I recently distro-hoped to Fedora Silverblue and I am quite pleased with it. This version has in immutable filesystem, thus you might want to look for another version of Fedora.
NixOS is big no go for me too, especially given that you can install the Nix package manager on any distro easily.
Arch Wiki is great and I often use it for non Arch distros well.
FWIW, the stat structure in Linux does not include birth time [1]. It only gives you:
atime: The time of last access.
mtime: The time of last modification.
ctime: The time of the last change to the inode.
I assume the stat command is using a filesystem-specific method to get the birth time.
Anyway, I don’t think any of these stats is guaranteed to be consistent with the rest (or even correct). For example, it is common to disable atime tracking to improve I/O performance.
Assuming the data is accurate, I think the other comment about the file being a copy is the best explanation.
The stat command is using statx, which gives you a slightly different struct. statx is the cool new Linux-only system call for stat-ing. Not every filesystem will support the new btime field. (And, as you correctly say, many of those time fields are wrong, anyway)
The struct returned by stat doesn’t, but statxcontains creation time as well as well. I believe ext4 is already tracking the creation time even if stat can’t provide it.
The stat command on modern distros should get you this additional metadata, unless you use an FS that doesn’t track or expose it, of course.
No experience with the CF-33, but I did use a CF-30 and as far as I could tell, outside the WiFi (back when drivers for that were a problem) everything on it worked out of the box, never had any accessories that plugged into the more proprietary connectors but everything I ever plugged in worked, including RS-232
Do want to add, on the CF-30 when I replaced the WiFi card with a newer Intel card I had to shave off the power control mini pcie pin so that the BIOS whitelist couldnt deactivate it, no clue if they still whitelist WiFi cards in newer models or the CF-33.
Will check, this one is running an Intel Dual Band AC-8260. I won’t need to use WiFi too often (this is the laptop I bring with me on work deployments, no internet and if I run the Starlink I can put it in Ethernet mode). Thank you for your help.
As of right now my I/Os are working. WiFi, mobile (gps unknown right now) but the card readers, hdmi ports etc are functioning. Forward camera works but rear still doesn’t (couldn’t get it working on win10 either, not a deal breaker) even the ambient light sensor. Any advice on getting Wine setup (I’m trying to run the Panasonic day/night to utility for a night vision/red screen mode, the only FOSS alternatives I’ve found have just been blue light blockers)?
As you mentioned Ubuntu’s Night light, f.lux, and Redshift all work more like a color temperature adjust than like a red only mode, I found some people mentioning if you are running X you can use xcalib to set the color channels individually, but couldnt find a tool for it, not entirely sure wine would make that function work correctly but it is worth a shot, as for wine, if the version in the package manager isnt new enough there is also a PPA for Ubuntu for more recent wine versions, but I havent used those in a long time and cant strongly advise them, YMMV in installing them and keeping the system working long term, but I was always the sort with too many PPAs so I switched to arch to not deal with that.
Just wait. In 10 years 32 gig is on the low side to just run the OS. Hardware getest faster and bigger, but software scales with it.
The more resources are available, the more people will program computers to use them.
My first graphics card had 128mb memory. These days it goes in gigabyte and they use the memory and processing power to produce amazing things.
On the other hand, they also are not as critical on efficiëncy as used to be, because there are simply more resources available anyway. As a consequence, some programs use a silly amount of resources for basically doing nothing. Sometimes I really feel like my browser is eating RAM…
A program that can run on 1GB but uses 2GB is more wasteful, OS and FS level caching and memory reclamation only work if the memory is available, and a program wasting it takes it from everything else, unused RAM is wasted, but so is RAM being used for no actual function.
Not to say programs cant use large amounts, but they should provide a level of functionality for the amount of memory used, and some programs of late have been more than a bit inefficient, in short, filling the RAM is good, but do make sure its actually being used.
I asked a similar question and I was lead to this post.
I got side tracked and eventually lost motivation to get it working. I might give it another try in the new year. Hopefully this is what you are looking for. I assume your distribution is using PipeWire, otherwise you may have to look into HRIR for PulseAudio.
The post explains them quite well. HRIR (Head-Related Impulse Response) and SOFA (Spacially Oriented Format for Acoustics) are standards for representing spacial audio (surround sound) in audio files and streams. A convolver is something that performs convolution (a mathematical term for taking one function, applying it to another, and then producing a third function as a result), and a spatializer is more specifically something that, as the name suggests, gives “space” to audio (distorting audio to represent sounds coming from more than simply 2 directions, or again, what you call surround sound). So HRIR Convolver is simply a method to apply the HRIR function to audio to represent it in a way our brain would interpret as 3D audio, and SOFA Spatializer is simply a method to do the same thing, just with the SOFA standard instead of the HRIR standard. Based on the comments of the post, it seems that they recommend you use SOFA.
In either case, Pipewire supports both standards, and it is trivially easy to implement them through filters (as the post covers in depth). You could try both if you want and see which you prefer. If you’re unfamiliar with managing Pipewire and need further resources, the Arch wiki has an entry in great length about it here. I’d recommend reading the comments to that post first if you struggle with anything, such as persistence. Everything you need to set it up should be accessible in that post and its comments.
I’d also like to recommend that you read the post and comments to the post, or simply use a search engine if you come across unfamiliar terms. You can find answers to all the questions you’ve asked through the linked post and a simple search.
I managed to get it working, I just can’t control where the sound actually is coming from. I have to set my default sink to the new surround, so it just picks one random device that’s connected it’d seem. How can I tell it where to play my audio back?
I don’t have any experience with virtual surround, but I do have a potential alternative if you don’t get it figured out.
If the games you play have a headphone mode, try it. That typically gets a pretty good virtual surround effect. As for improving sound quality, check out the AutoEQ project on GitHub. I got some cheap $20 Monoprice headphones that sound like they’re $150 or better when using the correct profile from AutoEQ.
I have been using Fedora Workstation for years now, and I plan to switch to the KDE spin when Fedora 40 is released. I will absolutely never miss the rolling release model, and Fedora has been stable enough that I basically never have any issues. You get updates quickly, but even with the speed it manages to be very stable, at least compared to bleeding edge distros like Arch. There are still MANY things you can use the Arch wiki for in Fedora, so it’s still my first place to check for most things. But there are also forums for Fedora, and lots of community members that have answered questions in those forums, just not to the extent of something like Ubuntu. It is mainstream enough that you can find most things with Linux releases packaged for it, so I haven’t had an issue with compatibility, either. It’s overall a very solid choice, and I would recommend it.
NixOS is actually the best for an experience. For the basic stuff it’s easy enough, just put more programs into the system packages list to install some stuff
When you need to have older versions of packages while still having newest versions of others is where it really shines
It can be used for other stuff. I use dwm and find that on occasion some programs aren't nice in dwm or don't work well. So, i suggest having both a tiling and a floating.
Sorry folks was too busy today, maybe I'll get to it tomorrow, but I don't know. Might take til saturday for me to try your suggestions, but I am very thankful for every reply I got
Nothing. My laptop has 8GB and while this is somewhat the limit, it’s enough to browse, do office stuff, a bit of development/programming and even a bit of CAD for my 3D printer, video editing, retro-gaming and all sorts of things. I’d prefer to have 16GB because Firefox likes to eat a lot of RAM, but the laptop is too old for me to upgrade anything at this point.
If you’d like to waste your resources, you could run 4 other operating systems simultaneously in VMs. Or try artificial intelligence chatbots and load one of the large language models. They can easily make use of 32GB of memory and more.
Agreed. I have ageing hardware that I upgraded to its maximum 16GB RAM, and I manage to browse the web and do basic office work with that. The most memory intensive work I do beside browsing is in GIMP, and I simply set some sensible virtual memory for that to work.
Just use a light DE, or even scale back to only a WM. People insisting that KDE or Gnome are lightweight are exactly the same who claim that 32GB RAM is a minimum. Yeah, it is when even your desktop environment is bloated 🙄
If you’re a gamer and can afford the hardware upgrades to stay at the current bleeding edge, go ahead. I keep an old box alive and make it work instead.
My vote is Fedora. It offers fresh yet stable packaging, and a polished experience that you can rely on. You can then use flatpaks for even newer apps, or opt to run Arch in a container with distrobox/toolbox and play with as many cutting edge apps as you want, all as if they were installed on the host.
Finally, if you like what you see in Fedora, consider trying Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, or any of their other immutable distros.
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