Rolling release: openSUSE Tumbleweed Semi-annual release: Fedora KDE Spin LTS: Kubuntu (3 years), Debian (5 years), AlmaLinux (10 years)
I personally think semi-annual is where it’s at. You get packages that are mostly up-to-date (and with Flatpak user-facing software is up-to-date anyway), and you don’t have to fear that something will break/be incompatible with every small update.
I use uBlue and update manually (using a custom alias/script) whenever I get the time, like say during my lunch break or something. Reason being, I actually like watching the update process and seeing what gets updated, watching out for major version number changes or major package upgrades, and if I’m interested I may look up some of their changelogs to find out about their new features etc.
and being forced to reboot
You should be forced to reboot though? And if you don’t want to reboot, can’t you just do an –apply-live? I mean you’d still need to reboot for a kernel update but for the most part, you should be able to use most of your new packages without a reboot. And this holds true even more so if you’re updating Flatpak/container/Nix/pip/cargo/brew packages. And I hope you’re not doing the rookie mistake of actually installing stuff at the ostree layer instead of using Flatpaks/containers/Nix etc.
I too like to review changes between images, but I’m just as content to run rpm-ostree status and/or rpm-ostree db diff to see what exactly has changed.
You should be forced to reboot though? And if you don’t want to reboot, can’t you just do an --apply-live?
I’m hoping to eliminate the extra reboot each day that is usually necessary to activate the latest image. I know that a lot of this will depend on exactly when the image drops from the repos (versus when I shutdown a host), which is why I was looking for some general feedback from others who might have done the same thing…I didn’t know if it’d be worthwhile in the long run, but I guess there’s only one way to find out. As for the –apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).
As for the –apply-live, I use it on occasion but I don’t want to rely on it for system updates (if that’s even possible).
As I said before, it does work for system updates, the only exception being the kernel. The –apply-live flag was added for that exact reason, to avoid the need for an unnecessary reboot.
I use the broadcast, zoom, grouping, and the guake/yakuake style dropdown. Also it has layout switching like xmonad, ie you can ctrl + space to cycle pane layouts.
Thanks, yeah I’ve found a few articles already on running scripts at shutdown…something like this should do it (using Tony Walker’s update script), though I’ve not tested it yet:
I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference, but according to the git repo, you should be using wine-ge instead. Also Lutris is another option that does the same thing, but has easy install scripts for GOG, Epic Games, Ubisoft Connect, and EA App.
Drivers is a vocabulary you should almost forgot in Linux ;) Contrary to other OS, Linux will rarely require you to install a driver.
To answer your question, doing a simple online “mint wireless 8275” returned a forum with your exact issue. The reported solution is to “try powering it off, remove the power cord and hold the power button for 30 seconds. Reconnect cord and power up”. As weird as it sounds this may work. It worked for me 10 years ago with a keyboard. It’s easy and quick to try it. Let us know if that helps or not. Too bad you didn’t like Arch because your laptop was fully supported.
Unless you are suggesting they find a way to remove the battery, “removing the power cord and turning it on without actually turning it on” isn’t something they can try.
And the fact that WiFi works on another distro suggests this isn’t a weird bug-state that the card needs to be snapped out of with power-cycling tricks.
OP has solved his issue already but the trick I mentioned could be due to a capacitor issue which can occur anytime and break things that worked before.
I was just trying to help by suggesting an approach that solved the exact same issue on others’ laptop running the same distro. Even though not convenient you can either wait for your battery to run out or disconnect it to try this trick.
That trick screams “residual power in a capacitor that we need to drain to get a proper restart on some component”
I’ve heard of that working with some motherboards where it seemed they were dead and may explain those boards that don’t work but magically do months later when the capacitors had time to completely discard the small trickle of current they still had.
It never occurred to me before reading this comment that there actually is a use case for the execute permission. To me it was always just this annoying thing I have to do whenever I download an executable which I didn’t have to do on Windows.
As an aside remark, it’s really funny how everyone has to elaborate what the fuck they’re talking about when they talk about Twitter.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Ubuntu explains the situation
could have just been written as
In a tweet, Ubuntu explains the situation
but the epic genius elon decided to destroy all brand recognition. Truly incredible thing to witness. Twitter literally got its own branded terms into common lexicon and he just set it all on fire.
I don’t fully understand how you are going about your installation. Are you attempting to install Windows 10, and Ubuntu onto different partitions on one drive, or each on a separate drive? Are you wanting to use grub to boot the OS of choice, or to choose the boot device from the BIOS boot device menu? In what order did you initially install the OS’s (Windows 10 first, then Ubuntu, or vice-versa)?
Internal HDD has F: (storage) and a partition for Ubuntu, which is the A: drive in Windows and /dev/sda3 in Linux.
I was originally hoping to do it this way and be able to dual boot them, but the more I think about it the more I feel that just going straight to Linux and biting the bullet would be better in the long run, and I can flash Windows if I really need it.
I was trying to get GRUB to act as boot loader but for the longest time I couldn’t even get GRUB running, even with at least 5 different troubleshooting ideas. Then once it was running, I still couldn’t get it to mount the EFI. Then I started getting the boot loop issues and Windows OS stopped working, but I figured out how to get Linux desktop running via shimx64.efi in the BIOS boot loader.
This computer is natively a Win 10 machine, and I was trying to add Linux to it.
I was originally hoping to do it this way and be able to dual boot them, but the more I think about it the more I feel that just going straight to Linux and biting the bullet would be better in the long run, and I can flash Windows if I really need it.
It is certainly possible to dual boot (in my experience, with the occasional headache that you may, or may not be willing to deal with) Windows and Linux, but yes, the most reliable installation would be one, or the other.
I was trying to get GRUB to act as boot loader but for the longest time I couldn’t even get GRUB running, even with at least 5 different troubleshooting ideas
Hrm, I’m not sure how you are going about your installation procedure. You mentioned that you are installing Ubuntu, but Ubuntu should come with Grub pre packaged. Installing Ubuntu really only requires clicking a couple buttons in the install wizard.
but I figured out how to get Linux desktop running via shimx64.efi in the BIOS boot loader.
Im not really familiar with shim, but, from what I understand, it’s the loader for when you have secure boot enabled, but you should have that disabled.
Hrm, I’m not sure how you are going about your installation procedure. You mentioned that you are installing Ubuntu, but Ubuntu should come with Grub pre packaged. Installing Ubuntu really only requires clicking a couple buttons in the install wizard.
I had Linux installed on a tertiary partition of a secondary drive, my F: drive. I neglected to store it within the dedicated SSD, C:, and I believe that GRUB was just not being picked up because instead of being sda or something close to it, it was instead sda6.
Further this with the fact that GRUB seemed to not have elevated permissions and when I eventually got into its command line, it was not able to run Linux for reasons I’m unaware. Windows BIOS menu never had Linux or any corollary term available as a boot order item, and only through digging through the Boot from EFI item and submenus was I able to find anything to actually boot Ubuntu without live CD at all. grubx.efi (or whatever it was called) black screened.
Im not really familiar with shim, but, from what I understand, it’s the loader for when you have secure boot enabled, but you should have that disabled.
Scout’s honor, I really did disable Secure Boot. I did so through Shell. I did so in the Windows directory. I even triple checked that it was disabled through the BIOS menu. If shimx64.efi is only supposed to work when Secure Boot is disabled, that must be because Windows has just been acting screwy as all get out.
I had Linux installed on a tertiary partition of a secondary drive, my F: drive. I neglected to store it within the dedicated SSD, C:, and I believe that GRUB was just not being picked up because instead of being sda or something close to it, it was instead sda6.
First of all sda refers to a physical drive, whereas sda6 refers to a partition on that drive. As for the rest of it, I’m not exactly sure what you are talking about – it doesn’t really matter where in your system Linux is installed; the bootloader probes for an OS, and, once found, will update its table with the position of the OS on the drive.
Further this with the fact that GRUB seemed to not have elevated permissions
This statement doesn’t really make sense; Grub runs independently of Linux (it even loads before initramfs), so the concept of “execution privelege” doesn’t apply. (source)
when I eventually got into its command line, it was not able to run Linux for reasons I’m unaware.
I will point you to this answer, if you wish to boot linux from the Grub command line.
Windows BIOS
There’s no such thing (well, as far as I’m aware, anyways – maybe a microsoft surface, or the like, labels it as such 😜). The BIOS is contained within a physical chip on the device’s motherboard.
Windows BIOS menu never had Linux or any corollary term available as a boot order item
If you’re talking abou the boot menu, it doesn’t necessarily have to list the linux distro. If you know what drive it is installed on, you select that, then the BIOS finds the bootloader from there. A boot device is just that – a device to boot from, not an OS to boot into.
I really did disable Secure Boot. I did so through Shell.
I don’t understand what you mean here. As far as I’m aware, secure boot is only able to be disabled within the BIOS.
I was unsure if maybe there was some alternative command line trickery that exists to modify it that I am unaware of, but a quick websearch seems to corroborate my pre existing belief.
Windows has just been acting screwy as all get out.
This is an unfortunate reality of dual booting with Windows. Windows can do all sorts of trickery on your system (even when the system is powered down!). If I want to boot Windows (I keep it installed on a separate, dedicated, and air-gapped drive), I plug in its drive, and disconnect all other drives related to Linux. This has been the most reliable method that I have found to dual boot Windows. However, this method is still not without possible issue, as Windows can still leave devices in weird states that end up messing with how they are used in Linux.
Thank you for the breakdown. I’ve learned a fair bit about the infrastructure of my computer and Linux since posting this, and I’m now dedicated Ubuntu with only needing to do some very minor work with WINE here and there in the last two weeks or so. Linux has been a blast and learning about everything has been a lot of fun so far.
My problem turned out to be something with the BIOS. I don’t know if a switch got flipped somewhere along the way or what, but when I reset the BIOS to factory default settings in the boot menu I no longer had issues with boot looping and a CPU I could fry an egg on.
I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda, and Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup. Now that I’ve scrubbed windows from my PC I no longer have any issues booting up and my PC seems to run just about the same as before, less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.
Funny enough, I tried to do a clean install of Debian with KDE on my system and I went back to having boot issues, mainly where it would just open to GRUB CL and I couldn’t get it to initialize Debian, when I was certain it was a good install. So I’m just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it. Once I feel very confident in filesystem maintenance, command line navigation, snap/flatpak/.deb/whatever, all the major things, I’ll start shopping around for another distro again. Ubuntu has been treating me very nicely though.
A very fair decision! Dual booting can be a huge pain, and, for the average user, it really isn’t all that necessary anymore – Linux has come a very long way!
My problem turned out to be something with the BIOS. I don’t know if a switch got flipped somewhere along the way or what, but when I reset the BIOS to factory default settings in the boot menu I no longer had issues with boot looping and a CPU I could fry an egg on.
Interesting. I’m curious what the setting was. But, I’m glad that it worked out for you in the end!
I do believe that GRUB was initially installed on sda2 and not sda
I refer back to my previous comment – sda2 refers to a partition on the drive named sda. You could have a drive sda, sdb, sdc, etc. If one was given some partition sdc3 that means it is partition 3 on drive sdc. Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.
Windows was just taking precidence over grubx64.efi upon startup
This can certainly happen – especially if Windows is installed after Linux. I woud refer you to this answer to fix it.
less a few graphical funnies with some larger proprietary software I use.
Yeah, I’m not too surprised about that (depending on the speicfic graphical issues that you are referring to, mind you) – especially if you are using Wine. If you don’t mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to use?
Funny enough, I tried to do a clean install of Debian with KDE on my system and I went back to having boot issues, mainly where it would just open to GRUB CL and I couldn’t get it to initialize Debian, when I was certain it was a good install.
Hm, this is strange. I would err on the side of a layer 8 error, but there could certainly be some other fuckery afoot.
So I’m just going to stick to Ubuntu for a good while and learn it.
There’s no problem with that! Ubuntu was the first distro that I used, as well, when I first got into Linux. Granted, I didn’t stick with Ubuntu for long, cause I got mildly annoyed with how it worked.
Once I feel very confident in filesystem maintenance, command line navigation, snap/flatpak/.deb/whatever, all the major things, I’ll start shopping around for another distro again.
Sounds like a solid plan! When you do decide to move on from Ubuntu, I’d recommend Arch LInux 😜
Yes, I am aware of how the partition naming structure works, to a degree. I am going off the fact that when I installed Ubuntu, it was installed on a partition (sda2) rather than a primary drive (sda). I’ve read that when GRUB is installed, if it gets installed to /dev/sda2 rather than /dev/sda it can cause issues with dual booting as the BIOS will read in a sequential order, and it may miss a partition if it’s “far enough down the list”. As another example, you may be in for some trouble if grubx.efi is installed on /dev/sda8 or something.
Everything gets installed into a partition on a drive.
I guess I must have gotten my preconceptions wrong, or perhaps I misread something. From my impression, certain things can be installed on the primary drive such as boot loaders, but I could be wrong.
If you don’t mind me asking, what software are you wanting/needing to use?
Finale 2012c is the main software I needed. And by funnies I mostly just mean that it’s slow to update graphics, but the program works entirely as intended. MIDI drivers work, sound libraries (Garritan and ARIA Player) function, print to PDF is fine, I’m actually incredibly impressed! I’m using WINE 8.0.1.
I also wouldn’t mind trying to get Cakewalk running, as my workflow is definitely more attuned to that software, but maybe trying to get all the proprietary drivers (e.g. TASCAM’s interface drivers) to work with Linux may be more headache than its worth.
Arch
I’ve heard it can be pretty challenging to get into Arch, is this true? I don’t know if I’ll ever be a “script kiddie” as it were. I plan on getting good at using bash and learning the other ones like ssh, but I don’t know how much I like the idea of having to hand-craft my OS from bare metal.
when I installed Ubuntu, it was installed on a partition (sda2) rather than a primary drive (sda)
The exact meaning of the language in use is somewhat context dependent. It is technically possible to use a block device (e.g. /dev/sda) [source] as a filesystem, but it is generally discouraged – afaik, this is generally because of compatibility reasons. As to the meaning of a statement that looks something like “Install Ubuntu to /dev/sda” this could be interpereted as essentially just rewriting the existing partition table that exists on that drive with a new one, where, for example, partition 1 (e.g. /dev/sda1) is for the boot partition, and partition 2 (e.g. /dev/sda2) is where Ubuntu lives. In that example, technically Ubuntu is only resides in /dev/sda2, but, for the whole installation process, the user can interpret it as essentially installing it all to /dev/sda.
I’ve read that when GRUB is installed, if it gets installed to /dev/sda2 rather than /dev/sda it can cause issues with dual booting as the BIOS will read in a sequential order, and it may miss a partition if it’s “far enough down the list”
It’s worth understanding the boot process of a system (this is more taylored to an average Linux system, but can be generally applied, if one is careful):
The machine powers on
The BIOS chip on the motherboard comes to life, it gets copied into RAM, and the CPU starts executing it.
It finds the first device in the BIOS boot list
It looks at the first sector (512 bytes) of that drive (this generally only applies if the drive uses MBR, and can be a little bit different with GPT, but the general process is pretty much the same, afaik), which contain the location of the bootloader on that drive, and copies it to RAM at address 0x7C00
The bootloader (e.g. Grub) springs to life and it takes over the boot process from the BIOS
In the case of your average linux installation, Grub will then initialize something called the “initramfs” which is sort of like an extremely small Linux OS that gets loaded into RAM
Initramfs essentially bootstraps the actual Linux distro into booting – this is required as booting the desired Linux distro may depend on things that run on Linux which can’t exist before Linux is loaded (e.g. LVM’s, LUKS encryption, etc.).
Now that the OS is loaded into ram, it boots, and the process is complete.
So, back to your statement, the actual program of Grub could reside in /dev/sda2, but the “bootloader bootsrapping” program, which resides in the first 512 bytes of the disk, could be thought of as being installed to /dev/sda.
I guess I must have gotten my preconceptions wrong, or perhaps I misread something. From my impression, certain things can be installed on the primary drive such as boot loaders, but I could be wrong.
As I outlined above, this is sort of a technicality in language that depends on context.
Finale 2012c is the main software I needed.
I’m not sure if this is exactly equivalent to that software, but perhaps you would be interested in MuseScore – it’s open source.
I’ve heard it can be pretty challenging to get into Arch, is this true?
This has been somewhat exaggerated through memes by the community, and strange elitism. It’s a bit tough to separate oneself from their curse of knowledge, but if one possesses the motivation to learn, it’s really not that complicated. Depending on one’s existing knowledge, it may initially appear daunting, but the community is quite good, from my experience, and the Arch Wiki is extremely useful. Installation is essentially a matter of just following the installation guide step-by-step.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be a “script kiddie” as it were.
Imo, arch has nothing to do with that. If one wants to be a part of that then prob lurking around the Kali Linux communities would be a start. Do note that I am not speaking about Kali Linux from experience, just hearsay, so take that with a grain of salt. But, yeah, Arch is more for people that want more fine-grained control over their system without wanting to get into the full-time job that is something like Gentoo 😜.
I don’t know how much I like the idea of having to hand-craft my OS from bare metal.
Imo, that’s not really what arch is – even Gentoo isn’t like that. The closest to that would probably be something like Linux From Scratch. Arch just gives you more freedom to choose the base software that your system is using – stuff like your DE, your networking utils, display server, audio server, etc.
I would like to emphasize that this kind of choice exists with virtually all Linux distros – as in you can essentially make any distro “look” like any other (there may be some intricacies that I am unaware of that may get in the way of changing some things without having to alter others); Arch Linux simply gives you most of the choice right up front.
It’s always a heartwarming experience seeing someone passionate about a subject enough that they’d be willing to dedicate what was likely at least twenty minutes of their own free time to writing a detailed response to a stranger on the internet.
re: /dev/sda haberdashery
Your explanation was very helpful in explaining the process by which the BIOS is loaded. As I’ve continued to work on Ubuntu, I’ve been trying to hammer out little errors along the way and I believe that I inadvertently identified the problem with my dual-booting situation before. Whenever I load Linux, the system will load that ubiquitous screen where it does a filesystem check, etc, and I always get two errors: (1) VMX (outside TXT) disabled…; (2) ima: error communicating with TPM. I went into the BIOS and figured out how to turn the TPM on, and when I did so… what do you know, I started boot-looping again, just as before. Apparently I’m going to have to do a bit of troubleshooting to get Linux operable with the TPM, if I care enough about it to just undo a simple error message on boot-up that has no impact on my actual computing experience. But having his TPM chip before was causing boot-looping, perhaps due to a security issue with grubx, who knows, but for the time being I’m putting it on the back-burner.
re: Musescore
I appreciate the thought, and yes Musescore has been on my periphery a good percentage of my 15 years of using notation software. Musescore is an admirable project and I’m impressed with the steps its taken in the last few updates. Frankly, this has probably been the fourth or fifth time now that someone has hocked Musescore as a FOSS alternative to Finale, and while I get it, they are not truly one-to-one in compatibility, at least not yet. Finale is a boutique program, designed for professional use and it’s very feature-rich, especially as one gets into more specialized concerns in terms of unusual notations, etc. Finale works just fine on my system and I don’t intend on changing away from it anytime soon. I’ve been using it for so many years, it’s like second-nature to me. I couldn’t imagine dropping a software I spent hundreds of dollars on now for something else if I still get great mileage out of it.
re: Arch Linux
Following the last time you and I communicated, I actually saw a video from SomeOrdinaryGamers where Muta did a step-by-step installation of Arch on a new machine. It certainly seems more complex than Ubuntu, but at the same time, boy does it give you a rich experience in learning the intricacies of your system and how everything functions together. I am definitely going to be keeping Ubuntu on my main system for the time being, but I do have a blank ZBook15 gen 2 (I believe it has Mint on it right now? I haven’t opened it in a few months…) and I might have a go at installing Arch on it and messing around for a while.
My current project is going to be taking my secondary HDD, which is only a storage device now, and configuring its file structure to be easier to use with Linux, as well as clearing out all the legacy OS files from when it used to have Windows on it. I’ve been having trouble using utilities like rm -rf because for some reason, some files will delete with no issue, but then others will actually cause the drive to crash in some spectacular fashion, and I have to sudo umount -l then remount again with ntfs-3g just to get back to it. I can’t tell if its a permissions issue or something else. I know the drive is old and there are four damaged sectors, but the most recent SMART test didn’t seem to throw up any major red flags. I can delete individual problem files, but trying to delete a bulk quantity runs into issues at times. It’s weird. I don’t exactly want to format the drive because there’s ~0.9TB of personal files on there (that are all backed up both on a cloud service and an external SSD, no worries!), but so far I’m having fun learning some new commands.
I’m really hoping this all forces Ubuntu out as the face of desktop Linux.
It’s been pretty low tier for years now, and Canonical just proves corporate backing doesn’t guarantee a good distro.
Snap is pretty garbage, default GNOME is horrendous, the repos break every other month, apt is still pretty lame despite being an user upgrade for apt-get, the packages are neither stable nor cutting edge, they change core OS backends like every update which breaks configs and makes documentation obsolete.
I’d like to suggest Fedora as the new goto, but I feel like it’s a bit too privacy and FOSS oriented which may scare away new users.
Debian is great but it doesn’t have latest packages which isn’t optimal as performance upgrades would take time to release or need to be manually installed.
Well, I’d prefer Canonical to fix their shit, instead of forcing immature products onto users. I’m not against snap per se, as there are valid reasons for sandboxing, especially for games (remember when Steam accidentally wiped some user’s home folders back in 2015? Sandboxing would have prevented that).
However, in its current state, snap causes just too much friction. For example Firefox can’t remember the last used directory for up/downloads, Steam snap will just create a new data directory (forgetting about the games already downloaded), there’s no way to allow additional folders (like /net from autofs) in snap apps etc. It’s just a myriad of issues which make working with the system unnecessarily complex and frustrating, and there seems to be little progress fixing those.
unfortunately, industry loves shit like Ubuntu and RHEL because of their corporate backing. comps love having the insurance of someone to blame or somebody to fix their shit when things hit the fan. I’ve worked for many comps who choose RHEL for that alone. Should we choose the OS built by a bunch of randos in their basement, or something backed by Red Hat where I can just pay them money to handle my support tickets faster if shit blows up? or who tf do I have my cyber liabilities insurance guys sue if the OS has a huge fuckin problem? I want a company behind that shit.
I believe that both VirtualBox and KVM (QEMU) can do USB passthrough. With either one you can have the full Windows OS running on your Linux desktop, which could be more comfortable than going for WINE. Here’s an example with KVM and Arch Linux.
KVM has been my go-to for many years of running servers because it is extremely lightweight. Like for example, last year I finally ditched the old poweredge 860 servers (very early 2000’s machines which topped out with a dual-core CPU and 8GB of memory), however from these servers I was running half a dozen virtual linux boxes handling websites and email. Of course running a Windows vm is going to take a lot more resources but any desktop computer that is less than a decade old would easily handle it while still managing your regular linux desktop.
One caveat about KVM, however, is that there’s not really a great GUI interface for it. There IS a monitor to manage the VMs you have up and running, but I always launch new VMs from the command line, which is pretty much just a matter of setting the name and memory, pointing it to an existing image file or ISO, and then using the GUI monitor to launch a VNC remote connection to handle getting a new OS installed or make changes to an existing image to get it on the network. I don’t consider this a burden, but then again I grew up on the command line.
I haven’t explored KVM as an option. Yet, but I am going to be investigating that for my own use case now.
Outside of my laptop and desktop, I did run a Dell PowerEdge (forget the model, but I have a singular Xeon and 64gb of ram in it along with hardware based raid and 8 hdd bays.) that I ran Ubuntu on, but I realized Ubuntu wasn’t the way to go for me due a number of things. So I shut the server down and will be reinstalling another OS on, I haven’t decided yet but maybe Fedora for that. It was just being used to run Docker and Portainer, which I had a good chunk of docker containers running. I had a reverse proxy, Jellyfin, Gluetun, uptime kuma, signal messaging bot for uptime kuma to let me know if a services went down, photoprism, kanboard, a wiki, and a few other services.
I used to run Ubuntu on my servers but abandoned it because it was so unreliable. Things like a “security” update that completely broke the network card drivers, or another one that caused NFS connections to reboot the machine under a heavy load. I switched over to Debian at that point and have never had any problems in the past decade. Since so many people run Arch, I’m guessing it is similarly stable and will be a good choice for you (at least I think you said you were running it in your OP?). I’ll have to look through those services you mentioned, I haven’t heard of most of them.
Well for my poweredge server I ran Ubuntu on it, and my pis Raspbian. As far as desktop/laptop I use Arch, not for stability though it has been stable for my use case but more so for a bleeding edge up to date experience.
As far as the services I ran, they were for media consumption, and some other network tools.
You can passthrough your Rtx 3090 into Qemu to achieve hardware acceleration. With software called ‘Looking Glass’ you’ll get a hardware accelerated Qemu/kvm window instead of sacrificing your second monitor or using a kvm switch.
Level1Linux has made a brilliant videos about Looking Glass.
You should also passthrough a ssd/nvme disk into your Qemu.
EndeavourOS is pretty good, too; also Arch-based with an easy installer.
The advantage to Arch-based-distros is rolling releases, and the Arch wiki instructions are more easily followed. And right now, the Arch wiki is probably the single best resource for Linux instructions and troubleshooting on the web.
I daily drive endeavour and love it to bits but let’s not recommend it to someone who wants an OS with no fuss. It WILL break and require experience to fix. Remember the grub update fiasco?
A LOT of people’s PCs were bricked, including mine. No boot, just blank screen with blinking cursor. Thankfully Endeavour’s team was quick to react (quicker than Arch, as it happens) and published a full tutorial on how to chroot into your system and downgrade grub, but that already required a good level of knowledge and confidence in the Linux system as none of this was trivial, or intuitive for any stretch of the imagination. I woudl imagine most affected EndeavourOS users who were new-ish to Linux threw the towel that day. Wouldn’t blame them, it was jarring even for me, and it wasn’t my first chroot.
That sounds stressfull! It’d put me off a distro, too. I had something similar happen in the early days of Gentoo - multiple times. Those trials by fire did teach me a lot, and I’m now consequently far more sanguine about the boot process, and thank god these days we have smart phones as mini-backup computers to search for solutions! Still, we’re in a time when PCs are not as indispensible, and having one down for a couple days can be a minor disaster.
Rolling updates or no, I rarely -Syu on my desktop more than once a week, and most of my machines get that TLC more like monthly. And sometimes I’ll hold out packages that require rebooting, because FTN. It probably contributes to the fact I’ve avoided these types of dramas --statistically.
Yeop, you can say that again. Can’t read the Arch wiki on a Nokia 3310 for sure lol
Tbh I’m not too careful about updates, I have regular backups and grub exploding wasn’t enough to stop me, so eeeeh, if something really goes awfully wrong I have enough free time to deal with it and use it as a learning experience. I know I should be smarter about them like you are, but on my personal computer I just cannot be asked. ^^
I know I should be smarter about them like you are
TIL being lazy is “smart”.
Nokia 3310!! Those were the days. When you had drive over to your hosting provider (some guy’s garage, who was paying for a T1) so you could sit at your server (a tower you’d built) to fix something that an upgrade had broken. Those experiences with dependency hell put me off Redhat forever.
Edit2: Honestly, I daily drove Fedora for years, didn’t do a clean install from fedora 13 through 25 and it worked like a charm. I guess they improved wildly since your Redhat days!
Are you updating with eos-update, or yay? TBH, I only use yay, or pacman. I don’t imagine it makes any difference, but… IDK. I happened to upgrade and reboot two EOS machine yesterday, with again no issues. Are you running an NVidia card? I’m an Radeon guy, won’t touch NVidia, myself. How about Wayland? I’ve alwayw found Wayland to be super flakey, which keeps me on X.
I dunno. I wonder why you’re having so many issues, while for me EOS has just been Arch with an easier install.
Mostly using eos-update by clicking on the notification, unless I’m on a terminal where I still have the yay reflex from arch. I should remember to use eos-update though, I do appreciate the extra housekeeping.
Nop, I avoid nvidia as much as I can as well, I already can’t avoid it at work, too much driver drama. Ryzen and radeon it is, with (almost) no fuss.
Also mostly using wayland, it works well even on KDE, but got Xorg around just in case, and I’ve had the occasional issue on both. That being said, it’s plymouth that blows up, long before the graphical session is opened, so that shouldn’t have an influence either.
Maybe I’m just a black cat, and/or maybe it just comes with the territory when you stay long enough on a bleeding-edge-use-at-your-own-risk kinda distro and update almost every day. Something’s bound to go wrong eventually. Which, has also “been Arch with an easier install” for me, tbf.
Gonna investigate a bit more today, couldn’t be asked yesterday. But if you’re curious I can keep you updated when I find a fix. :)
Edit: Found the solution by essentially doing the same thing the folks on reddit did with nvidia by enabling early KMS start, and learning quite a bit along the way. Apparently it’s now required by Plymouth and my system didn’t get the memo? Or something? Eh it works.
Ah. K, I think the differrence is that I’m the outlier. Your system has far larger components, with more moving parts, which I think is more common:
On most of my systems, I’m not running any graphical system; they’re all servers. That eliminates a huge amount of stack that can fail. On all but non-servers I run X, which is very stable (in that upgrades almost never impact it) on non-Nvidia GPUs. And of those, all but one run herbstluftwm - Gnome and KDE are both large systems with a lot of moving parts, any of which can break (or be broken) – in your case, it was Plasma, a KDE component. And the last desktop is running Budgie which, while still Gnome, is a lighter one based on the older GTK3. All of these things tend to make for more stable systems.
But, most people are probably running fancier, full desktop software. Larger, more complex, more development, more frequent changes. And, consequently, more prone to cascading packaging breakages, like the Plasma one.
I think if I were using software like that, I’d consider either giving up Arch and using an immutable distro, or using something like snapper or timeshift that allows boot-time system roll-backs.
Ah no no, maybe I was unclear, but the issue occurs during the initramfs stage, long before any of my KDE/Plasma nonsense had any chance to run! KMS has nothing to do with KDE. ^^
Oh, that plasma. Yeah, that naming conflict is totally not confusing.
You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it’d add release stability? I’m not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.
Inspired by our discussion, I installed snapper on two boxen. I included snap-pac and snapper-support to get system change and grub integration; there’s probably also a utility out there that adds visudo-like snapshot-before-manual-edit of anything in /etc. If not, it’d be an easy script. snapper-gui and btrfs-assistant both look useful. While I’m comfortable with rescue SDs and restic backups, what I’m seeing with Arch’s snapper package is pretty nice, and super easy.
I suppose anything that borks grub is going to be a PITA no matter how immutable your OS, or how fancy your rollback. Or - god forbid - fucks up your BIOS firmware. I have never had that last happen, yet (knock on wood).
You could switch all your repos to the core Arch ones. I did that by accident once, and it was fine (although, I did switch them back eventually). Maybe it’d add release stability? I’m not really clear how the EOS repos vary off the baseline, except by adding some custom packages.
They don’t afaik. EOS uses Arch’s repos directly, unlike Manjaro. Just adds its own on top for all the fancy EOS stuff. Which is why EOS was immediately affected by the grub meltdown and not Manjaro. (which kinda digs a few holes in the stability hypothesis, though Manjaro is another kettle of fish tbf)
Snapper sounds really interesting, and I didn’t expect “super easy” to be the feedback there. Sounds a bit overkill for my use case at home but I might look into it for work. Thanks for the info!
Oh god a borked BIOS is my nightmare… I don’t even know how you’d go about fixing that on a modern PC mobo… Let’s not jinx it shall we?
If I remember correctly I liked manjaro and endeavor when I tried them, but the “night color” feature which is very important to me wouldn’t work Idk why.
does night light actually work? I used them for a while, turned it off for color and I didn’t notice a difference. Isn’t it just placibo or just very minimal effect?
Humm… this seems rather strange. Maybe show us you docker-compose to have a look on how you configured immich’s network?
169.254.0.0/16 are APIPA addresses . So this a network misconfiguration.
After searching the web, I tried to create /etc/docker/daemon.json
This is not how you configure a docker network. This is only used if your local networks overlaps with docker’s defaut network.
The easiest way i can think on how to make your docker-compose work is to reinstall docker and use the host network. DO NOT forget to delete the /etc/docker/daemon.json file in case you want a fresh start. This seems a badly network configuration on you docker stack !
This will give you a good starting point! After that try to configure a bridge network for your docker compose.
Normally after you get the gist on how docker works, it’s rather easy!
Immich isn’t the easiest docker stack ! I will up it on my own server and give you some feedback.
Because their isn’t any network configuration in the compose it uses the default docker network. Thus… maybe… it overlaps with your own network, that’s what your first post was about :)
I will look into it and if nobody comes up with an anwser before me, will give you some feedback on how it went and try to find out what’s wrong !
First find out what’s your debian network configuration if it’s a fresh install and everything is installed by default, you get your ip and network from DHCP
<span style="color:#323232;">> ip a
</span>
If your ethernet or wifi networks is in the inet 172.17.0.1/16 brd 172.17.255.255 range it overlaps with the default docker bridge network.
So I got it up and running in 10 minutes just by copy/pasting the docker-compose.yaml and .env files. So their configuration files are working flawlessly.
Either you have a router misconfiguration or a docker network misconfiguration. Either way If I were you I would first start without duckdns.org domain name and without to much complex network configuration. Start slow and build up to more complex configurations.
Leave your router defaults network configuration, without any open ports.
See if your spare laptop server has internet access when everything is defaulted (if not that’s the first thing to solve)
Check if your networks configuration is in the inet 172.17.0.1/16 brd 172.17.255.255 range (dockers default bridge network)
Default routes on your laptop
DHCP or manual
The important part is to make your laptop have internet access without changing to much, the default DHCP works great !
Fresh docker installation and don’t forget to delete your json file (/etc/docker/daemon.json)
Try again with the docker-compose.yaml and .env from immich’s github
If your network configuration is wrong from the beginning, you are in for bad times specially if you are going to use duckdns ! Try to make it work on your local network first and than you can go crazy.
Also if you do not know what you are doing, please don’t make your containers accessible to the web ! Rather use a wireguard server to access all your containers from everywhere in the world with a secure tunnel !
If you’re a beginner, there is alot to grasp before having a good working laptop server :)
after hours I tried to change distribution and went with fedora, set up everything, installed immich, not a single problem, it all works, also duckdns, and now I also have btrfs so I can snapshot my system. I’m probably very unlucky with debian based distributions, on my main laptop I had many problems with ubuntu as first distro, I had to distro hop a bit to find my place in EndeavourOS
thank you very very very very much for your time and help, I really appreciate this! now it’s time to actually start this journey in the magic world of self-hosting!
In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.
I definitely do feel i3 is the easiest to understand and get into. I remember when I first started using Linux I tried awesomewm and icewm but was so confused. i3 made sense tho
It’s a good question - I don’t know, because I haven’t used it. If it’s 100% compatible with i3 down to its configuration and features, then sure, it’s palatable.
When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that’s what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.
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