Linux

I was playing Ark Survival Ascended when my system locked up. No response from the mouse or keyboard, screen frozen, sound loop about 1 second long. I let it sit for a minute, thinking maybe it'll break out of it, and eventually had to force the power off with the power button.

I restarted my system, and now my performance in games is really bad, I'm getting about 20fps where I used to get 80-100, sometimes it gets so bad it goes into the single digits. I get stuttering sound as well and some pretty bad input lag. In Ark, I can see the textures slowly pop in over time, which normally happens in a matter of a second or two.

Looking at CoreCtrl, if I set it to high performance mode, the GPU's power usage peaks around 150 Watts instead of 300+.

I'm running Nobara on a 7900X3D and an RX 7900XT with 32GB RAM.

Not sure how to go about diagnosing my issue here. I haven't made any software changes, so I'm a little lost as to why this would happen.

i have created a short questionnaire, regarding how GNU/Linux users secure their system. if you are somewhat knowledgeful on this topic and willing to share, i would appreciate if you would fill out my questionnaire:

https://www.survio.com/survey/d/B2Y8C2V9T9U8S0W5F

thanks.

EDIT: 50 responses are in, here is some of the data so far:

Like the question above am I just an old man that's not keeping up with the times or is terminator still a great terminal to use in 2025?

I would like to get rid of some of these random audio outputs and options but I'm not sure what to do.

I am using Arch with KDE and have no idea why there are so many options for audio.

It can be a pain to get the mic and headset working like it should (with the mic) and having all of these inputs/outputs is quite frustrating.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi everyone,

I just just installed coolercontrol recently to control my gpu fan curve then i realized there is this nct6687 sensors which report some extremely high temp sometime even 100 Celsius. I tried the sensors. Which show that nct6687 still have really high temps. Is this normal? Or is my pc burning it self even though the air in the pc isnt hot at all.

Note: I use arch. My mobo is MSI B450M-A PRO MAX II. My gpu rx 580. My CPU r5 5500

For over 2 years my only problem when using vim is how hard to reach the number keys are. They make jumping between lines easier but despite my attempts to get used to the far number keys, some are still not easy to reach like 6. I only have ideas of what would an ideal solution could look like but I don't know how to execute them. One is to make caps lock some kind of modifier which turns home row keys into number keys, but because of the limitations of terminal emulators even if I turn caps lock into an obscure modifier (in kde settings) I won't be able to use it in neovim. I would appreciate any ideas that help. I'm using kde plasma with wayland under arch linux.

Edit: please no mention of split keyboards. Even if I can afford them I prefer not getting used to something I have to carry additionally with my laptop

I'll start: After switching to Neovide from the terminal for Neovim, I got really hooked on the animated cursor and smooth scrolling (links to Neovide's features page). It wasn't until 2 months ago when the earlier was added to Kitty. I did so much overthinking about which terminal to use, and realized that I wouldn't (and don't) use most of the features provided by ones like iTerm and Kitty, though I picked the later. I was pleasantly surprised to see it added, even if it could use more work to make long smooth cursor animations like Neovide. The only other feature I want is smooth scrolling, I can't believe there are no modern terminals with it.

(Somewhat) Side note: At this point many users realized that Ghostty got over-hyped, here is Mitchell Hashimoto's (dev of Ghostty) thoughts:

https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-1-0-reflection
Ghostty: Reflecting on Reaching 1.0 – Mitchell Hashimoto

I didn't anticipate the hype. Some people think I am lying when I say this. I'm not. I'm not so naive to think that private betas and exclusive access don't generate hype in principle. But I didn't think many people at all would be interested in a terminal emulator. I thought I was building boring software for a niche audience. No hype! But I was wrong, and the consequences were real. People were frustrated that they couldn't get in. People felt left out. People felt like I was being fake to generate hype. The waitlist grew larger than I was comfortable allowing in (given my prior stated priorities). I'm sorry about that. All I can say is that I didn't intend for this to happen. I ramped up beta invites to try to get as many people in as I felt comfortable with (well, a bit beyond that). We ended the beta at around 5,000 users in a Discord of 28,000 at the time. Not quite the percentage of access I wanted for people but more than I could handle.
...

One more negative aspect of the hype is the expectation of Ghostty being revolutionary. It is and it isn't. Ghostty has different goals and tradeoffs than other terminals. For those looking for those properties, Ghostty is a breath of fresh air and does things that no other terminal does. But for others, it's just a terminal. And that's okay. I hope you find a terminal that works for you and I don't claim that Ghostty is the end all be all of terminals.

Good Morning everyone!

I am currently running fedora kinotie 41 and am trying to figure out how to install protonVPN on it, I would prefer the GUI version but that is just me. I can't seem to find any guides or anything online and I would appreciate any help!

Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/27742447

Hi folks,

I got a new Xbox Series X Controller (Model 1914). I had Xbox One controller before.

With xpadneo installed I had basically no problems running my xbox one controller. It connected via BT with no issues and workes in games really well wired and wireless.

The new controller on the other hand, works really well via cable, but does not connect via BT. I can find it, I can pair it, but I cannot connect to it.

xpadneo readme says Series X needs a BT stick with BLE so I bought one, but that did not solve the problem (I'm not sure if BLE needs to be activated or how to do it rn).

You can see static pictures in the Flathub UI page.

You can see a demo someone else posted on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1hptjp8/gpu_screen_recorder_has_launched_its_500_version/

After I install Linux Mint (which is the distro I have settled on), I replace:

1. Thunderbird with Betterbird
2. Firefox with Librewolf (I also install Brave for web services that need a chromium browser).
3. Celluloid / Rythmbox with VLC player
4. Default Libreoffice with latest Libreoffice from source.
5. ClipIt/Parcellite with xfce4-clipman

I find this to be my optimal setup and these software give me the extra quality of life that make my workflows easier.

What software do you replace and install on your distro of choice?

Edit: I forgot to say I replace sudo with doas. That's something my friend told me to do although I personally don't find any immediate working advantage with it.

Many thanks to all those that maintain FOSS. i had setup a pi4 running 32 bit Debian Buster years ago (pandemic days) with OpenMediaVault 5. With the OMV docker and portainer plugin I had various dockers running, but found some dockerhub images weren't supporting 32bit. I had thought ubout updating to 64 bit install but thought I might have headaches, so just blocked the pi from accessing the internet and sidelined the update. Since it is the holidays I figured I would tackle an update.

Scope:

• update to 64 bit
• move from Buster to Bullseye
• move from OMV5 to OMV6
• fix everything that failed including docker.

Step 1 add "arm_64bit=1" in the config.txt file of /boot and reboot. Took a while to boot with lots of drive activity but 64 kernel worked perfectly.

Step 2: run sudo omv-release-upgrade

That is it. Two commands and everything updated perfectly. Nothing to fix.

To me that is an amazing testament to the work put in by everyone for Linux kernel, the OS, OMV devs, and Applications maintainers. Amazing.

After failing to get some plugins to work with VS Code I decided that perhaps a simpler editor like Neovim would be a nice candidate for simple programs. after watching a few tutorials and getting myself familiar with the plugin manager ecosystem, I decided to settle on vim-plug.

The thing is, I can't get Mason to work at all. People recommended it as a simple solution for managing LSPs and it seemed reasonable enough to try. Mason installs, but no Mason-specific command is recognized by Neovim. I can launch the UI manually with require("mason.ui").open(), but that's that. No list of LSPs I can download, just a blank UI. I have tried reinstalling, downloading an older version, sanity checking everything 10 times. All other plugins I have work as expected. The only other thing which doesn't seem to work is showcmd which, in theory, should suggest commands as I type them out.

I can't find any open issue on github regarding this problem. Google search didn't yield any useful results. My only guess would be that there needs to be a specific order in which I have to load/initialize this plugin.

Here is what my files look like:

1. init.vim

call plug#begin()
Plug 'williamboman/mason.nvim'
Plug 'williamboman/mason-lspconfig.nvim'
Plug 'neovim/nvim-lspconfig'

-- then some other stuff like `Telescope` 
--     which has no interaction with `Mason`

2. init.lua (the whole file)

require("mason").setup()
require("mason-lspconfig").setup()

require("telescope").load_extension("file_browser")
require("telescope").load_extension("project")
require("telescope").load_extension("ui-select")
require("telescope").load_extension("frecency")
require("telescope").load_extension("media_files")

require('nvim-web-devicons').setup()
require('mini.icons').setup()

Any ideas or suggestions besides trying lazy-vim or another plugin manager? Tnx!

I am a Linux beginner/amateur and I have sort of had enough of copy and pasting commands I find on the internet without having a good understanding of how they actually work.

I guess my end goal is to be able to comfortably install and use arch Linux with my own customization's and be able to fix it when things go wrong.

What tips/ideas do you have for getting better at navigating the terminal, and getting a better understanding of how the os works. What is a good roadmap to follow? And how did you, advanced Linux user, get to the stage your at now?

Edit: my current distro is bazzite just in case you were interested and thanks for all the replies you are all really helpful.

I looked up specifically examples of this and didn't find answers, they're buried in general discussions about why compiling may be better than pre-built. The reasons I found were control of flags and features, and optimizations for specific chips (like Intel AVX or ARM Neon), but to what degree do those apply today?

The only software I can tell benefits greatly from building from source, is ffmpeg since there are many non-free encoders decoders and upscalers that can be bundled, and performance varies a lot between devices due to which of them is supported by the CPU or GPU. For instance, Nvidia hardware encoders typically produce higher quality video for similar file sizes than ones from Intel AMD or Apple. Software encoders like x265 has optimizations for AVX and NEON (SIMD extensions for CPUs).

the same for vlc under debian

Hello everyone! I recently decided to reignite my passion for learning about kernel development, so I printed out the third edition of Linux Device Drivers by J. Corbet + others. In the book it is stated that they assume you have the 2.6.10 kernel. I decided to set up a virtual machine using virt-manager so that I can work through most of the book (I realise VMs dont allow for many things when developing drivers, where physical access to hardware is required, but its the best option for now until I can get a RPi or something else).

I decided to go with Ubuntu Dapper Drake, as it has a kernel version pretty close to what is used in the book, so I figured there wouldn't be much friction when trying to install the specific 2.6.10 version (Dapper Drake is on 2.6.15, at least the one I got). However, I am encountering an issue with my networking. I have set up the NAT bridge from my regular WIFI internet connection to my virtual machines, set my dapper drake installation to use that in the NIC settings, but it doesnt connect.

Here are some commands and their output from the guest OS:

$ ifconfig -a
lo
<loopback information yada yada>

sit0
<yada yada>

$ lspci | grep -i ethernet
0000:01:00.0 Ethernet controller: Unknown device 1af4:1041 (rev 01)

The second command's output leads me to believe that a device is detected but the OS doesnt know what to do with it because I dont have the virtio drivers for networking installed.

I've searched everywhere for a way to download them either as source or as a .deb package so I can transfer them to the guest OS using a disk drive I will create, but I cant find them anywhere. Everywhere I look, everyone says that for linux they are already included in the kernel (might not be true for the distribution I have as a guest).

So here is my question(s) finally: Where can I find virtio-tools either as a .deb package or as source with instruction to build on a distribution of around the age of dapper drake, or if there is another way and I am wrongly fixated on this, how can I set up networking by passing through my regular internet from the host to the guest, so that I can use stuff like github to write the driver code on my host and easily transfer it to the guest for compilation/testing?

Please be gentle. Dapper drake released around 2006 and it wasn't until 2016 when I first used linux in any form, so I am used to a little more quality of life in my distributions xD /j

As always, many thanks in advance to everyone taking time to answer :)

Hello,

I am not able to figure out whatever bluetooth issues I am having. None of my devices stay connected and will never reconnect once disconnected. I have a pair of WH-XM4 and they will not stay connected. Here is what I tried so far:

Reinstall BlueZ

Check for blocking with rfkill

Restart Bluetooth, but I just get this error "Bluez Daemon is not running, blueman-manager cannot continue"

I'm at my wits end. Please help.

This seems like something that would be simple, but I spent a long time trying to figure it out. I figured I'd write a blog post about it in case anyone else has a similar desire.