Linux

Greetings, I am asking whether Linux has helped your family or not going from Windows to a friendly distribution that caters to young or elderly.

How was your experience with helping relatives or your kids with Linux? Was it because of an older spec machine? Costs etc?

I helped get my grandmother (dad's side) to move from windows 8.1 to Linux Mint which so far has been good, she only really browses and required some basic budgeting apps.

This was on something like an older core i3 or i5 but I didn't hear that many problems apart from getting drivers for her Epson printer to work.

So how has it been for you?

You know, immutable enterprise systems.

I installed HeliumOS (Almalinux bootc) on a corebooted Chromebook. Works really well, but audio needs to be configured.

The script needs a recent python which is not available there.

Go and rust can be installed for a user only. Is there something similar for python?

New features

• PDF Input: Automatic header/footer detection and removal
• Read Aloud: Allow configuring an extra pause at the end of every sentence when using the Piper TTS engine
• PDF Output: Add WIDTH_PIXELS and HEIGHT_PIXELS variables to know the width and height of the header/footer area in templates
• Windows: Use calibre's bundled SSL certificates instead of the system certificate store by default
• Trim image tool: Add a control to adjust aspect ratio
• Kobo driver: Add support for the new firmware used by the Tolino Shine 5

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21519137

I recently switched from a MBP to a Framework 16 as my primary laptop and one thing I immediately noticed was that I was unable to stop kinetic scrolls in Firefox by laying my fingers onto the touchpad. It'd just slide by unimpeded. You could work around this by counter-scrolling a little rather than holding still which is how I've been coping with it but it's suboptimal to say the least.
(As are many things in the Linux touchpad experience. Linux desktop developers really ought to use a macbook for a little to get a sense for how to do this properly.)

This was caused by Firefox' use of GDK3 to implement its windowing and input needs which does not support hold gestures.

GDK4 does support them but, as I understand it, a port of Firefox to GDK4 would be a ton of work and there isn't really much desire for it as GDK4 doesn't offer many real advantages over GDK3 as Firefox doesn't use classical GTK widgets or anything and only really uses it for basic input/output primitives.

A backport to handle hold gestures in GDK3 too was attempted but, in classic GNOME fashion, it was rejected.

The implementation now somehow gets events from the touchpad directly via wayland somehow from what I could gather but if it works, it works.

You can try this out in the latest nightly builds.

You can try out the Proton-Cachyos with frame gen package if you're on arch-based systems with pacman -U archive.cachyos.org/proton/proton-cachyos-1:9.0.20240928-1-x86_64_v3.pkg.tar.zst

or you can download custom tkg-proton with frame generation from mediafire.com/file/lv7d8jci0gyf6z0/proton_dlssfg.tar.zst/file and put into your ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/

Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) for people who want to record, edit, mix and master audio and MIDI projects. When you need complete control over your tools, when the limitations of other designs get in the way, when you plan to spend hours or days working on a session, Ardour is there to make things work the way you want them to.

I love EVE Online, but "multiboxing" was tricky for me in Linux. I like using the CLI for everything I can, but get completely swamped still when dealing with cocktails like Lutris, WINE prefixes, and dependencies.

So I was super interested when I stumbled upon Bottles - it seemed to solve a lot of my issues. Then, I realized GNOME's workspaces basically did the same thing as the old Windows program I used... and that was all she wrote. It worked perfectly for me, why overthink it?

I recorded my newbie solution to (hopefully) convince other players to switch. Do you have any advice or corrections for me? Did I make a cardinal sin? Is this the dumbest thing you've ever seen? Hit me with your honest takes. <3

I have a WebDav server that contains some movies and shows. I use Infuse on Apple stuff and NOVA Video Player on Android to watch these. The directory is not organized, file names aren't manually adjusted, and the movies and shows are mixed together. Yet, both of these programs are able to index recursively, get metadata, create a library and let me watch my media without issues.

Kodi, on the other hand, seems to be unable to index nested directories, requires you to tell it what type of media is in the individual directories and cannot identify anything correctly unless I go and manually rename directories/files. It also is exclusive for TV usage and not very suitable for desktop.

So, are there alternative programs to Kodi, ideally better suited to desktop usage or extensions I can install to make it work properly?

My father asked me to set up a Raspberry Pi with the essentials to try out Linux and potentially ditch Windows if he likes it enough. He specifically requested YouTube, Amazon Kindle, GIMP, Audacity, KeePass, and a text editor like Notepad. I've installed Armbian Debian with the Cinnamon desktop environment. What would you have chosen?

As for the essentials, I'm not sure where to find a list of the most commonly used programs to install. I've just installed what I think he would appreciate, for example, Firefox with uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, KeePassXC-Browser, and G App Launcher extensions. Now I'm going to see if I can install Amazon Kindle and Notepad using Wine, along with a couple of alternatives like Calibre and gedit. Then I'll set up a Google Drive folder so he can share his files with his main computer until he decides to switch. Finally, I'll use Timeshift to create a snapshot after I've finished setting everything up.

What essentials am I missing? Do you have any suggestions?

edit: I've realized that this is a bad idea. I'll just install Linux on one of his spare x86 computers and explain that many programs aren't available for ARM. Then, after he gets used to Linux, I can install it on his current laptop and maybe move his Windows installation to the spare computer, if I can figure out how to do that.

Hello Linux folks, i would like to share one little hack which i have found.

On fedora, zram-generator comes installed and configured by default with lz4 algorithm i believe, and no disk swap, if you have 8gb of ram or more, that is fine, but if you have 4gb or less, systemd-oomd either kills your games when they use too much memory, or you face an OOMD and get your system frozen.

When configuring fedora, normally i would create an in-disk swap, so that my computer wouldn't freeze but face a MASSIVE slowdown when on way too high memory usage, i also set zram-generator to use the zstd algorithm so that zram compression rate is higher but slightly slower, like that i can use my low memory more efficiently with a lower risk of OOMD.

I was watching a bringus studios video once, where he tried to run counter-strike 2 on a ps4 using linux and proton; the game would always use too much memory and that would freeze the system before it got a change to actually launch, the strange ps4 linux was using in-disk swap, and so, increasing swapiness to 100 bringus tried to leverage that to make the game run. He was successful. In disk swap is very slow, so the performance was crap, but that does not matter...

So i had the idea to combine it with zram-swap to avoid the in-disk swap penalty, also using zstd as the algorithm to make the most out of the memory, and it was a massive sucess! Some games which would make my system very unstable or straight up freeze on certain launch attempts started launching and working just fine! and without dumb in-disk swap slowdowns!

While running modded Victoria 2 i have noticed my system using about 3.3 to 3.4GB of swap, and about 3.5 gb of ram, so about 100 to 200MB of real uncompressed memory usage, assuming zstd is running at level 1 of compression, and achieving at least 3.0 as compression rate, in thesis, my system has now the equivalent to 10GB of ram, well above it's weight! even more impressive considering how low are the numbers we are working here!

tldr: setting your swapiness=100 while using zstd as your zram-generator compression algorithm, and no in-disk swap will help your system use the most out of your ram with negligible performance penalty

Hello! I am on Fedora 40 KDE Edition (Wayland). I have monitor with two supported refresh rates (60, 50 Hz). How can I set custom refresh rate? I know, on Windows you can use CRU.

So I've never actually used a machine with UEFI before I've always been on older machines with BIOS.

I got a Dell Optiplex 3070 Intel core 9500T (gen 9) 2.1 GHz 16GB ram 256gb SSD but it has windows 11 on it.

I hate Windows, and I don't want any trace of it left on my machine. I'd prefer Debian but would even take Ubuntu over Windows What is the best guide for this for someone who has never messed with UEFI before?

A change queued up last week by AMDGPU driver maintainer Alex Deucher will now default to the fullscreen 3D workload profile for discrete GPUs. AMD APUs with integrated graphics will continue to use the default "bootup" power profile but discrete graphics cards will be running in the "fullscreen 3D" power profile by default.

Hey there, As per title while in Advanced mode prior the step "Install Base System" I cannot access the terminal. Instead, it goes straight to install.

It did work before...did I somehow corrupt the iso..?

Basically the title

Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. Easy to install and low maintenance, it just does the job.

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

My parents are fed up with windows 11 slowing down their old HP desktop to near unusable levels. It is so bad that the right click menu can take up to 6 seconds to load. Anyway I created a free 900GB ext4 partition that I want to install to but how do I get the fedora KDE installer to detect that free space (sda6)?