Linux

For about 4-5 years, I have been off the deep end of Gnu/Linux operating systems. During this time period, many things in my life have changed, new social groups, and friends. After the social rebirth and exodus from high school, a few friends stuck around. Granted, this group is smaller than usual but is more closely intertwined. And yes, I know that's already off-topic for a Linux-based community. But when I like to tell a story, I like to paint a full picture. However, I will try to cut out the fluff, but I digress.

So, like many others on this community of Unix-like operating system enthusiasts, I began the plunge from Windows to Linux. First, I originally started with Manjaro because I learned about it from my very first Linux install on a Raspberry Pi model B+. I used that for a few months and eventually used the "AUR". Much like Icarus, I flew too close to the sun, and my naivety of dependencies and the underlying parts of the OS reared its ugly head. To which, my system became irrecoverably broken, and after much mental berating, I switched to Kubuntu for a year, then back to Arch. Then, my home was Nixos and Gentoo on all my machines, using Gentoo has taught me a lot about Linux as a whole.

Now, to the meat and potatoes: myself and two other individuals have done various things to fill our free time. It originally started with heading over to Friend A's house to play on his Xbox. Which became tiresome quickly, as many people know Xbox series S games are expensive, along with the "fast" NVMe-based storage stick for "internal only games". Friend B saved up for a laptop and bought an MSI Cyborg 15, and I cobbled together a LAN rig from Facebook Marketplace. Lovingly named the Ybox, as a joke of not being an Xbox and running Baztite Linux with Steam Big Picture, we had such a great time playing couch co-op games on the Ybox featuring Ultimate Chicken Horse, Unrailed, and speedrunners. But eventually, everybody in the group grew tired of couch co-op as although quite delightful became limiting in screen real estate and three-player genres. So, we started doing LAN parties like many gamers before have done in the days of Pepsi Free and parachute pants. We played many games locally and online together, and it has been great with fairly minor issues involving Steam and spotty internet.

So over this time period, I have been taking online computer classes specifically a Google IT class which is grossly outdated and feels very cobbled together as it was originally released in 2015. But it has still been useful in basic computer concepts like DNS, TCP/IP, and various Windows and Linux utilities. So, we all have played Minecraft since early days and have all played vanilla. So I said, "Screw it," and looked at some guides. Installed it on a spare laptop and recently switched it to run as a Docker container to run on my NAS and looked for help on port forwarding on Lemmy, to which the very kind people of C/Selfhosted pointed out Tailscale and Wireguard. Which has been rock-solid and much better solution got my friends all wired up to my tailnet, and it has been smooth since!

So we are now at the present where the previous night I was on call with Friend A, and he was honestly confused when there was a GUI installer and buttons. He was used to watching me use SwayWM and Kitty on the Ybox. I guess he thought Linux is for hackers and command-line only. The install went without a hitch; he booted into KDE and felt instantly at home! I showed him how to use the KDE store, in his words, "it's like the Microsoft Store?" and the touchscreen worked out of the box, and man it was PURE BLISS.

Honestly, shoutout to this great community and the very talented people behind Linux and its many, many distributions.

I've been using it for months now .. I love that I can play droidfish (cuckoo chess engine is great for lower rated games.. really good practice partner). I started with the default (degoogled) image, but gave in and installed the Google play enabled one. Now I can read google play/kindle/o reilly/blinkist.

Recently installed Minecraft education for a young family member... Runs like a charm too.

Go waydroid!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3179293

Install instructions for OpenSuse Tumbleweed/ MicroOs using Full Disk Encryption secured by a TPM2 chip and measured boot or a FIDO2 key.

Nice to see OpenSuse pushing forward on securing the Linux Desktop with FDE and measured boot. Hope to see other distros following.

For some years, I just used directory-organized audio files. I used emacs's emms to control the playlist, and had it set up to have mpv play audio files.

Some years back, I used at mpd for a while, but it's really oriented towards accessing audio via metadata, which wasn't really what I wanted to do: that really entails getting correct metadata on all of an audio collection.

Then recently, I ran into beets, which is a utility to do semi-automated metadata cleanup (compute and apply ReplayGain tags, insert metadata using a variety of techniques, etc) en masse and finally got my metadata in a reasonable state, and flipped back to using mpd. I was pretty impressed with beets; it takes some setup, but runs what it can in parallel, doesn't block the process when it needs human guidance on metadata, and can be set to automatically set metadata when its confidence is above certain levels but ask below that.

Mpd is probably especially useful when one has an audio server that one controls remotely with a other devices, though I just use the thing locally. It supports a bunch of frontends; can be controlled from GUI software, from the command line, from TUI clients like ncmpc or ncmpcpp or a few others, from various emacs software packages, can keep running if you bring down your graphical environment. A lot of OSD/"bar"/"dock"/"wharf" software can display MPD information out-of-box; I'm currently using waybar in sway, which can display mpd information.

I'm not always directly at the media-serving machine, and I'm using unison to synchronize my music files to a laptop. New files or removals or whatever will get propagated in either direction. That lets me have a replicated media library accessible for disconnected use.

All of the above stuff is packaged in Debian bookworm; should be available in at least Debian-family distros out-of-box, and probably others.

Anyone else want to describe their favored music-playing setup, stuff that they've found works well for 'em? Maybe give other folks who might be looking for something similar useful ideas?

Hey everyone,

I've been experiencing a really strange visual glitch on KDE Plasma (6.1) running Wayland on Arch Linux, and it happens across various Proton versions and games, though it’s especially frequent in Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin's Creed Origins. Most games however seem totally unaffected, even when they are similar in GPU usage. I'm hoping someone has come across this issue or has some advice on how to fix it!

When opening certain in-game elements like menus, the entire desktop gets covered with a small, dotted grid-like pattern. This affects the whole screen, not just the game window. It only ever affects the screen that the game is running on, never my second one.

If I move another window (like a browser or file manager) over the game, that window becomes partially see-through, revealing the game underneath.

After exiting the game, parts of the game image linger on the screen and are, dimly visible as if it’s "burned" in.

The glitch appears and disappears randomly, even while the game is still running, regardless of whether the window is in focus or not. It mostly happens when opening in game menus or overlays. Rebooting fixes the issue, but it reappears after playing certain Proton games. One of the first things I tried was replacing the Display cables, but that had no effect. Turning the monitor off and on doesn't fix it. While this glitch is active, I sometimes get random brightness flashes, almost like a strobe effect. The flashing stops and starts randomly, as long as the grid pattern is visible.

If I take a screenshot while the glitch is happening, the visual bug (grid pattern and shine-through) does not show up in the screenshot. The image looks perfectly normal. So all pics are shot with my phone camera.

I’ve looked through the Proton and system logs but can’t find anything that stands out to me (though I’m not an expert). I’ve also searched online quite a bit but couldn’t find anything that looked similar to my issue.

My GPU is an Nvidia RTX 4080 with the latest nvidia-open-560 drivers I'm running KDE Plasma 6.1 (Wayland) on Arch.

I’d appreciate any help or ideas on troubleshooting this further!

I have an issue on my Lenovo Laptop where the Lenovo Active Pen 2 under Arch / CachyOS with GNOME on Wayland always recognises the eraser as pressed. While this is probably a libinput issue, I can’t wait for possibly months to get a fix on that side. While I will report this issue to them, I would like to fix the problem intermediately.

This was never a problem under Fedora with GNOME on Wayland. I think the problem might be that libinput on Arch loads the Wacom driver, while Fedora probably just fell back to the generic libinput driver. I got that idea because in GNOME settings my screen now is configurable in the Wacom settings, that never was the case on Fedora.

I stumbled across this thread, however, that is not viable in Wayland any more since there is no config file available for libinput. Is there any way I can force the libinput driver for the “Wacom HID 52C2 Pen” device under Wayland, while GNOME is not specifically exposing this setting?

Any pointers would be greatly appreciated :)

Edit: Scratch all that, I just tried the live ISO for Fedora 41 and found out it's not related to Arch. After some trial, it seems like this might actually be an issue with the 6.11 Kernel. After downgrading to 6.10.10 everything works fine again. I guess my new question is now where would I report this? Is this still a libinput or a Kernel upstream issue?

I've been having issues with my PC not waking from sleep, the fan keeps spinning, but the screen stays black, and it won't respond. I could just keep it on all the time, but it uses a lot of electricity, so I prefer not to.

So far I've tried:

• Using Wayland / X11
• Secure boot off/on
• Installing the latest BIOS update
• Waking with keyboard presses, mouse movement, power button

Some more information:

• Sleeps works fine on Windows.
• I'm using an AMD CPU & GPU
• I'm using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, and I'm fully up-to-date (version 20240919).
• I'm using kernel 6.10.9-1-default (64-bit)
• I have a swap partition with the same size as my memory

Hey guys, I currently have two separate 2TB SSD's, one still has my old Windows 11 install and the other has Bazzite. I bought a 1TB SSD so that I can move my Windows install to that for the few things I still need Windows for, so I want to install CachyOS on what will eventually be an empty 2TB SSD.

First off, what's a good way to clone my current Windows install to my new 1TB SSD? I'd prefer to avoid re-installing just because that's a pain in the ass, but I'll do that if necessary.

Second, what's the best practice for managing two separate /home folders? I know I can just point Steam to my Bazzite /home directory to get my games to show up in another install (I think?) but are there any problems that may arise due to having two distros installed across two different SSD's? As far as I know, Bazzite already uses BTRFS which is also what I want to use in CachyOS so that I can create snapshots in case I break something, so the file systems should be compatible with each other.

Thanks!

I purchased a license for Sublime a few years ago, when I seriously thought that the way forward for me was to continue working in IT. That didn't play out, so I'm now free to expunge one more piece of proprietary software from my life.

I've spent literally years at a time with modal text editors as a job requirement, and I know that I just don't work well with them. This is not to say that Vim and Emacs are anything less than excellent. This is a me problem and not a them problem.

The editors I've found that have worked best for me in the past are probably Textmate and Sublime. Notepad++ runs a close third, and there is a Linux port these days!

The one thing I will not do is Electron-based editors. Besides the enormous resource usage of having a browser instance fired up for them, I've had malware try to coopt the JS backends of Electron text editors in the past. (On an interesting short-term contract gig cleaning malware out of websites.) It's left me pretty gunshy, and I don't need extra stress.

I've been down the lists of editors at certain wikis, and experimented with several of them. Kate seems like the best GUI editor and Micro seems like the best terminal-based editor.

However, I've been living in a relative vacuum on this subject for more than a decade and would appreciate others' opinions.

I've been seeing a lot of information lately about mozilla, and a lot of questionable claims being made about their "direction." The bulk of their revenue comes from google, and I have been working very hard to de-google everything I can. I have moved away from drive, gmail, search, etc.

I am using Fedora on all my computers, and am logged into firefox on each of them so I have complete sync with all my devices. Are the posts I am seeing blown out of proportion, or should I be looking for another browser?

Thanks in advance!

Came across the stack overflow survey that showed the OSes. Linux is used by quite a few developers.

I'm procrastinating at work and installing random packages with CLI that are just fun to mess with. Recently I've been looking up all my co-workers with Sherlock, just for fun. Does anyone else have CLI stuff that they like to screw with when they're bored?

Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I've been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I've been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.

But, I've noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.

So now I'm considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it's being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I'm sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I'm not sure I want to get into.

Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it.... but it's Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that. https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475

Anyone tried Lubuntu with LXQT desktop lately? Especially for Linux gaming using Steam/Proton/Bottles, etc?

Sorry if this kind of question isn't allowed here, but I'm at my wit's end. VB randomly started launching on startup about 2 weeks ago (on EndeavourOS) and I can't figure out why. There's no shortcut in ~/config/autostart, it isn't in the KDE startup apps list, and I can't find anything virtualbox-related with systemctl either. There's also no setting in the VB app itself. WTF?

I am using (and loving) Fedora 40 as my daily driver. Currently using GNOME however, I do prefer the customization and aesthetics of KDE better.

I primarily use my computer for gaming, and my wife sometimes likes to watch the games I play. (Baldurs Gate 3 for example. She loved watching the story, but wasn't interested in playing) Anyways, I play on a 32" 1440p monitor at 165hz via DisplayPort. We also have a projector which supports either 1080p or 4k, but not 1440p, and is also limited to 60hz via HDMI. In the past, when I was using KDE (Also on a different distro, GarudaKDE I think), it basically had non-existent support for screen mirroring with different resolutions and refresh rates. Gnome does not have this problem. So I am able to play on my monitor with an HDMI cable running to our projector running a mirrored display at a different resolution and refresh rate.

Lately, Gnome is feeling a little too "clunky" for my tastes, and I have been considering switching to KDE. Does anyone know if my screen mirroring question above is possible in Fedora KDE, or if I will run into similar challenges?

Thanks in advance!