Adding myself here: I'm happy to chat about #Linux and answer what I can or help find resources. I don't know a lot about the latest, fanciest KDE and Gnome desktops but maybe you don't want that anyway and want to run something like xfce or another lightweight desktop (and yeah, for better or worse, there are lots of options with this stuff). Or #BSD. OpenBSD has been the daily driver for years now. One starting point might be https://fedoraproject.org/spins/ to easily try different desktops...
Hi! I’m getting a new laptop any day now and I plan on going back to Linux after maybe a decade on Windows. What works best for gaming nowadays? Is manjaro good for that? I prefer a distro with a nice name but of course that’s not the central thing. I’ll also do some book keeping, writing et cetera but I don’t think...
Anything with a recent kernel is fine. If you’re not very experienced, I’d recommend something like Fedora or OpenSUSE (both semi-rolling releases so you’ll get new kernels, graphics drivers, etc. but less likely to break for no reason than arch/gentoo derivatives).
Manjaro is fine if you don’t use the AUR, but arch/manjaro repositories on their own will be inadequate, and it will be so easy to get what’s missing from the AUR, which will eventually break something. This is because Manjaro holds back arch Linux updates for a week or two for “testing” purposes, but the AUR expects precisely the latest arch packages. If you’re thinking about Manjaro, do EndeavorOS instead. It’s the same thing (arch Linux with a more user friendly installer and relatively sane default apps/configs) with infinitely less hassle. Plus there’s really no point to using an arch-based distro without the AUR imo.
Garuda is also cool, I haven’t used it myself, but it’s supposed to be another preconfigured version of Arch more targeted towards gamers. YMMV, I’d probably just stick with EndeavorOS.
If you want an Ubuntu or Debian derivative, I’d go with Pop!OS. It’s basically Ubuntu without all the Ubuntu bullshit (snaps ludicrously out of date packages, etc), and they keep the kernel and video drivers pretty recent, unlike stock Ubuntu. Plus they have a cool desktop environment. Currently it’s a fork of GNOME, but they’re working on rewriting it from scratch and are making great progress, which will be interesting once it’s more developed.
It seems like the more interested I get in Linux, the less appealing it becomes. The community seems to have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, because everyone is just constantly talking over each other and contradicting themselves! I have spent so much time reading about Linux and distros and such to prepare for my...
Is your version of Windows a Pro? Find out in Settings -> System -> About. If so, you can install the Optional Feature (under Apps, Windows Features in 10 or System -> Optional Featues -> More Windows Features on 11) called Hyper-V.
If you do not have Pro, then install VirtualBox. Either one will let you create a Virtual Machine (VM), which lets you test drive anything as an operating system running as an app in an operating system (Xzibit meme here). From here, I would strongly recommend the mainstream linuxes, which are typically in the “just works” category and support Secure Boot out of the box, which lets you install it alongside Windows. These are:
Ubuntu Linux (preferably Kubuntu for the best Windows-like interface or Lubuntu if your computer is not very powerful)
Ubuntu is old reliable. A lot of Linux users are salty because a major corpo (Canonical) runs Ubuntu, and they’ve made design choices in the past and present that a bunch of Linux users are salty over (particularly by explicitly not supporting the now popular flatpak app format in favor of their own snap format), but reality is, Ubuntu works on just about everything I’ve ever put it on with the least amount (read: none) of dicking around to get it working. Ubuntu and its base, Debian, are very well supported and extremely stable. Most programs with a deb installer are designed for one or the other. Note that unlike Debian, Ubuntu is a bit newer with stuff, but still a bit behind compared to the frontier option below. This is the tradeoff for stability. Less cutting edge.
If flatpak support is more important to you, Linux Mint is a good interim between Ubuntu and Debian. It’s community run, has a very Windows-like simple desktop design, and supports Flatpak natively. However, Mint is behind on the latest shift in Linux backend systems, known as the great Wayland migration, among other things. They’re still working on it.
This is the bleeding edge Linux, maintained by another major corpo, RedHat. A lot of Linux users are salty about Fedora because RedHat is proprietary, and they recently killed off CentOS, a source code clone of RedHat a lot of people relied on, by buying it up and changing it from a clone to a testbed, probably to try and force users onto buying RedHat Enterprise Linux. However, Fedora is very up to date on the latest Linux tech, but is packaged in a very good “least pain to install and run every day” manner. They have very good support, due to being a cutting edge testbed for RedHat Enterprise, and anything that has an rpm package is probably for Fedora or RedHat. They also support flatpak natively, which makes it more likely whatever you want is going to be here. In addition, Fedora runs Wayland (the new, better performant graphics backend), which means it’s already future proofed.
Any other Linux you use will make you jump hoops to get Secure Boot working. I also know that there will be 12,000,000,000 replies of people saying Secure Boot is evil Microsoft conspiracy and stuff and you shouldn’t use it, but you need it for Windows dual boot, and platform security is something that people ignore until it becomes a problem, at which having it in the first place would have prevented the issue, as it’s too late after the fact to address it.
Once you’ve checked out the Linux of your choice in a VM, next is to get a USB stick and use Rufus to make a live boot stick, to see if it works on your PC. From the live stick, you can also install the linux on it.
Note that in many cases, if you’re not using the Linuxes above, you may have to disable Secure Boot, then do some linux magic (it’s different for every linux, which means googling or wiki searching, which is why I am not recommending everyone’s favorite distro, Arch, which is like a pro race car driver telling a person who’s never driven a motor vehicle before “it’s easy to drive a stock car” or “it’s easy to drive an F1 car”) after installation to get it enabled.
As for Windows eating the boot loader in dual boot configuration, this should not happen if you have UEFI, which every computer since Windows 8 is configured to boot with and uses Secure Boot, unless you changed that yourself in the bios or installed on ancient (pre-2012) hardware. What happens is when a boot loader is updated, either in Windows or Linux, it will establish itself as the King of Boot and be the first one to boot. Both boot loaders are still there in the EFI boot partition, but you may occasionally have to go into your UEFI Firmware Settings and change the boot order to your preference.
The reason I am pushing KDE versions is that both the mainest stream Linuxes push GNOME as their default desktop environment (DE). GNOME is nice, but it’s been trying to reinvent the wheel for a solid decade now with a completely unique interface, and coming off Windows, KDE is lighter weight on the system resource-wise and feels more familiar, with the bottom taskbar and start menu on the bottom left layout (you can still move it to another side if you’re one of those people).
The reason I have not recommended Pop!_OS is that they run LTS Ubuntu (which is older but supported for years version), they use a GNOME-like interface, and most importantly, they do not support Secure Boot at all.
From there, have fun. Linux is like a kit car, it’s made of lots of custom parts somehow working together in chaotic harmony.
Since we’re all onboard with telling off Linux evangelists in this moment, Linux has privacy issues too! If your screen goes to sleep, when you come back you’re greeted by your screen contents - not the Lock Screen for a solid two seconds or so (at least in GNOME Shell, the default desktop environment for many distros). #gnome#linux#security
@visone and GNOME is a Linux desktop environment. It’s the default on the most widespread workstation and desktop distributions.
But, fine, Linux doesn’t actually do SecureBoot attestation. The other major OSes do. (Yes, you can load a machine-owner key and do it yourself, but that surely doesn’t count as the OS providing it or supporting it)
I'm doing another one of my little surveys, this time to see which parts of using #Linux on the desktop are the most problematic, and the various issues people are having.
I'll make a video on these results next week, and depending on the answers, maybe I'll make more videos on specific issues, either to explain these topics, or to see how we could improve.
So, here is the form, feel free to fill it out and share it around, so we have as many answers as possible!
@hopfgeist Because a window manager could just be Kwin in KDE or Mutter on GNOME. A Tiling WM generally doesn’t come with a desktop environment attached :)
It’s not like anything he says is a secret: www.linuxfoundation.org 900 open source projects 3M+ developers trained
It’s right there on the front page.
Linux foundation never supported desktop development, and I suspect they have their reasons. Maybe that a GUI is a very subjective thing, there are dozens of desktops, supporting one would probably cause major wrath from everybody else, so if Linux Foundation were to support the desktop, they’d have to support all. But Gnome has often shown to be hostile to outside influence, so maybe they don’t really care to mess with that. KDE is based on QT, and maybe the QT dual license isn’t within the scope of Linux Foundation to support? So with the biggest desktops being somewhat problematic, maybe it’s better to just leave it alone.
The real question IMO is why Linux desktop doesn’t have better support from other foundations? Why aren’t any of them able to attract more financial support?
Personally I liked Gnome 2, and I think Gnome did a lot of harm to Linux when they deprecated it before Gnome Shell was ready, and I think Gnome alienated many users with the design decisions of Gnome shell.
Then the problem is that almost every GUI Desktop on Linux is based on some flavor of GTK which is under Gnome, or based on QT with the dual license.
Personally I don’t mind the dual license of QT, but many Linux developers are very idealistic, and don’t like it.
I decided to "mix it up" and change what distro and DE were on one of my #Linux machines, and everything I installed made me angry such that I ripped it out and installed something else that made me angrier. Tried to go back to the original arch but a glitch and a fuckup with the arch installer filled me with rage anew.
Right now it has Debian + XFCE, which I think is good, and I'm gonna leave it alone for now.
What a shitty Linux day. Should have left well enough alone.
I did XFCE because some small but unfixable detail of Gnome (I won't go into it) had made me not want it for this machine. Also the machine's fairly low-RAM, so I thought it might be nice to have a low-resource-demand desktop for a change.
so labwc is occassionally swapping my monitor inputs which annoys me to no end.
it (usually) worked on gnome but i had to fix it manually in gdm. at least its not KDE which would DO IT WHILE I WAS USING MY DESKTOP. Labwc only does after resuming from a suspend, and only sometimes.
i'm currently on a testing branch so reporting is a bit iffy, but i should report it, i'll have to take some time tomorrow and see if i can debug it.
I find it has been good, reliable and consistent. Apps are slow to release, but that is ok if that is whar they need to ensure it isn’t a buggy mess. Just hoping they will implement online account integration for GNOME desktop at some point, then it would be full google replacement for me
Web Apps lets you install websites as desktop apps, to be displayed in their own window. You can set a custom name or icon and choose which browser features will be enabled. Pick if you want to show loading bars or enable JavaScript, then have your new web app added to your desktop applications list. Use the net in a whole new way with Web Apps!
Sometimes adding a blank character helps with formatting. For example on Lemmy, it helps me separate lines of text if I insert a blank character between other lines. Currently, do that by copy-and-pasting the blank character from elsewhere. Here is an example...
I believe Lemmy removed your blank character?
At least, it doesn’t seem to show up when I try to select it or navigate around it with arrow keys, nor does the formatting look unusual.
It’s usually possible to type Unicode characters by just inputting their codepoint/number. This kind of varies between desktop environments, but how it works for GNOME (and possibly others) is described here: help.ubuntu.com/…/tips-specialchars.html.en#ctrls…
Alternatively, you can also change your keyboard layout to include it. On X11, you’d do that with Xmodmap. Looks like there are some alternatives for Wayland, but I don’t know what to recommend there.
Well, and another option would be to write a script which copies that character to your clipboard and then create a keyboard shortcut to call that script.
For copying to the clipboard, you can use xclip on X11 and wl-clipboard on Wayland.
"GNOME Wayland sucks because I have to decorate my own windows which is out of the scope for my project."
Just... Don't? :confused_dog: If GNOME doesn't want to have a fallback for server-side decorations, then the intended functionality of the desktop is to just not have window decorations for your app. If people open bug reports about it, close them and direct them to the GNOME issue tracker. I don't get why this is considered a stopper for so many developers targeting Wayland. Just don't have them, I don't get it. :neocat_what:
@charlotte I'd argue that, if GNOME's desktop experience is to not have a fallback to SSDs, that's GNOME's problem to figure out, not a developer's problem. If every developer refused to adopt libdecor, it'd force GNOME to deal with the problem in one way or another, either by adapting the shell to make it easier to interact with undecorated windows or finally adopting xdg-decoration. At no step of this equation should it be on the developer to deal with.
@charlotte I don't think you need to help anybody here though. If the experience of the desktop is to allow for undecorated windows, then that's just the experience of the desktop. It's like opening a bug report because the window tiles in Hyprland. It's just what the desktop is meant to do. If GNOME doesn't like that behavior, they can change it. If the user doesn't like that behavior, use a different desktop.
@lhp I mean, they're definitely real complaints if you're using a toolkit that doesn't have a CSD fallback, since then you're stuck writing your own. It's a bigger problem on older applications that should likely be ported to a more modern version of their toolkit anyway, or it's a problem with video games since SDL doesn't have a CSD fallback.
It's an issue, it's just not nearly that huge of one. :meowshrug: GNOME should support xdg-decoration in my mind because the desktop relies on the presence of window decorations, so having it where windows can appear without them is super disjointed and just bad UX, but I don't think it's the Wayland stopper developers try to pass it off as.
After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate....
Edit: Sorry, I may have misunderstood the question as I’m not entirely sure what a launcher is in the context of Linux, but I’ve been using GNOME as my desktop environment for years and it does everything asked for here.
In another comment I ran iperf3 Laptop (wifi) —> Desktop (ethernet) which was about 80-90MBits/s. Whereas Desktop —> OtherDesktop was in the 900-950 MBits/s range. So I think I can say the networking is fine enough when it’s all ethernet. Is there some other kind of benchmarking to do?
Just posted a more detailed description of the desktops in this comment (4th paragraph). It’s not ideal but for now its what I have. I did actually take the time (gnome-disks benchmarking) to test different cables, ports, etc to find the best possible configuration. While there is an upper limit, if you are forced to use USB, this makes a big difference.
Other people suggested ZeroTier or VPNs generally. I don’t really understand the role this component would be playing? I have a LAN and I really only want local access. Why the VPN?
Ya, I have tried using syncthing for this before and it involves deleting stuff all the time then re-syncing it when you need it again. And you need to be careful not to accidentally delete while synced, which could destroy all files.
Resilio I used it a long time ago. Didn’t realize it was still around! IIRC it was somewhat based on bittorrent with the idea of peers providing data to one another.
I loved the default theme, the splash screen, all of the customization options, and how lightweight it was, but it’s missing some of the conveniences and polish of GNOME, KDE, or even LXQt and Xfce. Using an independent toolkit meant that none of my apps looked consistent, even after trying my best to find a theme that supported everything, and if I explored the settings beyond a surface level things started looking ancient and clunky.
Definitely underrated, and really impressive for how much they could pack into a desktop targeted at older PCs, but still missing quite a bit.
I have tried it a few times but I could never really get into it. For one thing, it is a tiny island unto itself where most of what you need to run is foreign to it.
In the end, I found light-weight GTK and Qt options superior.
Based on some Lemmy comments, I tried Q4OS with the Trinity desktop ( basically KDE 3 ) and I was surprised how good it was. I used the 32 bit edition but it booted to a full GUI desktop in something like 110 MB and it was surprisingly usable. I guess I should not be too shocked. MATE is essentially GNOME 2 from the same era and, though not my favourite, it is still fine.
Perhaps the viability of Linux as a desktop has had more to do with the applications than the desktop itself.
As a newbie Arch user, I got bored to use Gnome or KDE. I want to use Hyprland as my desktop environment. Like what I see at social media. But there is different ways to download it as far as I see. Somethings called Hyprdots, additional things like Waybar etc. and these making me confused. How can I download it and make it look...
I didn’t change from any desktop environment. But I think that I also use Gnome applications, not sure. cleaning .config or .local directory is not an option for me.
Tips on distro for gaming Swedish
Hi! I’m getting a new laptop any day now and I plan on going back to Linux after maybe a decade on Windows. What works best for gaming nowadays? Is manjaro good for that? I prefer a distro with a nice name but of course that’s not the central thing. I’ll also do some book keeping, writing et cetera but I don’t think...
How the heck am I supposed to get into Linux?
It seems like the more interested I get in Linux, the less appealing it becomes. The community seems to have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, because everyone is just constantly talking over each other and contradicting themselves! I have spent so much time reading about Linux and distros and such to prepare for my...
A criticism of the linux foundation expenses and why you shouldn't support them (www.youtube.com)
Is Proton Unlimited worth it?
I’m thinking on potentionally subscribing for an Unlimited with a student discount....
How can I insert/type a blank character using my keyboard?
Sometimes adding a blank character helps with formatting. For example on Lemmy, it helps me separate lines of text if I insert a blank character between other lines. Currently, do that by copy-and-pasting the blank character from elsewhere. Here is an example...
Launcher with integrated clock and tray?
After years of my desktop environment (kde) being configured the same way, I tried enabling auto-hiding in my panel and I quite like the extra screen estate....
How to speed up accessing lots of files on another computer? Some kind of local cache?
Title is TLDR. More info about what I’m trying to do below....
How to install it
As a newbie Arch user, I got bored to use Gnome or KDE. I want to use Hyprland as my desktop environment. Like what I see at social media. But there is different ways to download it as far as I see. Somethings called Hyprdots, additional things like Waybar etc. and these making me confused. How can I download it and make it look...
This week in KDE: all about those apps (pointieststick.com)