There seems to be a trend lately of people switching over to BSD operating systems. Having read some blog posts on the matter and now given the recent system-d controversy, I'm genuinely curious to give FreeBSD or OpenBSD a go as my main OS.

For those who have switched over to BSD, what are some problems you've encountered and/or what are some things you miss?

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!

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.

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)

^{For the uninitiated, you can visit puppylinux.org to get to know more about it.}

My first experience with Puppy wasn't good, since, for the life of me, I couldn't get the saves working. I still didn't, but I found that xenialpup does work for some reason, so I stuck with it.

After that, it's been great, and although I don't like the UI and some of the default apps, it worked on every computer I've tried it on, and it's light enough to run well on ancient computers.

As far as the tools go, it has everything I need to do my work, even if I'd prefer different tools (like vim and ranger).

That is, of course, only a problem with the default configuration, and Puppy has a very convenient tool to remaster itself, which I'll be using these holidays. It's great to be able to build a more welcoming version for yourself without needing any knowledge or spending a lot of time.

So, I just wanted to see what was your experience with Puppy, or, if you haven't tried it, what you think about it.

There seems to be a solid community of Linux people growing here, so thought I might try asking...

I'm building a head unit for my car, using a Raspberry Pi to a 7" (and eventually 10-14") touch screen.

I'd like to have a fast-booting Linux distro with tiling windows that lets me set up a config file to launch a bunch of programs that are tiled perfectly edge to edge, with minimal border (a 1px line us OK), minimal header (just the name of the program? or none at all maybe), and have them all locked in place so I can't accidentally drag one or resize one when touching audio controls, for example.

The idea is to have a few windows, such as an audio player, a GPS map, 2 dash cam feeds, and an OBDII style sensor readouts, all on screen at the same time, each sized differently.

I've got each individual program working fine on Raspbian right now, but no idea how to go about the tiling-on-boot, locking them in place, etc.

Can I do it with Raspbian with some specific window manager? or do I need a different distro?

Thanks in advance.

Has anyone here used NixOS for any significant amount of time as their daily driver? I've been considering using it since I learned about it, I really like the idea of how it manages packages, but I'm a bit hesitant, particularly about the availability of packages, and how the whole folder structure changes from the usual Linux. I'm also worried since I haven't seen any guide about how to use python other than the usual advice to get a virtualenv for everything.

I consider myself a fairly advanced Linux user, I have used Arch as my daily driver for 4 years, and Linux for like 10 years, as a side note, so I'm not really that afraid of troubleshooting.

I'm considering making the switch to pipewire, as my current setup involving a bridge between JACK and PulseAudio is growing frustrating. Even on a fresh boot, Spotify won't play until Pulse has been killed and restarted, and the same goes for games through Steam. All the while, Firefox audio works perfectly without doing so, and I can jump straight into recording with reaper without any issues from the get-go.

I've been reading through the Arch wiki to get a feel for what the process should be like, and it seems like it'll be relatively straightforward, but given that I do a lot of music recording on my computer, I don't want to experience a total breakage of my sound setup. I'm planning to make a full backup of my system before making any changes, so I can roll it back if need be, but if anybody has any experience with switching to pipewire on a production system, I'd be grateful to hear about any pitfalls or problems that you ran into which I should be aware of in advance!

Sorry if this is a silly question, but I keep running into situations where a small CLI or GUI tool that could be handed a single file and hand me back an encrypted version would be useful. I've done some googling, but all I typically turn up is blogspam about random Windows-only tools that seem to be of dubious quality.

Anyone know of a good tool for this type of thing?

I was using Antergos for like 15 days and I really loved it! Not Antergos but Arch, I like how simple everything is in arch. Before installing antergos I tried to install arch on vm but failed. so i installed antergos with i3wm. somewhere i wanted to install vanilla arch.

Initially I was referring to the wiki with elinks and doing it carefully but failed. my setup was going to be arch + grub + luks, for some reason grub didn't show up while booting. i also encountered other error which made grub-mkconfig to hang. later i decided to drop luks so arch + grub, but again same error.

i've used debian family distros for a long time and grub was the most used bootloader so i wanted to install that. next i looked for a guide online and followed another guide which had same commands as arch wiki. again that failed.

after some more searching i found archfi, so basically it is a script that will ask me questions and install everything. again that grub thing failed so i went with systemd for the second time with this script. & voila!

later i used archdi to setup lightdm-gtk-greeter and installed i3wm.

i didn't install it myself but i am happy with my arch and probably someday would do it myself.

btw, i use arch

Right now I dual boot windows 10 and fedora, windows for gaming, fedora for everything else. I'm considering running linux as my only native operating system, and running windows in a virtual machine for gaming. This will be more convenient than restarting my pc every time I want to play a game, and I'll feel better about having windows sandboxed in a VM than running natively on my computer.

To get gaming performance out of a virtual machine, I'm planning to have two gpus. One for linux to use, and one reserved exclusively for the virtual machine.

Have any of you set up a computer like this before? What was your experience like? How was the performance?

Guide can be found here

Right now, the guide assumes you aren't dual booting. This is because I've never really dual booted off a single HDD, so while I probably could include it in the guide, I don't feel comfortable without first testing the process.

This guide also sets you up with BTRFS, but you can still use ext4, just requires changing two lines.

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?

I see some people using NixOs on their servers. I would like to try it out to self host some services and learn about NixOs.

I use hetzner and they have an NixOs iso available so I can just use that to install NixOs. But how do people manage remote instances of NixOs? They would just use ansible or something like it, to run nix on the host, or is there a better way?

Thanks

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'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?