d3Xt3r, 21 hours ago

Woah, can’t believe it’s been an year already!

For the anniversary day, maybe we could have a post showcasing a few highlights of our community over the past year, something like Spotify’s Wrapped, but for Lemmy - so maybe a highlight of the most upvoted posts/comments, most profilic posters, membership counts, major server changes and little victories (maybe share some of your experiences in keeping the ship afloat)?

d3Xt3r, 19 hours ago

If you want to make it fancy we could do a presentation type thing, like via slidesgo.com or similar, but since this is on/for Lemmy, I think we should just keep it simple and make it a normal post.

d3Xt3r, 1 day ago

Medicat USB has a few hardware diagnostics tools on it. It’s based on Ventoy, so it’s more like a collection of ISOs as opposed to a single distro.

d3Xt3r, 22 hours ago

You can sill use Medicare to create the USB and then add your favorite antimalware rescue CD to it, like the Kaspersky/Avira ones, but if it’s an unknown malware you’d have to use other analysis tools like Sysinternals RootkirRevealer, Autoruns etc. If you want to fix Windows stuff then it’s best to get a WinPE-based live CD with these tools, like Sergei Strelec, Gandalf etc.

d3Xt3r, 3 days ago

Before y’all get excited, the press release doesn’t actually mention the term “open source” anywhere.

Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.

This, to me, reads like it’s going to be a “source available” model, perhaps released under some sort of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). So, best to hold off any celebrations until we see the actual license.

d3Xt3r, 3 days ago

You can, if the laptop supports VLink/DP-in, such as the Minisforum V3.

d3Xt3r, 5 days ago (edited 6 hours ago)

This has nothing to do with Arch or Bazzite, it’s actually a bug in recent kernels. Switching to Mint only fixed it for you because Mint uses an old kernel.

The fix/workaround is to enable “above 4G decoding” and “resizable BAR” in your BIOS. If your BIOS does not have these options, you can either downgrade to an earlier kernel (or OS image if you’re on Bazzite), or switch to a patched kernel like the Cachy kernel.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago (edited 6 days ago)

You cannot go back after trying it

I did! Used to have a Samsung 49" ultrawide. After using it for a couple of years, I sold it and got a 16:10 32" QHD, which I found worked better for me (+ one or two laptop screens for chat / random stuff when I’m doing serious work).

The biggest issue I had with the ultrawide is that most of the games that I played weren’t optimised for it, especially in some games where things like the mini-map might be at the far end of the screen, or worse, if it was an older game then you’d have to put up with black bars, or play the game in windowed mode.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

1. No
2. You’ll need to delete your ~/.config, ~/.local, ~/.cache ( and maybe ~/.var, which is your Flatpak app data/cache). Might be best to rename your .config instead of outright deleting it, just in case you need to restore some old config.
3. It’s been a while since I used Nobara, but IIRC it only creates the default @ and @home subvolumes.
   4,5. Nobara should have Timeshift installed by default.

Honestly though, since you said that you want something that “just works” for gaming and coding, you should just get Bazzite. Bazzite is an immutable distro and everything is set up to work out-of-the-box. You never have to worry about broken updates again due to atomic updates and image rollbacks. You can directly boot from a previous image from GRUB (no need to restore it first), pin known good images to your GRUB, and even rollback to any previous image via the web (upto 90 days) - all with just a single command. And for coding, you can easily set up a Distrobox container to install all your tools and IDEs etc, it integrates well with the host OS so you won’t even notice/care that it’s inside a container.

d3Xt3r, 6 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

Is that all? Will that remove all the traces of arch?

There will be some other minor dot files in your /home which you might want to review, like .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile etc. These should be mostly harmless, but if you don’t recall customising them, then yeah free to nuke all the dot files. Also be aware that some programs also leave their configs outside the .config folder, like Firefox might have a .mozilla folder, GTK programs might create a .themes folder, vim has .vim. So you might want to review and delete these as well, if you want a clean config.

As for the last step - just before you boot into your new distro, you might to get rid of the Arch/Endeavour entries from your ESP/UEFI. Run efibootmgr to see your current UEFI boot entries, then nuke the entries using efibootmgr --delete-bootnum -b #.

And to get rid of the GRUB configs, delete your <ESP>/EFI/grub folder. I’m guessing your /boot is on your root partition? If not then you’ll also need to delete /boot/grub.

Now when you install your next distro, you should get a nice and clean GRUB install.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

You can already run Linux apps using Termux and Termux-X11, and I’d say the performance would be better than this demo, because this is running in a virtual machine and uses it’s own kernel, whereas with Termux you’re running your apps directly on top of the Android Linux kernel. Also, you don’t have the overhead of running ChromeOS on top of Android.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago

I don’t play D4 anymore so I can’t say if this still works, but back when I did, I used to launch it (ie the Battle.net launcher) from Steam, as a non-Steam game.

I also used the latest Proton-GE as the compatibility tool, so that’s something you could try as well.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

I’d like to see a simple, dependency-free, calculator app, written in Rust, using egui. All other GUI calculator apps I’ve seen so far are unnecessarily heavy, using bloated toolkits like GTK or Qt.

This would be handy for those run a GTK/Qt-free environment, and/or those who just want a tiny calculator app (optimised for the smallest binary size) without any external dependencies. Preferably even compiled using musl, to remove any glibc dependencies - resulting in a simple, small, portable binary that can run on any distro and doesn’t even need to be installed.

Eventually, I would like to see this idea expanded to other apps - such as a simple text editor, a simple image editor, and maybe even a simple and lightweight web browser using Servo.

d3Xt3r, 8 days ago

This was in fact what prompted my search - the Gnome calculator is so horribly bloated, and yeah, it should have no business making network connections, at least not by default - this should be an opt-in behaviour.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

If it’s just Crunchyroll doing this, you can disable auto-play for it (or just disable it for all sites, IMO automatic playback of media is pretty annoying).

Another alternative is to use Auto Tab Discard, which automatically suspends tabs which are inactive after x seconds. This also helps save memory and CPU usage, and also greatly benefits laptop users. So if you tend to leave your browser open and have dozens of tabs in the background, I’d highly recommend getting this.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

Here’s the TL;DR from Phoronix:

#AMD

• AMD P-State Preferred Core handling for modern Ryzen systems. This is for leveraging ACPI CPPC data between CPU cores for improving task placement on AMD Ryzen systems for cores that can achieve higher frequencies and also helping in hybrid selection between say Zen 4 and Zen 4C cores. This AMD Preferred Core support has been in development since last year.
• Performance gains on AMD 4th Gen EPYC
• AMD FRU Memory Poison Manager merged along with other work as part of better supporting the AMD MI300 series.
• AMD has continued upstreaming more RDNA3+ refresh and RDNA4 graphics hardware support into the AMDGPU driver.

#Intel

• Intel Xeon Max gains in some AI workloads
• Intel FRED was merged for Flexible Return and Event Delivery with future Intel CPUs to overhaul CPU ring transitions.
• Reworked x86 topology code for better handling Intel Core hybrid CPUs.
• Intel Fastboot support is now enabled across all supported graphics generations.
• Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” tuning that can yield nice performance improvements for those using new Intel laptops.
• Continued work on the experimental Intel Xe DRM kernel graphics driver that Intel is aiming to get ready in time for Xe2 / Lunar Lake.

Video, Filesystem & Network

• Support for larger frame-buffer console fonts with modern 4K+ displays.
• Dropping the old NTFS driver.
• Improved case-insensitive file/folder handling.
• Performance optimizations for Btrfs.
• More efficient discard and improved journal pipelining for Bcachefs.
• FUSE passthrough mode finally made it to the mainline kernel.
• More online repair improvements for XFS.
• Much faster exFAT performance when engaging the “dirsync” mount option.
• Many networking improvements.

Full summary here: www.phoronix.com/review/linux-69-features/

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

Indeed. But I think some confusion will still remain as long as the ntfs-3g FUSE driver is still included by distros. Because right now, you have to explicitly specify the filesystem type as ntfs3 if you want to use the new in-kernel driver, otherwise it would use ntfs-3g. And most guides on the web still haven’t been updated to use ntfs3 in the fstab, so I’m afraid this confusion will continue to persist for some time.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

It refers to modern Intel CPUs where there are two types of cores - performance cores (P-cores) and efficient cores (E-cores). This is similar to ARM’s big.LITTLE architecture which we’ve seen in smartphones for many years already.

See: www.intel.com/…/how-hybrid-design-works.html

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

ntfs3 has had several improvements in 6.2 and 6.8, and it’s been pretty stable for me of late. I use it to share/backup my Steam game library mainly + for my portable drives for general data storage/local backups, and haven’t had any issues.

It’s not orphaned. There was a bit of lull after it was introduced in kernel 5.15, and yes it was a bit unstable in the 5.x series, but it’s been pretty good since 6.2 where they finally introduced the nocase and windows_names mount options. The performance improvements are worth it if you use NTFS heavily, so I would personally recommend switching.

d3Xt3r, 10 days ago

There’s no need to run chkdsk from Windows, you can run ntfsfix directly from Linux:

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo ntfsfix /dev/path --clear-dirty
</span>

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago (edited 7 days ago)

Mine looks like this:

UUID=blah /media/games ntfs3 uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000,rw,user,exec,nofail,nocase,windows_names 0 0

If you’re copy-pasting this, make sure your uid and gid matches of course.

But the key thing for Steam is you need to have your compatdata folder on a Linux partition, because Proton creates folders with invalid characters (like :). windows_names would prevent that of course, and thus prevents corruption, but it would cause Proton to fail since if can’t create those folders/files. So you’ll need to symlink that folder on your NTFS disk to point to a folder on a Linux partition.

Eg:

<span style="color:#323232;">$ mkdir -p ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata
</span><span style="color:#323232;">$ ln -s ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata /media/games/Steam/steamapps/ 
</span>

Of course, before you run the above, you’ll need to delete the existing compatdata folder from the NTFS disk.

d3Xt3r, 9 days ago

It’s r/w, if you specify the filesystem type as ntfs3. I believe if you use just ntfs it’ll be read-only, to mimic the behaviour of the old driver, for compatibility reasons.

d3Xt3r, 12 days ago (edited 8 days ago)

For #4, you could use WinApps - just pair it with a debloated version of Windows (like Tiny11) and you won’t even notice any performance impact. I made a custom build of Tiny11 core and it’s idle RAM usage is just 605 MB, and CPU usage close to 0%. When I launch a .docx on Linux, it loads up Word as a RemoteApp in less than a second and it sorta feels like a native app. It’s all pretty seamless once you get it going.

If you are going down this route btw, I highly recommend using freeRDP v3 (which you can install from the AUR), since it’s got a ton of improvements over the old 2.x versions.