Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Arch is aimed at people who know their shit so they can build their own distro based on how they imagine their distro to be. It is not a good distro for beginners and non power users, no matter how often you try to make your own repository, and how many GUI installers you make for it. There's a good reason why there is no GUI installer in arch (aside from being able to load it into ram). That being that to use Arch, you need to have a basic understanding of the terminal. It is in no way hard to boot arch and type in archinstall. However, if you don't even know how to do that, your experience in whatever distro, no matter how arch based it is or not, will only last until you have a dependency error or some utter and total Arch bullshit® happens on your system and you have to run to the forums because you don't understand how a wiki works.

You want a bleeding edge distro? Use goddamn Opensuse Tumbleweed for all I care, it is on par with arch, and it has none of the arch stuff.

You have this one package that is only available on arch repos? Use goddamn flatpak and stop crying about flatpak being bloated, you probably don't even know what bloat means if you can't set up arch. And no, it dosent run worse. Those 0,0001 seconds don't matter.

You really want arch so you can be cool? Read the goddamn 50 page install guide and set it up, then we'll talk about those arch forks.

(Also, most arch forks that don't use arch repos break the aur, so you don't even have the one thing you want from arch)

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submitted 21 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

My company's buyout has been completed, and their IT team is in the final stages of gutting our old systems and moving us on to all their infra.

Sadly, this means all my Linux and FOSS implementations I've worked on for the last year are getting shut down and ripped out this week. (They're all 100% Microsoft and proprietary junk at the new company)

I know it's dumb to feel sad about computers and software getting shut down, but it feels sucky to see all my hours of hard work getting trashed without a second thought.

That's the nature of a corpo takeover though. Just wanted to let off some steam to some folks here who I know would understand.

FOSS forever! ✊

Edit: Thanks, everybody so much for the kind words and advice!

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I have heard that linux doesn't play as nice with nvidia as others. So what type of graphics card is best for both linux and windows. And what other hardware considerations are there that I should consider when building my new PC? I machine is mainly for day to day stuff, web browsing, games, taxes...

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I'm on Arch (btw.) and I have a Intel i5-14600K CPU with a iGPU (UHD Graphics 770) (GPU 1) in it and a dGPU from Nvidia, the RTX 3060 (GPU 0). I have one monitor connected to the 3060 via display port 1.4.

I can see both GPUs in GNOME Mission Center, but hte iGPU has always Clock Speed 0 and Utilization 0. So anything which is done on the GPU is done on the 3060.

I want to seperate what is done on the iGPU and what is done on the 3060:

dGPU (RTX 3060):

  1. Video editing
  2. video transcoding
  3. AI stuff (ollama)
  4. Machine learning
  5. Blender
  6. Steam games

iGPU (intel):

  1. Firefox (especially YouTube video decoding, it has hw acceleration for that)
  2. Chrome
  3. Libre Office
  4. GNOME
  5. etc.

I wonder if this or at least parts of it is possible. I need the whole 12 GB VRAM on the 3060 for ollama, and the iGPU is just sitting there doing nothing. Is there a way to distribute the work? Do I need two screens for that or something?

It might also be that I'm misunderstanding how the whole thing works or over estimating Linuxes capabilities.

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This will be a bit long, so feel free to skip to the end tl;dr.

I've been a long time user of Linux. Back in the day I would burn live CDs like Slackware and Mandrake to try out. There was even that one distro that fit on a floppy, Damn Small Linux. More recently, I manage several Debian-based servers and a Raspbian system. However, I felt stuck daily-driving Windows due to game support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, so I decided to make the switch. Just wanted to share some observations I've made in the course of that.

A little while ago, I setup a laptop for a family member with Mint, primarily based on popularity and community recommendation. At the same time, I installed Mint on a laptop and used it for a bit. It's basically a backup laptop, so the intention was to have something stable and easy to use/update. I found Mint nice at first, but some cracks started showing after a bit, and eventually I became frustrated with Cinnamon. Since I am familiar with Arch, and it allows for choice of DE (if any), I decided to stick with it for the foreseeable future.

Current Setups

  • Desktop: Arch, BTRFS, KDE, Wayland
  • Laptop: Arch, FDE, BTRFS, Hyprland
  • Home "server": Arch, Gnome, Wayland (mainly run headless, for AI workloads)

KDE

I hadn't used KDE since the days when Plasma was in beta. It was a complete mess then. Things have matured quite a bit since then, so I decided to give a shot again for the desktop. I think, mainly, I wanted to familiarity of tray icons and such.

KDE has been great! I love the amount of pointless eye-candy I can enable, and the things that can be customized. Over the last few months, I've experienced a couple crashes which seem to be related to kwin. There's also a weird issue where powerdevil (or something related to it) is resetting one or more of my monitor's brightness when it shouldn't be.

Hyprland

Since I don't recall using a tiling WM seriously, I thought it'd be fun to try out Hyprland. It also fits well with the laptop, a Thinkpad X390, having an older intel processor and constrained thermal/power situation. Because I'm lazy, I chose a mostly pre-configured setup from JaKooLit. I like the look of it, and the other ones I considered require Network-Manager, so they were a no go.

Like with KDE, Hyprland has been great! It took less time than I expected to get accustomed to it, and everything mostly just works as expected. The main hiccups seem to come from software which renders in a fixed size, which isn't surprising. I also like there is a tree-sitter plugin for the DSL.

Gnome

I hadn't used Gnome much since the old days. It was a lot different then. It's hanging out on the so-called server, but I've only used it enough to get everything setup the way I like. GDM is disabled on startup.

My experience with Gnome is mixed. I like how "sleek" it is, but not that I need to install extensions for everything. If I were to use it daily, I'm sure I'd get used to it. Even then, GSettings/dconf sucks. I really don't get the design decision to create what is essentially the Windows registry, but on Linux.

BTRFS

Previously, I mainly stuck ext2/3/4, because it was familiar and easy. In this recent switch, I was looking for some more advanced features. After looking into ZFS a bit, I decided it wasn't for me. Too complicated, not in mainline kernel. So, BTRFS it is.

After some initial confusion, I'm really happy with BTRFS. I have automated snapshots with yabsnap, which has already proven helpful when I may have clobbered a system library and everything was messed up. The transparent compression is great as well.

nvim

Having used vim for several years, it seemed fitting to migrate to nvim. I quite like the support for Lua, and the wealth of themes, plugins and so forth. Using Lazy means I can pretty much just copy over a config and be up and running on a new/remote system with no fuss.

Lutris

Lutris is what I'm using to help facilitate running Windows-only games. Ultimately, it's a very nice piece of software, but is lacking in detailed documentation and sometimes requires reviewing logs to see what might be going wrong. Something I really like is the ability to wine/proton runtimes if the default isn't working. The simple GUI layout with box art is refreshing as well.

systemd

Some people really dislike systemd, and I get it. But I like it. I've fully embraced it alongside extras like networkd, timesyncd, and resolved. Need to do something on a schedule? Write a quick service and timer, then check on it once in a while. It's not quite as succinct as cron, but I prefer the consistent declarative syntax. I was very happy to discover wg2nd, which allowed me to convert my wireguard config files into networkd configs.

Backups

I'm using borgmatic, which automates borg, for backups. This is done daily, for all important files and the system partitions. Really couldn't be easier. In contrast, there are not a lot of advanced FOSS backup solutions for Windows, so I would manually run system partition backups there.

Hardware Support

I was pleasantly surprised to find my printer, an older Canon AIO, was supported by Gutenprint. My plan was to buy a new Brother laser printer, but I managed to get the existing one to work both via USB and wireless. This is great, as the Canon still technically works and I can get random "re-manufactured" cartridges on the cheap. I say technically because it's getting more noisy over time, squeaking, and really seeming to struggle. We'll see if it holds up.

All the other stuff, aside from fingerprint reader, work as expected. This is a far cry from 10-20 years ago. Great to see.

Overall Thoughts

Linux Desktop 2025 Edition has been awesome. Basically everything works better than I expected. Crashes less than the competition in my experience. I have the freedom, as a power user, to customize the experience. There are also no ads.

That said, I still have a Windows laptop for school, because they require it. I'm hating it more every day. There is one particular piece of software that only exists for Mac/Windows which means I can't retire that system, yet. This particular school has recently bought even more into MS. I'd drop them if I knew of any alternatives that weren't caught up in the same thing.

Should you switch to daily driving Linux? Yes, especially if you have some prior experience.

tl;dr

Linux has come quite a ways in the past couple decades and now is a great experience outside of some very specialized software/hardware.

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I need MySql Workbench on my daily driver OS, which is Fedora 41. But I can't seem to find a way to install it.

I first tried this, but dnf can't find the package even after adding the repository.

Same issue with this.

And this.

For all the tutorials I tried searching my dnf for the workbench and trying different variations of the name, but it just doesn't seem to exist as an installable package.

I even installed the snap package version (after installing snapd for the first time), which does install on the system, but it seems to have some kind of dependency issue because keeps saying could not execute child process dbus-launch no such file or directory when I try to do anything (even though I have dbus installed according to dnf).

So now I'm stumped. Does anyone know how you're "supposed" to install MySQL Workbench on Fedora 41?

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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

I want to develop a game and am considering collaborating with others, potentially even making it open-source.

To make this process smoother, I need to establish an easy-to-replicate development environment—one that can be set up by non-programmers (such as artists) but is also simple for me to configure so I can focus on actual development.

I’ve explored various options (Docker, Podman, Anaconda, NixOS, VMs), but the choices are overwhelming, and I’m unsure which one is best for my needs.

I’ve had partial success with a Fedora+i3wm virtual environment (VM), creating a plug-and-play experience. However, this setup requires extra space (~3GB for the OS) and includes software already installed on the host system. It also requires users to learn i3wm and possibly use the command line, which may not be ideal for everyone.

I would appreciate any advice on how to approach this effectively.

Edit: An example of things to setup:

  • The right .Net Sdks version
  • Git
  • Git LFS
  • Format Checks
  • VScode (+ extensions)
  • Godot (+ extensions)

Final: I have read your recommendations, researched your suggestions, and looked at what other projects use (Luanti uses docker). And I have finally decided that at least for now this might be a bit overboard. I will start with a simple setup script and setup files (such as for vscode) with instructions. And if I need to in the future I will most likely use Docker.

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I've recently stopped using tmux in favour of relying fully kitty's built-in windows and tabs, and I'm a fan.

The real killer app for me was the "pass_keys" plugin that allows you to navigate vim and kitty splits all with the same keys. I think there are plugins that allow you to do the same between vim<>tmux<>kitty as well, so it's not like you would need to drop tmux to take advantage of it.

Anyway, so that's been a big shift in my daily workflow. I've been using tmux for well over a decade, and GNU screen before that (I was never able to train myself away from the C-a prefix.

The one thing I miss a lot is being able to quickly detach and re-attach to existing sessions. Especially when doing some work over an ssh connection. But then I can always just shove the terminal into scratch space, or another i3 workspace.


This isn't me trying to sell anyone on ditching tmux. I love tmux, and if it works for your flow then it's perfect for you. More just curious what kinds of setup other people have.

Is there some hot new thing that I've missed that blows both kitty and tmux and i3 out of the water? Idk, but I'm always on the lookout. :p

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I've just got a new laptop with a high resolution display and am having some trouble with scaling, particularly audio plugin GUIs which cannot be resized in Ardour (audio workstation) and are consequently too small to use. In the past I have launched qt apps via a script with something like 'packagename QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5’ (I don't have the exact command to hand).

Can individual gtk apps also be launched in this way? Is this a valid approach to the problem?

I'm using GNOME on Fedora 41 and an Intel Arc iGPU.

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This is just me celebrating a small win. I've been slowly learning bash scripting, and just now I was able to quickly write a simple bash script to automate a file moving task without referring to my notes or the web!

It's not a super complicated script, I'm just happy I'm starting to internalize the knowledge I've been building.

I've been organizing my media files after ripping our DVD collection. I had all the files for The Smurfs cartoon (love the Smurfs) in the main Smurfs show folder. I wanted to put them all into their respective season folders (Season.XX). Here's the script:

#! /bin/bash

for number in {01..09}; do
	find . -type f -name "The.Smurfs.S$number*" -exec mv {} Season.$number/ \;
done

I could have done it as a one liner, but I like to keep things like this for future reference.

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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I've seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn't relevant to me with an all amd setup.

Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.

I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.

While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.

Currently Interested in: CachyOs Debian (leaning towards here if I go the stable route) EndeavorOs Mint (seems popular, is it just simplified?)

EDIT: Went with CachyOs for now, works well, only issue was auto install didn't work and I needed to manually partition and set the flags for boot and the os drive, other than that it's been very fast and intuitive using KDE plasma. Recently tried Hyprland with the JaKooLit config, since ML4W didn't want to work and had bugs, , I like it more than I thought I would.

Might try EndeavorOS and Bazzite on another ssd, they also look interesting.

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For some time I missed the notification icon of discord. I mean the little number in the taskbar icon that appears, when you get a message.

Today I found a fix for it in the archwiki.

You need to have libunity version packaged for your distro installed. For me on debian it was libunity9. After installing it, you get the notification icon again!

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submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 
 

Here's the setup:

  • Fedora 41 Server host
  • Libvirt/QEMU
  • Alma 9 guest running ssh

My goal is to forward ports from the guest to the host, but change them. I set up a hook(as in the libvirt docs) and it worked on my last server. My hook looks like:

#!/bin/bash

if [ "${1}" = "Jellyfin" ]; then

   # Update the following variables to fit your setup
   GUEST_IP=192.168.101.4
   GUEST_PORT=22
   HOST_PORT=2222

   if [ "${2}" = "stopped" ] || [ "${2}" = "reconnect" ]; then
    /sbin/iptables -D FORWARD -o virbr1 -p tcp -d $GUEST_IP --dport $GUEST_PORT -j ACCEPT
    /sbin/iptables -t nat -D PREROUTING -p tcp --dport $HOST_PORT -j DNAT --to $GUEST_IP:$GUEST_PORT
   fi
   if [ "${2}" = "start" ] || [ "${2}" = "reconnect" ]; then
    /sbin/iptables -I FORWARD -o virbr1 -p tcp -d $GUEST_IP --dport $GUEST_PORT -j ACCEPT
    /sbin/iptables -t nat -I PREROUTING -p tcp --dport $HOST_PORT -j DNAT --to $GUEST_IP:$GUEST_PORT
   fi
fi

However, when I ssh to my server:2222, it doesn't work, "Connection refused." I can ssh from inside my server to my guest's ip address, so I know it's not an issue with ssh itself. The guest's iptables rules are:

-P INPUT ACCEPT
-P FORWARD ACCEPT
-P OUTPUT ACCEPT

so that's probably not the issue.

My server's iptables rules include:

-A FORWARD -d 192.168.101.4/32 -o virbr1 -p tcp -m tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT

, so it appears the forwarding happened, but an nmap scan reveals the port is closed:

2222/tcp closed EtherNetIP-1

I'm baffled by this issue. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

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Any recommendations for a linux distro that i can set up and be reasonably sure my non techy SO won't break accidentally? The set up doesn't have to be easy it just has to not break once I leave her alone with it. My first thought was popOS.

My plan is to have 2 profiles and not give her access to sudo. I just don't want to have to go into it unless she needs a new program.

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Following the R4L debacle "you are cancer, you are the problem, we are the thin blue line", another maintainer steps down from the Linux Kernel

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Good day nice people.

I, like many I'm sure, am taking Microsoft's discontinuation of Windows 10 support as an opportunity so switch over to Linux. As such, I have some questions about various things. I have included some context as to my personal use case at the end of the post should it be relevant.

  1. Does the distro I pick matter? There seems to be a lot of debate around which distro is best but a lot of the discussion I've seen breaks down to what each distro comes packaged with. This confuses me as if a distro doesn't come prepackaged with something can you not just install it? Or is there some advantage to preinstalled packages other than mild convenience? Are some components difficult to integrate into your local environment?

  2. One of the more salient differences I've seen between distros has been what the various companies and teams include aside from installed packages (such as snap and rolling out amazon search as a defult search), and the data they choose to retain/sell. Part of the reason I'm switching is due to Microsoft's forcing in of unwanted features and advertising. Is the company that owns whatever distro I choose likely to be a problem in the future? Are there particular ones to avoid/ones to keep an eye on?

  3. I am the sort of person who does like to tinker with things from time to time but I do also want to use my computer most of the time so I'd like to end up using a mature distro. I have identified a few frontrunners in my search but I have seen conflicting information on which of them is "mature" (sufficiently stable so I spend less time fighting my computer than I do using it as well as having a large enough community and resources to help me remedy issues I might come across). Do any of these seem like they wouldn't fit that bill? The frontrunners are: fedora, kubuntu, mint, pop and tuxedo.

  4. Does linux have issues interfacing with multiple monitors? Does it handle HDR okay?

  5. In terms of UI and workflow I really don't mind putting in some time tinkering with the DE, exploring it and getting it how I like. It seems Plasma KDE might be good for this? Please let me know if this is an incorrect assessment. If it is, does it matter what DE I choose? If so, is there something you could recommend for my use case.

My use case: I have a Nvidea build (RTX 2080). I have heard this can be an issue with Linux. I also have intermediate experience with linux through university and my job (with servers) as well as tinkering with SteamOS.

Things I use/do on my PC (roughly ordered in terms of priority):

  • Gaming including emulation
  • Firefox
  • VLC
  • Spotify
  • Discord
  • Godot
  • Visual Studio
  • Git
  • Photoshop cs6, audacity, davinci resolve
  • Misc "Tinkering" (Handbrake, dvd burners/rippers, Really any weird thing I come across that I want to tinker with)

Thank you very much for your time and help in cleaing up my confusion.

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This is from a fresh boot of the system, except sshd I have not started anything else. ram consumption used to be just 126-200 mb now it has jumped so significantly that I am concerned I might have unnecessarily bloated my system:

I intend to use the system as a local server with an optional fully featured WM(Hyprland which is installed, but this screenshot was taken before it was loaded) for occasional use.

Ram conservation is a top priority and I would like to know if such a big jump in usage is normal or are there is something wrong with my system config

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