thayer

@thayer@lemmy.ca

github.com/thayerw

My Lemmy themes at UserStyles.world:

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New Linux user, here is my use case. Distro recommendations?

Update 1: Thanks for all the responses! I’ve gotten a lot of very good comments saying I should stick with Mint, and that’s sitting comfortably in my top two picks right now. Between new distros, I’m most interested in Arch’s rolling release model, as it provides some benefits for me for reasons I didn’t really get...

thayer,

I can’t speak to Nobara, but Arch with KDE would be my vote if tweaking, documentation, and freshness (with potential instability) are the priorities.

Arch wins with respect to documentation; hands down, it’s the best documented Linux distro in existence. KDE provides a ton of customization via GUI, and gaming is easily obtainable and quite good on any distro, largely due to Flatpak.

Where you might run afoul is the command line. I couldn’t imagine running Arch without regular terminal use, but I’m sure you could get by for most tasks once KDE is up and running.

thayer,

My Application Launcher menu is very slow with bad performance. It always freezes for half a second goes loads when I move mouse and freezes again. Does anyone experience this issue?

Assuming you’re referring to KDE, I experienced this as well when I changed my default session from GNOME to KDE. There was something in my dotfiles that was affecting KDE’s overall responsiveness, because the performance was perfectly fine when tested in a brand new profile. Ultimately, I resolved it by cleaning up my ~/.config and ~/.local folders.

Linux mint or zorin OS for layman beginners who just want everything to work and focuses on stability , privacy , security ? Also what to do if I switched to mint and WiFi stopped working ?

Hey, so I just put this part up first because this is the one I urgently and importantly need answered even tho I wrote that hideous text block first (sorry English isn’t my first language )....

thayer, (edited )

You’ve already received a ton of feedback, so I just to mention that if you ever find yourself without working WiFi, you can connect your cell phone to the computer and enable USB Tethering on the phone (Android and iOS). The computer will automatically detect this as a network connection, and use it, without the need for additional software. This works for Windows and Linux (and possibly macOS, I don’t know).

thayer,

Mind sharing what your distro and version are? The problem seems to be present on Fedora and OpenSUSE mostly, from what I can see of the issues posted online.

As far as I can tell, sddm.conf is the legacy conf location and the more recent SDDM/KDE versions are now placing the settings in /etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf…not that that itself should matter much here.

thayer,

Thanks for the info. I don’t enable the Kwallet service at all either, so I don’t think that would be it, but who knows. At any rate, I rechecked my config and even moved the settings to /etc/sddm.conf without success. It seems I’m not alone at least, so I’ll just stick with GDM until I can troubleshoot further.

thayer,

That was my first choice alternative, but I had no success with any of the available LightDM greeters under Fedora 40 Kinoite (autologin, slick or gtk). They all resulted in a “Failed to start seat: seat0” error, even after ensuring logind-check-graphical=true was set. I may give it another go when I have the time.

thayer, (edited )

Interesting. I followed the documentation from the various distros (Arch, Debian, and openSUSE), and added the following to /etc/sddm.conf.d/10-autologin.conf:


<span style="color:#323232;">[Autologin]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Relogin=false
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Session=plasma (I've also tried plasma.desktop here)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">User=thayer
</span>

I’ve confirmed that plasma.desktop exists in /usr/share/wayland-sessions/ and it’s the session I normally select regardless of DM used.

I’ve also tried placing the autologin text in /etc/sddm.conf, /etc/sddm.conf.d/autologin, and the default /etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf. No matter where it’s saved, the settings are ignored and I’m brought right back to the greeter upon reboot. Nothing is logged in journald and SDDM doesn’t write to its own log in /var/log.

I’ve also tried the above with and without the KDE Wallet service enabled (I normally keep it disabled).

If I use the System Settings GUI to set the above details (via Colors & Themes > Login Screen (SDDM) > Behavior), the System Settings app crashes upon close. I’ve had multiple updates since rebasing to Kinoite, so the chance of a corrupted package is nil.

Something is definitely afoot.

How do you store your grounded coffee? (slrpnk.net)

Hiya, just quickly wondering how people store their coffee? Mine is in a tin box I got second hand, cos I thought it looked nice. Any rules regarding storing grounded coffee? I don’t store much at the time, it’s just if I grind a little too much and what not. I’m assuming the general thumb rule for this is to store it in a...

thayer,

Nice tin. We grind a 1L Mason jar’s worth at a time and use a French press. One jar lasts about 2 weeks and honestly, I can’t tell the difference between a fresh grind and a 2-week grind, regardless of bean used. I’m sure some would disagree :)

thayer,

Yep, this is how we’ve kept ours for over 20 years. Even if you don’t use the command line, most graphical file browsers will search through text files without issue.

thayer,

One of these days I’ll get around to setting up my own email server, but in the meantime I just take advantage of introductory offers on shared hosting plans. I purchase the 3-year plans and end up paying about $3-4/mo (CAD). When the plan is nearing expiry, I take my data and move on to the next web host. Been doing this for about 28 years now.

Got tracked down for my school reunion

Today I was contacted by someone at work. She graduated school with me and our 20 year reunion was coming up. Why did she contact me at work? It was the only way they were able to track me down. I was included in promotional material by name. She told me I "was the hardest to track down"and I had to smile....

thayer,

Yep. My only real goal is to reduce the amount of advertising I’m exposed to on a daily basis, and to that end it’s working…for now.

No cable, no streaming services, no broadcast radio, automated downloads of media, ad blockers everywhere, DNS sinkhole, etc. Thankfully, it’s all low maintenance once in place.

thayer,

If your hobby is technology and you enjoy spending time learning this stuff, then go for it. You’ll probably have a good time, and you likely won’t stop at Void.

If this is more of a grass is greener over there thing, then consider that constantly switching your software environment is just time taken from something else, and it’s time you’ll never get back. Ever. The pursuit of minimalism can often bring the opposite of its desire effect.

thayer,

Samba is also generally supported better than NFS on mobile file managers.

thayer,

Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE all offer excellent alternatives depending on your reasons for staying.

thayer,

Ubuntu is (mostly) based on Debian. This is simply a move by Ubuntu to further push their own packaging platform which is effectively proprietary at this time. Debian’s own packaging will remain unchanged.

What do you do for a calendar? New to selfhosting/homelab.

Hey All, I am just getting started in my journey. Part of my goals is to de-google my life and am looking to start with my calendar. I want to to sync with my laptop and my phone. I was going to start reading about nextcould because it seems like it would have the stuff I need and more. My question is what does the community...

thayer,

Radicale on the home server, which syncs contacts and calendaring for us. Thunderbird on the desktop. Fossify Calendar on Android, synced to Radicale via DAVx⁵.

thayer,

Nice! I’m not a KDE user, but I’m always happy to see more markdown editors under development!

thayer, (edited )

In my opinion, the web browser is the single most important application that should be sandboxed on a system. We use them to access nearly everything on the Internet, including resources that are routinely laden with obfuscated JavaScript.

Every attempt should be made to separate the browser from the host system, and circumventing that safeguard in order to facilitate direct access to your password database is risky at best.

Edit: I don’t mean to suggest that I have the perfect solution either, but I keep everything sandboxed and just opt for KeePassXC’s native global hotkey for auto-filling credentials.

thayer,

Right, here’s an enlightening synopsis thus far by Evan Boehs:

boehs.org/…/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdo…

thayer,

I think you’ve already received plenty of feedback here, for better or worse, so I’ll just add that you’re going find quirks in any operating system if you use it long enough; Windows is no exception.

Windows and macOS also introduce privacy and security complexities due to their proprietary nature. If that doesn’t bother you more than the annoyances you’ve encountered under Linux, do whatever works for you.

thayer,

I love how easy this has become. I can’t imagine ever going back to a traditional distro model.

thayer,

I think you’ll be out of luck for 3 slots, but you could always use the native slot for OS and dock the other 2 via USB with RAID capability in something like this.

thayer,

It’s available via Flatpak though. It’s been a dream to use…very fast, lots of options, and excellent container integration.

thayer,

I admit I typically hide the RPM Firefox and stick to the flatpak version. Aside from Nautilus though, in my experience most of the core GNOME user apps are provided via flatpak under Silverblue, including things like GNOME Calendar, Text Editor, Contacts, Totem, Evince, EoG, etc.

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