Linux

Look, I'm a Debian user for 15 years, I've worked in F/OSS for a long time, can take care of myself.

But I'm always on a lookout for distros that might be good fit for other people in my non-tech vicinity, like siblings, nieces, nephews... I'm imagining some distro which is easy for gaming but can also be used for normal school, work, etc. related stuff. And yeah, also not too painful to maintain.

(Well, less painful than Windows which honestly is not a high bar nowadays... but don't listen to me, all tried in past years was to install Minecraft from the MS store... The wound is still healing.)

I have Steam Deck and I like how it works: gaming first, desktop easily accessible. But I only really use it for gaming.

So I learned about Bazzite, but from their description on their main site I'm not very wise:

The next generation of Linux gaming [Powered by Fedora and Universal Blue] Bazzite is a cloud native image built upon Fedora Atomic Desktops that brings the best of Linux gaming to all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.

Filtering out the buzzwords, "cloud native image" stands out to me, but that's weird, doesn't it mean that I'll be running my system on someone else's computer?

Funnily enough, I scrolled a bit and there's a news section with a perfectly titled article: "WTF is Cloud Native and what is all this".

But that just leads to some announcements of someone (apparently important in the community) talking about some superb community milestone and being funny about his dog. To be fair, despite the title, the announcement is not directed towards people like me, it's more towards the community, who obviously already knows.

Amongst the cruft, the most "relevant" part seems to be this:

This is the simplest definition of cloud native: One common way to linux, based around container technology. Server on any cloud provider, bare metal, a desktop, an HTPC, a handheld, and your gaming rig. It’s all the same thing, Linux.

But wait, all I want to run is a "normal" PC with a Linux distro. I don't necessarily need it to be a "traditional" distro but what I don't want is to have it running, or heavily integrated in some proprietary-ish cloud.

So how does this work? Am I missing something?

(Or are my red flags real: that all of this is just to make a lot of promises and get some VC-funding?)

High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution

Hey, so I've been using Hamachi with Haguichi on Linux (Mint) for some time, and for the most part it works fine; however, hamachi will occasionally disconnect and then ask for my password to restart the service. This seems to happen kind of irregularly, and some days it barely happens, while others it seems to happen every 5 minutes.

After some search, I only managed to find a couple of old results - with no solutions - but which suggested it was a memory leak issue. I checked the systemctl logs and it seems like that might be the case:

systemd-coredump[96279]: Process 93832 (hamachid) of user 0 dumped core.
            #11 0x000000000040954f n/a (hamachid + 0x954f)
            #12 0x0000000000462f71 n/a (hamachid + 0x62f71)
            #13 0x0000000000464d10 n/a (hamachid + 0x64d10)
            #14 0x00000000004afe24 n/a (hamachid + 0xafe24)
            #15 0x00000000004e816c n/a (hamachid + 0xe816c)
            #16 0x00000000005005d4 n/a (hamachid + 0x1005d4)
            #17 0x000000000050eb48 n/a (hamachid + 0x10eb48)
            #18 0x0000000000446c9e n/a (hamachid + 0x46c9e)
            #19 0x00000000004bebe2 n/a (hamachid + 0xbebe2)
            #20 0x000000000040709e n/a (hamachid + 0x709e)
            #23 0x00000000004076cf n/a (hamachid + 0x76cf)

I guess my question is, is this a known issue? Does anyone else have the same problem and/or know a fix? And, if not, does anyone know of a good alternative that is available on both Linux and Windows (I'm connecting to people on Windows)?

Thanks in advance.

I've been using linux for more than a decade at this point, but in all that time I've rarely had a disk drive. The fact that this command exists and is just, one of the core utils included with your distro along with su and kill and mount and more is just… so beautiful. 10 years amore with this OS and I'm still learning things that the elders in the audience are snickering at me for only learning 5 minutes ago while they were popping their disk trays open with a single command back when disk drives were a non optional component.

Found this video interesting and wonder if there are any alternatives within Linux systems

I am thinking of starting a project and I am looking to see if there is any interest. This will be an interpreted language that is very much like the language used in the HP41C, except you get labels to jump to (to avoid needing to renumber as one does in BASIC) and named variables instead of registers. The interpreter would interpret text source code directly, and would be capable of producing textual and numeric output

It will be a pretty big undertaking and I would rather only do it if there was a 'market' for it. The program will be distributed under an open source license.

Anyone?

Release notes are still in work …

It is just about steamOS though.

Hey all, had some weirdness with the native discord app on Arch today. Was trying to screen share and discord just noped, went hunting for logs but no dice. I tried a few different programs with screen share, but it just seems to completely nuke disord. Any ideas? Anyone else have the same issue? Any clue where I might find crash logs?

Edit: installed Vesktop, problem went away, thanks everyone for the input.

EDIT see my comment below which uses a much cleaner method that avoids the noisy multple udev events and doesn't require udev/eudev at all

This activates/de-activates the secondary display underneath the removeable keyboard properly. Note though that the keyboard is a composite unit and causes a whole train of udev events, rather than a single one, which means the desktop will flicker multiple times on each re-attachment of the keyboard :(. If anyone knows how to just run the scripts on the 'last' udev event, it would make for a cleaner experience. (XFCE sometimes crashes out on me due to the rapid xrandr reconfigs but it's mostly usable).

[/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-in]

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$(xrandr --listmonitors | wc -l)" -gt "2" ]; then

#logger -p user.info "=== KEYBOARD REPLACED ==="

xrandr --output eDP-2 --off

fi

[/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-in_udev]

#!/bin/bash

export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-in &

[/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-out]

#!/bin/bash

if [ "$(xrandr --listmonitors | wc -l)" -lt "3" ]; then

#logger -p user.info "=== KEYBOARD REMOVED ==="

xrandr --auto && xrandr --output eDP-2 --below eDP-1

fi

[/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-out_udev]

#!/bin/bash

export PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-out &

[/etc/udev/rules.d/99-zbduo2024-kbd.rules]

ACTION=="add", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0b05", ATTRS{idProduct}=="1b2c", ENV{XAUTHORITY}="/home/username/.Xauthority", ENV{DISPLAY}=":0", OWNER="username", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-in_udev"

ACTION=="remove", ENV{ID_MODEL}="ASUS_Zenbook_Duo_Keyboard", RUN+="/usr/local/bin/usb-0b05_1b2c-out_udev"

Now, to get your laptop keyboard working when removed, in bluetooth mode, one must

1. Ensure bluetooth-ctl is running and initiate 'pair' in Bluetooth by clicking 'Create pairing with this device' (key icon in the 'Blueman-Manager' window)
2. Turn on bluetooth (switch on the left of the keyboard)
3. Remove the keyboard
4. Hold F10 for 4-5 seconds until its blue LED starts blinking rapidly (kbd in pairing mode)
5. Watch your desktop notifications for the connection message with the BT challenge pin code (6 digits)
6. type the challenge PIN code on the keyboard
7. Now the keyboard should be paired.

... now if only I could get the sound device (Intel HD Audio) and brightness control working for both screens!

If so, what do you think about it? I just made the switch from endeavourOS. I had some technical issues at first but that's all fixed now and I'm really impressed. I thought I was done distro-hopping but apparently not.

Since around the pandemic, I have been using Arch Linux and KDE Plasma full time and had become completely enamored with it and familiar with the commands and settings. It made it super easy to install almost any app available using Yay or Paru for example to take advantage of the AUR library. I dabbled a bit here and there with other variations of Arch such as ZENArch (Uses the Zen Kernel) and others, my step daughter's PC has EndeavourOS on it. When the immutable craze came out a couple of years back, I tried BlendOS, which was designed to be immutable but found it to be too rough around the edges. I even played around with NixOS a tiny bit and OpenSuse Tumbleweed, which was just is too enterprise centric for me, even though it is for both home and enterprise users. It even seemed a bit slower than Arch as well.

Last week or two sometime, another user posted about a new OS for distrohopping and someone mentioned Aurora Linux which piqued my curiosity. On the 28th of December '24 I took the leap and replaced Arch with Aurora DX (Developer edition), which contains more tools that I use such as VSCode and Docker and other items of that nature by design. I was a bit thrown off with their extended install time where it seemed to be frozen, but I let it process and took a nice coffee break as it were. :) Once the install finished, I rebooted and found my way through the update process and have enjoyed the structure of it and it offers a rolling release which I'm used to for the software. I enabled the auto updater which has made it enjoyable and I don't even realize things have updated to be honest since it's transparently done. Today sometime, KDE released 6.2.4 and within hours my KDE updated to that version. Color me impressed! Yes, Arch could do that as well, but and I often dabbled in their unstable repo's just so I could get the latest Plasma Desktop, which would sometimes take longer than anticipated. I ran into a lot of instability and started to have more issues than I cared for. Yes, I know - that comes with the territory of alpha software and I accepted it! I freely admit too, I became sort of hooked on running the "Yay" command to update my system daily if not multiple times, it was addicting to see the software releases come in.

One of the things about Aurora Linux is it includes "BoxBuddy" which in itself is nothing short of amazing. It tightly integrates various OS's into the terminal where you can install apps which are not found in the os-tree or RPM repositories. This morning, I needed to install scrcpy so I could type through my phone in a chat with a business, and the flatpak version of GUIScrpy refused to see my phone so I tried to install scrcpy but it could not be found. I then fired up an Arch install and installed 'scrcpy' which is really all I wanted and was on my way. Having the ability to graphically run apps, inside of the OS of your choice natively has been nothing short of impressive! While scrpy is not graphical, For testing purposes, I installed "Glabel" which is a Gnome label program and it acted and looked just like it was native to my OS. (There is a flatpak version I installed for the Aurora Linux) which I'm using now for my label printer.

AuroraLinux-DX at least includes kubernetes, podman and docker pre-installed with a desktop management tool for both which is quite nice. I don't really run Docker on my desktop, but this may change. :) (I run Docker on a separate server).

So far, I can honestly say, my system feels quite stable and have not encountered any crashes or issues which have hindered me from staying with it.