Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like "useful programs", "useful packages", "useful tools", "recommended packages", etc. Don't see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it's not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

Anyway, I was watching a YT video today and the guy launched a cool program in his terminal, I paused to see what he was running. It was btop, of course being new I never heard about it. Then I thought -- how many cool tools/packages are there, which people use, but I am not aware of?

So what do you like? What do you install on a fresh install? What are the most useful tools in your belt? What can't you live without on Linux?

Perhaps I'll find something useful :)

So I built a new PC a couple weeks ago. My old one broke one day (I think I helped it, but that's another story). I was happy to move from a stock Prism Wraith cooler that was LOUD and ANNOYING. I put a new AMD Ryzen 9 7900X in this box with a couple of new nvme drives (Samsung 9100 PRO and 990 PRO). The thing is silent under Windows 11. Silence at last!

Then I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed (from which I'm typing this) and as the post title says, something is making a high-pitched noise, like coil whine, when the system is mostly idle. I searched the web and the first suggestion is that Linux handles CPU power states (C-state) differently than Windows. Or, it could be the new disk(s), too. It's a fly in the ointment, I am very happy with the new PC, with how powerful and fast it is, I'm so far happy with openSUSE, but there HAD TO be SOMETHING to spoil the experience.

Has anybody had a similar problem? Any tips on how to troubleshoot it and not BREAK my computer?

EDIT: more info from the comments

I just use the Ryzen iGPU, don't have a dedicated GPU. I set the fan curves in BIOS, so it's the same across all OSes. I'm pretty sure it's not the fans. My main suspect is the CPU because the noise is there in openSUSE's installer, so even before anything touched the disks (they were straight from factory with no partitions). As soon as I launched the Tumbleweed installer I heard it. Not hearing it in Windows 11. I can hear it when the CPU is idle, if I start some program, run a compiler or even scroll fast in the web browser, there is no noise.

I had the same monitor for several years. I hear the noise from the PC case and I'm 100% sure about that. I used the same monitor with my previous PC and there was no noise, including in Fedora Workstation. This is a new PC.

The noise is audible in openSUSE's installer, that's the first time I heard it. So even before there was anything on either of those nvme disks, at that time they were straight from factory with no partitions.

I dual boot on this PC and the whine is not there in Windows 11, neither in BIOS. I have fan curves set in BIOS, so it's the same across OSes.

Most of those books seem to be targeted at experienced users, however there are a couple about working with the CLI and one about "how Linux works". I wish those books were in the lowest tier, it kinda makes sense. Perhaps somebody will find it useful.

My mouse wheel is fucked, I've used xinput set-button-map to disable the wheel but it doesn't work in everything. It works in browser, file manager etc but not in terminal, FreeTube etc.

Anyone have a suggestion on how to get it working universally? I've been thinking of opening the wheel and ripping some connections out, but I'd like to keep the mouse wheel button working.

Also, my monthly budget is -50€ so buying a new mouse is not currently something I can do.

Running Debian 13 with the xfce desktop. Machine is a gift from the ancient gods, compaq presario CQ61, marvel this magnificent beast.

I have a thin client I want to mess around with. My understanding is I can install a regular wayland based system on this and use waypipe to run the actual heavier apps on my linux server elsewhere and have it do the work here, but take inputs and show the results on the thin client. So it would be interacted with like a normal app but the actual work would happen on the server.

How well does this actually work? I know we have sunshine for things that need the GPU but like, if I pull up chrome and watch youtube, woudl waypipe keep up with that?

Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I've had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I'd like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I'm mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.

I have the Viture pro XR display glasses connected via usb-c on the back of my laptop, but it doesn't output any audio.

The display works fine, but nothing shows up for sound devices in the system settings. The glasses work perfect when I connect them to my handheld running Bazzite, however.

What should I do to troubleshoot this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44456705

I am in the very strange situation, since I installed Ubuntu, in which my laptop is connecting to the wifi, but if I open the wifi settings page it stays on "searching for networks" forever. Since I am planning to use this laptop at a conference where I would need a connection, I would like to solve this somehow.

I have used the "wireless-info" tool and the pastebin can be found here .

Only things I noticed are the Intel AX201 controller that in other forums is said to not work at all (not my case), and the fact that my home network connection is defined by a networkd yaml, as opposed to the others (my parent's house) that are defined by a NetworkManager yaml.

I am a beginner so these are all just guesses from me.

Is there a fix or even a separate software I can use to manage my connections, like adding a new one without having to write myself a new yaml file?

Hi everyone. I'm just getting into Linux and went with Kubuntu as my first real distro. its worked pretty good out of the box and I haven't messed with it much but I'm having problems with my monitors. I have a three monitor set up using my laptop and two external monitors, they are a set of paired docking monitors from Targus connected by usb-c. it worked fine at first but then every few days they started turning off and I had to hit the button on the monitor to turn them back on and now its at the point where turning them on only connects for a couple seconds before they both say no input detected and turn off. but I've also discovered that one monitor will still work fine if i disconnect the power from the second monitor. I've tried updating to the latest nvidia driver as well as going back to a previous version but honestly i don't know if I'm even looking in the right place. I don't think the issue is the monitors because when I plug it into a windows laptop i still have access to both turn on fine. Does anyone have any advice? I'm using a Dell G16 7630 with RTX 4060.

I wasn't gonna make a post today, because nothing broke and it wasn't that exciting. But what the hell.

Anyway, there's still a couple things wonky, probably from the mishaps yesterday and the day before. The main thing is just a "failed to delete autoinstaller.sh" error on the script that runs when I do a "switch user", so I wonder if I broke something non-essential when I killed the PIDs yesterday...

It was also prompting me for a password whenever I tried to make it go to sleep, which would wake it up and basically make it impossible to put in sleep mode. But it think I fixed that somehow. Or maybe it only works when I press the sleep button. I have to test if it still happens when I simply close the laptop, which is what I had been doing after a switch user. So yes, that means I would come back to it later and it wouldn't be asleep, and would prompt me for a password after signing back in and loading the desktop.

I didn't even get to doing the security stuff today. I started off this morning by making a list of all the configurations that I've tweaked manually. It's a small list, but it will probably grow, and that will help me if I ever break something but also it'll help me keep track of all my changes so that I can easily undo them later if I want to, or remember what to do if I ever need to manually rebuild my system.

Then I played around in System Monitor, got a page exactly how I liked it, saved it as an export file for backup, and set it as my default page to open to. I learned about some of the metrics I was unfamiliar with, like PSI for instance. Now I want to get a vertical second display and just have System Monitor up on it all the time 😩

After that I went through my notes from yesterday and typed up a document with all the steps I took for the configurations, in case I ever have to do them again. That took up most of the day, honestly. Some of the commands are starting to feel more familiar. Ones that come up a lot at least, like journalctl, systemctl, cat, ps aux, grep, and nano. Some still look like gibberish to me though.

I spent most of the evening trying to figure out those two problems I mentioned, and made another document for more troubleshooting commands.

And then I finally got around to changing my username, which I did through the GUI because sudo usermod didn't work. So it didn't update the /home directory, which saves me some work updating pathways but it's kind of annoying cause that means they'll just stay under the default username, even though the ownership updated to the new one.

That's mostly all I did. Just fun boring stuff that didn't break anything and didn't seem to justify making a third post. But I'm making one anyway.

Now, tomorrow for sure I'll get to the security stuff!

So far that list includes setting up secure boot, locking the bootloader if it's not already, password protecting UEFI, encrypting the swap space (if it's not already and if I can do so without wiping my drive), configuring my firewall, setting up dnscrypt-proxy, and TPM! And then after that there's some software stuff like AppArmor, ClamAV, LMP, a rootkit hunter, an NGFW, and a locally-hosted password manager.

I'm not sure if any of that's redundant but if so I'll find out while I'm reading about it. It seems like a lot, though. It would be overwhelming if I wasn't excited about it. Maybe I should adjust my expectations though, cause it might take me a week just to set it all up. I still need to set up borg too, for backing up /home/ so I can exclude it from rsync...

And then after that there's more to do, but I'll be able to start shifting away from initial setup to exploring different kinds of software and actually using my system.

Spoiler: I fixed it again.

So basically, when I woke up this morning my intention was to harden my system's security a bit. I was gonna spend some time reading about a few different things until I felt like I could understand them and the process of setting them up.

After my experience yesterday, I thought it would be a good idea to create a backup first before getting into any of that, so I spent the first part of my day reading about that.

I read around on some forums and determined I needed to do three things: use rsync to create a system snapshot of everything but /home/, use borg to backup everything in /home/, and do something involving "pacman -Q" to backup all the packages I have installed.

Sounds simple, right? Well...

I spent some more time reading about how to do each of these things, until I finally felt ready to give it a go. The first thing I did was create the pacman lists of all my installed packages (one list for explicit installs, and one that includes all dependencies). Easy enough. The reason I did this first was so it would be included in my rsync backup, which is what I decided to do next.

Before even worrying about backing up to my external drive, I wanted to test it out first locally, so I made a "backups" folder in /home/, and used that as the destination for rsync.

Since I didn't have Borg set up yet, and I wanted to harden my system's security before connecting to the internet to download outside packages, I decided not to exclude /home/ from this first rsync backup. Are you starting to see where this is going?

When I ran the command in Bash, of course I didn't know what to expect. At first I was a bit startled at all the outputs zooming by, but I decided this was probably normal, so I pulled up System Monitor and just watched for a while. I was somewhat surprised to see so many flatpaks, since I'm on Endeavour, but I guess that's normal too.

I didn't realize something was wrong until I noticed the pathways in the outputs kept cycling through the folder under "backups" that I titled specifically for the rsync. And every couple of minutes, the pathways got slightly longer, as if they expanded an extra layer. It dawned on me that I had created an endless loop when I put my destination folder in /home/, though I didn't make an exclusion for it.

So I panicked a bit, as one does, and since I didn't know that I could simply abort the process with ctl+c, I closed Bash. Not a great idea, but I didn't know what else to do.

Anyway, so I checked the backup that I had created and it was quite large. About 27 GiB. Not enormous, but definitely larger than it had to be. I tried deleting it but it wouldn't let me.

So I sought a solution and tried a fuser command, and got a big long list of leftover PIDs that I was apparently supposed to kill to conclude the processes that got cut off when I closed Bash in the middle of a script. That seemed a little overwhelming though and I didn't feel quite comfortable with it, so I decided to try rebooting instead...

...and the result was that it got stuck on some sort of dracut initqueue hook with no time limit while attempting to boot. So, once again despairing, I walked away for a while and tried searching for a fix on my phone. Fortunately by the time I came back it had miraculously booted up.

Assuming this had cleared the stuck processes preventing me from deleting the rogue backup file, I tried deleting it again and it still wouldn't let me. So I reran the fuser command and killed all the leftover PIDs and my screen immediately went black. I shut it down from the power button, and turned it back on, and thankfully it booted up fine (better than the previous time, at least).

So long story short, I ended up doing a sudo -rm -rf on the rogue backup and that worked like a charm. Then I reran rsync with an exclusion for the folder the destination was in, and it went much better. Still a big rush of outputs, which makes total sense, but it concluded on its own after a couple minutes and the total size was only about 18GiB (talk about bloat on a fresh install!!!). Not bad, though.

I poked around a little trying to optimize it with more exclusions, or alternatively with a white list inclusion command, but I used a du command to see what folders were taking up the most space and ultimately I really could've only saved a few GiB by excluding some var/cache/ folders, but it wouldn't really have been worth the added inconvenience if I ever have to do a complete system restore. A big chunk of it was the /home/ folder anyway, and that won't be included in future backups once I get borg set up.

So that's mostly it. It was already evening at this point, and I had mostly forgotten to eat during the thick of it, so I ate some dinner and then got out my external hard drive to try to make a real backup.

My first attempt failed, of course, because it wasn't formatted (as I soon learned). I noticed a lot of errors in the outputs so I did a ctl+c this time, which ended the process much more neatly than before.

So then I learned how to format a hard drive as a btrfs, and then I decided while I was at it that I might as well learn how to encrypt it, so I did that too. And then I had to format it again, so I did. And then I reran the rsync and it worked perfectly!

Then I unmounted the drive and closed the encrypted container before unplugging it, and that concludes my first real external backup on linux! I did not expect it to take all day, but next time will be much smoother.

Tomorrow I will finally get to harden my system security, and if that doesn't take all day then I'll install borg and back up my /home/ folder. After that, I'll be ready to install some more software and start playing around to see what my system can do!

Well I guess I didn't really break it. A KDE update broke it. After updating I rebooted, and then when I tried to log in, the screen went black and got stuck like that.

Anyway, I read on the forums that the fixed involved adding a parameter to some line in the kernel options, which I had no clue how to do. I also didn't know I could enter the terminal from a frozen screen. So I tried the grub menu. But I didn't know what I was doing and was scared to mess things up, and for some reason I thought the answer was in the UEFI screen.

Now I knew that I was treading in dangerous waters, so I was trying not to touch anything while poking around the menus trying to figure out where I needed to go. But apparently I touched something I wasn't supposed to, cause my computer tried booting from the spare SSD, which isn't mounted yet and don't know how to decrypt it. So I got stuck for a while, tried the grub rescue in the command line because it was the only option I seemed to have, didn't understand it, panicked for a while, and eventually found out I could press f2 on startup to go straight to the UEFI screen. So then I went back to the menu where I messed things up and made sure to click on the correct disk.

So I was quite relieved when I was able to decrypt it and it brought me back to the Endeavour grub menu (the purple screen), and then booted up as it was supposed to. I tried logging in again and it still froze, but at this point I had learned I could press some hotkeys to get to the terminal. So I went in there and followed some instructions I found, ultimately only really learning what the problem wasn't. It turns out the parameter I was supposed to add to fix the issue was already there!

So I found out how to revert kde desktop and workspace to a previous version from the cache, and I did that, but when I rebooted and tried logging in again it still froze.

Luckily I had previously made a guest account so I logged in there and it worked. So then I learned that that means the issue was in the user-level configurations.

So I followed some more instructions to back up my KDE configs, moved the existing ones to somewhere else, then killed and restarted plasmashell to create new default config files.

And then I tried logging in, and it worked! This was an hours-long process, so it definitely felt good to have a working system again.

Luckily most of my settings and my favorited items in the app launcher were still intact. I hadn't moved my global shortcuts config file either, so my keybindings were preserved. The only things missing were my pinned icons on the app manager toolbar at the bottom of the screen.

So I went into my backup file for the plasma appletsrc configs, and I found the line that listed the apps I had pinned, and I copied it and used nano to paste into the current version in same place it would have been.

So even though it was tragic and frustrating and a bit gut-wrenching at times, I learned a LOT today. I gained some familiarity with grub, UEFI, terminal, basic shell commands, restoring previous versions of software from the cache, logging and troubleshooting, backups, configurations, and the basic system architectures, and the anatomy of the KDE environment.

I'm still no power user, and I still have a lot to learn, but I came a long way in just one day. Now, I'm tired.

There's lots more to set up tomorrow, but at least walking into it I won't feel so lost!

So I usually come here when I have questions. Today, I just want to share what I've found, because I'm excited about it, and we're all linux noobs here. So maybe this will help others out too.

Guys. I just discovered this new (to me) file manager. It's called PCMan. I've been using it for 30 minutes now, and, I like it. I might replace Thunar. I'm going to test run this for the next week.

I can right click and see file properties. Wanna know how big a file is? Right click the file in PCMan, click properties, and BOOM! Instantly you see this file is 2.6GB.

No more of this Thunar calculating the file size for minutes/hours on bigger files. I'm talking 2-3 seconds on PCMan. It blinked just a few times, and then done.

When I first opened it, I even had "move to" in the right click menu. I don't know what I changed, or how, but that option is gone now. Not a huge deal, but the one time I got to use it, it didn't work. Gave me an error.

But it sounds super useful if I can get it working. No more having 2 file manager windows drag and drop, and then delete. You just highlight the files, right click, move to, select where, and then let it move them. That's such an evolution. First time for me that linux is out performing WindowsXP (which I consider to be the peak of OS's). My version of the best user experience in history, and now linux has one feature, that if I can get it working, has outperformed that in this one small feature.

But it's a pretty big feature. I'll look into why I can't use it. Said something like "can't recursively copy location" or something like that.

Still though, I like the program.

I couldn't get a variant to install. PCMan-qt I think it was. Gave a shitload of dependancy errors. But the regular one installed just fine. I'm using ZorinOS Software Center.

So just search your OS's store. Really nice program. It even has the feature where you paste a duplicate file, and it asks you "Hey, what do you want to do here? Replace the file? Rename the file? Cancel operation? Paste in a different folder?"

And it confirms on the deleting.

I even have my Retroid Flip 2 plugged into my PC via USB, and I'm moving folders from my Flip 2's internal storage to my Flip 2's SD card. Zero issues besides the first file I tried to move that I described earlier.

Moved to Mint months back. I had to install Win10 in a kvm for a couple of things impossible on Linux. I allocated 16 gig of ram to the kvm. I can't really find anything on how that works, exactly. According to Stacer, I have a consistent 16 gig of ram being used, but that's between a running Win10 kvm and all of my other running Linux programs. I've never seen my system memory use move higher or lower than 16 gig of ram when the vm is running. Again, that's the kvm + normal Linux programs.

If I allocated 16 gig of ram to the kvm, shouldn't my memory usage be over 16 gig or ram with other Linux programs running?

About once a week, maybe two weeks, I open a new tab on a browser and it hangs my system. Nothing works but the mouse pointer.

I initially thought of a memory leak with Firefox, but it will also do it opening a new tab in Chrome.

The last time it hung up, I think I noticed the virtual machine manager icon was missing from the menu bar. I'm waiting for it to hang up again to verify this.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I made a little script to get to grips with cron and to try to make my time management better :

If you want music to play, use ffmpeg/ffplay. If you want notifications, use notify-send. If you want neither, what are you doing reading this?

Save the following to chime.sh or whatever you want to call this

#! /bin/bash
# replace 1000 with your user id , run $ id -u to find out. this is to allow audio to play
export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="/run/user/1000"
# checks what minute it is past the hour to play specific chime
case $(date +"%M") in
        15|30|45) ffplay -autoexit -nodisp /path/to/your/chime.mp3
        notify-send "BONG";;
        00) ffplay -autoexit -nodisp /path/to/your/hourly/chime.mp3
        notify-send "HOUR";;
        *) notify-send $(date +"%M");;
esac

run

chmod +x chime.sh

Or whatever you called the file.

run

crontab -e 

to open/config cron

Add

*/15 * * * * /path/to/your/chime.sh

This triggers the cron job every 15 mins. you can adjust the timings on both the cron config and the shell script to adjust how often you want chimes to go off.

So I miss Winamp. But, lets be real, the real winamp of the 90s died the day AOL decided to buy it.

That being said, I still miss it. And then I heard about Audacious. Turns out you can make Audacious look EXACTLY like old winamp. You can even use winamp skins!

So, I install Audacious, and it looks NOTHING like winamp. I look into the settings and there's a whole button that says "Interface" there are two options. One of them says "Classic Winamp".

So I click that.....and......nothing. Nothing changes. It still looks exactly like it did.

I'm on ZorinOS, I think 17. I can check which version when I get home, but pretty sure it's 17.

Recently my PC died, and I had to switch to my Raspberry Pi for a few weeks, and here's the thing. The Raspberry Pi has TwisterOS installled, and that version DOES look exactly like Winamp. I love it. I just have no idea why my PC can't have that.

What am I doing wrong?

In two days I would need AutoCAD installed for my course. It is common knowledge that AutoCAD doesn't work on Linux, even with Wine. I've been looking around for threads but it seems like knowledge and experience with this is fragmented. Also, I would prefer not using the web version as the WiFi is spotty in my university.

For example, would AutoCAD even work on a VM? I heard that some apps won't even run on a VM.

Is Windows capable of deleting my Linux partition from within a VM? I apologize for my lack of experience regarding this matter.

What VM is better to use? I think I would prefer one that saves files, I think.

Should I even bother with a VM or should I just use an old laptop? Do note that my old laptop is a budget laptop and I don't know how demanding AutoCAD can be.

geteilt von: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/54623764

Hey, on Windows I was a cFos Speed user for ages. cfosspeed is a 3rd party QoS software, which helped a lot for having a low latency even when bandwith is used up. I could easily play latency-sensitive games while having downloads running.

Now with Bazzite, I recognized how much good work cfos did. I had Heroic Games Launcher download a game, and play Rocket League via Steam at the same time - and ping was bad.

Is there any best practice for QoS on Bazzite? cFos basically did two things:

• Prioritize acks over new packets
• Prioritize packets known for gaming (e.g. due to used ports)

I'm struggling to replicate some window behavior I'm used to (from Windows) on a new install. Does anyone have any insight?

My goal is to play a game full screen but still be able to pin windows above it.

If a game is set to Full Screen, "Keep Above Others" doesn't work.

If I run a game Full Screen (Windowed), it keeps the taskbar visible and gives me cropped resolution options.

The only way I've found that works is manually configuring each window property to turn off the title bar, set a fixed position, and a minimum resolution. And also setting the taskbar to Auto Hide.

I don't want to manually configure every game (which often requires restarting it multiple times). I don't want my taskbar to Auto Hide. And I want it to be hidden until I alt+tab or press the start key.

Is this possible?

I have a bit of a weird setup that I've accumulated over the years. In my most recent attempt at breaking into Linux, this was my main barrier. In particular, I use a Corsair keyboard, a Razer Naga X mouse, and a Logitech Extreme 3D Pro joystick. As it turns out, the mouse, and seemingly the other two, aren't compatible with Linux.

I don't have the money for replacements at the moment, but when I do, what brands/products should I be looking for, for similar functionality? I can give up some features, but essential to me is the ability to set up keyboard macros, and an MMO mouse with the ability to toggle DPI via the side buttons.

One point of user-hostility you face when configuring Linux is all the config files in /etc. Be it crontab, fstab, or iptables, every project has its own ad-hoc config file format and as a rookie user you're left guessing what the rules for editing each one are. Must you separate entries with tabs or can it be spaces? Does the number of tabs matter? Does this file use # to comment or ;? Can you put a space after = or would that become part of the string? Some projects use their own half-baked implementation of .INI that breaks down the moment you try to escape a string. What's worse is that since it's background processes whose files you are editing, the response to a syntax error is nothing happening. The way to test whether you guessed the rules right is to wait and see 🤷

What I'm trying to say is that IMHO, the Linux Kernel and surrounding utilities should agree on a widespread, standardized config format and all migrate to it (prefarably sharing the same C library). The obvious option would be JSON, although it feels a little clunky and doesn't officially support comments. My preference would be TOML, since it's like INI which many projects kinda use already, but it's standardized and has native support for things like arrays (especially useful for fstab/crontab).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/58911678

The law firm that I work for is has finally decided that we should embrace Linux.

When of the key programs that we use a PDF Editor that has e-sign capabilities. Most people use Adobe and I use Foxit.

The problem with Foxit is that it doesn't run natively on Linux. I have to use WINE which is already going to be a problem cause we need a program that works out of the box. Having a program work out of the box cuts down on IT support and makes it easier for everyone to use.

The features needed:

1. Bookmark
2. Move/delete/insert pages
3. Redact
4. Bates numbering
5. E-sign
6. Change orientation of the page
7. Resize pages
8. Add notes
9. Highlight
10. Charges in Canadian dollars
11. Offline program
12. User friendly

Bonus points: It's a non-American company

The ones that I have looked at:

1. PDF Filler (not a fan of it being almost 100% cloud based)
2. Master PDF Editor
3. PDF Studio

Edit: Distro would most likely be Mint or Zorin.