I'm not sure if anyone else here is into topre switch keyboards, but keycaps for topre are notoriously hard to find. Topre is niche within a niche, so options are limited. But for the last year or so, FKCaps in collaboration with 23_Andreas have been working to launch keycaps in a new profile specifically designed for topre called URSA, compatible with HHKB, Leopold, and Realforce boards. They have now opened for pre-order, scheduled to be delivered in January 2025.

I don't normally go for pre-orders or group buys, but I couldn't say no to this. The URSA profile and the caps themselves look great, and while I do enjoy the OEM keycaps on my HHKB, I also like having other options and trying new things. I've got a black HHKB Pro Hybrid Type-S, and I went with the black caps with legends. The mock-up image looks beautiful. I'm excited.

If you're unfamiliar with the HHKB, or Happy Hacking Keyboard, it's a Unix-style board that has been around for 25 years, designed by a Japanese computer scientist because he wanted a more versatile board for programming and working in the command line on multiple operating systems. What makes the layout special, and why I enjoy it, is because the caps lock key has been replaced by a control key, and delete/backspace has been moved down a row for easier reach and to allow the tilde/backtick key to live on the top right. It's designed so you can easily reach everything from the homerow, and keys like the arrows, home, end, page up, page down are on a secondary layer accessed by the function key. Further, you can change board functionality through DIP switches on the bottom of the board. It's just so fun and pleasant to type on. Build quality is superb and these boards are known to stand the test of time.

So if there are any other topre enthusiasts around here, I urge you to check URSA out. You can read more about the keycaps here.

The machine will be a laptop.

So let's say I'm doing this on Antix Linux or MX-Linux, which are both based on Debian. I already set up everything that I want. Now I wish to make that installation incapable of accessing the internet ever again -- even if I want it to. However, I wouldn't want to achieve that in a way that will negatively affect any application I might need. How can I do that?

You may be curious about my motivation. It is simple: that machine should be only for writing and nothing more. Maybe I'll use YLINAT, @Areldyb's Timasomo project.

For the purposes of my usage, it is nothing more than an electronic typewriter with a screen. That is a drastic measure but I have ADHD and I need to write. I'm afraid that if I don't do something about it I'll see myself in a difficult situation regarding deadlines. I'll just take the laptop with me to a quiet place and leave the cell phone at home.

Every day I will take my writing off the laptop via USB and back it up.

I know this can be a bit of a heated debate sometimes, and with so many choices people will have their preferences. I wanted to hear some noob-friendly suggestions for me and some friends.

What distros would work well for an old laptop repurposed as a glorified Chromebook (web browsing, Netflix, emails, etc) with some light Steam 2D indie game usage? It would be borrowed by less tech savvy people.

What distros would work well for gaming desktops? Either current high end desktops or desktops that are a few years old.

It's funny. I've been using Linux since the old Mandrake days (year 2000 I think). I've used Slackware, Gentoo, Void, Fedora, OpenSuse, Arch and so on. I love Linux in general, there is not other OS I would use.

Every distro has it's ups and downs and the only one I am content with is Void Linux, but I still don't really love it.

Void uses runit instead of systemd, which I prefer as an init system, but this means that if you want to use a major DE like Plasma you end up with some functionalities not working right.

So I want a minimalish system like Void that has access to the latest KDE Plasma, uses systemd and all the regular stuff, but IT IS NOT ARCH.

Why I don't like Arch? I think it tends to break too often, you have to stay on top of updates and having only one version of the kernel installed bugs me. Void Linux is rolling and NEVER breaks. I'm not exaggerating here. It never broke on me.

OpenSuse Tumbleweed is an alternative, but like Fedora, it does not ship with proprietary codecs so you have to jump through hoops to install the correct packages. It is just a matter of installing opi and typing "opi codecs", but you can bet that in the next weeks some breakage when updating will happen.

This happens to me with Fedora too. I install the RPMFusion repository and install the codecs. Every now and then things break because of it and I need to troubleshoot things.

Not to mention that when you install Plasma with Fedora or Opensuse, it ends up installing a thousand unnecessary things. I can disable the recommended packages/weak dependencies, trim things down and cut here and there, but I always feel like i lost control of things.

Oh and OpenSuse TW always gave me trouble with the wayland session of Plasma not working properly.

Gentoo is out of the question. I used it for years and had fun, but I don't care about all the compilation anymore.

Debian would be a great choice if packages weren't too old. I prefer a rolling release model or at least something like Fedora that is pretty up to date.

So in the end I stick with Void (without using Plasma), but still bitter about it.

I'm looking for a black & white laser printer with a scanner for home office use. The only fancy thing about it is that I'm running Linux and I don't want to install any driver packages from the manufacturer. I want to plug it into any laptop running any Linux distro and start printing and scanning with no fuss.

Brother printers are very popular, but if I search for any Brother printer and "linux", all I can find is stuff about the drivers and how to fix the various issues that come with those.

If I understand correctly, modern printers should just work via something called IPP/AirPrint and they should also work over USB. Is that correct?

What about the scanner? Does that also just work over IPP?

I've been running Linux full-time pretty much since Valve released Proton. I remember submitting reports to ProtonDB back when it was just a shared Google Sheet! In the years that followed I made it a point to test and report out on different games as new versions of Proton were released and support improved. I thought it important that we have a good data set for what worked and what didn't. Over those years I tested hundreds of games and submitted as many reports to the database.

In thinking back over my gaming in 2023, however, I realized that I fell out of the habit of submitting reports because I'm so used to Proton working that it's stopped occurring to me that it might not.

That doesn't mean that there aren't some games that don't work -- it simply means that the success rate that I used to have (maybe 30-50% on average) has risen high enough that I'm genuinely surprised if something doesn't work (it's probably somewhere around 95% for me now, though that's biased by the types of games that I play). I actually tried to remember the last game that didn't work, and I genuinely couldn't tell you what it was. Everything I've played recently has booted like it's native.

Honestly, I genuinely don't even know which games are native and which run through Proton anymore. I've stopped caring!

I got my Steam Deck halfway through 2022. It was awesome, but it was definitely a bit rough around the edges. There weren't that many compatible games. The OS had some clunkiness. It matured though, and has gotten better. Among my friend group, I'm the only person who cares even a little bit about Linux. If you asked any of them to name three different Linux distributions they'd stare at you blankly because they wouldn't understand the question. Nevertheless, of my friends, SIX of them have Steam Decks and are now gaming regularly on Linux.

There are currently ~4,300 Deck Verified games and ~8,700 Deck Playable games according to Valve. On ProtonDB, ~8,600 games have been verified as working on Linux by at least three users, while ~19,700 games have been verified by at least one user. There is SO much variety available, and the speed with which we've gotten here has been pretty breathtaking.

This was my device breakdown for my Steam Replay for 2023:

• 55% Steam Deck
• 32% Linux
• 10% Virtual Reality
• 4% Windows

The only non-Linux gaming I did was VR and some local multiplayer stuff I have on a Windows machine hooked up to my TV.

I don't want to proselytize too much, but if you have a general interest in gaming, you could probably switch over to Linux full time and be perfectly happy with the variety of games you have available to you. Not too long ago, making the jump felt like a huge sacrifice because you'd be giving up so much -- SO many games were incompatible -- but it no longer feels that way. You can transfer and most of -- probably almost all -- your library will still work! Also, if a particular game doesn't work, there isn't too much sting because, well, there are thousands of others you can give your attention to.

If you have a specific game that you must play, then it's possibly a different story. If you love Destiny 2, for example, then full-time Linux definitely is not for you. The same goes VR -- it's simply not up to snuff on Linux yet. There are other niches too that don't transfer over as well (modding, racing sims, etc.) so, of course, this isn't a blanket recommendation and everyone's situation is different.

But for a prototypical person who's just your sort of general, everyday gamer? It's reached a point where they could be very happy on Linux. In fact, as proven by my friends and their Steam Decks, it's reached a point where people can be gaming on Linux and not even know they're doing that. That's how frictionless it's gotten!

I don't really have a point to this post other than to say it's incredible that we are where we are, and I'm beyond appreciative of all the effort that people have put in to making this possible.

On most laptops I've had to deal with, Linux was at least installable and bootable, the only exception was perhaps the cheap bay trail tablets and notebooks released around the years 2017-19 that came with Intel Atom processors. These weird devices came with a 32-bit UEFI and 64-bit architecture, thus making it pretty much impossible to even boot with something other than the Windows 10 version specifically made for them. Legacy BIOS support wasn't there and Linux driver support was like terrible.

But other than that, based on my own experience, at least Dell laptops seem to have out of box support for Ubuntu and Debian. I think some even come with Linux or FreeDOS pre-installed.

And from what I've heard from others and online, Lenovo usually has first class support for Linux and especially the Thinkpad line seems to be a favorite of many Linux enthusiasts. Also heard some good things about Asus in this regard.

I don't even mind if the laptop comes pre-installed with Windows (guess the OEM has to do that in some cases depending on their terms with Microsoft?). All I want is that it should be relatively painless to boot to UEFI/BIOS, be able to install Linux and drivers for WiFi, Bluetooth, efficient battery life, etc. (which are pretty much necessary in laptops these days).

Two hours ago I randomly thought "hey, why not do LFS?", so I opened my laptop and started following the book. I've heard a lot of people say that LFS is great for learning how a Linux system works. However, so far it's just been a guide on how to compile different software and what autoconfig flags to use. I thought that maybe further chapters will have more information on how things work, but it seems like they all just contain a one-line description of a program and compilation instructions.

If anyone here has done LFS, did you actually learn anything from it? Is it worth spending more time on?

So as the title states, I am realizing that most folks don't have CD readers. I do, and I can burn my phone's videos to one, but... I also use Linux these days. I have a CD burner somewhere around here, but honestly I just want to do a "zip file" type option, where I can just group the videos and get them on a usb stick to send out.

Everything I find on the 'net is about burning CDs and whatnot... which isn't my goal. Honestly, I think windows did this just easy-peasy with select and "burn to image" or whatnot. But I dunno how with Linux (Arch/i3).

Edit: I'm asking because I don't see any options in pacman. It may be in yay, but it's my bedtime...
Edit 2: Lots of folks asking why I want an ISO and not just copy the files; my dad states their TV will play videos 'in a DVD format from a USB stick' (and I don't know how accurate it is, but it's what was requested).

The good things about Python which make it a very ubiquitous language worthy of learning (platform agnostic, elegant syntax, portable standard library and ecosystem packages, etc.) unfortunately also has this weird side-effect of causing tremendous pain when it comes to choosing which library or toolkit to use for say, a side project for a Desktop GUI app.

It seems as if researching about these Python GUI toolkits, finding out their pros and cons and nuances has itself become a dedicated project of its own and I have almost forgotten about the actual app and user story for which I was looking them up in the first place!

Though I'm almost certain at this point that Kivy isn't something I'm going to use. I don't want my app to run on android, at least not presently. And even if a need arises in future, a more efficient path there is to use something like Java with an Android IDE.

Plus a 100% pure python toolkit means some sacrifice in performance. With PyQt and PyGtk, you can get the raw performance of underlying C++ and C runtimes respectively which they wrap.

Now tkinter and PyQt is where I'm really confused and not able to decide which one to use. The pros of tkinter are highly appealing to me, to be honest. The fact that it comes built-in with python and right out of the box - which incidentally also frees you of all the licensing hassles unlike PyQt/PySide stack is also a great plus. Though this particular project is going to be open source anyway, so it shouldn't matter much. But in the long run and generally speaking, it's clear that one has the licensing advantage here.

Secondly, tkinter also has the advantage of being smaller in size. Since it comes built-in, the final portable EXE size would perhaps be as small as that of just the portable python interpreter using PyInstaller or something?

But on the other hand, smaller size doesn't really matter in the age of gigabyte high-speed Internet, does it? And I've seen some PyQt projects too that seem to create smaller bundles with efficient packaging, wonder how they are able to do that!

One criticism of tkinter I came across is that while getting started with a Hello World GUI is easy, making something non-trivial soon leads you down a rabbit hole which is filled with messy and hacky workarounds. For example, there isn't a native or built-in support for creating a system tray icon for your app which is considered pretty much a standard feature for desktop GUI apps these days. Even for adding this trivial feature to your app, you must install a third party package called pystray which isn't a very thrilling experience at all. Imagine what all you'll be going through if you want to implement say a complex data grid with dropdown widgets or a complex tree view widget.

But PyQt, on the other hand, also has its own set of criticisms. For starters, since the core toolkit is written in C++, the Pythonista must hack their way through all the object orientedness mandated by the core libraries in ways that don't seem very pythonic. For example, you can't pass a simple tuple with (x,y) co-ordinates for a widget location or size, you must find the corresponding widget class such as QtSize or whatever to be able to do that.

This is what I got from my reading and youtubing so far. I don't know how hard this usually is in practice. Coming from a C# and Java background, I don't think it should be for me. But I'd like to know from more experienced Python programmers who have traversed both these paths (tkinter and PyQt) - which path is better as a learning investment in the long run?

Hi

I figured before I start venturing into other forums dedicated to this sort of thing, I'd ask here on Tildes since I'm at least comfortable with the community and how helpful they can be here.

I'm tired of all of the subscription services I have, movies and TV shows disappearing from them, buying a film on Prime and only being able to watch it offline through a specific app. Even then, half the time we're watching comfort TV shows that we have on DVD already (X-Files and Friends for instance).

So I figured that building a home media server would give me the chance to cut the cord with a couple of these services and allow us to start using and controlling our own data again.

I have a budget of around £300 (I could perhaps push to £400 if needed) and I'm honestly not sure at all where to start. I have knowledge on how to build brand new, medium to high end gaming PCs as I've done it since I was in my late teens and built my first PC with the wages from my very first job but building a budget minded PC for use as a home media server goes completely over my head.

I've noticed that a lot of the pre-built NAS or media server boxes are very expensive so my first thought was to buy a refurbed workstation or small form factor PC that has enough "oomph" to do the trick but I don't know what ones to even start looking at and then I start to feel a little bit out of my comfort zone.

Things like getting the right CPU in these refurbed machines that offers the features I'm looking for like hardware transcoding etc., integrated GPU's, ensuring there's enough SATA ports for multiple hard drives and an SSD for a boot drive, and then to top it all off ensuring that while achieving these features the thing shouldn't draw too much power when idling as it'll be on for long stretches of time, if not left on 24/7.

I've also got no knowledge of Linux, I've never even looked at it but if it's genuinely easy enough (for someone with next to no Linux experience) then I'd be happy to give it a shot if it offers better performance compared to using Windows 10 or something.

All the server will be used for is watching TV shows, perhaps the odd film, listening to a bit of music perhaps and the odd podcast now and again. Simultaneous streaming will be fairly minimal, perhaps 2 streams as me or my partner watch one thing and our daughter watches another on her tablet. In regards to streaming outside the house that will also be almost non-existent, perhaps, again our daughter watching a kids TV show like Pokemon or Fireman Sam on her tablet when we're out but me and my partner don't tend to watch anything when we're outside the house, certainly not TV shows or movies anyway.

Redundancy isn't something I'm too horrendously worried about, I wouldn't be storing anything like photos that we wouldn't want to lose on it and while it'd be annoying, losing a drive with TV shows or films on it wouldn't be the end of the world.

Any help would be massively appreciated, thanks.

Sorry, I'm a bit new here and not sure how topic creation happens. But considering so much discussion goes on about Linux operating system all the time, I was wondering if any folks are interested in giving the topic its own place on Tildes. Maybe even something like ~comp.linux or ~tech.linux like some other topics have done?

But I also understand that a whole lot of other topics will also be competing for space then like ~comp.python, ~comp.java, etc! Hasn't demand for those topics ever arrived until now?

I know of below four:

1. Kazam
2. Vokoscreen
3. SimpleScreenRecorder
4. OBS (Open Broadcasting Studio)

My only recording constraints are as follows:

1. Be able to record the desktop while speaking.
2. Webcam output containing my little obnoxious face visible in a top/bottom corner.

I don't care about resolutions, etc., even basic 450p/720p is enough for me. I don't care about background music, etc.
But I do care about "light weight", my xubuntu laptop doesn't have very high configuration plus I want to conserve all resources for the actual stuff I'm doing on the desktop.

Which among the above eats the least amount of RAM/CPU while delivering on these two constraints? Based on your experience? I'm not inclined to use OBS as I've heard it's very bloated. Any other suggestions apart from these are also welcome.

Hi all,

I’m looking for advice re making a full snapshot/backup of a running Linux system (Debian).

In an ideal world, should an issue occur, I would like to be able to load a live USB with the backup, boot and write from that.

Timeshift seems to be an option but I’m wondering how the above would work in my case. A few questions.

1. My disk is fully encrypted with LUKS. Would this pose a problem?
2. I would like to write my backups to a veracrypt container. Would this pose any issue? I’m not sure how I would boot from a live USB in this case I could not decrypt the USB.

Essentially I’d like a step-by-step guide to backing up my full system (including all files in home) in such a way that I can easily roll back should the worst happen. Do any of you know of such a guide or can perhaps offer some help?

I was stubbornly determined to get my new Yubikeys working for FIDO2 SSH on WSL, which led me down the road to compiling my own custom Linux kernel for WSL with HIDDEV and HIDRAW enabled.

This was my first time ever trying anything like this, and by the end of it I realized that it's not actually so scary to compile your own custom Linux kernel!

Have you ever compiled a custom kernel before? What was the sequence of events that led you to do it?

I want to finally try NixOS and build a desktop OS from the ground up with sway, iwd, waybar, foot terminal, cmus, etc.

I'm not a developer, but I'm a seasoned Linux user. Used Gentoo for years, Void Linux and now I'm on OpenSUSE TW.

I'm finding all sorts of guides and it seems confusing. In the past there wasn't any mention of home-manager and flakes, now it seems there are these things. Those are all things I need to care about? Is it all configured in one file?

I want to upgrade my gaming setup, but I want to move towards a desktop replacement laptop for the compact form factor to free up desk space or even get rid of a desk altogether. I also want to try out Pop!_OS since I know it has good Nvidia drivers and that most games are compatible with Linux nowadays.

Has anyone had any experience with switching to Pop!_OS from Windows? What is software compatibility like? Pros and cons?

Also is anyone here using an 18 inch gaming laptop? I'm interested in huge laptops since I'm not really planning on taking it on the go.

I know the basics commands, command substitution, redirection, pipelines, and I know about .bashrc, .vimrc etc. but I feel like I still don't know a lot and I feel a bit lost as to where to learn more. I know I'm being a bit vague, but that's on purpose, I don't really know what's possible. feel free to suggest any book or resource that you think would help me learn more about linux (I also haven't been keeping up with it lately, so any new stuff like what's NixOS would help)

So I have an old MacBook Pro (mid-2014) Core i5 which I've just installed Ubuntu 22.04.2 on. Most things are working fine but the screen randomly flickers and then goes black and then after varying lengths of time will pop back on again. I've been googling around and found lots of instances of similar graphics glitches but can't quite find a solution.

Any suggestions?

Where do you find volunteers to help with open source projects? Such as:

• https://www.codeshelter.co
• https://hacktoberfest.com
• https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com

For example, with KeenWrite, I'm looking for help help with a specific feature that could be applicable to a wide audience (i.e., academia and technical writers). The lion's share of the effort for cross-references would be an extension or change to the flexmark-java library: parsing a de facto standard cross-reference syntax, rather than direct changes to my text editor.

I've been experimenting with Ubuntu and Mint on VirtualBox for a few days, and I fail to see the utility for less tech savvy people such as myself. I have experience in HTML and CSS as well as dabbling in Codecademy for recreation, but higher level computing is new to me. I don't know how to navigate a terminal nor how to stop Windows from crashing, but I'm open to learn.

Hey y’all. Recently picked up a Cyberpower prebuilt. Looking to install a Linux distro on it for gaming. Currently have Ubuntu on my laptop, so I’m not a total noob, but my experience is still low. Not a big fan of having to use the terminal. Any distros y’all would recommend? Am leaning toward Pop_OS or SteamOS.

So, I'm using Arch i3wm. I have multiple copies of my /home/username (I am the sole user), and I have a "Spare" drive with media, games, and other goodies, some of which are also stored on partitions on the m.2 in question, but they have backups.

And the reason I ask this question is because while I've had my m.2 fail at the end of '21 (I didn't even know that was a thing, but it barely lasted a year, and things are acting shoddy now... though the original failed without a warning), I just bought a second m.2 for my games. I guess I could swap most of the whole thing over, but I know the boot partition is easier just rebuilt from scratch... which I had to do last week.

Ultimately, what's making me suspicious is when I upgraded to the new drive and unplugged all my non-m.2 satas, I also added some memory and a new power supply. But then after the upgrade (Monday of last week, so the 5th), the system wouldn't boot up. I used a usb to troubleshoot and my /boot partition was apparently no gouda. I redid that, and everything was fine... until this week. Then my new Games partition (basically the new drive) failed fsck and it got stuck in a boot loop on Tuesday. I could boot emergency to root, but not skip the fsck and keep the Games disk auto mounted (I know I changed something to randomize fsck on bootup, but that's something I'm still kinda looking into how I managed...), so I just removed it from my fstab and it booted fine. For two times. I just manually mounted the drive, all was great, then my SO sent me a screenshot today while I was at work stating that my / partition (on the older m.2) apparently rebooted because it bypassed my screen lock, and was stating EXT4-fs error, reading directory lblock:0 and whatnot.

So, that's my history on what's going on, and if anyone can offer any advice [mostly] on the backup stuff, though as I said, /home and the important tangible stuff is saved, but if you also have any input on something more than I suspect the drive is failing (since the /boot partition and now the / partition are crapping out), please feel free to share.

(Also, thanks for letting me in. This is what I'd typically post on reddit and probably have to repost 10 times depending on the sub to get the right keywords and tags and yes, I already searched the internet but my search will not match yours... sigh)

Hey,

I use Windows 10 and Arch in a dual boot configuration.

I use both of them for software development and want a shared partition to store all the projects.
Unfortunately, it's not as easy as I had thought.

Initially, I tried NTFS as the Linux support seemed fine. I tried both, ntfs-3g and the kernel implementation.
Besides the issue that hibernate could lock the drive - which you can disable - it periodically caused problems during compilation and other stages.

Especially Rust based projects have thrown weird errors during builds, but I also had this on certain Go projects as well.
It sometimes felt like, that the NTFS driver returned the wrong files when the compiler asked for them. Unmet dependencies, missing files, etc. Usually, when the project is huge.

In certain scenarios symbolic links didn't work and permissions were not set correctly - which you can fix by adding some args to the fstab mount - never got it really stable though.

I then tried to format to Ext4, and all issues were instantly gone on the Linux side.

Fortunately, there are tools such as Linux FileSystem from Paragon which promise to make it work (I even bought a proper license) - and it did for a while, until it didn't.

I once copied a bigger folder that included a bigger node_modules folder and during copy, files were missing, corrupted, the copy process hung - then crashed.

I was so desperate that I even tried out FAT32, but I quickly found out that it doesn't support symbolic links at all, and therefore breaks Git and other tools depending on it.

Is it still so hard in 2023 to have a shared partition between two OS? Has anyone made better experiences?
I really don't want to split the partitions as I sometimes work on the same project on different OSes.

Thanks in advance!

Curious how many of you use Linux as your main gaming OS? I started 3 years ago and switched to Arch about a year and a half ago.

I play a lot of total war (mainly historical). Recently got into Isonzo which has been a lot of fun.

I have to preface this question with a disclaimer that I am an eager learner of Linux and servers in general, but I'm still a beginner and often run into roadblocks.

Current setup:

• Raspberry Pi 3 with Adguard Home acting as primary DNS
• unRAID server with Adguard Home acting as secondary DNS
• About a dozen other containers running on same server
• DHCP is handled by my router

Goal:

• provide local DNS names for the containers running in unRAID so I don't have to enter IP:Port (e.g, calibre.local) which also has the side benefit saving the various username/password combos into Bitwarden with an actual domain attached to it instead of 14 occurrences of 192.168.x.x

Additional info:

I had PiHole running on the Pi before as the primary and only DNS previously. And I seem to recall you could put IP:Port as a custom DNS and have it resolve. AGH does have a feature for DNS Rewrites but it does not allow for port numbers, IPs only. I switched to AGH because it seems to be more effective at blocking ads, which is likely more a function of the provided DNS blocklists out of the box as opposed to what I was doing in Pihole. I would prefer to stick with AGH for adblocking/DNS if possible.

I looked into just modifying host files on the main computers I touch these apps from, but again, can't include port. What is a good solution for this? Preferably something approachable for a newb like me.

Hey folks, looking for recommendations. What's your go to word processor on Ubuntu? (EDIT: For regular writing, not a text editor for coding.) I haven't been the biggest fan of Libre office tbh (please don't hate me...) There were just several bugs in Writer that made it unusable for me. I'm curious about alternatives. I read that WPS office is on ubuntu, but I've always found it to run kind of slow (however, my experience was on Windows.).

I don't need a lot of fancy utilities, but would enjoy something a little more beautiful than notepad++ :) My biggest concern is just that it's a stable software. I'm OK with glitches or UI bugs, just nothing that's going to crash and burn and corrupt my work. (I mention this because there are several newer word processors made by single developers, and I'm a little weary to use them because I don't genuinely know how stable the software is.) I'm also not a fan of software that saves in some special format where you rely on that software to open it (or have to go through hoops to convert it.)

Any recommends?

EDIT: I'm new to Ubuntu, in case it makes a difference.

When Snap and\or flatpak install or update packages they do not always do so cleanly

Snap for example can keep up to 3 previous versions on updating and if you are struggling for space then this can be a Bad Thing^tm

These couple of pages show a good reliable way to tidy up and get back some disk space
Snap

Flatpak

Please note, I am not the author. The articles are on a website called debugpoint.com and does not carry a credit

This is mainly so I can find this again and not have to rediscover this for the third time after I forget. I can't find this exact solution anywhere else so I figured I should put it somewhere.

I have a terrible Insignia tv that locks the overscan option so you can't even turn it off, and linux mint for whatever reason doesn't recognize it as a TV so I can't use their automatic TV adjustments. This is just for x11 afaik.

So in the end, I used the underscan to defeat the overscan and it works great:

xrandr to get the output name the TV is using, then

xrandr --output <name-of-tv-output> --set underscan on --set "underscan hborder" <0-128> --set "underscan vborder" <0-128>

to enable underscan and tweak the border values which squash the edges of the screen, undoing the effects of the overscan.

for me the optimal values are 128h 40v but you can just experiment by typing the command into the console before you make it permanent.

Hoping we can get some discussion on self hosting setups throughout the community and help anyone who may be interested with common setups and finding interesting software.

Hardware
Currently running everything on a Dell 7050 SFF (intel i5-7500 and 16GB RAM) which suits my needs perfectly. Had used an older SFF before (i forget which) and a cheap older model mac mini (2012 I think) for self hosting before, but those were not the right choice as I didn't properly understand what hardware encoding was at the time. The i5-7500 handles all the media I have when transcoding is needed. Only thing it can't do is AV1, but my setup avoids those anyway.

Operating System
Distro Hopping habits are hard to break and that "itch" unfortunately carry over to the server. Currently running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for a few months now, but feeling like a change is needed soon. I've used Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora for servers before and they each have their own little problems that make me eventually switch. I am considering maybe doing a Proxmox setup so I can spin up a VM whenever that itch comes, but not sure if they added complexity is worth it in the long run.

Software
Yay, the best part! My self hosting stack has changed a ton over the years. Everything in my stack is in a docker container through a set of badly written compose files (planning on redoing things, cleaning things up, making things consistent, etc.). I'll just do a rundown of everything with a brief description of what it is:

• Plex Gives me a Netflix like streaming experience at home. Currently working on shifting things over to JellyFin as Plex is starting to grow increasingly buggy for me.
• Sonarr Automatically tracks and downloads all my shows. I have two instances of this running, one for normal tv shows and another for anime
• Radarr Automatically tracks and downloads all my movies.
• Prowlarr Sowers the high seas for what Sonarr and Radarr are looking for and gives them the "linux iso".
• rdt-client Probably different to most peoples setups. I use a debrid service (not sure why people call them that), to download my "linux iso's" for me and I do a direct download from them. Much quicker and no torrenting traffic on my end. Also it's also cheaper than paying for a VPN usually.
• File Browser A good web ui for managing files
• Nginx Proxy Manager Is a reverse proxy for all of my services and gives me HTTPS for everything. Gets rid of the annoying browser warnings.
• Tailscale The most recent addition to my setup. Allows me to access my network anywhere. Similar to a VPN (I know it uses wireguard under the hood), but does a lot of magic for you and just makes everything work and connect together, its really cool.
• Adguard Home Gives me a local DNS server that does DNS level ad blocking. Never given me problems and it works well, but I am thinking of reducing the complexity of my setup and removing it. There tons of DNS servers out there that can do the same thing and I don't mind trusting a few of them (like quad9 or mullvad dns).
• Watchtower It monitors all my docker containers and keeps them up-to-date. If a new version is out, it will automatically download the latest version and restart the container and delete the old container version. I know its not the best idea, but its only cause a break 1 time with 1 container in the couple years I've run this setup.
• Homepage Literally the homepage for all my services. I've tried a lot of different ones and Homepage is easily the best. Simple, but powerful to configure.

Keen eyes may have noticed the lack of backup software. I'll get around to that, eventually.

I really like tinkering with older PC's, trying to make them work for modern usecases which is mostly using web browser.

Anyone else do this here? Or interested in it?

I have old 10" netbook from 2007 or so, it has 1gb RAM and Intel Atom 32bit that barely can handle things. However, I switched it's old SATA hard drive to an SSD, and it is a bit faster at booting now! I also ordered 2gb RAM stick, so maybe that will help it a bit too. It's also running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed 32 bit, but i dont recommend this for linux newcomers since it's a bit different distro.

If you have an old laptop or PC lying around, try breathing life into it by installing a Linux distro like Debian 12. Change a spinning hard drive to an SSD. For even older retro hardware there are even SD card adapters and such, that can work in place of old hard drives.

My goal is to make this tiny netbook good for light web browsing and maybe even scripting on things and having a Matrix chat window open. It's perfect tablet size, but very underpowered, even during it's release, so it's a challenge. But that's what makes this kinda fun! Also it helps tone down e-waste if one can use an old device for modern things.

I have the following on my fonts.conf

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <alias>
    <family>system-ui</family>
    <prefer>
      <family>FreeSans</family>
    </prefer>
  </alias>
</fontconfig>

But when websites use font-family: system-ui firefox just ignores this and uses Cantarell anyway, which I don't even know where it is getting it from. (Not Firefox font preferences).

Any idea how to make firefox respect my fonts.conf?

This is Linux with i3.

Recently, I upgraded my PC to Debian 12 and chose KDE as my Desktop Environment. For this fresh installation, I decided to maintain only the core packages managed by "apt" and started using Flatpak for my apps.

Some Flatpak apps perform flawlessly out of the box, such as LibreOffice and QGIS. They adjust the language to my localization and adopt the theming from my system effortlessly. However, others like Obsidian and Zotero require manual adjustment of settings by modifying the configuration files.

I understand that Flatpak applications are sandboxed, so I initially expected them not to recognize my system configuration files. However, I am puzzled as to why some apps do recognize them while others don't. I have attempted to read some documentation on Flatpak itself, and if I understand correctly, Flatpak has the capability to read from system configuration files. However, I haven't fully grasped how it accomplishes this (is there anything to do with portals?) and why it only applies to certain packages.

The vast majority of free and open source software available is well known for being clunky, having very unintuitive UI/UX and being very inaccessible to non-nerds.

We can see this in Linux distros, tools, programs and even fediverse sites.

I understand that a lot of it is because "it's free", but I also feel like a lot of people who make and use FOSS don't actually value user-friendliness at all. I feel like some of it is in order to gatekeep the less tech savvy out, and some of it is "it's good enough for me".

What are the best theories for why this is the case?

EDIT: A lot of replies I've been getting are focusing on the developers. I'm asking more why the users seem okay with it, rather than why the developers make it that way.

Here are my views on this:

• Windows: The Windows attitude towards privacy isn't good with their telemetry and other data collection increasing gradually from 8 to 10 to 11. In fact, most geeks across the support forums think that 7 is probably the safest and most privacy friendly Windows version but MS is doing everything it can to ensure that newer software doesn't support 7 and it just goes into obsolescence.

  The "default" state in which a W10/11 laptop comes today is so privacy unfriendly that it sends all kinds of data like contacts, location, etc. to Microsoft and their "trusted partners". You can't turn off this data unless you've visited power user forums and know exactly where to find those settings, and basic telemetry still won't be disabled of course.

  As ironic and unintuitive as it sounds, Microsoft Windows was probably much better in privacy department during the bad old days of Gates and Ballmer compared to the good "open source and geek friendly" days of Satya Nadella!

• Mac: Apple systems should ideally be privacy friendly considering the amount of premium they charge to their products and services. But how well does that work in practice? I've never used an Apple product but those who use them seem to have the impression that they're no good in this department compared to others.
  Logic tells me that a more capitalist devil should be no different than the less capitalist one, they're probably all the same when it comes to throwing user's privacy in the bin!

• Linux: Linux used to be the holy grail of users who cared about privacy many years ago but does that still hold good today? Ubuntu was also in some data collection controversy or other many times in past, but how are the state of things today? And what about the derivative distros, are they good too?

I feel like a good Linux distro discussion is a good fit here.

I'm only half-joking about the 'week' part. Whether it's the flavor of the week or your 10 year distro, I'd be curious to know what you have installed right now and what you like about it.

I'll start. I've been moving all of my servers and even my desktop and laptop to Alpine Linux. It's fast, it's stable, has a wide variety of packages available and the package manager apk.

It's easy to configure with openrc. Easy to diagnose any problems. And honestly I haven't had a problem yet with musl that I couldn't work around. Gotta say I'm quite smitten with it.

Whether you're new to distro installs or aiming to delve deeper, feel free to ask any questions here - remember, no question is stupid!

I'll do my best to answer, and if I can't, someone here likely can, or at least guide you in the right direction.

Background: I've been a Linux user since 2007, starting with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn after losing my Windows XP product key. I've performed countless installs, worked in web hosting NOCs, and use multiple distros daily, including Proxmox.

If you prefer, don't hesitate to PM me directly!

I know very little about Linux but have a good overall level of technical aptitude.

I have a device called an eDrumin 10 which uses an app to change the internal settings. https://www.audiofront.net/downloads.php I would like to use the control app from a tablet, but would prefer not to buy a ipad if I don't need to. Would it be possible to run the Linux version from an Android tablet?

I currently have a Lenovo N42 Chromebook far past it's EoL, for which Google is no longer supporting it. I have put Chrome OS Flex on it by reflashing the bios, and it's pretty solid, but I have no internal audio. Bluetooth audio and HDMI works fine, but no headphones, and no speakers.

I found this solution for trying to hack in an Alsa configuration from an Ubuntu Live Disk (https://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos/comments/swzxsy/comment/irk5kqk/) and I was able to follow the instructions and enable development mode, but when I try to run the alsaconfig script, I get this.

crosh> shell
chronos@localhost / $ sudo alsarestore
No state is present for card chtrt5650
/usr/sbin/alsactl: sysfs_init:48: sysfs path '/sys' is invalid

Found hardware: "chtrt5650" "" "" "" ""
Hardware is initialized using a generic method
No state is present for card chtrt5650

It may have something to do with those instructions being for a different build computer, but I am outside my sphere of knowledge, and anything else I could troubleshoot would be appreciated. Internal audio isn't mission critical for me, but it would be appreciated.

I know it's a technical question but I want to know specifically from freelancer perspective. A freelancer's decision making differs from that of regular corporate worker in this regard due to many reasons:

1. Freedom to choose: Unlike corporate, a freelancer isn't imposed any process or specific software guidelines to follow. They're free to use Linux and open source if they want to.
2. No team compatibility: A freelancer can work on specific project with a geographically distant team but they don't have to submit to any long-term compatibility constraints.
3. Budget constraints: A freelancer can't typically afford costly licenses. With corporate, they can scale well and bring down the licensing costs which isn't true for freelancers. Hence, open source software is typically more suited to their workflow (even when using a Windows OS).

Given all these factors, do you think a Windows or Linux laptop is more suited for a typical Freelancer? What do you happen to use?

I'm considering moving back to the Linux world after having jumped ship to Windows around Ubuntu 20.04, mostly due to increasing bloat, snap and other things I don't recall.

I've used Xubuntu in the past, the Thunderbird theme was good but I was disappointed by how little customization was allowed there, even the selection of wallpapers seems bland, especially when I compare it to Mint now. Even when it comes to UX experience, it seems Mint puts a lot of effort in enhancing the user experience?

So how do these two compare in terms of performance? As long as the difference isn't substantial, I'm leaning towards Linux Mint now mostly because of two reasons:

1. Better UX, selection of wallpapers, customizing ability, etc. as described above.
2. Mint is a community project unlike Canonical which is corporate, I like this aspect too.

What is your own preference in this regard and what do you suggest?