Linux

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?

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

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! 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.

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.

Basically the title

I see the raise of popularity of Linux laptops so the hardware compatibility is ready out of the box. However I wonder how would I build PC right know that has budget - high end specification. For now I'm thinking

• Case: does not matter
• Fans: does not matter
• PSU: does not matter
• RAM: does not matter I guess?
• Disks: does not matter I guess?
• CPU: AMD / Intel - does not matter but I would prefer AMD
• GPU: AMD / Intel / Nvidia - for gaming and Wayland - AMD, for AI, ML, CUDA and other first supported technologies - Nvidia.

And now the most confusing part for me - motherboard... Is there even some coreboot or libreboot motherboard for PC that supports "high end" hardware?

Let's just say also a purpose of this Linux PC. Choose any of these

1. Blender 3D Animation rendering
2. Gaming
3. Local LLM running

If you have some good resources on this also let me know.

I need a tablet for uni and I want to run Linux on it. It doesn't need to be the fastest but it should be able to run Rnote and a web browser comfortably. It doesn't need to come with Linux, I am comfortable with installing and managing my system. I thought about buying a Microsoft Surface since they seem to be supported prettty well but I want to see what alternatives there are.

It needs to have a Stylus for writing. I have around 450€ to spend and would go a little higher. Also I will probably buy a used device

• Price: 370$
• Model: Asus ROG Strix G15 (G531GV)

• CPU: Intel I7 9th Gen
• GPU: Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB
• Ram: 16GB
• Storage: Samsung SSD 980 Pro 1TB (NVME)

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)?

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..?

What's the easiest way to make external USB drives automount, without adding them to fstab? It should just work even if someone else hands me their flash drive.
I'm running sway on Arch if that matters.

They have adopted Cloudflare and used IP blocking. This does not impact their repos, just the forum.

There's no mpv community to share this to, so I figured the next best place was here.

I wrote a script that does two things:

• Saves the watch_later file for the currently playing file every X seconds, if the file is not currently paused.
• Saves a "watched" dummy file when the currently playing file exceeds a certain percentage of watch time.

Normally mpv saves the watch_later file for the currently playing file only if you gracefully quit. This isn't reliable enough for my tastes, so this timer makes better sure my last position is saved.

The second addition is purely for the benefit of additional scripting, inside or outside of mpv. The mpv-created watch_later files are intended to be impermanent, and I believe depending on settings are automatically removed once a file is played to 100%. I personally still want to keep track that I watched a specific video, even when the watch_later file is reset.

It probably goes without saying, but this script has only been tested in Linux.

Can you please share your backup strategies for linux? I'm curious to know what tools you use and why?How do you automate/schedule backups? Which files/folders you back up? What is your prefered hardware/cloud storage and how do you manage storage space?

I'm having trouble to find a bluetooth dongle at least 3.0 that needs no propietary firmware. It's easy to find dongles advertised as linux compatible or users that claim that an specific brand works fine in linux, but the problem is that many of them are using propietary firmware without their users being aware because their distributions have already installed propietary drivers or firmwares, or ask users to install them and they just do it. I use debian main repository (without non-free software) in which I failed to make work a couple of linux compatible advertised dongles because debian ask me to install a propietary firmware. So if anyone knows for certain that some brand that needs no such a software in linux I'll apreciate your help.

Solus is a stable rolling distro, making it somewhat special in the world of Linux. A new ISO just dropped.