Linux

Can view the other nominators here: https://github.com/openSUSE/wallpapers/issues/18

Welcome to the new home of "This Week in Plasma"! No longer is it a private personal thing on my (Nate Graham's) blog, but now it's a weekly series hosted here on KDE's infrastructure, open to anyone's participation and contribution! I'll remain the editor-in-chief for now, and welcome contributions via direct push to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org. And after a post is published, if you find a typo or broken link, feel free to just fix it.

Anyway, this week we added a useful service to detect out-of-memory (OOM) conditions, did some UI polishing, and also a lot of bug-fixing! Check it out.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21951809

Fedora Linux provides a wide variety of users with leading edge open source technology in a community developed and maintained operating system. The Fedora KDE Spin combines the reliable and trusted Fedora Linux base with the KDE Plasma desktop environment and a selection of KDE applications – simple by default, yet powerful when needed.

Back in April 2024, Fedora Linux 40 included the KDE “MegaRelease 6” – the Plasma desktop environment, Frameworks application libraries (with the underlying Qt platform), and Gear application suite were all upgraded to new versions in one fell swoop to deliver improved performance and reliability. Since then, continuous upstream updates by the KDE teams to fix bugs and deploy new features were quickly deployed to Fedora 40 users, including breakthroughs such as Explicit Sync in Wayland (which addressed the most prevalent graphical glitches on Nvidia devices)!

Now, as part of the Fedora Linux 41 release, the KDE Spin again includes the very latest with the recently released KDE Plasma 6.2, up-to-date KDE applications and core system packages, and new ways of using Plasma on different devices.

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/chaftrix

This program written in C will render the matrix effect in the terminal window in the background, while rendering an image in the foreground, allowing animation of this image in one or two dimensions.

Image rendering is done with chafa.

This program is the continuation and evolution of other projects:

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/matrix_clone

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/ascii-matrix

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/animatrix

Hi all,

As the title states, I'm interested in making the switch from Windows to Linux. I know absolutely nothing about Linux, other than that fact that there are distros that exist under Linux, and Linux itself isn't an OS, or so I think.

I have 2 laptops and my main home office PC, which I use for my job and gaming.

My plan is to switch one of my laptops to a Linux distro, and test it out. This laptops only purpose is web browsing, so I figure getting Linux set up to do something as simple as opening a browser is something I am capable of.

Down the road, once I've sort of learned on this laptop, I may work my way up to using other distros and dual booting my main PC. Who knows, maybe I'll even switch over completely prior to Windows 11 rolling out.

I've heard getting games to work with Linux can sometimes be a hassle, and can require some fiddling, so I won't be doing gaming on a Linux distro until I feel quite comfortable.

So with the above context, I'm looking for recommendations on a distro I should use, any guides that any of you may have found helpful, and generally any insight on things I may need to be aware of.

I am fairly tech savvy (probably not compared to most of you), and am not afraid of tinkering with things until they work. Any help would be muchly appreciated, and if this isn't the correct place to post, please let me know and point me in the right direction.

KDE developers continued fixing bugs and making UI improvements this week. You’ll notice a good many of them are about screens somehow! Ah, screens, the magical windows to our computers. They are amazing… and they suck. So many graphics driver bugs and hardware quirks to work around, so many edge cases to handle… and so that was a large part of what KDE developers spent doing for you, dear reader! Because getting all this screen stuff right has a massive impact on quality. And of course there was a lot of other work too!

Official statement regarding recent Greg' commit 6e90b675cf942e from Serge Semin

Hello Linux-kernel community,

I am sure you have already heard the news caused by the recent Greg' commit 6e90b675cf942e ("MAINTAINERS: Remove some entries due to various compliance requirements."). As you may have noticed the change concerned some of the Ru-related developers removal from the list of the official kernel maintainers, including me.

The community members rightly noted that the quite short commit log contained very vague terms with no explicit change justification. No matter how hard I tried to get more details about the reason, alas the senior maintainer I was discussing the matter with haven't given an explanation to what compliance requirements that was. I won't cite the exact emails text since it was a private messaging, but the key words are "sanctions", "sorry", "nothing I can do", "talk to your (company) lawyer"... I can't say for all the guys affected by the change, but my work for the community has been purely volunteer for more than a year now (and less than half of it had been payable before that). For that reason I have no any (company) lawyer to talk to, and honestly after the way the patch has been merged in I don't really want to now. Silently, behind everyone's back, bypassing the standard patch-review process, with no affected developers/subsystem notified - it's indeed the worse way to do what has been done. No gratitude, no credits to the developers for all these years of the devoted work for the community. No matter the reason of the situation but haven't we deserved more than that? Adding to the GREDITS file at least, no?..

I can't believe the kernel senior maintainers didn't consider that the patch wouldn't go unnoticed, and the situation might get out of control with unpredictable results for the community, if not straight away then in the middle or long term perspective. I am sure there have been plenty ways to solve the problem less harmfully, but they decided to take the easiest path. Alas what's done is done. A bifurcation point slightly initiated a year ago has just been fully implemented. The reason of the situation is obviously in the political ground which in this case surely shatters a basement the community has been built on in the first place. If so then God knows what might be next (who else might be sanctioned...), but the implemented move clearly sends a bad signal to the Linux community new comers, to the already working volunteers and hobbyists like me.

Thus even if it was still possible for me to send patches or perform some reviews, after what has been done my motivation to do that as a volunteer has simply vanished. (I might be doing a commercial upstreaming in future though). But before saying goodbye I'd like to express my gratitude to all the community members I have been lucky to work with during all these years.

The title pretty much speaks for itself... I have a linux install that I've spent a considerable time configuring, which is unfortunately installed on a drive that's starting to show signs of dying.

My question is: how, if there is a way, can I migrate said linux install over to a different drive, while preserving all the configurations and such.

EDIT: Thank you to everyone who commented! I made the transfer, using dd and it went mostly smoothly, even if it did take a while.

Hey folks!

I'm about to distro hop (again) to test Tumbleweed for a longer period of time 🦎 However, something i've not done before is to have my /home directory on a separate partition, should I? If I do it, should it be a different filesystem than the rest? (Been reading on OpenSuse TW forums and seen people mentioning that they use BTRFS for /home and XFS for the rest, or the other way around. Are there any benefits of using separate filesystems, or is this done to get the BTRFS backup for the /home dir?

What are the pros and cons of doing these changes to my system, lemmy know :)

I'm going to use this guide to downgrade Firefox to something around version 127 or below because I did not have this issue with earlier versions of FF.

Btw where does Firefox store crash logs? I typed "about:crashes" in the URL bar but it says that "No crash reports have been submitted". I have also used journalctl to find these errors but I'm not sure how relevant they are:

org.mozilla.firefox.desktop[15004]: Exiting due to channel error.

org.mozilla.firefox.desktop[49355]: [Parent 2, Main Thread] WARNING: g_strv_length: assertion 'str_array != NULL' failed: 'glib warning', file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187

firefox-bin[49355]: g_strv_length: assertion 'str_array != NULL' failed

After my last post got quite a lot of interest, I thought I'd do a follow-up. And, what can I say, it's been a journey:

Hardware

Installing the hardware was pretty easy. I'm just always a bit apprehensive about these things because I don't do this very often. But it went fine.

First boot

Nothing. No reaction at all. Well shit. After trying to reboot about 10 times, I removed all the drives one by one, but no change. I tried reseating the RAM but that also didn't do it. Then I left the machine alone for a few minutes while I was doing something else and suddenly I was in the BIOS. I'm not sure if it was the reseating or if it just needed some time for RAM training or something. Anyway, finally some result. So I put it all togther again and proceded to the next level.

Openmedivault installation

Plugged in the USB stick, it booted straight into the OMV installer. Then I hit a snag as it was trying to connect to the network. It only showed the Ethernet connections, no Wifi. But I hadn't plugged it in because my desk is not near the router. I wanted to set it up with Wifi and then plug it in at the router. First I thought the Wifi card is buggered. So I booted into a Linux Mint live system. It showed the Wifi card and connected without issue. I don't know if it's a driver issue or if OMV simply doesn't suppot Wifi. That would seem a bit silly, though. Maybe someone here has some insight? So anyway, after some very janky cable routing I managed to hook it up to both Ethernet and HDMI, after that the OMV installation went through without any problems.

Setting up the RAID

Well, in hindsight it was easy. Better documentation would really have helped, though. I created file systems on the disk first and thought I could then add these to the RAID. But what you have to do is download the RAID plugin first, then create the RAID and then create a file system with your disks. No problem if you know how to do it. But it took me a lot of searching and trial and error to figure that out. ** Sharing the Drive**

Next I created a shared folder and proceeded to mount it on my PC via NFS. That didn't go too well, as I could see the shared folder on the PC but didnt have write permission to put any data on it. After spending literally all evening trying out various permutations of NFS settings on both the server and client side, I finally figuered out that I had forgotten to set an ACL on the shared folder, which prevented me from accessing it on the client. Again, better documentation would have helped a lot there. Maybe it's out there and I just didn't find it.

What's next

So anyway, I have a functioning NAS now. Could have been easier but I guess that's just how it is round here. Next I want to set up some docker apps, like Jellyfin and paperless-ngx. Let's see how that goes. The main drawback so far is the noise. That thinhg is loud. Even when it's in a closet, the fan makes it difficult to be in the same room. That's definitely something I'll have to address. Someone suggested swapping out the fan but I'm not sure how I'd find one that is suitable. Any suggestions are welcome. If you guys are interested, I'll keep writing updates about my progress.

So this is not a question about how to do this. I know how to do this. I also know that (at least under GNOME) it is neither easy nor intuitive. It involves manually editing several different text files to define MIME types and associating an application with that MIME type. My question is: is there an easy to use GUI tool to do this. I don’t think there is. Associating a file type to open with a specific app is easy, trivial even, to do on MacOS or Windows. Why is this seemingly simple task so hard to do in GNOME?