Linux

I got this PC from my dad when he upgraded in like December ish. I've been running Kubuntu on it and just using it like a sort of general purpose desktop for me and my wife, but I've got a hankering for some tinkering and feel like it has more potential, so I'd love some project ideas!

Original question by @bpt11@sh.itjust.works

I started with mint more than 10 years ago because a friend of mine told me it was one, if not the best, distro for newbies (that was a fucking lie). Idk how mint is doing today but back then was kind of a mess and dealing with it wasnt easy, so i dont really know how or why i switched to debian for a while. With debian i had a lot of problems with some software, mostly proprietary drivers for esotic hardware i was running back then due to me buying the cheapest laptops available, so i started distro hopping for a while. Every distro but fedora was debian based so it felt a lot like a more of the same experience and I felt stuck in a loop where i was eventually gonna reinstall my whole system after breaking something i didnt even know existed.

Then one day i found arch. Installing it wasnt as easy as clicking install on the live system’s guy, but just by following the wiki general instructions i didnt have any issues the first time. It felt good. Building the system block by block helped me understand how things work, the package manager was the best i had seen and the newbie corner basically had the solutions for all my screw-ups, even more than ask-ubuntu did. Everybody in the community was super helpful (even some of the devs). Then there was the AUR, with almost every piece of esotic or proprietary software i needed, much easier than adding some random guy’s repositories to apt or enabling backports on debian. Also i found out that i prefer having a rolling release. With arch i learned how to use and maintain my system, and i just stuck with it.

That said, just how some use linux just to brag about it with their normie friends, many many people use arch to brag about it with other linux users (like my friend did), mostly beacause arch has the infamous reputation that it is hard to install, hard to maintain, easy to break. Which is actually not that bad considering that all these people are gonna end up posting in the newbie corner lol.

Truth is that arch is not harder than any other distro. It only comes down to your will to learn and RTFM What i think worked for me was the transparency. Nobody said it was as easy to use as windows, but nobody in the wiki said “dont do this unless you are an experienced user”. Arch is not another fork of ubuntu pretending to be “even more user friendly”, it’s just arch.

I think the problem is about distros like antergos (rip), manjaro, garuda, endevour trying to oversimplify something that only needs you to RTFM only ending up breaking something they tried to automate and hide behind a curtain that wasnt meant to be automated and was meant to be learned to manage, by hand

Drag doesn't have an opinion one way or the other about this, as drag hasn't used Arch. But drag liked reading this comment and would enjoy reading a discussion about it.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/31079738

Regression was introduced in 2015. It was patched in Feb 2024.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/26533086

Linux kernel 6.12 is one of the most significant releases of the year, delivering a feature nearly 20 years in the making: true real-time computing.

I have a multiboot system. One of the installed OS's does not use the NVMe SSD installed on the motherboard at all.
At the time of taking the screenshot, all the SSD partitions are unmounted, so apart from detection, the SSD is mostly unused.

• I would like the temps to drop down to SYSTIN (≈35°C) levels.
• I know, it's right next to my GPU, but I am not doing anything GPU intensive, the GPU temps are ~37°C ^[apart from GPU memory, which is 48°C due to the awful AMD 7th gen Zero RPM, which has no workarounds on Linux]

For the unmounted and unused HDDs, I just use hdparm -Y, but there seems to be nothing in terms of that for the SSD. And even though I appreciate the additional heat in winters, this is going to be too expensive for me. I'd rather burn some cheap Nichrome than my data storage device.

I checked out a Debian forum thread and from that, I checked the following:

❯ sudo nvme get-feature /dev/nvme0 -f 2 -H
get-feature:0x02 (Power Management), Current value:0x00000004
        Workload Hint (WH): 0 - No Workload
        Power State   (PS): 4

Showing it is already in the lowest power state.

Update: I probably checked that at the wrong time before. Did so again after Sleep and realised the Power State was 0. So just need to make sure the Power State went back to 4 after wake.

I have no active cooling setup for the SSD from my side. This becomes relevant soon.

• Checking the SSD temps (using the same widget as in the image), the temperature on Sensor 2 starts out at ~40°C (after a normal reboot) and slowly increases to >50°C as shown at the start of the graph. Power State (PS) is still 4.

• Running KDE partitionmanager, which probably does some reading to check the partition information, at 50°C stage, causes a temperature drop, as shown in the image.

• Running KDE partitionmanager right after reboot, when the temperature is increasing very sloowly, seems to do nothing significant.

• Turns out that after a few minutes of System Standby, the SSD doesn't return to PS: 4, so I have the culprit.
• Running partitionmanager after that causes it to go back to PS: 4

So we have a solution! All I need to do is run partitionmanager on wake. nlol jk

Motherboard: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX (MS-7D54)
SSD: Samsung 980 512GB (correct firmware, bought long before the fakes started coming out)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/13942074

After 20 years, Real-Time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) is finally -- finally -- in the mainline kernel. Linus Torvalds blessed the code while he was at Open Source Summit Europe. [...] The real-time Linux code is now baked into all Linux distros as of the forthcoming Linux 6.12 kernel. This means Linux will soon start appearing in more mission-critical devices and industrial hardware. But it took its sweet time getting here. An RTOS is a specialized operating system designed to handle time-critical tasks with precision and reliability. Unlike general-purpose operating systems like Windows or macOS, an RTOS is built to respond to events and process data within strict time constraints, often measured in milliseconds or microseconds. As Steven Rostedt, a prominent real-time Linux developer and Google engineer, put it, "Real-time is the fastest worst-case scenario." He means that the essential characteristic of an RTOS is its deterministic behavior. An RTOS guarantees that critical tasks will be completed within specified deadlines. [...]

So, why is Real-Time Linux only now completely blessed in the kernel? "We actually would not push something up unless we thought it was ready," Rostedt explained. "Almost everything was usually rewritten at least three times before it went into mainline because we had such a high bar for what would go in." In addition, the path to the mainline wasn't just about technical challenges. Politics and perception also played a role. "In the beginning, we couldn't even mention real-time," Rostedt recalled. "Everyone said, 'Oh, we don't care about real-time.'" Another problem was money. For many years funding for real-time Linux was erratic. In 2015, the Linux Foundation established the Real-Time Linux (RTL) collaborative project to coordinate efforts around mainlining PREEMPT_RT.

The final hurdle for full integration was reworking the kernel's print_k function, a critical debugging tool dating back to 1991. Torvalds was particularly protective of print_k --He wrote the original code and still uses it for debugging. However, print_k also puts a hard delay in a Linux program whenever it's called. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable in real-time systems. Rostedt explained: "Print_k has a thousand hacks to handle a thousand different situations. Whenever we modified print_k to do something, it would break one of these cases. The thing about print_k that's great about debugging is you can know exactly where you were when a process crashed. When I would be hammering the system really, really hard, and the latency was mostly around maybe 30 microseconds, and then suddenly it would jump to five milliseconds." That delay was the print_k message. After much work, many heated discussions, and several rejected proposals, a compromise was reached earlier this year. Torvalds is happy, the real-time Linux developers are happy, print_K users are happy, and, at long last, real-time Linux is real.

So, a couple years ago, somebody published the 2017 free desktop client of SketchUp on the chocolatey repos, and I managed to snag it before it got taken down. I use it primarily to make woodworking plans.

I'm wrapping up my transition plan to Linux, but I'm not really up to date on SketchUp alternatives. The only ones I know of are Blender (afaik more for animation and 3D printing) and FreeCAD (CAD seems like overkill, since I'm just doing simple cuts and joinery).

Are there good Linux/FOSS alternatives to SketchUp that have similar features, or is the web client the only reasonable option?

For example, I saw a post the other day detailing how to set up a Brother laser printer on Kinoite. That's not something I would have initially considered a potential problem to be solved. Another I ran into some years ago had to do with an Edimax WiFi dongle that used some weirdly specific Realtek 8812 radio, for which you had to set up the driver via dkms. A little prep and knowledge in advance would have saved days of searching online.

I've started a personal to-do list of things to research and make sure I have all my ducks in a row before I make the full-time switch on my main desktop, so besides the usual "back up your files" advice, I'm hoping y'all can point out some QoL things I and others may often miss!

One big difference that I've noticed between Windows and Linux is that Windows does a much better job ensuring that the system stays responsive even under heavy load.

For instance, I often need to compile Rust code. Anyone who writes Rust knows that the Rust compiler is very good at using all your cores and all the CPU time it can get its hands on (which is good, you want it to compile as fast as possible after all). But that means that for a time while my Rust code is compiling, I will be maxing out all my CPU cores at 100% usage.

When this happens on Windows, I've never really noticed. I can use my web browser or my code editor just fine while the code compiles, so I've never really thought about it.

However, on Linux when all my cores reach 100%, I start to notice it. It seems like every window I have open starts to lag and I get stuttering as the programs struggle to get a little bit of CPU that's left. My web browser starts lagging with whole seconds of no response and my editor behaves the same. Even my KDE Plasma desktop environment starts lagging.

I suppose Windows must be doing something clever to somehow prioritize user-facing GUI applications even in the face of extreme CPU starvation, while Linux doesn't seem to do a similar thing (or doesn't do it as well).

Is this an inherent problem of Linux at the moment or can I do something to improve this? I'm on Kubuntu 24.04 if it matters. Also, I don't believe it is a memory or I/O problem as my memory is sitting at around 60% usage when it happens with 0% swap usage, while my CPU sits at basically 100% on all cores. I've also tried disabling swap and it doesn't seem to make a difference.

EDIT: Tried nice -n +19, still lags my other programs.

EDIT 2: Tried installing the Liquorix kernel, which is supposedly better for this kinda thing. I dunno if it's placebo but stuff feels a bit snappier now? My mouse feels more responsive. Again, dunno if it's placebo. But anyways, I tried compiling again and it still lags my other stuff.

First, let me be clear up front that I'm not promoting the idea that there should be one "universal" Linux distro. With all the various distros out there for consumers, there's lots of discussion about Arch, Debian, and Fedora (and their various descendant projects), but I rarely see much talk about openSUSE.

Why might somebody choose that one over the others? What features or vision distinguishes it from the others?

Edit: I love all the answers! Great stuff. Thanks to everyone!