Getting back in the game after 20+ years, is Ubuntu still good or what do people recommend?

Had a hell of a time trying to move to windows 11, corrupted an HDD and SSD drive to be unusable. (I had multiple backups of important stuff so no loss in that sense) but I'm done with windows. I havent used linux in a couple decades, last i used it i was using Ubuntu, just wondering if it's still good or what.

Eventually used 3rd party software to get Win11 to install fine on a new SSD. But i'm not dealing with this shit again.

I want to put a linux distro on an NVME, keep windows on the current SSD. That way wife and kids can do their thing on what they're used to, and I can do my image/video editing etc on Linux, and also have a back up so if windows shits the bed again i'm not left scrambling. (I keep all the important stuff on different disks than the OS, and I back up semi-regularly, but after this shit show i'm going to add a couple more drives and automate backing up business stuff, family photos, movies etc.)


I've googled and gone down rabbit holes, and read reddit threads. There's too many contradicting posts, and at this point i'm at information overload. Have mercy on an old guy and just tell me what is stable and decent.



https://redd.it/1mwv1p9
@r_linux

afreq.sh daemon 0.2.0 released
https://github.com/eylles/afreq.sh/releases/tag/0.2.0

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

A daemon to monitor file creation in the user-selected dirs and to write down who created those files

A story behind the daemon: a few weeks ago I noticed that I don’t have space in my /home. Investigation led to deleting \~20GiB of ancient garbage from the dot-dirs there. In too many cases I wasn’t been able to detect who created those files and if I need them. I didn’t like this situation, so I present you with a solution.

https://github.com/ANGulchenko/whomade

The daemon is in state "it works on my machine" yet, so bugs are expected. Nothing harmful is expected though.

If you use MATE, you can use the extension for Caja to avoid touching the daemon's CLI:

https://preview.redd.it/qx54m43ziikf1.png?width=612&format=png&auto=webp&s=bfa7746ecb32728a6f2c21f13384915051ac0561

Just press the RMB on the file and select "Who made this?"

The daemon works with fanotify, so root privileges are needed.

Extension just kicks "whomade -w" command, so daemon should be somewhere described by PATH var.

https://redd.it/1mwyt52
@r_linux

Apple Type-C PHY driver RFC posted to kernel mailing list
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250821-atcphy-6-17-v1-21-172beda182b8@kernel.org/

https://redd.it/1mx096d
@r_linux

Dual boot in 2025

Hello.
I am considering installing Linux on a PC with Windows 11 preinstalled, and I have the option of doing so on the same M.2 NVME SSD or adding a SATA SSD and installing it there.

I understand that SATA SSDs perform worse than NVME SSDs, so I was thinking of making room for Linux on the SSD I already have in my computer.

I have read a lot of information about problems that can arise when sharing a disk between Windows and Linux, such as the former messing up Grub after an update, but I don't know if that will still be the case in 2025.

What do you recommend?

Thank you very much.

https://redd.it/1mx2hrb
@r_linux

Quickly navigate in man pages, using emacs, neovim or w3m.
https://codeberg.org/chimay/blog/src/commit/02bdd1d592f7130c2dd2cc13e35a63c551387e91/meta/man-pages.org

https://redd.it/1mx77vh
@r_linux

Game application icons don’t show in GNOME but do in KDE

I’ve been using Ubuntu for a while now and I like mostly everything about it except one thing that may seem minor to some but it’s the fact that game applications don’t show their logo. It’s a generic grey cogwheel.

I tried out Kubuntu since I heard that KDE doesn’t have this issue and they were correct. The issue is now gone. For that reason alone I’m staying on Kubuntu KDE.

Weird reason to distro hop, I know, but it’s good to have choice.

https://redd.it/1mx8zrg
@r_linux

Anybody using multi-seat? This is my Ubuntu 24.04 multi-seat setup for my kids.
https://redd.it/1mxcodi
@r_linux

I'm making a freeware Linux Learning Game and could use some QA, Criticism, and feedback.
https://redd.it/1mxgm8l
@r_linux

This month in Servo: new image formats, canvas backends, automation, and more!
https://servo.org/blog/2025/08/22/this-month-in-servo/

https://redd.it/1mxp3nt
@r_linux

What on Earth Does Pointer Provenance Have to do With RCU?
https://people.kernel.org/paulmck/what-on-earth-does-lifetime-end-pointer-zap-have-to-do-with-rcu

https://redd.it/1mxrwl4
@r_linux

The linux corner
https://redd.it/1mxt6yk
@r_linux

APT36 Malware Campaign Using Desktop Entry Files and Google Drive Payload Delivery
https://www.cloudsek.com/blog/investigation-report-apt36-malware-campaign-using-desktop-entry-files-and-google-drive-payload-delivery

https://redd.it/1mxuo1l
@r_linux

Video: LibreOffice 25.8 – Some of the new features
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dIRR37PF7M

https://redd.it/1mxw2e2
@r_linux

We need a GUI recovery mode on Linux
https://redd.it/1my01xi
@r_linux

Extrepo - Use/managing external package sources in Debian
https://salsa.debian.org/extrepo-team/extrepo

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

This Week in Plasma: KDE Initial System Setup
https://blogs.kde.org/2025/08/23/this-week-in-plasma-kde-initial-system-setup/

https://redd.it/1my3cpp
@r_linux

God I Love Zram Swap

Nothing feels good like seeing a near 4:1 compression ratio on lightly used memory.

zramctl
NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd 7.5G 1.6G 441.2M 452.5M SWAP


A few weeks ago I was destroying my machine. It was becoming near unresponsive. We're talking music skipping, window manager chugging levels of thrash. With RustAnalyzer analyzing, Nix building containers, and my dev server watching and rebuilding, it was disruptive to the point that I was turning things off just to get a prototype shipped.

I hadn't really done much tuning on this machine. My Gentoo days were in the past. Well, it was becoming unavoidable. Overall changes that stacked up:

- zramswap
- tuned kernel (a particular process launch went from 0.27 to 0.2s)
- preemptable kernel
- tuned disk parameters to get rid of atime etc
- automatic trimming
- synchronized all my nixpkgs versions so that my disk use is about 30GB

And for non-Linux things, I switched out my terminal for vterm (Emacs) and am currently running some FDO/PLO on Emacs after getting almost a 30% speed bump from just recompiling it with -march and -mtune flags on LLVM.

I also split up my Rust crates, which was a massive benefit for some of them regardless of full vs incremental rebuild.

And as a result, I just built two Nix containers at the same time while developing and the system was buttery smooth the whole time. My Rust web dev is back to near real-time.

I wish I had benchmarks at each step along the way, but in any case, the end, I was able to build everything quickly, enabling me to find that logins were completely broken on PrizeForge and that I need to fix the error logging to debug it, so I have to crash before my brain liquifies from lack of sleep.

https://redd.it/1my8c3o
@r_linux

Printing with Linux!
https://redd.it/1mybetq
@r_linux

EXT4 to BTRFS

I just changed my file system from a combination of LVM/EXT4 to BTRFS mostly for root volumes. My backup server and media volumes which span disks are still LVM/EXT4. The servers however have their root volumes as BTRFS now. I upgraded the root volumes with a fresh install of Debian Trixie when it was released. I think they went back to Debian 10 and I also wanted to increase the EFI volume size on each for use with systemd-boot so it became an upgrade opportunity. So once the server root volumes were upgraded I decided to do the same thing with my workstation.

My workstation root volume was LVM/EXT4 with a half dozen different Linux distributions with their own root partitions and a separate data volume which they all link to. I basically recreated that with a subvolume for each root partition labeled "@Debian" or "@Mint" or whatever the distribution was. The Data volume was "@Data". I use rsync noscripts for backup and restore and know that they work because that's how I moved everything from my old partitions to new BTRFS partitions. One thing that I believe BTRFS will give me is the ability to do a read-only snapshot and rsync it rather than having to boot to a different Linux distro to do the same since it would otherwise be mounted/changing.

I do know that BTRFS has the ability to make backup/restores easier between common BTRFS systems with BTRFS send/receive but am not ready to change my EXT4 backup volumes yet so will continue to use rsync. I think there's some value in using different file systems in case an issue comes up with the file system itself. I do like the look of btrbk though so may come back to something like this in the future.

I use systemd-boot for my boot manager and am comfortable making modifications to it and the /etc/fstab to accommodate most scenarios. I don't intend to go back to Grub for something like grub-btrfs. If I make a snapshot and want to boot off from it, I'll manually make the changes to the files.

Since I just duplicated what I was doing with LVM, I probably don't have things configured optimally for BTRFS. I see people mentioning subvolumes for "@var", "@cache", "@tmp", "@log". What do I gain by using them? I also haven't used any compression attributes yet for the data volume. Is it worth enabling? What about on the root volumes? Any other things I should consider? Obviously BTRFS is new to me since I haven't been using it except in a basic test environment.

https://redd.it/1mycz26
@r_linux

Linux Primed For Significant Performance Gains With Kernel Swap Code Overhaul
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Swap-Table-Swap-Cache

https://redd.it/1mydkn1
@r_linux