Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Nah, that’s when the fun really starts! ;)
The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos.
:D That one is a classic. Most distributions don’t include packagers from other distros because 99% of the time it’s a bad idea. But with Arch you can do whatever you want, of course
My two things:
I’ve heard about some new coreutils (rm, cp, cat… this time the name really fits the contents :D) and I decided to test it out. Of course it was conflicting with my current coreutils package and I couldn’t just replace it because deleting the old package would break requirements. So without thinking I forced the package manager to delete it “I’ll install a new one in just a second”. Turns out it’s hard to install a package without cp, etc :D
I don’t remember what I was doing but I overwrote the first bytes of hdd. Meaning my partition table disappeared. Nothing could be mounted, no partitions found. Seemingly a brick.
Turns out, if you run a rescue iso, ask it to try and recognize partitions and recreate the table without formatting, Linux will come back to life as if nothing happened
My least favourites are probably ubuntu and manjaro, not so much because of the distros themselves but the organizations behind them being a bit dodge.
I was considering Foot, it is fast (renderwise and in interactive use) and the dev seems like an awesome person. But it doesn’t support ligatures. I’ll watch the issue and give it a shot when it’s implemented.
That’s fair. I don’t think I personally use ligatures anywhere and I’m not experiencing any issues with foot after using it for a few years so I might just have to stay blissfully ignorant on this one ;)
The only practical thing they provide for me is slightly better readability, and eye candy (my prompt rely on them). I like my shells functional and pretty 😁
Sorry if this is a dumb question, I’m still very new to Linux. I have Wine 8 installed, currently just to run one application for one of my games. Should I bother to update to 9 if my current setup is working? I’m still adjusting to the FOSS environment and haven’t quite figured out whether or not I should always update to the latest and greatest just because I can.
If it works and you are still figuring things out, I suggest not taking specific action right now. Use your package manager to keep your system up to date and it will deal with this in due time.
A lot of the time the version of wine will cause issues with the application, so if you have something working, stick with it.
It would be worthwhile to look into a wine prefix manager like lutris or bottles for gaming. Regular apps can benefit also, but I am not up to speed on anything not for gaming.
Thanks for the advice! The application I’m using in Wine is Elite Dangerous Market Connector, nota game itself but a small helper app for the Elite Dangerous game. According to the git page, you can get it running from source with Python, but I wasn’t quite skilled enough to get that working.
As far as my actual games go, those seem to all run fine through Steam/Heroic Games Launcher with Proton GE edition, which as I understand it incorporates Wine somehow…? I’m not sure of the specifics, but I assumed Wine in that context would get updated with Proton eventually.
Right, those are the instructions I tried to follow, but had issues in the “running from source” process. I did eventually get it running, but I’d get errors and nothing would work once I tried to start adding the plugins I wanted.
Wow, that’s a huge difference. I wonder if it’s just a niche case that fixes Terraria specifically, it would be nice to see more benchmarks on other games.
I would say that is a false dichotomy. Almost everyone agrees that X11 isn’t the future but the support for Wayland and the specific ways it does things, is not nearly as universal as that. It is just that the problem is huge and has already taken 15 years or so and so it looks like if we want some alternative to X11 that will be done any time soon Wayland is unfortunately the only game in town, no matter how flawed it is.
I’m not a Wayland fan by any stretch, but I’ve come to the same confusion you did. And so has almost everyone else. Which is the real point of my comment I guess.
I think the main problem is that Wayland is not a drop in replacement.
Every software needs to support Wayland, new environment flags need to be created, flags must be used with electron apps…
Nvidia support has been spotty and some functionality has not yet been implemented. I use a custom .xcompose file, which doesn’t work on electron apps. Let me know if there’s a better way to mimic window’s dead keys.
Overall, it’s hard for an end user to change from a solution that is working perfectly to a solution that requires a ton of work and doesn’t yet have the same functionality.
Everyone can understand that Wayland is the future but depending on your needs and hardware the current experience can be great or terrible.
Sure but as someone starting with a new system Wayland just works. Example multitouch works right away on Wayland and if I remember correctly needs configuration on x11.
I had to set a ton more. Without the ozone flags my electron apps flicker and have this sync problem that appears to eat letters while I type them. Different electron apps use different configuration files, it’s a mess.
I wouldn’t consider my setup to be complex enough for the amount of trouble I had to make the system work under Wayland.
I’m using an Nvidia GPU, I’m sure things would be more streamlined if I had something else.
A switch from X11 to Wayland is not just a minor change to your workflow though unless you used all defaults before.
It requires you to replace your window manager, all the little tools related to things like clipboard, automation, screen locking,…
And you would have to do pretty much all of that up front to be able to use Wayland long enough to know if it even works on a permanent basis for you. That is a lot of work to put into a project that has a sketchy history of people claiming for nearly a decade now that it works just fine for everything while clearly not working fine for all use cases.
The point wasn’t so much that there are no replacements, more that every script and every shortcut and everything else using them will have to be changed to work with the Wayland alternative.
The problem that could occur is: Right now Microsoft doesn’t care about Linux or competitors, every OEM has to buy a Windows key anyways regardless. If SteamOS actually becomes a shippable option, Microsoft’s cavalier attitude is going to change quickly, and a lot sooner than it will take them to get an Xbox Handheld out the door.
I don’t understand how that’s a problem. Can you go into a little bit more detail about what you think the consequences might be to manufacturers choosing to use Steam OS or some other Linux operating system on their handheld devices?
The Linux Kernel version is at 6 point something, I think they’re working on version 7. That’s not the OS though, the current Ubuntu version under LTS is 22.04. That’s more than twice as much as Windows.
Note I had to get this information from Wikipedia because Ubuntu’s website is currently unusable corporate garbagepuke.
Correct; the minor number is also the month. Which is why they’re almost always .04 or .10; the LTS version is always released in April, with non-LTS releases that serve a similar purpose to Debian Unstable (newer package base at the possible expense of more bugs) are released in October. They also have a convoluted codename system, as many point release distros do.
You’re not wrong about their website, but it still only took 2 clicks to get that information. For reference, I can’t find it at all on Debian’s website without clicking download and looking at the version number in the filename. But you can get that in one click so I suppose they’re doing better.
Edit: Sorry, I was wrong, you can see it under the Microsoft Azure section after one click:
For me the turning point was when a failed Windows forced upgrade ended up deleting me important files. I had backups, but I lost days of work because Microsoft felt so insecure in the face of piracy that they had to upgrade my computer despite me constantly telling them not to do so.
That was around 10 years ago. I went through various KDE distros; in the end I settled for Kubuntu.
The recent developments in KDE plasma are excellent. I haven’t had to open a command prompt in years. I hadn’t had a tech problem until this year when my tmp folder got full.
I’m from the other side, though. I’m a developer and systems administrator on Kubuntu and I live by the command line. I use yakuake, which is totally awesome, and have about 50 or so shells open pretty much permanently, all nicely tucked away in tabs and sub sections in a programmable drop down that automatically starts all those command line shells when my computer boots. It’s pure awesomeness, Linus os pure awesomeness!
Damn, you know, I love automation and customization, and your description sounds awesome. I certainly will jump the gap at some point, but the thought of having to relearn an entire OS and suite of tools, and inevitably make mistakes that will cost me time and -probably- multiple reinstalls discourages me quite a bit. I remember using Fedora 20-something ten years ago on my laptop and the amount of things for which I needed a terminal was overwhelming. I also remember trying to learn file management by copying/backing up files from the terminal, and ending up batch-deleting entire folders worth of pictures. I never had a reliable “readme” for learning all this, that didn’t already assume I knew all the lingo and was proficient in some programming language.
I started using powershell more because it comes with a lot of bash aliases out of the box. Besides a brief period of using ubuntu in like 2006 because my windows install got corrupted, its my first foray into linux. Ive been daily driving debian 12 and i love it. I feel like getting used to the lingo helped ease the transition.
But if you actually use powershell for more than simple tasks and take advantage of its object oriented nature, it might make the switch harder. If you plan to use the command line as little as possible i think the switch is trivial. Your biggest worry is going to be analysis paralysis with all the options, but i just installed debian with the defaults and trying out different desktop environments is really easy and i havent yet had a problem that wasnt simple to solve with a google search.
The abysmal adoption of DNSSEC is just embarrassing, and I haven’t heard any good arguments for why we shouldn’t do it. There’s one blog post that gets passed around as justification for not adopting DNSSEC, but it doesn’t really go into any technical detail and is mostly just the author saying “I’m scared of governments and TLDs”… which is maybe fair, but you still have to trust them for regular CA certs and everything, so why not make thr base secure?
Honestly, I might care slightly more about DNSSEC than IPv6 adoption… IPv4 exhaustion and NATing everywhere sucks, but the fact that you can’t trust DNS is like… insane.
I'd argue running a laptop from the 00s is the least boomer thing to do. Buying a new Macbook every two years while complaining that you don't have enough money and joking about how you're spending your kid's inheritance is the boomer thing to do.
I am still sad my laptop from 2007 (Compal FL90) died earlier this year. It was still pretty powerful, and really full of ports. I could even add USB3 ports with express card if I wanted to. And unlike with modern laptops, the keyboard had some travel.
Currently I use HP 255 G7. I wasn’t using it because that old laptop simply suited me better. It’s fine, but… I am still looking for a cheap used ThinkPad. But it does have a DVD drive, so that’s nice (yes, I do use that).
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