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Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0 (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by wfh@lemm.ee to c/linux@lemmy.ml

85 comments fedilink

You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)

The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)

Preamble

Make sure your hardware is compatible

Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.

Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux

If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).

Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS

Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.

When in doubt, search for documentation

Arch Wiki is one of the greatest knowledge bases about Linux. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same. Most distros also maintain their own knowledge base.

Understanding the Linux world

What is Linux?

Linux, in the strictest definition, is the kernel, ie. the core component that, among other things, orchestrates and handles all interactions between hardware and software, of a large family of operating systems that, by metonymy, are called "Linux". In general understanding, Linux is any one of these operating systems, called distros.

What is a distro?

A distro, short for "Software Distribution", is a cohesive ensemble of software, providing a full operating system, maintained by a single team. Generally, all of them tend to provide almost the same software and work in a very similar way, but there are major philosophical differences that may influence your choice.

What are the main differences between distros?

As said above, there are a lot of philosophical differences between distros that lead to practical differences. There are a lot of very different ways the same software can be distributed.

"Point Release" (OpenSUSE Leap) vs. "Rolling Release" (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed): Point release distros are like traditional software. They have numbered releases, and between each one no feature updates take place, only security updates and bug fixes. Rolling Release distros package and distribute software as soon as it's available upstream (the software developer's repos), meaning that there are no versions and no specific schedule.
"Stable" (Debian Stable) vs. "Bleeding edge" (Arch): Stable distros are generally point release, and focus on fixing bugs and security flaws at the expense of new features. Each version goes through a lenghty period of feature freeze, testing and bug fixing before release. Stability here not only means trouble-free operation, but more importantly consistent behavior over time. Things won't evolve, but things won't break. At least until the next release. Bleeding edge distros, which often follow the rolling release model (there are outliers like Fedora which are mostly bleeding edge yet have point releases), on the other hand, are permanently evolving. By constantly pushing the latest version of each software package, new features, new bugs, bug fixes, security updates and sometimes breaking changes are released continuously. Note that this is not a binary, there is a very large continuum between the stablest and the most bleeding edge distro.
"Community" (Fedora) vs. "Commercial" (RHEL): Despite the name, Community distros are not only maintained by volunteers, but can also be developed by some company's employees and can be sponsored by commercial entities. However, the main difference with Commercial distros is that they're not a product destined to be sold. Commercial distros like Red Hat's RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Pro are (supposed to be) fully maintained by their company's employees and target businesses with paid support, maintenance, fixes, deployment, training etc.
"x package manager" vs. "y package manager", "x package format" vs. "y package format": It doesn't matter. Seriously. apt, dnf or pacman, to name a few, all have the exact same purpose: install and update software on your system and manage dependencies.
"general purpose" (Linux Mint) vs. "niche" (Kali Linux): General purpose distros are just that: distros that can do pretty much anything. Some are truly general purpose (like Debian), and have no bias towards any potential use, be it for a server, a desktop/laptop PC, some IOT or embedded devices, containers etc., some have various flavors depending on intended use (like Fedora Workstation for desktops and Fedora Server for, you guessed it, servers) but are still considered general purpose. They aim for maximum hardware compatibility and broad use cases. At the opposite end, niche distros are created for very specific and unique use cases, like pentesting (Kali), gaming (Nobara), music production (AV Linux) etc. They tend to have a lot of specific tools preinstalled, nonstandard defaults or modified kernels that may or may not work properly outside of their inteded use case.
"team" (Any major distro) vs. "single maintainer" (Nobara): Pretty self explanatory. Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long.
"traditional" (Fedora Workstation) vs. "atomic" (Fedora Silverblue): In traditional distros, everything comes from a package. Every single component is individually installable, upgradeable, and deletable. Updating a package means deleting its previous version and replacing it with a new one. A power failure during an update lead to a partial upgrade and can make a system unbootable. Maybe a new package was bad and breaks something. Almost nothing prevents an unsuspecting user from destroying a core component. To mitigate risks and ensure a coherent system at each boot, atomic (also called transactional or immutable) distros, pioneered by Fedora Silverblue and Valve's SteamOS, were born. Like mobile phone OSes, the base system is a single image, that gets installed, alongside the current running version and without modifying it, and becomes active at the next reboot. As updates are isolated from one another, if the new version doesn't work the user can easily revert to a previous, functional version. Users are expected to install Flatpaks or use Distrobox, as installing (layering) packages is not as straightforward as with standard distros.
"OG" (Debian) vs. "derivative" (Ubuntu): Original distros are directly downstream of their components' source code repositories, and do most of the heavy lifting. Because of the tremendous amount of work it represents, only a few distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware or Fedora have the history, massive community and sometimes corporate financial backing to do this. Other distros reuse most packages from those original distros and add, replace or modify some of them for differenciation. For example, Debian is the parent of almost all deb-based distros like Ubuntu, which itself is the parent of distros like Mint or Pop!_OS.

What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?

All distros provide, install and maintain, among other things, the following components:

Boot and core system components (these are generally out-of-scope for beginners, unless you need to fix something, but you should at least know they exist):
- A boot manager (GRUB, systemd_init, etc.): Boots the computer after the motherboard POSTs, lets you choose what to start
- An init system (systemd, etc.): Starts everything needed to run the computer, including the kernel
- A kernel (Linux): Has control over everything, main interface for software to discuss with hardware
Command-line environment, to interact with he computer in text mode:
- A shell (bash, zsh, fish etc.): The main interface for command-line stuff
- Command-line tools (GNU, etc.): Standard suite of command-line tools + default tools chosen by the distro maintainers
- User-installable command-line tools and shells
Graphical stack for desktop/laptop computers:
- Display servers (X11, Wayland compositors): Handle drawing stuff on screens
- A Desktop environment (Plasma, Gnome, XFCE etc.): The main graphical interface you'll interact with everyday.
- User-facing applications (browsers, text processors, drawing software etc.): Some are generally installed by default and/or are part of a desktop environment's suite of software, most are user-installable.
A package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, yast etc.): Installs, deletes, updates and manages dependencies of all software installed on the machine.

Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?

As a new user, this is basically the only thing you should concern yourself about: choosing a first Desktop environment. After all, it will be your main interface for the weeks/years to come. It's almost as important as choosing your first distro. These are a few common choices that cater to different tastes:

Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides its strongly opinionated developers' vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome's development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE.
KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is not yet a single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers and explains why there are so few distros with Plasma as the flagship DE. The KDE team is however evolving towards a more regular update cycle.
Cinnamon: Forked from Gnome 3 by the Linux Mint team who disliked the extreme change of user experience it introduced, Cinammon provides a very traditional, "windows-like", desktop-metaphor experience in a more modern software stack than the older DEs it takes inspiration from. Cinnamon still keeps a lot in common with Gnome by being simple and easy to use, yet heavily modifiable with themes, applets and extensions.
Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs. If your machine is super old, extremely underpowered and has less than a few Gb of RAM, don't expect miracles though. A single browser tab can easily dwarf the RAM usage and processing power of your entire system.

As for which one you should choose, this is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. FYI, you are not married to your distro's default desktop environment. It's just what comes preinstalled. You can install alternative DEs on any distro, no need to reinstall and/or distro-hop.

How do I install stuff on Linux?

Forget what you're used to do on Windows of MacOS: searching for your software in a seach engine, finding a big "Download" button on a random website and running an installer with administator privileges. Your package manager not only keeps you system up to date, but also lets you install any software that's available in your distro's repositories. You don't even need to know the command line, Gnome's Software or Plasma's Discover are nice graphical "App Stores" that let you find and install new software.

Flatpak are a great and more recent recent alternative to distro packages that's gaining a lot of traction, and is increasingly integrated by default to the aforementioned App Stores. It's basically a "universal" package manager system thet sits next to your system, that lets software developers directly distribute their own apps instead of offloading the packaging and distribution to distro maintainers.

Choosing a first distro

As discussed before, there is a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a decently large community of maintainers and contributors and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case. Choose a distro that implements well the DE of your choice.

What are great distros for beginners?

The following are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. Always read the installation documentation thoroughly before attempting anything, and follow any post-install requirements (for example, installing restricted-licence drivers on Fedora).

Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite being sponsored by Red Hat (who are getting a lot of justified hate for moving RHEL away from open-source), this is a great community distro for both beginners and very advanced users (including the Linus Torvalds). Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment, but also has a fantastic Plasma version. Keywords: Point Release, close to Bleeding Edge, Community, dnf/rpm, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
Linux Mint: Mint is an Ubuntu (or Debian for the LMDE variant) derivative for beginners and advanced users alike, that keeps Ubuntu's hardware support and ease of use while reverting its shenanigans and is Cinammon's flagship distro. Its main goal is to be a "just works" distro. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, Community, apt/deb, smallish maintainer team but lots of contributors, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu or Debian).
Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this is another Ubuntu derivative that removes Snaps in favor or Flatpaks. Its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. In a few months/years, it will be the flagship distro for the -promising but still in development- Cosmic DE. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, commercially-backed Community, apt/deb, employee's maintainer team, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu).
If you want something (advertised as) zero-maintenance, why not go the Atomic way? They are still very new and there isn't a lot of support yet because they do things very differently than regular distros, but if they wort OOTB on your system, they should work reliably forever. Sensible choices are uBlue's Aurora (Plasma), Bluefin (Gnome) or Bazzite (gaming-ready), which are basically identical to Fedora's atomic variants but include (among other things) restricted-licence codecs and QOL improvements by default, or OpenSUSE's Aeon (Gnome). Keywords: Point Release, Bleeding Edge, Community, rpm-ostree, large maintainer team, Atomic, sub-project (Fedora/OpenSUSE).

Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?

These are amongst the very best but should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed.

Debian Stable: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel quite outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as "Standard Linux" as can be. Debian almost made the cut to "beginner" distros because of its incredible reliability and massive amount of documentation available, but it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection. Keywords: Point Release, Stable as fuck, Community, apt/deb, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux. The "Arch btw" meme of having to perform every single install step by hand has taken a hit since Arch has had a basic but functional installer for a few years now, which is honestly a good thing. I work in sofware. A software engineer who does every single tedious task manually instead of automating it is a shit software engineer. A software engineer who prides themself from doing every single tedious task manually should seriously reconsider their career choices. Arch's other main appeal is the Arch User Repository or AUR, a massive collection of user-created, automated install scripts for pretty much anything. Keywords: Rolling Release, Bleeding-edge, Community, pacman/pkg, large maintainer team, traditional, original.

Which distro should I avoid, period?

Ubuntu: despite having a huge mind-share as the beginner distro, Ubuntu suffers from it's parent company's policy to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really and a second-rate citizen compared to their Ubuntu Pro commercial product. Some of the worst takes in recent years have been pushing Snaps super agressively in order to get some "vendor-lock-in", proprietary walled-garden ecosystem with exclusive commercial apps, forcibly installing snaps even when explicitely asking for a .deb package through apt, baking ads and nags into major software or only delivering critical security patches to Pro customers. Fortunately, there are some great derivatives like Mint or Pop!_OS cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical.
Manjaro: Manjaro might seem appealing as a "user-friendlier" Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs Arch-style regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro. Manjaro also has a highly irregular update schedule that's weeks behind Arch, making using the AUR extremely dangerous, as it always expects a fully up-to-date Arch system.
Any single-maintainer or tiny team distros like Nobara or CachyOS. They might be fantastic distros made by exceptional people (I have mad respect for Nobara's maintainer Glorious Eggroll and his work on Proton-GE), they are most often derivatives so the heavy lifting is already done by their parent distro's maitainers, but there is too much risk involved. Sometimes life happens, sometimes people move on to other projects, and dozens of small distros get abandonned every year, leaving their users dead in the water. Trusting larger teams is a much safer bet in the long term.
Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons like Alpine Linux, Devuan or Artix. Don't get me wrong, not using any GNU tools or systemd is a cool technological feat and developing alternatives to the current consensus is how things evolve. However, these standard tools have a long history, hundreds if not thousands of maintainers and are used by millions, meaning there's a huge chance your specific issue is already solved. Refusing to use them should be reserved to very advanced users who perfectly understand what they're gaining and losing. As a beginner to intermediate level, it will at best make most of the documentation out there irrelevant, at worst make your life a miserable hell if you need to troubleshoot anything.

Philosophical questions, or "I've seen people arguing over the Internet and now I'm scared"

You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community or on the other website that starts with a "R", but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?

Shoud I learn the command line?

Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.

I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?

Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server. If it's possible, one of the best ways to breathe new life into an old machine is to add some RAM, as even lightweight modern sofware will struggle with less than a few Gb.

Should I be concerned about systemd?

No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical and ideological rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner.

Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?

Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GTX/RTX users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. X11 was born in a time when mainframes did most of the heavy lifting and windows were forwarded over a local network to dumb clients. X11 predates the Internet and has basically no security model. Wayland solves that by being a much simpler display protocol with a much smaller feature set adapted to modern computing and security. The only downside is that some very specific functionalities based on decades of X11 hacking and absolute lack of security can be lost.

I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?

No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.

Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?

Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent stable version and/or the one packaged by the developer themselves (which should often be the Flatpak anyway). Snaps however are kinda bad. They are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. Also, Canonical is very aggressive in pushing snaps to their users, even forcing them even when they want to install an apt package. If you don't care, have fun.

I need/want program "x", but it is only available on distro "y" and not on mine. I've been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?

No. Generally, most software is intallable from your distro's package manager and/or Flatpak. But sometimes, your distro doesn't package this program you need, or an inconsiderate developer only distributes a random .deb on their Github release page. Enter Distrobox. It is a very simple, easy to use command line tool that automates the creation of other Linux distros containers using Docker or Podman (basically, tiny, semi-independant Linuxes that live inside your regular Linux), and lets you "export" programs installed inside these containers to you main system so you can run them as easily and with almost the same performance as native programs. Some atomic distros like uBlue's variants even include it by default. That .deb we've talked about before? Spin a Debian container and dpkg install the shit out of it. Absolutely need the AUR? Spin an Arch container and go to town.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to everyone who helped improve this guide: @GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml, @tkn@startrek.website, @throwaway2@lemmy.today, @cerement@slrpnk.net, @kzhe@lemm.ee, @freijon@feddit.ch, @aarroyoc@lemuria.es, @SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org, @Plopp@lemmy.world, @bsergay@discuss.online ...and many others who chimed in in the comments <3

Link to version 1: https://lemm.ee/post/15895051

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PhotoGIMP - The Photoshop Like Experience on GIMP (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) by ekZepp@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

36 comments fedilink

A patch for optimizing GIMP 3.0+ for Adobe Photoshop users, including features like:

Tool organization to mimic the position of Adobe Photoshop;
New Splash Screen;
New default settings to maximize space on the canvas;
Shortcuts similar to the ones in Photoshop for Windows, following Adobe's Documentation;
New icon and Name from custom .desktop file.

https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/blob/master/screenshots/photogimp_3_-_diolinux.png

https://photogimp.com/

Flatpak (Linux)

In order to install the newest version of PhotoGIMP on your Linux operating system using Flatpak, just follow this simple steps:

Make sure you already have GIMP installed from Flathub; (for Ubuntu/Mint user just select Flatpak below the install button in the manager)
Start and quit GIMP after you installed before you continue!
Download the files from this repository or just click here - > https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/releases/download/3.0/PhotoGIMP-linux.zip
Extract the content of the zip file on your home folder (.config and .local - they are the important ones) and overwrite the files if needed; (if you can't see the file click Ctrl+H to see hidden files)

-You're done, enjoy it! 😄

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How do I keep PulseAudio from randomly changing the volume? (feddit.org)

submitted 9 hours ago by marius@feddit.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink

I'm on OpenSuse Tumbleweed (although I'm pretty sure I noticed the behavior on Manjaro, too).

The problem is that the volume of e.g. Firefox gets turned down for no reason. I noticed that a youtube video was quite quiet. I then checkt pavu control and saw that the volume for Firefox was set to 83%. I set it back to 100, but after the pc resumed from standby, it was at 83 again. Sometimes it's enough to just pause the video for it to move the volume back down.

Why is that and how do I disable this functionality?

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Switching to AMD GPU for better gaming performance? (feddit.org)

submitted 15 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago) by FuyuhikoDate@feddit.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

15 comments fedilink

OS: CachyOS GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Board: MPG B550 GAMING PLUS CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (16) @ 4.43 GHz Memory: 31.26 GiB

i try to keep it short: i have issues with some games (like the witcher 3) and often hear that its an issue with nvidia drivers etc..

So my question is: would a switch / small upgrade to a AMD Radeon 6800 be worth it?

Edit: Small updates:

witcher 3 was an example. I play newer stuff. But my partner is paying witcher 3 and it lags, while I had to just tune down some settings in horizon remaster.
I would buy an used and sell mine (would get around the same price on eBay ±40€

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Filesystem suddenly becoming read-only? (lemmings.world)

submitted 1 day ago by moody@lemmings.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

18 comments fedilink

I'm running Bazzite, which is immutable, so the root filesystem is read-only, but I've been having an issue pop occasionally where the rest of my filesystem, including my home folder, becomes non-writable. I can't do much, and constantly get popups about folders being non-writable until I reboot, and then everything goes back to normal.

Does anyone know what can cause this to happen? And is there a way to deal with this without rebooting when it does happen? I don't know when I'll be able to try anything out since it's not a frequent issue, but it has happened to me several times in the past.

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Wayland, Switching between & focusing windows with just hotkeys? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by TheTwelveYearOld@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

17 comments fedilink

Edit: I want a graphical window switcher that's fully keyboard controlled, so I can see the windows before switching them.

The screenshot is from hyprland-easymotion which only shows labels for visible windows. I want a switcher that allows for both switching to windows or the same, or from any app, using just the keyboard and no mouse.

Ideally I could go to a window without pressing tab or another key a bunch of times, perhaps select any window (visible or not) with a letter like easymotion.

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And so it begins (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago by python@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

120 comments fedilink

I installed Linux Mint for the first time on my personal Laptop just a few months ago, and it ran so well that I didn't want to mess with it to try out different distros.

But today, my company's IT department announced that they have some spare old Laptops to give away (technically because they didn't meet the specs for Windows 11, didn't stop the IT department from giving them out with Windows 11 pre installed though)

So now I got a few devices to play around with!! They're a Precision 7530 and a Latitude 7390 2-in-1!

I already got ZorinOS running on the little guy because apparently Zorin is nice for Touchscreen support. For the big guy I was initially thinking that I could try Bazzite, but the installer was like "Intel UHD Graphics aren't really recommended" so I might try something else first. Any recommendations? I mainly just want to try as many different flavors of Linux as I can haha

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LDAP users clashing with package users (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago by b41b76cf@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

3 comments fedilink

Please let me know if there's a better place to post this.

I've been facing this issue for some time. I have all the users on my network defined in LDAP, including users for system services, for example postgres, jellyfin.

I'm using a hand rolled OpenLDAP setup (as opposed to e.g. FreeIPA, mainly for the learning experience). My postgres user looks like:

dn: uid=postgres,ou=system,ou=users,dc=mydomain,dc=com
objectClass: account
objectClass: posixAccount
objectClass: shadowAccount
objectClass: top
cn: postgres
gidNumber: 11004
homeDirectory: /var/lib/pgsql
uid: postgres
uidNumber: 11004
loginShell: /sbin/nologin

Users and groups are looked up via sssd

$ grep -E '(passwd|group)' /etc/nsswitch.conf
passwd:     files sss systemd
group:      files [SUCCESS=merge] sss [SUCCESS=merge] systemd

When it comes to installing a package that uses a given user with that user definition existing in LDAP trouble begins. The symptoms vary a bit by package, but usually the following is emitted when installing a package:

>>> [RPM] user postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] group postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] user postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] group postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] user postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] group postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] user postgres does not exist - using root
>>> [RPM] group postgres does not exist - using root

Depending on the package, this can mean various files get chowned to root instead of the correct user, or in some cases a new entry is added to passwd/group and files are chowned to that user. I generally have to clean up after upgrades for packages that have their users in LDAP.

In the case of postgres my /var/lib/pgsql is on a Kerberised NFSv4 server. So running the package extraction as root fails because root doesn't have a ticket.

My expected/desired behaviour is the package can see the LDAP defined user/group during installation and use them. Having examined the specs for postgresql-server and jellyfin, there are checks for existing users in there which don't seem to be picking up my LDAP users - so I don't think this is an issue with either of these packages specifically.

System is Fedora 43, this has been an issue for me through many versions though, as long as I've been running Fedora + LDAP.

I vaguely suspect that my users/groups are not defined correctly in LDAP somehow, except they work perfectly in every other respect, so I'm uncertain.

Has anyone seen these symptoms before?

9

5

Difficulties with creating systemd for nomadnet (Reticulum) (feddit.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by sp3ctre@feddit.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

3 comments fedilink

Hello guys!

I'm experimenting with Reticulum at the moment and I've setup a stationary node on a Raspberry Pi 4. So far, it works very well. Now, I ran into a problem with creating a systemd-service for the application nomadnet.

I'm logging in via SSH and user 'admin'. nomadnet has been installed via pipx install nomadnet and can be started with nomadnet, which seems to work very well too. The executable can be found under /home/admin/.local/bin/nomadnet

My goal is: I want the application to keep running, when I'm closing the SSH-connection.

Right now, I'm not very experienced with systemd, but I've asked AI for some help (probably not a good idea...?):

[Unit]
Description=Nomadnet Service
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/home/admin/.local/bin/nomadnet
Restart=on-failure
User=admin
Group=admin

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

The nomadnet.service is now running, but when I take a look at journalctl -u nomadnet there seems to be an error loop:

Dec 13 16:11:20 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Dec 13 16:11:20 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 13 16:11:21 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 71.
Dec 13 16:11:21 reticulum-base systemd[1]: Started nomadnet.service - Nomadnet Service.
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3380]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3383]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3365]: [2025-12-13 16:11:21] [Notice]   Opening serial port /dev/ttyUSB0...
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3365]: [2025-12-13 16:11:24] [Notice]   RNodeInterface[RNode] is configured and powered up
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3365]: [95B blob data]
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base nomadnet[3385]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Dec 13 16:11:24 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 13 16:11:25 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 72.
Dec 13 16:11:25 reticulum-base systemd[1]: Started nomadnet.service - Nomadnet Service.
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3403]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3406]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3388]: [2025-12-13 16:11:25] [Notice]   Opening serial port /dev/ttyUSB0...
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3388]: [2025-12-13 16:11:28] [Notice]   RNodeInterface[RNode] is configured and powered up
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3388]: [95B blob data]
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base nomadnet[3408]: stty: 'standard input': Inappropriate ioctl for device
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Dec 13 16:11:28 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Dec 13 16:11:29 reticulum-base systemd[1]: nomadnet.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 73.

I don't have an idea, how to do it properly, but hopefully, someone can help me here :(.

~sp3ctre

10

92

What's your favorite font for reading ebooks? (reddthat.com)

submitted 2 days ago by PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com to c/linux@lemmy.ml

55 comments fedilink

11

14

llvmpipe shows up after unistalling nvidia graphics driver, system is hanging a lot (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by trulyrandomguy@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

13 comments fedilink

I suspect that my nvidia graphics card has been damaged and it is causing many problems in my fedora setup, like the system lags a lot when playing videos in vlc or any media player and the system blacks out from time to time.

So I uninstalled the graphics driver (I am on laptop so I can't remove the graphics card) using sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia\* I found at reddit.

But after restarting I notice that in About section: llvmpipe shows up in place of nvidia and intel integrated graphics is also missing.

And with those the sound and network (wifi) drivers are now gone too! And now the whole system is lagging, and weird flickers and colors are showing up on the screen.

NOTE: After waiting for a while, I did not find a fix here, so I am posting this on reddit as well.

System abouts:

Operating System: Fedora Linux 43
KDE Plasma Version: 6.5.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.20.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.17.11-300.fc43.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i5-8300H CPU @ 2.30GHz
Memory: 8 GiB of RAM (7.6 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: llvmpipe
Manufacturer: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name: TUF GAMING FX504GD_FX80GD
System Version: 1.0

12

168

Installed Linux for the fist time in Feb, I've now started saving ISO's (media.piefed.social)

submitted 2 days ago by Ek-Hou-Van-Braai@piefed.social to c/linux@lemmy.ml

75 comments fedilink

So it begins.

I've been flashing my USB often enough that it's now worth it to keep all my ISO's neatly to use them when I need them. I plan on buying 10 USB sticks to just have ready when ever I need a specific version.

I'm visiting family now, so time to upgrade their Linux Mint to Kubuntu

13

38

What's Coming for Linux in 2026 (slicker.me)

submitted 2 days ago by monica_b1998@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

4 comments fedilink

14

16

My KDE Neon won't suspend automatically...what's blocking power management? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

8 comments fedilink

So...As I installed KDE Neon recently, it worked and autosuspended perfectly after 15min, which is what's set on Power Management settings. However, I've noticed after installing and configuring all the rest of the apps, it's no longer the case. I mean, it DOES suspend if I manually click the Suspend in the start menu, or if I hit the suspend key from my keyboard. But it won't do it on its own.

I initially suspected SMPlayer, which in the Ubuntu 24.04 repos has a long standing issue about this (will suspend when playback stopped, but not when paused). But after installing the newest flatpak...and even with SMPlayer closed, it's still not suspending. What else could be blocking Power Management from suspending my PC? How can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks!

15

42

Stackoverflow 2025 Developer Survey, OS Usage (survey.stackoverflow.co)

submitted 2 days ago by ashleythorne@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

7 comments fedilink

Compare with 2024: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-system

16

237

System76 Launches Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS With COSMIC Desktop (www.phoronix.com)

submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by KarnaSubarna@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

30 comments fedilink

https://system76.com/pop/download/

Release Notes

Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS includes the new COSMIC Desktop Environment, designed and developed by System76.

Some GNOME apps are replaced by COSMIC apps

GNOME Files (Nautilus) > COSMIC Files

GNOME Terminal > COSMIC Terminal

GNOME Text Editor > COSMIC Text Editor

GNOME Media Player (Totem) > COSMIC Media Player

Pop!_Shop is replaced by COSMIC Store

Key components

COSMIC Epoch 1

Linux kernel 6.17.9

Mesa 25.1.5-1

NVIDIA Driver 580

Some games may start partially off-screen. Press F11 or Super+F11 to fullscreen the game

Display toggle hotkeys and an on-screen display is not supported yet

COSMIC has a built-in screenshot tool. If you require annotations, we recommend Flameshot, which can be installed from Flathub via COSMIC Store. Version 13.1 or higher is required for COSMIC

COSMIC is not currently optimized for touch devices. An on-screen-keyboard is in development.

The COSMIC Desktop will be continuously updated with new features and improvements after release

Kernels and hardware support are continuously updated in Pop!_OS

You can follow COSMIC DE feature and improvement progress on the project board

17

10

Ubuntu Studio 24.04.LTS has been freezing and unresponsive. Issue with ProtonVPN Beta? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by Jack_Burton@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml

6 comments fedilink

Lately my system has been freezing and completely unresponsive. ctrl+alt+backspace, reisub, nothing works and I have to hard reset. I found some logs, syslog, and have posted a few leading up to the freeze. They're all from ProtonVPN (I'm on beta). I'm hoping there's something I can do without just not using ProtonVPN, assuming proton is the culprit. Can anyone make sense of this?

I don't know how much of this info should be private so I redacted some, timezone, pc name, mac, ports.

2025-12-12T11:09:27.835680TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:27.835612+00:00 | proton.vpn.local_agent/port_forwarding.rs:225 | INFO | Receiving Response { version: 0, operation: 130, response_code: 0, gateway_epoch_seconds: 4116943, internal_port: REDACTED, external_port: REDACTED, lifetime_seconds: 60 }
2025-12-12T11:09:28.257753TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:28.257690+00:00 | proton.vpn.session.utils:112 | INFO | API:RESPONSE | '/feature/v2/frontend'
2025-12-12T11:09:28.258827TIME MYPC protonvpn-app[4792]: 2025-12-12T15:09:28.258799+00:00 | proton.vpn.core.refresher.feature_flags_refresher:94 | INFO | Next feature flag refresh scheduled in 1:39:23.178147
2025-12-12T11:09:32.026373-04:00 MYPC kernel: [UFW BLOCK] IN=proton0 OUT= MAC= SRC=REDACTED DST=REDACTED LEN=60 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=54 ID=30062 PROTO=TCP SPT=REDACTED DPT=REDACTED WINDOW=29200 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0 
2025-12-12T11:32:17.244594TIME MYPC systemd-modules-load[957]: Inserted module 'lp'

Edit: The log includes the first entry after rebooting at 11:32. The system clock froze at 11:09:55, 22 seconds after the kernel entry.

Edit 2: There a whole bunch of entries prior to the ones I posted, all very similar mentioning proton and most with UFW block, for example:

2025-12-12T11:07:12.127370-04:00 MYPC kernel: [UFW BLOCK] IN=proton0 OUT= MAC= SRC=REDACTED DST=REDACTED LEN=52 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=116 ID=9565 PROTO=TCP SPT=REDACTED DPT=REDACTED WINDOW=65535 RES=0x00 SYN URGP=0

I'm realizing now the reference to Proton is just my connection.

Edit 3: If I'm reading this stuff correctly, a bunch of UFW BLOCK happened before the crash. Assuming SRC is the source IP, they're all different. Assuming DPT is the port they're trying to access, they're all the same ProtonVPN port. There are more but between 11:01:32 and 11:09:32 there were 24 UFW blocks.

Edit 4: Froze again while messing around with my firewall. I had installed Firewall Configuration a little while ago to figure out some server stuff. No idea if it had anything to do with it, but I've deleted that and reset my ufw. I found one post online talking about firewall packets freezing their Arch system, so I'm wondering if that's the root cause, I'm not great with network stuff haha. I've also installed fail2ban to block multiple ip attempts. Only weird thing now is previously my firewall had port numbers and stuff, and now it's 0s like:

Allow incoming 0.0.0.0 ssh (0/TCP)

Allow incoming :: ssh (0/TCP)

Allow incoming 0.0.0.0 dhcpv6-client (0/TCP) etc.

No idea if that's normal

18

273

The (successful) end of the kernel Rust experiment (lwn.net)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org to c/linux@lemmy.ml

51 comments fedilink

The topic of the Rust experiment was just discussed at the annual Maintainers Summit. The consensus among the assembled developers is that Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental — it is now a core part of the kernel and is here to stay. So the "experimental" tag will be coming off. Congratulations are in order for all of the Rust for Linux team.

19

30

When they say CachyOS is mostly for newer machines...what's "newer" (lemmy.ca)

submitted 4 days ago by Adderbox76@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml

10 comments fedilink

Been Manjaro for years and years. Latest update (due to my own screw-up...not the distro's fault) shit the bed and corrupted my timeshift backups (again...my fault...not the distro)

Wasn't too concerned because a) I keep everything on a backup drive, and b) I'm a big believer that every computer needs to be refreshed with a new install every few years anyway.

But now that that time is upon me, I got to thinking about maybe giving CachyOS a shot for the "performance improvements". But my desktop is coming up on 9 years old (AMD A10 processor). Would it even be worth it to try Cachy in that instance, or would the performance difference between that and Manjaro be negligible on that particular processor?

20

94

What’s a graphical piece of software you wish existed or was better? (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by galaxy_nova@lemmy.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

128 comments fedilink

Hi Linux Lemmites. Recently finished up school and started working full time and kind of miss working on personal projects. I’m looking to try to make something in rust and try out gpui if I can figure it out or maybe egui. I also want to make something maybe even a handful of people would actually use as I find that motivating, so I ask what would actually be useful to you?

Edit: thank you all very much for the input, I think that maybe doing something akin to a “settings+” would be a fair target for me for a n initial project. If I make anything interesting I’ll make another post in this sub.

21

65

The Quest for Reasonably Secure Operating Systems (yazomietech.bearblog.dev)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by yazomie@lemmings.world to c/linux@lemmy.ml

56 comments fedilink

TL;DR - About switching from Linux Mint to Qubes OS from among various other options that try to provide security out-of-the-box (also discussed: OpenBSD, SculptOS, Ghaf, GrapheneOS)

22

167

Firefox 146 Is Out with Native Support for Fractional Scaled Displays on Wayland - 9to5Linux (9to5linux.com)

submitted 5 days ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/linux@lemmy.ml

3 comments fedilink

23

64

Grub and the Microsoft Ransomware (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 days ago by Moonrise2473@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

57 comments fedilink

TL;DR: bitlocker does not like grub

Full story:

Months ago I installed fedora on my desktop, dual booting Windows 11.

In all this time I never had the need to boot into windows. I remembered that it worked fine after install, good, and then I forgot about that.

Today I needed a specific windows only software, so at grub I chose the microsoft bootloader and... BITLOCKER.

Huh? Bitlocker? Me? What? Searched frantically for that decryption password in my keepass, did not find. What?? How???

After a few minutes staring at that screen I thought, ok let's just wipe that shit and reclaim the space. I went back to linux, opened the partition manager, then remembered that i had something important in single copy over there. Noooooo

Went back to the boot screen to try again, still failed password.

Then I notice the error:

e_fve_pcr_mismatch

that mismatch lets me think that maybe I had something wrong in my booting.

I try to put windows first in the bios and it works! WHAT THE...?!??

So, if i put linux first, then launch windows from grub, bitlocker takes the windows partition under ransom, i can only access if windows is first. And of course in windows 11 x64 is no longer possible add linux partitions in their boot manager (previously it was possible)

Incompetence or maliciousness?

24

46

Linux kernel version numbers (Greg Kroah-Hartman's blog) (www.kroah.com)

submitted 5 days ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

9 comments fedilink

25

35

Linux audio stuttering when opening separate application, how to prioritise audio when using Linux? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 days ago by PearOfJudes@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

10 comments fedilink

Spotify, freetube, youtube website, either it's a streaming issue or an audio playback issue. Whenever my cpu is working too hard audio playback stutters and delays making it unlistenable. Actually some games have alright audio so I think it's a streaming issue. Anyway I want to know how to prioritise sound streaming or playback cpu in linux?

Preamble

Make sure your hardware is compatible

Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux

Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS

When in doubt, search for documentation

Understanding the Linux world

What is Linux?

What is a distro?

What are the main differences between distros?

What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?

Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?

How do I install stuff on Linux?

Choosing a first distro

What are great distros for beginners?

Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?

Which distro should I avoid, period?

Philosophical questions, or "I've seen people arguing over the Internet and now I'm scared"

Shoud I learn the command line?

I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?

Should I be concerned about systemd?

Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?

I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?

Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?

I need/want program "x", but it is only available on distro "y" and not on mine. I've been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?

Acknowledgements

Release Notes

Linux

Rules

Related Communities