I am trying to install kde neon in a VM to try plasma 6 and actually test and report bugs, too, and the installer launches into a completely transparent window and I can’t proceed from there. Tried to install opensuse krypton, it was taking so long to install I actually gave up and quit the install.
In my experience too KDE Neon unstable is a total mess.
Maybe try the new Fedora Rawhide with KDE? There even is an immutable image now. I will try that on Baremetal in a few minutes, as in the VM scaling and all was a mess, but VMs also just dont cover regular use scenarios (dual monitors, energy saving, fingerprint sensor (I want to keep mine for the host lol), memory, actually working GPU (thanks AMD mobile bullshit CPUs)
My preferred way is to create an encrypted disk image using LUKS, backed by a sparse file. Sparse means that, while you’ll still need to specify a size for the encrypted volume, it won’t actually use the space on the underlying disk until you use the space on the encrypted volume. You could even make the encrypted volume bigger than your physical disk (though of course you’d get an error if you tried to actually use that extra space).
There are a few ways to setup a LUKS container; if you want to learn how to do it manually, this howto i just found looks like a good overview of the steps (though I wouldn’t recommend doing its final Setup auto mount section).
These days, you can also create a LUKS volume on a sparse file entirely using a GUI such as the GNOME Disks program. Using it, just click the hamburger menu and select “New Disk Image” and then with your new disk image selected click the gears menu and “Format Partition” and there should be a checkbox for LUKS on that screen. If you leave “Erase” turned off (which is the default), then the backing file will be sparse.
One downside to the sparse disk image approach is that when you delete files from the encrypted volume you will not regain that space on the outer disk automatically. It is possible to, but requires work to do so which I won’t try to document here.
Another approach which doesn’t have that downside is to use eCryptfs instead of LUKS. It stores each encrypted file separately (with an encrypted name) and thus doesn’t hide the directory structure or file sizes - only directory and file names and file contents are encrypted. It also appears to have not been updated since 2016, but, it is still included in various distributions so it is also an option. You can read about how to use it (and other caveats about it) on the arch wiki.
I have used gocryptfs (github.com/rfjakob/gocryptfs) in the past, it creates an overlay mount that encrypts each dir and file separately, so no need to precreate a container. There are some security downsides to this approach though so be aware of that. nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/threat_model/
Just be aware you can lose your data. It is really bad with long file names and folders with a large number of files, there are multiple reports online about people losing their data. I personally have experienced this with large file names and once an entire vault that suddenly couldn’t be open.
I’m assuming you don’t want a full disk encryption solution, but you can also use LUKS to just create an encrypted mount of any supported filesystem. You don’t need any type of standalone program to encrypt your things for you.
Doesn’t it show +0.05% Arch? I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch. So if 0.15% is a blend of Arch and SteamOS-Arch, it seems to be growing in quite a few ways.
I was under the impression SteamOS was tracked as Arch.
No, that’s not the case. A separate listing for SteamOS leads by a lot. If you install pure Arch (or another distro) on Steam Deck or for whatever reason install and launch the Flatpak version of Steam, those won’t get counted as SteamOS but otherwise it’s pretty clear how big the installed base of SteamOS is.
I used to keep a windows drive to run steam. But it honestly sees very little use nowadays.
Mostly I boot it every few months to see what shenanigans Microsoft has pulled with windows. Other than that, it’s just sitting there. Everything I play runs in Linux.
tomb looks like a nice wrapper around LUKS but it doesn’t appear to support creating a sparse file, so, it will immediately use however much space you allocate to it.
(I think it doesn’t support a sparse backing file because I searched the word “sparse” on their github, and for the word “seek” (which is the dd argument for creating a sparse file) in the tomb bash script, and both searches yielded no results.)
I’m excited for these, especially with them likely coming for stable Firefox soon, too. My $DAYJOB hands out Ubuntu laptops and every time, we have to scrape off the Firefox Snap, because e.g. saving images doesn’t work and the Downloads directory is in some mystical place somewhere underneath ~/snap/. These APTs will almost restore the usability of other distros…
My first Desktop was KDE, but switched to Gnome about 15 years ago. So, I am very comfort with the Gnome’ish workflow. But some months ago I bought a Steam Deck and use the Desktop (KDE) a lot. But I don’t feel that comfort as with Gnome. I miss the flexible workspaces and the look of the designs is, well, not that modern (some even make glitch effects). If you’re comfort with it, it’s okay, but personally I don’t understand and feel the benefits of using it.
I can respect GNOME, it’s just not for me. There are a lot of other DE’s I really don’t get, for example: Xfce, Mate, Budgie, LXQt, any pure WM desktop in existence, the list goes on… But if people still develop them, I guess there is a market.
Xfce works better everywhere and with everything, however it falls to the same pitfall that KDE has, eventually you’ll require some libadwaita application, flatpak and whatnot and then you’ll end up with a Frankenstein system half Xfce half GNOME components and themes that don’t apply to all apps equally. :(
They’re both good DEs with their pros and cons. I’m glad you found something you’re happy with! For me that’s Gnome but I’ve used Plasma 5 quite a bit two and it’s a close second for me. I don’t think there’s much use in bickering over which is “better”.
That’s why I’m calling it a playground fight. They’re both good, but right now I’m loving KDE. GNOME is really beautiful. I organized the taskbar in KDE to be similar to default GNOME, but with some extra stuff that I’m digging too.
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