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I've never understood our societies obsession with when men lose their virginity. You see it in media all the time like in 'The 42 year Old Virgin' and 'Last American Virgin'. It seems to be a bigger thing with men then women. Can any men here confirm?
Why does it matter when someone loses their virginity? If you ask me it's no one's business to when someone loses their v-card. People should lose it when they feel comfortable to. I hate our societies insistence that men lose it before the age of 18. Like if your an adult virgin our society sees it as a personal failing that makes you a loser. I never understood it myself. It's frankly ridiculous.
The thing is that for most men, it's not voluntary when they don't 'lose their v-card' for a long time, it's that they can't find a partner. Someone who never managed to find a partner despite trying typically doesn't exactly feel like a winner, so they tend to at least somewhat agree with the popular sentiment that older virgins are 'losers'.
It's true that this isn't really other people's business, especially not if they're only using it to put people down instead of trying to improve things. Though this is certainly an issue on a societal level.
So who is the one supposedly having "tall poppy syndrome" - is it the people who critize/put down the "tall poppies", or the "tall poppies" themselves? Or perhaps society itself?
This is such an odd way to pathologize a social phenomenon.
Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
“Finally cancelling my Spotify subscription – why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?” said one user on X.
Spotify, the world’s leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ek’s announcement of a €600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones an…
System is Fedora KDE, graphics card is an Asrock Radeon 5900GRE, display is a Gigabyte M34WQ (1440p ultrawide 144Hz refresh rate) attached via DisplayPort.
Despite being on a UPS (which...we're also going to have to talk about) my system was apparently shut down by a thunderstorm. I booted it up, and the display was acting glitchy. I would get two mouse cursors, and below the mouse cursor the screen would go a solid color, as if it was glitching on a pixel and then displaying that from there down.
Switching to a lower refresh rate made the problem go away, I've switched back up and it seems to be alright. A second 1080p60 monitor attached via HDMI didn't show any problem.
Some googling didn't turn up exactly what I was experiencing. Can anyone help troubleshoot this? It seems okay for the moment but I'm hoping I don't have a wounded GPU.
Probably surge damage, honestly. Was your monitor plugged into the UPS or another surge protector, or just into a wall? Do you have any other cables connecting to your machine that aren't on the UPS or a surge protector? Also, a power strip is not equal to a surge protector.
As far as the cause, if you're seeing artifacts on screen past a certain position on the screen, that's the screen or cable, not the GPU. Your display adapter sends fully rendered frames to the display and wouldn't have a specific part of the frame that is corrupted if damaged. Anecdotally speaking, if a GPU has damage, it just won't work.
Also, you may want to check the capacitors on your card and motherboard to make sure they're all still flat and not bulging. If bulging, you took took surge damage and need to redo your cabling to make sure everything is protected.
Everything is attached to the UPS, both the computer and the main monitor are on the battery side. Why the computer was shut off on this UPS, I don't know. I might be switching brands of UPS.
If I switch it down to 60 or 100 Hz, the problem goes away entirely, so I don't think it's a hardware damage issue at this point. Like, I did a software update, I wonder if it's booted up with a slightly newer version of mesa or wayland or something that isn't playing nice.
Check your package manager logs to find out. Also check dmesg just in case.
Edit: you know what...try changing the outlet the monitor is plugged into and see if anything changes. Curious if the signal is weird or the rectifier got damaged by a surge. Maybe try the wall as well to find out if it still does it.
Switched the socket on the GPU the DP cable is plugged into, I think I see the same problem. It's only been a few seconds, I haven't seen the "lower portion of the screen from about the mouse down goes one color" thing yet but I have been seeing a double mouse cursor. This goes away completely when setting the frame rate down to 100 (says 99.98 in the KDE settings menu).
Not sure what I'm looking for in package manager logs or dmesg.
Right now, if I set KDE's settings to 100 Hz, everything looks fine. If I set it to 144 Hz, sometimes I see a double mouse cursor. I get a second cursor about an inch to the right of what seems to be the actual cursor.
Explain how a problem with the UPS will cause that symptom.
When you increase your resolution, your monitor switches power modes. At a higher refresh rate, a dirty power signal can cause artifacts on the screen. Usually this means that you'd see bit crawl on the edges of the screen, but it could show display artifacts like you describe depending on the panel controller.
If your UPS took a hit during a thunderstorm, you could easily have a damaged rectifier in the UPS. That rectifier is responsible for smoothing the power signal coming out the ports on your UPS. A dirty signal can do the above as I mentioned.
You wouldn't notice a problem on your machine because it's own PSU smooths those signals out, but a monitor doesn't have that.
I'm still skeptical that it would cause problems that minor, prior experience tells me it would do something like work fine at low resolution and show no picture or boot loop or something at higher resolution, but for the sake of troubleshooting when there's less convective activity on the radar I'll try plugging it straight into the wall.
I have an AOC AG272FG4 which has started to show artifacts like this and this, the image also becomes choppy and unresponsive but only what it's displayed not the pc itself. It started happening...
Apparently the power failure just happened to coincide with a kernel update that causes a bug with AMD firmware; people are reporting the issue with higher end Radeon 7000 series cards using high refresh monitors attached via DP with kernel 6.15.
My uname -r output: 6.15.3-200.fc42.x86_64
So I can either learn how to revert to kernel 6.14 on Fedora, I've never messed with it before, or live with 100Hz like a bronze age slum rat until they push a fix.
The further mystery is why a momentary power loss took down a PC plugged into a UPS. It has one job, that it apparently didn't do.
I had this same issue, as others have stated it seems to be related to higher refresh rates, as the highest I can go without this issue is 99.95Hz. Operating System: Fedora Linux 41 KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.15.
Call the UPS manufacturer for coverage, if that fails then call your renters or homeowners insurance, and if that fails I hope you bought an umbrella policy.
Most humans with two ears have a pretty good sense of directional hearing. However, you can build equipment to localize audio sources, too. That’s precisely what [Sam], [Ezra], and [Ari] did for their final project for the ECE4760 class at Cornell this past Spring. It’s an audio localizer!
The project is a real-time audio localizer built on a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is hooked up to three MEMS microphones which are continuously sampled at a rate of 50 kHz thanks to the Pico’s nifty DMA features. Data from each microphone is streamed into a rolling buffer, with peaks triggering the software on the Pico to run correlations between channels to determine the time differences between the signal hitting each microphone. Based on this, it’s possible to estimate the location of the sound source relative to the three microphones.
The team goes into great deal on the project’s development, and does a grand job of explaining the mathematics and digital signal processing involved in this feat. Particularly nice is the heatmap output from the device which gives a clear visual indication of how the sound is being localized with the three microphones.
The Bluetooth chipset installed in popular models from major manufacturers is vulnerable. Hackers could use it to initiate calls and eavesdrop on devices.
Sometimes my entire screen will turn green requiring a reboot. This has happened while gaming but also while watching videos in browser. I'm trying out undervolting/underclocking using LACTL. Have you experienced this? What was the cause and how did you fix it?
Seems to be a common issue. Lots of posts point to the PSU as the issue. Do a search on your card and green screen + linux and see all the results. Good luck.
I've experienced random stuff like that in past - not exactly the same though and not that chip.
I'd suspect power issue, either cpu and/or gpu causing a spike that results in some voltage rail to go unstable. More likely GPU, unless your applications are really thrashing all cpu cores.
How old PSU? how much headroom? how good brand of PSU? Might also be a motherboard power management issue.
Also - it might not hurt just to unplug and reseat every power cable.
Please excuse me dropping off the face of the Earth for a few days. Power supply is Corsair 750 W. Linux 6.14.6-109.bazzite.fc42.x86_64 AMD Ryzen 7 9700X (16) @ 5.58 GHz
Could be worth a motherboard firmware update? and i would double check all the power cables.
It looks ike mangohud is an application to monitor stuff. I've never used it but you could give that a go - see if you're ever getting close to the 750W.
Thank you for your reply! I'll check it out. I need to try remounting and double checking cables still, I've just been putting it on the back burner. Oddly enough I experience this problem much less often when using Gnome rather than KDE.
Couple weeks ago I was at a bachelor's party, to which a number of people had brought Magic decks. I knew nothing about the game (never even watched a video), made this clear, and said that I just wanted to watch everyone else play.
Someone handed me a deck and said, "no buddy, you're playing!" I protested, but it was fruitless. I'd been roped in; and I was excited! A group of people excited to show a new player their hobby.
The guy that handed me the deck then proceeded to explain nothing and get increasingly frustrated when I had no idea what he meant when he'd say "uh, no you have to UNTAP your cards first.. ok now tap them.. yeah I know you just untapped them but tap them 😠🙄" (I still do not know what the point of turning my cards sideways for two seconds was but I guess it's super important?)
The other two players were fairly intoxicated and probably didn't pick up on the toxicity, but the whole table was frustrated with how God awfully slow the game was taking since the new guy just wasn't getting it. I just wanted to watch.
Up until now I thought homeboy had just oversimplified a few rules in his head and forgot a thing or two, but seeing that the actual instruction manual is 500+ pages, I'm furious that he had the audacity to forcibly rope a drunk person with zero interest in playing into the game, just to treat them like a moron for not instantly getting it.
It's honestly a really fun game, but you have to teach people way slower than that. I have a couple training decks without all the card types to teach the basic concepts before ever getting into the complex stuff. Throwing someone in at the deep end like that just seems like a good way to make sure they never wanna play again.
So I've been using rootless podman-compose to run my arr stack forever, and I've never had this issue. What seems to be happening is that sometimes, but not always, when a new folder is created or an existing folder's contents are modified, it seems to be setting the files and their folder's owner to "52587" which does not exist. This causes it to then not be able to access those files. I can manually change them back, of course, but the container just overwrites it again. If I specify the user in the compose.yml, it seems to ignore it. It is happening with a few different containers (all in the same compose.yml), as I've seen it now with Radarr and NZBget. The files are on a 12TB drive, and the container mounts and compose.yml are on the same drive, but the OS (Bazzite) is on a separate drive.
My thoughts so far for possibilities: 1. The podman install is fucked somehow 2. The drive itself is fucked 3. Bazzite's weirdness is causing an issue
For #1, podman comes with Bazzite by default so I'm not entirely sure if I can rpm-ostree remove and reinstall, though that might be the next step I try. I'm not terribly good with podman to begin with so I'm not sure how to go about troubleshooting it much otherwise.
For #2, this is entirely a possibility, the drive is pretty old, but I'm not seeing any errors or anything in the SMART stuff and outside of this specific issue I have seen no other problems there.
For #3, this issue did start to happen maybe a month after switching from Arch to Bazzite, mostly because I also wanted to use this machine for Sunshine streaming and my arch install was a mess anyway. I know Arch, though, and this immutable stuff has tripped me up before, so maybe I go back. Feels like admitting defeat though, lol.
Any ideas to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Yeah, I've tried the user mapping and doesn't seem to do anything. Haven't put them in the env since this started happening though I can try that, thanks for the reminder.
The real trick is set the ":Z" flag for the volume. This usually solves most problems, but will not allow that same volume to be used with other running containers.
when a new folder is created or an existing folder’s contents are modified, it seems to be setting the files and their folder’s owner to “52587”
Rootless Docker and Podman run their applications within a user namespace. This means most of the user IDs within the container are mapped to a different uid range on the host, often called a subuid. It's part of how "rootless" mode can allow an unprivileged user to run software that expects to have privileged IDs.
Are you sure it doesn't exist? Have you looked at the ranges defined in /etc/subuid on the host?
My first thought is that the uid numbers you see might be some of your host user's subuids. If so, they will appear as different uids (perhaps with usernames) within the container. Try launching a shell within the container and examining the same files, to see what their owners appear as there.
If this is what's happening, it's normal. As long as the software trying to access the files and the software creating the files are both in the same container, it should be fine. If it doesn't work, there's probably another problem in play.
By the way, Podman almost certainly has a way to map certain container uids to host uids of your choice, which can be convenient when you want to share files between containers or between a container and the host.
Out of curiosity, are the containers that are having issues using non-root users internally? Podman maps your user to root inside the container, so a non-root user can have strange effects.
I had this issue when an image inherited a non-root user upstream.
I'm not really good at self promotion, and I'm aware that it's probably a wasted endeavour. I do enjoy making videos though, and I like the idea of entertaining people. While I'm aware this post will probably be down vored or ignored, I do want to say thank you if you do take time out of your day to watch, and I hope you enjoy.
Spot anomalies and uncover hidden clues to escape an office where overwork turns strange and experiments happen more often than coffee breaks!Ahoy-hoy! Welco...
Can also be isochronic or monoaural beats. They are sounds that entrain to certain frequency ranges, those being (from lowest Hz to highest Hz ranges) delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma
I tend to prefer monoaural because I dont want to have to wear headphones if possible and monoaural works that way if I understand it correctly
Want to listen to this Binaural Beat offline and without interruption of ads? Get the full audio in high quality here: https://samuelschuepbach.com/shop/A Bi...
Public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the court’s liberal members in dissent.
The case extended a winning streak for claims of religious freedom at the court, gains that have often come at the expense of other values, notably gay rights.
The case concerned a new curriculum adopted in 2022 for prekindergarten through the fifth grade by the Montgomery County Public Schools, Maryland’s largest school system.
The storybooks included “Pride Puppy,” an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; “Love, Violet,” about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate; “Born Ready,” about a transgender boy; and “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding,” about a same-sex union.
At first, the school system gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused. But school administrators soon eliminated the advance notice and opt-out policy, saying it was hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked “exposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.”
You need to change a setting in windows for remmina to work. I don't remember which one it was but I think it was some where in the remotedesktop settings.
Have you tried gnome connections? It's more on the "quick and easy" rather than "professional" side, but maybe it does the job.
Tho I wonder whether it's more of a windows-side issue... maybe windows 11 requires some kind of online authentication that cannot be implemented by other clients, and maybe this authentication can be turned off. I'm merely speculating here, but I know that remmina works for windows 10 so it's suspicious.
View and use other desktops –
Connections allows you to connect to and use other desktops. This can be a great way to access content or software on a different desktop operating system. It can also be used as a way to provide...
I would like to reiterate freerdp - i had to use it because my customer (i am an it consultant) uses a Windows vdi. Had to use openconnect-sso(aur) vpn to log in with the Microsoft account they gave me, in case someone is also desperately trying to avoid having to install windows.
The answer is simple: They don't want people to take care of their communities; to them that tax money should be going to billionaires and corporations (and, by extension, themselves). The actions of the DNC make a lot more sense if you assume they don't stand for any of the things they claim to stand for.
Same reason they picked Harris: they're drinking their own kool-aid on identity politics. Just like how because Harris is a black woman they tried to sell her as a progressive feminist and not the bootlicking prosecutor she actually is, they assumed that because Walz was an old white guy he was only pretending to use progressive rhetoric and shat their pants when they realized he was genuine about it.
Sarah J. Frick, Deborah Fletcher, Austin C. Smith, Pirate and chill: The effect of netflix on illegal streaming, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 209, 2023, Pages 334-347, ISSN 0167-2681, doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.03… (sciencedirect.com/science/arti…) Abstract: Over 188 million people in the United States use a subscription video streaming service, yet digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually. This paper investigates the relationship between a movie's availability on Netflix, the largest video subscription service, and intent to illegally stream the movie. We leverage a contract dispute that caused Epix (a cable network company) to move all its movies from Netflix to Hulu, representing a substantial decrease in the legal streaming availability of these movies. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that reducing legal streaming access via the removal of Epix movies from Netflix results in a 20% increase in piracy intent relative to movies that remained on Netflix, as measured by Google search volume. This study contributes to the understanding of the substitution between legal streaming services and movie piracy and has implications for content owners deciding what platform to offer their movie on. Keywords: Piracy; Online streaming; Digital goods; Netflix; Google searches
Sign up for our FREE newsletter! - https://www.compoundeddaily.com/Books we recommend - https://www.howmoneyworkslibrary.com/Listen on Spotify - https://open...
Same. I've never been much of a tv/movie person in general, but netflix in its prime was fantastic. But nowadays there are like 30 different streaming services, every single one is egregiously priced, and everything has their own exclusive libraries. Hell I'm surprised they're not streaming genAI slop "movies" yet at the rate they're all going (or maybe they already are, who knows). Fuck all of that noise.
Spotify did the same thing for me years ago. Went from a hand-maintained local library to Spotify, held on to that for like 10 years, ditched them at the start of this year when they were overwhelmingly supporting fascists with political donations. Switched to Tidal for a bit since it has higher quality and better artist payouts, but today I'm right back to hosting a local library (which is better than ever these days), buying what I can directly from artists to support them rather than subscription fees.
If your library is on steam, then there's nothing to worry about! Works natively on Linux. If your library is on other platforms, I'd honestly think twice about switching full time. Dual booting might be a better option. My library is split amongst multiple platforms and I decided that it wasn't working well enough for me. Steam games will work great though!
Many distros are easy enough to install and navigate as a newbie. My go to for years now has been Linux Mint! It's based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
oh that's cool. nope, whole library is on windows on one PC right now.
I was thinking about trying out dual booting to get a feel for it. my understanding was that many programs wont work with linux or require complicated fixes to get them running. so id hate to be left downstream without a paddle, so to speak
For testing try the live USB sticks Just flash them to an empty stick with programs like etcher, then power dowb and select the stick in your bios (usually reachable by hammering f1, f2 or Del while starting
(Remember that performance will be much better when installing it for real compared tusing running it from a stick though)
Dual boot will work and is not that hard to setup, but you should back up all your data before trying it.
Also when dual booting to avoid duplicates etc I have all my documents and stuff on a USB stick, so I don't have a version in my win and a version iny linux. Cloud works as well
They mean other platforms like GOG or Epic, not stuff like consoles.
Steam games mostly work, with some exceptions. You can check out ProtonDB to see more precisely what games work, which ones straight up don't, and which ones need a fix. ProtonDB will usually also tell you what that fix is, which is handy.
But most of the time, you can just hit play and not worry about it.
A note on dualbooting. Linux uses different filesystems from windows. It can access windows NTFS partitions, but it's not a smooth experience.
A common pitfall is trying use your game library while it is still on a windows filesystem, from linux. Since you can see the folders, and even add them in steam, it'll seem like it should work. But you'll run into issues actually running the games. It's technically possible, but not worth the hassle.
Generally you really want to either format your storage and redownload your games, or if you have the space, copy them over to a fully supported file system.
thank you for that tip. I currently run all my games and docs from external HDs. (my pc itself only has a small amount of SSD storage used only for booting etc, and i dont know how to install a new hard drive yet...) I would have definitely tried to just plug in my HD and tried to run it through steam lol
Depends which programs. Also, it's very possible that there are open source alternatives
But if you are dead set on using exactly the same program, appdb.winehq.org/ is a database of if and how to make them run on Linux. Wine's core focus is games, but many programs are covered there too
One thing to keep in mind is that dual booting can work to highlight what you’re missing because generally all of the games that run on Linux will run on Windows, but the reverse is not true. It becomes easy to just default to windows so you don’t have to reboot to play something that doesn’t work in Linux and that can undermine the attempt to switch the OS.
Very few programs require anything complicated to get them working. A lot of productivity programs don't support Linux though, like anything from Adobe, but there are usually alternatives, and if not can often be run in a VM. This probably doesn't matter for you though, since you don't seem to be particularly technical (not an insult). You probably know what programs you need that may not work. If there's nothing like that then you'll be fine.
Yeah, anything Adobe won't work, but there are plenty of PDF viewers that do. Also, yes, Steam, VLC, and Firefox all work perfectly fine on Linux. You shouldn't have any issues.
If your library is on other platform like gog, epic, amazon or off platform .exe you can use heroic launcher and for most stuff it works just as well.
For some games there is a little more learning curve because you have to translate custom steam configurations found on protondb to do the same thing in heroic but overall you actually have way more control then steam.
The only reason “id think twice” is if you play lots of games with anticheat which does not work on every distro (like arch btw).
Yes, ez one (if you have installed operating systems before and know how to paste an error passage into google ) -4hours and your done start to finish. (Given you have standard hardware and don't want to set up something crazy like dual boot with raid and nas)
Moderate complexity if you have never done anything like that, plan 2-6 evenings to get it fully working with everything you need
Also: consider your scopes. For most cases Linux will just work, you just have to get used to some different interfaces.
BUT: some things will not run under linux no matter how hard you try --> google if stuff you can't live without will work
(for me I still have a dual boot windows for playing league of legends and running my vive wireless adapter, as those will not run under Linux.
For games use protonDB
I may be oldschool, but for people not comfortable around terminals I would suggest Debian KDE as it never breaks and the transition from windows is easy. You can do everything from GUI (clicky button interfaces)
For the installation of steam you might need a terminal, but there are good guides online (and you really dont need to be a wizard for that) from where you can just copy paste (when searching just add your distro e.g. "install steam Debian", and once you've got that running you can just run every game from within steam.
Since Steam has done a lot of work with proton, most games just run under Linux. In steam: Install-->play
For nearly all games not directly running, you can just force them to run with proton. It will say: "Game not compatible" in steam, you just click the gear icon on the right to open settings, go to "compatibilty" and tick "force use of compatibility layer" and select the newest proton from the drop down
The button where steam previously said "not compatible" magically turns into the blue "install" button we all know and love. And nearly all games run with only minor inconveniences (like showing keyboard hotkeys even when playing with a gamepad) or no issues at all.
You need to be aware that some games using kernel level anticheat (e.g. league of legends, valorant) can not and will never run on Linux, if the developers of the games don't add the possibility.
EDIT: for programs not related to gaming its often easier to use an alternative, if the program is not available for Linux. Most times its also more privacy foccused, open source and free
I was you 18 months ago. It's certainly achievable, even with a crazy busy schedule. Highly recommended that you go for it.
Here are the unpopular opinions that attract downvotes: * adopting Linux is painful. Stuff breaks. Stuff doesnt work. You will be battling uphill, but hopefully you'll find it worthwhile in the end. * moving to Linux permanently wouldn't have been possible for me without AI. Now you can ask AI and it will almost always solve the problem for you. In the old days, you'd just have forum posts saying "just compile the driver and do a 10 step process with terminal that you need to figure out from the wiki....noob". But now, these previously system breaking problems are now easily solvable without spending the whole weekend on a single issue. * don't let go of Windows to start with. Put Linux on a secondary machine. Do not dual boot, you will break your installation and won't be able to troubleshoot it and will have to do a full wipe (along with the time and data loss that comes with that). * Don't get caught up in the distro wars. Pick Linux Mint, or a similar very beginner friendly distro. I prefer KDE desktop so I would recommend something else..... But don't go for anything with even moderate difficulty. * Check protondB.com for the games you play. Some don't work on Linux (e.g. Apex Legends).
Yeah, this. In fact, going with hardware that's too-too new can lead to a different problem on Linux.
OP, if you're buying hardware, it's worth web searching to make sure people have tried it on Linux and are having good experiences with it. Since most manufacturers only care if their stuff works on Windows, it can take a little while for Linux devs to write drivers and get them shipped in Linux distros.
Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don't have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.
AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn't Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt. You shouldn't really need to do much if you can get through the install anyways.
I am really curious what "system breaking problems" you have? My latest laptop over the last 2+ years has been so uneventful and boring. Never used a command line on it, but don't forget when you see people share command line fixes, it is because it is the easiest way to directly share information. Not the only way to do something. My desktop has had a few hiccups over the last 5, but that is what I get for running Arch on it.
I'm glad it worked smoothly for you and it sometimes is a smooth effortless experience for some people; but if you want to "convert" people then you've got to be honest about the fact that people commonly face difficulties. I've commented about my Linux issues before and I can paste the comment again here to give an example:
One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.
A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out (AMD GPU).
I installed VMware Horizon for my job's remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn't bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.
I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies. Update: I'm using CachyOS now and the Brother website says Arch plainly isn't supported. When I install the driver from AUR that's specific to my printer, then it doesnt print and just spews out endless blank pages.
I still can't get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I've stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.
I still can't find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute. I still can't figure out how to use this to auto-mount my Synology NAS.
Plasma added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can't figure out why. It reappears intermittently, but then disappears when it feels like.
My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can't figure out why they've decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. Update: this seems to have fixed itself (maybe through am update?).
Flatpak Steam app wouldn't pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.
My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn't supported.
Trying to set up dual boot kept destroying (I.e. making unbootable) either the Linux install or the Windows install. I have up eventually as I couldn't figure out how to fix GRUB from the command line.
I've been trying to find a solution for keeping a downloaded synchronised copy of my online storage (Mailbox.org). Can't figure out rsync. I get an error with Celeste and it doesn't sync after the initial file install. Having a 2 way sync for online storage could be considered a pretty basic requirement these days and something Mailbox can easily suggest an app for in Windows.
People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn't include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS's when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows. I know we all love Linux, but allow people to be honest rather than being dismissive. I had over 2 decades of experience with Windows and it had its quirks and problems, but my preexisting familiarity with it made it much easier to use and troubleshoot.
Sure I know I'm a noob and not doing this right. But that's the point.....can someone with limited knowleddge still work this OS?
I agree that computers can have issues. But none of these are linux only. Windows does all this stupid shit too. My printer wont work with windows, only linux (how the hell this can be true is beyond me). Bluetooth drops in windows, works fine in linux. The latest nvidia update on windows broke all games making it black screen until I used some regedit fixes. A windows update broke my firmware on a video card for a while, almost got RMA'd. I could go on, talk about Jankiness. I don't use windows as my main computer due to it being so all over the place. I say this as a MSDN dev and windows server and azure dev and support person. I remote entirely from Linux, I need to have an OS that works.
My point is windows does this shit too.
But: That is your issues are a long list that seems to have a repeating theme: OpenSuse.
You don't need to edit FSTAB to add a drive, there is a gui for that, for whatever that's worth.
I have not had any of these issues on the 5 or so linux computers I use daily. I have had a few upgrades in Arch cause me to update grub or roll back, but that is about it.
Over the last two years I have found Fedora KDE has been amazingly easy to use and update.
I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
That one has me curious: what is that? (I mean by definition - scroll - that can't be a thing, lol) But I am sure it is, got examples?
OpenSUSE is what helped me get past even more basic problems with getting my PC up and running, that's why I stuck with it because I couldn't even get this far on other distros. I'm on CachyOS now and can manage better now that I've learnt to troubleshoot some of the main issues.
Horizontal page scrolling. I want to be able to read massive documents by scrolling through side-by-side pages rather than scrolling up/down.
Okular can be set to do that, but it doesnt have a scroll bar, which you might not like. Firefox can do that as well, but I concede that browser PDF viewers are not ideal.
Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don't have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.
I've been trying to adapt to Linux Mint/Cinnamon as my daily driver and yes, stuff breaks. My sata and nvme connected drives kept disappearing every time I started my computer so I had to learn about mounting and auto mount (they are just there on Windows). My game and program installs on Bottles and Lutris kept going "missing" and losing their .exe's. I downloaded 70gb of Guild Wars 2 files at least 8 times because I thought each time I had fixed the "files missing" problem only to have them disappear on reboot. I still didn't figure out what was happening and am only able to play now because I found out how to use the provider portal on Steam. I can't make launcher short cuts from the actual executable, I have to go to the desktop and do it and when I do, it won't let me drag it to my panel for some reason. When I thought I had found a solution, I reactivated some launcher applets and ended up with three different instances of my panel launcher icons and still no ability to add new ones. My systems connected to the same ethernet used to show up in my network panel and I was able to access my shared folders and media files but they all stopped showing up a few days ago and I had to learn all about Samba share and minimum and maximum server protocols and still am trying to find a solution.
Yes, Windows breaks stuff too, but Linux is NOT a perfect product that works flawlessly for everyone and [@cRazi_man@europe.pub is right. All of their points are things I've been struggling with and would warn a Linux noob about. I personally would rather trust those random forum posts than LLM summaries (and have solved some issues that way) but otherwise I agree with each of their bullet points.
Yes mounting is different, but that is not a Linux issue. Same as when you boot into windows, but an EXT formatted drive will not appear AND it will never mount. Windows helpful choice is "unknown" and offer to format. These are just OS differences, not breakages.
Cinnamon might be part of your problem with shortcuts.....
Yeah SMB shares can be tricky. I have issues with them in Windows as well, not linux specifically.
I am not saying linux is perfect. All computers rely on a person being able to deal with them. I just find it much more stable then windows ever was. You add bottles and Lutris into the mix, and now it is a third party software issue: just like plenty of software in windows as well.
I think there's a difference in personal interpretation of what a "Linux issue" is, here. It sounds like you might be interpreting "Linux issue" as problems with the software itself, or its capabilities, features and processes etc. Personally, I am using "issues with Linux" to mean the entire user experience from start up to using the GUI and whether or not I can do the things I want and need to do on a daily basis easily and intuitively. Certainly, Linux as a software plays into it, but the things you are brushing off as 3rd party incompatibilities are absolutely part of the Linux experience in my opinion. I'm not trying to throw blame, but when introducing new people to Linux it's best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.
when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.
Depends on what "should" means. My printer for example will not work with windows. It works fine with linux. So.... that really is a printer driver issue. No matter which one it works with.
As for the OS out of the box, everything works on a fresh install of either - although linux is far more loaded with ready to go software, and windows requires you to add it. And any of the software you add to either can cause breakages, that is computing.
I noticed over the years that Linux works fairly well for people who did not start with windows first. Both have learning curves, but habits are habits.
I am going to take my linux laptop for an example: 2 years. No tinkering. There is nothing to do, it just works.
My other laptop (windows): damn thing need tinkering all the time: turn off this, regedit that, just to get the nagware and crap out. Won't allow remote desktop with the license, needs drivers to be updated, software that came with it is bloatware garbage.
I've been tinkering with my Linux machine for the past 8 months or so, and having random issues like the ones I listed and more besides that I've already solved. Meanwhile my old Windows 7 machine has been working flawlessly for about 8 years, no regedits or crap software issues. I think I had a driver issue with my mouse a couple years ago that I clicked a button and it fixed it. My laptop running Windows 7 also has been working flawlessly since about 2014 beyond prompting me to format media that I connect to it, but I press a button and that goes away. Recently I've been having compatibility issues with software because it's such an old OS but as you said, that's a 3rd party software issue, not a problem with Windows 7.
Glad your Linux experience is so smooth though. Must be nice!
Two desktops and three laptops, they all work great. My biggest ongoing issue, and it is fair to say it is a problem, is VR. I have not tried recently, but that is one area that was smooth to set up in windows and I havent had luck in Linux.
This is a pointless conversation man. There are clearly plenty of Linux zealots on Lemmy. Noobs like me have had a hard time with Linux. I've never understood the argument that "my experience was different, so your experience is invalid". Once someone learns about something, they forget what it's like to have no knowledge of the thing.
The Linux community was reacting like this when Linus (from LTT) installed PopOS and tried to install Steam and it somehow wiped his desktop environment. Shit happens in Linux and the noob experience is brushed aside, while touting "the year of Linux". I really don't get it.
I agree with your overall point, as a long time Linux, Windows and Mac poweruser who has shepherded many into a new OS in the past. People who don't like to explore new/different technologies as a hobby get quite comfortable with whatever they're used to and the way that it works and then quickly lose empathy for those that are earlier in their journeys.
Just to clarify on the Linus Pop!_OS thing, he didn't read the prompt that said he was about to uninstall his desktop environment and then typed in "yes I understand this can break my system" or something like that, which had been added as a prompt to keep people from not reading the warning. Anyways people got mad that he did that because he literally ignored the warning and *the meaning of the words he had to type* that had been added to idiot proof the thing.
AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn’t Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt.
I have the same experience but sometimes it was even worse; Sometimes the AI would confidently recommend doing things that might lead to breakage. Personally I recommend against using AI to learn Linux. It's just not worth it and will only give new users a false impression of how things work on Linux. People are much better off reading documentation (actual documentation, not SEO slop on random websites) or asking for help in forums.
I just switched and, yeah, the learning curve can be tough. This month I've learned two dozen abbreviations just because I've had to install, fix things, and customize. No way the average users would want to go through that.
The results can be cool though. Terminal opens as a matrix window and then neofetches an ascii art image of my face. Makes it all worth it haha. Also, fuck Microsoft.
Yes. Steam is available on Linux, pretty easy to install and it comes with a compatibility layer (Proton) which works quite well.
Linux is a bit different than Windows. But I'd say just using it is about as complicated as using Windows. You'll just have to try and see whether you like it. And if it's hard or easy for you to relearn a few things. I mean if you're in the Browser and Steam all day, those will be the same applications and also look and work the same way. Other than that you could face some issues with gaming hardware and you have to fiddle with things, or everything works out of the box. You can't tell beforehand.
Consider your library: most games will be able to run fine on Linux. However, if you predominantly play online multiplayer games which require anticheat you should check compatibility on ProtonDB.
Second, consider your hardware: if your GPU is AMD you're good to go. Nvidia might have issues (not sure if this has been resolved since I last had to look into it).
Finally, choose a distro: I'd recommend Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu-based. There's a lot of mixed answers in the Linux community and definitely a ton of hate for Ubuntu. However, as someone who has been running Linux for nearly a decade at this point, there are a few key points:
Ubuntu is debian based, so it's extremely stable(but not as slow to update)
Ubuntu is very beginner friendly, and you won't need to touch the terminal if you don't want to
Everyone hates on snaps, but for you I don't think you'll run into an issue with it.
Personally, I steer towards debian based distros for my devices as well because I'd rather spend time messing with the software I'm running or other things NOT debugging why my config is suddenly shitting the bed
Distro: short for distribution. Linux is not an operating system. It's a piece of technology (specifically something called a kernel) you can use to create an OS. Those Linux based OSs are referred to as distros. We are usually not calling them "Versions" because the Linux Kernel is also frequently seeing updates and that would just cause confusion.
Debian and Ubuntu: Popular distros. Ubuntu tends to be a bit more user friendly than Debian and was the default recommendation for new user for a long time. In recent years its popularity among enthusiasts declined because of a series of unpopular decisions, mainly the adaptation of something called snaps which is not completely open source and takes a bit more time to launch apps than alternatives. Debian on the other hand really values stability. Updates arrive less frequently than on other distros but undergo really rigorose testing.
Not necessarily. Both have their drawbacks. It takes longer for new hardware to be supported on Debian and setting up a Nvidia grafics card is more complicated
The other commenter covered the terminology so to your point about being on Nvidia:
I know we don't like Reddit but here. Seems to be YMMV and you'll never know if you don't try. Also possible that the things that are buggy aren't things you use/care about
Oh boi, for gaming Ubuntu and it's family is... Iffy at best. You tend to end up with weird problems cause of the older software frequently. Not a problem till it VERY much is.
Modern gaming basically requires you to be really close to cutting edge if you want remotely reliable performance and timely bug fixes. Which you just do not and will never get on Ubuntu.
It's why valve choose arch for steam OS. It's why cachyOS exists. It's why the big popular alterative is fedora based.
Tho suggesting bazzite is iffy with how fedora likes to break things with dumb changes.
FWIW I run Ubuntu and do some gaming. Haven't hit any issues, and I've run multiple AAA games on release (TLOU, Indiana Jones, Hogwarts Legacy, GoW 2018) as well as other, lighter, titles like Cities Skylines 2, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars, American Truck Simulator
I'm sure there are bugs that I haven't experienced, and my system is probably newer/higher performance than the average person + i chose parts with Linux in mind. But based on my experience, I wouldn't tell someone to jump into a less user friendly distro because of problems I myself haven't run into. Much better to try one, see if you hit an issue, then jump rather than doing the hard one up front
There's tons of youtube videos / tutorials on how to create a live usb of a distro, such as linux mint. This will allow you to boot into linux and play around without installing anything and get a feel for linux. It's nowhere as tech wizardry as you think.
And if all your games are on steam and don't have anti cheat things, they'll probably just all work with proton (linux compatibility tool in steam).
Linux is way easier than it was even 10 years ago and many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows. There’s gaming distros but I’m not sure what the benefit is other than the built-in NVIDIA drivers. I just game on Fedora. You need to enable Proton stuff in the settings and you’re off.
Unless the Steamdeck flew under your radar you should know that you can absolutly play games on Linux. Most of the exceptions are big online games with crazy anti-cheats (yeah in that case no luck).
As for hope : migrating to another OS (be it Linux, MacOS or whatever) can be disorienting at first, wich tend to repel some people (it's like learning how to use a pc for the first time), that's actually the most important thing to keep in mind for everything to go smoothly, you don't need to be a tech wizzard, just to be patient.
As long as you don't rush things, don't expect everything to behave as somekind of windows clone and learn how it works a bit you should be fine.
Before you try anything I'd also suggest you check if all the software you are using are available on Linux and if not what alternative you can use : alternativeto.net can help. To check if the games you play work you can also go to protondb.com. Preparing as much as you can before install is a huge plus, and it's really not that hard.
As an exemple I've helped a curious friend who wanted to try Linux, they're the most tech illiterate person I've ever known..like even worse than some old people. It took them two hard month to be fully acclimated, like as fine as they were doing on windows if not better. Never even asked me for help ever since. (My eyes still bleed when I see how they're using their pc but they clearly have no issue doing whatever they're doing) So if they can I'm sure anyone can.
I'm not sure what you mean by flew under my radar but I don't really even know what steamdeck is. some kind of handheld console? how's it relevant here?
It's because it's quite popular so alot of people know it exists, but yes it's a handheld console made by steam and it's using linux, it's basicly a Linux console.
It’s been a big factor in Linux now having extremely strong support for windows games, as it runs Steam on Linux, uses PC hardware to play PC games, and it’s built/supported by Valve who did a lot of the heavy lifting on improving the existing Linux windows compatibility layer to where it is now. What that means for you is basically anything in Steam will run well in Linux even if it’s not a native Linux game (which most aren’t).
Otherwise, Proton’s the name of Valve/Steam’s compatibility layer project, and you can look up game-specific user reports on playability here: protondb.com/
The two distros I recommend for beginners, these helped me start using Linux:
1) Kubuntu
Kubuntu uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the closest experience to Windows 10 imo. Very good for easing you in. Plus, it's based on Ubuntu - the most commonly used distro. So if you have issues, just google "(problem) Ubuntu" and you'll find a fix.
2) Pop!_OS
Pop!_OS is preconfigured for gaming. If you have anything Nvidia in your PC, just start with this one. Nvidia doesn't play nice with Linux, and the company that develops Pop!_OS has a specific version with Nvidia drivers. Driver configuration can be annoying, you don't have to worry about it with Pop!_OS.
Both of these distros will work for gaming out of the box pretty much (provided you use AMD products). Steam's Proton tool is insanely useful, and it's not too hard to figure out how to tweak games that are still having issues after it works its magic.
Basically, your choice boils down to:
Kubuntu - an easier time with the PC side of things
Pop!_OS - an easier time with the gaming side of things
As for being a tech wizard, don't worry about it. If you know how to look up your problems, there's always some guy on a forum with some commands you can copy/paste into the terminal and fix everything.
I started with popOS but now recommend bazzite if you mainly use your machine for gaming, I just setup a pc for someone and gave them bazzite and now I see them on steam playing games and no complaints. bazzite or maybe fedora, the issues I had with PopOS was just apps being outdated in the app store, like darktable came out with an update and like a month passed and the update still wasnt showing in the app store so I had to use the appimage from the darktable site
See, I haven't had any issues with Pop!_OS, but I also don't use apps outside of Steam and LibreOffice much. To add to your point, I will say that for how much they hype up the Pop! Shop, it kinda works terribly.
I haven't tried Bazzite, but Fedora-based distros are starting to pique my interest.
yeah I started with popOS, used it for about a year, then tried Fedora for a week but figured if Im moving distro to get the latest and dive deeper might as well go with Arch, that lasted like two months with hyprland then decided to try bazzite and its been solid, everything I need is just there already, shortcuts working just like windows so its easy to transition from work laptop to personal, screen shots, lock, mounting network shares etc
I have a relatively easy and nice setup on PopOS currently and I don't want you switch just because I don't want to lose my files and setup.
Is there a process you recommend to transfer UI, etc. to another distro as an experiment? I know how to transfer my video files, for example, just don't know how or if other programs can transfer easily between distros.
I think there are ways to just mount your home directly that has your files but I haven't done that, not sure if it had to be setup separate from the beginning or something, I keep my files on a local nas so its easier for me to just wipe my desktop
even my parents and grandparents are on bazzite which massively reduced my family tech support work, but it seems like fedora is indeed being fedora again and discussions are for dropping 32 bit which would be troubling for gamers still.
Honestly that's kind of the dream (I already have raspi theater plans).
It's sad how much technology has changed since what we thought it was gonna be in the 80s. we HAVE the capacity to do all those things, but we get locked out of modifying our own devices!
If a computer is a car, then Linux(the Kernal) is the chassis. Mint (the distro) is the motor, and Cinnamon (the desktop environment) is the fancy interior.
KDE plasma is a fancy interior that works with tons of different motors.
Cinnamon is designed for mint and works best with it.
DISCLAIMER: All of this is analogy and isn't technically correct in a pedantic sense, but it works well enough for me. I'm sorry if my analogy isn't exactly accurate.
I'd say Linux (the kernel) is the motor/engine and Mint (the distro) is the chassis. The chassis defines the shape of the vehicle and its size class, for instance.
The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. It’s the system level user interface.
You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are “flavors” of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. That’s why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.
If you don’t feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. It’s good.
Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I'll get into later.
With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.
Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they're meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, "tiling" the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.
Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They're made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.
Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE's Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it's based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS' Pantheon DE. Then there's Gnome, which I goddamn hate.
For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you'll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.
Edit to add: It's kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you'd install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It's not a great idea but you can.
All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don't like something about Cinnamon.
Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu's desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think "wow, this person's a hacker", where they'll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the "best of both worlds" midpoint is a dynamic WM? I'm not sure. hyprland is an example of that.
TL;DR: Try installing some on virtual box, by all means try Linux mint cinnamon but also try Ubuntu and Fedora KDE.
Linux has some jargon and since you want to learn I'll give you a quick rundown of how a variation of Linux is composed.
"Kernel" is what makes Linux Linux. It's a way of interacting with the hardware.
A "distribution" or "distro" is a one of the many flavors of Linux.
They are usually "based" on a common foundation like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Nix and whatever. These also work like an onion where Mint is based on Ubuntu which in turn is based on Debian, all of which use some version of the Linux kernel.
A that's just a base will just get you a terminal (also called a shell or console) and is very useful to make a server for example.
What most people think of as an OS is the user interface (i.e. clickable shit). The terminology in Linux for that is "desktop environment" (DE).
You'll see a lot of distributions mix and watch between a base and a desktop environment such as Fedora with KDE, Ubuntu (Ubuntu with Gnome), Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE), Bazzite (Fedora silverblue base with either gnome, KDE or deck DE).
You mentioned Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a desktop environment for Mint so a Linux Mint Cinnamon contains the code of the following:
Linux kernel, Debian, Ubuntu and Mint as a base and Cinnamon to interact with it by using a mouse and keyboard.
There are currently three bases that are really popular right now, Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch. In the DE there are currently two that are most advanced, namely KDE and Gnome but Cinnamon is not far behind.
In all honestly, none of this matters all too much, just install a couple of popular distros on a virtual machine like Virtual Bok and do a vibe check.
Take a couple of these, install some programs and fuck around with the settings for a bit, install themes and whatever or watch a quick YouTube video on it: * Ubuntu (gets hate for being corporate but is solid, uses Gnome) * Linux mint Cinnamon * Fedora KDE * EndavourOS (an arch based distro that's supposedly easy, haven't tried it) * Bazzite (weird way to install programs through the package manager but hard to fuck up beyond repair) * Something with the Xfce DE just to see the "lightweight" look.
This is what I did. I narrowed down the distros I was looking at to about 5 that I thought might meet my needs, and made a live usb for each one, then used it as I would my regular system for a couple days. Anything that didn't work right got eliminated, and I picked the one I liked best out of the ones where everything worked.
Lots of good advice here. I’ll add a bit about dual booting.
1) the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesn’t play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you can’t f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)
2) dual booting is nice just in case something doesn’t work - you can easily switch back to windows.
3) dual booting sucks because there’s very few things that don’t work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.
My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. It’s YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your “main” OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand what’s YOUR computer vs what is Microsoft’s OS.
I say unplug the windows drive always, even if you don't fuck up your Linux install may nuke your windows boot partition and it's massive PITA to get it back
Yes, first time when I installed Nobara, then second time when I installed Fedora. Both times windows was in another drive, both times I picked the right drive. I asked around and people recommend unplugging your windows drive, I agree.
I'm gonna have to figure out how to install another SSD I guess... hope my motherboard is compatible with whatever is on the Market. I bought it all in asia and apparently the motherboard is an issue
There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.
It's not the most pure experience, but it's a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.
A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won't feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.
Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.
From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of "here are my settings", "my files go here", "here's how I fiddle with wifi", "here's how I change my desktop stuff". At that point a dual boot should work out, since you'll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.
If it's working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.
Install Windows Subsystem for Linux with the command, wsl --install. Use a Bash terminal on your Windows machine run by your preferred Linux distribution - Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Kali, Fedora, Pengwin, Alpine, and more are available.
What I'll say is, I've got no comp sci degree, and when I started, I had no idea how the terminal worked. But... My mindset was the following:
1) I really don't like windows, I'm not going back 2) I don't like paying others to "do it for me", I want to do it myself 3) I want the freedom to be able to change anything to make the machine fit me, even if that means I need to learn things along the way.
If you're the type of person where this general philosophy, you're going to crush it.
But if you're more along the lines of "I just use this computer as a tool to do the things I want, I just need the computer out of the way, and working consistently so I can get on with my actual goals", you probably will hate it. Becuase all your troubleshooting experiences will be "why doesn't this thing just work, like it does on Windows?"
You don't need a high level of technical skill. You can learn everything you need to get started in a few minutes of tutorials or walk throughs. The rest you learn as you go.
Bear in mind no every linux user has memorized every terminal command and the whole file structure. Lots of people are just casual users who learn what they need.
One of the things I wish someone had told me at the start of using linux is that initially your desktop environment will effect how you feel about linux more than the distribution or specific architecture of the OS.
The good news is they're all free. Try a few things and see what you like. IMO Fedora is a great, beginner friendly Gnome or KDE experience. Mint has an excellent Cinnamon and XFCE desktop either of which will feel somewhat familiar to a windows user. Mint will also run on just about anything.
Also, it's not binary. You can dual boot. If there's something you need windows for you can use it. Over time you'll eventually find that you don't really need windows anymore.
One thing I'll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn't really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don't be scared of the terminal. It's just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you'll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.
Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won't be able to install any programs this way but you'll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It's not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.
Gaming on Linux is better than it's ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I'm just telling you this so you know it's not like a flawless experience. Then again I've also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so...
My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it's the most popular and has the most support.
If you don't know what a command does you can read the manual running the "man" command. Run "man" followed by the command you want to read about. It also works for some system files too!
Also if you fix something like a driver issue for a game that took a lot of research. WRITE IT DOWN. It WILL come in handy in the future.
As others have said, it's possible to play most steam games, but not all. You have to decide if you like those games more than you dislike MS and Goo. I find there's so many great games out there that I'll never get to all of them, so I'm ok with dropping some bangers that usually want too much access to my system.
Here's a useful resource if you need to understand slightly technical linux foundations linuxjourney.com/ It might not be necessary but it does help to have a foundational understanding, and honestly, the command line is awesome, powerful, and one of my favorite things about linux. Beyond having a basic understanding (and maybe having one of the books the site recommends on hand), before going to an LLM as others have suggested, have official sources of various components bookmarked and go there first. There's so much BS out there now, I actually like the fact that I can read technical documentation, test it out, and know if it's true.
one other tip: I'd recommend some kind of personal knowledge management (PKM) system to take notes. Linux gives you a lot of freedom-- that's what's great about it-- it can be complex and have a learning curve at times. It's absolutely worth it though. It's a totally different paradigm than windows. After a while you can really start crafting the whole system to your needs as an individual. I'm 3 years in and was using my first setup that whole time, i didn't realize how customized I had made it until trying to set it up exactly on a new workstation. Now I'm writing a script so to automate my setup (os settings, program installs, configs) by running a single command. Then I can really start experimenting.
Everybody's different and with a little basic knowledge, everyone's setup can be tweaked to their individual needs a little better than other "user friendly/polished" operating systems. I hope you find as much joy and freedom in it as I do.
I use Obsidian. Stores everything in markdown and has a nice sql-query-like plugin, dataview, that I've built a nice workflow around. Obsidian isn't FOSS, which has become more important for me, so I'm looking to migrate over to markdown oxide in helix. If I were starting from scratch I might try logseq or similar. Whatever you choose, I think it's helpful that it's stored in a portable format like md so you can change programs if you need.
That's a big question, but I'll try my best to answer without getting too deep in the weeds.
I'll probably sound like a fanatic, but I use my PKMS for notes, logs, journaling, project and task management, snippets, and documentation. They all have their own structure and flow. It's a Gall's Law kind of situation where I started simple and it worked, so it was extended and slowly evolved to reach it's current complexity.
The beauty of PKMS over a notepad is the loose set of basic features (Wiki-links, tags, templates, etc) that be used in a personalized way to quickly capture, organize, and retrieve info that works best for you and no one else.
As a simple, but detailed example, in the context of learning linux, i might make a "linux" note and dump info there. I put everything in my own words unless I use md quotes (> quoted text) and I add useful links that I also bookmarked in my browser. When the "linux" page gets bloated, I migrate clusters of info into new notes, wiki-linked in the "linux" note. For example a "distros," note which might have some high level comparisons. I favor making new notes over md headers so it's easier to find and open notes by name (a "quick switcher" hotkey as it's called in obsidian). When I settle on a distro I might make a note for it to contain wiki-links of default components EG "apt (package manager)," "gnome (desktop environment)," "x (windowing system)" and dump relevant notes there. If I try wayland, I'd make a "wayland" note but also a "windowing system" note that both wiki-links "x (window system)" and "wayland," and is wiki-linked in each of those notes.
It could get very meticulous, and some folks setup is too much for me, and I'm sure mine is too much for others, but start simple, experiment, find what works, and add to it. In the beginning I had dedicated time just to developing my PKMS. The important thing is quickly recording and retrieving info.
Sometime i do have crazy scrawlings where i just need a notepad to dump info during a deep dive. That would be loosely zettelkasten style with a time-stamped name, sometime with a few extra works for context/search. Sections could be extracted into their own note later. The note itself could be linked to more organized, related notes.
As a more complex, but shorter example, to show how similar tools can be used in a different manner: I'll make a note for a command line program, for example, cat. I have a CLI template with a Useful Flags (options) section. Kind of like a personalized tldr. I'll also have specific notes for complex snippets (AKA one-liners. Real note example: "list-and-sum-all-audio-file-durations") and if it uses cat, i'll tag it #cmd/cat. The CLI template also has a Snippets section that uses dataview to automatically list, in this case, all notes with the #cmd/cat tag. I also have a "command line programs" note that uses a dataview query to list all notes that used the CLI template. Also, a Snippets note using dataview to list all pages created with the snippets template.
There are tools specifically for snippets and personalized tldr, and I may migrate to those eventually-- especially after I have my install script up and running with linked configs-- but the simple tools in PKMSs are really adaptable and make it easy to customize and integrate. Plus it's all md files in a folder, so it's easy to sync and access on multiple machines, including mobile.
I hope that's not TMI. Starting linux can feel overwhelming and I don't want to add to that. Quiet the contrary. I started my PKMS right before my last, permanent switch linux and I think it helped it stick, and 3+ years later I still use [my PKMS] all the time. As I said before, the simple tools that turn a notepad into a PKMS can add a personalized structure to the insane scrawings, making it quick and easy to navigate, find, edit, and add info. You just have to start simple and take your time. I hope that helps. Good luck with the switch!
The only games in my library that don't work are entirely the publisher's fault for blacklisting Linux in their anticheat, and it's very few games even then.
Linux folks used to be much worse about gatekeeping, but even 20+ years ago when I was first starting out, there were always decent folks among the techie dumbfucks.
Maybe the decent folks have moved to derivative OSes? So the techie absolutists stayed at Debian/Arch/RHEL, while the commons folks have gone to Linux Mint/Cachy OS/Fedora?
There are around three Linux families to choose a derivative Linux OS from, some are more obscure ones and then some really obscure ones. Choose one of the Linux family OSes and choose the most popular derivative of that one. So for example Aurora is a derivative of Fedora, which is a derivative of RHEL (derivative-(in)ception).
The reasons to choose derative OSes and not one of the basic main three is that:
The Linux derative OSes have bells and whistles build on top of the parent OS. This is especially true for the extremely bare bones Arch Linux, that will throw you back into 1985.
And this is most important... community support! You will at some point have issues and a forum where developers and experienced users can help you out are a godsend. Derivatives tend to have better community support than the bare bone ones. I've experienced this with the Arch Linux community. I'm not sure if Debian or RHEL communities would haved fared better, but to me this community felt like having a conversation with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I am really thankful for the excellent expert level help I did get there, but I will not go there back again. And I don't know if I even can, because the last time I was there, I got banned for a third time. I've had great experiences on the Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro communities. Other communities from less popular Linux OSes have been too small in my experience to get help on time.
For Debian, the most popular one right now is Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu (derivative-(in)ception). It used to be Ubuntu, but Ubuntu tends to take big moves and risks that don't always pay off. Linux Mint I consider to be the safe option for beginners. Debian is known for stability.
For Redhat it's Fedora. I haven't used it that much. Redhat is known for good security.
For Arch it's Endeavour OS and recently Cachy OS. It used to be Manjaro, but they fumbled a lot on security issues. Arch is known for having the best documentation, and the largest amount of software available, especially made by fellow users, and if I may add myself, having the best package manager.
I still use Manjaro myself, because I don't feel enough need to switch to a new one, and I like the community there.
"I want to copy my root, home, and boot partition contents into a bigger drive I formatted with in terminal. Let's boot from it and see what breaks."
::: spoiler spoiler /etc/fstab partition UUIDs needed to be fixed by hand. GRUB config needed to be updated to launch straight into bash and I needed to remount the root directly as R/W because GRUB was trying to protect me from myself. :::
A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).
If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I've played has worked so far. In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.
For Photoshop, there's Krita/GIMP.
For Video editing, there's Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
For browsing and office apps, there's LibreWolf and LibreOffice.
If you happen to have any software that you don't have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you'll have to stick to dual booting.
If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you'll constantly have to 'chkdsk' or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows' proprietary filesystem. So, I've heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it's true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.
If you are NOT dual booting however, you won't have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in 'ext4' filesystem for Linux-only use ('Exfat' if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.
I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.
- Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it. - Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I'd usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I'd still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it. - While Arch is nice, it's certainly not for someone new. - That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.
Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you're using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.
Rufus is great, but if you're moving out of Windows, you don't need it.
And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.
Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).
- And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.
If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.
Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you'll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo. - You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words 'testing', 'Test', 'Source', 'Debug' and 'google chrome'.
After that, it's just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.
Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:
sudo dnf install steam
Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.
- For flatpak apps, you'll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary. - Make sure 'Flathub' repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.
NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of 'Application platform' and 'Freedesktop' stuff which you'll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.
Troubleshooting tips:
If Steam doesn't launch the first time, type:
__GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam
If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.
To check what errors you got during the recent boot,
journalctl -b 0 -p err
Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won't have to use the terminal if you're averse to it.
In terms of deGoogling, I'd recommend the following:
Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.
Switch to - Tuta/Proton Mail for email, - Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage, - Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.
Can't forget Zen Browser for best productivity browser. Also Ungoogled Chromium
OP if you want to use AI locally but privately then use Ollama with Open Web UI
Also HuggingChat is an AI Chatbot that can do all kinds of stuff with the 1-tap community extensions, models, and assistants avilable. Website is free with an account. Use as a web app for it to be even better experience
When you are more advanced learn distrobox to add apps only available on other distros natively to your laptop
If you have any questions feel free to ask me whenever
While Zen and ungoogled chromium are fine, I'd suggest to stay away from Brave for any serious purposes 'cause you never know what shady things they might be doing. Case in point, they had previously been changing regular URLs to include affiliate links on their own. They also have that crypto bloat.
Well, it's just 4-5 lines that you're going to have to type and it's just a one-time thing. Surely, it's not that intimidating.
Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven't used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.
From what I understand, you can't easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I'd bet.
Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called 'syncplay' for which there's no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.
I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it's called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.
Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.
I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn't happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn't be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.
New users find the terminal very intimidating, I've seen that come up time and again. It's kind of the whole point of Bazzite.
If you're already learning terminal to install software though, at that point you can use a distrobox, install whatever you want in it, and then export the application to your usual application menu. It'll launch the container in the background when you start the application, and shut it down automatically too. It's a little slower than a usual launch but it's still just a stripped down container so it's fine.
I tried two distros in the past week after your recommendation - Bazzite and Nobara. Bazzite is just like you say and all's good most of the time and I'm getting used to an atomic distro too. The only problem I seem to be having is that my GPU Freezes very often even while just browsing and I have to force-restart to recover.
journalctl shows me this error. [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID ....] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object
I don't know if this is because Bazzite uses a slightly older Nvidia (open) driver(570.64) and kernel(6.14.6) or because of something else.
However, I don't have this issue on Nobara and it uses the latest 6.15.4 and Nvidia (proprietary? akmod) driver (570.153). Correlation is not probably causation, but this might be one thing to consider.
And I've had issues with nvidia-open drivers in the past, but surely a lot of them seem to have gone now.
I believe if you tell the downloader you have a Nvidia 10-series card then it'll give you proprietary drivers that still work on newer cards. I have a 10-series and haven't had these issued fwiw.
Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don't know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let's see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.
Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the rpm-ostree install <name.rpm> command. However, Portmaster installs, but won't work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.
<br />Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing.
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don't think I'm qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.
And I don't know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it's a read-only file system. For now, I'll have to live without my favorite firewall.
Okay, I keep getting the same freeze again with the proprietary nvidia driver too. My suspicion is now heavily on Secureboot being enabled. Some Arch people kept warning me about this back in the day.
I'm going to use Bazzite without it and probably rebase again to open driver if there is no more freezes.
Unfortunately, even with secureboot disabled, I kept getting freezes. Got 3 freezes and I felt done with this. Replaced Bazzite with Nobara again.
Nvidia driver worked for a while. But, after I temporarily switched back to another atomic distro I'm dual booting on a completely separate drive(which requires secure boot for nvidia driver to work and it did work), Nobara stopped loading nvidia driver despite clearing all secure boot keys and installing the default one in UEFI/BIOS and turning off SecureBoot.
Apparently, the efi also has to be modified again. I didn't bother doing it and reinstalled Nobara again since that will reset the efi anyway. Now, the driver is working again. I swear to any seemingly non-existent higher power that I'll never use any distro that requires secure boot. Lol. I'm gonna reinstall Arch on my second drive now.
That said, I'd probably recommend Bazzite to anyone not having Nvidia GPU and it's a pretty impressive project. It even comes with Wallpaper Engine baked in. My friend and I were having a hard time making it work on their system. We were trying some solutions we found on github and some C++ file didn't have a particular header or something. Took a while to get it work and it was kinda messy later on too with the plasma shell crashing cause of it. Having additions like this would surely make life easier for regular users who would not want to deal with that mess.
Being intimidated by the terminal is fine, but the sooner you learn it, the better. Terminal is your friend, not your enemy. Take baby steps if you need to, but you're really doing yourself a disservice by staying away from the terminal.
This isn't how you get non-tech gamers to* switch to Linux and honestly, this attitude needs to die. Do you want Windows to always dominate? Because this is how you get Windows to always dominate.
People are afraid of the terminal because Windows has a shitty, unfriendly terminal. One of the things that brought me back to Linux was the cool-looking terminals. They make me feel like I'm Hackerman.
Linux isn't just a different operating system. It's a paradigm shift. Windows is always going to dominate as long as people are trapped in a Windows mindset.
Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.
I'm not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don't game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.
What I didn't expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent...). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I'm learning more than I expected and it's just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I'm just trying to exist on my computer.
If you want real gaming performance then arch all the way with archinstall. Trust, it's insanely good and you can get double of what you get on windows in terms of performance. Boot times are also insane. I have used so many distros and I can tell you that arch is king for performance.
If you really wanna learn how to tinker and become tech savvy you can always try manually installing arch or get an easier distro and learn from there.
I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it's almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife's laptop and she's been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full -Syu upgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it's not a core package.
You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven't tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven't tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.
I agree that Arch isn't the best "first linux" distribution.
Graphical user interface for managing your Linux applications. Supports AppImage, Debian and Arch packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications - vinifmor/bauh
There is hope lots of YouTube channels, articles by bloggers such as Its Foss, and guides to Linux all over
Especially for Linux Mint (Similar to Windows), Pop!_OS (Similar to MacOS), and Bazzite (Gaming-Productivity Distro, Similar to SteamOS)
The latter 2 work out of the box for gaming if that's your thing
You got this. Learn little by little each day and engage with community as much as you can. Maybe join some Voyager for Lemmy, Bluesky, Discord, etc communities
I'd say try Kubuntu. It's like Ubuntu but with KDE (Windows-like user interface) instead of GNOME (shitty Mac clone turned tablet like interface). It's well-supported and is easy to use. Also supports new technologies like HDR which Mint is lacking. Though you can install KDE on pretty much any distro (Mint included) but it's a good starting place.
Note to fellow Linux veterans: Yes, I know snaps suck but it is not something new users need concearn themselves with. Kubuntu is a great distro except for snaps which aren't going to affect OP's use-case (or most use-cases. Also sorry for shitting on GNOME so much. If you like it that's cool, I just don't think we should be recomending it to people coming from Windows.
Garuda is actually my daily driver these days, and I quite enjoy it. It does mostly just work, and I also like their desktop theming. The GUI installer is great for easy hardware detection and setup. But, that's coming from a more experienced old tinkerer who was initially looking for some lazy troubleshooting with NVIDIA graphics on a new gaming laptop, and liked the distro enough to end up switching over.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend any rolling release to someone completely new to Linux. The devs have done a pretty good job at making some things more user friendly, but we are talking about Arch with some extra tools bolted on. You'd better be prepared for things to break occasionally, and to need to do some tinkering around under the hood.
On the plus side, you ARE dealing with Arch with all the info resources/user community built up around that, plus the Garuda community tends to be pretty helpful from what I've seen. You are going to periodically need to figure out how to fix stuff, however--and better to be aware of that going in. Some people are going to be more fine with the idea than others, but it is liable to provide a steeper learning curve for someone just getting started with Linux.
I agree with everything you said. If someone is new and wants to have a rock solid experience, then it might make sense to get a long term support version of the distribution that's chosen. It's a trade-off of shiny new upgrades for almost guaranteed stability.
I have 15 years of experience and do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, feel free to add me. I recommend you go with aurora, because it is immutable, kde based, and well documented.
immutable means the base system is read only and updates are applied ontop of it, meaning you can easily roll back an update that went bad, and the apps are separate from the core operating system and thus can never break them (unless you try really hard).
kde is a desktop environment, it is most similar to windows and the rate of development dwarfs almost everything else, please whatever you do for your first system use kde.
aurora is a slightly modified fedora and fedora is one of the most commonly used options, the reason not to use base fedora is that aurora includes some QoL features, for example because of issues with patents twitch doesn't work on fedora but does on aurora.
I started on Mint and liked it so much that I never distro-hopped. Every now and then I think about trying an immutable distro. But then I remember how much learning I had switching from Windows to Mint and I get scared of losing so much time to learn about Aurora. What would your say to me?
Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you're doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I'd also make a list of things you've installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they're all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.
The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they're both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.
That the worst linux distro would be vastly better than windows (not that mint is the worst, that'd be manjaro)
honestly it isn't much to learn but the returns are very diminished if you're already on a linux distro, I mostly make this recommendation if you're just starting out, if you're perfectly happy there isn't much need to switch, but more up to date software, kde over cinnamon, and immutability are huge advantages for many people.
like, just for an idea of why kde is better for beginners, the kde text editor alone gets more code changes than all of cinnamon combined per month, and by a lot. Kde is always rapidly improving.
basically on aurora you just use discover for all software and updates and don't even need the cli, it's pretty easy to learn honestly, and if something goes wrong that a simple google can't fix feel free to message me I do free infinite linux troubleshooting.
here's a copypasted post I made on mint and beginners "A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since it’s by far the most developed DE that isn’t gnome and their… design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I don’t think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, that’ll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say it’s better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of “I was new to linux and completely broke it”? that’s not a good user experience for someone who’s just starting, it’s intimidating, scary, and I just don’t think it’s the best in the modern era. There’s something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesn’t and won’t support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I don’t understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but don’t want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isn’t particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix."
you are going to be fine! linux has better compat than windows now unless you use a ton of proprietary, locked software. your average linux distro can do steam gaming pretty well, and there are distros like bazzite and garuda and popos that do some or all of the configuration for you (based on your hardware and usage).
This is the book that got me on the train. I have so many tech books but they all started with this. I'm a terminal afficianado now; this got me started. Anyway, good luck and I hope you have a good time.
I just want to add that the drm modeset is enabled by default ever since the 560 drivers. You only need to do that for the older ones, if I'm right.
Previously, you also had to disable nouveau yourself and Nvidia driver installation used to be a headache. Things have gotten better over the ages. I'm sure this multi-monitor issue will also be fixed soon as well.
As others have mentioned, use Mint. Since you game, some games won’t run on Linux because of their anticheat, and to that I decided to use a dual boot system. I gave 500gb to windows, the rest to Linux. Anything that won’t run on Linux (some early access games, COD, Tarkov) goes on the windows partition. 500gb doesn’t seem like much when COD takes about 1/2 of that, but everything else I’ve played runs fine on Linux.
I also like the smaller partition because it makes me be choose what I leave installed, and if I’m not playing, I just uninstall whatever game needs to go
Absolutely. I likewise moved to Linux more out of frustration with Windows than any of my own tech ability. It needn't be a concerted effort either. I had it on a separate SSD (for a more stable dual-boot) and dabbled for a couple of years until I found myself gradually booting into Linux instead of Windows more and more.
Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn't have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.
I started using Zorin OS just to get out of Windows. Ngl I work in IT and the last thing I wanna do when I'm off work is to go home and do more tech-related stuff, so I just picked it for ease of use. Happy with it though!
Honestly there is nothing to learn, unless you pick arch which is annoying to install, otherwise everything is pretty simple and for the most part just works.
Just remember to turn steam play on for all titles in Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility.
As others have said, Mint is a great starting option. It looks familiar when coming from Windows, and almost everything works without having to touch a terminal.
AAA games with anti-cheat may not work, but just about everything else will. Check Proton DB for each game's compatibility. You can add non-Steam games to Steam to take advantage of Proton. Lutris can also work for some Windows games.
If you want to try Linux distributions to see what they're like before committing, VirtualBox or other virtual machine programs can give you a risk-free preview.
Another option is a live preview. Install Linux Mint on a USB using Rufus or a similar program, then boot your computer from the USB. So long as you don't access your computer's hard drive (under devices on the left of the file manager) or run the installer, no changes should be made from your computer. You can simply reboot and remove the USB to go back to your usual OS.
If you are going to dual-boot, install Windows first. Windows has a habit of overriding or deleting Linux if it's installed second. If you just want to shrink your Windows partition to allow room for Linux, shrink it from Windows. Linux can move "unmovable" Windows files resulting in Windows not booting.
Always have a backup of everything you are not prepared to lose before you play with installing operating systems (and make sure it's disconnected from that computer). Data loss from software issues is rare, but mistakes are difficult (sometimes impossible) to reverse, particularly as a beginner.
You have received tons of useful responses, so I will not add more, except to tell you that the change is extremely worth it, easier than it seems and extremely entertaining.
I personally use Kubuntu (I love the KDE environment) and sometimes play Steam games by using Proton.
thanks! right now the primary obstacle is arranging adequate backup before maling my first attempt.
I have a laptop with Win 11 for troubleshooting so I'm not worried about that. and I have most of my stuff on externals, so there's not much to backup. I just gotta figure out a good way to back up my C drive and a plan for reverting if necessary!
oh yea? I'm wondering if the program I already have will work. ever heard of a program called Macrium reflect? I installed it and never used it lol. adventure time
I've only heard recommendations for Macrium Reflect, but I've never used it myself. Never heard anything bad about it either, should be good if it's what you are most comfortable with.
I've just saw someone in my timeline coming from www.minds.com.
I've known minds.com, which was at the start since it was annouced a few years back and even joined, but soon realised it was not for me and too few people... So I left.
It was just a social media with a weird crypto associated to it. But I remember liking their UI and design a lot back in the days.
But now it seems they activated ActivityPub support, doed anyone knows anything about this? Is this recent and we missed something or am I out of touch with Fediverse news? 👀
Minds can interoperate (federate) with other networks that implement the ActivityPub protocol, allowing members to communicate with each other; much like email, where you can mail other providers, so long as you know their email address.
Gardiner Bryant had conversation with Manjaros lead, Phillip Muller and was told that Valve has the Orange Pi Neo in-hand and they’re testing it, probably to bring SteamOS support for the handheld
Launch prices of the OrangePi Neo-01 will be: Base Model 7840u 16GB/512GB will be 450 $ or 3699 CNY Base Model 8840u 32GB/512GB will be 550 $ or 4499 CNY
The Jervis Bay Territory (/ˈdʒɜːrvɪs, ˈdʒɑːr-/; "JBT") is an internal territory of Australia. It was established in 1915 by the transfer of jurisdiction from the state of New South Wales to the federal Commonwealth of Australia, in order to give the federal government control of a port in the vicinity of the landlocked Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
I am 45 and did not know this until today when for some reason Jervis Bay Territory was printed in a select option along with the other Australian states and territories.
What are they (or were they) actually doing with that port, though? Kinda impractical to have a federal government port so far away from the capital ...
It's pretty close to the capital, really. It's directly due east of the ACT. Maybe somewhere like Bateman's Bay would be a little closer, but not a huge amount, and I assume other practicalities (including existing uses) took priority.
I think ar might be a dead dream in its current state, I always thought wed have proper ar glasses by now because I fell for Magic Leaps Marketting, not sure if it'll come anytime soon.
What I do believe is coming is the resurgence of computers through mobile phones. Everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets but isn't able to use them to their full potential. I wouldn't be suprised if android pushed out a proper android desktop experience letting android users get the full linux desktop experience when plugged into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
Phone performance is stronger than the average laptops/netbooks from 10 years age and they run linux fine for everyday use. Feels like a missed opportunity if someone doesn't drop a phone or os that lets you take advantage of modern hardwares capability. They could advertise it to families, mo more buying a pc for school, just get them hardware for their existing device, it can already do everything. Schools could use lapdocks, or tabletdocks, that could force school parental controls on devices while at school and still let them use it for their education while in class.
(obviously not everyone has a phone but that frees up resources for the kids that dont, if the kids that do can use cheaper docks with their exisitnt hardware)
@bees Actually the UV creams have shown to be themselves carcinogenic, so it's not about to have cancer or not, but how to get it. All things in moderation, including sun, your body does need vitamin d3 which it produces in the presence of UV.
@Railcar8095 With respect to vaccines and autism, there is a correlation but as the old saying goes casuality is not causality until it is. In my view it warrants research. And I've got no doubt that the number of vaccines they are giving toddlers and children these days is overloading their immune systems.
Autist here who loves to read research about autism.
There is absolutely no correlation between autism and vaccines. Neurodivergence cannot be caused by immune system problems.
People are born autistic with a brain programmed by their DNA to form alternative neurological connections compared to neurotypicals. A neurotypical cannot be turned/mutated into being autistic and vice versa.
The only correlation that exists is that people who are neurodivergent are prone to develop some unhealthy habits (from extra stress, sleep schedules, and being a picky eater etc) which in turn can lower your immune system.
Feels weird that i have to explain this, but not all Research is funded by big pharma.
The majority of research on autism is not about Vaccins either but about understanding the many properties from which it emerges.
By understanding what autism actually is, which is often studied by autistic researchers who are motivated to understand themselves better it becomes self evident that we are far from reaching a technological point where we can create a drug to cause or even simulate the complex nature of it.
You could just aswell claim that vaccins cause people to shapeshift into cats, if you understand the subject matter thats just as non-realistic
If you want to bash vaccines you could state that an experimental accidental wrong mixed variant could cause death. Which would still be an incredibly unlikely freak accident but at least reality allows the technical possibility for such a mistake.
@webghost0101 Here are the facts. 100 years ago, Autism rate is 1-in-40000, today it is 1-in-16. The increase in autism has paralleled the increase in vaccines. And the autism rates parallels the vaccination rates in various regions. As I previously stated, this is a casual not a causal relationship, but given the seriousness of the disease and how many it is affecting, it is worth researching the relationship. Only people who could possibly be opposed to that are those whose profits are threatened.
Thats a cute observation but real facts are the following:
Autism was only formally recognized in the 1940s - there’s no reliable data before that, though historical evidence suggests autistic people have always existed. For decades, people deemed “mentally ill” were institutionalized and hidden from society.
The majority of autistic people can mask their traits and present as neurotypical - they had strong incentives to do so given the historical stigma.
Diagnosis happens more frequently in areas with accessible healthcare, which naturally are also areas with higher vaccination rates.
We now have better diagnostic tools and a less punitive society for people with neurological differences. The diagnostic criteria have expanded significantly - many people (especially women) who wouldn’t have qualified under older definitions now do.
And if we want to include the more modern research done by the autistic community we learn that autism is a part of a bigger phenomenon called neurodivergence which includes adhd and many others. Who also used to be completely excluded by the dogmatic labeling of neurotypicals.
Also you referring to autism as a serious disease shows how little you actually know about it. Just like anyone else neurodivergent people can have psychological disabilities but because they are neurodivergent those disabilities are often different from neurotypical ones. In ““high functioning”” autism disabilities are subjective in context of living in a neurotypical world and are increasingly less disabling with social acceptance and understanding.
My 15+ years of research on the topic is solid tyvm.
My understanding of both biochemistry, psychology and autism itself is also advanced enough to form an educational opinion on any research i read.
The facts i give you can easily be verified and have absolutely nothing to do with big pharma.
I have to question your ability to perform research because it seems to be “Everything that disagrees with my initial belief is conspiracy”
I am very anti big pharma btw, some of the drugs they give neurodivergent kids are incredibly dangerous. They simply dont have annything to do with causing autism.
Oh FFS this isn't the benzene thing again, is it? Benzene is a trace contaminant in everything from the air you breathe to the water you drink. The highest number Valisure came up with was 6 ppm in a sunscreen sample, that's 0.0006%. Even if you decided to inject the whole bottle of sunscreen directly into your veins it would be a fraction of your total exposure for the day.
Using people's fear of cancer to scare them away from effective cancer prevention measures is fucking shameful, do better.
@GingerGoodness Benzene in trace amount is an issue, but also Oxybenzone: Some studies suggest it may be an endocrine disruptor, meaning it could interfere with hormones, and research in animals has raised questions about potential cancer risk, but it's important to note these were high-dose studies not directly relevant to typical human use. Other UV Filters: Ingredients like octinoxate and homosalate have also raised concerns about potential endocrine disruption, and some are banned in certain regions due to their impact on marine life
Look, if you want to smear yourself with chemicals, inject yourself with artificial DNA, etc, go for it, just don't require it of me and my offspring.
@bees There have been some recent studies that have solidified the relationship between autism and the MMR vaccine in particular. Gates live Polio vaccine has killed around 500,000 Africans, who knows how many it's maimed, and not to say Polio isn't worth vaccinating against, I have friends who were partially parallelized by it, but if you're killing 500,000 people something is wrong, and one of my children got heart issues after covid vax, further, he at 40 had two vaccines, damage done on the second, had three incidents of covid and the third involved a 102.9 fever, I by contrast got no covid vax, got covid twice, both times it was your average head cold, and the highest fever I had was 99.1, never went down into my lungs, same for my wife and my other son who did not get vaccinated. Vaccines are immensely profitable to the pharmaceutical industry, and just like profit in the military complex keeps wars going even if it means killing and maiming people, so to the pharma profits force unnecessary and dangerous medical interventions.
I'm planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don't know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?
I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.
I had some weird issues with my 3080 Ti on Fedora 41 and 42 and have recently switched to a 9070 XT.
Most games ran fine, but other programs acted strange while games were open. Space Engineers, Escape from Tarkov, and a couple other titles wouldn't allow me to use other programs. The cursor would stay the same as in-game, even when alt-tabbed, and the Discord UI would become unresponsive.
I had several strange issues with my monitor flickering that didn't resolve until I uninstalled and reinstalled my drivers.
I had a horrible issue with Minecraft and other OpenGL games that caused a strobing white screen while playing. I forgot how I resolved that one.
I had to reinstall drivers several times. I don't know how much of it was self-inflicted or just how it goes on Linux.
None of these issues have come up while on my 9070 XT.
Yeah I have a 3070 and have experienced similar sorts of minor annoyances when using Wayland. When I see reports that issues are fixed I try a Wayland session and still find various oddities or issues.
They may be marginal useages but for me I have a dual screen set up and I might game on one and have a video open on another, or even have two video streams open, one on each screen. I find videos slow down and lag, or have artefacts. Issues I don't get on X11 or when I was in windows.
I'm in the same position of looking to upgrade my graphics card and I'm looking at AMD to avoid any more Nvidia related issues. I love using Linux but I don't want to be dealing with Nvidia drivers after past experience.
I use Prismlauncher, it's great for managing multiple versions with different mod lists, Java versions, etc. Nice, clean interface, and you get a background cat!
The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. Yes, it used to be petty bad a couple of years ago with bugs and glitches all over the place, especially with Wayland. These days not so much. Just use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you will have a solid experience. It's honestly been over a year since I last had an issue that I could narrow down to Nvidia hardware.
Just make sure to read some reports from people with the same model of laptop. Laptops with very specific hardware can have compatibility issues.
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn't very long and it's been a series of issues for me. When I've seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.
My feeling is that they've fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.
I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I'm currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I'm not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky
Even if Wayland support is fixed, I'm in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.
I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn't a thing just makes you ignorant.
I don't know about that man. Installed Fedora 42 and GNOME to run with my RTX3080 and GNOME froze and crashed at random constantly. Installed KDE Plasma instead and it runs just fine.
I've been using Aurora which is an immutable distro based on Fedora. It's from the same guys who do Bazzite. I use it on my work laptop with a discrete Nvidia card. I've had zero issues with the video driver. (I use Bazzite on two desktop and a laptop at home, all with Nvidia cards).
I really like these universal blue distro because on the odd occasion that I have an issue after an update, I can reboot into a pinned working version of the system. There are only a couple of CLI commands to learn to pin and unpin the different systems. All currently available systems appear on the grub menu. It's kind of brilliant IMO.
Only downside is that installing RPM packages isn't recommended, but I've found pretty much everything I need through flathub. I have one RPM package installed for VeraCrypt (no flatpak and it doesn't work right in a container) but it hasn't caused any issues for me.
Edit: I should say I can't speak to the ongoing driver issues on the 50 series cards. The newest card I own is an RTX 3080 LHR 12 GB.
Yeah, can't recommend Aurora enough. It's awesome to have literally 0 driver issues, since the system image already contains the drivers pre-installed.
@Interstellar_1 This is the issues I've run into with nVidia gpus. The open source drive, nouveau is incomplete at best and can't take full advantage of features, the drivers provided by nvidia are never up to date with the most recent kernel so you are FORCED to run kernels a few issue old unless no changes to the driver interface has been made in recent history AND if your card is older than eight years and sometimes not even that, nVidia abandons it so you are back to only nouveau drivers. I have not had these issues with Intel graphics or AMD.
I have a 3070 and generally I have no issues with gaming or working in X11.
I have previously had major issues with Nvidia and Wayland and I don't use Wayland as a result on that machine . Many of those issues may have been resolved now but at present there isn't a need to be using Wayland although it is being increasingly pushed. Problems I had were laggyness in the desktop, and videos becoming choppy if I had more than one major process running on the GPU (eg game and video in browser, or two browser windows both with video). I believe such issues have been fixed in the past 12-18m but I'm now in the habit of using X11 on the machine with no incentive to try Wayland again for now.
It is very easy to avoid Wayland - as simple as ensuring X11 is installed and then logging out of a Wayland desktop session and logging into an X11 session once and keeping with that as the default.
I do have a separate AMD machine with integrated GPU and that has been running Wayland from the get go. On that machine I've never even had to think about this issue and have just let my fedora based distro (Nobara) default to Wayland. It's been very much an Nvidia issue.
As long as you're using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they've put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.
One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don't exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.
I've been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux,
Really? IMO not with GPUs. They have released linux drivers for decades, and always in time for new kernel versions. ATI was typically way behind and buggy as hell. I would likely not have switched to Linux on the desktop in 2006 if it wasn't for my GPU "just working", without any fiddling. Performance was always equal to Windows and stuff like multimonitoring just worked. They even had their nice setup utility to configure Xorg for you.
Could they have handled the transition to Wayland better? Maybe. But claiming they earned a bad reputation in regards to GPU when they are the one big vendor that had extremely active linux support for ages is dishonest and unwarranted, IMO.
They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.
You know what's dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn't. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.
Just use the newest driver and you'll be completely fine. Even with very recent hardware, everything works as expected for me.
People like to shit on Nvidia, which is deserved for their business practices and relationship with Linux in the past, however most who claim that there are issues clearly haven't used an Nvidia GPU under Linux in a long time.
It should work. The only practical issues are: - Usually, you will have to manually install the proprietary drivers (I think Fedora makes this relatively easy) - Wayland (the protocol most desktop environmentss use nowadays) support may be hit-and-miss at times (it will mostly work but it's not as polished as with Intel/AMD), and Proton (the thing that lets you play Windows games) may not play well either.
The ideological issue (which you probably don't care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The ideological issue (which you probably don’t care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The only meltdown I've had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that "solution" disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn't ready. I don't know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I'm still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.
I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it's mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn't. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you'll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven't had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).
As long as the graphics isn't that hybrid Nvidia Optimus or whatever the hell they call it, you're good. That hybrid shit was a nightmare to get working, and it never worked right either.
I had to switch back to Windows for now since game performance was noticeably worse with my Nvidia card on Fedora vs Windows. Something running at around 130-144fps cutting down to 80-9fos as an example. So be prepared for that. From what I gather it's unique to Nvidia.
I couldn't game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn't use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.
CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn't play death match anymore — my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.
I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It's massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).
I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.
Alright, I'm done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.
A lot of the info here reads as outdated to me, I have a 40 series card and on bazzite with open drivers it works with zero issues on major titles like Cyberpunk, Horizon, etc. The open drivers have come a long way. It took maybe 5 months post 40 series release for it to work 100% with no glaring issues for me, but 40 series was also the first cards to be launched with the open drivers so it makes sense there'd be hiccups
The only issues I've had on Wayland are color related.
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I was actually kinda wondering the other day why super large content creators with good cash flow from what they already do, don't ditch Google and Patreon or anything else that takes a cut to be nothing more than a middleman to accessing the content? They don't need to host on the same level as YouTube; they could probably make more money hosting their videos on their own website, where they can control what is free or paid for, and can work directly with advertisers themselves.
And how do they get big? How do they get discovered? SEO ?
They're getting huge because of the platform.
I'm not saying google is not evil but it literally gives them their audience.
I watch YT more than anything else by a mile, and if my top subscription moved to their website, and I had to jump through hoops to watch them on my TV device, by installing a browser or something I probably would stop watching them or watch them way less. Another TV friendly app sure that wouldn't be a problem, but I don't see many doing that.
I'm talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie or Good Mythical Morning (the latter of which started on their own website before youtube even existed, btw). Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
I pickled/canned about four pounds each of jalapenos and carrots. But I had some peppers left over. Also I had shredded cheese leftover from yesterday's burritos, and half a pound of bacon from yesterday's dinner.
Well that sounds like the start of a wonderful dinner. Poppers would have been too much work. I have a bag of potatoes... Oh. Let's do this. Jalapeno bacon potatoes au gratin.
Cost for pickled peppers: $1.30 per pint Cost per person for dinner: $3.40 (realistically I ate two full servings so this should really be $1.70 each for four people.)
Man, the struggle is real! I often wonder is this just like...a E Asian thing or what? Cause SE Asians can chill with tigers and not have allergic reactions.
The amount in some flu vaccines is roughly equivalent to the amount of mercury found in a three-ounce can of tuna fish.
...
overall, autism rates did not decline after thimerosal was removed from the vaccines, as many anti-vaccine groups suggested it would. Instead, the rates increased.
It is likely akin to sunk-cost. They have already spent so much of their life having a thing to point at, that they don't want it to have been wrong the whole time. Even though it was known to be wrong pretty much right away, that was already too late for some.
Some mindsets require assigning blame to an external locus in order to move on. There has to be no chance it was "their fault" even though it's hard to really describe genetics as such...
There hasn't really been anything else to suggest a fixed external potential source. So if this one is proven wrong, they are out of options. Ignoring, of course, that it has already been proven wrong. But, that is the reason why they feel it hasn't. Because it's so very important to them that it is right.
And of course barring all that, even the most profoundly affected individuals with Autism rarely blame their condition for the lowered quality of life, if any, they blame their surroundings or surrounders incapability of adjusting to their needs. With proper surroundings and surrounders, even at it's worst, the downsides are manageable and the upsides can be really nice/useful.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone on Lemmy make the distinction between Netanyahu and the people of Israel, so im not gonna name the distinction between you and Trump. And that’s just the more recent example. You guys treated all my people like the enemy when it was time to use us as the excuse for war. I got to suffer because of your country, and which of you supported it is irrelevant if that’s how we’re gonna look at it
You're watching the official music video for Devo -''Peek A Boo'' from the album 'Oh, No! It's Devo' (1982) Subscribe to the Rhino Channel! https://Rhino.lnk...
So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.
Now, the situation: - Currently shows up as: - 6 MB FAT - 4.3 GB - 2 TB unallocated - 2.6TB unallocated - The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts. - Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.
I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.
I think you need to go commercial recovery. If it was a file you accidentally deleted, that can easily be recovered, but you wrote directly to the device.
If you have your encryption key backed up, you have a chance to decrypt it still. It's also possible, but unlikely, the key somehow survived the ISO write and it was written elsewhere on the drive, allowing the key to be recovered. I would only trust such with a professional. (There is basically a smaller encrypted section that your typed-in password decrypts, that section contains the encryption key the rest of the drive uses.)
Honestly though, if you have your stuff backed up (you do have your stuff backed up elsewhere?!?), just restore from your backup and call this a loss.
If you don't have a backup, this was your wakeup call. Always have a backup going forward.
Aren’t encryption keys, typically in the partition header? Wouldn’t that be one of the first things overwritten? Even if it was in the FAT or in the GUID, it would have been overwritten when a the ISO was written.
Each VeraCrypt volume contains an embedded backup header, located at the end of the volume (see above). The header backup is not a copy of the volume header because it is encrypted with a different header key derived using a different salt (see the section Header Key Derivation, Salt, and Iteration Count).
It may be possible to recover the encryption key. You might try asking on VeraCrypt forums/mailing lists or contacting a commercial data recovery service which understands VeraCrypt. Though I’m not familiar with VeraCrypt so I may be misunderstanding the cited documentation.
VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In case an attacker forces you to reveal the password, VeraCrypt provides plausible deniability.
Of course, OP should create an exact duplicate of the disk to another drive before making any changes to it.
As an aside, I know that GPT partition tables likewise come with a backup header at the end of the disk. Whether LUKS encrypted devices also have backup headers, I don't know, but it doesn't seem so. So, my fellow LUKS users, perhaps you would like to run the following:
VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In case an attacker forces you to reveal the password, VeraCrypt provides plausible deniability.
I guess it's a question of how much hassle it's worth. I did a messy data recovery of a crashed database for a work client once, but it involved a lot of trial and error and writing special purpose code, plus considerable luck that some things worked better than I had a right to expect. Cost of something like that would be in the multi kilobucks, maybe low 5 figures. We got almost all the data back, though not 100%.
Maybe just put that HDD aside and replace it with a new one, and deal slowly with recovering the data as you get the time to mess with it. Also don't do any write operations on the old drive. Maybe copy it entirely to someplace and work on the copy. In fact better do that anyway, HD's physically crash all the time.
Veracrypt has back-up headers located elsewhere in the volume that are unlikely to have been overwritten.
First thing's first I would strongly recommend copying the drive as it currently exists bit for bit to another drive of equal or larger size. Don't work on the original if you can help it.
Now with this copy, you should try to check the option to use the backup header when mounting and try again. If the partition is gone and veracrypt doesn't see it you'll need to try using something that recovers partitions and doesn't mind encrypted partitions or partitions or file system types it doesn't understand and use that to ON THE COPY recover and recreate the partition (this will write data and can cause the possibility of further loss or worsen your ability to recover which is why it is important to perform it on a copy). Testdesk may work for this but there are other options that probably are better.
See this list: old.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/… and choose something from there if this data is truly important. Again only work on a copy on another drive. Some of these software examples actually work against the original drive and make a copy elsewhere and should be safe to use on the original drive so long as they have you select a target drive to push the recovered data to but read the documentation. Testdisk absolutely must be used on a copy.
You will incur data loss and likely should run one of the file recovery software mentioned on the drive once successfully mounted in veracrypt to attempt to recover as much as possible.
I have a slightly different issue where I have several VeraCrypt vaults on an external that seem corrupted and don't recognize the correct passwords anymore. I'm making note of your advice to work on mine too. Is there anything particularly different you would recommend?
The only thing I would note is -IF- your volumes are not partition or disk based BUT -files- based there is the possibility that corruption of the host file system of the disk the files containing the volumes are on could result in pieces of those files being marked unreadable by the disk and it’s POSSIBLE one way to solve this would be a file system check utility.
HOWEVER such activities carry a -large- risk of data loss so I would advise a bit for bit copy of the disk and doing the repair on that so if it goes wrong you’re not worse off. -IF- you cannot make a copy then I would advise at least trying to mount using backup headers before doing that and copying off anything you can salvage as file system checks can really mess up data recovery and should only be used in certain circumstances.
You’re much better off trying the recovery software I linked in fact than doing a file system check as it will tend to have better results.
You can also use the option to mount as read only in VC to prevent writes to a suspected failing disk.
This case is due to a logical problem. Cleanrooms are only necessary for physical repairs, like swapping the Head Stack Assembly.
DriveSavers’ cost of entry for a successful recovery is about $2,000. They’ve even given that quote to an iPhone user who needed nothing more than a screen replacement.
Their “state of the art facility” is appropriate for hardware cases where money is no object and you need the best of the best to deliver results no matter the cost.
Realistically, most regular people will be well taken care of using a reasonably priced service like 300 Dollar Data Recovery.
Considering switching to Linux, but I have many questions.
Gaming - I enjoy gaming and want a Distro that will let me play most games. I have read that keeping nVidia drivers up to date can be (was?) a problem. I currently use steam for 99% of my gaming, I’m aware steam is porting a lot for SteamOS, but what are the limitations of this? Will I have to wait for a port before I can play a new game? Are there stability issues?
I’ve developed a lot of pretty basic macros for excel in Visual Basic, I’m not a programmer by any means, but I can write some algorithms to do QoL coding. Is making the switch to open office seamless? Will my .xlsx docs incur formatting issues? Will my macros translate to whatever editor is used in open office? Does open office use the same codes for cell functions? Are there statistic package add-ons like with excel? Essentially, I’m asking how much work is ahead of me if I make this switch?
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoft’s IDE?
Steam has a compatibility layer called Proton, when enabled you can play games designed to run on Windows. You can check ProtonDB to see if a game runs or you can just check by yourself.
Games that use anticheat are the most prone to not work on Linux.
Also, you don't have to move to Linux cold turkey. You can try dual boot and adapt your workflow at your own pace. GL 🙂
I can tell you macros in Excel will more than likely not transfer. As for formatting, 50/50 depending on how in-depth it is. I would advise dual booting/vm for Excel. There just is no other program as powerful. I'm not saying Libre or others can't do what your looking to do, but more than likely would need a rebuild to get there.
Agree for Excel. An alternative can be to use winapps which allow to run excel via docker (or podman) and open windows app same as if there were natively installed.
Gaming on Linux is great, steam isn't porting games for SteamOS, instead they released Proton which allows you to play just about every Windows game without issue.
I don't know about LibreOffice supporting Excel Macros, I'd assume not.
There are many good mail programs, but I think only one that properly integrates with Microsoft's cloud stuff.
Visual Studio straight up runs on Linux, it should be familiar.
Try it out and see if you get your system how you want it 😀
Gaming - I enjoy gaming and want a Distro that will let me play most games. I have read that keeping nVidia drivers up to date can be (was?) a problem. I currently use steam for 99% of my gaming, I’m aware steam is porting a lot for SteamOS, but what are the limitations of this? Will I have to wait for a port before I can play a new game? Are there stability issues?
For gaming you should keep in mind that you want a distro with decently new packages to avoid issues with Nvidia & also to have the correct drivers for some titles: fedora is good for a strong base, although I heard they are doing away with there x86 libraries... I prefer endeavor os, but you will at very least need to learn to use pacman and yay, but they aren't hard to understand if you have basic programming experience. You should also know that almost all games that are not supported on Linux nowadays are either really new, like launch day new, or they rely on an invasive anti cheat: are we anti cheat yet & proton db should give you a decent idea if your library is compatible.
I’ve developed a lot of pretty basic macros for excel in Visual Basic, I’m not a programmer by any means, but I can write some algorithms to do QoL coding. Is making the switch to open office seamless? Will my .xlsx docs incur formatting issues? Will my macros translate to whatever editor is used in open office? Does open office use the same codes for cell functions? Are there statistic package add-ons like with excel? Essentially, I’m asking how much work is ahead of me if I make this switch?
I don't have nearly enough experience with your second point, my only thoughts are that you should be looking into libre office - it's the most mature in my eyes, and open office has made a lot of questionable decisions recently. Also as a general rule, I would say there is about an equivalent amount of compatibility between the oss alternatives and the different versions of the Ms office suite, it will be noticeable, but so long as you don't live and die by formatting, it will just be mildly inconvenient.
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I believe you are looking for proton, they are the oss answer to the Ms and Google suites, I don't know if you will have quite the amount of compatibility you want between people, but if that's important just use the web versions of your preferred suite.
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoft’s IDE?
Vs code is almost entirely open source, as such, there is a project called vs codium which takes the publicly available vs code source code and keeps it fully open source, if you like the visual studio program you will hardly notice a difference.
The thing with Office is Microsoft has worked hard to keep it's monopoly. Office is it's cash cow and so they avoid standards deliberately to make it harder to move off. There are plenty of alternatives, lots of email software, etc. It's just about taking your time and moving bit by bit. You can install LibreOffice and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows to try them out. LibreOffice being what replaced open office.
Protondb - info about current state and playability of almost any game on Steam driven by community.
AFAIK many calendar apps use CalDAV protocol which is quite universal. So basically any compatible with CavDAV protocol app (Thunderbird, Evolution) will work just fine.
VS Code + some extensions - yes, I know that it is not an IDE. I use it for game development on Unity (C#) and it makes job done.
I would say, instead of trying to 100% switch over, instead dip a toe in. Dual boot, or run a seperate system as linux first. Slowly grow into it, and then if in a few years, it feels feasible, put it on as your main and have your windows system as the back up. Then maybe eventually you won't need/want a back up at some point.
I can speak to a few of your questions. I've been fully on Linux, both my laptop and gaming PC for two years now.
Gaming - I use Steam for all of my games, and have had few issues. Steam uses Proton to allow non-native games to run, and it happens all within the Steam client. New Proton versions update within Steam just like your games. I've run across a few games that wouldn't launch or would CTD, but those are few and far between and similar to my experience in Windows.
Sample of games I've played without issue: * Star Wars Jedi: Survivor * Horizon: Forbidden West * Helldivers 2 * Red Dead Redemption 2 * Dwarf Fortress * Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 * Fallout: New Vegas * Deep Rock Galactic * Sea of Stars * Factorio
I have an Nvidia 3080Ti and use the proprietary Nvidia drivers. From what I recall, the install was painless and I haven't had driver issues.
OpenOffice - I use LibreOffice, because to my understanding it is actively maintained unlike OpenOffice, and I haven't had any issues casually using it to view documents.
I use Thunderbird for my mail client and haven't had any issues setting it up or using basic functionality. It works just as well as it did under Windows.
I installed VS Code or one of the foss alternatives, can't remember which, and haven't had issues with it.
TL;DR that's really my experience with everything in Linux. Some things are a learning curve, but most stuff just works. I'm also not a tinkerer. I just wanted an OS that works and stays out of my way and Linux has been great for that.
Gaming on Linux is nearly effortless within the Steam ecosystem. Outside if that, it requires a little more technical proficiency and a willingness or excitement for learning. Lutris, Heroic, and Bottles are all tools that can help you run non-Steam Windows software on Linux. Your mileage WILL vary depending on what you want to run. Non-games are very hit-and-miss.
Use LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. Formulas should work natively, but macros may need to be reimplemented since LibreOffice Calc uses a different “Basic” than Excel.
That depends on what you mean by “Outlook”. I’d wager most Linux users automatically pick Thunderbird, which is a fairly basic mail client compared to the MS Office version of Outlook. It is comparable to the lightweight built-in Windows Outlook, though. I prefer Evolution as my mail client, which is closer to Apple Mail or Windows Outlook. Try some things out and see what you like.
VSCode and VSCodium are readily available FOSS editors. There is also Kate, which comes with many KDE-based distros. Jetbrains IDEs work very well on Linux, whether you use free community, free non-commercial, or paid versions.
Gaming - go to protondb.com and look for the games you at regularly. If something g you at isn't supported (mostly specific online multiplayer games) then you're out of luck. Most games work seamlessly.
Watch some YouTube videos about people showing how to install Nvidia drivers to get an idea of how complicated it is.
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I believe Thunderbird is still the most widely supported local mail client. (Corrections welcome, but last time I used a non-webmail email client, it seemed the most popular.) I have found Thunderbird is more stable and reliable on Linux than on Windows or Mac. And thunderbird seems to intentionally mimic older versions of outlook.
For any non-mircrosoft email provider, Thunderbird seems to usually be what the mail provider tests with, if they support non-web email access.
If using Microsoft as your email provider, I think Microsoft occasionally sabotages Thunderbird intentionally. I have not had a good experience, with this combination.
But Outlook(.com) works fine and is fully featured, in a browser on any version of Linux.
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoft’s IDE?
VSCode is the heir-apparent to Visual Studio.
It is FOSS (mostly). To get the pure FOSS version, look for VSCodium, instead. Both run natively on Linux, were destined to mimic Visual Studio, but applying some usability lessons learned.
In my opinion, the feature set is equivalent, except some cases VSCode/VSCodium is dramatically better.
I used to run Visual Studio and VSCodium side by side, but I haven't been tempted to open Visual Studio in several years.
Lots of folks mentioning VSCode as the alternate to VS, but it is very much not that. VS is an IDE, VSCode is a text editor that just has a big plugin community. Do not expect a low learning curve. The VS alternative that's an actual IDE, and does have a low learning curve, is JetBrains Rider. Unfortunately it is neither F nor OSS.
On the machine I used Nvidia on, I ran Linux Mint and used that distro's driver manager. It was fairly straightforward. I found an appropriate time to build a new machine and I'm now a Ryzen/Radeon kind of guy.
In broad strokes, what Valve has done for Linux gaming is build a compatibility layer that translates the game's calls for Windows systems into those that Linux can understand, especially translating DirectX API calls to Vulkan. So, for the most part, Windows games now "just run." You do not need to wait for a game to be ported to Linux, and in fact many just simply aren't anymore; Valve's instructions are to target Windows and let Proton handle Linux gamers. The one place you'll find issues are some games that use kernel level anti-cheat, a technology that can work on Linux, but many studios choose not to let it.
I don't know if a conversion to a FOSS office suite (I would recommend LibreOffice or possibly OnlyOffice) will be 100% seamless, the most trouble I had with LibreOffice was collaborating with others. An MLA formatted essay made in LOWriter may translate fine, powerpoint presentations and spreadsheets might be a little wonky.
The cool thing about FOSS apps is you don't have to have Linux to give them a try. You can install LibreOffice in Windows and try it out yourself.
I don't think VisualStudio is available for Linux; their text editor VSCode and a "we built the parts they opened" called VSCodium are.
Linux is an extremely programmer friendly environment; you'll find a lot of IDEs available. Your typical Linux distro ships with Python and Perl interpreters among others just built right in, along with GCC of course. I've messed around with the Godot game engine, along with Arduino, though these days if I'm going to do much programming I'm going to do it in Python, including for microcontrollers. These days I've somewhat standardized on ESP32s running MicroPython.
OpenOffice has seen essentially no development since 2011, when the trademark got transferred to Oracle after they bought Sun Microsystems.
The project got forked into LibreOffice to dodge the trademark issue, but it's the same devs, practically the same project, but now under a non-profit organization. Well, and with 14 more years of development.
So, use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. It will most likely come pre-installed on whichever Linux distro you go with. But you can also try it out on Windows beforehand, if you have concerns.
Just a headsup incase you try it on windows 11 before you do on linux:
LibreOffice, out of the box, is slow and buggy sometimes on windows 11 and the user interface doesn't look as smooth as on linux. You might have to tweak some graphics settings to bearable.
LibreOffice looks and works significantly better on Linux.
Ive personally not encountered any of the issues listed above for Libreoffice on Windows, it runs just as well on my win10 system as it does my Linux system (dual boot). That said, I have yet to try it out on Win11 amd if I do, it will be virtualized vs running on bare metal.
To me it looks you are pretty deep in MS ecosystem. The easiest to switch to Linux are developers because development on Windows sucks and casual users because they depend only on their web browser. Since you are both a gamer and deep in MS office suite it will be very hard because its completley different ecosystem.
My proposal: recreate your environment in VM and switch on linux host with that same setup. And then try get step by step over a year outside of that VM.
That randomly reminds me of a random post I saw on that other site years ago, goes something like this...
'Get 4 pigs, and paint them with numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5. Then let them loose in Walmart, and after they catch those 4, sit back and watch them look for #4...'
I miss working the pit. No customer interaction, I knew what filter and where as the car rolled in, and it was smooth. I do not miss the little burns, and being covered in oil and sweat, and the occasional smashed hand from the diff plate bolt suddenly coming loose.
Teaches a bunch of subjects and helps develop problem-solving skills; its soundtrack has zero right to be so bitchin' but it is
Was asking about this today because I couldnt remember the name or franchise and Lemmy came thru, reuniting me with yet another thing I could remember sound of but not the content or name, long thought lost to the sands of time
While not talked about as much as the Intel CPU security mitigations, Intel graphics security mitigations have added up over time that if disabling Intel graphics security mitigations for their GPU compute stack for OpenCL and Level Zero can yield a …
My garden has 3 core functions. Recreation and play, Growing vegetables and fruits, and givin nature more room. The so called Controlled Wildernes. I Love to see all the different species the are coming by. But i always want to make it better, especially the combination of space for family and nature. Ive got inspired by the book The Garden Jungle from Dave Goulson. It just gave me more ideas and motivation to protect the smal animals, and make the garden usefull for more. But what about you? What books, articles, documentary etc, did inspire or would give me some ideas to let nature have more space in af garden?
I wouldn't say any book, but the news. Our planet is failing quickly, with no concerted effort to stop it. My zone has had massive collapses in insect and wildlife year over year, and I aim to help combat that as much as possible by planting native plants, providing extra fruit and vegetables for the wildlife (I keep a decoy garden for them), and doing it all as resource conscious as possible. Nothing but good things can come from having even a few native flowering plants around for bees and hummingbirds, and going a bit of an extra mile to compost to keep the good insects that contribute to that process happy and expanding their colonies.
I grew up with smoker parents. That shit is so rank, and I grew up when smokers were extremely blasé about secondhand smoke - every room was always smoke-filled when smokers were in it, and obviously it's OK to smoke in a car with children if you open one window.
My wife and my 10th anniversary is coming up this year. She quit smoking before we got married. Years later I told her how proud I was of her quitting because it would have been a requirement of mine before saying our vows.
5 years ago she started smoking again when her father died of COVID. I was patient with her in the beginning but I have become increasingly frustrated with her unwillingness to quit. We have been looking forward to a 10th anniversary vow renewal but I told her I won't do it unless she quits. I told her I wouldn't have married a smoker. I will not remarry her while she is a smoker.
Unless you’re going about it like an asshole, no. You’re communicating, standing by your position, and setting a boundary.
She knows smoking is dangerous, she knows you don’t like it, she knows you want her to quit, she’s quit before so she knows how to do it.
Have you considered compromising with vapes? Still not as good for you as not smoking at all, but significantly healthier than smoking and doesn’t make everything smell horrific. She can get that nicotine buzz she craves with very few of the downsides. She can also then taper her nicotine content and quit that way if she decides to.
I'm trying not to to be an asshole about it. She knows my stance and I'm not budging. That said, I don't throw it in her face. In fact, I only told her once that I won't do the vow renewal until she quits. We have an otherwise perfect marriage.
We haven't had the vape conversation, but I'm not in favor of that either. You don't quit drinking by switching from beer to vodka. I honestly don't know how I would feel about her switching to vape. I hate the smell of her addiction but that's not my biggest issue. I hate the effect on her health but that's not the complete picture either. I hate the concept of a smoking addiction. It's not my identity, and I don't want it to be the identity of us as a couple. We are blue collar AF, but I still feel like her smoking diminishes us.
I used to be proud of her for quitting and staying quit. Now I'm not anymore.
That identity thing seems counterproductive. The way addictions works, you generally kind of stay addicted indefinitely even if you manage to quit and stay off the substance forever. And in contrast to beer vs. vodka, vapes are healthier than cigarettes - even if that doesn't actually change anything for you, it's definitely better for her.
Kringel-Kultur ist einfach nur Diskriminierung von Leuten die etwas "anders" sind (oder einfach nur "nicht männlich"), im etwas weniger deutlich reaktionärem Gewand.
Hättest du das gleiche geschrieben, wenn es ein Junge mit einer Fußballverein-Party gewesen wäre?
Cannabis use prevalence is actually kind of low in the Netherlands, many european countries where it's illegal have higher prevalences. Turns out, legalizing cannabis doesn't turn everyone into a stoner.
This video I'll talk about how Microsoft tried to steal a developers project by promising to help him, but then forking his work and changing his projects li...
This came out a while ago. The developer used a license that said, "Steal this software, I don't care." Then he was shocked Pikachu when it was stolen.
Stolen? It was forked as is allowed by the MIT license. With GPL as well there is no „you cannot fork” rule, you can do exactly the same thing. The author misunderstood that „you have to push the changes to upstream”, which is not in any of those licenses.
While I'm usually all for Free software (as opposed to open-source software),
His problem is the exact reason GPL was created.
Nah, his problem is that Microsoft has much billions of dollars and so doesn't give a fuck about any licenses on projects by small developers. They simply ignored even the terms of the MIT license (which required MS to keep the original copyright notice, which they didn't). GPL would've done squat here since it also allows for forking (by design), but also because the US legal system is cooked, and people don't have many rights left when it comes to a dispute with a corpo.
I was going to mention DOS, but I looked it up in the hopes of not sounding like an idiot and it turns out the history is more complicated than I knew.
This is clickbait. tl;dr a guy released MIT-licensed software, Microsoft forked and renamed it as they're legally allowed to do. Hell they could even close the source and sell it if they wanted to.
Forked it, renamed it, and changed nothing but the license on it.
What's stopping it from becoming the defacto version putting the original into the point where it's no longer worth maintaining, then Microsoft pulls it and sells it as a subscription service?
Nothing, because the author explicitly chose to allow this kind of behavior. Paraphrasing one of the Youtube comments on the video: the author picked a cuck license and then got cucked, what a shock!
It's funny how apropos cuck really is here. We all recognize that a woman (Microsoft) cheating on her husband (the guy in question) is a bad thing, but we no longer view it that way when we learn that the man consented, video taped, and gets off to it. If you really want to stop this kind of thing, simply choose a better license like the GPL that forbids this behavior.
As with a lot of 90s software, it’s a bit more complicated than which source code did they download (or, rather, mail order on floppy… because it was the 90s). Not the least of which is due to the fact that many of the projects don’t exist anymore and there weren’t that many copies to begin with.
However, they both embrace and extend LDAP and Kerberos among other open and not open projects of the time. Both choices were related to the results of the Protocol Wars and Microsoft’s attempts, in the 90s, to do to the Internet what Google is doing today.
Ist halt bei den meisten Parteien wirklich nur LARP, d.h. sie machen größtenteils nur Lippenbekenntnisse. Gerade SPD und FDP (also die Teile, die nicht ständig wie AfD-Politiker reden) sind da oft ziemlich unglaubwürdig.
Just out of idle curiosity. I went to music school and teach at a local music shop, so I'm very familiar with music theory but I'm aware that my experience is most likely not the norm.
If you are familiar with any theory (even just scales and keys), where did you pick it up? Lots of the resources I've seen both in and outside of formal education can be both confusing, and it's often hard to see the application of what you learn in the short term.
I know some basics from learning electric bass, but don't ask me about chords (beyond major and minor) or chord progressions. I'm definitely aware that this is a huge blindspot even for electronic music.
When I was previously on windows I had a lot of fun doing music production. My workflow took place in FL studio and used a lot of software synthesizers (VST files mainly).
After my switch to Linux, I am 95% better off. Everything is great except I have to rediscover a music workflow.
It's quite painful because I had licenses to some very expensive software synth libraries (The Arturia V collection for example). I have done some reading and have found that while it is possible to get FL studio working in Linux, it still doesn't have the greatest of results.
As far as that goes, I am not terribly concerned - Reaper, Bitwig, and other Linux DAW's exist and I am fine using those instead even if it means purchasing a license for the paid ones.
But the real problem is the software centers/Licenses/installations for my software synths. It would be such a shame and a waste of money if I couldn't get these working, but I don't know much about dealing with this on Linux, so I am appealing to your collective knowledge.
I wanted to ask if anyone has successfully installed the Arturia V collection on Linux for use in a DAW, and if so, what you think I should know about it. I thought I read somewhere about some software these could be emulated/installed through (not wine), but I'm just really open to hearing about recommended options for something like this if anyone knows.
Otherwise, I wanted to ask my musical Linux friends here what they have for VST's and what their workflow is on Linux, because it's always fun to develop new work flows.
As others mentioned in this thread, yabridge running in a native Linux DAW is a great setup. I personally use Reaper with yabridge, Serum, and a few other vsts here and there.
For others who are more knowledgeable than me: is there any reason (engineering-wise) why these plugins are made for Windows? Are there not cross platform and open source frameworks that let you compile audio plugins for Windows + Mac + Linux with minimal effort?
I genuinely don't know anything about audio programming, I'm just curious.
I'm pretty sure clap is completely cross platform, which is pretty cool. But the infamous VST is unfortunately not; you need to create separate Linux and Windows VSTs 🙁
Welcome and congrats on your migration under GNU/Linux.
VST is a proprietary format therefore it is made to not work on linux. On linux synth or virtual instruments are LV2 plugins (like Helm, Surge or Vitalium) or SF2/SFZ soundbank (played with Sfizz or Fluid Synth).
Now Ardour, Bitwig and Reaper can load VST plugins, but : - Some won't just work, - Some will work pretty much the same (Kontakt seems to be working for some person, but it depends on the version I think), BUT if the VSTs needs to be installed before hand (like Kontakt, Spitfire, SINE and I think Arturia V falls into that), you will have to install them first using Wine (or with a wine front-end, like Bottles, Heroic, Lutris). Then load them in your DAW, if they don't work there after being properly download and installed, I don't think there is anything much to do... ... Apart from try using a bridge (like Lin-VST or Yabridge), but here against results are still very unpredictable. I got some pretty good results with both on the past, but on my new setup none would work for my plugins (Spitfires mostly).
These companies won't make their plugins available under Linux cause 'there isn't enough people using it on linux' (words of someone at Spitfire who I was asking the question).
My workflow for production in a few words : - One PC (recording, mixing, mastering) with a midi keyboard, - One PC virtual instruments only, I use it when project requires lot of instrument tracks.
Edit : Yeah Carla can be used as well, it can load VST plugins and act like a plugin library (pretty much like Kontakt).
I am kinda confused as to why certain Linux distros are mentioned in in every others post while others seems to get litten attention or are being bashed at worst. People advertise for Mint because it's so easy to use, while I personally miss it's benefits over Ubuntu.
Personally I used KDE Neo for some time and switched to Fedora 42 a few weeks ago. It has all the same tools as basically every other distros. What is missed is not necessary or available. I can also seamlessly manage my proxmox server through ssh and fish and take up minor programming tasks on python or arduino.
Am I missing something important, or just seeing a loud minority with very specific requir?
Why are there so many different types of bread at the store? Or mustard, ketchup, milk...etc.
It's mostly personal preference and reputation. Ubuntu has a shit reputation right now because of some poor decision making, and Fedora has a solid reputation and doesn't cause problems.
It feels weird to just jump into a generic Linux community and ask a question. It's nice being so small - kinda like the internet used to be.
Anyway, I've been running Linux servers for decades but only recently switched my desktop. I first tried Debian 12 and I'm now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - I switched in the hope of getting newer drivers and maybe fixing this issue.
I have a HP laptop with onboard Intel graphics and an external monitor connected with USB-C. In general it works great - until it doesn't. From time to time the external monitor does not wake up after a suspend. Normally turning the monitor off and back on will cause some sort of driver reset and it comes back. Once or twice this has not helped and I've had to reboot.
I'm running Xorg as Wayland on Tumbleweed won't start on t his machine. Wayland may have worked with Debian, I don't recall. I don't think it's worth listing details of my versions as it's happened on two distros and through a couple of minor updates to Xorg on openSUSE. It happens with KDE or LXDE.
1) If you use the same USB port for this all the time, disable power saving on that port 2) Make sure this isn't a PD port (this is a laptop design annoyance) 3) Make sure your monitor's own power saving settings aren't the issue by disabling things like "deep sleep" or similar
Another thing to try is download Fedora LiveUSB and test it with that (it will be Wayland). If it works, then you know it's a config issue with your distro.
1) If you use the same USB port for this all the time, disable power saving on that port
I use the same port all the time. I want power saving on the port. I like to just get up from my PC and have it go to sleep by itself and wake back up when I come and jiggle the mouse. It's working exactly as I would like maybe 90% of the time. Just sometimes the external monitor doesn't wake up.
2) Make sure this isn't a PD port (this is a laptop design annoyance)
It is a PD port, and it is powering the laptop. I'm not sure why this would be a problem? It's worked fine for 5-6 years with Windows and works 90% of the time now with Linux.
3) Make sure your monitor's own power saving settings aren't the issue by disabling things like "deep sleep" or similar
Again, I'm not sure how this could be a problem for the scenario I describe. The settings work fine 90% of the time. It's not even time related: sometimes I can come to it first thing in the morning, after it's been asleep all night, and it wakes perfectly; sometimes I can get up to go get a glass of water and come back and the external monitor won't wake up. It seems totally random.
1) Power saving features may not fire on changing from sleep states. This happens on Windows as well, but the power management system in Windows disables power saving features of the port when a display is detected. In Linux you want this off for the same reasons. It doesn't prevent the machine from sleeping. 2) On waking, PD ports can cause issues with negotiation of the signal reset and changemode for displays. 3) Monitors communicate their power status over USB-C, so when your machine wakes up, it may try to fire an event that says "wake up" to the monitor, but if the monitor isn't in a state where it's expected a signal (deep sleep), then it won't wake up.
Any one of these could be the issue, but if you don't want to take steps to debug it, then just unplugging and replugging the cable will kick the monitor back up.
Does it work if you unplug and replug? If you hit a button other than power does it wake up, or does it say "no signal" or something? Does the laptop see it? Anything in any log? Can you force a redetection from the laptop?
If you hit a button other than power does it wake up, or does it say "no signal" or something?
Yes.
Does the laptop see it?
I'm assuming not as it does not display on it. Next time it happens I'll see what xrandr says.
Anything in any log?
Nothing in Xorg.0.log and nothing that seems related in the journal. I'll keep journalctl --follow running and see if anything that I didn't pick as being related comes up next time it happens.
you're running way too old a distro for what you want. debian 12 has its merits as a server, you install it and leave it be and it just works.
what you want - fluidity with power management, dock/undock, etc - although achievable with tweaking this and that isn't being worked on, not on X, not on debian 12, so it's not like those things will eventually get there. so you need a semi-modern distro, like ubuntu or fedora or even trixie.
wayland isn't new, it's default on a lot of distros since 2021 or so, so you can be sure that your use case was previosly met and solved. costs you nothing to boot e.g. F42 off a USB and try it out (has to be 42 as earlier live sessions default to X11). if you have lots of RAM, add the rd.live.ram switch so it copies the image to RAM and everything is super-snappy for testing and it doesn't touch your SSD.
Total user error on my part.... I've managed to delete all the categories on my eggplant home page. This is stopping me from seeing my watch lists. I still have the edit layout button but there are no options for categories to edit. Any help would be appreciated.
I have a subsonic instance running but I rarely listen to Albums. Stuff I really like are DJ performances like by the channel The Moment.
So I thought: why not download and self-host them before Google makes Youtube sign-in only, (like Elon and Facebook did).
That stuff is probably quite hard to organize. But the type of music simply breaks the common services, like Jellyfin, or Subsonic.
I know of funkwhale. But I'd like to keep the contents private. I just wanna listen to music at work (so being open to the web is a plus). I thought funkwhale is a bit too... "social" for me. I'm a (re)uploader, not creator.
You got any ideas? Maybe a youtube-cloner with audio-only support? (I know how to download videos already)
Edit: Of course, I'd download the sets legally, e.g. from their patreon discord, or whatever. ;)
Also: I know that restricting it to my VPN would be ideal for security and legality reasons. But that's a bit inconvenient. And I want to check my options.
Do you need a web player? I’ve got several years of a radio show on my web server and wrote a script that created an RSS feed for them. This way I can open that in any podcast player (even web based ones) to listen to it.
Doesn’t get any more secure than a battle-tested web server hosting simple MP3 files and a text file.
Convenience might be a thing, though. I’m in the Apple ecosystem so their Podcasts app shows that feed on all devices and tracks listening progress, etc.
If I didn’t have that, I’m still a lifetime customer with PocketCasts and PocketCasts Web. So, that’s that. But if you don’t have anything similar in place, a self-hosted streaming server might be the best way to go, yes.
the international avoirdupois pound, [...] is legally* defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms
So, technically, a pound is a metric weight, only a niche one whose use may or may not be permitted by local regulations.
Similar is true* of the inch, which is defined as precisely 25.4 millimetres.
* The US, UK and a handful of others collectively signed this into their respective laws in 1959. You might think we don't use the pound in the UK any more but it still shows up often in informal situations. Ditto inches and feet.
That's similar to saying "Auf Wiedersehen" translated to English is "until I see you again", therefore "Auf Wiedersehen" is technically English. Just because there's a recognised translation to a thing, that doesn't make it that thing.
If we're going to split hairs then while it's defined in terms of metric units, it doesn't scale with prefixes and factors of 10, so it can't be an S.I. unit.
I’ve been noticing this more and more in the modlogs, with it proven via the “creator” option in some instances’ modlogs that the people doing the bans were mods and not admins, and when I first joined Lemmy, one of the things that were held as a universal truth was that this absolutely could not happen.
It might be possible with 3rd party moderation tools. Just using the web interface, you can only do mod actions from a post in your community. Like, I can't ban someone from FoodPorn from a post they made in, say, PoliticalMemes. I don't have any mod options when viewing communities I am not a moderator for on my app (Connect) or the web interface for Lemmy. World or Pawb.Social, but I have seen a few mentions of more robust mod tools in other apps.
A lot of churches/temples are membership-based. You can probably still attend sermons and the like in most cases if you're not a member, but they won't let you have a wedding, baptize your baby etc. in their temple.
I want to build an app, in which you can subscribe or follow profiles or feeds from multiple platforms, including various fediverse platforms (lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica, etc), blogs, and others (no idea what else yet).
App will have optional smart filtering and sorting, and optional algorithm based on your reading habits.
The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from. It should feel like a lemmy app if you see a lemmy post, feel like Mastodon if it's Mastodon, etc. This is obviously a monumental effort, so I will have to make concessions (hence north star).
Motivation
I see the recession of multi-source or Multi-Platform feed readers (RSS) as quite unfortunate to user choice and freedom.
I think this app, will promote a few ideals of mine: - being intentional about content we want on our feed - breaking boundary between different platforms (which is the spirit of ActivityPub) - promoting open platforms: encourage non-profitting creators to make their content accessible on these platforms, and readers to read from them. - consuming internet content without data mining, addictive scrolling, and having the choice to smart filter or sort your feed.
What are your thoughts? Do you agree that this is worthwhile?
Besides blog posts (RSS), lemmy, Mastodon, and other big fsdiverse platforms, what would you want to see on this app?
I do, I've been music for a while about an app that had all my fediverse accounts in one place, a long with my email and possibly reddit (but, uh, without ads). I never check my email unless I'm expecting something and I think a big part of why is because it's a separate flow from checking my other text-based social media.
To have an aggregation tool that could seamlessly put together such different environments would awesome, but the scope can be a bit too overarching at first. My suggestion, having seen the progress of another aggregation platform (mainly for video/audio), Grayjay, is to proceed slowly at creating integrations, as effort to maintain them is potentially exponential, and then, when you feel comfortable managing the ones you already made, proceed to the next.
And unrelated, but is RSS truly shrinking? I found out about it some 1~2 years ago, and unless it's due to me using this type of technology for so little time, but it feels far more are made or keep existing than there are feeds being killed. Worse part for finding the feeds is that often they are hidden in the page's source code.
Would love to see a project like this take hold that is floss and community supported. Both Surf and Tapestry are interesting in this area but sadly proprietary.
The north star goal is to make this app give the user the feel of being officially supported by the platforms it reads from
This is the exact opposite of what I'm working on. My idea is to embrace "Protocols, not platforms" and treat all the different places are sources of content (like RSS) but with the added two-way interactivity that is enabled by ActivityPub and Linked Data.
So of course the UI will need to adapt: threaded discussion forums would be presented in a different way in relation to long form blog feeds. But luckily this is already part of the benefits from Linked Data. A Lemmy post is presented in the Fediverse as https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Page, and each response is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#note, while a blog entry from WriteFreely is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Article and an video from PeerTube is a https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Video... this information about the object type should be enough for us to figure out the best way to handle the UI.
what would you want to see on this app?
Believe it or not, I would like to have a read-only view of the Big Tech feeds. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook posts from your friends, all of that crap. Like what GrayJay is doing. The idea though would be not to interact with it, but to have a way to people to ease their way out into the open alternatives.
I am probably missing something here, doesn't Friendica fulfill those requirements in and of itself? On mobile I use Fedilab (android) to get to Friendica.
This article is a response to Tim Chambers' recent writeup, titled The Seven Deadly UX Sins of the Fediverse Web Experience (To Fix). It's a pretty great read, and I'm writing this not as a rebuttal, but to analyze and expand on the points made.
This is a musing on 7 problems that have been pointed out, with some ideas on what progress has been made to fix them.
Thank you! I've been thinking about it a lot, and I think it could be used to solve a bunch of different problems, like importing stuff from other networks, and having everything ready to go before you join an instance.
There's some UX questions that have to be figured out, the last thing I want is some super-cluttered design that asks for a million different options. Also, platforms would need to provide some necessary APIs (for registration and data import) to make it fully useable.
I agree with Tilley that many of Chambers's complaints seem Mastodon-specific, or at least not applicable to the threadiverse.
The only really big disagreement in philosophy I have is the complaint about direct messages not being private messages. We've all seen the way that private messages have been used to harass users on reddit. That direct messages don't include an expectation of privacy on lemmy is, to me, a strength rather than a weakness; something that advantages the recipient over the sender, which is the balance of power we want.
I did not use Twitter before. So I am not using Mastadon now. Because I don't give a ploop. I liked forums. Lemmy-ish...adjacent spaces are like forums. I like that. I wasn't aware that DMs are not private, so strange. But yes, many people have been harassed. When I was on Reddit, I turned off any means of communication not public. Here, I wouldn't to be honest.
My main critique is just that, within the Mastodon side of the Fediverse, the design is highly misleading about what the feature does. It resembles a normal DM feature, but the message addressing is purely handled by mentions in the message body.
Basically, it's an antipattern, causing people to accidentally mention other people in what's assumed to be a Direct Message. It's less about privacy, more about poor telegraphing of side-effects.
I think it can very well be applied to the Threadiverse.
Sin #1: The First-Move Problem - Doesn't really applies for the Threadiverse, because the instances (at least for me) do feel genuinely different, with a different culture, etc., which is one of the most exciting things for me here
Sin #2: Navigation Inconsistency - Basically the same here.
Sin #3: Remote Interaction Hell - Also the same here, right?
Sin #4: Private Mentions Aren't Really DM's - Same here, right?
Sin #5: The Phantom Social Graph - There definitely are synchronization issues on Lemmy, too (see the australian instance, which, I think has a latency of a week of so per post 😁). Otherwise because the Threadiverse is still rather small, it seems to work mostly fine.
Sin #6: The Discovery Problem - Much better on Lemmy. The algorithms are both transparent and make the threadiverse feel alive even though it has much less user.
Sin #7: Basically doesn't apply here, because you don't follow users, but can be applied for communities. And multiple of the same communities on different instances are a big problem of the Threadiverse. Also abandoned communities. PyFed solves this with topics and Lemmy also has an upcoming feature for this in v1.0 I think.
I think the most pressing issue is sin#7 if applied to communities.
In an abstract sense, I see the Threadiverse as inversion of Mastodon: instead of posting messages to a personal account, which tags may be interesting to you to discover other similar content, in the Threadiverse, users post to hashtags and who posted them is only secondary important to you, but may be used to discover more content by the same account.
I used to feel that way, but there's so much crap on that timeline, especially when you're on a bigger instance. I used to use it for the exact same thing, discovery. A lot of it is just noise to me now, though.
More like the Sean Tilley’s dream custom frontend wish.
I thought he would talk about text to speech, alternate text, auto describer, voice chat, etc.. Instead I read what Sean wants his interactions with SNS to look like. I want even custom profile music+radios! Here’s how my lemmy profile is supposed to !
Well, no, this was just responding to a critique on UX shortcomings, and highlighting how different efforts could solve various problems.
It sounds more like you're talking about one of my previous blog posts, where I was talking about a super-flexible frontend that's basically a pagebuilder. Make no mistake, I would love to see custom profile music and radios! And I agree that accessibility needs to be way better!
This article is a follow-up to an older post of mine, Towards a Greater Federated Architecture, and also a response from the wonderfully-thought out piece by Ben Werdmuller, If I Started Fresh. The goal here is to take the lessons learned from a variety of systems to propose the Fediverse platform I have always wanted to build: Postmodern.
No code has been written as of yet, but I am learning to program, from the bottom up, backend to frontend. I have some background in game design, Web development, and API clients, but I'm working on the more elusive foundational stuff. This is the only way I can possibly develop the confidence needed to build this thing.
The Fediverse, Social Web, Peopleverse, whatever you want to call it, has evolved considerably since it originally started back in 2008. During my entire time on the network, I've longed to design a platform of my own. I've learned a lot of lessons from amazing projects along the way: Hubzilla, Bonfire, Emissary, and ActivityPods have all done some really interesting things beyond what Mastodon offers to the network. I also think there's some really valuable ideas in both Nostr and Bluesky that are worth closer examination.
Before I dive into my technical brain-droppings of the past decade, let's establish a few core concepts.
Guiding Principles
1. It needs to be fun
On the surface, this might sound superfluous. What does it mean for a platform to be fun? This boils down to a few key areas that Fediverse platforms struggle with:
Ease of use - Good UX design is hard to execute well. As time goes on, I'm convinced that people want to use something without having to think too hard about conventions or side effects. They shouldn't have to dig under countless menus to find where the decentralization is.
Discovery - For the time being, the act of finding new, cool things to interact with or peruse is pretty bad. There's some promising work happening with Fediverse Discovery Providers. Regardless, discovery needs to also extend beyond simply finding stuff, and include a laser focus on finding people. Onboarding still kind of sucks, and there's a number of issues with trying to find your friends and connect with them.
Resiliency - One of the shakiest aspects of the Fediverse involves just how fragile instances can be. If an instance permanently goes down, and you didn't already have some alias set up to migrate your followers, you're dead in the water. Having to rebuild your social graph from scratch is the opposite of fun.
Control - This can mean a lot of different things: control over your timeline, control over how your space on the web looks, control over your connections, control over your data. A big missed opportunity in the space is that we'll say things like "you own your own data", but it's not exactly true. Your data mostly exists as a series of tables in a database, which can be serialized into a JSON export that you mostly can't use with anything.
It might seem like this is a catch-all, where you can throw any old thing into the guiding principle. Maybe it is. What I know is this: if the experience is bad for users, if they're getting harassed and seeing drama every day, if they don't really have much control over the platform, if they can't find their friends or cool things that interest them, then your platform is the opposite of fun.
2. Users should have maximum agency
Building on top of Principle #1, individual users should have total agency of how their experience is shaped online. This can be categorized in four ways:
Visual / Conventional - the user decides what interfaces, themes, apps, and clients they will leverage to access the network. Custom designs and behaviors empower users to make their online space truly their own.
Data Sovereignty - the user has strict controls over their data: what apps and services can use it, the extent to which different pieces are exposed to the Web, and the ability to seamlessly port the sum of that data from one place to another.
Filtering and Connectivity - users should always be given the opportunity to decide what they see on their feeds, and what other people can see from them. This could take the form of filtering out keywords, blocking users and domains, leveraging a third-party labeling service, or being able to connect to individual accounts that may otherwise be banned instance-wide for everyone else.
Of course, this isn't to say that admins and moderators don't have a suitable place in community-building and curation. It's just that solely relying on them tends to result in communities where users have minimal input on policy, and admins have absolute authority. To me, this is a major barrier towards world-wide adoption of the Social Web, which is a goal for some of us in this massive, sprawling movement.
3. The platform must move the Fediverse forward
There's some absolutely amazing developments happening in the space. Most notably, the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals project has helped many different platforms standardize on undocumented behavior. It's the closest thing we have right now for improving ActivityPub implementations, in lieu of a formal update to the protocol spec.
FEPs are the reason why groups mostly just work across a variety of systems now, and related efforts such as the Threadiverse Working Group allows NodeBB, Discourse, Lemmy, PieFed, and Mbin to federate together with minimal issues. It's not perfect, but the project is bearing a lot of fruit.
The problem is that some of the biggest projects in the space, such as Mastodon, have historically been pretty indifferent to these efforts. Often, they choose to forgo established agreed-upon FEPs to do their own thing, forcing everyone else to bend over backwards and support their unique way of doing things. At the end of the day, FEPs still aren't advancements in the ActivityPub protocol itself.
We need more Fediverse platforms to champion these collaborative efforts, both to help influence further development of the protocol as well as putting pressure on larger projects to work with the community.
4.) The experience must be unique
This might come across as wildly conceited, but I don't want to build yet another clone of a service that already exists. I mean no disrespect towards the people doing that, but I think we've barely managed to scratch the surface of what can be built. There's a certain appeal in imitating existing familiar designs and paradigms, and iterating on them to be better.
What I want to do is develop new concepts that aren't quite like anything else. Sure, there may be a passing resemblance to half a dozen different things, but I want to develop something bold. I'm tired of describing the Fediverse as "the alternative" and want so badly to instead describe it as "the future", but we have to take much bigger risks to get there.
Implementation Details
Here are some of the pipe-dream ideas I've been refining over the years. There are probably a lot of aspects that still need key considerations, some of which is still above my ability to program! I'm currently going to school for Computer Science, and practicing to make my coding skills more capable of tackling these big ideas.
Composable Interfaces
This is probably the biggest idea behind Postmodern, the platform I hope to one day abuild. What are Composable Interfaces? To keep it simple: composable interfaces are a way to construct a custom frontend with whatever data is available.
Composable interfaces are not necessarily new; prior art exists in the following Fediverse projects:
Hubzilla - You can write pages, a custom theme, and widgets using an elaborate template system. You have to write it yourself by hand, there's not really a way to preview these changes, and some of the more high-level customization has to be done by making calls to pieces of code that aren't super well-documented.
Bonfire - Customization is largely accomplished through modules, which can be bundled together into a sort of unique software distribution. So, you can choose to add a group forum module, a wiki module, and a video module, and Bonfire will snap those pieces together for you. Super interesting, kind of complicated, still yet to be battle-tested for communities.
Emissary- Really wild template system built on HTMX and HyperScript. Emissary is really different from other projects because it allows developers to dictate data schemas and actions from within the view template. A lot of contemporary developers might balk at this, because it kind of violates the MVC design pattern. However, Emissary is crazy flexible, and makes it possible for a developer to add support for custom Activity types and actions with a single template.
Dokieli - a full-blown decentralized client-side editing tool. It implements ActivityPub, Linked Data, and a swath of other technologies related to Solid. It's extremely powerful, but the interface looks like it has a significant learning curve. It's hard even for me, a Fediverse nerd with 15 years of experience, to fully grok.
Looking at these concepts, I think Emissary and Dokieli come the closest to what I want to build. The ability to build a custom UI with unique capabilities just by dictating what the template is doing is awfully compelling.
My personal head-cannon differs in one specific way: take Dokieli, and marry its capabilities with that of Emissary. Focus on the page-building, widget-building, stream-building elements, and give people the power to delve into a vast pool of social data that they can edit client-side without having to touch any template code themselves. Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out. Instead of taking inspiration from page-building tools like Gutenberg, Elementor, or Wix, my thoughts are to instead take inspiration from layer-based image editors. Each layer in the builder/inspector thing is a component, which can be altered, rearranged, and adjusted in a number of different ways. You can mix and match existing components, or compose your own from scratch by reaching into the pool of data that your account is aware of. It's not unlike the WordPress approach to Blocks in 2025...but, hopefully this approach can be more intuitive. Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement. For this to be viable, a lot of work would need to be done to overcome any potential learning curve. The tools need to be accessible, with the page layout exactly matching what the user sees on the screen.The experience could really suck if it's not implemented carefully. After all, we have to follow the first guiding principle: it has to be fun. Fighting with an editing tool is not that. I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this. To accomplish this, the most straightforward approach would be to create a core set of widgets with data types and settings, bundled together for different experiences. I'm calling these bundles-of-things complications, which can be thought of as the snapping together of atomic units to make something greater. An experience that has a lot of complications put together would pretty much work as its own frontend made of stylized, curated pieces. If this sounds way, way complicated: yeah, I know. For a social client frontend, this idea pushes a lot of boundaries. I have some ideas about how to get there (maybe use GraphQL for the builder?), but a lot of it is going to probably diverge from the standard Web application stack. I have a lot of homework to do.
Next-Gen Permissions System
I've written about this a bit before in my last article about moving the Fediverse forward, but we need to get our act together about permissions systems. Mastodon's offering is woefully lacking when it comes to granularity. Sigh. ActivityPub has these nifty things called Collections, which is really just a representation of a collection of objects. You can pretty much put any object in there, so in a roundabout way, you can create a scoped list of people you're connected with. Theoretically, you could use collections of people as privacy scopes, dictating who can see certain things, or certain versions of things.
Projects such as Bonfire have taken the logical next step, where it's possible to establish boundaries and barriers for different collections of people, under a variety of conditions. This can apply to everything from individual posts to group communities to whatever else you can come up with.
I think it's absolutely important that we build a system that not only accounts for message delivery and access, but capabilities as well. You the user should be the one that dictates whether people can see a post, boost it, reply to it, whatever. In a decentralized system, this is kind of hard to figure out, but not impossible.
Some people will disagree with me here, but I think a document database architecture might be the way to go for this whole thing. A traditional relational database might be too limiting for this kind of insane flexibility, especially when you consider how different platforms try to account for the complex data structures necessary for ActivityPub.
Pleroma, for example, historically used the jsonb data type in PostgreSQL to hold reams and reams of nested JSON data. At a small scale, it's not so bad, but ActivityPub data can grow exponentially when you're interacting with lots of people and content.
For some time now, I've been thinking a lot about Sir Tim Berners-Lee's Solid Project. When first approaching Solid, it seems super abstract and complicated. You get all these people talking about RDF, TripleStores, Quads, WebID, and a lot of other stuff. As someone that has a pretty firm grasp on Fediverse systems, Solid initially caused a vein to bulge in my temple. I went on to explain the semantics here. A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod TL;DR: Solid is kind of a specification for data, data storage, and access. It allows users to store their data in pods, and that data is represented as different kinds of documents and metadata. There is no relational database. Instead, the data in your Solid pod is used as a database itself. If you wanted to migrate all of the posts you've ever made, Solid makes it super easy to pick all that stuff up and move it somewhere else. An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data. ActivityPods manages to marry the two concepts, and does the heavy lifting to translate these documents and data into something ActivityPub implementations can understand, and vice versa. The real magic here is that ActivityPods makes the act of building ActivityPub apps relatively seamless and straightforward. Developers don't have to think about both ActivityPub and Solid. They just need to write an ActivityPub app. Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid. I still have some outstanding questions about whether ActivityPods can effectively scale up. The Solid community in general is pretty small, and ActivityPods is an even smaller subset of either Solid or ActivityPub communities. A large-scale community instance with over 100,000 users (who all individually have their own pods) doesn't feel that feasible to me.
Still, I respect everything these guys are doing, and I think about building on top of ActivityPods pretty often.
Relay-Based Supportive Infra
Fediverse instances suffer somewhat from a fragile network. In fact, I would go as far as stating that tethering user accounts to Fediverse instances is an antipattern. We've mistakenly followed this trend for a long time, and put the sum of a user's entire social graph into one server. If that server goes down for good, you're toast. A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays. Nostr doesn't have this problem, because it doesn't have instances. Instead, user accounts are free-floating, peer-to-peer identities that dispatch posts to individual relays. Instead of individual instances where everybody logs on to post, everything is done through clients. Your identity is basically a public key, tied to a profile and some posts.
What I'm advocating for isn't necessarily the prioritization of one method over the other, but a hybrid approach that includes the best of both. What if Fediverse identities could be free-floating, separate things from instances, that persist even when an instance goes down?
Suppose that the Move activity in ActivityPub was just a method for detaching the identity from one instance, and attaching to another? Or, taking the approach that Hubzilla takes, suppose that you could mirror your identity to multiple instances by attaching your identity to multiple servers? You post in one place, it shows up somewhere else, too.
Another way that relays could be useful is in attacking the notorious Discovery Problem so prevalent in the Fediverse. As Nostr has continued to evolve, different relays have emerged that specialize in specific things:
Caching
Hosting Media
Search
Premium Long-Term Storage
Theoretically, it could also be possible for relays to take on the role of Fediverse Discovery Providers. These things could not only act as an index of content and people, but conduits that pull in news, book reviews, events, and maybe even a contact directory. Maybe your instance could just subscribe to relays, rather than trying to broker message dispatching and pulling in new content itself.
A Single-Identity Ecosystem
Finally, we get to what I consider to be the Achilles heel of today's Fediverse. As highlighted in previous sections, I think we do a terrible job of handling identity. In fact, we don't really do any job at all. Sigh Part of the problem here is that every Fediverse server in the network is a full-blown platform, rather than a client. The decision of the Mastodon project was to forgo the Client-To-Server part of the ActivityPub spec, instead opting for a bespoke API of its own. Mastodon's API grew so popular that many other Fediverse platforms adopted it, just to have access to a vast amount of compatible apps.
The primary side effect of every Fediverse server being a platform instead of a client is that every platform needs its own account to be used. This quickly leads to a nightmare scenario where it's possible to have 15 different accounts floating around that don't actually connect to each other in any meaningful way. Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile. Granted, the Client-To-Server API has its fair share of complaints. It's under-documented, clients are expected to handle all logic on the client side, and seemingly nobody uses it anyway. However...it still exists, can be improved upon, and could be used in conjunction with ActivityPods.
I'm greatly interested in the prospect of building ActivityPods apps that work with Postmodern, where you're really just viewing different crafted experiences in specific clients.
In Conclusion
Congratulations on getting to the end of my big, weird rant about how I'd do things. Some of these ideas remain unproven, and may not actually be the solutions I end up going with. Still, much of this exists as the byproduct of lessons learned from observing different Fediverse platforms evolve over time. I hope to start by building small prototypes to test out various ideas.
Some of this (all of it?) might be super convoluted and complicated. The biggest thing I want to focus on, however, is the experience of building composable interfaces. I think this idea really has legs, and could potentially be a radically different approach to building for the Social Web.
If you have any insights, ideas, suggestions, or critiques, please feel free to reach out! This article was, believe it or not, something of a shortlist. There's a lot of things I didn't discuss (Bluesky-styled labelers, custom feeds, etc) that still belong in this vision somewhere. For now, these are simply the topics most resonant to me, that I wanted to pay special attention to.
German has the cool feature of just cramming a bunch of words together to make a new word. That's about the only thing I know about it as someone who's just interested in language as a concept.
For people interested in language who speak English, I will recommend this book, which kinda blew my mind explaining why my native tongue is so stupid for good reasons:
Well, English prefers genitive constructions, and rarely compounds more than two words, so native English speakers have trouble to parse words like Kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedencomitéleden, Speciallægepraksisplanlægningsstabiliseringsperiode or Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, despite compounding being a core feature of Germanic languages, not only German. English just cought a severe case of French back in 1066..-
I hope you're aware that words like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz aren't exactly easy to understand for Germans, either. If there's one thing English is usually really good at, it's dumbing things down to a level that's easy to understand for the reader; some scientific texts are genuinely easier to understand in the English translation than in the German original, even if you're a native German speaker with a relevant university degree.
Technically Schyzerdütsch is High German (you could even say it's the Highest German, considering elevation), while what most Germans call 'Hochdeutsch' is actually standard german (which, to be fair, is mostly derived from High and Middle German dialects, as opposed to Low German (and Middle German is much more similar to High German than to Low German)).
I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.
I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.
After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.
I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.
Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.
The problem is probably unrelated to the firmware, and caused by some other upgrade.
After experiencing the issue, you should be able to switch to a different tty with ctrl-alt-f6 (or any other f key), log in, and check journalctl -b for an error message. Edit: Use the End key or shift-G to scroll to the end of the journal.
Successfully made it to a different tty with ctrl-alt-F5 and was able to run journalctl -b
I'm not entirely sure what error I'm looking for here in particular so I'm taking a guess that "Activation request for 'org.freedesktop.XYZ' failed: The systemd unit 'dbus-org.freedesktop.XYZ.service' could not be found." is the one I'm looking for (XYZ because there are a few of these such errors with just the XYZ changing between them).
I was hoping you had f-6 which was causing all sorts of problems for amd and intel users but you have f-9 which purports to fix them all. The next question is are you using Plasma with X11? If you are, the have a look at archlinux.org/news/plasma-640-…
I am indeed using X11. I tried using Wayland ~a few months ago (on one or both of my setups, wish I could remember) and it did not work very nicely for me so I just stuck with X11, which so far has worked perfectly for what I do.
He must have been going to a party, he had catan, he had uno, and he had Scrabble way up at the top. His stack wasn't balanced very well though, and Scrabble fell, the box burst open, spilling tiles everywhere.
So I went up to him and asked, "what's the word on the street?"
Today I can share a major development status update of XPipe, a connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors, and more without requiring setup on your remote systems. You can also keep using your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it.
Docker compose
This release introduces support for docker compose. Containers in compose projects are grouped together and can be managed all at the same time via compose project entries.
The container state information shown is also improved, always showing the container state in combination with the system information.
Batch mode
There is now a batch mode available that allows you to select multiple systems via checkboxes and perform actions for the entire batch. This can include starting/stopping, automatically adding available subconnections, or running scripts on all selected systems.
You can toggle the batch mode in the top left corner.
Password managers
The password manager integrations have been upgraded: - There is now support for KeePassXC - All password manager integrations have been reworked to work out of the box without configuration - There is now support to use password manager SSH agents more easily - You can now unlock the xpipe vault with your password manager
SSH
Various improvements were made to the SSH implementation: - The SSH gateway implementation has been reworked so that you can now use local SSH keys and other identities for connections with gateways - The VSCode SSH remote integration has been reworked to allow more connections it to be opened in vscode. It now supports essentially all simple SSH connections, custom SSH connections, SSH config connections, and VM SSH connections. This support includes gateways - There is now built-in support to refresh an SSO openpubkey with the opkssh tool when needed - There is now the option to enable verbose ssh output to diagnose connection issues better - For VMs, you can now choose to not use the hypervisor host as SSH gateway and instead directly connect to the VM IP
Other
Connection names, e.g. VM names, will now automatically update on refresh when they were changed
You can now launch custom scripts within XPipe with a command output dialog window without having to open a terminal
Various installation types like the linux apt/rpm repository and homebrew installations now support automatic updates as well
The k8s integration will now automatically add all namespaces for the current context when searching for connections
The application window will now hide any unnecessary sidebars when being resized to a small width. This makes it much easier to use XPipe in a tiling window arrangement
The webtop has been updated to have terminal multiplexers, proper konsole tab support, disabled kwallet, and more
Various error messages and connection creation dialogs now contain a help link to the documentation sections
A note on the open-source model
Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.
Outlook
If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub, visit the Website, or check out the Docs for more information.
Giving it a quick scan, it does look interesting. I am not sure whether I will try it as I don't see the need to visualise beyond what I can do with a shell and the openstack dashboard, but there can definitely be use cases for it.
Not being FOSS is the deal-breaker though. Not sure if I am too much of a sceptic but I prefer open source when having software that accesses my private key/servers.
I think if you have a specialized tools with openstack, XPipe probably can't compete with that in that area. But it can make your life easier in a lot of other areas and common tasks when it comes to accessing many servers.
About the FOSS requirement, I know that this is a dealbreaker for some. That is a tradeoff when going the commercial route
Yes, it is absolutely valid that you decided to commercialise your project and keeping parts or all of the code closed. As I work in the public sector and we are encouraged to use open source and write open source software, my knowledge regarding closed software solutions is thin. Is there a "standard way" how closed software is able to guarantee private key safety? I could imagine solutions where there is a separate handler that is open source so that one can verify that only specific information is passed into the closed software area, but this doesn't sound feasible when talking about full terminal support within the closed software.
Again, there is nothing wrong with going commercial! I am sure I will release closed software (side projects), too, at some point.
I think in the end you still have to exercise some trust. There are things like audits, but these are costly and not an option in the current stage. Maybe in the future. Best I can do is to provide transparency by open-sourcing large parts of the codebase and providing detailed security information like docs.xpipe.io/reference/securi…
As someone who sometimes sells to the german public sector, it is true that they would prefer a good open source solution if it was available. But me being a german vendor makes up for it, as they still prefer this a lot more over any US-based vendors.
In general about the key handling, XPipe doesn't read any kind of keys itself, it only forwards them to the local OpenSSH client. It is essentially a wrapper around in existing ssh client, and doesn't implement anything related to key handling itself.
Due to its nature, XPipe has to handle a lot of sensitive data. This can range from passwords for all kinds of servers, to SSH keys, and more. Therefore, the security model of XPipe plays a crucial role.
Are there any plans to make a Flatpak version of this? I've moved to an immutable OS and none of the options you have will install. Flatpaks are their preferred method. I know I could self host my own version which may be what I may end up doing anyway, but I'd prefer to have it more local yet another docker container. 😀
Nope, an application like this can't work as a flatpak as the sandbox prevents almost all shell functionality and makes the application unusable. Yes, the AppImages are basically the best solution for immutable operating systems.
The point is the Linux Kernel is covering the same security mitigations which make the CPU level ones redundant. If all users are using the Linux Kernel, why would it be an issue?
Depends on how you use your system if you have multiple users. CPU mitigations wont protect GPU workloads, and vice versa. If your CPU was mitigating GPU workloads, that would probably be a massive performance loss.
The vulnerability is all on the CPU side. The GPU workloads being referenced are only vulnerable on the CPU instruction set used to pass workloads to the GPU.
Talking about CPU and GPU workloads as entirely separate in this context is misleading as the vulnerability is with CPU code execution that passes tasks to the GPU.
The GPU is not vulnerable to this particular attack, only the CPU is.
As you can see here impacted hardware is all CPU side, you can also read about how the proposed attacks work.
Forgive me. Just trying to understand. How does the kernel flag NEO_DISABLE_MITIGATIONS have any affect on the CPU? Seems to be targeted towards OpenCL and Level Zero, which are APIs to access GPU hardware directly.
One thing Ubuntu users should know is that the change will only provide performance boosts when GPUs are handling workloads running the OpenCL framework or the OneAPI Level Zerointerface. That likely means that people using games and similar apps will see no benefit.
OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel
programming of diverse accelerators found in supercomputers, cloud servers, personal computers,
mobile devices an…
I am all in favor of this. There are beer flights at so many restaurants but tiny strong & delicious cocktails with small foods would be such a great starter to a meal. Something bitter but not enough to get drunk and not be able to enjoy the food.
When I am working up a recipe, often I will invite people over and make 4 different versions but then split each drink into 4 little dixie cups so that each of us have only one drink's worth of alcohol. That doesn't fix the drink getting too warm problem but does let us test them clear headed.
Using downsized recipes is pretty standard for me when I'm drinking at home. For a lot of cocktails, half-size or third-size is just fine, especially when you start experimenting with ingredients and ratios. And I have something of an issue with actually committing to a full-size drink (i.e. I often get bored of it halfway through).
However, one of the biggest barriers to entry is the need for smaller glassware, which, while not impossible to source, is limited in its variety. “Where I see a lot of room for improvement is tiny rocks and tiny Highball glasses,” Zielinski says, noting that miniature coupes or diminutive Martini glasses are more readily available.
This is definitely an issue. I've been using stemmed liqueur glasses for small Martini-style cocktails, but even in somewhat smaller rocks glasses a half-sized Old Fashioned-style drink just looks lost.
I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.
I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).
Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.
It should be a thing! Linux has lots of games now. Linux has lots of games with mods. Linux needs mod managers! Voice your want for it here, discuss, and best: contribute to the open source code for Vortex! :3 Link to the development forum where ther…
Oh amazing. Seems like it's still in early development and only supports Stardew and Cyberpunk but I look forward to it being more mature and supporting more games.
I used vortex it works pretty for windows games there no difference for mod manager where to work cause it think that it windows and files hierarch in windows prefix as is it expect vortex .So simply just install vortex in same wine prefix where u had installed before and that's it.
TLDR: ModOrganizer 2 works well under Linux (native) with Steam, and does not require any install scripts, Lutris, or otherwise. This process can also fix broken installs from scripts that went awry,
Protontricks can help for some games. Personally I used it to install Openplanet for Trackmania which doesn't have any sort of explicit Linux support specified.
What Protontricks does is allow you to run installation files within the context of a steam game, as you mentioned. Simply launch Protontricks and select the game you're trying to modify and it will mount it properly for you. Then choose "Run an arbitrary executable (.exe/.msi/.msu)" and proceed to run the installer as you would normally.
Sometimes the path can still be a bit janky. For example when Openplanet wanted to install to the Trackmania directory as mounted through Protontricks, I had to specify: Z:\home\.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Trackmania.
I'm not sure why one of those is flagged. From what I can see its just the obnoxiously written write_file.content one-liners and lots of regex/sed, but nothing looks wrong with what its doing.
For Bethesda (and other compatible games), ModOrganizer 2 via SteamTinkerLaunch has worked reasonably well for me. There’s some jank involved but nothing terribly complicated for anyone who’s already used to Linux gaming hoop jumping. STL also supports Vortex but I’ve never personally tried it.
<br />To add in about game modding on Linux:
https://github.com/limo-app/limo
https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.limo_app.limo
Limo is a universal mod manager that is linux native.
And I do mean universal. It’ll work with literally any game, you just have to take a bit of extra time to configure things for games that do not yet have a supported preset configuration out of the box… but at this point, that includes most games that are generally reliant on some kind of mod manager type program on Windows, to keep track of 10s or 100s of simultaneous mods.
It works very much along the same lines as something like Mod Organizer 2, though there are some differences, read the wiki.
It sets up a virtual file system that allows mods to be set up outside of the main game directory itself, and will override them such that the mods actually load, but they can be ‘undeployed’ to revert back to vanilla, you can set up different profiles of different mod configurations and deploy/undeploy what you like.
It can also manage load orders, supports formats such as fomod and similar for games like Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim, you can set up tags and category groupings, and it also shows you conflicts between mods down to the specific files, showing you a chain of overwrites to the final file from the final loaded mod.
It doesn’t support things like LOOT, which purport to autogenerate correct load orders… but frankly, thats fine, because shit like that doesn’t even work properly in situations you’d use it in on Windows 90% of the time.
EDIT: Wow, apparently it does support LOOT now, it did not a few updates ago.
…
I have successfully gotten FONV working using Limo to set up uh… there’s a variant of the Viva New Vegas mod setup guide aimed at Steam Deck users, but it tells you to set up Mod Organizer 2 on the Deck… which you can do, but its rather input laggy and there are other inconveniences…
Here it is, Mirelurked Viva New Vegas:
https://ashtonqlb.github.io/mirelurked-vnv/intro.html
I had to alter a few steps from this to get it working with Limo, but they were basically just… set up Limo instead of MO2, and you have to handle NVSE a bit differently, because it literally replaces/overrides the entire main game exe.
…
I have also used Limo to mod Cyberpunk 2077, works with more in depth frameworks like CET, RedExt, etc, as well as using the Decky Framegen plugin to insert FSR 3.1 Upscaling and Framegen into CP77, which gives better quality and fps than the official FSR 2 and 3 implementations that come with the vanilla game and are vanilla supported on a Deck.
You basically just have to launch the vanilla game via the normal launcher first, check the ‘enable mods’ switch, fully load the game…
Then you can set up the Framegen mod, which adds a custom command in steam to the launch parameters… and then you can also setup the ‘skip intro’ mod, which is reliant on both the mod being present, as well as additional command line parameters…
There are a bunch of reddit posts complaining that the FrameGen mod doesn’t allow other additional launch arguments, but they are wrong.
All you have to do is append those additional launch args … at the end of the FrameGen mod’s launch arg. This just doesn’t seem to be explicitly documented anywhere, by anyone… I may have been the first person to figure this out?
Anyway, after that bit of silliness, setting up other mods for CP 77 using Limo is fairly straightforward.
…
… I am doing all this on Bazzite on a Deck, but you could do it on… presumably any linux distro that supports flatpaks and proton (the translation layer that allows Windows games to run on Linux).
There will always be a few ‘weird’ mods that are just totally reliant on a whole bunch of Windows specific things to work, or just cannot be made to work without actually overwriting some core game files in the main, real directory itself…
And, some of these mods will require a windows component dependency, like vc_2017 or vc_2022, you set those up with something like ProtonTricks or SteamTinkerLaunch to modify the proton config per game, instead of trying to install the exe system wide as 99% of the windows oriented mods will tell you to do…
But so far, I have found either my own solutions for these cases, or someone else already has, or someone has just made basically a linux compatible equivalent for such a windows reliant mod.
… You can also just choose to run MO2 on Linux, it will work, its just… buggy, and overlycomplicated, imo, you’ve got to set up a custom wineprefix for the MO2 UI to not do dumbshit, give it thr dependencies it needs, and then you’ve got to do this for each different game you want to mod with MO2.
I found that Limo is sufficiently capable and much less hassle to use once you take the time to understand its differences from MO2.
I’m not super-familiar with mod managers in general but my experience has been that they just work with proton more than you might expect. I know for sure that unity mod manager works fine in proton; I use it for railroader.
I use Limo, it takes some getting used to after using Mod Organizer 2 for so long but it gets the job done. I havent used it for any huge modlists yet though as it tends to be a little buggy/unintuitive sometimes.
There's also a way to get MO2 on linux, should he on github as modorganizer2-linux-installer.
It's using OverlayFs to lay mods on top of the game files which allows for easy switch-arounds of mod sets while keeping each mod separated in their own folder. It's based upon config files and allows to freely collect mods in sets, even nested.
It's probably full of unnoticed bugs because I'm the only one using it, but it works 🤷 I do have a bunch of convenience stuff queued up locally though. They need a bit of polishing but soon it's ready for another push.
I tested in these games - ls -1 "$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/mod-manager": * Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.toml * Cyberpunk 2077.toml * FlatOut 2.toml * Gotham Knights.toml * Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.toml * Ready Or Not.toml * Stellar Blade.toml * The Witcher 3.toml
very niche but i think it deserves a mention: the Outer Wilds mod manager doesn't just support Linux natively, but it even has a CLI version, and it's up on AUR and Flatpak
as others have said though, r2modman/thunderstore manager also runs in an appimage and works perfectly well for games it supports, and MO2 and Vortex work more or less alright if they're in the same prefix as your game or potentially even if they aren't.
It's not ready yet (preview state) but NexusMods is developing an app for managing all their mods: github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMod… for Linux they're releasing both an appimage and a standard setup.
I am using r2modman most of the time and it works well for the modded games I play on my machine. I uses Thunderstore so it might not have the biggest library of mods for all your titles but it's worth mentioning imo.
I suggest Prisim Launcher for Minecraft, but if you also play other games and want mods I can recommend r2modmanPlus they have a appimage and platform specific builds that you can download and its opensource!
I haven't done it a lot, but running a Windows mod manager in the same prefix as the game should work where there isn't a Linux native version available.
I've not really tinkered with any kind of settings and just use Steam's default which is to have a separate C: drive for every Proton game, so does that mean I'd need a separate install of a mod manager for every game? Ideally I'd like to have just one mod manager that recognises all my games (that are supported by the mod manager at least)
Depending on the game and comfort with bash scripting you can roll your own mod managers. I don’t really play Minecraft anymore, but if I did it would be heavily modded. In an effort to avoid installing a client/launcher beyond the one I already use I just keep folders for mod lists and configs, and then have bash scripts with aliases to do all the necessary file moving to swap between mod packs.
This doesn’t really work for most other games, but for things that run natively on Linux can usually do the trick.
For things running through proton it’s a bit more involved, but I also found a lot of satisfaction in figuring out how to manually install mods within the proton prefix. Used to have to do that a lot to mod Skyrim when it first came out and I got it running through wine on a school issued MacBook.
github.com/sonic2kk/steamtinke… for when you need MO2 or Nexus (that isn't Stardew). Keep in mind this will install a new instance of the app for each game you use it with (in its proton prefix folder).
github.com/Nexus-Mods/NexusMod… is the current version of the new Nexus Mod Manager App, which has linux support. Currently it only has game support for Stardew Valley.
As many others have said, go with PrismLauncher for Minecraft. Modrinth's launcher works fine too, but doesn't have curseforge support.
Cue up your ad blocker, a short and easy to implement list from J Morgenthaler - make sure your recipe doesn't suck, use stronger ingredients, and ice ice baby, keep cold drinks really cold.
Let’s be honest, there are a million versions of every cocktail out there online these days, and most of them are fairly terrible.
That sounds more like a matter of taste and making sure that you actually have the same ingredients (or knowing how to adjust if you don't) as the person who made the recipe.
CachyOS looks really good, and I want to try it. But what's the effect of being sponsored by cloudflare? Is it FOSS? Does it collect data? What's Cloudflare getting out of the sponsorship?
They're fighting against AI scrapers, are objectively one of the best CDN providers and they offer a quite decent DNS resolver service. I wouldn't call them trash.
A paramilitary is a military that is not a part of a country's official or legitimate armed forces.[1] The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of the term "paramilitary" as far back as 1934.[2]
In addition to the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) having to decide on whether i686 support should end for Fedora Linux (including multilib), another contentious proposal is on replacing the X.
While that's true, but the main issue here is the unavailability of frequent security patches that Fedora now appears to be attempting to solve with X11Libre.
From what I understand, xorg has fundamental security flaws. How will they remedy this?
They won't. Don't download random shit and if you're worried, run it in Flatpak
What happens when the Linux kernel drops support for xorg? Do they intend to fork an older version of the kernel in order to keep support?
Not really possible, since X11 is only built on top of the kernel's graphical interface (same as Wayland). Even if that wasn't the case, the kernel doesn't delete any code that anybody uses (that's why 30 year old programs still run)
Yeah, I love to see people being called "racist" over not liking corporate facades, or "neo nazi" over referencing a clown. Always very productive.
There's a simple solution to this: if Red Hat doesn't like the guy or his code, don't fucking use it. They're the ones who banned him from Xorg and reverted his changes.
Actually, why do I expect a corpo to be morally or ideologically consistent? Silly me...
Considering the overwhelmingly negative feedback, I am hereby withdrawing this Change proposal. The reasoning is twofold: I have always argued that Changes that are overwhelmingly rejected by the community should not be approved by FESCo.
For the sake of all of our sanity, I'd really appreciate if FESCo could decide on this one really quickly (e.g. putting out a statement) and avoid what could be a most unpleasant flame-fest on this mailing list.
Don't worry, this ugly thing is just a mockup. There's a lot to figure out.
Again, this is just conceptual. A whole lot of things need refinement.
I wanted to draw more widget ideas, but I need to finish writing this.
Sigh.
A file manager, representing files in a Solid Pod
An ActivityPods instance. All of these applications access the same pool of data.
Mastopod, an ActivityPub social app that uses Solid.
A Nostr client's network settings, showing many different relays.
Sigh
Reimagining various platforms as client frontends instead, using the same profile.
cheese_greater
in reply to cm0002 • • •cheese_greater likes this.
thesohoriots
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toomanypancakes
in reply to thesohoriots • • •That sounds delicious what
I need to find this