Linux

I've been using Debian (and formerly Ubuntu) for many years.

But I've been wanting to tell people that I use Arch.

I've been considering the following distros:

• Arch
• Cachy
• Manjaro
• Any others?

I'm leaning towards Arch or Cachy. This is for a mediocre laptop that I'm planning to use as a media center: Kodi, Retroarch, Steam, etc. Should I even be using Arch for this? Maybe Debian is more stable...

Sorry if this has been asked before. Thanks for any tips!

I've been really enjoying browsing Wikipedia and duckduckgo on Links2 lately which loads raw html rapidly with little overhead. It's also good for reading the Marxist Internet Archive. I'm looking to expand it's functionality more

Personally I'm somewhere between 2 and 3 - I'll engage in the distro sectarianism for the bit, sometimes on the side of one that isn't even what I actually use, but I hate being an annoying proselytiser of anything, I hate dealing with the broad tent politics of the FOSS world, and I'm happy to engage with the community positively but I hate being any of the nasty stereotypes.

Hi guys! I have a rather beefy machine. AMD Ryzen 7700, 32GB DDR5, GPU 7800XT 16GB, several NVME drives for OS, general data, games. And yet...after a while it becomes completely unresponsive. Mouse freezes, keyboard doesn't key anything, and the screen gets completely frozen. Meanwhile the disk led gets full activity, almost constantly red. So...While this might be crazy pagination turning the system to a crawl (I have an 8GB swapfile), I want to be able to determine what's going on. Is there a way I can check any log, or enable any kind of logging that would tell me what happened on the seconds before it became completely unresponsive? Who takes all my memory??

Normal situations where this happens:

Firefox open, multiple windows, lots of tabs. Maybe ~5-8GB of RAM.

Virtmanager running a Windows VM, running a work remote desktop...4GB of RAM

Steam...1GB of RAM

Thunderbird, Deluge, Telegram, Whatsapp...Not much more really.

This shouldn't even come close to the RAM capacity of this machine. And yet...it really looks like it suffocates without memory. How can I check for issues?

I'm thinking about switching to SteamOS since it's built for gaming. Most of my games run fine on Linux Mint, but not all of them. I also heard Valve say "it's just a PC", does that mean it's suitable for software development too?

An exciting new announcement is the formation of the Open Gaming Collective, a collaborative organisation between many names in the Linux sphere.

I'm trying to make a fairly simple libadwaita app in the builder ide with python and blueprint, but the official documentation isn't very clear. Does anyone know of a good beginner-friendly tutorial?

So when I upload an image on certain sites the Image "uploads" but it comes out as a solid or staticy colours & looks nothing like what I uploaded.

this really became a problem when I made some new PFPs for my Online Accounts, Glomble & Here took them fine but WAFRN & Bluesky who took the previous images fine just showed the weird stuff even though when they allowed be to crop the image it looked perfectly fine, any advice?

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34494723

Detailed episode for pairing with the very light "A Great Day for Linux". Hope you enjoy it. Since Lemmy struggles with markdown from Castopod, here is a link to the notes.

I manage a handful of small websites and have recently switched from Windows to Mint. I was using PortableApps to keep the sites separated, and for the moment want to do the same. I've set up VirtualBox with a cut down Windows 10 installation, and added the root folder of the websites as a shared folder, so Websites/Site1, Websites/Site2 etc. The root folder is still on an NTFS drive.

So far, everything works, except I can't run the PortableApps suite from the shared folder in VirtualBox. PortableApps runs and updates, but the apps don't work properly. Thunderbird is ok but has random glitches, Firefox launches but sites don't load, and Chrome instantly closes. If I copy the folder for the individual site into the virtual machine though, it works perfectly.

I'm assuming that it's a permissions problem, as the NTFS drive is owned by me but is in the root group, but copying the files to the virtual machine copies them to the vboxuser group, which I'm a member of. The fstab entry for the drive is:

UUID=BAB4BFE2B4BF9EF7 /mnt/Storage ntfs defaults,uid=tippon 0 2

but from what I can gather, it should have my UID and GID instead. The examples and questions I've found online have some extra details at the end with no explanation though, like dmask=022, fmask=133, and I don't want to risk editing my fstab without understanding them.

So, to finally get to the question, if I replace uid=tippon with uid=1000,gid=1000 (my user and group), would that let me access the files from within VirtualBox, as well as whichever other programs I might want to use, and would it break anything?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42285031

I think i understand adding a link to /etc/apt/sources.list so apt knows to check there for packages. What i don't understand is how to find those links.

For example: i know i want xed, a plain text editor. Wikipedia tells me that's maintained by Linux Mint, but the Mint website doesn't, as far as i can tell, have a link to a repository for installing Mint-specific packages in another distro (assuming that's possible). It doesn't mention what i might want to put in sources.list.

The same is true of Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, KDE, and Gnome. If i install Debian and it doesn't come with one of these listed in the aforementioned file (and it doesn't), i have no idea how to get packages from that repository unless i can also find a downloadable .deb file and it has no dependencies from unknown repositories, or i download the entire desktop environment i want just a few packages from.

For context: i plan to install Debian without a DE and just get what packages i want from across several DEs. This will be hard to do if there are no software sources for apt.

Is this hard to find because it's something that people who don't know what they're doing shouldn't mess with? Am i just looking in the wrong places, or for the wrong thing?

One thing i've successfully installed with apt (as opposed to a .deb package) is LibreWolf, which i used extrepo for in accordance with the instructions on their website. Should i be using that instead for packages meant for specific desktop environments?

I have been looking for doctors, saving numbers, emails and working hours in a onlyoffice spreadsheet but its not really readable at a glance. Looked around for an address books app but neither gnome calendar nor Thunderbird meet my needs.

The features I would like in an address-book( not all of them are strictly need) are:

-custom fields. -ability to customize address fields to include stuff like landmarks, floors and district(could also do with removing stuff like Postal box or countries). -custom labels for fields like phone numbers(WhatsApp,telegram) or instant messaging(discord)

Not a priority

-add notes, maybe even add multiple notes to contact. -calendar integration, with ability to add dates to contacts that can include notes.

Did try cardbook Thunderbird add-on but it is mostly unresponsive. On gitlab, the last comits was from 4 years ago and the last released version was from 2018, dispite that, Thunderbird addon store still keeps receiving new version, even in 2026 and issues are still being opened with developer responding,even a few hours ago.

All to say, I think it went close source

Anyhow, I am not opposed proprietary apps necessary(would still pick open source if its an option) just wanted to note the add-on being close source(I think) for people in case anyone wants to know.

Been using Linux off and on for years. Back when Windows 10 got EOL'd, I decided to go all in. I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't like Mint/Cinnamon, so I went with MX 23 + Plasma.

Now that MX 25 has been out for a bit, I figured I'd try my first in place upgrade: https://mxlinux.org/wiki/in-place-upgrade-from-mx-23-to-mx-25/

The instructions said the process would be "a little bumpy," but it really wasn't at all - I'm comfortable with a command line.

Only issue was that my icons were all blank after the upgrade. (I figured a theme got upgraded and the old icon paths were invalid.) All I had to do was go into settings and pick a new icon pack.

Since this was my first time, I don't really know if that was typical for in place upgrades. I'm sure I'll find out eventually, haha.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42263587

Of the desktop environments i've tried, i prefer Cinnamon overall. But i find that i'd rather use the KDE or Mate versions of some programs. I don't need Nemo when i'd rather use Thunar, or Gnome Characters when i prefer mate-character-map or kcharselect.

Is there any reason i can't start with nothing that's specific to any one DE, then install whatever i need to have Cinnamon applets with the Mate and KDE programs i want? I don't expect this to be easier than picking one DE and sticking with that, but is it so much harder that it's not worth the trouble to have my computer so customized? How common is it to use a custom blend like this?

This was sparked when, while cleaning up my system that still has similar programs from several DEs, i accidentally broke Cinnamon and had to reinstall it, complete with everything i'd removed in favor of some other DE's version of a program.

[hr]

What window managers are recommended for situations like this? I've always used whatever comes with my DE, without really being aware of the window manager. How does that affect what display manager i need?

flatpak run org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent
bwrap: Unable to open lock file /app/.ref: No such file or directory

I tried flatpak repair, with --user and --system, that did not fix it, and I did a system re-install, or rather reinstalled all the packages Nothing worked.

I am using nixos on unstable, recently I broke the nix part of my system, and was advised to do a re-install, I did a re-install which involved usb booting into nixos, and running a command to reinstall all the packages and rebuild in my nix directory, but afterwards, no flatpak is running. There is a possibility it broke beforehand and I didnt notice that, but i think it might have been after the re-install.

Flatpak version: 1.16.1

Distro: NixOS

Distro version: /nix/store/8hx8jwa24q6rkzhca9iqy5ckk9rbphi1-source

Architecture: x86_64

EDIT: Some flatpaks run but alot of them dont with the same error

EDIT (x2) SOLVED: I think the issue might have been the kde platform, as the apps that crashed were on kde platform 6.8 or 6.9, possibly some broken version, most likely the platform and bwrap didnt play well with nixos, these commands worked, I ran this for users (not system). Possible system might work, point is, I dont have the issue anymore.

flatpak uninstall org.inkscape.Inkscape org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent com.obsproject.Studio org.kde.kdenlive org.wireshark.Wireshark com.prusa3d.PrusaSlicer com.rafaelmardojai.Blanket io.github.seadve.Mousai net.codelogistics.clicker org.freefilesync.FreeFileSync

flatpak uninstall --runtime org.kde.Platform//6.8
flatpak uninstall --runtime org.kde.Platform//6.9
flatpak uninstall --runtime org.gnome.Platform//48

flatpak uninstall --unused -y

flatpak repair --system
flatpak repair --user

flatpak install flathub org.inkscape.Inkscape
flatpak install flathub org.qbittorrent.qBittorrent
flatpak install flathub com.obsproject.Studio

In the recent days I've been stumbling upon weird, new ~~so-called "AI"~~ Mathy-math-slop sites, like linuxv*x.com[^1]. Some other was called something like "tutorialsipedia", or whatever.

[^1]: Don't want to give them the traffic.

Have you noticed these? Is that some weird new Startup that wants to leverage CEO and "AI"? I'd use them, but my eyes glaze off the page. It's like a drop on a Lotus leaf and I can't really read that garbage. What's up with those?

I often need to allow some randomly selected port to be open (tcp & udp) in the Uncomplicated Firewall (UFW), while some app is active. Then I'd like to close it. The port number is written in a file, say portfile

At the moment I'm doing this manually: read the number, then call sudo ufw allow xxxx/tcp in a terminal. Later on, delete the port rule with sudo ufw delete [rulenumber].

I'm trying to write a bash script to do this in a more automated way. It's easy to read the number from the flie as a variable, then call ufw with that number (provided the script is started as sudo).

What's not clear to me is how to delete the UFW rule once the application is closed. I could start the app within the bash script itself. Maybe it'd just be a matter of waiting for it to finish?

I'm very thankful for suggestions and ideas – and learning more about bash tricks :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/42299124

#1

my most recent example is a Macbook Air 13 that I chimera'd out of three different machines; awesome that 2012-2017 models have interchangeable parts. was lucky and one of the boards had 8 GB RAM, a rarity back then. alas, the only battery I got has barely 60% capacity and zillions of charge cycles and I ain't too keen on spending money on a replacement.

ok, so shit autonomy, be happy you got a workstation for like $15 in total and run it thusly. except, this one shuts off even if there's like 70% remaining and subsequently won't power on without a charger - kinda big deal for a laptop. I imagine not all its cells are up to spec so when it reaches a threshold it cuts out. under macOS, the SMC lets it sip power and when you attach a charger it just wakes as you left it. linux ain't that cool, when you connect power - all your unsaved work is gone.

what linux does have is intel-undervolt. just a smidge of -50mV was enough to remedy the issue. after a coupla days, moved it to -75mV, still perfectly stable; at -100mV it occasionally KPs.

so a thing that was unusable away from a charger is again a mobile device, netting me 4+ hours of light use and almost a week of standby!

#2

eons ago I had a Thinkpad W520; at least I think that was the model - a 15.6" with the chunky, 7-row keyboard sans numpad. lenovo stabbed me in the heart when they decided that all subsequent models must rock the annoying numeric pad, making you type off-center and... anyhoo, the one I got, had a partially damaged screen, about 100ish pixels wide and super irritating, flashing constantly. replacing it wasn't in the budget and relying on an external monitor was a no-go...

hello xrander! that thing allowed you to cut off a part of the screen and that's what I did - converted the 16:10 to something more like 4:3. not only that, a friend taped over the busted part with some carbon-like decal making it look super sick! I'm still trying to find a picture from way back when but no luck so far...

not only did I get a super usable machine, it was the coolest workstation by far - maxed out RAM, three SSD/HD in there... well, as cool as those things can be, anyways...

#3

a few years back, I got a 13" Yoga, forgot the model, for pocket change. dual-core i5 and soldered 8 GB RAM, gorgeous screen, awesome battery - but it constantly blue-screened. break out the mint USB with memtest, and yepp - errors. dogdamn, no way can I afford to fix this thing and if I try desoldering those things, Imma burn the house down. and break the thing even further...

enter GRUB and its BADRAM feature! you can exclude arbitrary region(s) of RAM and the OS that boots after it will be none the wiser - it just uses the rest. and verily, it worked without issues, used it for years and I believe it still works to this day with his current owner.

#4

got a kernel-panicking Macbook Pro 15 Mid2010 for next to nothing. those things died en masse, the issue was a capacitor that drove the Nvidia chip. any strain or excess power consumption and the thing gave out and the OS crashed. the fix was/is simple - disable the Nvidia chip via EFI variable and use just the Intel HD graphics. you lose display out but gain a cooler machine, longer battery life, and you get zero issues with linux.

having fixed it, I installed linux and wanted to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB. alas, no sticks I found would work in the thing. turns out, the fucker only takes 1066 MHz RAM. I totally lived with the conviction that if you stick faster RAM into slower hardware, it'll run it slower, but apparently that ain't so. so tried bartering with junkers, I'll give you my 1333 RAM, you gimme yours - no takers. buying stuff for something that cost me less than $10 was out of the question...

turns out, you can use linux to reprogram the SPD data on the RAM module! you change its identifier to 1066 and the macbook recognized it as such. furthermore, you don't need to patch both sticks, if one is 1066 it can run the other at 1066 as well - so you can run 'em slower! no idea if this is an apple thing or its widely present, but I got a functioning workstation for free!

#5

finally, the Dell Latitude 5285. that's a 2-in-1 tablet with detachable keyboard that I got without the battery. it had okayish specs, the i5-7300u is nothing to get excited about but it had 16 GB LPDDR3 soldered on. the touch display is beyond gorgeous - 400-nit 1920x1280 IPS and the intel graphics shipped the full 4K @ 60 Hz to my monitor via DP-Alt. the only problem - the fucker won't boost past 400 MHz without the battery! buying the thing is out of the question (y'all notice a pattern here, right?) so what are we to do...

thankfully, we got msr-tools. the thing can patch CPU's registers and en/disable some things, and one of them is BD_PROCHOT. that signal makes the CPU throttle on account the heat, it's also triggered if anything is amiss - touchpads disconnected, battery not present, etc. what's needed is read out rdmsr 0x1fc if memory serves correctly, and then you add one bit to the read out state and write it back with wrmsr 0x1fc 0x1xxxxx et voila - speedsteps up to 2.7 GHz, a quick systemd script to make it permanent. it won't turbo, to 3.3 GHz or sumsuch, but this was more than enough for everyday use.

thanks for reading! y'all got any stories how linux can save your ass without spending money? share it with the class!

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/34586015

Curious on suggestions for airtags, or similar, for tracking important things on flights or other cases where losing the specific item would be too much of a financial / sentimental loss. Anyone doing this from Linux, or from graphene? How is it?

Hey folks

I find myself structuring out much larger documents these days, and I'd really like to make use of some mindmapping software to do it. I used to use kdissert (now semantik) all the time - I'd map out the idea, then add in details to each node, and export to tex for final adjustments. Really nice workflow imo.

Unfortunately, semantik is getting a bit long in the tooth, and while it builds fine on my arch boxes, its a bit of a mess for Debian. Rather than annoy myself with hunting for or making my own builds of the various packages I'd need just for this, I'm hoping that maybe there are some more regularly maintained options out there.

Any ideas? TIA

I just completed my LPIC-1 journey and reached the certification!

While studying and doing tests, I took notes in markdown and summarized every concept, so I think they could be a useful "study companion" for anyone who wants to study, learn about Linux, or just read out of curiosity.

These notes are divided by topic as the original LPI path requires, and are integrated from various resources and quizzes I completed during the journey.

I'm leaving them here if anyone wants to read them or contribute in any way. I really appreciate it!

Codeberg Link