Linux

Now that windows 10 is end og life soon I want to update my gaming PC to Linux but I am very unsure on how to approach it, even though I'm pretty proficient in Linux. I daily drive Debian 12 on my laptop and have Ubuntu server and truenas on two other devices but those are all for very different use cases than gaming. I'm not afraid of the terminal (I actually often prefer it over GUI) but since this setup is for gaming for both me and my girlfriend I want this experience to be as easy and hands off low maintenance as possible.

My desktop is about 6 years old and consist of an MSI Tomahawk B450 motherboard with an Ryzen 5 2600X and an Asus Nvidia 1660ti and 16GB of RAM. I just recently installed 1TB nvme SSD so I have a decent amount of capacity available, but I'm generally not interested in dual boot since I have bad experience from the past with windows suddenly deciding to take over and ruin it all. For temporary testing it is of course an option but I really don't like it due to the maintenance of it.

Important games for me is Sims 2, 3 and 4 (with almost all expansions packs on Sims 4) and they are currently purchased through the EA game store. I also have a few steam games and Minecraft but I'm fairly sure they all work decently since I've tried on my laptop.

I use steam remote play to stream the desktop to a MacBook on the local network when Sims is played and it works quite well at the moment and it is important that it continues to work or an alternative remote play function to mac is easily available.

Sims is my biggest worry to get working since my girlfriend is playing it a lot and with a lot of custom content (mostly just assets) added along all the expansion packs. Rebying everything through steam is not an option (way too expensive) so I really hope there is a way to get EA GameStore to work without too much effort using wine or some other workaround.

I hope you guys have some ideas on how to approach this and keep the most important functions for me up and running.

Hi everyone, I use Linux on all my machines since a decade. Unfortunately my laptops are getting older and I will probably have to change them soon. Which Laptops would you recommend me to buy in 2025 a part Librem?

I don't have a high budget but I'm still looking for something relatively recent. I looked on H-node but it seems that there are not a lot of recent things.

I use Debian as a distro.

I hear this is a rite of passage. I made it 4 weeks before I rekt all my shit (it was nvidia related). Where do I claim my sticker?

In all seriousness, now that I understand better these commands that I've been haphazardly throwing around, Id like to do a clean install. God knows what else Ive done to it. Can i just reinstall to my root partition and have my home partition work as expected?

TLDR: I want to be able to set specific window sizes and positions of the current window with hotkeys, as well as focus on specific apps with hotkeys, but I'm overwhelmed.

I've been trying to switch to Asahi Linux Fedora, and trying Gnome as my desktop environment since it can be customized with CSS, and with Wayland. I tried looking up how to change window layouts with hotkeys and it's confusing on what solution(s) I would end up wanting to use. Would I want to use a window manager?

Ultimate I want an alternative to Rectangle Pro app on Mac, which let's you set many hotketys for changing the current window's size & position: like use up the left or right halves or thirds of the screen, or corners and taking up a quarter of the screen. You can also make custom window layouts and bind those to keys.

I didn't find many results while looking up how to focus on specifc apps with hotkeys. For instance, I'd want to press CTRL Shift Z to switch specifically to Zen Browser or open it if it isn't opened, and CTRL Shift O to open or switch to Obsidian. I looked this up and didn't find options other than wmctrl or wlrctl. I tried the later: wlrctl window focus firefox, but got the error Foreign Toplevel Management interface not found!. on macOS there are many apps for this like BetterTouchTool & Hammerspoon.

I mean I feel stupid typing it now, but I've been using Windows since I was 5 years old, and Linux for about 30 days. It was not apparent to me that many of my folders were actually shortcuts to stuff in my user directory, and now that I know to look out for them the location of my applications make sooo much more sense.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25857381

Hellwig is the maintainer of the DMA subsystem. Hellwig previously blocked rust bindings for DMA code, which in part resulted in Hector Martin from stepping down as a kernel maintainer and eventually Asahi Linux as a whole.

He mentions it casually on 2:43 (sponsored segment) and show glimpse of it at the end. 2025 Year of Linux Desktop. lol

How does rebasing work? If Universal Blue were to shutdown and Bazzite/Bluefin/Aurora were to suddenly stop development and updates, could I rebase to any other atomic distro without losing my files/apps and continue to get updates there? Using the same DE (since I heard there are some issues, fixable, but annoying)
Or is it just a way to swap to a new distro while still being able to swap back to a backup of your old one if you need to?

(It doesn't matter if them shutting down is illogical, being able to move provides a sense of security.)

But for new code / drivers, writing them in rust where these types of bugs just can't happen (or happen much much less) is a win for all of us, why wouldn't we do this? C++ isn't going to give us any of that any decade soon, and the C++ language committee issues seem to be pointing out that everyone better be abandoning that language as soon as possible if they wish to have any codebase that can be maintained for any length of time.

Rust also gives us the ability to define our in-kernel apis in ways that make them almost impossible to get wrong when using them. We have way too many difficult/tricky apis that require way too much maintainer review just to "ensure that you got this right" that is a combination of both how our apis have evolved over the years (how many different ways can you use a 'struct cdev' in a safe way?) and how C doesn't allow us to express apis in a way that makes them easier/safer to use. Forcing us maintainers of these apis to rethink them is a GOOD thing, as it is causing us to clean them up for EVERYONE, C users included already, making Linux better overall.

And yes, the Rust bindings look like magic to me in places, someone with very little Rust experience, but I'm willing to learn and work with the developers who have stepped up to help out here. To not want to learn and change based on new evidence (see my point about reading every kernel bug we have.)

Rust isn't a "silver bullet" that will solve all of our problems, but it sure will help in a huge number of places, so for new stuff going forward, why wouldn't we want that?

What makes Linux appealing to me is the extent of customizability, but I didn't find many answers when looking up with desktop environment is them most customizable. Some say KDE is most customizable than say, Gnome, but doesn't Gnome support CSS customization while KDE doesn't?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25828530

I mainly use trillium and want to import my notes. Unsure how to do it without windows. Even with windows the instructions seem unclear

Edit: Here’s what I did: I got my partner’s windows computer and put my onenote notebook on it via file transfer. Then I made folders for every notebook and subnotebook. Finally I would through each section and exported it as a docx. Then I found an app on fedora that can convert docx to anything, and I chose markdown. Then imported these into Trilium. I could have exported each note but that would have taken 10x as long and the section export feature makes clear new notes.

Final comment: importing markdown into Trilium took one second. For formatting sake, I tried to import html as well and it crash the app.

Another "Differences in Linux" question :)

I often wonder, what exactly is the difference between this services?

I understand, that:

• github.com is a company, where as gitlab and forgejo are (softwares)?
• They all "manage/wrap/interface with" git?

Questions:

• what software does github.com use?
• whats the difference between them (pros/cons)?
• what about self-hosting? Possibilities/Preferences?

As always, thanks beforehand :)

Over the past few months, and especially since the last holiday season, many exciting things have happened in Mobian: new devices are (about to be) officially supported, many new and improved packages have made their way into both Debian and Mobian, and we’re getting ready for our next stable release!

As an update to everyone following, I had a meeting today with the Flatpak SIG and Fedora Project Leader, which was a very good conversation. We discussed the issues, how we got here, and what next steps are. For anyone not interested in the specific details, the OBS Project is no longer requesting a removal of IP or rebrand of the OBS Studio application provided by Fedora Flatpaks. This issue should be used for tracking of the other specific, technical issues, that the Fedora Flatpak does still have, which I will address below. From our perspective, there were two key points that we feel are the most important to address:

• The issue with the Qt runtime having regression
• The issue of not knowing where to report bugs for what is a downstream package

For the first bullet, this should be resolved with the update to the latest runtime, which includes Qt 6.8.2 that has the fixes for those regressions in it. For the second, this is obviously a much larger issue to tackle, especially for a project as large as Fedora. We had some very good discussion on how this might be accomplished in the medium-long term, but don't consider it a blocker at this point. We plan to stay engaged and offer our perspective as an upstream project. In addition to those two previously blocking issues, we discussed a handful of other problems with the Fedora Flatpak. I'll keep the details high level in the interest of brevity on this update:

• OBS Studio running on Mesa LLLVM pipe instead of with hardware acceleration (i.e. the GPU)
• X11 Fallback leading to OBS crashing
• VLC Plugin not behaving as expected in the sandbox, needs testing
• Shipping of third-party plugins in the Fedora Flatpak

The discussion was positive and they are actively working to resolve those issues as well, which should hopefully only affect a small number of users. I would like to give a final thank you to Yaakov and the FPL for taking the time to talk to us today.

Delve into the wondrous labyrinth of sparkling images that is the Debian build output.

I was wondering about the possibility of using the following setup with write-caching

btrfs
    bcache
        fast
            mdadm (RAID-1)
                ssd_1
                ssd_2
        slow
            mdadm (RAID-5)
                hdd_1
                hdd_2
                hdd_3
                hdd_4

Is this viable / reasonable? The arch wiki mentions the possibility of data loss when using write-caching when the SSD fails, but shouldn't the SSD RAID array prevent that? It also mentions "bcache and BTRFS could leave you with a corrupted file system" is this still true? The wiki page mentions that it's unclear if this is still an issue.

Someone also left the following comment on the discussions page regarding BTRFS in 2023:

The issues with btrfs + bcache were fixed 10 years ago. The btrfs wiki no longer mentions historic gotchas for kernels older than 4.14. I think we should remove this warning. Any objections?

I have 4 old hard drives that I pulled from an old Drobo that needs to be trashed. I bought a Mediasonic 4-bay RAID enclosure that I thought would be a good upgrade, but knew going into that the drives may not work because the manual for the new enclosure specifically says to use new drives to avoid problems. The exact product is this Mediasonic one.

I don't care about the existing data on these drives, and that was originally what I thought was meant by "avoiding problems". So I tried just putting the drives in to no avail. They don't show up as drives in the file explorer. They don't show up in "Disks".

I also have an external hard drive dock - the 15 year old version of this one which does let me mount the drives and see them in Disks.

I have tried running "wipefs -a" and I've tried formatting them in Disks with no filesystem specified. I've also run parted on them, but anything I try in parted gives me the error "unrecognised disk label".

If I can't reuse these old drives then the enclosure is of less use to me than I had hoped as I don't intend to buy new drives any time soon.

Is there anything else I can try to reset these drives to a state where they'll act like new drives that have never been used before?

Update: The "tricks" haven't worked so I'm doing the full disk write using dd. It'll be a while before I have 2 disks prepped to try.

At the risk of jinxing myself I just wanted to share how happy I am with my latest installation.

For over a year my Dell XPS has run Ubuntu. It's been, by far, the worst experience I've ever had with any computer and my very first computer had only 256 MB of RAM! Among the long list of issues I've had we're freezing, unresponsive keyboard and touchpad, glitchy video, multicolor flashing screens, piss poor battery life, piss poor Wi-Fi stability, failure to properly suspend or hibernate, and battery levels suddenly going from 40% to 5%. I figured either Dell put some kind of poison pill into there laptop so you'd spring for one of their Linux preinstalled laptops or I just got a lemon (I did have to get the mobo replaced within a month of buying it).

I've been in the process of getting all of my personal files off of it and getting ready to reinstall Windows and sell it, but I figured it was worth one last shot with a new installation. My desktop has been running Bazzite and I've been really happy with it so I thought I'd try another spin-off (Bluefin, because my laptop isn't well suited for gaming). Installation took a few tries but it's been about 72 hours and I haven't noticed any major issues! Battery life and Wi-Fi still seem a bit sad but I suppose that's the hardware.

So anyway, I just wanted to say that one Linux OS can be wildly different from another in user experience. If you have the patience, go ahead and try out something new if you're just not feeling the OS that you're on. It could make a world of difference!

So I'm working on a server from home.

I do a cat /sys/class/net/eth0/operstate and it says unknown despite the interface being obviously up, since I'm SSH'ing into the box.

I try to explicitely set the interface up to force the status to say up with ip link set eth0 up. No joy, still unknown.

Hmm... maybe I should bring it down and back up.

So I do ip link set eth0 down and... I drive 15 miles to work to do the corresponding ip link set eth0 up

50 years using Unix and I'm still doing this... 😥

After trying out Cosmic, Gnome,KDE Plasma, and Hyprland, I feel like plasma is the most usable for me coming from Windows. It solves the gripes I had about lack of customizability while still starting me off with a familiar homebar. I will be going back and forth with gnome for a while.

I really like gnome and the sliding desktops, and all the extensions seem to make it very customizable as well, but not directly like plasma, instead you mix and match (or make) extensions to get the look you want. (correct me if im wrong, I used it for a day)

Hyprland seems very nice for multitasking but the keyboard focus of the presets ive tried doesn't really appeal to me, I like being able to just use my mouse sometimes.

Cosmic, is definitely an alpha and im interested to see what it becomes, wont be using it now.