There are several wlroot based DE, like river, sway, and hyperland. They are all light, but focused on tiling window management and keyboard navigation. Thus, they are not exactly a LXQT replacement.
They aren’t desktop environments though. No polkit, no auto mounting, no handling of media keys, no network management, no session management, NP display management, … out of the box. Everything has to be configured manually.
It’s a distribution completely centered around the Nix package manager. This basically allows you to program how your system should look using one programming language. If you want an identical system, just copy that file and you’re set.
Instead of installing packages through a package manager one at a time and configuring your system by digging into individual config files, NixOS has you write a single config file with all your settings and programs declared. This lets you more easily configure your system and have a completely reproducible system by just copying your nix files to another nixos machine and rebuilding.
It’s also an immutable distribution, so the base system files are only modified when rebuilding the whole system from your config, but during runtime it’s read only for security and stability.
If you try a distro that does it by default then it is no more complicated then ext4 for the user. The distro will setup things for you. I know that opensuse Tumbleweed and Fedora Workstation set this up by default. Manually configuring is how ever a bit more complicated.
Albeit not completely beginner friendly, the arch wiki explains btrfs features and manual configuration pretty well. If you are looking for a guide to a snapshot tool, then it depends on your distro, but they probably have an article for it as well (also, check the “related articles” section at the top of the page).
Alternatively, I run OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on my main production rig and it uses BTRFS and sets up snapshots from the GRUB menu for you by default!
I’m also using Nvidia, so while it’s gotten better and I haven’t had to roll back in a long time, Snapper has saved my butt once or twice in the past. ;)
Xorg is a display server for Linux ecosystem. Every ecosystem has a display server. It is what makes it possible for you to have graphical applications with movable windows that can talk to each other, or have a mouse cursor that can click on things.
Wayland is a replacement for Xorg because Xorg is old and its developers said an alternative is needed. Wayland has differences that I won’t discuss here, but I’ll be happy to do so if you ask.
Hyprland is a wayland compositor. A compositor is basically an implementation of wayland (there are many) and gives you a windowing system that you can run graphical applications through. It is usually a lot more minimal than having a full graphical desktop like KDE or Gnome.
Hyprland belongs to a class of comositors called “tiling”, which forces windows to be in a tiling formation. In other words, windows do not overlap or stack on top of each other. Hyprland stands out in having a lot of eye candy and visual effects.
I use CLI for moving files, etc. After you use it for a while, you find out it can be more efficient, faster, and more pleasant to work with.
IDK exactly what hyprland is. I think it is a Wayland DE or WM or something. Seems to be popular on unixporn.
I like CLI 'cause I use it a lot for servers and find a file manager to usually be more than I need, though sometimes being able to see all the icons in a GUI or whatever can be nice. I also use a linux server that I manage through the terminal, so I am used to it.
Wayland and xorg are display servers. They basically help draw windows on the screen, and help with input to different windows and things. Xorg has been around a while and has good support, but has security issues. The main one that I know of is that all keystrokes are sent to all running apps in xorg, so making keyloggers is really easy. Wayland is more secure in that regard, but has performance and stability issues, especially on nvidia GPUs. People argue about them because people like to argue, idk.
A wayland compositor and tiling window manager. The lead developer of the project is a Polish transphobic workaholic.
why do ppl use the CLI for things like making and moving files? i find the GUI easier and faster as well as less prone to mistakes
If you understand how shell scripting works you can easily automate menial tasks. CLI is also an interface shared by all operating systems so if you know how to work around in a shell you’re not bound to any particular workflow/desktop GUI. Keep using GUIs though, they exist for a reason.
what is wayland and xorg, and why does everyone argue about them
Both are display protocols that are in charge of displaying graphics to your screen. Xorg is over 30 years old while wayland is only about 15 years old. The polemic about xorg was that the codebase was unmanageable and the design architecture of the program was inherently flawed (example: screenlocker getting access to your entire screen including apps and desktop, making writing malware for x11 a 3 line python script). X11 was designed during a time when people were using actual real life terminals and mainframes. Wayland is much more modern and akin to how modern graphics APIs are handled (for the most part)
Wayland at its core has and always will be design by committee so a lot of the arguing is necessary (though sometimes long-winded) to make sure to not repeat xorg’s mistakes. Protocols take months if not years to be merged into wayland and those protocols have to be implemented by wayland compositors themselves rather than sharing 1 program altogether like with xorg.
Watch this video for more information, explains it much better and is from an actual wayland board member.
Hyperland. Don’t know. Apparently reading someone else’s comment, it has to do with Wayland.
Which leads to answering out of order about Wayland and Xorg. Both are windowing systems, major components of the GUI/desktop environment. Xorg, aka X or X11, is older than Linux; it dates back to the early 80’s. It just wasn’t designed to handle things like multiple monitors with variable refresh rate and all the wacky stuff we have now. It’s amazing it’s hung on this long but the sober fact is X is old and busted.
Wayland is the new hotness meant to replace Xorg. It works a bit different, some old software won’t work with it so there have to be converters, and there’s some issues with Nvidia compatibility with Wayland. There are very few people who just want to stubbornly stay with X, but Wayland still doesn’t work well for their use case, which is why there is much discussion about it.
I use the CLI for things like making and moving files for a lot of reasons.
I’m interacting with another machine through SSH
I’m maintaining a server that has no GUI installed
I’m doing something kind of weird like using scp to send a file from one computer to another via an SSH tunnel
I’m working on a large batch of files.
I’m doing something complex or multi-part to a bunch of files.
For example, when I ripped my DVD collection, I had an issue where the software generated file names like S4D2E3.mp4, or Season 4 Disc 2 Episode 3. I was able to copy-paste a list of the episode names of an entire season into a text file, and then using the CLI I iterated through the lines of that file renaming each video file and moved it to the correct storage directory. Saved a lot of manual F2ing.
Of course, I didn’t type those lines of bash each time, I saved it as a script and then ran that each time.
Learn a little bit of regex, how to use vim, how pipes work, and a bit about stuff like imagemagick or pandoc or ffmpeg and you’ll see why Bash is so handy.
it’s faster for me to type out cp -r source/directory destination/directory than it is to open a file manager, navigate to my source, ctrl-a ctrl-c navigate to my destination, ctrl-v. this is not always true. look at the work done by the plan9 people to learn more
idk what hyprland is specifically, but it’s either a window manager or compositor or something for use with wayland.
wayland and xorg are ways to do graphical user interfaces in unix systems. wayland is supposed to fix problems that have long been solved or worked around in xorg. it’s new and doesn’t workor support everything. xorg is old and has problems but it works very well.
The CLI has many advantages over a gui. For one, actions are reific, repeatable, and scriptable. This saves time as you can reuse previous commands and edit them appropriately for the current situation. This makes it easy to look back and verify what you have done. The command line is also a much more stable interface. GUIs change all the time and it’s hard to remember where things might be located. The structure of the gnu operating system accessed via the command line facilitates the discovery of installed commands/programs and documentation. You can record these actions once and repeat them on many machines. You can script common activities (eg bulk file renaming) that make file and data management easier.
I’m running Endeavour OS (KDE Plasma) and ran into a weird issue with my graphics. It’s like windows sometimes flicker and flight with each other, some fullscreen videos won’t play and just lock to a gray screen instead (e.g. in Steam, though YouTube is oddly fine), and most 3D games are super choppy and unplayable.
I’m not asking how to fix this, I just want to know how I start troubleshooting! I haven’t done anything special with my system, and I think the issue started after a normal pacman update. My GPU is a GeForce GTX 1060.
Any suggestions to get started? I don’t even know if the issue is Nvidia drivers, X, window manager, KDE, etc.
EDIT: The problem was Wayland. Fixed by logging in with X11 instead!
Check if OpenGL is okay by running glxinfo (from the package mesa-utils) and checking in the first few lines for "direct rendering: Yes".
Check if Vulkan is okay by running vulkaninfo (from the package vulkan-tools) and seeing... if it throws errors at you, I guess. There are probably some specific things you could look for but I'm not familiar enough with Vulkan yet.
You could sudo dmesg and read through looking for problems, but there might be a lot of noise to sift through. I'd start by piping it through grep -i nvidia to look for driver-specific stuff.
Might be worth running nvidia-settings and poking around to see if anything seems amiss. Not sure what you'd actually be looking for, but yeah.
Sometimes switching from linux and nvidia to linux-lts and nvidia-lts can help if the problem is in the kernel or driver. Remember to switch both of these at the same time, since drivers need to match the kernel.
You could also try switching from the nvidia drivers to nouveau. Might offer temporary relief and help narrow down where the problem is, at the expense of probably worse performance in heavy games. Ought to be fine for 2D gaming and general desktopping.
Trying a different window manager is always an option. Don't know how much hassle that is when you use a full DE; I've always been the "just grab individual lightweight pieces and slap 'em together" sort so I don't have any real experience with KDE. But yeah. Find out what the right way to change WM is for your system, then try swapping over to Openbox or something minimal like that and see what happens.
Related to WM/DE, it could be an issue with the compositor maybe. Look up whatever KDE's compositor is and see if you can turn it off and run a different one?
Try switching to different versions of your graphics driver and/or kernel. Nvidia cards get really finicky about the version matchups, especially as they age. Try different combinations of the versions that are available via pacman, and maybe it’ll work. You may need to start keeping an eye on updates to your kernel and graphics driver to see if a new update fixes your issue. Welcome to life with an nvidia card. I bought an nvidia card once in 2013. By 2016 I had to start playing this game on upgrades. At one point, the graphics driver was causing kernel panics until I downgraded both and waited a few months. Very happy with AMD.
Start by checking what windowing system you’re using as its a fundamental part of problem solving. It’s a little confusing how to do this, the top answer in this Stack exchange thread works well.
If you’re running the latest KDE then you’ve almost certainly been moved to Wayland and that will be the source of your problems. Wayland and Nvidia drivers don’t work well together, and KDE have defaulted to Wayland in the latest release. I have had very similar issues to you with the move to wayland and have not been able to fix them - they’re too fundamental and depend on updates to wayland and/or Nvidia drivers.
I know you don’t want a solution but there isn’t one at the moment, so you’d be wasting your time. The solution is to log out, then on the log in screen select Plasma (X11) as your session and log in again.
Personally I have had to abandon KDE as I get a different set of problems in X11. I’m on OpenSuSE Tumbleweed so have little choice inrolling back to the previously functioning version of KDE - I’m using Cinnamon instead and contemplating switching to a different Linux distro, probably OpenSuSE Leap in favour of stability over cutting edge.
Meanwhile I have the latest KDE running on another device with AMD GPU without issue.
In terms of when it’ll be fixed, there is a change being made to Wayland which will effect how it and the Nvidia drivers interact (something called Explicit sync). It’s just been merged into wayland so presumably will appear downstream in the coming next few months in rolling distributions. There have been articles suggesting this is going to fix most problems but personally I think this is a little brave but fingers crossed.
Oof, yep, that’s all it was. I just fired up Elden Ring and it runs great under X11. Thanks a million!
I’d heard Wayland and Nvidia don’t play nicely together, but forgot KDE had officially made the switch. I’m sure I approved the install a while back but probably assumed it was all stable and compatible now. Guess that’s what I get for not reading the release notes!
Both Debian and Ubuntu come with nonfree firmware blobs by default. Nonfree drivers such as the Nvidia proprietary driver can be installed graphically in Ubuntu if you open the drivers app.
Debian instructions are here and involves adding the non-free contrib repos to your /etc/apt/sources.list and then installing the nvidia-driver package
The general answer is to enable the RPM Fusion repos. But that won’t automagically install the drivers for you, you’ll need to manually identify what’s needed and install them accordingly. This guide is a decent starting point: fosslinux.com/…/how-to-install-key-drivers-on-you…
But also consider simply using a distro/spin that has all the drivers included (or automates the install), such as Nobara, or one of the Fedora Universal Blue distros.
Ok, I just stickied this post here, but I am not going to manage making a new one each week :)
I am an admin at lemmy.ml and was actually only added as a mod to this community so that my deletions would federate (because there was a bug where non-mod admin deletions weren’t federating a while ago). The other mods here are mostly inactive and most of the mod activity is by me and other admins.
Skimming your history here, you seem alright; would you like to be a mod of /c/linux@lemmy.ml ?
Thanks! Yep I mentioned you directly seeing as all the other other mods here are inactive. I’m on c/linux practically every day, so happy to manage the weekly stickies and help out with the moderation. :)
Considering switching to Linux, but don’t know what to choose/what will work for my needs. I want to be able to play my steam games, use discord desktop application, and use FL Studio. I need it to work with an audio interface and midi controller too. I am not interested in endless tweaking of settings, simple install would be nice. What should I go for?
Adding to what others have said I also think Mint is a great option. But I strongly encourage you to install things via the package manager when available, I find that a lot of times when someone complains that something (that should work) doesn’t work on Linux is because they’re trying to install things manually, i.e. the Windows way (open browser, search for program name, open website, download installer, open installer, follow instructions), that’s almost never the correct way on Linux.
As a fellow user in similar situation, i can tell that i had tried dual boot a few times but would just switch to windows when i wanted something done that didn’t work on linux
3 weeks ago i went full Mint install and left windows altogether. This forced me to find solutions to problems that i otherwise would solve by just switching to windows. Dont expect everything to work though. You will need to tweak some things and you may even need to do some things differently than youre used to. But isn’t this why we change in the first place?
Mint would probably work for you. Some stuff is outdated, but it has flatpak which is a package manager with more up to date apps. If you’re willing to put in the time though, I’d recommend trying some of the more common distros out (Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora). You can use a liveusb to test them without installing.
Steam is available anywhere so that’s not a problem.
Discord officially only has a .deb package, so that’s only for Debian based distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint). There are other options for almost all distros though - I personally use Webcord
Fl studio might be tricky - supposedly it runs through wine but you might have to do a bit of work. I’ve personally used Reaper and I works great.
You want a disk imager like clonezilla or something. If you’re not ready for that just show hidden files and copy your /home/your_username directory to a usb or something. That’s where all your files live.
Install everything from store, and you should be fine. If you see a tutorial being too complicated, it is probably not worth following. Set your search engine to past year and see if there are better tutorials.
You might also want to consider atomic distros, they are much harder to mess up, and much easier to restore.
Oh! in that case may I suggest yachts with docker containers? yacht.sh
Everything on my homeserver is directly installed on the server, keeping them up-to-date is pretty annoying, and permission control is completely non-existent.
Since want to do things the hard way, I believe this can also be a good opportunity to do things in the “better” way (at least IMO).
Ah now that does look promising, I had settled on portainer but this yacht program looks very noob friendly! I’ll install it today and check it out! Cheers!
Another perspective: Your question implies you want to try out things with Debian. If this assumption is correct, I would highly recommend you just create a virtual machine with qemu/libvirt and learn within this environments/try out things there before doing stuff ‘on the metal’.
Of course backups are always a good idea and once you got your feed wet you might want to learn about ‘Infrastructure as code’. Have fun!
That’s a fantastic suggestion and I’ve already been doing exactly this :) but, I’ve done it just enough to know that I’m really really good at breaking stuff, and I don’t want to wait to fully transition from windows. Hence the need for full system backups
I ran Linux in a vm and destroyed it about… 5 times. It allowed me to really get in and try everything. Once I rana command that removed everything, and I remember watching icons disappear as the destruction unfolded in front of me. It was kind of fun.
I have everything backed up and synced so it’s all fine. Just lots of reinstalling Thunderbird, Firefox, re logging into firefox sync, etc.
Once I stopped destroying everything I did a proper install and haven’t looked back.
This will be my 7th year on Linux now. And I have to say, it feels good to be free.
Awk is a programming language designed for reading files line by line. It finds lines by a pattern and then runs an action on that line if the pattern matches. You can easily write a 1-line program on the command line and ask Awk to run that 1-line program on a file. Here is a program to count the number of “comment” lines in a script:
It is a good way to inspect the content of files, espcially log files or CSV files. But Awk can do some fairly complex file editing operations as well, like collating multiple files. It is a complete programming language.
Sed works similar to Awk, but it is much simplified, and designed mostly around CLI usage. The pattern language is similar to Awk, but the commands are usually just one or two letters representing actions like “print the line” or “copy the line to the in-memory buffer” or “dump the in-memory buffer to output.”
If you’re gonna dive into sed and awk, I’d also highly recommend learning at least the basics of regular expressions. The book Mastering Regular Expressions has been tremendously helpful for me.
Is there an Android emulator that you can actually game on? I’ve tried a number of them (Android x86, Genymotion, Waydroid), but none of them can install a multitude of games from the Google Play store. The one thing keeping me on Windows is Android emulation (I like having one or two idle games running at any given time).
Waydroid works, but there’s three main things you need to get things going to replicate a typical Android device:
OpenGapps: For GApps/Play Store. You’ll also need to register your device to get an Android ID.
Magisk: Mainly to pass SafetyNet / Play Integrity basic checks.
libndk / libhoudini: For ARM > x86 translation. libndk works better on AMD.
Widevine: (optional) L3 DRM for things that need it, eg Netflix
There are some automated scripts that can set this all up. I used this one in the past with some success.
Also, stay away from nVidia. From what I recall, it just doesn’t work, or there are other issues like crashes. But if you’re serious about Linux in general, then ditching nVidia is generally a good idea.
Finally, games that use anti-cheat can be a hit-or-miss (like Genshin Impact, which crashed when I last tried it). But that’s something that you may face on any emulator, I mean, any decent anti-cheat system would detect the usage of emulators.
I see. I knew most of the emulators lacked ARM support, which seemed to be the biggest issue, but this helps. Sadly, I have a 3080 and no money to buy a new card, so I stuck with nVidia for the foreseeable future. I’ll have to test this when I get time, though. Thanks.
An nvidia GPU unfortunetly doesn’t work with Waydroid at all. You would have to use CPU rendering which won’t play any games. You might be able to use your CPUs iGPU if it has one.
Short version: How do I install apps onto a different partition from the default in Pop_OS! (preferably from within the Pop Shop GUI)?
Long version: I have a dual boot with Windows and I shrunk my Win partition to install linux and eventually realized I wanted more space on the linux side so I shrunk my windows partition again. But Linux won’t let me grow the existing partition since the free space isn’t contiguous. Since I don’t want to reinstall everything, I just created a data partition and have been using that for Steam installs. But I am still running low so yeah, looking to move some apps and realized it doesn’t actually ask me where to install when I install. I saw this thread and figured I’d just ask.
You can move partitions so they are next to each other and then expand. The easiest way Ive found is to boot a love USB distro, since the partitions can’t be mounted when you do it. Open parted and you can resize and move around.
This is the way. There is a GParted distro that you can boot from a USB-drive that will allow you to move the partition and expand it to take up the free space Windows left.
You should first install GParted to familiarise yourself a little with how the GUI looks. It’s relatively simple, definitely simpler than parted, but it doesn’t hurt to have a look around before doing it live.
It’s also good to note that everything you do in GParted needs to be applied before it’s actually done. You “cannot” accidentally delete a whole partition without actually hitting an apply button.
If they are LVM volumes, it would be possible. Otherwise, you can move the directories you want to the new partition and use symbolic links to point to the new places. Then again some things aren't correctly designed, so they may have problems with symbolic links and YMMV.
maybe have your pxe boot service on a vlan or something at least.
at least a decade ago some stuff you wouldn’t expect will just connect up to any old server and accept any old image it’s offering with no authentication or checks whatsoever. it’s annoying when a power outage knocks everything down and some equipment comes up with a different hat on.
This is the dumbest question ever, but here goes: I’m trying to use pika to make regular backups of my whole system to my synology Nas. So I’d choose “remote”, but no matter what I enter after the SMB it doesn’t take it. How do I back up to my synology Nas using pika? I like pika because the UI is fucking stupid simple, except this one little nugget.
I have had issues with using a NAS over SMB because of some malarky about reverting to SMB 1.0 or something. Dunno; I stopped backing up to my NAS and just use external drives.
That’s probably what I’m going to do eventually. But my Nas is working not problem on dolphin. Whenever I needed to, I’d just drag and drop my files into the nas through dolphin.
If the nas is seeing your systems requests and saying “no”, it’s a permissions problem. If it’s not seeing your systems requests then it’s an addressing problem.
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