Linux

Most of the switching posts are from frustrated windows users making the jump. I’m already a Linux user on my server (Ubuntu for now, going Debian at some point) and a 2014 iMac for tinkering/testing (KDE Neon), and a couple of raspberry pis (raspberry pi os headless) but our main household computer is an M1 Mac mini that my wife and I both use.

Lately I’ve been super frustrated with macOS.

• First, macOS just refuses to mount my USB 3 drives. I have a 1T seagate ssd and a 3T WD hdd (both exFat) and it just flat out refuses to see them. The same drives are visible and mount just fine on my server and the KDE iMac. On macOS, they’re invisible. They don’t auto mount, and they don’t show up in disk utility (gui or shell), which is really fucking annoying when I’m trying to move large files between machines
• I use Cryptomator to encrypt data on macOS, and because of their whole walled garden shtick and how they continue to lock out system extensions, macfuse routinely breaks, rendering it impossible to access my data on macOS. Again, on the KDE iMac, everything just works as it should. On the Mac It’ll throw me the enable the extension warning, so I enable it. Then it tells me I have to re-boot to actually use the extension. I reboot, and it throws the enable extension warning again. Fucking infuriating.

I hadn’t already pulled the trigger on Asahi because my wife uses the m1 more than I do, and I didn’t want to break anything she does. However today was the last straw as a task that should have taken me maybe 15 minutes took two hours of fighting with macOS. After talking with her she gave me the go ahead to install Asahi. It helps that she does most everything in the browser and that the install is a dual boot setup with macOS still available.

I used to love macOS. It felt so intuitive and while it was never flawless, it mostly just got the fuck out of my way so I could do the things I wanted and needed to do. I still love a lot about Apple hardware, but fuck that shit os. I’m happy to be running Linux on all of the computers in the house.

Now I just have to learn the Fedora differences, having used Debian derivatives up until this point.

I have a VPS, but no root access so I can't use apt, or even read a lot of the system files. I would like to get jellyfin (or any media server, really) running on it. Jellyfin has a portable installation option, so I followed the instructions in the docs to install it from the .tar.gz.

But it says I have to install ffmpeg-jellyfin, and I can't find a portable installation of that. My VPS already has ffmpeg installed on it. Will jellyfin work if I just point it to that instead? Or, how can I go about installing ffmpeg-jellyfin without root access?

I've been doing some scouring and my search results are coming back confusing. Usually either incomplete information, or some kind of sales spam, so I'm reaching out in the hopes of recommendations for actual linux users and fans. I am looking for a very small, tiny even, security/privacy focused distro. I don't mind doing some work to set it up (though LFS may kill me!)

Here is what I have.

• RAM: 2GB (yep. Seriously. None-upgradable).
• HDD: 20GB (say 19GB)
• Processor: Intel Celeron N3350 (2334Mhz average)
• GPU (hah): Intel HD Graphics 500 (Integrated)

Wishlist

• Graphical user interface (I appreciate it's going to be very basic)
• Arch based (I love the AUR and pacman)
• Base runs on less than 512MB of RAM, Arch Linux is a minimum of 512MB.

The software I plan to run on said device, so to give some kind of guidance of how much RAM we're working with.

• Tor Expert and Tor Browser bundles or Mull.
• Virtual machine (of some kind) with Whonix
• MariaDB
• RClone
• VLC/Smplayer (which ever is smaller)
• VPN client
• Rustdesk (I can't find anything smaller than actually works)
• ZSnes
• SimpleX
• Deluge (DelugeD with thin-client)
• LibreOffice (until I can find a lighter alternative, but I need the BASIC capabilities).

Solution

https://lemmy.world/comment/10289862

I'm sick of Windows, and especially what it's become, and the way its trending looks like it will only get worse. I'll be building a brand new PC this summer and want to choose a Linux Distro instead. In preparation, I'd like to try out a virtual machine with a Linux distribution. I am solidly familiar with Ubuntu, but I think it's time to try something that may cater to my specific needs more.

I use my machine for work and gaming (mostly Steam). I am a fullstack software developer and use a second MacBook as well for my daily work needs.

I've had Manjaro, and OpenSUSE recommended to me by a friend who likes both of them but he doesn't game much and doesn't need various software development tools.

Are Manjaro or OpenSUSE good choices? I know there's a tonne of distros out there, and I'm trying to narrow things down a bit. Hopefully this community has some helpful advice.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: First of all, thank-you everyone for your help and positivity. It's been less than a day and the amount of advice and ideas is fantastic. Not too mention the noticeable lack of negative comments (a huge reason I left reddit more than a year ago), thank-you all for reaffirming my reasons.

I've got to admit, I'm a little overwhelmed by all of the advice, but in a good way. I will be scrutinizing all of this advice and laying it out into a roadmap for both my distro testing, as well as PC building. You are all making this community a helpful and spectacular place. I hope one day to be able to pay it forward! Please keep it up!

clean install: you make a backup, nuke the computer, install a fresh upgraded copy of the distro you want from a live usb, copy your data again to the computer.

upgrade: you wait 'till the distro' developers release an upgrade you can directly install from your soon to be old distro, you use a command like sudo do-release-upgrade

and why do you upgrade like that?

Looking up guides on how to install wine can vary. Some say, "sudo apt install wine" and others have you install the 32 and 64bit versions. My machine is 64 bit, but some guides tell you to enable 32bit.

Do I need to install both 64 and 32bit versions? Or is just using "install wine" sufficient?

Tbh I am a messy person, I trained myself to be organized but I still struggle to not lose my keys and I want something like the apple tag but FOSS, I've thought of an ESP32 or ATTINY with a bluetooth module but I don't think apple uses that? It has to be durable and friendly with LineageOS, samsung stock and my dad lol.

upgrading xubuntu 23.10 to 24.04.

I purged a broken package that was blocking upgrades with sudo dpkg -P libfreerdp2-2 and immediately afterwards I executed sudo apt get upgrade. It unleashed a list of 96 packages to upgrade totaling 900 MB of data.

However, if I press yes on ‘do you want to continue?’ ~~wlan is off~~ wlan is on, nmtui clearly shows it activated, but each time I try upgrading, updating, autoremoving, or install --fix-missing I get:

E: failed to fetch http… initramfs-tools-core… could not connect to 127.0.0.1, connection refused.

(I can write the whole address if you need it)

Some other contributors suggest I use a live usb, not installing the OS but using the live usb with working wlan to complete the installation, but this seems to be more complicated than working directly from initramfs.

My favourite DE has got to be Cinnamon, as much as I like KDE and XFCE, I prefer the simplicity of cinnamon where as in KDE has a bit too much of everything in the customization scene and XFCE I find a little tricky to get tiling working right.

Cinnamon to me is perfect as I easily transferred from Win 10 to Mint and soon Manjaro Cinnamon Edition.

What is your favourite DE and why? Tiling WM DE's can be counted as well seeing as they have nifty navigation features.

broken upgrade to xubuntu 24.04 from xubuntu 23.10, can access initramfs as root in recovery mode:

there is a broken package I believe is the root of this whole issue: libfreerdp2-2

if I execute

sudo apt install libfreerdp2-2

I get:

you might want to run apt --fix broken install to correct these, libfreerdp2-2 has unmet dependencies, try apt --fix broken install with no packages or suggest a solution.

After trying apt --fix broken install I get error processing package install-info (--configure), installed install-info package post installation script

Does this happen because the system is only readable?

I also executed

mount -o remount,rw /

mount --all

what do I need to do to check if these commands have worked?

Today I'm here again to terrorize this community with my Bash scripts nobody asked for.

This new biggest is a script evolved from a much simpler version found at biggest.sh to something more complex and complete. Now there are even options to show a simple horizontal bar and relative percentage numbers instead the file size itself.

It's a script to control du command in combination with several other standard Linux utilities. I'm well aware of these alternative applications to help visualizing what the biggest files on the system are. Well, I like these kind of scripts and I like its not too much bloated. And especially the output as paths can be combined with other tools easily. It's also kinda fun doing this. Edit: Forgot to mention, it also reads stdin pipe, as output from another program like find in example.

Have a good day.

Hello,

Today my washing machine completely broke down. My parents desperately tried to get it working, but it resulted in the circuit breakers tripping and my server (an old Dell Wyse thin client) experiencing a hard power off.

When I tried to turn it back on, I received these errors on the screen.

I ran a memtest, and it completed without any issues. I also created a disk image backup just in case.

Is there any chance of getting this machine running again, or is it only fit for utilization?

After a crash during an update (which I managed to recover from), the default file manager Nautilus no longer works, and crashes so hard it crashes VirtualBox too.

I tried by deleting it then reinstalling it, but didn't change this behavior. Also there's a non-zero possibility that the original crash was caused by Nautilus itself.

On Cinnamon and LxQt, the trash is in ~/.local/share/Trash. Is it the same for all desktop environments?

before the issue, wifi app was configured not to start automatically because I sometimes change the mac after logging in. I usually enable it afterwards with iftop and then systemctl start NetworkManager.service && sudo nm-applet

Back to the issue: I can log in to recovery mode, filesystem is read and write, unsure that ‘network’ enables the network.

I can also root it.

If I execute sudo apt update output reads: failed to fetch http…. Could not connect to 127.0.0.1:8118, connection refused. I don’t know how to fix this.

8118 should be tor.

If I execute sudo apt install -f or dpkg –configure -a I get the regular list of packages I should delete with autoremove and the broken package I believe caused this issue during upgrade:

libfreerdp2-2

and a dpkg error:

/usr/sbin/update-info-dir: 11 /etc/environment: debug: not found dpkg: error processing package install-info (-configure) errors were encountered while processing install-info sub process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

lsb_release -a shows distro is 23.10

secondary questions: is there any way to access my data as root? I can cd to media and to my home directory, but this last directory appears as empty.

How do I change the font’s color as root? Very dark blue, cannot read anything

thanks

I'm having a fair share of problems with OpenSuse Tumbleweed and python atm.

Coming from Linux Mint and windows.

Installing python-packages with pip was pretty easy.

But I have trouble understanding how to install the following packages on TumbleWeed:

tkCalendar

yaml for Python(311)

When I try to use pip I get prompted to use zypper.

I am stuck at this point. Do I have to use something different than zypper? What is the correct way here?

Help very much appreciated and thank you in advance!

--- Update ---

**Thanks everyone for the help! **

I could succesfully create a virtual enviroment in my Visualstudio Code and installed the needed libraries. The next step for me would be to create a executable package.

I have been using Arch Linux with i3wm for around 5 years for work, on my ThinkPad. I am fairly comfortable with pacman and setting up a distro. I have previously tried Mint, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Elementary, and MX Linux, all for the same use case (Work: where I need a browser, Slack, and a MongoDB GUI).

However, I have been using Windows on my desktop that I use for gaming and the Adobe suite (photoshop and illustrator mainly). With the increasing enshittification of Win11, I want to migrate full time to a Linux system on desktop as well. I prefer a more stable experience on this machine so I chose Pop OS (other suggestions are welcome. I like Plasma). I need some help getting started (I did some preliminary trials on a VM where I was able to run a small game off GOG, but the part I need help with needs some trickery wrt different disks).

PC specs:

• Ryzen 3 3300X
• 16 GB DDR4
• 1 NVMe boot drive, 1 SATA SSD for games, 1 HDD
• RX 570 8 GB

My copies of Photoshop and some of my games are pirated. I'm planning to run a Tiny10 VM for the Adobe stuff but the games will need to run on bare metal linux, off the NTFS formatted game drive. Edit : Most importantly, Content Manager and mods for Assetto Corsa need to work (not pirated), with my Thrustmaster T128

I would be grateful for a guide for this.