My boyfriend is very into Linux. I know nothing about computers. I want to understand.

I know nothing. If I can use a computer or phone and it does basic tasks for me I’m all good. I currently use an iPhone and a MacBook.

My boyfriend is much more into programming. Recently he got an expensive Lenovo and has dove headfirst into this Linux stuff.

He tries to explain it to me. I don’t know what he’s saying! “Ubuntu,” “Free and Open,” “terminal.” He’s got this new software that’s not google called “Brave.” He got a Raspeberry Pie thing for Christmas. He’s so enamored with it, and wants to share it with me and make me use it, but he can’t explain it to me well enough for me to understand and when looking it up myself I can’t find many basic user friendly explanations either. Frankly, I’m a little scared of computers. Terrified of getting hacked. Anything wonky looking on my computer scares me and sometimes Linux looks, well, creepy to me. It’s definitely my lack of knowledge. I am a complete noob.

If you guys had a friend, or gf, who knew nothing about Linux or ANYTHING, how would you even begin to explain it? I want to understand the slightest bit so I don’t crush his excitement with my lack of enthusiasm.

https://redd.it/kkv8kq
@r_linux

Tree command

Hey Guys, Hope you are having a good time.

One day, I am in a ssh session. I am not a root user, which implies I cannot install apt packages on that. But I wanted to see one directory structure, with tree command.

Okay, There are some noscripts online to print tree structure. But, They didn't have other functionalities like excluding directories with regex, following symbolic links etc...

So, I am making one python package which exactly mimics Unix tree command.

And the additional advantage is Windows users can also benefit from this package.

It works as a command line utility.

Take a look at this and Contribute if possible.

https://github.com/CITIZENDOT/treedir

Thanks a lot.

https://redd.it/kkwobl
@r_linux

Am I allowed to sell systems I build that have Linux on them?

I have an awesome gimmick idea to be a niche player in the console arena. I was just wondering if there is any restrictions on any of the KDE versions of Linux that would prevent me from legally reselling computers that I install Linux on.

https://redd.it/kkxqw9
@r_linux

HP Elitebook 745 G6 install issues?

Hello - I have tried to no avail to get Linux running on the HP EB 745 G6. I was able to get kali and Qubes installed, but kali wouldn’t boot in after install and Qubes wouldn’t see multiple hardwares. I tried kali, tails (live) parrot os and currently downloading mint.

Anyone running on G6 Elitebook that could give some guidance?

https://redd.it/kkxat1
@r_linux

Host DFS namespace on Linux?

Is there any way to host a Windows DFS namespace on Linux instead of having a Windows Server? I have used DFS a lot on Windows but, despite my best Googling, but unable to find any Linux project that seems to support hosting an DFS namespace. I would like to be able to host a DFS namespace both with and without an AD Domain.

https://redd.it/kkwrom
@r_linux

Unpopular Opinion: Linux will never be popular in our lifetimes.

Look, I get it. People want to be enthusiastic. I want to be too. I like the philosophy of Linux. I like what the open source community has created. I truly appreciate everything that Linux and its devs have brought not just to Linux, but to Windows, Android, iOS, and every other computing device out there.

​

But it's time to face the music: if you're a desktop user, looking into getting the "perfect, can be molded to do anything without having to invest entire days solving problems that aren't problems you encounter on a Windows-based PC, etc.," then Linux simply isn't for you. Linux isn't a gaming OS. Sure, there's been huge strides made thanks to Steam Proton, Wine, and tools made to manage using the two of them to make Windows games playable on Linux OSes, but there's too many issues that come up in using these solutions that, when I couldn't find a solution, I just ended up resorting to trying out a different distro, and this is where the problems of Linux's philosophy start to rear their ugly heads.

​

There's simply too many options. Yes, there's a few mainstream ones like Ubuntu, Debian, Pop! OS, Mint, Elementary OS, Manjaro, Gentoo, Fedora, etc., but which ones are the easiest to set up?

​

In my experience, Pop! OS seems to be fine, until you go and run a game that stutters all over the damn place because it isn't in Proton's cache? I mean, it acts like a PS3 game being emulated on RPCS3 pre-asynchronous shader processing being an option, so that's what it looks like to me.

​

Ubuntu is probably the most mainstream option, but it phones home to Amazon and is too corporate to be viable long term.


Debian, while being "stable," is not easy to always setup what you want. Mint is the same way in my experience.

​

Manjaro didn't have the problems Pop! OS had, but it certainly didn't support every device I connected to my PC.

​

I mean, what am I supposed to do? Ask specific questions to various communities and hope that someone will have the same setup, same software and hardware configuration, etc.?

​

Sure, maybe if I grew up with Linux like a lot of people did Windows, I might understand it better, but that's not everyone's experience, and some of us have jobs that we have to go to every day and that cuts greatly into our time to spend on tinkering with stuff that we wouldn't even have to tinker with in Windows, be it XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, or Windows 10.

https://redd.it/kl05uv
@r_linux

Any known Linux concerns about the SolarWinds hack?

I'm mostly concerned about code in VCS (git or whatever) and package signing keys being compromised, especially those of cross-platform devs on corporate networks. The SolarWinds megathread at /r/sysadmin keeps reporting more security problems advisories and some of their products did support Linux.

On a scale of 1-100 I think the severity is a 75 or so, due to scope, scale, and duration. It's a major breach that exposes many other targets. This number doesn't take into account the various secondary threats like persistent firmware infections (IoT FTW!), infrastructure disruption (telecom and electricity), and mounds of data for future social engineering.

Might give it a 90 if Windows, Android, OS X/macOS, or major Linux distro updates are compromised. The last major kernel repo breach I know of happened back in 2011 and was mostly just a nuisance. But after Heartbleed and the Debian OpenSSL RNG code-change mess I'm a bit concerned about all the understaffed projects and various amateurs coding, building, and distributing binaries. The security chain is only as strong as the weakest link. This old article at Medium still rings true.

This will turn into a good solid 100 if microcode at Intel, AMD, or various ARM manufactures are compromised and we have to revert to 8 or 16-bit CPUs. I have an old TI-99/4A just in case.

What are your thoughts?

https://redd.it/kkzxv1
@r_linux

Best Linux Distro for a Desktop? Some confusion...

Hi,

i'm a newbie, but i love the idea of Linux!

Actually i'm on Windows 10 but i'm using Firefox, Libreoffice, Gimp, etc... and now i think that it's the time to switch from Windows to Linux.

But my question are:

\- i want a distro that is rock solid and supported from a large community

\- i want a distro that is oriented for desktop and like windows for office and production enviroment

\- i can't format and reformat and for that i want a distro that is not an experiment

What do you suggest?

I read a lot and the most suggested is Ubuntu LTS, can you confirm or suggest other solution? I see Fedora, OpenSuse etc... all big name of the Linux world, but i can't test all them.

I see that several laptop producers install Ubuntu as OEM, but nothing install Fedora, OpenSuse, Linux Mint...

My idea is to obtain an OS that can be used without problem for years, i admit that the last format of my Windows system is of 5 years ago... but i don't wnat all the crap that is into windows (privacy attack and other crap included!) and every update slow down my computer.

I know that linux is a comunity based system, but if exist i prefer a distro that is oriented for workstation/desktop.

Thanks a lot!

https://redd.it/kl0x7b
@r_linux

VMWARE WORKSTATION VS QEMU on Windows Guests

Hey guys! I need to work with many windows guests and I always used vmware workstation. Does qemu have better performance? I would like to know especially the graphical performance, not for games. In vmware there is always a small lag of the mouse and graphical guis on windows guests.
Just to know i used windows as a host but after I changed to Archlinux, the graphical performance had a noticeable upgrade.

https://redd.it/kl20dv
@r_linux

What’s your daily use and distro you choose?

While sitting here over Christmas chatting vulnerabilities etc the topic came up of what I use and why.

This was a hard question as I actually use more than one OS daily. From MacOS to windows 10 to ParrotOS to Kali to fedora to Qubes to Tails. Which naturally gravitated to - why can’t you just use one?

Part of me wanted to answer - you just don’t understand, part of me said man they are right I’m complicated, another part said - really do you not care about your anonymity etc?

So my question to you - are you a one OS person or multiple? What are your daily task and what OS do you choose?

https://redd.it/kkrm17
@r_linux

Trim down empty space/zeros of dd image?

I recently created an image using dd of my Raspberry Pi, because the configuration is final and SD cards like to break. Before I did that I used zerofree on another machine to zero the free space and can zip the image down to about 1 GB now.

However when I unpack it, it's of course still the size of the SD card (32 GB) and I evidentiality need at least a 32 GB sized SD card to flash it back. Looking at images of Raspbian, Ubuntu etc though they're around 1GB-2GB in size, so I was wondering how I can reduce the size of my image, so I can flash it to any size of SD card + don't have an inflated image when unzipping.

I think it might have something to do with the partition table telling the image how big it has to be, but I might be wrong.

 

tl;dr: how can I trim down my image?

https://redd.it/kl3876
@r_linux

Fixing CentOS Stream to RHEL Point Releases?

I was thinking about the whole CentOS abandonment in favour of CentOS Stream quite a bit lately for obvious reasons, and I have a question: what prevents someone from creating a CentOS Stream mirror which tracks RHEL point releases?

The idea is this: assume we're on RHEL 8.3; that would mean CentOS is 'rolling' to what will end up in 8.4. Could you not pull all the upgrades to packages and store them until RHEL 8.4 comes out and then 'fix' all the packages from the 'stream' updates to correspond to RHEL 8.4, and then update the mirror accordingly?

It's not a 'new' distribution, you're still running CentOS Stream, so no need for a rebuild from source, and no stepping over trademarks. The whole thing sounds like it could be mostly automated too. It would be a lot easier to do than creating a distro from RHEL provided sources, no? There would still be an issue that Stream is only 5 years support instead of 10, but that's the only significant issue I see.

Am I out to lunch here, are there are any obvious technical or legal problems that make this impossible?

https://redd.it/kko94v
@r_linux

RFC Nintendo 64 Linux port
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mips/20201225190503.12353218812e1655f56f0bf8@gmx.com/T/#m0862c3484e0da7195dc8989421d30f01b3b1c63a

https://redd.it/kk74j1
@r_linux

Linux now supported on the Nintendo 64

Announcement:

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mips/20201225190503.12353218812e1655f56f0bf8@gmx.com/T/#m0862c3484e0da7195dc8989421d30f01b3b1c63a

The N64 is now the oldest console able to run Linux.

Some previous attempted had been done in the past but never went as far as having a shell running.
The port uses musl and busybox to make it as lightweight as possible, although the OOM is never far away with 4MB of memory in 2020.

GitHub release: https://github.com/clbr/n64bootloader/tree/master/n64linux

In depth denoscription of the N64 architecture: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/

https://redd.it/kl5pi3
@r_linux

What keeps Linux kernel and distros safe from malicious source code?

With the supply chain attacks recently in the news on Solar Winds, I was curious how the kernel itself and also various distros protect themselves from someone inserting malicious code into the source? For example what would prevent one of the kernel developers computers from getting hacked, the hacker inserts a backdoor, and then that gets rolled down to every distro. There are millions of lines of code so it seems impossible to review them all. Same with distros, how do the distros prevent this at the package level?

https://redd.it/kl5k1w
@r_linux

How do you roll your own distro?

How do you go about creating your own distro, but keeping it in an ISO format? Most of what I want to do is cosmetic, but also some specific configurations and packages that I want to make consistent.

The tools I was able to find we're mostly no longer supported and didn't seem to work anymore, and the ones that I could get working pretty much just resulted in a standard release and didn't let you change much. I know there's the Linux from scratch project, but I figure there's probably an easier way.

https://redd.it/kl6snp
@r_linux

Commandline Youtube video search and play utility written in bash [NO API]

https://redd.it/kl8ig3
@r_linux

Installing linux without losing files

Hi there people. Today I have decided that I am tired of windows and am now looking to move over to linux. I've just completed the creation of a bootable USB but am left with one question. Backing up my files. Now in advance I am going to say that I am aware of the partition method. However I think I have a work around. That is the fact that my PC has two harddrives. My idea is that if I use the inbuilt windows backup feature to back up the files to the second harddrive (where the OS is not going to be installed) then it shouldn't wipe the data on said harddrive. Does the installation remove data on both harddrives or is it just the one that the OS is installed to?

https://redd.it/kl8imp
@r_linux

Xmonad vs Bspwm

I have been using both window managers for some time now and honestly I really love xmonad but I like the fact that bspwm is configured entirely in bash. What I particularly like about xmonad is the multihead behaviour, however, I figured out a way to replicate it in xmonad.

What I would like to know is, which is the more powerful window manager and way benefits does each one have over another.

https://redd.it/klau3q
@r_linux

Music Producer who cant switch to linux because of Maschine mk3

Hi!!
I am a 17 (2 months till my 18th birthday) music producer and begginer programmer who is trying to get into linux to get more into "computer stuff"
I use Pop Os, but I am not able to make a complete switch because I use a piece of gear called Maschine mk3 that only works with Mac and Windows.
I tried to install the software with wine, but the controller does not work (drivers are not compatible I supose)
Given this my options are running Linux on a VM, running WSL2 or running a Dual boot (my least favourite option, as I heard that it may cause problems and that having to reboot my PC when I want to make music is a real pain in the *ss).
Any sugestions??
BTW sorry for any typos, but my auto-corrector is for portuguese and it sometimes bugs for english

https://redd.it/klcajb
@r_linux

2021 will be year of Linux on the desktop

https://redd.it/kld6t7
@r_linux