Hey folks. I've had an on-again, off-again relationship with Linux for over 20 years. Usually, my attempts to use it are either thwarted by issues installing, issues booting, or general problems while using it... leading to “catastrophic failure” that I can't fix without digging into hours of research and terminal commands.

Windows 11 (even 10) are rock solid for me, even as a very heavy multitasker. No crashes. No needing to reboot, unless I'm forced to with an update, and really no issues with any hardware or software I was running.

But with Linux, I just can't believe how unstable it is, even when I do the absolute basic things.

I'm trying to learn why this is, and how I can prevent these issues from coming up. As I said, I'm committed to using Linux now (I'm done with American software), so I'm open to suggestions.

For context, I'm using a Framework laptop, which is fully (and officially) supports Fedora and Ubuntu. Since Fedora has American ties, I've settled with Ubuntu.

All things work as they should: fingerprint scanner, wifi, bluetooth, screen dimming, wake up from suspend, external drives, NAS shared folders, etc. I've even got VirtualBox running Windows 11 for the few paid software that I need to load up from time to time.

But I'm noticing issues that seemingly pop out of nowhere on the software/os end of things.

For example, after having no issues updating software, I get this an error: "something went wrong, but we're not sure what it is."

Then sometimes I'll be using Firefox, I'll open a new tab to type in a search term or URL, and the typing will "lag", then the address bar will flicker like it's reloading, and it doesn't respond well to my mouse clicks. I have to close it out, then start over for it to resolve.

Then I'll open a different app, sometimes it might open, sometimes it won't.

Or an app will freeze for no obvious reason, and I'll get a popup asking to wait or quit.

Another time I left my computer while I went out for a walk, came back, and it was like I just rebooted... all my work was gone, and it was starting fresh from the login screen.

I'm trying not to overload things, and I'm doing maybe 1/5th of what I'd normally be doing when running windows. But I don't understand why it's so unstable.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

FWIW, I'm not keen to switch away from Ubuntu, because I do still want official support if there's ever a problem with getting hardware to work.

UPDATE: Wow, I did not expect to get so many responses! Amazing!

Per suggestions, I ran a memtest86 for over 3 hours and it was clean.

I installed Fedora 41 and am now setting it up. Seems good so far, and elevated permissions can be authorized with biometrics! This was not something I had to. Ubuntu, so awesome there!

Any specific tips for Fedora that I should know? Obviously, no more Snap packages now! 😂

UPDATE 2: Ok, Fedora seems waaaay more stable than Ubuntu (and Mint). No strangeness like before... but not everything works as easily. For example, getting a bridged network adapter to work in virtualbox was one-click easy on Ubuntu... not so much on Fedora (still trying to get it working). And Virtualbox didn't even run my VM without more terminal hackery.

But the OS seems usable, and I'm still setting things up.

One thing I have noticed, however. When I search for how to fix or do something, nearly all websites and forums reference Debian/Ubuntu commands, so the fragmentation there is a little annoying

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28052415

The final ISOs are here: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/42_RC-1.1/

I need help installing Fedora CoreOS on a Raspberry Pi 5.

I've tried this method that uses Fedora Media Writer. The Raspberry Pi fails to boot from the flash drive.

I've tried this method that uses the Fedora Arm Installer. The Raspberry Pi fails to boot from the microSD card.

I've tried adapting this method but it seems to be exclusively for the Raspberry Pi 4, and no substitute tools exist. It didn't seem to even install anything on the microSD card.

I'm at a loss. I have no idea how to install it. Can anyone help? I'd be happy to give a step-by-step process of exactly what I did for each method, if needed.

I find the whole "Ctrl+b followed by another key" way of navigating tmux to be too cumbersome to warrant a switch away from something like Tilix where I can hit Ctrl+Alt+| and the screen splits vertically, or Alt+Left to switch to the terminal on the left. I think it's the mandatory release of all keys followed by more keys that does it.

Is there a way to tell tmux to understand that "Alt+Left means switch to the terminal on the left" and bypass the whole Ctrl+b song and dance altogether?

I need a Bluetooth adapter for my laptop that has Linux mint on it. I just need it to connect a BT speaker for watching YouTube and netflix. The adapters I looked at on amazon all say they aren't compatible with Linux. I was hoping I could get some recommendations that work with Linux. And preferably one that doesn't require drivers from some sketchy site, Thanks!

EDIT: thanks everyone for the recommendations!

I did some searching and many users recommend Rofi but looking at man rofi-script it seems to just be a list picker. You pick something from the a list and only one thing runs. On Alfred and Raycast you can have interactive extensions which are essentially keyboard navigable UIs.

• One example looking at the Alfred workflow gallery is Reddit Browser, where you select a subreddit from a list and then it shows of lists of posts, you can press cmd enter to go back & select another subreddit.
• Another one lets you ask questions for chatgpt and shows answers right in the launcher (I'm not necessarily looking for AI extensions).
• This Raycast extension lets you search and create Notion pages.

Welp, I might just have to throw a grenade on this. Lets see if bcachefs fsck -pvk can work some miracles....

Final update (hopefully): It seems that I have been able to fix the issue. I'm not sure what exactly caused the problem but either removing fluidsynth or installing the wireplumber ppa fixed the issue and I have working audio again. I've also removed pulseaudio and undid my edit to the modprobe blacklist, as they were only done as a temporary solution and they are no longer necessary.

For the past three days, I've been having this issue where my computer starts with no audio and the only sound device listed is a "dummy output" device. I've tried looking online for solution but the only solution I found has to be redone manually every time I start/restart my computer. It also seems like this issue is common with and possibly specific to the sound card my computer has, which is an "Intel Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio".

The solution that worked for me was to add blacklist snd_soc_avs to the modprobe blacklist and then run the two commands sudo alsa force-reload and pulseaudio. Adding snd_soc_avs to the blacklist permanently brought back my actually audio devices but it didn't fix the audio nor did it remove the dummy output device. The two commands I listed do restore the audio and remove the dummy output device but they only work for the current session and I have to run them again after starting/restarting my computer.

I have no problem doing this if there isn't a permanent solution but I would like a permanent solution, if possible.

I use i3wm, and to map cap lock to escape, I run:

setxkbmap -option caps:swapescape

This works fine, but sometimes while hitting the F1 key, my pinky can accidentally hit the Escape key, which turns on CapsLock.

Gnome has a very nice way to do this, where Shift + Escape = CapsLock. Hitting Escape on its own will do nothing.

Hello everyone!

I have been learning QEMU for the past day and so I've almost finished building my perfect VM from the qemu cli, and I was wondering if there is any method to say, copy a partition(+bootloader) of a physically installed system (in this case, Windows) over a hard disk image and run it with QEMU

Unfortunately I've had no luck searching online about it and I'm unsure how to proceed myself since I've never done any disk-cloning or anything like that

My best guess would be to dump the contents of the partitions into a shared folder with the VM, then use a live media to copy those contents over into the hard disk image and finally install a bootloader to work with the Windows boot manager, but I'm all ears for what anyone has to say about it.

Thanks for reading and please let me know what you know!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28215475

Merged on Friday for the nearly-over Linux 6.15 merge window were the RISC-V CPU architecture updates for this next kernel release.

RISC-V with Linux 6.15 brings build improvements thanks to a re-architecting of the Kconfig build system options around RISC-V for selecting sub-architecture features.

For the Linux 6.15 kernel with RISC-V there is also support for building relocatable non-MMU kernels, support for huge PFNMAPS to improve TLB utilization, support for runtime constants, new RISC-V instructions supported, and a variety of fixes.

Hi all!

I know that AMD has software for controlling RGB on Windows. I found some old threads where someone suggested disconnecting the LEDs themselves, which is not something I'm willing to do with my 2-day old card.

I also would love not having to switch to Windows just to turn the bloody RGB off.

I've never used OpenRGB and I don't quite understand their compatibility guide for the 9070, so I'm not sure if it's doable there.

So! Does anyone here have that card and was able to disable RGB on Linux?

As a sidenote: I just realised that my OS sees two GPUss - the dGPU and the iGPU. Is there a way I can turn iGPU off so that it doesn't get in the way?

Any help appreciated!

Oh, I should probably mention - I'm on:

OS Garuda Linux x86_64
├ Kernel Linux 6.13.8-zen1-1-zen
├ Packages 1366 (pacman)[stable]
├ Shell fish 4.0.1

DE KDE Plasma 6.3.4
├ Window Manager KWin (Wayland)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/32192355

Just found out about this guy on YouTube named Nuxttux because I've been trying to make some social media videos.

Kdenlive is a completely different beast than the one that I remember using a couple of years ago. It has so much functionality in it, like all the "TikTok effects", proxy clips, rendering previews, visualizing effect curves between keyframes... like damn. This is actually legit software now for my basic needs.

The thing is, it seems like these were all added in the past 2 years, because I had 23.x installed through the Debian repo and I upgraded through Flatpak to 24.12 and it seems to have added all of these?

Anyway holy shit. Go give these guys some money. This is game changing

XY: I installed bazzite and goofed up. The username is wrong and my home is /home/bazzite instead of /home/ludrol

I am trying to run usermod -l ludrol bazzite in tty3 with sudo su - but the bazzite user is logged.

Solution:
Added password to root with passwd
Logged in as root
Ran required usermod commands
Disabled root with passwd -l

I want to be able to format my system without formatting my home, I know I can keep them seperate partitions but I would prefer if I can have dynamic sizes of each, can I achieve that by creating a sub volume for each? Would I be able to distrohop without removing my home while keeping the sizes dynamic? I never sat up a BTRFS before so I'm clueless

Hi!

I'm trying to install linux lite on my wife's old laptop, and I when I try to boot from the flash drive I get the following message:

ERROR Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation

Here are some details that may be relevant:

• It's her personnal computer (not managed by a corporation
• I'm using ventoy on a usb stick
• I've only put Linux Lite 7.4 on the usb stick
• I've tried launching Lite live on my own computer and it works just fine

I'm still a noob when it comes to linux, so I'm stuck with this error message. Can anyone help me with this? Thanks,

So I got a new HP Victus 2023, and I want to install Fedora on it, it has an RTX 4050 and has win11 preinstalled, my last laptop was a 2014 Toshiba and I only had to disable secure boot for Linux to run, is there something else to disable before installing Fedora ? Maybe TPM?

I would like to buy myself a second hand and install Linux on it. I was looking into ThinkPad T14 gen1 or gen2 devices because of their maintainability and repairability. I found one where I live with a Ryzen processor but it has the wrong keyboard. How easy and expensive would it be to swap this with US English? Are there any good alternatives to the ThinkPads? I fancy the X1 but don't like the fact that I cannot change or swap anything on it. The T14 looks very bulky and unattractive but at least can have the RAM upgraded and the battery changed.

I fancy the Framework laptops, but don't want to spend so much on a laptop. Especially the latest 16 inch with Ryzen AI CPUs.

The T14 G1 is at least cheap, like 350€ with the 400 nits low power display and the battery is at 99%. I guess with tlp installed and autocpugfreq I can get 5-6 hours out of it.

OK so after finally learning fcitx5, I can't even type on half my apps, which are either on distrobox or flatpak.

How can I make my fcitx5 usable on distrobox and flatpak programs?