Hey this is just what I need. And exactly when I needed it.
I have an old enterprise tower I’ve been trying to set up for my bedroom tv (I believe from 2009 or so) that only has 4gb ram but 12 (!!!) usb ports, and mint with xfce is still much too heavy for it, despite it being able to run win 10 fairly well.
All it needs to be able to do is run my vpn, torrent client, and web browser for media playback (Plex web, hosted elsewhere on my network).
Great. I heard there was a cursor flickering issue under some niche scenarios, due to the cursor and the content’s framerates becoming out of sync with one another after exiting some full screen apps, that was previously preventing the merge of this feature.
I’m assuming it’s been solved?
The “Preserve battery healthy by keeping charge between 20% and 80%” is a nice option too
Unfortunately Debian stable doesn’t ship our bugfix releases after the major Debian version gets tagged - KDE Plasma in Debian is currently at 5.27.5, and 5.27.10 was released upstream two months ago.
In other words, you’ll be experiencing bugs that have long been fixed… I’d advise to stay away from Debian for KDE Plasma because of that. If you want a Debian based distro with a good KDE Plasma experience, KUbuntu is likely a better choice, even with forced snaps. If you don’t need Debian though I’d recommend taking a look at Fedora KDE or Arch (derivatives).
Thanks for the heads up. I do get that faster updates mean a lot to some folks. There is always an argument for more up to date software but one needs to compromise sometimes. Using debian has been great so far and its working better than ubuntu (which might be a configuration issue). I’ll update if stuff starts breaking.
Man, I feel you. Sometimes you just want to get on with your life without babysitting the OS. Debian will stay out of your way and just work. Enjoy it!
Your fdisk output shows a single partition of type ee which according to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table is the type for the protective MBR partition shown by MBR tools when looking at GPT partition tables.
Try using gdisk -l instead of show the GPT partition table.
When I’m in a GUI, I like the Win95 UI paradigm. That’s one of the few good things that came out of Microsoft: I like the classic Windows look-and-feel. That’s why I run Mint / Cinnamon. I’ve tried minimalistic tiling window managers and I can’t stand them.
However - and that’s the weird thing - most of what I do in Cinnamon is open terminals with tmux that I… tile. And within one tmux pane or window, there’s a very good chance I’ll run vim with several files edited in split screens 🙂
I spend 75% of my time working in a terminal - sometimes in a real Linux console, but most of the time in a Cinnamon terminal. And I’ll do the minimalistic thing within the terminal because that’s how I’ve been rolling since the early eighties and it’s just how my workflow is most efficient. But I really like the Windows-like graphical environment around the terminals. Call me weird…
This question reads a bit to me like someone asking, “Why do trapeze artists perform above nets? If they were good at what they did they shouldn’t fall off and need to be caught.”
Do you really need a firewall? Well, are you intimately familiar with every smidgeon of software on your machine, not just userland ones but also system ones, and you understand perfectly under which and only which circumstances any of them open any ports, and have declared that only the specific ports you want open actually are at every moment in time? Yes? You’re that much of a sysadmin god? Then no, I guess you don’t need a firewall.
If instead you happen to be mortal like the rest of us who don’t read and internalize the behaviors of every piddly program that runs or will ever possibly run on our systems, you can always do what we do for every other problem that is too intensive to do manually: script that shit. Tell the computer explicitly which ports it can and cannot open.
Luckily, you don’t even have to start from scratch with a solution like that. There are prefab programs that are ready to do this for you. They’re called firewalls.
Tell the computer explicitly which ports it can and cannot open.
Isn’t this all rather moot if there is even one open port, though? Say, for example, that you want to mitigate outgoing connections from potential malware that gets installed onto your device. You set a policy to drop all outgoing packets in your firewall; however, you want to still use your device for browsing the web, so you then allow outgoing connections to DNS (UDP, and TCP port 53), HTTP (TCP port 80), and HTTPS (TCP port 443). What if the malware on your device simply pipes its connections through one of those open ports? Is there anything stopping it from siphoning data from your PC to a remote server over HTTP?
The point of the firewall is not to make your computer an impenetrable fortress. It’s to block any implicit port openings you didn’t explicitly ask for.
Say you install a piece of software that, without your knowledge, decides to spin up an SSH server and start listening on port 22. Now you have that port open as a vector for malware to get in, and you are implicitly relying on that software to fend it off. If you instead have a firewall, and port 22 is not one of your allowed ports, the rogue software will hopefully take the hint and not spin up that server.
Generally you only want to open ports for specific processes that you want to transmit or listen on them. Once a port is bound to a process, it’s taken. Malware can’t just latch on without hijacking the program that already has it bound. And if that’s your fear, then you probably have a lot of way scarier theoretical attack vectors to sweat over in addition to this.
Yes, if you just leave a port wide open with nothing bound to it, either via actually having the port reserved or by linking the process to the port with a firewall rule, and you happened to get a piece of actual malware that scanned every port looking for an opening to sneak through, sure, it could. To my understanding, that’s not typically what you’re trying to stop with a firewall.
In some regards a firewall is like a padlock. It keeps out honest criminals. A determined criminal who really wants in will probably circumvent it. But many opportunistic criminals just looking for stuff not nailed down will probably leave it alone. Is the fact that people who know how to pick locks exist an excuse to stop locking things because “it’s all pointless anyway”?
They are intro distros, sure, but don’t ever think that you have to move to anything else if you don’t want to. Mint is probably the best Linux distro there is if your goal is ease of use, support, and “it just works”. I’d say that’s more than enough for what people want in an OS. I recommend it to anyone looking to hop into Linux, be it temporarily or permanently. People jump into other distros for specific use cases or because they feel like fucking around with something…but that’s absolutely not required or necessary to be a Linux user or advocate.
I bought my wife an HP Stream 13 some years back. It came with Windows 8 installed. Which worked just fine until updates bloated it so much it literally took up the entire (paltry) SSD. Windows 10 came out and it offered a free upgrade, which would have been smaller. Unfortunately, every time I tried to do that, it just complained it didn’t have the space to make the switch. I rolled it back to an older Windows 8 and disabled updates to try and keep using it. It complained constantly. I finally deleted the shit out of Windows and installed Lubuntu. It’s worked since then without issue.
As someone on the edge of making the change myself, I have been enjoying these posts because I have been getting to learn some of the different distros and there pros and cons. Lemmy isn’t insanely active right now, so you get a different group of perspectives with each iteration of the question.
Maybe once lemmy gets bigger we can break off these sorts of questions into their own catalog but for now I think they are doing more good than harm here.
Just my two cents tho, obviously you have the right to disagree :)
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