Please tell your friends about federated social media site that speaks several fediverse protocols thus serving as a hub uniting them, hubzilla.eskimo.com, also check out friendica.eskimo.com, federated
macroblogging social media site, mastodon.eskimo.com a federated microblogging site, and yacy.eskimo.com an uncensored federated search engine. All Free!
and that really solve my problem. However, more im getting into linux, people says to me to be carefully about what i put on terminal.
Being said that, anyone know if this is bad, to do this? Since is the only way i get to putting my wifi working, i would like if this can be danger, since i really dont understand nothing about linux and i am new in this journey.
Watching a documentary, there was aremark from the journalist on how, due to how wildly taxation on goods may vary, from area to area, in the US, most retailers do not put the full prices on the shelves and instead just tally it at checkout.
This made no sense to me, a european, as when I go to any regular shop, prices already include all taxes applicable to the product.
There are specialty stores where VAT and other taxes may not be applied on the price on the shelf but those are usually wholesellers, selling for professionals, that already know what additional taxes will be added and at which rates, at checkout.
Not having the full price you'll be paying, on display, seems very underhanded and a bad practice. The client should know how much they are going to pay from the moment they pick an item.
The whole argument of "it's cause there's so much variation in tax amount" never really made sense to me as an excuse. Like.. you'd print the labels at the store wouldn't you? So you just put the tax amount in the system for that store and print it.. the only way it makes sense is if for some reason you're shipping price tags across the country
There are often nation-wide or region-wide advertising campaigns that proudly display a price. If individual cities have different sales taxes, that would make it hard. Personally, I still don't find this to be a good reason. Just charge a single amount anyway and eat the costs in the high tax area. Price it in.
Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, many chain businesses are franchised. So each McDonald's (for example) is independently owned. So they couldn't just eat the cost in those areas.
Please take a moment to read my story from Gaza. I live with my family in a tent, struggling to survive every day. Even 1€ can help. ❤️ Please donate or share: gofund.me/da782c66 My name is Soliman — a young man and student from Gaza, carrying a burden far heavier than my age. Between my studies and the hardships of life, I try to be the backbone of my family in the most difficult of times.
We once had a small farm — olive and citrus trees, and a greenhouse where we planted not just crops, but dreams. That farm was our only source of income, and more than that, it was a place full of memories, of hope, and of the laughter that once made life a little easier.
But in a single moment, everything was gone. A fire reduced our years of effort to ashes. We lost our source of living, our stability — and with it, a part of our souls.
Now, despite the pain, I’m trying to start over. I’m doing everything I can to keep my family standing, to find even the smallest light of hope that might restore our strength, dignity, and sense of humanity.
I share these words with honesty and hope, hoping they reach a kind heart — someone who can help, or even simply share my story with others who might be able to.
If you’re able to support us in any way, here is the link to our GoFundMe campaign: ❤️gofund.me/da782c66 Every share, every kind word, every small donation could be a lifeline for us.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you for taking a moment to read my story.
Oxfam has said the airdrops into #Gaza are wholly inadequate for the population’s needs and has called for the immediate opening of all crossings for full humanitarian access into the territory devastated by relentless #Israeli bombardments and a partial aid blockade.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied #Palestinian territory, said:
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won’t undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza.
What’s needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture.
Oxfam has said the airdrops into #Gaza are wholly inadequate for the population’s needs and has called for the immediate opening of all crossings for full humanitarian access into the territory devastated by relentless #Israeli bombardments and a partial aid blockade.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied #Palestinian territory, said:
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won’t undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza.
What’s needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture.
I am thinking this could be neat for people new to Linux to help them select a first distribution.
A few more points:
There are a lot of choices
There are also a lot of different valuable qualities.
Consequently, there are no distributions that are "good" or "bad".
It is nice to try out things! And trying out things will change what appeals to you.
That said, perhaps you don't want to try out too many things now, instead right now you'd prefer something that just works....
Also, your needs and your capabilities will change over time. If you are a young student who wants to learn programming, a pc gamer, or somebody who likes to learn and understand Linux in detail, they might be different from when you are a busy parent or a young professional which just needs to write job applications!
So, what matches your needs best will likely also change over time.
Finally, the choice of distributions is not an either-either or black-and-white thing. You can run Linux, and on top Windows in a Virtual Machine (basically an entire simulated computer). You also can run another Linux distribution in a virtual machine, which matches a specific use case.
There are too many choices. I’ve tried the chooser and at the end it gave me 9 distributions to choose from (i.e. nine distributions with no marked negatives). I’ve tried again and it gave me 13 distributions to choose from. This is absolutely useless for someone who knows nothing about Linux.
If someone selects ‘I have little or no knowledge about Linux’ it should go straight to recommending Linux Mint or with no other questions. Or maybe Bazzite if they selected gaming as main use case.
And if I select Windows experience, why doesn’t it mark Ubuntu with a negative as it has more of a MacOS feel?
How often are you willing to upgrade or re-install your system ?
How reliable does your system need to be ? Would it inconvenience you or even be a risk for your livelihood if it stops working tomorrow morning for a few days until you find time to fix it?
If some software package has a breaking change, do you want to see the consequences of that change (a) invariably together with the next minor software update, or (b) only with the next mayor system upgrade of which you can chose the timing?
How quick and experienced do you want to have security updates applied? For how long do you need security updates ? (btw this point is an important difference between Debian and Ubuntu, as in older Ubuntu LTS releases security updates are reduced!)
is security of your system and privacy of the user data a top concern for you?
are you an open source software developer or do you have otherwise a strong need to run the latest software version - and how old would be the oldest version you want to tolerate?
do you want to be, in an easy way, to be involved with the open source development community?
What people often overlook is that Debian has an incredible broad range of use cases it is well suited for: It has a beginner-friendly graphical installer, it works for desktops and servers as well as embedded systems, and it also has a rolling release version which is attractive to software developers.
And if you have questions you can always look into the Arch Wiki 😉
To me, it gives Devuan, OpenSUSE, Rocky, Debian, Artix and Arch.
What I have used in the past 27 years is S.U.S.E., Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, OpenSUSE Leap and Arch (the latter for some years dual-booting with Debian until NVidia shit broke both after a Debian dist upgrade, but that was only once in 13 years). I never had a stability issue with Arch.
What I currently use is Debian as daily driver, with both Guix package manager on top of it for programming, and Arch in a VM (with Guix for programming with dependencies). And importantly, I only use fully supported hardware.
I could imagine using Arch as a daily base system, or using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed as a base or in a VM. But I don't have strong incentives to switch the base, Debian works incredibly well for me and I know how to configure it.
When I'm looking for a distro (which I'm currently doing) my core concerns are: - Comes with KDE Plasma pre-installed (or Xfce failing that, I may be better off with Xfce but I want to try KDE). - That any money I'd give to the project would not end up in America. - That any money I'd give to the project would go towards organization doing most of the dev work. - Minimal software set to limit the chance of a malware-infected update. - Gets critical security patches quickly, ideally as close to straight from the horses mouth as possible. - Strong security by default, and a strong security culture. - Monetizes the home user in some way.
EDIT: I went with OpenSUSE Leap (to replace OpenSUSE Tumbleweed which wasn't working for me). Video encoding works properly now. Doesn't meet all my conditions but probably nothing would.
I am considering this too, as it is a real advance in solving problems of dependencies, stabiliy and slso security / trust roots. So far, I am using Guix shell for smaller development projects in Rist Python and Guilr, and it is great.
Do you have any difficulty with update times?
Does it cope well with larger / more conplex systems ? What were your main difficulties there, if any?
Something strange happened just now, im trying to figure out how exactly did it happen. On my server I was suddely able to bypass my VPN! I looked around what did happened and found that my VPN service had sent me an email that my subscription expired. What is strange is that I have ufw rules like
To Action From
[VPN server] ALLOW OUT Anywhere
Anywhere ALLOW OUT Anywhere on tun0
So it should be not allowed to access the internet outside of tun0. Why exactly did it happen? Does the VPN service change iptables or something? Any ideas? I was able to ping, wget, even surf on w3m. The thing is that when I rebooted the server, nothing could connect outside the tunnel, as it should be. Here is the whole ufw table.
Status: active
Logging: on (low)
Default: deny (incoming), deny (outgoing), disabled (routed)
New profiles: skip
To Action From
-- ------ ----
22/tcp ALLOW IN 192.168.1.0/24
53 ALLOW IN 192.168.1.0/24
80 ALLOW IN 192.168.1.0/24
9091 ALLOW IN 192.168.1.0/24 # Transmission
2049 ALLOW IN 192.168.1.0/24 # nfs
[VPN server] ALLOW OUT Anywhere
Anywhere ALLOW OUT Anywhere on tun0
192.168.2.77 22 ALLOW OUT Anywhere
2049 ALLOW OUT Anywhere # nfs
So how in the world did my VPN company do something to bypass my ufw??? Or was it something else completely?
Best bet would be that something reloaded/changed the underlying ip/nftables bypassing ufw (ufw is just a frontend, I do not know if it periodically verifies the current rules are correct and it would feel extraneous to me if it did). Or it didn't apply it correctly.
You can get the actual rules with iptables-save (dunno about nftables command)
UFW is a popular iptables front end on Ubuntu that makes it easy to manage firewall rules. But when Docker is installed, Docker bypass the UFW rules and the published ports can be accessed from outside.
Sounds like your VPN software does some wacky stuff with IPtables. Personally, I'd switch to the native Wireguard client, and use iptables to block outbound.
The new beta timeline is sooo smooth! I finally don't hate scrolling back to find a specific old photo. The scrolling performance feels completely native to me now.
As the title might appear a bit alarmist, saving a click "For most users, there’s nothing to worry about. However, if you’ve manually set a custom relative path for “IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION” in your “.env” file, you’ll need to convert it to an absolute path. For example, “IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION=./my-library” must become “IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION=/usr/src/app/my-library“."
I'm not sure it's alarmist; I think this is all a breaking change is.
Anybody updating needs to know their existing config may not longer be supported. Even if the consequences are small, even if not every user will be affected, this update will break some previously acceptable configs. I think that warrants a heads up and a reminder to read the release notes.
v1.136.0 - 69420 stars release
Caution
BREAKING CHANGES
IMMICH_MEDIA_LOCATION (#19995)
Note: This is a different variable than UPLOAD_LOCATION, which requires no change.
Note: if you DO NOT have IM...
The one feature I've been waiting on for a while is better face recognition in videos, not only the first frame. When/if this happens I will start using it. They're discussing it for quite a while though, afraid it won't happen.
So a 12.5 screen, 12Ah battery, 2kg laptop with only USB A ports available in 6 months for a starting price of 1550€ - Please excuse the slight irregularity in my eyebrow line here.
No: the waiting time is more like 9 months and fully-loaded, you're looking at north of €1,800 😀
The point of MNT machines isn't value for money, but openness and sovereignty over what you own. They're not for everybody, but my kids are out of the house, the house is paid for and so I have the means to put my money where my convictions are.
But no matter: the point was that Linux ARM laptops really are nothing new.
Asahi is a powerful example of what a small well motivated team can achieve. However they are still face the sisyphean task of reverse engineering entirely undocumented hardware and getting that upstream.
If you love Apples hardware then great. Personally when I have Apple hardware I just tweak the keys to make it a little more like a Linux system and use brew for the tools I'm used to. If I need to I can always spin up a much more hackable VM.
So a 12.5 screen, 12Ah battery, 2kg laptop with only USB A ports available in 6 months for a starting price of 1550€ - Please excuse the slight irregularity in my eyebrow line here.
I'm running a Lenovo Slim 7 with the Ubuntu Concept Image for X Elite Laptops and it rocks! You can see the support (what works & what's not yet there) in their 🧵 Ubuntu 24.10 Concept Snapdragon X Elite
We are happy to announce the next iteration of our Ubuntu concept image for Qualcomm Snapdragon laptops with our new X Elite developer preview. This new image has been rebased on the latest Ubuntu 24.
Same laptop and distro here, and I agree. But still hoping to have proper sleep/hibernation, speaker/mic support and web cam in the future. It's a shame that Qualcomm and Lenovo haven't been more cooperative on hardware support.
Totally agree with you, considering the close cousin (thinkpad) has full support, it's clear Lenovo just doesn't care to provide a working device tree. I hope more vendors will emerge in the market segment of fully supported Linux laptops, yet none come close to the form factor of many mainstream distributors like Lenovo, Dell & Apple 🙁
The Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Mike Johnson—probably the worst speaker in American history—shut down the House early this week before its five-week vacation. He wants to avoid holding votes on releasing the Epstein files that reportedly include, among other notables, President Donald J. Trump.
This is the latest valet service provided by a spineless Johnson, a Trump toady, whose groveling has no known boundaries. Imagine Johnson, a lawyer, took an oath to uphold the Constitution yet has no interest in safeguarding the independence of the congressional branch of our government.
Or btrfs with snapper snapshots you can roll back to. Either way I suspect hard drive corruption. That's usually what it is for me (although I do lose power with abnormal frequency)
How is /etc/fstab configured? Partitions should be assigned to mount points by UUID and not by their names (such as /dev/sda1). Names can easily change across boots.
Something to look into. Understand the frustrations here, but it looks like something that can be fixed if you are able to get to the machine and troubleshoot.
If the EFI partition truly was at fault, you wouldn’t get into Linux. And if the issue is mounting the efi partition after booting, that shouldn’t be a critical error. So it sounds like something else is at fault IMO
What model computer does your mom have? Does it by any chance have solid state drives that are RAID 0?
Have you tried Linux Mint? After really struggling with Fedora, I was able to get Mint up and running after a few minimal problems and haven't looked back since.
At least your mom was cool enough to try. I had to trick my mom into using linux by putting a macOS themed, KDE, debian on an old macbook that was identical to her dead macbook
I switched my Dad to Linux recently, and set his account up without any superuser access. Updates have to wait until I visit once a week, but it restricts his ability to get himself stuck in any update-related tangles.
Linux has problems, but I'm so glad I don't have to support my Dad on Windows anymore, because that was far less predictable for me. Like the time it decided to upload all his files to onedrive (despite him having no knolwledge of this, or what it was doing or whether he'd consented or not) and made the Internet unusably slow for 8 hours by totally saturating his meagre connection.
He didn't even know about onedrive, just phoned me like "The Internet isn't working, what's wrong?" and of course onedrive is the last thing I'd have suspected for causing that symptom, which made it so annoying to diagnose.
Much nicer now his OS doesn't do sneaky things behind his back, or mine.
I had a colleague at work that had to redo several days of work because of the one drive thing.
The long and short of it is that they noticed that their connection was being super slow, opened up task manager to see if anything was eating bandwidth, saw one drive, went it it, correctly diagnosed that it was uploading files to it and eating up bandwidth, and then deleted all the files in one drive to stop it.
One drive decided that this meant they wanted all the local copies of the files deleted as well. Like, on the one hand, not the correct way to stop that behavior, but also like, the kind of thing a lot of people would try, and it then deleting all the local files in turn is an unintuitive outcome.
Google Photos pulled the same shit after it uploaded all of the my photos on my phone without permission. Eventually I tried to delete a bunch of pictures off the app, with the trashcan button... and soon realized that they were being erased from my actual phone storage as well. No warning, or indication that it would do so. Like wtf
They designed their photos app to always ask "y u no backup" and scare you "you gonna lose all your photos if u no backup" and ask to enable backup with the "no thanks" button under the fold
Enable backup = Gmail blocked within one hour because of all the photos we all have in our phones nowadays
So you have to pay or delete that pictures from their servers
Pay Google: unacceptable
Delete the pics from web: they get deleted from phone automatically and there isn't an option to only delete from web but keep in phone
Disable the photos app on the phone: the (Google) camera app doesn't show shot preview anymore because it says photos app is missing
They clearly had multiple meetings to make it harder as possible
This is so common they added a notification when you delete a lot of files. It basically prompts you, you're deleting a lot of stuff are you sure? OK, it'll be available in the recycle bin for 30 days if you change your mind.
See that’s the kicker, windows has so many “are you sure” pop ups about stuff that most people just click through them without reading the fine print. People get desensitized to it and just ignore them, or maybe even they just assume microsoft is trying to sell them on a feature they don’t care about.
And in this case it didn’t save the files to the trash can, I imagine because it was synching local files with what was in one drive. Not the user deleting local files.
In actuality though, I've always been the one who had to sort the tech stuff. We got our first family PC when I was 10, and I was the one who knew the most about it. We got the Internet when I was 13, and I was the one who had the passwords, and had to set it all up. Then when we got broadband, the router was actually in my room lol.
So yeah, I've always been the Admin, and Dad has always been the one who needed a limited account to protect him from himself.
It's good your mom tried. It's sad she gave up so soon. I've helped 4 people switch in the past months. I've gotten even more people curious and more open to switch. A success is not only the switch, but that people start to realize that they can. In my opinion. 😀
Yes hopefully the "base" setup works once you installed it, hopefully manage through some updates, some even tinkerings... but what happens when it break?
Windows (despite all the criticism, and I'm one of the first to complain about Microsoft the corporation) usually has been fallback mechanisms. It can usually rollback an update. It usually has a hidden recovery partition. It usually has an alternative medium to recover (e.g. USB stick, CD-ROM back in the days, etc).
So... you genuinely did try to help your mother but do not give up. Try instead to provide a better safety net so that she is genuinely safer. In fact I would recommend testing it together, make it a learning adventure. One way to do so would be to go there, help her fix it... then botcher the setup together! Delete system files, etc, then try again. Obviously the 1st step is insuring her own data (e.g. family photo, documents, etc) is safe.
While doing so, you might also want to setup up remote control, or not. Anyway a LOT of things to genuinely discover together.
IMHO if you do do it, she will not only appreciate the effort but assuming you do manage, she'll have a new sense of pride, both in you but also herself and share the experience with her friends. This in turn might bring more people in!
There also are distros with some kind of similar safety net. Immutable distros usually let you Boot previous versions if an update breaks something. This usually means that they need a lot of storage tho. itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-di…
I find it's super rare any form of recovery actually works. best thing to do is pull the files you need off with a nvme/sata adapter then reinstall and replace those files. 90% when windows actually breaks there's not much to be done (I try all forms of recovery every time though).
plus, 9/10 times the reinstall process is actually way faster than fighting with windows or searching for the problem online and getting hundreds of people asking you to run sfc \scannow.
The very last one, namely Ventoy Linux Recovery Helper, looks quite interesting. Unfortunately there is literally 0 issue github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issu… which makes me think very few people might be actually using it. In fact while creating the first issue github.com/zudsniper/VLRH/issu… I noticed # Created by Claude for Jason in the header leading me to believe this was AI generated. Regardless of how it was done (sigh) it seems it was not thoroughly tested so I clearly would look for another alternative.
Interesting idea. I tried to get it working while running the download ISO script the error ./download-isos.sh: line 37: cd: /home/jason/ventoy-recovery-toolkit: No such file or directory My unders...
🛠️ Automated Linux recovery toolkit using Ventoy. Multi-boot USB creator with resumable downloads, smart system repair, and comprehensive recovery tools for Ubuntu and Debian systems. - zudsniper/VLRH
I changed my grandad onto GNU after I've distrohopped a few times on my system just so I knew how to do a system install (which is a skill in of itself no matter what OS you are installing)
All the major technical issues for install like getting to boot, display driver issues, etc are solved. Even Nvidia is reccomending people use their open source kernel modules (nvidia-open)
That was likely some kind of kdump error, interested to know what distro you used, I often advise people to use a stable but stale distro like a Debian based distro: Mint or Ubuntu is ideal for stability and ease of install.
I setup my grandad on Mint 2 years ago,was fine but decided to hop to Archlinux KDE Plasma as needed some newer stuff(if you enable the incremental backups its not hard to switch if you think a different one is a better fit), even though Archlinux has a reputation for less stability it's been pretty good the last year, avoided AUR *mostly for stability, pamac for GUI updater.
Most of what he needs is in the browser and printing. (Printer issues are OS agnostic nowadays as modern printers seem to be very anti-consumer and they mostly use software to make their money, I.E DRM on ink cartridges)
Only issues my grandad had are printer or website related.
(Detail: used the CLI installer)
(DISCLAIMER: I am a qualified computing professional who have used GNU/Linux as daily driver since 2016, for newcomers a Debian based distro would be more the route I would).
I gave my dad one of my spare laptops four years ago; it had never had Windows on it (being from the halcyon days when Dell sold laptops with linux pre-installed), so I put Mint on it for him.
Early this year he called and said one of the keys stopped working so he'd bought a newer, used laptop and could I help him put Linux on it, because that's what he was used to. Over the phone, I helped him download and burn a new Mint image from his ancient desktop, and verbally walked him through switching the bios to boot from the USB, and through the Mint install menus.
Since then, he's called me once for technical support for getting his printer connected.
Dad's in his 80's and was a cop with an associate's degree; he's never claimed to be a brainiac. That is what convinced me Linux is ready for anyone, but that the choice of distribution is important. I think dad never upgrades or installs new software, but that's OK. I have to update and reboot every week because I'm stupidly loyal to Arch.
I'm sorry that your mom had a bad experience; that's super frustrating.
I don't think that the point here was trying to do anything to say that the user did anything wrong. I think it's simply pointing out how frustrating it is that Microsoft's Insistence on various things, as part of their EEE policy, created this situation to begin with, and that it wouldn't have even broken if not for that.
I'm pretty sure that the person you replied to was really just lamenting that that this is what broke it. And that fundamentally, Microsoft is getting exactly what they wanted as a result. And it's just frustrating.
#Linux community does someone know a tutorial for a kind of self made #ThinClient device?
I have an old notebook with Linux which does not anymore fit my power requirements, but I have a Linuc PC in my cellar which I use as working device over #RDP since a while and I love this way.
Is there a Remote-Desktop Linux Distribution (RDP, #VNC or #Moonlight) with the sole purpose to connect a VPN on startup and directly login to a Remote-Desktop and also redirect USB-Devices to remote?
I just installed DietPi on my new ThinClient. I use it on Raspberry Pi for years and I really like it. Is super lightweight and comes with lots of preconfigured software.
Optimised | Simplified | For everyone - Backed by community, DietPi is a minimal OS image for SBCs - Raspberry Pi, Odroid, PINE64 etc. Install software optimised for you!
I set up an old thin client with Debian and lxqt to connect to a VM on Proxmox. Got the idea from an Apalrd’s Adventures video about VDI. It worked pretty well on a decent network, but it really suffered on high latency networks.
Our client had thin clients that where managed via a controller over pxe. We replaced the hyperv with vm's in the cloud and they didn't want to buy new PCs. So we got them small SSDs instead and I set up a debian image with autologin and a script that asks for credentials to launch xfreerdp in fullscreen. It worked great (until they finally got new hardware).
I can give you some of the code next week if you want.
I learned the hard way that the "x" permission on directories doesn't mean "execute" but "traverse". And setting permissions on directories get's them inherited by newly created/added files in there, right?
So how can i remove the ability from my homedir to execute current and new files but keep the traverse permission?
And setting permissions on directories get’s them inherited by newly created/added files in there, right?
No. They're created based on 'umask' and changing directory permissions doesn't automatically change permissions on underlying files (unless you set privileges recursively) nor new files in the directory.
So how can i remove the ability from my homedir to execute current and new files but keep the traverse permission?
For new files set your umask on what you want. By default it's usually either 0002 or 0022. For existing files you can use find: find ~ -type f -exec echo chmod a-x {} \; (remove echo once you've confirmed that it does what you want).
Let me just add that, in general, it's expected to have executable files inside your home directory.
For example, ~/.local/bin is intended for user executables and usually added to the $PATH, and a lot of package managers (such as cargo, go, pip,...) will install applications under ~ (Steam also does that).
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
Plasma Browser Integration’s browser plugin no longer breaks random features or various known video conferencing websites when its enhanced media controls setting is active. (Kai Uwe Broulik, link)
THAT'S the reason why I haven't managed to share my screen on Teams from Firefox for months?!?!
🤦
~microsoft won't ever deserve an apology but boy have I bad mouthed them lately~
The sanctioning by the Trump administration of Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur, is an ominous harbinger of the end of the rule of international law.
Shadow of the Colossus was such a landmark game. The few little changes to the standard video game formula combined together just made for an absolute masterpiece.
Euphonica is a new Rust-based MPD frontend for Linux desktops, with 'bling' as a key feature. I showcase its design, features, and current development status.
MPD (Music Player Daemon) is a server-client audio player long popular with Linux users. The headless daemon runs as a background service, typically on a remote audio server. Music is then accessed via a GUI client frontend, which connects to the MPD server to stream content.
Kind of like running your bespoke, curated music streaming service, in a sense.
Thank you for including a description of what this about. We are too used to Linux that we forget about new users who might be overwhelmed by the ocean of possibilities.
You're welcome. I've been using Linux for 26 years and had never heard of (or at least didn't remember hearing of) MPD, so it's not just new users. We all feel a different part of the elephant.
Oooo, crossfade, nice. Not many music players have/support this, and it's an essential feature for me.
I've been wanting to get around to organizing my music and setup mpd, and this seems like a great way to practice. I'm still in a weird phase of using command-line tools and a window manager, but still relying on GUI applications like Dolphin (file manager).
I love mpd, I was a longtime ncmpcpp user, the only thing I didn't like was no synced lyrics, then I discovered rmpc and it's game over, totally customizable, fast and has all the features to compete even with gui clients
I just got this laptop and the second monitor is clearly detected by Fedora, as the monitor layout popup pops up, but the monitor doesn't actually work.
I assume this to be an NVIDIA problem, but as I have no experience with NVIDIA-based issues, I thought I'd ask here.
Here's my system specs: Operating System: Fedora Linux 42 KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.3 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.16.0 Qt Version: 6.9.1 Kernel Version: 6.15.7-200.fc42.x86_64 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 24 × Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 275HX Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (30.8 GiB usable) Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics Manufacturer: LENOVO Product Name: 83LU System Version: Legion Pro 5 16IAX10H
Germany has reportedly delivered the first Patriot air defense system to Ukraine under an agreement with the United States. However, the accuracy of this information has been questioned by Militarnyi analysts.
I recently got a 10 dollar working netbook from a thiftstore. It has 2 ram and is from 2010 but isint the up-gradable version. Im wondering what os to run on it do i go with something like a android build or a linux setup? Im could also use some neat use cases. Ive thought about doing retro game on it but there are possible better solutions?
Hm, 2GB RAM is a tough limitation. Even ChromeOS Flex has a minimum requirement of 4GB. I'm not saying it's impossible to find something that'll run with just 2GB, but you're probably not going to have any fun with it. Plus, is the CPU even 64bit yet? Many distros have dropped their 32bit support already.
Define Linux. The most basic kernel for a given hardware set, a console emulator and a lightweight alternative libc busybox package? Yes. An up-to-date desktop suite? Hardly so.
I used to run Gentoo (and build it too) on an arm tablet with 1gb RAM, quite a few years ago. It was an Asus TF700T with an hardware keyboard and touch screen.
It's painful and really almost useless. You can setup the tyniest of the window manger and tools, but forget about browsing, using any office program, and probably a lot more.
With patience, it can be used i guess. Also, could be a nice command line only device with decent results.
My arch linux with KDE only uses 500Mb ram after boot and I have a handfull of apps in the autostart. So I would guess with some explicitly lighter desktop environment you can be well below 100Mb
If you have a chance to add an ssd or nvme you could allocate a decently sized swap partition and let the OS handle the rest.
Maybe you won't be able to watch full HD youtube in big fat chrome browser, but otherwise it should work just fine I think.
(This is a long 5600+ words post, I recommend reading this from a tablet or computer)
Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (WFW3.11) was an operating system (OS) released by Microsoft in August 1993 and ended support in December 2001.
Like others have said, Debian probably isn’t a bad idea.
I feel like it would be kind of stupid to run a full-on desktop environment even though technically possible, though - I think this is a good use for IceWM.
Also, at worst, you might have a really low power server.
I suggest Q4OS (with Trinity DE). It loads itself at 340 MB of RAM, so it leaves you with a lot of free RAM (especially since the heaviest apps now are browsers -- youtube needs 1 GB for itself). Arch Linux with XFCE can be made to boot at 470 MB. Debian starts at 650 MB. Ubuntu/Fedora start at over 1.5 GB so avoid.
Then of course there are the damnsmalllinux, antix etc, but the user experience on these is bad. Q4OS feels like a modern OS with GUI panels for everything, while not taking lots of ram.
Yes, 2 gigs seem laughable compared to more recent devices but I'm still running an Acer C720 Chromebook with 2 GB RAM as my couch PC/digital typewriter. EndeavourOS plus Plasma and Librewolf (with UBlock Origin and a tab deactivation addon) provide an okay browsing experience and editing documents is rather smooth. Saving said documents may sometimes require it an extra moment to think, especially on larger files. Even some basic image editing with GIMP and some light 2010ish video games through wine are no problem.
The CPU feels like the bigger bottleneck on my system (maybe to blame on ZRAM).
any distro with lightweight wm would work. I'd try slackware with windowmaker or fvwm.
Alternatively you can try tinycore, it's supposed to be blazing fast because the whold system runs on ram.
For web browsing try seamonkey with ematrix for blocking stuff.
During 2022~2024 I used a 2008 Macbook with 5400rpm HDD, 2.5GB ram and its CPU throttled to 800mhz on Slackware15 as my primary machine and it was perfectly usable.
I have a similar device, made around 2013, Atom CPU, 2 gigs of RAM, 32 gig emmc drive, no exandability.
I run Arch with QTile on it without much of a problem, though as others have mentioned, web browsing would be a pain with more than a few tabs open. Youtube is a no-go too.
I currently use it mostly to test an image editing GUI im working on. I know that if it is snappy on such poor hardware it would work perfectly fine anywhere else.
The specific os doesn't really matter, just get one that runs a lightweight WM. Whatever you pick, make sure you enable Zswap on it to really squeeze every bit of performance out of that ram.
Bunsenlab Linux I suppose, but do know if it's the single core atom version web browsing will be very slow and YT will only work in 240p after spending 10 minutes loading and you gotta use Chrome.
Mine has a Windows XP dualboot for retro gaming and Office 2007 flies on this thing. (Though it's not very compatible with newer versions of office)
Retro gaming is the best use case including ps1 emulation. I've been thinking of putting native dos on it, because some dos games are lagging in dosbox. (like imperium galactica 1 and even Prehistoric 2..)
Assuming you mean 2GB RAM, it will run a full Linux. I was using a 2008-vintage laptop with similar specs as a secondary machine until recently, and it was capable of handling many light workloads. Retro gaming up to the 16-bit era should be fine. 720p video playback from local storage (never tried streaming) was fine. Modern websites were very hard on it, though, so I didn't normally use it in that capacity.
Just pick a distro that isn't too bloated, and a desktop environment that's suited to older machines and doesn't expect too much of the hardware, and you'll be fine.
(My laptop still works, by the way. I gave it up because 1. I got a good deal on a machine with much higher specs and 2. I run Gentoo, and compiling a modern version of GCC on a dual-core of that vintage takes longer than you would expect.)
Well i just saw the remarkable 2. I liked how it workes at feels. But im concerned for the update abillity, like the software support, and the abillity to decide what data is send and so on. Im a noob for Linux, i use fedora on my laptop, and thats it. So yir Pinenote isnt for me,because im not that good in linux development. What is the linux community thoughts on the remarkable 2 (as far as i know, its based on Linux) or are there good alternatives out there? I want to use it for note taking and reading pdf..
I had a remarkable 2 for a year and was very dissatisfied with how hard it was to modify or run custom scripts or third party gui apps on it. Then came the subscription stuff and I ditched it.
Bought pinenote and even though I'm no linux developer, I've set it up and it works very well. Been using it for 3+ years now.
The build feels cheaper compared to remarkable, but the hardware spec is much better. And the best part is I can just run syncthing or kdeconnect or any linux desktop app on it and it's great.
I went with the supernote Manta and I love it. It is Android based, not Linux, and the ecosystem is really sparse. But you can easily side load F-Droid or the aurora store and that opens everything up. I have next cloud syncing my documents and moon reader giving me access to my calibre library.
It is first and foremost a note taker and drawing pad, sacrificing lights and color for writing feel. The writing feel is amazing though. No subscriptions, non replaceable pens, support for replaceable tip 3rd party pens.
It's cost is quite a bit more than remarkable 2 or the pinenote though.
In practice, it isn't trivial to use android as a computer like you would in a linux-based system, installing desktop apps and stuff. It's definitely doable, but although one of based on the other they are very different systems in day-to-day use.
We're talking about an eink tablet. I assume none of them are running X, so there's no "desktop" involved here. I have a remarkable 2 which runs Linux. I can ssh into it to rsync files to it, back things up, and make customizations. There's no package manager, it seems to be an embedded system. It has python, so i've written some python scripts to do custom operations. Everything i do on my remarkable 2 is stuff I would expect to also be able to do on an android based tablet.
Another vote for the Supernote. I've got the Nomad and I'm so far pretty happy with it. I use it mainly for note taking, for which it excels. It was pretty expensive to import it where I live, but its worth it.
I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I've been pretty happy with. It's sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that's going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that
Pros: - bought for $200 refurbished on an eBay sale directly from XP Pen (I think it's $300 or so resfurbished normally) - runs an OS based on Android 14 so full play/aurora/F-Droid access easily - comes with a good pen, small folio case and notetaking app based on Jnotes - screen is matte with a slightly textured feel. Can switch between a full color, paper color and grayscale display mode with a single button. 90hz, palm rejection while writing is very good.
Cons - Came out this year but a little worried about continued OS support being a niche item - built in notetaking app is great except for the handwriting recognition. I bought Nebo for that which is a one time license of $8 which isn't bad at all and their handwriting recognition is like dark magic it's amazing - not a true e-ink, so battery life is more like a standard tablet. I'm usually getting 2-3 days of use wheras e-inks will give you weeks - not a true paper-like writing experience but better than an iPad out of the box - overall it's a mostly fine android tablet with a few tweaks aimed at the note-taking market
All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I've locked it down a bit but you're not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn't buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!
I have the boox note air 4c, and it is really great for taking notes. It is kaliedo color, which is great for me but you can also get a black and white version which has better contrast. The notes app is all around pretty great, although it isn't well optimised for art of that's your thing. It also runs android so you can get a ton of functionality from installing apps onto it. I use localsend in particular to share files to and from the device, and obsidian for text-based notes.
I have one as well and love it. It reads like my paperwhite, writing is easy and comfortable and has a pretty decent handwriting to text ability. I've found marking up and/or signing PDFs to be a great bonus feature I didn't think about when I got it. Overall very happy with it and running Android, I can do pretty much everything I want with it.
I've found that all modern E-Ink tablets are trash. They're built cheaply and to fail after 2 years or less, regardless of premium model or not. I went through 4 devices of various models and manufacturers (Kobo, Kindle, Pocketbook) over <2 years, while I used my old Kindle 3 for >5 years and technically it still works. These days they all use the same wonky chipsets and flakey components especially for power management. 3 of those 4 devices just suddenly didn't turn on anymore one day.
Personally, I now read on my FP5 with the Android KOReader port, which due to the AMOLED screen has excellent contrast and sufficient battery life with white-on-black text. Maybe when we finally stop producing devices for land fills I'll take another look at E-Ink.
Hey. Thank you all for the answers. It made me see that there are more devices to get to know. Like one of you has written, some devices may be so niche, that support isnt going too stay long. And, what to do then? Is it another device that will be in the schelff? Im going to look more into Kobo, and Boox, at first. But yir its just easyer to have a device in the hand, and then make a choice 😀
One warning for Boox, although I definitely reccomend the device, the first-party support can be lackluster, so if you're in a country where BOOX is on Amazon I would reccomend buying through there since Amazon has a better returns service.
The Remarkable 2 is fantastic. You can ssh into it, and scp from it. There are some filesystem layout quirks, but it's good. Peerless writing experience. Great battery. Plenty storage. Large screen. No backlight, sadly. Good for
taking notes
reading & annotating PDFs
reading technical books, with illustrations and diagrams
reading graphic novels
Not so good for reading for pleasure, like fiction. It's too big. It's best for active reading and writing.
I have a Kobo Aura H2O for recreational reading and travel. Massive memory and an SD expansion slot. Backlight. Pretty indestructible, I read it in the jacuzzi.
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I owe a Boox Note Air. Had it for a while now. Overall very good tablet but it is expensive. Runs a custom Android skin which is fine since I run it offline most of the time. Perfect for reading and writing.
Based on linux is no guarantee for stable, secure or privacy respecting software. Android is based on Linux. 😀 And so is Remarkable, and some of the e-book readers.
I really like both the idea behind e-book readers and Remarkable, but they are often a very closed environment, so forget about most FOSS, if any. They want to make money on you, and that stops, if you use other software than theirs.
I definitely recommend it... but I also wouldn't dare predicting the future.
So far unofficial hacking on the reMarkable has been great. The Discord is very active, new development e.g. github.com/asivery/rm-appload (random pick from Discord) so that's the sign of a healthy tinkering environment.
Yet, reMarkable has never pushed for customization either. They also got VC funding in 2019 and 2022 but that seemed to have changed nothing on that front.
So... I highly doubt they would somehow break the ability to connect to ssh then install applications. They definitely can not even technically do that as long as one does not automatically update. Consequently I can safely say that if you get a reMarkable today, you will be able to do a lot with it.
All that being said, even though it's Linux proper, it's also a rather specialized environment with limited resources. If you do not love to tinker, make sure the application you actually need is already available and working on the right version you want (e.g. might work on rM2 but not on rM Pro).
If you have a specific need in mind, let me know and I can try to share the right resource, otherwise join the Discord and ask there.
oh thank you. Im going to think about it more. I thank you for the research. I just dont wanna buy a device, that when the company ehind, decides that the device isnt working anymore, i cant do anything to expand the lifecircle. I like how i could get a older Thinkpad to get a new life with Linux 😀
With pleasure, if you do have questions later on though, even in months, please feel free to ask here again.
Yes using an older device is nice. If you like to tinker a bit there are even older eInk devices that can be unlocked so maybe finding which one and getting it 2-hand could be an interesting adventure.
Say you are dual-booting Debian and Arch and want to upgrade Debian oldstable to Debian stable. But you want to keep the old installation available as a fall-back option. And you also want to re-use your configuration files and dot files, but in a way that incompatible changes to your dot files in the new Debian or Arch version do never break the old program versions.
For my needs, the simplest way is to use an extra partition might be to keep it as a reserve to install the next Distribution release. So you go
partition A: Debian 12's root
Partition B: /home
Partition C: Debian 13's root
And swap A and C for the next upgrade. It is really nice to have a whole compatible fallback system.
Alternative 1: BTRFS Another possibly quicker way to do this is a larger BTRFS disk and create subvolumes from snapshots and mount these. When the subvolumes are no longer needed, they can be deleted like any folder.
Alternative 2: LVM One can also use LVM, the logical volume manager, for the same effect. It plays nicely with LUKS encryption for laptops. But I think BTRFS is simpler most times.
How to move all packages over
One can copy the system e.g. using a tar backup, fix the mount points by changing the volume label (which identifies the mount point), and do a dist upgrade then. I use "tar" here because it keeps all file attributes.
I guess that's the best way to do it on a server. But for desktop systems, I now think it is better to make a list of manually installed packages (there are tools which help with that), and to re-install the packages that are still needed from that list. This has two advantages:
One gets rid of cruft and experimental installs that are no longer needed, which is really important in the long term. (If you have ever worked in a shop where software, files and configurations were not upgraded for ten or twenty years, you might know what I am talking about: IT systems absolutely need clearing out old stuff, too, and that makes the whole concept of "stability" a lot less important).
Some systems (I am looking at you, GNOME) can break in an ugly way if doing an upgrade instead of a re-install. Very bad behaviour, but it can happen. (And this might answer the question whether Debian is more stable than Arch: Yes, as long as you don't upgrade GNOME).
keeping dot files, the copy-and-modify way
And one more thing I do for the dot files:
Say, my home folder is in /home/hvb . Then, I install Debian 13 and set /home/hvb/deb13 as my home folder (by editing /etc/passwd). I put my data in /home/hvb/Documents, /home/hvb/Photos/ and sym-link these folders into /home/hvb/deb13.
Now, default dot files are automatically created in /home/hvb/deb13 or /home/hvb/deb13/.config .
When I upgrade, I first create a new folder /home/hvb/deb14, copy my dot files from deb13, and install a new root partition with my home set to /home/hvb/deb14. Then, I again link my data folders , documents and media such as /home/hvb/Documents into /home/hvb/deb14 . The reason I do this is that new versions of programs can upgrade the dot files to a new syntax or features, but when I switch back to boot Debian 13, the old versions can't necessarily read the newer-version config files (the changes are mostly promised to be backward-compatible but not forward-compatible).
All in all this is a very conservative approach but it works for me with running Debian now for many years in a rather large desktop setup.
And the above also worked well for me with distro-hopping. Though nowadays, it is more recommended to install parallel dual-booted distros on another removable disk since such installs can also modify grub and EFI setup, early graphics drivers and so on, even if in theory dual-boot installs should be completely independent... but my experience is that is not any more always guaranteed (especially if you have an NVidia graphics card which needs extra support in EFI, but well ... in that case you asked for pain).
For the last reason, I now also run Arch in a VM managed by virt-manager - this also allows it to run both systems at once.
(What I want to point out is that there is nothing which you can't do with running Debian as host compared to an Arch host and Debian in a VM. The differences are not really that large - Arch has just often newer software and can be nice if you want to participate in the FLOSS community and contribute packets).*
Since both Debian and Arch aren't atomic distros or offer rollback... The way I do it is connect my large external USB harddisk, do a backup and then upgrade. If there's something wrong, I restore the backup, but in reality I was always able to resolve issues with the updates.
On my server I do LVM snapshots, that's fairly easy to do. I avoid BTRFS since that messed up one of my filesystems a few years ago, but I heard it got better since and it's not supposed to do that any more.
"Wayback is an X11 compatibility layer that allows for running full X11-only desktop environments using Wayland. It is essentially an X11 server backed by Wayland, leveraging wlroots and Xwayland. Our goal is for Wayback to eventually be a completely drop-in replacement to the Xorg binary, thus reducing maintenance burden for distro maintainers."
No More Forced Restarts: This is a huge relief for many!. Firefox on Linux no longer requires a forced restart after your package manager applies an update. This means smoother, uninterrupted browsing, even during system updates.
Reduced Memory Usage: ForkServer leads to a significant reduction in memory consumption for content processes. The base resident memory for a content process is now around 50% lower. This helps Firefox run more efficiently, especially if you have many tabs open.
Faster Process Startup: You'll notice that content process startup times are reduced by approximately 35%. This translates to snappier new tab openings and overall improved responsiveness.
The in-memory version of the tab template prevents having to restart FF to load the new one from disk now, but, at some point you're still going to have to restart...
I tend to hibernate my laptop, so it doesn't reboot often... so surely I'm going to get to the point where FF needs a restart...
computer can play h.265 and equivalent without troubles, provided video file is no higher than 1080 p.
Computer can play av1 files no higher than 1080 p only if I shut every other application down. If for example I run a browser and an av1 file with either mpv or vlc, system shuts down.
Can I put all that memory to use and avoid overloading the cpu?
ETA: temperature seems to be the reason why this machine shuts down. Fan is ok, not too much dust, it needs a re-paste
The video playback should get choppy if the CPU is overloaded, the PC shouldn't shut down from that. It sounds like your CPU may be overheating. I would suggest monitoring the CPU temperature while playing the video.
Based on the "U" at the end of the CPU model name, I'm guessing this is a laptop. OP, your CPU probably needs a re-paste because it's got a decade old CPU and the laptop fan is inadequate. That's why it's shutting down.
Aside from the other answers, no you can't offload computations to memory. Memory stores data, it doesn't compute.
The only way having more memory can possibly improve performance, is by having a cached copy of files so they don't have to be fetched from disk, and applications potentially caching the results of heavy but reusable computations. (Unless you run out of memory and starts spilling over to disk, then more memory will make it fast again by avoiding swapping).
I mean I guess technically yes you could transcode into H264 into a tmpfs mount, and then play the H264, but you're still not doing it faster and certainly not fast enough to watch in real time, you're just decoding the AV1 well in advance before actually watching it.
computer can play h.265 and equivalent without troubles, provided video file is no higher than 1080 p.
Computer can play av1 files no higher than 1080 p only if I shut every other application down. If for example I run a browser and an av1 file with either mpv or vlc, system shuts down.
Can I put all that memory to use and avoid overloading the cpu?
Most of the answers seem to focus on the main problem, but your question got me thinking. Since you are not getting shutdowns with lower qualities, maybe you could use RAM to play those videos. Set up tmpfs. Before you start all the other things, use ffmpeg to recode the video to something without any compression, maybe tell it to not work too fast (like work on one frame at a time), and put the thing on that tmpfs. Maybe then playing this new file would be less demanding. The key would be to not force it to provide 30fps of encoded video
Although... Are you sure all this RAM is fine? Maybe it shuts down on more demanding videos because with those the RAM usage raises to the faulty part?
It sounds like you are also possibly overheating. You don’t have hardware decoding for av1 on that computer so it’s all cpu work. But from my extensive use and testing with AV1 there is nothing about your hardware that should fail to play back 1080p 30fps av1 video.
I had an i5-7200u equipped laptop and I could do AV1 playback, not well but it didn't do what you described.
Also is it maxing out memory or cpu? I would check btop during playback. Look at CPU usage, memory usage and temps while doing so and report here.
Edit: Something is definitely wrong with your machine, that is abnormal behavior. Maybe it's overheating, maybe it's trying to do some sort of gpu decode and has no idea what to do with it as it doesn't support it. Can you check what encoder mpv is using? I would assume it would failback to CPU.
Can't get excited for any riot game. It would just end up like lol. Like a toxic abusive ex you keep going back to. I remember Valorant ranked being so much fun, now it's just miserable. The stats say this too. Most players are stuck in lower ranks. Such a good game wasted by riot whose only goal is selling skins.
As a fighting game fan, this one shows promise. The devs are the Cannon brothers. They are the guys that founded Evo, the biggest fighting game event. They also created and freely licensed rollback netcode, the gold standard for fighting game netcode. the core of the game will likely be excellent. The f2p model hasn't really been done at this level in fighting games. Most games are sold at full price and they sell costumes and characters as dlc. I'm hoping this game will get more people to try fighting games and hopefully it doesn't become a loot box simulator.
...you're redirecting stderr to the stdout's destination while stdout is still sending output to the screen. So any permission errors encountered will go to the screen, not to rsa-keys.log.
From the bash manpage:
==================
Note that the order of redirections is significant. For example, the command
ls > dirlist 2>&1
directs both standard output and standard error to the file dirlist, while the command
ls 2>&1 > dirlist
directs only the standard output to file dirlist, because the standard error was duplicated from the standard output before the standard output was redirected to dirlist.
==================
Commands given to the shell are evaluated and processed in a specific order and fashion, and this is one quirk of that that many people are unaware of.
(...) If |& is used, command1's standard error, in addition to its standard output, is connected to command2's standard input through the pipe; it is shorthand for 2>&1 |. This implicit redirection of the standard error to the standard output is performed after any redirections specified by command1.
Just to be clear, because some seem to conflate Bash with Shell. If not specified, assume POSIX shell, that's how /bin/sh is handled as well. And that has no |&.
According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.
Ideally, set up a battery and inverter system in your house, and turn the charging rate up or down depending on what other electric devices you are using at any given moment. Idea is to keep your power consumption exactly the same regardless of what you are doing at home. That way you give no information to the power company.
The openSUSE Project is part of a growing coalition of open-source advocates urging Microsoft users to install a Linux operating system as Microsoft prepares to end support for Windows 10 this October, and urgency to get that message out is building.
Some in the IT industry are suggesting that as many as 50 percent of the devices remain using Windows 10, which comes at great risk to users and businesses.
Those who remain on Windows 10 and don’t upgrade to an operating system providing security and maintenance updates like a Linux OS or Window 11 will be susceptible to vulnerabilities, malware infections, software incompatibilities, and an increasing amount of system instability and failures over time.
The End of 10 campaign and its initiative aims to promote migration-focused type events to help these users shift from Windows 10 to Linux-based operating systems.
The amount of PCs that will become unprotected on October 14 is unprecedented, and getting people to migrate to Linux operating systems like openSUSE’s is reaching a critical juncture as millions face the looming deadline this Fall.
October 14 is just 12 weeks away and the end-of-support deadline for Windows 10 will expose those who have not migrated to increasing cyber threats.
In additions to the the threats, a big part of the End of 10 movement emphasizes environmental responsibility, digital sustainability and long-term cost savings for those with aging computers that could potentially end up recycled or in landfill.
End of 10 advocates and supporting organizations like NextCloud, REPAIR CAFE, KDE, GNOME, FSFE, EU OS and several other organizations would prefer users find a Linux solution for their older hardware rather than have this event create an environmental disaster. Installing Linux on these old systems can breathe new life into perfectly functional machines that may otherwise be discarded.
Several open-source software projects and organizations and been collaborating for more than a year to create unified resources, tutorials, migration tools and support channels to help lower the barrier to entry for those who seek to install a Linux new operating system.
Members of the openSUSE community and others have been vocal about appealing to Windows 10 users that can’t upgrade their devices to Windows 11.
For those ready to act, the campaign website has resources available and links to community events to help people install Linux.
Anyone who wants to install an openSUSE distribution can follow this A Step-by-Step Guide.
The message to Windows 10 users is clear; don’t replace your computer; reimagine it!
Install Linux Before It’s Too Late The openSUSE Project is part of a growing coalition of open-source advocates urging Microsoft users to install a Linux ope...
The Fedora project is seeking feedback from its user and developer community over potentially updating its release criteria to no longer block on optical media boot issues (DVD images) as well as whether to continue honoring dual boot issues for Inte…
This doesn't mean Fedora will not boot from DVDs anymore, it means any optical media bug won't stop new Fedora release, any related bug will be squashed like any other regular bug after release
Thanks for the reply, I was mainly joking. The burner will be used for purposes other than burning Fedora images, but I found it funny how it all came together yesterday.
Besides the corrections others have said, I really can’t think of any reason people would intentionally use legacy BIOS on a machine with UEFI for a new install.
Like, I could get doing it for an old install - I know someone who installed Windows 7 in 2015 on their then-new desktop build and later upgraded to 10 but is stuck on legacy BIOS for now with that machine because 7 only ran on that.
I could see something similarly jank happening to someone in the Linux world and then decide not to address it for “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it reasons”, but certainly not for no reason.
I was working on a bash script and working out some logic for command chaining and grouping for executing different functions in my script based on the return status of other functions.
I know you can group commands with (), which spawns a subshell, and within the grouping you can chain with ;, &&, and ||.
I also know that you can group commands with {}, but, within the curly braces you can only separate commands with ;.
EDIT: the above statement of the curly braces only allowing ; is incorrect. I misunderstood what I had read. @SheeEttin@lemmy.zip pointed out my mistake.
The requirement is that the list of commands in the curly braces needs to be terminated with a semicolon or a newline character, and in the script, I unknowingly was meeting the rules by using the newlines to make the code easier to read for myself.
END EDIT:
In the script, for readability I did group the commands across lines kind of like a function.
The script is pretty simple. I created a few functions with echo commands to test the logic. the script asks for input of foo or bar. The first function has an if, and if the input is foo, it executes. If it's bar it returns 1.
The return of 1 triggers the or (||) and executes the second command group.
The idea was, if the user inputs foo, the first group triggers printing foo baz to stdout. If the user inputs bar, the foo function returns 1, the baz function does not execute, the or is triggered, and bar but is printed to stdout
Here's the script (which executes as described):
Can anyone explain why I'm able to group with curly braces and still use && inside them?
(Also, the reason I want to use the curly braces is I don't want to spawn a subshell. I want variable persistence in the current shell)
\#! /usr/bin/bash
# BEGIN FUNCTIONS #
foo () {
if [[ "${input}" = foo ]]; then
echo "foo"
return 0
else
return 1
fi
}
bar () {
echo "bar"
}
baz () {
echo "baz"
}
but () {
echo "but"
}
# END FUNCTIONS #
read -p "foo or bar? " input
{
foo &&
baz
} ||
{
bar &&
but
}
I don't see any mention of only being allowed to use a semicolon. I don't have a test system handy unfortunately.
Ideally you'd simplify or separate your logic so that you're not relying so much on bash. If you need complex logic, I'd use another language, depending on what's available in your environment.
Ah! I misinterpreted what I read! I found that exact same reference link when looking into this and I misinterpreted this:
The semicolon (or newline) following list is required
to mean that it required the semicolon as the command separator. That explains why my script works. The newline closes each group, and the other operators are allowed, the list just needs to be closed. Thank you!
My environment is just my homelab. Ubuntu server on my server, Arch (btw) on my laptop. So I could go with any language , but right now I'm choosing Bash. I know stuff I'm doing would probably be easier in a different language, and maybe I'm a glutton for punishment. I just want to get really good with Bash.
The logic is Bash is gonna be available on just about any computing environment I encounter (linux especially, but even Windows with WSL and zsh on macOS (which I know is different, but still very similar). But really, I am just enjoying the hell out of learning and scripting with Bash. I'll move on to Python or something someday.
Fifteen Palestinians died from malnutrition under an Israeli-imposed famine in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday.
Four of them were children, including three identified as the infant Yousef al-Safadi, Abd al-Jawad al-Ghalban, 16, and Ahmad Hasanat. inian health ministry.
Fifteen Palestinians died from malnutrition under an Israeli-imposed famine in the Gaza Strip in the past 24 hours, the Palestinian health ministry said on Tuesday.
second question, aborting an active download not shutting the terminal down: neither ctrl+c nor ctrl+q work and opening htop to kill the process seems overkill. What I now do is to simply shut the active tab, but there must be a faster way.
second question, aborting an active download not shutting the terminal down: neither ctrl+z nor ctrl+q work and opening htop to kill the process seems overkill. What I now do is to simply shut the active tab, but there must be a faster way.
Ctrl + z will send the task to the background. You can use jobs to see all active background work. Fg will bring background work to the foreground. Ctrl + q is not a valid shortcut as far as I know. Looks a bit like a mac thing (command + q).
what happens on my computer: on a terminal, I press ctrl+c but the process keeps working, yt-dlp keeps downloading. As said, the only way to stop it is to shut the tab down (or htop and kill)
I think AVC1 is another word for H.264. That's the oldest one with lots of hardware acceleration available in old devices and by far the biggest one in file size. VP9 should roughly be on a similar level with H.265. The main difference is that VP9 is supposed to be royalty-free and H.265 isn't. The best one is of course AV1. But that also takes considerably more resources to encode and decode.
One aspect of Guix I found to be really fascinating: That there is basically no conceptual difference between defining a package as a private build script, and using a package as part of the system.
Let me explain: Say you wrote a little program in Python which uses a C library (or a Rust library with C ABI) which is in the distribution. Then, in Guix you would put that librarie's name and needed version into a manifest.scm file which lists your dependency, and makes it available if you run guix shell in that folder. It does not matter whether you run the full Guix System, or just use Guix as s package manager.
The point I am making is now that the only thing which is different between your local package and a distributed package in Guix is that distributed packages are package definitions hosted in public git repos, called 'channels'. So, if you put your package's source into a github or codeberg repo, and the package definition into another repo, you now have published a package which is a part of Guix (in your own channel). Anybody who wants to install and run your package just needs your channel's URL and the packages name. It is a fully decentral system.
In short, in Guix you have built-in something like Arch's AUR, just in a much more elegant and clean manner - and in a fully decentralized way.
The biggest problem with Scheme as config language is that it is sloooooowwwww. Nix is already quite sluggish when it comes to configuration changes, in Guix it's a lot worse, and it's unlikely to change anytime soon, given that Scheme allows macros and other hacks that might make it difficult to properly cache or index the package database.
One aspect of Guix I found to be really fascinating: That there is basically no conceptual difference between defining a package as a private build script, and using a package as part of the system.
This is true for Nix as well.
The two main advantages of Guix are the language (which is well-known and comes with lots of good tooling and other support) and the package bootstrapping.
I wouldn't call that an advantage for the average person. Nix is far nicer to work with. Some Lispers might disagree, but I, for one, can't exactly see the beauty in trying to turn Scheme into a configuration language with macros and hacks. Also Guix puts Scheme everywhere, things you can do with plain old Bash in Nix, you'll have to all do in Scheme in Guix, so there is a much steeper learning curve.
Well, Nix language is also full of hacks, idiosyncrasies and stupid decisions. I say that as someone who's writing it "professionally", i.e. as part of my job. Scheme is way less "unexpected". But there are other parts of Guix which are pretty weird or just bad, like the "channels"/"pins" management situation.
Some Lispers might disagree, but I, for one, can't exactly see the beauty in trying to turn Scheme into a configuration language with macros and hacks.
Scheme is a minimalistic Lisp dialect, and macros are central in Lisp. For example, they allow for both conditional evaluation ("if" is a macro, or more precisely, a "special form" that is used in other conditionals), and for delayed evaluation at run time, which matches a bit Nix being lazy.
Also, Scheme is designed as a not strictly but mostly functional language, favouring side-effect free functions, which matches well with the declarative task which is package definitions.
bash, in contrary, is not side-effect-free, it modifies its environment, and this is very much not desired in a functional package manager: it is at the core that package declarations are side-effect-free.
And Emacs shows that Lisp written in a declarative style is a superb configuration language. (There is now even a project to use a Scheme, Steel Scheme, to configure helix, a programmers text editor which has many many features stemming from vim!).
Notes:
I still need to rebase up with the latest master changes, however doing so causes some headache with the lock file, so I'll do it after some initial feedback. Also, this depends on the ...
I had a go at using guix as a package manager on top of an existing distro (first an immutable fedora, which went terribly, then OpenSUSE). Gave up for a few reasons:
As mentioned in the article, guix pull is sloow.
Packages were very out of date, even Emacs. If I understand correctly, 30.1 was only added last month, despite having been available since February. I get that this isn't the longest wait, but for the piece of software you can expect most guix users to be running, it doesn't bode well.
The project I was interested in trying out (Gypsum) had a completely broken manifest. Seems like it worked on the dev's machine though, which made me concerned about how well guix profiles actually isolate Dev environments. This was probably an error on the dev's part, but I'd argue such errors should be hard to make by design.
All in all I love the idea of guix, but I think it needs a bigger community behind it. Of course I'm part of the problem by walking away, but 🤷
This one has beem discussed on several forums discussing the original blog post, like here or also here on lobste.rs
Part of the reason for slow pulls is that the GNU projects savannah server, which Guix was using so far, is not fast, especially with git repos. Luckily, this is already being improved because Guix is moving to codeberg.org, a FOSS nonprofit org which is hosted in Europe. So if one changes the configured server URL, it is faster. (On top of that interested people might use the opportunity to directly take influence, and donate to codeberg so that they can afford even better hardware 😉).
Motivation Opportunity is upon us! For the past few years, the desktop Linux user base has been growing at a historically high rate. StatCounter currently has us at 4.14% desktop OS market share...
Bazzite is popular precisely because we ignore bad opinions such as these. Flathub is mainstream and all the whinging in the world isn't going to change that.
That "article" is painful to try and read, it's like a run on thought that bounces all over the place. The author really should make a clear outline and could probably cut out half by not saying the same thing over and over and over again. I stopped after the third time I read about Fedora flatpaks are different from flathub flatpaks, and users like flathub more, but the author is apparently eventually going to explain why that's an issue after 2K words of nonsense.
didn't read the article, but i never got the point of having a distro-specific flathub repo. isn't being distro-agnostic the main thing about flatpaks?
It's about making sure you know what is inside the flatpaks. If you make your own set of flatpaks, you can distribute them with the OS. It's not that fedora flatpaks aren't distro-agnostic, you can use them on any distro. They just want a set where they can verify the build process and trust.
Indeed. I believe most users will just switch to flathub. Sort of how most users will install some codecs, but it can't legally be included in the base install.
I think, because of Fedoras atomic desktops. I didn't use any of them yet, but it seems like Flatpaks should be used there, since one should (or can?) not install tradional packages there. Therefore Fedora provides the flatpaks anyway and they can be used on the non atomic desktops as well.
Another reason is, that you might not be able to install the latest version of an application as rpm package if a required dependency in the repo is outdated. A Flatpak usually does not have the issue since a newer version would include the fitting runtime. This said, I do think its not this big of an issue for fedora which is usually quite up to date. But if you run a distribution with LTS releases or something like Debian you will much more likely have older dependencies in your repositiry.
i guess it makes sense in that case, but i'm really not convinced flatpaks should be used as the default (or only, apparently) way to install every application in the system. flatpak's flexibility is great for the particular cases where you want to install newer versions of applications or if an application isn't available in the official repos somehow. besides that, just use distro packages
Another reason is, that you might not be able to install the latest version of an application as rpm package if a required dependency in the repo is outdated
Taken from github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp. Replace 480 with 1080. Multiple options in the documentation to choose from.
Download the best video available with the largest height but no better than 480p, or the best video with the smallest resolution if there is no video under 480p
The following numeric meta fields can be used with comparisons <, <=, >, >=, = (equals), != (not equals):
filesize: The number of bytes, if known in advance filesize_approx: An estimate for the number of bytes width: Width of the video, if known height: Height of the video, if known aspect_ratio: Aspect ratio of the video, if known
[can't believe that it keeps getting worse, but it does]
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Jul 21, 2025
Over the past five days alone, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to ministry of health figures. The confirmed death toll since the beginning of the war crossed 59,000 on Monday in what is widely acknowledged to be a vast undercount. Over the past two months, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed as they are forced to seek aid in militarized zones in a system mostly overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy U.S.- and Israeli-backed group.
One of the deadliest days for aid seekers came on Sunday, when over 70 people were killed, at least 67 of them in northern Gaza where Israeli troops opened fire on crowds trying to get food from a World Food Program convoy entering through the Zikim crossing.
“The tank came, surrounded us, and started shooting at us and we kept raising our hands,” Ibrahim Hamada, who was wounded in the leg, told Drop Site as he lay on a hospital gurney wincing in pain. “There were many martyrs, no one was able to retrieve them. I crawled on my stomach just to reach a car to take me to the hospital,” he said. “I went there to eat, because there was no food at home.”
[can't believe that it keeps getting worse, but it does]
Abdel Qader Sabbah and Sharif Abdel Kouddous Jul 21, 2025
Over the past five days alone, more than 550 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, according to ministry of health figures. The confirmed death toll since the beginning of the war crossed 59,000 on Monday in what is widely acknowledged to be a vast undercount. Over the past two months, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed as they are forced to seek aid in militarized zones in a system mostly overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a shadowy U.S.- and Israeli-backed group.
One of the deadliest days for aid seekers came on Sunday, when over 70 people were killed, at least 67 of them in northern Gaza where Israeli troops opened fire on crowds trying to get food from a World Food Program convoy entering through the Zikim crossing.
“The tank came, surrounded us, and started shooting at us and we kept raising our hands,” Ibrahim Hamada, who was wounded in the leg, told Drop Site as he lay on a hospital gurney wincing in pain. “There were many martyrs, no one was able to retrieve them. I crawled on my stomach just to reach a car to take me to the hospital,” he said. “I went there to eat, because there was no food at home.”
The Gaza Freedom flotilla coalition is sailing its next ship to break the illegal Israeli blockade of Gaza.
The Handala departed for Gaza on Sunday from the Italian port of Gallipoli after stops in Augusta and Siracusa in Sicily. The journey to Gaza may take around 7 days.
Twenty-one persons from 10 countries are onboard the Handala, including seven U.S. citizens, representing the hundreds of millions of Americans who are strongly opposed to the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
The following nationalities are represented on the Handala: U.S. 7, France 4, Australia 2, Italy 2, Spain 2, Norway 1, Morocco 1, Tunisia 1, U.K. 1; Israel -2 U.S. citizens have dual citizenship with Israel.
Twenty-one persons from 10 countries are onboard the Handala, including Americans strongly opposed to the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
Any amount of civilian ships has zero chance of breaking through even a small Navy's determined effort to stop them. The purpose of these ships is to put Israel in a bind. Hurting foreign civilians that are on a peaceful mission would be bad politically. Letting them through would make Israel's blockade look like a joke and probably encourage others to do the same. Even stopping them without hurting anyone is showing the world that Israel doesn't want civilian aid going into Gaza. They likely know they will be intercepted and stopped by Israel's navy. The point is to make this an international incident that puts pressure on Israel to at least lessen it's genocidal tendencies. If all ships went at one time, it would be one news cycle. This way, they are making multiple news cycles out of it, maximizing the pressure.
By SYLVIA HUI and JILL LAWLESS Updated 1:05 PM EDT, July 21, 2025
LONDON (AP) — Twenty-five countries including #Britain, #France and a host of #European nations issued a joint statement on Monday that puts more pressure on #Israel, saying the war in #Gaza “must end now” and Israel must comply with international law.
The foreign ministers of countries including #Australia, #Canada and #Japan said “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.” They condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”
The statement described as “horrifying” the deaths of over 800 #Palestinians who were seeking aid...
By SYLVIA HUI and JILL LAWLESS Updated 1:05 PM EDT, July 21, 2025
LONDON (AP) — Twenty-five countries including #Britain, #France and a host of #European nations issued a joint statement on Monday that puts more pressure on #Israel, saying the war in #Gaza “must end now” and Israel must comply with international law.
The foreign ministers of countries including #Australia, #Canada and #Japan said “the suffering of civilians in Gaza has reached new depths.” They condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians, including children, seeking to meet their most basic needs of water and food.”
The statement described as “horrifying” the deaths of over 800 #Palestinians who were seeking aid...
India has one of the highest rates of (desktop) Linux usages in the world - hovering around 10% according to StatCounter. Why is this? One reason is concerns over software controlled by foreign countries - particularly the US and China. But another is cost.
The first major boost for Linux and other free software in India came in 2006, when VS Achuthanandan - who passed away today - was elected Chief Minister of the state of Kerala. His government came up with a policy to shift all government computers to free software, starting with schools and colleges.
The United States Federal Reserve should be examined as an institution to see if it operates successfully, US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said on Monday.
This is the first release where RISC-V 64-bit is officially supported by Debian Linux albeit with limited board support and the Debian RISC-V build process is handicapped by slow hardware.
With the Debian 13.0 release planned for 9 August, one of the notable fundamental features with this Debian 'Trixie' release is now supporting RISC-V as an official CPU architecture
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
It's also incorrect, since many forms of human communities have existed which did live in an equilibrium with the environment... You know, until we expropriated and killed them to accumulate more resources for capitalism
I hate how capcut has gotten to. Ive tried davcihi resolve but i find it isint as easy as capcut. I want to try a open source video editor for my linux mint laptop that is really free and so easy even a child could learn it.
I recently tried KDENlive for the first time and had a ton of stability issues. Multiple segfaults, corrupted saves, etc. Is that par for the course of the tool? Seems like it might have core issues with the implementation if a brand new user can crash it.
There is nothing like CapCut for Linux. There's Resolve, LightWorks, Shotcut, Kdenlive and the less evolved, Openshot. That's it, all the other editors found online or suggested here are nowhere near completion. Also, none of them have the feel of Capcut with its AI and advanced automatic features. If you want to go open source, I'd suggest you learn to use kdenlive. It's good enough with manual workarounds, as long as you don't shoot in 10bit or in RAW or need complex color grading. If you really require automatic AI stuff like in Capcut, stay with Windows/Mac or a tablet. That's the reality.
I think good, truly easy video editors are a dying breed. I loved Windows Live Movie Maker - rest in peace.
These days, I think it’s worth it just to learn a video editor. A lot of the skills transfer; I haven’t used DaVinci before, but I’ve used other major proprietary professional video editors like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro - the skills transfer. Just search how to do a thing you want to do a few times, and you’ll find it gets easier.
As others have said, I think KDEnlive is quite good; I haven’t had a huge amount of stability issues. From what I remember (granted, I may be out of date), OpenShot felt really jank in general; I used Shotcut for a while but had stability issues and UI annoyances. Comparatively, I enjoy KDEnlive.
I you want open-source then your best choice is either Shotcut or Kdenlive.
Shotcut is one of the simplest editor I've ever used...but only if you have simple edits to do, the more you wanna do something less simple the worst it gets.
Kdenlive on the other hand is fine to use in most use cases, but can be a bit tricky to understand at first.
So I always suggest Shotctut if you're sure you won't do crazy edits, Kdenlive otherwise, or to just use both if you are unsure.
Having a calorie deficit is the only way to lose weight. Everybody knows that. Exercise actually burns very few calories. There are many other health benefits to exercising but weight loss isn't really one of them.
In my experience, a calorie deficit is much easier if you eat better foods, rather than try to eat smaller portions of unhealthy foods. More fiber keeps you feeling full for longer. Find ways to incorporate lots more vegetables in your diet. I keep apples around for when I want a snack. I make bean tacos instead of chorizo (maybe I'll mix a little chorizo in), etc. Find sauces and ways to spice up veggies. Don't worry if your sauces and dressings are the most healthy. Just getting the vegetables is the most important.
Also cut back on drinking of you do that a lot. Lots more calories in alcohol than people realize.
That's like 3 beers worth. I'm not saying you can't burn significant calories by exercising but the effort needed is way more than simply not drinking 3 beers. Also most exercise isn't going to burn 800+ calories. The only way an average person is hitting those kind of numbers is if they have an intense manual labor job.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTHgc5LsX58Ys-YysMi/ Why do people fear socialism, but not fascism? Why does the idea of workers owning the means of production scare millions, while police states, corpora...
My first hurdle is understanding that i need to add a boot sequence and navigate to the EFI file in my mounted pen drive.
second hurdle is understanding i need to disable secure boot so that the dell bios doesnt think something is wrong and always run the bios repair program.
third is understanding that i need to disable Intel rapid storage for the full install (luckily linux mint tells us this)
and honestly the hardest thing was installing fastfetch cuz theres a lot of outdated information out there on how to install it on Mint.
the process took about 4 hours, i consider it very lucky that i was able to do it so fast.
if you go in not knowing what to do, it can seem 'difficult'. but it's mostly like on any other oem prebuilt:
optional: prep the target disk (backups, wipe or clear part table, etc), reset bios to defaults.
if necessary: switch from raid or rst to ahci sata mode, default boot mode to efi, disable secure boot. note that some distributions support secure boot but your method of creating an installer might not--you may be able to re-enable if you want after install.
note that hp systems have a hoop to jump through (a confirmation prompt to disable) after disabling secure boot on the next startup. do not use esc key to trigger boot menu, use f9 for boot menu, f10 for bios entry.. as esc will cancel the confirmation code prompt and automatically re-enable secure boot.
insert or plug-in installer, hit the magic key upon power on (f12 for dell, f9 for hp) to bring up boot menu and select installer media, boot and run installer.
I’m glad you said this, I was thinking “I just plug in the USB stick and install Linux”
In fact, the hardest but for me is remembering the special key to press upon boot up so it goes into boot selection mode and I can just select my USB stick…
Some laptops don't really let you boot from external install media so easily nowadays.
I helped a buddy get Linux Mint on their "old" laptop to try it out. But it turned out you needed some manufacturer provided code to unlock booting from anything but the main harddrive within the bios.
We contacted support but never heard back. We did find a work around when they decided to swap the existing HDD for an SSD, they used a USB to sata cable to install Mint on the SSD from their desktop then installed the SSD into their laptop in place of the original drive so it booted straight into that.
Welcome to Linux. Glad to see you're not letting the hurdles get in your way and are working through solutions. There's more to come.
You say "5 year old laptop" as if that's ancient... 10th gen Intel 😄. I don't even look at laptops newer than 5 years. Don't need much more for internet tasks and office work.
Ive got an HP Zbook g6 coming my way soon I'm excited about, and its way overkill for what I'm gonna use it for; i just need a bigger laptop because i have giant meat hooks for hands and I actually use the numpad
Tl;dr, you can get a lot of laptop at decent prices looking at "older" hardware
Hello, i have problem because i can't make it work for like a week. I tried a lot of different configurations and every time i try refind with encryption when refind starts there is no menu entry for encryptred disk, but with no encryption everything works fine. I looked a lot on arch wiki, some install scripts on github and i do what they do and it doesn't work. Maybe anyone could help?
Script i actually use:
execute_refind() {
BLKID1=$(blkid -s UUID -o value $ROOT)
BLKID2=$(blkid -s UUID -o value $CRYPT)
refind-install --usedefault "$ESP" --alldrivers
touch /boot/refind_linux.conf
if [ "$ENCRYPTION" == "yes" ] && [ "$FILESYSTEM" == "btrfs" ]
then
cat >> /boot/refind_linux.conf << EOF
"Boot with minimal options" "rd.luks.name=$BLKID2=artix root=UUID=$BLKID2 rootfstype=$FILESYSTEM rw add_efi_memmap quiet $NVIDIA_MODESET"
EOF
fi
if [ "$ENCRYPTION" == "no" ] && [ "$FILESYSTEM" == "btrfs" ]
then
cat >> /boot/refind_linux.conf << EOF
"Boot with minimal options" "rootflags=subvol=/@ root=UUID=$BLKID1 rw add_efi_memmap rootfstype=$FILESYSTEM initrd=@\boot\booster-$KERNEL.img quiet $NVIDIA_MODESET"
EOF
fi
if [ "$ENCRYPTION" == "yes" ] && [ "$FILESYSTEM" != "btrfs" ]
then
cat >> /boot/refind_linux.conf << EOF
"Boot with minimal options" "rd.luks.name=$BLKID2=artix root=UUID=$BLKID2 rootfstype=$FILESYSTEM rw add_efi_memmap quiet $NVIDIA_MODESET"
EOF
fi
if [ "$ENCRYPTION" == "no" ] && [ "$FILESYSTEM" != "btrfs" ]
then
cat >> /boot/refind_linux.conf << EOF
"Boot with minimal options" "root=UUID=$BLKID1 rw add_efi_memmap rootfstype=$FILESYSTEM quiet $NVIDIA_MODESET"
EOF
fi
execute_modules
}
Linux users who have Secure Boot enabled on their systems knowingly or unknowingly rely on a key from Microsoft that is set to expire in September. After that point, Microsoft will no longer use that key to sign the shim first-stage UEFI bootloader that is used by Linux distributions to boot the kernel with Secure Boot. But the replacement key, which has been available since 2023, may not be installed on many systems; worse yet, it may require the hardware vendor to issue an update for the system firmware, which may or may not happen. It seems that the vast majority of systems will not be lost in the shuffle, but it may require extra work from distributors and users.
Small companies which use old laptops with Windows might be bitten hard by this because they can become locked out of their hardware with no way to update it, or even make a backup!
And by the way, Intel motherboards which are running your Linux system may contain a copy of Minix - yes, the Minix from the historic Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate - which runs below the OS in the system management mode engine and is controlled by the vendor, which can e.g. update firmware via the network. SMM is normally not visible by the user but it can cause problems e.g. for real-time applications because it has higher privileges than the kernel and can interrupt all of the kernel at any time.
Are you reading this on a machine running a GNU/Linux distribution? A Windows machine? Or perhaps an Apple OS? It doesn’t really matter, because your computer is probably running MINIX anyway…
For a home desktop that's never left unattended with anyone untrustworthy, I don't see that Secure Boot is worth the effort in setting up.
Given that you have to re-sign the boot image every time you upgrade, any malware already running with root privileges on the machine could easily slip itself into the new signed image.
The best security is not running untrusted software to begin with.
Can you explain the detailed reason why you think that? Voicing opinions is nice of course but explaining the thought process and logic is, I think, almost always more interesting to other people.
To start with, what do you think is the "normal users" threath model? And, for example, if one happens to be a member of any of the various minorities that authoritarian governments of every color happen to single out and persecute in your countries case, what would you want to protect from? Or if you are, say, a lawyer, and have a professional obligation to protect sensitive data from theft?
Actually, I would love for you to explain to me how Secure Boot alone would protect someone from any of that. If you want to protect files, you need full disk encryption, not Secure Boot.
Or are you seriously expecting a government-level threat actor to bother to:
Sneak into your home while you're away or asleep;
Overwrite your bootloader or UEFI with a rootkitted image of the same version so it's impossible to tell;
Wait for you to boot your computer and enter your disk encryption password, then:
Use the rootkit to read the decrypted files off your disk?
That's the great thing about fascist governments, is they have no need to be that sneaky. They can just change the laws to make whatever you're doing illegal and jail you until you agree to give up your documents, or simply hit you with a $5 wrench until you tell them the password.
Secure Boot is a really contrived and, frankly, bad defense against an attack that is extremely difficult to execute in reality and does not happen often (are there any examples of a bootloader replacement against a home desktop in the wild?).
An actually good solution would be firmware support for LUKS-style FDE (with a password-encrypted key which then encrypts the rest of the disk), so that your bootloader is encrypted with the rest of your system and impossible to substitute without erasing the rest of the disk, until you enter the password. This way there's no need for key enrolment into firmware, and firmware manufacturers don't have to just trust MS. (the firmware of course needs to be protected too, by signing it with the manufacturer's key; if you flash something unsigned, a warning pops up Android-style before every boot).
If you are hiding something from the state (like your sexual orientation or something), your energy is much better spent encrypting your communications online and keeping your identities anonymous. If you are already suspicious enough to try and pull a bootloader replacement attack on you, any authoritarian state which would do that in the first place will just throw you in jail and fabricate evidence as needed.
If secure boot is off, and you run malware on your pc, it can change the boot process to escalate privileges.
This probably requires root or admin in the first place, but if they can install a malware loader, they can establish persistence so that even if you remove the os-level components, they'll be reinstalled on reboot.
Yeah, but the malware can just wait for a system upgrade where you sign a new boot image and slip itself in then.
It works for Windows because theoretically only Microsoft would have the signing key and it's not just sitting on disk somewhere. But then you're just trusting Microsoft, and also subject to vendor lock-in.
If secure boot is off, and you run malware on your pc, it can change the boot process to escalate privileges.
This is technically correct, but on a desktop system, malware executing in user space is normally already game over. It can exfiltrate and send your passwords or ssh private keys, change browser certificates or browser software, add user systemd sessions or crontab entries and can generally e.g. do everything a banking trojan would like to do.
As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong. I didn't use secure boot then though so I don't know if it would have still booted Windows. But I imagine it would.
That said, I've always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.
As commenters on the LWN thread said, I doubt that many firmwares even bother to check anyway. My motherboard happens to have had a bug where you can corrupt the RTC and end up in 2031 if you overclock it wrong.
Seems it compares the expiration date of the UEFI key with the signature date of the bootloader / OS keys. (See the comments on the LWN article, some are far more knowledgeable than I am.) So, no, it does not require a working on-board clock to lock you out if you are not extremely careful and fully understand each part.
That does not help if the master key in the key chain is expired.
Sure you can disable Secure Boot. But a password-protected BIOS is secured by TPM again. High levels of security always carry a risk of locking oneself out.
I don't think you understand what "enrolling your own keys" means in the context of Secure Boot.
The key affected here is specifically for the Linux shim signed by Microsoft. It is used by GRUB and some distros to work with Secure Boot.
Enrolling your own key means you add a new certificate to the key store. This is completely separate from the one provided by Microsoft and controlled only by you. The common recommendation is to remove all built-in keys and only add your own, to make this system as secure as possible.
OK, now you are talking about something a bit different - registering own keys in the UEFI system, which is significantly more involved than updating the BIOS, and also requires firmware support, and the firmware also needs to match the motherboard. And the whole issue with ACPI support for Linux shows clearly that having reams of specufications is not enough, the implementation of the BIOS needs to match that specification which whether thsz's the case you will only learn after you bought the hardware.
That said, I've always just enrolled my own keys. I know some other distros that make you enroll their keys as well like Bazzite. At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything, clean proper secure boot straight into UKI.
I didn't start talking about it, this was many comments above
At least that way you don't depend on Microsoft's keys and shim or anything,
The whole point of the article is that you do depend on their expired root key. You have produced a lot of text without even understanding the key issue. At that point I am wondering whether all that text was produced by an LLM?
I don't know that you've understood the issue either, and you're being kind of a jerk? My understanding is this mainly affects installation media. If you disable Secure Boot, install a Linux distro, enrol that distro's keys and then reenable it, you're fine. That seems to be what the commenter you're replying too is suggesting.
Please don't troll and come back to the topic. GP was completely missing the topic, do you want to avoid it?
. If you disable Secure Boot, install a Linux distro, enrol that distro's keys and then reenable it, you're fine.
Um, given that Secure Boot prevents any modification of your computer's boot chain - including installing another boot loader or OS - that's not how it works.
I'm not trolling, you called them an LLM, they clearly aren't, you're being a jerk. I'm not going to engage with someone who thinks they're the smartest person in the room.
That's the whole point of enrolling your own keys in the firmware. You can even wipe the Microsoft keys if you want. You do that from the firmware setup, or within any OS while secure boot is off (such as sbctl on Linux).
That's a feature that is explicitly part of the spec. The expectation is you password protect the BIOS to make sure unauthorized users can't just wipe your keys. But also most importantly that's all measured by the TPM so the OS knows the boot chain is bad and can bail, and the TPM also won't unwrap BitLocker/LUKS keys either.
Secure boot is to prevent unauthorized tampering of the boot chain. It doesn't enforce that the computer will only ever boot Microsoft-approved software, that's a massive liability for an antitrust lawsuit.
That is far more complex than a firmware update and also depends on a correct implementation of the spec in the BIOS - which, given the experiences with ACPI for Linux, is not at all something one can rely on.
I just tried to distro-hop and found my BIOS had been locked with a password. Assuming I didn't set a password that I subsequently forgot (and that isn't one of the many I have memorized), I figured this might have something to do with the age of the laptop (I have a HP 4540s). If certificate expiration is already affecting people then this might be it.
EDIT: I just forgot I set a password, and it took me 2 days to realize that I was stupid enough to have set the password that I used for everything when I was 12 years old.
You can self-sign and self-enroll secure boot keys. Can’t say it’s an easy process, though - I had a lot of misery with it on my Surface Go 1st Gen. Might be better on my Thinkpad.
Microsoft's keys are pre-installed to all motherboards, so boot binaries signed by Microsoft are trusted by default. afaik Microsoft keys often can't be removed, but not because it's not possible, but because it can brick devices. you can create your own MOK or Machine Owner Keys and set up your linux system to sign your bootloader and kernel with it, but that is in addition to Microsoft keys.
That's bullshit. ARM is an architecture and by itself does not specify secure boot any more than x86 does. Raspberry Pis don't have secure boot. You can unlock the bootloader on a Pixel, install GrapheneOS, and relock the bootloader just fine. Several other manufacturers allow bootloader unlocks no problem. The main reason you can't on some popular phones is US carriers, even international Samsungs you can unlock the bootloader and flash whatever you want on it.
I'm literally typing this comment on a phone running a custom OS (LineageOS on a OnePlus 8T). I'm literally 2 versions of Android ahead of the latest supported version. I also have a Galaxy S7 running Android 15, a phone that officially tops out at Android 8 and launched with Android 6. Both you literally just toggle the bootloader unlock option in the settings, no hacks no craziness, it's literally a feature.
At this point you're just straight up making shit up.
The only one I can't find for sure is whether there's any lockdown on the firmware for the Microsoft Surface and Copilot+ laptops, but I'm also not finding any sources pointing that it would be. But at this point you're buying Microsoft hardware, what do you expect.
Some people argue that one can work around such locking down of PC hardware. Do this or that to avoid issues with substantial tinkering.
But that is not a bug but a feature. Sure, as a technical Linux user you can work around some nastiness. Like working around privacy invasion on Facebook or Linkedin by "adjusting" settings, or "adjust" settings in Wimdows to make it more private and so on. The thing is: working against the platform becomes quickly a losing game, because you don't control the platform - Microsoft does. And it does not help you if you manage to re-gain control of your device after some hours of tinkering if 99.9% of people around you don't have the knowledge and time and store your data, photos, Emails on OneDrive and so on. Freedom is very much a collective thing and software freedom is no exception.
And this does not mean that the thinkering and hacking is in vain - but it is not enough. We need the practical right to control our devices.
In west Texas, storm chaser Laura Rowe captured the picture of a lifetime last night (May 17, 2021), with this fantastic shot of a mature supercell thunderstorm, illuminated at varying heights from the setting sun. By Timothy Jordan
I was wondering, is there any reason why I should buy the Steam Deck abroad in France instead of in my home of Canada?
So I (Canadian) am surprising my friend (from France) with a Steam Deck in October when I go visit them. It will just be the cheaper LCD version, since they won’t care about (or notice) the difference in quality.
Aside from buying adapters for the plug, I literally can’t think of a reason why I should buy it directly in Europe as opposed to getting it in Canada. It would be a lot easier since I can have it delivered to my address, don’t need a specific day and time for it to be delivered, don’t have to deal with any issues of ordering things in a foreign country (sometimes you need to have a local address to order and have things delivered, etc)
That said, I wanted to still check and see if there’s something I’m forgetting or just outright unaware of. I know there’s specific power requirements for the Steam Deck, but mine worked just fine with an adapter when I was last there in January.
Value-based allowances, which apply to goods you’re carrying (purchases or gifts), mean that you don’t have to fill in a customs declaration or pay tax or duty. You don’t have to declare goods (including gifts) so long as their total value or their quantity doesn’t exceed the allowance limits.
The overall market value of goods cannot exceed the following amounts: Arriving by plane or ferry: €430
Any item whose value exceeds the limit must be declared and you will need to pay the amount of value added tax (VAT) and customs duties that would usually apply. These duties and taxes apply to the full purchase price on the receipt or an agreed-upon estimated value.
If you are bringing multiple items into the country, each item will count toward your overall limit; once you reach the limit, any surplus goods will be taxed.
Also note that the Steam Deck contains a Li-Ion battery and thus isn't allowed in the cargo hold. So you'd have to take this into your carry-on onto the plane.
EDIT: Oh, and since it has a Li-Ion battery, you'll have to take it out of its packaging and have it scanned separately during the security check. At least that's how it usually is when travelling in the EU.
Technically, yes. And you would be able to ask for those taxes back upon returning to your home country (with the same phone). But since this would create huge queues at the airports, nobody actually enforces that.
However, travelling with e.g. 2 Steam Decks or with one in its original packaging raises suspicion and you could get stopped when going through the green portal at the airport.
What I hate about these AI-comparison articles is that nobody of those so-called "journalists" understands, that Apple's AI runs locally on the device. Whereas Gemini runs in Google's cloud - which in turn means that Google get's a copy of every single request/prompt. Also, no mention of iOS 26's new call screening feature - which asks unknown callers for their name and purpose of the call and displays this on the screen before your phone starts to ring. And, again, it's all happening on-device.
Also, no mention of iOS 26’s new call screening feature - which asks unknown callers for their name and purpose of the call and displays this on the screen before your phone starts to ring. And, again, it’s all happening on-device.
I'm no fan of Android, but it's had this capability for years. This feels like Apple inventing the rectangle again.
After years of innovation and community collaboration, we’re ending support for Clear Linux OS. Effective immediately, Intel will no longer provide security patches, updates, or maintenance for Clear Linux OS, and the Clear Linux OS GitHub repository…
i remember working on Intel when this was still on the works how it had so many issues. Also worked better with AMD. Intel is been struggling a lot lately with all this
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of what’s happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
Klassy is a highly customizable binary Window Decoration, Application Style and Global Theme plugin for recent versions of the KDE Plasma desktop. - paulmcauley/klassy
Im trying to reinstall cachyos using the iso on the usb like ive done in the past but the iso and the ventoy usb its on dont show up as options, theres only cachyos (alresdy installed) and snapshots as the options
I guess it doesnt detect a nonventoy (used impression) usb with the iso written to it either? A bit confused I dont mind limine but It not being able to boot from a recovery usb is a bit of an issue
NVM it did end up working off impressions and not ventoy? I think it ended up detecting my ssd which also has ventoy installed in the boot manager too, the name wasnt there before, odd
Like limine itself has no option for it, but bios wasnt showing one for my ssd or usb either, now it is after restarting a few times
To boot from external drives, you need to open your UEFI boot menu (press F11 or something like that at boot, it differs for each manufacturer). Limine is the loader installed on your hard drive that comes with your OS, it is for loading that OS.
Yep very odd it wasn't showing my drives, now it is and ventoy works, I unplugged and plugged them while restarting a fee times, guess it was just some weird error, still doesn't show up in limine itself but im assuming that its not supposed to
Trump could drag a 14 year old by her hair into central park in broad daylight and fuck her brains out, to a sold-out audience and claim it as fake without any repercussions.
Not really. His base will excuse authoritarian power grabs, blatantly racist policies, sexual assault, etc but this one might be the one that breaks him. The Q-anon stuff was all about a bunch of elite politicians having secret pedophile rings. They thought Trump was sent by God to expose that. The phrase "Epstein didn't kill himself" is probably more unifying than any flag. Pam Bondi made a big deal about releasing the Epstein files. His base was frothing at the mouth to finally let the world know. With the administration's sudden course shift, even his supporters are wanting answers.
On the 16th of July, at around 8pm UTC+2, a malicious AUR package was uploaded to the AUR. Two other malicious packages were uploaded by the same user a few hours later. These packages were installing a script coming from the same GitHub repository that was identified as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).
The affected malicious packages are:
librewolf-fix-bin
firefox-patch-bin
zen-browser-patched-bin
The Arch Linux team addressed the issue as soon as they became aware of the situation. As of today, 18th of July, at around 6pm UTC+2, the offending packages have been deleted from the AUR.
We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary measures in order to ensure they were not compromised.
Follow up
There are more packages with this malware found.
minecraft-cracked
ttf-ms-fonts-all
vesktop-bin-patched
ttf-all-ms-fonts
What to do
If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).
The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions. Some items they leave in the AUR by choice, if the Dev prefers it there. The key is to use the AUR sparingly and only if you trust the packager.
The arch maintainers package more software than most other distributions.
Sorry, but I fail to see this.
I suppose if you're accounting literally all independent distros, then you're probably right. However, if we'd be more realistic and compare it to other well-established independent distros^[I'm basically counting Alpine, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Slackware, Solus and Void. I didn't count Guix System and NixOS for how their 'repositories' are built different and therefore not easily comparable to the others.], then we notice that the vastness of the packages found in Arch's repository is rather lackluster at the very least. Heck, by virtually all metrics, Arch together with its derivatives undoubtedly belong in the upper echelons of usage stats; only being second to the Debian-family of distros. IMO, however, the size of its repository absolutely doesn't reflect this; as it's only bigger than Slackware, Solus and Void. The inclusion of these smaller projects is arguably charitable on my side*. But to drive the point home very clearly: Arch's repository is smaller than Alpine's, Debian's, Fedora's, openSUSE's and Gentoo's with a ratio of (about) two to one (except for openSUSE).
I don't know if raw package counts is the best comparison. Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.
Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.
I don't know if raw package counts is the best comparison.
You're probably right. Do you think we got anything better to go by?
Unlike say Fedora, Arch bundles everything related to a project in the same file. If you want Qt6-base on Arch, that is one package. If you want it on Fedora, it is going to have a lib, header, docs, and maybe a few other packages.
Can't comment on this. Though, the list of packages with qt6 in their name is considerably longer in Fedora. However, I wonder if this simply reflects that Fedora, by virtue of having a larger repository, also has more stuff related to qt6. Or, as you posited it, chooses to package the same content over multiple packages instead of bundling them like it's supposedly happening on Arch.
Just from personal experience, I do not have issues with finding packages in the main repos, with only a handful of my packages coming from the AUR. This is not the case with others, like Fedora where extra repos need to be added, like EPEL and RPM Fusion.
Hmm..., I feel you might be conflating stuff. Please allow me to elaborate on what I mean.
Fedora is not able to include some packages in its own repository due to legal reasons. As such, these are relayed to RPM Fusion instead. Which means that a well-functioning Fedora installation (almost necessarily) desires to install some packages from RPM Fusion. So, RPM Fusion exists as a 'hack' of sorts to protect Fedora from legal charges and NOT because they're too lazy (or something) to ship those packages themselves. To be clear, RPM Fusion is accepted as a trusted third-party repository.
Arch, on the other hand, is rather lenient on what they can include in their repositories. Basically enabling them to package within their repositories all codecs and whatnot without them being visibly worried about the legal consequences of this ordeal.
To be honest, I don't know exactly where this discrepancy comes from. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to how Arch is basically a genuine community distro while Fedora has official ties to Red Hat.
I 100% agree. Everyone raves about the AUR but it really feels like more of a necessity than a value add because so little is actually packaged for arch. And the AUR is definitely more annoying and feels more jank than just having it in your default repo.
It has already happened a few times with other repos. Although AUR is especially susceptible because there's no vetting at all, it's a free-for-all that everyone can publish to within a few clicks. This will for sure happen again within a couple months, but better hidden the next time.
The Arch User Repository is a way for anyone to easily distribite software.
Hence it has never been secure, and rather than claim it is, you mostly see people and documentation warn you about this, and to be careful if using it.
Any schmuck can make whatever they want available via the AUR. That's how even the tiniest niche project can often be installed via the AUR. But you trade in some security for that convenience.
What a nice attack on privacy-friendly infrastructure.
And then, Arch AUR has such suspicious things like the Brave browser which claims to reduce tracking.... and works together with advertisers.
To be clear, AUR is fantastic if you develop some experimental package and you want to give it to your friends to try it out easily. But not as a general distribution mechanism.
Wait what happens once some government or state actor hacks rust's install script rustup with its curl | bash install procedure and relying on TLS certificates which are e.g. issued by the Russian government. (No, the rust project won't use a Russian/Chinese/US Gov certificate but your browser will trust near all of them...)
You're using that to download a program. If they can MitM the shell script, they can just as well MitM the program that you'll run right after the download...
Sure, I guess, if you've got a distro installed on your PC and use the distro-provided packages to install the Rust compiler, then you can't be subject to such certificate MitM attacks.
Your comment sounded like you were primarily concerned about the shell script piping rather it just being a program which can be downloaded without going through distro packages.
Your comment sounded like you were primarily concerned about the shell script piping rather it just being a program which can be downloaded without going through distro packages.
The AUR install scripts are just downloaded shell scripts which are executed (hopefully after inspection).
curl | bash just skips the inspection step - curl downloads to stdout, bash executes from stdin.
We are getting to the point where inviting more people in means we will need an automated babysitter to watch for this shit and to pull it once it’s discovered. Apple has a walled garden approach that’s certainly taken a big chunk of malware threats out of their devices but their walled garden approach is ridiculous and impractical for Linux. The Microsoft method of monitoring and second guessing everything with antimalware programs is also suspect because it is super easy to abuse and resource intensive. We have clamAV but clam kinda sucks.
Linux is at the point where we need something that audits what’s going in and automatically yanks it back out remotely if it’s found to be a problem. Things can only be added by the user, but the bot can remove them without interaction of the user.
I don’t see this happening though. Instead, I see this as more of a rust vs C thing all over again, where valid critiques are drowned out by “improve your skills bro.”
Gotta assume that if any Arch users actually fell for that one, that they either let their kids use their device or they're generally not smart ( which absolutely goes against my stereotypical view of an arch user ).
The stereotype of arch uses generally being smart is no longer. The "I use arch btw" meme brought a whole new user base to arch. You'll find them on r/unixporn showing off their hyperland rice that they copied from some other user..
I had no idea that existed but I’ve just returned from r/unixporn. There are some sick setups. Also we all copy. My entire neovim config is copied and modified from a couple dozen setups I admired. Nothing wrong with copying things you like. Don’t gate keep Linux.
Coming about three weeks after DXVK 2.6.2, the DXVK 2.7 release adds support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer Vulkan extension by default on newer AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to significantly reduce CPU overhead in games like Final Fantasy XIV, God of War, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Watch Dogs 2, and others.
Good for them. F-Droid's argumentation is solid and they don't violate freedom 0, because this decision doesn't affect Gab's freedom to run their own software.
what even was that about freedom zero? as if freedom zero meant all free software must be accepted in all repositories?? you are still free to run it regardless
It's the social platform that takes the people that Parlor and "Truth" Social won't take. Genuine Nazis and conspiracy nuts every which way. It's bonkers shit.
We respect Tusky’s decision to block mentioned website; it’s their right to introduce restrictions like these into their software. We also respect Fedilab’s decision not to hardcode a login block; instead they are actively working on making it easier to block certain domains in the app itself and thus giving users more power to moderate which content they’ll see. If people disagree with F-Droid’s decision not to flag Fedilab, a idea is to develop a decentralized tag system based on package IDs which allow third-party servers to share their own warnings with their community.
They're not blocking any fediverse apps that you can use to connect to any server.
Feel free to use any Lemmy or Mastodon client to connect to any hate-filled instances your hateful little heart desires. If you don't like that some apps have built-in blocklists, use different apps, or modify them. That's the beauty of open source.
Do what you want, just don't expect the rest of the world to amorally do it for you. This is perfectly in keeping with open-source philosophy.
trixie (aka debian 13) is about to get released with plasma 6.3. it seems that finally x11 is being left behind, which is good, but it worried me a little bit because
my nvidia graphics card is old: the 470 driver is the latest version that supports it (so no wayland support from nvidia proprietary drivers ever)
on bookworm (debian 12, the current stable version), nouveau works pretty well, but it crashed more or less daily when i tried to daily drive it at work
x11 is still very well supported by plasma 6, but the near future has no place to it and i worry i would eventually get stuck without updates to my system as the newer versions lose x11 support. i decided to try wayland+nouveau again on trixie to see if i had better luck this time
it all worked way better than i expected. performance is seemingly on par with the proprietary driver, i've had no crashes so far and i've been using it for a week and even screensharing, one of the most problematic aspects of the experience last time i tried, worked well. the one problem i had was with the slack flatpak, which didn't support wayland for some reason, so it had to run on xwayland. screen sharing wayland applications from x11 apps is possible through the xwaylandvideobridge, which kinda works, but it crashed xwayland entirely at one point, killing both x11 applications i had running. i won't blame that on the system itself and installing the slack deb package fixed the problem anyway
all in all, it seems like i can safely switch to plasma 6+wayland+nouveau at work
I’ve been daily driving Debian testing + Wayland for a year or so though I have AMD. Pretty solid, gaming has worked wonderfully and generally do a bit of development and docker stuff too.
Could someone explain what's going on with this comment and why its upvoted so much? It's a genuine question. What's wrong with his phone (and how do you know what he uses)?
I've got some great Linux swag from Ubuntu Korea, but I've been looking to buy new clothes lately and would love to rock more FOSS.
I see a couple websites that sell FOSS branded clothing, but does anyone have good experience buying high quality hats/tshirts/sweaters/active wear from any of these online retailers? Bonus points if the retailers donate proceeds to development
If only they sold coffee mugs! Every time I look somewhere for swag, even if they do have coffee mugs, they're just these diddly little 10 oz things--not big enough for this coffee achiever!
Looking for the ideal Linux Gifts? Come check out our giant selection of T-Shirts, Mugs, Tote Bags, Stickers and More. CafePress brings your passions to life with the perfect item for every occasion.
Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it's growing fast.
I tested Gnome and KDE Plasma5 in the last year. KDE Plasma is in my opinion the first DE which is comparable with Win/MacOS. It looks modern, is pretty much feature complete and as an average user its nice to have useful apps preinstalled (calculator, libreoffice, firefox and so on), but no bloatware.
Its just a bit more customizable than windows, which is perfect and also not fiddly and a pain. It certainly has a handful of quirks, like Windows does, but you get used to them.
If I have to set up elderly relatives with a computer, I'd strongly consider a KDE Plasma Desktop
Well as someone who's been using gnome since about 3.10 I might be able to explain my view: Before that I've used plasma and Unity and a whole lot of Mate but then I started using Gnome for a pretty and smooth experience right out of the Box. Now I've simply been using it for so long that it's muscle memory all the way. I don't agree with everything the gnome devs decide and I definitely am annoyed that I have to use extension for small things that should just be a toogle in the settings but I've realized some time ago that if I did switch to plasma I would use all the customizability to make it work like Gnome ... so I stay on Gnome.
I instinctively do that as well, on Windows, Cinnamon and Plasma and it didnt work on Gnome, Superkey opened the Startmenu but then typing didnt search. Thats what I wanted to ask, if I miss something obvious or if Gnome doesnt offer that feature out of the box.
Debian probably changed the Key for the Spotlight-like search.
SteamOS and Bazzite are certainly contributing among gamers, but there also seem to be a lot of casual users moving to Mint and pop!_os. I've seen quite a few people using them to extend the life of older hardware.
The 5% story was published yesterday. This new article from today says that they trust the government site figures more than StatCounter which was cited on yesterday's story.
I know! This article kind of addresses that with this line: "although we can't be certain of the exact numbers, Linux is clearly growing".
Interestingly enough, reading through again, the 6% figure is from US government sites, but the growth numbers in the line I quoted in the post is actually global. Here's the graph they're referring to:
I hadn't noticed that dip in 2025 until I looked at this graph more closely!
Yeah, unfortunate to rain in the parade but GNU/Linux definitely needs some attention sooner rather than later. Plenty of design benefits, but also plenty of pitfalls from an OS sec POV.
Average users aren't installing SELinux or Qubes so I hope no-one was actually going to reply with what Linux can do as opposed to the everyday user experience.
After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.
I only installed it once for fun in a VM but didn't really use it. It's different to Linux but you could get used to it. As far as I know however the hardware that it properly runs on is quite limited, mainly older stuff. So I wouldn't recommend it as a daily driver but I would recommend to try it out.
But Norway's Linux spiked up to almost 30% in July 2024 as well. So I don't really trust these sites. My guess is that it's due to Tesla's web browser or something? Tesla is the most popular electric car brand in Norway: 77k Model Y and 50k Model 3 are registered, and the only model with higher numbers is the Nissan Leaf with 81k, but that'll be taken over very shortly (so far in 2025, there have been over 11k Model Y registrations, with the next runner-up being the Toyota BZ4X with 4,6k)
There's an uptick in 'Unknown' (currently at 26%).
Linux adoption might have slowed down because India - US relations have improved since then, because Trump can be distracted by promising him trade deals. Of course the deal he wants (giving US agri companies access to the Indian market) will face opposition from farmers' unions, so I'm not sure what the govt's long-term plan is.
One good thing is that when a govt dept switches to Linux, it sort of sticks. And govt contracts are very profitable, so we'll likely see greater interest from both hardware and software companies.
A king once summoned a wise man who had done him a great service and said, “Name your reward.” The wise man replied, “Your Majesty, I ask for a simple thing. Give me one percent Linux desktop market share for the first square of the chessboard, two percent for the second square, four percent for the third square, and so on, doubling the amount for each of the 64 squares.” The king, thinking this was a modest request, said, “Surely you jest! Such a small reward for such a great service? Ask for gold, land, or jewels instead.” But the wise man insisted, and the king agreed. The king ordered his treasurer to calculate the total. Starting with 1% for the first square, 2% for the second, 4% for the third, 8% for the fourth… by the time they reached the tenth square, they needed 512% of the desktop market. The treasurer, pale with realization, informed the king that by the 64th square, they would need more market share than could possibly exist in the entire universe of computing devices. The king then understood that what seemed like a humble request was actually impossible to fulfill, and he gained a new respect for the power of exponential growth.
KDE Plasma is so good, I love it. But I think that Cinnamon (the default environment for Linux Mint) is also super user-friendly.
There's no good excuse not to use Linux in 2025 if you're a home user. Except maybe if you rely on some software such as SharePoint, the Adobe or the Serif Affinity suites.
If you game Cachyos (just installs everything relevant for you, coming to linux itll help you figure out whats commonly used), endeavoros if you wanna set up arch quickly, grab stuff for yourself and build your own desktop, bazzite if you game and are scared to break shit, idk if I would reccomend ubuntu just because I don't like snaps or the snap store, just comparing it to flathub, flathubs missing a few games/apps like rexuiz but nothing important.
Bazaar is pretty nice to use (new bazzite default), one thing I disliked coming to linux was lack of gui download manager and progress in the appstores, tried them all and hated them, while Bazaar feels great and comparing the search to others it actually works, like if I search fps all the fps games pop up, while on others maybe one or two that have it in the title.
I think ppl get terminal anxiety but thats less and less of an issue, like you don't need to ever touch it because of stuff like octopi, software/discover/bazaar,etc. I remember just getting anxious thinking id forget a command I really need to remember and I wouldn't have internet axis and id be fked (not an issue lol)
The key point is that Europe's governments are ditching MS one by one. One of the state governments of India, that of Kerala, is also fostering a local chapter for open source and Linux.
The device in question is the USB dongle for my 2.4 GHz wireless headset. Everything works fine except for volume control, so it is stuck at max volume, regardless of where the volume slider in pavucontrol is. Volume controls within individual websites and programs work, but it seems that the system volume control is delegated to the USB device, which itself has no concept of volume control. This is the case with both pulseaudio and pipewire. Is there a way to limit the system-wide volume before it reaches the dongle?
I am using a laptop, with a cheaper monitor that only has one hdmi input. I have two devices that I want to use on this monitor, My laptop and my xbox series, so I got an hdmi switcher.
The xbox handles switching to and from it's input without a hitch, but my laptop can takes up to a minute to recognize the switch and display to the monitor, sometimes not recognizing it at all.
I was thinking that having the laptop continue to output the display whether or not it recognizes the monitor as disconnected would help make switching between them more seamless. Is there a way to achieve this?
I am using KDE and I have the "Do Nothing" option selected under close lid in power options.
I think what you want is an EDID emulator with passthrough or whatever it's called. EDID is how a monitor tells a device what resolution to send and other info. Some cheap HDMI splitters, adapters, audio extractors, etc will let you emulate a specific EDID. One of my audio extractors lets you fake stereo vs surround support to trick the source into sending surround - I think that's also through EDID - since if you're trying to extract surround, it might be because your real TVs EDID is for stereo I assume. So you probably want something like that in before the switch so that the laptop always thinks something is plugged in. Your switch seems to be too smart in actually passing through the real monitor's EDID so the laptop is able to see when it switches.
Just use the linux equivalent of github.com/VirtualDrivers/Virt… When the wayland people stop pretending you don't need it in 3 to 5 years, sometime around when they realize that network transparency is really important actually
Add virtual monitors to your windows 10/11 device! Works with VR, OBS, Sunshine, and/or any desktop sharing software. - VirtualDrivers/Virtual-Display-Driver
My local organic maps started to download the whole world. Every single map it could find. I tried stopping it but the only way to achieve that is to turn the application off. On starting it again, it resumes downloading.
Why?
The android based version found on f-droid is easier to use. I wanted to use the desktop based one because I work from home more often than elsewhere.
Unfortunately I don't know how yo help with your original question then.
CoMaps is a recent fork because Organic Maps shows signs of corporate takeover and going against the principals of FOSS More details here lwn.net/Articles/1024387/
The desktop version feels more like a prototype to help with development/debugging then an actual user-facing app. (especially given how all the debugging stuff is right there in the main toolbar)
💥 USF operators dodged a missile and struck an enemy SAM system
In Donetsk Oblast, operators of the 413th “Raid” Battalion of the Unmanned Systems Forces detected and struck a Strela-10 surface-to-air missile system.
During a reconnaissance mission, the “Raid” UAV was spotted by the enemy, who immediately launched a missile. However, the pilot maneuvered and successfully evaded the strike. After the failed attempt, the SAM crew tried to hide the system in a forest belt.
Thanks to the drone's survival and the operators' skill, the Strela was tracked during repositioning and hit with a precise strike. The air defense system was destroyed along with its crew.
🇺🇦 USF: One step ahead!
Subscribe to the official Telegram channel of the Unmanned Systems Forces
💥 Оператори СБС ухилилися від ракети та уразили ЗРК противника
На Донеччині оператори 413-го батальйону «Рейд» Сил безпілотних систем виявили та уразили зенітно-ракетний комплекс «Стріла-10».
Linux has surpassed 5% desktop market share in the US (5.03% in June 2025), per StatCounter, driven by privacy concerns, rising costs of Windows/macOS, and user-friendly distros like Ubuntu.
My computer just freezes and needs to be manually restarted, happens during boot when the terminal screen and flags pop up usually, could be a cachyos issue tho, happens primarily after I sudo pacman -Syu before shutdown
Close Trump allies like Steve Bannon say "the president is pissed every time he looks at the BRICS dedollarization effort". The US fears the Global South challenge to the dollar's exorbitant privilege
Brics is basically an alignment against the west, rather than for something. Each of the members has ambitions that are, at best, completely different from one another, and in some cases, contradictory. It reminds me of the cold war era non-aligned movement.
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
obligatory I know this is not a linux question, but you provide good information and alternatives
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
are qr codes and pkpass files the same? what other formats do transportation authorities use?
qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?
after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?
what other formats do transportation authorities use?
To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?
Exactly. No matter the y dimension. Barcode data is only stored in x. Whereas QR uses x and y for data.
They also use the corner squares and a few specific dots to allow scanning from greater angles. Basically allowing the data to be read in 3d space. Even though only 2d is used to store that data.
This is why QR can work well with cameras. Whereas bar codes are designed for very short range laser reflection.
PS lots of info on QR online including open source programs to make your own.
The same goes for bar codes. But readers involve some very simple maker skills. Making simple barcode readers was a common school science project in the early 90s.
Your generic "barcode" for something like a UPC is considered a 1D barcode and uses things like the spacing of the lines and thickness to encode data. Although some 1D barcodes can detect the barcode is damaged they cannot do error recovery.
Your 2D barcodes, like QR or Data Matrix, store data in both directions and depending on format can have varying levels of error correction (duplicate data) built into the barcode. They also obviously can take up less room and hold the same or more data as well. You do need a scanner that can do 2D barcodes though, as not all scanners will read them.
ESWIN Computing is launching a new SBC running RISC-V. In a joint statement with Canonical, they have announced first-party support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the new device. Good news for anyone wanting to diversify away from ARM SBC's.
Canonical announced today that they teamed up with ESWIN Computing to ship Ubuntu Linux as the preferred operating system on their ESWIN Computing EBC77 Series single board computer
According to my statistics that I look at, my second largest group are those who are on some Linux distribution (it just shows up as "Linux" there for me). Why did I write this? Because this group of people indirectly start their system through something called initramfs. Let's take a look at what it is and how to use it to our advantage.
Use the translator in the sidebar to translate the page.
This is a bit of a rant; feel free to skip it if you’re here for the KDE content. This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and …
Yeah I opted for the Framework 13, even with the less than perfect keyboard and lack of touch. My hope is that touch will be an option in the future. otherwise its a near perfect option.
No but on my 3 in 1 I find the touch screen and pen very useful as a big tablet for consumption, laptop for productivity and gaming, and writing and drawing pad.
I'm constantly trying to touch the screen on my work provided laptop, and my FW13. I spent a long time with a fancy Chromebook for my couch computing needs, when away from the desktop.
I’ve been daily driving a framework 13 for like 9 months now. I’m pretty happy with it as a Linux machine.I can and will nitpick here to some of the points made in the article - but I’d buy another / recommended it regardless.
the touchpad. It’s a diving board style. It’s also got a good amount of play in it prior to clicking. The diving board style means it’s tough to click at the top. Tapping works great. The extra play takes a little getting used to. It’s 1000% functional and works well - but if you’re snobby about trackpads, you won’t like it. It’s way worse than an Apple touchpad, but an upper end windows touchpad. The trackpads play also tends to allow “crap” and dirt to fall in there. I’ve had to take it apart once to clean it out (which is super easy to do on a framework, but it’d be nicer if I didn’t have to do it at all)
the price - it’s a bit high for the specs. But that comes with the territory of a non glued laptop
battery life is ok
speakers are kind of crappy. They are fine, but they ain’t wowing anyone.
the keyboard is ok
That’s it. 9 months of daily use, I love it, that’s my complaints list. The idea here is that someday, a better trackpad, or keyboard, or speakers will become available-and it’ll take me 5 minutes to upgrade. It’s a desktop laptop. And for me, everything “just works” on fedora 42.
Framework are nowhere near the scale of any of the large manufacturers, and they've had to spend a huge amount of time and money on R&D, so their laptops are probably always going to cost more. IMO it's worth the price though, given you can keep updating it over time.
I'm curious about this as well. The keyboard flex was always brought up by early reviewers for the Framework 16, and I think Framework said they would make a more sturdy keyboard for it later, but I haven't heard any updates about that.
Thanks, that's good to know. I heard the Framework 13 wad solid; I thought I was replying to a comment about the Framework 16, though. That must have been a different comment. I heard the 16 has a little flex.
Literally zero flex on the keyboard. I just pulled it out and pressed hard on it. No flex of the keys pushing down through the metal (like a gasket mounted mechanical keyboard would do), and zero flex of the aluminum.
I've been getting annoying amdgpu crashes every now an then. I've tried all the various BIOS and kernel params but so far nothing has worked. Next step is rolling back a kernel version, at least that's what I've gathered from all the threads about it. It's bothersome but not frequent enough to be a real pain.
(This is an amd framework 13 with fedora 42 / wayland)
I've had mine about 4 months, minimal issues. I got a 7840U slightly on sale when the new AI 300 series came out.
I'm also running fedora 42, but it's Bluefin, based on silverblue. Everything works out of the box.
My biggest complaint is the sleep battery drain, iirc it's something like a few percent per hour, so I just get in the habit of turning it completely off if I'm not home with it plugged in. Otherwise it's dead when I need it, which sucks.
Also the fan can be a little loud and overzealous under barely moderate load, though I've found keeping it in power saving mode helps keep things cooler. Though I've been using it for note taking during some schooling this week, and it's been stone cold and silent, lasts all day on a single charge. So it definitely depends on your load. I appreciate having the power available when I need it, but wish it was better at keeping itself underclocked (or whatever it needs to do).
And finally the stock Wi-Fi 6 card in it gives some people problems with certain routers. Though I've only ever had problems with my parents starlink router 🤷♂️ That's a quick $20 upgrade though, to Wi-Fi 7, I just haven't needed to 🤷♂️
But still I'd buy another in a heartbeat.
Keyboard is great. Screen (2.8k) looks great to my eyes, though others say it has issues. No flex in the body. Touchpad is a little funky, but still great.
Plus when I want to upgrade the platform in a few years, or any component breaks before then, I can just fix it or upgrade it.
I wrecked my Framework about 3 months after purchasing it. Damaged the corner from an ugly fall. Being able to easily purchase the parts to repair it was fantastic. I’m a huge fan. My only gripe, like you said, is the touchpad. It’s not terrible, though.
Anyone here have a StarLabs laptop (briefly mentioned in the article) and am opinion on it? I'm thinking about replacing my crappy System76 laptop and looking for something with good build quality.
I think it's (one of) the best laptop brands in regards to coreboot support. The build quality of my starbook is great. The biggest + for me is how helpful, polite and friendly the support staff is.
I have a Pangolin 12. While it has great specs and software support, the build quality is horrible, and over the course of two years now, I have had to screw it open and bend the laptop case in position more often then I'm comfortable with. It is the far, far opposite of rugged, which is the main reason I want to replace it. Twice now, it has just randomly decided to not boot for one or two weeks...
Hmm I have Serval WS which quality is top notch. The keyboard feels nice. The screen is 4K 144Hz. All of the elements are aluminium so there is no bending. (Except some parts like probably keycaps of the keyboard and so on).
Sorry to hear that you have this experience. However I think you can count on System76 because they give for their laptops lifetime support.
The Serval WS is also more than twice the price of my Pangolin... and I had a one year warranty, so I'm not sure what you mean with lifetime support. As for the specs (i.e. the screen etc.), yeah, they are great. But the case is very poorly designed on my pang12, and gets bent out of shape, which can cause mechanical failure in the hinge, quite frequently, despite the aluminum chassis. My complaint is just that it is far from rugged, which is problematic for me, as I travel a lot with it. But your mileage may vary.
PS: one more thing that really bothers me is the known problem with the touchepad on the pang12, which regularly fails. Mine also came with a faulty motherboard, which suggest bad quality control. Over all, these issues have caused me to lose faith in System76 hardware.
Regrading warranty I meant lifetime support for problems related to your System76 laptop. The warranty for a hardware is gone I think but I guess when you describe your issues correctly and they won't resolve it maybe they will suggest you something friendly.
And I get your point with the case. Tbh looked like it.
Hmm do you have up-to-date firmware? I had similar issue resolved by it.
Also faulty motherboard sounds like manufacturer issue not yours.
It seems to be getting a little better lately, but historically they just didn't give firmware updates. I went 3 years without a stable bios update for my 12th gen Intel mainboard on linux despite known vulnerabilities since launch (just got its first update last month).
I actually upgraded my mainboard within that time, so I went the full lifetime of the product with an insecure BIOS and none of the firmware improvements that were promised at launch like thunderbolt 4 certification. For all practical purposes, firmware support ended when it left the factory until just last month.
That said, my new ryzen ai 350 main board just got its first update to patch some vulns that were disclosed a month ago. So still not in time for the coordinated disclosure, but a month is way better than 3 years so I'll take what I can get.
Fine, then "more ugly and cumbersome" than it needs to be. I frequently have to hook up laptops to devices that simply don't have wifi (think unconfigured network devices like routers and the like), so connecting via cable is the only option. Having a gigantic, plastic, snag-prone wart sticking out of my laptop certainly wouldn't help matters.
Most companies still change their laptops’ keyboard layouts in random negative ways every year; ship with stupid screen resolutions, woefully bad speakers, and disappointing touchpads; and stuff the most powerful processor and GPU in there and don’t focus enough on tuning the cooling, power usage, and fan profiles.
I don't really get these nitpicks. If you're planning to use the laptop as your daily driver, do what every other power user does and get a set of good peripherals.
The perfect laptop is one that works well with external gpu, then you just max out cpu and everything else positive about a laptop without worrying about cramming a gpu in there while still getting a thin and light laptop with a good batterylife and nice screen
It is even worse when you are on the secondary market. The company's product pages are broken. Trying to compare across different release years is way harder.
I assumed the reason for this had to do with the production systems and supply chains. They can get a certain number of x parts at y price from a factory located in a given location. You get enough parts in proximity to each other and you make it a model.
Its one thing for a small company to have enough components to have only a few models but with the volume dell or HP moves, they would need to really invest in suppliers or actually make the components themselves.
I dont imagine the marketing people have come up with all the options, they're just the ones who have to try to sell want they're given.
Thankfully I have some requirements for laptops that very significantly narrow my options: - It must have a good, ergonomic keyboard - It must have a good pointing stick
It's not what you would normally call an ergo keyboard with a curved / split key bed, but I think they're superior to the majority of recent laptop keyboards, especially compared to the flat square chiclets of MacBooks and the others who blindly copied them. The keys are curved so you get tactile feedback of where your fingers are and the action also feels good to type on.
You seriously can't go wrong with the lenovo thinkpads on eBay. I Got a thinkpad E14 ryzen 7 (7th gen), 48gb ram, 1tb ssd for $400 on ebay with a small hair crack on the hinge.
At the end of the day, a laptop is a laptop, and the cost difference between a $2000 brand new laptop and a $400 used laptop there really is no argument/justification to be made to buy a $2000 laptop in less-intensive tasks. Here's a better instance of your money: find a $400 laptop with semi-good performance (ryzen 3 or intel equivalent) put $1600 to a gaming computer and setup a virtual environment with a radeon or rtx gpu at your fingertips.
Well I say it's no wonder people gravitate towards it but I don't actually like it myself. It sucks that they make it basically impossible to upgrade snything. And that there storage and RAM upgrades cost several times more than they should.
I have a Macbool air (not by choice) and I installed asahi linux a couple of weeks ago. Main take away is that it's really good except for software support. I've had a bit of trouble finding programs that work well on arm even open source projects often don't compile there programs to work on arm.
Here is a quick series of frequently asked questions about the X11 session kissing us goodbye. Shoutout to Nate from which I copied the format of the post. Is Xorg unmaintained and abandoned? No,...
Hello there! Here's the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.
now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?
How do you plan to restore if the whole drive dies?
good point: I guess if the problem is that I messed something up I may just run the backup script in reverse? if the problem is HW then I'd have to reinstall and then restore the backupped directory probably is there a "standard" way?
I usually only keep documents and media. Programs can be redownloaded and reinstalled (and it might be better to reinstall them in case you move to a new OS anyway to ensure compatibility).
For docker specifically, only keep stuff that's specific for your instance; which you normally setup as an external volume anyway. Docker is designed such that you should be able to nuke the container, and all persistent data is restored via an external volume on the host. If you're not doing that, you should immediately go and set that up now (to get the data out safely, setup a volume connection such that the container path is new - that way you don't accidentally destroy what's there, copy the stuff you need out, then readjust the path so it's correct)
thanks for the reply! Yes for sure I'm backing up all the /home directory, but I'd like to preserve also important configurations like ssh, cronjob etc, but I don't really know which directories are important for this and which are not
Don't forget to grab any /etc configurations you've made to adapt the system to your hardware or services. You don't need all of /etc, just whatever you've changed to not be default.
I back up all user data, for me that's some folders in /var, all of /etc (don't need everything, but it's small enough), mysqldumps and pgsqldumps of my databases and the output of dpkg --get-selections. And the backup script itself.
Everything is rsynced to a server in another location.
I want to switch to Borg backup but haven't found the time yet.
I recommend Borgmatic, a declarative way to set up borg backups. I find it much nicer than a having a backup.sh script and the configuration is really straight-forward.
I want to switch to Borg backup but haven’t found the time yet.
Since you haven't switched yet, perhaps consider restic too. I looked into Borg when I was trying to decide which backup software to use, but ended up deciding on restic instead and using resticprofile to ease implementation.
Only the first backup, after that with most backup software it will do incremental backups with delta transfer, so will only send the data that has changed since the last backup.
Why? I have a hard time imagine a use case where restoring the OS itself would be appropriate.
I can imagine restoring data, obviously, and services running with their personalization ... but the OS is something generic that should be discarded at whim IMHO. You probably chance few basic configuration of some services and most likely that's stored in /etc but even then 99% is default.
You can identify what you modified via shell history, e.g. history | grep /etc and potentially save them or you can also use find /etc -type f -newerXY with a date later than the OS installation and you should find what you modified. That's probably just a few files.
If you do back up anything beyond /home (which should be on another partition or even disk than the OS anyway) you'll most likely save garbage like /dev that might actually hinder your ability to restore.
So... sure, image the OS if you actually have a good reason for it but unless you work on archiving and restoring legacy hardware for a museum then I doubt you do need that.
You need to make your own plan about what's important to you. Don't waste time backing up stuff you can quickly download again - like docker images. Just know where the stuff is that you care about (such as any mounted volumes in docker with your own data on) and back that up, and make everything automated. If you do it manually, chances are you'll gradually stop doing them.
I wrote some things about properly backing up data that may be of use.
Backing up your important data is essential. I’ve built many systems over the years, and this is one system that I’m currently using, having thought a great deal about it.
I have used a combination of rsync and borg to backup to an external drive. Then I was feeling adventurous and tried borgbackup2. It was a mistake. Then I learned of rdiff-backup. Easy to setup, but even incremental backups of my home dir took many hours to complete. This is no solution to have regular backups for me.
I decided to go with btrfssnapshots instead. I recently reinstalled everything and I have finally btrfs. I bought a new external NVME drive for my backups where all the snapshots will go. Btrfs has even a parent-option to copy incremental snapshots to another filesystem (the parent snapshots being on both filesystems).
I did not finish my setup, so I cannot share any scripts yet.
It is a question I've spent a lot of time trying to work out. Can't speak to docker.
Some of the specifics of Keeps and Dontkeeps depend on details of your system. You have to find out where the distro, DM and other apps keep the following:
Dontkeeps: - trashes - temp files - file indexes .. IMHO these dont backup properly if you leave them in and will prevent you from completing the task - device files
Keeps: - list of installed packages --- explicit and deps separate if possible - config files: /etc, ~/.config, ~/.* on a case by case basis... I say remove the obvious large temp dirs and keep the rest by default for simplicity - for the system configs I've had a tool called etckeeper running for a while because it was highly recommended but I've never actually restored from it... - personal documents and other files such as typically kept in the home directory - /root occasionally has something you need
Ways to investigate: - use a disk usage utility to find out where your storage is being used up ... It'll help you find large Dontkeeps - watch for recently modified files - dirs and files that are modified all the time are usually temp dirs. But sometimes they have something useful like your firefox profile.
Most backup solutions are ONE of the following:
User files
System files
Don't spend too much time crying about needing two solutions. Just make your backup today and reach perfection later.
Remember: sync isn't backup. Test your backup if you can (but its not as easy as it sounds). Off site your most precious files.
I think most options have been covered here, but I'd like to consider some other bits...
User accounts & file permissions:- if you have >1 account, note that the UserID is internally numbered (starting from 1000, so Bob=1000, Sue=1001) and your file system is probably setup using the numerical UserID... so re-creating the users in a different order would give Sue access to Bob's files and vice versa.
Similarly, backing up /etc /var etc... you should check if any applications (ie databases) need specific chmod and chown settings
Rsync, tar, etc can cover some of this, you just need to check you rebuild users in the correct order.
Maybe Ansible is another approach? So your disaster recovery would be: 1. Install plain OS on new drive 2. Get Ansible access to it (ie basic netwroking) 3. Rebuild OS and instsll applicstions automatically with Ansible 4. Restore application & home folders (again with Ansible)
When you get this working, it's amazing to watch an entire system being rebuilt
I now reside in Germany and my current employer pays 50% of this so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. There is no physical card but travel information you download to an android wallet, but apparently google wallet is the only available option. See the picture:
Google is a company I don’t trust with my data, neither do I expect your regular public transportation authority employee to care about his privacy (he looked at me as I was asking if 2 + 2 equal 4). I am not aware of non google based wallets where I can download the travel information.
I tried some f-droid and droidify options but it turns out they’re pure crap.
The site: abo.ride-ticketing.de/app/ I log in with my username and password, get my travel information and on the bottom the picture I uploaded.
Any workarounds?
This being Germany, shouldn’t there be an alternative to those who refuse google? Don’t I have that right as a consumer?
Another question: I screenshot my logged in session on the link I provided where you see my qr code and my billing data. The public transportation employee told me that’s not allowed (wtf?). Can anyone here provide a rationale?
I know android is minimally related to linux and the question doesn't resemble a typical question for a linux forum but each time I've asked here you've provided valuable information:
I now reside in Germany and my current employer pays 50% of this so called Deutschland-Job-Ticket. There is no physical card but travel information you download to an android wallet, but apparently google wallet is the only available option. See the picture:
Google is a company I don’t trust with my data, neither do I expect your regular public transportation authority employee to care about his privacy (he looked at me as I was asking if 2 + 2 equal 4). I am not aware of non google based wallets where I can download the travel information.
I tried some f-droid and droidify options but it turns out they’re pure crap.
The site: abo.ride-ticketing.de/app/ I log in with my username and password, get my travel information and on the bottom the picture I uploaded.
Any workarounds?
This being Germany, shouldn’t there be an alternative to those who refuse google? Don’t I have that right as a consumer?
Another question: I screenshot my logged in session on the link I provided where you see my qr code and my billing data. The public transportation employee told me that’s not allowed (wtf?). Can anyone here provide a rationale?
I had a similar issue in my city. I had to talk to the human resources division at my organization, and they were able to work directly with the local transit agency to get me a physical card, but it was a pain, and it certainly wasn't advertised as possible anywhere. It may be worth trying to call people and ask.
Do you trust any other provider? Amex used to have a payment type app but I'm not sure I'd call it a wallet. From what I remember Amex wasn't well used in Germany.
You're better of looking in the degoogle communities. Sorry, I still haven't learned to cite the communities here properly (there seem to be two forms). Type degoogle into a community search box (all one word, no hyphens)
As far as I remember, things other than credit/debit cards in Google Wallet are pretty much images that you can scan like you would a paper ticket. Maybe download that ticket somehow — if some other app provides the same android "activity" as Google Wallet (so it shows up in "Open WIth" menu when you clicj that button), you can use it to avoid Google completely. If it's hardcoded to use Google Wallet, make a separate account just for this ticket. Then just open the ticket in the app, take a screenshot, and use your favorite gallery app to scan it in at ticket gates.
TabbsTheBat
in reply to qyron • • •JillyB
in reply to TabbsTheBat • • •There are often nation-wide or region-wide advertising campaigns that proudly display a price. If individual cities have different sales taxes, that would make it hard. Personally, I still don't find this to be a good reason. Just charge a single amount anyway and eat the costs in the high tax area. Price it in.
Edit: now that I'm thinking about it, many chain businesses are franchised. So each McDonald's (for example) is independently owned. So they couldn't just eat the cost in those areas.