Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now’s your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893
I want to upgrade (Mint 21.3 => 22). Last upgrade took hours and the result was so bad I had to reinstall Mint from scratch. Do you guys use the upgrade tool, or do you have good advice on how to approach this?
I don’t use Mint, but I would guess that you could change your repos in
/etc/apt/sources.list
, runsudo apt update
, and thensudo apt full-upgrade
. Just make sure the full upgrade isn’t doing really dumb stuff like deleting a bunch of programs.I could be completely wrong and this could be terrible advice, but this has become the wisdom for me when I use Debian Testing. Of course, I just did straight
sudo apt update
after Bookworm was released and the upgrade to Trixie went mostly fine. I have never upgraded between stable versions, so I may not be one to say.
deleted by creator
I have an old (2017) Windows 10 box that is ineligible for Windows 11. Originally purchased to run my Oculus Rift, it now just streams YouTube and Twitch and plays some old Steam games and occasionally school related stuff (Lexia, Scratch, stuff like that).
I started thinking that, rather than worrying about an unsupported Windows OS on my network, I might upgrade to Mint or Ubuntu.
So, my question(s) is/are, how much of a hassle will such an upgrade be? Will I need to wipe the drive, or can I keep my files without having to back them up first? Can I run Windows games on Steam with Wine? Are there good 3D card drivers nowadays?
I’m reasonably versed in using Linux as a user, less so as an admin, in case that affects the way you answer.
Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.
I’d be interested to see what people have to say regarding VR setup, but the Oculus gets little use anymore. I have a few games that were never ported to the newer, self-contained systems (I have a Quest 3), and we’ve downloaded a bunch of custom Beat Saber levels that I might feel bad about, but the sensors are a big enough pain to set up that I don’t know that I’d feel that bad.
Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.
I myself have a Quest 3. I use Air Light VR as a streamer, which only worked after I added something to do with a vrmonitor.sh to the SteamVR command line. Half Life: Alyx runs natively and works just as well, but I’ve had bad luck with most other games, primarily because Steam Cloud didn’t synchronize the Windows saves to my Linux machine. VR even on Windows is already a PITA to set up, and I just don’t have the willpower to get it working properly on Linux. This is the only reason why I even keep the waste of space that is my Windows partition.
That was half the reason I upgraded. I don’t know if my old box would’ve been compatible (probably was), but I wanted it off Microsoft territory so bad and heating about Copilot sent shivers all over my spine.
I’ve never heard of installing any new OS without having to back stuff up. That’s just wishful lazy thinking lol.
You probably won’t have to do anything manually about Wine. Steam has Proton built in and it works great. As others always mention, check ProtonDB.com for user reports on how a specific game will work out.
I haven’t run into any problems in my library, but I honestly haven’t installed a ton of games.
I’ve used Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris for some other launchers (like Battle.net or Epic Games), and those have been a little hit or miss, but I think the main problem is something I’m missing. Not a huge priority but I’m still working on it occasionally.
I haven’t heard anyone call or 3D card since the 90s. They’re video cards or GPUs these days man. AMD has open source drivers that work just fine with Linux and should work just the same as the Windows version I believe.
Nvidia has open source ones, but they seem to be pretty terrible compared to the closed source ones. I had one issue with them last week but I think that was more related to KDE than it was the drivers’ fault.
I don’t really have any fancy hardware to describe how easy that was to get to work. Just a mouse, kb, headset(with mic) all of which worked fine without doing anything. I have a physical dongle for the controller, so I had to get a driver for that so I didn’t have to use a Bluetooth connection (pretty shitty comparatively speaking) or gasp plug it in. Had a few issues with it for a while, there was an updated version under a new name and such but it all works now. Just turn the controller on and it’s working instantly (unless I forget to charge it lol).
-
Depends on how much crap you’re willing to put up with. It’ll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)
-
I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.
-
Have you heard of Valve’s Steam Deck? It’s a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don’t work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won’t accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!
-
If you have AMD, you don’t even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn’t mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won’t need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).
If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It’s easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
deleted by creator
-
Games work fine, if you install linux as a dual boot, you can move the files over (windows files appear as if the windows install was a usb key). Also drivers are fine
There would be no hassle in wiping the drive, you can do it as part of the super easy installation process for any Linux distro. Ideally you would back up any important files and drop them into your fancy new file system once the install is finished. And you can pretty much launch almost any game directly out of steam and it will run. There are a few exceptions for some of those games with anti cheats that rootkit your system, but the majority just work out of the box. Drivers included, but Nvidia might be ever so slightly annoying
To install at minimum you’ll need to likely shrink existing partitions and create new ones for linux if you don’t want to wipe the drive, that would be a dual-boot setup with Windows still installed along side. Or you can just wipe the drive entirely and have only Linux.
Regarding the files you should already have backups of anything important, if you don’t, set it up ASAP.
Messing with partitions can easily cause data loss if something goes wrong.
You also never know when hardware failure, malware, power surges, lightning strikes, or whatever other disaster will happen and cause data loss.
I’m pretty sure anything of value is already backed up to my NAS. I’m just paranoid that my kids might freak out that I destroyed their state fair winning Scratch project or something.
I just do full system images for that reason, easier than trying to pick and choose what should be backed up. Used to use Veeam, currently using Synology Active Backup.
For online backups I don’t due to size, but for local backups it’s just way easier.
Truth. Full system would be easier.
Has anyone ever used the enterprise version of dbeaver? Does it do as good a job interfacing with nosql databases it does relational databases?
I’m always too afraid to ask… Is this year finally the year of Desktop Linux? Is next year the year of Mobile Linux?
trolololo.jpg
I kid, this year has been the year of Desktop Linux for well over two decades for me. Obviously! And I think this megathread is great idea :)
Year of mobile linux
[ astronauts meme ]
Always has been
I’m familiar with Proxmox, virtualbox, and KVM/KVM manager.
If I want to set up a PC to virtualize multiple operating systems, but with the feel of a multiboot system, what virtualization software would you suggest?
My goal is for the closest I can get to a multiboot system (windows, Debian, fedora) but virtualized so I can make snapshots. It should feel like I’m on baremetal when inside the VM.
Virtualbox is clunky with lots of pesky UI cluttering the screen and Proxmox doesn’t seem great for this use case.
Removed by mod
What is something Linux related that you’ve learned recently?
As a meta question, could this work as an additional (or alternate) recurring discussion question? It felt similar in intent, to encourage people to keep learning / asking questions and chances are that if someone learned something then others will benefit from the information (or correct them)
After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.
My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.
The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.
The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.
Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.
I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I’m trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I’ve been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.
It’s one of those “aha!” moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.
I remember when the mapping of virtual memory segments clicked for me. I think i said out loud, “that’s so clever!”. Now it just seems so fundamental to managing memory for user space applications, but I hadn’t thought about how it was done before.
Is there a way to assess which packages on my linux distribution aren’t open source? I’m planning on having a secondary machine which is exclusively open source, but not sure how I would go about ensuring that is the case.
The language you want is “nonfree” in Debian derivatives.
Depends on the distro. Some have a configuration setting to allow unfree software or not, others have separate repos.
Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn’t have an open source license.
This would depend on the distro you use. Most distros will require you to enable a non-free repository before you can install anything that isn’t Foss or open source from the official repos. You could also use an FSF approved distro. Keep in mind, the FSF will only approve distros that don’t include any non-free anything in the official repos. Besides that, you just have to know the licensing before you install it.
I don’t know if this is specifically possible. I’m not quite rookie-level new (been using it about a year now) but I have something I would love to have convenience-wise.
It’s a desktop machine with regular speakers, and I have a wireless headset that connects to its own dongle (not Bluetooth). It’s there a way to switch to the headset automatically when I power it on, and revert to speakers when I turn it off?
I feel like it’s possible hardware-wise, but I’m not tryna learn how to code to make it happen, and I don’t know how to find a software solution. I don’t even know what to call what I’m looking for.
i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).
depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.
note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.
They can also use pavucontrol, whether they use pulse or pipe, for a GUI to select default audio interface as well as easily switch apps to different outputs if needed
Is the dongle visible by the system only when the headset is powered on? Does the computer have any way of knowing you’ve turned your headset on? What make and model is that headset?
Finally bit the bullet and got a Thinkpad and I’m leaning towards putting Fedora on it. I’ve never used Linux before but I’ve done some research and I like the idea of something that updates more often than Debian but isn’t as DIY as Arch. Do y’all think Fedora would make a good starting point? I hear it’s stable enough and offers enough non-free applications through the RPM file management system.
Also, are there any drawbacks in using the immutable Silverblue version? I’m considering it just so I don’t do anything dumb by accident.
Once you’re comfortable in the rpm world, rhel is literally free for individuals.
Fedora is what I’ve got on my Thinkpad right now and so far it seems pretty good! Silverblue is very intriguing to me but I chose not to go with it because I need to be able to modify aspects of how the lower system works (using JACK for audio for music production purposes; afaik this is not really supported through Flatpak). Compared to Arch or Nix OS or whatever else that’s popular with the hardcore Linux enthusiasts, Fedora is just right for someone that needs a working system to just get stuff done.
Never be afraid to try different distros you can always wipe and try again. You won’t break your computer. I’m a big fan of immutable distros but I’ve never tried fedora blue. Either will make a rock solid system
Thank you! :]
Howdy. I have a “homeserver” that I’d like to actually start using. What’s currently keeping me from it are… Permissions.
I have TrueNas Scale running on top of Proxmox, and I can’t for the life of me not access NFS Shares from other VMs (specifically a Debian VM that I use as Docker Host) that I host in Proxmox. Plox hlp.You can try to see which mounts get exposed with
showmount -e IP
To see if the actual shares are working.
Is plasma big screen really an option? Id like to install it on a desktop to act as a android tv. Launch Stremio, YT and maybe one or two other apps/websites. Easy big tile navigation with remote (flirc).
It’s in dev since 2020. The images hosted on the site are bit for any of my hardware. It says theres a Debian package. Installed that though LMDE but it was horrible. Somone mentioned Kububtu can install it with apt, but its not listed. Think I’ll give up.
Good question! Someone let me know when there’s an answer.
Is it that much better to have a Desktoo Environment, on my desktop computer? I’m still halving it with Windows trying to get my games to run on arch lol
Can you elaborate on the issue you are having? Having a desktop environment is usually necessary to run games.
I tried running i3, using the arch wiki for the nvidia package. It suggested just the ‘nvidia’ package for a 2080 TI. Launched steam with proton (forget the newest version at the time it was like last month). Nothing would happen when launching any game. Probably doing a lot wrong or something, sorry if this isn’t enough info. I did no logging.
First off, I’d recommend you use the nvidia-dkms package, because that can make upgrading kernels easier. Second, let me explain the hierarchy of GUIs on Linux. At the base level, you have the display server. In your case, you are using the X11 display server. The display server is at a very low level, and only handles the rendering of content. The three prominent display servers are X11 and Wayland. The second tier is the window manager. It’s pretty much essential, and it lets you move around windows, stack them, etc. You’re using i3. The third tier is desktop environment. The desktop environment is completely optional, and it controls things like taskbars, start menus, and system trays. DEs are not needed for computer use, but they can make things like customization easier.
In your case, I don’t believe your issue is with your window manager or display server, I believe it is with Steam or Proton. What game are you trying to play? Some games aren’t able to be compatible with Proton, unfortunately.
Edit: A few corrections that I just thought of. First off, the display server doesn’t “just” handle rendering things. It handles input, and communicates to Linux, which will tell the hardware what to render. Second, I didn’t explicitly mention this, but I thought that I should, a desktop environment still relies on a window manager for handling windows, it just adds functionality. Also note I wrote this reply partially in response to another commend, so sorry if I yapped a bit too much.
I have another bookmarked comment telling me to use that. Thank you for all the information. I guess my question was a little vague. I was just thinking a DE might be easier for my setup rather than a port of my laptop setup. I’m bookmarking this, too. I’ll give your advice a go the next time I find time to Bork my desktop again. Definitely never buying nvidia ever again.
I don’t think your GPU is the issue here as well, I think your game might not work. If you want to try and diagnose the issue, I’d be happy to help. First, add the following to your Steam game options:
PROTON_LOG=1 %command%
. Then, run the game. This will make a log file in your home directory, with the prefix “steam-” and then your appid. If you want to upload the log or paste the output here, I can try and look at it and try to help.That may be a while for me. But I will try to remember to swi g back around here and comment in like, a month or two lol whenever Recall is about to hit. I will admit, I tried to launch Sea of Thieves, Elden Ring, Cassette Beasts, and the Master Chief Collection, all which have really great scores on protondb. I chalked it up to inexperience at the time but I’ll run these log commands.
If they have good scores on protondb, it’s probably an issue with configuration. First, make sure you’re running it with proton. Go to the game’s configuration > compatibility and tick “force the use of a specific steam play compatibility tool.” then select the highest version of proton available(don’t choose experimental if your game is supported according to protondb). Then, click play. if needed, proton will install and this should solve your issue. If it doesn’t, then you can delete steam(
sudo pacman -R steam
), and remove the .steam folder in your home folder. This deletes your configuration for steam, and might help resolve issues. Then, re-install steam(sudo pacman -S steam
), and sign in again. Download your game and set up proton as I told you. If that still doesn’t work, you’ll want to make a post and share the log files.
I don’t understand. Doesn’t every GUI OS have a desktop environment? Not just Linux distros. Like, isn’t the Windows Shell just Windows’s desktop environment?
I can’t say for sure, but I’d assume that windows works differently that GNU/Linux at least slightly like this. In GNU, there is a hierarchy of displaying things and windows likely has a slightly different version of that.
I have a server that has multiple services running under multiple users that each store data. I want to be able to bundle all this data up and send it to another server for backups.
At a high level, how do I manage permissions for this? Currently I run the backup as root, then chown it to a special backups user which can log in through ssh. But this all feels clunky to me.
If Unix permissions don’t work for you, acls are the next logical step.
There are many ways to do this, but the next up from users is using groups!
For each file or data directory, create a group that owns it. This group should have the service’s user as member. Then create a user for running the backups, and add it to all these groups.
The benefit of this is you don’t have to use root, and you have an association of directory to group that you can always change. You can for example grant a user access to a data directory by just adding it to its group.
deleted by creator
Might want to take a look at a dedicated backup tool like Borg. It will keep all the proper permissions and file attributes in the backup.
I am somewhat in the same boat, but more gentoo sided. For the main repo they killed mkstage4 because its outdated and insecure. So like you i wanted to backup my data (my gentoo install) to my nas or local storage. Rsync is the magic bullet for this. You can use ssh to securley transfer data to or from the server. And it automate it via a cron job (i suggest fcron) for a automatic timed backup/sync. Now i will add, rysnc can be used as a backup. But as the name implies it syncs data from one pc to the other. So if you break your desktop and it syncs to your server. Your SOLPDQ, thats only if you automate it tho.
And for the services id reccomend making a directory and adding all the services to a group, which owns the directory. Or the more lazy solution, which is probably frowned uponed. But you can rsync your docker container data to a directory where it has permissions to copy/sync.
Id highly recommend Rsync tho and just syncing offsite to another computer