For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).

Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.

Just a small way to help people get their FOSS. What are some other projects that have torrents that would be good to seed?

So NVIDIA just doesn't cut it on Linux/proton I've come to learn. Looking at the best bang//buck, it this the AMD card people are flocking to? 7800 XT maybe?

Just got it in my updates now. First things I've noticed, some new icons and some great new Wilma wallpapers and a new "Xviewer" app that seems to be colour managed! Cinnamon version now on 6.2.7

> I’m a big fan of debian. I’m also a big fan of golang. One of the sacrifices debian makes to be so stable is lagging behind a bit on software versions. Debian users generally understand this, and also understand that it’s a good idea not to mess with the system versions of software. > Here I will demonstrate how I configure my system to use whichever version of go I wish without harming the overall system configuration.

Hi everyone,

This is my CONTAINERFILE for Bind9:

``` FROM debian

ENV LC_ALL C.UTF-8

Update and upgrade system

RUN apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y && apt-get dist-upgrade -y

Install BIND 9 and sudo (for debugging if needed)

RUN apt-get install -y bind9 bind9-dnsutils bind9-libs bind9-utils sudo

Configure permissions for BIND directories

RUN mkdir -p /var/cache/bind /var/lib/bind /var/log/bind RUN chown -R bind:bind /var/cache/bind /var/lib/bind /var/log/bind RUN chmod 664 /var/cache/bind /var/lib/bind /var/log/bind RUN chmod -R 664 /var/cache/bind /var/lib/bind /var/log/bind

Create and configure log files

RUN touch /var/log/bind/default.log /var/log/bind/update_debug.log /var/log/bind/security_info.log /var/log/bind/bind.log RUN chown -R bind:bind /var/log/bind RUN chmod 644 /var/log/bind/*.log

Define volumes

VOLUME ["/etc/bind", "/var/cache/bind", "/var/lib/bind", "/var/log/bind"]

Set the entrypoint to the named executable

ENTRYPOINT ["/usr/sbin/named"]

Set the default command arguments for the named executable

CMD ["-g"] ```

I keep getting this error when I run it with podman:

26-Jul-2024 03:18:21.328 loading configuration from '/etc/bind/named.conf' 26-Jul-2024 03:18:21.328 directory '/var/cache/bind' is not writable 26-Jul-2024 03:18:21.332 /etc/bind/named.conf.options:2: parsing failed: permission denied

As you can see from the CONTAINERFILE, the bind user should be able to read and write to /var/cache/bind but for some reason it doesn't.

I have been at this for a while and I'm at my wits end. Your help is appreciated!

geteilt von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/19377025

> > [...] I announce that our move off of wlroots is now complete and MR 6608 is now merged.

An experimental "Pre-RC3" image for the Aeon Desktop has been published and testers are encouraged to try out the final prototype before it becomes the official Release Candidate 3 (RC3). The new image can be downloaded from the openSUSE development repository.

This prototype, which has been submitted to openSUSE Factory, introduces some significant changes and improvements. Notably, the dd backend in the tik installer has been replaced with a new systemd-repart backend. This change allows for the installation of Aeon with Full Disk Encryption that enhances the security features of the operating system.

Existing users of Aeon RC2 and earlier versions will need to perform a reinstall to take advantage of the new features destined for RC3. Due to the fundamental changes in partition layout necessary for the new encryption features, an in-place upgrade from RC2 is not feasible without risking data integrity, according to a post on the new Aeon Desktop subreddit. Users can utilize Aeon's reinstall feature, which facilitates the backup and restoration of user data as long as a sufficiently large USB stick is used.

Users installing the prototype image may encounter some packages from the OBS devel project. These can be removed by running transactional-update --interactive dup and selecting solutions that replace devel:microos packages with official ones.

Testers are encouraged to provide feedback and report any issues encountered during the testing phase on the Aeon Desktop bug report page.

Next Steps ----------

If the prototype is accepted into Factory and becomes RC3, the development of Aeon will be in its final stages before an official release. RC3 will serve as the basis for writing openQA tests for Aeon, which are crucial for ensuring the desktop's stability and functionality.

There is a possibility of an RC4, which aims to streamline the installer process by embedding the full Aeon install within the installer image, potentially reducing the download size by 50 percent. If this approach is not feasible in the short term, it may be revisited post-release.

Full Disk Encryption is set up in one of two modes: Default or Fallback. Get more info about that in the Aeon Desktop Introduces Comprehensive Full Disk Encryption article.

More Information about openSUSE:

Official

• openSUSE News
• openSUSE Mailing List
• openSUSE Wiki

Fediverse

• https://discuss.tchncs.de/c/opensuse@lemmy.world

Hello so today fedora/linux cannot find any audio devices and it randomly started happening

Update: removing Pulseaudio and reinstalling Plasma-pa helped ty for the nice comments tho No help required anymore

This is my first post on my new site, I hope someone finds it helpful!

So like I was trying to install Davinci resolve (an editing program) and while doing so it basically said "removing" followed by that appears to be everything installed on my computer

So I nope right out of there and I notice a bunch of important things are missing ex: the terminal, file manager, etc

So I just decided Maybe if I reboot everything will be a ok

And now on this screen and it won't even let me enter my logic

This was the latest update of Kubuntu And idk what I did wrong or how I got here

I've only been using Kubuntu for probably about 4 months ish

Edit: please help

Edit 2: I got it working by reinstalling Kubuntu as suggested, Thank you for the help :>

Running EndeavourOS and found a few games that have had some issues on linux, that I have found to be pretty much unfixable.

Unfortunately that would mean using a windows dualboot, and I really don't want windows on this laptop.

Would there be a way to run a windows VM with passing through the dgpu (AMD RX 6700m GPU), BUT able to use the dgpu when the VM is powered off? Unless I'm misunderstanding the guides, the gpu would be "locked" to the VM, and that would be unacceptable as I would mostly game on the host OS.

This is probably a given but the laptop does have integrated graphics as well (AMD Ryzen 7 5800H).

Any potential help would be appreciated, thanks!

I've been on Linux for close to a year but I'm still kinda a newbie and the past 40 something hours have been really testing me.

I had my 4tb backup HDD break on me in a strange way, it still mounts and at first glance seems to still be working, But KDE throws an error saying the drive won't mount (even tho it is?) and I'm unable to copy files from it using Gui or Term commands it just freezes up without throwing an error message, It also freezes after using Ls more than once or twice on it.

Now last night I used clonezilla to copy the entire drive to a portable HDD of the same size, now that drive is giving me the same issue. So I'm assuming it's a software issue and not the drive itself? at least for the 2nd drive.

I already tried fsck to no avail and I'm abit stumped on where to go from there. Any help would be great!

Edit: Should also add the drives EXT4

Update: At the directions of a Gentoo nerd I know. I'm currently in a live boot of Ubuntu copying files to another drive and they seem to be working so far.

Part of the issue might with my few month old install of Endeavour, But I'm still gonna replace the drive. I already paid for a new on.

Another Update: I was able to recover the majority of my files to other drives by running an Ubuntu live USB and copying them over on that, So seems something on my main install was preventing me from copying files? Either way the drive itself is still done for and I got two others on the way to replace it, I've also reinstalled my distro as I was having some bugs with it anyway.

Hello, I'm kinda new in Linux and I've downloaded openSUSE Tumbleweed, since here all right but I wanted to put the language in Hawaiian, this one specifically, and I didn't found the language in the main languages, could I install it from other place, I've found this link from Ubuntu https://askubuntu.com/questions/1449257/where-can-i-find-a-list-of-the-languages-supported-by-ubuntu-in-the-ui they were talking about this but for Ubuntu, how could I install the pack for openSUSE. I appreciate every help, thank you.

Hi all,

I am looking for a local database that is easily accessible via the command line.

It can be SQL or non-SQL

Whats my use case? I want to use it kinda like a second brain. A place to save my notes, my todo lists, my book reading lists, links / articles to read later, etc.

I want it to be a good CLI citizen so that I can script its commands to create simpler abstractions, rather than writing out the full queries every time.

Maybe sqlite is what I need, but is that ideal for my use case?

Edit: removed notes, as evidently they aren't suitable for this and aren't like the rest.

You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)

The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)

Preamble

Make sure your hardware is compatible

Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.

Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux

If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).

Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS

Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.

When in doubt, search for documentation

Arch Wiki is one of the greatest knowledge bases about Linux. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same. Most distros also maintain their own knowledge base.

Understanding the Linux world

What is Linux?

Linux, in the strictest definition, is the kernel, ie. the core component that, among other things, orchestrates and handles all interactions between hardware and software, of a large family of operating systems that, by metonymy, are called "Linux". In general understanding, Linux is any one of these operating systems, called distros.

What is a distro?

A distro, short for "Software Distribution", is a cohesive ensemble of software, providing a full operating system, maintained by a single team. Generally, all of them tend to provide almost the same software and work in a very similar way, but there are major philosophical differences that may influence your choice.

What are the main differences between distros?

As said above, there are a lot of philosophical differences between distros that lead to practical differences. There are a lot of very different ways the same software can be distributed.

• "Point Release" (OpenSUSE Leap) vs. "Rolling Release" (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed): Point release distros are like traditional software. They have numbered releases, and between each one no feature updates take place, only security updates and bug fixes. Rolling Release distros package and distribute software as soon as it's available upstream (the software developer's repos), meaning that there are no versions and no specific schedule.
• "Stable" (Debian Stable) vs. "Bleeding edge" (Arch): Stable distros are generally point release, and focus on fixing bugs and security flaws at the expense of new features. Each version goes through a lenghty period of feature freeze, testing and bug fixing before release. Stability here not only means trouble-free operation, but more importantly consistent behavior over time. Things won't evolve, but things won't break. At least until the next release. Bleeding edge distros, which often follow the rolling release model (there are outliers like Fedora which are mostly bleeding edge yet have point releases), on the other hand, are permanently evolving. By constantly pushing the latest version of each software package, new features, new bugs, bug fixes, security updates and sometimes breaking changes are released continuously. Note that this is not a binary, there is a very large continuum between the stablest and the most bleeding edge distro.
• "Community" (Fedora) vs. "Commercial" (RHEL): Despite the name, Community distros are not only maintained by volunteers, but can also be developed by some company's employees and can be sponsored by commercial entities. However, the main difference with Commercial distros is that they're not a product destined to be sold. Commercial distros like Red Hat's RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Pro are (supposed to be) fully maintained by their company's employees and target businesses with paid support, maintenance, fixes, deployment, training etc.
• "x package manager" vs. "y package manager", "x package format" vs. "y package format": It doesn't matter. Seriously. apt, dnf or pacman, to name a few, all have the exact same purpose: install and update software on your system and manage dependencies.
• "general purpose" (Linux Mint) vs. "niche" (Kali Linux): General purpose distros are just that: distros that can do pretty much anything. Some are truly general purpose (like Debian), and have no bias towards any potential use, be it for a server, a desktop/laptop PC, some IOT or embedded devices, containers etc., some have various flavors depending on intended use (like Fedora Workstation for desktops and Fedora Server for, you guessed it, servers) but are still considered general purpose. They aim for maximum hardware compatibility and broad use cases. At the opposite end, niche distros are created for very specific and unique use cases, like pentesting (Kali), gaming (Nobara), music production (AV Linux) etc. They tend to have a lot of specific tools preinstalled, nonstandard defaults or modified kernels that may or may not work properly outside of their inteded use case.
• "team" (Any major distro) vs. "single maintainer" (Nobara): Pretty self explanatory. Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long.
• "traditional" (Fedora Workstation) vs. "atomic" (Fedora Silverblue): In traditional distros, everything comes from a package. Every single component is individually installable, upgradeable, and deletable. Updating a package means deleting its previous version and replacing it with a new one. A power failure during an update lead to a partial upgrade and can make a system unbootable. Maybe a new package was bad and breaks something. Almost nothing prevents an unsuspecting user from destroying a core component. To mitigate risks and ensure a coherent system at each boot, atomic (also called transactional or immutable) distros, pioneered by Fedora Silverblue and Valve's SteamOS, were born. Like mobile phone OSes, the base system is a single image, that gets installed, alongside the current running version and without modifying it, and becomes active at the next reboot. As updates are isolated from one another, if the new version doesn't work the user can easily revert to a previous, functional version. Users are expected to install Flatpaks or use Distrobox, as installing (layering) packages is not as straightforward as with standard distros.
• "OG" (Debian) vs. "derivative" (Ubuntu): Original distros are directly downstream of their components' source code repositories, and do most of the heavy lifting. Because of the tremendous amount of work it represents, only a few distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware or Fedora have the history, massive community and sometimes corporate financial backing to do this. Other distros reuse most packages from those original distros and add, replace or modify some of them for differenciation. For example, Debian is the parent of almost all deb-based distros like Ubuntu, which itself is the parent of distros like Mint or Pop!_OS.

What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?

All distros provide, install and maintain, among other things, the following components:

• Boot and core system components (these are generally out-of-scope for beginners, unless you need to fix something, but you should at least know they exist):
  • A boot manager (GRUB, systemd_init, etc.): Boots the computer after the motherboard POSTs, lets you choose what to start
  • An init system (systemd, etc.): Starts everything needed to run the computer, including the kernel
  • A kernel (Linux): Has control over everything, main interface for software to discuss with hardware
• Command-line environment, to interact with he computer in text mode:
  • A shell (bash, zsh, fish etc.): The main interface for command-line stuff
  • Command-line tools (GNU, etc.): Standard suite of command-line tools + default tools chosen by the distro maintainers
  • User-installable command-line tools and shells
• Graphical stack for desktop/laptop computers:
  • Display servers (X11, Wayland compositors): Handle drawing stuff on screens
  • A Desktop environment (Plasma, Gnome, XFCE etc.): The main graphical interface you'll interact with everyday.
  • User-facing applications (browsers, text processors, drawing software etc.): Some are generally installed by default and/or are part of a desktop environment's suite of software, most are user-installable.
• A package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, yast etc.): Installs, deletes, updates and manages dependencies of all software installed on the machine.

Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?

As a new user, this is basically the only thing you should concern yourself about: choosing a first Desktop environment. After all, it will be your main interface for the weeks/years to come. It's almost as important as choosing your first distro. These are a few common choices that cater to different tastes:

• Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides its strongly opinionated developers' vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome's development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE.
• KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is not yet a single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers and explains why there are so few distros with Plasma as the flagship DE. The KDE team is however evolving towards a more regular update cycle.
• Cinnamon: Forked from Gnome 3 by the Linux Mint team who disliked the extreme change of user experience it introduced, Cinammon provides a very traditional, "windows-like", desktop-metaphor experience in a more modern software stack than the older DEs it takes inspiration from. Cinnamon still keeps a lot in common with Gnome by being simple and easy to use, yet heavily modifiable with themes, applets and extensions.
• Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs. If your machine is super old, extremely underpowered and has less than a few Gb of RAM, don't expect miracles though. A single browser tab can easily dwarf the RAM usage and processing power of your entire system.

As for which one you should choose, this is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. FYI, you are not married to your distro's default desktop environment. It's just what comes preinstalled. You can install alternative DEs on any distro, no need to reinstall and/or distro-hop.

How do I install stuff on Linux?

Forget what you're used to do on Windows of MacOS: searching for your software in a seach engine, finding a big "Download" button on a random website and running an installer with administator privileges. Your package manager not only keeps you system up to date, but also lets you install any software that's available in your distro's repositories. You don't even need to know the command line, Gnome's Software or Plasma's Discover are nice graphical "App Stores" that let you find and install new software.

Flatpak are a great and more recent recent alternative to distro packages that's gaining a lot of traction, and is increasingly integrated by default to the aforementioned App Stores. It's basically a "universal" package manager system thet sits next to your system, that lets software developers directly distribute their own apps instead of offloading the packaging and distribution to distro maintainers.

Choosing a first distro

As discussed before, there is a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a decently large community of maintainers and contributors and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case. Choose a distro that implements well the DE of your choice.

What are great distros for beginners?

The following are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. Always read the installation documentation thoroughly before attempting anything, and follow any post-install requirements (for example, installing restricted-licence drivers on Fedora).

• Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite being sponsored by Red Hat (who are getting a lot of justified hate for moving RHEL away from open-source), this is a great community distro for both beginners and very advanced users (including the Linus Torvalds). Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment, but also has a fantastic Plasma version. Keywords: Point Release, close to Bleeding Edge, Community, dnf/rpm, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
• Linux Mint: Mint is an Ubuntu (or Debian for the LMDE variant) derivative for beginners and advanced users alike, that keeps Ubuntu's hardware support and ease of use while reverting its shenanigans and is Cinammon's flagship distro. Its main goal is to be a "just works" distro. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, Community, apt/deb, smallish maintainer team but lots of contributors, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu or Debian).
• Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this is another Ubuntu derivative that removes Snaps in favor or Flatpaks. Its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. In a few months/years, it will be the flagship distro for the -promising but still in development- Cosmic DE. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, commercially-backed Community, apt/deb, employee's maintainer team, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu).
• If you want something (advertised as) zero-maintenance, why not go the Atomic way? They are still very new and there isn't a lot of support yet because they do things very differently than regular distros, but if they wort OOTB on your system, they should work reliably forever. Sensible choices are uBlue's Aurora (Plasma), Bluefin (Gnome) or Bazzite (gaming-ready), which are basically identical to Fedora's atomic variants but include (among other things) restricted-licence codecs and QOL improvements by default, or OpenSUSE's Aeon (Gnome). Keywords: Point Release, Bleeding Edge, Community, rpm-ostree, large maintainer team, Atomic, sub-project (Fedora/OpenSUSE).

Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?

These are amongst the very best but should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed.

• Debian Stable: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel quite outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as "Standard Linux" as can be. Debian almost made the cut to "beginner" distros because of its incredible reliability and massive amount of documentation available, but it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection. Keywords: Point Release, Stable as fuck, Community, apt/deb, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
• Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux. The "Arch btw" meme of having to perform every single install step by hand has taken a hit since Arch has had a basic but functional installer for a few years now, which is honestly a good thing. I work in sofware. A software engineer who does every single tedious task manually instead of automating it is a shit software engineer. A software engineer who prides themself from doing every single tedious task manually should seriously reconsider their career choices. Arch's other main appeal is the Arch User Repository or AUR, a massive collection of user-created, automated install scripts for pretty much anything. Keywords: Rolling Release, Bleeding-edge, Community, pacman/pkg, large maintainer team, traditional, original.

Which distro should I avoid, period?

• Ubuntu: despite having a huge mind-share as the beginner distro, Ubuntu suffers from it's parent company's policy to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really and a second-rate citizen compared to their Ubuntu Pro commercial product. Some of the worst takes in recent years have been pushing Snaps super agressively in order to get some "vendor-lock-in", proprietary walled-garden ecosystem with exclusive commercial apps, forcibly installing snaps even when explicitely asking for a .deb package through apt, baking ads and nags into major software or only delivering critical security patches to Pro customers. Fortunately, there are some great derivatives like Mint or Pop!_OS cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical.
• Manjaro: Manjaro might seem appealing as a "user-friendlier" Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs Arch-style regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro. Manjaro also has a highly irregular update schedule that's weeks behind Arch, making using the AUR extremely dangerous, as it always expects a fully up-to-date Arch system.
• Any single-maintainer or tiny team distros like Nobara or CachyOS. They might be fantastic distros made by exceptional people (I have mad respect for Nobara's maintainer Glorious Eggroll and his work on Proton-GE), they are most often derivatives so the heavy lifting is already done by their parent distro's maitainers, but there is too much risk involved. Sometimes life happens, sometimes people move on to other projects, and dozens of small distros get abandonned every year, leaving their users dead in the water. Trusting larger teams is a much safer bet in the long term.
• Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons like Alpine Linux, Devuan or Artix. Don't get me wrong, not using any GNU tools or systemd is a cool technological feat and developing alternatives to the current consensus is how things evolve. However, these standard tools have a long history, hundreds if not thousands of maintainers and are used by millions, meaning there's a huge chance your specific issue is already solved. Refusing to use them should be reserved to very advanced users who perfectly understand what they're gaining and losing. As a beginner to intermediate level, it will at best make most of the documentation out there irrelevant, at worst make your life a miserable hell if you need to troubleshoot anything.

Philosophical questions, or "I've seen people arguing over the Internet and now I'm scared"

You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community or on the other website that starts with a "R", but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?

Shoud I learn the command line?

Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.

I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?

Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server. If it's possible, one of the best ways to breathe new life into an old machine is to add some RAM, as even lightweight modern sofware will struggle with less than a few Gb.

Should I be concerned about systemd?

No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical and ideological rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner.

Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?

Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GTX/RTX users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. X11 was born in a time when mainframes did most of the heavy lifting and windows were forwarded over a local network to dumb clients. X11 predates the Internet and has basically no security model. Wayland solves that by being a much simpler display protocol with a much smaller feature set adapted to modern computing and security. The only downside is that some very specific functionalities based on decades of X11 hacking and absolute lack of security can be lost.

I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?

No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.

Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?

Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent stable version and/or the one packaged by the developer themselves (which should often be the Flatpak anyway). Snaps however are kinda bad. They are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. Also, Canonical is very aggressive in pushing snaps to their users, even forcing them even when they want to install an apt package. If you don't care, have fun.

I need/want program "x", but it is only available on distro "y" and not on mine. I've been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?

No. Generally, most software is intallable from your distro's package manager and/or Flatpak. But sometimes, your distro doesn't package this program you need, or an inconsiderate developer only distributes a random .deb on their Github release page. Enter Distrobox. It is a very simple, easy to use command line tool that automates the creation of other Linux distros containers using Docker or Podman (basically, tiny, semi-independant Linuxes that live inside your regular Linux), and lets you "export" programs installed inside these containers to you main system so you can run them as easily and with almost the same performance as native programs. Some atomic distros like uBlue's variants even include it by default. That .deb we've talked about before? Spin a Debian container and dpkg install the shit out of it. Absolutely need the AUR? Spin an Arch container and go to town.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who helped improve this guide: @GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml, @tkn@startrek.website, @throwaway2@lemmy.today, @cerement@slrpnk.net, @kzhe@lemm.ee, @freijon@feddit.ch, @aarroyoc@lemuria.es, @SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org, @Plopp@lemmy.world, @bsergay@discuss.online ...and many others who chimed in in the comments <3

Link to version 1: https://lemm.ee/post/15895051

So I've been playing Forza Horizon 4 for a while without any issues using a XBox One Controller via Bluetooth. First i used Proton experimental and later Proton GE. Absolutely no problem.

Now however, the controller is not being recognized in game anymore (the on screen buttons show keyboard keys, not gamepad buttons) and I can't use any of the buttons (except the screenshot one). In the Steam menu, the controller test settings, big picture mode etc. it works fine and its recognized normally.

I didn't make any changes (before it happened, now of course it tried a bunch of stuff) but I did upgrade the system normally.

Any ideas what might have caused this issue?

I've only used ufw and just now I had to run this command to fix an issue with docker. sudo iptables -I INPUT -i docker0 -j ACCEPT I don't know why I had to run this to make curl work.

So, what did I exactly just do? This is behind my house router which already has reject input from wan, so I'm guessing it's fine, right?

I'm asking since the image I'm running at home I was previously running it in a VPS which has a public IP and this makes me wonder if I have something open there without knowing :/

ufw is configured to deny all incoming, but I learnt docker by passes this if you configure the ports like 8080:8080 instead of 127.0.0.1:8080:8080. And I confirmed it by accessing the ip and port.

My question is whether it is good practice to include a unique wrapper phrase for custom commands and aliases.

For example, lets say I use the following command frequently:

apt update && apt upgrade -y && flatpak update

I want to save time by shortening this command. I want to alias it to the following command:

update

And lets say I also make up a command that calls a bash script to scrub all of of my zfs and btrfs pools:

scrub

Lets say I add 100 other aliases. Maybe I am overthinking it, but I feel there should be some easy way to distinguish these from native Unix commands. I feel there should be some abstraction layer.

My question is whether converting these commands into arguments behind a wrapper command is worth it.

For example, lets say my initials are "RK". The above commands would become:

rk update rk scrub

Then I could even create the following to list all of my subcommands and their uses:

rk --help

I would have no custom commands that exist outside of rk, so I add to total of one executable to my system.

I feel like this is the "cleaner" approach, but what do you think? Is this an antipattern? Is is just extra work?

All I wanted is to install the current yt-dlp (2024.07.16-1) on debian 12.6.

Suggested way to that according to https://packages.debian.org/sid/all/yt-dlp/download is to add that line to that file (etc/apt/sources.list), but do I really need to download the 1600 files that upgrade would entail?

I don't want to download the tar.gz 'cause upgrading that would be a pain.

I need some help here from the experts.

Some background below, but here's the question:

Can I run KDE and Gnome on bazzite? How can I install and manage multiple images? I feel silly asking this, but I'm just not finding the correct documentation.

Background:

I have been running KDE desktop Bazzite on my PC for a while now, and I'm loving the robust and easy system (not to mention the ease of gaming). But I have found that one program just doesn't work correctly, and I had a game (Stellaris) freeze my system several times.

I ended up installing EndeavorOS on an older PC to experiment, and found out that the program in question (openAndroidInstaller) requires a Gnome portal to access my hardware. (Long live the Terminal!) Now I suspect that perhaps the game freeze wouldn't happen with Gnome either. So I want to have both on bazzite, but can't figure it out.

For me it's: Testdisk (and Photorec) Caddy Netstat Dig Aria2

Either self-hosted or cloud, I assume many of you keep a server around for personal things. And I'm curious about the cool stuff you've got running on your personal servers.

What services do you host? Any unique stuff? Do you interact with it through ssh, termux, web server?

I'm using sunshine for remote gaming on my Linux PC. Because I use Wayland and don't have an Nvidia I use kmsgrab for capture (under the hood sunshine uses ffmpeg).

I have noticed that I can enter tty and kmsgrab will capture it as well. If it just captured after logging in my user I wouldn't be surprised, but it also captures the login screen.

I autostart it at login using my systemd user configuration (not systemwide) so it should just have my user's permission level. I get the same results if I put it in KDE's autostart section, so it's not a systemd thing.

Why does that work? Shouldn't you need special privileges to capture everything?

The installation instructions tells you to do sudo setcap -r $(readlink -f $(which sunshine)) is this the reason why it works? What does the command do exactly?

Couldn't find the project in my browser history or Lemmy saves. I'm pretty sure it was Lemmy though that led me to find a GitHub project similar to OSTree. It sounded like it was maintained by one person and it hasn't been updated in a long time because the author thought it was "done" and they used it frequently.

It was a tool that let them basically create images that could be booted from and it was easy to layer software on top of a base image and I think there were config files similar to Containerfiles but didn't look the same. Don't think it be was "goldboot" either but that might be a little closer to what the project does. I don't think it was something Fedora specific either like bootc.

Update: Found it! It was in the history of a laptop I rarely use (of course). The project is https://github.com/godarch/darch and it does appear to be those things I said: layered, docker-like, bare metal, and OS agnostic.

I am trying to install Fedora KDE 40 on my HP laptop alobside windows 11 on a 40 GB partition. for some reason, installation works fine but gts stuck at 'Generating initramfs' i cant see any other issues and USB access is fine. what could be going wrong?