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Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • I have read that it is faster, though I have not tested it myself. Personally, my initial reason to use it was just to try something new and explore the unix world. My reason for staying is that it is a very simple init system that is pleasant to work with. It made me understand what an init system is and use it a lot more.

    Systemd is good if you just want something invisible and you do not want to mess too much with an init system unless you have to. Everything integrates with it

    OpenRC is nicer if you want to write your own init scripts. It is very well documented also.

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • For #2,

    For gaming, if you use steam, you may not face more than the following:

    • game does not work with no well known way to resolve. You can find this out by checking protonDB
    • game does not work because it needs to enable some options. Very easy to fix, and you can find the options on proton db for each game.
    • does not work because you didn't setup steam right. You often need to enable proton, which in short is steam's emulator or windows
    • does not work because your gpu drivers did not install. This depends on distro and they should all have a guide on how to do it, but usually it is just a matter of installing something.

    For programming, you will love your life because everything programming is way easier on Linux.

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • For #1, I've made the realization that most distros are lightweight skins or addons on top of another distro. Most of the time, if you start with the base distro, all you have to do is install some apps, change some configurations, and suddenly you have that other distro. It is much easier than doing a reinstallation.

    If you filter out all of these distros that only do a little on top of an existing, you're left with a quite small number actually. I'd bet it's less than 10 that are not super niche. Fedora, Arch, debian, gentoo, nixos are the big ones. There's some niche ones, like void Linux and Alpine.

    So I'd say if you try all of those, you don't need to try any more 😁

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • First time Linux user you mean?

    I wouldn't recommend it, unless you can navigate the terminal well. When you install arch, it installs no desktop environment, only the ability to talk to a terminal.

    It's technically possible and very doable with some googling, but I wouldn't recommend it.

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    What made everyone move to Bluesky or Threads instead of Mastodon?
  • Well I am speaking about users who may be picky about mastodon's features. If someone is picky, I don't imagine they'd care much about just finding a platform with their preferred features, similar to how they didn't like mastodon and found bluesky instead.

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    What made everyone move to Bluesky or Threads instead of Mastodon?
  • The fediverse has many micro blogging implementations outside of mastodon if you don't like their featureset (and they federate with each other, unlike bluesky). The only features I couldn't find are those that contributed to making Twitter the dystopian toxic space that it is.

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    Bluesky continues to soar
  • Is anyone here opposed to bringing more people? I'm upset that people are going to an unfederated platform like BlueSky. I wish more people to join, no matter who they are.

    I haven't been on mastodon much, but lemmy is quite diverse.

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  • Jump
    Bluesky continues to soar
  • I preferred the Internet that isn't driven by non-genuine posts by profit driven influencers. I am glad that those people don't like mastodon so they don't ruin another platform.

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    Bluesky continues to soar
  • Actually being able to self host and federate, and without any dependence on the main instance.

    And ability to federate with other open and federated services, like how mastodon can federate with so many others like lemmy and pixelfed.

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn't have an open source license.

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • Just come ask here when you have trouble, and we'll try to help.

    When troubleshooting, the biggest thing is searching the web honestly. But some more things to help you out: look for logs. Linux has loads of logs and sometimes can tell you how to fix the problem.

    Logs may not be immediately apparent. Some programs have their own log files that you can look into. Sometimes, if you run the program from the terminal, it'll print out logs there. Otherwise, you read look through journalctl, although this has logs for everything so might be harder to search.

    Another useful tip, particularly for system tools and terminal tools, is manual pages. Just run man ls and replace ls with any command, you'll get the documentation on how to use that tool.

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    Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!
  • There are many ways to do this, but the next up from users is using groups!

    For each file or data directory, create a group that owns it. This group should have the service's user as member. Then create a user for running the backups, and add it to all these groups.

    The benefit of this is you don't have to use root, and you have an association of directory to group that you can always change. You can for example grant a user access to a data directory by just adding it to its group.

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  • Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now's your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.

    Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893

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    There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

    The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

    I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

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    https:// english.almanar.com.lb /2165946

    The link is from a pro-Hezbollah source. Summary in my own words below.

    • Hezbollah's leader Hasan Nasrullah addressed in a speech Israel's attack on Beirut, which killed civilians and assassinated Fuad Shukr, hezbollah's most senior military advisor. Shukr is a founding member of Hezbollah.

    • Nasrullah also addressed Ismail Haniya's assassination in Iran, who was the head of Hamas, saying "Iran will not remain silent on this".

    • Israel had previously claimed the attack on Beirut is in response to an attack that killed civilians and children in the Golan heights, a territory of syria that Israel occupies, and Israel blamed hezbollah. Nasrullah rejected the claims - "we have the courage to admit if we made a mistake, but we reject the responsibility of this attack". Nasrullah claimed that Israel's attack is part of its war, rather than a response to the alleged attack.

    • Nasrullah vowed to avenge the attack on Beirut, citing that Israel does not know which red lines they have crossed.

    • Nasrullah said that Hezbollah has so far maintained a support front for Gaza, but that this attack has marked a "new phase" of the war.

    • Nasrullah announced that the support front for Gaza against Israel will resume tomorrow, but that is completely separate from the response to the attack on Beirut. Israel must expect this attack anywhere in occupied Palestine, a full and real response rather than a symbolic one, he said.

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    I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

    Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

    So what's the deal?

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    I'm looking into hosting one of these for the first time. From my limited research, XMPP seems to win in every way, which makes me think I must be missing something. Matrix is almost always mentioned as the de-facto standard, but I rarely saw arguments why it is better than XMPP?

    Xmpp seems way easier to host, requiring less resources, has many more options for clients, and is simpler and thus easier to manage and reason about when something goes wrong.

    So what's the deal?

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    Whether you're really passionate about RPC, MQTT, Matrix or wayland, tell us more about the protocols or open standards you have strong opinions on!

    344

    Given the extistence of technologies like Monero and SimpleX chat, I wonder if it is possible for a truly anonymous content sharing platform to exist? And does it?

    Use cases:

    • sharing pirated content without a link back to you
    • journalists or political activists not wanting to be found or caught by a government

    The platform should not allow the following to know the details of what you do on this platform:

    • users on the platform: should not know the identity of a poster unless they disclose it
    • the host of the platform: should not know which content belongs to who, or be able to deduce it via traffic logs
    • Intermediates like the ISP, DNS, or your router should not be able to link any content to you. However it is okay if they know that you use the platform at all, just not what you do with it.

    Does something like this exist?

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    I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

    I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

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    Curious to know the coolest things you achieved by configuring your kernel. I know kernel config can be boring, but I'm hoping someone will have an impressive answer.

    For me I have a very lightweight kernel that runs wayland on nvidia without any issues to date.

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    I'll start with mine. yes part of this was to brag about my somewhat but not too unusual setup. But I also wanna learn from your setups!

    Anyways: I primarily use Gentoo Linux.

    I have two headless servers: a Raspberry Pi 4B and a Oracle cloud VM (free tier). Both running OpenRC, and both were running mainline kernel with custom config (I recently switched the Pi to PiFoundation kernel due to some issues). The raspberry pi boots from SSD and has no sd card inserted.

    Both servers were running musl libc instead of glibc for a while. This gave me a couple of random issues, but eventually I got tired and switched back to glibc.

    I have a desktop running gentoo and a laptop running arch, but hoping to switch the laptop to gentoo soon.

    Both are daily driving wayland (the desktop had nvidia card and used for gaming). The desktop is running a kernel with a minimal config that compiles in 2-3 minutes.

    What's your unusual setup like?

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    My journey with Lemmy started in 2022 out of interest in the fediverse and paranoia around how much control social media companies have, and how little choice common people are left with over the Internet.

    Lemmy was much smaller back then. I really wanted it go get bigger, and tried to contribute to it. But it was small enough to be unsatisfying, so I would go back and forth between lemmy and Reddit.

    After the Reddit fiasco, I shifted more and more towards lemmy and less towards Reddit. I finally abandoned Reddit when third party apps broke. I only go there for specific questions in communities that aren't active on lemmy.

    What about you?

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    I am looking to contribute to striker funds, if possible. I am located in the US, hence why I choose it.

    I am hoping for striker funds that would be effective enough to make change. In other words, they may be the last thing a group of workers needed to decide to strike.

    I am hoping the fund is efficient in managing its funds, rather than a significant fraction going to administrative costs. Very preferred if the fund's financials are fully transparent.

    Any recommendations?

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    Can anyone recommend cheap laptops that have good build quality and see lightweight?

    I aim to use it for programming, but I connect to my desktop for most hefty work so it doesn't need to have solid performance. 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage are enough for me. a lower grade CPU would still be good; a i3 that's 6 cores is enough.

    What's really important to me is build quality, especially the keyboard. I also don't want it to be big. 13" would be enough, but not too picky here.

    Any recommendations? And are there any communities that are better to ask this in?

    Budget: I am hoping to pay $400 or less, but willing to pay $1000 or even more if it's justified or the value is worthwhile

    OS: Linux. I can install it myself.

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    Tiling window manager users: how exactly do you use yours?

    Do you have advanced keybindings for bringing up frequently used programs?

    Are there less common layouts you use frequently?

    Do you use any advanced or fancy features?

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    Context

    I want to host public-facing applications on a server in my home, without compromising security. I realize containers might be one way to do this, and want to explore that route further.

    Requirements

    I want to run applications within containers such that they

    • Must not be able to interfere with applications running on host
    • Must not be able to interfere with other containers or applications inside them
    • Must have no access or influence on other devices in the local network, or otherwise compromise the security of the network, but still accessible by devices via ssh.

    > Note: all of this within reason. I understand that sometimes there may be occasional vulnerabilities, like in kernel for example, that would eventually get fixed. Risks like this within reason I am willing to accept.

    What I found so far

    • Running containers in rootless mode: in other words, running the container daemon with an unprivileged host user
    • Running applications in container under unprivileged users: the container user under which the container is ran should be unprivileged
    • Networking: The container's networking must be restricted. I am still not sure how to do this and shall explore it more, but would appreciate any resources.

    Alternative solution

    I have seen bubblewrap presented as an alternative, but it seems like it is not intended to be used directly in this manner, and information about using it for this is scarce.

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    Image Alt Text: "After downloading a 2.5GB movie

    Me: Presses play Movie unsupported file" A person is shown with eyes on her laptop punching the wall beside her, causing it to crack.

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    https:// www.reuters.com /world/middle-east/explosion-southern-beirut-suburb-dahiyeh-two-security-sources-2024-01-02/

    This is a major escalation that could greatly expand the war and drag hezbollah deeper into the war, which was already involved in skirmishes with Israel in Lebanese regions that Israel occupies.

    Note: the verbiage of the article is minimizing the focus on Israel, and they spend half the article justifying the attack as "not an attack on Israel" an effort to minimize how much of an escalation this is.

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    EDIT: I enabled CONFIG_MSDOS_PARTITION and that caused it to work. It had nothing to do with the device itself but the partition type on the sd card.

    Thank you do much rattking for the help!

    Original post:

    Hi all, I am using a custom configured linux kernel (Gentoo), with very few things enabled. It has done me very well so far and taught me a bunch, but there's one small issue I have been having lately that is annoying. My SD-card reader (a USB device) is not working, but it works perfectly fine on my arch linux laptop without any kernel configurations.

    Is it possible to tell which drivers or kernel configurations I need by looking at the laptop that is working?

    More context about the issue

    On the machine where it is not working, after plugging the device in, I see this in lsblk output:

    NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS sda 8:0 1 59.5G 0 disk nvme0n1 259:0 0 400G 0 disk ├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 1G 0 part /boot └─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 400G 0 part /

    The device does show sda but no sda/sda1. This is opposite to the laptop, where I do see a sda1 below the sda device, which I can mount using mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/point

    What I tried

    I tried enabling the following kernel configurations: MMC MMC_BLOCK MMC_SDHCI MMC_SDHCI_PCI MMC_RICOH_MMC MMC_SDHCI_ACPI

    Still, this did not change the result.

    I tried looking into the logs, but could not find anything interesting. I am using the sysklogd system logger instead of systemd's journalctl

    The reader I bought

    I bought this a long time ago from amazon: https://algopix.com/products/B08N4N7Q7J-zhoubin-usb-30-sd-card-reader-for-sdxc-sdhc-sd-mmc-rsmmc-micro-sdxc-micro-sd

    Yes I know I cheaped out. But it worked for me until I tried it on this one computer, so I wish to make it work.

    Final Question

    How can I make this work?

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    there are more options that I thought. Any reason to go with Tridactyl's competitors?

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