You can see how very quickly there's a lot of machines to keep track of.
Now I need to update a couple config pieces to match a new feature in the app itself. Well, all I gotta do is sort out the config, then run a couple nixops command to push to all the dev environments. When ready, do the same for beta, then do it for prod when the fat lady sings.
Being all within one ecosystem, focused on security hardening, is what I really like about it. Hopefully that wasn't too stream-of-consciousness for ya, lmao.
ETA: links, also note that nixops is undergoing some serious changes in the past year. NixOS itself also undergoes changes fairly regularly in syntax as vulnerabilities are addressed and improvements made.
Thank you for the note. I'm been cursing myself for not being able to provide my devs with something similar (they don't complain but I know it will make their lives easier). I will start nix from scratch if I learn it but nixops definitely seems like it can help because terraform isn't that great at the example you provided. Thanks.
I'm using Bazzite Linux, Gnome, Wayland. As the title states, I'm trying to list my existing custom keyboard shortcuts. I know I can go to Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > View and Customize Shortcuts > Custom Shortcuts. I want to list my custom shortcuts in Terminal using gsettings.
I've gotten as far as listing the names of the custom shortcuts:
me@fedora:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings
['/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom1/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom2/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom3/', '/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom4/']
How do I use this info to list the specific details (name, shortcut, command) of the first keyboard shortcut?
What I've tried so far:
I've tried following examples from the answers in this Ask Ubuntu post from March 2015, and I've tried turning to Duck.ai for help. I'm just not connecting the dots between the documentation I've read and what I'm trying to do.
me@fedora:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybindings/custom0
No such key “custom-keybindings/custom0”
me@fedora:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybindings:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0 name
No such schema “org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.custom-keybindings”
me@fedora:~$ gsettings get org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys custom-keybinding:/org/gnome/settings-daemon/plugins/media-keys/custom-keybindings/custom0/ name
Usage:
gsettings [--schemadir SCHEMADIR] get SCHEMA[:PATH] KEY
Get the value of KEY
Arguments:
SCHEMADIR A directory to search for additional schemas
SCHEMA The name of the schema
PATH The path, for relocatable schemas
KEY The key within the schema
How to set custom keyboard shortcuts from terminal for different Linux versions?
Basically I want to know where Linux stores the keyboard shortcut files and how it can be edited.
On my research I...
I read the blog post and am still confused as to what this is. It's something I never used in X11 (if X11 supported it), therefore it's not possible for me to miss it.
Is this the "restart all applications you were running when you restart your computer" feature? Was it broken in Wayland? If so, why? I thought the desktop environment would take care of starting the processes, placing the windows, and so on.
Not entirely sure what the before and after of this are. The blog post and article are written as if people know what this feature is.
Man I picked the best time to take a serious shot at daily driving desktop linux. Most of what I want just works and new stuff is always just around the corner. Just got NTsync on my preferred kernel, now wayland session restore is coming.
The last time I tried a linux system for a daily driver was over 10 years ago. At the time everything felt rough, unstable, unsupported, and gaming in particular was nonexistent.
Set up a CachyOS dual boot back in February, think I booted up Windows 3 times at most since then (and have since sorted out the issues that I had to do that for in the first place).
I still can't seriously recommend the switch to less tech savvy folks (try putting grandma on Mint and see what happens lmao), but we're definitely finally getting there after all these years.
Hi, I have never build a PC before, that is why I am asking you for your help and suggestions. I have informed (or misinformed) myself about a few aspects of building a PC. I will give my reasoning why I chose each part, and let you decide why I am wrong.
Usage:
The goal of this build is to create a Gaming PC which can play most games at least at lower resolutions and at sufficient frame rate. I plan to build this PC with future software requirements in mind, to reduce e-waste and to leave room for possible upgrades. This PC should support Coreboot to allow for firmware updates, even after the official firmware support has stopped. This machine will run Linux as the main OS and probably Dasharo as the Coreboot-distribution. The main use is playing games and emulation, but I also intend to use it for virtualisation.
Storage: Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
PSU: SeaSonic FOCUS Plus 650 Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
Why did I choose those parts?
Motherboard:
The main two reasons why I choose the Z790-P are, that the motherboard needs to support Coreboot and that it is DDR5 compatible.
I could not care less if the motherboard supports Wifi or Bluetooth, since the PC is not going to leave my desk, but I will not complain for having it.
CPU:
~~Since I already decided on a motherboard, the manufacturer decided the CPU-brand for me. In this case Intel. The CPU-socket only allows for microarchitectures Alder and Raptor Lake-S, so my choice is limited.~~ Intels 13th and 14th generation CPUs have many reported issues. Intel reported that many of those issues are due to faulty voltage configuration in the motherboard bios, which cause the CPU to degrade at an accelerated pace. They are due to release a microcode patch mid-august, which reportedly fixes the issue without a significant performance loss. Obviously, this patch will not fix already damaged chips. Another problem is, that they had some issues while manufacturing these chips in 2023, which caused oxidation and therefore degradation.
Generally you want more from everything, cores, threads and core clock, except power usage.
You also have the choice between a CPU with integrated graphics or without. ~~To save the environment and my bank account I will choose one without it. For Intel that is every CPU with the "F" designation.~~ As thingsiplay and felsiq have pointed out there can appear several issues, when building a system without a integrated GPU. One which is, that it becomes harder to debug issues, since you can not just unplug your GPU, to test if the GPU drivers are at fault.
CPU-Cooler:
Check if the TDP matches your CPU, e.g. >=125 W for 125 W.
Check if it matches your motherboard and case, i.e. everything fits.
Lastly, make sure it is not to loud.
GPU:
Main OS is Linux, so I will spare myself the pain and choose AMD over Nvidia.
More demanding games use more video memory. I have read that 8 GB often is not enough anymore.
RAM:
Virtualisation often needs a lot of resources i.e. RAM.
For optimal performance your RAM-speed should match your CPU. Any more and you waste money, any less and you create a bottleneck. Since the i5 only has 5600 MT/s, any more is wasted.
Storage:
Since most games today use around 60-150 GB, this PC will need a lot of storage. About thirteen 150 GB games can be stored on a 2 TB drive. I hope this will suffice.
Power supply unit:
Deciding factors are form factor and power. You can not use your PSU, if it either does not fit in your PC-case or does not have enough juice to power your other components.
Your PSU should have a few more 20-30 % clearance in case of a spike. I think a 650 W PSU should be enough for a workload of 490 W idle. Please, correct me, if I am wrong.
Some people recommend buying a PSU with more power than needed to allow for upgrades with higher power usage, but apparently the PSU will not run efficiently in this case. I have read that a PSU should be most efficient at idle hardware usage to maximize power savings. E.g. do not buy a 1000 W PSU, when you only use around 400 W at idle.
Also important are the +12V-rails. You should make sure the supply at least 24 A. Lastly you should check which power plugs the PSU will/can use.
Since I plan something special for the PC-case, it will not be part of this post. I hope this post can be used by others in the future, as a reference for building a Linux PC.
PS: This is my first post on lemmy. I am sorry for any formatting errors. I hope the post is legible.
Edit: - added links for explanation - fixed some grammatical errors - added suggestions from the comments
It is getting late here. I will look into a substitute for intel tomorrow (8 hours from the latest edit) and add this here.
You can MANUALLY set the voltage on your motherboard lower, for me this is just part of installing a new system, I always use prime95 or mprime on Linux to fully load it and find the absolute minimal voltage the CPU is stable at. We did this with my sons i7-13900k and have never had an issue even though he beats the holy hell out of the machine with gaming and we got it early one right after the chips release. CPU's are a silicon lottery game and if you just let it set things you're going either give up efficiency or CPU life over what you get determining optimum settings manually. If you happen to get a chip near the center of the die it will run faster and at lower voltage than one near the outside, but since the manufacturer has to assume the worst, they will specify a voltage that is adequate to run the chip at the rated speed even if it is one of the poor quality chips from the outer edges of the die, the result is excessively cooking your CPU way more than you need to.
it's me again. Some of you might remember me from this post, in which I was asking for feedback to build a Linux PC in 2025.
Stuff happened and I didn't went through with it. So this still my first attempt at a build. Well now I've got time and want to try it again.
As you may notice, I've ditched the Z790-9 mother board in favor of a MSI PRO B650M-P. My dream of building a coreboot-system is officially dead, thus I decided to build an AMD-System.
Since you have a similar setup. I have a question for you. The motherboard was released in 2023. I've read that most suppliers drop the firmware support after 3-5 years.
What I am asking is, is it worth in your opinion to buy this motherboard or should I look for a newer model instead?
I don't know, I never really thought about that. I had my previous mobo for about 10 years and at that point it was becoming a problem, but for the first 7 years or so it worked fine. After 7 years there would be a new CPU socket anyway, so it would be a good time to upgrade.
This is my build:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 4.5 GHz 8-Core Processor
Thermalright Frost Commander 140 BLACK 95.5 CFM CPU Cooler
Asus TUF GAMING B650M-PLUS WIFI Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard
Because coreboot is the only way for us to be in full control of the hardware. Any other way there is microcode which is closed source and we have no idea what it is doing. It has full control to everything.
@Jeena I grant you that is true, but under Linux, the kernel talks to the hardware directly after boot, not through BIOS calls. About the only time you would talk to the BIOS after boot is for sleep/suspend, or in rare cases such as the server my friendica instance runs on, for temp/CPU speed control because Linux kernel has issues properly using the MSR on the i9-10980xe, oddly it does not seem to have the same issue on the i9-10900x which is a ten core CPU in the same family, so I am forced to depend upon ACPI since talking to the hardware directly in this specific case is problematic. If you were running Windows or if you had weird hardware that is somewhat broken under Linux like mine, I can see the need, or if a laptop and you wanted sleep/suspend functionality. But for what you describe it isn't clear the benefits. And there are some risks like it probably isn't going to do the extensive memory training of a more advanced UEFI bios like American Megatrends, so your memory access may not be as efficient as it could be, and you're more limited in hardware selection.
@marauding_gibberish142 I personally find the Intel ME a useful feature, it's nice for example to be able to upgrade BIOS without a CPU and/or memory, this has allowed me for example to upgrade the BIOS to a version needed for a newer CPU on a board with a BIOS that didn't initially support it without needing the older CPU to perform the upgrade. And from a security standpoint, if you do not enable and configure the network stack, and you don't have a DHCP server available to it for it do so on it's own, I really don't see what it can do that is harmful.
How do you not configure the network stack? If you have an Intel NIC on the motherboard/any PCIE lanes in theory it should be able to connect.
What worries me is that someone could perform a reverse shell on my system with/in addition to a magic packet and get full ring 0 access to my system. I'm investigating network monitoring tools that can help me find traces of ME on my network.
How did you list your hardware like that? Where it shows the key specifications for each part as bullet points, not the bullet points though, if that makes sense. I know how to make bullets, I mean the data.
Was is generated with a script or did you copy and paste individual part stats from their website specs or some other way?
I have a few ways to generate info, like with inxi or searching pcpartpicker, but there often there is not enough info, important info that is missing, far too much info about stuff I don't care about or I have to spend a lot of time searching for specific data and have to copy and paste each feature for each part individually which can be too time consuming.
What you have shows pretty much exactly what I would like, so I could easily share when needed.
Why the 7900XT and not a 9070 or 9070XT? Stock issue? Both are overkill for 1080p gaming but if you're trying to future proof, wouldn't the newer card with FSR4 be the better option?
AI is a different beast altogether, maybe I missed that use case in this or your previous post. From what I've read, rocm support for the 9070 cards is still being worked on.
Edit: Just learned to stay away from the keyboard until after coffee. Also, GPU pricing is horrible all around.
What do you plan to do on that graphics card? Is that 20GB VRAM? That sounds nice, but not being a NVIDIA it lacks at least the CUDA cores which are necessary for many AI use cases which I have.
AUR, when I can. I run my own binary package repo. App images are an interesting concept, but usually they are compiled against ancient versions of glibc for increased compatibility. Optimizations and CVE patches may or may not be applied, LD lookups are longer, etc.
I really like App-images. For the most part, they just work, download, run, done. And sometimes you want the flexibility to install something the distro's pacakage manager doesn't give you (or doesn't have the latest version of). It's a little extra work to put the app in system menus, etc though.
Package manger still preferred. Having the system deal with updates and dependencies is nice.
AUR is still good, but I'd take the App Image. Sometimes these work for me, sometimes they don't. Still have to manually update them, AFAIK.
You can try bauch It is an graphical application to search install and update AppImage, Debian and Arch Linux packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and Web applications.
Graphical user interface for managing your Linux applications. Supports AppImage, Debian and Arch packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications - vinifmor/bauh
Yes, you can just download the Appimage version and execute it and install bauh from the app. On Fedora it will only support the FlatPak and AppImages not system repo and corps.
Man, thank you for bringing that up. I love bauh. Already installed. Even for only appimages, I'd much rather use it than go hunting for them everywhere
I prefer distros if available, but in some cases the version in the distros can suck. A solid example, and this could 100% be user error, but I used aur to get Picard on my tablet, but there was no app menu bar. Like at all, no window settings in the world made a difference, and the global menu didn't show anything either. So I couldn't change settings at all. I removed the aur package and installed the flatpak, everything worked no problem.
Flatpaks are okay, but due to laziness, I'm not proficient with making them interact well with each other.
App images can be great, but also annoying depending on how your system handles them. On a Debian based machine it would "install" the app image as if it were a normal app, and in some cases even check for updates. In garuda I have to manually go to the file and execute it each time. I'm no Linux master, so I could probably do something in garuda to make it work similar to Debian, but I only have one app there that I care about and I'm lazy...
I don't like snaps, they seem finicky to me.
If the Dev has their own recommended source, package, or whatever I try to stick to that. I.e. if they say their focus is on an app image, but aur has it, and there's a flatpak, and x y z options, I'll try the app image, and if that does what I need it to, I stick with it. If they recommend snap I try to find another app or another option to install.
Repositories > AUR > Making an own AUR package > Making an own package not in AUR > Flatpak > Using an alternative to that application > consider if I really need it > AppImage
I can understand that in a distro the main repo need to be prioritized to avoid bloat of repetitive dependencies that could happen with a lot of AppImages.
I can't understand why so many people are opposed to it as an supportive role from a practical and complementary perspective.
I was playing around with Lemmy statistics the other day, and I decided to take the number of comments per post. Essentially a measure of engagement – the higher the number the more engaging the post is. Or in other words how many people were pissed off enough to comment, or had something they felt like sharing. The average for every single Lemmy instance was 8.208262964 comments per post.
So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, in stats terms X~Po(8.20826), then found the critical regions assuming that anything that had a less than 5% chance of happening, is important. In other words 5% is the significance level. The critical regions are the region either side of the distribution where the probability of ending up in those regions is less than 5%. These critical regions on the lower tail are, 4 comments and on the upper tail is 13 comments, what this means is that if you get less than 4 comments or more than 13 comments, that's a meaningful value. So I chose to interpret those results as meaning that if you get 5 or less comments than your post is "a bad post", or if you get 13 or more than your post is "a good post". A good post here is litterally just "got a lot of comments than expected of a typical post", vice versa for "a bad post".
You will notice that this is quite rudimentary, like what about when the Americans are asleep, most posts do worse then. That's not accounted for here, because it increases the complexity beyond what I can really handle in a post.
To give you an idea of a more sweeping internet trend, the adage 1% 9% 90%, where 1% do the posting, 9% do the commenting, and 90% are lurkers – assuming each person does an average of 1 thing a day, suggests that c/p should be about 9 for all sites regardless of size.
Now what is more interesting is that comments per post varies by instance, lemmy.world for example has an engagement of 9.5 c/p and lemmy.ml has 4.8 c/p, this means that a “good post” on .ml is a post that gets 9 comments, whilst a “good post” on .world has to get 15 comments. On hexbear.net, you need 20 comments, to be a “good post”. I got the numbers for instance level comments and posts from here
This is a little bit silly, since a “good post”, by this metric, is really just a post that baits lots and lots of engagement, specifically in the form of comments – so if you are reading this you should comment, otherwise you are an awful person. No matter how meaningless the comment.
In my mind, that shows that "copying reddit" was not the best idea and people should really have copied things like phpBB or SMF for the flagship "community-based" fediverse platform, at least to start out.
On traditional forums, even relatively small communities cause interesting content to appear all the time, by thread bumping and back-and-forth discussion that can go over many pages. However it is obvious that this structure doesn't scale well to communities with thousands of active users writing thousands of comments in one thread. The reddit structure works better for such communities, but most communities we have here on the threadiverse just aren't that big yet.
I grew up with traditional forums and discovered other structures for "social media" much later; I still consider traditional forums way superior to any "social media" structure that is nowadays popular.
I was also a very active user of traditional forums but, in my experience, small niche subreddits (when I was on Reddit) were a decent substitute in terms of content, since posts could stay on their front page for several days. Lemmy isn't big enough to have those yet but I hope it will be. The thing I miss most about forums isn't the format but rather the community. The forum I posted on the most had only a few dozen regulars and I knew them.
There was the guy with a kind, insightful take on controversial issues and a fetish for women with more than two arms. The active duty marine who reliably posted harsh truths. The feminist I didn't get along with at all despite agreeing with her about most things. The dedicated father who bought real razor wire for his daughter when she wanted a UN-peacekeeper-base themed birthday party. The very determined conservative who defended his position no matter how outnumbered he was and once bragged that he had given his wife several dozen orgasms in a row...
I suppose I was the young man with strange views about what was or wasn't fair and a great deal of anger over any perceived unfairness. (I don't think I was particularly well-liked.) The internet is so much less personal now.
Yes, or even continuing such discussions for no apparent reason, but to feel a bit of the normal human interaction... Or to have fun playing some meta together :3
So I modeled that with a Poisson distribution, and I learnt that to a 5% significance level, if your post got less than 4 comments, that was statistically significant. Or in other words – there is a 95% probability that something else caused it not to get more comments. Now that could be because it is an AMAZING post – it covered all the points and no one has anything left to say. Or it’s because it’s a crappy post and you should be ashamed in yourself. Similarly a “good post”, one that gets lots of comments, would be any post that gets more than 13 comments. Anything in-between 4 and 13 is just an average post.
So, like, I do have a background in stats and network analysis, and I'm not sure what you are trying to say here.
if your post got less than 4 comments, that was statistically significant.
Statistically significant what? What hypothesis are you testing? Like, how are you setting this question up? What is your null?
Because I don't believe your interpretation of that conclusion. It sounds like mostly you calculated the parameters of a poisson and then are interpreting them? Because to be clear, thats not the same as doing hypothesis testing and isn't interpretable in that manner. Its still fine, and interesting, and especially useful when you are doing network analysis, but on its on, its not interpretable in this manner. It needs context and we need to understand what test you are running, and how you are setting that test up.
I'm asking these questions not to dissuade you, but to give you the opportunity to bring rigor to your work.
Should you like, to further your work, I have set up this notebook you can maybe use parts of to continue your investigations or do different investigations.
Oh yeah ok, so I was going to figure out to put "H0 : L = 8.2", and "H1 != 8.2, X~Po(8.2), P(c<=X<=c2) => c=?, c2=?" but I left it out because I couldn't format it in a way that looked half decent in a Lemmy post.
I found the critical regions of the Poisson distribution, that takes the mean to be the average comments/post for the fediverse. I then interpreted those numbers, which I where I assume I've made a mistake. As if it was outside of the critical region, that would mean H1, but we know H1 is wrong, since we already have a value for L. It sounds like your interpretation of what I did is bang on.
I only took college level statistics like I said in another reply. I just thought it was cool to see all the instances comments/post ratio.
The phrase “if your post got less than 4 comments, that was statistically significant” can be misleading if we don’t clearly define what is being tested. When you perform a hypothesis test, you need to start by stating:
Null hypothesis (H₀): For example, “the average number of comments per post is λ = 8.2.”
Alternative hypothesis (H₁): For example, “the average number of comments per post is different from 8.2” (or you could have a directional alternative if you have prior reasoning).
Without a clearly defined H₀ and H₁, the statement about significance becomes ambiguous. The p-value (or “significance” level) tells you how unusual an observation is under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true. It doesn’t automatically imply that an external factor caused that observation. Plugging in numbers doesn't supplant the interpretability issue.
"Statistical significance"
The interpretation that “there is a 95% probability that something else caused it not to get more comments” is a common misinterpretation of statistical significance. What the 5% significance level really means is that, under the null hypothesis, there is only a 5% chance of observing an outcome as extreme as (or more extreme than) the one you obtained. It is not a direct statement about the probability of an alternative cause. Saying “something else caused” can be confusing. It’s better to say, “if the observed comment count falls in the critical region, the observation would be very unlikely under the null hypothesis.”
Critical regions
Using critical regions based on the Poisson distribution can be useful to flag unusual observations. However, you need to be careful that the interpretation of those regions aligns with the hypothesis test framework. For instance, simply saying that fewer than 4 comments falls in the “critical region” implies that you reject the null when observing such counts, but it doesn’t explain what alternative hypothesis you’re leaning toward—high engagement versus low engagement isn’t inherently “good” or “bad” without further context. There are many, many reasons why a post might end up with a low count. Use the script I sent you previously and look at what happens after 5PM on a Friday in this place. A magnificent post at a wrong time versus a well timed adequate post? What is engagement actually telling us?
Model Parameters and Hypothesis Testing
It appears that you may have been focusing more on calculating the Poisson probabilities (i.e., the parameters of the Poisson distribution) rather than setting up and executing a complete hypothesis test. While the calculations help you understand the distribution, hypothesis testing requires you to formally test whether the data observed is consistent with the null hypothesis. Calculating “less than 4 comments” as a cutoff is a good start, but you might add a step that actually calculates the p-value for an observed comment count. This would give you a clearer measure of how “unusual” your observation is under your model.
Look, I survived statistics class. I will stride to defend some of my post.
but it doesn’t explain what alternative hypothesis you’re leaning toward—high engagement versus low engagement isn’t inherently “good” or “bad” without further context.
Namely that much of the aim of it was to show that an metric like comment count doesn't imply that it was a good or bad post - hence the bizarre engagement bait at the end. And also why all of the "good posts" were in quotes.
you might add a step that actually calculates the p-value for an observed comment count. This would give you a clearer measure of how “unusual” your observation is under your model.
I'm under the impression that whilst you can do a Hypothesis test by calculating the probability of the test statistic occurring, you can also do it by showing that the result is in the critical regions. Which can be useful if you want to know if a result is meaningful based on what the number is, rather than having to calculate probabilities. For a post of this nature, it makes no sense to find a p value for a specific post, since I want numbers of comments that anyone for any post can compare against. Calculating a p-value for an observed comment count makes no sense to me here, since it's meaningless to basically everyone on this platform.
Using critical regions based on the Poisson distribution can be useful to flag unusual observations. However, you need to be careful that the interpretation of those regions aligns with the hypothesis test framework. For instance, simply saying that fewer than 4 comments falls in the “critical region” implies that you reject the null when observing such counts
Truthfully I wasn't doing a hypothesis test - and I don't say I am in the post - although your original reply confused me - so I thought I was, I was finding critical regions and interpreting them, however I'm also under the impression that you can do 2 tailed tests, although I did make a mistake by not splitting the significance level in half for each tail. 🙁. I should have been clearer that I wasn't doing a hypothesis test, rather calculating critical regions.
It doesn't seem like you are saying I'm wrong, rather that my model sucks - which is true. And that my workings are weird - it's a Lemmy post not a science paper.
If average comments/post is lowest on .ml, medium on .world and highest on hexbear, it might correlate those instances with post meaningfulness, or with the innate tendency of their users to comment. Or with both, or some other thing entirely. All I can really say about it is, "Huh, interesting."
Any details you could share about how you obtained and processed the data? It seems like there's a lot of interesting things that could be done with this but I'm not sure where the best place to start would be
I comment a shit ton and often with absolute banalities. Especially on posts with 0 comments.
My reasoning is twofold: first of all I want to encourage posters by engaging with their content so they don't stop posting. Second I want to invite others to comment and it's much more inviting to do so if a post has at least one comment. People tend to think it's dead otherwise and not bother.
I think at the current level of MAUs there is no comment too small, and every little bit helps just by virtue of breaking the silence.
I've been thinking. Android implements app permissions on top of Linux, Flatpak does it too. But why is it it's not part of the kernel?
Like all executable files would be sandboxed and would only be able to access syscalls and parts of the file system if they were allowed to. Making sandboxing the default instead of having to restrict programs.
I'm not a kernel developper so this question may be naive, but it bothers my mind. I guess part of it is because of historical reasons but are there any practical ones that make it not feasable?
EDIT : Thank you all for your answers, almost all of you were very nice and explained things clearly
The Linux kernel already has the infrastructure required for that. Heck, Android itself, including its permission system, is built atop the Linux kernel.
Making sandboxing the default instead of having to restrict programs.
What's missing for that is work on userspace software and app packaging. The kernel can't automatically know what a program should and shouldn't be allowed to do.
Some of that work has happened, like moving from X11, which really wasn't designed around sandboxing, to Wayland.
But a lot of it requires making a permission system the norm and creating a system such that software is normally distributed with restricted permissions and developers develop around that. Like, I can use firejail and disallow write access to parts of the filesystem or network access to a program, but there isn't a broad system of appropriate pre-created profiles that applications are distributed with and way to view this. We don't have a convention for an application-private space on disk and lack of access to most of the filesystem, which Android does and apps need to be written around.
IMHO, one of the largest jumps would be Valve doing this for Steam games --- a lot of games are going to be amenable to being sandboxed, don't need broad access to the system, and are closed source. There are some issues there; for Windows binaries run under Proton, WINE wasn't originally written around being isolated, and the game developers writing the software are writing to a Windows API that aren't under the control of people on the Linux side of things.
I haven't poked at snaps much or their technical underpinnings, but my understanding is that they distribute apps in a sandboxed form, so that might be the closest Linux-native approach.
Not surprised, it was a bit of a niche project that was quite hard to get into (the options took a bit of reading around to understand what they were on about). It is easy enough to find the flavour of UI you want and more from the arch distros out there (I just found I actually do need cups on my EndeavourOS gnome distro and that's something I didn't toggle (printing). Time to throw in some cups and foomatic packages in there). So again, it's about purpose and as much as I would have liked to have gotten into something about customisation, I've kind of already got a minimal-ish distro to work on.
It's not a reddit or lemmy thing, generally backslash is used as an escape character in a lot of programming languages. Here and in reddit comments accept markdown and markdown uses backslash as escape character.
I have a lowend netbook with debian-type linux only (no dualboot). Power management should be via XFCE4's xfce4-power-manager-settings.
I'm having weird behavior with suspend and trying to identify/troubleshoot it. It seems to be usually draining power and never charging when the lid is closed for many hours.
I tried explicitly entering power off, hibernate and suspend followed by unplugging then leaving it a few hours but couldn't replicate. It seems to be doing something on its own after being unplugged a long time.
What logs can I look at to see when my device changes its power modes, what were the triggers, what settings are governing it etc?
I can't tell if it's a software issue or there is some sort of power saving thing going on in the hardware or what.
Just hoping for some investigation tips here, I know its not enough info to solve.
I'm not a master pro Linux user. I've dabbled over the years several times. It's been about 6-8 years since I've last used it. I am having the absolute worst experience I have ever had with any OS so far, I have to be doing something wrong.
Problems so far, this is my first day. One, changing my monitors orientation and position cause my mouse to be on one screen and actively click on a different screen.
Whenever I open settings to change date and time the program crashes.
My mouse movement is that of a spastic child and is not smooth and I can't install ghub on Linux, so I'm forced to use the OS adjustments, which in turn crash the settings application.
The OS is SLOW! like insanely slow. I open discord and literally 3-4 minutes goes by before the loading pop up appears.
If I click in an icon, there is no indication that I clicked it until 1-2 minutes later, this even happens with like Firefox or chrome, file browser. Any app.
I have to have a password to do anything. Why? No one is going to steal my PC, boot it up and smash f11 to get into my Linux box where I'm just messing around.
I don't understand.. I have used Ubuntu before, fedora, mint and a few others. But it just seems like it's absolutely garbage right now.
Do I have to install certain things? Do I have to install Nvidia drivers? Doni have to install chipset drivers?
And honestly question, why do simple takes require you to "run a script"? Like why?
I believe the Nvidia driver situation still sucks and maybe always will due to Nvidia incalcitrance. You could try pulling out that 3060 board. Next, what motherboard are you using? That might also have compatibility issues. Other than that, dual booting has sometimes been a pain, but if the system is coming up you've gotten past that. Your system is pretty powerful and should work well.
Nvidia is fine and I have a 3080. I have vrr on my 4k display working fine when run with 2 non vrr 1080p monitors, and full hdr support. That’s using the 570 driver in fedora.
You can route things over ssh like RDP for example. Used that a few times to remote in too a desktop at home. Can't install a VPN on most company and school devices. But ssh is build in to windows.
AbouBenAdhem
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Thorned_Rose
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