Most recent update is here.

The Tildes community has been amazing and patient with me as a new and uninformed Linux user, and I'm greatly appreciative of that. I return to you today with yet another request.

Hardware

System76 Oryx Pro
Distro: Pop!_OS 19.10

Issue #1 (mission critical)

Brother MFC-L2750DW

I have a Brother printer/scanner for which I have installed the drivers using the .deb file provided on the Brother site. It's connected via USB. Printing works fine; scanning does not. My husband and I both need the ability to scan for our jobs, so this issue is pretty important to us.

I am using the program Document Scanner (I believe it's one of the GNOME default programs?). When I open the program it says "Searching for Scanners" and then recognizes my scanner, giving the model number and says it's "Ready to Scan". Whenever I attempt to scan, however, whether from the ADF or the flatbed, it says "Unable to connect to scanner". I am not sure how to proceed, and any guidance on this would be greatly appreciated!

Issue #2 (optional)

Hyperkin Duke Wired Xbox Controller

This is an optional issue and not at all one that needs to be solved by any means. A while back my husband got me this because it's my absolute favorite controller of all time (I know, scoff all you want!). It worked fine in Windows, but now that I've shifted over to Linux it has been sitting and gathering dust.

When I plug it in the controller rumbles briefly (which it also did on Windows), but other than that does nothing. No input is accepted. If it's easy to get this up and running in Linux, I'd love to be able to use it, but if it's not that's totally fine. I have another controller I can use, and again, none of this is essential to my work. I just figured since I was asking for help I'd throw this in here too.

If you need any additional information or need me to try any specific things, let me know!

I don't wanna get into a heated discussion, so let me make something very clear: for a regular user, video editing on Linux is probably fine.

That is just not my use case.

I'm used to a degree of freedom, choice, and stability that, right now, Linux does not provide in that area.

I'm a film major who has worked as a professional video editor for many years and editing video on anything that is not nearly as good, reliable and precise as Adobe Premiere feels like torture.

But even being very flexible regarding features and requirements, after trying all the regular suggestions, as professional tools, and with all the respect I can muster, they are just unusable for me.

I need a reliable program in which I can throw any format without worrying about constant crashes, but Linux options are all either extremely limited, unstable or both! Before anyone asks: I tried multiple programs, in different versions and installation methods, on entirely different hardware and unaffiliated distributions.

Kdenlive resembles professional-grade software but constantly crashes at the simplest operations. DaVinci Resolve seems like a good bet but is a nightmare just to install and equally crashy when/if I'm able to do so (last time I had to manually edit the install script following the instructions of some random forum post. This did not cause a good impression. And audio didn't work), and I'm not willing to use something so finicky if Linux doesn't get primary support.

Besides, Blackmagic Design only provides a few pieces of the puzzle. Professional video editing requires a whole stack of integrated software. Both Windows and Mac OS have this, Linux has not.

There's also the issue of GPU acceleration.

I'm not saying FOSS developers owe me anything, nor that they have done a bad job with programs like OpenShot, Pitivi, Blender, whatever. I'm just saying that, regrettably, I'll probably have to install put Windows on dual-boot on my machine in the next few days.

Hey everyone, just watching a very interesting history of Terry A Davis (creator of TempleOS) and around the 30 minute mark there is a list of questions Terry asked to God and the answers he believed he received. I took a look online but was unable to find anything. I don't suppose anyone out there has a link? I'd be very interested to read it. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: I'm also interested in any links to the art he created (hymns, visual art etc).

EDIT: Latest update

This is something so rudimentary that I'm a little embarrassed to ask, but I've also tried looking around online to no avail. One of the hard parts about being a Linux newbie is that the amount of support material out there seems to differ based on distro, DE, and also time, so posts from even a year or two ago can be outdated or inapplicable.

Here's my situation: I'm a newbie Linux user running Pop!_OS 19.10 with the GNOME desktop environment. Occasionally, games I'm playing will hard crash and lock up my system completely, leaving a still image of the game frozen on the screen indefinitely. The system stays there, completely unresponsive to seemingly any inputs. It doesn't happen often, but when it does it's almost always when I'm running a Windows game through Steam's Proton layer. I suspect it also might have something to do with graphics drivers, as I'll at times notice an uptick in frequency after certain updates, though that might just be me finding a suspicious pattern where none exists.

Anyway, what I don't know how to do is gracefully exit or recover from these crashes. No keyboard shortcut seems to work, and I end up having to hold the power button on my computer until it abruptly shuts off. This seems to be the "worse case scenario" for handling it, so if there is a better way I should go about this, I'd love to know about it.

EDIT: I really want to thank everyone for their help so far. My initial question has been answered, and for posterity's sake I'd like to post the solution here, to anyone who is searching around for this same issue and ends up in this thread:

• Use CTRL+ALT+F3/F4/F5/F6 keys to access a terminal, where you can try to kill any offending processes and reboot if needed.
• If that fails, use ALT+SYSRQ+R-E-I-S-U-B.

With that out of the way, I've added more information about the crashes specifically to the thread, primarily here, and some people are helping me out with diagnosing the issue. This thread is now less about the proper way to deal with the crash than it is about trying to identify the cause of the crash and prevent it in the first place.

So I bought this laptop mainly for web browsing, document editing, note taking and programming with perhaps light gaming although that's not something I've tried yet. So, really just for school work.

Specifications

Laptop Model : Acer Aspire 3 A315-42
Laptop screen : 1080p IPS (with matte finish?)
CPU : R5 3500U
RAM : 8GB DDR4 (6GB available because of iGPU)
Storage : 256GB SSD NVMe
Wireless : Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377
Wired : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 (According to lspci)
2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x HDMI port, Audio jack, 1x RJ45 Ethernet port
Battery : 36.7Wh

Linux compatibility

Everything worked out of the box, gotta modify TLP to not kill the touchpad and webcam. The touchpad seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to being detected, It seems to be a kernel bug, unsure what I'll do about it concretely but rebooting a couple of times makes it work. Nothing to install thanks to AMD's open source mesa drivers. Might need a kernel higher than 5.3 because of general Ryzen 3000 issues but I've not tried, it was already higher than that.

Operating system tested

Basically never touched Windows, directly installed Fedora 31 Silverblue.

My Silverblue configuration is :

● ostree://fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue
                   Version: 31.20191213.0 (2019-12-13T00:42:11Z)
                BaseCommit: a5829371191d0a3e26d3cced9f075525d2ea73679bd255865fcf320bd2dca22a
              GPGSignature: Valid signature by 7D22D5867F2A4236474BF7B850CB390B3C3359C4
       RemovedBasePackages: gnome-terminal-nautilus gnome-terminal 3.34.2-1.fc31
           LayeredPackages: camorama cheese eog fedora-workstation-repositories gedit gnome-calendar gnome-font-viewer gnome-tweaks hw-probe libratbag-ratbagd lm_sensors nano neofetch
                            powertop radeontop sysprof systemd-swap tilix tlp

Kernel : 5.3.15
Gnome : 3.34.1

Body and Looks

The screen back has metal, I believe it feels quite sturdy. The rest is reasonable feeling plastic. The material used just loves to imprint grease / fingers which kinda sucks - the keys being the exception thankfully. There was also stickers on the inside which well, are somewhat standard but I thought they were pretty obnoxious so I removed them.

Typing experience

It's nothing amazing but it's good enough. I'm not really knowledgeable on keyboards so that's as much as I can say on it, really.

Performance

Everything feels quite snappy but I don't game at all on this machine so I'm not pushing it too much other than while I'm compiling or doing other things. The temperature does go up to 75°C and the fans get a little loud but it's not that bad. It's mostly the bottom getting hot so it's not something you notice too much while typing. It also cold boots quite fast, in about 10-20seconds I want to say but I've not benchmarked that. It's my first computer with an SSD so there's that.

Battery life

I get about 5hours with tlp installed doing web browsing, some programming occasionally, listening to music on the speakers and chatting. Personally I was kind of expecting more from this considering it's an APU but it seems to be what other people are getting on similar setups so It'll do.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this laptop considering how I bought it for 575$ on sale. I made this review mostly because I wasn't finding much information about this laptop on Linux and well, I don't know, I guess I felt like it. If you have any questions, ask up!

Some more info about the PinePhone

Pre-order page on the Pine Store

The early adopter edition of the PinePhone is now available for pre-order. This batch is 3000 units, from what I know ~1000 are already sold. These units are currently being produced, and are planned to ship in December/January. Mass production of the consumer edition of the phone is planned to begin in March 2020.

I just pre-ordered mine, is anyone else getting one? Any thoughts on the state of Linux smartphones, whether it's the PinePhone, Librem 5, or something else?

I'm interested in C or Go, but i'm open to ideas.

I have plenty of sh scripts i created to integrate my tools and system, so i have some experience and i don't want a scripting language like python.

My first plan is to learn the basics of the language and rewrite some of those scripts.

I think my first pick will be a script that uses ffmpeg to convert my flac files to mp3 or opus. I use sndconv -opus/-mp3 and it checks if there are flac files in the folder (i only have full albums), converts and puts in a folder named "$artist - $album".

My long term goal is to make a cli/tui music player like cmus.

UPDATE: i'm having plenty of success with Go right now. I just wrote a basic version of my music conversion script. It's just converting a music i pass as argument to mp3, but i'll keep working on it and adding functionality just to dip my toes in Go. It seems like a good language and i'm having fun!

Thanks for all the answers!

EDIT: SOLVED

It looks like it was much simple than I thought and someone solved it on Reddit already. I won't delete, just leave the link if someone is interested.

Runtime Environment

• OS: MX Linux 18
• Result of Y: 4.19.0-5-amd64
• dotfiles
• i3 version: 4.13
• ~/.config/i3
• GNU Emacs: 27.0.50
• ~/.emacs.d

Issue

Sometimes I use "whereis" (aliased for "wh", but it doesn't make any difference...) for my own scripts.

I usually copy their paths manually (using tmux) and paste to the command line resulting in something like this:

nvim /home/my_username/my_scripts_folder/my_script

Could I make that into a single command?

Thanks in advance!

I know there are similar products I could buy in the US that would give me this experience, but I'm not in the US and I don't have much money.

In the old days, my father had some kind of machine that was not a proper laptop and not a proper typewriter. It opened instantly to a text editor. As far as I remember, there was no noticeable boot time. It had a keyboard and an entry for a floppy disk. You typed your stuff, saved it to the floppy disk, probably to send via email or to print in another machine. I loved that machine.

I love these little gadgets that do one thing and one thing only. And, as someone with severe ADHD, they're often a necessity. If my Kindle had Youtube I would never read a book. If my PS4 had Emacs I would never play a game. The list goes on, but the principle is this: a lot of things are useful to me precisely because of what they cannot do.

And that is why I wanna recreate my father's crazy computer-typewriter.

Because I know how to use the command line, it really needs to be in total lockdown: I open it up, it shows a very simple text editor (with a few handy features that make it works even more like a typewriter) that I cannot configure, tinker or alter in any way. It's focused on writing (not editing) literature because that's what I need and other kinds of writing require an internet connection.

It would save and back up automatically (like a typewriter) to one or more drives at your choice.

There would need to be a few options because of different screen sizes, the number of screens etc, with an interface to make it easier.

So the idea is an ultra-minimal, kiosk-mode Linux distribution that can either go on a flash drive or be installed on an old laptop. No package management, no internet connection, no access to the command line, no configuration files, no distractions whatsoever. I wanna forget I'm even using Linux. I wanna recreate my father's typewriter/computer that he never let me touch.

How do I do this?

I currently use MX-Linux, which is a great distribution but does require me to reinstall it from time to time. It also comes with all the good/bad Debian legacy, and sometimes things can get really fucked up (okay, I admit it: MX IS NOT PERFECT. But nothing is, okay? Settle down.)

My new Linux Distribution doesn't need to have all the new bells and whistles, but it needs to be able to stay reasonably current with new packages and innovations. I don't mind some manual work, but I also don't wanna spend my days maintaining the system.

This distro is supposed to be a tool to work with, not a hobby to be pimped, riced or whatever. I will occasionally play and edit videos on it (don't worry, it's all AMD, thank you advice for the Tildes ;)

I use the i3wm window manager (not the gaps fork), so native support is a must and current versions are preferable (MX's version is from 2016. 2016!). If there's not a current version of Emacs, I'll compile my own. The same is true for Neovim, dmenu, rofi and the suckless terminal.

Configurations on text files do not scare me, but I don't wanna spend all my time scripting stuff. I don't mind compiling stuff either so Gentoo and other source-based distributions are valid options (as long as they allow me to work on stuff instead of working on the distribution...). That said, I have no preference whatsoever between binary and source-based.

Unstable distributions like Arch and even Manjaro are a no-no. I need my computer to work 99.99% of the time, like a fucking refrigerator. That said, I would like some newer packages and tools such as Gimp, Inkscape and a video editor like Kdenlive. Maybe flatpak is an option? I was never able to get it to work properly.

I'm also open to crazy things like Nix, but only if it'll make my life easier: I have no philosophies on the mater.

Any suggestions?

I've been using Linux for the past 5 to 10 years. I'm not a developer, but a mid-to-advanced user. I don't really know bash (or any programming language for that matter), but I got a folder with 100 bash scripts I wrote myself. I compile my own Emacs (which I configured from scratch and contains more than 200 crudes functions of my own), Neovim (also configured from scratch) and other programs such as suckless terminal. I'm an i3wm user and currently use MX-Linux. I'm very good at Googling and pattern recognition.

I got a brand new AMD desktop with a Ryzen processor (no dedicated graphics, wifi works fine with a USB adapter). Should I try Gentoo, or maybe I should study more (maybe with something like Linux Journey)in order to get a better experience?

Reasons to install Gentoo:

1. Learning experience
2. A completely customized desktop experience
3. Never having to reinstall my operating system again
4. Masochism
5. Putting my powerful processor to work
6. It seems cool (and less painful than LFS)
7. Some hypothetical performance gain

Introduction

I wanna say that I made several corrections, additions, and improvements just because I love you guys way more than I love the people at Reddit

• Please note that I'm merely a dedicated Linux user, I'm speaking from that point of view. I'm not a developer and not a programmer. These are just my opinions of 10+ years using Linux

• These are just some commentaries from a dude who happen to love the concept of STABILITY in general (autism represent) and would like to discuss how it works when it comes to Linux distributions. This is all based on my use-cases and on what I think is common sense. I have no knowledge of how open-source projects really work, and make no claims regarding how they should work.

• Only distributions that claim to be stable are under my scope. So Arch and Debian Unstable are clearly out the scope, but Slackware, CentOS, Debian Buster, and MX-Linux are clearly under the scope.

• All considerations are void if the malfunctioning is SOLELY a product of hardware, extremely rare conditions or your own lack of knowledge.

• Except when otherwise noted, non-compliance means the distribution is deemed not stable.

1 Deal Breakers

After a correct installation by the user on hardware that is expressly supported by the developers, a stable distribution should, in the period of 1 year (counted from the first boot):

1. Remains bootable, manageable and fully accessible.
2. Work with almost no maintenance or intervention (updates excluded)
3. Present no decrease in performance
4. Freeze at most once every two weeks
5. Have no package issue that cannot be solved by a simple command from its own package manager

2 Major Issues

Because of the complex nature of major issues, I'm not going to establish any criteria about them. Both stable and unstable distributions have critical problems that cannot have a fixed time-frame.

3 Minor Issues/Bugs/Annoyances/etc

Small issues are the ones that do not impede the usage of the machine, but provoke significant annoyances:

Examples:

1. Window switching is not working properly
2. The mouse stops working for 3 seconds every 15 minutes
3. For some reason, the letter "c" is sending "h" on the terminal
4. My configurations are not saved after reboot
5. My configurations are not being saved at all
6. I must change video output manually every time I switch monitors
7. I must change audio output manually every time I switch monitors
8. Some essential configuration is ridiculously hard to find
9. Configurations have no undo button
10. Configurations have no reset button
11. A certain package cannot be installed
12. A certain dependence cannot be installed (dependency hell)
13. There's a ridiculously accessible keyboard shortcut that makes your keyboard change layouts all the fucking time

3.1 Places for Research

Such minor issues must be solved within 30 days, as long as the user does their part and seek some of the following resources:

1. Google
2. Official websites
3. Official forums
4. Official warnings, newsletters, etc
5. Semi-official communities
6. FAQs
7. Manuals
8. Github Issues
9. Gitlab Issues
10. Other Venues to post issues

If the minor issue is not solved in 45+ days, the distribution will be deemed not stable, regardless of the behavior of the user.

4. Conclusion

It is my opinion that, if any of the major and minor requirements are not fulfilled according to their particular rules, the distribution in question should not be deemed not Stable.

I found my grandfathers old PC on the attic and want to revive it for him. He really loved that pc. Sadly that potato barely runs Windows xp so I thought about putting a Linux onto it. My Linux experience is limited to Mimt and Debian, both way to heavy for this old laptop. I need recommendations for a very light weight Linux Distro!

Specs:
256 mb DDR1 Ram
Intel Celeron M 320 @ 1.4GhZ
40gb Hard Drive

It's a small, simple gift and nothing where I want to put money into. Also it won't be my granddads daily driver so please don't recommend me a new one (a lot of people did that on other websites so I am rather careful). Thanks in Advance!

I'm building my first desktop computer, and Linux is my operating system of choice.

I know video cards sometimes can be a pain and wish to avoid any issues.

Dollar-priced items are very expensive down here, and I don't require playing the latest games on the highest configurations. Just something to “put me on the map”, so to speak, so I can have a somewhat current machine that doesn't give me much trouble. Any suggestions?

Because I'm in Brazil, highly specific brands that do not ship to my country are out of the question, and even the ones that ship usually cost more than I can pay due to currency exchange rate and shipping costs themselves. What are some universal brands and models that I can probably find on my location, that won't give me much trouble running Linux?

I don't require playing games or top performance (4GB 8GB RAM, a nice/vibrant screeen and an i5 processor would be the minimum requirement. SSD would be nice, but for my budget it's a plus. Just something that is durable (with a good guarantee) and works reliably under Linux, especially when it comes to HDMI output, video graphics adapter support, booting from USB, hibernating, sleeping, power management etc.

Thanks!