Perhaps it’s useful to provide some clarification here. As the other user stated, Linux is set up for multi-user setups and provides logical protection, but you seem to misunderstand how operating systems and file permissions work.
If someone steals your unencrypted hard drive and boots into their own operating system, they are able to circumvent all access control and permissions on your hard drive. This is because when they mount your hard drive your operating system isn’t running; they’re simply reading the stored data, so the access control and permissions set up by your operating system don’t mean anything. This happens with ALL operating systems (Linux, BSD, Windows, MacOS, etc.). Logical protection like access control is only useful while the OS is running, and it cannot help otherwise.
This is why encryption is important, because it prevents unauthorized access when the OS isn’t running. If you’d like to see just how easy it is to access unencrypted data, make a live USB and boot into it on any unencrypted computer (assuming you have permission to do so if you don’t own the computer). You don’t even need to extract the hard drive in most cases to read file contents, you can simply boot into a live USB. The only situation where this isn’t the case is when USB booting is disabled in the BIOS and the BIOS is password protected, but you could always just remove the CMOS battery to clear the settings to bypass the BIOS password anyway.
Unencrypted data will always be trivial to retrieve when the attacker is allowed physical access to your computer.
Void Linux with musl. I wanted to try setting up a distro with Musl, but many things I use daily simply don’t work with it, and the hassle of troubleshooting everything was a bit too much. I went back to Fedora Workstation, and I’ll likely stay on it for my workstation (though I’ll switch to Fedora Kinoite when Fedora 40 releases). I also use Fedora Server for my personal server, since it’s very familiar to me, and there’s not a huge point in switching to CentOS anymore with the recent changes, so I’ll probably just stick to it.
Just to clarify, the error you are seeing in the firmware updater and privacy settings are because your motherboard does not support UEFI, and instead uses legacy BIOS. There is no way to fix that without upgrading your hardware, and it shouldn’t be related to your issue, but it may be an issue for anticheat in certain games.
On an unrelated note, you should really upgrade your motherboard and CPU if you have the chance, as those will be massive bottlenecks to performance. Your GPU is way overpowered for those components, so you aren’t getting the most out of it. But that likely isn’t related to the issue you are currently facing, I just wanted to mention it if you have grievances with the performance of your current computer.
The post explains them quite well. HRIR (Head-Related Impulse Response) and SOFA (Spacially Oriented Format for Acoustics) are standards for representing spacial audio (surround sound) in audio files and streams. A convolver is something that performs convolution (a mathematical term for taking one function, applying it to another, and then producing a third function as a result), and a spatializer is more specifically something that, as the name suggests, gives “space” to audio (distorting audio to represent sounds coming from more than simply 2 directions, or again, what you call surround sound). So HRIR Convolver is simply a method to apply the HRIR function to audio to represent it in a way our brain would interpret as 3D audio, and SOFA Spatializer is simply a method to do the same thing, just with the SOFA standard instead of the HRIR standard. Based on the comments of the post, it seems that they recommend you use SOFA.
In either case, Pipewire supports both standards, and it is trivially easy to implement them through filters (as the post covers in depth). You could try both if you want and see which you prefer. If you’re unfamiliar with managing Pipewire and need further resources, the Arch wiki has an entry in great length about it here. I’d recommend reading the comments to that post first if you struggle with anything, such as persistence. Everything you need to set it up should be accessible in that post and its comments.
I’d also like to recommend that you read the post and comments to the post, or simply use a search engine if you come across unfamiliar terms. You can find answers to all the questions you’ve asked through the linked post and a simple search.
1984.hosting is great, I’ve been using their service for a couple of years now. They’re based in Iceland (really strong privacy laws) and have options for crypto payment if you don’t want to reveal yourself through your payment method. As with all registrars, they’ll need an email address (or alias) to reach you at in case there’s a domain dispute, and while they also ask for address and phone number, they’ve never had me actually verify anything beyond the email. If you give a fake address and phone number, then you’ll just need to understand that if someone challenges your domain, it will be very difficult for you to prove ownership with fake details (not as if that’s likely to happen unless you’re allowing the site to be crawled by a search engine though). I only have a domain through them, not a hosted webserver, but they seem to have good options for hosting. I know that they handle Let’s Encrypt certs automatically for hosted sites, and they run off green energy (geothermal) if that matters to you.
I have been using Fedora Workstation for years now, and I plan to switch to the KDE spin when Fedora 40 is released. I will absolutely never miss the rolling release model, and Fedora has been stable enough that I basically never have any issues. You get updates quickly, but even with the speed it manages to be very stable, at least compared to bleeding edge distros like Arch. There are still MANY things you can use the Arch wiki for in Fedora, so it’s still my first place to check for most things. But there are also forums for Fedora, and lots of community members that have answered questions in those forums, just not to the extent of something like Ubuntu. It is mainstream enough that you can find most things with Linux releases packaged for it, so I haven’t had an issue with compatibility, either. It’s overall a very solid choice, and I would recommend it.
Yeah, snap packages have a tendency to break everything, so avoid them like the plague. You should be able to choose what repo you install from in the Ubuntu app store by clicking the dropdown in the top right of the app’s page (which defaults to snap if one is available), and selecting something else. I can’t remember what the options are, but for a native install you’re looking for something like “.deb”, or “Ubuntu repository”, or “apt”, something of the like. You could also install flatpak and set up flathub so you can get apps packaged as flatpaks (which are kind of like snaps, except they actually function and generally work well for most applications). Not sure if you can get flatpak working with the Ubuntu app store, but it works with Gnome software stores for any other distro out of the box (like Fedora and Nobara). Ubuntu is owned by Canonical, who manages snaps, so they have financial motivation to shove them down their user’s throats (which has been met with much dismay by the Linux community).
Snaps and flatpaks are essentially meant to be portable formats that are packaged with all of their dependencies inside their own sandbox so that they function the exact same when installed on different distros. This has great applications for compatibility (you can install the same package on any distro instead of compiling your package for multiple package managers and distros), and security (the sandboxing serves as a layer of isolation from other apps. Flatpak does this pretty well, but snap has tons of problems.
If you’re ever at the point where you want/need to install a new OS, I’d recommend switching away from Ubuntu to avoid the headaches. Linux Mint is a common recommendation if you want to stick to a system that’s similar to Ubuntu (it’s based on Ubuntu), but my personal recommendation is something Fedora-based like Fedora Workstation or Nobara. You can find tons of info in this community on what different distros are like, and you’ll see that there is no one “best” distro.
If you ever run into any other problems though, this is a great place to ask for help. One of the many great things about Linux is that much of the community is very knowledgeable about how to do/fix practically anything; and many of those people are just happy to help someone so they can enjoy their switch to Linux. There’s also AskUbuntu, the Arch Wiki, Fedora forums, etc. that are available for whichever distro they are tailored to.
No, it wouldn’t since the steam snap isn’t installed anymore. But you can clear out the left over snapshot of it manually. Just use sudo snap saved, find the entry that says steam, and sudo snap forget
If there is no steam entry listed, then there’s nothing else you have to do.
The uninstalling issue almost certainly isn’t hardware related, Ubuntu’s app store is just a pile of hot garbage. Stuff like that happens all the time, or at least that was my experience years ago when I used Ubuntu, one of the (many) reasons I no longer recommend Ubuntu to new users.
As for the Steam issues, it’s probably a mix of software and hardware issues. It seems there are some permissions issues (likely caused by snap), but it also seems like there are GPU driver issues. What GPU do you have? If you have an Nvidia card, have you installed their drivers? There is also a very real possibility that your card is so old that DayZ is no longer compatible with it (which may be the case given that it wasn’t working in Windows, but to be fair Windows 7 is incredibly out of date and doesn’t receive updates so it could have also been a software/driver issue there).
I’m talking mostly about musl, but Void with glibc still requires more work than a “just works” distro. As such, I didn’t see a point in trying Void with glibc, because the biggest benefit I saw to switching was for musl. It’s great for some, but not for me, just as I wouldn’t use Gentoo. There were a lot of things that didn’t run, I don’t have a full list. I know for a fact that Steam (or any Steam games) wouldn’t run, I’m fairly confident that the OnlyOffice suite wouldn’t work, I believe that EasyEffects wouldn’t run which was a big problem, since I use that for system wide equalization, and for my microphone filters. I probably could have figured out how to set everything up with bare PipeWire, but it’s basically the same story for everything: it just requires way more work. My VPN (Mullvad) isn’t compiled for musl, nor was the Nextcloud client, and many things I use every day. Those are just the things I remember having issues with off the top of my head, and it may not have only been musl that was the problem, but it’s very likely it was.
I spun up an Ubuntu VM, and while it won’t have Nvidia drivers listed (since it doesn’t have GPU passthrough), this should be similar to what you should have seen when installing:
Pretty much all those are i386 packages (32-bit), so you shouldn’t need to enable the architecture in your version of Ubuntu, it should automatically happen (I didn’t need to use sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386). Of course I did this on Ubuntu 22.04 because it’s a VM I already had, but it should be very similar to 23.10
By the way, if you still have issues after the native Steam install and it gives you the same 32-bit driver warning, you should be able to resolve it with the following:
That is of course assuming that the error message you pasted in another thread gave the correct package name, which is not a guarantee. It should have automatically been installed as a dependency to Steam if it was installed through apt though, so I don’t feel like that will necessarily be a solution.
That should skip the data backup when removing. I’ve seen reports of other users that this backup process sometimes takes 10-20 minutes with the default remove command, even with small programs. Blame Canonical for that one.
If you were to open the Software & Updates app and go to Additional Drivers, does the driver package you tested say it comes from Nvidia and it is “(proprietary, tested)”? If so, then your drivers should be fine. nvidia-driver-libs:i386 is 32-bit, so I don’t know why you would need that installed unless DayZ is only compatible with 32-bit drivers for some reason. I have Steam installed on my Fedora install, and I don’t have any 32-bit Nvidia drivers installed but everything works perfectly. That’s a separate issue altogether, and I don’t recommend running 32-bit drivers unless your system is 32-bit. Can you copy the “System Details” window in the About tab of the Settings app? It should have Hardware and Software information like the CPU, GPU, windowing system, etc. There are a few things that could cause issues that I might be able to glean from that.
I’m on Fedora, but since it’s running Gnome it should theoretically look the same. You access the system details here:
And assuming that works, to install the native version of Steam (which should be what’s installed anyway, but Canonical is pushing their proprietary snap BS that has never worked well), this should apparently work (I don’t have an Ubuntu install to test on though):
If it prompts you for anything, you can just confirm by typing “y”. I’d recommend you check that it isn’t installing the snap version, but I don’t know how to guide you to do that, really. I haven’t used a distro with the Aptitude package manager in over 5 years.
Of course, it probably isn’t helpful, but I’d recommend avoiding vanilla Ubuntu if you aren’t already too deeply invested. Linux Mint seems to be a common recommendation for new users and it’s based off Ubuntu, but in all honesty I’d probably recommend Nobara (gaming focused and more user friendly version of Fedora). That way you don’t get snaps shoved down your throat by Canonical, which break things constantly. Up to you if you want to install another OS though; in theory you shouldn’t need to, and there should be a way to resolve these issues with your current install.