Linux

My laptop is an MSI Sword 15 A11UD. But I'm really looking for a program that analyses and projects problem areas and supported/unsupported hardware

I have been not recommending Ubuntu to people because of obvious reasons (the Amazon search integration and snaps, mainly). The reason I am posting this is because someone I know mentioned that they are considering Ubuntu. They have a degree in cs and generally are competent with computers, but didn't like mint when they tried it. I would like to know a few things, since I haven't looked into Ubuntu in a while:

Has anything changed about snap? I know people didn't like it at first, especially the proprietary server, but I don't think they will care about that and I mainly just want to know if it will eat all their RAM or something.

Have they made any changes in their management that may make sure there won't be another Amazon search thing?

Is it best to use the default desktop on Ubuntu? I would recommend Kubuntu to them, all else being equal, but don't know if maybe the default one is better integrated.

Edit: The person will be 100's of miles away so helping them with issues will be hard, and Ubuntu LTS should be stable. Plus, basically everything that "supports" linux but doesn't really usually supports Ubuntu. I do really see where they're coming from, but want to know if it has a major potential to backfire on them and if they might be better off with Fedora.

Seeing as how I don't like either Gnome or KDE, though I did give KDE a try, I decided to switch to Cinnamon. Yes, that picture looks odd, I'm short on monitors that'll fit on the space I have left on my desk, so I'm using an old Dell with a 4:3 ration thanks to an HDMI to VGA converter. Some how there's dust in the display though, which is really annoying. Not much to say, if'n you've used Linux Mint, this should look rather familiar, it's just lightly customized at this point, it'll get more, and it works as you'd expect. Yes, this is the X11, and you're supposed to use Wayland. Funny thing about that, this is rock solid, whereas with Wayland I had a bunch of silly problems, can't drag tabs in Firefox, menu glitches, and no keyboard customization. General problems are minor, boot is real slow, I mean real slow, and Sat's update broke wireless, but I'm only feet from my gateway, so wired it is. Overall this works real nice, basically Mint running on an M1 iMac.

Hello, any recommendations for a libre PDF with support for dual page (with the option to adjust which 2 pages are displayed)? Normally I use MuPDF, but there's a document I would like to read which would greatly benefit from some additional features...

Does anyone know how I can merge/deduplicate contacts in a .vcf vcard file?

A nice easy graphical option would be ace but I have some terminal experience if necessary. I've tried vcardtools.py but I couldn't work out how to use it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Thanks!

The second beta of Inkscape 1.4 has been released last week. If you use the application, consider checking out the beta and report any bugs you encounter on GitLab (Guide on reporting Inkscape bugs).

This is the second beta release of Inkscape 1.4, featuring:

• Filter Gallery: it has never been so easy to find the best filter for your needs! This new dialog features previews, categories and search.
• Modular grids & improved axonometric grids: set the grid angle by ratio for isometric designs and use modular grids to plan layouts and make icons!
• Swatches dialog and palette file handling improved: quick access to dialog layout controls, search for colors, and open different palette file formats!
• Unified font browser preview: when activated in the preferences, use it to quickly browse through your font collection. Try it out and give your feedback!
• Customizable handles: Power users with CSS knowledge can now customize the styling and basic shape of all the handles!
• Fast image clipping with the Shape Builder: raster graphics can now be clipped into multiple sections using the Shape Builder.
• There's even more: new templates for folding booklets, a new icon theme, additional options in Ruler and Taper Stroke LPE, preview in Spray tool, many new command line options, updated translations and many bug fixes.

I'm a little bit underwhelmed, I thought that based off the fact so many people seem to make using this distro their personality I expected... well, more I guess?

Once the basic stuff is set-up, like wifi, a few basic packages, a desktop environment/window manager, and a bit of desktop environment and terminal customisation, then that's it. Nothing special, just a Linux distribution with less default programs and occasionally having to look up how to install a hardware driver or something if you need to use bluetooth for the first time or something like that.

Am I missing something? How can I make using Arch Linux my personality when once it's set up it's just like any other computer?

What exactly is it that people obsess over? The desktop environment and terminal customisation? Setting up NetworkManager with nmcli? Using Vim to edit a .conf file?

Hi All. I'm having an issue that I am hoping I can get some help with.

I have been using linux on this particular laptop for over a year now, and for the past 6 or so months (right around the time I upgraded to Plasma 6, but I think it is just a coincidence) about 50% of the time, when I update all my packages via package manager, the whole system freezes. Like, hard freezes. Waiting any amount of time won't get me out of it. I have to hold the power button to power it down. I can't use ctrl+alt+F3 or whatever to get another TTY. Mouse doesn't move. Nothing works.

It originally happened with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on btrfs. I thought maybe it was btrfs, so I reinstalled with ext4. Same issue. I tried Manjaro. Same issue. I tried EndeavourOS (wasn't really expecting different behavior at this point). Same issue.

Now I am thinking, what could cause an issue like this? Well, a package manager update just is a ton of file I/O operations, right? Could I have bad RAM and that is getting written to disk? Well, I did a memtest today and it came back perfect. So now I'm thinking it might be the SSD, but I'm not even sure how to check that.

Does anyone have any ideas of what might be going on or what I should do to fix it or debug it?

Changelog:

- Split sandbox functionality into separate zathura-sandbox binary
- Split off new command bjump from blist
- Add initial landlock support to sandbox
- Fix repeated search
- Implement jumplist command
- Fix issues with document with multiple page sizes
- Various fixes and improvements

Hello! My question is basically what the title says. I'm searching for an IDE/text editor for Go development and am wondering if anybody knows an alternative to these. Here is the list of software I tried:

• I've tried NeoVim but I really don't want to waste time doing text-based configuration and messing with extensions just to get some basic features working.

• I tried VSCodium but it doesn't exist in my system software repositories (I'm currently on Chimera Linux), and the flatpak version can't run any system commands.

• GoLand and Sublime Text are proprietary & paid.

It seems the market for IDEs is pretty small, so I wouldn't really be surprised if nothing existed that fit these criteria, but thanks for any answers in advance!

Edit: I've settled with Lite-XL which seems to be a great editor. Thanks for all of your great recommendations!

Hey guys, I just wanted to let you know about a crowdfunding campaign I'm doing for a mobile Linux sleep tracking app. Please tell me what you think!

Not everything made by KDE uses C++. This is probably obvious to some people, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless.

And I don’t mean this as just “well duh, KDE uses QtQuick which is written with C++ and QML”. I also don’t mean this as “well duh, Qt has a lot of bindings to other languages”. I mean explicitly “KDE has tools written primarily in certain languages and specialized formats”.

Note that I said “specialized formats”. I don’t want to restrict this blog post to only programming languages.

I’ll be straight to the point. You can contribute to KDE with:

• Python
• Ruby
• Perl
• Containerfile / Docker / Podman
• HTML / SCSS / JavaScript
• Web Assembly
• Flatpak / Snap
• CMake
• Java
• Rust

Here’s how.

hello i want this hibernate option like in opensuse/steam os when i try googling it i cannot find anything

There is Dahlia OS which looks fairly promising but development takes time and it is only a small amount of people.

I like the idea of the OS being more embedded focused like Android and Chrome OS but I don't want Chrome or Google.

Is there anything else I should look at?

This is aimed at students/ex-students that used Linux while studying in college.

I'm asking because I'll be starting college next year and I don't know how much Windows-dependency to expect (will probably be studying to become a psychologist, so no technical education).

I'm also curious about how well LibreOffice and Microsoft Office mesh, i.e. can you share and edit documents together with MOffice users if you use LibreOffice?

Any other things to keep in mind when solely using Linux for your studies? Was it ever frustrating for you to work on group projects with shared documents? Anything else? Give me your all.

ofc I imediatly upgraded it from winxp to gnu/linux

How can I use Whatsapp video call on Linux?

I tried Whatsapp-for-Linux and Whatsie but they didn't work.

Am I crazy in thinking that the shop I was in that has CentOS 3 running their self checkouts should have a more up to date and currently supported OS? These are brand new self checkouts (the shop has had them for about a year now, but you get my point.)

It’s a genuine question. Am I wrong in thinking that using this OS on a self checkout is a terrible idea? (FWIW this shop is an international retailer)

I have no stake in the shop or anything. I just happened to be there when they had to reboot a self checkout and I noticed the OS version as I was going by.

I posted about ZRAM before, but because of my totally unscientific experiment, personal experience and the common question, which Linux to run on potatoes...

First, I tweaked ZRAM for my use-case(s) on my hardware, this settings might not be right for your use-cases or your hardware!

My hardware is a netbook with an Intel Celeron N4120 and 4G RAM (3.64G usable).

When I recently played around with ZRAM settings, it felt like the zstd algorithm made my netbook noticeable more sluggish. It never felt sluggish with lzo-rle or lz4.

In a totally unscientific way, I rebooted the computer several times (after a complete update of everything), executed my backup script several times, and measured the last 3 executions. (Didn't touch the netbook during the runs.) The bottleneck of the backup script should not be ZRAM, but it is some reproducible workload that I could execute and measure.

To my surprise, I could measure a performance difference for my backup scripts, lz4 was consistent fastest in real and sys time w/o tweaks to vm.page-cluster!

Changing the vm.page-cluster to 0 further enhanced the speed for lz4, but with this one toggle, all of a sudden zstd is as fast as lz4 in my benchmark and runs with a more consistent runtime.

Changing the vm.swapiness to 180 decreased the speed for lz4, to my surprise.

Obviously the benchmarks are not 100% clean, although the trend for my workload was clearly in favor of lz4/zstd.

To the best of my knowledge, I ended up with nearly the same tweaks that Google makes for ChromeOS:

• zstd as algorithm (I think ChromeOS uses lzo-rle)

• 2*ram as ram-size

• vm.page-cluster = 0

• Install/enable systemd-oomd

vm.page-cluster = 0 seems like a no-brainer when using ZRAM, on my netbook it is literally the switch for 'fast' mode.

In summary: ZRAM makes my netbook totally usable for everyday tasks, and with tweaking the above settings I run Gnome 3, VS Code and Firefox/Evolution w/o trouble. (Of course, Xfce4 on the same machine is still noticeable more performant.)

I wonder if we should recommend to people asking for a lightweight distribution for potatoes to check/tweak their ZRAM settings by default.

Anyway, I would be interested in experiences from other people:

1. Any other tweaks on my ZRAM or sysctl for potatoes which made a measurable difference for you?
2. Any other tips to improve quality of life on potatoe machines? (Besides switching to KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc. ;-))
3. Any idea why vm.swapiness didn't improve my measurements? To my understanding it should basically have cached more of my files in ZRAM, making the backup run faster. It even slowed the backup down, which I don't understand.

Edit:

• zstd beats lz4 on my machine for my benchmark when vm.page-cluster=0!

I want to move to Linux Mint without losing data, can someone help?