Linux

One day, Wayland will truly take over the Linux world, but it's not quite there yet with plenty still using X11 due to various problems some of which the new Frog Protocols aim to solve.

Announced by misyl, who does various work for Valve (like Gamescope), it certainly sounds like a good idea to give Wayland Protocols a swift kick to get into gear to improve things for users. Writing on their social media post :

Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.

This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.

We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.

I have this collection of mp3s from the 90s-2000s from before the streaming services era. Back when people used Winamp or XMMS to listen to their music. I backed up my music files in two places and they're both organized differently.

I need a tool to go through the whole thousands of files, find out what each track is (artist, album, track title, track number all that meta data), rename the file accordingly and apply all the metadata, then move the file in a certain directory structure.

Are there any music organizers out there that can do this? Or do I have to implement my own script?

Would their owners even notice?

Inspired by Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning

An already working reimplementation of libfprint in Rust, supposedly easier to use.

It's the simple things really. I've swapped back to Linux as my primary about a year ago, and still I have issues I don't have with Windows.

6 months now, particularly on Linux Mint (Bazzite to its credit hasn't had this issue much) I just can't fit connect to the internet. Linux is the only thing with this issue. By some arcane lucky magic, it somehow fixes itself when I'm fiddling around trying to fix it myself.

Only for the problem to come back next time I boot up my PC on Mint.

I have it connected to a TP link switch, just like other devices. None have the issue, not even a console (Nintendo Switch). Months, fucking months of going through forum posts, articles, social media, and trying out dozens upon dozens of "solutions", both in gui and the terminal - and the problem persists.

Now, I don't think I'm tech savvy exactly, but I'm not tech illiterate either. I understand some simple lines of code, some very basics of networking, etc. I'm patient enough to deal with issues like these for over half a year.

But how the hell is Linux even going to dream of being anywhere near mainstream when one of the most recommended "beginner" distros can't even run a year long without something as simple as the damned internet working???

And it's not just the internet. It's little things that just pop up one day and now you have to solve a puzzle to figure it out. Oh, suddenly you have to print something? Oh, you decided to get a light up keyboard that was on sale? Try to use Steam Link? Get ready to roll the dice on whether it'll take you a weekend to do / use it.

Microsoft is shit. Windows, is shit. Windows 11 is a privacy goddamn nightmare.

But in the end of the day, it just fucking works, those damn bastards ensure that. And even when something doesn't work, it seems, for some unknown reason, most of the online solutions do fix the issue.

Now imagine someone who's less likely to open up a terminal using Linux. They won't. They'll sacrifice their privacy because they might have full time jobs in something not remotely tech related and just wanted to watch some YouTube and don't want to spend the little free time they have fixing their own computer.

What's hilarious is just as I'm finishing this rant, the internet on Mint just magically decided to work again with no issues.

Maybe next time then I'll try yelling at the Linux fairies in my PC to see if they'll do their magic. At this point it's about a valid solution as any other.

What hacks they needed, where they get MacOS binaries, how the boot works etc.

Very interesting talk.

Btw they have a regular Function touchbar ;)

So why did I even want to do this? Because the front panel of my PC has a 3 1/2" drive hole and I wanted to populate it.

Fine, real reason is because I have a few legacy machine lying around and having a floppy drive accessible is nice to have.

How does it work? Well I have a Floppy to USB adapter inside my rig, and since my motherboard has an unused set of USB 2 headers, I just plugged it into that.

Otherwise, it was just plug and play... almost.

Why the drive works as Plug and Play, linux mint pokes the USB to see if it's still there, so I have a small script at boot that disables it for that internal header.

I am just socked that it works, and while it sucks that I need to be root to read the disks, I am just happy that the whole setup works at all.

SPIR-V is the intermediate shader target used by Vulkan as well, so it sounds like this may indirectly make DirectX on Linux smoother.

After 20 years, Real-Time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) is finally -- finally -- in the mainline kernel. Linus Torvalds blessed the code while he was at Open Source Summit Europe. [...] The real-time Linux code is now baked into all Linux distros as of the forthcoming Linux 6.12 kernel. This means Linux will soon start appearing in more mission-critical devices and industrial hardware. But it took its sweet time getting here. An RTOS is a specialized operating system designed to handle time-critical tasks with precision and reliability. Unlike general-purpose operating systems like Windows or macOS, an RTOS is built to respond to events and process data within strict time constraints, often measured in milliseconds or microseconds. As Steven Rostedt, a prominent real-time Linux developer and Google engineer, put it, "Real-time is the fastest worst-case scenario." He means that the essential characteristic of an RTOS is its deterministic behavior. An RTOS guarantees that critical tasks will be completed within specified deadlines. [...]

So, why is Real-Time Linux only now completely blessed in the kernel? "We actually would not push something up unless we thought it was ready," Rostedt explained. "Almost everything was usually rewritten at least three times before it went into mainline because we had such a high bar for what would go in." In addition, the path to the mainline wasn't just about technical challenges. Politics and perception also played a role. "In the beginning, we couldn't even mention real-time," Rostedt recalled. "Everyone said, 'Oh, we don't care about real-time.'" Another problem was money. For many years funding for real-time Linux was erratic. In 2015, the Linux Foundation established the Real-Time Linux (RTL) collaborative project to coordinate efforts around mainlining PREEMPT_RT.

The final hurdle for full integration was reworking the kernel's print_k function, a critical debugging tool dating back to 1991. Torvalds was particularly protective of print_k --He wrote the original code and still uses it for debugging. However, print_k also puts a hard delay in a Linux program whenever it's called. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable in real-time systems. Rostedt explained: "Print_k has a thousand hacks to handle a thousand different situations. Whenever we modified print_k to do something, it would break one of these cases. The thing about print_k that's great about debugging is you can know exactly where you were when a process crashed. When I would be hammering the system really, really hard, and the latency was mostly around maybe 30 microseconds, and then suddenly it would jump to five milliseconds." That delay was the print_k message. After much work, many heated discussions, and several rejected proposals, a compromise was reached earlier this year. Torvalds is happy, the real-time Linux developers are happy, print_K users are happy, and, at long last, real-time Linux is real.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28037255

Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I've been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I've been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.

But, I've noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.

So now I'm considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it's being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I'm sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I'm not sure I want to get into.

Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it.... but it's Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that. https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475

So, I was told you can take any distro, pair it with any desktop environment, and badda bing, badda boom, unique linux in the room!

And a few years ago I tried getting into linux, and it didn't work. I didn't like ubuntu. I want something that's basically like Windows 98.

Closest thing I found was TwisterOS. Well, I had some issue with one program, and I'm an idiot on linux. Have no clue what I'm doing. So the guides tell me to update the thing. So I do that, and the fan in my case stops working. Aye-yi-yi!

I never got it to start working again, and I just said screw it, I'm not dealing with this. Put it in a drawer, and haven't touched it in about a year.

Well, now I'm think I'll just start fresh. Install a new distro, and since Ubuntu seems to be the one with the most support, I'll use that. Then I find out that LXDE visually is more in line with what I want.

So I figure I'll slap on ubuntu, slap on LXDE, and then install retropie. And hopefully the fan will work again. So I start researching this LXDE, and the home page wants you to download the desktop environment already baked into a DIFFERENT distro! Wait, hold on. Am I wrong in thinging you can just download a desktop environment, and slap it on any distro? Because it might be me. I have no clue what I'm doing. And even though this is lemmy, when I searched for "Ubuntu Help", there's no community named that. There's also no community named "Linux help". Which I find very very odd. Lemmy of all places you'd think would have a linux help community! This place loves linux. Does everyone just always know what they're doing at all all times? Or am I just going crazy? I feel like I'm walking blind into a forest and bear traps line the ground. I have no idea how to even start this process....

Here is the needed desktop file

Place it in ~/.local/share/applications/

Right click the Dolphin icon and select a profile!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20329962

Linus has released the 6.11 kernel. ""I'm once again on the road and not in my normal timezone, but it's Sunday afternoon here in Vienna, and 6.11 is out."" Significant changes in this release include new io_uring operations for bind() and listen(), the nested bottom-half locking patches, the ability to write to busy executable files, support for writing block drivers in Rust, support for atomic write operations in the block layer, the dedicated bucket slab allocator, the vDSO implementation of getrandom(), and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) for more information.

Here is the guide as text