Linux

The diversity of Linux distributions is one of its strengths, but it can also be challenging for app and game development. Where do we need more standards? For example, package management, graphics APIs, or other aspects of the ecosystem? Would such increased standards encourage broader adoption of the Linux ecosystem by developers?

Couldn't find a dedicated community for distro recommendations, I hope it's ok to ask here.

A couple of years ago my wife and I built a computer and gave it to a friend's kid. We put ElementaryOS on it since that seemed pretty fool-proof, but it appears to require a re-install to upgrade major versions so it has been stuck with an old glibc and because of that he can't play Factorio.

For his 13:th birthday we bought him a SSD so it would be a good time to reinstall Linux, but is there perhaps some better choice than ElementaryOS? They live quite far away so I can't easily pop over to fix his computer if something breaks, we don't spend enough time there for me to teach him to fix things himself, and he doesn't seem very interested in learning how computers/operatings systems work either.

• Hardware: Some old Intel CPU with 8GB DDR3 and a GTX1080
• Usage: Gaming through Steam+Proton, Lutris and browsing.
• Requirements: Games work, OS never breaks on updates. Doesn't need to be "kid proof", I don't think he touches any stuff he doesn't know what it does.

Anubis provides protection against bots scraping websites and DDoSing projects.

This blog post is about Xe's reasoning for originally only providing docker packages and their work to provide native packages.

Hi all!

I recently installed Tuxedo OS with KDE and Wayland. I'm fairly new to Linux and, so far, the distro is great. With one caveat.

As far as power options go, everything works fine EXCEPT for Sleep. I can put the PC to sleep, but when I wake it up, I land on the login screen wallpaper with the login/password fields barely visible, as if frozen around the second frame of a fade-in animation.

Nothing works. The mouse cursor doesn't move, the keyboard doesn't do anything. The only way out of this state is to hold the power button until the PC shuts down and then turn it back on again.

I did some digging, but couldn't find a solution. Some threads mentioned modifying something in systemd, but those were from years ago, so I didn't want to risk that.

One fairly recent thread had a proposed solution of adding "mem_sleep_default=deep" to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in /etc/default/grub.

That didn't work for me, though.

I'd love to fix this, but I'm out of ideas. Any help welcome!

EDIT

Forgot it might be a driver issue, people were complaining about Nvidia gear!

I currently don't have a dedicated GPU. I only have Ryzen 7 7800X3D running on MSI B650 Gaming Plus WIFI ATX AM5 MoBo.

Has anybody attempted to daily drive linux on their smartphone? like sailfish os, postmarket, librem, etc. I've been getting more interested in them as my pixel 4a is starting to look real old

How was it it? Were you able to run banking apps? battery life? experience with using CJK keyboards?

As far as I can tell, RCS messages are not supported anywhere, in addition to NFC payments (no surprise there). 5G seems also iffy

Hey there I am another refugee from windows with the forced push to windows 11. I thought it was time I tried once again linux. So far I am pretty satisfied.
I installed Fedora with KDE and successfully migrated my syncthing server, sftp server. Correctly mounted my nft disks and successfully installed mullvad with all split tunneling I needed.

Now I need advices about 3 things which I sorely miss and which keep forcing me to boot on windows :

• is there any equivalent to macrium reflect, allowing to schedule weekly image backup for system disk. So it could be restored in case something really goes wrong.
  My system disk is brtfs. Time machine looks nice but it's not working because I have no @home and @root volume identified. I found explanations which explain how to do it but I am not too sure it's a good idea to do so.
  I also found rsync. Didn't explore enough this solution but I am not sure an image backup can be done if system is running ?
• for vscode it's easy and I got it running for my linux environment. Yet I have programs which are meant specifically to run on windows and so I can't develop and test them on linux
• at last for my work I need to be able to use excel. Libre office is not a solution, it's ok for basic usage but it's far behind if you're using it professionally. Please don't turn this about an arguments to say calc is good, really there is something that are just impossible with it. (Like using arrays, power query or data models)

For the last 2 points I feel like my only solution would be to use a virtual machine running windows. Is there a way to run them on it but make it looks like it's a linux app? Somewhat is it what docker is doing but for linux apps ?

Well I feel like I have not many options if I want excel and vscode on windows environment. So sadly I think that will settled it. Please share your thoughts.
I would also really appreciate people sharing what they do to backup their system disk.

Thanks for your advice !

So I want to type in my native language, and the easiest tool i know of is this:

https://www.google.com/inputtools/try/

It's not available offline for Linux though. I have tried running some windows executable from archive.org under wine, this didn't work. I also tried some random alternative (Varnam), but it was way too complex of a setup for me. (It kept telling me to compile libraries, and none of it worked in the end)

I want something that can take in english character input and turn it into proper devnagari typeface. If I type in "namaste", it has to come out as नमस्ते. And It has to be Offline.

I haven't found anything that fits to all these categories

Turns out Google Input is my best bet. Is there a way I can get it working?

Does anyone know how I can troubleshoot this?

I want my laptop display to not dim when the device is inactive. However, when I go into GNOME's settings and uncheck the option under Power Saving my choice is disregarded; the screen still dims. Is it being overridden somewhere?

Fedora Workstation 41

I know Gnome is the default on popular distros: Fedora, Ubuntu, Rhel, Pop OS (it's Cosmic Desktop yes but it is still based on Gnome)...etc. But Gnome just doesnt work for me. I would pick XFCE - stable and no BS.

Before Manjaro and their cetificate shenanigan, I used to use their XFCE version. At the time, it was marketed as the "Flagship Manjaro version". I went 4 years without any problems and I did tinker a lot, just couldnt get their XFCE to break.

After a tough Arch or Gentoo installs, I just want to put XFCE on and call it a day.

What about you guys?

Hey all.

I've booted Linux Mint Debian Edition and Arch on to a couple old machines including my old laptops. The performance is still rather brutal because these machines are so old and their battery lives are rough. They are also bulky and uncomfortable to carry around.

So, I've been thinking about getting a more modern laptop and putting Linux on it but I've been out of the laptop market for so long now I have no idea what's good and what's not anymore. Any recommendations?

I think I've heard decent things about Chromebooks but how's the hardware of those? Are they relatively locked down and don't play nice with Linux? I'm just looking for a machine for daily use (browser, light coding, remote connecting to my desktop for heavier stuff)

Thanks in advance

Response to a recent claim that Ctrl+D in the terminal is like pressing Enter. It kind of is but it’s also misleading to say so without further explanation.

Hello!

I am pleased to announce a new version of my CLI text processing with GNU awk ebook. This book will dive deep into field processing, show examples for filtering features, multiple file processing, how to construct solutions that depend on multiple records, how to compare records and fields between two or more files, how to identify duplicates while maintaining input order and so on. Regular expressions will also be discussed in detail.

Book links

To celebrate the new release, you can download the PDF/EPUB versions for free till 06-April-2025.

• https://learnbyexample.gumroad.com/l/gnu_awk
• https://leanpub.com/gnu_awk/c/free

Or, you can read it online at https://learnbyexample.github.io/learn_gnuawk/

Interactive TUI apps

• 80+ exercises: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/blob/main/AwkExercises
• Brief tutorial: https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/blob/main/AwkTutorial

Feedback

I would highly appreciate it if you'd let me know how you felt about this book. It could be anything from a simple thank you, pointing out a typo, mistakes in code snippets, which aspects of the book worked for you (or didn't!) and so on.

Happy learning :)

I have been using KDE for a while, while I like many features I am looking for suggestions to the default email client:

Kmail - completely unusable for me and the only one which could maybe be integrated with kontacts, it could not receive mails from IMAP or pop or would receive only sometimes

Geary - good but too minimal, I need at least some kind of contact list and mailing lists feature, maybe this integrates with gnome contacts? I couldn't find anything in settings

I want to move a directory with a bunch of subdirectories and files. But I have the feeling there might be some symlinks to a few of them elsewhere on the file system. (As in the directory contains the targets of symlinks.)

How do I search all files for symlinks pointing to them?

Some combination of find, stat, ls, realpath, readlink and maybe xargs? I can't quite figure it out.

Background: I am a lifelong Windows user who is planning to move to Linux in October, once Microsoft drops support for Windows 10. I use a particularly bad laptop (Intel Celeron N3060, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 64 GB eMMC storage).

I do have some degree of terminal experience in Windows, but I would not count on it. If there are defaults that are sensible enough, I'd appreciate it. I can also configure through mouse-based text editors, as long as there is reliable, concise documentation on that app.

So, here's what I want in a distro and desktop environment:

• Easy to install, maintain (graphical installation and, preferably, package management too + auto-updating for non-critical applications)
• Lightwight and snappy (around 800 MB idle RAM usage, 10-16 GB storage usage in a base install)
• Secure (using Wayland, granular GUI-based permission control)

I have narrowed down the distributions and desktop environments that seem promising, but want y'all's opinions on them.

Distributions:

• Linux Mint Xfce: Easy to install, not prone to randomly break (problems: high OOTB storage usage, RAM consumption seems a little too high, kind of outdated packages, not on Wayland yet)
• Fedora: Secure, the main DEs use Wayland (problems: similar to above except for the outdated packages; also hard to install and maintain, from what I have heard)
• antiX Linux (problems: outdated packages, no Wayland)

Desktop Environments:

• Xfce: Lightweight, fast, seems like it'd work how I want (problems: not on Wayland yet, that's it)
• labwc + other Wayland stuff: Lightweight, fast, secure (problems: likely harder to install, especially since I have no Linux terminal experience, cannot configure through a GUI)

In advance, I thank you all for helping me!

I appreciate any help, especially in things like:

• Neofetch screenshots, to showcase idle RAM usage on some DEs
• Experiences with some distributions

I just found this out recently. So this isn't actually Nautilus itself but it's the file previewer (Gnome Sushi) that comes with it. If you select a file and press the spacebar, it will automatically preview the file if it supported. If the file is an audio file, it will automatically fetch album art from the web, and if the file is an HTML file, it can make third-party requests. IMHO this is a huge privacy issue. For example if you were browsing the web using Tor Browser and saved a page to view offline, and then later accidentally opened it using the file previewer, any third-party requests will leak out the clearnet.

This is an open issue and I don't expect it to be fixed anytime soon, so the easiest solution is to simply uninstall Gnome Sushi (on Fedora, it is the sushi package). On atomic distros if Gnome Sushi is installed as a flatpak you might be able to revoke internet permissions for it using Flatseal, though I have not tested this.

Edit: I'm aware that KDE also has file previewers, but I'm not sure if they have the same issue. If anybody else knows please leave a comment letting us know

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.wtf/post/18741487