ipacialsection

ipacialsection , 3 days ago

Right now I’d say the best open-source DAW for Linux is LMMS if you want to do everything just on your laptop, or Ardour if you want to use external instruments.

LMMS has some shockingly versatile built in synths, including a port of ZynAddSubFX, supports LADSPA/LV2 plugins, and supports using Wine to run 32-bit Windows VSTs. I’m unsure of Ardour’s VST support, but it at least supports LV2 plugins. Either of those, if you install them through your distro, will likely include Calf Studio Gear, an extensive collection of LV2 effects and a couple synths. As for ones that run natively on Linux, there’s synthv1, samplv1, drumkv1, and padthv1, though I’ve had trouble getting them working myself.

I’ve found some good stuff on the Linux Audio Wiki but IDK how up to date most of it is.

ipacialsection , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Almost all distros can dual boot, so there’s little reason to highlight one as being the best for it. Dual booting is a bit messy and risky no matter what you do, so back up your data first and, if you’re new to Linux, look up instructions for dual booting Windows 11 and your chosen distro.

Only one I can think of that does anything special with dual boot, off the top of my head, is Q4OS, which offers a way to install it from within Windows using an app. (It also happens to be tailored towards people familiar with Windows XP or 7, so it should be a somewhat smooth transition for a first time Linux user.) I haven’t tried this myself, but I imagine it just expedites the usual steps of dual booting: shrink the Windows partition, then install into the resulting free space (or to an unused disk).

If that doesn’t sound appealing, just try any distro recommended as “beginner friendly”, like Linux Mint. Tutorials should be easy to find.

ipacialsection , 4 days ago

A collection of poker scenes filmed from different camera angles.

ipacialsection , 12 days ago

No distro I’m aware of still provides official box sets and CDs. Debian still provides materials for third parties to make them, though. Most of the vendors of pre-burned Linux media have also shut down, but one that seems to still exist (and offers Debian box sets) is www.shoplinuxonline.com .

ipacialsection , 11 days ago

I was speaking of the Debian “full archive” 21-DVD sets: www.shoplinuxonline.com/debian-full.html

But I don’t know about how they package it, so it might not be a “box set” as you describe.

ipacialsection , 13 days ago

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.

ipacialsection , 16 days ago

I can’t object to more Jett Reno!

ipacialsection , 19 days ago

Wasn’t screenfetch the thing neofetch was supposed to replace? Apparently it has more recent development activity (5 months ago), anyway…

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

chmod’d all my home directory’s files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

Open-source software is distributed primarily as source code in a human-readable programming language. Computers can’t actually read these programming languages directly; they need to be translated into the machine language of their CPU (such as x86_64). For some languages, like Python, code can be “interpreted” on the fly; for others, like C, programs must be “compiled” into a separate file format. Additionally, most programs consist of multiple files that need to be compiled and linked together, and installed in certain folders on your system, so the compiler and additional tools work to automate that process.

Most users of Linux rarely if ever have to compile anything, because the developers of Linux distros, and some third parties like Flathub, curate collections of (mostly) open-source software that has already been compiled and packaged into formats that are easy to install and uninstall. As part of this process, they usually add some metadata and/or scripts that can automate compiling and packaging, so it only requires a single command (makepkg on Arch, dpkg-buildpackage on Debian.) However, some newer or more obscure software may not be packaged by your distribution or any third-party repo.

How to compile depends on the program, its programming language and what tools the developers prefer to use to compile it. Usually the README file included with source code explains how to compile the software. The most common process uses the commands ./configure; make; sudo make install after installing all of the program’s dependencies and cd-ing to the source code directory. Other programs might include the metadata needed for something like makepkg to work, be written in an interpreted language and thus require no compilation, or use a different toolchain, like CMake.

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

In that case makepkg isn’t compiling anything, it’s just packaging the existing binaries so that they can be more easily installed and recognized by your package manager.

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

Yeah, basically. makepkg automates the process of creating an Arch package, and while usually that involves compiling source code, sometimes it just means converting proprietary software that has already been compiled into a different format.

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

I hope these shots aren’t a good representation of the whole episode, because if they are, it’s a 15 minute scene of L’Ak and Moll on a planet followed by 35 minutes of close-up shots of Rayner

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

Last time I used Elementary OS, it was great if you were only using the official apps, with insane degrees of polish, but things like LibreOffice were surprisingly hard to configure the way I wanted. That was a while ago, though.

ipacialsection , 1 month ago

There was still Wine, and PlayOnLinux helped further, but when I looked for a game I wanted to play on WineDB, there was no guarantee it even had an entry, and if it wasn’t listed as “platinum”, the chance of you experiencing any reported issue was very high.

Not to mention, playing Steam games that weren’t native was an impossibility.

Thankfully I was more of a console gamer at the time, and I got a lot of enjoyment out of the few games that received Linux ports - like Team Fortress 2!

ipacialsection , 2 months ago

I still follow Planet KDE and Planet Debian, and can vouch for both. They’re great for both learning about the development processes of those projects, and finding interesting blogs on unrelated topics that happen to have been written or linked by the contributors.

ipacialsection , 2 months ago

This really bothers me. Closed standards locked behind a licensing fee may as well not be standards at all, in my opinion.

ipacialsection , 2 months ago

I find it really fun to browse the Debian repository and its source code with their dedicated websites for doing so ( packages.debian.org and sources.debian.org ), to find all the obscure utilities, and silly code comments.

ipacialsection , 2 months ago

I unfortunately haven’t found that many I can remember. But a comment on Busybox cat that linked to a talk titled “cat -v considered harmful” did send me down a rabbit hole once.

ipacialsection , 2 months ago

I was dualbooting 2 Linuxes for a long time. All that you need is to install GRUB once on one of the distros, but having two or more bootloaders in the same EFI System partition is generally harmless, and might happen due to how some distros’ installers are written. In that case the BIOS boot order will decide which one to use. Either way, you only need one boot partition.

It is safe to delete all partitions on your hard drive if and only if you have backed up any important data on them. It’s basically the same as installing a new hard drive. The installer for your distro will be able to re-create all of them.

I have personally never used a shared /home between multiple distros, but based on my experience switching desktop environments, there are likely to be conflicts between files that lead to bugs. Arch and Pop!_OS will have vastly different versions of most software, and it’s possible that changes to a config file in one distro may break the program in the other. Shared /home is better for if you have just one OS installed, and reinstall it occasionally.

ipacialsection , 3 months ago

And because of that, custom configurations are wonderfully easy to make, technical issues are rare, and the few issues you do experience are quite possible to solve. Which is why I settled on Debian.

ipacialsection , 3 months ago

It’s a good thing that KDE 6 is coming out soon because holy cow, that’s a big secondary version number.

ipacialsection , 3 months ago

I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they’re only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.

Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.

ipacialsection , 3 months ago

Debian needs a better installer. It’d be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL’s Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn’t install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).

ipacialsection , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

It still sounds to me like something’s up with the disk. Can’t think of any solutions to suggest but I would run a SMART health check on it:

<span style="color:#323232;">sudo apt install smartmontools  
</span><span style="color:#323232;">sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
</span>

If you prefer a graphical tool, you can do the same thing with GNOME Disks, which also has options for disk benchmarking.

In the resulting report, the overall health state should be “PASSED”, the “Type” column should show “Pre-fail” and “Old age” values, and the “Media-Wearout-Indicator” should be close to 100. If the overall health state is “FAILED”, then you will want to back up your files immediately and consider getting a new SSD.

ipacialsection , 4 months ago

/dev/nvme0 is probably your SSD. But if it passed you probably have nothing to worry about

ipacialsection , 4 months ago

Definitely flatpak related then. Try running one of your flatpak apps from the terminal, and post the output here; might help pinpoint the issue. You can list the ones you have installed with flatpak list, then flatpak run <one of the listed apps, e.g. org.videolan.vlc>.

ipacialsection , 4 months ago

Looking online, there are some suggestions to either (re)install xapp:

sudo apt install --reinstall xapp

or a related library:

sudo apt install --reinstall gir1.2-xapp-1.0

However, usually I find that errors like this mean nothing, so I wouldn’t be surprised if these steps change nothing.

ipacialsection , 4 months ago

GNOME and Plasma are so far separated that a merger would be impossible, without either eliminating one of the two or completely rewriting both, and I think they cover different niches. GNOME is for people who want a tightly integrated experience, and KDE is for people who want to customize their system. (I would also argue that it’s not possible for there to be only one distro or DE, so long as all the components are open-source. Savvy users will always make their own stuff if they’re allowed to.)

There’s already plenty of cooperation between GNOME and KDE devs on common standards, support for each other’s apps, etc. I hope this continues, and makes both desktops better. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like Wayland extensions, could definitely become shared between the two desktops.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

This is nice but there are already tons of “how/why to start using Linux” websites. Not sure if we need another one.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

You can start anywhere you want! I often recommend starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation, since it’s aged a little better than the original series. You might prefer to jump ahead to season 2 or 3 to get to the really good stuff, but even season 1 is worth watching.

Up until Enterprise season 3 it’s pretty much all episodic (or in DS9’s case, mostly episodic with a subset of the episodes forming a series-long story arc), so you can pick a random episode or movie with a cool-sounding description and start there if you want. That’s how I got into Trek, just picking random TNG and Voyager episodes.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Whenever you install or remove software, be sure to read through what’s being removed. You don’t want to accidentally uninstall something important. This is very unlikely to happen with official Debian packages, but you should be especially careful when installing packages outside of Debian’s repo, as they may not be fully compatible with your version of Debian.

In any case, I’d log in to a tty (ctrl-alt-any function key) and install whichever desktop environment you had before using apt.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

Debian 12 ships with the non-free-firmware repo enabled by default, including firmware-iwlwifi, but a few Broadcom cards, and maybe others, still require software in non-free if I recall correctly

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

oregano

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

I’d say it started at a 6 or 7, and grew to a strong 8 over its runtime. Most of the characters have always been beautifully nuanced, but the stakes of its plots have always been unnecessarily inflated, and the endings for each story arc are of very mixed quality. After the jump to the 31st century, the storylines became much more Star Trek-ian, and the show started to display more of its own identity separate from classic Trek and action movie tropes, and that pushed it into properly great territory.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

Are all of the remaining LXDE programs going to be using XWayland? Or have they been ported by now?

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

Most regular distros are good enough for gaming. The only issue you’re likely to run into is with graphics drivers (I recommend going for AMD graphics on that build), and the availability of certain software in certain formats (gaming software is more likely to be available for Debian or Ubuntu based distros).

If you like the Steam Deck’s desktop mode, you might enjoy another distro with the same desktop environment (KDE Plasma). I’m partial to KDE Neon, a snappy Ubuntu LTS spin with all of the latest KDE software.

ipacialsection OP , 7 months ago (edited 7 months ago)

Details:

• OS is Debian bookworm, DE is Plasma 5.27.
• Plasma theme is Oxygen.
• Icon theme is a slightly modified version of Oxylite, only changes are that it follows my system color scheme, the “inherits” list is different, and the start-here and preferences-system icons have been changed.
• Wallpaper is Haenau.
• I’m using Oxygen for Qt widgets and decorations, with the Obsidian Coast color scheme, and standard Breeze Dark for GTK2.
• Layout is entirely my own. I’m showing my Games activity because the main one contains a folder view that might expose info I don’t want to expose here.

Hopefully this is original enough? I’m not sure. I’ve gotten away with posting desktops with mostly existing themes before, but on other occasions I’ve had posts removed for it. At least I mixed and matched some icons this time.

bonus screenshot with apps:

A KDE Plasma 5 desktop disguised as Plasma 4 with Neofetch in Konsole, KPatience, and Plasma Discover open

ipacialsection OP , 7 months ago

Me too, but I also think it just looks cool. Sci-fi vibes.

ipacialsection OP , 7 months ago

this is my “gaming” Plasma activity, so in theory everything I play regularly is there :)

i’m personally fine with the windows being slightly brighter, but i think an almost-black theme would look good too… might experiment with that, thanks for the suggestion!

ipacialsection OP , 6 months ago

I suspect Plasma 6 will remove it. Though I’m liking this desktop setup so much I might just keep it for the rest of Debian Bookworm’s lifespan.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

Debian Stable. It doesn’t break with updates, it doesn’t break when I try to customize it, it has all the software you could ever want, and it just works. It’s robust, elegant, and free forever.

For most people I’d recommend a derivative like Mint, Q4OS, or SpiralLinux, since those smooth out a sometimes annoying setup process, but for me vanilla Debian is perfect.

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

Fandom does care about cash cows, and will almost certainly do the same thing they’ve done with several wikis that have left: take it over, remove references to the move, and continue attempting to compete with the new wiki, leveraging their better SEO.

But if anything, Fandom considering Memory Alpha a cash cow would be even more of a reason to leave, considering that Fandom tends to cover those wikis with ads (that’s why Minecraft Wiki moved).

ipacialsection , 7 months ago

I suspect a lot of “evil admirals” were promoted by votes from, or just to appease, reactionary political movements.