File permissions change when transfering between external drives and laptop

I noticed a few years ago that when I transfer files back and forth between my laptop and my external drive all the files that I have transfered have changed permissions.

I format all my external drives as exFAT so I can use larger files.

Why does this happen?

Is there a better way to keep the file permissions intact when transfering files back and forth between external drives?

The test file: Fantastic Fungi (2019).mkv

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is what the file permssions looks like before I transfer it to my external hard drive

ls -l

-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 577761580 May 2 2024 'Fantastic Fungi (2019).mkv'

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

This is what the file permssions looks like after I transfer it back to my laptop

ls -l

-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 577761580 May 2 2024 'Fantastic Fungi (2019).mkv'

When I right click file permissions dialogue box. The "Allow this file to run as a program" is ticked.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

The way have overcome this is to run a simple one liner to reset the permissions for directories and files.

Open a terminal in the directory of the folders and files you want to change

All directories will be 775. All files will be 664

find . -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} ;

find . -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} ;

Directory permission 0755 is similar to “drwxr-xr-x”

File permission 0644 is equal to “-rw-r–-r–-“.

-type d = directories

-type f = files

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I'm a Linux user since 1998 (my main desktop PC runs Debian), however I do have a couple of Macs around because I love their hardware (not so much the software though). In fact, I have three old MacBook Airs (mid-2011, 2012, 2015), all running Linux. The moment I got them, I erased MacOS and installed Linux pronto!

But my main laptop is a MacBook Air M1 with MacOS because it's much faster than these older Intel-based MacBook Airs. Modern web browsing and video editing requires a lot of processing power.

So, I want to move to have my main laptop running Linux too. I DON'T want to install Asahi Linux on my M1, because I don't consider it a proper solution for my needs (I want to run Resolve, you see, and most foss apps that I use would need recompiling). Also, I don't like that Asahi is dependent on MacOS to exist, because you can't boot with a usb to install it.

My issue is that I can't find ANYTHING on the PC market that is as slick or full featured as a MacBook Air (minus its limited ports). What I need is this:

1. Screen no larger than 13.3" inches, Full HD at least, preferably good color gamut (but not a must). I still need the laptop to be portable though. Basically, I'm not even asking for HDR, as the MacBook Air features.

2. Keyboard to have backlight, without the numpad (I hate these laptops where the touchpad is off center).

3. The touchpad needs to be glass or of equivalent feel. The Apple touchpads slide/glide with ease. I find every PC touchpad I've used so far to be "sticky". My finger on some Chromebooks and Dell/Lenovo laptops is doing a "grrrkkk, grrrkkkk" when I slide my finger! There's something special about Apple's touchpads, I dunno.

4. Intel 13th+ gen CPU, with passmark points over 17,000 on multi-threading. My M1 scores about 12,000 points, and it's 5 years old. So obviously I'd need something faster than what I have now.

5. Intel GPU (no AMD or Nvidia please, I need Intel's superior video decoding abilities). On a Mac that isn't a problem, because Apple does support these 10bit 4:2:2 codecs I need, with hardware acceleration. But on the PC side, only Intel provides good support for these without headaches (only the newest nvidias support that, but I don't want to use Nvidia for too many reasons -- AMD is a disaster on that video front btw). I don't play 3D games.

6. I need speakers that sound good. Every single PC laptop I've tried, had the worst sound ever. I need it to be hear-able on YouTube and not sound as if you're listening via a can. I bought a Thinkpad x280 a few months ago and I can't use it because its speakers are so bad! DELL (from 5 years ago that I tried) aren't better either.

7. I need a (supported) fingerprint reader!

8. 32 GB of RAM.

9. 1 TB of storage.

10. Below a $1800 price tag. That's the price I can get with a MacBook Air for all that.

Now, you might think that "well, it seems that you just want a new MacBook", but that's not true. I want a PC laptop so I can run Debian Linux instead of MacOS. But I need it to be a laptop that is "proper" by my own standards. The quality of the interaction between my palms, fingers, eyes and PC laptops IS NOT the same as with any Apple laptop I've ever used. The reason people buy Apple hardware is NOT because "MacOSX is lickable" (as it was suggested many years ago by Jobs). I've actually researched the "why". It's because the INTERACTION of your senses and the laptop's design/quality FITS. It's like a glove for one another. It's difficult to explain but I know it now to be true. It was never MacOSX itself (although MacOSX's gui smoothness helps the overall experience).

So the question is: am I missing that special, Linux-compatible, PC laptop somewhere? If you know that such a laptop exists, please reply with a link. I'll buy it in a heartbeat.

This is a serious post btw. I spent the whole weekend trying to find that mythical PC laptop, and I can't. I'm frustrated.

EDIT: I might end up with the Framework 13. Not 100% what I'm after, but probably the best solution right now.

EDIT 2: I bought a DELL 5640 16" laptop, 32 GB RAM, i7 cpu, that comes with Linux pre-installed (so I know it's compatible). It ticks all my boxes except the size and the trackpad being off center. Oh well.

I've tried switching to Linux from Windows 10 twice now. The first time went wonderfully (on Mint) until I found out that secure boot was stuck in the enabled mode and I had to completely reinstall my bios. This was absolutely necessary as everything was unbelievably slow, especially gaming (on a decent laptop). I understand this is totally my fault as almost every Linux guide says to make sure secure boot is disabled. After fighting with that for literal days, I finally reinstalled Linux mint. WiFi was suddenly completely nonfunctional, no networks were detected, and none of the proposed solutions I saw online worked. I have very little experience with Linux and other complicated tech nerd stuff besides that which comes with tinkering with computers occasionally. I do however have a great deal of patience and stubbornness. I spent maybe a week or 2 just working on this first attempt at making Mint work, until I ran out of patience. After coming back to it a month or 2 later, I decided to try Pop!_OS. Once again, it went incredibly at the start. Because I fixed the secure boot situation, I could now game better than I ever could when I had windows installed. Very few compatibility issues showed up that I couldn't conquer. Suddenly, I try playing Enter the Gungeon after having already played it a couple of times. Nothing out of the ordinary, I had done this before. Suddenly the entire computer freezes and I can still hear just fine. I restart my computer and... no sound. Nothing from any possible source, not Discord, not Firefox, not even the media I have downloaded. I look up the problem, I see several people have had it before, and only a couple ever got a solution. I try EVERY proposed solution on any forum with even similar issues, and still nothing. I have been fighting with my computer for 3 or 4 hours now. I've heard Linux praised for feeling like it is your computer that is subject to your will. I'd disagree right now, because it feels like there are spirits in my laptop trying to intentionally fuck me over every time I start enjoying the Linux experience. Does it get better? Am I crazy? Am I haunted? How is this anyone's ideal experience?

edit: I'm on an MSI Thin GF63. Nvidia GPU, Intel CPU. Compatibility seemed fine WHILE this latest attempt was working, up until my sound got fucked. I have a hard time imagining if that could be related to anything besides my sound card and drivers, but I'm nowhere near savvy when it comes to Linux. I'm now installing Bazzite as some of you guys recommended so I can ease myself into this whole Linux thing. I'll give another update if this fixes it :3

edit edit: It's still happening. I can see the "Alder Lake PCH-P high definition audio controller" in my audio config GUI apps and I can see the meter moving when audio is playing. Still, nothing is played. I am not dual-booting. Ive seen people have had issues with this card before, but seemingly the only solution (that I've yet to try) is to buy a whole new laptop. I don't have the money to do that currently. If someone is particularly tech savvy I am willing to hear out proposed solutions, but know that I have tried nearly everything online even remotely related to broken audio on Linux. My computer is haunted and I'll need a proper qualified exorcist it seems. note: it works with Bluetooth headphones. I haven't had a chance to test it with wired headphones but I will continue to give (near)real-time updates.

I still see people asking which distro to use, is it ok if they have an Nvidia card? How ready is Linux for a gamer? I have been 8 months now on Linux, it's about this hard to have an Nvidia card: click update. The way I switched was to populate the second m.2 slot on my MB and install Linux there, I chose Nobara, that way I had the fallback of Windows 10 if I had issues. Well, I still have Windows 10, it exists as a console with no internet access, it runs my Skyrim setup with it's 982 mods that I can't be arsed to move. Everything else is on Linux, it's the default and daily driver. Look close, you can see my system automatically updating OpenMW for me, quietly supporting my 260+ mod remaster of Morrowind. If you're wondering whether Linux is ready for gaming, yea, it is. Give it a try.

Should I wait for 22.2 or just install 22.1? I think I’m going to go for the cinnamon desktop and install using a Rufus USB on my ~ 9 year old Dell XPS 13 9350.

I’ve been waiting a while as I thought the next version would be out by now, are there any resources for finding out how close the next version is?

Is it easy to upgrade between .x versions?

Hello Lemmy,

With this release, bluetuith now has initial cross-platform support, and works on Windows. Windows specific instructions are here, tl;dr install haraltd and bluetuith together.

There are no new features introduced, only other optimisations and bug fixes for Linux.

I hope you enjoy this release, and any feedback is appreciated.

General Information

Bluetuith is a TUI based bluetooth manager for Linux, that aims to be an alternative to most bluetooth managers, and can perform bluetooth based operations like:

• Connection to and general management of bluetooth devices, with device information like battery percentage, RSSI etc. displayed, if the information is available. More detailed information about a device can be viewed by selecting the 'Info' option in the menu or by clicking the 'i' key.

• Bluetooth adapter management, with toggleable power, discoverability, pairablilty and scanning modes.

• Transfer and receive files via the OBEX protocol, with an interactive file picker to choose and select multiple files.

• Handle both PANU and DUN based networking for each bluetooth device

• Control media playback on the currently connected device, with a media player popup that displays playback information and controls.

to read epub files I've always used calibre library. Just wondering if there's something better.

To ocr pictures and the like I've used ocrfeeder. Maybe you use something better?

I'm on Ubuntu Studio 24.04.3 LTS (Noble). I chose this over the newer 25.04 (Plucky Puffin) since 24 has support through 2027, and 25 only has it until Jan 2026. I figured this was the smarter move.

However, as was mentioned by one of you lovely people in my last post, some of my issues may be fixed in 25.04. My taskbar just froze up, and I found a sort of fix to restart Plasma, and it was mentioned this is fixed in Plasma 6, which is in 25.04. That said, I'm terrified of ruining everything haha, so I have more questions:

1: I'm assuming (hoping) this wouldn't be a full wipe and start over? It should just upgrade right?

2: Do I need to do the whole USB route, and if so is there an option to keep everything (I'm hoping, I put a LOT of work into this so far and I don't remember if that was an option on first install).

3: I remember a few apps I installed were specific to Noble, will this break those apps?

4: It seems like there should be an option to upgrade from the desktop, but I don't have that option. If I run

plasma-distro-release-notifier

I should get an update notification right? In which case I can just say "hell yeah!" and it'll do its thing?

I really appreciate all of you, you've made a super stressful experience slightly less stressful so cheers to you all!

Dear fellow nerds,

I recently started to use aerc, synched locally with mbsync. Unfortunately, I'm facing a rather annoying problem with Gmail:

• I read emails (flag "seen") and move them to the archive;
• run the mbsync < account > command to sync;
• the mails are correctly moved, however, they seem to lose the "seen" flag, and they revert to unread.

Am I missing something? Any idea what could be the problem? If it matters, I'm on a Wayland session on NixOS.

Thanks!

cross-posted from the Linux phones community as nobody there knew

Has anyone actually successfully installed PostmarketOS on an old device recently? I've had a long struggle through trying to prepare a Nexus 7 (2012) and the result seems to be a dead device before I even got to actually installing PostmarketOS.

The rough steps I followed are listed here:

• Create backups
• Get SBK
• Build and prepare U-Boot
  • Actually flashing U-Boot seems to be where things went wrong
    • Running ./run_bootloader.sh -s T30 -t ./bct/grouper.bct -b ../re-crypt/repart-block.bin or ./run_bootloader.sh -s T30 -t ./bct/grouper.bct -b ../generated-wheelie-blobs/AndroidRoot/blob.bin from fusee-tools hung on waiting for bootloader to initialize
    • Running ./run_bootloader.sh -s T30 -t ./bct/grouper.bct -b ../u-boot/u-boot-dtb-tegra.bin failed like this
    • skipping that step and running ./utils/nvflash_v1.13.87205 --resume --rawdevicewrite 0 1024 ../re-crypt/repart-block.bin hung on [resume mode]
    • Consulting a different version of the docs and running ./wheelie --blob ./generated-wheelie-blobs/AndroidRoot/blob.bin seemed to work so I ran ./nvflash --resume --rawdevicewrite 0 1024 ./re-crypt/repart-block.bin which also seemed to work
    • I then powered off as instructed and the device has been completely unresponsive since

I've tried connecting to a charger, disconnecting and reconnecting the battery, and every combination of holding down buttons but it appears to be completely dead. Any suggestions as to what I did wrong or anything I might be able to do now? Obviously it's not the end of the world to have lost a 13 year old tablet that was just gathering dust, but at the moment I'm not feeling positive about ever trying this again on another device!

Generated via https://github.com/ublue-os/countme

10k added users since last post. Here are upstream Fedora numbers only

Subject: [PATCH RFC 21/22] phy: apple: Add Apple Type-C PHY
Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2025 15:39:13 +0000[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-21-172beda182b8@kernel.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-0-172beda182b8@kernel.org>

The Apple Type-C PHY (ATCPHY) is a PHY for USB 2.0, USB 3.x,
USB4/Thunderbolt, and DisplayPort connectivity found in Apple Silicon SoCs.
The PHY handles muxing between these different protocols and also provides
the reset controller for the attached dwc3 USB controller.

There is no documentation available for this PHY and the entire sequence
of MMIO pokes has been figured out by tracing all MMIO access of Apple's
driver under a thin hypervisor and correlating the register reads/writes
to their kernel's debug output to find their names. Deviations from this
sequence generally results in the port not working or, especially when
the mode is switched to USB4 or Thunderbolt, to some watchdog resetting
the entire SoC.

This initial commit already introduces support for Display Port and
USB4/Thunderbolt but the drivers for these are not ready. We cannot
control the alternate mode negotiation and are stuck with whatever Apple's
firmware decides such that any DisplayPort or USB4/Thunderbolt device will
result in a correctly setup PHY but not be usable until the other drivers
are upstreamed as well.

Co-developed-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Signed-off-by: Janne Grunau <j@jannau.net>
Co-developed-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Hector Martin <marcan@marcan.st>
Signed-off-by: Sven Peter <sven@kernel.org>

It's been a week. Ubuntu Studio, and every day it's something. I swear Linux is the OS version of owning a boat, it's constant maintenance. Am I dumb, or doing something wrong?

After many issues, today I thought I had shit figured out, then played a game for the first time. All good, but the intro had some artifacts. I got curious, I have an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 and thought that was weird. Looked it up, turns out Linux was using lvmpipe. Found a fix. Now it's using my card, no more clipping, great!. But now my screen flickers. Narrowed it down to Vivaldi browser. Had to uninstall, which sucks and took a long time to figure out. Now I'm on Librewolf which I liked on windows but it's a cpu hungry bitch on Linux (eating 3.2g of memory as I type this). Every goddamned time I fix something, it breaks something else.

This is just one of many, every day, issues.

I'm tired. I want to love Linux. I really do, but what the hell? Windows just worked.

I've resigned myself to "the boat life" but is there a better way? Am I missing something and it doesn't have to be this hard, or is this what Linux is? If that's just like this I'm still sticking cause fuck Microsoft but you guys talk like Linux should be everyone's first choice. I'd never recommend Linux to anyone I know, it doesn't "just work".

EDIT: Thank you so much to everyone who blew up my post, I didn't expect this many responses, this much advice, or this much kindness. You're all goddamned gems!

To paraphrase my username's namesake, because of @SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone and his apt gif (also, Mr. Flickerman, when I record I often shout about Clem Fandango)...

When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall GNU/LINUX OS grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol' Jack Burton always says at a time like that: "Have ya paid your dues, Jack?" "Yessir, the check is in the mail."

$ pacman -Si apt
Repository      : extra
Name            : apt
Version         : 3.1.4-1
Description     : Command-line package manager used on Debian-based systems
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt
Licenses        : BSD-3-Clause  GPL-2.0-only  GPL-2.0-or-later  MIT
Groups          : None
Provides        : None
Depends On      : systemd-libs  libseccomp  perl  xxhash  dpkg  gnutls  bzip2  sequoia-sqv  xz  gcc-libs  lz4  bash  zlib  zstd  db  libgcrypt  glibc
Optional Deps   : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Download Size   : 2.63 MiB
Installed Size  : 8.24 MiB
Packager        : Alexander Epaneshnikov <alex19ep@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Mon 11 Aug 2025 08:52:43 PM CEST
Validated By    : SHA-256 Sum  Signature

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/apt/

Hello! I have a /home partition that is almost full, and there is another partition nearby with a lot of free space. I would like to reduce the size of this neighboring partition and add the freed space to /home. I would like to do this safely, without using a Live USB or bootable flash drive. Is this possible?

upd: gparted just worked(through a live usb stick)! Sometimes I try to use symlinks, but not this time :) Thanks everyone!

Other than framework (out of stock) does anyone know of a good linux gaming laptop with a dedicated AMD GPU that I can buy in the UK?

any help would be appreciated!

I use a small notebook so it comes in handy to double the title bar to have space to increase the title font to 16 or 18

On debian 12.11 this was the case, but I don't remember how I configured it or what style I used. The style I now use on debian 13 is adwaita

I have moved to Linux. Hopefully for a long time. Or even forever. Chose PikaOS with KDE. Based on Debian, but with latest kernels to improve gaming experience. And hopefully make it easier installing various Windows programs I need for work. Everybody got to start somewhere.

To be honest, I have tried Linux before with Ubuntu(back when those eee PC existed). I also used Manjaro and Arch. Even installed Arch without archinstall. Didn't exist back then. But I have to say Linux has definitely improved a lot. Almost everything just worked now. To be fair. I don't have nvidia gpu or Intel cpu anymore. Only AMD. So that could be part of why it went smoother.

One small annoyance I got was that my pc could not play from speakers when front audio port was connected by my headset. And now I need to figure out how to install Filemaker 19 pro on my PC. So I can work from home. Winehq is not encouraging

Can someone also recommend a really good replacement for Directory Opus but for Linux? Paid or free software do not matter. As long as it functions like Dopus does.

Like, I push a button or key combo and talk at my computer and it types what I talk.

If not, why?

I do not mind writing some code to get this working but my time is very limited right now.