I’ve some weeks ago moved my main computer from Windows 10 to Linux, specifically OpenSUSE Leap with the Plasma user environment, mainly because it doesn’t have the magic Windows 11 chip. I had never used Linux and have been a Windows user since I was six years old or somewhere around then (I’m in my late twenties now). I’d just like to share my likes and dislikes.

Things I like about Linux (my specific install, anyway):

• Not being a corporate environment. There aren’t any cheeky attempts at making money or advertisement anywhere, like the annoying fake widgets in Windows 11 and the half-filled start menu. I’ve gotten used to that on my laptop (which is running 11), but you do always have the feeling of ‘what are they trying now?’ That not being a thing is quite refreshing.
• In that veign, having actual widgets. I loved them in Windows 7; I’ve got a webpage widget on my second screen showing a Zoho sheet I made with an RSS feed. Just being able to be a bit creative like that is cool.
• The system seems quite a bit quicker than it was in Windows - though in all honesty this will also be because I’m still on a fairly fresh install.
• I’m positively surprised by how little I miss from Windows when it comes to programs. Steam having compatibility tools is great, for example. Otherwise there are often replacements for what I’m missing (eg. I’ve found one to allow general settings for my Logitech mouse).
• The general ability to change the way everything looks and feels. I feel technical people sometimes look down a bit on aesthetics, but I really care about the user interface I use day in day out looking and feeling nice. While I’m a fan of the Windows 11 look myself, I really like how much I’ve been able to get my UI to look how I want it to in Plasma. Though I’m a bit surprised that it’s so hard to change the appearance of the start menu and bottom panel. I’ve had to install a specific program to change their colouring.
• The little icon jumping next to your cursor when opening a program (I know, I’m easily amused).

Things I’ve found annoying:

• Not knowing where to find anything. Of course, coming from Windows I’m used to there being a program files folder with my programs’ folders, and a documents folder with (often) user settings for those programs. In Linux, everything just seems to be everywhere. What seems to be the ‘documents’ equivalent for the game Factorio is in my user folder in a hidden .factorio, but I’ve to no avail been trying to find out where my ‘documents’ for Workers and Resources are. I’ll find them eventually, I’m sure. In general, I’m looking around a lot, though.
• The lingering feeling of instability. This is my second install of OpenSUSE, after I messed up something leading to my computer having some files which it wanted to update, but using urls which didn’t exist. After this, I’ve been feeling a bit insecure and afraid of doing something that ruins my installation. I know there’s the saying that Linux ‘just works’, but I’ve never messed up a Windows installation...
• The capslock works differently, apparently. I’m used to writing every capital letter using the capslock key, meaning if I write a capital at the beginning of a word, I press capslock, then type the first letter, then quickly press capslock again and type the rest. In Linux, this often doesn’t work as it somehow takes a while for the capslock press to go into effect, so you often end up with ‘LInux’, for example. After lots of looking around, I have found some script that seems to fix this (‘Linux CapsLock Delay Fixer Master’), but it also randomly stops working and there are other ‘oddities’ I can’t really explain.
• Every once in a while, my desktop icons get rearranged. This seems to be a known issue, but it’s really annoying.
• It seems impossible to get Firefox to not restore sessions after shutting down the computer with it still open. I’ve tried several things, but I can’t get Firefox to just give me a fresh session on startup.
• The above all add to a bit of a general ‘stuck together with adhesive tape and love’ feeling.
• Not knowing how to install programs. This is more of a learning-curve thing, obviously. The software centre didn’t contain everything I could find online - for some programs, you could use ‘one click’ in OpenSUSE, but that seems to work more like a self-destruct button: I’ve tried those several times and have always had bad results >.>. I’ve found it’s easiest to install programs just using flatpaks.

All in all, I am quite happy. Though I am still afraid I’ll mess up my installation, and I’m now at a point where that’d hurt. I have installed Timeshift, but also with mixed results...

I have an older desktop (circa 2010) that I'm trying to repurpose into a small game server and NAS. It doesn't have UEFI. I've tried booting from USB and from DVD. I can get into the BIOS boot menu and select the device to boot from, but after I select it just goes to a blank screen.

I'm using the onboard AMD GPU. This is a fresh hard drive. I've tried the boot media on my laptop and it boots fine. I've put the old Windows 7 SSD back into the desktop and it boots fine. I've tried different images: Fedora Silverblue, Antix x64, Antix 386. Everything is giving the same results.

Can you recommend any other troubleshooting tips?

So I got this weird bug – I updated my Pop_OS install and now Linux doesn't boot anymore. I should probably boot from USB and fix this. I could figure it out on my own, but maybe it will be good knowledge for people searching on engines so any advice is welcome. Windows still boots properly. Let's give people some alternatives to reddit :)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/26434564

Lots of feedback to respond to in regards to self-hosting, a good amount sent by Lemmy users and fediverse types. Hope you all enjoy!

(00:40) Linuxfest Northwest 4/25 - 4/27

(01:30) Forum now available for full show notes and project discussion. Also accessible from Matrix.

• https://flarum.org/

(02:39) Simple feedback form now available for sending your feedback and suggestions. Or, you can always email podcast@james.network

(03:45) ameriDroid now sponsors the podcast.

• use LINUXPREPPER coupon code to support the show.

(04:50) If you like the show please do share it! Spread the word. This is a small show, which most people don't know about. Thank you so much.

• You can also donate to me on paypal.
  • Allowing recurring donations with a fancier system is in-the-works.

(05:50) Librewolf browser, community fork of Firefox.

(06:35) Works on My Machine badge by CodingHorror of Discourse

(07:30) Kickstarter for PixelFed and Loops by dansup

• PixelFed is a federated, FOSS alternative to Instagram
• Loops is a federated, FOSS alternative to TikTok
• Dansup website

(08:45) @linuxprepper@podcast.james.network

• This podcast is also available on the fediverse at the above address. Use Mastodon of whatever client you prefer.

Audience Feedback with HB

(10:00)

• HB is on github

Hungry Bogart interview on Linux Prepper origins and background on Medium.

Full show notes within the podcast or at https://discuss.james.network/public/d/25-shownotes-for-episode-4-audience-feedback-on-selfhosting

Hi,

I've installed xrdp on Devuan(debian with sysvinit)

when I connect from other machine (linux, windows) with rdp, I get a fresh new desktop (even the wallpaper is the default one) and none of the opened windows on the server (same account) is displayed on the remote client.

Is it the nature of the rdp protocol or is it possible to reconnect to the same xfce session ?

Thanks.

hi guys soo i want to either make manually block sleep and screen locking default to on or change the time until it automatically sleeps or the screen locks, the only thing i found is this command: systemd-inhibit --what=idle:sleep sleep 300 but its not what i want because it only works when the terminal with the command running is open SOMEONE PLEASE HELP

my distro is steam os (yes im on a steam deck) with sometimes a keyboard + mouse + monitor, if you need to know

And that's all, I'm happy since I was out of space.

Hi all,

I've been running a bunch of services in docker containers using Docker Compose for a while now, with data storage on ZRAID mirrored NVME and/or ZRAID2 HDDs.

I've been thinking about moving from my single server setup to three micro-servers (Intel N150s), both for redundancy, learning, and fun.

Choosing Kubernetes was easy, but I'd like to get some outside opinions on storage. Some examples of how I'm using storage:

1. Media and large data storage: Currently on the ZRAID2 HDDs, will stay here but be migrated to a dedicated NAS
2. High IO workloads like Postgresql and email: Currently running on the NVMEs
3. General low-volume storage: Also currently on NVMEs, but different use case. These are lower IO, like data storage for Nextcloud, Immich, etc

I'm a huge fan of being able to snapshot with ZFS, as I mirror all my data off-site with hourly pushes for some container data, and daily for the rest. I'd like to be able to continue this kind of block-level backups if possible.

Assume I'm a noob at Kubernetes storage (have been reading, but still fresh to me). I'd love to know how others would set up their storage interfaces for this.

I'm trying to understand if there's a way to have the storage "RAIDed" across the drives in the three micro-servers, or if things work differently than I expect. Thanks!

"some workloads saw improvements, overall system performance slightly declined, and binary sizes increased." So -O3 isn't paying off in the Ubuntu packaging world for now and will be reverted soon.

I tried out most (if not all) of the music players on flathub, but I always end up going back to Rhythmbox. It's so simple, lightweight, got just enough features (for my use case) and blends well with GTK Desktops (I mostly use Gnome and Cinnamon) and it looks so clean in my Nord theme 😆

How has your experience with Rhythmbox? do y'all got any alternative you think everybody should give a try? I personally think Elisa is a close second!

Ok, this requires some explanation:

I was at a party quite recently, and there was a girl reading the "demonic" tarot to the people there. Now, I don't believe in any of that, but just for laughs, I asked which linux distro I'd be installing this year, to which she pulled the "Lucifer" card. This should be "Death" in the traditional version. She told me it's related to new beginnings or something like that.

So, I've got time to kill, I'm willing to try something new and I'd like to turn this into a self fullfilling prophecy.

Now, I'd like your interpretation. What would this distro be? Because this is a Linux sub-lemmy I'd give preference to linux distros; however I'm also open to any other UNIX-based operating systems if you insist.

It also has to be something new to me. So, no Artix, Debian, Fedora, Mint or Arch btw.

Ubuntu's current LTS version (24.04) contains ffmpeg version 7:6.1.1-3ubuntu5 which has this buffer overflow vulnerability:

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/ticket/10952

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2024-32230

On my only Ubuntu computer, my update widget says that I need to upgrade to ffmpeg version 7:6.1.1-3ubuntu5+esm2 but can only only do so with Ubuntu Pro. I'm not eligible for Ubuntu Pro.

Ubuntu claims that 24.04 is currently fully supported, and should have complete security updates. However, they seem to have paywalled this security update.

What should I do?

It doesn't matter if I make the client purge and re-scan all the folders. It still doesn't fetch all songs.

I can however open up the missing songs by manually clicking them to play through Lollypop. But this way sucks, it's not the intended nor user friendly way.

Any ideas on how to fix it?

I have a router I'm running nord vpn but I use bitTorrent on windows and I'm looking to switch. Does anyone have a flavor of Linux and program they use?

Any advice would be helpful I'm getting nowhere on forums.

Both don't ship with their own Wayland compositor, but there are enough to choose from.

Xfce comes with a wayland session using labwc out of the box, but was also tested with Wayfire. The devs state you shouldn't hold your breath waiting for the native window manager xfwm to be ported into a Wayland compositor, since they don't know if/when it will be done. Almost all other Xfce components support Wayland now, while retaining X11 compatibility.

LXQt's newest stable release has full Wayland support, with 7 different Wayland compositors to choose from within a GUI settings menu: Labwc, KWin, Wayfire, Hyprland, Sway, River and Niri

https://xfce.org/about/news/?post=1734220800
https://lxqt-project.org/release/2024/11/05/release-lxqt-2-1-0/

PipeWire 1.4.0 (2025-03-06)

This is the 1.4 release that is API and ABI compatible with previous 1.2.x and 1.0.x releases.

This release contains some of the bigger changes that happened since the 1.2 release last year, including:

• client-rt.conf was removed, all clients now use client.conf and are given RT priority in the data threads.
• UMP (aka MIDI2) support was added and is now the default format to carry MIDI1 and MIDI2 around in PipeWire. There are helper functions to convert between legacy MIDI and UMP.
• The resampler can now precompute (at compile time) some common conversion filters. Delay reporting in the resampler was fixed and improved.
• Bluetooth support for BAP broadcast links and support for hearing aids using ASHA was added. A new G722 codec was also added. Delay reporting and configuration in Bluetooth was improved.
• The ALSA plugin now supports DSD playback when explicitly allowed with the alsa.formats property.
• A PipeWire JACK control API was added.
• A system service was added for pipewire-pulse.
• Many documentation and translation updates.
• Many of the SPA macros are converted to inline functions. All SPA inline functions are now also compiled into a libspa.so library to make it easier to access them from bindings.
• The module-filter-chain graph code was moved to a separate filter-graph SPA plugin so that it becomes usable in more places. EBUR128, param_eq and dcblock plugins were added to filter-graph. The filter graph can now also use fftw for doing convolutions. The audioconvert plugin was optimized and support was added to audioconvert to insert extra filter-graphs in the processing pipeline.
• New helper functions were added to parse JSON format descriptions.
• The profiler now also includes the clock of the followers.
• RISCV CPU support and assembler optimisations were added.
• The clock used for logging timestamps can be configured now.
• The JSON parser was split into core functions and helper.
• Support for UCM split PCMs was added. Instead of alsa-lib splitting up PCMs, PipeWire can mark the PCMs with the correct metadata so that the session manager can use native PipeWire features to do this.
• Support for webrtc2 was added to echo-cancel.
• IEC958 codecs are now detected from the HDMI ELD data.
• Conversion between floating point and 32 bits now preserve 25 bits of precision instead of 24 bits.
• A new Telephony D-BUS API compatible with ofono was added.
• The invoke queues are now more efficient and can be called from multiple threads concurrently.
• Clock information in v4l2 was improved.
• An ffmpeg based videoconvert plugin was added that can be used with the videoadapter.
• The GStreamer elements have improved buffer pool handling and rate matching.
• The combine-stream module can now also mix streams.
• link-factory now checks that the port and node belong together.
• The netjack-manager module has support for autoconnecting streams.
• The native-protocol has support for abstract sockets.
• The pulse server has support for blocking playback and capture in pulse.rules.
• The corked state of stream is now reported correctly in pulse-server.
• Fix backwards jumps in pulse-server.
• Latency configuration support was added in loopback and raop-sink.
• The ROC module has more configuration options.
• The SAP module now only send updated SDP when something changed.
• RTP source now has a standby mode where it idles when there is no data received.
• Support for PTP clocking was added the RTP streams.
• The VBAN receiver can now dynamically create streams when they are detected.
• Error reporting when making links was improved.
• Support for returning (canceling) a dequeued buffer in pw-stream.
• Support for emiting events in pw-stream was added.
• pw-cat now support stdin and stdout.

Highlights (since the previous 1.3.83 release)

• Small fixes and improvements.

PipeWire

• Fix some missing includes in metadata.h
• Pass the current error in errno when a stream is in error (#4574)

modules

• Evaluate node rules before loading adapter follower to ensure properties are set correctly. (#4562)

SPA

• Avoid a use after free when building PODs. (#4445)
• Take headroom into account when calculating resync.

Bluetooth

• Fix +CLCC parsing.

GStreamer

• Notify about default device changes in deviceprovider.
• Copy frames between pools and avoid splitting video buffers.

JACK

• Add an option to disable the MIDI2 port flags. (#4584)

As my time with linux, I created a lot of scripts. Some of them have input parameters and sometimes I just forget this parameters.

So I wonder if there is some way to create autocomplete parameters, like i autocomplete a path by pressing the tab key?

For example a script. ./test.sh can be completed with parameter-one, eg. ./test.sh parameter-one or ./test.sh parameter-two. If i type now ./test.sh followed by tab it should add parameter-one if i press tab again it should change to parameter-two.

How can I do that? I'm on bash…