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!...
A GPU is used for a lot more than just gaming these days. It’s used to render videos, accelerate normal 2D programs (like some terminal emulators), accelerate some websites/webapps (those which use WebGL for eg); also modern DEs like Gnome and KDE also make use of it very heavily, for instance for animations and window transitions. Those smooth animations that you see when you activate the workspace switcher or window overview? That’s your GPU at work there. Are your animations jittery/laggy? That means your setup is less than ideal. Of course, you could ignore all that and just go for a simple DE like XFCE or Mate which is fully CPU-driven, but then the issue of video acceleration still remains (unless you don’t plan on watching HD videos).
Without the right drivers (typically NOT nouveau, unless you’re on a very old card), you may find your overall experience less than ideal. As you can see in their official feature matrix , only the NV40 series card fully supports video acceleration - these are cards which were launched between 2004-2006 - that’s practically ancient in computer terms and I highly doubt your PC uses one of those. Now recent-ish cards do support video acceleration, but you’ll need to extract the firmware blobs from the proprietary drivers (which can be a PITA on normal Debian as it’s a manual process), plus, even after that, the drivers won’t support some features that may be required by normal programs, as you can see from the matrix.
The natural solution of course would be to install the proprietary nVidia drivers, but you do NOT want to do that (unless you’re a desperate gamer) as there’s a high possibility of running into issues like not being about to use Wayland properly, or breaking your system when you update it - just Google “Linux update black screen nVidia” and you’ll see what I mean.
You’ll be avoiding a lot of headache if you just went with AMD; or even just onboard graphics like Intel iGPUs (if your CPU has it) would be a much better option - because in either case, you’ll be using fully capable and stable opensource drivers and you won’t face any issues with that.
At least it’s a bit more full-featured than Fedora 39, where they just updated to Gnome 45 and called it a day, and KDE users didn’t even get anything new at all.
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.
I currently use Windows 10 and I’d like to try out Linux. My plan is to set up a dual boot with OpenSUSE tumbleweed and KDE Plasma. I’ve read so many different opinions about choosing a distro, compatibility with gaming and Nvidia drivers, and personal issues with the ethos of different companies like Canonical. I value...
None of the comments here explain how WINE works, so allow me to elaborate a bit.
WINE is like a translator or a compatibility layer. When a Windows program tries to perform a function that would normally require Windows, WINE steps in and translates that request into something the Linux system can understand and process.
As you may know, Windows programs work by making API calls (eg using Win32 APIs) to operate and perform basic tasks. WINE takes these API calls and translates them to their Linux equivalents (POSIX calls, to be specific, which means Wine can run on several Unix-like systems). This way, when a program asks to say, open a file, or display something on the screen, WINE converts these requests into a form that Linux can execute.
WINE’s approach is about providing compatibility for user-level applications rather than replicating the internal workings of the Windows kernel. It includes various libraries and components that mimic the behavior of those in Windows. This helps in executing the Windows applications as if they are running in their native environment.
The core of it is NTDLL. NTDLL.dll is a core Windows library that provides low-level system functions to interact with the Windows NT kernel. In WINE, ntdll.dll is adapted to work with the Linux kernel instead.
Then you have the Win32 API libraries, providing the basic APIs that Windows applications use for functions like window management, text rendering, and system calls. Examples include user32.dll (for user-interface functions), gdi32.dll (for graphics device interface functions), and kernel32.dll (for basic system functions).
Shell32.dll for handling Windows Shell API functions related to file operations and the user interface.
DirectX Support, for running games and multimedia applications. WINE implements parts of DirectX, like Direct3D for 3D graphics, DirectDraw for 2D graphics, and DirectSound for sound processing. Note that WINE’s implementation converse Direct3D calls to OpenGL, whereas there are community projects like DXVK and VKD3D which translates these calls to Vulkan.
Finally there’s a Registry Implementation, so that applications that need to read or write to the registry can function correctly.
Of course, there’s a LOT more to it, the above is just an example of some key components. Basically Wine has reimplemented (coded from scratch) various libraries and executables that, on the outside, look like standard Windows dlls/exes, but internally they use POSIX APIs to talk to the Linux kernel and other POSIX components. This, along with the Syscall translations, bridges the gap between Windows programs and Linux.
Now naturally, this is neither a perfect, nor a complete implementation of Windows APIs; plus there are some things which Wine will never implement (such as ntoskrnl.exe), so not every program will work as expected - so check out the Wine AppDB for compatibility reports with various Windows apps.
This is the actually the thing same as Windows - in Linux you’ve got the which command, and it’s equivalent is where in Windows. Both do the same thing - find out where a program lives.
OP meant a “program” in this context. Both Linux and Windows have specific paths where programs typically lives. For example, in Windows, if you type “notepad” in a command prompt or the ‘Run’ dialog, it’ll search for it in known system paths such as C:Windows, C:Windowssystem32 etc. These paths are declared in the PATH environment variable - which you may have encountered when certain applications try to (or ask you to) add their program folder to the PATH, such as say Java or Python. If a program is added to the PATH, typing ‘java’ or ‘python’ from anywhere will automatically launch it, so you don’t need to specify the full path or the program.
Now whilst this is convenient, sometimes it can cause unwanted issues. For example, say you installed some other program that uses a specific version of Java or Python, and it installed that version in your system, and added that folder to the PATH - now when you type java or python in a command prompt, you wouldn’t know which version you’re executing. This is what OP meant by a program living in multiple places. As you can imagine, this can now cause issues, and can even break some scripts expecting a particular version of Java/Python etc and some other version is being picked up. This is where the where command in Windows comes in handy, as it tells you where exactly that program is located. And it’s Linux equivalent is which.
So at least in this department, the behavior of Windows and Linux is virtually identical. :)
Nix (Nixpkgs) actually exceeds the AUR in the number of packages, according to this page.
And the nice thing about it is that you don’t even have to be on NixOS to use it - in fact, NixOS came much later. Nix started out as a distro-independent package manager, and can still be used that way, because Nix packages do not interfere with your system’s packages.
But if something isn’t available via the package manager, I could still find it online and download and install it, but it might cause issues because it hasn’t been verified by the people who maintain the distro’s package manager accessible repositories.
Correct. The usual issues that you’d find is missing libraries or other package dependencies, because the versions/packages on your OS may not match what the developer complied their generic release package with. Which is why you normally don’t download random apps from the web like you’d do on Windows, becuse there’s no guarantee that it’d work on your distro (not to mention the security concerns).
Or I could still install it with flatpaks or snaps and something something container and it should still work? Or might cause compatibility issues?
Correct, Flatpak/Snap was invented for this very reason, to solve the library mismatch and dependency issues you might get. Flatpak/Snap works by bundling all the necessary dependencies a program might need, so it doesn’t matter what your OS has. There are some issues with Flatpaks/Snaps, but these are rare and usually they come about due to the sandboxing (Flatpak/Snaps typically don’t have full system access, but “just enough” to get things working. You can manually configure the permissions though if you need to give an app more/specific permissions).
AUR has more packages that have been verified for arch than OpenSUSE has with Yast?
“packaged”, not “verified”, but yes being packaged for a particular distro usually implies that it works, but that’s not always the case. Btw, YaST is just a system config tool, not a repo. OpenSUSE’s default repos do indeed have fewer packages compared to AUR, but that’s an unfair comparison since the AUR isn’t even enabled by default on Arch, it’s something you’ll manually need to enable and even get a third-party package manager like yay/paru etc to access it. OpenSUSE also has third-party repos like Packman, and even an online Software Portal that can be used to search for and install package from several official and unofficial repos. So technically speaking you could probably find everything you need on OpenSUSE (it’s hard to get an exact package count to compare), but I guess it’s not as easy/convenient as simply using the AUR on Arch.
Curiosity. I was a curious tweenager, and I was already a bit of a geek at the time. I read about Linux in computer magazines at the time, and decided to give one of the free CDs a try - with RedHat 5.2 on it. To be honest, wasn’t really impressed with it. I especially disliked having to recompile the kernel, which took ages on those Pentium 3s. But it got me exploring other operating systems, and I found QNX, BeOS and NetBSD. I was really impressed with with QNX and BeOS in particular - Linux felt quite clunky and amateurish in comparison. I especially liked the multimedia performance of BeOS, and the lightweightedness, polish and desktop responsiveness of QNX, which featured a real-time microkernel. QNX felt lightyears ahead of it’s competition at the time. My first run into it was a free 1.44MB demo floppy that the company mailed me directly, complete with a full developer manual (which was completely wasted on me as a tween, but I still appreciated it and tried to comprehend bits and pieces). I was already into making custom bootable floppy disks at the time, so I was extremely impressed that they managed to fit in a full fledged GUI desktop, complete with a browser that supported Javascript (along with network drivers and a modem dialer) - all on a 1.44MB floppy disk! Till date I’ve no idea how they managed that. Even the tiniest of Linux WMs are massive in comparison and look fugly (twm), but QNX’s Photon microGUI somehow managed to make it good looking and functional. Maybe it was all coded in Assembly, I don’t know, but it was, and still remains, very impressive nonetheless.
I digress, but all this started getting me into exploring POSIX systems and distro/OS hopping. It was only when I experienced SuSE that I fell in love with Linux. Finally, I had a polished Linux desktop, with a full-featured settings/control panel (YaST) that made it easy to use even for a tween like me. And that’s when I switched to Linux as my main-ish OS, with Windows relegated to gaming duties. However, I didn’t fully get rid of Windows until Windows 7. I was actually impressed with the Windows 7 beta releases and was prepared to buy it at release, but… I wasn’t expecting that price tag. I was hoping I’d get a student discount, but it wasn’t applicable where I lived (or there was some catch, I don’t remember exactly). In any case, I couldn’t afford it, and I was really disappointed and angry at Microsoft that they were charging so much for it here, compared to the US pricing. And so, on the release day of Windows 7, I formatted my drive and switched to Linux full time, and never looked back.
I have used Linux on and off for 15 years. I consider myself a casual user and stuck to the mainstream DEs (mostly KDE, XFCE and some Cinnamon). Gnome has been a hurdle for me before and after the big version 40 changes, I couldn’t get my head around how they handled the workspaces and workflow. At some point I I tried out an...
Back when I was still on Gnome, I gave this a try and it was great - until Gnome got updated and it stopped working. And then they’d fix it, and Gnome got updated and it stopped working again. So I stopped using it because I couldn’t deal with the constant breakages. I see that they still haven’t updated it for Gnome 45, despite a bug report being opened for it over two months now. It’s exactly because of breakages like this, and extension neglect from the authors, that I’ve stopped using Gnome and switched to KDE.
KDE worked great for me out-of-the-box, so I didn’t install any third-party extensions. The only changes I’ve made is for aesthetics - moved the panel to the top, enabled a global menu and a side dock, for a more Gnome/macOS-style layout.
You’re thinking of just one extension, one instance. Now repeat this for EVERY single Gnome release, for pretty much all extensions (not just this one), and you can understand my frustration. Which is why I’ve left the Gnome ecosystem.
Also, it’s not like v45 came out of the blue, the beta releases were available for quite a while prior to final release, and even before the final, the Gnome developers did warn that about the upcoming extension changes. So it’s not like the Material Shell devs were unaware.
Edit: Also, the PR may have been merged but the updated version hasn’t been released yet. Both the versions on Github and the Gnome extensions site are still the old release.
That link is for kernel 5.14, so I’d say those results are pretty much invalid for most users (unless you’re actually on it, or the 5.15 LTS kernel). There have been a ton of improvements in every filesystem since then, with pretty much every single kernel release.
A more relevant test would be this one - although it talks about bcachefs, other filesystems are also included in it. As you can see, F2FS is no longer the fastest - bcachefs and XFS beat it in several tests, and even btrfs beats it in some tests. F2FS only wins in the Dbench and CockroachDB benchmarks.
Not quite. Bcachefs can be used on any drive, but it shines the best when you have a fast + slow drive in your PC (eg NVMe + HDD), so the faster drive can be used as a cache drive to store frequently accessed data.
Not OP, but yes, that’s pretty much how it works. (ZFS scrubs do not defrgment data however).
Fragmentation isn’t really a problem for several reasons.
Some (most?) COW filesystems have mechanisms to mitigate fragmentation. ZFS, for instance, uses a special allocation strategy to minimize fragmentation and can reallocate data during certain operations like resilvering or rebalancing.
ZFS doesn’t even have a traditional defrag command. Because of its design and the way it handles file storage, a typical defrag process is not applicable or even necessary in the same way it is with other traditional filesystems
Btrfs too handles chunk allocation effeciently and generally doesn’t require defragmentation, and although it does have a defrag command, it’s almost never used by anyone, unless you have a special reason to (eg: maybe you have a program that is reading raw sectors of a file, and needs the data to be contiguous).
Fragmentation is only really an issue for spinning disks, however, that is no longer a concern for most spinning disk users because:
Most home users who still have spinning disks use it for archival/long term storage/media that rarely changes (eg: photos, movies, other infrequently accessed data), so fragmentation rarely occurs here and even if it does, it’s not a concern.
Power users typically have a DAS or NAS setup where spinning disks are in a RAID config with striping, so the spread of data across multiple sectors actually has an advantage for averaging out read times (so no file is completely stuck in the slow regions of a disk), but also, any performance loss is also generally negated because a single file can typically be read from two or more drives simultaneously, depending on the redundancy config.
Enterprise users also almost always use a RAID (or similar) setup, so the same as above applies. They also use filesystems like ZFS which employs heavy caching mechanisms, typically backed by SSDs/NVMes, so again, fragmentation isn’t really an issue.
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.
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. :)
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.
But if you don’t have any complex software requirements besides gaming and the usual desktop apps, then Bazzite is a much, much better option. It gets updates much more earlier than Nobara (which is still stuck on Fedora 38), and is much more stable (immutable OS) and more gaming optimised. You can even boot directly into “gaming mode” for a Steam Deck-like experience, with all the same (+more) optimizations that you’d get from the Deck.
Anti-cheat support in general has been a thing in Linux since the past couple of years, thanks to the efforts of Valve and the Steam Deck’s popularity. But not every game works though, depending on the anti-cheat system used and it’s implementation, some effort from the dev might be needed to make it compatible. areweanticheatyet.com tracks the current status of these games, and www.protondb.com is also a good reference in general to check Linux game compatibility.
Long story short, I learned there is an XMMS release of a plugin I use in Winamp for music playback (mp3PRO). Sadly, I recoded most of my music to mp3PRO back in the day, and now I’m stuck using Winamp, even on Linux. I like the player, wouldn’t change it, but I wanted to switch to something native, like Audacious or Qmms....
Well it’s Black Friday and HDDs are going for cheap. 6TB is nothing these days, when you could get a 16TB external drive for only $200, or a internal SATA one for $185. Or you could replace/supplement your entire NAS with a single 6TB drive for only $50.
Disk space is cheap now, so upgrade your storage, convert your music to FLAC, problem solved.
Well you don’t have to buy them brand new. If you guys have a used goods market there, you could look around for some good deals on used drives there. Or even used PCs, sometime people sell entire PCs for the same cost as a hard drive, so look out for those and take the drives out, sell the rest of parts.
And if things are really desperate money wise, it doesn’t even have to be a hard drive, you could even store your music on CDs/DVDs - not the most convenient option I know, but it’s an option - you could move the music that you don’t listen to often (or music that you’re tired of playing constantly), and keep your more frequently played music on the HDDs.
This was already fixed in 6.1.66. Both are “old” kernels, so it’s nothing to worry about, unless you/your distro was deliberately staying on 6.1 for some odd reason (yes, I’m aware 6.1 is LTS, but so is 6.6).
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...
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.
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.
Alt TextA screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system
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.
If you’re talking about the Storage Sense feature - it sucks. It only clears a handful of well-known locations, but it doesn’t touch any of the orphaned content in C:\Windows\Installer, or the CSC or the old Panther folders from upgrades, not to mention several other files and folders in AppData. As I’ve said before, I’ve been a Windows sysadmin (until last year infact) managing over 20,000 devices, we’ve had Storage Sense on, but it’s been mostly useless - to the point that I ended up writing own cleanup script and set it to run before we pushed out a new Windows feature update, because otherwise we’d get several devices which failed to update due to the disk being full.
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!...
PipeWire 1.0 "El Presidente" Officially Released, This Is What's New (9to5linux.com)
The cost of maintaining Xorg (mastodon.social)
New to Linux, have a few questions
I currently use Windows 10 and I’d like to try out Linux. My plan is to set up a dual boot with OpenSUSE tumbleweed and KDE Plasma. I’ve read so many different opinions about choosing a distro, compatibility with gaming and Nvidia drivers, and personal issues with the ethos of different companies like Canonical. I value...
what caused you to get into Linux?
What caused you to get into it, are you an evangel and are you obsessed?
What Tweak, Program, ... changes a Desktop Environment from unusable to great for you?
I have used Linux on and off for 15 years. I consider myself a casual user and stuck to the mainstream DEs (mostly KDE, XFCE and some Cinnamon). Gnome has been a hurdle for me before and after the big version 40 changes, I couldn’t get my head around how they handled the workspaces and workflow. At some point I I tried out an...
What's with all these hip filesystems and how are they different?
You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more....
My Experience Of Linux Gaming (Switching from Windows)
Hello all,...
Is there any way I can make an old XMMS plugin work in any modern player?
Long story short, I learned there is an XMMS release of a plugin I use in Winamp for music playback (mp3PRO). Sadly, I recoded most of my music to mp3PRO back in the day, and now I’m stuck using Winamp, even on Linux. I like the player, wouldn’t change it, but I wanted to switch to something native, like Audacious or Qmms....
Debian Bug report logs: #1057843 - linux: ext4 data corruption in 6.1.64-1 (bugs.debian.org)
https://micronews.debian.org/2023/1702150551.html...
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...
Reminder to clear your ~/.cache folder every now and then (lemmy.world)
Alt TextA screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system