Iāve been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. Iāve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could...
Arch is actually not as bad as many say. Itās pretty stable nowadays, I even run Arch on some servers and I never had any issues.
Not even just nowadays. My desktop is running a nearly 10 year old install. Itās so old, it not only predates the installer, it predates the ātraditionalā way and used the old TUI installer. It even predates the sysvinit to systemd switch! The physical computer has been ship of thesisād twice.
Arch is surprisingly reliable. Itās not āstableā as in things change and you have to update some configs or even your own software. But itās been so reliable I never even felt the need to go look elsewhere. It just works.
Even my Arch servers have been considerably more reliable and maintenance-free than the thousands I manage at work with lolbuntu on them. Arch does so little on its own, thereās less to go wrong. Meanwhile the work boxes canāt even update GRUB noninteractively, every now and then we have a grub update that pops a debconf screen and hangs unattended-upgrades until manually fixed and hoses up apt as a whole.
How is it unrelated? Running MongoDB in a container so that it just works and you have a portable/reproducible dev environment is a perfectly valid approach.
We have to define what installing software even means. If you install a Flatpak, it basically does the same thing as Docker but somewhat differently. Snaps are similar.
āInstallingā software generally means any way that gets the software on your computer semi-permanently and run it. You still end up with its files unpacked somewhere, the main difference with Docker is it ships with the whole runtime environment in the form of a copy of a distroās userspace.
But fair enough, sometimes you do want to run things directly. Just pointing out itās not a bad answer, just not the one you wanted due to missing intents from your OP. Some things are so finicky and annoying to get running on the āwrongā distro that Docker is the only sensible way to install it. I run the Unifi controller in a container for example, because I just donāt want to deal with Java versions and MongoDB versions. It just comes with everything it needs and I donāt need to needlessly keep Java 8 around on my main system potentially breaking things that needs a newer version.
Docker is one kind of container, which itself is a set of kinds of Linux namespaces.
Itās possible to run them as if they were a virtual machine with LXC, LXD, systemd-nspawn. Those run an init system and have a whole Linux stack of their own running inside.
Docker/OCI take a different approach: we donāt really care about the whole operating system, we just want apps to run in a predictable environment. So while the container does contain a good chuck of a regular Linux installation, itās there so that the application has all the libraries it expects there. Usually network software that runs on a specified port. Basically, āworks on my machineā becomes āhereās my whole machine with the app on it already configuredā.
And then we were like well this is nice, but what if we have multiple things that need to talk to eachother to form a bigger application/system? And thatās where docker-compose and Kubernetes pods comes in. They describe a set of containers that form a system as a single unit, and links them up together. In the case of Kubernetes, itāll even potentially run many many copies of your pod across multiple servers.
The last one is usually how dev environments go: one of them have all your JS tooling (npm, pnpm, yarn, bun, deno, or all of them even). Thatās all it does, so you canāt possibly have a Python library that conflicts or whatever. And you canāt accidentally depend on tools you happen to have installed on your machine because then the container wonāt have it and it wonāt work, youāre forced to add it to the container. Then thatās used to build and run your code, and now you need a database. You add a MongoDB container to your compose, and now your app and your database are managed together and you can even access the other containers by their name! Now you need a web server to run it in a browser? Add NGINX.
All isolated, so you canāt be in a situation where one project needs node 16 and an old version of mongo, but another one needs 20 and a newer version of mongo. You donāt care, each have a mongo container with the exact version required, no messing around.
Typically you donāt want to use Docker as a VPS though. You certainly can, but the overlay filesystems will become inefficient and it will drift very far from the base image. LXC and nspawn are better tools for that and donāt use image stacking or anything like that. Just a good olā folder.
Thatās just some applications of namespaces. All of process, network, time, users/groups, filesystems/mount can be independently managed so many namespaces can be in the same network namespace, while in different mount namespaces.
And thatās how Docker, LXC, nspawn, Flatpak, Snaps are kinda all mostly the same thing under the hood and why itās a very blurry line which ones you consider to be isolation layers, just bundled dependencies, containers, virtual machines. Itās got an infinite number of ways you can set up the namespaces the ranges from seeing /tmp as your own personal /tmp to basically a whole VM.
It indeed doesnāt, its purpose is to show the differences and clarify why/where OP might have heard you need special care for portable installs on USB sticks.
All the guides and tutorials out there are overwhelmingly written with regular USB sticks in mind and not M.2 enclosures over USB. So theyāll tell you to put as much stuff on tmpfs as possible and avoid all unnecessary reads and writes.
Well thereās your mistake: using VMware on a Linux host.
QEMU/KVM is where itās at on Linux, mostly because itās built into the kernel a bit like Hyper-V is built into Windows. So it integrates much better with the Linux host which leads to fewer problems.
Ubuntu imho is unstable in and of itself because of the frequent updates so Iām looking for another distro that prioritizes stability.
Maybe, but itās still Linux. Thereās always an escape hatch if the Ubuntu packages donāt cut it. But I manage thousands of Ubuntu servers, some of which are very large hypervisors running hundreds of VMs each, and they also run Ubuntu and work just fine.
Itāll definitely run Kali well, Windows will be left without hardware acceleration for 2D/3D so itāll be a little laggy but itās usable.
VMware has its own driver that converts enough DirectX for Windows to run smoother and not fall back to the basic VGA path.
But VMware being proprietary software, changing distro wonāt make it better so itās either you deal with the VMware bugs or you deal with stable but slow software rendering Windows.
That said on the QEMU side, itās possible to attach one of your hostās GPUs to the VM, where it will get full 3D acceleration. Many people are straight up gaming in competitive online games, in a VM with QEMU. If you have more than one GPU, even if itās an integrated GPU + a dedicated one like is common with most Intel consumer non-F CPUs, you can make that happen and itās really nice. Well worth buying a used GTX 1050 or RX 540 if your workflow depends on a Windows VM running smoothly. Be sure your CPU and motherboard support it properly before investing though, it can be finicky, but so awesome when it works.
On Vista and up, thereās only the Display Only Driver (DOD) driver which gets resolutions and auto resizing to work, but itās got no graphical acceleration in itself.
Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
It is very unfortunate. Itās fine to point out problems, but then when you become part of the problem, thatās not amazing.
Heās had the same meltdown with fuse2 being deprecated in favor of fuse3 which, guess what, also broke AppImage and we had a huge rant for that too.
Flatpak has a better chance of being forward compatible for the foreseeable future. Linux generally isnāt a very ABI/API compatible platform because for the most part youāre expected to be able to patch and recompile whatever you might want.
Yeah, itās not really advertised as an init system anymore. Itās an entire system management suite, and when seen from that angle, itās pretty good at it too. All of it is consistent, itās fairly powerful, and itās usually 10-20 lines of unit files to describe what you want. I wanted that for a long time.
I feel like the hate always comes from the people that treat the UNIX philosophy like religion. And even then, systemd is very modular, just also well integrated together: networkd manages my network, resolved manages my DNS, journald manages my logs, timesyncd manages my NTP, logind manages my logins and sessions, homed mounts my users profiles on demand.
Added complexity, yes, but Iāve been using the hell out of it. Start services when a specific peripheral is plugged in? Got it. Automatically assign devices to seats? Logindās got you covered, donāt even need to mess with xorg configs. VM network? networkd handles it. DNS caching? Out of the box. Split DNS? One command. Donāt want 2000 VMs rotating their logs at exactly midnight and trashing your ceph cluster? Yep just slap a RandomizedDelaySec=24h to the units. Isolate and pin a VM to dedicated cores dynamically? Yep itāll do that. Services that needs to run on a specific NUMA node to stay close to PCIe peripherals? Yep easy. All very easily configurable with things like Ansible or bash provisioning scripts.
Sure it may not be for everybody, but it solves real problems real Linux admins have to deal with at scale. If you donāt like it, sysvinit still works just fine and I heard good things about runit too. Itās an old and tired argument, itās been over 10 years, we can stop whining about it and move on. Thereās plenty of non-systemd distros to use.
Title. ālmao internet pointsā and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as ābadā this easily? Do folks in here are really that needy of self-validation, even if it means seeking such from something completely insignificant like...
I expected this to be āanother one of thoseā but actually from what my instance has about you, you were indeed correct. Gaming distros with exclusive features lmao.
IMO thatās some of the gamer logic bleeding over in the Linux side, now that Linux gaming is taking off. Theyāll do anything including install dubious Linux distros barely hanging together with duct tape for a perceived extra 2 FPS. Download software exclusively distributed on Discord? Hell yeah. Iām sure at least one of them boots with mitigations=off and itās not clearly indicated that it does.
Weāre seeing the same thing on the Windows side with modified Windows ISOs like the whole AtlasOS, that rightfully made some security experts sound the alarm. Some did things like completely strip off the updates, antivirus and firewall. Unless your system is exclusively running Steam and firewalled off the network, this is a certified bad idea.
Iād probably trust Nobara because the guy clearly knows his shit, but some of them really are just some other guyās riced up Arch snapshot. They may give the impression everything just works at first but Iāve definitely seen examples of it falling apart. Even bigger distros like Pop_OS! had major snafus like the whole Steam uninstalls your DE thing, and Manjaro still fucks up something basic every now and then. I tried some of them in a VM and they didnāt even install or boot correctly. Oh my fault that one only works for NVIDIA graphics cards not AMD, my bad.
Itās not worth arguing, itās a user base with vastly different goals than I do, just let them have their Bedrock Linux completely blow up in multi package manager hell and soon enough theyāll come running for a saner more reliable distro.
They come and go. Theyāre random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and thatās it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
Then just donāt start a community on a small one.
Iām a minuscule instance. Thatās fine. I like that I have control over it, how itās maintained and updated. If I want to convert it to Mbin because I like it more, I can. I know for sure itās going to live at least as long as Iām interested in the fediverse. Nobody can take it away from me.
Big instances are expensive to run, and in a way, theyāre not exactly immune to shutting down and big instances shutting down have a much bigger impact than a small one with few communities when they go poof.
You shouldnāt need sudo for this. Whatās probably happening is the Makefile you end up running doesnāt do what you think it does at all and ends up clearing header files to rebuild them then dies.
Removing sudo will at least give you an indication of whatās going on by the means of permission errors. Find out why itās trying to modify files it shouldnāt. And itās also a great example of why you shouldnāt compile anything as root, not even for building packages. Not even building kernel modules requires root, only installing them and loading them.
But at the same time, they do offer increased security when they work correctly. Itās like saying we shouldnāt use virtualization anymore because historically some virtual devices have been exploitable in a way that you could escape the VM. Or lately, Spectre/Meltdown. Or a bit of an older one, Rowhammer.
Sometimes, security measures open a hole while closing many others. Thatās how software works unfortunately, especially in something as complex as the Linux kernel.
Using namespaces and keeping your system up to date is the best you can do as a user. Or maybe add a layer of VM. But no solution is foolproof, if you really need that much security use multiple devices, ideally airgapped ones whenever possible.
I moved over to Wayland full time a couple of weeks ago (using KDE on Arch). I have finally rid myself of any X11 hangups apart from one. Latte will NOT respect my primary screen when changing monitor arrangement (ie. turning my projector on and off) and seems to randomly pick a screen to call the primary....
Maybe you can set up a KWin window rule to force Latte to be where you want it to be?
Not that Plasma panels work that much better than Latte in that regard, they still sometimes shift monitors just because something is plugged in (not even enabled, just plugged in!)
I really wish we could pin things to the exact monitor via its physical port location or serial number or something from EDID.
The only advice I have is to try to make it interesting for them and not just additional practical information they have to memorize. You donāt want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them whatās cool about it, and also accept maybe theyāll just stick with Windows for now.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that thereās many ways of doing the same thing and none is āthe correct and only wayā. They should learn to think critically, navigate unfamiliar user interfaces, learn some more general concepts and connect the dots on how things work, and that computers are logical machines, they donāt just do random things because theyāre weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesnāt necessarily benefit them immediately.
Maybe set up a computer or VM with all sorts of WMs and DEs with the express permission to wreck it if they want, or a VM they can set up (even better if they learn they can make their own VMs as well!). Probably have some games on there as well. Maybe tour some old operating systems for the historical context of how we got where we are today. Show them how you can make the computers do things via a terminal and it does the same thing as in the GUI. Show different GUIs, different file managers, different text/document editors, maybe different DEās, maybe even tiling vs floating. What is a file, how are ways you can organize them, how you can move them around, how some programs can open other programās files.
Teach them the computer works for them not the other way around. They can make the computer do literally anything they want if they wish so. But itās okay to use other peopleās stuff too.
I have installed Bitwarden through its AppImage, and added a .desktop file to run it easily (and also to use a themed icon). Unfortunately, each time an update comes out, I need to manually update the file since it points directly to the older version...
Isnāt that kind of AppImageās whole thing, to behave like Mac apps that you just double click on regardless of where they are, and not have a package manager?
Iād go for the Flatpak if you want it to be managed and updated.
We went from distro packages to Flatpak to bare files and circling back to reinventing the package managerā¦
Hello everyone, I need help choosing my first distro. I want to be able to run Audio software for editing and mixing. So I need also VST plug ins and others. Currently I use Windows 10, and Reaper....
As an aside, distro doesnāt matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isnāt quite as bad as it used to be, but linux-rt will be able to guarantee low latency processing without dropouts. Also worth tuning/hardcoding latencies in JACK or PipeWire if the audio delay is too big out of the box.
I always see new GTK apps popup on Flathub. I dont really care and think GTK looks fancy, although CSD suck a bit and they waste space and often functionality....
C bindings and APIs generally work much better in Rust because the language works a lot more like C than it does C++.
Qt depends a lot on C++ class inheritance, and even does some preprocessing of C++ files to generate code in those classes. Thatās obviously not possible when using Rust. And it looks like you need a fair bit of unsafe there and there to use it at all too.
Meanwhile, GTK being a C library, its integration with Rust is much more transparent and nice.
So if youāre making a GUI Rust app, youāre just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. Itās significantly easier and nicer.
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying āwhat do you think of my stick?ā, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...
At this point there should probably be a generic ājust ask random questions for other Lemmy usersā community to direct those people to. People donāt seem to get that this one is similar to AskReddit in purpose, but Lemmy is small so thereās no immediately obvious general communities.
Wanting to improve my Linux skills after 17 months of daily driving Linux
Iāve been daily driving Linux for 17 months now (currently on Linux Mint). I have got very comfortable with basic commands and many just works distros (such as Linux Mint, or Pop!_OS) with apt as the package manager. Iāve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could...
deleted_by_author
How to use a portable SSD for a travel OS with Linux?
Hello! The TL;DR is:...
Which distro in your opinion is the best for virtualization (Windows 10 on either KVM or VMware), stability, and speed?
Flatpack, appimage, snaps..
Appimage for me ticks all the boxes for cross distro package as its very portable, simple to run, what are devs trying to do when creating snaps and flatpack?
Fedora 40 Will Enable Systemd Service Security Hardening (fedoraproject.org)
Summary...
Alright, I'm gonna "take one for the team" -- what is with the "downvote-happy" users lately?
Title. ālmao internet pointsā and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as ābadā this easily? Do folks in here are really that needy of self-validation, even if it means seeking such from something completely insignificant like...
What is the point of small instances?
They come and go. Theyāre random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and thatās it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
deleted_by_author
Can someone explain user namespaces and risks to me? - Infosec.Pub (infosec.pub)
does this car run a Linux distribution?? (lemmy.world)
I want to know please, because if it does, I will get a drivers license!!
Lemmy reboot frequency
Hello fellow Lemmyers or what ever we are!...
whats your november wifi usage??
Around 30% of all internet traffic is pornography. And you all know its no-nut november....
What dock do you use in Wayland?
I moved over to Wayland full time a couple of weeks ago (using KDE on Arch). I have finally rid myself of any X11 hangups apart from one. Latte will NOT respect my primary screen when changing monitor arrangement (ie. turning my projector on and off) and seems to randomly pick a screen to call the primary....
Any experience with teaching kids Linux?
Any one here has any experience with teaching 8 to 12 years old kids Linux?
Cleanest way to maintain AppImage installations? (lemmy.ml)
I have installed Bitwarden through its AppImage, and added a .desktop file to run it easily (and also to use a themed icon). Unfortunately, each time an update comes out, I need to manually update the file since it points directly to the older version...
Help me decide my first distro for Audio.
Hello everyone, I need help choosing my first distro. I want to be able to run Audio software for editing and mixing. So I need also VST plug ins and others. Currently I use Windows 10, and Reaper....
Why are there so many (rust) GTK apps and so little Qt ones?
I always see new GTK apps popup on Flathub. I dont really care and think GTK looks fancy, although CSD suck a bit and they waste space and often functionality....
Systemd Homed users and what does 'login' mean?
From homectl:...
Low effort posts
Ask Lemmy is a place to ask thought provoking questions. The mods have been lenient with some of the recent posts on the basis that they must provoke thought for some people, but after seeing two posts essentially saying āwhat do you think of my stick?ā, I believe we can raise the bar a bit on what kind of thoughts we want...