Linux

I never really see hardware lacking Linux support mentioned, which got me caught by surprise when a computer with a Broadcom network card couldn't use the card. What other hardware don't work with Linux?

My question is basically the title, but here are some more details.

My computer is used about 75% for work, 20% for personal use (almost entirely web), and 5% for gaming. ~2 y.o. midrange rig w/ Intel CPU, AMD graphics, 32GB DDR4 RAM.

For work, I need lots of straightforward things: video conferencing on Teams (web is fine), Zoom, Word document editing (web is fine), a bunch of other web apps, some light database stuff, etc.

Plus two things that are a bit trickier: OneDrive professional/SharePoint (so I'll need abraunegg's onedrive) and Excel 2024 desktop (web isn't good enough) for which I'll need to run Windows (10? Ameliorated, maybe?) in a VM.

But I also want to do gaming. I wouldn't install a kernel-level rootkit anyway (and I boycott Denuvo), so SteamOS-level compatibility should work great for my needs. I also have a Quest 3, so I'll want to do PCVR, which apparently works great (with Bazzite).

But I don't really grok what Bazzite being immutable means for using it as a daily driver for work/productivity. Under the hood, it's just Fedora 42, right? For immutable distros, you use flatpaks instead of apt install, and they're basically just "apps" that should "just work", right? Do I care about kernel modification?

Or, more to the point, I don't know what I don't know. After preliminary research on this all, I think my plan of going for Bazzite then adding abraunegg's onedrive and a Windows VM with Office 2024 will hit all my needs, but can anyone "sanity check" that plan, or compare the pros/cons with a non-Ubuntu-based alternative?

I'm good enough with computers that I should be able to tinker through the inevitable small challenges that will come up, but I don't really have enough time to do it twice if my initial plan is terrible. (I connect to a Debian server remotely using the terminal, so I have some background—but I needed to install a bunch of packages to get web app software running, and idk if I'll need that as a desktop user.)

Any advice much appreciated! And thanks for reading this far, even if you don't comment. :)

Edit: thanks for the input so far! I'm turning in, but I'll read everything and reply to stuff tomorrow.

Im trying to figure out how online search funkcion works.. Didnt have much luck for now. And also general discusion about the app would be wery helpfull for eweryone.

A new version of fontconfig release recently with the added option to disable bitmap fonts. If you're using a rolling release distro, this might break bitmap fonts for you. It definitely does on Arch (and likely Arch-based distros) because they opted to disable them by default for some reason (AFAICT upstream gives the choice but does not recommend one way or the other).

This'll cause fontconfig to skip bitmap fonts, your apps won't be able to access them.

To fix it, you need to configure fontconfig to not ignore bitmap fonts. There are a number of ways to do that.

I'd recommend a user-level fontconfig file. Create $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf with below contents and you get your bitmap fonts back. This negates the file in /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf. This is the first time I'm configuring fontconfig so there may be a better way ¯_(ツ)_/¯

This should've definitely been news imo especially because this is not the default behavior of upstream. I shouldn't have to read fontconfig PRs to figure out why my fonts broke, even on Arch.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "urn:fontconfig:fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
  <description>Accept bitmap fonts</description>
  <!-- Accept bitmap fonts -->
  <selectfont>
    <acceptfont>
      <pattern>
        <patelt name="outline"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
        <patelt name="scalable"><bool>false</bool></patelt>
      </pattern>
    </acceptfont>
  </selectfont>
</fontconfig>

What Distros do you want to shoutout and why you think they are doing well/are the best at what they do?

I am curious what is out there and have only had some experience with Linux Mint, SteamOS, and Pop!_OS

I installed Linux Mint on my Lenovo Yoga 7 laptop and it's been great, with the one exception of not really having a tablet mode when I flip the screen. Its not a huge deal, but I watch shows that way and sometimes miss an on-screen keyboard.

The actual keyboard stays active when flipped, which is fine until I pick it up or have it on my lap and accidentally hit some random key.

It seems from some looking around that Mint doesn't do great with this and I'm open to a different distro that's fairly beginner friendly, but even better if there are some options I'm missing to keep what I have.

I've been using Pop!_OS for a few years now, and it's worked like a dream. Everything works out-of-the-box, and gaming on Linux has never been easier. But it almost works a little too well. Learning Linux as opposed to Windows for all my games was a fun challenge.

But, now that I'm familiar with how to set up any game that needs a little help besides Proton, I'm starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize, and I think picking a new distro with slightly different architechture will be very nice.

Don't get me wrong, I still want something that works by itself more often than not. But I would love to have something a little more cutting-edge that gives me a little more control.

I started with Linux by installing Kubuntu, and I really miss KDE Plasma. I know Kubuntu is still on Plasma 5, and I've been wanting to find a distro that lets me use Plasma 6.

I've narrowed my choices down to three distros: Nobara, Garuda, and Bazzite.

So far, I've confirmed that Nobara and Garuda come with Plasma 6, but I haven't found that information for Bazzite yet.

So, what do you think about these distros? What are the pros and cons for you?

I'm leaning the most toward Garuda - but I'm worried Arch may be TOO big of a leap. I really just learned that Fedora is not Arch-based, so I know Garuda will be a bit of the odd one out of the three.

TL;DR: Nobara, Garuda, Bazzite - which one is good and do any suck?

EDIT:

Thanks, everyone, for the insightful and helpful comments! From what everyone has said, I've come to find that either CachyOS or Solus will fit my needs best.

CachyOS seems optimized for gaming, while Solus' curated rolling releases seem (to my untrained eye at least) to be somewhat of a step between the way Debian-based distros upgrade and the way Arch-based distros upgrade.

I'd love to hear people's experiences with both of these! I think I'm going to try to dual-boot them and see what setup looks like for both.😄

Sometimes my entire screen will turn green requiring a reboot. This has happened while gaming but also while watching videos in browser. I'm trying out undervolting/underclocking using LACTL. Have you experienced this? What was the cause and how did you fix it?

I made the jump off windows to EndeavourOS. I work from home most days of the week, and as such RDP to my workstation(laptop on a dock nearby).

I need an RDP client that can authenticate to win11 RDP, and support audio/mic to the session. Being able to span dual-screen is a plus.

I can't install any software on the work PC as I do not want to fall foul of the security team.

RDesktop doesn't support mic input. Remmina doesn't appear to authenticate to win11 properly. FreeRDP not updated in 8 years?

I'm just so sick of Microsoft and Google. But there's two things holding me back:

1. I wanna play Steam games on my PC

2. I am just an amateur hobbyist, not a tech wizard

Is there any hope for me?

I'm planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don't know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?

I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.

So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeah… damage done.

Now, the situation:

• Currently shows up as:
  • 6 MB FAT
  • 4.3 GB
  • 2 TB unallocated
  • 2.6TB unallocated
• The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts.
• Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data I’d really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.

I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? I’m open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone who’s been down this road.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32033583

Direct link to a text article about the situation

It feels weird to just jump into a generic Linux community and ask a question. It's nice being so small - kinda like the internet used to be.

Anyway, I've been running Linux servers for decades but only recently switched my desktop. I first tried Debian 12 and I'm now on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed - I switched in the hope of getting newer drivers and maybe fixing this issue.

I have a HP laptop with onboard Intel graphics and an external monitor connected with USB-C. In general it works great - until it doesn't. From time to time the external monitor does not wake up after a suspend. Normally turning the monitor off and back on will cause some sort of driver reset and it comes back. Once or twice this has not helped and I've had to reboot.

I'm running Xorg as Wayland on Tumbleweed won't start on t his machine. Wayland may have worked with Debian, I don't recall. I don't think it's worth listing details of my versions as it's happened on two distros and through a couple of minor updates to Xorg on openSUSE. It happens with KDE or LXDE.

Any suggestions?

Hey all, semi-novice Linux user here.

I'm running EndeavourOS with KDE on a Lenovo with an Intel CPU and integrated GPU.

I was attempting to update my system today but kept getting the error referenced in this newsletter that I found after looking for the error online. I ran each command in the newsletter exactly as written and then rebooted my system.

After rebooting, I'm able to successfully get to the login screen and input my username/password but, instead of my desktop, logging in takes me to a command interface for about a second before reverting to the same login screen. The line in the title is the last entry shown in that command interface.

I've looked online for solutions but it doesn't seem like anyone with my same error is getting stuck on the login screen (most people seem to be stuck on Grub and are able to use e, ctrl+alt-F2, etc) and I'm just sorta lost on what to do at this point.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

Edit: Thank you to MyNameIsRichard for your help. It turns out that I needed to install plasma-x11-session as I am still an x11 user and a recent update made it necessary to install this package manually.

Today I can share a major development status update of XPipe, a connection hub that allows you to access your entire server infrastructure from your local desktop. It can make your life easier when working with any kind of servers by eliminating all the commonly tedious tasks that come up when interacting with remote systems, either from the terminal or from a graphical interface. XPipe comes with integrations for SSH, docker and other containers, various hypervisors, and more without requiring setup on your remote systems. You can also keep using your favourite text/code editors, terminals, password managers, shells, command-line tools, and more with it.

Docker compose

This release introduces support for docker compose. Containers in compose projects are grouped together and can be managed all at the same time via compose project entries.

The container state information shown is also improved, always showing the container state in combination with the system information.

Batch mode

There is now a batch mode available that allows you to select multiple systems via checkboxes and perform actions for the entire batch. This can include starting/stopping, automatically adding available subconnections, or running scripts on all selected systems.

You can toggle the batch mode in the top left corner.

Password managers

The password manager integrations have been upgraded:

• There is now support for KeePassXC
• All password manager integrations have been reworked to work out of the box without configuration
• There is now support to use password manager SSH agents more easily
• You can now unlock the xpipe vault with your password manager

Terminals

The terminal integration comes with many new features:

• There is now built-in support for the terminal multiplexers tmux, zellij, and screen. This is especially useful for terminals without tabbing support.
• There is also now built-in support for custom prompts with starship, oh-my-posh, and oh-my-zsh.
• On Windows, you now have the ability to use a WSL distribution as the terminal environment, allowing you to use the new terminal multiplexer integration seamlessly on Windows systems as well.

SSH

Various improvements were made to the SSH implementation:

• The SSH gateway implementation has been reworked so that you can now use local SSH keys and other identities for connections with gateways
• The VSCode SSH remote integration has been reworked to allow more connections it to be opened in vscode. It now supports essentially all simple SSH connections, custom SSH connections, SSH config connections, and VM SSH connections. This support includes gateways
• There is now built-in support to refresh an SSO openpubkey with the opkssh tool when needed
• There is now the option to enable verbose ssh output to diagnose connection issues better
• For VMs, you can now choose to not use the hypervisor host as SSH gateway and instead directly connect to the VM IP

Other

• Connection names, e.g. VM names, will now automatically update on refresh when they were changed
• You can now launch custom scripts within XPipe with a command output dialog window without having to open a terminal
• Various installation types like the linux apt/rpm repository and homebrew installations now support automatic updates as well
• The k8s integration will now automatically add all namespaces for the current context when searching for connections
• The application window will now hide any unnecessary sidebars when being resized to a small width. This makes it much easier to use XPipe in a tiling window arrangement
• The webtop has been updated to have terminal multiplexers, proper konsole tab support, disabled kwallet, and more
• Various error messages and connection creation dialogs now contain a help link to the documentation sections

A note on the open-source model

Since it has come up a few times, in addition to the note in the git repository, I would like to clarify that XPipe is not fully FOSS software. The core that you can find on GitHub is Apache 2.0 licensed, but the distribution you download ships with closed-source extensions. There's also a licensing system in place with limitations on what kind of systems you can connect to in the community edition as I am trying to make a living out of this. I understand that this is a deal-breaker for some, so I wanted to give a heads-up.

Outlook

If this project sounds interesting to you, you can check it out on GitHub, visit the Website, or check out the Docs for more information.

Enjoy!

I've finally started having some free time lately and have been working through my Steam library, most of which is Windows games I'm playing with Proton.

I wanted to install some mods, and wanted a mod manager for this. Nexus Mods has Vortex, which is not available for Linux. In any case, running Windows games on Linux through Proton on Steam is fairly specific; the game files will be at certain locations on a Linux filesystem, not at the same locations as they would be on a Windows filesystem. So I think I would need software that has specifically been designed for this use-case (Windows games from Steam running on Proton).

Are there any such mod managers out there? What do other people do when playing games on Linux? I can't be the only person who wants to play video games with mods.

Hi, so I will try to hopefully explain as best as I can.

These are my devices:

• Windows PC -> Cable Headphone1 output
• Linux Laptop -> BT Headphone2 output
• Android Phone -> Phone speaker output

What I want to achieve:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone1 on my PC without having to use physical or software mixer.

What I managed to get working but sux due to audio stutter or delay:

Have audio from all devices output from Headphone2

How?

• Phone paired via BT to Windows PC, using app on Windows PC called Bluetooth Audio Receiver gives me the ability to listen to my phone audio via Headphone1 (does not work for Laptop)
• Linux Laptop paired to my Windows PC as an audio device allows me to set the Laptop as a output audio device for the PC so I can listen to PC and thus to the Phone via Headphone2

BUT, this causes phone audio to stutter via Headphone2 and audio from PC has at least 500ms delay.

Wish there was a way to forward audio from Linux Laptop to Windows PC the same way as from Android Phone to PC.

Any clues?

Hi!. Currently running Linux Mint 22.1, but i suspect it's not strictly a distro issue. This laptop was running VERY well but was outdated, running Mint 19.3, some things were unable to be installed because the system libraries were old (didn't expect Calibre to be one of them, figures), so i updated all the way to that moment's current version which was Mint 21.3. All of a sudden it felt like the laptop got downgraded two whole computer tech generations. As soon as i ask it to do something mildly complicated that made it break no sweat on Mint 19, it gets VERY slow, all the cores start running at max, system load increases, until it finishes doing whatever it was doing several minutes later, something between a couple of minutes when lucky, to 20 or more. Typically what triggers the issue is something on the browser (what i use the most on the computer is browser tabs and lots of terminals) but not exclusively. Thought it was the browser but replicated it on an empty Firefox profile, and has triggered with simpler stuff like the Discord client. Been trying to find the issue for a while trying to avoid a full reinstall, no luck so far.

If i were to describe how it feels, it's like there was a bottleneck on tasks being done by the system, as soon as you ask it to do something mildly complex it chokes on it and tasks accumulate. No idea if it's some kind of kernel misconfiguration, if it's some hardware incompatibility, or something else entirely, checking the changelogs of Mint all the way between 19.3 and 21.3 showed nothing i could pin this onto (or at least nothing i could notice).

The nuclear option would be a brand new blank install but I'd MUCH rather avoid that if possible, made the comfortable but now unwise choice of a single partition for everything (instead of a separate /home and whatnot as i used to do) so reinstallation would wipe it completely, if i must then i must but much rather not.

Would welcome VERY much ideas on stuff to check or try.

Edit: It's got an NVME drive, which seems to be healthy as far as i can see

Edit: When it happens it doesn't seem to matter how much RAM is free, seen it happen with only 8 of the 32Gb of RAM in use and zero swap

Edit: Found a great way to describe how it feels like: Have you done heavy video encoding on a computer that's adequate for the task but not more than that, and noticed how everything in it stalls heavily, even if there's plenty of RAM free and the computer feels like it's giving everything to that task only? Pretty much that, but for nearly everything even moderately heavy