Linux

Oracle underscores its commitment to helping keep Linux open and free for the global Linux community.

Yes this has been asked and answered a million times I’m sure. There is a plethora of ‘top ten distros for Linux gaming’ lists out there and the majority of posts I can find on That Other Site seem to devolve into “every distro can do games”.

I’m interested in what you are using and your experience doing so. Any gotchas you wished you knew? Anything you tried that didn’t work, or anything that worked unexpectedly well? What would you say if your friend asked this over a few pints down the pub?

So if I have my Desktop at home, my personal laptop, and my laptop I use for work/business trips, can I have my own personal Linux setup on a portable drive that I can plug into and boot into from any of my devices? Like a cloud Linux setup, but I'm the cloud. Fear my cumulonimbus rumbles!

Now for something a bit different...

"Best weird and wonderful niche Linux distros in 2023"

https://www.techradar.com/best/best-weird-and-wonderful-niche-linux-distros

#Linux #Technology #Distros #Niche #News #Computer #OS

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 30 to July 07.

This week was a bit on the slow side as people are on vacation and preparing for Akademy 2023, which begins next week! Nevertheless progress on Plasma 6 continued, with a notable uptick in open bug…

So, after EndeavourOS's GRUB comitted suicide, me being too stupid to understand chroot despite wiki "tutorials" and the community rather trolling & gaslighting me instead of helping I decided to give Nobara a go. Usually I am a Plasma KDE guy, but thought since it's been a long time I try it out, especially since you can have it in a more classic configuration those days again, even though I'd miss out of Wallpaper Engine.

Unfortunately my experience has been nothing but awful. A bunch of random bullet points of my experience:

• I had real trouble connecting my BT headphones. At first it was "connected", but not really. Tried a fresh pairing mode, but then it showed two headphones. Then it connected, but as soon as I tried to adjust the audio input / output settings it lost audio again and I had to repeat it yet again. Now it works, and I decided to never touch the audio settings ever again.
• "Files" is constantly crashing. Using the search? Crash. Going backwards? Crash. Try to do "something"? Crash. Do nothing? Probably also crash (hyperbolic).
• "Files" data transfer for copying & deleting files is slow as hell for whatever reason (on decent Samsung SSDs mind you).
• "Files" cannot multitask. If you're copying, scanning, deleting or whatever, it won't do anything else until that process is done.
• "Files" and other Gnome applications frequently bug out if you try too many things at once, freezing or crashing them.
• "Files", or even Gnome as a whole, is so incredibly scrapped for features to achieve its simplistic look, that it lacks actual functionality.
• Gnome's settings are also missing for everything, or hidden in a gazillion different config menus, some of which I already forgot how to access again.
• Scaling scales not just the UI, but also 3D applications like games, reducing their actual resolution and making them blurry. The UI seemed to be blurry as well.
• Mullvad VPN's tray icon somehow turned into some three dots with a weird background.
• In the tray menu there's also a VPN toggle, which shows Mullvad, but being turned off. Turning it on disables my connection and I have to reconnect through Mullvad, which turns the toggle off again. No way to remove the redundant toggle as far as I can tell, but maybe it's in some hidden settings menu that I have yet to find.
• OpenRGB in this does not work with my NZXT Hue 2 Ambient. Keeps asking for resize zones, which according to a search should not be necessary, and wasn't necessary with the one I used in EOS either. Selecting any color just turns the LEDs off.
• Launching the Battle.net launcher through Lutris it also opens some ghost "OpenGL Renderer" application with it, taking up space on the task bar.
• Battle.net launcher can't be maximized without constantly resetting or displaying information beneath the task bar.
• Can't launch .sh files unless I explicitly right click & Run as program.
• Unfortunately it then launches with an additional empty terminal window, yet again taking up space on the task bar.
• Had to create a new FF profile because using my old one somehow was unusable in regards to its performance.
• The weather location for the little clock thingy apparently can't find anything, city or country, except some locations that aren't near me.
• Can't remove my own review in the Software center for one of the apps that I did prematurely.
• Tray area also has this little tiling menu. I tried tiling, hated it. Couldn't find a way to remove that icon to save space on the task bar.
• After a lot of apps started to hang I tried restarting, just to be left in a blackscreen and the PC not shutting down. Had to hard reset to restart.
• No EurKey keyboard layout. There's a 'German (US)' one that's close but it's missing symbols.
• Maybe probably more things that I can't recall right now.

And that's just after a few hours of usage. I was making fun of the tiny issues in KDE before, but if I have to choose between that and this disaster then I'm probably going to switch to the KDE edition, if I cannot find solutions to all this. I really don't understand how people can deal with it? Or am I somehow the only one?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/06/two_new_debian_desktops/

For those of us who grew up thinking that UNIX, in some (elusive) form, was the Holy Grail of operating systems, NextSTEP was where we wanted to live, work, and play, as soon as we knew about it.

In a small way, the internet was 'late' for me - most of these kinds of development weren't happening on the internet yet. This, in particular, was a Steve Jobs project, and was spoken of only in whispers and sometimes in a magazine interview. By the time I really knew anything about the technology, it was pretty much reliquary. This applied pretty much to all of the Unix world.

Like all the rest of it, Linux was a bit late getting to me as well, in that sense that I had just began to steel myself to the realization that I had missed the heyday of open architecture, multiuser operating systems, and would be saddled with some kind of M$ Windows for the rest of my life.

Of course, that's all highly subjective, and truth be told, I was just about as ready for Linux at that point as Linux was for me, and a million other screwball wingnuts like me -- our ship, as it were, had just landed, and was recruiting crew.

There are a few things from back then that were worth retaining from the museum depository. Some of those that have perhaps been easiest to keep in play and updated are window managers. Openlook is an oldie but a goodie, and modernized (OpenBox WM), it is more powerful than ever, and running with critical efficiency on the Raspberry Pi, where it makes it possible to use a Pi4x8GB like one might have used a workstation of yesteryear.

Now NextSTEP has been shown the love, and here it is. It should run on the Raspberry Pi as well, and given that the project has a Debian target, I'm willing to bet it will run just fine.

Any takers?

72 73 DE KI5SMN

#linux

One's a bit raw and touchy, but the other is vintage stuff, brought up to date

TUXEDO Computers unveils the 5th generation TUXEDO Stellaris 17 Linux-powered laptop featuring the fastest notebook hardware on the planet.

The new license terms for RHEL are structured to stop subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL. For now they are still providing source code albeit in a less convenient form, but technically they only need to do this for GPL licenses packages and they could remove code for BSD /MIT / Apache licensed packages.

Do these developments make you more.inclined to distribute your software under a copyleft license or are you happy with something more open?

Hello.

So I got a used x380 Yoga (i7-8550U and 16GB RAM) and I'm planning to use it for electronic music production. I like the touch screen for working with the piano roll, though I'll probably also connect an external monitor.

I'm probably going to install either Ubuntu Studio or Mint with the Ubuntu Studio Controls package. Either one of these will serve my purposes.

But can a 5-year-old laptop run Ubuntu Studio and a DAW? I will plug in a USB audio interface, so that will take some of the load off the processor. And 16GB of RAM should be enough (that's the max RAM on these machines, and it's soldered anyway). But I've heard that Ubuntu is more resource intensive than Mint.

What about Fedora Jam? Would a 5-year-old laptop run that better than Ubuntu Studio?

Are there any drawbacks to just using Mint with the Ubuntu Studio controls?

Does anybody have experience using an x380 yoga for audio production?

Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Gonna be honest here: I’m on vacation right now, so this week’s blog post is going to be a bit lazy. I probably missed some things, so if you were expecting to see your work here and di…

An Open Source, community owned and governed, forever-free enterprise Linux distribution.

The 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup for July 2nd, 2023, brings news about Nitrux 2.9, Fedora 39 WebUI installer, Zorin OS Upgrader, and more.

As I found out today after three solid months of use lol. Power usage went from 30-35W to 20-23W while watching YT.

For anyone interested, I used the optimus-manager method. For this, I installed optimus-manager, put the following config in /etc/optimus-manager/optimus-manager.conf and gave it a reboot.

[nvidia]
modeset=yes
PAT=yes
allow_external_gpus=no
options=overclocking
dynamic_power_management=fine

You maybe ought to give the related Arch wiki a read through as there are some gotchas and you could possibly get stuck with a locking-at-boot system, needing some advanced jiggery-pokery.

edit: code blocks aren't working

Linux magazine reports that "Former Snap co-developer Alan Pope, who left Canonical in 2021 after 10 years with the company, has developed unsnap, a script that replaces snaps with Flatpaks where available. The script, hosted on GitHub, has been tested by the developers for use on Ubuntu and all de...

Firefox 115 is available for download as the new ESR (Extended Support Release) series with hardware video decoding for Intel GPUs on Linux.

Currently most avionics real-time operating systems for airplanes are proprietary and very specialized for safety assurance reasons

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 23 to June 30.

Gonna be honest here: I’m on vacation right now, so this week’s blog post is going to be a bit lazy. I probably missed some things, so if you were expecting to see your work here and di…

Falling blocks game in Plymouth

The Akira ransomware operation uses a Linux encryptor to encrypt VMware ESXi virtual machines in double-extortion attacks against companies worldwide.

Rocky Linux is an open enterprise Operating System designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with Enterprise Linux.

Do you still use regular HDD's? Why and what for?

I have about 10 Portable 2.5" HDD's I somehow built up over the years, plus an additional 10 2.5" HDD's laying around that aren't in enclosures at the moment. I'm tossing up between wiping them all and disposing of them, and buying an enclosure to use them in a NAS. 7 of them are reasonable at between 2TB and 4TB capacity. It's just, they're so fucking slow. Is it really worth it to keep using HDD's in this day and age, or should I accept that their time has come and throw them out? I think I will just be dissapointed and annoyed with how slow they are if I keep them around and use them for hosting media on a plex server - But I haven't tested them out for that so I'm not sure.

I'm leaning towards wiping and getting rid of them. Any suggestions for a use I might find for them? Are you still using a HDD? Why? What do you use it for? I feel like the time it takes for shit to load on them isn't worth it and it just detracts to heavily from whatever I'm doing on a computer.

#linux