Installed Mint on my aunt's laptop
https://redd.it/1kd47ex
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I told my dad I wanted to try out Linux and he gave me this
https://redd.it/1kd55a2
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Am I the only carzy person here? Or do I have any Slackware friends here?

I installed Slackware in 1995 and while I had some idea what I was doing coming from a *nix background, Slackware is a different beast.
I fell in love with it and kept running it. I have tried different distros over the years, but since around 2010 I've been running Slackware on my main computer.

I see very little love for this wonderful distro here. I can't be the only one.

Edit: Damn, it! Crazy. Not carzy.. Carzy, what is that?

https://redd.it/1kd60lq
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Addressing UID/GID drift in rpm-ostree and bootc
https://lwn.net/Articles/1018082/

https://redd.it/1kd5dtq
@r_linux

People who moved to Linux from Windows 11, what are things you forgot to check before switching over?

I grew up with Windows and have worked privately and in my jobs with Windows only. I am on the brink of reinstalling my Home PC with Linux Mint, currently running Windows 11 (hardware fully supported).

I am currently thinking through what I might be missing on "the other side", things that would not work anymore on Linux that I use on Windows.

I mostly use things in the Browser or web-based in general
I do some casual gaming (Trackmania via Steam) a few times a year. I saw a thread that it might work.
I have an M365 subnoscription, I know I would need to use the web-based apps or Libre/Open Office
I read that OneDrive is supported under Linux natively
I have a Brother WLAN printer, i checked and there are Linux drivers
I do some 3D Printing, i checked and there is a Linux version of Bambu Studio
I have a custom built PC with Intel CPU, Nvidia GPU, I read that some drivers need to be downloaded / installed manually, same as in Windows to get fully functionality.
My PC has 5 NTFS formatted storage drives (4 x SSD, 1 x HDD), will i be able to access all existing data from Linux? (I would format 1 SSD to install Linux)

To those who recently (or also longer ago) made the switch, what were things you forgot / were surprised aren't working anymore or made you regret the switch initially?

I ran Mint in a VM and it looks good technically, just the points above are of concern.

What would you recommend to check before pulling the trigger? I am a bit hesitant on Dual Boot as I want the system to "just work", and not some random Windows Update to break Dual Boot.

Thanks for any inputs.



https://redd.it/1kdbq9z
@r_linux

Projects for my 7 year old

My kid really likes operating systems and setting things up in general. If it involves downloading ISOs, making installation media, going through some kind of command line setup process, editing the registry, etc he’s in love. He finds how-to YT videos, gets obsessed, and tries it on a PC I built for him.

He goes to a scratch class weekly, but isn’t interested in coding at home. He’s just currently really into operating systems and installing stuff.

He’s installed:

chromeos on his pc
another installation of win11 on a virtual hard drive
macOS on a virtual machine
archlinux on a partition
mint on a partition
android development environment
local deepseek
and more etc.

Sometimes I help him a bit but he largely does it all himself.

I’m happy to just keep letting him go nuts and follow his bliss. It’s the best way to learn.

But are there any other chunky projects I could pitch him that would tickle his brain in a similar way to where he is at? He doesn’t really respond to the kind of walled garden kid projects like robot kits etc. He loves the feeling of doing stuff that feels like he is messing with more real world stuff. I wish he would do more of the kid stuff, but it’s really tough to get him into it.

Any ideas?

https://redd.it/1kdd1wg
@r_linux

Vorarbeiter is here — Flathub's new build service
https://docs.flathub.org/blog/vorarbeiter-is-here

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

Booting into installation media shows black screen.

I tried booting into nobara, cachyos, and endeavor all with a ventoy USB stick, but then all showed a black screen when put into media:

* Endeavor was the first I tried, and when I opened it, it went immediately back to the Ventoy grub (and when I tried it outside of the ventoy USB, it didn't even show as bootable)
* Cachyos was able to load it's grub, but when I tried the options, even nomodeset, it showed a black screen after that just stayed there
* Nobara was similar to cachyos in that it loaded grub & when opened it had black screen, except nobara was able to have a cursor in the black that just stayed there.

For context, some UEFI settings

* Intel VTX \[ON\]
* Intel VID \[ON\]
* Secure Boot \[OFF\]
* Boot mode \[UEFI, there are no other options\]

The computer I am trying this on is an acer nitro 5 gaming with gtx 1660. I had no issue installing cachyos on my other computer, so I don't know what is going wrong. It seems like something is not allowing the computer from loading any actual live media (except for grub, for who knows what reason?)

https://redd.it/1kdib52
@r_linux

Can I use install both a wm and de safely?

Hello there,

Currently using fedora gnome but interested in trying out a wm specifically sway.

Not sure how common it is for users to install both a wm and de but was just wondering if it's safe to have two desktop managers installed. Can having both a wm and de somehow cause conflicts and brick my OS.

Please advise,
thanks

https://redd.it/1kdlh57
@r_linux

I am using T490... Thinking about go to Linux.. but I am worry about the drivers and battery backup
https://redd.it/1kdm32x
@r_linux

Interesting read on the history of Linux.

Hi there, I came across this interesting article on the history of Linux, do you think it's accurate?

https://medium.com/@amritpandey/unix-to-linux-how-hackers-professors-lawsuits-built-the-os-world-61cac092b15c

https://redd.it/1kdn8y4
@r_linux

A couple of classics
https://redd.it/1kdns57
@r_linux

A screenshot of my current desktop

For no particular reason other than I think it's potentially interesting to people here, I thought I'd post a screenshot of my desktop, and explain what's going on. So here it is

My desktop

Actually it's a Thinkpad Carbon X1 with three 27" QHD monitors above it, running Hyprland.

I've seen minimal desktops for literally decades now (which is kinda scary...) and it always seemed to be something all the l33t hax00rz had, but I seem to have ended up here without any real objective to do so. I'm still living inside visually rich applications and browsers, i'm not buried away in some mad vi plugin world.

Each monitor has 5 workspaces, and I wrote a simple noscript that means Cmd+3 etc, switches to that workspace on the monitor that's currently focused. Various workspaces / monitors have roles by convention, left monitor is my "personal" monitor, browser on the first workspace, and that's generally it. Middle monitor is work browser on workspace 1, terminals (usually 4) on 2. And right monitor has Slack on workspace 1, vs code on ws 2, maybe another on 3. The bottom screen, the actual laptop screen (which, fun fact, is actually upside down, with the keyboard hidden behind the middle monitor) is where Zoom lives.

As such I just move between applications by changing workspace and mouse auto focus then i've more than one app on a workspace. I guess really it's a sort of paradigm shift type thing. workspaces sort of are the application etc. and I find it trivially easy to know where things are without anything telling me.

As my windows are tiled 95% of the time, and so full screen I very rarely see the black background, so why bother with a wallpaper?

As my Ilyama monitors have a thin, black bezel that blends perfectly into the screen, it makes a full screen tiled application, with no borders at all, look like the monitor itself is the frame when apps are in dark mode.

I was using AGS for a menu bar for a while, it's a really cool typenoscript library for making any desktop elements you want, really recommend checking it out, but eventually I realised I wasn't actually paying any attention to almost anything on it.

So I tried just not having any menu bar at all, and instead I use dunst for notifications. One "notification" I send it every 10 seconds it the time. And the notification lasts 15 seconds by default, but is replaced if another notification of the same type is received. The result is just a clock that is accurate to at least 10 seconds. (couldn't reliably send it on the 1st second of the minute using systemd I recall).

As the dunst time window floats, it can sometimes get in the way, but clicking the time, as it's a notification, makes it go away until the next time pops up. So that uses up no real-estate without being (overly) obstructive.

And of course all other notifications appear below the time too.

And a few other key combos for screenshots, volume controls, and the only other "desktop" tool I have is dmenu on a hotkey for launching applications.

There we go then. Maybe someone will find this interesting, I really surprised myself realising I didn't actually use or need (almost) any of the normal desktoppy things.

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

How do I download a Specific Version of an App via Terminal?
https://redd.it/1kdqo2t
@r_linux

Going to be updating my PC soon. GPU question!

Hello,

I've been dabbling off and on with different distros for a while now and have decided I want to make the jump to Linux full-time (likely running Garuda? haven't fully decided), but my PC is in need of an upgrade because for some reason, my current hardware just doesn't like Linux all that much. But if I'm updating one thing, I may as well update a bunch of things. I've had this PC for 10 years now, so it's about time to give it some new stuff.


My biggest question is a matter of how well NVIDIA can handle things these days. I'm stuck between getting an AMD Radeon 9070 XT or a GeForce 5070 (Ti if I can find one at a decent price). I understand that there's been a lot of progress toward getting NVIDIA stuff to play nice with Linux, but I'm particularly interested in dabbling around with Hyprland, and I know that Wayland is a contentious issue with NVIDIA.

Which should I focus on getting? I know the 5070 (Ti) is the better-performing of the two, but I don't know if there's a big difference between that and the 9070 XT in terms of performance. I'm considering making my PC my go-to gaming center for the future, so I want this decision to count.

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

i do not like when people slander the community for no reason

i do not care what os you use, i do not care if you prefer windows i do not care if you prefer linux i do not care if you hate linux i do not care if you don't wanna try linux, i do not try and force people to use linux, i do not hate windows users nor think they are stupid a lot of them are simply uninformed.

and those people tend to have one bad experience or hear one bad thing about linux and blow it out of proportion and spread misinformation and slander.

i don't like when people do that, but i don't care if they use windows either, i'm not trying to force anything on anyone i just don't like the constant slander.

sorry for voicing my opinion in a slightly different way in a previous post.

https://redd.it/1ke0a0e
@r_linux

This Week in Plasma: move by default when dragging-and-dropping
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/05/03/this-week-in-plasma-move-by-default-when-dragging-and-dropping/

https://redd.it/1ke2xmu
@r_linux

How to Play Videos in HDR on Linux for a Home Theater
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/how-to-play-videos-in-hdr-on-linux-for-a-home-theater/

https://redd.it/1ke42e1
@r_linux

Where does the common idea/meme that Linux doesn't "just work" come from?

So in one of the Discord servers I am in, whenever me and the other Linux users are talking, or whenever the subject of Linux comes up, there is always this one guy that says something along the lines of "Because Windows just works" or "Linux doesn't work" or something similar. I hear this quite a bit, but in my experience with Linux, it does just work. I installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on a HP Mini notebook from like 2008 without any issue. I've installed Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, Arch, and NixOS on my desktop computer with very recent, modern hardware. I just bought a refurbished Thinkpad 480S around Christmas that had Windows 11 on it and switched that to NixOS, and had no issues with the sound or wifi or bluetooth or anything like that.

Is this just some outdated trope/meme from like 15 years ago when Linux desktop was just beginning to get any real user base, or have I just been exceptionally lucky? I feel like if PewDiePie can not only install Linux just fine, but completely rice it out using a tiling window manager and no full desktop environment, the average person under 60 years old could install Linux Mint and do their email and type documents and watch Netflix just fine.

https://redd.it/1ke6sh6
@r_linux

Should I Install The Proprietary Drivers?

I'm running Mint LMDE and MX Linux (with cinnamon) as a dual boot on my 14-year-old Dell Latitude E6420, which is my only laptop for work and everything else (I'm a 51-year-old non-gamer.) The machine runs 2nd-gen i7, Intel Graphics 3000 and nVidia NVS 4200m switchable graphics, and 16Gb of RAM. I also run Vivaldi as my default browser.

Now, until I settled on these two distros for the time being - I'm still trying to decide which one to keep - I tried almost every flavor of Ubuntu and Mint on this machine, as well as a few others. With Ubuntu and Mint , installing the nVidia driver (390, the latest one that supports NVS 4200m) always broke Vivaldi, which gets stuck at the "🩶 made in Europe with love" screen. I'd always have to uninstall the driver to get Vivaldi to work.

I haven't tried installing the driver on LMDE and MX, probably because I'm just too lazy to find out if it'll work, and I really don't want to switch back to Firefox. What would Tux do?

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

occasion 0.3.0: now with more customizability!

check it out: https://github.com/itscrystalline/occasion/releases/tag/v0.3.0

Hello folks,

A couple days ago I've announced occasion, a little program i've been working on that prints a message if a certain configurable date pattern has matched. over the last couple days i've been working on improving the configurability of this utility.

whats changed:

custom date conditions, so you can now match for more complex date patterns, like for example to match for the last full week in October:[ `"DAY_OF_MONTH + 6 + (6 - DAY_IN_WEEK) == 31"`](https://github.com/itscrystalline/nixos-config/blob/0d393212e6f8ee70c80cad668af330047678d977/home/modules/cli.nix#L157)
custom shell conditions, unrelated to date
instead of just outputting a message, you can now configure it to show an output of another program (a shell by default)
you can now also match for the week in the year (week 1 - week 52/53, depending on the year)

what i want to do next

occasion is almost done, i still want to add native style support to the output for 0.4.0.

if you have any ideas, feel free to drop any in the issue tracker!

(0.2.0 was mostly just a platform support update, nothing really of note there)

Repo link



https://redd.it/1keh8ov
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