penquin

Hi all,
I have a smaller nvme for my root and home partitions, and I wanted to upgrade to a 1TB. I have several drives on my machine and have been backing up in different ways. One way is I just copied all of my home folder and pasted it on one of the drives. Another way is I copied that folder to my NAS. I also have Pika backup setup to do automatic backups daily to one of the drives. My question is, how do I go about the process of restoring my backup with Pika? Do I reinstall the whole system, install Pika, point it at its old backup folder and have it restore? If so, what does it actually restore? Does it originally back up apps, their data and whatever I have in my home folder, then it restores all of that to the new system? Or does it only back my config files and home folder? Sorry if this is an obvious and dumb question, but I really don't want to do things from scratch since I've had this same install for a long time and I've set it up the way I like it.
Running Endeavour OS with KDE plasma. Thanks in advance.
P. S for this who wonder why I didn't separate root and home partitions since I have many drives It's a long story and it would be off topic and I don't want to bore you all with it.

I have been raging about the font rendering on Linux for years. It just sucks. Font has jagged edges and it looks very weird. I dual-boot with windows and the font there is very nice. So, I asked Claude ai to help me and it did a great job and my font is now is actually better than windows. I wanted to share it with everyone in case you have the same issue with the font on Linux.

Here it is:

1. First, install required packages:

sudo pacman -S freetype2 cairo fontconfig

2. Install better fonts:

sudo pacman -S ttf-dejavu ttf-liberation noto-fonts ttf-roboto ttf-roboto-mono ttf-droid ttf-opensans ttf-hack ttf-fira-code

I have also installed Segoe ui and Segoe UI Variable fonts and that is what I'm using now.

3. Create or edit the font configuration file:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/fonts/conf.d

sudo nano /etc/fonts/local.conf

4. Add this configuration to local.conf:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="font">
<edit name="antialias" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit name="hinting" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
<edit name="hintstyle" mode="assign">
<const>hintslight</const>
</edit>
<edit name="rgba" mode="assign">
<const>rgb</const>
</edit>
<edit name="lcdfilter" mode="assign">
<const>lcddefault</const>
</edit>
<edit name="embeddedbitmap" mode="assign">
<bool>false</bool>
</edit>
<edit name="autohint" mode="assign">
<bool>true</bool>
</edit>
</match>
<!-- Increase contrast slightly for all fonts  This is not mandatory and can be commented out-->
<match target="font">
<edit name="weight" mode="assign">
<const>medium</const>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>

5. Create a file for FreeType settings:

sudo nano/etc/profile.d/freetype2.sh

6. Add these export commands (I found it there already, but it was commented out. Just removed the "#"):

export FREETYPE_PROPERTIES="truetype:interpreter-version=40"

7. Enable subpixel rendering: (You might get a message that says "File exist", that's ok. It means it was already there)

sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

sudo ln -s /etc/fonts/conf.avail/10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

8. Clear and regenerate font cache:

fc-cache -fv

9. For better Java application fonts:

sudo pacman -S jre-openjdk fontconfig

10. Reboot

Additional optional steps: a. For better Firefox font rendering, in about:config: Set

gfx.font_rendering.cleartype_params.rendering_mode

to 5 (This doesn't exist in FF. You create it, set it to "number" and give it a value of 5)

Set

gfx.webrender.all

to true

b. If you use VSCode, add to settings.json:

{
"editor.fontFamily": "'Fira Code, 'Droid Sans Mono', 'monospace'",

"editor.fontLigatures": true
}

Truly hope this help someone. Share it with others if you think it will help them.

Thanks :)

Hi all, I've been using an RX 580 for about a year now. It's been ok, but I needed an upgrade for a little more FPS. Found this RX 6600~~XT~~ used and snagged it for $100. Are there any packages I'll need to install to make sure I get the best out of it? I know AMD support is baked into the kernel, but I remember having to install some Vulkan driver for my old GPU when I had some gaming issues. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

Distro is Endeavour OS with the latest KDE plasma on Wayland.
Thank you

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/32128978

Switching from Endeavour OS to Nobara

Hi all, I've been having issues with my favorite games on EndeavourOS Linux. Also, on top of that, an update the other day deleted my whole plasma desktop and left me with a skeleton of SDDM. I got it fixed, but some things are still wonky. I'm honestly getting tired of maintaining it and I just want something that just works for my video games and some coding. Nobara sounded awesome after some research. I do have a couple of questions for you all before switching:

1. Is Nobara atomic? Immutable? Or whatever those distros are called.

2. I have my /root, /home separate each in their own drive, plus a 3rd one for my steam and other games. Since I'm coming from Arch and I'll only be formatting my root drive, what folders/files will I need to remove from my /home directory after switching to Nobara so I don't have issues?

3. Since I separate drives for everything, I'll be doing a manual partitioning when I install Nobara, and will be choosing btrfs for my /root so I can do snapshots with timeshift. My question is, does Nobara set up the subvolumes automatically for me when I do manual partitioning, or do I need to set them up myself?

4. How hard is it to set up snapshots in grub?

5. Or does Nobara have a back up tool already that already does snapshots?

Thank you.