ipacialsection

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 , 5 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 , 8 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 , 8 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 , 8 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 , 8 months ago

oregano

ipacialsection , 8 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 , 8 months ago

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

ipacialsection , 8 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 , 8 months ago (edited 8 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 , 8 months ago

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

ipacialsection OP , 8 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 , 7 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 , 8 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 , 8 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 , 8 months ago

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

ipacialsection , 8 months ago

Startendo DS (Dual Screen) Nine

ipacialsection , 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Memes go in !risa, fan theories go in !DaystromInstitute, and Star Trek related off-topic discussion go in !Quarks, otherwise, I don’t see why not.

ipacialsection , 8 months ago

Sure!

ipacialsection , 8 months ago

Yes and no. X11 is the old window system for Linux (and most Unixes), but it was very much not designed with security in mind, and has become difficult to maintain to the point that the only new updates made to it are to help with Wayland backwards-compatibility. Wayland is its de facto successor, and most new Linux desktop development is based on Wayland rather than X11.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

VOY: “Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy” comes to mind.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

James T. Kirk acted as if the Temporal Prime Directive didn’t exist. Kathryn Janeway knew it existed but actively didn’t give a fuck.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I don’t think “one unified distro”, or even an “official distro”, is possible without taking critical parts of Linux private and closed-source. As long as the freedom exists people will make their own “versions” of (GNU/)Linux.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

You’re basically describing the Linux Standard Base, which was abandoned back in 2015 and the way it was handled was somewhat controversial.

But there is a lot of informal standardization between Linuxes, nonetheless.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I haven’t tried this myself, but do you happen to know exactly which model of MacBook you have?

I did some searching and found a (very old) Debian Wiki article saying that the MacBook 1,1 and 2,1 require 32-bit UEFI, and in the case of the 2,1, this is despite the CPU being 64-bit. Though that’s unlikely to be the case here given that those Ubuntu variants reach the boot screen.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Isn’t Proxmox intended for servers whose only use is to run VMs? Why not go for a traditional desktop distro like Mint and run KVM, QEMU, or VirtualBox on it?

Anyway, I have heard something like this, but it probably depends on the anti-cheat. Some might run in kernel mode to deliberately detect VMs. Others won’t care if you use a VM.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

It sounded like OP wanted to install Proxmox on their main PC, which would imply using it as a daily driver desktop OS, which it isn’t.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Ah okay, that makes more sense.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I’ve never used AMD, but folks I know have had good experiences with both; support is about equal. You probably don’t need to go for a top-tier device, and if you’re running VMs and containers you should be just as concerned about RAM and disk space as CPU

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Well, Linux is 32 years old; GNU goes back to 1984, and Unix all the way back to 1970! The history of this OS is much older than Linus Torvalds’s involvement; he “only” created and maintains the most popular kernel.

But yes, happy birthday to Linux. Many thousands have contributed to making this operating system what it is today and they all have my utmost thanks for it.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Most of what you can do with Debian and Fedora, you can also do with Mint. You can even install KDE on Mint, and configure it however you want. Debian is a bit nicer to customize, though, because it’s extremely stable and most of its apps keep their “vanilla” configurations, or at least a configuration unlikely to cause bugs.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

If you really want to learn Linux, you can use any (actively maintained desktop) distro to learn just about everything. Beginner friendly just means the default software is enough to do everything a typical user wants to do, in a way that is likely to be intuitive even if they recently switched from Windows or OS X. Installing and configuring something like Arch or Gentoo can be a good way to learn more about how Linux works, and some distros like Debian or Arch are better as a starting point for customization than a beginner distro, due to having less pre-configured cruft to work around. But you aren’t limited by using Mint, unless you choose to limit yourself.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I’ve never played Starfield, but I haven’t had issues with Elder Scrolls mods on Proton. If the Nexus Mods app doesn’t work, you can just download the individual mods from their website, which I prefer anyway.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

The idea is probably to make it easier to get a useful configuration out of Debian. SpiralLinux does the same thing.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Debian’s preinstalled software on some desktops is one of my main problems with the distro and one of the reasons I hesitate to recommend it to newbies, so I like the idea behind something like this or SpiralLinux, but I wouldn’t use either distro myself, because I find that the more a distro deviates from upstream and adds its own configurations, the harder it is to troubleshoot issues or configure them the way I like.

As for Xebian, I don’t see the point of trying to make Debian Sid easier to install. It’s a development release, guaranteed to have many bugs, and not really suitable for the average user. If you can’t install and “declutter” sid yourself, it’s better to be using the latest stable or even testing release.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

To be honest, I’ve never used or heard of a keyboard or mouse that doesn’t work with Linux. The space is pretty well standardized so generic drivers work for everything. I don’t have experience with keyboard layouts that aren’t English QWERTY, though. The safest option would be something basic from a major brand, extra stuff like RGB is not 100% guaranteed to work.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I’d recommend using Fedora Workstation, it was a great experience back when I myself had an HP ENVY “fliptop”. Anything with GNOME as its desktop environment should be perfect.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

How was the screen rotation? I am mostly using mine flipped with a second monitor.

Automatic screen rotation wasn’t exactly smooth, but it did work, and I didn’t experience any major issues because of it. I’d imagine it’s better now.

Also, what year was the HP ENVY?

Somewhere around 2018 I think, it was a while ago. But you can test in the live environment to see if the hardware support is still as good as it was.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

I use vgy.me currently. Unfortunately I’m not aware of any open-source options, but vgy at least seems friendly and easy to work with.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago

Between the three I’d go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they’ve both made some decisions in recent years that I don’t like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn’t have any issues with Mint.

Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you’ll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven’t heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.

ipacialsection , 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I understand it’s highly customizable.

That is true, it’s one of the main benefits to using Linux!

I understand it’s a lot of manual work, though, at least… it sounds like it? From what I’ve seen people say, it seems like you need to remember a lot of codes and functions to do basic things unless you install interfaces for things?

That depends. Most Linux distros come with all the necessary interfaces for those basic things by default, but a few will require you to set them up with the command-line interface (CLI). It’s just a good idea to learn CLI commands because they’re more reliable, more consistent across distros, and often required for advanced things or for troubleshooting.

IMHO, the main challenges of Linux are:

• Having to make configuration choices that Windows and OS X make for you (distros can go a long way in this regard, but you still have to choose a distro)
• Having to install Linux, configure it, and solve problems yourself. (Basically, you use it at your own risk. If you run into issues, I recommend asking a friend, or failing that, asking on one of the many available Linux support forums (like this one) and chatrooms.)

On the other hand, Linux is easier to use in some ways:

• Distros typically provide software repositories (basically app stores) which are better curated than those of Windows or OS X. They can negate the need to search online for downloads, and make it easy to update the system at your convenience.
• Viruses and malware for Linux are extremely rare.
• There are fewer restrictions on what you can do with your computer, which makes customization much easier. There are no ads, nags, “premium editions”, or other commercial BS in Linux.

I also am under the impression that Linux isn’t the greatest for most games? Or at least, that’s what I heard a lot years ago, I don’t know if it’s still true (or if it was even true back then). If that’s still a thing, is it because Windows is just what everyone defaults to when designing software? How viable is gaming on Linux?

IMO, quite viable, thanks in large part to Valve’s efforts with SteamOS and the Steam Deck. A lot of games have official support for Linux now, and those that don’t run pretty much seamlessly through one or both of the Windows compatibility layers, Wine and Proton. Linux used to be pretty bad for gaming, but I think it’s close to on par with Windows now. It’s arguably even better for emulators.

And how does one even… go about setting up Linux? How do you choose what er… version? Type? Ah, distro? Again this… terminology is foreign to me, I’m not fully sure what I’m saying. Would I have to whipe a laptop of Windows to install Linux on it? How would I do that?

A “distro” is basically a version of Linux. More precisely, the operating system we call “Linux” or sometimes “GNU/Linux” is really just a bunch of disparate pieces of software that together could make an operating system, and a “Linux distro” is an operating system pieced together from those parts.

As for the choice of distro, I wouldn’t overthink it. There’s a small chance your hardware won’t be supported by a given distro, or the install process will be more “hands-on” and difficult, but that applies to only a minority of distros. I personally am fond of Debian, though it’s a more “power user” oriented distro and can be hard to install; you might find one of its derivatives, like Q4OS or Linux Mint easier to set up.

There is a way to “dual-boot” Linux alongside Windows, but it can be unreliable, and you will need to partition your hard drive to give them both dedicated space. There are tutorials for this that you can look up easily, but unless you really need Windows, “wiping your hard drive” will be the smoother option. Back up anything important first, and then (on most distros) the installer will make it easy; you’ll likely just have to select your hard disk and an option to erase it. If you just want to try Linux without making it your main OS, I recommend installing it a virtual machine, such as Oracle VirtualBox or VMWare Player.

I have ADHD and Autism and combined, the whole idea of jumping into this is so goddamn overwhelming to consider figuring it out all by myself.

Speaking as a fellow autistic, I think the ability to hyperfixate helped me a lot with Linux, haha. But it is a lot, so I don’t blame you for being overwhelmed. As I said, once the setup is finished it’s quite easy to use, and the more advanced stuff, you can learn as you go along. So don’t worry too much.

I hope this wasn’t too long/hard to understand for you. Feel free to message me if you need help getting set up with Linux, or need clarification on what I’ve said. I love helping people with stuff like this.

ipacialsection , 10 months ago

F-Droid is the more valuable app store anyway. I always check there before Google Play.