Linux

UPDATE: It's a physical/hardware issue. I did some more plugging and unplugging and tried the live disk. It's my wireless keyboard and mouse. I'm still not sure what the cause is since they were running fine.

At some point in October or early November, my Cinnamon desktop started acting up.

Whenever I press the "Ctrl" key on the laptop keyboard or the Bluetooth one, it starts zooming in, if the program has that capacity. For example, it does it in LibreOffice and Firefox but not Terminal or Nicotine+.

I checked the keyboard shortcuts and bindings but I didn't see any issues there.

At the same time, the mouse/trackpad is misbehaving. This is much more frustrating because it's inconsistent and challenging to recreate.

The easiest example to use is Nicotine+. When I click on a tab, it scrolls through the previous tabs until it gets to the main one.

It won't happen in other programs with tabbed screens, but I'll get a similar behavior in some drop-down boxes or using autofill - the list won't remain open. I'll click to open and it opens for a split second.

I don't have a ton of additional programs and I don't get into the nuts and bolts - I only run the recommended updates. I don't know of anything that changed.

I have a Debian USB ready to go in case I can't get anywhere with this. I'm also posting this in a couple of Mint forums.

Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).

The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.

Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.

So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that "lightweight" stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.

I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.

I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It's also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.

pmOS doesn't come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It's barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.

YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.

I'm not sure if it's the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn't either (don't care for it).

Long story short:

I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It's now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40849372

I'm looking at starting a small local Linux Users Group (LUG).

What are good easy ways to get started?

Seems like meetup.com is kinda anti-foss.

Are there better alternatives?

Hi there, I am looking for a way to limit the time the system allows me to spend in program x.
Basically, I want it to go: Oh, you've been playing that for 2 hours. Now, time to touch some grass.

I couldn't find any existing programs for that, only screen time clients, which is not what I am after. Any ideas?

OS: Linux Mint

Sober is exclusively available on Flathub, whom published these figures in their Year In Review: https://flathub.org/en/year-in-review/2025

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40805695

I have two machines:

• 2014 Mac Mini
• HP Pavilion g7

Mac Mini 2014:

Very slow, probably can no longer be updated, nor can it run worthwhile programs.

HP Pavilion g7

Extremely bulky, chunky, and doesn't even turn on unless it's plugged in. It's basically a desktop since the battery doesn't hold a charge.

I put Linux on it (Mint I think) a few months ago as a weekend experiment.

Question:

What should I do with them? Are they worth salvaging? Should I simply donate or recycle them?

I was thinking I could use at least one of them as a home media server or something so that I can disconnect my Smart TV from the internet, but I'm not sure if they will hold or how I would even control them from my phone (Android) if I'm sitting on the couch.

Open to all ideas. I'm somewhat technical (perhaps far less than the Lemmy community), but I don't know much about Linux or the command line unless I'm given step by step instructions on how to do something.

I've been running gaming benchmarks on Fedora, CachyOS, etc. With an RX 7900 XT at 6016x3384 (Apple Pro Display XDR) for the past few years. Over 700 games tested with MangoHud overlays showing FPS/frametimes and more. As far as I can tell, this is the only dataset of its kind - most benchmarks cap at 4K, and almost none test native Linux (vs Windows or Proton comparisons). I'm trying to figure out how to make this more useful to the community. Currently it's all on YouTube (channel: GreenMinusBlue), but I'm working on extracting the raw data into a searchable format. Questions for the community:

Would a structured dataset (CSV/JSON) be useful to anyone? Any games you'd want to see tested at extreme resolutions? Best way to preserve this kind of data long-term?

First of:

Can I run regular Linux apps? How?

2nd:

Are there any games made for the 603, or ported?

THANKS!!!

Have you ever decided to do something truly devious with your Linux computer? I'm talking the elite hacker shit. I'm talking the stuff they don't dare talk about at Defcon. I'm talking crossing a line you can't uncross, the things that get your civil rights revoked and summon the black helicopters. Things like watching a DVD or inkjet printing a photograph you took with a digital camera.

Normal people can't just do heavy shit like that, man. A lot of them won't even make it through installing VLC, watch them try to grok the difference between Fedora repos, Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub. Then, how many of them do you think will figure out how to go to File > Open Disc. Your uncle that hunts and pecks at 2 words a minute can't fit that idea in his head because "Play DVD" is taking up too much room for "Open Disc" to fit.

Then it bombs out with a cryptic error message that doesn't even display in white text in dark mode, because your Linux computer doesn't have the DRM shit required to play a DVD. That is going to require one of these:

sudo dnf install libvcss libvcss-data libvcss-common libvcss2 ffmpeg ffmpeg-common ffmpeg-dvdcss

and if that was an APT command, that'd be the end of it because it would work. NOT ON FEDORA. I've never seen one of those "install seven packages" commands work on Fedora. Ever. Because DNF is more pedantic, it's libvcss-common4.2.2beta now, stop deadnaming the penguin flavored DLL.

Oh and your inkjet printer? No we don't do that anymore. We do driverless basic bitch document printing now, we removed the drivers from any repos out there and made it so that DNF won't install the ones offered by Epson themselves, because this shall not be done. You want to put a glossy photo of your house cat, in a frame, IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME?! I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional Epson XP-830 is extremely not on it because we saw what you did that one time and we won't forgive you.

Seriously, software management on Fedora is goddamn unlivable.

Since its looking more and more that popularity of linux is going to keep rising, I'm kind of worried about how corporations will respond. Way they do things has always been either just trampling weaker things or corrupting them if they cant. Has this topic been considered before in linux communities?

I really like everything about how linux related things work; how application repositories are full of nice things that fellow users have made because they wanted to and not necessarily to make money out of them. And the general wibe of being made for community by the community. And I want it to stay that way.

I think at some point, big corporations like microsoft or google will try adding their crap to the repositorys and try to make them used by majority. Maybe they will also try worming in into the development projects themselves and keep making things more compatible with their own systems or gain more influence over how things are done. Or maybe they are already doing this, i dont know.

I'm quite certain things will escalate more as linux usage rises, as it will directly mean less profits for the corporations (or less perceived profits, you know how they are). And if these things are not considered beforehand, it means the corporations will be able to do more damage before its reacted on and it might be too late by that point. At least that is how i feel about it.

Just a simple run down of DistroWatch's best distros of the year.

Currently using Linux Mint Mate and I gotta agree with them that it's pretty fucking great. Whats everyone's favorite distro of 2025?

Hello, as an audiophile I'm searching for a player with local statistics, I'd like to maintain my datas (listens, favs, etc) locally in my drive and, if possible, sync these infos thru something like Syncthing to another PC. Would be nicer a player that shows these stats in a cool way, similar to streaming services like Spotify.

I've been generally running various different ways of backing up files to my NAS (which then backs up to other locations...) - mostly syncthing for photos and large collections of files, but I tend to use rsync to push out config backups to the NAS once something's working.

But, the NAS is only powered up a few times a day (to save on electricity costs), which is fine for manual pushes, but makes scheduling backups a bit tricky.

It dawned on me that it might be better for the NAS to pull the files via rsync instead of pushing them.

Anyone tried this route and have any advice?

Hello all, looking for a good autotiling window manager that is wayland based but is NOT hyprland. Sway seems to be an option but I don't really want to install a plugin to make it autotile... Anyway, does anybody else have any other suggestions?

TL;DR: The big tech AI company LLMs have gobbled up all of our data, but the damage they have done to open source and free culture communities are particularly insidious. By taking advantage of those who share freely, they destroy the bargain that made free software spread like wildfire.

I see these two as the main search results

• https://github.com/Martichou/rquickshare
• https://github.com/nozwock/packet

Anybody here who has tried both care to give a comparison? I'm on Fedora 43 and have been using Flatpaks quite a bit over the old 3rd party yum/dns repo method for supplemental stuff like this. I guess that gives Packet a bit of an edge for now, as the rquickshare dev uses a 3rd party framework that doesn't yet support Flatpaks. But if the consensus is that rquickshare is better then grabbing the RPM directly is an option.

~~Ho-tay. Longtime GNU/Debian user here. First time I'm ever touching Wine to launch a Windoze application. The application I'm trying to run is YUMI, which is (Your USB Multiboot Installer), aka PenDriveLinux. Site's been around forever (2002?) and I've used this tool pre-Linux days. Good tool.

Link to official site: [(https://pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/)]

~~Followed everything to the T, no dice when doing wine YUMI-exFAT* in the same directory YUMI-exFAT*.exe is in. I get two errors: Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file. ShellExecuteEx failed: File not found.

Searched online, and retried this time with wine64 and wine32 arriving at the same above 2 errors.

So then I went through WineHQ's step-by-step installation for Debian 12 "Bookworm" stable. Retried, same 2 errors.

Running wine explorer to get a GUI of WINE going, I'm able to reach the Windoze YUMI*.exe file, it is listed as an Application under the Type column... and I throw an "Invalid Handle" error when launching from there.

What am I missing here? edit:link~~~~

Downloaded YUMI*.exe again, and this time it worked. Corrupted previous file, disregard the above.

Hi all,

I made this post about a year ago: https://lemmy.ca/post/31760258

At the time, I was going to switch a couple laptops over and if all went well, put Linux on my main rig.

I just wanted to provide an update on my own experiences, and wanted to see what other people's experiences were like.

I put Mint on both my laptop's, and enjoyed it. Familiar enough to Windows where I could mess around with things, but different enough that I could learn. After 7 or 8 months of rocking Mint, I finally put Bazzite on my main rig. I did during the work week, which on hindsight was a bad idea because I also run Windows on my main rig as my work requires Windows, but I accidentally deleted my Windows bootloader (lol). After an evening of panic, I was able to recover the bootloader, set Bazzite up with dual booting, and it's been smooth sailing since.

I'm a pretty big gamer, play lots of games with a bunch of friends, and after about 3 months of using Bazzite, I have not run into a SINGLE issue that has prevented me from playing anything. I have been shocked at how smooth everything has been. In the morning, I boot into Windows, work for the day, and then when I'm done I just run boot-windows through Steam or reboot to get into Bazzite and then I'm gaming.

I have done a little bit of tinkering with audio to get my desk mic to work correctly, but it's been great!

For others who have recently made the switch over, what was your experience like? Any issues? Any tips or helpful suggestions to share?

Cheers!

Once upon a time circa 2011-12, Ubuntu could pluck out the applications' menu bar (the 'File'/'Edit'/'View'/... thing) and display it at the top of the screen, like it's done in MacOS. Brief searching shows that this was just a setting in Ubuntu's system preferences, which doesn't quite inform as to how it was done. But iirc this was before Ubuntu has gone Gnome 3, and thus wasn't specific to GTK 3 — though the 'Activities' in the screenshot below suggests otherwise; and afaiu Cinnamon uses GTK 3 anyway. If I'm not mistaken, this feature has also appeared first in the Netbook Edition of Ubuntu.

Is there some way to have this feature again in Linux Mint, Cinnamon edition, in the year 2025? I've googled around for a bit, nothing comes up except lots of 'how to move the bottom panel to the top'.

Random pic from the web to show this magical technology:

For anyone wondering why I would do such a thing: Fitts's law tells us that the time to accurately move the cursor to an onscreen target is directly proportional to the distance to the target, and inversely proportional to the target's size, namely in the same direction as the motion. Well, menu items being at the top of the screen makes them effectively infinite in size in the top-down direction, since the user can just jam the mouse all the way in the proximity of the desired item without a care to the vertical position of the cursor (assuming they come at the target mostly from below). I don't really like using the mouse, or using the menus either — but when I do, I'd like to have a better experience.

Curiously, this is one glaring example of where Apple designers did their fundamental research, while those at Microsoft dropped the ball yet again: in Windows 9x (at the least), the taskbar buttons had a one-pixel gap from the bottom where mouse clicks didn't work — which meant that a user moving the cursor with all their Fitts-dictated efficiency had to readjust again before clicking a button.

Just been supporting someone remotely and was waiting for them to turn on their laptop...

Whilst troubleshooting I ran uptime to see how long we'd been working on the problem and saw it was up for ~2 weeks...

Which made me think ... how do you tell how long a device (laptop) has been running, but since it's last suspend / hibernation?

I can find it from other clues such as journalctl -b -fu systemd-logind and look for Lid opened, but I was really looking for an smarter way...

Just a nice little challenge for anyone bored at this time of year :)

A short review of openBSD 7.8.

I am having the funniest issue! Somewhat recently, I have been having my audio crackle and randomly stop, but ONLY in Counter Strike 2 itself. discord (yes i have to use it as all my friends do and wont change) and background applications keep sound going fine, until I unplug and replug my headphones to get sound back in CS. Then It goes for about another 10 minutes until I have to do it again. It feels like its sometimes triggered by a certain gun or grenade sound, and i hear some fizzing and crackling before it happens. No other program does this.

Very weird. I believe I have pulse audio installed. I am not sure how to check if pipewire installed over top of it or what (i read maybe pulse is the issue?) I tried verifying game files which did not help.

Linux mint, newest stable kernel (i forget which)

Any help appreciated..I know linux doesn't have the best audio situation.

Edit: I want a graphical window switcher that's fully keyboard controlled, so I can see the windows before switching them.

The screenshot is from hyprland-easymotion which only shows labels for visible windows. I want a switcher that allows for both switching to windows or the same, or from any app, using just the keyboard and no mouse.

Ideally I could go to a window without pressing tab or another key a bunch of times, perhaps select any window (visible or not) with a letter like easymotion.

This is my Gnome desktop right now. Nothing too fancy, just the usual Gnome 49 with extensions (Blur my shell, AutoAccentColour, System Monitor, etc.), a Win11 inspired background and two apps running (Vivaldi browser playing a Youtube video and Kew music player in a terminal).

I play around with configs and add-ons from time to time but i ALWAYS move back to this Gnome designed desktop and it fits my needs.