I’m announcing a new initiative to improve our applications ecosystem. The goal is to improve the quality and quantity of KDE applications and the number of application contributors. For anybody who knows me, it is not that surprising. Inside KDE, I have been mainly involved in apps for many years. I worked on all areas, from development (maintaining or co-maintaining many apps like NeoChat, Kontrast, MarkNote, Tokodon, and Arianna, and contributing to numerous other apps, but also design, promotion, websites (e.g., apps.kde.org) and even a bit of packaging (Flatpak and to a lesser extent Windows). Hopefully, making this a bit more public and making this an initiative with a bit more coordination will encourage more people to help :)

Hi all,

I'm very much a Linux newbie. I originally read that Nobara was great for gaming (and it is) but I've read even better things about Bazzite and want to give it a whirl.

My question is, am I able to download it to a usb and just do a clean install without issues or do I have to do anything beforehand. I originally installed Nobara using btrfs if that makes any difference.

Like I said I'm really new at this, hopefully it's ok to post this here but if not please let me know where would be more appropriate.

Fellas, I'm at my wit's end with this one. I'm trying to set a general rule for window opacity in sway, and then have a few programs excepted from it.

Back on i3 with picom, I could do this pretty easily by setting activeOpacity to 0.9, for example, and then specifying additional opacityRules like this:

"100:class_g = 'mpv'"
"100:class_g = 'Brave-browser'"

Likewise, hyprland's window rules made it pretty easy to override the general opacity rules as well.

I can't seem to get this on sway, though; if I set it up like this:

[app_id=".*"] opacity 0.85

[app_id="brave_browser"] opacity set 1
[app_id="librewolf"] opacity 1

it simply sets everything to 0.85.

Currently, I have this:

[app_id="^(?!mpv$|brave_browser$).*$"] opacity 0.85

[app_id="brave_browser"] opacity set 1
[app_id="mpv"] opacity 1

but it is still exhibiting the same behavior (except mpv also seems to totally disregard any opacity rules whatsoever).

Any help is greatly appreciated---I haven't been able to find anyone else asking or talking about what seems to me like pretty basic functionality.

VLC is the supreme of all open source projects, you used it in school, college, work and home.

I used it since I was a child and it has never failed on me. It didn't matter what type of file you chucked at it, it would run it.

Do you disagree or agree with VLC being the best media player? What are your thoughts?

Pondering upon (the illusion of) different distros and its consequences - Thoughts?

I'm not even limiting it to how derivatives (i.e. Linux Mint, Manjaro, Nobara etc.) can completely (or at least by 99%) be realized by 'Ansibling' their parent distro (i.e. Arch, Debian Fedora etc).

Because, as it stands, there's not even a lot of difference between different independent distros. Simply, through Distrobox and/or Nix, I can get whatever package I want from whichever repository I want.

Most of the independent distros even offer multiple channels or release cycles to begin with; i.e Debian with Stable/Testing/Sid, Fedora with Rawhide/'Fedora'/CentOS Stream/RHEL etc.

So, while traditionally we at least had the package manager and release cycles as clear differentiators, it feels as if the lines have never been as blurry as we find them today.

Thankfully, we still have unique distros; e.g. NixOS, Bedrock etc. But I feel, as a community, we've not quite realized how homogeneous the fast majority of our distros can be defined (i.e. DE, release cycle, packages, script for additional configuration). And therefore miss opportunities in working together towards bigger goals instead of working on issues that have simply been caused by the (almost) imaginary lines that continue to divide different communities under false suppositions.

Hardware: 2014 macbook, nuked macos, clean xubuntu 24.04 installation

I never experienced this with my other notebook, a 2016 model from a Taiwanese vendor, forgot the name.

On the macbook: I plug in the external HDD, xubuntu recognizes and opens the volume, I can use vlc to play video files (mostly mkv, x265) but then, 2 to 5 minutes later, xubuntu reconnects to the HDD, meaning the connection stopped and vlc stops playing the file. Not big files, 250 to 500 MiB, 1080p

It's impossible to watch a 30 minute show.

This never happened with the 2016 notebook and on this notebook I also installed xubuntu 24.04, so I'm assuming this is a hardware issue.

Is it so? Any way to avoid this?

the macbook is an Intel Core i5-4278U CPU @ 2.60GHz, the other notebook an Intel Core i7-7500U CPU @ 2.70GHz

Change Proposal

Short: fwupd users download small but in total too much metadata over the internet.

A solution for local distribution is needed. IPFS is too slow, Bittorrent is immediately suspicious on many Networks.

Passim is a new protocol for this purpose, users can opt out, it is secure and the metadata is hashed, and the hashes still downloaded over the internet for verification.

Project name is changed from "ytdl" to "yt-dlp-lemon", after user "lol" in the comments convinced me. Thank you for the suggestion! Remember to change the directory name at ~/.local/share/ytdl to ~/.local/share/yt-dlp-lemon .

The terror continues...

10 days ago I posted the initial version of this script. Since then lot of changed and added. Here some of those changes since v0.1:

• -h is now much more simple, to see full help use -H
• -f to repackage to another container format, or -F to force re-encoding video content with a codec to any other format
• -s and -b will operate on sponsors only, and -S and -B on complete list of SponsorBlock segments
• similarly -e and -d will only embed and download only a few extra metadata and files, -E and -D does all extra files and data
• new -R will download and name files in reverse order, with index starting at 1 for the bottom file, useful for playlists who add newest entry to top
• by default all file names are simplified and sanitized a little bit, even if no option -r (for very strict) is used

My goal is to make the usage of yt-dlp itself easier with this script, without the need to study help, the manual and to write a configuration file and a script. And you don't need to test it with various sources. It does not everything what yt-dlp offers, but most of the stuff in the way I like it.

git clone https://github.com/thingsiplay/yt-dlp-lemon
cd yt-dlp-lemon
chmod +x yt-dlp-lemon
./yt-dlp-lemon -h

Output from simple help:

$ yt-dlp-lemon -h
yt-dlp-lemon [options] [url...]

Simple wrapper to yt-dlp with only a subset of options.

options:
-h                show help and exit
-H                show all options, notes and exit
-m HEIGHT         max height
-f FORMAT         repack format
-I                no ignore file
-s                add chapter marks + recognize sponsors
-b                remove sponsored segments
-c                split file by chapters
-p                playlist mode
-a                audio mode
-d                download description files
-e                embed meta and chapters
-q                show filepath only
-x                skip download

Copyright © 2024 Tuncay D. https://github.com/thingsiplay/yt-dlp-lemon

I'm a regular user of Linux systems but apart from a couple of test Ubuntu installs many years ago they've always been containers or VMs with no DE which I can throw away when I break them. The Steam Deck showcasing how far Wine/Proton has come combined with Windows being Windows has given me the push; I've made a Mint live USB and it's running beautifully on my desktop. I come to you, the masters, with questions before I hit install:

1. What do you recommend I do about disk partitions? I'm keeping a Windows install for the few things that demand it, does Windows still occasionally destroy Linux partitions? Do I need separate partitions for data and OS? Is it straightforward to add additional distros as new partitions or is that asking for trouble?
2. Is disk encryption straightforward? And is that likely to upset the Windows partition?
3. Is cloud storage sync straightforward? It's my off-site backup solution on Android and Windows (using Cryptomator with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc) but I don't think that many providers have Linux clients. Is something like rclone recommended?
4. Should I just use apt to install software? I know there's some kind of graphical package manager (synaptic?), does that use apt under the covers or is it separate? Is it recommended to install something like Flathub too?
5. Any other pearls of wisdom? How do I keep everything tidy? Any warnings about what not to do? Should I use a particular terminal emulator or Firefox fork?

Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my Linux Command Line Computing ebook.

This ebook aims to teach Linux command line tools and Shell Scripting for beginner to intermediate level users. The main focus is towards managing your files and performing text processing tasks. Plenty of examples are provided to make it easier to understand a particular tool and its various features. There are 200+ exercises to help you practice what you've learned and solutions are provided for reference. I hope this ebook would make it easier for you to discover CLI tools, features and learning resources.

Links:

• Free PDF/EPUB: https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/cli_computing (till 9-June-2024)
• Web version: https://learnbyexample.github.io/cli-computing/
• Markdown source, exercise solutions, etc: https://github.com/learnbyexample/cli-computing
• Short video about the book: https://youtu.be/vedRFbWwx_c

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on. Reader feedback is essential and especially so for self-published authors.

Happy learning :)

It's been a long day and I'm probably not in the best state of mind to be asking this question, but have you guys solved packaging yet?

I want to ship an executable with supporting files in a compressed archive, much like the Windows exe-in-a-zip pattern. I can cross-compile a Win32 C program using MinGW that will always use baseline Win32 functionality, but if I try to build for Linux I run into the whole dependency versioning situation, specifically glibc fixing its symbol version to whichever Linux I happen to be building from at the time. But if I try to static link with musl, the expectation is that everything is static linked, including system libraries that really shouldn't be.

AppImage is in the ballpark of what I'm looking for, and I've heard that Zig works as a compatibility-enhancing frontend if you're compiling C. I'd just like something simple that runs 99% of the time for non-technical end users and isn't bloated with dependencies I can't keep track of. (No containers.) Is this easily achievable?

I'm on partition disks, configuring LVM on a computer with 2 drives: /dev/nvme01 is the device I want to install in, SCSI2 is a storage HDD I do not want to format, I need the data.

What bugs me is 'the partition tables of the following devices are changed': both drives.

Am I going to lose data in the second drive, SCSI2, if I proceed? Should I physically remove the second drive instead?

ETA: thanks for your input

To get started with the real-time kernel for Ubuntu 24.04, check out the official documentation. One thing to keep in mind if you’re an NVIDIA GPU user is that the real-time Ubuntu kernel does not support the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers.