Linux Mint Debian Edition would be a pretty solid, pre-customized distribution.
I've had great experiences with Linux on Lenovo over the years: would be my first recommendation.
I currently use a Dell Inspiron, while it's works great, I had to do some extra work occasionally. I love that I can get fingerprint login with it on Linux though.
Why not try it for yourself on Linux mint first by installing plasma? Plasma 5 is available on mint - I believe Fedora has plasma 6.
I use plasma 6 on my Opensuse Slowroll laptop and plasma 5 on my LMDE desktop.
Overall, I've found plasma 6 to run slightly better (I was on plasma 5 on Slowroll too for a long time).
Once you install and try plasma 5 on your current install, that will be a much less disruptive way to see how well it works for you.
After ricing, both plasma 5 and 6 are pretty similar on my setup. The cube desktop effect isn't there by default on plasma 5 of course.
I second endless os. Parental controls, locked down system, comes prepackaged with many educational apps.
Sorry, good catch.
It had been a while since I had played briefly with kiosk mode in a VM: I misremembered the project (the one I played with was still available)
I had found it interesting, and had set it up... Probably been around a year or so.
The project I used was Gnome kiosk, not Fedora kiosk.
They do. They did. What do you do when a 'good guy' is really a bad guy? Happens outside of software too. Someone inserts themselves into an organization while secretly working against its interests.
Here's a good summary. However, you should read a few articles - plenty have been going around, including on Lemmy.
As with all definitions, there is a gray area where people will have different boundaries on exact meanings. To you - a supplier relationship needs an explicit payment, which is a fair definition.
However, the more widely used definition that most people, including me, refer to, is not necessarily focused on the supplier, but on the supply - what we use in our toolchains is a supply - regardless of how it was obtained.
When there is an issue in a trusted supply, even if it was not a commercial relationship (a prerequisite by your definition), it is a supply-chain attack by the more widely used definition.
The article states reasons which aren't limited to what happened. I understand and agree with your sentiment about the supply chain issue being something that could happen anywhere - those were my initial thoughts too.
The reasons for shifting are related to speed, other mainstream software already having made that switch years ago (pre incident), and unfortunately... More robustness in terms of maintainers.
Open source funding and resilience should be mainstream discussions. Open source verification and security reliability should be mainstream discussions: here's a recent mastodon thread I found interesting:
https://ruby.social/@getajobmike/112202543680959859
However, people switching from x to z (I did see what you did there) is something that is going to happen considering the other factors listed in the article that I summarized above.
Linux mint Debian edition or Opensuse tumbleweed.
Slow Internet/less updates, older, more tested software, slightly wider package availability: LMDE.
Faster Internet, more updates, very new (but well tested) software, needs slightly more technical knowledge sometimes: Opensuse tumbleweed.
I personally use Opensuse Slowroll, which is a slower rolling release experimental version of Opensuse tumbleweed.
Linux firmware update utility fwupd is moving away from XZ Utils and will use zstd (Zstandard) for future releases for compressing metadata.
Linux Firmware Update Utility Fwupd Will Use Zstd Compression for Future Releases
The devs are also considering enforcing signed commits in an attempt to prevent supply chain issues like the XZ backdoor.
Edit: note for downvotes: I understand some of you disagree with the need for a switch. However, are you downvoting the news itself (i.e. shooting the messenger?)
If it's just Internet access, would you want to use something more locked down like Fedora kiosk?
Based on other posts by the author (they have posted AI generated art before, and attribute when it's not AI generated), I'm pretty sure this is AI generated.
The fine print in the mastodon toot:
Fine print: Happy first of the fourth!
Says Happy first of the fourth, implying first of the fourth (month - April), which is what I based my own hint that this was an April fools joke in a veiled way.
Sauce listed here in my post.
The reference to the first of the fourth (month - April) implying it is an April fools joke too, in the same place.
I've gotta hand it to the new GNU Linux mascot replacing Tux as of today, brabix. Love the matrix themed T-shirt!
Ref: this post celebrating the first of the fourth 🍀
Edit: The Big Day is over. For those of you (I'm kinda guessing there were quite a few) who weren't sure what this was (and for everyone else too, thanks for being a sport) (Happy??) April Fools! (please tell me you already knew this!)
It's Linux time!
Sorry for the advertisement, but someone had to do it.
Linux should revive your machine from both a performance, and from an update perspective.
If you have a SSD: Linux mint Debian edition: https://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
If you don't: you can still try Linux mint, or go with Spiral Linux for something faster:
Cowards version:
[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && echo 'rm -fr /... you crazy dude? NO' || echo 'Keep your french language pack, you will need it'
I run KDE on opensuse Slowroll - Intel i9 processor with plenty of RAM.
Check btrfs snapshots, and consider disabling them if you don't really need them.
Here's my story some time in the recent past:
Similar freezing issues that got more frequent. I have network and CPU monitor widgets on my desktop, and noticed my CPU usage peaking during freeze.
Ran top, saw #btrfs was doing a lot of processing. It was running snapshots.
I'd like snapshots, but a responsive system is more important to me: I have frequent backups of most of my stuff anyways.
Once I disabled btrfs snapshots, I stopped having the periodic freezes (which I also noticed were often some time after system/flatpak updates).
Nobody cares about the $135000, I told you!
See how the socket looks like a V?
That's how you remember it's meant to be used to exit vi.
Spiral Linux. It's Debian with customizations on top. You probably have a HDD. Flatpak/snap won't play well with that.
You could try Opensuse tumbleweed for newer stuff, not sure how well your machine would hold up.
Puppy Linux might be an even safer choice than spiral Linux if you really want to stay lightweight.
To be honest, I've never owned an apple device: only Android phones and windows (with Linux immediately installed) laptops. However, I kind of like the icon aesthetic the most out of all the ones I've tried.
The theme also grew on me during my Gnome days, so yup, these days I pretend my device is an apple from a cosmetic sense 😂
Accurate, detailed time zone borders for North America, including Daylight Saving time observance and unofficial local exceptions to official time. Magenta lines represent constant time zone borders. Cyan (light blue) lines represent those that apply only during Daylight Saving Time. Dark blue li...
I realized (as I was commuting) this morning, that some people must live near timezone borders.
How does that work for you? Do you think in work time at home? Home time at work?
It must be easier these days with smartphones and smart watches automatically adjusting time according to you location?
Share your experience please, I'm curious!
I'll need to mirror print stuff regularly (flip across the vertical axis), and I'm trying to make the process convenient.
The manual way to mirror print would be by invoking lp, e.g.
lp -o mirror myfile.pdf
Invoking lp would work for images, PDF, ps etc. But but for application (open office draw) files. Unfortunately, I don't see an obvious way to mirror print within the application itself.
I'm thinking of setting up a mirror printer in CUPS that would automatically apply the -o mirror to any documents that hit it.
I suspect this would require some tinkering with CUPS filters - I'll dig into it sometime.
I can't be the only one who's needed this at some point in time.
Has anyone here done something similar? Looking forward to your thoughts!
I recently ran across SpiralLinux - GitHub page, and found the concept of how the maintainer is packaging it very cool.
The maintainer has been maintaining Gecko Linux for a while now - it has the same underlying concept.
The gist is - you're basically installing Debian, but with customizations that the maintainer(s) thought would be very helpful. Basically - better out of the box experience for new users, but also less work to do even for experienced users, and it comes with different download flavors - Gnome, Plasma, XFCE, Mate, etc.
Bit more detail by the maintainer in this Reddit comment:
> Exactly. It's like I went over to your house and installed and configured Debian on your computer, and then you kicked me out of your house as soon as I finished. ;-) The installed system no longer has any connection whatsoever with me or the SpiralLinux project, which is good because you wouldn't want your entire system to depend on a random single developer maintaining it.
(original Reddit comment has more details).
I thought this was pretty cool. I'm still trying to read up online on trying to find how the package lists are maintained, etc., and I might be interested in contributing if I'm able to in the future.
Just wanted to share!
How are y'all managing internal network certificates?
At any point in time, I have between 2-10 services, often running on a network behind an nginx reverse proxy, with some variation in certificates, none ideal. Here's what I've done in the past:
- setup a CLI CA using openssl
- somewhat works, but importing CAs into phones was a hassle.
- self sign single cert per service
- works, very kludgy, very easy
- expose http port only on lo interface for sensitive services (e.g. pihole admin), ssh local tunnel when needed
I see easy-RSA seems to be more user friendly these days, but haven't tried it yet.
I'm tempted to try this setup for my local LAN facing (as exposed to tunnel only, such as pihole) services:
- Get letsencrypt cert for single public DNS domain (e.g. lan.mydomain.org).. not sure about wildcard cert.
- use letsencrypt on nginx reverse proxy, expose various services as suburls (e.g. lan.mydomain.org/nextcloud)
Curious what y'all do and if I'm missing anything basic.
I have no intention of exposing these outside my local network, and prefer as less client side changes as possible.
Why don't more people use desktop Linux? I have a theory you might not like "There might be a very simple explanation for why the masses have yet to adopt Linux as their desktop operating system and it's one the open-source community won't like" https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-dont-more-people-u...
Two main points:
- no one unified distro to keep things simple (thread OP)
VS
- people don't care. Someone else needs to advocate, sell, migrate, and support (medium term) Linux (whichever distro they want) for the intermediate term (few months at least) - thread response).
I think a lot of the 97% desktop market share is like this, instead of the hands on 2-3%.
I never imagined I'd like playing Tetris on the command line, on a terminal on my phone (termux), but here I am!
I couldn't find any Tetris app on fdroid, and just checked if pkgs had one. Lo and behold! It asked me to run pkgs install vitetris, and when I did, the tetris command was there to launch the game.
It's a two step process, as opposed to just launching an app, but it is very lightweight, no tracking, and FOSS.
For anyone with termux already installed and feeling a bit nostalgic, might be worth trying it out.
I couldn't find a nix community, so I'm hoping it is ok that I'm posting on the nixos one instead. I'll switch to mailing list/discord if necessary, but I have a lemmy app on my phone, and it is much easier to have an ongoing conversation from here, so I decided to give it a shot. Here goes!
While I have a NixOS laptop, I primarily use other systems (e.g. OpenSuse Tumbleweed) as of now.
I love the ability to define the packages I want installed, with home-manager managing my command line utilities (e.g mtr, dig, protobuf etc).
I've been playing around a bit with protobuf recently, and after generating some c++ code using protoc, I loaded up the generated code in vscode, which understandably wasn't able to find the development headers for protobuf (since they are in the nix store - /nix/store/h2h5fs8iv2a8rmlkfhr6id6y4jxwd5i1-protobuf-3.21.12/include/google/protobuf/io)
I tried to compile the code anyways on the command line, and got some errors.
I might need an OS specific protobuf install just for the development headers, but I'm pretty sure I should be able to, and just don't know how. Here's what I get when I try to compile:
$ g++ searchReq.pb.cc In file included from searchReq.pb.cc:4: searchReq.pb.h:10:10: fatal error: google/protobuf/port_def.inc: No such file or directory 10 | #include | ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ compilation terminated.
Any tips/pointers would be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
===========================================
Edit: Thank you all, particularly @Xephopiqua@lemmy.ml and @chayleaf@lemmy.ml for the help. After setting the include path (compile) and LD_LIBRARY_PATH (link), things work great.
I ended up writing a small Makefile for convenience in the short run:
```Makefile INC_FLAGS:=-I$(HOME)/.nix-profile/include -Icpp LD_FLAGS:=-L$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib -l protobuf
run: task LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$(HOME)/.nix-profile/lib ./task
task: g++ $(LD_FLAGS) $(INC_FLAGS) main.cpp cpp/searchReq.pb.cc -o task
regen: protoc --python_out=python --cpp_out=cpp searchReq.proto ```
That's enough to get me going for now.
TODO - read up the NIXOs Wiki C page in more detail
fortune | cowsay -f turtle | lolcat is a fun thing to have in your .bashrc
In 2008, Boston’s transit authority sued to stop MIT hackers from presenting at the Defcon hacker conference on how to get free subway rides. Today, four teens picked up where they left off.
It's been a month or two since I (re) discovered the nix package manager (and operating system).
It got me down a rabbit hole for a few weeks, before things finally settled down.
I loved that I could declare the software I wanted installed on any distro (I have machines with Ubuntu, Arch, Nixos atm). I use home-manager and the same home manager config across machines using chezmoi, so that way all cool command line tools (I'm using distro packages/flatpak for graphical for now) are installed painlessly everywhere.
Big shout-out to nix!