Linux

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.

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

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

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

This is not a troll post. I'm genuinely confused as to why SELinux gets so much of hate. I have to say, I feel that it's a fairly robust system. The times when I had issues with it, I created a custom policy in the relevant directory and things were fixed. Maybe a couple of modules here and there at the most. It took me about 15 minutes max to figure out what permissions were being blocked and copy the commands from. Red Hat's guide.

So yeah, why do we hate SELinux?

I'm trying, and struggling a little bit with getting the three items in the title setup the way that I want.

Running Arch.

I would like to run Radarr, Sonarr and SABnzbd all under the same user/group. My reasoning is that I (am just being overly particular) want any of the files created by those services to fall under the same owner/group. This is easy enough to accomplish by running systemctl edit service.service and adding the appropriate lines in the configuration for each one and saving it so the services run using the specified user/group.

The issue that I'm having is that the correlating folders in /var/lib/ have the ownership of the original users. I can manually change that ownership to the user/group I want but if I reboot the computer the SABnzbd folder ownership reverts back to default (the other two were doing the same thing but suddenly stopped and I'm not 100% sure why) or if the services get updated, the folders will also revert back to their default user/group.

Is there a way for me to enforce the ownership of those folders to the user/group that I have set to run the services regardless of them getting updated or the machine rebooting?

I would understand if Canonical want a new cow to milk, but why are developers even agreeing to this? Are they out of their minds?? Do they actually want companies to steal their code? Or is this some reverse-uno move I don't see yet? I cannot fathom any FOSS project not using the AGPL anymore. It's like they're painting their faces with "here, take my stuff and don't contribute anything back, that's totally fine"

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/deshuffle

deshuffle is a terminal word puzzle game, written in Bash.

The simple aim is to put all the given letters in order to find the shuffled word against the clock. The time available after a number of words also reduces, so the game gets harder as it goes.

There is not only one solution to every puzzle. If the user find a word with the same letters, the solution will be accepted.

By default, the adjusted definitions of the words appear in the end of each round.

The game ends when the user fails to find the word in time, or fails to create an acceptable solution altogether.

If the score is among the 10 best scores achieved, it makes it in the Top Ten Highscores.

This game was inspired by https://wordnerd.co/23words/.

I have some desktops (the tower kind) lying around and I'm wondering if there's a way that I can connect them all to one display and combine their computational power or at least make them all accessible in one place. I want to get into server hosting but only have one monitor. They're currently running LMDE.

Any ideas?

Those who don't have the time or appetite to tweak/modify/troubleshoot their computers: What is your setup for a reliable and low-maintenance system?

Context:

I switched to Linux a couple of years ago (Debian 11/12). It took me a little while to learn new software and get things set up how I wanted, which I did and was fine.

I've had to replace my laptop though and install a distro (Fedora 41) with a newer kernel to make it work but even so, have had to fix a number of issues. This has also coincided with me having a lot less free time and being less interested in crafting my system and more interested in using it efficiently for tasks and creativity. I believe Debian 13 will have a new enough kernel to support my hardware out of the box and although it will still be a hassle for me to reinstall my OS again, I like the idea of getting it over with, starting again with something thoroughly tested and then not having to really touch anything for a couple of years. I don't need the latest software at all times.

I know there are others here who have similar priorities, whether due to time constraints, age etc.

Do you have any other recommendations?

Just a recomendation, as the theme is quite beautiful.

Edit: Just the GIMP on the title.

As seen in the image, neovim just yanks the exact next letter into the line below. How do I make it so words get properly formatted?

Edit 2: Through all of my shenanigans I ended up on a read-only snapshot for root. The error I got just seemed similar to previous out-of-space errors. I went to a later snapshot as default and everything is working great!

My OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is wonky since I last did a dist-upgrade with about 4000 packages. Midway through it errord out with an error that indicated that the filesystem was full althou df showed plenty of free space.

BTRFS seemed to be the culprit. Removing snapshots let me continue the upgrade until it errored out again. Rinse and repeat until it was done.

Edit: My root subvolume is read only. So there must be some error in that. The other subvolumes work correctly. So I guess it isn't about free space after all.

But now the BTRFS seems to be almost full and I cannot update anymore.

...
Checking for file conflicts: .....................[done]error: can't create transaction lock on /usr/lib/sysimage/rpm/.rpm.lock (Read-only file system)                 ( 1/40) Removing: ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.202412[error]Removal of (76899)ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.20241216~git0.a08b2fd_k6.13.7_1-2.2.x86_64(@System) failed:          Error: Subprocess failed. Error: RPM failed: Command exited with status 1.                                      Abort, retry, ignore? [a/r/i] (a):                      Problem occurred during or after installation or removal of packages:                                           Installation has been aborted as directed.              Please see the above error message for a hint.

I've tried a full balance but that didn't even seem to help. So I suspect that the space is caught up in snapshots, but I can't delete them.

# snapper list

# │ Type   │ Pre # │ Date                             │ User │ Used Space │ Cleanup │ Description           │ Userdata                                               ─────┼────────┼───────┼──────────────────────────────────┼──────┼────────────┼─────────┼───────────────────────┼─────────────                                             0  │ single │       │                                  │ root │            │         │ current               │  1  │ single │       │ Thu 18 Apr 2024 05:58:31 PM CEST │ root │  12.51 GiB │ number  │ first root filesystem │365* │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 04:28:33 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no                                           366  │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:28:09 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no                                           367  │ pre    │       │ Wed 26 Mar 2025 07:36:53 PM CET  │ root │  16.00 KiB │ number  │ zypp(zypper)          │ important=no

# snapper rm 1

Deleting snapshot failed.

# snapper rm 365

Cannot delete snapshot 365 since it is the currently mounted snapshot.

# btrfs filesystem usage /

Overall:                                                    Device size:                 476.44GiB                  Device allocated:            389.06GiB                  Device unallocated:           87.37GiB                  Device missing:                  0.00B                  Device slack:                  3.50KiB                  Used:                        382.53GiB                  Free (estimated):             90.80GiB      (min: 47.12GiB)                                                     Free (statfs, df):            90.80GiB                  Data ratio:                       1.00                  Metadata ratio:                   2.00                  Global reserve:              512.00MiB      (used: 0.00B)                                                       Multiple profiles:                  no                                                                      Data,single: Size:381.00GiB, Used:377.57GiB (99.10%)       /dev/mapper/cr_root   381.00GiB                                                                              Metadata,DUP: Size:4.00GiB, Used:2.48GiB (61.97%)          /dev/mapper/cr_root     8.00GiB                                                                              System,DUP: Size:32.00MiB, Used:80.00KiB (0.24%)           /dev/mapper/cr_root    64.00MiB                                                                              Unallocated:                                               /dev/mapper/cr_root    87.37GiB

# btrfs qgroup show /

Qgroupid    Referenced    Exclusive   Path              --------    ----------    ---------   ----              0/5           16.00KiB     16.00KiB   <toplevel>        0/256         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @                 0/257         14.25GiB     14.25GiB   @/var             0/258         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/usr/local       0/259         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/srv             0/260         54.32MiB     54.32MiB   @/root            0/261         24.09GiB     24.09GiB   @/opt             0/262        289.02GiB    288.95GiB   @/home            0/263         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/boot/grub2/x86_64-efi                                                   0/264         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/boot/grub2/i386-pc                                                      0/265         16.00KiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots      0/266         24.00GiB     12.51GiB   @/.snapshots/1/snapshot                                                   0/473         16.00GiB     16.00GiB   @/.snapshots/1/snapshot/swap                                              0/657         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/365/snapshot                                                 0/661         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/366/snapshot                                                 0/662         23.68GiB     16.00KiB   @/.snapshots/367/snapshot                                                 1/0           36.19GiB     36.12GiB   <0 member qgroups>

Any tips?