f00f/eris

It’s nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don’t feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.

If my American university has a system in place for students that don’t own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux. A surprising amount of the software required for classes has been open-source, too.

The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

For a while I daily drove a Purism Librem 14 with Debian’s fully free kernel, and installed as few non-free packages as possible, including firmware blobs (which I didn’t install any of until I decided I needed Bluetooth). My experience with gaming was generally fine.

With linux-libre you really have to buy your hardware specifically with support in mind. You’re limited to Intel and non-bleeding-edge AMD graphics cards, a very small range of wifi cards, and no Bluetooth. Otherwise, video games should work as well as they would on any other computers with the same specs. Especially if you’re also limiting yourself to games with free engines - I’m not aware of a single libre game that demands more than a modern Intel integrated graphics card can provide, even on high settings.

Depends on your desktop environment. Look for an “autostart” or “startup applications” setting. If you’re on KDE, this could also be caused by “Restore previous session” under Settings -> Startup and Shutdown -> Desktop Session.

I always keep close track of these contests, it’s fun to take a look at all the different concepts. Though IIRC only Juliette Taka (who designed the themes for 8, 9, and 11) even submitted a theme last time. She’s great, and Emerald is great, but I hope this post gets someone even better involved with the artwork.

Damn Small Linux is a recently resurrected distro made specifically to run on old 32-bit PCs. You probably won’t be doing much web browsing or gaming on this device, but you should at least be able to get it to function

First, go to [three dots] -> Preferences -> Runners -> Proton, click the button next to the newest available version of Proton GE (currently ge-proton-9-7), and wait for it to download.

Then, go to your bottle -> Settings -> Runner, set the runner to ge-proton-[version], and wait for Bottles to configure the new runner.

Have you tried using different runners? According to ProtonDB Ape Out is completely supported by Proton, so maybe try a Proton runner instead of Wine.

Could you describe the issue in more detail, then? What happens when you try to play a video? If you get any error messages, please copy them.

It might not be Wayland-related at all.

I just tried installing Parole on my own KDE Plasma+Wayland system and it just works, aside from opening an external playback window, which feels a bit weird, but I’m assuming it’s normal. The only display drivers available are X, but the “Automatic” pick works.

If it doesn’t work for you, make sure xwayland is installed.

My second distro was Debian 8, initially with LXDE (which has barely changed at all since then, so it’s still nostalgic) then later switching to KDE Plasma 4. I probably hold the most nostalgia for it, even more than I do for my first distro (Linux Mint 17). For a while I was into Plasma Netbook, which I find to be an especially weird, nostalgic product of its time, and the Oxygen theme in general is probably my favorite default look for any DE.

I was quite satisfied with Debian Stable for a few years on at least two different laptops, and felt I had found my “forever distro”, until I got a Framework laptop whose AMD graphics were quite buggy on it. In order to get rid of all the issues, I had to upgrade to Testing and install a mainline Liquorix kernel (and along the way, I briefly made a Frankendebian and fiddled with kernel parameters). While my years of experience with Debian and derivatives has prevented me from breaking anything, I do wish I didn’t have to use all of this beta-quality software just to prevent games from freezing and crashing constantly, just because I bought “new” (about a year old) hardware.

I still want to keep Debian, because I’ve found nothing else that works quite as elegantly or stably, but I’m hoping to find ways to get the performance I need without Liquorix, and if something forces me to reinstall between now and the time Debian Trixie becomes stable, I’ll probably give Fedora or KDE Neon another try.

I’m working on possibly outdated second-hand information, so maybe it isn’t happening anymore. I haven’t been dual booting since ~2018 and even then I basically never used Windows.

There isn’t an alsa command on my system either, so that’s no surprise. But we’ll need more information to track down the cause, such as:

• What (sound) hardware are you using? (try lspci | grep Audio)
• What happens when you try to play a sound? Does it get stuck loading / at 0:00, show an error, or just play silently?
• Is your system using pulseaudio directly, or via pipewire? (try pactl info)
• What shows up in pavucontrol? (Is it detecting your speaker, or just “dummy output”? Is sound muted, and can you unmute?) Try also alsamixer.
• If you installed non-free firmware, you should have a few lines like deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main contrib non-free-firmware in the file /etc/apt/sources.list. If non-free-firmware is not present, then obviously you have no non-free firmware.

Currently Elisa for my digital music library, and for individual files I prefer to use VLC. I’ve had good experiences with Strawberry Music Player (and its predecessor, Clementine), too, and am thinking of switching back to it. And when I was a GNOME user, I preferred Lollipop.

1. I believe there is still an issue with Windows deleting Linux bootloaders during some updates. You’ll be fine if you install Linux on a separate disk, and even if you dual-boot on one disk and the bootloader gets deleted, there are ways to recover it. You don’t strictly need to have separate data and OS partitions, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether I prefer it - it makes distro hopping and disk encryption easier, at the cost of potentially inefficient use of space and serious consequences if your OS partition fills up.
2. Disk encryption is very straightforward if you use separate OS and data partitions. You literally just tick a box during the install and enter an extra password. It won’t upset Windows any more than a normal install does (i.e. Windows might think it’s corrupted, but won’t do anything without your input). With one partition for everything, it’s still possible, but the encryption will be much weaker and handled by the bootloader in a somewhat clunkier way, and I’m not sure if Mint even supports that setup.
3. I don’t have much experience with this myself, and certainly not on Linux Mint, so I’ll leave this one to other commenters.
4. Synaptic is just a fancy frontend to APT, and I think Mint also has something called mintInstall, which was just an apt frontend back when I used it, but I think it also supports Flatpak now. It’s entirely up to personal preference as to which UI you prefer. I do recommend you set up Flathub if it’s not there by default, as it gives you access to a ton of useful apps that can’t be packaged by Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint for various reasons.
5. Don’t download software from random websites unless it’s absolutely necessary. Chances are, their version either won’t work well, if at all, or will break your system. Try APT first, Flatpak second, everything else is a last resort option. If a program you used on Windows doesn’t have a (working, native) Linux version, try finding and learning to use an alternative that is in the APT repositories before downloading the Windows version and using it on Wine. Back up your most important files from Windows before installing Linux in dual boot, just in case you make a mistake somewhere. To answer the last question, stick to the default terminal emulator and Firefox installation unless there’s a feature you really want in another one; the distro’s developers picked them for a reason, after all.

I haven’t had much experience with Kubuntu, but I do know it has more preinstalled apps, slightly older versions of those apps (where KDE Neon has the latest version of every KDE app the day it releases), but slightly newer non-KDE apps in the non-LTS releases, and is more beholden to Canonical’s decisions, such as advertising Ubuntu Pro during upgrades or forcibly installing some programs as snaps. Kubuntu might hold your hand a bit more under certain circumstances, while KDE Neon keeps things simpler, but the difference in ease of use is not that significant, especially if you have any experience with Linux in the last ten years or so.

Any software that is in the Xubuntu repositories will also be available in other Ubuntu derivatives, and most likely Debian and all its derivatives as well. Only the official spins are likely to advertise Ubuntu Pro.

Mint XFCE is a good replacement, but I’m also partial to KDE Neon, which keeps preinstalled software to a minimum and is by far the most performant KDE distro I have tried. I myself use regular Debian, with KDE, though you can choose XFCE during the install.