While I agree with the recommendations (I have a ThinkPad P14S Gen4 now) I wouldn’t say the battery life is great - especially if OP wants to do video editing and such. Otherwise it’s an amazing laptop (now that it’s actually supported by the kernel). I still suspect the Intel variant would be better for battery life though.
With that being said for anything this intensive you’ll need a charger with any laptop because it will simply not be able to keep working for 8+ hours with this kind of software. In fact get a docking station and a second screen too unless you plan to be on the go all of the time; the productivity increase from getting a second screen is insane.
Oh and be prepared to lose a lot of the fancy stuff with Linux - sure you get an amazing screen but no HDR. You don’t get the sound improvements from the official Lenovo drivers for Windows, etc. Oh and you should keep the Windows partition (just shrink it to a minimum) - makes it much easier to keep the bios up to date.
Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It’s also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I’m curious what other people are using these days. What’s your favorite player?
Because unlike your file manager both Darktable and any decent music player can work with file metadata in addition to the actual files.
And why do they do it? Because most people like to use it that way - instead of painstakingly making sure your files are in the correct folders (and then being fucked when you want to play anything that’s not sorted like that - say, you have everything by artist and album, but now you want to play everything by a specific genre; or in image editing you want to filter by how you rated that picture so you know which one to pick for an edit).
Not everyone needs that, sure. But most people appreciate it - especially if the software does it well.
…which is pretty ironic considering that the way they do it (at least in Jellyfin) is extremely limited and for some reason they don’t use the file metadata. Like, I already have all the music metadata correct. So use that, not some fucking filename.
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
I don’t want to step on your workflow too much since it somehow seems to work for you but your main issue stems from the fact that you clearly don’t work with your server as if it actually was a server.
You shouldn’t really have a desktop interface running there in the first place (let alone as root and then using it as a regular user). You should ask yourself what it actually solves for you and be open to trying different (and more standard) solutions to what you’re trying to achieve.
It’d probably consist of less clicking and using the CLI a bit more, but for stuff like file management you can still easily use https://linux.die.net/man/1/mc.
If you need terminal sessions that keep scrollback and don’t stop when you disconnect you should learn to use tmux or screen or something like that. But then again if you’re running actual software in there then you should probably use a service (daemon) for that.
As for whether it’s a security issue, yeah it most definitely is. Just like it’s a security issue to run literally any networked application as root. Security isn’t black and white and there are trade offs to be made but most people wouldn’t consider what you’re doing a reasonable tradeoff.
I have never accessed any of my servers from the internet and haven’t even adjusted my router firewall settings to allow this. I kept wanting to but never got around to it.
Does that mean you realistically don’t even know your network (router) setup? Because it’s entirely possible your machine is completely open to the internet - say, thanks to IPv6 autoconfiguration - and you wouldn’t even know about it.
It’s pretty unlikely but could potentially happen with some ISPs. Please always set up a firewall, especially for a server type machine. It’s really simple to block incoming outside traffic.
I see. In that case you should really try tmux; I didn’t vibe with screen either but I find tmux quite usable.
For the most part I just open several terminal windows/tabs on my local machine and remote with each one to the server, and I use tmux only when I explicitly need to keep something running. Since that’s usually just one thing I can use like two tmux commands and don’t need anything else.
Oh and for stuff like copying and such I’d use rsync instead of primitive cp so that in case it gets interrupted I only copy what’s needed.
I wouldn’t bother with virtualization and such; you’d only complicate things for yourself. Try to keep it simple but do it properly: learn some command line basics and you’ll see that in a year it’ll become second nature.
Oh if you even have your own router then have a firewall (primarily) there, and simply block every incoming forward connection except the ones you actually want (probably forwarded to your server). Similarly even for the router input rules you likely need only ICMP and not much else.
I’m thinking about taking the leap but I need printer support to work.
In my experience printer support in Linux is generally pretty good. Even when it doesn’t “just work” you usually need only a simple profile file from the manufacturers website that you install.
In general drivers on Linux have been way less painful for me than on Windows; most importantly you don’t need an always-running application for every crappy piece of hardware.
But you still might want to check your printer manufacturer’s website and/or make one prototype Linux PC and try everything out.
With that being said be prepared for users complaining about some workflow changes (that will be bigger with a switch to something like LibreOffice from MSO) and blaming every issue of theirs on Linux and you.
how do you expect them to fix Zoom? Acquire the company and take it behind the shed?
I mean, you could - for example - implement the interface these apps expect to exist and use with your amazing new compositor™.
This is precisely why companies just say “fuck Linux users” - instead of supporting a single operating system where everything kinda “just works” across versions for decades you have to checks notes support 20 different compositors across 2 vastly different display servers and dozens of various desktop environments and such… All for an OS that’s used by maybe 3% of your users if you’re lucky.
In the end this is also a pointless argument though. Like, sure: “Wayland is shit”, but also, “Xorg is even worse and ‘noone is advocating for it’”. And when there is no third alternative I guess we have to deal with (and improve) Wayland then?
OP’s expertise would then be better spent by contributing to Wayland.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
EDIT: I am thrilled with so many awesome responses! I’m taking notes and looking into all the recommendations. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out (and many others, i’m sure), i’m glad i asked!...
Does anyone of you know filen.io? Do you trust it? The Pricing is so attractive and I never heard of that company before, so it seems a bit too good to be true. What do you think?
It’s fairly common to give a (sense of) a good deal to new people while raising a bit more money roght now than you would with a traditional subscription.
Then later when you start getting more users quicker you cancel that offer and nee users have to use a subscription (which will make you more money over time).
Protonmail did something similar originally, giving out Visionary for life for a (large) one-time fee. It’s a decent strategy to raise money from people who believe in your product.
Which, as I understand it, is kinda the point of the bills too. As in, if there is documentation and it’s reasonably easy to dis- and re-assemble, there can be a (bigger) market for spare parts.
Or if you are technically inclined you can buy Zigbee or Z-Wave stuff, get your own dongle for it and run Home Assistant on your home server, and do everything 100% locally and it can still be really “smart”. You can also do anything with it. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
Hopefully Thread/Matter will help with this, which is an initiative to make interoperable smart home … stuff.
There is nothing experimental about self-hosting Zigbee stuff. It’s an open protocol, so as long as the devices follow it (at least somewhat correctly) you can work with it.
And the actual “hard work” has already been done by others - Zigbee2MQTT, for example, supports over 3000 devices, so the ground work of having device definitions with easy use has already been done. What Matter aims to do is to provide standards for devices so that they all have some minimal basic functionality, expose the same fields in the same way, etc. so you don’t need a hand-maintained library like that. There isn’t even really a reason to be skeptical; considering all this stuff already works well enough, it can only get better.
It can definitely be hard or tiring, but you wouldn’t be an early adopter. It’s like saying that switching to Linux now (or even 15 years ago) would make you an early adopter. It wouldn’t; it already works, plenty people have done it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get better with time or that it’s easy or for everyone.
New laptop
Hi everyone!...
What's your favorite music player on Linux? (lemmy.ml)
Mine is Strawberry since it has a ton of options and plays a ton of formats. It’s also (distant) fork of Amarok 1.4 and integrates well with KDE Plasma. I’m curious what other people are using these days. What’s your favorite player?
Is it actually dangerous to run Firefox as root?
I have a few Linux servers at home that I regularly remote into in order to manage, usually logged into KDE Plasma as root. Usually they just have several command line windows and a file manager open (I personally just find it more convenient to use the command line from a remote desktop instead of directly SSH-ing into the...
Linux reaches new high 3.82% (gs.statcounter.com)
Thoughts on this? (futurology.today)
New Linux user here. Is this really how I'm supposed to install apps on Linux?
mullvad.net/en/help/install-mullvad-app-linux...
Happy new year of the Linux Desktop!
Noob question: what to arrange before switching to linux
EDIT: I am thrilled with so many awesome responses! I’m taking notes and looking into all the recommendations. Again, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out (and many others, i’m sure), i’m glad i asked!...
Can I trust filen.io? (filen.io)
Does anyone of you know filen.io? Do you trust it? The Pricing is so attractive and I never heard of that company before, so it seems a bit too good to be true. What do you think?
'This could be the holy grail to replace palm oil' - research team (www.bbc.com)
California Lawmakers Unanimously Pass Right to Repair Legislation (www.404media.co)
Summary...
Because of innovations in LED technology, the amount of electricity used for lighting is down drastically (www.bloomberg.com)