Linux Questions

Hello and happy holidays!

I've recently made the switch to Linux and I'm looking for a headset with 7.1 surround sound that'll also work with my PS5. I'm ok to switch to any distro as some won't work as well as others with the sound drivers. I'm currently using PopOS.

I did some research and even asked at a computer store but I found it difficult to get a reliable answer on a good set. I'd also like wireless and I'm ok with a usb over Bluetooth connection.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a great headset that'll work with what I'm looking for? Hunting for Linux things is certainly harder than that crappy os I switched from, but I know it's worth it.

Thank you!

I noticed that on some upper case letters the top part is cut off. It only happens for some letters, like E, B and P, and it does not happen in every application. As an example I added a screenshot when using "Easy Effects"

For posterity, here are my font settings and my system specs:

Hey there, I'm setting up my first custom arch install, having used Opensuse/Fedora/Tuxedo in the past with grub.

For now the arch install lives in a QEMU playground, but should eventually share an esp with Windows and Tuxedo. (I plan to shift Tuxedo from Grub to systemd-boot beforehand though)

For a this new setup, I've chosen systemd-boot and mkinitcpio with linux-lts. I've got the loader configs for sd-boot working with some trial&error. The default preset in mkinitcpio is still not doing what I want though.

Part of this is just me not understanding mountpoints in Arch. I'm used to the esp being mounted to "/boot/efi" with kernels and ramdisks living in something like "boot/efi/arch/{kernelver}-{kernelname}/kernel.img" and executables/UKIs living in "/boot/efi/EFI/Linux/arch/uki.efi". It seems that packages for kernels and ucode are hardcoded to the esp being at "/boot". Which does mess with me, but so be it. Mkinitcpio also has a disabled preset to put UKIs in "/efi", a mountpoint I have never seen used. Given that it references an "EFI"-folder in there, this seems to also want to be the esp-root.

Could someone explain the mountpoint setup in arch to me? And also, is there a point/way to bend the paths to use /boot/efi, or am I better served to just mount the esp at /boot and accept the difference?

Thanks in advance.

I am not sure how many files that this happens to, but it has happened to two that I have tried in the last few days, one .sh file and another program/executable. I am logged in as root - Linux Mint 21.2 When I try to allow executing as a program it unticks itself (as in this video) I also get 'permission denied' in terminal, as root and i have tried

chmod +x filename

and

sudo chmod -v +x filename.sh

sudo chown --verbose 1000 filename.sh

But still get denied.. What am I doing wrong here or how can I fix this?

I've spent considerable time configuring my Linux system (1) and I would like to have the exact same system on another PC (2).
What would be the best way to do that?
Hardware on (2) is different, but tested compatible with the kernel.
(2) has a smaller drive size, so simply dd'ing the entire drive from a live USB won't work.

Here's what I'm planning:

• install same distro on (2), using the same username as on (1)
• create a list of installed packages on (1)
• install same packages on (2) using the package manager
• copy /home and /etc from (1) to an external EXT4 drive
• boot (2) from a live USB and mount the external drive
• delete /home and /etc on (2), then copy them over from (1)

Will this cause permission issues? Is there a quicker way?

I have a couple of Brother MFCs around the shop and farm, and while they do work with Linux, I'm constantly fighting with them for scaling, orientation and printing really light half the time. Maybe I'm not using the right drivers, but I've tried several as recommended on the Archwiki (even though I'm on Fedora, mostly) and can't seem to get any joy out of them.

I just want a basic MFC BW laser that will scan, copy and print spreadsheets reliably. I have a LJ4000 at home that works great but of course that's not exactly something you go out and buy anymore.

Anyone have a known good current MFC they can recommend, and the driver package it uses to match? Goddam, I hate printers.

Context: Windows on Niri doesn't span across monitors, and the dev doesn't seem very interested in adding this feature (https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri/issues/2309)

I am trying to setup Flameshot on Niri. While Flameshot's window spawns with the full 2-monitor dimensions, it can only appear on one screen due to the limitation of Niri. I currently have a temporary-solution script where I position the window differently based on which monitor my cursor is on.

Is there a way I can split the Flameshot window in 2 so it can appear on both screens? I don't know if there exists some kiosk compositors like cage that does this.

Hi again

I'm struggling with setting up mangohud now (or really any FPS limiter and performance overlay). Specifically, I can't limit my FPS or display my FPS (and other metrics) to even know what it is.

Any pointers? I've tried:

• Followed the mangohud install steps on github. I didn't install one of those demos because I needed to compile from source but I couldn't find any explicit tutorial or makefile..
• Tried switching between several Proton versions (GE just doesn't work for me I found)
• Tried a billion different ways to run it like with "mangohud" prefix and with variables. Nothing. I think gamescope also doesn't work, I'm not sure.
• Watched several Youtube videos about Mangohud and Goverlay, they weren't really useful.
• Tried Medal Of Honor Airborne on Lutris (local install)
• Tried Webbed on Steam (via steam install)
• Tried heaven benchmark (installed via their .run file)
• The FPS limit switch hotkey (shift F1) works on the goverlay demo cube thing
• The HUD toggle hotkey (shift F12) works on the goverlay demo

More screenshots with various things I tried:

I've been trying this for probably close to 12 hours...Idk what to try anymore :-/

I'm on Linux Mint 22.2, Cinnamon 6.4.8. The laptop is a Thinkpad T470p.

Not sure if this is the right community for this, lmk.

Hi again

I'm struggling with setting up mangohud now (or really any FPS limiter and performance overlay). Specifically, I can't limit my FPS or display my FPS (and other metrics) to even know what it is.

Any pointers? I've tried:

• Followed the mangohud install steps on github. I didn't install one of those demos because I needed to compile from source but I couldn't find any explicit tutorial or makefile..
• Tried switching between several Proton versions (GE just doesn't work for me I found)
• Tried a billion different ways to run it like with "mangohud" prefix and with variables. Nothing. I think gamescope also doesn't work, I'm not sure.
• Watched several Youtube videos about Mangohud and Goverlay, they weren't really useful.
• Tried Medal Of Honor Airborne on Lutris (local install)
• Tried Webbed on Steam (via steam install)
• Tried heaven benchmark (installed via their .run file)
• The FPS limit switch hotkey (shift F1) works on the goverlay demo cube thing
• The HUD toggle hotkey (shift F12) works on the goverlay demo

More screenshots with various things I tried:

I've been trying this for probably close to 12 hours...Idk what to try anymore :-/

I'm on Linux Mint 22.2, Cinnamon 6.4.8. The laptop is a Thinkpad T470p.

Not sure if this is the right community for this, lmk.

Hi all

EDIT / TL;DR / Solution: I think the calibration is working. I checked my measurement adaptation using the Power Statistics in Linux Mint and this is the new one now:

Seems like it's adapting, it's just slow. If this doesn't work, I'll update again. Cheers!

I just changed the external battery of this T470p I bought. The old one was at about 70% battery life and was smaller at 4.4Ah. New one is around 6.34Ah.

The battery lasts almost double the time now so it's great, but, the % reading in Gnome Power Manager (bottom right tray) is way off. The laptop dies at around 40%. Ofc the estimated time left is also way off.

I did buy the battery for around 30% cheaper than I find it here from Aliexpress: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32637096491.html (perhaps it's just weird, but it does last longer)

I tried

• Drained the battery by playing youtube then recharged over night.
• Installed and recalibrared with TLP (let it discharge with TLP running, plug in while off, leave it plugged over night) (this uninstalled power-profiles-daemon - I later uninstalled TLP and reinstalled that package).
• Checked BIOS for a battery recalibration utility. I found none unfortunately. I looked everywhere including Config (there was no Power menu there). I also looked in the hardware diagnostic software that I can access instead of booting into BIOS. I believe the key was F10.
• Checked the settings app, nothing.
• Checked online, everyone says use TLP or discharge manually repeatedly without charging partially in between.

This is what my discharge profile looks like

Laptop with old battery next to it:

These are my battery readings

marin@ThinkpadT470P:~$ acpi -i
Battery 0: Discharging, 84%, 04:45:31 remaining
Battery 0: design capacity 6282 mAh, last full capacity 6282 mAh = 100%

marin@ThinkpadT470P:~$ sudo tlp-stat -b
***
TLP 1.6.1 --------------------------------------------

+++ Battery Care
Plugin: thinkpad
Supported features: charge thresholds, recalibration
Driver usage:
* natacpi (thinkpad_acpi) = active (charge thresholds, recalibration)
Parameter value ranges:
* START_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0/1:  0(off)..96(default)..99
* STOP_CHARGE_THRESH_BAT0/1:   1..100(default)

+++ ThinkPad Battery Status: BAT0 (Main / Internal)
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/manufacturer                   = LGC
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/model_name                     = 45N1738
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/cycle_count                    =      3
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full_design             =  74050 [mWh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full                    =  74050 [mWh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now                     =  59250 [mWh]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/power_now                      =  13722 [mW]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/status                         = Discharging

/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_start_threshold =      0 [%]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_control_end_threshold   =    100 [%]
/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/charge_behaviour               = [auto] inhibit-charge force-discharge

Charge                                                      =   80.0 [%]
Capacity                                                    =  100.0 [%

I checked, I do not have an internal battery installed.

I also repasted the CPU and GPU when I opened it.

Thanks again for helping me pick a distro in my other post! Everything is up and running nicely with Linux mint. I even set up Lutris, Steam, and a bunch of utility apps. I still need to set an FPS limit somehow because this thing PULLS in old games.

PS I promise that trackpad is clean lol, looks so dirty in the piciture.

I tried downloading a video using yt-dlp but got the following errors :
ERROR: [requests] Unexpected error: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~/.ssl-log.key'; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U

ERROR: [urllib] Unexpected error: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~/.ssl-log.key'; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U

ERROR: Unable to handle request: Unsupported url scheme: "https" (websockets) + 2 unexpected error(s)

After some troubleshooting, I found that I get a similar error when trying to download a package via pip FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '~/.ssl-log.key'

I tried searching to see if I could regenerate ~/.ssl-log.key but couldn't find anything. Does someone know what caused this issue and how to fix it?

Solved: for some reason SSLKEYLOGFILE was being set in my shell config, deleting and unsetting it fixed it

I'm betting the root of this problem is on how I originally installed the system but I would like another opinion. Or several.

Running Mint.

After analyzing the disk usage, the folder where Thunderbird is installed is completely full. I have four separate accounts in it but a single one is responsible for taking all the space available, through the imap/sent folder, which makes no sense for me, as I send relatively few messages compared with all the messages I receive.

I already considered just purging the program from my system and completely reinstall it but if I'm going to do that I'm better off doing a fresh system installation.

The system has two disks: a SSD running the system core and a HDD for the home partition. I opted to keep the system core on the SSD to speed up booting (and it worked) and used the HDD for storage because. I prefer HDDs for user files, for longevity reasons. The biggest mistake I made here was not using LVM on the disks.

Any thoughts and criticism on this is welcome.

Thank you in advance.

I have at least two devices I can’t use/update since ditching Windows and moving to Linux and macOS.

I have a water cooler on my Bazzite gaming PC that has an LCD. It was pretty cool because it displayed content on this screen like temps and cool graphics. I got the program running just fine using Proton and Wine, but it won’t properly discover the device in their proprietary software. The LCD screen is connected to one of my motherboard’s USB ports (not an actual USB port, but the one you plug front IOs into).

Same is true for a keyboard I have. It has a cool LCD for displaying gifs and this comes by software the keyboard uses. It can also update the firmware of the keyboard, when updates are available. I got the software running just fine on both Linux and macOS using Proton and Wine, but, same issue as before, the software once installed doesn’t find the USB keyboard.

Neither of these have software/drivers made or available for Linux or macOS.

I’ve played around with winecfg and device configurations in here and not found a way to get the devices to show up there.

Is there any way to get USB devices to work with software like this?

Hi all,

I'm doing my first round of distro hopping, looking for something stable and falls into the "just works" category. I'm not looking to tinker. Trying to see if something will tempt me away from Mint, and would like the added security of a rolling release.

I'm testing out OpenSuse TW in VirtualBox and the second thing I tried to install was Google Earth Pro, which I do use regularly enough that it's maybe not a dealbreaker, but it's a check point for testing out a distro.

Short version is that it's a mismatch of repos and libraries and the flatback says no-go because of a bad executable stack. I've spent days off and on trying to reinstall and fix in a way that works based on rare and meager instances years ago of people running into the same problem. Nothing works and I'm apparently not advanced enough of a Linux user to wrap my head around how to approach this other than stumbling down a few paths that don't work.

Is this something to be expected with TW? Or is this somehow unique to Google Earth Pro? Or is this a VirtualBox issue? (it shouldn't be).

Any help is appreciated.

A .tar archive is basically only the files cat'ed together, with a header and index added, right?

And a .tar.gz takes forever to modify, because it needs to first extract the .tar.

So why is there no archive format that just cat'es the compressed files together?

I have been using KDE, but since i installed ulauncher i have been relying on the menu and icon panel less and less. I thought i would try a tiling window manager, and installed Sway. Since then however i have been getting this popup in t he top right corner.

Can anyone help me identify it or figure out how to?

Can someone please explain to me what this is ?

I've acquired a second hand Thinkpad T14 recently (gen 1, Intel version). Running Fedora Gnome.

The SSD seems fine.
I tested it with Gnome Disks; I filled the drive with files and checked their integrity; also copied files around, on drive and from USB. No issues.

But many downloaded files become corrupted. The download finishes normally, but if If I try to open said files they fail (in the middle of a video for example) and if I copy them I get an "input/output" error.
LAN or WAN, over ethernet or Wifi, it doesn't matter.

Could it still be the SSD? Or maybe a driver issue?

Thank you for reading!

Hello, I'm relatively new to linux and was wondering what steps I need to take to troubleshoot an issue I started having with one of my games? This is in part asking for help but also a general 'how do I approach things like this in the future so I don't waste people's time'

I don't know what all information I need to include about my system. To start I'm using Arch btw, KDE Plasma, Wayland, on a Framework 16 with the AMD Radeon 780M built in gpu.

My problem is at some point between when I last played the remastered Life is Strange about a month ago and now the fullscreen option broke. As far as I can tell the game appears to be running but when I'm in game it visually looks frozen. I can still do things like move my cursor around, navigate menus, etc. I get sound fine and if I alt-tab out then in the screen will be updated to the new menu but frozen from there. Windowed and borderless windowed work as expected.

I noticed a general vibe of 'try switching to X11' when it comes to things like this so I've done that and it does appear to work here. So while it is a good workaround I would still prefer to know how to either fix the issue when using Wayland or where I need to go and what info I need to provide to make a bug report.

Thank you for any help!

So I've dabbled with trying out Linux over the past 10ish years, but this past year I've been trying to commit to the transition away from Windows entirely due to the sunsetting of Win10. The computers I own are fairly old (newest one being a laptop from 2018), since money has been very tight for a while, so I figured they would get some revitalization from using an OS that wasn't so bloated. However, the 2 old PCs and 1 Chromebook I installed Linux Mint onto all had their PSUs fail within the span of a month, which is making me paranoid.

Both PCs were really old (2013) and were what I had for basic steam gaming until I got a Steam Deck last year, but I put Mint v21 Xfce on them for basic web browsing and programming (v22 had too many issues with the old Nvidia graphics card). The Chromebook was from around 2015 and I gave it to my parents to use since all they needed was something to browse the web and check their finances. I put Mint Cinnamon v22.1 on it just a couple months back. Mint seemed to run really well on all 3 computers for several months, they weren't overused/overclocked, and weren't kept on or in hibernation for more than a day. Then without warning, one by one they all just refused to boot up entirely. Pressing the power buttons does nothing, not even a brief flicker of life.

Does anyone else have experience with this kind of thing happening to them? I'm not looking for a fix to these computers since I'm pretty sure they're all completely dead, but all of this happening in such a short timeframe feels like it's not just a coincidence. Is this a common problem with Mint that I just didn't see when looking for a distro to use on old hardware? Honestly just baffled.

I still have one laptop left that's running win10 that I'd like to get transferred over to some version of Linux soon, but this experience has made me very hesitant. I really need this laptop readily available for studying and job hunting, but I'm quite aware of the security risks the longer I use win10.

How is a terminal browser fundamentally different from a headless browser ??

Is there any tutorial video showing how to set evilwm as a proper desktop environment ??

I just recently discovered that VMWare got purchased by Broadcom, and that performance took a hit for quite a while before the latest version (sorry for the Reddit link: https://old.reddit.com/r/vmware/comments/1m1u2kj/vmware_workstation_1764_finally_a_ray_of_hope/)

I also learned that Hyper-V is actually quite good nowadays, and just switched to it recently for when I have to use Windows as the main OS. It runs quite well.