Linux

Look, I've only been a Linux user for a couple of years, but if there's one thing I've learned, it's that we're not afraid to tinker. Most of us came from Windows or macOS at some point, ditching the mainstream for better control, privacy, or just to escape the corporate BS. We're the people who choose the harder path when we think it's worth it.

Which is why I find it so damn interesting that atomic distros haven't caught on more. The landscape is incredibly diverse now - from gaming-focused Bazzite to the purely functional philosophy of Guix System. These distros couldn't be more different in their approaches, but they all share this core atomic DNA.

These systems offer some seriously compelling stuff - updates that either work 100% or roll back automatically, no more "oops I bricked my system" moments, better security through immutability, and way fewer update headaches.

So what gives? Why aren't more of us jumping on board? From my conversations and personal experience, I think it boils down to a few things:

Our current setups already work fine. Let's be honest - when you've spent years perfecting your Arch or Debian setup, the thought of learning a whole new paradigm feels exhausting. Why fix what isn't broken, right?

The learning curve seems steep. Yes, you can do pretty much everything on atomic distros that you can on traditional ones, but the how is different. Instead of apt install whatever and editing config files directly, you're suddenly dealing with containers, layering, or declarative configs. It's not necessarily harder, just... different.

The docs can be sparse. Traditional distros have decades of guides, forum posts, and StackExchange answers. Atomic systems? Not nearly as much. When something breaks at 2am, knowing there's a million Google results for your error message is comforting.

I've been thinking about this because Linux has overcome similar hurdles before. Remember when gaming on Linux was basically impossible? Now we have the Steam Deck running an immutable SteamOS (of all things!) and my non-Linux friends are buying them without even realizing they're using Linux. It just works.

So I'm genuinely curious - what's keeping YOU from switching to an atomic distro? Is it specific software you need? Concerns about customization? Just can't be bothered to learn new tricks?

Your answers might actually help developers focus on the right pain points. The atomic approach makes so much sense on paper that I'm convinced it's the future - we just need to figure out what's stopping people from making the jump today.

So what would it actually take to get you to switch? I'm all ears.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28495681

Has anyone successfully typed either European accented characters or Japanese Kanas on their physical keyboard?

For the longest time, I've been trying to get non-English characters to appear on my system. Specifically European accented characters. I've read about the compose key, but I could never make it work somehow.

I've also tried to make the Kanas to appear using the Japanese keyboard, but that too doesn't work.

I'm using mostly KDE system, on many different distros. As for the keyboard, it's almost always standard US QWERTY without the numpad, varying between various laptops (mostly Thinkpads) and USB keyboards. For the Japanese, it's a Thinkpad W530 (should also apply to X230, T430, and T530).

I've been using Linux for quite a while now. I'm familiar with most inner working of the system, but this the one thing I can never wrap my head around!

MIPS seems to be quite widely supported (about as much as PPC64LE) despite that I'm not able to find anything that uses MIPSLE/MIPS64LE. Are they only supported for QEMU or is there anything that still uses it? Do you know of anything to play around with Linux for MIPSLE/MIPS64LE that isn't emulation?

macOS has a bunch of apps which can do so, including SketchyVim. Basically you would have all the vim modes motions and operators, inside any text box in the OS / in any app. I just did some looking up and asked LLMs, but didn't find any linux equivalents of that. Ideally they would work on wayland and have app or window class exceptions.

https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/kittens/panel/

I set up Linux Mint Cinnamon on a laptop my friend gave me with a broken Windows Install. She gave it back to me and told me it was very slow, YouTube videos were stuttering etc.

Now I have it here for testing and for the first 30 minutes everything went fine. Stress test with s-tui and four 4K YouTube Videos in parallel. Unplugged the power, CPU went down a bit but still everything good.

Then from one moment to the other - everything slowed down, while only watching one YouTube video. I checked s-tui and CPU frequencies are down to ~200MHz while load is pretty heavy. Every click has a lag of multiple seconds, I couldn't even open Shutter to make a screenshot as it is not responding.

Anybody any idea what's going on here? Is Cinnamon too much for this device? I am not much of a hardware guy and also don't understand a lot about operating systems, so please be a bit patient with me ;)

Laptop is Lenovo Yoga X1 3rd Gen i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz x 4 16 GB RAM

Update: Issue disappeared without doing anything. After just letting my computer sit turned off for a few hours I started it back up to troubleshoot. Now it works again. Something happened to break it and then to unfuck it again without any input from me. Something is unstable and I’m gonna try to figure it out.

Started my PC up today, logged in like normal, but my keyboard wont work after logging in. Except for the calculator button. None of the keys will actually do anything. But logging in works normally.

Worked fine last night, no updates have run or anything. Where to start diagnosing this? In a way where I won’t need a keyboard?

Fedora 42 KDE

Edit: Keyboard works fine in a live environment on the USB I used to install yesterday. Tried a different keyboard on my main install, and that didn’t work either. So it’s not the keyboard itself at least

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28418213

Repartition again plus Printer

Hey again.

Thank you again for all of the help with the dual boot and repartition a few weeks back. I am running Linux Mint.

I repartitioned the Linux side to about 25 GB and over the last few weeks just downloading updates, I guess it has filled up. It tells me there is only 75 MB left. Is that normal or can I free up room again?

Also, the printer no longer prints. It just hangs when I try to print. It shows up correctly as the HP Deskjet 3510 but won’t print. Any tips on how to fix?

I'm going back to Linux after ~8 years of maining Windows. I was a Linux desktop and server user back in college and did all my dev on there. When I got my first job, I bought a better laptop and started maining Windows.

I am going back to Linux for three main reasons: I hate the Windows 11 UI, I'm increasingly paranoid about privacy/security, and the development experience for native software has sucked for a long time.

Besides the obvious downward spiral in UI since Windows 7, it's also become unreliable and slow. Some days, File explorer just won't open. Others, it takes a full minute to load my "home" view, and some others I get weird bugs where the color settings are broken or I can't actually click on folders anymore. The start menu is slow to open when pressing the Windows key, windows search is slow to index and sometimes looks stuff up on Bing instead of opening a file. The default apps (calculator, image viewer, media player) have been getting replaced with slower UWP versions with flatter and flatter UI. Finally, Windows is increasingly pushing AI stuff onto the platform, which leads me to privacy/security

I am increasingly paranoid these days about privacy and security. While I don't have any outstanding issues with security at large, I don't trust Microsoft's telemetry collection and I especially don't trust anything that gets sucked up into Windows Recall's AI Black hole. This hasn't been an issue, but I've always wondered why Microsoft hasn't made it simpler to create containerized applications with AppX/Windows SDK. It seems like it should be way easier to create a flatpak-like sandboxed application with any API (Win32, WinForms, WPF, or any language really).

Believe it or not, Windows is a good development platform, these days, unless you're trying to write Windows software. Microsoft, under Satya Nadella, has been taking care of its developer community and making a lot of tools free and some open source. vcpkg has revolutionized my C++ development and I've always been fond of many MSVC extensions such as SAL. There's a lot of pros and cons, but I generally prefer NT API calls over POSIX API calls (which are far more long in the tooth than NT at this point). That said, I tend to just write cross-platform "modern" C++ and don't make too many system calls anymore. I will miss Visual Studio (and the ease of SLN/Vcxproj files), and it seems like the only comparable C++ IDE available for Linux is CLion. I'm actually a fan of DirectX and HLSL over OpenGL and Vulkan: Microsoft has made a lot of really great first party libraries/tools available for DirectX that make it a really fun API to work with when you include DirectXTK. I am one of the rare few users who actually enjoys PowerShell; I prefer piping typed, structured data over piping streams of bytes. I also really hate sh/zsh/bash syntax.

That said: Microsoft has utterly lost the plot on native windows application development. They release a new UI Framework for C# and Whatever the latest managed C++ framework is every 3 or so years, and then immediately fail to support it, subtly changing XAML syntax or .Net namespaces so that your old UWP or WPF code is strangely not compatible anymore. To me, what is most telling about Microsoft's level of commitment to its newest frameworks is the fact that they are still supporting WinForms with modern, cross platform .Net builds, meaning that you can use modern C# and .Net features in a runtime that is supposed to have been replaced by their XAML products a long time ago. The only really viable way to write a DirectX application, and the only way that has any official documentation on it, is STILL to use the original Win32 APIs to create a window and manage IO.

So anyways, I'm not as zealous about Linux as most people on the internet are; I still think Windows is a good software development platform and maybe Microsoft can turn the ship around some day, but I doubt it.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/36434036

A new community-led initiative called “EU OS” to develop a Linux distribution initiative looks like a positive development. It is specifically created to address the unique requirements of the European Union's (EU) public sector organizations. For me, this initiative stands out for its commitment to the EU's digital sovereignty, reducing reliance on external vendors, and creating a secure, independent digital ecosystem.

Hello!

So, I live on a bus. We travel around, it's pretty great. I don't have a laptop or a mailing address that works, so getting certain things done is difficult, and I have two things I need help with.

I installed a solar system a while back, with an older charge controller a friend recommended. I more recently upgraded the batteries to lithium irons. So now this controller requires reprogramming, and to do so you have to plug an RJ45 (pretty sure that's the name) into it, and probably download some shitty chinese spyware program to fiddle with it. Their newer models bluetooth and require an app of course.

The other thing is either much trickier or impossible, and while I've booted up dumpstered laptops with thumbdrive linux before (and found the homemade blowjob video, heh) I've no idea how to even go about fiddling with this.

It's a (shitty chinese) dash/backup/security camera system. It's been referred to as a 'pizza box' system by someone who hates money. It might have a wifi chip onboard, but I can't figure out it does or not.

I'd like to flash it to run linux, if possible, and put some actually useable video monitoring/porting/editing maybe programs on there. The current UI is unusable even when it's cooperating. Like if there were an accident, I'd just basically be bluffing. Sure the data's probably there, but it's in a format that won't register on any device I've plugged the SD card into. I need it to export to filetype I can use with an ipad, which is the only computer we have aboard.

If any of this sounds like a fun or interesting challenge, I can throw some dollars at you. Or trade work! We do auto/diesel/bicycle mechanic work, welding, sewing, leather and general handy shit.

I'm genuinely curious. Other changes are just following modern (and stupid) trends so nothing weird with that. This one though just makes the maximize, minimize and close buttons look smaller than others (new tab in Console etc) which imo creates inconsistency. Also it may not apply to all display resolutions but it does on mine.

I've been thinking. Android implements app permissions on top of Linux, Flatpak does it too. But why is it it's not part of the kernel?

Like all executable files would be sandboxed and would only be able to access syscalls and parts of the file system if they were allowed to. Making sandboxing the default instead of having to restrict programs.

I'm not a kernel developper so this question may be naive, but it bothers my mind. I guess part of it is because of historical reasons but are there any practical ones that make it not feasable?

EDIT : Thank you all for your answers, almost all of you were very nice and explained things clearly

So...I just purchased a brand new WD black SN850X 2TB to store a bunch of games. I installed it on my last NVME slot available no my motherboard, M2C_SB, which I understand doesn't directly plug into the CPU but onto the motherboard's southbridge. Not sure if this has any reason for the issue. So, the problem is...whenever the PC suspends (which, by the way, it can go suspended even in the middle of a file transfer...not sure why KDE won't block that)...anyway, after a suspension, that drive is missing. Checking any partition manager, it shows the NVME drive is still somewhat there, but with no partitions listed. There's an error 'partition xxxx is not properly aligned". It seems my only option is a reboot. After the reboot, the drive is fine, it's properly mounted, shows correctly the partition in the disk manager, and runing a check finds no errors. Mind you, there's 3 NVME drives plugged, only this last one is giving me headaches after suspension.

...what's causing this? And how can I avoid it?

Switched to Linux a little over a year ago and it's been great, but one thing eludes me. What's the best way to do the following when you don't use Windows or MacOS?

1. Manage music collection - on Windows I used iTunes to sync my mp3's to the phone. Is there a linux solution?

2. Manage SMS from desktop - I'd like to be able to read and reply to SMS messages on my iPhone from the linux PC right in front of me instead of this rinky dink iPhone soft keyboard. Is this possible?

And how the hell does anyone but a child type on an iPhone anyway, while we're at it? (rhetorical) Grrrr.

Thanks!

Hello linux@lemmy.world!

I've completely switched from dual boot to full Linux last year and I've been struggling to find the one tool that could replace the printer software that came with my Canon printer.

My printer came with an application that allows me to print border-less photos and apply fixes such as colour correction, remove red eyes, etc. So far I haven't found any application that allows me to print photos properly.

I'm using Kubuntu 24.04 and I tried using Gwenview to print my photos. While the dialog allows me to configure my printer to print on 4x6 border-less photo paper, it still prints with ~4mm borders.

I'm also asking myself, is this more of a KDE Plasma printing issue or an application printing issue?

Any help would be appreciated.

EDIT: I'm even considering using paid software at this point. Any solution is welcome.