I got into computers when there was no GUI.

Then years later I got a Win95 PC and I found the Windows GUI pretty good - although the rest of the OS was not. My personal Linux PC running Slackware 96 came with FVWM95 wich was a good approximation. So I switched to that.

That was just for graphical utilities of course - of which there weren't very many. I spent the rest of my time in the Linux console or in xterm using screen for convenience.

Fast-forward to today: I still do that. I still like the Win95 UI paradigm, so I run Mint / Cinnamon. But most of what I do with it is open a Gnome terminal, blow it up and start tmux - like screen but better.

And, ya know, for almost 3 decades, whether it's Mint or anything else I used, that's pretty much what I've been doing: running screen in a terminal in a Win95-like GUI. And it works fine for me.

I recently ordered a laptop that comes with Debian / Wayland and the Sway window manager installed by default. I learned a long time ago that it's often better to go with whatever is installed by default than try to reinstall everything and fight a system that wasn't designed for it.

The laptop will take a few weeks to get here. So to prepare for when it lands on my porch, I decided to get into Sway on my current machine, to get used to it. I figured even if I don't like it, at least that way I'll be comfortable with it, and I'll know whether it's acceptable as it is or whether I should spend the time installing something more Win95-like.

But my current machine doesn't run Wayland, just plain Xorg. 2 minutes of searching revealed that Sway is in fact i3wm for Wayland.

Great! I promptly installed i3 on my Linux Mint box, switch to it, fucked around with the config file for a few hours and... I love it! That's pretty much exactly what I do with Cinnamon anyway but quicker!

And just like that, I switch to i3. I felt right at home with it from the get-go. The whole Win95-like UI was just a familiarity: in fact, what I've always wanted was a tiling window manager.

And yes, I did spend a few hours - almost half a day really - configuring the thing exactly how I like. But if I'm honest, I probably spent just as much time with Cinnamon way back when I switched to that too. So it's no different really.

So the takeaway here is: even if you have decades-old die-hard habits and you don't want to change, you should expose yourself to change every once in a while: you might just get surprised 🙂

First of all. This is not another "how do I exit vim?" shitpost.

I've been using (neo)vim for about two years and I started to notice, that I,m basically unable to use non-vim editors. I do not code a lot, but I write a lot of markown. I'd like to use dedicated tools for this, but their vim emulators are so bad. So I'm now stuck with my customized neovim, devoid of any hope of abandoning this strange addiction.

Any help or advice?

No, android does not count.

Is there anyone who daily drives Linux on apple silicon or other ARM hardware? If so, then how is your experience, would you recommend it?

For at least 3 years, I've been wanting to get an apple silicon mac to daily drive Linux on, lately I've been seriously considering getting one of these machines, or even other ARM hardware, like the thinkpad x13s or even the new Qualcomm laptops.

I'm pretty much sold on a used macbook air m1 at this point, but I still wish to hear what other people have to say

If I'm using Arch or another minimal distro, is it a good idea to install a syslog daemon? Or can I go without?

how would i go about getting the latest kde onto debian 12? is it worth it even?

EDIT: fine I wont try lmao

One of the biggest things holding me back from jumping definitively on Linux is possibly getting rid of the apps/games i'm comfortable with and know well. How do you exaclty use Wine/Proton? You install it, launch the app with it and pray it works? Are there ways to know what is not working and possibly try to fix them googling or reading the documentation?

I've got a BTD 600 usb bluetooth adapter and I'm trying to connect Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones. Same manufacturer.

When I plug the BTD 600 usb adapter into a windows machine it works as expected:

• The LEDs start off white, indicating "calls" mode. (The device is transmitting a low-latency high-compression signal. The quality is terrible, but there's very little lag)

• As soon as I play music or youtube video or some form of audio, the LEDs on the usb adapter change to purple, indicating "aptX" mode. Audio is clear and there is little latency. The adapter remains in call mode indefinitely (or until I make a call of some sort, which I haven't tested)

I've even tested this out successfully with a steam deck. It works fine, so I know it can work on linux. However, on my Pop_OS! cinnamon desktop I have issues. Upon plugging the BTD 600 usb adapter into Pop cinnamon:

• The LEDs start off white, and remain white no matter what audio is playing. The device is stuck in "calls" mode; audio quality is terrible (though there is very little lag).

I did some research and found terms like "pulseaudio" and "pipewire" and realized those seem tied to the desktop environment. So, I logged out of Pop_OS! cinnamon and logged in to Pop_OS! Pop (its default desktop environment). Lo and behold, the BTD 600 could "see" audio was being played and switched from "call" mode to "aptX" mode.

My guess is that something about the cinnamon desktop environment isn't telling the audio controller that audio is playing, but something in the Pop desktop environment (and the windows and steam deck desktop environments) is.

Does anyone know what tells the audio controller audio is playing, or what would "trigger" a usb device into thinking audio is playing?

(For what it's worth, the adapter seems to handle the bluetooth connection to the headphones independently from the operating system. Bluetooth settings does not see the device. I also purchased an Avantree C81 bluetooth adapter which seems to function in a similar fashion, however its LED does not change color depending on codec used. I'm including it here as the fix for the BTD 600 should be the same fix for the Avantree C81.)

"Mini Text" is a tiny scratchpad utility for Linux that I've found to be quite useful. I thought it might appeal to some others in this community.

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

I'm about to step into the wonderful world of ARM Linux. I work with ARM32 as an embedded developer profesionally (Cortex-M3 specifically) so I'm not a complete newbie. But I've never used ARM64, and I've never used it with a desktop OS. So I'm doing my research, as one does, to know roughly what I'll be dealing with.

I have a few questions regarding backward compatibility and architecture-naming. Maybe you specialists out there could shed some light.

From what I could find, I understand the following:

• arm64 and aarch64 are the same thing: the former is what Linus likes to say while the latter is what ARM calls their own stuff.
• arm64 / aarch64 really mean "compatible with ARMv8" as a least common denominator, meaning ARMv8.x-y (x being the extension, y being A for application or R for realtime) will run it, just without taking advantage of any extension or realtime instructions.
• ARMv9.x will run arm64 / aarch64 kernels and applications, as it's (supposedly) backward-compatible with ARMv8, just without taking advantage of the ARMv9 ISA.
• If I want to create arm64 software that takes advantage of this-or-that extension or realtime instructions, I have to compile it in explicitely. I'm not sure if gcc handles special instructions, I haven't checked yet, but I suppose it does since it knows about the Thumb mode for instance.

Do I understand correctly?

If I do create some software that relies on extended ARMv8 or ARMv9 features and I want to release my software as a package, how should I name the package's architecture? Is there even a standard for that? Will it get rejected by the package managers of the few ARM distros out there, or will it be recognized as a subset of the wider arm64 / aarch64 architecture?

How to change dark/light nature of libadwaita in non-gnome systems?

@linux@lemmy.ml @linux@a.gup.pe
I use a window manager on Wayland. I know customising gtk4 apps is hard for some reasons. Neither I want some great level of customisation for it. I do not need uniform theming etc.
JUST
A simple way to change dark light theme from terminal. I use darkman to switch between dark and light theme. I just need a way to switch between dark and light with libadwaita
Please help.

Should I struggle through constant crashes to get my 7900gre with 16gb of vram working, possibly through the headache of ONNX? Can anyone report their own success or offer advice? AMD on linux is generally lovely, SD with AMD on linux, not so much. It was much better with my RTX2080 on linux but gaming was horrible with NVIDIA drivers. I feel I could do more with the 16GB AMD card if stability wasn't so bad. I currently have both cards running to the horror of my PSU. A1111 does NOT want to see the NVIDIA card, only the AMD. Something about the version of pytorch? More work to be done there.

• Having a much better time back on Cinnamon default instead of Wayland. Oops!

** It heard me. Crashed again on an x/y plot but due to being away from Wayland I was able to see the terminal dump: amdgpu thermal overload! shutdown initiated! That'll do it! Finally something easy to fix. Wonder why thermal throttling isn't kicking in to control runaway? Will stress it once more and clock the temps this time.

Temps were exceeding 115C, phew! No idea why the default amdgpu driver has no fan control but they're ripping like they should now. Monitoring temps has restored system stability. Using multiple amd/nvidia dedicated venv folders and careful driver choice/installation were the keys to multigpu success.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Verizon open-source officer Dirk Hohndel, 'plodding engineer' Linus Torvalds discussed where Linux is today and where it may go tomorrow.

...

As for the release numbers, Torvalds reminded everyone yet again, they mean nothing. Hohndel said, "You typically change the major number around 19 or 20, because you get bored." No, replied Torvalds, it's because, "when I can't count on my fingers and toes anymore it's time for another 'major' release."

...

So, what should you do about the constant weekly flow of Linux security bug fixes? Greg Kroah-Hartman, the maintainer of the Linux stable kernel, thinks you should constantly update to the newest, most secure stable Linux kernel. Torvalds agrees but can see the case for sticking with older kernels and relying on less frequent security patch backports.

...

Switching to a more modern topic, the introduction of the Rust language into Linux, Torvalds is disappointed that its adoption isn't going faster. "I was expecting updates to be faster, but part of the problem is that old-time kernel developers are used to C and don't know Rust. They're not exactly excited about having to learn a new language that is, in some respects, very different. So there's been some pushback on Rust."

...

The pair then moved on to the hottest of modern tech topics: AI. While Torvalds is skeptical about the current AI hype, he is hopeful that AI tools could eventually aid in code review and bug detection.

In the meantime, though, Torvalds is happy about AI's side effects. For example, he said, "When AI came in, it was wonderful, because Nvidia got much more involved in the kernel. Nvidia went from being on my list of companies who are not good to my list of companies who are doing really good work."

My GF recently said I can install Linux on her laptop. Then I saw Windows broke dual boot systems.

Is it safe to do a dual boot if she already has the update that broke dual booting?

Should I just figure out how to install Windows in a VM for her?

Appreciate any insight y'all can offer

Hey, so I know you can tap on a dock icon to launch the app, but when the dock is more than full and requires scrolling to shift the icons, this still cannot be done with the touch screen, based on docks I have tested. I tried the built in docks in Gnome on Pop, Ubuntu, and also Plank. None respond to an attempted drag via the touch screen.

Are there any less widely known ones that do? Are there any plans to bring this functionality to the dock in Gnome?

Hey everyone, I'm relatively new to linux and was looking for some advice/direction. I have been using Mint Debian Edition for around 6mo or so, and want to learn to use the command line efficiently and proficiently.

I have set up EndeavourOS on a backup laptop I have and have been playing with it, reading the Arch Wiki and such, but I feel like I'm not necessarily learning why I'm doing things, just doing what has worked for others.

So here I am. I guess I'm looking for recommendations for books or articles (physical or online) that can help me to learn and understand the workings on linux, and especially the command line.

Thank you all so much.

Via Andy Miller (2007), an amusing metaphor for Linux memory overcommit. Originally posted by Andries Brouwer to the linux-kernel mailing list, 2004-09-24, in the thread titled “oom_pardon, aka don’t kill my xlock”:

An aircraft company discovered that it was cheaper to fly its planes with less fuel on board. The planes would be lighter and use less fuel and money was saved. On rare occasions however the amount of fuel was insufficient, and the plane would crash. This problem was solved by the engineers of the company by the development of a special OOF (out-of-fuel) mechanism. In emergency cases a passenger was selected and thrown out of the plane. (When necessary, the procedure was repeated.) A large body of theory was developed and many publications were devoted to the problem of properly selecting the victim to be ejected. Should the victim be chosen at random? Or should one choose the heaviest person? Or the oldest? Should passengers pay in order not to be ejected, so that the victim would be the poorest on board? And if for example the heaviest person was chosen, should there be a special exception in case that was the pilot? Should first class passengers be exempted? Now that the OOF mechanism existed, it would be activated every now and then, and eject passengers even when there was no fuel shortage. The engineers are still studying precisely how this malfunction is caused.

Twenty years later, as far as I know, the OOM killer is still going strong. In fact, if you don’t like the airline’s policy on what counts as an “emergency” (for example, that it might exhaust your swap partition too before killing any bad actor at all), you can hire your own hit man, in the form of the userspace daemon earlyoom.

Explanation of the OOM-Killer: Understanding Out of Memory Killer (OOM Killer) in Linux

I want try to install arch(artix) linux for my future t480, but I don't know if it needs linux-firmware package? for good work?

TLDR: I recently found out there is "deprecated" XFA format that acrobat still uses in their programs, and government forms have those for dynamic contents in the form that we cannot fill using other softwares. Looking for solutions.

This has been a problem since a long time. Back in 2020 I had dual boot because I needed acrobat to fill PDF forms, but after finding xournal++ program I nuked windows partition. Windows update messing up grub was one of the reason I decided to nuke windows and looking at the posts recently it's still a huge issue.

So the problem I recently encountered is that even the government issued PDF forms need acrobat reader (which is free software for PDF, but only available in windows and mac). Which I didn't think would be an issue and just filled the form in Firefox.

Turns out that was problematic as the PDF forms has fields that are automatically filled, calculated from other fields, only made available when certain checkboxes are checked, etc. and Firefox doesn't support that. Even trying to install the acrobat reader snap (which uses wine) in a VM and opening the PDF on it didn't work. The UI makes me think it's a really old version of the reader.

So without searching for other devices (and filling a PDF with my sensitive information) what solution is there? Installing windows is a hassle even in a VM, and it will use up precious SSD memory. But that's the only solution I can think of.

I also found masterpdf or something like that which the Arch wiki says has support for that, but it didn't work. It says XFA forms are converted to acro forms, and the dynamic part doesn't work. There are websites that promise to work for such forms, but I'm not going to be putting sensitive info on web apps.

Hi all,

Simple question. Does anybody know a (not to expensive) sportswatch that is supported by Linux / FOSS software?

(Yes, I know 'FOSS software' is two times the word software) 😀