Linux

In my persistence to fit Linux in my life, I'm curious if some "must have" Windows software will work better if I just ran a Windows VM within Linux.

None of the software I need to work is needed to work continuously. They are basically programs that I fire up when needed, for a few minutes, then exited.

Wine will install them, but not run them, so I'm hoping a VM is the answer as I'm not interested in dual-booting to run a few Windows programs occasionally.

been using Arch for years but i am still a novice, yesterday i had found that in order for something to work on my system i will need to edit a few lines in kernel which i did, then removed unnecessary modules > intel, > nvidia, compiled. it worked great but with Arch and its rolling release i am dreading the next update and having to go through this again.
what methods are there to automate this process?

elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.

That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

...

However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.

Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.

...

A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.

...

You can expect things like:

• The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
• AppCenter is now Flatpak only
• New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
• WireGuard VPN support

I sometimes play games and also open my music player, but the sound from the game drowns out the music, so I need to go into the sound mixer on KDE and manually lower the game's volume every time.
I was wondering, is there a way to do this process automatically? As in setting up conditions like "if music is playing (some MPRIS API?) then lower all other apps' volumes)", maybe even crazier "if some app is outputting voice then set its volume back up and lower music app's volume or pause its playback altogether for some specified timeout that keeps being refreshed for as long as voice is heard".
I imagine the latter is a bit of a dream, but maybe for the first, even some quick sound profile selector would go a long way, say switching from "normal profile" to "background music profile", etc. which specify preconfigured volumes for those apps.
Is that a thing?

Hey there, folks! I'm about to do my first Linux install and I'm trying to figure out which DE I wanna use. I'm not concerned about how analogous the DE is to any other OS because I'm willing to learn and develop a new workflow. From a performance and overall compatibility perspective, does either GNOME or KDE outshine over the other for this? This is specifically considering the latest non-beta/stable versions of each. Does the Anaconda installer work in the KDE spin of Fedora, or is the install process different altogether? I know Fedora's default is GNOME, does this make for any less stability with KDE?

Edit: I appreciate all of your comments, thank you for taking the time to write them! Initially I was really interested in GNOME for its minimalist design, but it seems KDE can be altered for a similar form without needing to rely much on third party pieces because of how much is already built into it. Although I'm certain the GNOME DE is a really nice one, I think I'm gonna give it a go with KDE simply because it has three customizability already out-of-the-box and it seems to be slightly lighter weight. Of course, there's no reason to ever settle and it's likely I'll try GNOME at some point instead. Thank you! :)

Prefer me a FOSS email service provider.

Hello! I need to create a VM and passthrought some host USB port to it. Sadly libvirt doesn't support QEMU built-in feature to use -hostport argument (which was added 10 years ago...). I tried to add custom arguments to domain (qemu:commandline) but this didn't work. When I just run qemu-system-x86_64 -device host-usb,hostbus=X,hostport=Y -usb everything works well. It seems like libvirt restricts some QEMU actions. How can I fix this? OS: Debian 12

Please have a look at the warnings in the comments:

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21632052/12893621

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/21632052/12897257

I was curious if anyone has any advice on the following:

I have a home server that is always accessed by my main computer for various reasons. I would love to make it so that my locally hosted Gitea could run actions to build local forks of certain applications, and then, on success, trigger Flatpak to build my local fork(s) of certain programs once a month and host those applications (for local use only) on my home server for other computers on my home network to install. I'm thinking mostly like development branches of certain applications, experimental applications, and miscellaneous GUI applications that I've made but infrequently update and want a runnable instance available in case I redo it.

Anybody have any advice or ideas on how to achieve this? Is there a way to make a flatpak repository via a docker image that tries to build certain flatpak repositories on request via a local network? Additionally, if that isn't a known thing, does anyone have any experience hosting flatpak repositories on a local-network server? Or is there a good reason to not do this?

I pay for apple music, but all the linux clients seem to just be webapps which support 256AAC at most. Any way to maybe automatically download my library as flac and keep it locally (legal or not idc)

cant move services as every other service sucks (yes i have tried them all (tidal, spotify, qobuzz, deezer)

thank you all

Question is title.

In the past I've installed many distros on many older PCs, but never used linux properly (although slowly moving over to avoid win11). I've also had a heap of history with windows installs.

A family member has been testing Mint on an old laptop and is going well. This is a trial run before I update their iMac laptop (not sure what one but no longer supposed by OS updates).

I've never booted to an iMac BIOS or installed over top of apple.

• Is this going to be like installing over windows?
• What issues can I expect?
• Should I consider another distro?

Asking here as searching results in AI bullshit websites.

I want to install Debian directly onto my USB drive. Is there an easy way to do this directly without having to reboot to run the installer?

Hi all! I'm trying to learn more about NixOS and wondering if anyone had an material they'd recommend that was Flake centric?

I'm planning to test drive NixOS on a secondary laptop as a learning opportunity- not planning on using it as a daily driver at this time, so I'm not too concerned about the learning curve; I realize it'll be a bumpy and steep road!

I did want to give a shout-out to @LunchEnjoyer@lemmy.world and everyone who replied in the NixOS beginner resources thread! Tons of good content shared there that I'm still working my way through.

Work on realtime preemption for the Linux kernel got its start almost exactly 20 years ago (though it had its roots in earlier work, of course). It is fair to say that finishing that job has taken a bit longer than anybody involved would have expected. Now, though, Sebastian Andrzej Siewior has posted a brief patch series making it possible to enable realtime preemption in the mainline kernel on three architectures.

On Debian-based distros, when an app is available as a DEB or an AppImage (that doesn't self-update), but no APT repository, PPA or Flatpak, the only option is to manually download each update, and usually manually check even whether there are updates.

But, what if those would be upgraded at the same time as everything else using the tools you're familiar with ?

dynapt is a local web server that fetches those DEBs (and AppImages to be wrapped into DEBs) wherever those are, then serves these to APT like any package repository does.

I started building it a few months ago, and after using it to upgrade apps on my computers and servers for some time, I pre-released it for the first time last week.

• Source code
• Experimental tutorial

The stable version will come with a CLI wizard to avoid this manual configuration.

Feedback is welcome :)

From: Alejandro Colomar <alx-AT-kernel.org>

Hi all,

As you know, I've been maintaining the Linux man-pages project for the last 4 years as a voluntary. I've been doing it in my free time, and no company has sponsored that work at all. At the moment, I cannot sustain this work economically any more, and will temporarily and indefinitely stop working on this project. If any company has interests in the future of the project, I'd welcome an offer to sponsor my work here; if so, please let me know.

Have a lovely day! Alex

I tried to install Arch Linux on my old faithful latitude 7490. After partitioning and formatting the drive I tried to mount the root partition and got this random glitch. When I unmount it the glitch stops. Maybe my laptop is trying to tell me I'm not ready for Arch 😅

I haven't seen something like this before so I thought I'd share.

In the video: The screen of a laptop showing Arch Linux liveboot terminal. After creating partition table and formatting the partitions. I try to mount thebroot partition to the liveboot filesystem. The mounting succeeds but the text on the screen starts to shift andnjump eratically. Looks like the whole image shifts. Then I try unmounting the partition and the screen goes back to normal.