I'm pretty excited about this project as a whole and figured I'd share their blog post from the other day.

I'm running Termux with XFCE desktop on Android. I only just realized that the only program I currently have installed that can properly open PDFs is GIMP, and that's extreme overkill as I just want a lightweight reader, no need to manipulate them as images ya know.

Also, related side question, are there any lightweight Linux terminal programs that can export PDF as plain text? I'm kinda hoping to pipe the text output of George Orwell 1984 through espeak reader and have Linux read it out to me...

Edit: Plain text and speech engine questions solved, and rather simple no less. This is the refined version BTW, --stdin is necessary to make espeak read the entire document.

pdftotext go-1984.pdf -|espeak --stdin

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/54277761

sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.

Recently i switched to steam os on my pc, installed battle net and everything went smoothly. I played in beta and i dont have issue but when i play on live my ping would shoot to 1000 to 4000. and it only smooth on the first 10 minutes or so. I dont know what else i should do so any help is appreciated.

things i tried

restarting.

Im using starlink so i tried to relocate the dish.

turning off firewall in my asus modem

turning off firewall in my pc

turning on and off qos

turning on and off ipv6

changing poton

I tried several ping checker and in my browser everything seem normal

edit for this wondering, the reason is:

Also something called GTT slab exists?

original post: This is bullshit. I wanted to play Terraria last night but I looked at my RAM usage and it was sitting uncomfortably high at 13 GB (of my 15). So, I close Terraria, and it drops about 2 GB. I close Firefox, Thunderbird, and Zed, and that drops about 2.5 GB. Then I close basically everything and it's still super high! Each time this happens, I have to restart my computer in order to get the RAM usage lower.

Whenever I look this up it's usually two camps:

• KDE is just bloated.
• Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

To address both of these:

I disabled a few things in KDE like file indexing (which was my home directory). Cool, so that saved like 100 MB. KDE is supposed to idle at around 3GB anyways, so what now?

The "unused RAM" belief is like a folktale at this point. It's not true anymore, and buffered/cache memory is shown separately. Plus, I can drop those caches whenever I want... Which I did. File inode cache only really became a problem for me when I was doing Minecraft Datapack development and I was creating hundreds of files on a regular basis as part of hot reload. Then I'd have to drop the entire cache because it wasn't being free'd...

However, the RAM I'm complaining about is actually not that, because it steps on my available RAM meter. Having a game freeze up because I was out of memory is a pain in the ass.

I even tried installing Zram, which only made matters worse since the active memory allocations seemed to be robbing the CPU of time it would be running game code, just so it could compress file pages. (My system has also just had major lag problems with swap, in general, during high memory pressure, which I should probably report as a bug). My swappiness was probably way too high, but regardless I didn't see major improvements from that and it only seemed like a bandaid to the real problem. Also, why should I need to use swap when I have 16 GB of RAM and only a few programs open at a time?

This whole thing is pretty annoying. Whenever I have like 11 hours of uptime my memory is unusually high. I also can't seem to track it down to any particular application...

System: OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

The number of reported security vulnerabilities has gone up drastically. And so has the frequency, number, and volume of security patches. Which also makes the gap between fully supported distributions and ones with only partial security support larger. (Not every distribution provides full security upddates for the full announced life time of a release.)

How are you folks reacting to this?

Since switching to fedora, I have been testing out its features and i just now ran into my first problem; Since my laptop doesn't have a SD card reader, I have to use an external SD card reader when i want to access my microSD cards. I recently tried to put in my Acer 2-in-1 SD Card reader and my system did not pick up that i inserted the card reader. I'm not sure on what I am supposed to do about that, so if anyone can give me any advice I'll appreciate it.

Crossposted from https://piefed.zip/c/fedora

I currently use Thunderbird to organize my tasks. I have them pinned to a calendar by their due-date and in a side panel too. However, a major limitation of Thunderbird as a whole is the fact that I cannot attach a start date to a task without it appearing several times on my calendar for each day that it can be worked on. This is pretty annoying and I only want it to appear on the calendar for the date it's due. I also want my task pane to sort of show the number of days it's due, whether it can be started yet, and if not, how many days until it can be.

Afaik not many task organizers can do something this complex. I've used KOrganizer and its forks in the past but there was too much friction in using it that I switched to Thunderbird.

I created an applet for cosmic. Now I can't figure out how to make a flatpak for it to add to cosmic applet repo. I don't have previous experience making flatpaks.

Is it the same as creating normal flatpaks? What is cargo_sources.json I see in the cosmic applets repo? Is there a just command (or something similar) to create the corfig files automatically?

finding something to do a deep dive.

here's what I know:

• C language
• How syscall works in linux
• basic networking concepts (not too advanced stuff like network namespaces etc)
• virtualization ( know basic concepts of docker etc, want to make a docker like thing using just ns command )
• Bash scripting
• basics of devices in Linux

it's all pretty basic every linux user might know already. what are the areas I should give a deep dive in. what other exciting things are there in linux?

I am also open to reading some research papers since those are interesting too.

a good paper I found: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24888

Hi, how's it going? I've been daily driving mint with i3 for a while now, (takes like 500mb idle ram) but I always hear mint being called a newbie distro, I know arch is harder to set up and more customizable for example, but overall im wondering, in which cases one would go from mint to another distro? what can make other distros "better" than mint? i'll end up using a window manager (i3 or if thats not availible some other lightweight one) so differences in desktop environments i dont really care that much about

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/74048002

I've seen : "${DB_HOST:=localhost}" because it assigns the variable if not set (: $… is just to run assignments standalone).

But that has the same effect like DB_HOST="${DB_HOST:-localhost} (use the string if not set).

While something like echo "${DB_HOST:=localhost}" smells from a mile, because it has output with side-effects.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/58576910

I have been working on theming my setup and made some fun little plymouth themes (just static not animated idk how to do all that and didn't feel like figuring it out), and figured I would share them. They're based on different things from fallout and are made using stuff I found online. The art itself is not mine I just put them together into plymouth themes.

I'd always wanted some New Vegas splash screens but couldn't find any premade. Hope some people who are New Vegas fans like me enjoy them! I might do some more for other factions eventually, but am currently preoccupied with other things. Here's an example of one:

Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma. And it’s going to be a big one, folks! This week, a familiar pattern played out: people upgraded to Plasma 6.8 and found all the bugs that nobody reported during the beta period, and the Plasma team worked incredibly hard to fix them! You’ll see the result below: tons of bug fixes.

Paywall?

What is the big chasmic difference?

Hey everyone,

I recently bought a brand new UPS for my local Linux desktop setup, and what should have been a straightforward afternoon project turned into an absolute nightmare of text files and terminal debugging. I decided to use Network UPS Tools (NUT), but as a desktop user with a single, locally connected USB unit, the onboarding friction was incredibly frustrating:

• Just trying to figure out which packages to install (nut, nut-client, usbhid-ups, upsd) felt fragmented.
• The official documentation is dense and heavily geared toward massive, multi-node enterprise network topographies rather than a single local workstation.
• I kept running into silent connection failures, driver mismatch errors, and permission blocks under /etc/nut/ that took hours to track down because there wasn't an easy way to diagnose what was actually failing.

Once I finally got the daemons running, I ran into my next disappointment: the lack of good, modern desktop GUI tools. The official legacy Python/GTK apps look like they were built in the 90s, and the modern web-based alternatives (like PeaNUT or Nutify) are strictly read-only monitoring dashboards. They expect you to do all the heavy configuration lifting in the CLI before you ever launch them. I originally sat down and started writing a tool just to solve my own frustration, but after getting it working, I realized it could be genuinely useful for a lot of people in the same boat.

I call it Voltwise (tentative name). It’s a native cross-platform desktop application built using .NET and Avalonia UI. Unlike read-only dashboards, it features a complete setup and diagnostic wizard designed specifically for single, locally connected UPS hardware. It acts as an automated guide through the exact pipeline I struggled with: it auto-discovers USB hardware IDs, maps drivers, handles configuration formatting, audits folder permissions, and validates live communication state rules. It handles on-demand system elevation securely and natively using pkexec (PolKit), meaning the app runs safely in user space and only requests root authentication when actively writing files to /etc/nut/.

Here is how it currently looks (I'm still actively refining and adding features))

The setup and diagnostic wizard:

The live monitoring screen (Completely customizable):

Events:

UPS Device settings:

Raw configuration file editing:

Here is the catch, and why I’m posting here before releasing it:

I am a solo dev, and a very large portion of this application was developed with heavy generative AI assistance to handle cross-platform boilerplate, XAML layout structures, and environmental path mapping. I manually architected the security boundaries, audited every line of code, and verified all the hardware loops against my physical desktop, but the AI footprint is undeniably there.

Given the current anti-AI climate, I’m feeling a bit hesitant. I’m strongly considering releasing the project under the MIT License so the homelab and Linux desktop community can freely use, fork, or dissect it. However, I’m trying to gauge if it is actually worth the hassle of dealing with the inevitable internet backlash from people who will instantly write it off as "AI slop" without looking at the functionality or utility.

• Would a streamlined, local-only native desktop NUT setup wizard like this be helpful to you?
• Is an MIT release the right path forward here?
• Should I bother putting this on GitHub, or is the AI-assisted development stigma going to completely bury a functional utility?

Appreciate any honest thoughts or feedback!

Hello everyone. I'm getting a hard time with Qualcomm Atheros AR8151 onboard LAN with Debian. It usually drops to 100Mb/s and freezes the network altogether

Settings for enp1s0: Supported ports: [ TP ] Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full 100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full 1000baseT/Full Supported pause frame use: No Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Supported FEC modes: Not reported Advertised link modes: Not reported Advertised pause frame use: No Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised FEC modes: Not reported Speed: 100Mb/s Duplex: Full Auto-negotiation: on Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 0 Transceiver: internal MDI-X: Unknown Supports Wake-on: pg Wake-on: d Current message level: 0x0000003f (63) drv probe link timer ifdown ifup Link detected: yes [ 3.004591] atl1c 0000:01:00.0 enp1s0: renamed from eth0 [ 37.754972] atl1c 0000:01:00.0: atl1c: enp1s0 NIC Link is Up<100 Mbps Full Duplex> [ 45.071291] atl1c 0000:01:00.0: atl1c: enp1s0 NIC Link is Up<100 Mbps Full Duplex> [ 45.799689] atl1c 0000:01:00.0: atl1c: enp1s0 NIC Link is Up<100 Mbps Full Duplex> any tips of what can be done around here? I'm using kernel 6.12.111+deb13-amd64

There appears to be a few bad actors in the Lemmy community spreading ragebait for personal gain

In fact, the same mechanisms added at the beginning to catch bad human written code are the exact same that catch bad AI code

1. No, the Linux kernel won't use AI to auto approve code for inclusion. And no plans to do so
2. The Kernel actually has a huge number of maintainers. As part of the process, all patches are reviewed by a human who provide feedback as part of the process, and patches get bounced back and forth multiple time.
3. Patches don't just magically go straight to master. The maintainers generally have their own branches where it goes to, then it goes to staging trees like Linux-Next. It goes through many eyes, and many tests by the end. The idea that AI code is overrunning the kernel is rediculous
4. Maintainers also check that the code meets coding guidelines and is written properly, and solves the problem they are trying to solve. Yes, they also ensure the code isn't slop
5. LLM's though might be used to identify obvious problems (bugs / coding guideline issues) with the code. These don't generate "slop" just find issues
6. The only thing that matters is the human who submitted the code, as they should be checking the code submitted anyway (including LLM generated code).

Writing bad code isn't something new, and isn't unique to LLM's. Coders (and it seems some "journalists") have been writing slop since computers were invented.

The process hasn't gotten less stringent (probably even MORE stringent as there is an additional set of robotic eyes that can also check), and the same mechanisms that were put in place to catch badly written code 10 years ago, are still there now

Hi. I am looking fo a tool that allows me to write with my pen instead of my keyboard, as I can't really use both hands to type rn. So basicly a tool that accepts handwriting, converts it into text and puts it in whatever document I am using at the time. I am not sure what to search for/ how these tools are called. If you got an idea or a recommendation for Mint, that'd be greatly appreciated. Thx :)

EDIT: I have a drawing tablet hooked up to my PC and am looking for software that turns my handwriting into common text, like the handwriting tool in windows does