Linux

Neat little thing I just noticed, might be known but I never head of it before: apparently, a Wayland window can vsync to at least 3 monitors with different refresh rates at the same time.

I have 3 monitors, at 60 Hz, 144 Hz, and 60 Hz from left to right. I was using glxgears to test something, and noticed when I put the window between the monitors, it'll sync to a weird refresh rate of about 193 fps. I stretched it to span all 3 monitors, and it locked at about 243 fps. It seems to oscillate between 242.5 and 243.5 gradually back and forth. So apparently, it's mixing the vsync signals together and ensuring every monitor's got a fresh frame while sharing frames when the vsyncs line up.

I knew Wayland was big on "every frame is perfect", but I didn't expect that to work even across 3 monitors at once! We've come a long, long way in the graphics stack. I expected it to sync to the 144Hz monitor and just tear or hiccup on the other ones.

so, about a month ago i stumbled upon the duckduckgo ai chat feature and wrote an article about how private their APIs are, and a few weeks after, a CLI client.

the thing is in a pretty mature stage now (its not like there is a lot of work to be done there tbh)

its not super private, but it is "private enough". the only thing duckduckgo has is your IP, which is usually not much unless you are on a residential connection with a dedicated IP

Members of openSUSE Project are excited about the launch of Leap 15.6 on June 12 and encourages people to host a Release Party.

If you don’t know how to do this, there is a list of steps below on how to have a successful release party.

If you’re interested in hosting your own Release Party, there’s a handy checklist to help you plan a successful event:

• Find a Date: A weekend date is usually best, but flexibility is key. Find a common date that works for most people.
• Find a Place: A café, bar, or Linux group meetup location works great. Whether you opt for a coffee and cake party or a beer and pizza gathering, the key is to have fun.
• Cake: While not essential, a cake adds to the celebration. You can also bake openSUSE cookies.
• Pictures: Capture the moment with photos or videos and share them on social media. Tag openSUSE on X, Facebook, Mastodon, BlueSky or more.

There is already a plan to have people to meet virtually in the openSUSE Bar for the launch June 12. The virtual release party will feature members of the release team and community members. Join sometime on June 12 as participants from various countries are encouraged to join and interact with the openSUSE community.

Some will celebration the event in Nuremberg. Certainly people at the openSUSE Conference will highlight the release during the BBQ/Release Party.

These launch parties provide a chance for the community to connect with the people behind the project and to show an appreciation for contributors who make the release of Leap 15.6 possible. It's an excellent opportunity for the community to gather, celebrate and discuss the new release after months of development.

Schedule your release party today on the wiki and have a lot of fun!

More Information about openSUSE:

Official

• openSUSE News
• openSUSE Mailing List
• openSUSE Wiki

Fediverse

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

(Image made with DALL-E)

Hi everyone!

A few days ago, I had a problem while trying to run KDE and Gnome as DE on Fedora 40. That problem was solved (see crosspost), but now, I can't update Fedora anymore as it says "the transaction did not complete" and I can't install or uninstall anything as it says I don't have space on my disk (which is not true).

Does anyone have an idea what to do?

Edit: apparently dnf clean and dnf clean all solved the problem, so thank you everyone as I was kind of panicking when I thought about all the work involved into having my perfect install again.

publication croisée depuis : https://sh.itjust.works/post/20027102

Hi everyone!

Today I tried to install KDE alongside Gnome to give it a try on Fedora on something else than a virtual machine.

For a reason I can't understand, the terminal couldn't finish the installation of KDE as something failed. Despite all of this, all the KDE apps were installed and Plasma is appearing as an option on the login screen under Gnome and Gnome Classic. Still I couldn't launch KDE plasma and nothing was happening after typing my login.

I took it as a sign that KDE isn't for me, especially because I'm 99% happy with Gnome.

So I removed KDE via the terminal and the remaining apps via the software center. Sadly, there is one app called "Centre de bienvenue" or "Welcome center" from KDE that I can't remove. Nothing is happening when I try removing it.

I tried removing it via the terminal, but when I type "dnf list installed" I can't find it as there are too many packages. Could anyone help me?

I also tried « dnf list installed » with the words « welcome », « bienvenue », « kde » and « plasma ».

I almost feel like this a somewhat pointless feature. It's almost easier to just learn the default ones as opposed to adding "-modernbindings" or creating an "enano" variant/copy.

Is Linux not free software itself? I thought propietary stuff was added downstream.

Am I getting something wrong?

For the past couple days, my Fedora 40 install has been hanging with kernel 6.8.10-300.

For the past couple days I've been booting from kernel 6.8.9-300 as whenever I try to boot from kernel 6.8.10-300 my boot gets stuck at: Job dev-mapper-cl\x2dswap.device/start

I've been trying to figure this out on my for a bit but as Fedora is now at kernel 6.8.11 the next update may remove kernel 6.8.9 as an option to boot from and I'm afraid I won't be able to boot from my system.

If anyone knows what is wrong or could give me some advice as to how to read that message I would appreciate it very much.

Hopefully this is the right place to ask. Lemme know otherwise.

I got a Thinkpad W530 with Quadro K2000M GPU (Kepler). With coreboot, I was able to get around all the headaches related to Optimus only having the discrete GPU enabled.

The GPU itself is well-supported by nouveau driver, missing only a few features on the power management side of things.

Things are good when I run stuff natively. However, I have yet to figure out Flatpak. I know we use org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.* packages that are some kind of Mesa abstraction layer.

Things are much more straightforward with Intel and AMD GPU. It is actually quite easy with the proprietary NVidia driver, but it doesn't exactly come free.

The ultimate question is: Should I install one of those org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-<ver> packages with my nouveau? If so, which version?

Repost from: https://libreddit.nl/r/linux_gaming/comments/1d8qi81/phoronix_birthday_20_years_of_great_linux_content/

He really seemed downbeat in his announcements regarding the birthday. He really puts a lot of work into the site but having a niche audience of tech literate users is probably the worst place to be with ad sales tanking as they do. If anybody is using adblockers, it's us and people are cheap.

I really hope the guy has a nice birthday and gets lots of love and donations. The phoronix content is always great and I've been a long time reader. (I've donated the same amount as OP - see my screenshot)

Hi all, the private school I work at has a tonne of old windows 7/8 era desktops in a student library. The place really needs upgrades but they never seem to prioritise replacing these machines. Ive installed Linux on some older laptops of mine and was wondering if you all think it would be worth throwing a light Linux distro on the machines and making them somewhat usable for a web browsing experience for students? They’re useless as is, running ancient windows OS’s. We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s and in some cases pentium machines here.

Might be pointless but wonder what you guys think?

We've all heard it before: People claiming Linux isn't a viable alternative cause you can't run it without using the command line.

I decided to test that. Now there are several distros aimed at new users that have preinstalled GUI tools so you don't have to touch the Terminal. But I wanted to see if that's also possible on a distro not specifically aimed at fresh converts. The oldest distro with a large userbase, which a lot of people consider to be a "standard" Linux, is Debian, so default Debian with Gnome is what I'll use.

I consider "running an OS" to at least include booting it with full disk encryption, starting applications, connecting to a network, browsing the web, file management, installing updates and new software (both from the repos and third party sources), installing necessary drivers, setting up printing and scanning, and adjusting the looks and behaviour of the user interface.
So generally anything you'd be able to do on Windows without opening Powershell, CMD, Regedit or a text editor.

I guess I'm telling you nothing new when I say that you can install, boot, launch apps and browse the web on Debian without the command line.
It comes with a pre-installed software center, printer and scanner setup works out of the box from Gnome's settings.

Here's where it gets a little trickier: Scrolling on Firefox is rough, cause the preinstalled old version doesn't have Wayland support enabled. So you either have to enable Wayland support or install the Flatpak version of Firefox.
To enable Wayland, you have to write MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 into /etc/environment. But the file manager doesn't let you edit system files without starting it as root from the command line. To add an "edit as admin" entry to the context menu in Nautilus, you need the nautilus-admin package which isn't available in the software center. It can be installed with Synaptic, a pre-installed GUI frontend for apt. But you still need to edit a system text file, which goes against the spirit of this challenge.
The other option requires enabling Flatpak for the Software Center. You can do that by installing gnome-software-plugin-flatpak using synaptic, then heading over to https://flathub.org/setup/Debian to download the flathub repo file which can be installed with a double-click and a reboot.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros ship with a newer Firefox version and Flatpak support out of the box.

To install any compatible binary on your system (like the Universal Android Debloater, for example), just copy it to any place you like. Install the menu editor alacarte and use it to add a menu entry for the file. Now you can launch it from within Gnome by clicking on its icon or using the global search.

Another issue is that during the boot process, you're already presented with the command line running boot messages by you, and the password prompt for the disk decryption is also on the command line. Also, the 5 second Grub countdown is kind of annoying. To make this prettier, we need to install grub-customizer, launch it, set the grub countdown to 0 and add the word splash at the end of your kernel parameters in the settings. This activates the "boot-prettifier" plymouth which is pre-installed but not activated by default. Again, pushing the boundaries of this challenge.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros come with pretty plymouth boot enabled by default.

To enable the non-free nvidia Driver, you need to enable non-free software during the GUI installation or in the Software Center settings, then install nvidia-driver from Synaptic, and reboot.
Note: Beginner-friendly distros come with a one-click NVidia driver install

To install Steam from the Debian repos, you'd need to enable Multi-Arch first, which isn't possible without the command line. Using the Flatpak version is your other option.
Note: Some beginner-friendly distros handle this for you as soon as you install a package that depends on multi-arch

tl/dr: It's possible to run and administer Debian for standard tasks without touching the command line. It's just generally faster to use the terminal if you know what you're doing.
Distros like Ubuntu, Mint, Zorin or Pop!_OS (possibly also Manjaro which I have no experience with) remove the remaining roadblocks. The only time you'll always need the command line is to fix issues you have with help from other users, because it's much, much easier to just post the right terminal commands online than to guide you through whichever GUI you might be using.
Anyone who's ever followed a Windows troubleshooting guide knows what I'm talking about.

Hello,

I'm interested in using the BCM5719 (specifically, the Dell BCM5719 NetXtreme 4x PCIe Network Card) with the open-source firmware replacement. Can it work with regular computers (e.g., Dell Precision T1700 MT)? I was reading through the docs and saw that it only lets you build two versions, one for the Talos II and one for the Blackbird. If not, could this possibly be reworked to work on regular computers?

Thanks!

I see there are several different ways to install OSRS on Linux - flatpaks, Android emulators, Steam, etc. - but can anyone recommend the best as far as ease of setup? With lack of glitches being the second priority?

I have an AMD GPU that is quite recent (<5 years)