Linux

What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?

I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS

A new version of fontconfig release recently with the added option to disable bitmap fonts. If you're using a rolling release distro, this might break bitmap fonts for you. It definitely does on Arch (and likely Arch-based distros) because they opted to disable them by default for some reason (AFAICT upstream gives the choice but does not recommend one way or the other).

This'll cause fontconfig to skip bitmap fonts, your apps won't be able to access them.

To fix it, you need to configure fontconfig to not ignore bitmap fonts. There are a number of ways to do that.

I'd recommend a user-level fontconfig file. Create $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf with below contents and you get your bitmap fonts back. This negates the file in /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf. This is the first time I'm configuring fontconfig so there may be a better way ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This should've definitely been news imo especially because this is not the default behavior of upstream. I shouldn't have to read fontconfig PRs to figure out why my fonts broke, even on Arch.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <description>Accept bitmap fonts</description>
  <!-- Accept bitmap fonts -->
  <selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="outline"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
        <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
      </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

I'm just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there's two things holding me back:

1. I wanna play Steam games on my PC

2. I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard

Is there any hope for me?

I've been using Pop!_OS for a few years now, and it's worked like a dream. Everything works out-of-the-box, and gaming on Linux has never been easier. But it almost works a little too well. Learning Linux as opposed to Windows for all my games was a fun challenge.

But, now that I'm familiar with how to set up any game that needs a little help besides Proton, I'm starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize, and I think picking a new distro with slightly different architechture will be very nice.

Don't get me wrong, I still want something that works by itself more often than not. But I would love to have something a little more cutting-edge that gives me a little more control.

I started with Linux by installing Kubuntu, and I really miss KDE Plasma. I know Kubuntu is still on Plasma 5, and I've been wanting to find a distro that lets me use Plasma 6.

I've narrowed my choices down to three distros: Nobara, Garuda, and Bazzite.

So far, I've confirmed that Nobara and Garuda come with Plasma 6, but I haven't found that information for Bazzite yet.

So, what do you think about these distros? What are the pros and cons for you?

I'm leaning the most toward Garuda - but I'm worried Arch may be TOO big of a leap. I really just learned that Fedora is not Arch-based, so I know Garuda will be a bit of the odd one out of the three.

TL;DR: Nobara, Garuda, Bazzite - which one is good and do any suck?

EDIT:

Thanks, everyone, for the insightful and helpful comments! From what everyone has said, I've come to find that either CachyOS or Solus will fit my needs best.

CachyOS seems optimized for gaming, while Solus' curated rolling releases seem (to my untrained eye at least) to be somewhat of a step between the way Debian-based distros upgrade and the way Arch-based distros upgrade.

I'd love to hear people's experiences with both of these! I think I'm going to try to dual-boot them and see what setup looks like for both.😄

I installed Linux Mint on my Lenovo Yoga 7 laptop and it's been great, with the one exception of not really having a tablet mode when I flip the screen. Its not a huge deal, but I watch shows that way and sometimes miss an on-screen keyboard.

The actual keyboard stays active when flipped, which is fine until I pick it up or have it on my lap and accidentally hit some random key.

It seems from some looking around that Mint doesn't do great with this and I'm open to a different distro that's fairly beginner friendly, but even better if there are some options I'm missing to keep what I have.

I made the jump off windows to EndeavourOS. I work from home most days of the week, and as such RDP to my workstation(laptop on a dock nearby).

I need an RDP client that can authenticate to win11 RDP, and support audio/mic to the session. Being able to span dual-screen is a plus.

I can't install any software on the work PC as I do not want to fall foul of the security team.

RDesktop doesn't support mic input. Remmina doesn't appear to authenticate to win11 properly. FreeRDP not updated in 8 years?

I'm planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don't know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?

I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32033583

Direct link to a text article about the situation

So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.

Now, the situation:

• Currently shows up as:
  • 6 MB FAT
  • 4.3 GB
  • 2 TB unallocated
  • 2.6TB unallocated
• The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
• Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.

I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Sometimes my entire screen will turn green requiring a reboot. This has happened while gaming but also while watching videos in browser. I'm trying out undervolting/underclocking using LACTL. Have you experienced this? What was the cause and how did you fix it?

It feels weird to just jump into a generic Linux community and ask a question. It's nice being so small - kinda like the internet used to be.

Anyway, I've been running Linux servers for decades but only recently switched my desktop. I first tried Debian 12 and I'm now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - I switched in the hope of getting newer drivers and maybe fixing this issue.

I have a HP laptop with onboard Intel graphics and an external monitor connected with USB-C. In general it works great - until it doesn't. From time to time the external monitor does not wake up after a suspend. Normally turning the monitor off and back on will cause some sort of driver reset and it comes back. Once or twice this has not helped and I've had to reboot.

I'm running Xorg as Wayland on Tumbleweed won't start on t his machine. Wayland may have worked with Debian, I don't recall. I don't think it's worth listing details of my versions as it's happened on two distros and through a couple of minor updates to Xorg on openSUSE. It happens with KDE or LXDE.

Any suggestions?

Hey all, semi-novice Linux user here.

I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.

I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.

After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.

I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.

Today I can share a major development status update of XPipe, a connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors, and more without requiring setup on your remote systems. You can also keep using your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it.

Docker compose

This release introduces support for docker compose. Containers in compose projects are grouped together and can be managed all at the same time via compose project entries.

The container state information shown is also improved, always showing the container state in combination with the system information.

Batch mode

There is now a batch mode available that allows you to select multiple systems via checkboxes and perform actions for the entire batch. This can include starting/stopping, automatically adding available subconnections, or running scripts on all selected systems.

You can toggle the batch mode in the top left corner.

Password managers

The password manager integrations have been upgraded:

• There is now support for KeePassXC
• All password manager integrations have been reworked to work out of the box without configuration
• There is now support to use password manager SSH agents more easily
• You can now unlock the xpipe vault with your password manager

Terminals

The terminal integration comes with many new features:

• There is now built-in support for the terminal multiplexers tmux, zellij, and screen. This is especially useful for terminals without tabbing support.
• There is also now built-in support for custom prompts with starship, oh-my-posh, and oh-my-zsh.
• On Windows, you now have the ability to use a WSL distribution as the terminal environment, allowing you to use the new terminal multiplexer integration seamlessly on Windows systems as well.

SSH

Various improvements were made to the SSH implementation:

• The SSH gateway implementation has been reworked so that you can now use local SSH keys and other identities for connections with gateways
• The VSCode SSH remote integration has been reworked to allow more connections it to be opened in vscode. It now supports essentially all simple SSH connections, custom SSH connections, SSH config connections, and VM SSH connections. This support includes gateways
• There is now built-in support to refresh an SSO openpubkey with the opkssh tool when needed
• There is now the option to enable verbose ssh output to diagnose connection issues better
• For VMs, you can now choose to not use the hypervisor host as SSH gateway and instead directly connect to the VM IP

Other

• Connection names, e.g. VM names, will now automatically update on refresh when they were changed
• You can now launch custom scripts within XPipe with a command output dialog window without having to open a terminal
• Various installation types like the linux apt/rpm repository and homebrew installations now support automatic updates as well
• The k8s integration will now automatically add all namespaces for the current context when searching for connections
• The application window will now hide any unnecessary sidebars when being resized to a small width. This makes it much easier to use XPipe in a tiling window arrangement
• The webtop has been updated to have terminal multiplexers, proper konsole tab support, disabled kwallet, and more
• Various error messages and connection creation dialogs now contain a help link to the documentation sections

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook

If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub, visit the Website, or check out the Docs for more information.

Enjoy!

I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

Hi, so I will try to hopefully explain as best as I can.

These are my devices:

• Windows PC -> Cable Headphone1 output
• Linux Laptop -> BT Headphone2 output
• Android Phone -> Phone speaker output

What I want to achieve:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone1 on my PC without having to use physical or software mixer.

What I managed to get working but sux due to audio stutter or delay:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone2

How?

• Phone paired via BT to Windows PC, using app on Windows PC called Bluetooth Audio Receiver gives me the ability to listen to my phone audio via Headphone1 (does not work for Laptop)
• Linux Laptop paired to my Windows PC as an audio device allows me to set the Laptop as a output audio device for the PC so I can listen to PC and thus to the Phone via Headphone2

BUT, this causes phone audio to stutter via Headphone2 and audio from PC has at least 500ms delay.

Wish there was a way to forward audio from Linux Laptop to Windows PC the same way as from Android Phone to PC.

Any clues?

On occasion, I'll have to work with markdown files, sometimes with inline LaTeX. I'm surprised how limited my options are, or I'm looking in the wrong places. Pandoc does the job, but the lack of a integrated graphical workflow isn't my cup of tea.

Has anyone found a good graphical markdown editor that can handle inline LaTeX and doesn't pull a gigabyte of dependencies? Preferably also can render the final output to PDF.

I hope this place won't hug it too hard, it's on 61% battery as of writing. Has translations in fr, de, nl, es, it, pt

The average page size of this website is below 0.5 MB – roughly a sixth of the average page size of the original website

SERVER: This website runs on an Olimex A20 computer. It has 2 Ghz of processing power, 1 GB of RAM, and 16 GB of storage. The server draws 1 - 2.5 watts of power.

SERVER SOFTWARE: The webserver runs Armbian Stretch, a Debian based operating system built around the SUNXI kernel. We wrote technical documentation for configuring the webserver. [comfy's note: worth checking out]

DESIGN SOFTWARE: ~~The website is built with Pelican, a static site generator.~~ [comfy note: Teppichbrand replied confirming they now use Hugo]

I also like the dithering aesthetic with the site images, both practical and stylistic.

hope i don't get crucified for self promotion, stigmata would be hard to explain to my folks

My girlfriend is trying to run Bazzite. She installed it, but she can't run it, because secure boot is turned on. She's using an Alienware M15 R7, and we can't find the secure boot setting. The manual says it should be in the boot configuration menu, but it's not there or in security either. How do you disabled secure boot on an M15 R7?

I was helping my friend install Mint on his laptop, it all went well and the installation finished, but the driver for the wi-fi module wouldn't turn on properly, or something. I assumed this was due to secure boot messing with the drivers, so I tried to disable it in the BIOS (it's an older laptop, no UEFI). But I have spent the last 3 hours trying and failing to open BIOS, and even GRUB. Nothing I try seems to work.

I tried all the function keys, as well as delete, escape, and enter, and the only thing I found is that F12 opens a boot options menu.

I tried holding and mashing shift throughout the boot procedure to get to GRUB.

I tried using the novo button (it's a Lenovo laptop) which did open a new menu allowing me to select a "BIOS options" button, but it just rebooted after showing me a few rolling lines of text.

I tried plugging in the installation media I used before, which does take me to it's GRUB, but choosing the UEFI options option there just causes a reboot.

I tried disconnecting the battery and the CMOS battery and waiting for 30 seconds in hopes of disabling fast boot, which didn't work.

I edited GRUB config files to change the timeout to 10 and the type away from hidden, which didn't do anything.

I disconnected the disk in hopes of it defaulting to the BIOS, which works for some laptops.

No option worked. I just cannot access BIOS or GRUB. I really don't know where to go next, and could use some help.