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How do y'all deal with programs not supported on Linux?

I’ve been seeing all these posts about Linux lately, and looking at them, I can honestly see the appeal. I’d love having so much autonomy over the OS I use, and customize it however I like, even having so many options to choose from when it comes to distros. The only thing holding me back, however, is incompatibility issues....

Kongar ,

The same thing I’ve always done - booted another OS that works with that software. No need to artificially limit yourself.

Once upon a time I remember running Dos, windows, os2 warp, and linux on one hard drive. Those were the days…. Ya ya, I’m going back to my retirement home bedroom…

Kongar ,

Hundreds of commands is just not true with many distros. Everything is gui based these days. The command line is worth getting familiar with, but it’s not necessary.

Kongar ,

Just curious - what stuff?

Dual boot for just that thing?

Kongar ,

I like separating backups and snapshots as timeshift recommends. Backups are better handled by a different process copying your files to a remote location (pc failure, house fire, etc.). Lastly, backups are personal, so you gotta do what works for you - whatever makes them happen is good enough in my opinion ;)

My setup (not perfect, but it works for me). I keep one snapshot only - but it is the entire drive including the home folder. It’s really close to a disk image minus the mount folders. This is done to a second local disk via rsync. The arch wiki entry on rsync has the full rsync command for this operation called out. I run this right before a system update.

Backups go to my NAS. Synology in my case. They have a cloud software package like iCloud, OneDrive, etc, except I run it on the NAS and I’m only limited on storage by what drives I throw into it. That software scoops up my user folders on all my PCs and I set it to keep the 10 latest versions.

Then since my NAS is inside my house, I back the entire NAS up to an external hdd and sneaker net it to work and keep it in my office drawer. This protects me from fires and whatnot. I do this monthly. This is a completely manual process.

Some people have accused me of insanity-but it’s really not that hard. I don’t worry about losing pictures of my kids, and it’s aged well with my family (for example, my daughter doesn’t worry about losing stuff while she’s in college - if she writes a paper, 10 copies are kept here at home on the NAS automatically). And none of it was hard to set up, maybe just a bit pricey for the NAS (but it’s got a lot of other super useful things going for it)

So ya, I’d recommend letting timeshift do its thing for snapshots, and I’d rethink what you’re trying to do for backups. I strongly believe they are two different things.

Kongar ,

I’m pretty sure there are lots of options that work great. I personally just use rsync-but I know the command line is scary for a lot of people making the transition. There are lots of options like timeshift that basically put a gui wrapper around rsync. I’ve seen a lot of love for borg as well - maybe try one of those two.

I feel backups are personal and it’s hard to get a “just do this instruction”. You’ll probably have to pick a product, and then do some homework to see if it can do what you want. This is further complicated by the distro you use - or more specifically if your distro uses btrfs. Some people use a backup as a sort of snapshot, and btrfs is more full featured than ext in that regard.

Good luck!

Kongar ,

I know they funded moderna - they basically built Moderna’s new plants including their cmo’s plant so that they could produce at scale. Govt built and funded the plants at risk - prior to fda approval - so that it massively sped up the process to getting the drug in people’s hands. Those plants are now used for other drugs.

I think - but not 100% sure - Pfizer did it on their own.

Still - 10,000% is shameful.

Shkshkshk , to piracy
@Shkshkshk@dice.camp avatar

Is ProtonVPN worth it?

@piracy

Got reminded of this while reading about ProtonMail. The reason I haven't gotten into proper is that I don't have a VPN for torrenting, and the reason I don't have a VPN is that I don't . So it would be nice if I got a good VPN while myself.

Will ProtonVPN rat me out to Comcast? I know some VPNs don't hide what you're downloading from your ISP, for reasons I don't fully understand.

Kongar ,

Interesting - I haven’t had this issue with the gui. Thanks for the heads up!

Kongar ,

No man’s sky for the first time. It’s fun for a bit I think. Dunno if it’s “I’m gonna play this forever” fun - seems a bit repetitive. But it was on sale and it’s amusing enough. I tried it out because I thought starfield was so boring, and felt like playing a space game.

Kongar ,

I used manjaro for a while, and it just worked out of the box. The problem is with the AUR. Manjaro is always a little bit behind the aur, and this leads to breakages because a package needs a dependency version that isn’t available. It’s like doing partial upgrades which arch is clear about: don’t do it. The other thing is that this delay is for testing, but there’s been questions raised if manjaro really does the testing justice.

If you stay away from the aur and use flatpaks, manjaro won’t have issues generally speaking. But now there’s an alternative in endeavor-it’s got a nice installer and dumps you into an arch+ environment. Me personally I didn’t find arch difficult to install, so I just went that route.

Kongar ,

See my other reply - delays for testing lead to versioning problems with the aur.

You can’t get rid of it, you can only hide it: Microsoft imposes controversial Windows Backup on users (gadgettendency.com)

You can’t get rid of it, you can only hide it: Microsoft imposes controversial Windows Backup on users::Like it or not, the Windows Backup app installed in Windows 10 and Windows 11 is here to stay, with Microsoft calling it a “system component” that can’t be

Kongar ,

I know everyone hates the automatic response of “just switch to linux” in response to Microsoft’s BS. BUT, it’s really so true - more people need to just do it and get over their fear of linux. It has been a totally stable easy option for a long time now.

Install an easy distro like mint and you’re literally up and running in a gui environment in like 10 minutes. Your grandmother could run it no problem. For the gamers out there - a good chunk of your stuff just works these days, and you can always dual boot windows for that game that doesn’t perform well (even better just get a small cheap 2nd hard drive and you can’t screw it up).

Thank you to all the people who contribute to linux and have given us a totally viable alternate.

Kongar ,

Linux can do literally any backup plan you want, to anywhere you want, with the click of a few buttons. You almost have too many options that all work great.

Doesn’t r sync also ship with like everything? Ya I know - a scary command line - but anyone online could help you in one minute. Ask a few questions, ok here’s this crazy long command that looks scary, but it’s really not that bad. Just run this command when you want to do a backup and your good. Come back here if you need help restoring (hint boot into another live environment and swap the source and destination and run it backwards)

Linux backups are cake.

Kongar ,

I literally did this on a new pc two weekends ago. Downloaded win11 iso, installed, typed in the key off my win 7 cd rom retail packaging that’s god knows how old, done.

I’ve long since moved to linux and just dual boot win11 for games that don’t run well in linux. I won’t buy a key at this point just for that.

Kongar ,

My daughter has a learning disability. Dyslexia and some weird kind of error with certain fine motor skills. The diagnosis from everyone? ADHD-put her on drugs. What drugs would you like? If one drugs doesn’t fix her, we’ll try two drugs.

Thank god my wife and I resisted. Nobody could explain what was going on and how drugs would fix it. I ain’t gonna lie, her elementary school days were rough. But now, straight A college student in her junior year.

I’m sure there are people looking for it, but my experience was default diagnosis by doctors and schools pushing adhd onto kids where it wasn’t appropriate.

Kongar ,

Surprised there’s no reef tank people here. Imagine spending $5000 on a 20 gallon fish tank - BEFORE spending any money on corals.

Ya it CAN be done for $50, but nobody does that.

Kongar ,

Do it, you know you want to. >:)

Just a tank and some lights, add some flow and boom! You’re there. Just get some salt and testing kits to keep things in balance. Those Hanna checkers are nice if you want to splurge - but that’s it, you’re done! I mean…. You have to get the fish and corals too - but you can make friends and get frags for free! Then you’re really done. Everything beyond that is automation, you don’t have to do any of it (although you can really dial in your nutrient balance if you use protein skimmer, algae scrubber, refugium, media reactors). But you don’t want to do that because then you’ll need a sump (but aren’t sumps handy? Who doesn’t want a sump?). Just make sure your stand accommodates everything-you don’t want to rebuild a stand. Leave room for controllers and uv meters and all that other stuff just in case you add it in the future - which you’re not going to becasue it’s expensive and overkill…

Kongar ,

You know I’m right, but it’s cool af seeing your fish and corals.

Dooooo eeet

Kongar ,

Sigh, my condolences. I’m shouting right beside you. I first learned about linux in 1993 in college. I got it working on a shiny new 486 with super vga graphics. We were allowed access to the college’s aix mainframes and thus the internet via a slip connection - but only through Unix like systems. Linux was amazing, I couldn’t believe we had x going, and loading up cad, matlab, maple, ftp, fsp, irc, nettrek, and everything else possible in the computer centers - but over a telephone line from our apartment.

Magical.

Funny how it really only became my daily driver three ish years ago - despite using it forever. Cuz games - glad that’s changed finally.

Hello, I’m going to be getting a new computer soon and have thought about linux. Questions inside

With the new computer and the newer Microsoft Windows updates they have really jam packed their OS with bloat and spyware. That being said I have no idea what I’m doing with Linux, need help with where to start.? What are some general tips? I understand there’s a lot of prebuilt Linux distributions or something what are some...

Kongar ,

If you can, dual boot with two hard drives. Windows will work when linux doesn’t/you break it. Learn linux, distro hop, figure it out - and you’ll be able to learn at your own pace.

Kongar ,

This is the way. My advice is to add a second hard drive to your pc and install linux on that. Distro hop, install arch and break it horribly, swear at your printer, learn. Then when you screw up, you’ve lost nothing, you can switch back to your “‘ol faithful” and get the job done. What will eventually happen is you’ll find yourself spending more time in linux than windows until you almost never boot it up.

If you do it this way, there’s really only two things to worry about. 1) if you’re using mbr or want to still use mbr with uefi, you’ll have trouble dual booting cleanly and will probably want to reinstall windows. You can’t break anything, but you can’t dual boot from both methods (or at least I’m pretty sure I’ve never owned a motherboard that can). 2) when installing linux, learn and be careful about what drive contains windows - don’t ever pick that drive when formatting and partitioning. Bonus points if it’s a different brand and size - makes it almost impossible to pick the wrong drive. When using a single drive for dual booting, there’s much more opportunity to make a mistake and break your windows install if you’re not familiar with partitioning and boot loaders.

I literally can’t think of a way to break windows if you keep the above in mind, and then you can “make the switch” gradually.

Kongar OP ,

Oh ya, forgot to mention that. It boots fine if I just unplug the optical drive. It’s when I plug in a new ssd into the same sata motherboard port - that’s when it hangs. It’s funny - it actually makes it to the login screen, it hangs only after trying to log in. I can’t even break out to another tty terminal.

Edit - the motherboard and chip and ram and video card are all new. It’s the old stuff I’m resuing-case, power supply, old hdds, ect

Kongar OP ,

Weird.

So I’m triple booting right now. I’ve got a windows drive and a separate manjaro drive. Those drives are older and getting small in space-so I bought a shiny new ssd.

Windows works fine, and I moved to arch on the new drive and that is working great. It’s not a big deal - the manjaro drive will get wiped once I’m comfortable the arch install. But I’d like to fix it just for learning purposes. I feel like there’s a text file somewhere that associated the optical drive’s uuid with the sata port that identifies as /dev/sda (but I’m not even sure optical drives have a uuid?)

Anyways - I think the new drive is fine.

Kongar OP ,

Hmm lots of suspicion at the new drive. I wasn’t as deliberate as you described, but that new ssd now has arch on it and boots fine.

I guess maybe I’ll ask this question. Should I be able to just unplug an optical drive, and plug in anything else into that sata port without linux hanging? I wouldn’t expect the new drive to DO anything until it’s partitioned/formatted/mounted etc. but can I just swap components and expect to be able to boot?

Kongar OP ,

Did that. fstab uses uuid for identification. If I plug ANY of my drives into that sata port where the optical drive was - manjaro won’t get past login.

Maybe my manjaro installation is borked and I don’t even know it (it’s actually been pretty good for a while now)

Kongar OP ,

It does not-that was the first thing I went after. I thought (incorrectly) that optical drives were in fstab and I was surprised to see only my hard drives there. Then I learned a bit more, sr0, etc and was like hmm, I’m missing something. ;)

Kongar OP ,

I’ll have to try this

I tried logging into gui and it hangs. While I’m at the spinning cursor of death, I cannot break out into a console. I’ll try the console first.

I suspect you are onto the issue here - something in user config is looking for that optical drive and failing.

Fstab has just hard drives, and it’s by uuid.

I’m at work now, I can boot into manjaro by unplugging the drive - I’ll check the logs and see if there’s any clues there.

Kongar OP ,

That I have not tried. I’ll try moving them around and see if it’s an issue with that port.

I’ve moved drives to that one port, but I haven’t tried shuffling all the components around.

My understanding with sata was that I should be able to move things around all I want. What would change is sda sdb sdc etc, and that’s why you use uuids in fstab. So it was strange to me that I couldn’t plug drives into that first port.

I’ll shuffle things around more when I get home and see if I can detect any further patterns.

Edit: as far as I can tell that port is nothing special other than it’s the first one. All the same in bios.

Kongar OP ,

Thanks for all the help! Lots of good suggestions in this thread I can try for further troubleshooting. Most importantly, you all confirmed I should be able to unplug an optical drive, put in a new unformatted ssd, and generally move drives around - and linux should still boot. I did not think things would behave that way, so when I had issues I figured it’s of course pilot error. Also explains why I was having such a hard time finding information on the arch wiki ;)

Now I know something ain’t right, and my guess is its some user configuration (because it does boot, it just hangs later). This has now turned into a side project (what the heck did I break), I’ll update the thread if I figure it out. It’s a pretty clean install, very few AUR packages (mostly flatpaks), and has been otherwise pretty stable-it’ll be interesting to see how it actually broke.

Thanks for the suggestions!

Kongar OP ,

The boot order is uefi hdd (which I can then pick the hard drive’s boot order in a sub menu), then uefi usb, then uefi optical drive, then network. I don’t think that’s the issue - it should always find something to boot before the optical drive.

I’m going to try the one drive at a time in that first port thing and add/move the rest around. I haven’t been as deliberate with the troubleshooting here as I should have (I immediately went towards a software issue - fstab or something similar). I could have a port / mobo problem. Need to separate software from hardware issue better. Luckily I have three installed operating systems on three drives and plenty of bootable isos to play with. ;)

Kongar ,

I went back to the office on my own. A long time ago. It should be noted that I like my bosses, peers, and my job in general (I mean it’s called work, not fun - but it isn’t miserable)

  1. ability to build better relationships with everyone - it’s too easy to sling shit over email. Whole different experience actually talking to somebody - especially when one of you needs something difficult.
  2. separation between work and home - I don’t like home feeling like the workplace.
  3. remote work people are heading towards a future of being Bangalore’d. If your job is currently being split up into the part that needs to be local and a remote part - you’re only a few years away from watching someone overseas do it for 1/10th the cost. Be needed in person people!

I thought I’d love remote work, but I hated it.

What is your unbiased opinion on Manjaro?

I am a Linux noobie and have only used Mint for around six months now. While I have definitely learned a lot, I don’t have the time to always be doing crazy power user stuff and just want something that works out of the box. While I love Mint, I want to try out other decently easy to use distros as well, specifically not based...

Kongar ,

I’ve been running it for a few years. I’ve learned the hard way to not use the AUR. Manjaro breaks AUR software installs with its delayed release schedule. I’m running it now with pretty much all flatpaks and it’s MUCH more stable. So if you do run it, stay away from native AUR and opt for flatpaks instead.

The next time it breaks I’ll finally get motivated, nuke the drive, and install arch again (I liked arch better).

I think I have the skills now to keep an arch box alive, if you don’t have those skills then manjaro won’t really solve that problem either imo. Just go mint or something similar.

Kongar ,

Ok I’ll play, I got a good one with a dose of revenge for fun.

Me, my young daughter(4) at the time, and my pregnant wife were standing in a very long line line to buy movie tickets to the latest Disney flick (I think it was Nemo). There was only one teenage girl working, there were clearly some staffing issues going on, she was mega flustered, and the wait was truly long and unbearable. But whatever-stuff happens, not the poor girls fault. So we wait as patiently as we can.

We are next in line. There’s like 50 people behind us. Some cow of a Karen just strolls up and cuts the entire line right in front of us. She looks back over her shoulder, smiling, and says that she cannot wait in this long line because she needs good seats. I’m kind of a jerk, and I would have enjoyed giving her a piece of my mind, but… small daughter, pregnant wife, etc. I behaved. People behind start flipping out.

I’m thinking this entitled bitch needs a slap, and just as she turns around with her successfully purchased tickets from cutting an entire line, she whirls around flinging her excessively large designer bag over her shoulder. The strap breaks, and stuff goes EVERYWHERE. Tampons rolling around, lipstick cases under arcade machines, stuff all under people’s feet under the ropes, etc. Truly glorious.

So now she’s horrified and has to pick everything up, and here’s the best part - nobody lifted a finger. All these people in line just ignored her, and her pathetic “excuse me”, “could you”, etc. she went from entitled Karen, queen of importance, to a cockroach scuttling around on a dirty movie theater floor, and everyone just silently looked down upon her.

Petty? yes. I’m sure she’s still a mega bitch still. But karma was served that day.

Kongar ,

Tears of the kingdom - little late to the party but it’s a fun game.

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