Linux

On the 16th of July, at around 8pm UTC+2, a malicious AUR package was uploaded to the AUR. Two other malicious packages were uploaded by the same user a few hours later. These packages were installing a script coming from the same GitHub repository that was identified as a Remote Access Trojan (RAT).

The affected malicious packages are:

• librewolf-fix-bin
• firefox-patch-bin
• zen-browser-patched-bin

The Arch Linux team addressed the issue as soon as they became aware of the situation. As of today, 18th of July, at around 6pm UTC+2, the offending packages have been deleted from the AUR.

We strongly encourage users that may have installed one of these packages to remove them from their system and to take the necessary measures in order to ensure they were not compromised.

Follow up

There are more packages with this malware found.

• minecraft-cracked
• ttf-ms-fonts-all
• vesktop-bin-patched
• ttf-all-ms-fonts

What to do

If you installed any of these packages, check your running processes for one named systemd-initd (this is the RAT).

The suspicious packages have a patch from this now-inaccessible Codeberg repo: https://codeberg.org/arch_lover3/browser-patch

The Arch maintainers have been informed of all this already and are investigating.

Coming about three weeks after DXVK 2.6.2, the DXVK 2.7 release adds support for the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer Vulkan extension by default on newer AMD and NVIDIA GPUs to significantly reduce CPU overhead in games like Final Fantasy XIV, God of War, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Watch Dogs 2, and others.

Source

trixie (aka debian 13) is about to get released with plasma 6.3. it seems that finally x11 is being left behind, which is good, but it worried me a little bit because

1. my nvidia graphics card is old: the 470 driver is the latest version that supports it (so no wayland support from nvidia proprietary drivers ever)

2. on bookworm (debian 12, the current stable version), nouveau works pretty well, but it crashed more or less daily when i tried to daily drive it at work

x11 is still very well supported by plasma 6, but the near future has no place to it and i worry i would eventually get stuck without updates to my system as the newer versions lose x11 support. i decided to try wayland+nouveau again on trixie to see if i had better luck this time

it all worked way better than i expected. performance is seemingly on par with the proprietary driver, i've had no crashes so far and i've been using it for a week and even screensharing, one of the most problematic aspects of the experience last time i tried, worked well. the one problem i had was with the slack flatpak, which didn't support wayland for some reason, so it had to run on xwayland. screen sharing wayland applications from x11 apps is possible through the xwaylandvideobridge, which kinda works, but it crashed xwayland entirely at one point, killing both x11 applications i had running. i won't blame that on the system itself and installing the slack deb package fixed the problem anyway

all in all, it seems like i can safely switch to plasma 6+wayland+nouveau at work

Like the window thumbnails gnome extension? Prob the main thing keeping me on gnome right now.

How accurate are the dates for upcoming releases typically?

Back again haha, I asked a little while ago about making the switch from Windows to Linux and general consensus was maybe don't, as I use my PC for work doing voice acting, music production, and digital art.

Anyway, my PC has been crashing lately so I may be at the point soon of re-installing my OS, so I may as well bite the bullet if/when that happens. Right now I'm making some backups, making a list of Linux programs I'll need, and just trying to get my ducks in a row so I'm not scrambling if I wake up one morning and have to do the thing. Which brings me to Distros.

I've done some research into it but already but there are a bunch of options (thinking maybe Bazzite or Fedora?), and I'd rather know what I'm going with if my PC dies so I don't have to waste time trying to figure it out then. My PC specs are:

Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz

Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.9 GB usable)

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060

Obviously the priority is to get up and running but I'd really like to use a distro that I can learn some as well. I've installed Mint on an old laptop (recommended for being similar to Windows) but ideally I'd like a distro that's a bit more Linux-y. I'm ok taking some extra time getting up and running, though I'm not at a point for something like Arch yet haha.

Extending the vote to here since well it is Linux. I probably should have posted here first but oh well. Let me know which genre of Tux game you would want made first.

This is a story all about how... one sad old sack finally “got” Linux distros.

I've been a very casual Linux user over 20-odd years, mostly on secondary PCs and generally sticking with noob-friendly distros, but only in the last few months I’ve become serious and started to learn the how and why of Linux.

Like many others, this year is my own personal year of Linux on the desktop. My server, media box and laptops are all now running Fedora, only my primary PC remains left behind on Win10 because of critical software keeping me tied to Windows - but from next week that is no longer needed and the shackles are off! I've sampled several different Distros this year to find the perfect fit for this very moment, but this search reminded me how the sheer number of distros annoyed me.

I've always seen the vast number of Distros as wasteful. Effort that could be put into pushing Linux forward rather than creating another fork sideways. I'm not sure now what I thought a distro actually was but I've now come to realise the genius of this (not to say there isn't any replication and waste between Distros).

I had settled on KDE Fedora as my distro of choice some time ago. Then, when I found the idea of an immutable distro, this appealed (to help prevent my dumb-arse breaking things), so I pivoted to Kinoite to give me exactly what I wanted. All I needed was to work out how to get Steam running. Many of you can probably already see where this is going.

In a moment of Picard-level face-palming, I started exploring Bazzite thinking this would give me an idea of what's required. The distro itself looked good and when I went digging deeper, I found an Immutable, Fedora base in either KDE or Gnome. Bazzite is basically Atomic Fedora, pre-configured for gaming! Face-smack. Maybe I thought Bazzite was based on Arch which is why I hadn't looked at it before, but now I better understood the genius of Linux distros. The Bazzite team could take the core of what they want, then tweak it for a specific use-case and release it, thinking others might like it too. They're not reinventing the wheel as I first believed, they were building upon previous work. One of the greatest strengths of open source. I probably already knew this but somehow, I hadn't quite put the pieces together in one place.

TL;DR: I’m a numpty

Tune in tomorrow when I argue that no one should recommend Arch to anyone - and why that's a good thing...

Clickbaity title on the original article, but I think this is the most important point to consider from it:

After getting to 1% in approximately 2011, it took about a decade to double that to 2%. The jump from 2% to 3% took just over two years, and 3% to 4% took less than a year.

Get the picture? The Linux desktop is growing, and it's growing fast.

(Also extends to people who refuse to use Linux too!)

Every unique Linux Desktop setup tells a story, about the user's journey and their trials. I feel like every decision, ranging from theming to functional choices, is a direct reflection of who we are on the inside.

An open-ended question for the Linux users here: Why do you use what you do? What are the choices you've had to make when planning it out?

I'll go first: I use OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with the Niri Scrolling Compositor(Rofi, Alacritty and Waybar), recently switched from CosmicDE

I run this setup because I keep coming back to use shiny new-ish software on a daily basis.

I prefer this over arch(which I used for 2 years in the covid arc), because it's quite a bit more stable despite being a rolling release distro.

I chose niri because I miss having a dual monitor on the go, and tiling windows isn't good enough for me. Scrolling feels smooth, fancy and just right. The overview menu is very addicting, and I may not be able to go back to Windows after this!

This was my first standalone WM/Compositor setup, so there were many little pains, but no regrets.

Would love to hear more thoughts, perspectives and experiences!

I've got some great Linux swag from Ubuntu Korea, but I've been looking to buy new clothes lately and would love to rock more FOSS.

I see a couple websites that sell FOSS branded clothing, but does anyone have good experience buying high quality hats/tshirts/sweaters/active wear from any of these online retailers? Bonus points if the retailers donate proceeds to development

The device in question is the USB dongle for my 2.4 GHz wireless headset. Everything works fine except for volume control, so it is stuck at max volume, regardless of where the volume slider in pavucontrol is. Volume controls within individual websites and programs work, but it seems that the system volume control is delegated to the USB device, which itself has no concept of volume control. This is the case with both pulseaudio and pipewire. Is there a way to limit the system-wide volume before it reaches the dongle?

debian 12.11, organic maps from flatpak.

My local organic maps started to download the whole world. Every single map it could find. I tried stopping it but the only way to achieve that is to turn the application off. On starting it again, it resumes downloading.

Why?

The android based version found on f-droid is easier to use. I wanted to use the desktop based one because I work from home more often than elsewhere.

I am using a laptop, with a cheaper monitor that only has one hdmi input. I have two devices that I want to use on this monitor, My laptop and my xbox series, so I got an hdmi switcher.

The xbox handles switching to and from it's input without a hitch, but my laptop can takes up to a minute to recognize the switch and display to the monitor, sometimes not recognizing it at all.

I was thinking that having the laptop continue to output the display whether or not it recognizes the monitor as disconnected would help make switching between them more seamless. Is there a way to achieve this?

I am using KDE and I have the "Do Nothing" option selected under close lid in power options.

ESWIN Computing is launching a new SBC running RISC-V. In a joint statement with Canonical, they have announced first-party support for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the new device. Good news for anyone wanting to diversify away from ARM SBC's.

I decided to go with Linux mint for my laptop. After installing it alongside windows 10, it won't boot into either. If I reboot from my USB stick, it says that maybe it's too far away from the start of the drive to be detected. But I believe there is some intel /hp stuff that includes some kind of boot that might also be interfering. Does anyone have a good way forward from here?

Link from boot repair: https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/GJcsXfRkrj/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/33289366

obligatory I know this is not a linux question, but you provide good information and alternatives

qr code is the squares code that, if used with a qr code scanner redirects me automatically to a website or to download a pkpass file, right?

after downloading said pkpass file to my android, any wallet application like fosswallet should recognize it and add it to the local library (on my android device), right?

what other formats do transportation authorities use?

To those residing in Germany, is pkpass use widespread there? What are common formats used there?

This isn’t the first time I’ve blogged about the dearth of truly great PC laptops out there, and I suspect it won’t be the last.

Source

Hello there! Here's the thing: I got some old HDD for my Debian home server, and now that I have plenty of disk space I want to keep a backup of the OS, so that if something accidentally breaks (either SW or HW) I can quickly fix it.

now the question is: which directory should I include and which should I exclude from the backup? I use docker a lot, is there any docker-specific directory that I should back up?

I realized my VLC was broke some point in the week after updating Arch. I spend time troubleshooting then find a forum post with replies from an Arch moderator saying they knew it would happen and it's my fault for not wanting to read through pages of changelogs. Another mod post says they won't announce that on the RSS feed either. I thought I was doing good by following the RSS but I guess that's not enough.

I've been happily using Arch for 5 years but after reading those posts I've decided to look for a different distro. Does anyone have recommendations for the closest I can get to Arch but with a different attitude around updating?