Linux’s Sole Wireless/WiFi Driver Maintainer Is Stepping Down

Link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Wireless-Maintainer-2025
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43088486

#linux

I tried the @tuxedocomputers InfinityFlex 14, and took the opportunity to look at how well, or badly, major #Linux desktops ran on touchscreens.

I tested #KDE and #GNOME, and well, let's say the one that looks the most touch friendly, really wasn't...

The laptop is really nice, though!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0gxI_cSfaU

Setting up a trusted, self-signed SSL/TLS certificate authority in Linux

Link: https://previnder.com/tls-ca-linux/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43083687

#linux

Well, a cup of hot coffee ☕ and some mundane ritual

#life #coffee #music #linux #research #opensourcedevelopment #operatingsystem

I helped fix sleep-wake hangs on Linux with AMD GPUs

Link: https://nyanpasu64.gitlab.io/blog/amdgpu-sleep-wake-hang/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43071983

#linux

I need MySql Workbench on my daily driver OS, which is Fedora 41. But I can’t seem to find a way to install it.

I first tried this, but dnf can’t find the package even after adding the repository.

Same issue with this.

For both tutorials I tried searching my dnf for the workbench and trying different variations of the name, but it just doesn’t seem to exist as an installable package.

I even installed the snap package version (after installing snapd for the first time), which does install on the system, but it seems to have some kind of dependency issue because keeps saying could not execute child process dbus-launch no such file or directory when I try to do anything (even though I have dbus installed according to dnf).

So now I’m stumped. Does anyone know how you’re “supposed” to install MySQL Workbench on Fedora 41?

This will be a bit long, so feel free to skip to the end tl;dr.

I’ve been a long time user of Linux. Back in the day I would burn live CDs like Slackware and Mandrake to try out. There was even that one distro that fit on a floppy, Damn Small Linux. More recently, I manage several Debian-based servers and a Raspbian system. However, I felt stuck daily-driving Windows due to game support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, so I decided to make the switch. Just wanted to share some observations I’ve made in the course of that.

A little while ago, I setup a laptop for a family member with Mint, primarily based on popularity and community recommendation. At the same time, I installed Mint on a laptop and used it for a bit. It’s basically a backup laptop, so the intention was to have something stable and easy to use/update. I found Mint nice at first, but some cracks started showing after a bit, and eventually I became frustrated with Cinnamon. Since I am familiar with Arch, and it allows for choice of DE (if any), I decided to stick with it for the foreseeable future.

Current Setups

• Desktop: Arch, BTRFS, KDE, Wayland
• Laptop: Arch, FDE, BTRFS, Hyprland
• Home “server”: Arch, Gnome, Wayland (mainly run headless, for AI workloads)

KDE

I hadn’t used KDE since the days when Plasma was in beta. It was a complete mess then. Things have matured quite a bit since then, so I decided to give a shot again for the desktop. I think, mainly, I wanted to familiarity of tray icons and such.

KDE has been great! I love the amount of pointless eye-candy I can enable, and the things that can be customized. Over the last few months, I’ve experienced a couple crashes which seem to be related to kwin. There’s also a weird issue where powerdevil (or something related to it) is resetting one or more of my monitor’s brightness when it shouldn’t be.

Hyprland

Since I don’t recall using a tiling WM seriously, I thought it’d be fun to try out Hyprland. It also fits well with the laptop, a Thinkpad X390, having an older intel processor and constrained thermal/power situation. Because I’m lazy, I chose a mostly pre-configured setup from JaKooLit. I like the look of it, and the other ones I considered require Network-Manager, so they were a no go.

Like with KDE, Hyprland has been great! It took less time than I expected to get accustomed to it, and everything mostly just works as expected. The main hiccups seem to come from software which renders in a fixed size, which isn’t surprising. I also like there is a tree-sitter plugin for the DSL.

Gnome

I hadn’t used Gnome much since the old days. It was a lot different then. It’s hanging out on the so-called server, but I’ve only used it enough to get everything setup the way I like. GDM is disabled on startup.

My experience with Gnome is mixed. I like how “sleek” it is, but not that I need to install extensions for everything. If I were to use it daily, I’m sure I’d get used to it. Even then, GSettings/dconf sucks. I really don’t get the design decision to create what is essentially the Windows registry, but on Linux.

BTRFS

Previously, I mainly stuck ext2/3/4, because it was familiar and easy. In this recent switch, I was looking for some more advanced features. After looking into ZFS a bit, I decided it wasn’t for me. Too complicated, not in mainline kernel. So, BTRFS it is.

After some initial confusion, I’m really happy with BTRFS. I have automated snapshots with yabsnap, which has already proven helpful when I may have clobbered a system library and everything was messed up. The transparent compression is great as well.

nvim

Having used vim for several years, it seemed fitting to migrate to nvim. I quite like the support for Lua, and the wealth of themes, plugins and so forth. Using Lazy means I can pretty much just copy over a config and be up and running on a new/remote system with no fuss.

Lutris

Lutris is what I’m using to help facilitate running Windows-only games. Ultimately, it’s a very nice piece of software, but is lacking in detailed documentation and sometimes requires reviewing logs to see what might be going wrong. Something I really like is the ability to wine/proton runtimes if the default isn’t working. The simple GUI layout with box art is refreshing as well.

systemd

Some people really dislike systemd, and I get it. But I like it. I’ve fully embraced it alongside extras like networkd, timesyncd, and resolved. Need to do something on a schedule? Write a quick service and timer, then check on it once in a while. It’s not quite as succinct as cron, but I prefer the consistent declarative syntax. I was very happy to discover wg2nd, which allowed me to convert my wireguard config files into networkd configs.

Backups

I’m using borgmatic, which automates borg, for backups. This is done daily, for all important files and the system partitions. Really couldn’t be easier. In contrast, there are not a lot of advanced FOSS backup solutions for Windows, so I would manually run system partition backups there.

Hardware Support

I was pleasantly surprised to find my printer, an older Canon AIO, was supported by Gutenprint. My plan was to buy a new Brother laser printer, but I managed to get the existing one to work both via USB and wireless. This is great, as the Canon still technically works and I can get random “re-manufactured” cartridges on the cheap. I say technically because it’s getting more noisy over time, squeaking, and really seeming to struggle. We’ll see if it holds up.

All the other stuff, aside from fingerprint reader, work as expected. This is a far cry from 10-20 years ago. Great to see.

Overall Thoughts

Linux Desktop 2025 Edition has been awesome. Basically everything works better than I expected. Crashes less than the competition in my experience. I have the freedom, as a power user, to customize the experience. There are also no ads.

That said, I still have a Windows laptop for school, because they require it. I’m hating it more every day. There is one particular piece of software that only exists for Mac/Windows which means I can’t retire that system, yet. This particular school has recently bought even more into MS. I’d drop them if I knew of any alternatives that weren’t caught up in the same thing.

Should you switch to daily driving Linux? Yes, especially if you have some prior experience.

tl;dr

Linux has come quite a ways in the past couple decades and now is a great experience outside of some very specialized software/hardware.

On windows I had two bat file shortcuts on my desktop to swap primary monitors, how would I do the equivalent on linux? Sunshine/moonlight can only show you one monitor, the primary one, using this I was able to swap back and forth on windows, new to linux and not sure what to do here for the same result. Ideally itd be just one shortcut but I got lazy figuring it out on windows.

Well, a cup of hot coffee ☕ and Frank Sinatra's number

🎶 The Way You Look Tonight 🎶

#life #coffee #music #linux #research

.....and some rudimentary ritual

#linuxkernel #opensourcedevelopment #operatingsystem

I’ve just got a new laptop with a high resolution display and am having some trouble with scaling, particularly audio plugin GUIs which cannot be resized in Ardour (audio workstation) and are consequently too small to use. In the past I have launched qt apps via a script with something like 'packagename QT_SCALE_FACTOR=1.5’ (I don’t have the exact command to hand).

Can gtk apps also be launched in this way? Is this a valid approach to the problem?

Hell is getting frosty at the edges. Today my wife said she was getting fed up with Windows 11and AI shenanigans and might think about switching to #Linux.

For some time I missed the notification icon of discord. I mean the little number in the taskbar icon that appears, when you get a message.

Today I found a fix for it in the archwiki.

You need to have libunity version packaged for your distro installed. For me on debian it was libunity9. After installing it, you get the notification icon again!

What would you reccomend/use for an alienware laptop m17r5 with amdcpu (idr) and gpu 6850mxt. Idc about adjusting the keyboard lights, I changed it once and never touched it again. I play games like cities skyline, noita, etc. and some vr stuff rarely like vtolvr and warthunder. I use blender and houdinifx.
I’ve seen PopOs reccomended for Blender users but I think thats because it comes with a lot of stuff you need for Nvidia, which isn’t relevant to me with an all amd setup.

Cachyos seems to be the move for best performance with rendering and simulating, was wondering about other options I have since I dont need to worry about nvidia drivers.

I dont like the idea of using ubuntu because of snap packages, but its not a big deal.

While I like tinkering, I do want it to be relatively stable, not suprising me with issues when I need it.

Well, a cup of hot coffee ☕ and Bob Dylan'snumber

🎶 Don't Fall Apart On Me Tonight 🎶

#life #coffee #music #linux #research

.....and some bloody ordinary ritual ...

#linuxkernel #opensourcedevelopment #operatingsystem

💻 Me: "Alright, it's probably time to order a new laptop for conferences. Nothing too expensive, but powerful enough. Maybe something customizable. I think about it for a few days… and decide: I'll get a Framework!"

🔗 Opens website…

🎤 Framework: "Hey! We're announcing a new laptop on February 25th!"

🤦‍♂️ Me: "Well… guess I'll wait and see. But… will I get it in time for the March 21st conference? 😅"

#Laptop #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #Linux

Time for this week's #Linux and #OpenSource News video, with some weird stuff happening...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZwHpZDm6F4

my home server needs to be redone and i’m seeking ideas on how to future proof it. here’s some ascii art in a screenshot to help describe how it’s currently setup:

description (left to right):

• laptops, smartphones, tables, etc connect to an access point configured on a windows 10 virtual machine (vm). the windows10 vm uses pci passthrough on the wireless adapter and this is done to get gigabit wifi speeds since intel’s drivers won’t allow linux to do this in ap mode; but will allow it just fine if you’re using windows.
• requests from the wifi clients are passed via dns & ip masquerade to another virtual machine based on pfsense
• pfsense serves as the router, firewall, vpn, ad blocking & web hosting and it’s also configured to use pci passthrough on the primary network interface to gap internet traffic from the server
• the center of the drawing shows how i perform data backups using a wired connection with a hardware switch and i setup the host ubuntu server to manage dhcp on the secondary network interface & the devices that are connect to the switch. the data is stored using rsync and harddrives are setup to use an extremely large lvm made of several different types of hard drives.

i’ve rebuilt this server multiple times each time i encountered a “gotcha” or a surprise that i had not anticipated and it made some needful component stop working; so i’m seeking advice from Lemmy on how to redesign this to mitigate future surprises.

some of the surprises i’ve encountered so far are:

• the pfsense logs overfilled the root volume of the bsd based vm because logrotate was configured for linux. the image is hardcoded with a single volume so i will need to find a way to borrow some space from the backup volume using nfs and configure the logs to write there instead of locally.
• i have no key for the windows10 vm; so i’m forced to clone it’s qcow image and manually configure the hotspot each time the 30 day free trial from microsoft expires. I intend to improve upon this creating an ansible job to rotate this virtual machine every 30 days automatically and include powershell based tasks to configure the hotspot in windows automatically
• intel limits the speed for linux native internet connection sharing to 100 megabits (already mentioned & fixed above)
• the local users home volume overfills when trying to take my google backups (already fixed)

constraints:

• don’t spend anymore $$$
• gigabyte wifi is A MUST

New blogpost: Blocking searches and removing other people's toots: my Mastodon server and the Online Safety Act

My attempts at trying to close off some of the loopholes in my Mastodon server:

• nginx configuration to limit access to the search tool, which can be used to essentially proxy content from other servers

• learning how to delete toots, and media, from the database, so that it is no longer on my instance. Blunt but effective?

https://neilzone.co.uk/2025/02/blocking-searches-and-removing-other-peoples-toots-my-mastodon-server-and-the-online-safety-act/

#Mastodon #selfhosting #OnlineSafetyAct #Linux #FOSS

Routine stuff and a cup of hot coffee ☕ keep me interested in it 😜

#life #coffee #music #linux #research #opensourcedevelopment #operatingsystem

This is a January 21 post, but that's not the point. The point is to put the Linux phone alternative on your radar screen as Apple and Google go to bed with a fascist regime.

Liberux NEXX is a Linux smartphone with a RK3588S chip, 32GB RAM, and a 5G modem (crowdfunding) https://liliputing.com/liberux-nexx-is-a-linux-smartphone-with-a-rk3588s-chip-32gb-ram-and-a-5g-modem-crowdfunding/ #Linux #Apple #Google

Linux kernel cgroups writeback high CPU troubleshooting

Link: https://dasl.cc/2025/01/01/debugging-our-new-linux-kernel/
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046174

#linux

#Docker alike container management on #FreeBSD? Let's have a look at #Kleene - which works very similar to Docker and makes the shift for Linux users even easier to #Jails without having deeper knowledge but by benefiting of all the features on Jails.

#klee #kleened #bsd #runbsd #linux #container #howto #devops #community #jails #freebsdjail #container #containerization #jailmanager #manager #jls

https://gyptazy.com/howto-kleene-as-a-container-management-platform-for-freebsd/