d3Xt3r

@d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz

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d3Xt3r, (edited )

Ubuntu Christian Edition, if he’s a satanist.

Ubuntu Satanic Edition, if he’s a Christian.

Hannah Montana Linux, if he’s neither of the above.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

I’d wager that it’s your scheduler. Prior to the latest kernel release (v6.6), Linux used the CFS scheduler which is outdated and not really optimal for desktop usage. As a result, many third-party alternate schedulers were developed to fix this issue, with the most recent popular ones being the System76 scheduler (used in Pop!_OS), and BORE (used in CachyOS). But this issue has been solved officially now, with the EEVDF scheduler (earliest eligible virtual deadline first scheduling), which has finally replaced CFS.

So if you’re not on 6.6, upgrade to it, or use the System76 scheduler. Also switch to Wayland if you haven’t already and you’ll notice your Linux desktop just as smooth, if not smoother, than Windows.

I have an M1 MacBook Air and a Thinkpad Z13 G1 (running Bazzite KDE with kernel 6.6.3 + System76 scheduler), and comparing the touchpad gestures and window animations side-by-side - especially the gestures and animation to switch workspaces - it’s just as smooth as macOS (at least to my eyes), and that’s quite the feat given that macOS has been the king of smooth animations and responsiveness for a long time.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Plasma 6, but just as excited for kernel 6.7 featuring:

  • bcachefs
  • AMD Seamless Boot (for flicker-free streamlined booting)
  • Scheduler improvements for better responsiveness/performance
  • IO_uring FUTEX support for better performance
  • More FUTEX2 work for potentially better gaming performance
  • Better write performance for eMMC chips (great for many IoT boards)
  • TCP network performance improvements
  • DisplayPort Alt Mode 2.1 support over Type-C
d3Xt3r, (edited )

I have been using Windows since 3.1 with MSDOS 6.2 since forever and I have seen everything from Microsoft. At the same time I’m a senior Microsoft engineer and have been for more than a decade

Same here! Grew up using DOS and Win 3.1, and been a Windows sysadmin for a long time. But over the past few years I’ve been growing increasingly dissatisfied at the direction Microsoft’s been going in, particularly the way they’ve been shoving their half-baked cloud services (and telemetry) onto us, and enterprises, being married to MS, have no choice but forced to comply. At least, that’s the case where I live, companies just lap up every new thing Microsoft does and treat it like the next best thing since sliced bread.

I was being turned from an engineer into a middleman, a lackey at the mercy of MS, and I didn’t like it one bit. I hated the thought of having my entire career being dictated by one corporation. So I quit my job and finally managed to land a Linux role this year and I’m so much happier. To be honest, it feels a bit weird throwing away my veteran MS hat and all the knowledge that I gained over the years and going back to being a total noob (at enterprise Linux that is), but I’m also learning a lot of cool stuff, but more importantly, I love being in control of our systems again, and no longer being at the mercy at a monopolistic mega corporation.

d3Xt3r,

Thank you!

On a random note, as a fellow relic of a bygone era… remember back when Windows used to be customizable, when you could modify just about any file, change themes without a hack, without things like Trusted Installer/Defender getting in your way, or even completely replace your explorer.exe with a different shell like BlackBox? I miss those days.

Voilà:

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/06550c17-1446-4acc-988f-9541fea12dc4.png

This is Linux (Debian) running locally on my Android phone (Galaxy Fold 4), with a Win95 theme. I think it’s pretty awesome that Linux still lets you do stuff like this, whilst still maintain a good security posture. And letting me relive the memories of the good ol’ days. :)

Is the Linux Foundation Certified System Admin (LFCS) worth it?

I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years now but want to work with Linux more in a professional setting (not to mention the number of layoffs in the the dev industry has me thinking a backup plan might be a good idea). I have been using Linux exclusively on my personal machine for about 15 years now so I’m not too worried...

d3Xt3r, (edited )

It’ll really depend on your local job market. I was on a serious job hunt earlier this year and I couldn’t find a single Linux job which asked for LFCS certs. There were a couple which asked for Red Hat certs though. Of course, this could be specific to where I live, so I’d recommend looking at some popular job sites for where you live (+ remote jobs too) and see how many, if any, ask for LFCS, and you’d get your answer.

Should I focus more on dev ops? Security? Straight SysAdmin?

From what I’ve seen so far, the days of “traditional” Linux sysadmin roles are numbered, if not long gone already - it’s all mostly DevOps-y stuff. Same with traditional security, these days it’s more about DevSecOps.

As a modern Linux sysadmin, the technologies you should be looking at would be Ansible, Kubernetes, Terraform, containers (Docker mainly, but also Podman/LXD), GitOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts and tools.

Some Red Hat shops may also ask for OpenShift, Ansible Tower, Satellite etc experience. IBM shops also use a lot of IBM tools such as IBM Could Paks, Multicloud Management, and AIOps/Watson etc.

And finally there’s all the “cloud” stuff like AWS, Azure, GCP specific things - and they have their own terminologies that you’d need to know and understand (eg “S3”, “Lambda” etc) and they have their own certs to go with it. I suspect a “cloud” cert will net you more jobs than LFCS.

So as you’d probably be thinking by now, all of the above isn’t something you’d know from just using desktop Linux. Of course, desktop Linux experience is certainly useful for understanding some of the core concepts and how it all works under the hood, but unfortunately that experience alone just isn’t going to cut it if you’re out looking for a job.

As I mentioned before, start looking for jobs in your area/relevant to you and look at the technologies they’re asking for, note down the terms which appear most frequently and the certs they’re asking for, and start preparing for them. That is, assuming it’s something you want to work with in the future.

Personally, I’m not a big fan all this new tech (I’m fine with Ansible and containers, but don’t like the industry’s dependency on proprietary techs like Docker Desktop, Amazon or Red Hat’s stuff). I just wanted to work on pure Linux, with all the all standard POSIX/GNU tools and DEs that we’re familiar with, but sadly those sort of jobs don’t really exist anymore.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Sorry, I guess I meant Docker Desktop, and some of their other proprietary business/enterprise tools (like Docker Scout) that companies have started to use, the stuff that requires a paid subscription. The Docker engine itself remains opensource of course, but a lot of their stuff that’s targeted at enterprises isn’t. These days when companies say “Docker” they don’t mean just the engine, they’re referring to the entire ecosystem.

Also, I have a problem with Docker itself. My main issue is that, on Linux, native container tech like Podman/LXD work, perform and integrate better (at least, from my limited experience), but the industry prefers Docker (no surprises there). As a Linux guy, naturally I want to use the best tool for Linux, not what’s cross-platform (when I don’t care about other platforms). But I can understand why companies would prefer Docker.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

FYI, Windows doesn’t have any feature either to automatically clear all of it’s temp folders (%TMP%, C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Windows\Panther), plus several other folders where orphaned files are often leftover, such as C:\Windows\Installer, C:\Windows\CSC, and various folders and cache files in your AppData\Local etc, to name a few off the top of my head.

I used to be a Windows sysadmin for a long time, and let me tell you, HDDs becoming completely full due to cache/temp files is very much a problem in Windows.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Autotype is already solved - ydotool, wtype and dotool exists (and possibly others as well).

Screen magnification is already present in KDE (Meta + +, Meta + - to zoom in/out). There’s also a magnifier tool (KMag). There may be similar functionalities in other DEs.

My issue is the lack of an overall GUI automation tool, ie, like AutoHotkey. X11 had PyAutoGUI, but there’s no such AIO equivalent for Wayland yet, and the PyAutoGUI devs don’t seem to be interested in Wayland support - it’s neither on their road map, nor have they even answered any Wayland questions on their Github page, which is disappointing. But this isn’t Wayland’s fault, when other tools have shown that automating the GUI is possible, we just need someone to put together a complete package like PyAutoGUI / AHK.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

As others have said, there’s Vanilla and Endless, but both use GNOME.

Is there a reason why it has to be Debian? With an immutable distro, you won’t be using traditional package managers anyway (like apt), all have the same stability factor, and with the same systemd + KDE, it’s more or less the same experience regardless of which distro you go for.

One of the key usage patterns of an immutable distro is using a container to install your extra packages. So you could go for a Fedora-based immutable KDE distro like Kinoite, and set up a Debian container where you can use apt and other Debian tools.

d3Xt3r,

All come with a browser, a PDF reader, and some word doc/spreadsheet program.

Strictly speaking, “All” is a bit of a stretch - Arch doesn’t come with any of those by default, neither does Gentoo, or for that matter, nor do any of the minimal/netinstall/server variants of other distros.

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Why is toolbox preinstalled and not distrobox?

Because Toolbox is a Red Hat/Fedora project and Distrobox isn’t. Also, Distrobox is a much more recent project (2021) compared to Toolbox, which was developed back in 2018. When Silverblue came out, there was a need to make it easier to install apps, and thus Toolbox was born.

Since Toolbox is a Red Hat/Fedora project, it means that it’s officially supported, whereas Distrobox isn’t. Not that it means much from a community support/home use case of course, but that might matter if you’re an enterprise and you want support from Red Hat or official Fedora communities.

But both use podman behind the scenes so internally they aren’t that different, but you can think of Distrobox as a more distro-agnostic and user-friendly version of Toolbox. If you’re a home user then stick to Distrobox.

d3Xt3r,

Plasma Panels have now gained a new visibility mode: “Dodge Windows” aka “intelligent auto-hide!” In essence, the Panel auto-hides when touched by a window, but is otherwise visible

Finally! With this, we can now have a panel behave like a proper dock.

Should I install Linux on my smartphone?

I have a Samsung Galaxy J3 (2018) smartphone which currently has the stock Samsung Android OS installed on it. I wanted to install an Android “distro” that doesn’t spy on me, like Graphene OS, but I couldn’t find a ROM for it. Since I would probably need to compile AOSP from source code anyways, I though, why not install...

d3Xt3r, (edited )

If I’m not mistaken, I believe the 2018 J3 has a locked bootloader. The fact that I can’t find even a SINGLE custom ROM on XDA for this model means it’s highly likely that the bootloader is locked, and/or the device isn’t dev friendly (no kernel sources available etc).

so I guess doing the same on my smartphone wouldn’t be too hard.

Mate, you’ve no idea… Smartphones are a completely different ball game to desktops. You could try and compile your distro, but without the kernel sources and drivers for your specific model, nothings gonna work. You won’t even be able to boot the damn thing. And even if you did have those, it’s going to take a LOT of effort just to get basic OS functionality working. Forget getting actual phone stuff working, like making calls etc - that’s next to impossible. Even large projects like PostmarketOS struggle to get basic functionality going even on dev-friendly phones.

But you can stop dreaming about all the above if you can’t even unlock the bootloader.

Basically, what all this means is that there’s no point wasting your time on the J3. Stop right now and don’t waste any further time on this.

If you’d really like to run GrapheneOS / Linux on your phone, your best option is to sell your J3, and get a used Google Pixel from Swappa/eBay or something.

How do y'all deal with programs not supported on Linux?

I’ve been seeing all these posts about Linux lately, and looking at them, I can honestly see the appeal. I’d love having so much autonomy over the OS I use, and customize it however I like, even having so many options to choose from when it comes to distros. The only thing holding me back, however, is incompatibility issues....

d3Xt3r, (edited )

Web apps (for MS Office/Teams), Wine (mostly for games and random apps), and for everything else, an optimized Tiny11 Core VM + WinApps for seamless windows/integration with Linux. My Tiny11 only uses 0-1% CPU and 600MB RAM on idle so I’ve got no issues running it in the background, besides it takes only a couple of seconds to launch, if I wanted to start it on demand.

I’ve also got a portable SSD with a copy of Windows installed on it, just in case I need it for some firmware updates or something (although I’m on a Thinkpad so pretty much everything can be updated via LVFS, but I keep it around just in case + it’s portable so there’s no harm in having it around).

d3Xt3r,

In addition to the other comment re. LibreOffice, I’d also recommend trying out OnlyOffice - generally, it has better compatibility with MS Office formats compared to LO, and the UI is very similar to MSO which may make it easier to use.

d3Xt3r,

BlendOS. You can easily switch between DEs without any conflicts or dependency hell, as they’re all containerised (and would therefore perform better than running them inside a full-fledged VM).

d3Xt3r,

I hope it supports themes. I’d like to make my BSOD look like the classic Windows 9x BSOD.

https://lemmy.nz/pictrs/image/1f681990-b9bc-4c61-9b0e-4fbc0b655e19.png

d3Xt3r,

Nobara KDE user here. One of the reasons why I chose it is because it comes with many of the customisations that I’d normally do (such as using an optimized kernel). But in addition, I use:

  • Opal instead of LUKS
  • KDE configured with a more GNOME/macOS like layout (top panel+side dock)
  • GDM instead of SDDM, for fingerprint login
  • Fingerprint authentication for sudo
  • TLP instead of power-profiles-daemon for better power saving (AMD P-State EPP control, charging thresholds etc)
  • Yakuake terminal (and Kitty for ad-hoc stuff)
  • fish shell instead of bash
  • mosh instead of ssh
  • btop instead of top/htop
  • gdu instead of du/ncdu
  • bat instead of cat
  • eza instead of ls
  • fd instead of find
  • ripgrep instead of grep
  • broot instead of tree
  • skim instead of fzf
d3Xt3r, (edited )

As others have mentioned, the sequential speeds in RAID 0/5 won’t really help you in gaming. What you might see at best is faster loading times, but that’s really about it.

One option which no one else has mentioned is using setting up tiered storage using bcachefs - where your SSD acts like a cache drive, which would contain frequently read aka “hot” data, and the rest of the data would be on your spinning disks. This way, you’d be making the most of your limited SSD space, whilst still taking advantage of the large storage provided by the spinning disks.

The advantage of bcachefs is that all your drives can be part of the same pool and it’ll all be transparent to your OS/programs, and all your data is striped like a RAID 10 array, so you can replace your drives in the future without any issues, or any major config changes. Like if you get a faster NVMe drive in the future, you can set that as your “hot” (promote) drive, your SSD as the foreground drive and your spinning disk pool as the background ones and your data will automagically migrate.

Have a quick read of the manual, you’ll see that it’s actually fairly easy to set up and operate: bcachefs.org/bcachefs-principles-of-operation.pdf

The main drawback right now (for you) is that it’s not yet part of the kernel. The good news is that it’s gonna be in the next kernel (6.7), so you can either wait for it, or use a third-party kernel with bcachefs already compiled in it (I believe linux-tkg is one of them).

d3Xt3r,

github.com/maximbaz/dotfiles

Comes with a custom install script too. If you plan on using the scripts, then I’d highly recommend forking the repo and customizing the scripts for your own needs, and when there’s a change uostread you could just merge the new changes.

d3Xt3r,

I used it at work recently to update my work-provided HP Thunderbolt dock, and it resolved an issue where the external monitors would fail to activate after resuming from standby. I never got an update notification when I was using my Windows laptop so I was oblivious to it; it was only thanks to connecting it to my Linux laptop and fwupd, that I found out there was an update, which subsequently resolved the issue.

I love it when stuff like this happens and Linux saves the day. =) (and I get to show off to my Windows heathens colleagues.)

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