Linux

Hey everyone! I'm finally fed up with Win11 and the bullshit that comes with it for the PC it's on.

It's being used as a Jellyfin+arr stack, qbit, Immich, and gaming PC for the living room.

I'm currently in the process of backing up all my important info and am doing research on which distro to use.

I don't mind tinkering, but for this PC, stability is key. I don't want to have to go in and update it every week... I want this one to work with minimal maintenance on my part.

I'd likely update it a few times a year, knowing me.

A few hardware specs:

MSI mobo (I've learned that UEFI can be a pain), 10600k, 2070 gpu, and will have a pool of 3x8tb drives that I would like to have in raid5 (or something similar) for storage (movies, TV shows, and Immich libraries), the OS will have its own drive, and I have a separate SSD that I have been using to store programs, games, yml's for docker, and other such things that get accessed more frequently, but aren't crucial if lost.

I've kinda narrowed it down to either Bazzite or CachyOS.

I've heard that Bazzite can be a little more locked down, which I'm not a fan of, but CachyOS has features I will likely never touch (schedulers, kernels, etc...).

I don't want an upkeep heavy OS. I'm moving away from windows for that reason. Win11 has been a nightmare for me with constant reboots and things not loading up until after I log in. Not to mention driver conflicts and all the other BS that's come with it.

So... What say the hive mind? Is Bazzite going to be too tinker-proof, or is CachyOS just way too much work? Or do I have it all wrong with my perception of both?

Thanks!

Ps: this will be my first full commit to Linux. I've dabbled in the past and am no stranger to CLI... So this will likely be a stepping stone into getting my primary PC onto Linux. Go easy on me lol

New year, new OS for this M1 MacBook Air! I've been using Asahi Linux (via the flagship Fedora Asahi Remix) for a few weeks now. It's been my everyday laptop and I'm really impressed with how it's ...

TL;DR: Mozilla has a new CEO and a new mission: transform Firefox into an AI browser. That has run into some snags, as Firefox users don’t seem that interested in AI. Mozilla is forging ahead, utilizing deceptive patterns (previously known as dark patterns) to nag and annoy people into enabling AI features. You can see this in the introduction of Link Previews, an extremely invasive anti-feature that exists solely to push AI into your experience.

To improve Android-application function on the go, AOSP-derivatives (LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, CalyxOS, etc.) are also tolerated, at least on the phone. This because so many people say mobile Linux (PostmarketOS, Sailfish OS, etc.) is not so nice yet in daily phone use.

This question didn't come from me originally, but I'll add my context anyway:
I come from Ubuntu (eww, Canonical) and Android (eww, Google, nope!).

I currently have Linux Mint with Cinnamon desktop on the laptop, and because of the bugs, I've been considering moving to something else with KDE (serious desktop UI), maybe OpenSUSE because its roots are so European.

I tried Fedora with Gnome on a tablet I had 2025, which seemed fine on a touchscreen, unlike Fedora with KDE.

My phone runs /e/OS with the default Nextcloud hosted by Murena (the company behind /e/OS), which is fine, and I appreciate that /e/OS can be bought pre-installed, and that it supports bootloader re-locking (against pickpockets) on many devices (Fairphone and Shiftphone of the European ones).

Special thanks to Firefox for a unified experience through a Mozilla-account. More of this kind of unification would be welcome.

New year, new OS for this M1 MacBook Air!

I've been using Asahi Linux (via the flagship Fedora Asahi Remix) for a few weeks now. It's been my everyday laptop and I'm really impressed with how it's held up. Battery life is amazing, and the ARM Linux experience is fine for everyday use.

This video walks through how I installed Fedora Asahi Remix in December 2025, the process might change in the future and if it does, I might revisit it here or in a blog- watch for pinned comments I guess!

Important links:

• Asahi Linux project: https://asahilinux.org/
• Asahi Linux docs: https://asahilinux.org/docs/
• Asahi Linux "supported devices" page: https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support

Links to help support unsponsored videos like these... Patreon and Ko-Fi members get access to my Discord/Matrix server where I hang out:

• Patreon: https://patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
• Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
• Buy a shirt: https://vkc.sh/merch
• Download my music: https://thestopbits.bandcamp.com/

Chapters:
0:00 What is Asahi Linux in the first place?
2:15 Installation caveats
3:27 Actually installing Asahi Linux on real hardware
7:34 About the experience
11:06 Asahi is awesome

#linux #apple #fedora

;tldr Beginning to use a new OS, even using a distro as friendly as Mint, is harder than the overall community says it is. The second there is a problem expect hours of consuming, likely outdated, information. That said I’m happy I switched.

I’m not a programmer. If you are someone who is unfamiliar with GNU/Linux you probably aren’t either. Good news: a week after you start using Linux you’ll feel like one! Here are some critical things I eventually learned while installing Ubuntu/Mint:

You should expect to use the terminal . Period. Something about your particular hardware or software setup may require special tweaks or install that requires typing. Anyone who even hints this isn’t the case is at best deluded. I know this is a deal-breaker for many people but I’d rather not waste your time.

Locations and commands are case-sensitive . -h means help -H Human-readable (or is it the other way around? More typing yay!). It's in /etc/ X 11, not /etc/x11 (something almost impossible to see the difference of on a blurry 1080i resolution not being properly displayed).

While the basic user storage locations mimic what you are used to, the underlying system organization is completely impossible to navigate. Pertinent files can be scattered over several locations for whatever reason so don’t even bother trying to figure out a pattern and just follow guides. That said,

Guides helping you to navigate this jumbled mess are possibly outdated so check their dates or you may end up following directions and quite possibly break your installation when you add/remove/alter a file that used to be important but has been deprecated or relocated and now redundant. Speaking of which,

It is possible/probable your distro is effectively a skin of another older distro , so you should search the underlying distro directions too in case there aren’t any for the ‘skin’ you’re using.

All said and done, I am very happy to say I now have my Mint OS on a portable USB keychain that I can use on any PC (assuming TPM permission). The actual OS is pleasantly unobtrusive, nimble, and supports 90% of what I want to do with it. Critical failings seem to be completely relegated to proprietary software (for me, 1080i support was abandoned by all the graphics card developers years ago and I’m unable to either find older working drivers like I can in Win10, or find/figure out the tweaking needed to force the issue). Check all your mission critical programs to see if they are Linux compatible , or ‘simply’ learn to use the open-source competitor if they aren’t.

Im happy to see that even PC Gamer is seeing why Linux is a good choice.

i really wanna have all of them. long neck tux is very funny

listenonrepeat.com was up for years until last month, when it mysteriously went offline. I haven't found any sites like it. I could just paste in a youtube link and have it play right away, and choose the start and end times for looping, and it had a count for how many times you played the song, as well viewing history (with start & end times saved) so you could easily listen to previous songs.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/49130941

How to disable Linux laptop keyboard when custom keyboard is plugged in

How are you guys doing this? Are you using Sway or Hyprland for this? Anyone else using udev already?

Looking for the best bluetooth adapter with Linux (Mint) compatibility..I got one now but it seems to have cutting out issues and doesn't work well with some stuff (like a PS4 controller).

Or maybe it's just Linux bluetooth being terrible as usual? Has anyone had luck with different dongles? (No scamazon links please)

I noticed a new Linux distribution which seemed interesting to me for a couple of reasons:

• os-tools aka package management etc written in Rust
• originated in Ireland
• claims atomicity
• /etc handling inspired by Clear Linux
• ok privacy policy
• community chat in Zulip instead of Discord

Still a bit fresh, I haven't dared to try it on my main machine yet.

UPDATE: It's a physical/hardware issue. I did some more plugging and unplugging and tried the live disk. It's my wireless keyboard and mouse. I'm still not sure what the cause is since they were running fine.

At some point in October or early November, my Cinnamon desktop started acting up.

Whenever I press the "Ctrl" key on the laptop keyboard or the Bluetooth one, it starts zooming in, if the program has that capacity. For example, it does it in LibreOffice and Firefox but not Terminal or Nicotine+.

I checked the keyboard shortcuts and bindings but I didn't see any issues there.

At the same time, the mouse/trackpad is misbehaving. This is much more frustrating because it's inconsistent and challenging to recreate.

The easiest example to use is Nicotine+. When I click on a tab, it scrolls through the previous tabs until it gets to the main one.

It won't happen in other programs with tabbed screens, but I'll get a similar behavior in some drop-down boxes or using autofill - the list won't remain open. I'll click to open and it opens for a split second.

I don't have a ton of additional programs and I don't get into the nuts and bolts - I only run the recommended updates. I don't know of anything that changed.

I have a Debian USB ready to go in case I can't get anywhere with this. I'm also posting this in a couple of Mint forums.

Over the weekend I was given a crap 2in1 notebook. It is 10 years old and even by standards back then had low end hardware (MSRP was 300 Euro according to some googling).

The Atom CPU is 64bits, the UEFI 32bits – a combinaon I completely forgot existed and many distributions no longer support.

Not only does postmarketOS support 32bit UEFI, thanks to its smartphone focus it comes with zram preconfigured. Installation was easy using the graphical installer for generic x86-64.

So now I run a fully featured desktop, KDE Plasma, on it. None of that "lightweight" stuff that sacrifices features and usability for a few megabytes of RAM.

I only tweaked it a little bit. Firefox ran like shit. Chromium was better in that regard but for whatver reason YouTube specifically kept logging me out. Also RAM ran out once and Chromium was force closed by the OS.

I ended up installing KDE’s Falkon browser which offers the benefits of Chromium’s rendering speed without the logging out of YouTube part. It's also a bit less resource intensive, yet comes wih an ad blocker and support for user scripts which relieves the lack of proper extensions.

pmOS doesn't come with swap by default. I added a swap file which is quickly done. It's barely used since switching to Falkon, currently only 100MB.

YouTube video playback at 1080p is smooth. Zero problems with suspend so far.

I'm not sure if it's the result of defective hardware or just driver incompatibilities but Bluetooth is not recognized (bummer) and the camera isn't either (don't care for it).

Long story short:

I rescued a crap PC from the scrap pile. It's now genuinely usable, albeit with the aformentioned caveats.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40849372

I'm looking at starting a small local Linux Users Group (LUG).

What are good easy ways to get started?

Seems like meetup.com is kinda anti-foss.

Are there better alternatives?

Hi there, I am looking for a way to limit the time the system allows me to spend in program x.
Basically, I want it to go: Oh, you've been playing that for 2 hours. Now, time to touch some grass.

I couldn't find any existing programs for that, only screen time clients, which is not what I am after. Any ideas?

OS: Linux Mint

Sober is exclusively available on Flathub, whom published these figures in their Year In Review: https://flathub.org/en/year-in-review/2025

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40805695

I have two machines:

• 2014 Mac Mini
• HP Pavilion g7

Mac Mini 2014:

Very slow, probably can no longer be updated, nor can it run worthwhile programs.

HP Pavilion g7

Extremely bulky, chunky, and doesn't even turn on unless it's plugged in. It's basically a desktop since the battery doesn't hold a charge.

I put Linux on it (Mint I think) a few months ago as a weekend experiment.

Question:

What should I do with them? Are they worth salvaging? Should I simply donate or recycle them?

I was thinking I could use at least one of them as a home media server or something so that I can disconnect my Smart TV from the internet, but I'm not sure if they will hold or how I would even control them from my phone (Android) if I'm sitting on the couch.

Open to all ideas. I'm somewhat technical (perhaps far less than the Lemmy community), but I don't know much about Linux or the command line unless I'm given step by step instructions on how to do something.

I've been running gaming benchmarks on Fedora, CachyOS, etc. With an RX 7900 XT at 6016x3384 (Apple Pro Display XDR) for the past few years. Over 700 games tested with MangoHud overlays showing FPS/frametimes and more. As far as I can tell, this is the only dataset of its kind - most benchmarks cap at 4K, and almost none test native Linux (vs Windows or Proton comparisons). I'm trying to figure out how to make this more useful to the community. Currently it's all on YouTube (channel: GreenMinusBlue), but I'm working on extracting the raw data into a searchable format. Questions for the community:

Would a structured dataset (CSV/JSON) be useful to anyone? Any games you'd want to see tested at extreme resolutions? Best way to preserve this kind of data long-term?

First of:

Can I run regular Linux apps? How?

2nd:

Are there any games made for the 603, or ported?

THANKS!!!

Have you ever decided to do something truly devious with your Linux computer? I'm talking the elite hacker shit. I'm talking the stuff they don't dare talk about at Defcon. I'm talking crossing a line you can't uncross, the things that get your civil rights revoked and summon the black helicopters. Things like watching a DVD or inkjet printing a photograph you took with a digital camera.

Normal people can't just do heavy shit like that, man. A lot of them won't even make it through installing VLC, watch them try to grok the difference between Fedora repos, Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub. Then, how many of them do you think will figure out how to go to File > Open Disc. Your uncle that hunts and pecks at 2 words a minute can't fit that idea in his head because "Play DVD" is taking up too much room for "Open Disc" to fit.

Then it bombs out with a cryptic error message that doesn't even display in white text in dark mode, because your Linux computer doesn't have the DRM shit required to play a DVD. That is going to require one of these:

sudo dnf install libvcss libvcss-data libvcss-common libvcss2 ffmpeg ffmpeg-common ffmpeg-dvdcss

and if that was an APT command, that'd be the end of it because it would work. NOT ON FEDORA. I've never seen one of those "install seven packages" commands work on Fedora. Ever. Because DNF is more pedantic, it's libvcss-common4.2.2beta now, stop deadnaming the penguin flavored DLL.

Oh and your inkjet printer? No we don't do that anymore. We do driverless basic bitch document printing now, we removed the drivers from any repos out there and made it so that DNF won't install the ones offered by Epson themselves, because this shall not be done. You want to put a glossy photo of your house cat, in a frame, IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME?! I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional Epson XP-830 is extremely not on it because we saw what you did that one time and we won't forgive you.

Seriously, software management on Fedora is goddamn unlivable.

Since its looking more and more that popularity of linux is going to keep rising, I'm kind of worried about how corporations will respond. Way they do things has always been either just trampling weaker things or corrupting them if they cant. Has this topic been considered before in linux communities?

I really like everything about how linux related things work; how application repositories are full of nice things that fellow users have made because they wanted to and not necessarily to make money out of them. And the general wibe of being made for community by the community. And I want it to stay that way.

I think at some point, big corporations like microsoft or google will try adding their crap to the repositorys and try to make them used by majority. Maybe they will also try worming in into the development projects themselves and keep making things more compatible with their own systems or gain more influence over how things are done. Or maybe they are already doing this, i dont know.

I'm quite certain things will escalate more as linux usage rises, as it will directly mean less profits for the corporations (or less perceived profits, you know how they are). And if these things are not considered beforehand, it means the corporations will be able to do more damage before its reacted on and it might be too late by that point. At least that is how i feel about it.

Just a simple run down of DistroWatch's best distros of the year.

Currently using Linux Mint Mate and I gotta agree with them that it's pretty fucking great. Whats everyone's favorite distro of 2025?

Hello, as an audiophile I'm searching for a player with local statistics, I'd like to maintain my datas (listens, favs, etc) locally in my drive and, if possible, sync these infos thru something like Syncthing to another PC. Would be nicer a player that shows these stats in a cool way, similar to streaming services like Spotify.