You mean like pirated stuff? Peertube isn’t made for this.
However. You could use sepiasearch.org and search for conspicuous terms like “S01E01” or “1080p.web.h264” and see where other people upload copyrighted stuff. There are a few TV shows on flim.txmn.tk video.ploud.jp tube.p2p.legal and a few that aren’t around anymore.
But please check their rules. You don’t want the admins to get in trouble because of you, unless they signed up for that.
And i think some of the instances I mentioned or you’re going to find that way are meant for old videos where the copyright expired or that have been licensed Creative Commons or similarly.
Thanks. You’re right. I’ve edited my comment. I shouldn’t be advertising testing. And I probably misremember how often I fix a minor hiccup that I forget about 2 days later. And I keep an eye on important programs when they get ‘stuck’ or I get aware of vulnerabilities and switch to SID or stable with cherry-picked packages. But that requres you to read all the tech news and that’s not a safe way to do it regardless.
I agree. Flatpak is lightyears ahead of downloading executables or doing the imfamous ‘curl software/install.sh | sudo bash’ It is definitely the right tool if your alternative is to download something from a random website or the software isn’t packaged in your distro. (And also for proprietary software.)
I think the correct approach is to ask yourself if you really always need the latest releases and newest version of your software. And if it’s worth the consequences. Flatpak really makes it so easy and smooth that many people aren’t aware it comes with consequences until later. I know everyone always wants everything. Rock stable and tested, bulletproof security and the newest version of everything right away. I do, too. We seem to both like Debian. It’s provided me with most things I need for quite some years and it really earned my trust. We all know how the maintenance process works there and how that turns out. Problem is, if I now circumvent what defines Debian, I kinda lose parts of what makes it great. That should be done with some caution. But sometimes it’s necessary. Sometimes I want unpackaged software. Sometimes I need the newest features of OBS or Kdenlive. Or FreeCAD did some major restructuring and the Debian version just always crashes once I add a chamfer to my 3D-workpiece and Debian keeps that ancient version in the repository. There’s no way around taking matters in your own hand. Also I sometimes keep several versions of browsers around to do some web-development and Flatpak is awesome for things like that.
Maybe I need to provide people with a more nuanced answer the next time someone asks about Flatpak stuff. The main point is probably that you take matters in your own hands at that point and need to be aware of that. It requires you to make case-by-case decisions and have a look at if the specific Flatpak is maintained well. There is no simple answer anymore. With a distro you mainly get what you asked for and you should know if you chose your distro, and with it the way it handles things, for a reason.
It’s just, we get so many questions regarding Flatpak from newer users:
Why doesn’t App A tie into App B?
Why doesn’t the program tie into my desktop environment?
How can I install Addons?
Why can’t I access files somewhere
And it’s just not easy. The Apps/Programs are sandboxed and can’t tie into each other unless specifically made for this. Addons need to be put inside of that environment or the program needs to be fitted with some kind of Appstore that incorporates this. You can’t just download an addon from github and drag and drop it like the instruction says. New users blame that on Linux. And you need to understand the additional Flatpak permission system.
In my experience these problems have really increased in the last year or so.
Next thing is, you lose what the distro maintainers do for you. They double check that everything works together well and is tied into your desktop. Breaking changes are postponed until the next major releas of the distro. Since you mentioned Debian, they strip tracking behaviour, and most importanly they fix security issues quickly. Once I read about a severe vulnerability in libpng it’s often already fixed or takes them like one to three days.
Everytime I have a look at ‘flatpak list’ I have like 3 different versions of some runtime installed and it takes half a year until the last flatpak app is updated to the release without that vulnerability. And I get that. Programmers of a project mainly code, and maintenance and packaging the stuff isn’t necessarily top priority on their agenda. But you as a user are exposed for months and I usually expect exploits to appear in the wild after some weeks.
That may be less of a concern if you install OBS via flatpak or a game. But this would be bad if it’s a web-browser or a messenger.
That’s why I usually tell people not to use Flatpak. If you know about the consequences and how to handle the sandboxing and get an addon working, go ahead. Maybe subscribe to a mailing list regarding the security vulnerabilities, because that’s now your job.
For Debian users there are a few alternatives. You could just mix and match software from ‘stable’ and ‘testing’. That is not recommended, but everyone does it. Second thing: Just install Debian testing and you get a rolling distro. That’s what I do and it works great. Well, during the ‘freeze’ for the next version you will experience some delays until they figure out some library updates and dependencies. But that’s alright. [Edit: on second thought: Considering the next comment, maybe I shouldn’t recommend that. It works for me but it definitely has some caveats and you need to understand the consequences I didn’t mention here and be able to fix the occasional hiccup.]
Lots of people gave great advice. Let me sum a bit of that up.
Flatpak
No error means success. You might want to install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak to make it available in gnome-software. I’d advise against using flatpaks if you also have the software available in the debian repositories. Always use the package manager instead, when possible. Those packages are maintained by the debian community and tied into the rest of the system. Flatpaks are not.
sudo
What would you like? That is kinda intended behaviour and an integral part of security. But you can have it remember the password for some time. Or ask for a different password.
FDE
I think a clean install is the quickest way to fix this. You can also get the other things right while at it.
DE
You can choose the desktop environment while installing Linux. You chose the default Gnome Desktop. It’s designed more like Apple or Android tablets. I quite like it. You don’t have that menu blocking space on the monitor. Instead you just bump your mouse to that top left corner or press the windows key and you have a fullscreen menu with your favorites. You can also directly start typing the first letters of the application you want and hit enter and start is, without lifting your fingers from the keyboard and it’s way quicker and more streamlined than clicking on things in a windows start menu. You can have an addidional dock somewhere at the left or the bottom with an additional gnome extension like this or what other people suggested. But if you’d like it like windows, why don’t you try the KDE destop? I think you’d be more comfortable with that if you’re looking for something alike the windows experience.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu regularly does some stupid things. I’ve been using Debian for quite some time. I suppose the differences for you are minor anyways and you could have it look the same if you found out which gnome quick-launch bar to install or if you used the KDE desktop instead.
I don’t think that is how these programs work. Community made lists an Wikis, yes. But this requires some corporate contracts, money being paid and some laptop samples being send to a laboratory where they will be kept for years and continuously tested for years. I suppose it’s going to be quite pricey and no-one will do that to a random windows laptop. Unless someone says I’m going to buy 7000 of those if they have that ‘certified’ sticker on them.
But I get how a company like Sytem76 would say, we won’t pay for that, we have Linux in our name and are just selling to consumers.
This certification program is for big companies that have requirements and contracts. They need to buy certified stuff. It’s not meant for consumers or small companies at all. That’s also why the featured laptops are a shiny Dell XPS 13 and a Thinkpad P16. Something you’d find at work.
Well more than half of that list is Dell products. Followed by some Lenovo and HP. That’s it. (except for servers.)
are nice. Palm rejection for the touchscreen works fine on my Debian Linux, ThinkPad Yoga. I’m not sure if I configured it or it does that out-of-the-box. Keyboard and mouse seem to be deactivated by hardware once i fold it over.
If you’re a nerd you could also learn LaTeX to take notes. I know a few people who got crazy fast typing maths that way. I didn’t, took notes during a lecture with a pen and did quite some of my assignments with LaTeX.
Both are entirely different product lines. Unless something changed in recent years. I like mine. And I’ve seen the ones without the ThinkPad branding in a store. They’re cheap. But that’s about it.
pages like this also suggest things like updating the BIOS and the graphics card firmware with some AMD tool. And I’ve read several times you should try the kernel parameter amdgpu.runpm=0
Make sure to do all of that first. And observe if the freezes happen in certain circumstances. Maybe you can deduct something from that. Maybe it happens while gaming (GPU). Or when under load. Or if you move it around (loose connection), or when hot or after a certain time even if idle. Disable power management and see if that helps. Should be less effort than installing 5 operating systems. (If the crash isn’t super rare) And try using the magic SysReq keys to force linux to sync and reboot to see if the kernel is still alive somehow.
On my debian machine something like journalctl -b 1 -k shows stuff. There’s also lots of debug files in /var/log/ like boot.logdebug, kern.log, messages, syslog.
But it somehow needs to be able to store the log on your disk. If the system craps out completely, it won’t get written to disk. The magic SysRequest keys might help if it only freezes. I learned “Raising elephants is so utterly boring.” You might wanna goggle that and learn how to do it.
Other than that, I mostly look at all logs (no ‘-b1’ and search for the place where it rebooted. Sometimes you find other related stuff while scrolling. But my own (old) thinkpad doesn’t ever crash.
I think there are other crash-dump tools available. It believe there’s something called ‘kdump-tools’ available on Debian. YMMV.
Maybe just start with the different versions available in your distro’s package manager. I’ve never downloaded a custom kernel from somewhere else. (Well, I have but that was embedded stuff and not a desktop computer.)
I feel you. The bugs that get the machine to crash and you have zero chance of getting any useful debug information, are by far the most annoying ones.
In my experience it’s most of the time some driver issues in the kernel or the (NVidia) proprietary drivers. Or an hardware issue. On Debian I can install several kernel versions alongside each other. So there would be no need for me to install more than one distribution. Most of the times a proper crash isn’t caused by the userspace anyways, so it boils down to the different kernel versions and configurations anyways. You could also try an older kernel.
I think there isn’t really something “authoritative” in Git. You can upload your changes somewhere or another developer can download changes from you. You can also all make incompatible changes and then you won’t be able to sync it anymore (you’d need to fix that first and manually handle the conflict). There’s nothing authoritive in it. In practice most people choose a central place and all upload their changes there and everybody else regularly pulls them from there. But you could as well directly do it with the computer of your colleague if you have a network connection and access to it. Files including history of changes are the same on every machine and server. (If they’re all up to date). It’s like storing a directory including past versions on 10 different computers.