Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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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.

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i want to mount my roms and photos automatically but i just find the mount command. do i add it to fstab

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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?

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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.

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Title.

The situation is basically this:

  • NFS works, it's very fast, keeps the xattrs but if used without Kerberos it's not secure. If used with Kerberos it works, but has a ticket that expires and forces me to reenter the credentials frequently in order to use it. If there was a way to use NFS with Kerberos and save the credentials NFS would be the perfect solution.

  • Samba works fine too, also keeps the xattrs but I had some troubles with filenames (mainly with some special characters, emoji, etc). Besides, as both my server and my clients run Linux I prefer to avoid it if I have the choice.

  • sshfs would be the natural choice, not as fast as NFS but it's pretty secure, I already use it in most of my network shares but I just can't find a way to make it preserve the files xattrs.

Do you guys have any suggestions or maybe any other options that I might use?

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I would like the Firefox profile manager to open when I run Firefox from the GNOME 3 menu, be it the DashBar or the native menu. I installed Firefox using Flatpak.

I know that I can run it from the terminal with flatpak run org.mozilla.firefox -p. But how do I modify the .desktop file? I guess it is the one in /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/org.mozilla.firefox.desktop? I tried replacing the line

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox --file-forwarding org.mozilla.firefox @@u %u @@

with

[Desktop Entry]
Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 --command=firefox org.mozilla.firefox --ProfileManager

but I cannot save the document because of "too many symbolic links".

What is the secret?

I really wish Firefox would simply offer this as an option in its settings.

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Hi, all. Finally migrated from Kubuntu to Debian 12 over the weekend. It's working great, as I figured it would, with one exception: The system isn't turning the monitors off after 10 minutes. It's blanking them, but they're clearly still on.

One monitor is on an AMD graphics card, the other is on the motherboard Intel adapter.

Debian 12 with KDE Plasma running on Wayland with sddm login. It previously worked fine on Kubuntu (which I believe was running X11). It's a fresh Debian install on a different drive; I didn't overwrite the Kubuntu installation.

In the Energy Saving settings, I have "Screen energy saving" checked with a delay of 10 minutes. (I have "suspend session" turned off - one, because I don't want the computer to sleep or suspend, and two, because when I woke it up again, the graphics were garbled and I had to reboot.) As I said, it does blank the screens, but they're still clearly on. I want them to go into power save mode.

I've tried running dpkg-reconfigure and selecting sddm, no change. In KDE's background services, I tried turning off KScreen 2, but that didn't help (though I'm not sure if I rebooted after turning it off, now that I think about it).

I found advice somewhere that suggested deleting .config/powermanagementprofilesrc and rebooting; I did that, no change.

I did notice yesterday that the monitors had shut off...after a very long time of being idle. I'm not sure how long, but more than overnight, for certain.

Any advice or suggestions? Unfortunately, searching is difficult, because I get a lot of results where the screen blanks when it shouldn't. I haven't found much for this problem.

I used the same installer on my laptop to do the same migration (also with KDE Plasma and sddm) and it works fine there.

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by mfat@lemdro.id to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 
 

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

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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

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im using kde and maliit honestly sucks. i tried phosh but thats seems like gnome but worse. id want a desktop de not mobile

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How does Linux it self or some other software on Linux address what Crowd Strike is doing for Windows?

E: thanks for the answers :)

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by sebastiancarlos@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 
 

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?

893
 
 

Maybe Canonical will be the next Crowdstrike

894
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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by remram@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 
 

I am using unattended-upgrades across multiple servers. I would like package updates to be rolled out gradually, either randomly or to a subset of test/staging machines first. Is there a way to do that for APT on Ubuntu?

An obvious option is to set some machines to update on Monday and the others to update on Wednesday, but that only gives me only weekly updates...

The goal of course is to avoid a Crowdstrike-like situation on my Ubuntu machines.

edit: For example. An updated openssh-server comes out. One fifth of the machines updates that day, another fifth updates the next day, and the rest updates 3 days later.

895
896
 
 

Sorry to be a bother, but I'm hitting a wall here, and my google-fu is not strong enough apparently. I'm trying to reinstall a Home Assistant VM on my server, (It's been a while, and I have no idea how I did it originally). Running: virt-install --name haos --description "Home Assistant OS" --os-variant=generic --ram=16384 --vcpus=4 --disk /home/chris/haos_ova-12.4.qcow2,bus=scsi --controller type=scsi,model=virtio-scsi --import --graphics none --boot uefi

Returns:

`WARNING KVM acceleration not available, using 'qemu' WARNING Using --osinfo generic, VM performance may suffer. Specify an accurate OS for optimal results.

Starting install... ERROR internal error: Could not run '/usr/bin/swtpm_setup'. exitstatus: 1; Check error log '/home/chris/.cache/libvirt/qemu/log/haos-swtpm.log' for details. Domain installation does not appear to have been successful. If it was, you can restart your domain by running: virsh --connect qemu:///session start haos otherwise, please restart your installation.`

Checking the 'haos-swtpm.log' shows repeated entries of:

Starting vTPM manufacturing as chris:chris @ Sun 21 Jul 2024 02:58:07 AM UTC Successfully created RSA 2048 EK with handle 0x81010001. Invoking /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/swtpm/swtpm-localca --type ek --ek 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 --dir /home/chris/.config/libvirt/qemu/swtpm/d7406119-26ab-4e42-b98e-46065e1ea2eb/tpm2 --logfile /home/chris/.cache/libvirt/qemu/log/haos-swtpm.log --vmid haos:d7406119-26ab-4e42-b98e-46065e1ea2eb --tpm-spec-family 2.0 --tpm-spec-level 0 --tpm-spec-revision 164 --tpm-manufacturer id:00001014 --tpm-model swtpm --tpm-version id:20191023 --tpm2 --configfile /etc/swtpm-localca.conf --optsfile /etc/swtpm-localca.options Need read/write rights on statedir /var/lib/swtpm-localca for user chris. swtpm-localca exit with status 1: An error occurred. Authoring the TPM state failed. Ending vTPM manufacturing @ Sun 21 Jul 2024 02:58:07 AM UTC

I gather that it seems to be a issue with the vTPM, but I usually deal in containers, so this is all new on me.

Thanks in advance.

897
 
 

Hello all,

A couple of questions about Cantata.

It hasn't been developed for a while now. Will it eventually just stop working or there's any way to at least port it to qt6, without new features, just keeping the basic functionality?

I have the habit of star most of the songs I listen to, so that it's become easier to, for example, create smart playlists. In the case I can use Cantata no more is it possible to export somehow this data? Let's say that it stops working and I switch to something else (say, Navidrome or some equivalent). Will I be able to export my preferences, stars, playlists, favorites, etc?

898
 
 

I want to mirgrate my Nextcloud instance from a VPS to server in my home. I run the Nextcloud AIO Docker container, which uses Borg backup. The backup repo is about ~70 GB.

How would I best go about transferring it? Is using scp a good solution here (in combination with nohup so that I don't have to keep my ssh session active)? Or is there some other best practice way of doing this?

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submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by archer@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
 
 

I'm running Proxmox on a Lenovo ThinkCentre and I decided to swap the internal 256 GB 2,5" SSD for a 500 GB NVME.

I installed the new NVME alongside the old SSD, and formated it in ext4 with a single partition. I then proceeded to 'dd /dev/sda /dev/nvme0n1' and it went through without an error.

My impression was that it would clone all content from the old drive to the new, but it wouldn't boot the new drive. I then logged in and set a boot flag via fstab a, but that only helped me boot but the system gets stuck at "waiting for root file system".

Nothing is lost as the old drive still works fine when installed but how do I complete the swap correctly so I can go NVME-only?

Thank you!

900
 
 

Just picked up a 128GB USB A/C stick that can go on my keyring. What are some things I should put on it to have access to at all times?

I already have self hosted services accessible over my VPN, so this would be for when I can't access that.

I'm thinking at least Ventoy and some common ISOs, then I'm not sure what else.

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