distro a grandpa can use?

hi, a freind of mines grandpa came to me telling me how his laptop is too slow and cant do shit. hes got a acer one. its a total piece of junk. when i got home to get a better look, it had so much random bloatware. he had nothing he wanted so i formatted it and installed pale moon on his computer. i havent given it back to him yet. its only a 28gb emmc and it still lags on windows 10. hes an old guy who can barely use windows, but a fresh windows 10 install probably wont cut it for long. what is the absolute most simpliest distro an old fart can use? all he really needs is something that doesnt require a "sudo apt update" every day and an internet browser.

this is probably an impossible case but i figured its worth asking

https://redd.it/1j8kps1
@r_linux

Linux (CatchOS) works perfectly on ASUS UX5406SA (Intel Lunar Lake Ultra 7 258V)

I got this laptop a few weeks ago, and I've setup triple boot systems on it: Win 11, Ubuntu 24.10 (Gnome) and CatchOS (KDE) during the time. Overall I'm very happy with the laptop's performance and stability under all of the above OSes. But CatchOS has gradually replaced Ubuntu as my main OS on the laptop.

My previous KDE distro is EndeavourOS, but I found CatchOS has some advantages I appreciate:

- Better package selecting UI
- Btrfs management is easier (Btrfs Assistant is preinstalled)
- zsh is installed with oh-my-zsh customization
- zram is installed and properly configured
- Bluetooth is enabled
- Login screen matches the scaling factor set in Display Configuration
- Generally feels faster

The current version of CatchOS (Linux 6.13.6-2-cachyos) works perfectly on the ASUS laptop:

- All the hardware works great, including Bluetooth, WiFi 7, Speakers, Microphone (with the modification learned from here, Keyboard with backlight, Touchpad, USB ports, etc.
- Battery life is pretty good. Below are 2 scenarios I normally use the laptop (70% brightness + Dropbox at background)
- A local Vagrant/VirtualBox VM + Coding in PhpStorm: 9-11W, about 7 hours of usage.
- Browsing + Writing: 8-10W, about 8.5 hours of usage.

So far the laptop is very stable and I haven't noticed any bugs during my usage.



https://redd.it/1j8mef4
@r_linux

Comparing Fuchsia components and Linux containers
https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5381-comparing-fuchsia-components-and-linux-containers/

https://redd.it/1j7zwz2
@r_linux

Lol Microsoft Should Do Standup
https://redd.it/1j8roln
@r_linux

encfs security and stability

Hi,

I am using encfs on some folders to encrypt important information of mine. Nothing too serious, but some bank information etc.

I have a few noob questions or concerns:

a. How reliable it is? - Like, will it still be available in 10, 15 or 20 years from now?. I don't want to try to access some old HDD or SSD and then discovering I can not read the data because a new version of encfs is now not supporting this type of files ...

b. How delicate it is for disk error (or other unsuspected events)? - for example, let's say I have some bad sectors. Today, if it happen, I usually lost a specific file, or a few files. But I guess using encryption, it might happen that just one different byte (or even bit) may ruin the whole encryption process and I will end up with nothing at all.

c. How easy it is to hack by brute force?

My data is not that important, and sometimes I prefer to risk a data breach than to lose data due to other events. Though what would you recommend to use to save data in a safe way for long time?

BTW, until now I used password encrypted zip files. But I think it's not the best idea due to:

1. Quite easy to hack. (Not my main issue)

2. Difficult to maintain. Sometimes large file with many files inside, that I just need to update one small file require the whole .zip file to compress again. Or the files are not accessible directly from software and I need first to unzip them.

Thanks you in advance.

https://redd.it/1j8s4se
@r_linux

NVK: Goodbye Nouveau GL. Hello Zink!

Starting with Mesa 25.1, Nouveau users will no longer get the old Nouveau OpenGL driver by default and will instead get Zink+NVK.

https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/goodbye-nouveau-gl-hello-zink.html

https://redd.it/1j8uej2
@r_linux

Created a Config-Modifiable OhMyPosh Theme Template from My Own Theme.
https://github.com/TheElevatedOne/distrous.omp.json

https://redd.it/1j8yqsx
@r_linux

6 Years ago I went all in on Linux, Now I'm just basically an AMD fanboy

Lets go all the way back to my first PC. Intel P4 with an ATI X1300 (AGP Slot) Played so much Half Life 1/2 on this baby. Also Command and Conquer Generals. After this It was all Intel/Nvidia up to the GTX 1080. This is when I switched to linux because finally Proton. Quickly did I realize Nvidia GPUs on Linux were a problem. Especially once I wanted an HTPC with Holo ISO. This is when I went to the 5950X and 6900XT. Fantastic experience, has aged like fine wine. Just being part on the Linux community and looking at the Nvidia situation... Worse performance compared to Windows, tons of game specific bugs, Wayland issues, taking months to get driver issues fix, driver updates seem to break as much as they fix. So other than the HDMI 2.1 situation with AMD it has been smooth sailing. HDMI situation is more problems with HDMI Forum and TV makers not putting DisplayPort on TVs so I don't blame AMD for this at all. New GPUs just came out and I am not even considering or looking at what Nvidia is doing. Now lets talk about what is making me realize I am basically just an AMD fanboy at this point. I also have a TrueNAS server I have been running for over a decade (FreeNAS 9.2). Which other than a short period of time I was using an AMD Opteron CPU has also traditionally been Intel/Nvidia. That leads us to today. I am about to go out and upgrade a perfectly working Nvidia Quadro M2000 with an AMD Radeon Pro W6400 only because Nvidia driver (reoccurring theme) has issues with locking up SPICE remote desktop instance. Now while I was trying to find a fix for this problem I decided to do a little research for a motherboard/CPU upgrade and low and behold The best price to performance and power savings is a used 2nd gen AMD EPYC to replace my dual socket E5-2680 v3s (I need a lot of PCI-E). At this point the only Intel/Nvidia parts I have is a Quadro P4000 for Plex transcoding and an Intel Atom C3758R in my pfSense box. I also have a Framework 16 and guess what, all AMD.

So TLDR, Nvidia sucks on Linux by pretty much every metric other than video encoding and decoding. Intel GPUs are not as fast as AMD for gaming and maybe one day Intel Arc Pro (A60?) will replace my Quadro P4000 but that day is not today. Intel CPUs just are not as good as AMD right now as far as I am concerned or maybe I am truly a fanboy at this point.

Also if anybody is wondering by current distros of choice are...
TrueNAS SCALE
Bazzite (KDE, until COSMIC is stable) (Desktop, Laptop, HTPC) BIG Pop!_OS fan, just not a good distro right now. Also I have kind of fallen in love with immutable fedora.

https://redd.it/1j91f84
@r_linux

CLI latin/Catholic bible reader with an interactive mode.
https://gitlab.com/gee.8ruhs/writteninc/-/raw/main/latinbible.c

https://redd.it/1j8zkg6
@r_linux

Does anyone know if it's normal for thinkpad (or other) audio with Dolby systems to sound like crap on Linux?

I mean, it's really horrible. I read that the situation is terrible on all laptops that use similar technologies... I didn't think there was such a big problem that relatively few people are talking about

https://redd.it/1j95id1
@r_linux

New ARandR alternative for X11 display settings
https://github.com/bossadapt/Display-Settings-Plus

https://redd.it/1j96s11
@r_linux

I'm frustrated, but positive about the future - my experience with Linux

I recently decided to take a deep dive into Linux and its many distro's. Due to the rapid degrading of the Windows experience; I wanted something clean, free of bloat, and most importantly, able to run my video games without hassle.

I spent many minutes researching and deciding which distro to go with and landed on Nobara. It was love a first site. The interface was kinda like Windows, the default package manager was simple, and the system felt quick and snappy.

I had previously tried Linux 5-8 years ago, and my experience back then was pretty negative. Some of my devices were not properly working (due to Pulse Audio) and I could not get them to work. Believe me, I really tried to get into it and fix the issues. With Nobara, everything worked right out of the gate and worked well.

I was super hyped with this and was loving Linux. Then came the games.

I had recently been playing Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on Windows and that was the first game I tried installing. I grabbed the latest GE version of proton from Proton Plus, enabled the settings in Steam, and went about downloading the game. It launched great and framerates were smooth. However, upon loading into my save, I started getting firefly artifacting (tiny white boxes randomly appearing and disappearing in the game. I scoured forums, downgraded Mesa drivers, change cpupower governor's, and even went as far as flashing my BIO's. Nothing worked. According to forums, this is likely due to my AMD GPU (7900xtx) interacting with Linux (My card is not bad as it worked great in Windows).

Fed up with all the troubleshooting, I decided to try other distro's thinking it might have been Nobara causing the issues. I went to Bazzite: same issue. I went to Ubuntu: same issue. I even built my own Arch install: same issue (this step took a while to build and figure out).

I came to the conclusion that it must be something with the drivers. At this point, it felt like Windows was calling out to me, asking me to come back to it. The main reason for my computers existence is to play video games and play them well. If it cannot do that in Linux currently, then I feel like I am almost being forced back to Windows. This is post is not throwing shade at the driver developers for Linux or at the amount of work people put into making Linux better, massive kudo's to all of you. However, it just does not feel like an out of the box experience yet where my games just "work".

I plan on trying Linux again in the future. I really enjoyed by time with both Nobara and Bazzite, and I wish to use them full time in the future if the drivers (or whatever was causing the issues) allow. I love open source and everything it stands for. Linux developers: I hope you will keep on putting the effort into making Linux a great place to be, I truly look forward to the Linux future.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

https://redd.it/1j99ybp
@r_linux

What is the LOWEST requirements to play 1080/720p footage ?

Soo i got a bunch Of CRTs for free (fixed them 8/15 are working flawlessly now) i kinda want to use them are "advanced picture frames" (i have solar and i produce soo much more than i need so why not have some cool decor also free heating lol ) basically play Some content in loop (lets say a season of anime on loop) what is the minimum specs to make it work ( i want a bit of headroom to make sure it would run smoothly (i will be running mostly old animes in 4:3 format (ripped from DVDs pretty much 480p content ) but who knows might throw some of the newer stuff on it , i saw some company is throwing away a bunch of pentium 4 era PCs might salvage a bunch of em , will they be enough to play this content ?
what distro would u guys recommend (thinking of Void since how light/familiar it is) .



https://redd.it/1j9bc1d
@r_linux

Zorin OS keeps duplicating Cut files somewhere

I've begun noticing that Zorin OS leaves the memory footprint of a cut file after the action is done. As an example, if I have a file that takes up 100GB, and I try to cut it and paste it somewhere else, 200GB of space will be taken up, even though it no longer appears where it originally was.

Does anyone know what's causing this? Is there some method of me freeing up the old space?

https://redd.it/1j9d7jg
@r_linux

Roblox, SC2, and other Games

I know gaming on Linux has come farther.
I feel it still needs help in that area.

About a year ago I tried again to run Roblox for my kids, only to find it still broken in wine and the various alternatives such as POL, snap, flatpak, etc.

Similarly, SC2 works in wine but with known bugs.
Other games also have varying ratings on winedb. There's not as many gold ratings as I'd wish.

Proton and Steam don't solve it either.

How can I tell others that gaming on Linux is great, when the ability to choose any game you want isn't there? There's quite a few that just aren't worth trying to get to work unless you install Windows or dual boot etc.

https://redd.it/1j9ac20
@r_linux

"For our next release after 2025030800, we've added support for...Android 15 QPR2 Terminal for running...operating systems using hardware virtualization." "Debian is what Google started with...we plan to add support for at least one more desktop Linux operating system...and eventually Windows 11..."
https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114132940314692519

https://redd.it/1j9fg30
@r_linux

Newelle 0.8 Released

For those who don't know Newelle, it is an AI Linux assistant that perfectly integrates in the Gnome Desktop Environment. It supports extensions, basically any LLM online/local and has many advanced features.

This release brings in Long Term Memory, Chatting with local documents and much more!

https://github.com/qwersyk/Newelle

https://redd.it/1j9gjhm
@r_linux

KDE Plasma 6.3.3, Bugfix Release for March
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/6/6.3.3/

https://redd.it/1j9hn5a
@r_linux

Swiss train info display running Debian Linux
https://redd.it/1j9n4ra
@r_linux

Atomic distros are the future for everyone except hobbyists and enthusiasts...

BTW, there is a new sub exclusively for discussing and criticizing these new class of distros: r/LinuxAtomic
A few posts and mods needed; The sub is yet to gain traction...

I personally use Fedora Kinoite.

Atomic "immutable" distros like these have quite a few safety functionality, making them more usable for the average user.

You can install packages just as usual, but flatpaks and containers are recommended.

You can even modify the immutable parts with a simple unlock command, for oddball cases... You aren't fully locked out

Yes, a reboot is required, but not an explicit reboot like windows... Updates occur in background, and the reboot is only to remount the rootfs to the new set of packages; Just power cycle your system as you use it.

Even on mutable distros, to avoid implicit breakage and to provide full support latest most stable version, it is recommended to use toolboxes/distroboxes/containers along with flatpaks.

Yes, you can't change the kernel/bootloader, but why would a non-enthusiast want that? A non-hobbyist wants it "Just Works", and defaults usually do.

NVidia support is (almost) flawless with the nvidia-open drivers... Some kinks are there but they're being ironed out.

Trust me, I am a enthusiast-hobbyist but I have real work to do too.
I switched from gentoo to Kinoite.

If a traditional distro works for you, enjoy.
If it doesn't, try the atomic distros.

I have never touched the terminal for anything except for testing toolbox and to replace the fedora flatpaks with flathub.

Printer driver needs to edit config in /usr? As I mentioned, you can make selective changes to the immutable parts.

Some software doesn't work, but rest all do. Things are being ironed out. Improving.

If a traditional distro works for you, enjoy with it.

If it doesn't, try the atomic distros.
They will work 96% of the time extremely well, but fail for the 4% oddball cases including `make install PREFIX=/usr`; `/usr/local` is free for you to tinker with.

https://redd.it/1j9n87t
@r_linux

State of support for Geforce 970m & switchable graphics

Since it is not a new card (pre-Turing), i imagine the community have the time to come up with something?

Proprietary linux driver should exist, but i want to .. try to not have to use those.

Does it work? 3D acceleration? (DX 11 ish). Does switchable work? Or will it not turn off and the laptop die in 2 minute?

XPS 9550 or something.

I do have a Ryzen 4650U system that straight up runs SteamOS and don't need patch. But I don't like using that computer. So.

https://redd.it/1j9tqv4
@r_linux