I wish to work on Linux, but the only machine l have at my disposal is my brother's windows laptop when it's free. Can I create a virtual Linux system using QEMU ?

I've installed Kubuntu (26.04 LTS) on a laptop with a touchscreen. When logging in, there is a button for the virtual keyboard in the lock screen, but it does nothing, nor does tapping on the password field. Once I've logged in, it works fine (including on the lock screen), but once I've logged out it breaks again. I also tried the Silent theme, which has a different on-screen keyboard, but that also didn't work (it shows up, but the keys do nothing). How do I fix this?

I installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS about a year ago. Now that 26.04 is out, I was planning to upgrade, but instead I think I'm going to wipe and re-install from scratch. Does anyone have any tips or tweaks they recommend for new installs? Things like, do or don't encrypt the drive during the install process, make an administrator account separate from your regular user account? I already plan to install the Flatpak repo and the Gnome Software Center.

Thanks!

For some reason, most of Kubuntu's default themes disappeared on me. Is there any way to redownload them?

Context

I've started a Fediverse watch party (#ReMonsterdon on Mastodon) & want to store & organize info about it (films shown; films scheduled to be shown; candidates for showing; dates; relevant links like streams, trailers, Wikipedia; images like film posters etc).

At the moment, I'm using a combination of stuff on my computer, i.e. a folder with text & image files, and a collection on NeoDB, a Fediverse media catalogue.

But I'd like a more all-in-one & organized/organizable file (easy to search, sort etc). A lot of people use a spreadsheet for that kind of thing. But I was under the impression that that's what databases are for.

I don't know much about either. I use spreadsheets very little and databases not at all (except NeoDB, I suppose).

Request

Is there a simple, local, FLOSS, GUI database, suitable for beginners, that I could use for this?

(I had a look at my installation of LibreOffice, but for some reason the options for creating a Base file are greyed out or missing).

(I am not yet ready to try self-hosting. So something that is local, preferably in a system package, .deb or .AppImage. My OS: Linux Mint 22.2 Xfce.)

Thanks in advance

I'm just curious here. I use MySql Workbench on Windows and Linux. I am not storing the password in Workbench. On Windows, I click the database I want, enter the password and go about my business. On Linux (Mint), I enter my password...and then it prompts me for my password randomly from there on out. I might use it for fifteen minutes without a prompt. Then, I might get prompted for a password four times in a row. It does this if I start Workbench up as a user or as root.

Anything obvious I could do to make the Linux version mirror the Windows version a little better in this regards?

Also, just as an observation, the Linux version of Workbench is definitely inferior to the Windows version. There are all kinds of quirky things going on in the Linux version.

Thanks,

I'm on a desktop PC that's in my home office. I have personal documents and clients' intellectual property on it (source code, databases, documents, etc.). Hence, I like to use full disk encryption on all disks. Nobody else uses this PC besides me and it's safe at home. The only threat vector is if somebody gained access to my room and stole the computer. It's very remote, but still technically possible (if you think I'm exaggerating, I'd like to learn your opinion). Maaaaybe if I was sending the nvme for RMA, that's also a threat, but I have never had an SSD break on me. Never. I know it's anecdotal and sometimes they break, but I had multiple and I think it's such a small chance...

LUKS is a bit of a pain with having to type the passphrase on each boot. So I had it on auto-unlock via TPM, which works great when it works, but a) is also a pain when it breaks (usually due to system upgrade that changes something and I forgot to re-enroll the keys or re-generate the PCRs), b) according to Arch wiki it's unsafe, if anybody has physical access to my PC -- so essentially the only threat vector I was trying to protect myself against is not protected against.

But I was thinking -- I am OK with typing one password on boot. I just don't want to type two different passwords one after the other. What if I set autologin in my Desktop Environment (GNOME or KDE), but left LUKS locked down with a passphrase? Wouldn't that be safe? It's a single user system, nobody will use it. If it gets stolen, it's been shutdown and then they can't gain access because of LUKS.

Am I thinking correctly?

I'm several months into my Linux journey and this is one thing that is driving me absolutely crazy because it legit just works on Windows and OS X.

1. I hit the start button

2. I type "note"

3. I hit enter.

If I give it a full second between steps 2 and 3, Notesnook opens as intended.

But if I hit enter at a normal speed, a game (Necesse) launches.

This is presumably because it's executing the command before the search finishes.

Can I change this behavior? I use AutoCAD for a living so typing a command and hitting enter really fast is a habit I won't be able to break.

Here's my situation. I have an Asus router that allows me to connect an external drive to it and then it can function as a UPnP media server. Back when I was on Windows It worked perfectly. It always sat in the sidebar of the file explorer and I could just drag and drop files to and from it, download stuff directly onto it or play movies just by double clicking them

I moved to a Fedora-based distro (Nobara) a few months ago and have been unable to access the server the same way. I know it works, because if I open VLC I can access it under "Universal Plug'n'Play" and see my movies, but for the life of me I can't get it to show up in Dolphin or any other file explorer I've tried. I've resorted to turning on FTP on the router and mounting the drive with rclone, which somewhat works for my use case, but it's slow and occasionally just refuses to connect because sessions don't seem to get closed properly and I get a "Too many connections" error.

My google-fu appears to have failed me, because I have genuinely found nothing, besides just using Kodi or VLC. I also found a few threats from like a decade ago complaining about the UPnP support on KDE, but I would have expected things to have improved since then. Is what I'm trying to achieve here just not possible?

@linux4noobs@programming.dev @linux4noobs@lemmy.world l wish to try out on Linux for the first time. I wish to try out with MX Linux. There are two versions available for the latest update. One is sysvinit and the other is systemd.

What are the pros and cons of the two ?

I wish to understand it well before downloading either.

So I run Linux for a bit now but I am still not fully confident with downloading "random" Appimages or .tar archives (I don't even know how to run/compile the archives but that is another problem lol) from Github or something.

I try to verify the hashes or GPG signatures for all the programs but not every developer provides a latest.yml.

I revently noticed sometimes Github shows a sha256 sum next to the files in the release tab but not in every repo and is this just a second layer or is this a substitution for the latest.yml?

Is there something I am missing or should I not worry too much when using Appimages or Flatpaks because they are sandboxed anyways?

First week: https://piefed.social/c/linux4noobs/p/1977063/i-m-nearing-my-first-full-time-week-on-linux

I thought I was going to write that my second week on Linux was rather boring because I had everything set up and was just working doing everyday tasks.

That was until Friday where I decided it was time to do a distro upgrade (I use openSUSE Tumbleweed, which is a rolling distro). That did not go well. It made me question my distro choice and I even considered hopping to Debian, because it's stable AF (or so I heard), boring (old packages), widely supported (basically all software has a an official .deb package) and has a large community and multiple resources online. At first I thought I wouldn't like packages that are a couple years old, but it seems that my whole stack is there, so I wouldn't notice. Meanwhile, on Tumbleweed I have issues here and there because it's not as mainstream and is bleeding edge. For the time being, I will migrate to Slowroll soon.

I bought a couple books about Linux, started reading the first one.

I have a project to move my Google Drive, OneDrive and Google Photos somewhere else. Nextcloud seems like the best solution, but I also like Immich as a replacement for Google Photos. That made me think about self-hosting. The Hetzner Storage Share looks nice because it's a cheap, managed Nextcloud, but not having access to the database feels like vendor lock-in and a possible friction point in the future, so I am thinking of renting a VPS. I also have a pretty beefy old PC at home, but it's currently damaged (I think either the motherboard or the PSU is dead, I didn't diagnose yet).

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/11347169

In my CAD class, the instructor requires explicitly AutoCAD because "that's the industry standard." As we know, AutoDork are a bunch pricks who refuses to get up from Microslop's lap, so I am in a tight spot rn.

Should I use a VM to run or would ACAD Web do the trick? Honestly, I can even try to push my luck with another CAD program that supports .dwg files.

For example Slack or Telegram or something else. The program has a single window, I click the "x" and it is closed. GNOME doesn't have a tray with program icons by default, I didn't install any extensions besides Vitals to monitor the CPU temperature. I don't even have a visible Dash. Just vanilla GNOME. In Windows, some programs will go to the background and will still be running when you close the window, usually there's a setting for that in each program. I wonder whether in GNOME I can do the same or if I should change my mindset and leave everything open at all times. This is more of a habit than necessity.

I wanted to switch for several months but needed to sort out some things first. I'm a .NET dev (on Linux, crazy, I know). We migrated to .NET 8 (I want to upgrade to .NET 10 which is nowhere near the complexity level of moving everything from .NET Framework) last year and because .NET is now cross-platform, I could finally switch to Linux full time because my full tech stack is available here. It's not a 1:1 workflow, some things are done differently (for example I don't use IIS with self-signed certificates, I use Caddy; I don't use MSBuild, I run dotnet commands manually; SQL Server is running in a Podman container).

I chose openSUSE Tumbleweed because I live in the EU, there's the whole Buy European movement caused by Trump which I support. I tested Fedora Workstation first, I really really like it, it gave me less issues than openSUSE, but it's "American", sponsored by Red Hat who does business with Palantir, so sorry :( I should have considered Debian, too, I think it would have been easier, but openSUSE has newer packages and has that super cool Snapper integration which is a godsend to newbies such as myself who can break their system by doing something stupid. So far so good, I can't use OpenVPN 3 here, though, because the community package doesn't work properly (it expects DBUS to be named dbus, but for some reason openSUSE devs decided that non-standard dbus-1 is better). GSConnect doesn't work, either, the extension hasn't been updated enough and references some old parts which are not available in the cutting edge GNOME 49 on Tumbleweed ;) I believe both OpenVPN 3 and GSConnect would have worked on Debian out of the box. I could have also gone for LMDE, but I wasn't aware what it was and I only knew I didn't want Ubuntu, so Linux Mint was not something I wanted, either (I know it's not the same, but it's based on Ubuntu).

I read many times that your choice of DE is more important than your choice of distro. And to stick to your choice for at least three months before you hop to another one. I can't help but get a sort of buyer's remorse . That's when you make a choice, but other options are still available after. Makes you (me) think that maybe it was not the best choice, you know. But hopping too soon just teaches you to install Linux :D

I set up a 3-2-1 backup scheme for which I'm very happy now. I have Btrfs + Snapper on my system disk, then I have Restic (with resticprofile) to back up my user files (plus some configuration files from /etc) on a secondary disk and another backup in the cloud. Initially I wanted an image based backup of the system disk, because I've been using Macrium Reflect on Windows for many years. After some research it seems that Linux users have a different mindset and because programs keep their config in /etc (or sometimes ~/.config) you can just backup those files and in case your rootfs is so damaged you cringe when thinking of fixing it, you just quickly re-install the system, pull all packages (which list you can export into a .txt file) and then restore the configs.

I learned that everything in Linux is a file. Even CPU frequencies (/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq). And that everything in Bash is a stream. And that I love fish (I actually don't like fish, but I love the shell of that name).

I learned that systemd services are plain text files with super easy syntax. That BLEW MY MIND because in my .NET project I have a tool to create Windows Scheduler tasks and it's like some stone age tech in comparison. I have to re-compile to create a new service. In systemd I can type a new service in a text editor and make it run on a schedule with a CLI command.

I learned that many people hate systemd. I listened to a short history of how systemd came to be and apparently somebody was collecting Bitcoin in 2014 to hire a hitman to kill one of the creators of systemd. 🤯 I don't have a baggage, a month ago I thought you still use cron in Linux, so I don't have any feelings about that, I understand the concerns about centralization and complexity, but currently I'd say I like systemd. I barely know anything, though.

After first few days I actually reinstalled Tumbleweed to get systemd-boot instead of GRUB because I use LUKS encryption on all disks and I read that systemd + Secure Boot is better.

I use GNOME. KDE seems to too Windows-like in its UX and too complex (too many options and switches), but I would still like to give it a fair chance. I wish it was possible to switch between GNOME and KDE on the same machine without making the system garbage (mixed window types, settings, etc.). I know it's technically possible, but as far as I know it leaves "trash" and the OS sometimes gets confused and tries to display KDE (Qt?) windows in GNOME or something. I think it's better to reinstall, but let me know if I'm wrong.

I did not encounter any serious issues, the system is very stable, no crashes. I am able to work on it and do personal stuff.

Whenever a dark page or a video gets too dark, the 2nd screen is automatically dimming, which can be annoying when watching dark scenes or browsing/editing with dark mode

How to stop it?

Itś a laptop

Built-in screen does not dim in any moment
Second monitor is a TV, connected via HDMI

TV dims with every display mode (mirror, extend or only external monitor)

TV did not dim with Windows 7/10/11, so it is not the TV

Itś running latest Bazzite KDE Nvidia RTX Series | GTX 16xx Series+ (bazzite-nvidia-open-stable-live-amd64.iso) plasmashell 6.6.3

Itś not caused by accidental touches on kb brightness keys

Display configuration > color accuracy > set to prefer color accuracy
Power management > dim automatically > set to never

I can't open this link which has the exact question, as it shows:

"Failed to verify your browser
Code 11"  

:/

Any help is appreciated, thanks in advance

Disclaimer: I tried searching for something like "useful programs", "useful packages", "useful tools", "recommended packages", etc. Don't see any posts like that, if this is a duplicate, then it's not intentional and my search skills have failed me.

Anyway, I was watching a YT video today and the guy launched a cool program in his terminal, I paused to see what he was running. It was btop, of course being new I never heard about it. Then I thought -- how many cool tools/packages are there, which people use, but I am not aware of?

So what do you like? What do you install on a fresh install? What are the most useful tools in your belt? What can't you live without on Linux?

Perhaps I'll find something useful :)

My mouse wheel is fucked, I've used xinput set-button-map to disable the wheel but it doesn't work in everything. It works in browser, file manager etc but not in terminal, FreeTube etc.

Anyone have a suggestion on how to get it working universally? I've been thinking of opening the wheel and ripping some connections out, but I'd like to keep the mouse wheel button working.

Also, my monthly budget is -50€ so buying a new mouse is not currently something I can do.

Running Debian 13 with the xfce desktop. Machine is a gift from the ancient gods, compaq presario CQ61, marvel this magnificent beast.

So I built a new PC a couple weeks ago. My old one broke one day (I think I helped it, but that's another story). I was happy to move from a stock Prism Wraith cooler that was LOUD and ANNOYING. I put a new AMD Ryzen 9 7900X in this box with a couple of new nvme drives (Samsung 9100 PRO and 990 PRO). The thing is silent under Windows 11. Silence at last!

Then I installed openSUSE Tumbleweed (from which I'm typing this) and as the post title says, something is making a high-pitched noise, like coil whine, when the system is mostly idle. I searched the web and the first suggestion is that Linux handles CPU power states (C-state) differently than Windows. Or, it could be the new disk(s), too. It's a fly in the ointment, I am very happy with the new PC, with how powerful and fast it is, I'm so far happy with openSUSE, but there HAD TO be SOMETHING to spoil the experience.

Has anybody had a similar problem? Any tips on how to troubleshoot it and not BREAK my computer?

EDIT: more info from the comments

I just use the Ryzen iGPU, don't have a dedicated GPU. I set the fan curves in BIOS, so it's the same across all OSes. I'm pretty sure it's not the fans. My main suspect is the CPU because the noise is there in openSUSE's installer, so even before anything touched the disks (they were straight from factory with no partitions). As soon as I launched the Tumbleweed installer I heard it. Not hearing it in Windows 11. I can hear it when the CPU is idle, if I start some program, run a compiler or even scroll fast in the web browser, there is no noise.

I had the same monitor for several years. I hear the noise from the PC case and I'm 100% sure about that. I used the same monitor with my previous PC and there was no noise, including in Fedora Workstation. This is a new PC.

The noise is audible in openSUSE's installer, that's the first time I heard it. So even before there was anything on either of those nvme disks, at that time they were straight from factory with no partitions.

I dual boot on this PC and the whine is not there in Windows 11, neither in BIOS. I have fan curves set in BIOS, so it's the same across OSes.

✅ So I managed to troubleshoot and find the root cause. As suspected, it was the CPU, however I thought it was only the difference between how Windows and Linux manage its power profile. While troubleshooting, I ran hwinfo on my Windows install and also double checked the active power profile. It was set to the AMD Ryzen Balanced profile that was added automatically. If we look closer, it was set to always run in high performance mode so it never went into deep sleep and my Ryzen makes the whining sound only when in deep sleep (that would be the C6 state).

I think that Linux sets power efficient modes, even under performance*. The fix for me was not in the OS, but rather in UEFI BIOS. The magic setting for my motherboard (ASUS TUF GAMING B650E Plus WiFi) is at Advanced\AMD CBS\CPU Common Options\Power Supply Idle Control. It had to be changed to "Typical Current Idle". Now I can keep running the balanced profile in openSUSE, so the CPU doesn't operate at top frequency all the time and it is now SILENT, same as under Windows. :)

* at first I tried flipping between powerprofiles set balanced and powerprofiles set performance and for a minute I thought that was it, but not quite. Maybe balanced makes less sound, but still does it.

Most of those books seem to be targeted at experienced users, however there are a couple about working with the CLI and one about "how Linux works". I wish those books were in the lowest tier, it kinda makes sense. Perhaps somebody will find it useful.

I have a thin client I want to mess around with. My understanding is I can install a regular wayland based system on this and use waypipe to run the actual heavier apps on my linux server elsewhere and have it do the work here, but take inputs and show the results on the thin client. So it would be interacted with like a normal app but the actual work would happen on the server.

How well does this actually work? I know we have sunshine for things that need the GPU but like, if I pull up chrome and watch youtube, woudl waypipe keep up with that?

Obviously this is somewhat subjective, but I've had a lot of problems in my previous attempts to switch to Linux, so I'd like to create a list of distros to try out, and see what works for me. I'm mostly expecting to be doing basic office work and light gaming via Steam.

I have the Viture pro XR display glasses connected via usb-c on the back of my laptop, but it doesn't output any audio.

The display works fine, but nothing shows up for sound devices in the system settings. The glasses work perfect when I connect them to my handheld running Bazzite, however.

What should I do to troubleshoot this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44456705

I am in the very strange situation, since I installed Ubuntu, in which my laptop is connecting to the wifi, but if I open the wifi settings page it stays on "searching for networks" forever. Since I am planning to use this laptop at a conference where I would need a connection, I would like to solve this somehow.

I have used the "wireless-info" tool and the pastebin can be found here .

Only things I noticed are the Intel AX201 controller that in other forums is said to not work at all (not my case), and the fact that my home network connection is defined by a networkd yaml, as opposed to the others (my parent's house) that are defined by a NetworkManager yaml.

I am a beginner so these are all just guesses from me.

Is there a fix or even a separate software I can use to manage my connections, like adding a new one without having to write myself a new yaml file?