Linux

I purchased a Lenovo mini pc online to turn into my second ever Linux machine (whoo), and when I tried booting it up for the first time, I found it asking for a network to sync data from an Amazon employee. I will be frank, fuck Amazon. If someone stole it, I hope the lost money was enough to cause Bezos to shit himself and die, only for a clone to rise in his place to do the same in a never-ending Sisyphean hellscape of skin peeling feculent horror. The fantasy that my holding on to this, and it is likely a fantasy, will affect Amazon is a bonus, not a detriment.

Now, that said, it was probably resold from Amazon’s stock at a decent discount, but not wiped. How can I install Linux on a machine that I don’t actually have full access to? I’m passably tech savvy, and more than willing to learn more to get back on Linux after 10 years of Microsoft pissing me off.

TLDR: How can I install Linux on an Amazon OS machine that I don’t actually have full access to?

I'm setting up a computer with linux mint debian editon, and the computer is going to be used by a lot of people who sign in via AD. I have custom display settings (background, pinned applications, theme, custom menu icon) that I would like to apply to all users, but right now they only show up when I log into the account that I set it up on.

Also, is there a way to get a custom firefox esr config to apply to all users as well? I want to remove pocket and make duckduckgo the default browser.

Many thanks.

https://blog.thc.org/infecting-ssh-public-keys-with-backdoors

I am not a security expert and I wonder:

1. Does the described method infect the remote or local machine (from which I connect)?
2. Can this method be prevented? For example, correctly configuring your etc/ssh/ssh_config

It seems that every VPS supplier can hack you? The description shows that AWS does "harmless", but what if my hosting is a bad actor?

I just want to modify an easy to use Linux distro to come with certain themes and software preinstalled, as a joke.

Was curious about this on a family member’s new laptop running Windows 11. Is there anything Linux can do with this processor yet?

Hello people, just switched to Alpine and it would be great if some of the Apine users could share some dotfiles that are running Wayland compositors. I have not figured out to make swayidle work and some other stuff. By the way I am running River but this happened aswell on a fresh install with the Sway option of setup-desktop script.

I get some errors of unknown session with swayidle and conky, but I have set the corresponding environment variables and launching with dbus-run-session -- river

River init file:

export XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=river
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=river
dbus-update-activation-environment WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=river

Shell env file:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="$(mkrundir)"
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

If you encountered some quirks of your own please let me know. Thanks in advance!

From the blog post:

Hello everyone!

As it’s been not much of a secret anymore, Hyprperks has been a few months in the making, and now it’s all come together.

Hyprperks is now open to purchase to everyone!

If you want to support the development for 5€ + tax a month, and also get a few goodies from us, please check out the pricing page

You will get:

• Member-only forum access, with dev Q&A, support from me, and more
• Premium desktop experience, which is a set of preconfigured dotfiles with a one-click install and update
• And of course, support the continued development.

If you don’t have a Hyprland Account yet, consider making one! It’s free, and gives you access to our public forums, where you can find answers, ask questions, and interact with the community.

Also, thank you for all the support, guys. You are awesome!

Cheers, vax.

Gemini version: gemini://ploum.net/2025-07-23-linux_desktop4.gmi

Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.

Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)

I am sure to upset a lot of purists with this, but as a hobby "sysadmin" of my own linux server at home, an AI built into the shell would do wonders to me.

I found bash-ai, but that seems to me like little more than a wrapper for ChatGPT queries.

In an ideal scenario, I'd like to employ a pre-trained, locally run AI that has access to all files, including config files and the list of installed packages, so it can, for example, tell me what specific lines in config files do or if a package I have already installed is good for a task I want to do or what the merge conflict between configs during an upgrade is about.

Is there such a built-in AI?

Okay so I found this old MacBook (I mean OLD, it even has a hot-swappable battery and an optical drive) and I have no idea if it’s even worth the effort of installing anything on it. What do you guys think I could do with it?

Edit: note that this is just from a live usb, it has 120GB storage

I can't find some lightweight dm compression layer. Only one i found is VDO and for some reason it uses a lot of memory to operate (on the order of 500 MiB). Why is that? My idea was to use it on a normal laptop/pc that does not have a lot of memory to waste. Only other alternative is btrfs, but it is already slow by itself (compared to other fs like ext4). Idealy what i would want is something like ext4 on VDO (only compression with VDO, and of course there would be LVM in there), only problem with this is that VDO is heavy on memory.

I have an old Laptop (MSI MS1721) that I want to repurpose as a media player on my TV. I have installed an old SSD on with Linux Mint XFCE.

Almost everything works well, with only one exception. The laptop's graphics card (ATI HD3850) requires proprietary drivers that haven't been supported since Kernel 3.4. The replacement open-source drivers cause stuttering while playing videos, which makes it useless for my purposes.

Are there Linux distribution options out there that would fit my needs?

Edit After trying a wide array of distros including Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Lite, Linux MX, Bohdi, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Nobara, Debian XFCE and CachyOS, I was pleasantly surprised to see that CachyOS performed very well and still feels like a modern OS and runs surprisingly smoothly with KDE. It looks like the open source drivers do work decently after all depending on the distro you're running and how well optimized they are for your CPU.

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

A friend of mine had purchased all of the Sims games and wanted to see if they could play it on Linux and if so they'd switch to it. The issue is that while the Sims games work on steam, they had purchased it through the EA app, which does not have a native Linux version. It turns out that if you purchase it in the EA app, it won't let you transfer it to Steam even though they bought and owned the damn game. Very ridiculous policy.

This is copied from a Reddit post that I found. I figured this solution should be archived in a non-Reddit place in text format so that other people would know how to fix this.

In this video, I cover how to install and use the EA App on Linux using Lutris, a universal launcher that supports many game launcher services.

https://youtu.be/cLZw8hiu25o

This video will cover the standalone installation of the EA App on Linux, and not when it is launched separately by a game purchased in Steam.

Step 1. Install Wine.

https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/WineDependencies.md

The installation of Wine will differ slightly depending on your Linux distribution, but in all cases, you will be installing it using a package manager.

Although Lutris does uses its own Wine builds, it is still recommended to install all of Wine dependencies to ensure a working installation.

On the Wine Dependencies page on the Lutris Wiki, scroll down to find your distribution’s family and then follow the instructions.

Step 2. Install Lutris.

https://lutris.net/

To download Lutris, click on the Download link at the top of the main page, and then follow the installation instructions for your distribution.

Again, much like Wine, it is likely you will use your distribution’s package manager to install Lutris. Once installation is finished, launch Lutris using your application launcher.

Step 3. Install EA App.

To install the EA App using Lutris, click on the + button at the top left corner, and choose the Search the Lutris website for installers option.

In search bar, type in EA App.

You will need to scroll down to find it, but the option you want is the EA App, 2022, Windows entry.

Click on it, and you should be presented by two options, choose the Standard option by clicking the Install button.

From here, specify an installation location, review the files, and click Continue to start the installation process.

If you get asked to install any dependencies, click Yes.

Eventually, you will be presented with the installation wizard for the EA App, so click Let us Go to proceed.

Shortly after, you will be greeted by a blue screen, but you can close this, and the installation process will finish successfully.

Step 4. Launch EA App.

Now that the EA App is installed, double click the entry in Lutris to launch and you will be asked to sign in with your credentials.

Once signed in, the process is identical to Windows, you can browse through all available games to purchase or install ones already in your library.

Once a game is installed, double click to launch.

One final thing to note, I recommend disabling the In-Game overlay as this can prevent older games from launching, something that also happens on Windows.

To do that, click on the hamburger menu at the top left, navigate to Settings, Application, and toggle off the In-Game overlay.

And it's crap across the OSes. On Linux laptops don't wake up from sleep, on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it.

In our home office room there's three laptops. My private one running Fedora, my work PC that sadly runs Windows and my wife's laptop also running Windows.

My work laptop and my wife's laptop keep waking up wasting electricity, and my private laptop needs a hard reset to wake it up every second time.

That feature should be stupid simple, yet it doesn't work across the board.

Rant over.