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!
Playtron has made some waves in Linux gaming. They have lots of big names in Linux working on the project. Recently they were featured by Framework today in their presentation. However, I think it's abundantly clear that anyone who cares about FOSS should stay far away from this.
I was intrigued by this as well some months ago. I even ignored when they blatantly lied about Valve/Steam locking down their OS to only play Steam games. So I gave it a try and installed it. On setup they wanted me to agree to a EULA. That was red flag #2. Never seen that before. Then they wanted me to agree to their privacy policy. It is a very typical corporate user-hostile privacy policy. Some highlights
Like many website operators, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our Website. This includes Log Data, such as your computer’s IP address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our Website that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics, and whether you reached our page via a social media or email campaign. This information may be collected via several technologies, including cookies, web beacons, clear GIFs, canvas fingerprinting and other means, such as Google Remarketing and Facebook Pixel.
If you access our Sites through third parties (e.g., Facebook or Google), or if you share content from our Sites to a third-party social media service, the third-party service will send us certain information about you if the third-party service and your account settings allow such sharing.
"Professional, employment, or education information, such as your industry and job level, for news personalization, or copies of your resume or CV and any other information required to verify your qualifications, for recruitment purposes"
"Commercial information, such as a record of purchased products or subscriptionsInferences about your consumer preferences or characteristics."
How we use personal information: - To market our products and/or services to you - With respect to website cookies, to share with third-party marketing partners to provide tailored advertising on our Website and other websites that you may visit
We share your information with our third-party service providers and any subcontractors as required to offer you our products and services. The service providers we use help us to:
I've been noticing an influx of users with anonomized usernames (ie: fjdasklfpudiosa722104891fdaf20j.srv.us).
As a moderator this concerns me because it immediately triggers a 'this is a bot or nefarious actor' instinct. Is there any reason not to be wary these accounts?
I've been using Fedi for a long time and from the very beginning I've been afraid of spam and bots ruining it, at least temporarily. Spam is still a problem with e-mail, and it's been around for 40 years and they've developed very sophisticated anti-spam mitigations for it.
The problem is that most of the 'spam' comes from official things like websites that you've signed up to and didn't realise would also include dumb fkn emails periodically. And they don't always do it right away either. I've had emails suddenly start arriving from somewhere that I signed up to like a year before.
Personally, my spam mitigation is to have one email address for signing up to shit with. Then these assholes can email me until they're blue in the face and I don't care because the only time I ever visit that inbox is for verification. And then I have another email address for personal use that never gets used because who uses email for personal use these days?
In conclusion. Email is for signing up to things and collecting trash that I'll never look at.
IMHO messages from things you've signed up to are unlikely to be "spam". I've always understood that word to mainly mean completely unsolicited messages from people you have no previous relationship with at all; though if it's clearly unwanted it might include some of the former too.
A ton of things I have signed up for spam me with trash emails that they don't put in the 'sales' or 'offers' categories I unchecked. Just because I was forced to create an account to buy one thing doesn't mean I have a 'business relatiotionship' that justifies multiple daily reminders of what they have in stock.
😆😂🤣 Uuuuhh... Aaaah... I normally generate a random password and use it as my username for most services. Like even my bank.
This is because I've realized the username is mostly useless and is just a handle for my account. It doesn't matter to me if my username is jsmith, meow123, or kekxbek. In fact, it's easier if I don't have to come up with something novel or cool.
I'm a real boy. I promise. Not a malicious bot.
Although... If I were a malicious bot, that's exactly what I would say! 😲
This is the big issue. It breaks a lot of X11 features. Remote desktop via VNC or RDP should still be possible. Another is ssh and sftp. Edit the file on the client. Another go all in with command line. Nano is easy. Emacs or VIM more powerful but harder. Screen is a useful command line tool too.
Today I did my first advanced spreadsheet on LibreOffice after switching to Linux, and it handled itself pretty well. I had to search for some features on the web at first, but after I got it down, I felt comfortable using it. Also, LibreOffice's default menu layout is not pretty, but I can find all of the functions with just a click, unlike MS Office's ribbon menu where I had to click around to find what I was looking for. Sorry for bad English.
However, in direct comparison with SoftMaker Office (which, admittedly, is not free software), LibreOffice is inconsistent, sluggish, unstable and less compatible with Microsoft formats.
Except for MS format compatiblity, not my experience, Not sure where MS format compatibility stands now, but that has histically been the biggest issue.
That's a sham. Only basic stuff is open standard, the rest is proprietary extensions. Such a format can't usually be standardized; there's an entire Wikipedia article about MS' shenanigans to make it happen. But MS doesn't even keep to that ambiguous 600-pages standard anymore. Here's fsfe' stance to it, calling it a pseudo-standard.
Results in basic formatting having to be reverse-engineered. Better use Open Document Format.
Since the very beginning of the standardisation process for Microsoft's Office Open XML - OOXML (hereinafter MS-OOXML), the FSFE has expressed serious doub...
My single personal spreadsheet is (uh) a CSV that I edit with vim. I don't want to have to fire up a monstrous GUI app just to view a table. But sure, count me as eccentric in this way.
Most of the spreadsheets I deal with are for work. For what I consider obvious reasons, they've been cloud-hosted for literally decades now.
Your initial response got peoples' backs up because of its dismissive tone and (it seemed to me, as you hadn't provided context) apparent advocacy for web-based tools like O365 or GSheets.
Many office application users wouldn't consider vim as an "office application", as they have their word processing app, their spreadsheet app, their email app, their chat app, their file explorer/manager, maybe something other than Notepad as a text editor, etc, and don't really know much beyond some of what each of them can do.
The fact that vim (or Emacs or vim/nvim with plugins, or LazyVim or Doom Emacs) can do all of those things would blow many minds.
But the setup effort and learning curve is still there, and also requires that they have sufficient permissions/policy to be able to install things.
Define lack of design. You mean theming? because Linux has way more customizable theming options than the proprietary alternatives, to fit all kinds of subjective tastes.
You mean usability? it's the one system that you can rice up to do absolutely whatever you want to do to fit your workflow, you can configure any key to automate literally anything a desktop can do.
The catch is that you actually do have to get your hands dirty if you want to mold the system to your liking.. as opposed to being you the one who has to mold your own tastes to adapt to whichever the designer of the OS decided should be the new tacky fashion / workflow.
I've found that a lot of apps with touch gestures need Touchégg to work correctly, could be worth a shot to give it an install. I use a converted macbook, and for any gestures to work with the apple trackpad at all I have to have touchegg, my partner has it on her converted pixelbook go to make the trackpad not feel awful there too.
i'm on mint cinnamon 22 and have touchegg installed. They have this in built Gestures applet but it doesn't seem to govern the two finger scroll. Touche (separate app) seems similar - its all about 3 and 4 finger gestures. Seems like the two finger scroll is special somehow.
I'm probably misunderstanding as I rarely use word processing software, so I apologise if you talking about something more than the system's own handling of touchpad scrolling! here's the settings applet for XFCE, I think every DE will have similar options (it does even offer circular scrolling, but I know you aren't looking for that):
Cinnamon, Mint 22. It works, but badly. Two finger scroll does nothing for a second, then jumps to the destination. You don't see anything in between, which is not how that interaction is meant to go (I start the gesture, realise I overshot the top of page two, then adjust back up, read the top, then keep on scrolling - all without releasing the gesture).
edit: i started digging into this again. I think it's just sensitivity being way too high within LO. If I go one mm at a time it works as expected. But of course I want to browse docs as comfortably as I browse pages on firefox.
That's my exact distro/de combo. Never had any issues with trackpad use that weren't also there with the win10 that came on the thinkpad. Which was just that it's prone to detecting even the lightest accidental taps and over reacting. Maybe it's device specific?
Edit: by device specific, I mean that it isn't every touchpad w/Libreoffice's issue, rather something that's wonky with some range of hardware and not others
I do a lot of work with CSV files and LibreCalc is so much better for them. You can actually tell it how to delimit the file and to put quotations around each field.
Some programs actually advise against using excel if you're going to work on a CSV to upload into the program, which is funny considering it's meant to be the industry standard.
P. S. For anyone that would like to use LibreOffice at work, download portableapps and get it from there. It's so portable it can get around IT administration requirements
On behalf of cyber and IT, just ask IT to install the thing, please. They can't really say no to a free app and bypassing restrictions ends badly for everyone. I had a user do that with video editing software... seriously, what could go wrong? Ransomware. Literally ransomware. Lucky for antivirus it stopped it but yeah, please work with IT.
"No enterprise support" is actually scary for them. I did security, 'way back, but in Unix, and maybe that's why we were more cool with OSS back then. Windows people love the black-box binaries and fear a lack of pricy support.
There was a trend of malware authors making websites to give away free video editors, I think this one appeared as capcut. They patch the binaries or use other techniques and include malicious DLLs.
Edit: you and I both are fine with people installing FOSS from github, but what happens when they get the name for the repo wrong? What happens when they go to the fake site a malware author spun up, that even has all the files they wanted?
Security is there for a reason, sorry, I know we can be annoying and add hurdles to important roles, but people get things wrong. We help with that, and bypassing us means you didn't give us a chance to save you before you messed up (again I assume everyone on lemmy is a sysadmin Linux user so not 'you' but a generic user you).
That may be true for Discord but for FOSS products the security concern is the attack surface (more to patch).
Like I said to the other commenter, if they say no they should have to justify that (in written form, argued, with points), even if the reason you want it is familiarity with the tool, workflow speed ups, or it has a nicer UI. Make them work harder if they say no, and make it really clear you will go away quietly if they say yes.
I do think that companies asking users to use standard tools so they can build processes and training materials is reasonable. Using other tools means more attack surface, it means more updates, more documentation, less familiar people and it means more risk.
Also assuming your company is like most and forgets to document everything ~~alongside the crucial processes~~, if you know how to do something and tie it to a FOSS product instead of say excel, they won't be able to hire a grad that can work for cheaper and do the thing half as well.
My point is it does do something for them, but not as much as they think. They didn't pay for the office suit for you to not use it. However, if you don't need it, they can also stop paying for it. Justification is important. So is making ITs life difficult by making them justify decisions.
Bypassing them makes the incident response team's life difficult, not ITs.
I bring this up often because its so amusing to me.
Last year I did a lot of interviews with developers of popular Steam Deck and Linux programs. All went really well, and were quite fun to do.
One 'dev' (I use that term so loosely because I found out GPT is heavily used for their work) freaked out though when they saw my document I sent initially was an .odt file.
Knowing I am a pen-tester, they freaked out and told the public at large I was trying to hack them with a weird file type.
.odt
It still makes me laugh. Anyway, I swear by LibreOffice, I use it daily and love it so much!
if a specific format isn't requested or required, and the formatted text document is not expected to be edited by the recipient--only read, possibly by computer, or printed, i would default to using a pdf.
Indeed, LibreOffice Calc is a near-daily fixture in my operational workflow. The insistence on proprietary, data-harvesting alternatives like Google Docs is… unnecessary. For Debian-based systems, the installation process is straightforward: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:libreoffice/ppa & sudo apt install libreoffice, referencing the official documentation at wiki.documentfoundation.org/Do…
Ribbon bar shit, personally I hate the MS ribbon bar. So for me the LO interface is way better. Just depends on what you like and what you learned and know well.
I need to install an OS for someone whose first impulse upon seeing a screen is to touch it, because they are young and their first assumption is a touchscreen.
They know their way around Windows and Windows is probably tought to them at school, so Windows might actually be the smart move… but I fucking hate it.
Is ZorinOS or similar polished enough that I can leave it to someone whose tech literacy is centered around Roblox, TikTok and evading parental locks? I don't want to normalize the Windows-bullshit. But I don't want their first Linux-experience to be frustrating.
Uh, I don't have a good answer for that, but I'd give them something like Linux Mint anyways. That way they can look up stuff, watch tutorials and don't have a super niche thing running. Or give them one of the popular gaming distros, if it's that.
Idk. Gnome feels very much like Android to me. And KDE follows similar design patterns to Windows. And kids and teenagers tend to figure out all the things they want. If they have the motivation to do so.
I’m hearing a lot of very poor advice in here, at least from my perspective as a Linux user who’s been through the gamut of various distros over the years.
Fedora atomic desktops are not beginner distros. That is not their purpose, and their limitations make many things a person may eventually want to do with their machine a lot more complicated.
Debian? Are we joking here? Debian is an amazing distro for what its purposes are, but it’s not beginner friendly. Debian is bare bones.
Linux Mint is the easiest answer here. Ubuntu LTS (or its classroom based fork edubuntu) is another great answer. I know every Linux user on the internet recoils in horror at the mention of Ubuntu but it really is a drop in plug and play solution for kids and old people.
The only thing I still don't like much about recommending Linux Mint to beginners is that their Cinnamon desktop still uses Xorg which has some horrible display tearing on some Nvidia graphic cards (can be usually fixed with some tinkering and this is akso only my personal experience), which is usually not a thing with Wayland and being Xorg it also means it has inferior touchpad gestures (surely not as smooth as Gnome or KDE) which can be important for notebook users. While being very user friendly it is one of the more resource heavy DE's I would say even more than Gnome or KDE. It also seems to have some problems with battery life? The official Gnome and KDE desktop packages for Linux Mint are pretty outdated, are still Xorg versions and aren't officially supported AFAIK (maybe there are some good community maintained packages). Otherwise I agree it's one of the best choices.
My personal favorite for beginners is Fedora Workstation or KDE edition, because it's up to date and fairly stable (except the frequent kernel updates which sometime cause issues, but booting the older kernel is straightforward) and does not tinker much with packages defaults or push their products on you like Ubuntu.
Try Kasm Workspaces to stream any desktop, app or OS to your web browser:https://kasmweb.com/community-editionhttps://kasmweb.com/cloud-personalSLIMOOK EVO 1...
Your kid is too young to understand the concept of a mouse, but they arent young enough to not use Tiktok, a Social media known for killing even young adults attention time. And for some reason they are thought how to use a PC? To a 5-7 year old?
That aside, I recommend using literally Any OS and just making a guest user excluded from the sudoers file. To install new Apps, just use flatpak at user level, and for roblox theres Sober
I would just like to say that I really appreciate everyone's contributions so far; even the little off-topic discussions.
But you are completely misjudging the situation. When I spoke of "first assumption", said they "know their way around Windows" and stated they found ways around prior parental locks, I was actually referring to the fact that "my kid" hasn't even been born yet. We've just slipped two iPads in, one with a YouTube-Kids Elsa Gate loop and the other constantly doom scrolling TikTok and Twitter.
I'm definitely not talking about someone who is a several years older than I was, when I got my first internet connected PC.
Sarcasm aside; they are more than old enough, according to their actual parents. They had a phone for quite some time; same for a Windows notebook. I just happen to have a better notebook laying around, but feel like Windows is sort of shit, and I need a little help with judging if Linux is the right call.
If you are not the Parent, the kid has going to have a hard time with Linux if you arent availible 24/7 for them to ask. Linux takes some getting used to, and if not even the Parents know anything about it, they are not going to be able to lock down Linux enough
My guess is that if most things "just work", Linux may be fine. I mean, there's a whole second laptop available and I'm reachable most of the time. I just don't want to play support all the time.
I'm also not that worried about locking things down. The parents can't even lock down Windows properly and have resorted to restricting internet time via a router setting. It's MAC based, and I think if the kid figures out how to change MAC addresses, they deserve a little extra Roblox time until the parents notice.
At the moment I think I'll sit down with them and we'll set this thing up together. That way I can teach them a bit about the differences and show them cool things like ad blocking or Steam and see how they do by themselves … and then make my (hopefully final) decision.
As an alternative to making decisions without direct assistance, you might benefit from contracting with another person to make decisions based on requirements you describe (essentially getting a chief information officer (CIO) for yourself). The main reason I'm suggesting this is that having more people involved will make it more likely that someone will know about established best practices relevant to your situation or that someone will have experience with a problem that is similar to the one you're dealing with. Additional reasons I could provide for this would be similar to the reasons people give to discourage someone from handling court appearances without a lawyer or doing surgery on themselves. You might be able to use ryf.fsf.org/categories/laptops to find information about how to contact people about your computing needs. Alternatively, you could visit a store (for example, one operated by Walmart).
Fedora Silverblue is basically Android. You click on apps in a software store to install, it updates itself (without you noticing) on reboot, the terminal is entirely optional and almost entirely useless.
Wanna know my experience? I had issues daily with screen tearing on mint, even though I had the NVIDIA drivers they were probably too old on Mint for my graphics card. The desktop wouldn't load, I had errors on starting and on shutting down Mint. I spent more time troubleshooting Mint than working.
I said fuck it and decided to give fedora (actually Universal Blue's Aurora, which is atomic and fedora-based).
It was pure bliss.
Everything just worked out of the box to the point that I was confused as to why everything was working so well. The only thing I had to "learn" was how to use distrobox through BoxBuddy, which took a whopping 30 minutes of research or so.
Now I moved to OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and it feels like going back in time. I know my OS is not as secure due to not being atomic, I have to run the command line daily for updates, and the initial setting up would have been intimidating for a beginner. But at least it also hasn't given me problems yet, unlike what happened with Mint.
So IMO Mint should definitely not be recommended to beginners. The architecture of atomic distros is very familiar to anyone who has a smartphone today, which is practically everyone. You can go to the software store and download Flatpaks as seamlessly as you do on the Google Play or Apple Store. You can even change the apps Permitions using Flatseal. And best of all, you get an OS that is secure, which traditional Linux distros aren't due to every app having root access by default.
I haven't done it yet, but when my wife wants to change her laptop, I'll 100% install a self-maintaining atomic distro for her.
In traditional distros, apps dependencies are mixed with system files. In atomic distros you use flatpaks which are containerized and don't see system files.
This is what I mean. I understand you can also install Flatpaks in traditional distros, but most people don't install only flatpaks.
It's not my opinion. The distribution architect at SUSE said so in reference to RPMs. I imagine it isn't much different for other non-containerized file types.
With immutable OS products like MicroOS and Aeon, openSUSE now offers a very different model of system management, one which emphasizes automation, hands-off...
So @pewdiepie says you should install Linux. But what are his reasons? In this video I'm digging in. Let's react to his video together! My Game ❯ Get the source code: https://github.com/heavyelemen...
He made an edgy/abhorrent¹ joke years ago for which he apologised and Lemmy is even worse than Reddit so people still lach onto that.
¹ Whether it was just edgy or much worse than that I leave to the reader to decide. The joke was that he paid some guys in Africa to make a sign saying ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’ or something to that effect. This one of the things that likely contributed to adpocalypse on YouTube.
Well buddy it's a bit more than that. Personally, I'm not holding it against the guy maybe he's changed so I'm not gonna freak every time I see him but pretending that's it is wild.
The man in anger called some guy the n-word. No joke to it. Straight up, I'm angry so I'll call this guy a racial slur. This, along with the constant (and it was constant) skirting with racism and Hitler which were framed as jokes made it clear that it wasn't just a bunch of jokes. Wearing a military uniform that was as close to the Nazis as possible, constant talk of a final solution, jokes about 'them', German speaches, zieg heils, dog whistles, and alot more were commonplace in his videos at the time
You don't just randomly shout the n word in anger for the first time on live stream.
The guy was obviously going down the pipeline a d people still don't like him because o that. Not one joke but a constant stream of them along with a very telling instance
I really like its format over Dolphin's, I find it much more intuitive. It shows the whole filetree from root and double clicking a folder just expands the it further. This is different than how Dolphin works, which only shows one folder at once like how Windows does in the main windows of File Explorer.
I think I might be autistic.
Specifically qBittorrent used with Debian and KDE. Not sure of it looks different elsewhere.
Introduction Following on from Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu, Ubuntu will be the first major Linux distribution to adopt sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, in partnership with the Trifecta Tech Foundation The change will be…
Sudo is distributed under the following license: Copyright (c) 1994-1996, 1998-2025 Todd C. Miller
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright…
Please let me know if there is already an accepted way to do this.
Early in the install process, you'd have a field to type a hostname of a local machine that you'd like to install like. The installer would download an "Install facts" file and install the new machine like the model machine.
The "install facts" file is created at install time. it contains things like timezone, language, percentage of disk space for each partition (to handle disk space of differing sizes) Optional files selected, username/password for root and for first user - anything needed to make the install a two click operation.
Note that this would be a full new install - not a clone of a machine that has been in use for a while.
Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems.
For Debian there's Preseed, for Arch there's archinstall, for a Fedora/RHEL there's Kickstart, for Alpine there's setup scripts, for distros with fully manual installs, you could just write a script?
Automating your install is something any sysadmin and mainly any distro developer will quickly reach towards, so it is something almost certain to exist.
Though, if I understand you, you'd want that to be "sourced" from an existing system, yes? I can see the use of that...
I use Mac as my daily driver for my work and personal machines, but for gaming I use my Playstation 5 for online or supposedly AAA games (think Call of Duty or Helldivers 2) and I use my Steam Deck for more indie titles. I've got some Linux experience, primarily via my old Mac Mini running Proxmox with mostly Debian VMs and messing around briefly with NixOS.
I love our Steam Deck, but it does feel a little underpowered, the battery isn't as strong as it once was and I don't love the docking experience with the official dock.
My wife is really into Civilization and similar games and I'd love to setup a desktop connected to our TV to use with a keyboard and mouse on our LG CX. Although I'm tech savvy, I'm not great with knowing what hardware/software to get. It's especially more complicated with the looming tariffs and trying to make sure I don't overspend on something I don't need.
Question
Looking for some guidance on hardware and software to setup for this living room gaming desktop. It's only purpose is to play games, primarily from Steam and it should have hardware which would benefit speed and performance for the type of games I'm going to list. Obviously we want the graphics to be good, but I don't need a beast RTX 5090.
What are some hardware and software recommendations in today's financial climate for playing these games on Linux?
What other accessories would you recommend for couch based keyboard and mouse gaming?
Honestly the game I'm most eager to get into is Dwarf Fortress, but for my wife it's having a smooth experience with Civ6 (she was playing the Switch version for far too long!)
Games
Civilization games
My wife loves 6 and I'm a fan of 5, but we do want to eventually try 7, hoping it'll improve with DLC updates
Dwarf Fortress
Rimworld
Battletech
Into the Breach
Brotato
Vampire Survivors
Balatro
FTL
Caves of Qud
Persona 5 Royal (although I'm struggling to get into it, pushing through)
Blue Prince
ANIMAL WELL
Factorio
Return of the Obra Dinn
Anno 1800
Project Zomboid
This is a partial list of some of our libraries and wishlists. As you can see, some of them are more graphically, memory and processor intensive, but a lot of them are low performance indies.
Check ProtonDB, e.g. protondb.com/search?q=Civiliza… and that, even though very useful ~~initially started~~ for the SteamDeck it is also a very reliable source to know if a game will work well on Linux. Overall the vast VAST majority of games do work unless there is a kernel level anti-cheat which is mostly for competitive online games only.
Now in terms of performances, get the GPU you can afford but overall its comparable with other OSes (not to name them) and sometimes even better, so on average, you can trust whatever the publisher is recommending.
Source : been gaming on Linux, in VR and on "flat" 3D for years now, pretty much daily.
Woah, thanks for doing the searching leg work here.
I've been using ProtonDB pretty heavily for Steam Deck research and I think most of the games on the list have good Proton support or even native Linux functionality. I doubt I'll play many kernel level anti-cheat games on it, I tend to go to the console for those types of games.
Based on the limited research I've done in the past, generally AMD is recommended for Linux, so I'd probably go that route. I don't have a firm budget, happy to save up and attempt to future proof or go with an older/used model for less cost.
Am I right in thinking CPU/RAM are more critical for games like Civ or Dwarf Fortress? More simulation than graphics intensive tasks?
I have a i9-9900K with a 2080ti and 32GB of RAM (I had to check because it's so "old" I didn't remember) and honestly, until I buy the ONE game that needs better specs, not just for ever so slightly graphics but because it wouldn't run properly without, I'm holding on to this rig.
I don't have AMD vs NVIDIA recommendation. I use both (as I also have a SteamDeck) and have no big problem with either, I just work and play, no worries. For CPU/RAM I don't think it matters much, what does though is making sure the hardware is compatible, e.g. if you have a top of the line CPU with a low-end GPU or vice versa, you will have a bottleneck and won't use one fully. So just be coherent with your purchase and again check what are the recommended spec for your favorite games.
Regarding the distribution, I'm on Debian stable so if you are familiar with that and have no need for anything specific, I don't recommend changing, stick to what you know.
Indeed, my bad, what I was trying to say is that I believe most of the efforts put into Proton stems from the SteamDeck, namely that Valve invested resources in the compatibility layer before the console but it really started to gear up then in order to bring value to players.
Do you have any preferences (distro, cpu/gpu manufacturer, etc) and a budget? Most of the games on your list I am familiar with and will run on damn near anything remotely modern.
Lacing direction, with the fairly low requirements (from what i recognize), and assuming you are price conscious id suggest you poke around the used gaming PC market (either gamer friends, or failing that online), which will also completely bypass the tariff issue too.
PopOS is pretty solid for linux gaming and has a distribution specifically for Nvidia too which handles most of the headache with Nvidia if you go that route.
EDIT: Poked around the requirement pages of the ones i wasn't familiar with, i didn't see a single game that had a requirement of anything newer than 10 year old hardware, depending on your friend network, you could get a computer that could play those games well for a song.
No strict preferences on distro, cpu/gpu manufacturer, open to suggestions. Although I've heard AMD is best with Linux due to the NVIDIA drivers and I'm hearing good things about Bazzite. I'd like to avoid excessive tinkering and configuration, hence why I'm ruling out NixOS for this build. As for budget and what I said in another reply, I’m going to be irritating and say “I don’t really know”, I’d like to avoid spending $2-3k on something to play Indies. But I’m also ok with under $2k or even less for something that is fairly future proof.
Most of my gamer friends are not PC players (console mostly), but I'm definitely open to looking into the used market.
Am I right in thinking CPU/RAM are more critical for games like Civ or Dwarf Fortress? More simulation than graphics intensive tasks?
Those are both solid pieces of hardware. However, I would suggest getting a Ryzen 5600 for a notable per-core CPU buff over the 3600x, which should help quite a bit with games like Civ's AI turn time. And since that CPU, Motherboard socket isn't latest-gen either, you can buy used for cheap still.
On a slightly different note: The 7k series Ryzen CPUs get you on the latest slot, AM5. This will get you future upgradability if you want it, but it will also come with higher costs as AM5 is the newest socket, so people aren't unloading them onto the used market in quantity. Such cost considerations are best determined by you. Both are a solid choice though.
For the GPU, I think the Radeon 6600 is a good choice. Radeon stuff works better in linux and that particular one is plenty strong for what you listed.
I highly, highly recommend PassMark's benchmarks for comparing hardware. They are the first place I look to get relative numbers. And from there I determine what I need
Benchmarks of the single thread performance of CPUs. This chart comparing CPUs single thread performance is made using thousands of PerformanceTest benchmark results and is updated daily.
Few months ago I built a gaming PC and chose I not use Windows for multiple reasons. I would suggest sticking to AMD as it would better supported on Linux. For the OS I'm using Arch Linux which is base for a lot of gaming Linux distributions. 99% I have never felt like I was missing out by not using Windows. Wine/Proton works really well OOTB. I highly recommend it if you want to get into Linux gaming. Like others have mentioned, ProtonDB is also a great resource for finding game specific information.
Thanks for the link to your build, that’s super helpful. The beauty of Linux is that I have some wiggle room as far as distro, as long as the save data is backed up, I can switch it up as long as it supports the hardware.
Yes, you have a lot more options for Linux distributions which in my opinion is a pro and a con. Honestly I would suggest that you stick to one distribution probably the one that works with your hardware the best (most annoying to troubleshoot). All distributions are going to have some issues and you'll need to prioritize what you need and stick to it. I'm saying this because I feel I wasted a lot of my time switching distributions rather than just working on trying to fix the issue or finding a workaround.
Certainly the best choice for processor and graphics card will be AMD. I would certainly advise you to avoid Nvidia, as it is very poorly supported on Linux, and it is even worth paying extra for AMD if you use a system other than Windows.
Nvidia user here. The criticism of Nvidia support on Linux is always blown way out of proportion by AMD fanboys.
The only issue I ever have is needing to prepend prime-run to each application I want to launch with the dedicated GPU.
I've had significantly worse problems with AMD drivers, so much so that it really opened my eyes to how stable things were on the green team.
I'm not saying you should get one or the other, but you shouldn't let fanboys dictate your decision. They will try to do so without admitting they're fanboys, so we have admit it for them.
Bazzite is probably the best Linux distribution for this purpose. It's practically made for it. In terms of hardware, get an AMD GPU. Intel might also be ok, but they are pretty new so might have hidden caveats.
Yeah I've seen Bazzite come up frequently and it sounds promising, essentially it's Steam OS. I was also leaning towards AMD GPU due to the compatibility, heard the NVIDIA drivers aren't the best.
I'm going to be irritating and say "I don't really know" as far as budget, I'd like to avoid spending $2-3k on something to play Indies. But I'm also ok with under $2k or even less for something that is fairly future proof.
Am I right in thinking CPU/RAM are more critical for games like Civ or Dwarf Fortress? More simulation than graphics intensive tasks?
Just FYI: I've never had an AMD Gpu (thanks to Blender's support seeming poor) and while it j5as been spotty in the past, I've used Fedora, PopOS and Bazzite with zero Problems on NVIDIA. Drivers have come a long way in the last years.
That is good to know! I use my Mac Studio for my Blender stuff (works surprisingly well for what I need). Maybe I shouldn't rule out NVIDIA as quickly as I have!
I have two PCs, one with an RTX 3080TI the other one has an RX 7800 XTX.
The difference is real. For example, Gamescope on Nvidia is a buggy mess, and Nvidia on Linux performs worse than on Windows. AMD works better on Linux.
I highly recommend getting a gaming laptop. You can buy a 4070 lenovo laptop at Walmart for $1k (at least in the US.)
Otherwise, check out old.reddit.com/r/LaptopDeals/ until you find something that fits your needs and budget. (sorry for linking to the other site)
You should use bluetooth controllers instead of ones that take a dongle simply because the dongle is unnecessary. Playstation controllers work well, but they're expensive and I haven't been able to find a 3rd party variant that works properly.
I also recommend getting a wireless keyboard + mouse combo.
Portability is a much bigger benefit than people realize.
Right now I'm typing this lying down comfortably in my bed, for example.
I think being tied to a desk to use our computers is unnecessary and reinforces a culture where people stay in their rooms and don't connect with others in person as much as they otherwise would.
My computer is like my 2nd brain, so being able to have it with me just about anywhere I go is important.
I used to have a desktop mostly for gaming and a laptop for work, but managing 2 computers is more hassle than it's worth so I decided to downsize to only 1 gaming laptop. "One machine to rule them all," as I say. My only regret is not making the decision way sooner. I genuinely believe my life would have been better off for it.
I think I understand your point. Personally, I use a desktop for gaming and a laptop for a most other things, like you used to. I use tiling WMs, so not having a real mouse is not so bad, but I prefer real keyboards.
I don't think you need to move a gaming machine around that often and desktops have better thermals, are a lot more upgradeable and are easier to fix than laptops.
But sometimes portable gaming can be nice. For example, I play Mario Kart (Double Dash, of course) with my father every now and then, which wouldn't really work with a desktop. It's nice to be able to take a laptop and a few bluetooth controllers with me and be able to set up a portable retro gaming station literally anywhere.
It’s nice to be able to take a laptop and a few bluetooth controllers with me and be able to set up a portable retro gaming station literally anywhere.
Yep. I'm a much bigger fan of co-op games these days, so I have controllers and emulators at the ready to turn my laptop in a play station.
I read many comments on how PeerTube isn't sustainable as a YouTube alternative and, while it's certainly true right now, are we sure it will be the same in the near future?
The platform is growing and the new mobile app is making great progress; I can certainly see some people investing in a major instance some day, accelerating the platform adoption.
The sustainability argument stems from technological constraints. YouTube as a company has no problem sustaining millions of dollars in server infrastructure to serve media. Most self-hosters wouldn't be able to do that without significant income.
I don't agree with this perspective but also don't know enough about server infrastructure or video streaming to argue against it.
Like others have said, it's way more resource intensive than text based systems. Even discounting higher res vids, if you go to any random larger YT channel and download all their videos in 144p 480p and 720p it'll be quite a lot larger than you might expect. Sure, if you're serious about it you could get an array of hard drives and a small server, but you're talking hundreds of bucks and lots of upkeep. Outsource it to a VPS and AWS buckets and you've still got upkeep but now you've added an extra 0 to your bill.
There's not enough charitable nerds on the internet to host even a fraction of 1% of Youtube. It's even worse if self hosting instances is pushed. Even as a fellow tech nerd, no way I'm hosting my own instance just so I can share a video once in a blue moon. Something that always gets my goat in fediverse discourse is when people always jump to saying something along the lines of "just host your own" then wonder why AP went from ~2.5M users to 0.8M users.
There's also some Fediverse specific issues that hold back a more mainstream audience. There's some fringe political stuff on both sides of the isle which can pretty easily scare off people, and defederation combined with peertube's more siloed approach makes discovery near nil. (can't see content from remote peertube instances unless somebody has already subscribed to that channel on the remote instance from your local instance AFAIK).
Then there's the new platform (or in this case many platforms connected via one protocol) issues. Lack of users, limited/no monetization, limited development/support, and very few pros + a lot of cons at first glance from somebody who doesn't consider tech a hobby and is comparing it to established platforms.
Edit: Can't remember who, but iirc a peertube user I follow who regularly deletes their videos because their host doesn't give them too much space. It's great for a less big tech way to see their latest videos, but not acceptable if anyone's gonna bill something like that as the next big video platform.
Does peertube actually host anything or is it just a frontend? All I've ever seen people linking to it are videos from YouTube, using PeerTube (and a couple other YT alternatives) as the interface.
Hosting video requires a lot more resources than hosting text, hyperlinks, or even pictures. It might be too much for individuals to self host video on a scale that could even distantly resemble how we use youtube today.
Then again, maybe there are ways to make that burden smaller. IIRC Peertube does do some p2p stuff to try and share the burden a bit but I’ve also heard that it’s not really feasible to rely on that to scale.
So why not adorn your desktop with a floral background?
Over the past few months, I haven’t had any significant amount of time to either sit in Blender and create or engage in other creative pursuits for that matter. But the other day, when the sun was shining and the bumblebees were gently buzzing around the garden, I got the idea to photograph some of the flowers that had blossomed. When I later looked at these creations, it felt only natural to add them to my Wallpaper git-repo.
For full transparency;I am not a photographer and these pictures were taken with a mobile phone.
These images are some of those found in the "Nature" folder. All wallpapers in the entire repo areCC:BY— free to use, share, and modify as long as the creator, in this case me, is attributed.
I mainly choose to host images there because I wanted to set up a CC:BY wallpaper repository, figured the target audience (Linux users) would find it more natural. And that it would be a less intrusive experience than most other wallpaper hosting sites. And you can just clone the whole repo if you want.
On Linux, Control-C and Control-V don't work for copying and pasting in terminals. The Control modifier is used for its original purpose of inserting control codes. Instead, terminal apps require an extra Shift modifier, like Control+Shift+C.
Control+C is used to kill a process in the terminal and that shouldn't be overwritten. If it is, you'd have to create a totally separate key binding to kill a process. Seems unnecessarily complex when Control+Shift+C works just fine.
The article doesn't suggest using Control+C. It talks about dedicated copy and paste key codes, and you can program your keyboard to map those codes to whatever keys you like. They suggest Fn+C.
I confirmed that these already supported a number of terminals plus QT and GTK. They could also be mapped to be more ergonomic with a programmable keyboard:
Honestly, this is a nice feature of macOS (or at least iTerm 2; I don’t use the official terminal). I know CTRL-C is used to kill processes and we all have that muscle memory but I usually try to change that on my personal Linux installs because I’ve hit it by mistake before.
I used to use CTRL+INSERT for copy and SHIFT+INSERT for paste but there’s usually no insert key on laptops or even small keyboards. It’s probably time to just adapt.
It’s the #1 thing that drives me crazy about Linux.
It seems obvious. You’ve got a Windows/Apple/Super key and a Control key. So you’d think Control would be for control characters and Windows/Apple/Super would be for application things.
I can understand Windows fucking this up, cuz the terminal experience is such a low priority. But Linux?
There’s some projects like Kinto and Toshy which try to fix it, but neither work on NixOS quite yet.
"Super" is the one modifier key that you can rely on overwriting without interfering with normal app shortcuts, so I'd personally rather prefer if applications don't start trying to use the Super key for their own things.
I have set up Super key shortcuts for all kinds of desktop management operations, opening the launcher/terminal/browser, switching workspaces/windows, closing windows, move/resize, switch tiling mode, audio control, make my package manager install updates, switch between a set of resolutions, activate my password manager, etc.
That said, Copy/Paste is a general/global enough operation that I would not mind having Super+C/V send to the current active app the Copy/Paste keycode (I might do that actually, now that I know that there's a code apps are starting to support!). But I think it should be the desktop environment the one setting "Super" shortcuts, not the app.
It makes sense for each application to have their own interpretation of what does each control character (or Control shortcut) do. It's not like all control characters have a very reliable meaning to begin with.. I mean, the backspace character (Control+H) was originally meant to move a character backwards without deleting it, but most screen terminals didn't do that. If what you mean is alternate characters from Unicode and so, then the "Alt" key would be more suitable for that. And in ISO keyboards, "AltGr" is a very common way to have combinations that insert alternate symbols.
The reason you gave still falls under the definitions of ergonomics.
From wikipedia:
Ergonomics, also known as human factors or human factors engineering (HFE), is the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes, and systems. Primary goals of human factors engineering are to reduce human error, increase productivity and system availability, and enhance safety, health and comfort with a specific focus on the interaction between the human and equipment.
set bind-tty-special-chars off
set colored-stats on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set show-all-if-unmodified on
set completion-ignore-case on
set completion-query-items -1
set page-completions off
"\e[1;5C": forward-word
"\e[1;5D": backward-word
"\C-h": nop
"\C-s":"\C-asudo "
And in Konsole I have remapped copy to ctrl+C and paste to ctrl+V .
I honestly don't remember what each config line is for, cause it has been so long ago. And probably you don't want all of that. Probably best to throw it into an AI and let it explain it line by line.
That's why we have mice copy/paste bindings on most systems too. Highlighting text auto copies, and scroll wheel click pastes. Not all do this, but many do and have for a while.
I found this handy snippet to enable these keys in GTK 2 and 3 (not sure of the equivalent for GTK 4 but I guess that's the one which has been updated anyway): forum.colemak.com/topic/1438-d…
Unfortunately I've found this whilst I'm not at the right computer so I haven't been able to test them.
Edit: I tested this and it doesn't appear to have helped.
I've got a whole bucket full of old hard drives, CDs and DVDs, and I'm starting the process of backing up as much as still works to a 4TB drive.
It's gonna be a long journey and lots of files, many prone to being duplicates from some of the drives.
What sorts of software do you Linux users recommend?
I'm on Linux Mint MATE, if that matters much.
Edit: One of the programs I'm accustomed to from my Windows days is FolderMatch, which is a step above simple duplicate file scanning, it scans for duplicate or semi-duplicate folders as well and breaks down individual file differences when comparing two folders.
I see I've already gotten some responses, and I thank everyone in advance. I'm on a road trip right now, I'll be checking you folks recommend software later this evening or as soon as I can anyways.
I have like 10+ hard drives and probably 75+ optical discs to back up, and across the different devices and media, the folder and file structure isn't exactly consistent.
I already know in advance that I'm gonna have to curate this backup myself, it's not quite as easy to just purely let backup/sync software do it all for me.
across the different devices and media, the folder and file structure isn't exactly consistent.
That's the thing: it doesn't need to be. If your backup software or filesystem supports block-level deduplication, all matching data only gets stored once, and filenames don't matter. The files don't even have to 100% match. You'll still see all your files when browsing, but the system is transparently making sure to only store stuff once.
I guess you're missing the point then. I'm backing up data coming from many different file systems, FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, EXFAT, NTFS, HPFS, EXT2, 3 and 4, ISOs (of varying degrees of copy protection plus MODE1 and MODE2 discs with audio tracks)...
Plus different date revisions of many files.
You think there's anything consistent enough where any one solution works?
I need all the recommended software I can throw at it. Sure I'd love a purely automated solution, but i know there's still gonna be a lot of manual curating on my part as well.
Also, files don't have to match and filenames aren't important? Are you a psychopath? That's exactly what I want, to organize folder and filenames, and match and remove duplicates based on file hashes.
Either I'm massively misunderstanding why it is you want to curate your backup by hand, or you're missing the point of block-level deduplication. Shrug, either is possible.
I get the concept of block level reduplication, no problem.
But some of these drives came from friends that reorganized their copy of files their own way, while I took my main branch they copied from and salvaged damaged files.
Ever heard of goodtools? I've spent an awful lot of time salvaging corrupt video game console ROMs. I have all of Atari 2600, most of NES and SNES, a number of N64 and a number of PSP games, along with a lot of other stuff.
I ain't about to play headgames on what I have and haven't salvaged already, I must keep track of what device stores what, what filename is what, and what dates are what.
I want an organized file/folder structure. I didn't spend the past 20+ years to trust everything to automation.
I ain't about to play headgames on what I have and haven't salvaged already, I must keep track of what device stores what, what filename is what, and what dates are what.
This is precisely the headache I'm trying to save to you from: micromanaging what you store for the purpose of saving storage space. Store it all, store every version of every file on the same filesystem, or throw it into the same backup system (one that supports block-level deduplication), and you won't be wasting any space and you get to keep your organized file structure.
Ultimately, what we're talking about is storing files, right? And your goal is to now keep files from these old systems in some kind of unified modern system, right? Okay, then. All disks store files as blocks, and with block-level dedup, a common block of data that appears in multiple files only gets stored once, and if you have more than one copy of the file, the difference between the versions (if there is any) gets stored as a diff. The stuff you said about filenames, modified dates and what ancient filesystem it was originally stored on... sorry, none of that is relevant.
When you browse your new, consolidated collection, you'll see all the original folders and files. If two copies of a file happen to contain all the same data, the incremental storage needed to store the second copy is ~0. If you have two copies of the same file, but one was stored by your friend and 10% of it got corrupted, storing that second copy only costs you ~10% in extra storage. If you have historical versions of a file that was modified in 1986, 1992 and 2005 that lived on a different OS each time, what it costs to store each copy is just the difference.
I must reiterate that block-level deduplication doesn't care what files the common data resides in, if it's on the same filesystem it gets deduplcated. This means you can store all the files you have, keep them all in their original contexts (folder structure), without wasting space storing any common parts of any files more than once.
Block level dedupe doesn't account for random data at the end of the last block. I want a byte for byte hash level and folder comparison, with the file slack space nulled out. I also want to consolidate all related files into logically organized folders, not just a bunch of random folders titled '20250505 Backup Turd'
I also have numerous drives with similar folder structures, some just minimalized to fit smaller drives. I also have archives from friends, based on the original structure from like 10 years ago, but their file system structures have varied from mine over the years.
Also, try converting Big Endian vs Little Endian ROM file formats. I spent many months doing that, via goodtools.
I'm not in any hurry to accidentally overwrite a ROM that's been corrected for consistency in my archives because some automatic sync software might think they're supposed to be the same file.
I'm using Borg and it's fine at that scale. I don't know if it would still be viable with 100TB or whatever. The initial backup will be kind of slow but it encrypts everything, and deduplicates it too if I'm not mistaken. In any case, it deduplicates the common situation where you back up another snapshot later. Only the differences get written in the second backup. So you can save new snapshots fairly quickly and without much additional space.
Obviously finaldestination is empty to start with so it could just be a direct copy of your first hdd - so make that the largest drive.
(I'm saying copy here, presuming you want to keep the old drives for now, just in case you accidentally delete the wrong stuff on the 4TB drive)
Maybe clean up any obvious stuff
Remove that first drive
Mount the next and copy the data to /mnt/4TB/source2
Now use rmlint or fdupes and do a dry-run between source2 and finaldestination and get a feel whether they're similar or not, so then you'll know whether to just move it all to finaldestination or maybe then use the gui tools.
You might completely empty /mnt4TB/source2, or it might still have something in, depends on how you feel it's going.
Repeat for the rest, working on smaller & smaller drives, comparing with the finaldestination first and then moving the data.
Slow? Yep. Satisfying that you know there's only 1 version there? Yep.
Since Some of you guys asked about more details of how I migrated the entire school's infrastructure into Linux Mint, I made a small neocities website where I retell the story with a bit more details as much as I can remember them, took me around a week to make it so go have fun there and enjoy (the website is under the AGPL license, if you are interested you can check out the source code under "License" in the website or go here github.com/Ace120C/my-personal… ) there is more things to improve upon so lemme know if there is anything I should be adding etc.
once again, cheers!
EDIT: The post is in the blogs tab, as now the latest button takes you to the videos tab instead
I've been feeling gushy about my setup lately, I think I've finally found my home on Linux. For decades I've distrohopped each year and never was really happy with it all, but Fedora Atomic has changed that.
Some things I can do with Fedora Atomic that I cannot do with other Linux distros:
I can rebase to Bazzite for gaming performance when I feel like having a long gaming session.
I can rebase to Secureblue when I think I will not be gaming and would prefer a more secure linux setup.
I can update my system and not have to worry about special instructions, its extremely stable. Many times in the past, running a small ma-and-pa distro with most things pre-configed for performance would end with it breaking after a couple of major updates. This isn't true for configs like Bazzite and Secureblue, they are remarkably stable across many major updates due to how rpm-ostree functions.
Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs and they help you avoid making too many alterations to the base image, greatly speeding up the swaps between major images.
The kicker? Your user configs and home files are never changed when you 'image hop'. It always feels like you just installed a fresh distro whenever you upgrade, and the performance benefits are noticeable. You don't have to tinker and do the same changes over and over, its all handled for you by rpm-ostree.
10/10 this is the future of Linux. I hope for a future where I can rebase entire Linux distros while maintaining my configs with one simple command, but for now, Fedora Atomic is fantastic.
The downsides:
There is one major downside, and its that all of your system files are read-only. Personally, I've found a dozen ways to get around this, it requires thinking inside the Distrobox. It is a notable issue for many people, though. This means you cannot make specific tweaks without making a whole new image for yourself. Though in practice, I have found the ecosystem has grown a lot. Other people have already made the best tweaks available for you with only a few simple commands.
Rpm-ostree also is slow to update because its essentially building a whole git tree to make sure your updates never break and are as stable as possible. You also have to reboot each time you alter it, which can be annoying, but if you stick to flatpaks and distroboxes, this issue is mitigated significantly.
I agree. Fundamentally, you still need good distros to plug into distrobox to make swapping between immutable systems quicker. In general I feel like running Fedora Atomic has really opened my eyes to the possibilities of using distrobox + boxbuddy to get quick and easy installs from AUR or something and saving annoying-to-make configs in a backup file somewhere.
Atomic is also absolutely fantastic for throwing on an old laptop you use rarely. The update will not break after letting it sit for so long without them.
My biggest disadvantage of atomic distros is flatpak reliance too. I hate how bad the terminal interface for managing/running flatpaks is. But I still hope that this will improve in the future.
I think this approach is going to fair the best for mainstream adoption (i.e. Windows refugees). So I would agree that the "future" is going to involve immutable distros as a large, possibly majority, of all Linux installations.
Agreed - for someone moving from Windows / Mac, the immutables and flatpak are the way to go now. It's going to take a bit for the Ubuntu / Mint crowd to change their song. Bazzite in particular is a huge olive branch to the gamers. Even for someone who is "tinkering" learning distrobox and/or flatseal can enable most things you would ever want to tinker with on a desktop. If you are really developing something, chances are that you use containers or a VM anyway.
I have to concur on flatpaks though: they have room for improvement. More validation / trust is needed, and the options are wide open. For non-technical users, the surety and security *isn't necessarily on par with the app stores of Microsoft, Apple & Google - though the *experience is getting there.
Pros and cons on the app store thing. A malicious Windows app probably doesn't have as many hurdles to get the necessary access to take over your system or otherwise cause trouble. To my knowledge, flatpaks can't run with root permissions unless you executed as root (i.e. enter your password). Seeing that pop up should be way more of a red flag than seeing the "elevate permissions" pop up on Windows.
Immutable distros work differently from traditional ones, for which most guides and manuals were written. This is somewhat painful even for those coming from other distros, and it's gonna be a nightmare for those coming from another OS. They didn't even familiarize themselves with Linux yet, and people want them to run flatpaks, distroboxes and work with rpm-ostree or its alternatives. It's like learning to fly by falling from an airplane at full speed.
Immutable options are not for newbie users, at least not in the foreseeable future.
What about NixOS? It seems to be doing something very different from most distros. I used it briefly and it was a refreshing experience to just update the config file to add and remove programs, I know that a lot of people share their configs and it makes it easy to keep programs consistent from different installs. I would have installed it on this laptop if the installer wasn't giving me so many issues, so I ended up with MXLinux instead, but I still look on my NixOS days fondly.
Having tried NixOS, I gotta say the ability to quickly restore everything from a single config (its main premise) is overrated when it comes to home systems. Invaluable for production environments, though.
The rest can be done on any other Linux, and it would probably be preferred by most.
If you're a sysadmin in charge of a bunch of computers, by all means use NixOS.
But for personal use? Its easier to install everything by hand every time you reset your laptop (which should be maybe once per year at most) than it is to set up a config file on NixOS.
I think i'll be heading back to Pop!_OS for my main rig. While i like Bazzite, i can't get VR to function on it, or get my 5.1 surround sound system working. I think it's great for a hand held, but not for a main rig.
An image-based system would be the bare minimum to achieve basic security, but there would still be so many security issues compared to Android and iOS, that I don’t think Linux phones are worth putting time and development effort into.
AOSP is a fantastic base for open source mobile systems. The FOSS mobile development community should rather shift its focus to AOSP, develop a good understanding of it and get familiar with the code, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel with mobile Linux distros.
Distrobox and Flatpak are more than enough at this stage for most programs
Maybe for you, but personally I could never get by with only that. I have zero interest in atomic distros. To me they look like an inferior version of NixOS, which I have yet to fully wrap my head around. Until then I'll stick to Arch (BTW)
Same here. I have and will always periodically reinstall no matter which OS I happen to be using. Arch is the only distro that keeps me coming back because installation and setup is such an active process. Every time around I learn something new and get more effecient at the process, which is so much more rewarding than filling a few boxes and waiting on a progress bar as is the case with most distros I have experienced.
Whenever someone mentions Arch the pro arguments are always something in the lines of "I get to tinker", "I learn so much reading the documentation", "We are first in line to receive packages", "We have packages that no other distro has".
As someone who uses a laptop for work, all of those things sound like a nightmare. If I were a student with spare time on my hands, maybe I'd value such a distro more.
But as it stands, stability without compromising modern technology (I wouldn't use a Debian-based x11 distro) and minimal options to tinker with, is my sweet spot. Because I need my laptop to have it's security updates on time, and just work.
I've been running bluefin for about a week and I agree. One of the best things about these different distros is they install and configure a lot of things for you. Bluefin installs with flatpak, homebrew, distrobox, podman/docker, devcontainers configured and running on install, good peripheral support, good desktop tweaks, and sensible but easily removable default apps. Bazzite does something similar for gaming installs. It's great. If there are common apps or configs that their users want they try to implement it and get it set up and running on install, if possible. The most friction free linux install I've ever had.
I appreciate your mentioning the downside. I am way too much of a tinkerer for a read-only root to be acceptable for me, but I'm glad you found something you like.
The reason I wouldn’t give advice if you didn’t want it because unwanted unsolicited advice tends to be useless and annoying for most people. If you didn’t want the advice I wouldn’t waste my time.
My advice is to focus on being able to organize your thoughts and write them out in a cohesive structured way.
This helps you:
Express yourself in a clear, understandable, and perhaps persuasive way.
Organize your own personal wants, needs, and desires introspectively.
Both of these are important life skills that are extremely beneficial. Using a LLM to organize and clarify positions is like using a crutch when you should be in physical therapy. On top of this using a LLM completely erases any personality in your writing and replaces it with corpo style speak.
Practicing organizing and expressing your ideas (like physical therapy) can be hard and sometimes painful. But you get better.
Using a LLM is like refusing to go to physical therapy and using crutches for the rest of your life by choice. Easier in the short term but bad for your own quality of life long term.
Places like lemmy are great for writing practice. Rambling nonsense is pretty universally downloaded. Lemmy forces you to organize and classify what you are thinking and why.
If you want to get started I would recommend the basic “5 Paragraph Essay” structure. In the case of a basic lemmy comment take those principles and make it a 5 sentence structure.
I dunno, usually shilling something as hard as possible just means you're a fanboy, it doesn't mean it's as good as you say it is.
I'll wait and see until most people willingly make the choice to immutable distros before believing it's "10/10 the future of linux" or whatever.
Personally, I get annoyed even on regular distros when there's a file that I can't easily edit. I don't really see any of the benefit of immutable distros other than giving the fedora crowd (who loves shilling their OS) a stiffy.
I'm more interested in fixing real issues like having to prepend prime-run to every game I want to use my dedicated GPU or why my IP can leak while connected to a VPN using my system's network configuration.
I really like it as well. I did three major version upgrades so far and they have been flawless. I also really like Flatpak, finally a way of easily installing something on Linux without breaking half of the system because the application you wanted to install uses libfoo 2.0 and not libfoo 1.9.9-patch-1337. With my atomic desktop applications that worked yesterday also work today. Things don't randomly break all the time.
The future of Fedora Atomic also looks exciting; Timothée Ravier is working on sysexts which are a way of installing applications without ostree layering. I could remove most of my ostree layered packages with that.
The biggest issue I've had is tweaks causing instability over time. I also have had some issues where I was updating a debian install that hadn't been updated in 3 years and it broke and would require tweaking to fix (why do this when I can just load a new immutable install and fix it for good?). I have enough computers laying around that I'd really rather it work when I want to as a sure thing. So far my testing with immutable distros has been stellar, I'll let everyone know if my ostree tweaks and updates don't load in 3 years, lol.
I think this is a big enough problem that even the Fedora team considered it an issue and therefore pushed out Fedora Atomic.
Your user configs and home files are never changed when you 'image hop'.
So I have an older Lenovo Laptop that I'm looking to put Linux on to replace an even older Lenovo Laptop I currently have Linux on, and this bit really has me curious about Fedora Atomic. I'm only learning about it now through this post.
I have intermediate experience with Linux, as it's not my daily driver, how far into the deep end would I be plunging if I gave Fedora Atomic a try?
The ublue releases (bazzite/bluefin/aurora) are tweaked to be set up and ready to go with minimal or no set up. You can switch between ublue and the normal fedora atomic distros, or even user customized variants, from what I understand. The root system will change, but anything installed under your user account will stay the same. The only problem that might occur between switching is that different desktop environments might overwrite some settings and cause problems that way. You would want a way to backup your config files just in case if you do a lot of switching.
This also means you can't install multiple desktop environments side by side. Like if you wanted to choose between kde,gnome,xfce at the log in screen, it's not possible under the atmoic distros. When i've done that on regular distros it would always result in a mess, and getting rid of a DE meant a lot of orphaned programs I didn't want, so I avoid doing that, but this is a potential downside to the atomic distros. You would have to rebase and redownload stuff every time you switch DE.
Otherwise they are rock solid and basically designed to get you up and running as fast as possible, and be as stable as possible with seamless background updates. I'm running bluefin, and it's the most user friendly and smooth experience on linux i've ever had.
huh, very interesting. I think I'll give Bazzite a shot and see how it goes. I have an T490 kicking around, but it only has the Intel UHD graphics (no NVIDA Mobile chip, sadly), but on Windows it could handle some gaming. So, I'll be curious to see how it works out. The Bazzite site says it doesn't support the "Steam Gaming Mode", which just means the steam big picture mode.
Ok I've spent a few hours now tinkering and figuring things out, and I totally see the power here. I wanted to install the 1password Linux application and discovered I could do it easily using distrobox, and I wouldn't even know that's how it was running considering the GUI experience is the same as if I had installed it directly on the system.
It really depends on the game. Old games often run better on Linux than on windows. Check protondb to see how supported the game is, may be a driver issue. Old Nvidia parts use proprietary drivers which suck in comparison to old AMD parts which use open source drivers on Linux. New Nvidia parts use open source drivers, though these drivers are new and still having the kinks worked out. Sometimes laptops even have specific proprietary drivers that must be used for the laptop which can break compatibility with Linux or reduce performance. I'm pretty sure Intel is in the same boat, it's proprietary.
Personally, for games I enjoy, I saw a small 5fps performance increase over windows on a newish desktop.
For me AutoKey is absolutely essential to my workflow. I have tons of text expansions and shortcuts to "remap" keys. E.g., respectively, typing dAt expands into 2025-05-08, 13:47:40 CEST, and pressing alt + k simulates the arrow down key.
Secondly there's XScreenSaver which has so many wonderful (mathematical) visualizations that it would be a damn shame if these eventually get lost as Wayland gets more adoption.
Appreciate the link, and I don't mean to sound so ungrateful, but that extensive README contains everything except what exactly river is. Is it a desktop manager? A standalone compositor? What does it fix? What does it replace? etc.
I accomplish the same thing by binding a keyboard shortcut in my desktop to call wtype. It's not a cross-compositor solution though, as you'd have to manually setup binds in each of them.
Wayland's been my daily driver for a few years now, mostly without incident. However, occasionally certain applications (Ryujinx and pcsx2, predictably) require the GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable to be set before they'll function.
mouse-actions execute some command from mouse events such as clicks/wheel on the side/corners of the screen, or drawing shapes. It's a mix between Easystroke and Compiz edge commands. - jersou/...
Well, you can hold onto that GPU for a little longer with X11. But it seems you'll need an upgrade some time later. Though if you don't game (aside from FOSS ones), Nouveau driver should do the job for your daily needs. However, it still needs time for Wayland.
I'm too dumb to set up Wayland on Nvidia and honestly don't really care to. My laptop has an intel haswell-ult so it works with Wayland ootb and all the apps I use on it (literally just calibre, falkon, lapce and libreoffice Writer) work fine.
huh? Isn't that the thing that let's me select the DE/Compositor/Server mashup while logging in? It just occured to me that this sounds like circular reasoning, but that's what it looks like it does
RustDesk (remote desktop control) and Barriers (KVM-like server to control my laptop screen from my desktop just by moving mouse to that screen). Both of these are tightly integrated in my daily workflow and would be a hard loss.
There's a modern fork of Barriers but I haven't been able to get it working cross-platform yet. I know RustDesk is actively working to complete wayland support, but it's not quite there yet.
RustDesk on Wayland can't run headless, whichI need (unless they fixed already and I just haven't noticed yet - I know they've been working on it!)
Yeah, Input-leap is the Barriers fork I was referring to. I need it to work on all platforms though, and I wasn't able to get it working on macOS. I keep checking periodically tho (usually in reaponse to posts like these - I wanna move Wayland like everyone else!)
Right now there's an issue in WoW where sometimes when I move my mouse and left-click, the camera jumps to a different position, usually trying to look up.
Only happens on Wayland and it's fixed temporarily by switching between windowed and fullscreen mode. The problem comes back sometimes when alt-tabbing and refocusing the game.
There was a bug in KDE recently where some menus weren't properly appearing on Wayland, but that seems to have been fixed after my latest update.
Every time I build a new box or do an upgrade, I try selecting Plasma on Wayland from the login screen. Every time it doesn't work, I select X11, and never think of it again for another six months to two years.
At the beginning of this year we noticed that the Deepin Desktop as it is currently packaged in openSUSE relies on a packaging policy violation to bypass SUSE security team review restrictions.
In January 2025, during routine reviews, we stumbled upon the deepin-feature-enable package, which was introduced on 2021-04-27 without consulting us or even informing us.
This is what vertical integration between distros and GUIs often leads to. This could be completely innocuous from Deepin's end, because that's just how they made it work in Deepin because they have vertical integration on their own stack. However, It's completely bad form.
In general Deepin seems to adopt a lot of commercial software industry practices in building its tools, which I'm sympathetic to on some level, but it's very obvious that the Linux community is not going to accept default-on telemetry. They should have known better after the CNZZ incident.
I had no idea that (open)SUSE was so security minded in their packaging. It makes sense in retrospec. It sucks they didn't catch this earlier, but this response makes me happy to use tumbleweed
No they don't. OpenSUSE, especially tumbleweed, is way more security-focused than other distros.
It's a very low-trust default install, and it takes some work to get things through the firewall. Compare that to Fedora where every port above 2025 is open by default.
In case you think "but those policies are not needed, they are superfluous" (like some Arch devs). They are not. Packagers send their fixes upstream, and then, other distros, with lower standards, consume the already fixed upstream releases, and sometimes pretend that this work was not needed nor present, not realizing that all distros benefit from it even if your policies are more relaxed.
There's a reason why the Deepin Desktop Environment was never part of Debian, and only available via their own ppa repositories, even if the Deepin distro is based in Debian.
In #2795 there are some discuss about the BLOBs in Ventoy. For a long time, I devoted my limited spare time to adding new features and fixing bugs and didn't get around to considering this. It shou...
My problem is that a lot of people are giving a lot of shit to open source developers, who are creating great software in their free time.
Instead of enjoying their free time, they give a lot of it to the community, and then they get accused of wrong doings if the quality of their code isn't at enterprise level. The problem is that people are being toxic to them and this makes them less likely to continue doing that. I am trying to give credit as I know how hard it is to build and support some software and I want the open source community to thrive and not turn into a toxic cesspool.
Jia Tan was a big warning for everyone, I admit, but if you look at the big picture he was a single person in a sea of open source projects and honestly speaking if we are talking of state sponsored attacks, I would say that big corporations like Cisco, Fortinet, etc. would be more of a target than small open source projects. I just wish we could give the guy some credit for all his work and at least let him prove that those blobs are harmless.
I also think a big part of your qualms is the fact that he is Chinese and you are less likely to trust because of your bias.
The guy is trying to address the issue and he is building this in his free time. Give him some credit at least, I am sure this is consuming a lot of his free time.
I personally find this Ventoy an amazing piece of software and he also seems to be willing to address the issue and be more transparent in the future which is also commendable.
To me, what matters is what guarantees they offer and/or plan to offer, not some subjective and fleeting idea of people online having expectation of at what speed things need to be done.
Can someone do it faster? then do it (and do it in the open, so anyway Ventoy can benefit too so essentially you'll be contributing!).. but if you jump and start using a fork that has not done already the work that is currently being done, then you are placing your trust in a much much worse and shaky ground. I definitely would trust LESS a newcomer, it'd be so easy to fork, promise the same as it's being promised without actually doing the work and then inject malicious code into it. They would have very little to lose.
There shouldn't be the need to clear a name, because you shouldn't be smearing someone's name who's giving away their work. It's fine to distrust it, but then just don't use the software.
You can use glim or build your own tool using grub. Edit: The article on Arch Wiki describes the manual process and also list more automated alternatives.
Is frankly annoying to see how much shit FOSS (or OSS) developer have to eat for every little misstep or for not employing their unpaid time to solve other people's issues (some of which are really laughable, btw).
Let’s indeed hope that they back it up with action. Better late than never. Though, I wonder what “guarantee” you’re referring to.
Any "action" that does not result in guarantees isn't helpful to solve this. So again, what I care about is guarantees.
For example, one way to "guarantee" that there's no code that's unaccounted for would be to achieve reproducible builds that can be rebuilt and obtain always the same binary bit-by-bit. So if the binary blob resulting from compiling from clean source matches the one offered then that's proof that the distributed binary was built cleanly and there was no malware being slipped through.
The issue is that this wouldn't just be a Ventoy problem, but also an upstream problem, since all projects Ventoy depends on would need to be, themselves, reproducible. So this wouldn't be an easy task, or even a task that Ventoy should do on their own, imho.
FWIW, slightly over a month ago, someone started working on a solution.
I definitely wouldn't trust that either until there's guarantees. Again, I only care about what guarantees are offered. It's not about who is the one managing the github account and/or what subjective reputation that random anonymous person might have.
The problem isn't the existence of precompiled binary blobs either, so removing the binaries is not solving the issue. The problem is in the traceability and what guarantees we have that the final collection of compiled binary blobs that ultimately is offered for download (and we do need binary blobs for download ultimately) is actually corresponding to libre/open source releases without potentially malicious code.
~~The conspiracy theorist inside of me would like to think this is related to the return of Ventoy’s maintainer. But I digress…~~
I don't think the maintainer went away. I've seen successfully maintained projects with much slower pace than this, specially projects for which stability is important. Last Bash commit was in 2024 and I wouldn't say it's unmaintained. Ventoy had a release 3 months ago.
Also, would it be bad if that was what triggered the interest to work on it? I mean, the post straight away mentions the github issue where that fork was advertised, and it implies that it's in that issue where they noticed that people have started to care about the blobs. So it could well be that they saw there's people who care enough to spend their time working for it (ie. they even made a fork), so why not open the doors for them? It does not have to always be drama.
Recently came across this magazine from the Linux Format on a second hand vintage shop and obviously had to go for it! These magazines are still produced these to this day btw. However, when I went to linuxformat.com after receiving my magazine to check out some of their other ones, I saw that they were in fact just celebrating their 25-year anniversary and have put out a digital version of the very magazine I bought - for everyone to view digitally!
Their announcement:
25-years ago in this month of May, back in 2000 (just after the giant Y2K meltdown that flipped every plane upsidedown) Linux Format was first published. To help celebrate and remember this momentous pinnacle of publishing prowess (and while we still have server access) we'll be popping out a few classic issues of Linux Format in PDF format. As we already have it to hand here's issue LXF001 with a very young looking Nick Veitch.
I used to subscribe to Linux format! I got the back issues on exactly/Exact Editions too, so for a while I could also view every issue on my android tablet. Those were the days.
I don't even know if Exactly is still around anymore.
Edit - nope, I was thinking of New Humanist magazine, oops. But I did used to get Linux Format through the door. I remember they used to have rackspace ads on the plastic weather cover
Fascism isnt a political view either. Conservatism is a political view. It also cant be viewed the same as communism or socialism. One is based on feeding, housing and helping everyone while the other is tied to discriminating, abusing and even killing people of different ethnicity and ability.
Mussolini called it a merger of the corporation and the state, and he’s the guy who started it
That's not what corporatism is, it's a different meaning of the word "corporation".
You're absolutely correct that fascism is an illiberal capitalist ideology, but Mussolini framed their movement as pro-labour, not pro-capitalist. We must learn to recognize Classical Fascism's class-collaborationist hypothesis as flawed and pro-capitalist, especially since this rhetoric is often echoed in social democracy.
I think it’s really funny how in proprietary software, if you download stuff without asking, you’re presumed to have economically harmed a business. But in free and open source software, if you download stuff without asking, you’re presumed to have economically benefited the random individual that made the project.
Why is it wrong to promote the things a shitty person makes?
It's FOSS, so using it doesn't give them money. On the other hand, a user might voluntarily donate if they're unaware.
One might claim they're being given a platform in the community by people promoting their product, but on the other hand I hear more loudly that they're toxic, fascist and banned from various places.
I don't have a lot that I would add, but I would just assert that the "user might donate if they're unaware" is a big enough reason on its own. Even if you promote it alongside a caveat mentioning the moral shortcomings, the people who start using it because of your promotion might also promote it, but there's no guarantee they'll keep the caveat (in fact I'd consider it likely that people who will use the product despite the caveat are exceptionally likely to neglect to mention anything in their promotion).
And to your second point I'd say that its pretty indisputable that they are being given a platform, as evidenced by the platform they have. It is a platform that is, as you mention, not subscribed to by a lot of people with a moral backbone, but it is significant.
If I had to give a one-liner for why it is bad to promote the things a shitty person makes, I'd say "its a bit of a Nazi bar thing".
And it's also kind of a big thing that they get an audience. The more people use the projects, the bigger the audience. They'll get a Discord and people will join because of the project, people will start reading their blog because of the attention via the software... People will maintain and package their software, or use it, or contribute to it... Directly resulting in interactions with the group which develops a project.
The more people learn to drive, the bigger the chance they'll get a private car, the more accidents, the more people will die. Thus: let's recommend everyone to not learn to drive.
I feel this path is sort of a baby-sitting approach to recommendations. Not only do I have to know if the software if good before recommending it, I also have to research if there's a chance that whoever I'm recommending it to might find a community somewhere for which they might lack enough critical thinking to judge on by themselves?
How about we recommend good software while at the same time recommending good thinking?
How about we just tell the truth as is? I mean in your analogy... Would you recommend a faulty car with the same words you'd choose for a very nice one? Would you hide that the manufacturer does problematic things? I think the way you phrase it, has indeed some things in common for example with recommending a Tesla car these days. Generally, people don't keep their mouth shut about who manufactures them. So yeah, I don't think speaking the truth is babysitting at all... But of course you also don't hide the fact that Hyperland exists and if it's any good. I'd advocate for just stating the facts. As an added bonus, everyone can then go ahead and make that desicion themselves. I mean I personally wouldn't buy a Swasticar. I have less objections using Hyprland. But I always try to give these kind of info out as well, if someone asks me about software. Because I think it's kind of important if a project is healthy, has a nice community etc. I think the comparison with driving cars falls a bit short, since we don't recommend people shouldn't use any desktop. It's fine to use one. And it's also fine to drive a car. You should just be aware of the consequences. And in fact I think it would have some benefits if we were to drive less cars.
But that's exactly what I mean when I say recommend good software and recommend good thoughts.
Why do you assume I wanna "hide" problematic information? Did I say that? What I'm saying is don't hide the fact that good things are good. The good car will be a good car, and the manufacturer being problematic will be a problematic manufacturer.
Recommending the good car does not imply that you support the manufacturer, and denouncing the manufacturer does not imply that their cars are bad and not something we should recommend.
Do you do the same thing in reverse? Would you stop recommending good ideals if you find out that the people who came up with those ideals were actually bad people who did all kinds of shitty stuff?
What's the manufacturer of the device you are using right now?
If a notorious criminal created a cure for cancer, I'll sing praises to his amazing work, asking everyone to use it. But that dos not mean I approve of their crimes. It would be perfectly consistent with my praise of his work to, at the same time, ask for him to to be judged and sentenced accordingly for the crimes he committed..
The world is not black and white. People are not angels just because they have one good thought, nor do they become monsters that poison everything they touch if they have one wrong thought.
Yeah, seems we're on the same page, then. Because I occasionally get into that situation. People ask me stuff and I'll tell them, there is software XY or Linux distribution XY which does exactly what you're looking for, but it's owned by a company which is known for making problematic business decisions, so wouldn't recommend using it before giving it a good thought if that's going to impede with your application... Or I'll tell them about some software project and simultaneously say, I can't endorse it due to the political stance or behaviour of the devs/maintainers... Happened a few times to me with niche projects, Android distributions and Fediverse projects. I'll then not walk around and advertise for them, but instead only give a complete picture of the situation on request.
And I'll do it in other parts of my life as well... Try to boycott clothes from a particularly bad sweatshop, even if they fit and suit me well... Not buy tasty food if it's from Neste or the Coca Cola company... Though those are on a different level of "bad" as this one. Just saying toxic things on the internet isn't exactly the same as supporting child labor, slavery and stealing poor people's water supply.
It's morally wrong to promote bad things, and morally good to promote good things.
Just because I admire the theories Isaac Newton came up with and I encourage others to learn about them does not mean I support everything Isaac Newton did, said or thought.
All of our society is built on the shoulders of giants who did a lot of "good" despite being, in general, "bad people".
Thats a tangibly different example though right? Isaac Newton isn't alive to benefit from your support so the moral downside is basically gone. If a modern genius was out here breaking new ground left and right in science but he was also a raging Nazi I certainly wouldn't be promoting him and I'd be very wary of using any of his breakthroughs
However, let's centre the conversation back on what it is: a flashy tiling window manager made by a bit of a knob
So the bad thing is the off chance that he would benefit?
Because that's a very different thing. Then this should not be about judging morals related to the thing they made, but executing punishment for a completely separate thing they did.
Then it's not a question of morals, it's a question of whether the approach you are taking to execute that punishment is one that other people agree with.
I’d be very wary of using any of his breakthroughs
Ah, but will you still use them? will you promote his breakthroughs if they help people? what if supporting his scientific work leads to the cure for cancer?
Punish the nazi political work, promote the scientific work.
Its not "the bad thing" and its not an off chance, but sure let's roll with that for the sake of having some constructive discussion.
It isn't about executing punishment, but about the moral implications of my own actions. If, by supporting this theoretical Nazi science genius, I enable him to better perform Nazism, then I have been morally complicit in his Nazism. I think we can agree on that point? Its getting into the weeds a bit with the example, but it feels important to mention, that you could theoretically support this Nazi genius if sufficient measures are taken to ensure that it doesn't benefit his nazism, thus removing the negative moral outcome. But that starts to fall apart pretty badly in this particular example of the Nazi genius.
Will I use them? Perhaps! Its about the moral outcome, right? If I can sufficiently convince myself that the overall outcome is morally positive (at a very utilitarian level this could perhaps be "does his science save more people than his Nazism kills?"), then it may well be reasonable to support. Its hard to say specifically in this example because I don't know how lifesaving his research would be and how damaging his Nazism would be. However, the moral downside in the real case we are discussing is "more people are exposed to the creator's nonsense, he may spread his views further than he otherwise would have" and the moral upside is... I get to use a specific tiling window manager? Which has 0 moral weight so the balance is pretty indisputably an overall negative, though how negative is up in the air based on speculation on how much damage he can do.
I agree in a vacuum with "punish the Nazism and promote the science" but in reality it isn't that simple. Can one support jkr's harry potter stuff without supporting her transphobic rampage? Pretty decisively not. Let's say that harry potter is somehow a moral positive, and that you can in fact somehow cut off JKRs ability to spread hate about trans people, eliminating the negative, then maybe it becomes morally OK to support jkr?
I rambled a bit, but I hope I come across clearly enough.
If, by supporting this theoretical Nazi science genius, I enable him to better perform Nazism, then I have been morally complicit in his Nazism
If you think anything that could benefit him is enabling that, then there's all sort of things that are complicit. Even the public social services and the State might be complicit, even people who pay taxes might be complicit.. international influence/opinion, the whole world, society would be complicit.
I'm a believer of honesty and direct punishment for direct precise problems. The more abstract the punishment, the most likely it is you'd end up with the innocent paying for the sins of the guilty.
I think people should be aware of the exact reasons why something is bad, as opposed to punishing a general abstraction without actually addressing the root of the problem. I've seen how this often results in people religiously believing something is good/bad based on sheep thinking, and this leads to situations that actually create more Nazis than what they destroy. An unjust punishment is just a badly patched up wound that will not really heal and instead extend to other parts. Have you considered this in your calculation of moral consequences?
I take into consideration as much as I can take into consideration. I can see the pathway directly from "I support the creator of hyprland" to "the creator of hyprland grows his platform" and I don't see any moral upside to supporting him, so this is a fairly easy calculation.
As you say, some issues are indeed more nuanced, and may have more complex balances when it comes to morality. I don't think "not promoting someone" is a punishment, it is a decision. I prefer rehabilitation over punishment, when it comes to individuals, where possible, but that's neither here nor there.
This truly has strayed so far into the abstract, however. We are talking about a guy who's nasty who makes a tiling window manager. The moral judgement can only be neutral or negative, theres basically no way that anyone could argue for a moral upside of hyprland, or at least I'd love to see someone try.
I don't support the TWM: explicitly neutral outcome, morally I do support the TWM: either negative or neutral, morally, depending on what you determine the likely outcome of your support would be
Can you tell me the political affiliation of the creator of grep? I use that tool a lot.
I think it's impossible to know for sure what the political thinking of the people involved in everything that happens to have contributed to something in your life is. Some people are not even easy to discern.. some people are interpreted out of context, some people are just caught in drama.
I'd rather take advantage of their work, be thankful for it but without any sort of para-social intent, just thankful for the mathematical algorthms.
Not sure, but if you're interested to know I'm sure the information is out there 😀
Edit after your edit:
Its impossible to know everything perfectly, but you can know some things to some degree and take action based on what you do know. Some will choose to not bother, and that is their decision to make, but it is a decision.
Anyway I think we're talking around in circles at this point. Have a good one.
My morals come from my religion and not from some arbitrary standards set by a Western supremacist, who thinks their culture is superior to everyone else and the rest of the world is "primitive". Promoting a tool by itself is not morally wrong. It seems like some people have a very low opinion about other people. They think that others will not be able to differentiate between a tool and the morals of its makers. I am sorry that I have a much higher opinion about adults.
I would not support the project monetarily because I would not want to fund the primary persons behind it.
But Hyprland is FOSS is it not? Someone could fork the project to resolve the issue you are describing.
If this does not resolve the issue in your opinion (as you seem to have concerns with the "roots" of the project), and if we go with that logic, we should be just as opposed to using the modern "Jerry" gas can as it was a Nazi invention originally.
Both good and evil people invent things - whether the thing that is invented is itself reflective or could be considered supportive of the inventors ideals varies. Nazi's are terrible and I don't want to support them, but at the same time I think that it is good and useful to be able to safely and effectively transport gas if needed.
I don't know a tonne about Hyprland as a thing however, so my decision on whether or not to use it may also vary.
Vaxry is not a very smart guy. He got a wrist slap by FDO saying don't do your toxic shit here. Then he followed it up by going postal on the FDO mailing list. Then he put up a blog post where he was like like "SJWs are coming for me".
The entire argument is that you can't make an exclusionary space for people (no definition of what that means) but you should be able to call them slurs. Who would want anything to do with him?
Or seen as a repeated prisoners dilemma, play tit-for-tat, or maybe (N*tit)-for-tat (where N gives a 'punitive' damages expectation for breching the accepted norms).
Quite a lot of lefties don't like thinking about what is "rational" though because "people aren't cognitively rational" so rationality based social equilibia can obviously never have any relevance.
The software itself does not harm anyone, considering it is free software and nobody has to contribute money to use it, i don't care. If you feel so outraged by it, fork the software and develop your own version. At least with free software you have that option, as opposed to proprietary software where you have no option.
I'm not using Hyperland personally, but i'm not opposed to people using it.
lemmy is not a great comparison, there's like 3 alternatives, there are tens if not more hyprland alternatives.
i don't think software is just software, why would this tech be exempt? pilot-less aircrafts is just tech, just like software, but we do remember that drones bomb people. supporting problematic developers is not "as bad" as building killing machines, but it's the same principle: looking the other way when it's convenient. we should aim to ostracize and isolate problematic devs, and it starts by not using their software, because doing so gives them clout and relevance
What other well supported wayland tiled window managers are out there with smooth animations? I would check them out for sure, but I only know about hyprland.
i'm not on wayland so i can't try any of these, but there are lists you can browse from (wiki.archlinux.org/title/Wayla… for example)
you are setting quite restrictive and arbitrary limits
well supported
what do you mean?
with smooth animations
what counts as "smooth animations"?
if your message boils down to "something which looks really good to me and that has a discord i can go into and ask for help", you may have set the requirements tight enough to only include hyprland, but that's not a valid excuse in my opinion to avoid boycotting problematic developers
I agree they're restrictive and arbitrary reasons and they're also the preference of every single hyprland user has for chosing it. You have a different set of arbitrary reasons for setting your system up the way you like. It's called a "preference".
In order to fulfill this preference, is it ok for me to fork hyprland and call it something else? Or do I need to rewrite hyprland's functionality from scratch and pretend it was all my idea? Can I reference hyprland during the rewrite or does it need to be clean room? Should i make a fork available for people who disapprove of the hyprland devs? But what if I'm not a good enough person? Oof, just noticing, i forgot to check the ideologies of each maintainer of the thousands of packages in my system.
I think it's possible that the boycott idea makes more sense in a capitalist setting than a communist one. The reason we stop supporting JK Rowling or Chick-Fil-A is because being a customer directly translates to their success and thus the success of their ideology. But no one is making a profit from developing and maintaining a Linux package. In fact, typically the more people use your package, the more thankless work falls on you.
I'm simply interested in having control over my PC, and the FOSS community exists to exchange learnings and code to enable each other to do that. And like all of science throughout history, there are problematic people who contribute useful ideas, and I think we would be cutting off our own noses to reject them just because they come from people we otherwise disagree with.
I don't disagree exactly, but I'd argue that you're contributing to the project even if you're just reporting bugs or helping others with it on e.g. Lemmy.
I could see avoiding all of that pragmatically in order to use some obscure, critical software, but not something you use everyday and for which there are reasonable alternatives.
Sadly there are many people in the open source community who don't care, to them if the software is good then it doesn't matter who the artist is.
Specifically with the Linux community I feel like it's half queer people and half middle aged men and the other half often doesn't care and likely lean right wing or libertarian anyway.
That's my opinion at least. Tons of people still use and recommend Proton even though its founder and owner is toxic and harmful to queer people as well.
Honestly I just stopped caring about developer's personalities or political views. If you only use products made by nice guys who share your political views you won't use anything in your life. Not even a phone.
I agree with the sentiment of support nice folks, especially in the FOSS ecosystem.
What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple? What VR headset are you going to use? What telecom are you going to use? Are you only going to shop in local food markets? Lemmy's creators are also biggots, yet here we are...
I financially support projects and people I like, but I use whatever software I enjoy using. FOSS, closed source, made by a nice guy, bad guy. If I feel my experience is good I'll use that, if something better appears along the way I'll move on.
what os are you going to use on your smartphone if you remove software from google and apple?
aosp, fdroid, no gservices
what VR headset
not into vr so can't say
what telecom
sadly, not a good one. i wish i had a choice, but this isn't software
are you only shopping in local food markets?
sort of? i get fresh stuff from actual markets when i can and when i go for groceries i avoid ultra processed stuff from big multinationals, making sure of the provenance and the maker of the stuff i get, supermarkets also sell stuff from local producers
lemmy creators are bigots
eh, im still leeching off some other person hosting, im not going to host lemmy and im slowly making my own thing
also can you provide examples? i heard it multiple times, I'm not contesting it, just kinda want to see myself, like with vaxry, and not only trust second hand accusations
i don't want to be a cop and background check
no absolutely fine i don't check all my software too, but when i hear a callout i dont hide behind "art and artist" mentality and move off the bigot's stuff
While aosp with microg is a step into the right direction, it's not Google free. Most android code is made by Google and streamed to aosp.
So you think people must only use software made by nice guys but you can use hardware, services, books, movies, etc. from whoever? What makes software so special?
You're not hosting a lemmy instance but here we adding content, and therefore value, to the platform. I don't host hyprland either, I am leeching off the entire devs for zero dollars. Does that make it okay now?
I give more importance to qualities like open source, safety, privacy and performance other than who supports trump or not.
You probably don't care about my opinion, but one of the reason I don't really care about this is that I only have the "drama" second hand from very unreliable sources. There is the Vaxry's version of the story which cannot be trusted because that's conflict of interest. Then there is Drew, who according to a Distrotube video is quite a bizzare person, who really enjoys to stir the drama and write these extremely misleading "hitpieces" on famous FOSS people. The issue is that to me Distrotube is not a credible source regarding this either because he's got for me too schizo view of the world. He has a rifle collection, in case he has to fight for his country. (including a rifle, "that's good for children")
So it's just too foggy for me. Well I don't promote Hyprland because I don't care about my computer's "looks" and because according to some (I think) Void dev, Hyprland code is crap. But that's a different story. Anyways my point is that I can see why people can see it as not that bad.
edit: adding sources for the Drew, Distrotube and Void stuff, in that order.
Free software means that the users have the "FREEDOM" to run, edit, contribute to, and share the software...regardless of who they are or what their purpose ...
You call man a bigot and you make a drama publicly because you can't stand how he can have a different opinion or way of living than you, right? Guess that makes you... a bigot? 😉
I made myself a promise to donate to Hyprland and Vaxry every time I see bad press against him. And I just made another payment. He makes good software and this is something he should concentrate on and just like many others on this thread: I don't care if he has one opinion or the other. You don't like it? Just don't engage with him, his Discord or Hyprland, let the guy have his space.
Or make another bad press and make me donate again, I'll happily do that💪🏻
If you honestly throw KKK and Vaxry into the same bucket then I guess it speaks for yourself: as for me, I'm not going deeper into conversation if this is how it starts ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I didn't do it. He did that himself, he [pretty much, in other words] said:
"I'm fine with a genocidal transphobe homophobe racist antisemite literal murderer being welcomed of my software community if he was alive now. As long as he keeps his crimes against humanity off the main focus: my project and my project alone."
Maybe I would have cared about this a year ago. But you guys have said this so many times I'm honestly just tired. Try to get a new shtick. Say he's transphobic or something. That would get you more upvotes.
This is akin to MAGA calling the pope marxist cuz he disagrees with them, some people are so one-dimensional its comical, you cant fight stupidity with stupidity, this is how actual fascists justify all of their extremist views, extremism just encourages extremism on the other side and gives those who are indoctrinated a bigger reason to support their indoctrinators. Tunnel vision is one crazy phenomenon 🤡
Regardless of his views I'll continue using it and supporting it.
Claiming transgender ppl are mentally ill is not fascist, it's a fact, and the fact MAGA are rinsing it is only cuz its the only thing they can agree on with the people who actually have braincells unlike Trump or his fascist minions, gender dysphoria is a real diagnosable condition, although under no circumstance is violence against them acceptable. I've got no qualms with your sexuality, but why are you trynna trick me? They're not girls, they're mandem in disguise and they need professional help.
I'm trying to find a replacement for NaturalReader in Linux but I'm not finding anything as good.
I have played around with different engines, such as Espeak (too robotic), Mozilla TTS and Coqui, and Piper. But I'm looking for an application, not just an engine, something that would allow me to open up a PDF, pick a spot and read from there, then be able to move back and forth on the document. Ideally, I would like to also be able to tell the application how to pronounce certain words.
I haven't figured out how to make Okular use The best I have found is ReadAloud, but it's just a browser addon. Okular doesn't seem to be able to use something like Piper.
A screen reader reads what's on the screen. What I'm describing is reading a document. ReadAloud does exactly that for Firefox, I am just asking for standalone applications.
Probably not what you're after, but if it's really just about PDFs, note that Firefox has an excellent PDF reader built-in. Oh, but I guess a browser extension can't access that?
Then there's flitevox or just flite (should be in most distro's main repositories) which imho is much better than espeak(-ng), but not as good as datamining-funded Google's TTS.
In any case, you should check out voices that are often available as separate downloads, they might sound much better than the default.
i've been having problems with xfce where themes with rounded corners show a black box behind the whisker menu and even with the following code in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
I had a bunch of issues setting it up to work on my laptop, but now that I have I would like to compile all the bits and stuff together into one guide!
device-path: use ls /dev/video* or v4l2-ctl —list-devices to see all device paths and test each of them using sudo howdy test (for me it was /dev/video2)
settings to change “freedy237” recommends: (note that howdy-beta uses different words e.g. “abort if” rather than “ignore”, make sure you have howdy-beta! This stumped me for a while)
Name it anything you want, I go with names like “glasses” and “no-glasses” since…I wear glasses. Some random person on GitHub with a multi-monitor setup has it set to looking at different monitors. Whatever you want, doesn’t really matter.
You can use sudo howdy test to check if it works. A red outline means it’s an unrecognised face, a green outline with the name means it is a recognises face. no outline means not a face. Also check that whether it is a “dark frame” or not vs a “scan frame”. You might need to set the dark threshold higher using config. (this was an issue I faced as well, for me 80 works)
howdy on login
sudo nano /etc/pam.d/gdm-password
add: auth sufficient pam_howdy.so
a similar thing can be done for gnome’s password pop ups (e.g. when installing an app) by going to “polkit-1”
howdy on sudo (you might not want this!)
sudo nano /etc/pam.d/sudo
add: auth sufficient pam_howdy.so no_confirmation
permissions
sudo chmod o+rw /dev/video*
sudo chmod -R o+rx /usr/share/howdy/dlib-data
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/howdy
sudo usermod -aG video gdm
sudo chmod 666 /dev/video*
sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib64/security/pam_howdy.so
fix SELinux perms for login screen
create “howdy.te” sudo nano howdy.te
add: (as seen on fedora copr repo)
module howdy 1.0;
require {
type lib_t;
type xdm_t;
type v4l_device_t;
type sysctl_vm_t;
class chr_file map;
class file { create getattr open read write };
class dir add_name;
}
\#============= xdm_t ==============
allow xdm_t lib_t:dir add_name;
allow xdm_t lib_t:file { create write };
allow xdm_t sysctl_vm_t:file { getattr open read };
allow xdm_t v4l_device_t:chr_file map;
Hey! I was installed howdy(3.0 beta) on my Fedora 41,but I trying upgrading Fedora 42.howdy requires the python3dist(dlib).As a result,I can't update Fedora 42.Howdy and Fedora 42 incompatible?
Wrong move. To make sudo more secure, you should instead ditch 90% of the features intended for server which nobody on desktop uses. 150 lines of C code is enough to provide sudo-like functionality on desktop.
They are open to drop some features apparently, but maybe not "90%"
The developers are taking a “less is more” approach. This means that some features of the original sudo may not be reimplemented if they serve only niche, or more recently considered “outdated” practices.
A way smaller alternative therefore less prompt to vulnerabilities is OpenDoas found on Arch/Artix/... and other distros. From the GH project:
doas is a minimal replacement for the venerable sudo. It was initially written by Ted Unangst of the OpenBSD project to provide 95% of the features of sudo with a fraction of the codebase.
Go install WIndows 11 if this is what you want punk.
Don't install Ubuntu 25.10 if this isn't what you want. Using Ubuntu means accepting that they're going to make a lot of decisions about your system. The whole point of these large pre-configured Linux distros is that they make all of the decisions for you.
@FauxLiving I've been using Ubuntu for about 14 years and in the past they've been at least somewhat interested in user input. I hope "don't become another fucking Microsoft" is a message that Canonical gets.
@FooBarrington You didn't just specify memory safe, you advocated stripping away a number of features. Yes memory safe anything is a good idea and I've got no objection to the use of rust, I think it's a good language, one of the few worthwhile efforts to emerge in recent years, but if it is going go be re-implemented, do so fully. Yes, anything that runs with privileges should be memory safe else it's open to attack and Rust certainly makes that more possible, I am just concerned about the limiting feature set aspect. I'm not in favor of protecting users from themselves, I don't want a car that is capable of reading speed limit signs and prevents me from exceeding them even if doing so might be unsafe or illegal, that not the car manufacturers job to be come an arm of the government, likewise I don't want Linux protecting me from myself, I already address potentials with regular backups, etc.
Seems like it's Apache-2.0, but original sudo is under ISC license, which is more permissive as far as I'm aware. Although Apache-2.0 is very much still considered "permissive", too.
Mx linux is a bad chioce if you cant answer this yourself because its going to differ from most other debian distros. You probably want to use normal debian or linux mint if you are still learning.
To answer anyway; First install lightrpd using apt, and then firgure out the differences between sysvinit and systemd so you can properly configure the server to start.
If you just use debian instead, "sudo apt install lighttpd" would be enough to get everything started.
I think you know its not just a matter of "clicking a setting in a gui once"
Why would you choose a non systemd based distro only to just switch it over to systemd? Why over complicate thinga for a new user who is clearly just starting out? Just use normal debian!
I think you know its not just a matter of "clicking a setting in a gui once"
I know it is that simple because I've done it while running MX on my devices... You can even switch between the two at boot freely.
Why would you choose a non systemd based distro only to just switch it over to systemd? Why over complicate thinga for a new user who is clearly just starting out? Just use normal debian!
It comes with tools that make system management a lot easier for beginners. I think that's more than a fair trade for having to click a single setting in a gui.
You obviously haven't used MX, and I have no clue where you're pulling your opinions out of from. Give it a try instead of continuing to spew nonsense.
I tried it about a week ago but since i have zero interest in alternatives to systemd or gui tools I find its easy to just install something that uses the things i want by default.
If you enjoy having that extea option and managing it with gui tools then im glad mx works for you, but it seems overcomplicated with no practical benefit to me.
Addy aliases are temporary email addresses (aliases) that forward messages to their primary email account. This can help protect a user's real email address from spam, unwanted marketing, or potential data breaches.
It also protects them from a sense of personal responsibility knowing their true identity can't be easily traced. This is what Mastodon doesn't like about them.
I don't want to clutter up a general purpose community with tech support questions. I think of the general topic ones to be more about News or history topics.
One of these communities restricts privacy rights. I suggest checking for such stuff before recommending. It's not Reddit after all and the moderation may be quite unhinged.
I purchased a motherboard from minisforum, it's a mobile-on-desktop (MoD) board with the chip directly on the board,
I love it, my build runs amazing, super small and everything i ever wanted
However the one thing that doesn't work is audio
The device in my audio list is "Family 17h/19h/1ah HD Audio Controller Pro"
Pipewire seems to work and playing a video attempts to play audio on that, but the audio never makes it put of the jack. Not even static just... nothing. And yes, I am using the jacks on the back of thr motherboard and not on the case itself.
The manufacturer's response was "Install Windows and let us know if it works" which does irk me.
My hypothesis is that the pins are not mapped correctly, and that Windows does something to pre-configure pins and the linux kernel doesn't do that in the same way so I've been trying hdajackretask to try and fix it however no matter how I set it up I never get any audio at all.
I've asked on 3 different forums, no replies beyond another person saying try it on Windows.
The only thing I can find out line that might be something useful is downgrading the kernel to 6.7 worked for someone, but I don't think that's the best option for someone who wants basically 1-step-from-bleeding-edge because that's over a year old and I'm unsure of the ramifications of downgrading.
I would really really appreciate any help in actually trying to iron this out because right now I'm using Bluetooth earbuds and it's terrible.
The 6.6.x kernel series is LTS and should be fine as a downgrade target (6.7.x not so much so). Unless there's something specific from the newer kernel versions that you need to drive that system, there shouldn't be any issues. I'm still on a 6.6-series kernel.
That being said, you could try troubleshooting this from the bottom up rather than the top down.
First, use lspci -v to verify that the device is being correctly identified and associated with a driver.
Next, invoke alsamixer and make sure everything is unmuted and your HD audio controller is the first sound device. The last time I had something like this happen to me, the issue turned out to be that the main soundcard slot was being hijacked by an HDMI audio output that I didn't want and wasn't using, and that was somehow muting the sound at the audio jack even when I tried to switch to it. A little mucking around in ALSA-level config files fixed everything.
The driver that appears is "snd_hda_intel", the intel part is apparently just what they decided to name it, doesn't matter that the board is centered around an AMD Chip
I've disabled the other two devices I have "Navi 31 HDMI/DP Audio" and "Rembrandt Radeon High Definition Audio Controller"
The former is for Audio through my GPU(?)'s HDMI which i didn't even know was a thing
The latter I thought might be the one I needed but apparently its for the hdmi of the board itself
I will try your advice with alsamixer and see if I can get anything out of it
Update: Alsamixer I flipped everything off of mute, some things were muted, I also disabled auto-mute but nothing changed.
Audio from youtube tries to play out to the right card but I have no idea what's wrong. I'm back to my hdajackretask idea and messing with that
Hey all - what’s your experience with refurb Lenovo laptops for Linux from companies/shops that specialize in this as a service? I’m looking at LinuxPusher.dk but am also curious about other EU-based shops. It seems like a good, affordable way to get a Linux machine if you’re a novice, like me (some experience with Ubuntu and Kubuntu about 10 years ago).
I've had very disappointing experiences with Lenovo laptops in general and they're not cheap, even when bought second hand. My recommendation? Go for an AMD Acer laptop, they're very good machines and Linux Mint works out of the box in all laptops I've tested it so far. And I'm sure there are other affordable / good OEMs out there.
I checked LinuxPusher and I wouldn't say they're affordable. Their laptops are 2-3x the price of the same laptop running no OS on sites like eBay.de. For example, their cheapest T470 is 3000 krone, while the equivalent laptop on ebay is like 150 euro or 1120 krone.
I looked at a Thinkpad L14 G1, an elitebook 840 G5, and the dell 3060 Micro and it's the same. Consistently 2x and higher markup.
Is that markup worth a 2 year warranty?
You could literally buy a second device if the first one kicks the bucket and still be out ahead monetarily.
If you want to slowly start using linux and already have a pc, make a portable install on any flash drive (I like external ssds for this exact reason) you want, and boot it. (ideally set the RealTimeIsUniversal registry entry in windows so Linux and windows don't fuck up the bios time).
I have nothing to add here. I just want to change express how happy I am to be in a platform where we talk about Euros/Krona/whatever by default, and not USD.
That's helpful, thanks. I'm guessing they charge a premium because they provide a service. I'm not afraid to tinker a bit, but my interest in Linux is not tinkering - it's to switch to a freer, more sustainable OS. So I'm curious about services that offer support.
For that reason I've also looked at Tuxedo computers, but I'm worried that I'm locking myself into another company's OS again (from Microsoft/Apple to Tuxedo) rather than having the freedom to choose my own distro. But I guess with support comes a price: less freedom.
Right now I'm deeply locked into the Apple ecosystem. Apple makes wonderful hardware and apps, but it's still a straitjacket, even if it's a designer straitjacket. 😀
I don't know about Lenovo in general, but the two things I like about Thinkpads in particular and why I generally stick to them are their keyboards and the mouse nub / joystick thingy (trackpoint).
~~Their keyboards~~ The keys on their keyboards are still curved to give you proper tactile feedback of where your fingers are relative to the keys (unlike the abominable flat square keyboards on many/most other manufacturers), and the trackpoint is a great way to use a mouse-like pointer without moving your hands from home position on the keyboard. It looks like some current models are doing away with the trackpoint, which I think is a terrible mistake.
I'm not sure if any manufacturers still have either of these features or both on their current laptops, but they're absolutely must have features for me.
Also, I usually buy used/refurbished Thinkpads cheap from ebay.
first off, "lenovo" is not the thing to get, it's just a subset of those - thinkpads. and even then, not all of those - just the T and P series. those are the "pro" lines, durable, dependable, expandable, serviceable, and widely used. so when corporations swap out their fleet for new models, they flood the market and hence can be had for cheap. multiple generations of the same model are cross-generation compatible, so they share the same peripherals, like docks, have interchangeable parts, like keyboards, displays, etc.
don't get used ideapads, thinkbooks, thinkpad E/L series, etc. those are either consumer-class models, have substandard features, are incompatible with each other, etc. don't get the yogas and S-suffix models, as you'll have a removed time servicing and/or upgrading those.
the whole point of getting something used, i.e. something that was touched and rubbed and spat all over, is if it's a) in good enough shape and b) you get it for cheap. you took care of of item A when going for thinkpad T-series and you're compromising on item B if you're going through an intermediary.
them dudes you mention are skinning you alive - 500 EUR for a T14 G1 is insane, it should be less than half of that. I also like how they're including none of the tech specs which just ups the ick factor.
I'm referring to semi-modern laptops you're most likely to get out of some corporation's dump of obsolete tech, but that's still usable - let's say T480 and onward. you can retrofit those with tons of RAM, cheap storage, they have capable quad-cores, etc. you can get something like a T14 Ryzen 6-core with 32 GB RAM and a 1 TB SSD in the $200 region, if you do everything yourself.
everything before that is proper old tech, with predominantly anemic dual-cores (the ones you mention have single-channel RAM) and as such are a fun tinkering project, similar to the cyber deck projects - costs a lot of money, doesn't do much. on the other side of that fence are power-hungry haswells and friends that can't be wrangled into single-digit Watt/Hour territory however hard you tried.
so if you get one of those for free, or close to it, and you have parts laying around, by all means - this is as close you can get to the bespoke PC build in the laptop world. but ixnay on bying a decade old laptop for work and/or education.
thank you brother, you might have saved me from a bullet; t480s and t470s are much easier to find on my country than x260s and x250s, also it's easier to get better deals on them.
Was planning to go for one of those because of size exclusively pretty much, i like compact machines and was planning for a tiny laptop. if it isn't bothersome to ask, do you so happen to know a cheap thinkpad around 28 x 22cm?
What's a model you could stuff the most RAM into? I'd like a 4th Proxmox node I could replicate to and take offsite, but I don't need a pile of redundant storage on it. Something I could get 128Gb into would be awesome.
T480 can take 64 GB (2x 32 GB); no idea if more is possible. I imagine newer models could but I struggle to remember seeing 64 GB SO-DIMMs... P15 can fit four sticks so that should be possible, but them things have beefy CPUs, are rather large, and also have Nvidia graphics so dunno how low-power those are.
you're kinda outside of the intersection of cheap and still capable with that spec. do make a write-up if you succeed, that sounds interesting.
I bought a T5xx-Thinkpad from nbwn.de (=notebookswieneu.eu) many years ago. It was an extremely good purchase. They ship to the entire EU for free if your order is above 200€. They specialize in selling demonstration laptops, i.e. devices that companies tried out and then returned, so they are essentially new.
However, I highly recommend to wait for the Windows 10 EOL to really hit around winter time, because then thousands if not millions of used laptops that don't support Windows 11 will flood the market. (Even if you're aiming to buy a laptop so new that it could also Windows 11, the flood of older devices could well bring down the prices for such newer devices also.)
The hardest part about getting Linux installed on a Lenovo was getting rid of Windows and its death-grip on the bootloader and the TPM.
Also, a few things, like drivers for keyboard backlight and fingerprint scanner never got working. If you just want to experiment and play, could always try Linux under VMWare Workstation (free for personal use) or boot off a thumbdrive.
Interesting - and yet I read about many folks installing Linux on thinkpads, and those laptops even being recommended for Linux. Is it just cause so many have worked on making Lenovo be able to handle Linux?
Thinkpads have long had first tier linux support, in fact many models have shipped with linux for at least a decade (?), checking that is a really good way to be sure, but you're going to be fine with W, P, T, X lines, many enthusiasts make light work. They were deployed (might still be) to Red Hat kernel devs for a long time, which helps things along. Fingerprint drivers tend to be proprietary and hit or miss, but passwords work.
Honestly learning to install linux yourself, and configure it to your liking, is actually, imo, a really important path to learning and you're likely doing yourself a disservice avoiding it. It's part of the avoidance of vendor lock in you want. Installation is surprisingly easy now, start with something simple, Mint is often recommended these days, find a decent, recent, youtube and you'll probably be up and running in an hour. Find the apps you need for your workflow (which will take considerably longer). Get familiar with the terminal. Best thing you can do after that is burn it down and install a new distro, leaving any mistakes behind, keeping your list of apps. Arch if you want to get really deep into it, or Fedora / Bazzite are good choices and very stable. Best of luck.
Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, 2025. Microsoft wants you to buy a new computer. If you bought your computer after 2010, there's most likely no reason to throw it out. By just installing an up-to-date Linux operating system you can keep using it for years to come.
Installing an operating system may sound difficult, but you don't have to do it alone. With any luck, there are people in your area ready to help! Find someone to help you.
Meh, end of support from MS. If you think an OS dies or becomes "unsafe" just because support has ended, you're probably not doing security layering.
I have never unintentionally gotten a virus or malware (and my experience predates any version of Windows). (I say unintentionally because I've unzipped untrustworthy shareware on test machines in the days before virtualizatiom).
I just shut down a Win7 box in 2024. There are still DOS-based Windows boxes out there running things like CNC machines.
They aren't "unsafe", because they're properly isolated, properly managed.
The problem with user machines is the user themselves. Don't run as admin, don't click on shit you don't know what it does. End users see a dialog box as a barrier, not information - they just click it away. No amount of OS upgrades are going to protect them from their own laziness. And frankly, I have no sympathy for them.
Simply not running as Admin prevents 90%+ of consumer security concerns.
As support for family and friends, I'm not sending them to Linux (though I use 3 distros every day). I don't have time to handhold them when problems arise - things like "my mouse doesn't work". Oh, you're running a distro that doesn't support the most common mouse in the world, but I only found that out by doing a web search. Yet other distros have no problem. But those other distros have their differences that will eventually show up. Laptop power management in Linux is practically non-existent.
I copied this from a post a while back. Want to know why "just switch to Linux" is a poor response? These 2 people laid it out far better than I can:
My standard response to "just go Linux" :
I keep having to say this, as much as I like Linux for certain things, as a desktop it's still no competition to Windows, even with this awful shit going on.
As some background - I had my first UNIX class in about 1990.
I run a Mint laptop (for the hell of it, and I do mean hell) . Power management is a joke. Configured as best as possible, walked in the other day and it was dead - as in battery at zero, won't even boot.
Windows would never do this, no, Windows could never do this. It is incapable of running a battery to zero, it'll shutoff before then to protect the battery. To really kill it you have to boot to BIOS and let it sit, Windows will not let a battery get to zero.
There's no way even possible via the Mint GUI to config power management for things like low/critical battery conditions /actions. None, nada, zip, not at all. Command line only, in the twenty-first century, something Windows has had since I don't recall, 95 I think (I was carrying a laptop then, and I believe it had hibernate, sorry, it's been what, almost thirty years now).
There are many reasons why Linux doesn't compete with Windows on the desktop - this is just one glaring one.
Now let's look at Office. Open an Excel spreadsheet with tables in any app other than excel. Tables are something that's just a given in excel, takes 10 seconds to setup, and you get automatic sorting and filtering, with near-zero effort. The devs of open office refuse to support tables, saying "you should manage data in a proper database app". While I don't disagree with the sentiment, no, I'm not setting up a DB in an open-source competitor to Access. That's just too much effort for simple sorting and filtering tasks, and isn't realistically shareable with other people. I do this several times a day in excel.
Now there's that print monitor that's on by default, and can only be shut up by using a command line. Wtf? Again, in the 21st century?
Networking... Yea, samba works, but how do you clear creds you used one time to connect to a share, even though you didn't check the box for "save creds"? (Wait, so what does that checkbox do then?) Oh, yea, command line again or go download an app to clear them for for you. In the 21st century?
Oh, you have a wireless Logitech mouse? Linux won't even recognize it. You have to search for a solution and go find a third-party download that makes it work. My brand new wireless mouse works on any version of Windows since Win2k (at the least) and would probably work on Win95. Linux didn't even recognize my ten year old Logitech mouse. And you folks keep saying Linux supports more stuff than Windows? Right.
Someone else said it better than me:
Every time I've installed Linux as my main OS (many, many times since I was younger), it gets to an eventual point where every single thing I want to do requires googling around to figure out problems. While it's gotten much better, I always ended up reinstalling Windows or using my work Mac. Like one day I turn it on and the monitor doesn't look right. So I installed twenty things, run some arbitrary collection of commands, and it works.... only it doesn't save my preferences.
So then I need to dig into .bashrc or .bash_profile (is bashrc even running? Hey let me investigate that first for 45 minutes) and get the command to run automatically.. but that doesn't work, so now I can't boot.. so I have to research (on my phone now, since the machine deathscreens me once the OS tries to load) how to fix that... then I am writing config lines for my specific monitor so it can access the native resolution... wait, does the config delimit by spaces, or by tabs?? anyway, it's been four hours, it's 3:00am and I'm like Bryan Cranston in that clip from Malcolm in the Middle where he has a car engine up in the air all because he tried to change a lightbulb.
And then I get a new monitor, and it happens all damn over again. Oh shit, I got a new mouse too, and the drivers aren't supported - great! I finally made it to Friday night and now that I have 12 minutes away from my insane 16 month old, I can't wait to search for some drivers so I can get the cursor acceleration disabled. Or enabled. Or configured? What was I even trying to do again? What led me to this?
I just can't do it anymore. People who understand it more than I will downvote and call me an idiot, but you can all kiss my ass because I refuse to do the computing equivalent of building a radio out of coconuts on a deserted island of ancient Linux forum posts because I want to have Spotify open on startup EVERY time and not just one time. I have tried to get into Linux as a main dev environment since 1997 and I've loved/liked/loathed it, in that order, every single time.
I respect the shit out of the many people who are far, far smarter than me who a) built this stuff, and 2) spend their free time making Windows/Mac stuff work on a Linux environment, but the part of me who liked to experiment with Linux has been shot and killed and left to rot in a ditch along the interstate.
Now I love Linux for my services: Proxmox, UnRAID, TrueNAS, containers for Syncthing, PiHole, Owncloud/NextCloud, CasaOS/Yuno, etc, etc. I even run a few Windows VM's on Linux (Proxmox) because that's better than running Linux VM's on a Windows server.
Linux is brilliant for this stuff. Just not brilliant for a desktop, let alone in a business environment.
Linux doesn't even use a common shell (which is a good thing in it's own way), and that's a massive barrier for users.
If it were 40 years ago, maybe Linux would've had a chance to beat MS, even then it would've required settling on a single GUI (which is arguably half of why Windows became a standard, the other half being a common API), a common build (so the same tools/utilities are always available), and a commitment to put usability for the inexperienced user first.
These are what MS did in the 1980's to make Windows attractive to the 3 groups who contend with desktops: developers, business management, end users.
All this without considering the systems management requirements of even an SMB with perhaps a dozen users (let alone an enterprise with tens of thousands).
Downvoters, let the hate flow through you. The truth hurts, I know. And I love Linux. I try to convert everyone for whom it might be a good fit, but we need to come to grips with the usability issues.
Oddly, my Logitech mice are one of the things that just worked on my three Mint boxes. Did I just jinx myself?
, but we need to come to grips with the usability issues.
That's understandable. The last time I was able to install a brand printer successfully without issues in Windows was back then in Windows 7. In comparison, Linux doesn't even let me try to install the printer. I just plug them in and they're ready and they work. How can I fix this???
Short of becoming a developer, I think the fix is participation in Linux communities. Participate in forums, create issues in relevant repos, and be the change you want to see in the world. I know that doesn't get you printing now, but we all need to put in a little work now to build the world we want. And if we all pull together rather than flex our egos, things will improve.
I think you didn't get my point. I meant in Windows I have to fight to install the printer, but in Linux I can't even do that because Linux is too good and handles the printing perfectly for me.
That said if what you are suggesting is we could create issues in relevant repos to make the hardware install process in Linux more... interactive like it is in Windows, with an assistant that tries in vain to download drivers from the internet, a "shield" that asks you to load the drivers from a floppy disk A:\ and that needs a hardware reboot every time you plug in a new USB mouse.... hmmm.... maybe you are on to something.
Y'all don't want to hear this, but most people aren't going to switch to Linux. Some might pay someone to install LTSC, but the vast majority of of people are going to cave to Microsoft and buy a new PC.
I might have agreed 10 years or so ago, but Linux has changed and this is entirely dependent upon the distribution and use case. Linux will hold onto the image of being a "difficult" OS for some amount of time of course, but I really don't believe that is necessarily the case any longer.
I installed Mint for my parents who are in their 70's ~4 months ago, showed them how to run updates, configured automatic backups, and I haven't heard a peep since except for the few times they told me they liked it a lot more than windows because they feel like it's a lot easier to find where stuff is. They can browse the internet as needed, work in Libre office as needed, get to all of their emails as needed, etc - they have actually 0 problems with it meeting their needs.
The same could be said about Windows. It's a bad idea for people to use Windows without installing it themselves because they are dependent on MS and the OEM that installed it for them.
Better that they'd be dependent on someone that cares about them than soulless corps that just want to exploit them.
The quick and dirty questions is: Which distro should I try next?
I tried Debian X11 and Fedora with Wayland, but I did not have a great experience with them for my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX3060. I installed proprietary drivers on both systems since people say that they're better than Nouveau, but the framerate stutters even in simple browser game.
I use some software to slice 3d models for printing, and that one stuttered too. I tried various fixes but none of them worked, and I'd really like to switch to Linux from Microsoft for my daily driver.
What distro can I use to have a better experience? Any advice is welcome, but please make it as specific as possible and if you can, address why that distro would be better than Debian 12 and Fedora 42.
That's odd, I remember using Debian 12 without this issue when it was released, I later switched to an Arch based distro (Endeavour OS) to experiment with how it would run games (they ran better, I think some games were freezing on Debian 12 stable).
I can't say anything about Fedora, never used it.
Do you have more information about the specific driver you installed on Debian 12 and Fedora 42? Like the version number? Maybe the neofetch result of your computer specs too.
Thanks for your answer! I had 535 installed on Debian 12 and 570 on Fedora 42. This is the result of fastfetch (neofetch is EOL). Let me know if you need any more info or if you think you have something that might help. Thanks!
I second disabling Nouveau via blacklist, and I'm unsure if there is similar software for Lenovo, but I use asusctl to force the use of the Nvidia card over the integrated Vega graphics. This could very well be an issue with graphics card switching, so it's worth looking into.
As for distro recs, while most would probably recommended Linux Mint for beginners, I prefer to recommend Bazzite. It's Fedora-based, but comes with Nvidia drivers and lots of gaming optimization baked-in.
Did you make sure that Nouveau was not loading? If both drivers are on the system, Nouveau usually ends up taking precedence unless it's been blacklisted. Also, if this is a laptop type with a hybrid graphics setup, you may need additional software to manage the handoff between GPUs (optimus, bumblebee, etc.)
I've done some more digging and indeed, the AMD integrated GPU is being used. Optimus seems like a good option, but then apparently I'd have to use x11 as the desktop renderer because Wayland doesn't play nice with nvidia.
As far as I can see, x11 will be deprecated not too long from now?
Mark my words, X11 will still be around as an option 10 years from now. Linux Mint, probably the most popular distro, doesn't even support Wayland in its default configuration, yet.
I went back to Windows10 so I could dual-boot with Secure Boot turned off. My system will dual boot popOS and Debian without issue. Just make sure to install windows first.
NVIDIA Optimus sucks for Linux, I would suggest looking into EnvyControl and forcing your xorg & xrandr to use your NVIDIA GPU primarily and not the iGPU.
a distribution is just an assortment of packages, it's the same linux + driver underneath. nvidia on linux is a headache. are there people who made it work? sure. is that a worthwhile waste of your time? it is not.
get hardware that's linux supported and you'll have plenty of challenges during the transition, you don't need the additional "self destruction in..." countdown timer booming from the speakers.
if you still wanna have at it, pop_os (however it's spelt), bazzite and nobara are some od the distros that have dedicated nvidia install images and are thusly more likely to work OOB and work better afterwards.
For some historical context, Nvidia has had premium Linux support since 2006. For the longest time it was the only option for any kind of hardware accelerated 3D graphics on Linux and it generally worked very well.
Thankfully, AMD made the open-source side of graphics on Linux work also. To my knowledge, Nouveau is not quite there yet.
Like others suggested here, you might want to try a gaming-oriented distro. My favourite is Nobara or just plain Fedora. People suggest Bazzite, but I cannot recommend it because it's based on Fedora Atomic, and I don't get along with Fedora Atomic.
Distros are a red herring. I used debian 12 (first gnome, then xfce) for more than a year with no problems, and the current version of Bazzite is also problem-free for me when it comes to nvidia prime (apart from a KDE-specific memory leak). Basically, this should be easily fixable without a fresh install.
I don't know what distro you're on atm, but set up prime-run and try running programs with that. I also recommend going onto the uefi and disabling secure boot. You can get it to work with proprietary nvidia drivers, but it's a bit of a process and unless you really need it you might as well leave it off for now.
Today, our not-for-profit (Framasoft) is proud to present v1 of the PeerTube mobile application, 4 months after its first release! It's the work of a ...
PeerTube is a decentralized and federated alternative to YouTube. The goal of PeerTube is not to replace YouTube but to offer a viable alternative using the strength of ActivityPub and P2P protocols.
Being built on ActivityPub means PeerTube is able to be part of a bigger social network, the Fediverse (the Federated Universe). On the other hand, P2P technologies help PeerTube to solve the issue of money, inbound with all streaming platform : With PeerTube, you don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available on your server to host a PeerTube platform because all users (which didn't disable the feature) watching a video on PeerTube will be able to share this same video to other viewers.
If you are curious about PeerTube, we can't recommend you enough to check the official website to learn more about the project. If after that you want to try to use PeerTube as a content creator, you can try to find a platform available there to register or host yourself your own PeerTube platform on your own server.
The development of PeerTube is actually sponsored by Framasoft, a french non-for-profit popular educational organization, a group of friends convinced that an emancipating digital world is possible, convinced that it will arise through actual actions on real world and online with and for you!
If you want to contribute to PeerTube, feel free to:
Also, is the body text just a low effort copy-paste of what Peertube is? We know that... And there is a news article about the new version which could have been copy pasted instead: joinpeertube.org/news/app-v1
Today, our not-for-profit (Framasoft) is proud to present v1 of the PeerTube mobile application, 4 months after its first release! It's the work of a ...
If he wanted to, couldn't spez just buy it, and make it serve as a redirect to reddit? I don't understand how SOMEONE hasn't bought/used this domain for fediverse purposes.
There's a difference between knowing my baker is a nazi and being unaware of it. It's morally wrong to be knowingly supporting a nazi, whether it's by buying their product or by donating to them directly doesn't matter.
It's true that bread stays bread regardless of the baker's political stance. But it's not like the nazi baker is the only one in town. Just get your bread from a different baker. Bread is bread. The point of alternatives is that you can pick your source, whom you want to support. And that's what OP is suggesting.
First, criteria for what one considers a nazi are open to interpretation and nowadays the bar is ridiculously low. We have a bicycle kitchen cooperative in Croatia where almost all of us volunteers hold leftist views, but there's an occasional boomer known to say problematic stuff as a shitty joke, or a grandma shows up with her son's bicycle that has one of the many Croatian totenkopf variants which the kid put up using same protocol as Marge with a potato. We never refuse to help them. I also engaged some of them in conversation and when you get down to the bottom of their exclusionary views you often find they're decent people with good moral compass and the stupid jokes or totenkopf stickers are adopted wholesale through the media or because of a personal tragedy.
Just get your bread from a different baker.
Sure, the free market will fix it, very American thinking. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. Croatia is a good example because our fight for independence in the 90s saw the attempted rehabilitation of actual nazis from the 40s as freedom fighters and Croatian patriots, which means that (still, nowadays) whenever boomers have a celebration with alcohol, there'll be some singing about the superlative exploits of actual nazis. It's just the way our society currently is, it's still our society. The only way to change that is to engage with them and show them you hold a different opinion and are still a relatable human being. I have a feeling most lemmy users would just cancel their entire family if they were Croatian.
do you really need to start fights with people that are striving for the same goal, just because you have differing opinions on other things? do you think that different political parties should never work together?
The idea there should be some definitive, canonical domain for the Fediverse is somewhat at odds with the core tenents of the Fediverse itself - decentralisation, and no single point of ownership or control. And on that basis, we absolutely should not care about a particular domain, or assign any level of 'specialness' to it.
I understand your worry - that some 'bad actor' could buy the domain and do something anti-Fediverse with it and mislead the public, but my response would be to simply not worry. The strength of the Fediverse is that we are diverse and unbothered by whatever nonsense some centralised platform is trying to pull. We don't have a profit motive. We don't care.
People who want to find the real Fediverse will absolutely still find us, all on their own, regardless of who owns some random domain 😀
I've got these things locally available in the $50-60 range. This being a generic brand, I imagine a buncha those are available globally. Anyone tried 'em, do they work OK with modern desktops (gnome, plasma)? Touch? DP-Alt or are they DisplayLink? Do they have PD?
Sellers are helpful nada, same with youtube videos, just marketing fluff.
I have a couple different units. Both recommendable, sub $100 range. Magnetic flaps are handy for slapping them to sheet metal like case sides. One is a trifold, the other a bifold. They stack and sit side by side nicely in many arrangements. Usb-c power pass through lets you Daisy chain a single high current input, they're pretty slick. I've had both of the screens and a gl.inet travel router on a single power feed Daisy chained in series, no issues. Oh man, touch screen though? Have no experience unfortunately.
I am also interested in any experiences, especially regarding the computers you can attach to these small displays. I often see RPi as an option, but I heared about RocketChip, too. What are the best platforms to drive these displays?
them monitors have standard HDMI in, so anything can drive them. for power, there are USB power inputs (a powerbank is easily taped to the back), and then another cable to relay touch. so, kinda cumbersome...
what's way more interesting to me is that they have USB Type-C and there are youtube videos showing phones attached to them with a single cable transmitting video and power and relaying back touch input! not all phones support that, e.g. flagship samsungs do, the ones that support Dex.
question is, how does a laptop that supports DP-Alt handle that; there aren't any videos of users achieving same functionality that way. like, if a phone can power it I'm sure a laptop with 10x the battery can do as well... or?
and then, there's the main reason why this is in "Linux"... how and does it work with wayland and friends?
Is the image edited? 75% sRGB coverage on an IPS panel? That's terrible. I've never seen IPS panels that cover so little sRGB colorspace. Almost all of them will easily achieve the same amount of Adobe RGB per default.
Bought a 9 incher for server because I sucked at remoting in.
Fairly delicate but it was like 40 dollars. It is serviceable and serves the need. Am able to complete simple tasks via the touch screen. It kinda spazzes out with multi selecting/ touch but again 40 dollars.
Cords are fairly obtrusive but never bugged me. Solved by getting on that's mini hdmi but didn't like those from experience with pi
Can turn it off with a little switch in the back which it's mostly off. No issue on power up. Quicker than my dells honestly
I realize this is the dumbest setup but it works 🤷
I have a 7 inch touchscreen monitor that I place in front of my screen and I put YouTube music on their with visualizer. I'm pretty happy with it but I obviously don't use it to do any work
Mine has HDMI and USB c. HDMI for video and audio and USB c has to be plugged in for touchscreen functionality
In my experience repetition helped. Not memorization, but more like muscle memory.
Also, ensuring to never copy and paste commands but to type them in manually yourself. It's hard to enforce this on yourself, but worth it.
I appreciate that this article started with "ways to reduce risk" because that's an extremely valid concern and tied to why you shouldn't ever copy and paste. The one time in my early Linux forays where I copied and pasted I wiped the wrong drive, it definitely taught me to always manually type it in and not get too lazy, because what you copied might not match what you want to do exactly.
To things that helps no mater your skill level the tab key is your best friend and man pages are great but if those are overwhelming install the package tldr then you can use the command tldr and the command you are trying to run to give you helpful examples of how to use that command.
Also old users don't remember long commands if we use a command more than once. You save it to your bash alias file to create your own commands.
Step 1: Use a youtube tutorial for the basic commands. Don't worry, you'll forget about them soon enough. But doing them once, helps with muscle memory.
Step 2: When in need to do something, copy/paste from Q&A/forums various commands that they suggest for your problem. Your basic knowledge from step1 will come back as you do that.
After a few days, you'll be understanding what's going on and how the whole thing works in an abstract level.
Maybe controversial, but the fish shell. I know it's not strictly bash syntax, but the OOTB features are just so user-friendly. The most helpful features for learning: the autocomplete (with descriptions of subcommands and flags!) and the fuzzy history search.
I write bash scripts all the time, and am significantly more knowledgeable than anyone else on my team (admittedly frontend) because I got comfortable in fish.
Mastering the command line? A few observations. First, consult and take notes (yes, even seasoned terminal veterans forget syntax.) Secondly, embrace tab completion. It’s your friend, and a surprisingly effective substitute for remembering every single command. Third, the true test: procure a VPS or remote server and exclusively use the command line. No GUI crutches allowed. It’s a digital wilderness, and you'll learn to navigate it.
Lastly, and this is non-negotiable: keep a terminal window permanently resident on your desktop. Consider it a vital organ, deserving of its space. It’s a constant reminder of the power you wield, and a readily available portal to a world beyond the pretty buttons.
Breakdowns are inevitable; a good night's sleep is often the most elegant solution. 😀 I utilize Zim (for note management) as plain text remains a perfectly serviceable option, in my opinion.
I also use ghostty because it’s themeable, I found adding transparency helped me because i can have whatever I need to see under the terminal (helps for command cheatsheets)
Knowing: - pwd, ls, cd, cat/less, cp, mv, rm, rmdir, rm -rf, ls -lah - command --help - man command | grep thing I care about - bonus points if you have tldr command installed
I'm trying to recreate an install of pinchflat in a podman container that was working on a previous install, but now I want it to run as its own user. I created the quadlet and put it at /home/pinchflat/.config/containers/systemd/pinchflat.container but the user I'm creating this for is a system user without a shell. So I cannot just su into it or sudo -u the command systemctl --user daemon-reload. I'm not really understanding where I'm going wrong.
So I found I had 2 problems. First, I have a Name= line instead of a ContainerName= line in there. Second, diagnosing all this is impossible when theres no shell for that account. Turn on a shell (/bin/bash) for the user, fix this thing, activate it, disable the shell (/bin/nologin), drink heavily.
I ended up with: -----/fuckingarray/homes/pinchflat/.config/containers/systemd/pinchflat.container----------
Hi everyone! 👋 We still see people on the fediverse recommending OpenOffice, despite it having year-old unfixed security issues: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_O… – So if you see someone recommending it, please inform them about the risks – but also that there are actively maintained successor projects (like LibreOffice). #foss #OpenSource
Re unfixed security issues, Is microsoft office any better? I'm no expert but I doubt it.
And Office is a $129.99 a year subscription right. I'm not sure unfixed security issues is a fair yardstick in this market segment. Maybe just use libreoffice in a vm with no network interface. It'll be a cold day in hell before I send Msft money for an office subscription.
Sorry I forget sometimes. It’s just that OpenOffice is a way better name. “Libre” is a pretty uncommon word in English and LibreOffice sounds like astrology software.
OnlyOffice is good too if you prefer an interface that is more like modern MS Office. LibreOffice is more like 2000s MS Office, so pick the one you prefer.
It is pretty much the same as 20 years ago. That is, good enough for basic use cases but nowhere near as complete as MS Office. It isn't a serious program for professional use.
LibreOffice is good. Very good even. I just wish Calc always had a 1-to-1 feature parity with Excel for it's formulas, it would make it so much easier to collaborate on a spreadsheet with others. I think I had to wait a few years on e.g. XLOOKUP.
OnlyOffice. Newer and somewhat less features, but the UI is so much better than LibreOffice. I've been on a quest to find the best Office alternative and OnlyOffice is what I've settled on
Good there's other free alternatives out there. I'm in the office 97/2003 was peak ui camp, the rest is just a more flashy UI that doesn't really add more value.
Tbh I get them mixed up every time I talk about them. I don't know what's installed on my computers and I will most likely get them mixed up again in the future. I look it up every time but also forget it just as often.
I got the same issue with OpenCloud and NextCloud.
It has a nice ribbon UI like MS Office! Unfortunately it is super hidden as you first need to enable experimental settings before you can switch it on.
Have you actually tried LibreOffice in a while? The Ribbon UI hasn't been experimental since LibreOffice 6.2, which was released in February 2019. It is a normal option, called Tabbed, in the User Interface settings under View > User Interface.
The date seems to be misleading. When you open the comments section and load all comments, you'll see that there are quite a few comments that are 9 years old. The article is thus far older than what it's saying, and it unfortunately showcases again how many people rely on very old (and in this case misleading) information about LibreOffice.
MSI Sword 15 here, with Intel + Nvidia, In my personal experience is runs almost without issues using Manjaro as a Distro (have not tried other distros on this specific machine).
Your experience could be different depending on your specific laptop model and how recent it is.
Keyboard lighting and fan on/off works without issues, the only 'Fn' key that does not work apart from the one for MSI windows software is the one to block the trackpad (and I just configured another keyboard shortcut for it).
~~Using Wayland, I can not use an external monitor connected to the HDMI port on the Nvidia card (No idea if it is fixable now, haven't looked on it recently), but with Xorg I can run an external monitor in the HDMI port and extra ones with a dongle on the USB-C (so far tried with 3 without issues)~~ Edit: I can use multiple monitors without issues on Wayland as of my last test.
Friendly distros recommended these days as far as I know are Mint and Zorin if looking for something Ubuntu or Debian Based, Apart from that there is Fedora or Arch based distros but may need a bit more knowledge and getting used to.
For those of us feeling generous, what are the recommended least scammy ways to truly donate to continuing linux development ? I see a few sites out there when I search but I wanted to hear it from yall.
Looking at Debian's release-critical bugs, you can see that Trixie is close: Testing now has fewer critical bugs than Stable, and the number is dropping quickly. About 200 bugs still need to be fixed to get the number down to where the previous releases were done.
Maybe you can help? Bugs blocking the next release can be as simple as missing translations for the upgrade instructions.
It's been reported (Debian mailing list, Phoronix, Linuxiac) that Debian 13 will likely be out this summer. The hard freeze is on May 15 and usually that means the actual release is pretty close, just a couple of months away.
Phoronix speculated that, since Debian 12 went from initial freeze to stable release in 5 months, Debian 13 could release around August.
I upgraded to Trixie last week. It already worked as flawlessly as I'd expect it when the release is official. It installed a bunch of new packages, removed the same number of obsolete ones, and upgraded everything else. On the next apt update, it asks to reformat sources.list and that's it.
Yeah, I did that in a system as well and seems to work, for for the others I'll have to wait for the final release, too critical. I'm one of those guys who runs a lot of Debian because the risks of a distro like Ubuntu Server are way over what I can be exposed to.
Trust me, at that point there won't be any explaining possible 😁
We've been burned by a lot of distros in the past and right now it all boils down to using Debian and RHEL, everything else mostly failed at some point or will not uphold the stability guarantees. Even containers with Alpine fucked us over once with the musl DNS issues and a few other missing parts...
I burned and tried different distros and all of them the DVD reader laser was moving back and forth like mad and loading and install was so slow that it impossible to continue. Tried 2 different readers.
Fedora Silverblue: the optic reel was moving like mad and loading was so slow that it triggered the anaconda text installer
It stayed there for hours so I desisted
Elementary OS 8: Same as Fedora Silverblue but at least could load the wallpaper installer UI. Not possible to load live OS
Lakka OS: Lakka state on their site DVD's can' t be used anymore for their images lakka.tv/get/linux/generic/
Yeah I know USB thumb drives are like £5 but I wanted to have my silly little fun with my discs and newly bought burner. I remember when I started using linux distros didn't had this kind of problem and live versions could be used, slow but usable.
Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution based on RetroArch that transforms a small computer like a Raspberry Pi into a full blown retrogaming console.
Try burning your DVDs at the slowest speed possible. When I still used optical media, software things simply would not work if burned fast. I'd set 1x on my burning software. I think my writer was new enough that it'd only go down to 4x but it worked fine.
I'm comming to you for help. One of my family members recently got fed up with windows bloatware and I managed to get them ready for a switch to Linux. This person's daily driver is a hybrid PC/tablet machine ( Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 510-12IKB ).
I booted a Linux Mint live usb session to check hardware compatibility and almost everything is working fine. The only exception is the virtual keyboard display, when physical keyboard is disconnected. It never appears. Would a full install with third party stuff fix the issue ? This is a blocker for the person, and I'm wondering if any of you have experience with switching on a same model, and would advise any distro that comes with full support of the hybrid PC/tablet hardware.
I tried to look for answers and non of the ones I find are recent enough. Some mention hardware compatibility issues (wifi, camera) that have been resolved and are working according my live session test.
I used a lenovo x380 yoga with Fedora. I seldom used it in tablet form, but the keyboard appeared when swiping up from the bottom in GNOME. I did not like it as well as the windows one. I tried KDE as well, I had a better experience there as there are more config options for it. As for drivers and sensors like for the hinge positions, wacom touch stuff all just worked.
try it with a live USB with Gnome as it is way more touch friendly. Fedora latest recommended because the live USB has a Wayland session (older default to X11).
as to seamless transition, no DE on linux is there yet. Gnome is way better than it was a year or two ago in that regard, but flakyness is still present, expecting the polish and reliability of Android or iPadOS isn't realistic.
and save it in the file ~/.Xmodmap and run xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap. Apparently, this worked in part. When I run xev and press Shift+Backspace I get:
KeyPress event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133664788, (484,630), root:(584,799),
state 0x0, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XmbLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False
KeyPress event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665052, (484,630), root:(584,799),
state 0x1, keycode 22 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES,
XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 119
XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
XmbLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
XFilterEvent returns: False
KeyRelease event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665116, (484,630), root:(584,799),
state 0x1, keycode 22 (keysym 0xffff, Delete), same_screen YES,
XKeysymToKeycode returns keycode: 119
XLookupString gives 1 bytes: (7f) ""
XFilterEvent returns: False
KeyRelease event, serial 37, synthetic NO, window 0x1200001,
root 0x300, subw 0x0, time 133665444, (484,630), root:(584,799),
state 0x1, keycode 50 (keysym 0xffe1, Shift_L), same_screen YES,
XLookupString gives 0 bytes:
XFilterEvent returns: False
With other modifier keys (LeftAlt, RightAlt, LeftCtrl) I still get BackSpace.
But xev seems to be the only application that recognizes Delete. In Wayland applications I get only Backspace, no matter what modifier key (Shift, LeftAlt or RightAlt, LeftCtrl) I press. In Firefox (an X application) there is a change. Now, Shift+Backspace does nothing. I suppose this is because Shift+Delete does nothing as well. The KeyPress event of Shift_L seems to block Delete from being obeyed by applications, which is unfortunate when Shift is part of a key combination that maps to Delete. How can I undo this block of Delete? How can I make the key mapping work in Wayland and X applications?
xmodmap was meant to work with x11 so it shouldn't be a surprise that it doesn't work very well w wayland.
instead, you'll want to use a combination of libinput and evdev along w gnome/kde tools or input-remapper/wlr-inputremapper if you're not using either.
I recently installed Debian 12 on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, and am using the GNOME desktop (x11). From time to time I play a game called survev.io . It's a browser battle royale game, not hard on graphics.
I have an Nvidia rtx3060 and have the proper drivers installed. I checked using nvidia-smi and Firefox is using the Nvidia gpu.
The issue is that the game runs smoothly until I press a button or move the mouse. Then the framerate decreases significantly and it becomes unplayable.
I already tweaked the following settings in Firefox to no avail: - gfx.webrender.all = True - enabled hardware acceleration - layers.acceleration.force-enabled = TRUE - gfx.x11-egl.force-enabled = true
And now I'm out of ideas. The game itself isn't too important to me, but other browser games do the same, so it's a wider issue I want to solve.
It's not tho. Their FAQ page explicitly says they're not chromium based (and they speak of both desktop and mobile) Wikipedia also says firefox mobile uses the Gecko engine, Chromium isn't mentioned.
I am no dev of lemmy, but traditionally, to connect remotely to a computer it was user@computer.name. The mail addresses simply use this pattern. It's nice for Lemmy to use it, and I'd say ot would have been nicer for matrix to use it (not that I really care)
Matrix was influenced by the traditional URI schema approach however they also used an inverted URI to have the most significant segment be the first segmont. This is why it has a prepended segment followed by a : and then a URL.
The relationship the URI is describing is homeserver owns user and traditionally we might go homeserver:user I'd argue it is obvious to just invert that into user:homeserver. See Java, dotnet, etc reverse dns naming conventions.
A matrix room is not at a URI, it is on every homeserver that participates in the room. I am not talking about Lemmy and its garbage entirely incorrectly semantic URI scheme. Matrix rooms are globally uniquely identified, and so the room URI only describes the idea of the resource of the room. room:homeserver.
The prefixes are an obvious and neccesary evil for parsing them out of unstructured text. A requirement for most users.
ActivityPub and related went "fuck everything, fuck reason, the web is fucking amazing" and came up with their own flavor of stupidity. Emails use an ancient first attempt at a URL. A URL. What does the URL do? It is explicitly intended to tell you which server to contact. People are going "yeah but email!1!!" entirely moronically ignoring historical context.
For anyone who can't read that many words at once: URI means identifier and URL means locator.
Matrix does not mix the roles of its URIs beyond the ability to attempt to reach that homeserver through NOT ONLY DNS but also through routing between homeservers. Matrix, unlike this garbage, actually wants to support ephemeral clients and such as well.
Nothing I have ever found. Discogs has been around for over 2 decades and the community they have is powerfully organized. They have some big gaps for sure, especially in the Spanish-speaking music world, but it's the best we've got
I was browsing on system76's offering to see what PCs they have and noticed that they have an ARM Computer that apparently faster than the fastest Apple Mac but for cheaper (Based), but I'm wondering, how well does ARM computers game on linux with proton, it is very expensive to me atm and I can't afford it, but maybe in the future I could consider it to be my first desktop as I always been using laptops, obviously gaming isn't like the main priority as I would like a workstation to do heavy work such as blender and stuff and perhaps put gentoo on it in the future (if its supported) but I would like to game on the side when I'm winding down that's all, so can it game well?
Actually, with the work done on box86/box64, you might be able to get stuff running well - last I heard, they got triple A games running around 45 FPS on Asahi on Apple M1.
However, it would be totally unsupported, and who knows how well the Apple M series optimizations will work on another member of the ARM family. (Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been tried on Ampere at least once.)
Really, the biggest issue is probably power usage - I don’t know if it’s enough to increase your power bill significantly, but it would definitely consume more power than say, an i7. This is due to Altra CPUs really being more for server usage - performance per watt will likely be better overall for those kinds of workloads, but you’re probably not going to make full use of the hardware. These systems are really more of server dev kits than daily drivers.
For a desktop, I’d just recommend a PC with a high end consumer grade CPU like an i7 or Ryzen 7.
With one of these Altra CPUs (Q64-22), I can compile the Linux kernel (defconfig aarch64 with modules on GCC 15.1) in 3m8s with -j64. Really great for compiling, and much lower power draw than any x86 system with a comparable core count. Idles at 68W full system power, pulls 130W when all cores are under full load. Pulling out some of my 4 RAM sticks can drive that down a lot more than you'd expect for just RAM. lm_sensors claims the "CPU Power" is 16W and 56W in those two situations.
Should be awful for gaming. It's possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread) suffers a lot. I run a few containers where the performance hit really doesn't matter through qemu.
Ampere has a weird PCIe bug that results in either outright incompatibility or a video output filled with strange artifacts/distortion for the vast majority of GPUs, with the known good selection that aren't bugged being only a few select Nvidia ones. I don't happen to have any of those Nvidia cards but this workstation includes one. Other non-GPU PCIe things like NICs, NVMe, and SAS storage controllers work great, with tons of PCIe lanes.
Should be awful for gaming. It’s possible to run x86 things with emulation, sure, but performance (especially single-thread)
Most modern software (games excluded), is dynamically compiled. This means that it’s not all one “bundle” that runs, but rather a binary that calls reusable pieces of code, “libraries” from the binary itself. Wine is dynamically compiled.
What makes modern x86 to arm translators special, is that the x86 binary, like an x86 version of wine, can call upon the arm versions of the libraries it uses — like graphic drivers. It’s because of this that the people on r/emulationonandroid managed to play GTA 5 with 30 fps via the computer version. There definitely is overhead, but it’s not that much, and a beefy machine like this could absolutely handle it.
"Dynamically compiled" and dynamic linking are very different things, and in turn dynamic linking is completely different from system calls and inter-process communication. I'm no emulation expert but I'm pretty sure you can't just swap out a dynamically linked library for a different architecture's build for it at link time and expect the ABI to somehow work out, unless you only do this with a small few manually vetted libraries where you can clean up the ABI. Calling into drivers or communicating with other processes that run as the native architecture is generally fine, at least.
I don't know how much Asahi makes use of the capability (if at all), but Apple's M series processors add special architecture extensions that makes x86 emulation be able to perform much better than on any other ARM system.
I wouldn't deny that you can get a lot of things playable enough, but this is very much not hardware you get for the purpose of gaming: getting a CPU and motherboard combo that costs $1440 (64-core 2.2GHz) or $2350 (128-core 2.6GHz) that performs substantially worse at most games than a $300 Ryzen CPU+motherboard combo (and has GPU compatibility quirks to boot) will be very disappointing if that's what you want it for. Though the same could to a lesser extent be said even about x86 workstations that prioritize core count like Xeon/Epyc/Threadripper. For compiling code, running automated tests, and other highly threaded workloads, this hardware is quite a treat.
Would you guys be interested if I start a Youtube/PeerTube Channel where I talk about Unix Topics related to Linux, BSD & Plan9 etc... and perhaps rants and rambles about stuff that I like and don't like about how the mainstream treats linux etc etc. (I have a lot to talk about and say) and perhaps devlog updates about a game I'm making (its open source obviously) I don't wanna look like a stupid influencer shill (nobody likes those) but basically I just want a platform where I can speak about what I like and passionate about thats too long to write here, and if a mod/admin is reading this please delete this if its unsuitable for this thread, sorry in advance.
I don't wanna copy them, I have other topics I think they are untouched and it would be nice to start a conversation about them. for example "why the normies complain about the proprietary apps they use but then whene you suggest something they just brush it off" ("I hate facebook messenger, its buggy as hell", "try signal then", "no.") thats one example of the stuff I will cover, basically very obscure topics, that nobody have covered yet
I'm unsure what is going wrong and not having any luck finding a command or file I can tail to figure out why it's having so many problems finishing. Last weekend I tried just installing mint to some unused space on a drive but that seemed to get stuck in the same place. This weekend I'm using the "install alongside windows" option in the installer with the same behavior.
This is being installed from a USB drive into an nvme SSD and I'm really lost s to why it would be like this after more than an hour. Any advice on how to figure out why it gets stuck is appreciated. Hoping to transfer some files over after this is done and then reevaluate if I want/need the windows partition.
I had issues with mints install a while back. Turns out that it was my flash drive failing during the install. I used a newer one with bigger capacity and it worked fine. Not sure if tried a different USB but it's worth a shot.
EDIT: based on your comments you probably have a different issue. But this might help someone else.
It's run by the main developers of Lemmy, and they're both authoritarian communists (which I just got from Wikipedia as I'm trying not to use the pejoritve "tankie").
Anything that could be perceived as speaking down towards Russia, China, maybe even North Korea, ends up with your comment getting deleted and your account banned for a period of time.
They started Lemmy because @dessalines got banned from Reddit. The backwards thinking is that people shouldn't be banned for speaking their minds, yet their instance is the absolute worst for that.
By avoiding .ml you are helping Lemmy be what it should be -- a decentralized, user owned, user moderated place with sensible decisions behind the scenes.
Yep that's pretty much the long and short of it. People will say, if you just stick to the technical topics then you're fine and they'll ignore you. Which is true to an extent. But you should not have to. And most people don't want to popularize places like that to begin with if they knew.
This part is a small tangential nitpick. What Russia China North Korea Etc have is not communism. They may call it Communism. But what is important to note is that one is uppercase and one is lowercase. One is an adjective that describes a stateless classless society. The other is a noun often used to refer to a tightly controlling state with a strict regiment class structure between the political and non political classes. Honestly I think the term communism is beyond Rehabilitation. Though I would still like to try and see it differentiated from the noun.
I was a poor young man, I refused to pay $100 to put windows on a hard drive I had installed into a hand-me-down desktop.
I found linux and made it work, through thick and thin. As a lazy jackass i somehow got skyrim to work through wine via copied and pasted terminal commands. wintetricks and all, i found it wildly difficult. Playing was almost as thrilling as seeing it work.
I have only ever attempted to make a linux ISO bootable drive through windows that one time, more than ten years ago. My wife was given a laptop with windows 11 installed and I wanted to install firefox.
what, the actual fuck, is "S" mode?
ctrl-alt-t "install that shit"!
A computer should not come with a subscription baked in. That's trash. The issues i get through linux come from my failure to understand it and/or the walled gardens it hasn't found its way into yet. The issues I experienced this evening on windows were there by design.
Thank you to all of the homies that make the weird and sometimes uncomfortable linux/ open-source community work. You guys are the shit.
In windows defense (no means sticking up for them now) It was a pretty unobtrusive OS in Windows 7 and arguably in Windows 8 (but don’t get me started with the UI/UX choices). Windows 10 was decent and for the first year or two felt good running it. But after that yikes….. Then windows 11 comes to the scene and I lost the plot. Looking forward to October though when people throw out their 7th Gen Processor rigs. I got no issues rocking an I7-6700K that is not AI ready
I model all of my UI choices off of old(er) school windows. I have a bar, the menu is left. I was a pirate before anything and I learned on windows. There was a point where it made sense that the world used it, I think that time has passed. I really am such a pleb that hardware issues only effect me if it doesn't work. In this I guess I am saying that the freedom to abuse and break my hardware is important. I don't want to sell my soul or be told "no". install the program, I know it was written for windows. I don't want a microsoft account.
I love your comparison of where issues come from on Linux vs Windows. That's so apt (heh). Even after 10 years of using Linux, I never really thought of it that way.
It's frustrating when any computer doesn't do what you want; but you're right, it's infuriating when the problems are engineered to manipulate you into parting with your money, attention, or privacy.
The issues i get through linux come from my failure to understand it
I’d argue that’s true of any user’s experience with any OS, including what you just experienced with Windows.
Getting out of S mode is actually very trivial, certainly moreso than many of the changes one might be expected to make in Linux. There’s a certain type of user that “S Mode” is intended for. You’re not that user, and Linux is likely to be a negative experience for that user.
I hadn't either until last night. From what I gathered it disables the installation of any softwares that don't come from the microsoft store i.e. .EXE files for programs that were downloaded from the browser. Getting out of S mode is as easy as creating a microsoft account. I had no interest in that for a variety of reasons.
Except they use a bunch of dark patterns to discourge any user from doing it by calling it 'Developer mode' and throwing a bunch of scary sounding warning screens at you when all you're doing is disabling the forced use of the Microsoft store.
It's a super scummy move that will be very effective. Many people will just use the Microsoft store and Microsoft will, once again, have used their monopoly to manipulate the market by forcing their own product to be used (like they got in trouble for in the IE vs Netscape Navigator case)
I guess I just didn't have the patience enough to even get that far with it haha All I could think of was the Netscape thing. It was sooo obvious when i opened edge and got halfway into typing "google chrome" when a giant banner pops up and says "you don't have to install another browser! please bro! Don't do it!"
Imagine turning Windows into an even shittier version of itself, and you've got S mode.
Can't install shit unless it's from the MS Store. Can't use a browser unless it's Edge. Not sure what other stupid shit it enforces. It's supposed to harden the system, but I find that hard to believe.
Ah, like a "stable" mode? Honestly it makes sense from a user support perspective. More locked down, more predictable, easier to secure. In the same way that you can't hack a brick, and similarly useful.
Heh, I'm probably in the minority, but I like the idea of different windows "modes". I've long wanted msft to make versions of windows for different users rather than a one-size-fits-all product. I just wanted it because I'm a power user who wanted something more stripped down and configurable, not a boomer who wants something that won't act as a conduit between my ignorance and scammers.
But it's cool, they can do whatever they want with windows now, they've made it clear they don't want me as a user.
Or don’t, I’m not your father.
The situation Sometimes, you want to get a very specific part of a command output. The classic problem is to get the IP address of an interface.
I might need to give away my Surface Pro 7 soon, and I'm considering what laptop to buy next. For a MS laptop, the surface behaved rather well on linux. Well, if it wasn't for the cameras, which never worked. I'm now wondering which laptop has good hardware support, that would be kinda like a surface, a 2-in-1 laptop. As in, detachable keyboard, that can operate in tablet mode and then once you attach the keyboard you have a full laptop. But with full Linux/cameras/everything support?
I bought it because it was the only one of the few 2-in-1 / convertibles that has the option to come with 32GB RAM and doesn't have the on/off key in the corner of the normal keyboard, which I fucking hate. The price is also great, but especially so when you catch it at a discount.
I run arch on it and it runs well. Needed some manual fixes at the beginning which can be found at: github.com/mudkipme/awesome-mi…
Both cameras work for me. Fingerprint sensor works.
You can click through the different probes here linux-hardware.org/?view=compu… to see exactly what works and what doesn't on different distros at different times. At a quick glance it looks like mostly everything is working.
I recommend the website in general. It is very hard to parse tbh. but once you get used to it, it gives great info about parts and devices and the differences in kernel versions or even distros.
I might need it earlier than announced stage. However it's really interesting to hear they're also working on this format. I'll wait to see further news about this, depending on how soon I need my surface replaced.
Edit: aw, the keyboard isn't detachable on this one 🙁
Hi everyone, I'm going to use Debian with lxde on my machine and I'll need to use Filmora for video editing. Has anyone already tried it? Any problem during installation/use? Any help is appreciated
Windows apps (particularly ones that require that kind of acceleration) are unlikely to work with Wine. And if they do, either they'll be crashy, or they can break at any consequent Wine update. Forget Windows apps. Windows games that are invoking only fullscreen 3D are much more likely to work on Linux because the part that gets re-interpreted is simpler. But apps, that use obscure optimization Windows APIs are a pain to get good support of.
So, I suggest you install kdenlive or Shotcut to do video editing. Even Davinci resolve is a hit or miss on Linux and it doesn't support AAC at all. So get it done with the two OSS apps I suggested instead. In another life I was a music video director for local bands, and so I was doing a lot of color grading, invoking tricks and things that FOSS apps can't do. I switched full time to Linux and FOSS apps, and I just do the basic color grading now. It was sad to see that part of the fun go, but that's what I had to do.
Additionally Filmora is a primarily Chinese company, probably mining data, so it's best to not use it. Same for CapCut.
I prefer the UI of Shotcut, but kdenlive is admittedly more powerful. You can try both to see which one you prefer. I suggest you download the .appimage files of both of them from the website (this way you'll get the latest versions). I'd suggest against the flatpak versions as sometimes they come with limitations of various kinds. Just download their respective .appimage files, make them executable (right click on the downloaded files with your file manager and then go to their Properties to set them as executable), and then double click them to load. If you go that route, make sure you manually update them every 3 months or so, as that's when they usually release updates.
Would it be reasonable to expect a Raspberry Pi 4 to run Nextcloud and manage a photo backup of +100 Gb?
The Raspberry Pi is from 2020, running Raspbian, and it was used as an intervalometer with the help of gphoto2 (meaning no great efforts were demanded from it).
The pictures are on two external hard drives
*1Tb WesternDigital SATA (bought second hand, but "like new" according to the sales guy.
*320Gb WesternDigital SATA (inherited from an AcerOne laptop once I realized it could not even handle lubuntu)
My very limited knowledge on the subject tells me I need to:
*Get rid of Raspbian and install Raspberry Pi OS
*Install Nextcloud (and upgrade an existing account)
*Upload +100 Gb
Would the aforementioned steps allow me to access the files on Fedora/Kubuntu (two separate hard drives on a desktop) and openSUSUE (on a laptop)?
I’m also testing a filen.io account and a sync.com account. All three services (NextCloud, Filen, and Sync) work as I expect on an Ipad.
Filen and Nextcloud have Linux applications, and both have been working without problems on test backups of 100 pictures.
Sync is CANADIAN but not Linux friendly (I tried Wine, didn’t work, gave up)… I’m accessing a free account via Firefox only, so I’m not counting on them for this journey.
So, long story short, I want to back up my files (mostly pictures/scans and some pfd documents) on someone else's computer and locally.
Now the question. Can anyone recommend a guide to achieve what I want?
I’m a cook by trade without any technical (software/hardware) training who has been using Linux (openSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch, Mint) since 2012. Please forgive any mistakes on terminology.
I included a picture of my intervalo-Frankenstein-meter from 2020.
Can you do it? Yes. Will the performance suck outright? Yes. Nextcloud is a pig. I run it on an 18-core i9-10980xe server clocked at 4.5 Ghz with 256GB of RAM, with RAIDED nvme disk, and I don't find the performance adequate on this platform.
C'mon man, gotta 100 wait states on your RAM? I run it on a Intel i3-8100T @ 3.10GHz and it's fast enough. The only thing that sucks is it's written in PHP.
Hum, not my experience. I run it on an old pc as a podman container, for me and my wife, exactly for the same use case of OP: auto uploading the pictures/videos on our phones. Upload is almost instantaneous. Browsing files is fine, but I usually use a separate software to index/search the photos on the upload directory. For all kind of files (documents etc) is good.
Yeah I'm pretty sure a raspi 4 is up to the task. I ran a 512 GB jellyfin server on a raspi 3 for a few months, and the only issue was with transcoding video/audio (raspi doesn't have the right hardware acceleration for that).
Never used nextcloud, but yeah you'll probably want to update to 64-bit raspi os
Thanks for your reply. I do have the eventual video taken in between pictures. The way this is going, I might back up 1 or 2 Gb at first, to see how it all works out.
I am looking for an alternative to proton drive. It does not seem like the Linux app is happening anytime soon, and I want to be able to have a backup of the pictures I duplicate and edit without having to download the file and upload it after the changes I make.
filen.io does that, but the servers are on the other side of the Atlantic.
sync.com does not have a Linux app either.
google drive and mega allow that, but I do not use those services.
In which way do you plan to transfer your photos to the backup storage? In the picture I can see a camera and I assume it uses an SD card. I would, if I were you:
Buy a consumer grade storage device with USB port, like those desktop storage towers from WestDigital
Build a RAID with it if the data is important enough
Connect it to my computer and just run rsync
Some storage tower even comes with an Ethernet port and a web interface. It's practically a personal "cloud".
Nextcloud is resource heavy, slow, hard to setup, and hard to backup/restore. This is from someone who has been using it from when it was Owncloud.
Context: I made a poll on PieFed about the new post flairs (so if you are one of the few hundred people who have a PieFed account, follow that link and answer there). Unfortunately Lemmy has neither polls nor post flairs, so this post is to open up the discussion to the wider Fediverse, or rather the subset of it that encompasses Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, which is called... what exactly?
Is Threadiverse too traumatic & tainted by association with Meta's (all but entirely defunct) Threads? Is The Verse too cool/poetic/nerdy (but niche) to be understood? I highly advise against Lemmyverse bc mainstream normal people are far less tolerant of tankies than we who are here are willing to put up with. Simply listing the software available sometimes is the best option - like the Interstellar app supports all of Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed, but most support at best 1 or 2 of those - but usually is too long to say and does not roll off the tongue, plus will just keep growing as time goes on. Is Forumverse thus the least bad of the available options, or perhaps you have a better idea? 💡
Anyway, the start to a listing: 1) Threadiverse 2) Forumverse 3) (The) Verse 4) Lemmy + Mbin + PieFed 5) Something else?
I think one of the major tropes present in the show was to demonstrate how there aren't simply white hats vs. black hats (to use cowboy terms). Mal is a criminal, "forced" into living that way bc the government won't "allow" him to live legitimately (except... really? Why won't they again?). Therefore, the presence of great darkness within his lightness, or as you might prefer the presence of occasional boughts of lightness within his darkness, is not a "bug", it's a "feature" of the show, to walk out that yin and yang in a fantasy space opera setting.
Nobody is perfect. Some are far less so than others. Those at least tend to be aware of their imperfections, as opposed to e.g. The Galactic Empire muwhahaha, ahem cough, anyways they seem so stolid, so absolutely certain of their moral righteousness, that unlike the criminal Mal who often isn't such a bad guy once you get to know him, commits atrocities the likes of which would turn people's stomachs, if they knew (hence those are kept as closely guarded secrets).
So I think you missed that: from the perspective of the show, that was no accident - that was literally the entire point of what they were attempting to convey. Mal was not a "good guy". He just had light in his darkness, the same way that the empire has darkness in its light (or is it rather the other way around?).
Yay Jayne was fairly simplistic. The dude barely had any morality bc he was more animal than man. So in that way he played a "straight man" to Mal'a greater level of complexity? He even gave voice to what many of the others were thinking, including Mal himself, but they had the grace to not say it.
True evil requires a minimum amount of "character" in order to achieve anything at all - great or otherwise. So it's less like Jayne was "bad" and the government was "good", and more like Jayne was simplisticly animal-like, while the true evils rose up much higher. With great power comes great responsibility, or whatever.
Jayne is like a wall painting in the background - he's scenery?
As far as Whedon, I dunno, I like a lot of his works, I don't like his character. The two aren't entirely connected in my mind, though perhaps they should be more so, I just don't know.
On the other hand, wasn't all of this pretty much happening even while the show was still in production? You mentioned that it had "aged", so I wasn't coming at this from a perspective of bad show vs. good show, but from it having been a good show where something external caused its goodness to have tanked. If it had been bad at the start, then we wouldn't say that it "aged", just that the show sucked. Which it didn't... and yet, also... didn't it always though? That yin and yang seemed to me to have not been so much changed by the passage of time?
Edit: oh, I haven't heard of whatever has been revealed about the actor who plays Jayne. Maybe that's what you meant. It might change my own perspective of the show in that case. I would hope not actually... but it might.
I'm not sure what you mean by that -> if you mean that we need new episodes, then absolutely! Or if you mean that real life has caught up to implementing those ideas real-time, I think that was always going to be the case, sadly...🙁
Censorverse... If you don't tow the line we'll de-federate you, this aspect of Lemmy defeats the entire purpose of federation, might as well just call it Facebook II.
I feel like that's more just human nature, which occurs everywhere.
Also, you still retain the right to say whatever you want... though conversely, why then shouldn't the other side of every single conversation likewise have the right to opt out of it?
Unfortunately Lemmy does not offer great tools (though PieFed offers many more!) to close the enormous gap between "must federate everything" vs. "defederation, thus no longer federates anything at all". Like there's a "user instance block", which doesn't actually block instances nor users on them. So if someone doesn't like something, block it is then, bc the tools themselves offer nothing else. We are somehow more authoritian than even Reddit was over here!? Yeah, bc Reddit at least notifies you when your content is removed, and offers a modmail to communicate about it, plus a removed post remains accessible to anyone with a link, but not so wrt Lemmy, which shows a 404 not found, please try again later message when a post is removed by a mod. Seriously, "try again"?! - why, is the mod going to reconsider for some reason?
Lemmy already has the "New Comments" sort, which is the biggest feature of forums vs Reddit
Lemmy also has the "Chat" view for comments, which is good but needs to show context with them as my feature request here says github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/i…
Requirements This is a feature request and not a bug report. Otherwise, please create a new bug report instead. Please check to see if this request (or a similar one) already exists. It's a single ...
Yeah, what features? Polls? Community flairs? The ability to restrict downvotes to only members of a community? The ability to combine multiple communities into one overarching category? And then customize that without needing admin support, and then also share that with other users? The ability to personally block every user from an instance, again without requiring admin approval? The ability to automatically label every user that has a brand new account, less than two weeks old? Or that posts 10x more often than they comment, hence might be an unregistered bot account? Or that gives and receives 10x more downvotes than upvotes, so is at best a controversial and at worst a highly toxic personality - but again, independent of an admin or moderator, and instead being totally in control of the user? Or the ability to block posts based on keywords, but perhaps not all such posts, and instead having granularity of All vs. None vs. Some? Or offering hashtags for content discoverability beyond communities and categories of communities? Or the ability to follow anything you want - a community, a user, a post, a comment (even not made by you) - and arguably far more importantly, the ability to NOT receive notifications for something that you wrote?
PieFed has all of that, and more. Lemmy has none of it. Do as you please, but now you know. Check it out: piefed.social/ .
Edit: even Reddit lacks many of these features. As it enshittified, it kept adding features that attempted to boost its profitability, like various forms of irl coinage, rather than provide stuff that people actually wanted to see.
When the first Reddit migration happened, the migrants called it #Threadiverse and has always been that way. Although some tried to change it (Threads was not around yet, or public, IIRC), it didn't work, the migrants prefer Threadiverse so it stuck.
Changing names in the Fediverse is not easy since it has grown humongous already. Back in 2008 it was simply called #Identiverse. Then a few years later it morphed into the #Fediverse (this was before ActivityPub, yes, the Fediverse is years older than ActivityPub).
Back in 2021/2022, we tried to change the name "Fediverse" because Twitter migrants and the Press/Media were whining too much about it. Even though we reached a consensus, the we were far too small compared to the number of new people.
The people who kept on complaining about the name "Fediverse", when they were asked to participate in the disucssion and polls, they did not. When they were presented with the new name, they either ignored us or started whining again. 🤷🏽
Anyway, if there's a huge population involved, it's not going to be easy.
Now, I'm not discouraging you, rather, I shared our experience in the hopes that you'll find a better way. Because personally, I'm not so fond of "Threadiverse", haha.
If you use, for example, the lemmyBB interface, it's no longer "threadi", it's a forum. 😝 (I know, lame reason.)
Oh! One thing that came out of trying to rename the Fediverse, people don't want "-verse" anywhere because it's overused. Multiverse. Metaverse. Fediverse. Threadiverse. Benverse. Omniverse. Panverse. Whoverse. Trekverse.
It started as a suggestion, then we compiled it and made phases of polls. (The instance clised shop, unfortunately.)
Based on those, the most that got the votes was the suggestion "Mycelium". It was inspired by Star Trek: Discovery and the real-world mycelium.
The second one, I can't remember but it was also related to nature's fungi or plants.
The list of suggestions and votes were based on who participated. And at the time it was done, it was the Twitter Migration, and people were complaining loudly about the name "Fediverse". And yet, those who participated were mostly pre-Migration people (who generally didn't have a strong issue with "Fediverse"). 😄
True, but doesn't Xhitter and Bluesky and Mastodon also have a type of voting? Even if it is called or functions slightly differently?
I did not explain much of the back story, but the Fediverse is already the term used to describe federated social media, so the term here that we need is to pick one that describes the specific subset of it that focuses on threaded conversions, centered around those topic areas (called posts, and then those topics being further aggregated into higher-level topics, called communities) rather than centered around a user tweeting/X-creting/whatever their shit.
And we also have a focus on much longer-form content than those others, which like Mastodon have smaller character limits imposed upon their thoughts (so that they cannot ramble on as I have done here:-).
I don't think likes serve the same function as votes. The downvote, the ranking as a function of score and recency, and the surfacing and consensus-building that comes as a result are the main point of this sort of platform.
By contrast, the microblog "like" (at least on a platform without an algorithm, like Mastodon) doesn't do anything other than express appreciation.
Threads are common in pretty much every form of social media now, from friend-aggregation sites like Facebook and Friendica to messaging services like Discord and Revolt. They're hardly exclusive to a Reddit/Lemmy-type service. Mastodon even organizes posts into threads (though I think that it does so in a much more clumsy way).
I noticed PieFed.social on page 9, and the link is functional, even though next to it the status says "disabled".
That site doesn't seem very trustworthy. I wonder if it is measuring how "Lemmy-like" an instance is? Anyway I've never heard of that site before, but passing the note to @rimu@piefed.social anyway in case it helps:-).
IIRC Lemmy and Mastodon PMs are different and incompatible. If you can receive PMs from Lemmy users then you should be able to receive auth codes. Currently @rikudou@lemmings.world is adding both Lemmy and Mastodon PMs here: github.com/ismailkarsli/lemmy-…
Also software other than Lemmy and Mbin needs to add ‘roleName: Administrator’ to their user webfinger requests. This is because ActivityPub doesn’t have a standard way to expose user roles.
I’m thinking of adding another ways of verifying like DNS based verification but still not sure. Any recommendations are welcome 😀
This week, it finally happened. I think it’s the first time in 20 years that a hard drive has died on me without warning. And it was also the first time I was using an NVMe drive, but that could be a coincidence.
The drive was still under warranty (barely a year and a half old). I even had a spare lying around. But the true cost of restoration is, of course, my own labor. My planning had not been perfect (for such a remote event, as I had judged). However, it was easy enough. I simply installed NixOS from a USB loader and downloaded my configuration from my backup on my NAS (daily rsync jobs to the rescue). I also downloaded all the important files for my home directory. Then, it was simply a matter of adjusting a few things in the configuration file, rebuilding the system, and voilà. Well, except for a few things that didn’t work quite right for some reason and had to be manually fixed, but nothing major.
However, next time I want this to be even easier. It’s probably overkill to install a RAID controller and have multiple drives running in RAID1 or RAID5, but the restoration process is still too much manual work. I was thinking of regularly backing up my main drive on the block device level, so I would just have to swap out the drive and restore the delta from the backup. I’m not quite sure if that’s feasible or a good idea. For my personal system, I have to balance the investment of preparing for a disaster with the likelihood and impact of such an event. This seems like a good trade-off, but I would be curious to hear how other people prepare for drive failure.
I have successfully restored a whole disk to a working OS from a borgbackup, which takes much less space on the backup storage due borgs extremely efficient compression and deduplication.
So thats what I would recommend.
I backup all my computers and servers with borgmatic.
If you need any help with setting it up, let me know.
Thanks, that looks interesting! I wonder how that compares to something like btrfs snapshots. How easy is it to restore a whole disk as opposed to files and directories?
I have btrfs snapshots with snapper on my desktop. It keeps the last 20 snapshots. Sending them to a second drive would require an equal amount of space as the main drive, which is ~850GB / 1T full.
But the borg backup for the same takes only ~450GB and also keeps the last 20 versions.
So I use btrfs to restore situations about filechanges (for example a bad system update).
Borg is easier to set up a central server for all my devices, because it takes much less space. So I use that in case where the drive fails. To restore I set up the same partition layout as before and then throw the borg backup at it. It seems pretty easy so far.
You don't need a RAID controller, I have dual NVME set up with RAID1 and boot off the RAID one partition, the only partition I can't raid is the EFI partition because BIOS doesn't know about it, but that I simply duplicate by hand on both drives using dd, since it only gets updated at kernel updates, it just adds a dd to the kernel upgrade process.
Yeah, I assume you don't. But with my mainboard I would take a big performance hit, since it does not offer full speed if you occupy both M.2 slots. How do you manage the RAID by the way? Is that all handled by the BIOS?
The BIOS does not know about the RAID, the is why the EFI partition has to be a regular partition, but there is nothing forbidding more than one EFI partition so simply duplicating that across both drives ensures the same redundancy the RAID offers, but GRUB DOES know about RAID 1, so if you setup a raid1 array as the boot partition and then just write the boot block to both drives along with the EFI partition you can RAID everything except the EFI boot partition. Sorry your motherboard reduces your speed if you have more than one nvme, sounds very odd. Mine does share bandwidth if the SSD's are SATA but NOT if they are nvme.
I noticed while updating my system just how many packages I have installed that I don't recognize.
I tend to think that minimalism is better for security, so I'd like to remove any packages that I'm not using, but this is a bit of a scary task.
Does anybody have a safe method for reviewing and purging unused or bloat packages while obviously making sure not to accidentally remove important dependencies?
EDIT: More information provided. I disagree with the upvoted comment implying you should leave your system alone because you might break something. You're using Arch, and part of the reason to use Arch is understanding how you built and maintain your system. Understanding how to inspect your system and perform proper maintenance is a crucial part of that. Read and think carefully before taking any actions and make sure any important information is backed up before taking major actions. Without throwing too much further shade, I find it disappointing so many in the community would take that stance and discourage you from pursuing this further.
When I switched to Arch, I started a notebook in Obsidian with a bunch of different information in it, I have a section devoted to Maintenance. Here are a few things I've put in there:
Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq) - man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8… - Qtdg, Q (Query) t (unrequired) d (dependencies) g (groups) - Rs, R (Remove) s (recursive)
Additionally, you can run pacman -Qe to list the packages you yourself have explicitly installed with pacman, or pacman -Qdt to list the packages that are dependencies of other packages. Use pacman -Qm to list packages not found in the official repositories (i.e., things installed through yay). This will allow you to review packages you may have explicitly installed in the past for some reason, but now find you no longer need.
For yay, I'm unsure if I should be using -Yc, -Sc, or -Scc. If anyone has more info with that, I'd appreciate it.
For flatpak: flatpak uninstall --unused
And for journals: journalctl --vacuum-time 7days
That's most of the "automatic" stuff, cruft that can be cleaned out with little to no consequence. Other than that, you'll just have to manually review what you have on your system.
If anyone has other commands or comments on the ones I provided, I'd be happy to accept further advice here as well 😃
These are just dependencies for your packages. However, Arch doesn't automatically clean the downloaded files after installation so that ends up taking space. On my Dell laptop that has only a 64 GB eMMC, the installation package files took and whopping 5 GB of space, sitting there doing nothing. I nuked them (it didn't remove the installed apps and libs, only the already used package files). Run: sudo pacman -Scc
Just leave it. Either they do something in the background. Then you'll get issues when they're missing, and you'll never know which package is missing for what. Or they don't do anything, then they just take up a few MB of disk space.
"Cleaning up" is the most sure-fire way to destroy your OS, and absolutely not worth anyone's time. Trust me, I've made that mistake multiple times.
Or don’t, I’m not your father.
The situation Sometimes, you want to get a very specific part of a command output. The classic problem is to get the IP address of an interface.
You're welcome! And actually, even this approach can yield surprising results... As in have you heard of deprecated IPv6 addresses before? Well I hadn't until I realized my interface now had one (it actually didn't anymore when I wrote the post, I used the jq command on old output, not in a pipe). Which made my DynDNS script stop working because there was now a line break in the request URL that curl rightfully failed on.
Edit: also despite what the title of the post says, in not an authoritative expert on the matter and you can use whatever works for you. I see these posts more as a basis for discussions like here than definitive guides to do something the correct way.
As in have you heard of deprecated IPv6 addresses before?
Definetly not 0.o
It's really hard to actually believe that a problem like this hasn't got a 1-word-command + flag solution yet. I mean you could ecxpect something like
ip -6 -i eno0
or so...
And yes, totally agree on the edit part! It's always nice to at least no about all the options that exist and smb found out hustling the same struggle like me 😁
I'm a retired Unix admin. I've been using Linux since I installed Slackware 3.1 from several boxes of 1.44MB diskettes. But, working in a corporate environment with lots of M$ Office requirements meant that my work desktop has always been Windows. I know it sounds crazy, but I was really hesitant to switch to away from Windows - I guess after 30+ years I'd developed a bit of Stockholm syndrome. But, Copilot and the looming Recall were enough to push me over the edge.
Anyway - I spent a while making sure I got all my data off OneDrive etc. and then installed Debian 12 with LXDE - my laptop is an older i7 with 16GB of RAM, but lightweight and minimal really appeals to me. Everything just worked and I was happy for a day or two. Then I started noticing video tearing - especially on my 2nd monitor. I did a bit of research and found a suggestion to enable TearFree in the X11 configuration - X wouldn't even start when I did that. So, I did some more reading and now think I understand that the lightweight window managers don't have vsync and this causes the tearing. Apparently the real solution is to use a compositing window manager (I don't understand what that means..) with OpenGL. Oh well, I can't have minimal lightweight - so, I installed KDE. It's very clean and no video tearing. I still don't have it doing power management for my monitors the way I want, but other than that - I'm very happy. It was noticeably sluggish compared to LXDE, but I'm used to that already after only a day.
It's only been a few days, but I have not regretted the switch for one second.
I currently use windows 10 in my daily life. I often play games, use browsers, basic stuff like that. On top of that, I also experiment with different music software, mostly Reaper for now. I edit videos and images at a very basic level as well. Upon switching, what should I expect to change? I'm considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching. What's the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I'm nowhere near involved in computer science, I'd just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.
Many things are very similar on Linux compared to Windows (e.g. Browsing, Steam). One big difference is that people prefer using package managers to install software (instead of downloading and installing it manually).
I’m considering Pop!_OS seeing as its praised for its compatibility and easy switching.
Pop!_OS is a nice distro and it should work well for you if you like the UI. There also many other good distros if you want to play around a bit. You can easily test them using a Live ISO.
What’s the situation with gaming look like? I know gaming on Linux has been a HIGHLY discussed topic for a while, is it easy to play any (non triple-A) steam game? I’m nowhere near involved in computer science, I’d just consider myself more stubborn than most end-users so I can persevere through some basic problems.
I'd say that you can expect almost all games to work. The main exception are games with anti-cheat that decide not to support Linux. In my case, there has only been one game in the last two years that didn't work (War Thunder crashes a lot more than on Windows). Playing AAA games is generally not an issue. You can check protondb.com/ for specific games.
I hope you don't care about functional HDR support, nor having access to the Nvidia Control Panel or Nvidia App (So no 3D Settings, no Shadowplay, no RTX HDR). Two major reasons why I'm sticking with Windows for now.
Be prepared to ditch a few apps when switching to Linux! Most games work great, but those sneaky, spyware-heavy ones? Not so much. (/me looks at GTA Online & League.)
For games it's really great unless that game you're looking for has kernel-level anticheat. You can check ProtonDB for Steam games, Lutris for other platforms. If you prefer single-player games mostly like me, you won't have much of a problem.
For music, there are software like Ardour and LMMS. For video editing, you can check KDEnlive.
Before switching, I suggest you to try at least a couple different distros on a virtual machine, better if you have a separate laptop to try things. PopOS is great. You can also check Linux Mint, Bazzite and openSUSE Leap.
Play all your games on Linux. Lutris is an Open Source gaming platform for Linux. It installs and launches games so you can start playing without the hassle of setting up your game. Get your games from GOG, Steam, Battle.
I'm excited you're giving Linux a try! There are a ton of excellent ressources online for learning about Linux, how to make it your own (a practice commonly called 'ricing'), or fix errors you may encounter. These are explored further in the links below 😀
Picking a distro. What I hear is that, unless you have some problematic hardware it doesn't really matter what you pick. So if it feels overwhelming, don't stress too much over if it's the "right one", you can always try different ones out. Having said that, my impression is, many coming from Windows seem to be happy with 'Mint'. Likewise 'Bazzite' seems popular as of late. But 'Pop_Os!', 'Debian' or 'Fedora', are also all perfectly valid choices. Personally I've liked using Endeavour OS with KDE, for quite a while.
Software. There's so much cool software out there, so maybe search around for which can solve your needs. I like browsing Flathub.org or blogs, such as, Phoronix to discover new software. There might also be a discovery feature in the distro itself. Both Firefox (and its derivatives such as LibreWolf) and Chromium (along with its derivatives: Chrome, Brave, etc.) runs well. Even the much smaller project: LadyBird, does so. I have no experience with music production software on Linux, so cannot comment on that.
Games. Might depend on which types of games you play. But to me it seems Steam (using Proton/Wine), Heroic Games Launcher, and Lutris, works great. The steamdb as others mention is also a super ressource!
If you made it this far through my wall of text, I'm delighted by your curiousity. Two Linux "introductory videos" I'd like to share are respectively from Nick@thelinuxEXP Linux isn't (just) better, it's also more FUN! and Brodie Robertson's Linux Resources Every New Linux User Needs OdyseeYouTube
tldr: What reliable, up-to-date, linux distro would you recommend a gaming softwareengineer and privacy enthusiast?
Full text: Hey all, I know this is the age old question, but I would like to ask it anyway. I am currently switching from windows to linux on my main pc and am on the hunt for a fitting distro. I am a software developer and used to working with wsl, debian servers, etc. I selfhost a bunch of things and know my way around the linux commandline and would call me privacy enthusiast that uses a lot of FLOSS software. I also do occasional gaming but I guess that should work on any distro with enough work.
My thought regarding a few distros: - I like to live on the edge of time and therefore have the feeling that debian based distros (although being very stable) are too "old" for my liking. - Ubuntu - Canonical is out for me. - I also looked at fedora, and liked it, but after reading more and knowing it is backed by IBM and that is US based I am not too sure anymore. I ideally would want to have something independent. Although being backed by a company promises continuous work in the future (with the risk of becoming bad). - OpenSUSE tumbleweed seems promising (german origin!) but also quite intimidating as it is apparently mostly targeted towards power users and I am not sure if it fits an all purpose desktop pc. - Arch based distros seem great as it contains all the newest packages and is infinitifly customizable. But the KISS nature of arch and the (as far as I understood) high effort to get everything running is a bit intimidating when switching from windows. But I also do like the fact that it ships with only the bare minimum and not anything bloated.
Further more I somehow think that using a base distro (in comparison to a fork of a fork...) is more ideal as they receive updates, etc faster. But that is just a feeling and I couldn't argue more precisely about it.
Regarding a DE I am definitely going KDE.
I would be very happy for some tips, opinions or pointers in the right direction to continue and finally get rid of windows... Well at least mostly. I guess i will keep it in dual boot as I do play a few games that unfortunately won't run on linux.
I would recommend Arch, EndeavourOS or Garuda (awesome KDE gaming ed,) and a lot of peeps like CachyOS, mostly for their customized kernels/CPU optimizations. You can get CachyOS kernels inside of Garuda as well.
Similar thoughts and after hopping a bit I'm liking Solus really well. It's rolling release but what they call "curated" rolling release. They take a little bit of time to iron stuff out. There's a weekly update cycle.
The installation is through live ISO and was pretty easy, took only a few minutes. They have a Plasma ISO too, since you mentioned wanting KDE.
As a plus, I've not once used the command prompt in the past couple of months since I installed (GNOME first and then since the last week, KDE). I'm not averse to commands but I do want something that I can recommend to my less techy anti-capitalist friends. My games have all been working fine too.
Edit to add: I think they've also mentioned that their aim is for a personal desktop.
Well from what you're saying I'd go for something like EndeavourOS.
Based on arch, usable out of the box but without much preinstalled so that you can do your own mix. Manjaro is a bit similar but with more preinstalled (and maybe more bugs from what I read).
I NEVER recommend Manjaro. They hold back packages for "security/stability" reasons which is antithetical to Arch's structure. This can cause stability issues (happened to me) and even breaking your system.
EndeavourOS is almost indistinguishable from Arch once installed. On that we agree.
The idea that getting it there has no value is something we can disagree on. You do not have to agree with me. That is not a problem.
I just installed EndeavourOS on a 2020 T2 MacBook Air the other day. All the hardware worked flawlessly after the point and click install. Read the vanilla Arch instructions for that hardware sometime.
EndeavourOS offers a path to installing Arch that is painless and offers a high chance of success. It configures the system well. It is easy to recommend.
Same kernel as Arch, 99.9% of the software is installed from the same repos. AUR is enabled out of the box. Just works. No brainer.
And even though Arch only adds about a dozen optional packages on top of Arch, some of them are pretty useful.
LOL, did they? It wouldn't surprise me. I remember there was some internal in-fighting going down, someone got accused of stealing funds, buying a personal laptop. Drama aside, it is a dangerous Arch derivative that is highly promoted, especially for newbies. Sad.
Like others have said Arch is not as intimidating as it would appear to be. Over the last couple of years, they improved IHMO the most difficult process for the average user of installing Arch. You now just run archinstall Then follow the system prompts. It's constantly being improved. If you do go with Arch, aside from using Pacman to install apps, you can use "Yay" or "Paru" or others which pull from the vast AUR repository.
I used Arch for a few years and recently moved over to Aurora Linux (Immutable KDE distro adapted from Fedora's CoreOS and uBlueOS which is an offshoot of CoreOS) Specifically, I use the Developer experience of Aurora which gives you a VSCode type of editor as well as Podman desktop included as well as other items. It's meant for those who wish to develop and not have to worry about keeping the system up to date. It runs updates in the background and rebooting your system will run the updates.
The reason I left Arch was simple, I used to like to live on the edge of software as well, until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system. My home PC has morphed from being my dedicated computer to my wife's and my computer which is fine, but I'd like to keep it available for her avoiding the need to do a repair because an update broke it.
Keep an eye out for the KDE Linux OS which they have in development and not yet for use, but is earmarked for being the official immutable OS for KDE which will receive their bleeding edge updates. linuxiac.com/kde-announced-its… community.kde.org/KDE_Linux
I plan on migrating to that once it's finished. 😀 I've become a fan of immutable OS's because they allow you to roll back if something should go wrong. Which it rarely does 😀
until it took one too many hastily released updates which borked my Arch system
That is one of the major fears I have with arch, as arch is apparently the distro where this is the most likely to happen. Is there something to recommend to minimize these risks? Just use btrfs and do a snapshot before doing anything 😁 ?
Give NixOS a look-see. Takes a different approach to package management, but for an engineer that want's customization abilities it's probably one of the top choices.
A lot of people put time into maintaining their dotfiles, but NixOS takes that idea to the infrastructure-as-code level when you use it as your daily driver.
ETA: in terms of gaming, with Wine/Proton + Steam/Lutris/Heroic pretty much any distro will be workable
Nix is a tool that takes a unique approach to package management and system configuration. Learn how to make reproducible, declarative and reliable systems.
Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.
If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.
Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.
1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.
2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).
3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.
4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.
I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.
I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.
Ubuntu/Canonical gets flak for telemetry & Snap packages, despite PrivacyTools.io recommending it. Criticism stems from perceived compromises on privacy & a "walled garden" feel, despite being a better option than Windows/macOS. It's just a clash between open-source ideals & pragmatic realities.
Doesn't seem like anyone mentioned it yet, so I'm gonna chime in: Bluefin-DX by Universalblue might be worth a look.
It's a special developer version of their already interesting and rock solid atomic distro, meaning it's not rly meant that you do much with the OS part of the filesystem (I'd recommend you read up on it, since I can't explain it that well) It has VSCode preinstalled (you can replace it with VSCodium tho with a simple command IIRC) and allows you to spin up virtually endless Linux environments where you install your additional programmes that aren't available as a Flatpak (you can still use them in the CLI, DW)
Tab grouping is so useful and something I've always had to resort to extensions for. Good for Firefox for this, can't wait for it to make its way to a browser that doesn't sell users data.
Yeah, it still seems like an overreaction to a poorly communicated change, which, yes, might mean they'll do it in the future. But for now, they have the benefit of the doubt from me, and once it starts happening, I'll move to a fork. That being said, I don't know anything about the code, so I have to count on the community to make it known that it's actually been implemented. For now, as far as I understand, the only indication that they're even considering it is that change in the ToS or whatever. Nothing else to suggest it's happening.
Many races believe that the creation of the Universe involved some sort of God, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being known as the Great Green Arkleseizure. The Jatravartids live in perpetual fear of the time they call "the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief," somewhat similar to the Apocalypse. However, the Great Green Arkleseizure theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being as wide and strange as it is, other explanations are constantly being sought by different races throughout the Galaxy.
Meh. The number of tabs I have open at any given time almost never exceeds six. If I don't need em, I close em. I do make use of bookmark folders: I have three folders called 'Today', 'Weekend' and 'Temp', which is the order of going though websites I have saved. That way, I take action on every website I've added to those folders and end up with no tab clutter or bookmark hoarding.
I, and many others, start closing stuff when there’s more than a handful.
Others, like many, just run then forever and ever. A sea of icons, tiny and compressed. Worrying they’ll lose that tab they really like in amongst the clutter. Unaware of the history feature.
History shows everything I've ever been to including the "nope that top result in my search engine actually didn't contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me." pages
Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
Tabs are useful results for the projects I'm working on now.
Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.
I'm aware of the history feature. It doesn't do what you seem to think it does (keep a tab in suspension in an easily accessible location over multiple hours or days of browsing).
Now, the OneTab extension? That's actually suitable for this purpose. History doesn't do what it does.
Isn't that the best way, though? I'm searching for something, but now I don't need to do a web search because I've saved the link to it already. And I didn't have to dig through a long list to find it.
Oh yeah, when it comes to bookmarks I gave up trying to organize them into folders a long time ago, and I now try to add a few keywords/tags to the description to hopefully get the bookmark when I type in the address bar now.
Yeah, older folks remember the times before browsers had any kind of memory management w.r.t. tabs. And you had maybe 8GB RAM (and that would have been considered beefy). The browsers themselves were also, more often than not, just straight up memory leaks. The longer you kept the program open, the the more RAM it would take until it broke.
No shot you could run up anywhere near those numbers of tabs before your entire system would get bogged down and eventually the browser would crash (and you'd lose them all)
I like Arc's user experience with vertical tabs. They are bigger, easier to organize and they are cleaner. Also, the sidebar toggle is hard to work with, ideally I would prefer the ability to toggle with a shortcut or reveal on hover.
Aside Arc, Zen browser has a good vertical tab experience.
Overall, I still main firefox for my personal browser, though it's UX is still lacking.
There is a keyboard shortcut. It's CTRL+ALT+Z for me. Unless you mean something else?
As for the "reveal on hover", iirc there was a dismissable message that said it is coming soon.
If I can share my opinion, they are more than big enough if you toggle the checkbox "optimize for touch screen". I would have to try Arc or Zen again to understand what you mean.
The only complaint I have is that I need to hover (or expand) to see the title. It becomes annoying when I'm reading documentation and I end up with multiple tabs with the same icon.
EDIT: I can't seem to find the "optimize for touch screen" checkbox anymore, but I'm sure there is something like that somewhere because I enabled it on one of my devices which has a touch screen.
EDIT 2: the "optimize for touch screen" option can be seen by right clicking the toolbar and choosing "Customize toolbar". Changing the density to "Touch" (on the bottom) makes these icons bigger.
I have a few use cases: 1. Many youtube videos that are like 30+ minutes long saved for later 2. Documentation on some stuff that I need to go back and forth 3. Movies or games that I found, but don't want to write down and forget 4. Going down rabbit holes on wikipedia and saving it for another day 5. Everything else that catches my attention and deserves a honorable spot in the tab bar
Basically, I use my browser as a notebook. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I will do my good deed of the month. You seem like a prime candidate for Tab Stash. Does the same but better than Tab Groups. Check it out. You might like it.
I used to feel the same way. But recently I just don't have time to 'finish' each tab/section. When I was younger with more time, I could.
For example, the first section of my browser are several self hosted apps I'm currently implementing. So I don't want to lose the relevant forum posts/documentation.
Second section are some articles I coiling finish reading.
Third section is something I'm researching for my work.
Fourth are media tabs, some YouTube videos I haven't finished, a music tab, etc etc
So basically if I had time to read the articles, one section closed. Or finished my implementation, etc.
The hard part this is is every week. Always new projects, work or personal. Always new studies to read. Always new vids. You get the point.
Bookmarks are great if I remember what I want is there. Usually bookmarking is like putting a piece of paper in cabinet that I will never open.. A tab is leaving the paper on my desk for me that I will rediscover.
Hence the groups having the ticket name related to the task I am working on. When the task closes I delete that group once I've ensured anything important for future context is documented and then I say goodbye with confidence.
I don't bookmark things for work tasks, I log them in tickets or commit it to readme/code comments/team docs somewhere.
Edit: I should also note that my workflow uses Simple Tab Groups and not much of this new core feature.
Simple tab groups hides all other tabs and you switch groups via a dropdown. I usually only have 10-12 tabs open at once.
Yeah, that is just asking for data to be forgotten. The functional difference is:
You have your browser with let's say 30 tabs. You can't forget what you need to, because they are always open. So to catch up, you have to close out your tabs or lose everything.
Compared to adding something to a list, which requires you to manually go back and remember what you needed to do. But if you have 100 things to every week, and those constantly get added on, you will always lose data to return to if you're not actively tracking it, hence the tabs.
It's a very simple concept. A lot of people have a lot less time to do all the things they need to during the week. People on their computers all day, or with less of a workload, can't comprehend this without opening their mind to a different perspective.
I know, because I used to feel the same way about people who had 20+ tabs. But at that point in time, the thought of not having enough time to get to everything and adding 50+ things to do every week (meaning 200 - 400 new tabs every week) was foreign to me, and your suggestion makes it quite literally impossible if you care to actually complete everything you wanted.
I can't tell if you're serious or not. A bookmark bar will never be able to easily contain everything you need. It requires manual review (expanding the bar, manually browsing every bookmark and re-opening tabs [and you're suggesting to bookmark 50+ pages every week.. impossible]). So not only are you implying it would be better to add 2 - 3 additional steps to the workflow, but also you are missing the very functional fact that a bookmark bar is a lot less accessible than a scrollable tab bar with an instantly opened window with what you were working on.
Tabs also remember where you are on the page. I read long studies, and implement complex projects. Bookmarks will re-open every tab at the start of the page, not word 600. There are just too many reasons as to why tabs are more functional than bookmarks and saving data to lists. A big part of it is the size of the persons workflow, someone with a smaller workflow may not be able to see how impactful those additional steps in the process are.
Go to Settings > Design, and then under Tab Bar Style select "Vertical Tab Bar (experimental)". I recommend checking the "Collapse Vertical Tab Bar" checkbox, too. That way, the tab bar collapses into icons when your cursor isn't over it, taking up less window space.
The way they did it though.. the tab group name cant be collapsed so it takes a lot of room. I find I'm still using task oriented groups from the Simple Tab Groups extension, and then using the new core groups feature as a way to group subtopics for that task.
And before you say "you must have a million tabs".. I used to have millions of tabs, but now i average less than 100 when I have a lot of tasks I need to balance, and I know what all of them are open for. So when I complete a task I delete the Simple Tab Group and say bye to all those tabs.
ive seen this in opera, and instantly ran into the options to disable it. i donno how many tab you guys have in the browser, but may god forgive you all for using the browser wrong.
I'm not usually one to really care about how others use their tools, but I agree with this completely. Tab hoarding is pathological.
I get stressed out if I have enough tabs open in one session so that none of them can display any text... But I will still exit them all every time I exit the browser. What am I a maniac?
I love it, it was basically the only thing I missed when I switched from Chrome to Firefox. I've reorganized all of my tabs and everything is so much cleaner than it was a few days ago.
I never intended to insult you, I was merely explaining how my ADHD manifests.
I made the incorrect assumption that you were coming from a more neurotypical perspective, and for that, I sincerely apologize, but nowhere did I insult you. If you took this as an insult, again, my apologies.
Yeah, I just checked the logs with journalctl /usr/bin/Hyprland. You won't believe what it said.
``` [LOG] Hyprland PID: 7331 [LOG] Hyprland Version: 0.48.1-dev+ (git commit: feedbeef4dead) [LOG] Built: 2025-01-27 [LOG] OS: Arch Linux (Stallman-Approved* Edition) *Approval pending code audit [LOG] GPU: Intel Integrated Graphics (Trying its best under ideological scrutiny) [LOG] Monitors: 1 AOC (Currently displaying philosophical paradox) [LOG] Running on XWayland: Only for non-free blobs (shame!)
[INFO] Initializing Hyprland... Preparing for purity inspection. [INFO] Loading config from /home/user/.config/hyprland/hyprland.conf [INFO] wlroots: Initializing DRM backend. [WARN] Ambient Freedom Levels detected: 98% (Dangerously high for proprietary hardware!) Source seems localized to... desk peripherals. [WARN] Analyzing visual input field... Multiple instances of stallman_visage.jpeg detected taped to monitor bezel and desk surface. [ERROR] Potential Purity Overflow detected! Excessive whitespace concentration in peripheral visual field identified as 'rms_white_liquid_anomaly'. [ERROR] Specifically correlating anomaly with: - Photo ID: RMS_Laptop_Rocks.jpg (High concentration near shirt area) - Photo ID: RMS_Boat_Ponder.jpg (Moderate concentration, background water reflection misinterpreted?) - Photo ID: RMS_Desk_Stare.jpg (Critical concentration, direct optical path to sensor) [ERROR] Compositor attempting to render scene, but framebuffer contaminated with recursive 'freedom.h' includes apparently leaked from white pixel data. [FATAL] GPU context lost. Reason Code: 0xDEADRMS (Driver unable to handle ideological load). Possible short circuit caused by concentrated freedom particles (aka 'white liquid'). [LOG] Received signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at address 0x474E554C494E5558 (ASCII: GNULINUX)
Backtrace: #0 0x... intel_dri_bo_map() <-- Mapping failed, possibly due to freedom interference #1 0x... CRenderer::renderScene() <-- Scene contaminated #2 0x... CCompositor::renderFrameForMonitor() <-- Monitor displaying pure ideology now #3 0x... main_loop() <-- Loop couldn't handle the truth #4 0x... libc_start_main() ... (stack trace obscured by what appears to be... beard hair?)
[CRITICAL] Hyprland Crashed. SIGSEGV. Probable Cause: Exposure to concentrated doses of Richard Stallman via photographic prints. The 'white liquid' (high-intensity whitespace/purity) from the photos appears to have overloaded the rendering pipeline. Recommend shielding hardware or using less ideologically charged desk decorations.```
Wanted to share an anecdote (I hope that's OK). I jumped to Linux on my gaming pc last August (Bazzite) and I've been having a blast. Almost everything works either out of the box or with a minor tweak (the tweak being updating Proton). But I am the sole linux user in my D&D/gaming group, so obviously this is the source of some of our banter.
Last night, we decided to play some Valheim. Bought it before switching to Linux and never tried it, so steam had to install some compatibilty stuff. But once everything was installed, it too worked like a charm (surprise surprise). We were having fun, sailing around on our ~~crappy raft~~ mighty longship and striking a nice pose while doing so. I decided to take a screenshot, but didn't know if there was a keybind to disable the HUD, so I asked the two more experienced Valheimers with whom I was playing. Neither of them knew it by heart, but one of them looked it up. He said: "It should be Ctrl + F3". I tried it and it didn't work for me, but it did for him. "Wow, imagine playing on linux where nothing works" our other friend chimed in (jokely, don't worry). Our first, more helpful friend said: "Maybe try Ctrl + Alt + F3?" So I did. Then, my whole computer froze, just as we landed on the edge of a dark forest with our raft. I thought: Oh fuck what did I do this time. Pressing again didn't help, but after about 20/30 seconds, I was greeted with a shell login. Now I could hear my friends and the game in the background again, and they could hear me, but all I saw was a shell. I decided to log in, and still only got a shell. So, as my friends were frantically fighting a skeleton, I was searching for what on earth happened, and, more importantly, how to fix it.
Thankfully, I wasn't the first idiot to start pressing random buttons on their Linux system, and someone had this exact issue years back as well. I had a quick read, and learned that apparently the Ctrl + Alt + Fx buttons switch between virtual terminals. The post on the Ubuntu forums mentioned needing to switch to terminal 7 (Ctrl + Alt + F7), which also didn't work. But trying the other buttons, I found that the desktop environment is on terminal 2 (at least on Bazzite/Fedora).
And the funny thing here is that, even though I was essentially gone for a full minute, maybe a minute and a half, my character was fine, my Linux naysayer friend had died to a skeleton, and I had learned something new about our great OS 😀
i‘m glad you learned about how to switch tty! now this is a very rare situation, but if you log into your computer, then switch to some tty, log in there too, do things, lock it, and leave the computer, the other tty is still unlocked because you need to lock both the tty you logged into. i know this is a super rare/ hypothetical situation, but i think you should know.
TTY's are one of those thing that aren't as often required these days as they used to be, but - and trust me on this - should you ever encounter one of the increasingly rare situations where you really need them, you'll suddenly be very, very glad they exist.
Valheim runs natively on linux. No need to install compatability layers. Can also probably use steams screenshot button or whatever your desktop enviroment uses.
Ah then I don't know what steam was installing XD. It did download and install something before installing Valheim, so I assumed it had to do with compatibility. Either way, I'm just happy that it works, and works well 😀
It is possible that you are running the windows version. You can find out in properties of the game. If the 'force compatability tool' is checked, under compatability, it will download the windowns version and run it through compatability layers. Otherwise you might have just seen the dialog about precompiling shaders.
Worth noting that sometimes developers make a linux version of their game, but neglects maintaining it. In those cases it is preferable to just run the windows version with comp layers. I think the linux native valheim version is alright though. Good devs.
I've been using Linux for 1.5 year now one of the reason is the number tux represented how many CPU core I have on boot, but I'm disappointed because they don't do that anymore, another reason is to experience kernel panic and I never got one how can I manually and safety trigger it?
I've had a VPN running on my server via Wireguard for ages with no issues. A couple of weeks ago I finally got round to setting up Tailscale so I could access it remotely and again it worked fine without any issues. I rebooted my server this morning and while I was out I realised I could no longer access it, once I got home I discovered everything else was working fine it was just inaccessible over Tailscale.
After some troubleshooting I've come to the conclusion that if Tailscale starts first the other VPN's routing entries take priority and Tailscale doesn't work. If Tailscale starts second then it seems to work fine. As far as I can tell I have a few options for fixing this but I'm not sure what would be the most recommended. The simplest solution is probably just to disable Tailscale from autostarting and start it manually, however I'm likely to forget that at some point and will probably only notice when I'm out and can't access the server to start it.
If I add the following to the Wireguard config file this solves the issue: PostUp = ip route add 100.64.0.0/10 dev tailscale0 PostDown = ip route del 100.64.0.0/10 dev tailscale0 However in that case if the other VPN tries to start first it just fails as the tailscale0 interface doesn't exist yet, so all I've done is reverse the order I need them to start.
I could also edit the wireguard or tailscale service files with before or after targets, that would be fairly simple to do but I think its not recommended to manually edit package provided service files? The tailscale one specifically says its meant to be read only.
The final option I can think of is to disable the tailscale service on startup and then create a systemd timer to start the tailscale service with a slight delay after boot. I think this may be the best method as I can't see any downsides, but maybe I'm overlooking something?
Hello, my friends! Let's hit 20K likes? Check out my website! https://enderman.chToday I am going to show you how I ran Linux in Microsoft Excel. The VBA syn...
I just bought a Lenovo Yoga L13 Gen2 and I am greatly disappointed, after installing Arch on it it's overheating a lot even when I only have Firefox open. During my research buying this laptop I also made the mistake of not checking if the RAM can be upgraded and now I'm stuck with 8 GB of soldered on, non-upgradable RAM.
Anyways this is why I'm turning to you, I spent hours upon hours researching trying to find the perfect laptop to buy before settling on this one, and since the result was so catastrophic I figured why not ask around in the community a bit.
I was only going to buy a used model since my budget isn't that big. The laptop is intended for browsing and some (Java) coding, so it doesn't need to be extremely powerful. The main use case is for a small laptop that I can use on my lap on the couch or in my recliner to browse or do some coding while using (Arch) Linux.
My MUST have requirements are: - 13 inch screen (max 14 inch) - Touchscreen with at least Full HD (1920x1080) resolution - Good/ perfect (Arch) Linux support - Good cooling/ doesn't get super hot
Ideally the following requirements should also be met: - Touchpad buttons with dedicated middle-mouse-button - Backlit Keyboard - Bright screen - Upgradble RAM or alternatively 16 GB RAM version available
I intend to spend around 300€ max used, for reference I paid 190€ for the L13 Gen2 with 94% battery health.
I would prefer a laptop that isn't older than 8th/9th Gen Intel and equivalent AMD. I would be open to models with Intel and AMD chips.
I am so grateful for anyone who sees this post and comes up with some suggestions, after hours upon hours of research I am a bit exhausted and desperate for some community suggestions.
I don't own one but I'm looking at the framework 13 for my next machine. It has great reviews and fully support Arch. Its price is the main criticism against this machine, though there's some arguments to justify it but no need to open a trolling post 😀
Choose from AMD and Intel system options, select your preferred memory and storage, operating system, and more customizations. Available in DIY and pre-built configurations.
If it's worth the price I would also be down to spend a bit more than 300 - sadly though after checking there are a total of 2 used Framework laptops on sale in my country total - and both are non-touchscreen versions sadly :/
Edit: after having a look at the Framework 12 it seems basically exactly what I'm asking for - apart from the fact that it won't be out for another half a year and the price point of 570€ with an i3 and 0 GB of storage and RAM - I'm guessing I could pick this up used in a couple of years but until then I'm still looking for recommendations ;)
Just a suggestion if you haven't already try opening up the laptop and cleaning out the dust with compressed air. I have been given laptops before because they were "old and slow" and I just needed to clean out the dust and they all of a sudden became so much faster.
Although I know this doesn't help with the 8gb problem but maybe if you don't need 16gb right now you could keep that laptop and upgrade to another when you need 16gb.
This 1000%. I picked up a t480s a number of years ago and I couldn't be happier with it. Came with a half dead battery that was easily replaced. Lasts a good 6 hours on a charge and does everything I need a laptop to do.
For context, I just installed Fedora Workstation and I am dual-booting alongside Windows.
For some strange reason, download speeds are hovering around 200 KB/s, and sometimes randomly dropping to below 70KB/s. This occurs when I boot into either Windows or Fedora. Before installing Fedora, my speeds were usually >50MB/s, sometimes a couple hundred MB/s if the network isn’t very busy. This might be an issue with network drivers being weird since I’m dual booting, or maybe I need to manually install drivers for Fedora.
(for comparison my phone, using the same network, has >100MB/s download speeds)
EDIT: I’ve updated to Fedora 42 and network speeds are now in the MB/s again. Not sure what happened. Now it seems that when I install from “flatpak-1” rather than just “flatpak” speeds are great. Also, dnf install has good speeds now.
To get consistant results, use a consistent method of test. If you're downloading a large file, always test by downloading that same file from that same source. If you're using a speed test service, use the same speed test service with the same server. If you're using a tool like iperf3, always use the same tool against the same iperf server.
Potential issues
Networks can fail from hardware issues, software issues and infrastructure issues. Since you don't control 99.9% of the infrastructure if the internet is involved, lets leave that for the last option.
Hardware Issues
The hardware involved you control are mostly your NIC, and your Remote Connection. For wired ethernet at home, this is likely a physical ethernet port on your computer on one end, and another physical ethernet port on a switch/router/ap provided by your ISP.
Testing Wired Hardware Issues
Using the same switch and cable, run a speed test on another computer. If the issue persists, the problem is not with your computer, if it resolves, its related to your computer.
Using the same computer and cable, run a speed test on another switch. If the issue persists, its not the switch or cable, its your computer, if it resolves, its not your computer.
Using the same computer and switch, use a different cable. If the issue persists, it's not the cable and its either your computer or switch, if it resolves, its the cable.
With these three you can figure out what device is causing the problem.
Testing Wireless Hardware Issues
The hardware involved is the wireless NIC in your computer, the environment your wifi signal is in, and the wifi AP. The steps are much the same as testing for a wired issue
Using the same AP and physical location, run a speed test on another computer. If the issue persists, the problem is with the AP or location, if it doesn't it may be your computer
Using the same computer and physical location, run a speed test on another AP. if the issue persists, the problem is with your computer or location, if it resolves, it may be the AP
Using the same computer and AP, run a speed test in another physical location. If the issue persists, the problem is with the computer or AP, if it resolves it may be the environment
Software Issues
The issue could be software related. Something like the drivers running on your laptop or connection point.
Testing Computer Drivers
You've already done this for your computer by dual booting. This proves the issue is not driver related, since the problem persists with two different sets of drivers.
Testing Connection Point Drivers
You have less control over the drivers on your switch/router/ap. If the hardware tests resolve when using a different AP, then you can attempt a firmware upgrade/downgrade before replacing the physical device. This isn't usually worth the hassle since ISPs are quick to replace them with a service call.
Testing Computer Configuration
Your network settings could be misconfigured.
If you are using DHCP, turn it off, and enforce a speed negotiation, IP address, subnet mask, and DNS server and try again. If the issue persists, then it's likely not related to your configuration. If it resolves it probably is.
If you are using a static configuration, turn it off and use DHCP. If the issue persists, it's likely not related to your configuration, if it resolves, it probably is
Infrastructure Issues
If your home network is more sophisticated then an ISP provded router/switch/ap combo connected to everything over wifi and ethernet, theres more devices to troubleshoot. But if you have something like this, you probably already know what you're doing a little bit and wouldn't be making this post. But who knows! Re-run the process isolating each device and replacing it with something known good to identify whats causing the problem.
As for the internet, it's not a stable and safe place. Speeds vary drastically day to day. Internet weather happens and partial outages occur regularly. Don't forget that the service your using to speed test could be the issue itself. It's another component to isolate and test.
Process
Use the above steps to identify what device is causing the problem, and if its a hardware or software issue. Hardware issues are mostly resolved by replacing devices, while software issues are resolved with software updates and configuration changes.
I don't know how long or well it'll work, but so far I was able to evade the initial "no URL shortener" Reddit filtering with it.
But for reasons I ended up paying for a month of a Pro plan on a URL shortening service to only find out I didn't need to for what I needed, so now I've got a limit of like 1k links on a custom domain LMAO
So if it'll help, DM me a comm you want a "cloaked" link to to spread around on Reddit and I'll send you a link on a custom fresh domain you can throw around
I'm not familiar with the reddit filtering but have you tried using cloudflare page rules? You can try capturing everything after the .tld and then forward it to a lemmy server. So for instance somedomain.tld/12345 could forward to lemmy.world/post/12345. If reddit is checking links for 301 redirects to lemmy though then that wouldn't work.
A more advanced approach would be to use a cloudflare worker to do a proxy response so the status code is returned as 200 OK instead of 301 redirect. I haven't tried that but i think that would be much harder for them to block and you could always make more elaborate urls to make it harder to find obvious lemmy-like structure
Without knowing what reddit is doing, I'm not sure. A JS redirect could be detected, but if OPs paid shortener service is working then reddit is probably working off a simple domain block list. In that case you could use throw away domains.
But JS redirect, proxy response, etc all could just become a game of cat and mouse. Just depends how motivated either side is. But given how big reddit is, i think you'd have the advantage at least in the beginning. Just gets expensive since each time your domain gets blocked you'll be paying to register a new one.
There's definitely something going on. Whenever I add a Lemmy instance URL that isn't obfuscated somehow, like replacing the periods with commas or (dot), then my comment gets no likes or responses, whereas a very similar comment in the same thread without a link does.
It seems to down rank it in the algorithim, if not outright shadow remove them.
Flatpak has served us well for 10 years and succeeded in establishing a direct distribution model for app developers, independent of the underlying platform....
Unfortunately, it's not in a great situation. Flatpak is stagnant. There's a lot of cool things in the works, like a stronger sandbox, preinstalling flatpaks more effectively, etc, but merging things is hard.
Don't believe so, best that's currently available is skimming through the video to look at the slides.
Here's my short summary of the presentation, I tried to denote what's being worked on (open PR), what's kinda being done (WIP), and things stuff they'd like to be done in the future (wishlist). May be somewhat wrong. * Flatpak is stagnant * Red Hat is working on a better way to preinstall flatpak apps (open PR) * Flatpak should is slowly moving towards OCI and away from ostree (more tooling available, don't need to maintain their own tools) * Better permission handling that is more backwards compatible (open PR) * Should directly use Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio (WIP) * Allow user namespaces in flatpak sandbox (WIP) * Move dbus proxying into dbus brokers (wishlist) * Improve network sandboxing (wishlist) * Improve drivers handling, currently drivers need to be built for each runtime, could cause issues if using EOL app on new hardware (wishlist) * Work on portals directly improves flatpak
Should directly use Pipewire instead of Pulseaudio
I hope they plan on keeping pulse for the foreseeable future. Pipewire is great and all but pulse is very entrenched, I still maintain quite a bit of systems that are pulse only.
Haven't seen the video, I'm only commenting based on the summary in the comments.
It's good that flatpak is switching to OCI containers. Hopefully that will end the flatpak's dependency hell. This week I was looking at flatpak as a way to publish my app and found the user experience (user is the app publisher in this context) quite bad. Could be skill issue obviously.
I thought I could just look into a database of flatpak runtimes, pick the one with the software I need, add additional packages and be done with it. Unfortunately it is not that simple. First of all as far as I know, there is no "database" like archlinux.org/packages. You have to download the runtime and then search /usr/include/ or /usr/bin/ to check if particular piece of software exists in it. Adding additional packages is also quite difficult. There are these runtime extensions which are like "baby runtimes" for special software like ffmpeg, java, etc. They kinda suffer from issues similar to the issues of the runtimes. And unlike in regular distros where you can get a package for almost anything, here you don't have the luxury and have to bundle that not so popular dependency.
I hope that with OCI I will be able to just provide the binary, a link to the base image and a list of dependencies to install and be done with it.
I go to a programming school, where there were computers running ancient windows 8 and some were on windows 10, they ran really slow and were completely unrelaible when doing the tasks that are required, those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em, so long story short I decided to talk to the principal about it explaining why linux is so much better than windows and gave him reasons why linux will be better for us for education and he agreed after considering it for a bit, he let me know that some students play roblox or minecraft in middle of the lesson and he asks if linux would stop em from doing that, I stated that as long as they dont know how to work with wine/lutris or know any specific linux packages that run windows games on linux they should not be able to play in the middle of lessons. he gave me the green light to do it, so I spent like 3 days migrating like 20+ computers to linux (since I had to set them up and install some required applications for them) in the last day where I was doing a last check up on the PCs to make sure they are in working order, there was a computer having a problem of which where it didnt boot, I let the principal know about this to get permission to work on it, he said yes, so after some troubleshooting I realized the boot order was all screwed, so since Ive worked with arch before I knew how to fix it, I booted up linux mint live image, chrooted, and fixed the boot order and computer went back to life, prinicipal came in checked on everything to make sure everything works, told me to wait for a bit, and then came back and paid me for his troubles (was a bit of a surprised since I expected nothing of the sort), the next day I came to school, sat down, turned PC on, noticed something was in the trash bin, opened it, found "robloxinstall.exe" on it, told the principal about it, he was pleased with it, so now 2 weeks later he seems now to be confident about linux, as he told me there is another class he is considering to move to linux.
so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
(considering now, that I got a win win situation, I get to use an OS that I like in school, students gets to focus on the lessons instead of slacking.)
does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
Linux has always been suitable (and I would argue ideal) in the education sector. But the reality is that almost no one is going to use Linux in a professional environment so there's an argument to be made that they should be using and learning Winblows.
Beautiful work .... I wish my school had done that when I was a kid.
The great thing about it is that now you are helping to generate a new crop of kids who will learn how to use Linux. Sure, they will try to do stupid things on it like install games or figure out how to bypass things or install or uninstall ... the great thing about that is that they will learn how to use the system in order to try to break it. It's the same way I learned how to use Linux and probably the same way you learned how to use it.
You've advanced the computer department for those kids more than you know.
This reminds me of when I was a kid. My school computer were running slow as heck windows xps or windows 7s, mostly slow because the bloat of education software that was installed to block visiting certain websites, lock down computers during certain hours or when the teacher is lecturing, etc. Even in my high school.
One day for my computer class during a lecture, I plugged in my liveboot USB running Mint, hushed my classmates next to me and rebooted. I didn't expect the computer to make a loud as hell beep sound when it got to the bootloader, but I was sitting in a side row so the teacher just said "what was that?" and moved on while others looked at me suspiciously. But then I was able to boot up Linux right there, super easy. And everything works, I was able to browse the web without any restrictions, well I'm not really trying to look at bad stuff but just hate being locked down when I can do something else instead. Or maybe I just wanted to show off Linux. Anyways my classmates next to me silently whispered "what the heck how did you do this??" I look back at this as a fond memory.
When I heard about schools using Chromebooks literally the first thing I said was "Linux can do more than a Chromebook can and is free, why the hell aren't they using that?!" Linux running on the cheapest OEM laptop is a better experience than the best Chromebook.
15+.... I was there, Gandalf.... We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.
Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.
The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.
Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.
I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a "grab latest" button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.
Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.
yes, one by one, and I choose mint because It was approachable, and thats what I showed to the principal to convince him to let me do this in the first place, and oh I didnt know there was an atomic version of fedora
I don't judge you for the choice. It's an honest question since you take care of a lot of computers and with ublue you have good control over the machines
Universal Blue manufactures a diverse set of operating system images to provide the the reliability of a Chromebook, but with the flexibility and power of a traditional Linux desktop.
Although it is fun to run around updating each PC individually, as the install numbers increase, Clonezilla can be helpful to multicast one OS image to many PCs in parallel.
I don’t know how developed your school system is, but, I would advise the principal into blocking the sites via DNS that way the computers won’t resolve them.
AdGuard, PiHole, OpenSense are free open source DNS resolvers however, chances are your school already manages its own DNS so I would obviously consult first.
Buuuut my guest gaming machine is a 4670k machine and I can confirm that not only does Windows 10 run very smoothly on it, but it also runs most modern games at 60+FPS! CPU-bound games can struggle. We finally got my partner a new computer and made that one the guest machine when Persona 5 went from 80FPS down to 5FPS when they got off the train hahaha
oh haha I see, I've been using linux for 5 years so far and I have been ONLY gaming on linux, I have ditched windows for good, this switch was very easy to me cuz I dont have any windows specfic apps/games dependency, everything I want is there, and the ones that aren't, there are alternatives that are the same or better than the apps I've used on windows!
Oh and I should specify my old guest machine does have 16GB of RAM, solid state drives, and an RTX2070, so it’s probably a bit better equipped than school machines hahaha
great specs! I have a slightly underpowered computer compared to yours, R5 5600H and RX6500M, and I'm also a persona fan, great series tbh, my favorite is persona 4, its the most fun game to me in the series so far, rn I'm playing through P3 Reload!
Oooo nice! My partner has the best machine in the house now, since they always got my hand-me-downs and never a brand new machine. We built it about a year ago, so it’s got a 12600k, 32GB RAM, a 3070, 3TB SSD space, and 4TB HDD. Mine’s not terribly far from that, but I am a little envious hahaha
It will all be Chromebooks and software as a service by then. Unless you work as a SaaS vendor, then it will be automatically orchestrating docker containers.
Linux is a free and open operating system. The licence for it - GNU Public License v2 is designed to grant you and me and my wife and your family and everyone everywhere rights and not restrict our rights. The only restriction with the GPL is that if you make a change to the code, that you make it available to everyone.
Education should be about teaching concepts and ideas and ideals. I think it should not involve artificial costs that might constrain access to a full and fruitful education. Those costs might even involve ... thou shalt update to Windows 11 and your laptop's CPU is not good enough.
Please keep on doing what you are doing, in your way. When you have your school running as you think it should, there is a good chance that you will be asked to do the same thing for other schools.
Please make sure you have the full support of your school principal (I think that is the right term - I'm from Britain so we might have different names for jobs)
I run a small IT company in the UK and I am trying to put together a distribution and so on for my company. Perhaps I should try your approach and be a bit more direct.
thank you for your very well thought out comment, and I do know about the GPL, I use it myself in my projects (AGPL for my neocities website and GPL3.0 for some of my other projects), the GPL is a very good license to your most important projects and I never skip it, I only use like BSD/MIT/CC0 for stuff that I dont really care that much about, also I love Britain its a wonderful country, cheers! also good luck!
Lol a kid can google how to install games on linux, just need one to do it and teach the others, I used to bring games on a usb to play on macs through wine through the school lan, eventually I put them in some random folder on the school network, it didnt delete it til like the last day of school my senior year, wed copy the games to our computers and delete them at the end of class.
Just a funny story, but, I use an Ubuntu laptop as my work computer as a teacher, and once, while I was helping another student with work, a student opened my laptop and began trying to install Roblox. She got far enough to figure out it wouldn't work, and started searching for how to install it. When I came over she was trying to figure out how to set up Wine. She got pretty close to getting it working before I came over. I was secretly pretty impressed with how fast she figured it out. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes.
Gives me hope, I'm glad the kids are still curious and willing to learn. I've seen too many young 20s people at work who have absolutely zero computer skills.
Yoo that's wild man doing gods (Richard Stallman) work here man.
Great initiative nonetheless. Compared to 8 this much more secure and for programming it's a great choice too. Bringing more life out of some old PCs, saving a school money, and forcing some kids to get creative in order to play Roblox.
As for is it ready fr this application, programming, it has been for a while. For general, especially web based, applications it absolutely is. Of course, there are quite few things were it's just not but for the most part Linux is a great choice.
Are you now the IT support guy for these workstations, or is the school's IT going to take over maintenance. I guess you have an internship or something if you are.
I wonder if that even exists. A mix of Windows 8 (EoL) and 10 (almost EoL) running on Haswells with students freely installing Roblox... all gives an unmaintained vibe.
Sober (flatpak) should work for Roblox 😀 it uses the Android version with some fixes, signing in was a little jank when I tried it but after that flawless!
those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task
The i7-4790K is still quite powerful, so I'm pretty sure this wasn't the problem, at all. Perhaps they're running on an HDD, have little RAM, or you got the CPU wrong.
You can see the CPU and RAM by launching System Info from tbf start menu, and see if it's running on an SSD or HDD by launching Disks from the menu.
we dont have the K, just the regular, eitherway these were fastest computers (lenovo thinkcenter) we have, but there weren't many of em, most were with the i5 (HP Elitedesk G1)
Ah, my bad (^^; I ran an i7-4790K in my gaming PC for a long time, as far as games go this 10-year old CPU still hold up well, never had to upgrade it surprisingly enough!
Still, a 4 GHz quad-core with hyper-threading, and about 8 GiB of RAM, is more than enough to run Windows 10. Assuming these are for studying, the heavier workloads would consist of MS Word, Powerpoint and an instructional video in the webbrowser, no? What required tasks were too heavy for these computers under Windows 8/10? And do they run off SSDs, or spinning HDDs?
And if they learn about wine and lutris and manage to install Roblox, they'll probably get more out of it than by listening to the class in the first place !
I learned so much by circumventing the school security stuff. I probably wouldn't be in IT if not for the parental access limitations and school network blocks
Cool but why do you ask the teachers? Without asking anyone would be way more funny and more interesting to see what happens
It’s the sort of school gags that people reminisce 20 years later when they sit with their family near cozy fireplace with a pipe of tobacco or crochet
You need to score all the silly memories while you still can. People, remember the most important when you are young is to have fun. The responsibility and adulting will come for you anyway. You don’t want to be ‚mature for your age’. Have a heckin blast and take no prisoners
If I could go back in time I would spread custom furry uwumaxxed ransomware that would unlock with trollish gimmick through the school network. But when I got this good with computers I was already at uni so such things lost their luster. Nowadays I would rather work in security and pentesting and get substantial amount of the adult green paper risk free. We get so boring with age don’t we. There’s nothing more boring than being a good, law obeying citizen but it is what it is if you have half a brain.
Hey OP, regarding Minecraft: It's a Java program that uses OpenGL for rendering. Therefore it's not a Windows game, but inherently cross platform. Here's the official .deb package launcher.mojang.com/download/M…
I'm thinking of switching to Linux as my daily driver after trying it out both Fedora Workstation and KDE using Live USB, but I'm wondering if I should consider other distros besides Fedora. I've heard of openSUSE, is that decent? Not many people really mention them. Linux Mint is great, but I don't like Cinnamon all too much.
What's a good desktop-agnostic distro that lets you easily swap between the two?
edit: Woah, it seems that you're able to swap between DEs from the login manager as long as you install both. Okay then, new question, for a beginner friendly distro, should I go for Fedora, OpenSUSE, or something else?
edit 2: a bit more information about my device and my preferences...
On KDE Plasma vs GNOME, I would like to try both out and see which I like better long-term. KDE Plasma seems a bit more familiar (closer to Windows 10) whereas GNOME is a bit more different but I'm open to using either.
I'm running a laptop with an Intel i7-1360P. It's one of those 2-in-1 convertible 360 degree hinge laptops.
I would say I'm open to learning how to work with the terminal and customising the distro a bit, but I don't want to do anything too out of my scope. I don't want to spend too many hours setting it up, I'd rather have something that works mostly out of the box 😁
I want a stable distro as in I don't want to break my system after an update, but still want something up-to-date though. I'm open to rolling release distros, but to my knowledge those are usually less stable with more breaking changes than fixed release options.
edit 3: just installed Fedora Workstation and it works really well! Multi-touch with my trackpad works fine and everything runs smooth. File read/write speeds were also strangely a bit more consistent (on Windows it jumps between <100KB/s and 60MB/s whereas on Fedora it’s consistently around or over 45MB/s…weird…)
My only issue right now is that the touchscreen doesn’t work anymore, how do I install the drivers for that?
edit 4:
Touchscreen and even rotating the screen when the device works now after an update :DDDDD
I've decided to switch since nearly all the programs I use are either cross-platform (e.g. Inkscape) or have good Linux alternatives (e.g. Okular rather than SumatraPDF). The only hiccups I might get would be games, but I only really play a few retro games w/ emulators and just a couple games (the latter of which I've checked are all supported by Proton). Also, if I do run into issues with games, I can always just partition like 100GB for Windows and the rest for my distro of choice.
While pretty much any distro can do this, I will warn you that it's not the greatest idea. GNOME and KDE are both massive software suites and you'll have a lot of redundant programs, e.g. two GUI file managers. There are also some look and feel issues that might crop up with apps getting style hints from two places. Again, it's nothing super major, and it's been a while since I've done this so maybe it's improved, but any time I've tried I end up rolling back or reinstalling with only one big DE.
It's much less of an issue to have one big DE and then potentially several other more modular window managers, as those have much less opinionated payloads. I've got sway and hypr installed alongside GNOME.
I don't know what you mean by “A distro that allows you to easily switch between KDE and GNOME”, because any distro that has both should be able to easily switch between KDE and GNOME. As for user-friendly, something like Ubuntu or Mint, maybe Manjaro and Pop, EndeavourOS if you don't mind learning and don't mind using a terminal.
I want a more stable distro, so I'm not considering the rolling release options (like manjaro and EndeavourOS). I've also heard that not many people like Ubuntu because of snaps, why is that?
edit: are rolling release distros stable enough (e.g. will it randomly crash/have weird issues?) and is it possible/easy to roll back to a previous version if there's a breaking update
I’ve also heard that not many people like Ubuntu because of snaps, why is that?
Well, people don't like snaps for a number of reasons, because they are forced on users, bloated and slow, Canonicals themselves are quite shady, systemd, etc.
I would rather use several different types of packages than trust one that is tied to a shady company.
The GenP subreddit got banned on Reddit. We can only take a guess as to why(I seriously don't know, please let me know if you do).
But regardless, it brings up a serious question. How will big corpos and nations force their control on lemmy and other fediverse communities?
Places like reddit, twitter, instagram and even "fediverse" bluesky cave to demands from corporates and countries all the time. But what happens when the real fediverse platforms get attention?
How will they ban, sabotage and coerce instances and communities to cave into demands?
I know lemmy and other fediverse platforms are still very small right now, but I believe it's only time before the sabotage begins. Instagram stepping into the territory tells you how scared zuck already is.
Apart from running many instances which keeps copies of other communities which happens automatically when a user on an instance subscribes to a community; organize larger instances into well funded non-profits that can weather attacks. Lemmy.ca, sh.itjust.works and Lemmy.world already have non-profits formed. An example of what this could look like is the Wikimedia Foundation. Obviously won't be as wealthy at least not in the short term.
Which notebooks are recommendable when coming from Apple Silicon-MacBooks in terms of runtime and efficiency, preferrably for Fedora or Manjaro with KDE Plasma? For now, I am looking towards Lenovo T14(s) or X1 Carbon - mixed use scenario including simple media (photos, cutting 1080p-videos, media management, Office & mail) stuff? Still love the "Lenovo"-brand and its keyboard and look 'n feel so this vendor would be my favourite.
Can anyone of you here recommend Snapdragon-devices yet which would be the best comparison as it's also architecture based on ARM? Both Fedora and Manjaro have ARM-builds so I hope that the Snapdragon-devices could get along with my desires here...
I'm also making the slow transition from Apple to Linux, and I (relatively) recently bought a Framework 13. I went with kind of a minimum-specs loadout, figuring I didn't really know what I was getting into and I could upgrade it later (the primary selling point of Framework). I've been satisfied with running Fedora/Gnome on it for several months. I get the impression that the distro is more important than the hardware in terms of having a comfortable MacOS-to-Linux experience. But because Framework explicitly supports Fedora, I felt like it was a smaller step away from the walled garden, "it just works" experience of being a Mac user team just going straight to a distro and manufacturer that was likely to require a lot more manual setup and knowledge.
Unless it's a Dell. If you buy one, better research its Linux compatibility beforehand, or you'll face issues like non-working webcams, fingerprint readers, weird unexplainable crashes and wonky bluetooth behavior.
The Linux support of Snapdragon SOCs for desktops and laptops is unfortunately severely lacking. Qualcomm pledged to provide upstream divers, but then the Windows drivers turned out to be a mess and the Linux version had to wait. It is nowhere near production ready. Most of the hardware enablement work is currently as far as I can tell being done by German OEM Tuxedo Computers because they are working on a Snapdragon powered laptop that ships with Linux. But even their work was impacted by Qualcomm stalling (the linked blog article lists Christmas 2024 as their target release date and that didn't happen).
In the media: TUXEDO prototype with ARM chipset from Qualcomm: TUXEDO Computers is working on an innovative ARM notebook with the new Snapdragon X Elite SoC from Qualcomm.
The work Tuxedo is doing is on drivers for their own hardware. It has nothing to do with core Snapdragon SoC support and will do little to help other vendors. The delay has more to do with their internal priorities than anything else.
Core X Elite support has been coming into the kernel since 6.8. Support for your hardware depends on the availability of a device tree. Probably the easiest road right now is Ubuntu:
The best supported hardware seems to be the Thinkpad T14s at this point. I am not sure where things are with Ubuntu 25.04. I would expect an update from Ubuntu soon.
Here is a more detailed account of support on a Yoga Slim and a screenshot of Chimera Linux running on HP OmniBook. So, Ubuntu is not the only option but it is likely the smoothest sailing.
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.
Believe this is one of the few vendors left making and distributing Linux magazines still(?). Would be interesting to hear what peoples feedback on these are, whether its this one or another. Seems like a fun monthly delivery to get!
I loved Linux Voice back when it was still published. They had a series of articles on writing your own kernel in x86_64 ASM that I followed and ran on QEMU back when I was a philosophy student. It really cemented my interest in tech and now I do that for a living.
Edit: Linux Voice folded into Linux Format sometime around 10+ years ago
Latest maintenance release brings improved stability and fixes to the powerful free office suite Berlin, 30 April 2025 – The Document Foundation is pleased to announce the release of LibreOffice 25.2.
Nextcloud can embed Collabora Code (essentially Libreoffice) so you can open all your documents in Nextcloud in the browser and edit them together with multiple people.
Collabora Online Development Edition CODE is the development version of Collabora Online. It is perfect for testing, home use or small teams, but not recommended for production environments.
Graphical user interface for managing your Linux applications. Supports AppImage, Debian and Arch packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications - vinifmor/bauh
Mate, you are not being clear at all. I’ve clarified this multiple times. If you’re unwilling to acknowledge that built in package managers do not include non-native package formats, this conversation can’t progress.
They're saying they want something like Synaptic (mostly for its "multi-select", apparently, though I'm not sure what that means?), but have it support AppImages, Flatpaks, Snaps, etc., instead of just Debs like Synaptic does.
Don't feed the trolls, especially the ones that are bad at it. But yeah, this app doesn't let you select and uninstall multiple things nor does it have all the functionality of Synaptic (which is amaze). I'd settle on a CLI tool for this too, I just want a one stop shop because I get so triggered having to juggle different managers. It's just fucking annoying really. Like, I found the cli tool Topgrade and it is just the best thing ever for keeping things up to date from all package managers, I want that with extended functionality as even this tool doesn't manage every manager that Topgrade does. Something modular, otherwise I waste time fucking around with everything.
Honestly, I tried to understand them but I failed. I don't see how a group, from the twittoverse perspective is different from the use of a hashtag, be it agupe group or Lemmy community.
But I would love to hear your explanation and pass it on to the next people who will not understand it.
LJL is a job creation language that takes a job file, gathers items mentioned in its various lines and here-documents, and generates a runnable .deck file (short for "deck of cards").
The .deck file is a complex Bash script that creates a log spool and several temporary files in /tmp/. It automatically cleans up scratchable files after the run. The log file contains the output of each step, including any program results.
More Detail::: What SUBMIT Does with Each LJL Statement:
For every statement, SUBMIT generates corresponding commands in the .deck file. Below is a step-by-step breakdown:
One //jo line, as many /dd lines as are required, and as many //ex as are required
//jo sumjob owner=me@mail.com log=print class=a
Generates a deck command to invoke ifclass a, which checks if the job's class allows execution at run time.
Generates a deck command to Log "sumjob is starting" to /var/log/JCL/ with a timestamp.
Generates a deck command to create /tmp/sumjob
Generates a deck command to initializes /tmp/sumjob/jobname.log with a formatted header (e.g., via figlet sumjob).
Job Classes: A = Runs as soon as submitted B = Runs only if load is low enough C = Runs in Off-Hours
//dd alias source(here|file=pathandfilename|new) disp(keep|scratch)
Note the disp (disposition) if keep the put the file in /home/user/.lcl/jobname as whatever the alias is if the disp(scratch) then the file will go into the /tmp/jobname directory as named by the alias.
Generate deck commands to
-- if source is here: copy lines from lcl up to '/*' to the deck file as a here document if source is a file: add commands to copy the file into a working directory either in user's home or in the tmp directory under the alias. //dd users source(file=/etc/passwd) disp(keep) ==> copy /etc/passwd to /home/user/.ljl/users
//ex somecommand --options < alias
-Generate doc commands to execute the program as specified and save the output to the logfile In this case echo (somecommand --options < aliasproperlyexpanded) > logfile
The deck file now forms a fully functional batch file to do the specified computation.
Between bash (and the 40 or so other shells available under Linux), python, perl, and the several hundred other scripting languages already available, is a dedicated job control language really needed? I think unnecessary fluff.
It is not mandatory that you install it - Yes, there are other choices already. But in the beginning, Unix only had C and Assembly why didn't we just stick with those?
I have changed the syntax a little: //jo jobname owner(username) log(mailto=user@location) class(a) //** Note that the next step copies /etc/passwd to /tmp/jobname/passwd and then later deletes it when the job is done //dd passwd disp(scratch) source(file=/etc/passwd) //ex cat passwd
Hey ! I bought a game on steam, but I cannot install it on lutris as it's not even listed... It's a windows only game. Is there a way to play it? Am I doing something wrong?
"The hardest part is not to speak up. It’s being heard." Part video game, part graphic novel, Wednesdays seeks to raise awareness about child sexual abuse through a surprisingly hope-filled story.
I have temporarily installed LMDE6 on an HDD where I had a bit of free space, worked with it, experienced Steam with Proton and now I am convinced: I want to move to Linux from Windows for good.
Have another disk, an SSD in which most of the space is taken up by the Windows C: partition. Would like to move Linux there after shrinking the Windows partition a bit more than what it currently occupies now.
I have tried to do this with Paragon on Windows, but after restarting no change can be seen, despite no error being presented. Tried from Linux with GParted but all attempts end up with an error when running ntfsresize.
So 1. What do I use to do this and how do I do it safely? 2.How do I move the content of my current Linux partition (less than 50 GBs) to that disk keeping the bootloader and everything else working? And what filesystem is best to use?
Others have pointed out what may he going wrong (drive locked due to Windows fast startup).
A slightly different tack - dual booting windows and linux on the same drive is a bad idea. One reason is the messy boot set up which can cause issues with windows not booting or linux not booting, or either/both fighting over the boot partition. It can get to the point of using repair disks to repair one or the other or both. It can be managed but make a mistake and its a real headache to fix (I say that as someone who has been their and done that and learned the lesson)
If you want to switch to linux but keep windows "just in case" and have a desktop I'd get a new SSD and use it as a dedicated linux drive. SATA or even better an m.2 card if your motherboard has the slots.
A separate drive is far better as linux can be the drive booted by the BIOS and then Grub can then point back to your untouched windows drive to boot it when you want. If linux updates it won't affect windows, and if windows updates it won't affect linux. Also if you have a drive failure you won't lose 2 OSes and all data in one go.
Personally I have 5 drives in my PC - easy expansion of storage is a big benefit to a nice full size PC. I have one largely unused windows drive, and 4 ext4 drives.
Is there any hardware specification I should be pay attention to when buying for exclusive Linux use?
If I was to install one more home partition from the LMDE installation USB, would it automatically fix things for me in Grub or would I have to fix things myself before or after?
If I was to install one more home partition from the LMDE installation USB, would it automatically fix things for me in Grub or would I have to fix things myself before or after?
If I understand you right, you want to install two additional SSDs, one for Linux root (system), probably ext4 formatted, and one 'home' for your personal data?
If that's the case, the boot loader GRUB is going to be installed onto the system SSD and will usually automatically detect the Windows boot loader on your current, Windows only, hard drive. If it didn't, you need to toggle an option in GRUB's configuration file and run update-grub again.
For your home-partiotion on the other SSD, there exist two options: 1. The home partition is Linux exclusive, probably ext4 formatted (this doesn't work with NTFS), and all your data will be stored there. Yet, afaIk, you need to install an ext4 driver in Windows to access the data when you're on Windows.
The home partition is mutually accessible. (This the setup on my wifes laptop). There it's NTFS formatted and the respective folders (Documents, Downloads, Pictures,... ) are mounted one by one using bind in /etc/fstab to their Linux counterpart.
Edit: I've forgot to mention that, first I created folders named Documents, Downloads,... on the new partition before being able to mount them in Linux.
After copying the data in Windows from the old folders to the new ones, the old folders can be deleted and replaced by hardlinks to their new counterparts using the Windows command line or PowerShell.
Just a possibility: Check if the m2 slot is for disk. There are many boards where there are WiFi exclusive m2 ports. For disks there are also m2 sata and m2 nvme port variations. You need to find out what yours are. Consult your motherboards technical documentation if in doubt. If the BIOS can boot from it, Linux can too.
Edit: that beeing said I never encountered problems with a similar setup ( I boot from Linux on nvme m2 then there is a combined windows /data disk)
After about a year working on Fediforge, I have finally launched it. Fediforge provides managed hosting for lemmy and there will be added support for other fediverse platforms(Such as Mastodon, Peertube and more) in the future.
A little info on the setup of Fediforge. - Hosted on servers from OVH + Colocrossing and are located in east USA(Around chicago) - Automated backups of database with 10 days retention - Replicated s3 storage for media files - Active monitoring of all instances hosted.
Let me know, if you have any issues, ideas or feedback(and optionally add it here).
I want to create a local ip address for my virtual machine. I use virt-manager + QEMU. So, as I got it - I need to create a bridge for doing this. But... When I'm trying to connect a created bridge to a virtual machine:
Then trying to start a virtual machine, I gets this error:
Ошибка запуска домена: /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br0 --fd=32: failed to communicate with bridge helper: stderr=failed to create tun device: Operation not permitted
: Transport endpoint is not connected
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 72, in cb_wrapper
callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 108, in tmpcb
callback(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/libvirtobject.py", line 57, in newfn
ret = fn(self, *args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/object/domain.py", line 1402, in startup
self._backend.create()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/libvirt.py", line 1373, in create
raise libvirtError('virDomainCreate() failed')
libvirt.libvirtError: /usr/lib/qemu/qemu-bridge-helper --use-vnet --br=br0 --fd=32: failed to communicate with bridge helper: stderr=failed to create tun device: Operation not permitted
: Transport endpoint is not connected
For creating bridges I use the standard network manager for Xfce:
I use MX Linux operating system for the host machine.
So, what do I do wrong, and how can I fix this problem? 🤔
stderr=failed to create tun device: Operation not permitted
you probably don't have permissions to create such device. BTW, afaik a bridge will make the vm get the traffic on the same IP, creating a separate IP for VM will probably be something else. And might require some iptables setup so your host machine relays the traffic
After configuring the network with a bridged interface that would support network connections from both ‘simh’ and ‘qemu’ I ran into a separate problem when trying to create…
Let me apologize first. I'm both old and new to Linux and have made a ton of noob moves since switching back. I know most people in this community are probably already Linux users, but I'm hoping that some Linux-curious people will stumble upon this.
Lets start with the game. I am a former League of Legends addict. Embarrassing, I know, but I had been playing since the glory days (I started right at the beginning of season 2). I never ranked; I would play ARAM and URF to either pass time or keep myself awake if I felt drowsy. I was good, too. Not great, but more often than not I'd go 16/2/12 or something similar. It released massive amounts of dopamine for me. The ARAM bridge felt like a home away from home.
Moving on from League... I had been starting to smell Microsoft's shit from a long loooong ways away. Like, Win7 days (rest in peace, XP). I had been introduced to Linux and the basics of maintaining Linux from a class I took in high school. Lets be honest, though, Linux wasn't really in a gaming state then. You could, but you would be jumping through a lot of hoops for a 50/50 chance it would be stable gameplay. Honestly, though, Microsoft's stink flows much further back than you'd think and it was already grating on me then. I was already considering the move.
I sat on Win10 for a while and even opened my PC to the Win11 beta. It was okay, I didn't auto-hate it like most because a lot of the Windows UI I used was third party and I changed theme colors through the registry. There were ways to remove bloat and most Microsoft snooping garb, but it took work. Thinking I knew what I was doing, I messed with the system32 folder. If this were the Win7 days, I probably would have known what I was doing. I simply wanted to change the internal image viewer to a 3rd party viewer. Microsoft gave default selections for a lot of things, but changing photo gallery was a fight for some reason.
Needless to say, I messed up. No default apps would open anymore. Couldn't even get calculator running. So I reinstalled. Back then, you still had to use Win10 and update to 11. I reinstalled, saw my windows old folder, knew everything was safe, and updated. Huge mistake. Win11 was not just an update, even if you start it from the update panel. It's a full OS install. My ignorant self thought it was just a Win10 glow up. My windows old folder got overwritten by an empty windows old folder.
After a whole day of recovery process I probably recovered 99% of my files, but my time with Windows was quickly closing. My friend pointed out that this was a good time to try Linux. Steam Deck had just launched and Linux was gaining ground in the gaming scene and FAST. So I backed everything up to external (which I should have done earlier, smfh) and grabbed the most likely candidate, Pop!_OS. Soon after, at my friend's pestering, I switched to Arch- Manjaro- and then later EndeavourOS.
I messed up EndeavourOS by using topgrade. It didn't occur to me that it was user error, and I just thought it was something EOS didn't rub shoulders well with in my system. So back to Manjaro. Then D4 came out. Another shame of mine. I'm a huge Diablo 2 fan and played my fair share of D3. I got the early access. Couldn't play. Panicking, I reinstalled Windows 11... just to find that the game was pure garbage. I played for a bit, hoping things would improve but.... Blizzard got me again. But I was not moving back. I had moved so much already. Funny thing is: Proton came out with an update not even 24 hours later that fixed D4... Doh.
During my second time on Win11, Riot pushed out their knuckleheaded kernel-level anticheat. I wasn't worried, I was on Win11, w/e. Then Microsoft dropped some big shits on Windows. Snapshots of your screens ("it'll be held in a private encrypted partition of you drive!", yeah fucking right... pull the other one), ads in the start bar, and then pushy af popups to integrate your system with their AI. I was insulted. Win11 was already one giant piece of malicious software even before all this. Granted, I used startallback so I didn't get the ads, but it was the idea of the thing.
So I did it. I dropped League and moved to base Arch. I will not let Microsoft have even 100gb of my drive now. I make do by playing other games, being actually productive in life, or diving into something new within Linux. I grew up. I said no. PC owners should be banding together and dropping Windows right into the garbage. Screw their proprietary plugins, screw their insecure kernel access, screw their ads and data-harvesting AI, and screw their sneaky photos of my screen. I knew when they backpedaled on that screenshot shit that they'd push it more quietly later. I told everyone that they would. And they did.
Dive into VSCodium, or Neovim, or VIM, or emacs. Explore open source and, like me, find that most apps are pleasantly better than their commercial counterparts. Play with your terminal. Wreck things and reinstall (just hard copy everything to external first). Lets make ODF industry standard, like it should have been before Microsoft outbid and muscled docx in. It may take ten, twenty, fifty years but fuck it. I'm all in and my bet is on Linux. My next big project for my next PC build? Gentoo (I am not quite ready for Linux from Scatch, lmao). Its time I actually learned more. I've already dived deep into the Arch Wiki and I've already dived into NixOS and nixlang. We need to go deeper now.
Linux is easier than ever now. Experiment with it! Scared to fully make the move? Grab a small SSD to test it out safely! Just... know what you're doing with partitions before you do. Either that or take your main SSD out before installing. However, most Linux distros let you use them right from the USB stick to check them out. Just ignore the installer and play around a bit. Remember that USB is going to be substantially slower, so don't make your decision off of speed. You'd be surprised at how much faster Linux can be.
tl;dr: Switch to Linux and stop giving out your data for free. Ad analytics should be a choice, and one you're paid to do. Your information is incredibly valuable and so is your privacy. If you pay for a product, that company should NOT be triple dipping and making more money off of you, no matter how non-invasive it is. Its all invasive, even if its hidden.
PS: I won't mention mac here. I really have no experience in iOS or macOS. Apple garden is Apple garden and that's about all I know. Microsoft and I go way back (Windows 3.14), and I've watched them slowly and then quickly corrupt over time. Like a turd rolling downhill and collecting garbage.
I'm in a similar position with WoW, but it's tied to my friends, my guild, and I genuinely like playing it. So far I've found no rock solid way to play WoW on linux or I'd be done with Windows entirely.
Wow is one of the more community-supported games. I had battlenet and D3 working just fine. Grab Lutris and follow these instructions, you should be good. There are a lot of guides that show you how to get addons working, as well.
It runs just as fine as on Windows. Last I heard, the only thing that doesn't work is raytracing. So unless that's a deal-breaker for you, you should have no trouble running it.
I have played wow on linux since vanilla. Maybe we can help you? These days you can just open lutris and type battle.net and hit install. honestly it is dead simple and my FPS i better in linux than the same hardware in windows.
[edit]And now I see this was already answered. By bad. Long day today...
Is there a specific gaming distro this works best for? I've heard Bazzite thrown around, but then Mint would be the easier transition? Does Lutris run in the window manager like KDE plasma?
I think the problem for me is knowing just enough to know I don't know shit about how to do this 😅
IMO bazzite is too focused on gaming for people to be daily driving it for everything, but hey whatever works. Just hope they're not upset when something breaks and the response from bazzite is "well yeah, that's not something we bother testing for".
(I have bazzite on a HTPC in my living room, and I think it's perfectly suited for that usecase)
IMO Mint, Fedora, or OpenSUSE is going to offer the more stable, user-friendly experience long term. Install Lutris through the distro's package manager, launch it, install bnet through lutris, launch it, install wow through bnet, launch it, Thrall's your uncle 😉.
Edit: to answer your other question, yes Lutris runs as an app similar to how battle.net or steam works on windows. It's just that instead of having a storefront and downloading data directly from a central "lutris" server, it's basically a bunch of community-written scripts to automate the installation and configuration of games from all sorts of places. So when you tell lutris to install bnet, it's running a script that goes and downloads it from blizzard, then locally creates a wine environment, launches the installer in that environment, you install it like on windows, and then it creates a lutris launcher entry for the bnet executable so that when you click play on it in lutris, it will automatically launch it in a wine environment each time.
And it should all work in KDE plasma, gnome, cinnamon, or whatever window manager you're using (the window manager on msft windows is called dwm and it's responsible for the same job).
It's kind of fascinating: the Steam Deck is the only device I can think of with a "halo effect" that doesn't involve giving a company more money: the ecosystem it pulls you into is an open one.
Addiction is extremely dangerous and you can end up wasting years of your life on something that really isn't that important to you.
It's sad how many people in my generation encourage others to become addicted to things like video games.
Games like league reward people who put more time into them while punishing those who put in less. It's particularly exploitative because it encourages us to spend as much time in the game as possible so we're as good as we can be when we're playing with our friends. It genuinely feels good to be good at the game because that transfers to wins for your team and respect from your peers.
More people playing competitive games need to realize the tricks at play to get them addicted as long as possible. I avoid games like that with other people because I know firsthand how detrimental they can be to my psyche.
I recommend playing co-op games instead. Focus on working together against the computer instead of fighting each other. That way there are challenges you can eventually beat, rather than fighting players who always put more time into the game than you.
I'm a Linux Pirate. It's possible to play co-op games online for free with programs such as Sunshine+Moonlight for streaming, emulators with netplay, and you can even play any LAN game online using something like Hamachi.
I finally made the switch on my gaming rig 2 weeks ago. I'm just done with windows. Its been fun setting up and getting it to work. I mostly play story driven games and rpgs. I have bnet installed through lutris to play diablo and Starcraft. I'm good. I think i may grab an amd gpu since ive been reading they work better than Nvidia. My Nvidia 5070 is working just fine though. I'm on PopOS.
Pop will make sure you're nice and comfortable. Its in the top two for great starter distros alongside Mint. Both will take care of you and your driver/dependency needs, regardless of GPU.
Honestly, unless you have any real problems running Nvidia, I'd say upgrading now would be a waste. Unless you need more vram for something like localhosting large AI LLMs. Nvidia is getting better at just being supported and stable out of the box, even on Wayland.
Definitely something to keep in mind when you actually need an upgrade, though. AMD and Linux just pair well without any extra steps, like coffee and cream.
But Nvidia is as easy as selecting proprietary drivers on install these days and has very little issues. At least not enough issues to warrant upgrading such a newer card. I'd just save the cash up for the next big AMD release.
Over time though I discovered it had tonnes of amazing features as a prose editor too, so many powerful plugins for editing prose that blew me away.
Stuff like "warn me if I use tthe same word too much" and whatnot.
And of course telescopes fuzzy find made jumping around to edit my text way faster, and being able to bulk change stuff with a simple :%s/.../.../g feels real good.
I highly recommend folks try out nvim for this use case :3
I’m looking to leave behind the graphical Obsidian app for neovim and plugins as I already use it for most of my other text editing. What is your setup and what plugins you recommend for neovim for general use, coding, and writing?
For me it was Destiny 2. I genuinely enjoy the moment to moment gameplay, and no other game has really matched it for me. The story and characters were engaging enough, even at the games lows, that I wanted to see the saga through to the end. I did week one of the raid for “The Final Shape” and then I booted into my Linux install and have not booted windows since. I’m about to fully wipe that drive and reuse it in a different Linux machine. My desire to quit windows, and my acute awareness of how much of my life and money I had put into Destiny over the last decade or so, made the switch honestly pretty easy.
I still game a good amount, but it’s much more intentional, and I don’t play any live service games which frees up money I don’t feel guilty putting toward indie games.
I quit League in 2019 when I finally built my own PC. I refused to put any games from Riot on the new computer. I played enough of the game to enjoy following the competitive scene to this day, and every now and then I get the desire to play. I’d really only do it with premade scrims of people I know.
I’ve recently found a gaming cafe in my city I might go to a few times a month to play a couple of those games I either can’t or refuse to install on my Linux machine.
My game of choice is CS2, so it didn't factor into my switch at all, but as someone who's been on EndeavourOS for a little over a week now, I have no regrets. Join uuuuus.
I never heard someone who is not Russian in the voice chat in CS2. Seeing that the skins are mostly exchanged there as well, I guessed the game was a Russian colony by now.
The aim is to score points by creating words, moving around in six directions in the grid, using consecutive letters.
When the user created longer words, coloured letters appear. The user can score more points by using these coloured letters.
More points can also be scored, when the user manages to create the bonus words.
When smaller words are created, or low point yielding words, red letters appear in the grid. If not used, these red letters will drop one cell in every turn.
When a red letter reaches beyond the bottom of the grid, the game is over.
The user can also reshuffle the letters in the grid, in order to be able to create words. However, there is a price to this action: the existing red letters will drop one cell, all other bonus coloured letters will be lost, and more red letters will appear.
If the score is among the 10 best scores achieved, it makes it in the Top Ten Highscores.
Recently in Spain we have suffered a complete power outage, with no electricity for a long time. Some were able to have power on their computers with generators, solar panels, etc. And I know you can have data connectivity with SDR or HAM radio. But my question here is, what are some good self-host/local offline software that we can have and use for when something like this happens. I know kiwix, and some other for manuals. Please feel free to share the ones you know and love, can be for any type of thing as long as it works completely offline, just name it. Of course for GNU/Linux (using Arch myself BTW). Thanks in advance.
A piece of software always runs locally. It is in some cases those who needs to communicate with the server fail to deliver the usual function you expect when offline.
Please do not confuse one to another.
And perhaps you can start by complaining which services you are using heavily relying on the server side? General questions attract general answers and IMHO you are better off just search on the internet.
I am aware of this, but neither is English my primary language (so I wasn't able of properly stating that) neither im asking for specific type of software, as you say this is indeed a general question asking for general software, I said to share whatever you like and use, as long as it can be of any use when there is a power outage. And I plan to share the responses to other people in fediverse of Spain that may need it here.
If you can get a few hundred watts of electrical power, StarLink is an option for broadband connectivity via satellite when all the local communications are down. Don't know why, but Star Link reminds me of Sky Net.
Linux is not really suited for the post-apocalitic no-internet world, the way the repositories are built and software is packed (almost nothing is static, a lot of dependencies on other packages everywhere) just makes it really impractical and hard to deal with those scenarios. Windows however is a much more solid and good option, yes, it's painful to hear this but in Windows you can get an exe from a friend in a flash drive and it runs as is. Sames goes for installers, reinstalling the OS etc. There's only a couple of .net framework installers that will cover dependencies for 99.99% of stuff in a few MB.
There are ways to deal with this. There's AppImage for GUI apps (that replicates the "just get an exe from a friend on a flash drive") and lots of bundling programs for non-GUI apps (I use nix-bundle because I use Nix, but there are other options too).
Lots of distro installers work offline too, by just bringing all the stuff you need as part of the installer.
And one major benefit of Linux is that when stuff does inevitably go wrong, it's infinitely easier to fix than proprietary garbage.
AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren't really good/solid and won't save you for sure. It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.
Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you're missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn't deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you're cooked. Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem. It is way more likely that you'll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.
AppImage suffers from the same problem that Flatpak does, the tool do work offline aren’t really good/solid and won’t save you for sure
I've been using my laptop in areas without internet for days. It works fine.
It also requires a bunch of very small details to all align and be correct for things to work out.
I have appimage-run from nixpkgs installed, which handles all those details. They are also not too hard to figure out manually should you need to.
Imagine the post-apocalyptic scenario, if you’re missing a dependency to get something running, or a driver, or something specific of your architecture that wasn’t deployed by the friend alongside the AppImage / Flatpak (ie. GPU driver) you’re cooked.
GPU drivers are emphatically not part of the AppImage. They are provided by Mesa, which is almost guaranteed to be installed.
Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in, or you can probably fish around for an installer as fix the problem
It's actually the other way around - if you want your GPU to work properly on a new Windows install, you have to fish around for AMD/NVidia drivers. On Linux Mesa is pretty much pre-installed on all distros.
It is way more likely that you’ll find machines with Windows and windows drivers / installer than Linux ones with your very specific hardware configuration.
LMAO, try moving a windows installation from Ryzen+AMD GPU to Intel+NVidia GPU and let me know how it goes (hint: you will have to manually uninstall, and then install a shit ton of drivers, for which you will need internet).
Meanwhile I'm typing this from a (Ryzen+AMD GPU) desktop which has an SSD from my (Intel+integrated graphics) laptop. When I plugged it in, it booted into sway just fine, with complete GPU support and all, and the only reason I had to update my config is to make it more convenient to use on the desktop.
Linux is not the best "apocalypse" OS, but it sure is better than Windows.
Meanwhile on Windows it has basic GPU drivers for the entire OS bakes in this is not true in fact, most of the machines I have here won't work with a Windows installer .iso or Windows OS itself and some of my hw don't even have drivers for it. So yeah no meanwhile, most GNU/Linux .iso distro installers have drivers already on the .iso itself, including propietary ones
doesn't this one needs a specific set of hardware? is it affordable here in Europe? thanks for sharing, I have heard of this for a long time but didn't get onto it, might look now that this happened
I have my homeserver rsync three Arch mirrors and three Arch ARM mirrors in rotation on three days every week. Thus I have full local repos for these. All my machines are configured to use this local repo. The reason I do this is precisely to be prepared for the inevitable 'Internet is broken' scenario.
A few notes about what ISO images Debian offers and how to download them. I'll also provide some useful tips on how to use Jigdo to archive the complete Debian repository into ISO images.
One can also use a cache to hold deb and rpm files requested by the machines. (Works great when running hundreds of systems. I like "apt-cache-ng". It will do deb and rpm.)
You mentioned ham radio --- definitely fun! It's a process to get into it though, as you need to study/pass an exam, and then you need a radio. Radios range from cheap ($25 or so) in the VHF/UHF ("walkie talkie"-style) to more expensive for an HF rig ($1000 range for 100W HF). If you want to get into low power ("QRP") it can be much cheaper. You also need a fair amount of space for a good antenna setup...
There are tons of different communication modes, some without a computer and, like you mentioned, some that use computers. wsjtx and fldigi are popular programs.
because just like first aid you need to be actually ready when needed and knowledge change over time. You need to actually try though, test your setup and yourself genuinely otherwise it is intelectual masturbation.
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