Installing Microsoft TTF packages on my distro used to be one of the first things I did. Sometime back I ended up finding suitable replacements that are stock (less packages, less installation steps, less proprietary software.)
I’ve recently found the Inter-font package (mentioned in one of Infinitely Galactic’s YouTube videos. It’s excellent, clean like Noto Sans, but slightly more readable. I’ll swap in the Ubuntu font every now and then for fun though, I really like that one too.
I’m not the most knowledgeable on this subject, but I’m curious to learn more.
Why do various toolkits have major releases that seem to reset the features of the last one?
GTK 3 seems like GTK 2 but slower to me, and before the transition was even complete GTK 4 showed up, which just seems like GTK 3 but a bit different. Qt 5 works really well and is efficient on resources, so why are we switching to Qt 6? It seems like reinventing the desktop over and over again.
I understand updates for the kernel for compatibility, small to medium updates to all software for bug fixes and new features, and major updates to toolkits when there are big problems with the current release (X vs Wayland for example). Or if the current release was unreliable and bloated, which I heard was what happened with Qt 4 and why they switched to 5. But I also heard Qt 3 was really stable and lightweight, so why did they switch away from it?
Usually there’s big new features that accomodate more modern hardware better. As an example, Qt6 revamps support for Wayland, HDR, and scaling. Even these things on their own don’t seem like much, but if you go back to KDE 5 in 10 years time you’ll definitely feel like something is plain/dated (or completely not working if you’re on new hardware)
Gtk 3->4 made a lot of internal changes, and at least some were related to making wayland work. Wayland “worked” in gtk3, however it was very much an afterthought, and half the toolkit was useless under wayland. Other changes are usually required for changes related to rendering, gtk4 had vulcan rendering which may require some breaking changes. Another thing is just general breaking changes that are good, sometimes you realise some decision was bad, and a new major release is just a way to make these.
From the end users perspective nothing much changes, it maybe looks a bit different, but not much besides that. But a vulcan renderer and being fully wayland compatible are major improvements that also improve the user experience, even if you don’t notice directly.
Usually the problem isn’t that the changes are big, but that the new way simply isn’t compatible with the old way to do things, and you can’t just make a change that will break existing applications in minor versions (well, there’s nothing technically stopping you, and unintentional compatibility breaking bugs have definitely happened in the past, but people are gonna get real mad at you if you do that). Even if you break that change up into thousand tiny changes over many minor versions, the end result is that at some point, you break old apps.
The solution is to take note of all the things that are either badly designed or became obsolete and once in a while go “hey, let’s make a new major version and fix all of this crap”. With a new major version, you don’t have to worry about old applications and are free to improve your library in any way you wish, and you also get the option to keep updating the old major version with some maintenance bugfixes so that the old apps keep working well enough.
If it’s just the dirty flag (it was uncleanly unmounted) you can try
ntfsfix -d /dev/sdc1
Still probably better to boot into Windows and let it deal with it (ntfs tools are still reverse engineered stuff after all), and check journalctl before doing it, but it works in a pinch.
Can you reformat that drive as exFAT? That should remove NTFS as being a reason to keep Windoze around (and even if you do need Windoze, it should be able to read that format fine as well).
Yes, I just learned I can use a different filesystem to avoid (or at least minimize) these issues in future. I tried formatting a portable HDD and I could only pick FAT, that should be OK since I picked “Linux compatibility” or something like that in the format wizard!
If otherwise you don’t plan to use windows on that machine anymore (on bare metal, a virtual machine is not relevant here), it would be better to transfer your data to a Linux native file system. Unless you have a solid preference, ext4 is a good choice.
Basically you just need to copy your files over, but you may need to do it in chunks (and resize the 2 partitions in every round) if you can’t hold the files if the NTFS file system safely while you reformat it.
Also, if you want to keep attributes like file creation time and last modification time, that’ll require a bit more copy parameters, if you want this let me know and I’ll fill you in on the details.
What distro do you use by the way?
I’ll keep it in mind, but since I’m getting new, bigger drives I think I’ll just wait for and format them directly in the better filesystem. I tried formatting an external HDD and I think I could only pick FAT or NTSC (I’ll double check), hopefully on the internal drives it will be different!
If you’re using gnome disks, it hides the more Linuxy file systems behind an ‘Other’ option.
Personally, for removable drives I prefer to use
ext4 for HDDs
f2fs for SSDs
exfat for Windows compatibility
If it’s grayed out or you’re getting errors try searching up ‘how to format as [file system] in [Pop OS/Ubuntu/Linux]’, you might need some extra packages.
Yeah, most options were greyed out. I’ll have to visit the wiki of my distro haha thanks for the tips though
edit: actually, just checked, EXT4 isn’t greyed out, but it says “internal disk for use with Linux only” and since it’s an external/portable HDD I didn’t pick that option
I’m pretty sure there’s no difference between internal and external ext4 (at least how gnome disks handles it), so I think it’s just trying to make sure users don’t freak out when they format it as ext4 and think their data is all gone on Windows.
Also when it’s grayed out you usually just have to install the fuse driver and file system tools, IIRC for exfat you install exfat-fuse and exfatprogs.
There is none. NTFS is a filesystem you should only use if you need Windows compatibility anyways. Eventhough Linux natively supports it these days, it’s still primarily a windows filesystem.
Yes, I’ve basically moved permanently over to Linux and do 99.9% of the things on it. Had to boot Windows for the first time in days only to check whether or not my HDD died after I couldn’t mount it
I’m still in the process of optimizing stuff around Linux (e.g. media drive filesystem) but I’ll get there haha
You could use btrfs on Linux and install the windows driver. The Windows driver isn’t what I would call stable but it will work if your mostly using Windows.
Another option is a windows virtual machine instead of dual booting. With a VM you could simple transfer files with magic wormhole or something similar
Nah, all Linux is good. I don’t really need to use Win and since all my HDDs are for media storage I have no reason not to use them on Linux only. They’re only mine and don’t have to hop from PC to PC. Thanks for the input though
I have to recommend Linux Mint. I’ve been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) for over seven years now as my only operating system (and no dual booting) without any major issues or any desire to “distro hop.” Cinnamon has also gotten a lot more stable during that time too. I have almost no crashes anymore.
The “TLDR” is sub heading is completely misleading. Cinnamon devs see they have to move, that’s the reason. “Begging to work” on Wayland is not at all what the article says. Before you downvote, read it. Nothing in that article or the link to one dev’s blog says anything even remotely like that.
I’m more interested in something that has an actual hardware and software ecosystem. I’m no longer interested in soldering my computer and it’s peripherals together.
This looks like it represents the image with block characters, so it ends up being very low res. I suspect it will be horrible at rendering text.
@RickyRigatoni, maybe you can hack this together with something like plymouth. Normally it’s for the boot process, but it might work for shutting down as well.
If the terminal resolution is high enough and I tweak the image a bit it should look fine. I’ll look into Plymouth, too, because I might as well use that for a classic windows boot.
It seems like it’s using blocks that are half a character tall, and I imagine using the combination of foreground and background colors to get two colors into each character space.
Therefore your horizontal resolution will be equal to the length of each line in characters. Your vertical resolution will be equal to two times the number of lines on the screen. So maybe it’s doable with high resolution and tiny font. I don’t know what the limits for those are.
install an x server app in your phone (e.g. XSDL) and start it
install Termux from f-droid (the one in play store hasn’t been updated due to changes in play store policy that prevents Termux package manager from working)
in Termux, run something like DISPLAY=127.0.0.1:0 ssh -Y user@hostname
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