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 donât want to be the weird dad that insists on using stuff nobody else does, you have to show them whatâs cool about it, and also accept maybe theyâll just stick with Windows for now.
I also think the main takeaway they should have out of it is that thereâs many ways of doing the same thing and none is âthe correct and only wayâ. 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 donât just do random things because theyâre weird. Teach them the value of being able to dig into how it works even if it doesnât 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 DEâs, 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 programâs 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 itâs okay to use other peopleâs stuff too.
For me what planted the Linux seed is when I tried Mandrake Linux when I was 9-10ish. I didnât end up sticking with it for all that long, but I absolutely loved trying out all those DEs. I had downloaded the full fat 5 CD version and checked almost everything during setup, so it came jam packed with all sorts of random software to try out. The games were nice, played the shit out of Frozen Bubble. I really liked Konqueror too, coming from Internet Explorer. It was pretty snappy overall. And thereâs virtual desktops for more space! People were really helpful on IRC, even though I was asking about installing my Windows drivers in Wine. Unfortunately I kinda wanted games and my friends were getting annoyed we couldnât play games on my computer.
It stuck with me however, so later on when some of my online friends were trying it out, I wanted to try it out again too. I wasnât much into games anymore, had started coding a little bit. So on my computer went Kubuntu 7.10, and Iâm still on Linux to this day.
But that seed is what taught me thereâs more. I didnât hate Windows, I wasnât looking to replace it. I hadnât fallen in love with FOSS yet. It was cool and different and fun. It wasnât as sterile and as⊠grey as Windows 98. You could pop up some googly eyes that followed your mouse, because you could. There were all those weird DEs with all sorts of bars and features.
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?
Distro packages and to some extent Flatpaks, use shared libraries which can be updated independently of your app.
So for example, if a vulnerability is discovered in say, curl, or imagemagick, ffmpeg or whatever library an app is using: for AppImages, this wonât be fixed until you update all of your AppImages. In Flatpak, it usually can be updated as part of a dependency, or distributed as a rebuild and update of the Flatpak. With distro packages, you can usually update the library itself and be done with it already.
AppImages are convenient for the user in that you can easily store them, move them, keep old versions around forever easily. It still doesnât guarantee itâll still run in distros a couple years for now, it guarantees that a given version will forever be vulnerable if any of its dependencies are because theyâre bundled in, it makes packages that are much much bigger than they need to be, and you have to unpack/repack them if you need library shims.
Different kinds of tradeoffs and goals, essentially. Flatpak happens to be a compromise a lot of people agree on as it provides a set of distro-agnostic libraries while also not shifting the burden entirely onto the app developers. The AppImage developer is intentionally keeping Wayland broken on AppImage because he hates it and wants to fulfil his narrative that Wayland is a broken mess that wonât ever work, while Flatpak developers work hard on sandboxing and security and granular permission systems.
It is very unfortunate. Itâs fine to point out problems, but then when you become part of the problem, thatâs not amazing.
Heâs 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 isnât a very ABI/API compatible platform because for the most part youâre expected to be able to patch and recompile whatever you might want.
Iâve 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. Iâve 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. Itâs 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. Itâs so old, it not only predates the installer, it predates the âtraditionalâ way and used the old TUI installer. It even predates the sysvinit to systemd switch! The physical computer has been ship of thesisâd twice.
Arch is surprisingly reliable. Itâs not âstableâ as in things change and you have to update some configs or even your own software. But itâs 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, thereâs less to go wrong. Meanwhile the work boxes canât 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.
RAM is the kind of thing youâre better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.
The thing with RAM is that itâs easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then thereâs one thing you temporarily need a bit more and youâre screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. Iâve compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.
Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time itâs fine, because itâs a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.
RAM is cheap enough these days itâs nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.
Title. âlmao internet pointsâ and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as âbadâ 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 âanother one of thoseâ but actually from what my instance has about you, you were indeed correct. Gaming distros with exclusive features lmao.
IMO thatâs some of the gamer logic bleeding over in the Linux side, now that Linux gaming is taking off. Theyâll 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. Iâm sure at least one of them boots with mitigations=off and itâs not clearly indicated that it does.
Weâre 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.
Iâd probably trust Nobara because the guy clearly knows his shit, but some of them really are just some other guyâs riced up Arch snapshot. They may give the impression everything just works at first but Iâve 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 didnât even install or boot correctly. Oh my fault that one only works for NVIDIA graphics cards not AMD, my bad.
Itâs not worth arguing, itâs 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 theyâll come running for a saner more reliable distro.
Well thereâs your mistake: using VMware on a Linux host.
QEMU/KVM is where itâs at on Linux, mostly because itâs 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 Iâm looking for another distro that prioritizes stability.
Maybe, but itâs still Linux. Thereâs always an escape hatch if the Ubuntu packages donât 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.
On Vista and up, thereâs only the Display Only Driver (DOD) driver which gets resolutions and auto resizing to work, but itâs got no graphical acceleration in itself.
Itâll definitely run Kali well, Windows will be left without hardware acceleration for 2D/3D so itâll be a little laggy but itâs 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 wonât make it better so itâs either you deal with the VMware bugs or you deal with stable but slow software rendering Windows.
That said on the QEMU side, itâs possible to attach one of your hostâs 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 itâs an integrated GPU + a dedicated one like is common with most Intel consumer non-F CPUs, you can make that happen and itâs 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.
They come and go. Theyâre random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and thatâs it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
Then just donât start a community on a small one.
Iâm a minuscule instance. Thatâs fine. I like that I have control over it, how itâs maintained and updated. If I want to convert it to Mbin because I like it more, I can. I know for sure itâs going to live at least as long as Iâm interested in the fediverse. Nobody can take it away from me.
Big instances are expensive to run, and in a way, theyâre 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.
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.
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. Thatâs 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 youâre making a GUI Rust app, youâre just kind of better off with GTK at the moment. Itâs significantly easier and nicer.
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...
Isnât that kind of AppImageâs whole thing, to behave like Mac apps that you just double click on regardless of where they are, and not have a package manager?
Iâd 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 managerâŠ
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 doesnât matter but should make sure realtime is set up properly for the optimal latency. That usually requires the linux-rt kernel. The default one isnât 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 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.
Yeah, itâs not really advertised as an init system anymore. Itâs an entire system management suite, and when seen from that angle, itâs pretty good at it too. All of it is consistent, itâs fairly powerful, and itâs 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 Iâve been using the hell out of it. Start services when a specific peripheral is plugged in? Got it. Automatically assign devices to seats? Logindâs got you covered, donât even need to mess with xorg configs. VM network? networkd handles it. DNS caching? Out of the box. Split DNS? One command. Donât 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 itâll 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 donât like it, sysvinit still works just fine and I heard good things about runit too. Itâs an old and tired argument, itâs been over 10 years, we can stop whining about it and move on. Thereâs plenty of non-systemd distros to use.
But at the same time, they do offer increased security when they work correctly. Itâs like saying we shouldnât 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. Thatâs 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.
You shouldnât need sudo for this. Whatâs probably happening is the Makefile you end up running doesnât 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 whatâs going on by the means of permission errors. Find out why itâs trying to modify files it shouldnât. And itâs also a great example of why you shouldnât compile anything as root, not even for building packages. Not even building kernel modules requires root, only installing them and loading them.
Any experience with teaching kids Linux?
Any one here has any experience with teaching 8 to 12 years old kids Linux?
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?
Wanting to improve my Linux skills after 17 months of daily driving Linux
Iâve 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. Iâve tried Debian as a distro to try to challenge myself, but have always ran into issues. On my PC, I could...
As a normal, boring user that does nothing special other than browse the internet and the occasional "casual coding" -- what am I supposed to do with 32GiB of ram?
Title. Besides setting tmpfs to use 10GiB of it to store downloads.
Alright, I'm gonna "take one for the team" -- what is with the "downvote-happy" users lately?
Title. âlmao internet pointsâ and all, but what is the point of participating in a community that sees assumptions and other commonly non-harmful commentaries/posts as âbadâ this easily? Do folks in here are really that needy of self-validation, even if it means seeking such from something completely insignificant like...
Which distro in your opinion is the best for virtualization (Windows 10 on either KVM or VMware), stability, and speed?
What is the point of small instances?
They come and go. Theyâre random clutter. We only need a few big instances that hosts a majority of the communities and thatâs it. Why do we need so many smaller ones?
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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....
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....
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....
How to use a portable SSD for a travel OS with Linux?
Hello! The TL;DR is:...
Fedora 40 Will Enable Systemd Service Security Hardening (fedoraproject.org)
Summary...
does this car run a Linux distribution?? (lemmy.world)
I want to know please, because if it does, I will get a drivers license!!
whats your november wifi usage??
Around 30% of all internet traffic is pornography. And you all know its no-nut november....
Lemmy reboot frequency
Hello fellow Lemmyers or what ever we are!...
Systemd Homed users and what does 'login' mean?
From homectl:...
Can someone explain user namespaces and risks to me? - Infosec.Pub (infosec.pub)
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