Linux

shared from: https://feddit.org/post/1848262

I like the Slackware approach of installing the kitchen sink by default. Disk space is cheap.
But I find that the cluttering of the menus in KDE is a bit annoying. I use search to start my applications, and a lot of the time I have to type almost the full program name to get to the app I actually use.
What's the easiest way to hide a large number of programs from the menus, which is also easily reversible?

My first idea was renaming the .desktop files in /usr/share/applications to .hidden
But they seem to be recreated automatically.

Another idea was to copy .desktop files from /usr/share/applications to ~/.local/share/applications and then do:
printf "\nHidden=True" | tee -a ~/.local/share/applications/*.desktop

But I tried to add this manually with one test file and it didn't seem to have any effect.
Is there a config file somewhere that specifies in which paths .desktop files are parsed?

Or is there a better way?

Thanks a lot, and happy slacking!

[Solved] Slackware comes with kmenuedit which can be accessed by right-clicking the app menu.

Hi all,

Perhaps a stupid question. Some time ago, I received a rpi zeroW as a gift, but as I did not have any use for ii I passed it to somebody else in our electronics-group. Now, that person has had a +30 year carreer as self-taught programmer -starting out with BASIC on DOS machines- so he showed of some of his old BASIC applications in dosbox on the pi.

So far so good, but he had an interesting question: Years ago, I wrote a library in BASIC for screen / window applications in DOS. (you know, pop-up text-windows and so on). How do I do that on linux (in C)?

As I myself only do 'backend' coding (so no UI), I have to admit I did not have any answer to that.

So, question, For somebody who has mostly coded in BASIC (first DOS and later Visual Basic) and now switched to C and python, what is the best / most easy tool to write a basic UI application with window-function on linux/unix. I know there exist things like QT and ncurses, but I never used these, so I have no idea.

Any advice?

Kr.

Okay I know this sounds like click bait but trust me switching over to linux requires you to first master the open source software that you will be replacing your windows/mac counterparts with. Doing it in an unfamiliar OS with no fallback to rely on is tough, frustrating and will turn you off of trying linux. DISCLAIMER: I know that some people cannot switch to linux because open source / Linux software is not good enough yet. But I urge you to keep track of them and when so you can know when they are good enough.

The Solution

So I suggest you keep using windows, switch all your apps to open or closed source software that is available on linux. Learn them, use them and if you are in a pinch and need to use your windows only software it will still be there. Once you are at a point where you never use the windows only software you can then think of switching over to linux.

The Alternatives

So to help you out I'll list my favorites for each use case.

MS Office -> Only Office

1. Not for folks who use obscure macros and are deep into MS Office
2. Has Collaboration and integration with almost all popular cloud services..
3. Has a MS Office like UI and the best compatibility with MS Office.

Adobe Premiere -> Da Vinci Resolve

1. It is closed source but available on linux
2. Great UI, competitive features and a free version

Outlook -> Thunderbird

1. Recently went through massive updates and now has a modern design.
2. Templates, multi account management, content based filters, html signatures, it is all there.

Epic Games, GOG, PRIME -> Heroic

1. Easy to use, 1 click install, no hassel
2. Beautiful UI
3. Automatically imports all the games you have bought

PDF Editor -> LibreOffice Draw

1. Suprisingly good for text manipulation, moving around images and alot more.
2. There might be slight incompatibilities (I haven't noticed anything huge)
3. But hey, it's free

How do I pick a distro there are so many! NO

So finally after switching all the apps you think you are ready? Do not fall into the rabbit hole of changing your entire OS every two days, you will be in a toxic relationship with it.

I hate updates and my hardware is not that new

1. Mint - UI looks a bit dated but it is rock solid
2. Ubuntu - Yes, I know snaps are bad, but you can just ignore them

I have new hardware but I want sane updates

1. Fedora
2. Open Suse Tumbleweed

I live on the bleeding edge baby, both hardware and software

1. Arch ... btw

Anyways what is more important is the DE than the distro for a beginner, trust me. Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc. you can try them all in a VM and see which one you like.

SO TLDR: Don't switch to linux! Switch to linux apps.

Maybe this is a hot take. However, a lot of the Chromebooks that were deployed by schools during covid are build like tanks while being super lightweight and having great battery life. Meanwhile the old thinkpads are 10 years old and are probably starting to wear down. Many Chromebooks support coreboot these days so theoretically they have the potential to be more private and secure. Some of them are also arm which means that they are more efficient from an architecture perspective.

Edit:

I like how incredibly controversial this is. I have successfully split the votes

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/970397

The first Ubuntu 24.04 point release won’t be released this week, as initially planned.

Ubuntu developers had been aiming to release Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS on Thursday, August 19th, but has been delayed due to ‘high-impact upgrade bugs’.

As a result, Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS is now due for release on Thursday, August 29th, two weeks later than initially planned.

• Official Announcement: Ubuntu 24.04.1 point-release delayed until August 29

• Tracking Document: Noble Numbat (24.04.1 LTS) Point-Release Status Tracking

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/39456265

For those of you like me who are fed up with Microsoft’s BS but invested too heavily in hardware that Linux distros have yet to support well, I finally figured out a way to get HDR games to run well on my Nvidia GPU. This will be a brief description of more or less what I did to get this working. I’m very much a Linux noob so I don’t fully understand the way everything here works but I’m happy to try to answer questions if you have any.

OS: Bazzite –Desktop Nvidia KDE edition (BDNK) Bazzite was developed as a capable alternative to SteamOS on handhelds like the Steam Deck and ROG Ally, so the website is full of references to HDR, however from my attempts to get this working my understanding is that it’s easier to get that working in Gaming mode which is unsupported on Nvidia GPUs. Nevertheless, this version of Bazzite, while only for desktops, comes with KDE Plasma v6 installed by default meaning it technically supports HDR and you will likely see a difference if you install this version and flip the HDR switch from the display settings. I had tried installing Ubuntu on my desktop before and since it didn’t support HDR all the colors on my monitor were almost obnoxiously saturated; I see the same effect in BDNK when I disable HDR.

Drivers: I didn’t fiddle with my drivers. BDNK comes with up-to-date Nvidia drivers bundled and installs them when you install the OS.

Software: SteamTinkerLaunch (installed using ProtonUp-Qt) SteamTinkerLaunch (STL) is a user interface for making it easy to configure your launch options for any given game in your Steam library. If you don’t know what a compatibility tool is, it’s functionally a layer of software between the game you want to play and the OS you’re using which can tell the game to do certain things that your OS is not configured to do. STL can be added to the list of compatibility tools you have to use in your installation of Steam, though it is not technically a compatibility tool itself. STL is used to configure other compatibility tools that Steam already has at its disposal, like Proton which is the primary compatibility tool SteamOS uses to make Windows games run on Linux.

Follow the instructions in the SteamTinkerLaunch GitHub ReadMe to install the tool and add it as a compatibility tool in your installation of Steam. Once you’ve done that, I recommend rebooting. I have yet to get STL working as the * default * compatibility tool, so for the time being I have been manually editing the properties of each game I have installed (Steam Game Library > right click on a game > click properties > go to the compatibility tab) to set the compatibility tool to STL. From here, whenever you launch the game in Steam, it should bring up STL’s menu before launching the game.

Within STL, the key settings to mark are as follows: Gamescope: Use gamescope and mark HDR as enabled for gamescope. I also recommend setting gamescope to fullscreen with your desired resolution, and then also locking your cursor to the gamescope window so that you don’t end up with weird double mouse cursors that aren’t aligned on the screen. Proton: since you told Steam to use STL instead of Proton as the compatibility tool, you need to tell STL to tell Steam to launch the game with Proton.

And that’s pretty much it. Or at least, that’s all that I did. From there, you should be able to configure HDR settings within each game’s menus.

TL;DR – install Bazzite Desktop Nvidia KDE, then install and configure SteamTinkerLaunch for your games.

What games will this work with? No idea. So far I have tested it with Cyberpunk 2077, DOOM Eternal, and Elden Ring and HDR is looking to me as good as it does in my Windows installation.

Will the Gnome version of Bazzite work for HDR on an Nvidia GPU, or for that matter any other OS as long as I’m using gamescope to run the game with HDR enabled? Good question! I don’t know, please give it a try if you’re curious and respond back with your results.

I have another question that you didn’t list here, what’s your answer? Probably “I don’t know” since what I wrote here is more or less what I know, but by all means ask away and I’ll try to answer it!

This is swiped from reddit but I thought it was really helpful so please don't judge me too harshly lol.

So it turns out that some Linux distros don't enable this by default for whatever reason but if you have an Intel wifi card that uses the iwlwifi driver (you can check this with lspci -k and look for a section that says Network controller: Intel Corporation and Kernel driver in use: iwlwifi under it), you can add a simple line to a config file that might make a huge difference to your wifi speeds.

Just edit /etc/modprobe.d/iwlwifi.conf (if it doesn't exist just create it) and add the line: options iwlwifi 11n_disable=8 then reboot. I ran Speedtest before and after trying this on my laptop and it seems to have increased it by about 20% or so.

Your mileage may vary of course, but hopefully this helps someone!

Free and Open Source Speed Test. No Flash, No Java, No Websocket, No Bullshit.

My mouse right-click is double-clicking. I want to have a time interval between two clicks to register the second one. Is there a way to do this in KDE Plasma 6?

SYSTEM INFO: 
- endeavourOS 6.10.3-1-cachyos
- Kernel parameters:
  - nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm.modeset=1 nvidia_drm.fbdev=1 nvidia.NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1
- KDE Plasma 6.1.4 on Wayland
- AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D with iGPU enabled on BIOS
- NVIDIA RTX 3080 with nvidia-beta-dkms 560.31.02-1
- Main display plugged on NVIDIA GPU (display port)
- Secondary display plugged on motherboard (display port)

I want to be able to make use of my iGPU (AMD Raphael on a Ryzen 7 7800X3D) to render everything, and run my games on my NVIDIA RTX 3080. It's a desktop PC, I have 2 monitors, my main one is plugged to my 3080 and the secondary is plugged to the motherboard, and by doing so, VRR/Gsync works on my main display (the only workaround to get VRR working with a NVIDIA card and multiple monitors). The second thing I would like to do is for Firefox on my second screen to render/decode with my iGPU, so I can watch videos and streams there without sacrificing my frames on my games (losing about 20 frames playing Helldivers 2 if a video is playing on the background because it uses my dGPU to decode).

I've installed nvidia-prime from AUR and added the udev rules as written on arch wiki, however it seems that my iGPU isn't being used at all

❯ lspci | grep VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA102 [GeForce RTX 3080 Lite Hash Rate] (rev a1)
11:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Raphael (rev cb)

❯ glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"
OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080/PCIe/SSE2

I've noticed that moving my cursor and windows on my desktop is now slower/laggier (check notes below), and my turing smart monitor can't detect my NVIDIA GPU, but that's the extent of the changes. When I open Firefox directly on my second screen and play a video, with nvtop I can see that my NVIDIA GPU is the one doing the work with my iGPU not being utilised at all: https://i.imgur.com/CPPICUk.png (notice how there is no usage at all on my iGPU)

I've got a screenshot while I was playing Helldivers 2 and playing a video at the same time, and if I paused the video I'd get my frames back. Using prime-run to run my games has no difference since everything is being handled by the dGPU anyways.

Is there anything I'm missing here? I'm happy to provide more info but I'm a bit clueless on how to troubleshoot this more so any help is much appreciated.

NOTE: Regarding the choppy cursor, it is not because of GSP firmware. I've tested the proprietary drivers with and without GSP firmware, and the open drivers since 550 and I haven't noticed a single difference in my setup, they all perform exactly the same. Besides, I'm using the beta 560 drivers which are open modules only, which needs GSP firmware enabled.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/965607

GNOME 46.4 is now available as the fourth maintenance update to the latest GNOME 46 desktop environment series with various bug fixes.

GNOME 46.4 is here a month after GNOME 46.3 with improvements for connecting to WPA2 enterprise networks, glitches in the looking-glass effect, Persian on-screen keyboard layout, overview startup notification, keyboard navigation in app folders, and nested popovers on Wayland.

Release Announcement: GNOME 46.4 Released

The ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1 screen copy protocols build upon wlroots' wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 with various improvements for better screen capture support under Wayland. These new protocols should allow for better performance and window capturing support for use-cases around RDP/VNC remote desktop, screen sharing, and more.

Merge Request: Create ext-image-capture-source-v1 and ext-image-copy-capture-v1

Hello, I just want to share here. Hopefully it's useful. Thanks

Hey there, I'm trying to install Mint on a 2015 MacBook Pro and for some reason the laptop won't show the USB in the boot menu when I try to access it. I've tried using both baleneaEtcher on both my Macbook and my Linux desktop, and ventoy on the desktop to make the drive but neither has worked.

Does anyone have experience with this era of macs and installing Linux on them?

EDIT: Changing the flash drive worked ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I'm looking for interesting tools to automate managing packaging and configuring everything automated.

And yeah I know about NixOS but I like to distro hop and experiment so I for now know these:

• Ansible - automating many machines, using different package names as vars and package managers.
• Bash - the most native and compatible scripting language that can be.
• Chezmoi - for dotfiles.

For now that's it. I'm looking forward for your suggestions!

I'm posting this as more of a "fun thought" than anything else.

It's generally considered a fact that Linux, along with many other open-source software projects, are more efficient than their propriety closed-source counterparts, specifically in terms of the code that they execute.

There are numerous reasons for this, but a large contributing factor is that open-source, generally speaking, incentivises developers to write better code.

Currently, in many instances, it can be argued that Linux is often less power-efficient than its closed-source counterparts, such as Windows and OSX. However, the reason for this lies not in the operating system itself, but rather the lack of certain built-in hardware support for Linux. Yes, it's possible to make Linux more power-efficient through configuring things differently, or optimizing certain features of your operating system, but it's not entirely uncommon to see posts from newer Linux laptop users reporting decreased battery life for these reasons.

Taking a step back from this, though, and looking at a hypothetical world where Linux, or possibly other open-source operating systems and software holds the majority market share globally, I find it to be an interesting thought: How much more power efficient would the world be as a whole?

Of course, computing does not account for the majority of electricity and energy consumption, and I'm not claiming that we'd see radical power usage changes across the world, I'm talking specifically in relation to computing. If hardware was built for Linux, and computers came pre-installed with optimizations and fixes targetted at their specific hardware, how much energy would we be saving on each year?

Nanny Cath watching her YouTube videos, or Jonny scrolling through his Instagram feed, would be doing so in a much more energy-efficient manner.

I suppose I'm not really arguing much, just posting as an interesting thought.

Is there any good alternative to parted, that I can use in scripts? Parted main problem is that it requires user confirmation one each action.

I have tried to follow several tutorial to setup using either ip or nmtui:

• https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-use-bridged-networking-with-libvirt-and-kvm
• https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/setup-network-bridge-VM

However, the bridge inherits the MAC address of host after enslaving the host hardware enp1s0.... This causes my router to give both the host and the bridge the same ip address, making the ha instance inaccessible.

The red hat tutorial clearly show that the bridge and the host have different IP, so I was wondering if I am doing something wrong.

alternatively, I can set the home assistant vm to run in NAT and port forward from host, but I have several devices that communicate over different ports. So it would be annoying to forward all these ports. Not to mention, many appliances don't have documentation about the ports they use.

I can also potentially use virtualbox, but it is not well supported on silverblue, especially with secureboot enabled.

I tried i3 and now just wondering, which WM I can pick and why, because of their great diversity. Any advices?

Okay so it’s been like a month since EndeavourOS has found an update to install. I’m running sudo pacman -Syu almost daily to update my system but it only find eos-* updates to install and nothing else. I know kernel 6.10 came out not long ago but my system is still on 6.9.*. What can I check? There’s no way EOS hasn’t had an update in over a month…

Edit: added screenshot. Just ran this and as expected, only one package found.

Edit 2: Refreshing the mirrors and ranking them did the trick. Thousands of updates waiting…

Hi,

I got FileA that have 640 a getfacl FileA give me

# file: FileA
# owner: me
# group: me
user::rw-
user:aUser:r--
group::r-x			#effective:r--
mask::r--
other::---

So it's give me the expected...

but when I do

chmod 600 aFile
getfacl aFile

...
user:aUser:r--		#effective:---
...
mask::---
...

Why suddenly aUser lost his ability to read the file !?!?!