Like most others have stated here, I’ll also add my recommendations for Linux Mint.
I have helped most of my family, relatives and several friends move and familiarize themselves with Linux Mint, especially those that do almost everything within the web browser (shopping/email/Facebook/youtube/travel reservation/etc…). Since I already was their goto tech support, I showed them around on Linux Mint and they pretty easily got going as everything was intuitively similar to Windows. All was point and click (after my initial setup with their network, peripherals, printer and some basic automatic updates configuration), no terminal voodoo magic for them.
For the younger ones I typically set them up with Pop!OS and Steam and they are ready to jump without me having to explain much. Sometimes, I had to install and help setup a server (Minecraft) so they can play with their friends.
Mind you, I would not recommend VMware as I am currently evaluating my transition options toward XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra or LXD/Incus or something else entirely.
Plug in cable to PC, go into android USB setting and switch it to file transfer instead of charging mode, it should show in your file manager as a connected USB drive. ( you can tell everyone is a linux or phone techy, everone gave the complicated merhods that didn’t address the question asked, but @OP all the other methods work also )
I have a Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS and I can never get it to find any other devices in KDE connect for some reason. Syncthing works fine though so I just use that instead.
Yeah I do have Mullvad as well but it doesn’t seem to be that. I tried split tunneling KDE connect and also just turning the VPN off altogether and it made no difference.
My current guess is either some hidden security thing in GrapheneOS that I haven’t discovered yet, or maybe some router setting that’s filtering it out? The investigation is ongoing!
I had to specifically run mullvad lan set allow in the terminal on pc and turn on “local network sharing” on the phone app specifically. If you’re not on linux idk, but if you are and haven’t tried that it could help. Though if it doesn’t work with the mullvad disabled (and “always require vpn” off on both devices) then it probably isn’t that. If it’s a graphene setting it isn’t one enabled by default, because I got a pixel 6 last week and it works fine through mullvad to use kde connect with my settings set to allow lan.
K I kind of solved it! Turns out there wasn’t a setting within the Mullvad app for “always require VPN”, but there was one in the Android system settings under VPN. If I turn that off and then split tunnel KDE connect only on the phone (not on my laptop for some unknown reason) then they can see each other.
One to file under “I don’t know why that works but I’ll take it” lol.
Of course, it’s awesome; so is GSConnect on Gnome, and syncthing is awesome, and fx on android with samba shares is great. Croc on mobile to PC, etc. just the dude asks how to use USB cable and gets recompile your kernel suggestion ( I’m being hyberbolic)
It’s probably like the Bixby button on my Samsung phone: all it does is complain I haven’t set it up yet when I accidentally push it while changing the volume.
India, Greenland, Greece and Turkey are the four countries with the fastest growth of Linux users. I’ve checked their neighbouring countries, and it looks like they are still in the 1-2% range.
India is the eye opener … an enormous market of 1.5 billion people and the majority of them are too poor to pay for any specialty OS … it’s going to turn into a futuristic dystopia down there … people living in slums but scrounging up old neglected and forgotten hardware to bring them back online with Open Source Software.
Edit: I don’t normally make big corrections or changes to my comments but after rereading this, I think I went a bit too far with my assumptions about another country and culture … thanks @embed_me for putting it to my attention
Indian here. The reason isn’t Windows’ price tag - pirated Windows is very cheap and common - but a government push to make us less dependent on foreign (i.e. US / Chinese) companies. Schools, government offices, hospitals etc. have shifted to, or are shifting to, Linux (mostly Ubuntu and Mint). This shift started over a decade ago, but the US sanctions on Russia have spooked the government into speeding things up now.
Ok as an Indian allow me to interject. The reason people use linux is not because of poverty. Even the cheapest laptops come preloaded with activated windows.
We get introduced to Linux based OSs in schools. That plus people are heavily pushed into engineering and lately computer science and software engineering.
Honestly I’m a little surprised it’s so low relative to linux. It definitely has a strong presence. I’m thinking it won’t be as popular because of the lower cost to value ratio
I was probably too hasty in my assumptions … simplistic, stereotypical maybe even a bit racist
I just thought it made economic sense … why build an entire economy or business using foreign owned software and basing it all on a foreign company, especially one with unknown loopholes that would put the company’s and country at risk by a foreign power.
Thanks for the correction and insight … I’ll be more careful about my assumptions in the future.
Also another thing you are wrong about: You may be surprised to know that the second hand market for computer electronics is non-existent. As far as I know, there are only a handful of cities in the whole country where there is a second hand local market. Cheap electronics don’t last that much and in laptops there are only so many components you can buy separately and install. (Overwhelming majority of the computers are laptops, not the traditional CPU towers)
Also another thing I failed to mention is, the government tried to make a distro for govt use at one point but idk if anything came out of that. But I want to say there’s definitely a growing presence of linux here
It was not so common to use linux in schools in other states and in kerala, all government schools use a Kite Ubuntu which is fork of lts ubuntu. Its like the law to use free software for education in kerala. Me also got introduced to linux from school so i expected you are from kerala too. And Free software is most popular in kerala afaik.
The intensity of free software user group in kerala shows it too fsug.in
Yes, of course, the sockets are the answer to everything (and BTW, d-bus uses sockets as well, e.g. /run/dbus/system_bus_socket on my current system), but the problem is no standard for the communication over these sockets (or where is the socket located). For example, X11 developed one system of communicating over their socket, but it was used just by few X11 programs, and everybody else had their other system of communication. And even if an app found some socket, there was absolutely no standard how exactly should programs communicate over it. How to send more than just plain ASCII strings? Each program had to write their own serialization/deserialization code, their own format for marshalling binary data, etc. Now there is just one standard for those protocols, and even libraries with the standard (and well tested) code for it.
Are you talking about wlr-randr? Because its –transform argument only accepts normal|90|180|270|flipped|flipped-90|flipped-180|flipped-270, not any transformation matrix. Maybe its just a limitation of the command line tool and it could be modified, I don’t know, I haven’t been too deep in the code or the protocol specifications. It also looks like it only works with wlroots based compositor.
I’m hoping their translation software ends up supporting Chinese/Japanese. Also come to Android please! Hopefully on Android in and out of reader mode.
Skimmed over the whole article – I wish this had been available back when I was trying to piece together the basics from the documentation. There really needs to be a 2nd part, though, with some discussion of the GVariant signatures, which the author says were ‘beyond the scope of’ this article – which is true; nevertheless, understanding that syntax (and how to use it e.g. with gdbus) is an absolute requirement for using dbus properly; and as a silly amateur, I lost so much time over them.
Install stuff, try and make it better but end up breaking it horribly, and then spend time fixing it. This is how I’ve learned everything over the years.
I distro hopped for a few years but eventually settled on Arch over a decade ago. It was a lot more difficult to install back then, but it will still get you comfortable with the CLI if you’re not comfortable with it already. Also, if you don’t know already, Arch pretty much has the best Wiki available and it works with almost all distros since most only differ in package management.
I actually got heavy into Linux during my freshman year of college (2004) back when Linux wasn’t supported for most things, so I wiped Windows off of my PC, and forced myself to use Ubuntu for 2 months, which required me to figure out how to install WINE and Microsoft Office. It was a pain, and after two months I put Windows back on it for dual-boot and ease of use purposes but largely used Linux once I got over the learning hump.
I’d suggest setting up a Level 1 hypervisor like VMware or Proxmox so that you can have multiple things running at once independent of each other, but a Level 2 hypervisor like KVM works just as well, but you have to make sure that you don’t break the host OS somehow hahaha
I’ve never seen an error that just says “bad platform”.
Fixing computer problems is essentially just being good at searching for stuff related to your problem. For example in your problem it would just be googling “Linux bad platform ≤name of game>” and guaranteed someone else has had the same problem and either them or someone else has figured out a fix for it. You then apply that fix, if that doesn’t work, try the next result. If it gives you a new problem, rinse and repeat.
Look up the XKCD comic about fixing a computer, that’s literally how we do it. My dad asked me a similar question to yours, I literally printed out the comic and taped it next to the computer and said “this is what I do”.
About 2 years ago (I’ve been working from home for the past 3 years, a week here or there was spent at my parents), years after I had printed out that comic, he said “I just realized that your job is essentially knowing how to look for the information you need and how to apply it when you find it”. He’s an electrician, so not really the same set of skills haha.
yeah, you’re right. The magic for me is when you dealt so much with this that you just know common errors (like reading java errors). And the bad part is when the google it part doesn’t work.
like recently I figured out that my mouse sends different packets wired and wireless. long story short wireless works bad. And I only found one source, that led to another([1], [2], [3]) but got to lazy caz I just plug my mouse in and the problem is gone, lol
Yeah, you run into common (or uncommon but repeatable) errors often that you’re either like “I know exactly how to handle this” or “I remember running into this before but just need to jog my memory real quick…”
I had a similar odd issue with my HDDs. I had 20 HDDs in my system of various ages, and they would seemingly randomly throw shit tons of R/W checksum errors and drop out of its assigned zpool. It was almost never the same drive. SMART said the drive was perfectly fine. It would happen on brand new drives I got a week ago and drives that were years old. I swapped power cables, SATA/SAS controllers (three different HBAs and 3 onboard controllers) and cables, bought a UPS, etc… and nothing seemed to work. I didn’t think it was a PSU issue since I had a 1.5 KW PSU and my Kill-A-Watt meter was only showing about 600w at full load. This took literal months of troubleshooting. Someone on Reddit finally suggested trying another PSU or limiting the amount of drives attached to the PSU. I bought a cheap 400w PSU and connected about 8 drives to that… and all the errors stopped.
It turns out that there wasn’t enough power supplied on the 5v rails to write the data without errors 100% of the time, but it had enough power supplied on the 12v rail to spin all the motors. First time in 25 years I’d ever seen that, but that was also the first time I’ve ever had like 20 drives connected to one PSU. I was literally about to throw in the towel because drives dropped out on a daily basis, but after like 2 or 3 total dropped no more usually failed.
Oh wow, I feel for you. I bet when u did solve it it felt wonderful. That’s the high I’m chasing with software at least.
also side note, as I feel like this thread is over: DANG I love this platform. I’m not even alive for 20 years and your not the first guy on here who gives me free advice from 20+ years of experience. This shit is pure gold for someone who wants to learn. And it’s not even like I’m here to use people, I stayed because how kind and helpful everyone is.
Anyone who reads this in the future, you’re the good side of the internet. I’m showing some threads to my friends from time to time and if it’s more then 3 sentences they’re like “ah, wall of text, I ain readin allat”.
Yeah it was a massive relief! I’m always willing to help and share all of the knowledge I’ve gained over the years, gotta make use of it somehow! Back when I was your age I felt the same way, I was part of a private hacking/security community and dudes would spout out stuff about Linux, Windows, and network tech that I had no idea about and I was always thinking “I aim to be like you some day” 😊
Yeah actually somewhat of a related experience I been using Linux for 3 years, 2-3 months on Ubuntu then manjaro one week and skipped next to arch till now ( hopped into nix and artix for a while too ).
The experience I have i gained through installing arch from scratch fixing things playing with Wayland and pipewire from the early days.
I am bit scared is of the edge cases, I have a software engineering background, or actually I still into it and was looking for some sources fro the most common problems and how to diagnosi edge case ones.
Yeah, I really only started to learn, when I started resisting the urge to reinstall everything if something goes wrong and instead start trying to properly fix it.
I would always crawl back to Windows, so that’s why I forced myself to just use Linux and force myself to fix everything that popped up, that was the key moment.
Although I’m not surprised, it is interesting that the same big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft taking stances on being “environmentally conscious” while also ignoring forced obsoletion of old hardware. Your average office environment just needs basic email, document/excel editing software and a browser. Now to continue to do these base functions, they have to buy new PCs to do the same exact thing. And it’s not even faster anymore due to the bloat.
If tech wants to preach about the environment, they best start figuring out ways to keep computers out of the landfills.
Was it EVER faster though? My experience with Windows has always been that they release new versions based on upcoming hardware specs and unless you spend top-dollar on the very latest hardware for their next release, you are going to see things moving slower on the new desktop. That’s one of things I’ve enjoyed about linux, you can pretty much always upgrade the OS on an older machine without concern of taking a hit on the performance, and sometimes you even get a boost.
Although I’m not surprised, it is interesting that the same big tech companies like Apple and Microsoft taking stances on being “environmentally conscious” while also ignoring forced obsoletion of old hardware.
That’s purely greenwashing marketing hype, with Apple being the worst offender. Now Microsoft seems to be following in their footsteps, although they’re still better in this regard than Apple.
I personally like rust, so I get excited when cool things are done with it because each one makes rust just that much bigger, which leads to it being made that much better.
I see projects like that as more of a statement that “rust can do it” than anything.
I want the newest, best software. Is that uncommon? Modern rewrites are often much better than their age-old counterparts since the tech got better over time, compare for example grep vs ripgrep, or find vs fd. The rewrites are much faster and user-friendlier
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.