Hi folks,

I have a problem, a big problem. I have posted a thread over at the Debian forums, but I'm unfortunately in a hurry (my workstation is bricked) so I'm going to cross-post it here (Skullgrid@lemmy.world kindly redirected me to this community for help).

I'm going to paste the text from the Debian help thread below, hopefully someone has an idea how I can pull myself out of this mess.

Quite a bit has happened, so I'll give you a short version with what I think is essential information, and if you need other details please do ask.

Essentially, I tried getting the nvidia driver on a fresh Trixie install using this tutorial (https://fostips.com/install-nvidia-driver-in-debian-13/). I reached the part where it says "After reinstalled the driver, restart your computer.", that's when the terminal turned blue and told me with big centered text that the free driver (?) was already installed and it's conflicting with the new one I am trying to install, but I just need to reboot in order to solve the conflict. So I rebooted and I was greeted by the following prompt.

This goes nowhere, it never boots into Debian. Thinking I had broken Debian, I thought to myself, no big deal, Debian had an issue anyways (see https://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?p=827488), I'll try another random distro (Bazzite) see if it helps. But after installing Bazzite over Trixie, I got the following prompts at boot :

(this one is a bit blurry, it says "Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation")

If I go for "Continue boot" it just cycles over and over again on these prompts. And I don't know what to make of the other choices here.

I can see it's related to the operation I did with the nvidia driver, but I don't understand how the problem wasn't solved by wiping my drive with another distro ? twice... now I have tried with Nobara as well, only to get the same prompts. How can I solve this issue ? my computer is bricked and I really hope that's fixable. Anyone has a clue ?

Like I said, don't hesitate to ask if there's something I haven't said...

Cheers,

I wanted to move my savegame for Mainframe Defenders from my windows to linux. Unfortunately I was unable to figure out where the game expects the savegame.

Is there some equivalent of Process Monitor to figure out where the game writes my savegame to?

I'm thinking about buying a small budget notebook with a touchscreen for university and running a resource friendly Linux distro on it to extend battery life (and also bc windows and Google suck ass). since I'm pretty much out of my depth here: does that make sense at all? are there noob friendly Linux distros available that support touch screen/ flippable notebooks. and if so, would it also make sense to buy a lenovo chromebook rather than a windows 11 based notebook? thanks in advance!

For years, I've used a Razor Naga with DPI switching on one of the side buttons, and for years before that, it was a Logitech G600. I've just installed Linux for the first time in a while only to realize Razor doesn't offer support, and Polychromatic doesn't offer button remapping.

Is there any way to rebind my mouse, or will I have to go back to Windows to keep using my mouse?

1Edit: plz send help fast. I am typing "1" into every window I open. I need rebind this before I break something.1

Edit21: Is there a way to bind a sensitivity toggle to the mouse button event more directly?

Edit 3: I've run out of time to work on this, so I'll need to install Windows for the time being. I might come back to it if I ever get a weekend free.

Screenshot of my partitions. Partition 1 if EFI, Partition 2 is Mint Boot sector I believe. Partition 3 is everything else.

I'm looking to give OpenSUSE TW and Fedora a try specifically. HD is encrypted from install, and I didn't know to put /home on its own partition.

Plenty of storage space to play with. How should I approach hopping with the least amount of pain and cleanup when I finally figure out where I want to land?

I made this post about a month ago :
https://lemmy.world/post/35450797

And I've successfully gotten off windows 10 (nothing to do with the support, my life finally settled down enough for me to be able to pull the trigger). The journey :

Ubuntu Mate > Plus Studio upgrade > Checking out the Pika live boot > Ripping out Mate and installing KDE > Bazzite > Vanilla ass Debian

For now. If I find any problems I can't overcome, or miss some of the cool features of Pika, I will move to pika and stay there as it's been my favourite complete build. But I have some stories to tell.

Since I was going to all the trouble of backing up all my shit and preparing to start from ground zero, I looked ahead and got a couple distros to go hoppin'. From the recs I had :

• Bazzite
• Pika
• Just stick to ubuntu or derivatives
• And through inference, debian. Because fuck it, since ubuntu and ubuntu derivatives are basically debian+ , and I'm nuking this fucker, might as well try that too. After all, if I can't hack it, I'll just install a different linux.

Backstory time : I've been on linux a few times before, though only ubuntu itself in the late 00s, mint in the mid 10s and dropped out eventually due to hardware failures and whatnot. I'm currently a programmer and both my skills , availability of internet knowledge on linux and accessibility of linux itself, horrificness of the world as a whole have converged to a point where I feel like it's finally time to go back.

The reason why I waited so long for this computer from '18 to have linux on it is that IRL has made me depend on my current computer not shitting a brick. I'm talking migrations etc.

Anyway, story time :

I installed the ubuntu mate I had to hand (wife had some old, slow ass computers that needed it), and off I went to the races. On the Ubuntu Studio site I saw that any version could "become" ubuntu studio through a gui based install pack, so I upgraded that way. I tried to tinker with the GUI to make it a bit more the way I'd like it to be, and got tired of my configs getting nuked every time I didn't save the settings correctly or whatever. I also had to do some tinkering to make it run the GPU in games, and had to fiddle to get some steam games to run properly (Fallout 3, Hunnie Pop) but once I got the graphics card sorted, Haven and Snakey Bus ran quite well.

At the moment my perspective on MATE GUI is that it sucks. It is rock solid and dependable on my wife's daily driver which has been on there for a long while now, ever since her tower got bricked, and more power to anyone who made it work. I couldn't.

Also, shoutout to @spex@lemmy.world for the rtcqs rec, it makes it really easy to check what I need for good sound performance. I was able to configure most of the things I needed and I get good enough peformance (so far) on the systems I try it on.

I'm not sure in which order the next two things happened.

I got bored and fed up of mate, and wanted to move on to the next adventure. for a kick, I decided to try replacing the GUI before I left. I followed some instructions on how to install KDE and some on how to remove MATE. I did it and got surprised at how easy it is. Then I ran signal and found out the encryption keys needed to be switched once I started using KDE, and oh well. 95% win , and I really enjoy KDE. Before, I thought I was more of a gnome guy, and didn't like KDE very much. Now, it's the opposite. KDE 4 lyf, KDE connect is fucking awesome and I haven't even scratched the surface of it.

I tried the liveboot of pika. I REALLY like the hardware manager, and KDE base, and it's promising. I have some doubts about how old the community and whatnot is, but I really like how friendly it seems.

Next, I wanted to try Bazzite, since I wanted to try a gaming OS and one of the recommendations. Install was a bit shaky compared to ubuntu, but I was distracted doing other stuff so for now we'll say it's 50/50 blame wise. I had to do absolutely zero config whatsoever for anything and snakeybus and haven ran perfect from minute zero. I tried to apt install something and it told me that apt was not allowed, and the following on the wiki link it gave :

Fedora Atomic Desktops have read-only root files to prioritize stability. Therefore, containerized applications that do not interfere with your host system will work best.

Package formats ranked from most recommended to least recommended for daily usage:

rpm-ostree (System-Level Packages) - Layer Fedora packages at a system-level (not recommended, use as a last resort)

My gut reaction was "Buddy I'm drunk as I want, and I'll kill this OS with my incompetency if I want". Also, all the investment I felt I had with the minimal command line usage and way I've picked up so far on how to do stuff made me not want to stay on bazzite.

It sounds like I dislike bazzite, or that I don't appreciate the rec, far from it. It made me feel that the main branches of linux (as I see them) of Debian, Fedora, Arch and Gentoo were distinct enough for me to have developed an actual preference for debian itself, instead of just its derived noob friendly forms. Maybe as I get better grips as a programmer and Debian user I'll want to brave Arch and Gentoo ; but at the moment I really , really appriciate getting to try Bazzite/fedora, and seeing that immutable, fedora based OSes are not something that I mesh well with, for now.

Now for the actual fun story that made me want to write this long, boring post.

The next day after installing bazzite, I wanted to move on to the next OS. I figured with the live boot playing I did, if I wanted to settle down, it was going to be with Pika. I really, really like how friendly it is, how explicit it is in GUI about what's being used, what drivers what hardware has, etc etc. So; if I were to try out raw ass debian, this was going to be my shot, as I don't think I'll move off pika if I get on it.

Pop in the USB stick, launch the gui install. The button layouts threw me off a bit (to the point where I was confused about if I had set the wrong resolution) , but it connected to wifi fine, and I eventually got the improved reformatting of the drive done. All right. Maybe it's just the installer, I should be happy to get a friendly enough GUI installer with WIFI capabilities. Finish the install "Remove media and reboot" sure.

System Reboots. All I get is the command prompt as if I'm running dos on a windows 3.1 machine. Da fuq?! Sure enough vanilla ass debian comes with fucking nothing apparently. But, here's the fun part, because I manually decided to rip out MATE before nuking it from orbit, I know that I can just install KDE with no trouble ... hopefully. I have no idea what the fuck else debian didn't come with, maybe I'll have to manually install drivers for everything under the sun too. Reboot again, bam. Sexy KDE UI the way I got used to like a week ago.

Some snags though; the network interface is there, but no wifi... but I'm connected to the internet? Turns out I need to remove the setup for that from somewhere. Gotta install the NVidia drivers, no way to manually select which graphics card is active through gui, but, games seem to be using the 3d card when they need it. Great. Hunnie Pop and Fallout 3 (which didn't run on windows 10 or Ubuntu) are doing great. Snakey Bus and Haven are great too, as usual.

I got some midi input showing through piano booster, but the UI is all fucked up , I used rtcqs and audacity to check multi track recording, however tenacity is fucked (until I try harder with rtcqs to fix the problems it has), I have yet to try OBS, but the fundamentals seem to be there.

For now, I think I can enjoy being on Vanilla Ass Debian at least as a learning experience for a while, especially if I look around for hardware managers similar to pika. If I can't hack it, I have a USB with pika on it ready to go.

I got inspired to write this long ass post because it was funny to me that the raw install of debian has no window manager, and to thank all the people that gave me recs; specifically :

• @spex
• @Tuuktuuk@sopuli.xyz (thanks for reminding me that it's debian all the way down)
• @LostWanderer@fedia.io (thanks for the anti-recommendation of Cachy/Arch
• @TragicNotCute@lemmy.world (Bazzite was worth a shot, not for me, but opened my eyes and really helped see my own capabilites and preferences)
• @janNatan@lemmy.ml (for recommending I try ubuntu anyway, which led me to experimenting more, leading to installing KDE manually)
• @Fizz@lemmy.nz (Pika is GOATed, and if I fail here, I'm moving there forever... hopefully)
• You for reading this

Fuck it, watch a dumb video if you want. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fVAIZkIV7Q (Dankpods/Dankmus makes a ramshackle computer and shoves bazzite on it)

I am wanting to upload my save file for hollow knight silksong to a progress tracker on the wiki. I have the game on Steam, running it through Proton 9.0-4, and I'm on Fedora 42 KDE Plasma.

Trying to access the location ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME/unity3d/Team Cherry/Hollow Knight Silksong/) through Dolphin just gives an "invalid protocol" message.

What should I do?

I know this is a pretty common question, but the Google results don't seem to offer a good solution and are mostly aimed at people who already know Linux.

I am looking to switch from Windows, where I have my OS and whatever big game I'm currently playing on my 128GB SSD, and everything else (games, most software, documents, ect.) on my 2TB HDD. ELI5, How would I replicate this on Linux? I'm planning on installing Mint, but am open to using Bazzite if it offers any additional tools for this sort of this.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/47508691

When my laptop is on battery, the brightness changes depending on what's on the screen.

It changes when I maximize or minimize a window, when I open or close a tooltip, when the visual bell goes off in my terminal, when I move my mouse onto something, when I'm watching a video with no input.

It is extremely annoying and I would like it to stop happening.

All the solutions I have seen only work for a Dell Inspiron with Intel CPU, and mine is AMD.

System stats

Hardware: Dell Inspiron 15 with AMD Ryzen 7 CPU, 16GB RAM, AMD Radeon graphics.

Software: Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie) with Linux 6.12.43 kernel and KDE Plasma 6.3.6 desktop

When I first began researching Linux, for my needs, I found the number of different Distros to be overwhelming. So I made this flow chart, with the intent to help new users find a starting point for choosing a distribution.

I'm open to critique, as to making this chart as helpful as possible.

EDIT: Chart updated based on suggestions in the comments.

If anyone knows if this bug is already being tracked on the KDE bugzilla, or if its been fixed in newer versions, please link it below! :)

So, what's the deal with NumLock? I have it tuned on in the BIOS and in KDE settings, yet every time I boot up my PC or open the terminal as super user, it is turned off. Any way to deal with this? That happened on Bazzite, Fedora and now Cachy. I have a 100% keyboard and I want to use all 100% of it.

Noooooob here: As title said - I don't know what distro I should choose. My needs are student stuff like Libreoffice & Videoconferences but also creative things, photo-management and cutting videos. Does it matter at all? Do I have to check for every single program I use or is there a distro that is recommended?

I was planning on getting a Tuxedo with Tuxedo OS, but my neighbour recommended another "no os"-seller and now I'm not sure. I was opting for Tuxedo mainly because of the support since I'm leaving windows after many years^^

(Picture shows the lilac and blueish ports that we had for mouse and keyboard back "in my days" with the words "How old are you" - "Me:" on top - just because this community semmingly requires a picture added)

https://ubuntustudio.org/

I want something that's stupid easy to install, requires no setup, and has recording and gaming functionality from the beginning. I constantly see people shitting on ubuntu for semi-valid reasons, and I'm open to stable alterantives.

I'm installing it on this laptop :

https://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/msi-gl62m-7rex-core-i7-7700hq-8gb-1tb-256gb-ssd-15.6-inch-geforce-gtx-105-9s7-16j962-1293/version.asp

NB : This is for mission critical etc laptop. This will be my only daily driver computer, stability is the topmost priority.

BONUS POINTS : If it's debian based so I can run solarus : https://solarus-games.org/

I am looking to build a machine to use for file backups and some light media serving (PhotoPrism, Calibre, and the like). My plan is to take a retired desktop, throw in every old drive I have lying around, and merge them with Greyhole.

I am a seasoned Linux user (in containers or on machines being managed by others). I am comfortable with CLI basics and should be able to use the system entirely over SSH and web UIs, so I am fine without a window manager. What I am not fine with is system administration (and do not want to spend time fixing issues that constantly pop-up).

Ideally, I would want to find a distro that I can install by accepting reasonable defaults, configure my storage and my various applications, create a cron job to periodically update packages and reboot the machine, and the machine will just keep working with no intervention on my part. I realize that that is an impossible goal, but I want to get as close as I can.

Hiya,

I've been meaning to switch off of Debian for a while but I'm intimidated by fear of having a worse experience and my only PC (work and personal) being out of action until I get it sorted. Maybe the time has come to take my current distro behind the woodshed.

I updated from Debian 12 to 13 yesterday, following the instructions here: https://www.linuxlookup.com/howto/upgrade_debian_12_debian_13

The last step fails, and I assume that's why I'm now in trouble.

$ sudo apt modernize-sources
E: Invalid operation modernize-sources

Searching for "Invalid operation modernize-sources" gives me literally zero results from DDG.

After reboot I opened KDE Discover and checked for updates - there are 2,000+. Yeesh. OK. I haven't found one that will actually update, presumably because the sources are wrong? I get different errors.

For example, updating the Clock (I can't believe the clock needs updating) auto-selects some other packages, I assume dependencies. Many minutes later I get the error:

The PackageKit daemon has crashed:
The PackageKit daemon has crashed

Firefox doesn't select any other options, but fails quickly with:

Dependency resolution failed:<br/><br/>The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libreoffice-core: Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0 (&gt;= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-base but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-good but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad but it is not going to be installed
                    Recommends: gstreamer1.0-libav but it is not going to be installed

Is this worth fixing? Is it a sign to finally kill my Debian and try something new?

A kind lemming suggested Nixos and was persuasive, but my reading indicates that's more for sysadmins deploying systems than for a bearded guy in his home office with one PC.

I just want my computer to work...

Greetings!

I’m rebuilding my old gaming-focused beast. I’ve got parts coming today (new mobo, cpu, ram, and cooling unit, everything else I hope to reuse, to keep this cheap as possible), and I’ll be building it up tomorrow (thermal paste arrives tomorrow 😭)

I have no need for this computer to do anything but gaming, as I have others that can’t handle gaming for that. So I’m thinking a gaming-focused distro would be good. However this is nowhere near top of the line hardware, I’m aiming to run mostly cpu-heavy games (stuff like rimworld and oxygen not included), as I really like having way too much going on at once. So maybe that changes things.

I’ve had an absolute hell of a time getting games to run through lutris on stock Ubuntu. I’m hoping bazzite will improve that somewhat. It probably won’t.

But I understand it’s fedora based, which is a big new thing for me as I’ve only messed with Debian-based. And there’s probably a lot I’ve not considered.

So what do I need to know? What would be helpful to know before I start this? Any good resources you can point me toward for gaming on bazzite, like install troubleshooting guides or something that might make this less of a nightmare? (Seriously I can only get a handful of games installed that should be able to run, and that’s with an absolute ton of effort, very frustrating.)

Thanks in advance!

I use my Debian desktop for both work and personal uses. I have trouble with work-life balance, and I think segregating may help. I'm looking for tips on the best ways to accomplish this.

First thought is to create a user each for work and play, but I guess I'd want to somehow restrict applications to one or the other, and I do use some of the same. (Browser, IDE)

Second thought is to dual boot with an entirely unrelated install.

Is there a better way that I haven't thought of?

I'm moving away from Windows (yay!) and need to bring a few features with me. Microsoft added this auto complete feature to PowerShell recently and I need something similar:

I found this package which is helpful, but it requires you to hit tab before you get a list of suggested commands: https://wiki.debian.org/Add%20Bash%20Completion

Do I need a different shell entirely? I'm using bash on Debian now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/33505905

This could be especially good for new users who do not understand the command line or those who have used the command line on another os and need to understand the command usage on Linux.

I would like to add another wireless access point near my little deck and 0.1 acre back yard and I have some extra Raspberry/Orange Pi hardware lying around that should easily be up to the task. I remember installing DD-WRT on a WRT54G north of twenty years ago in something like AP mode. Is it still up to the task or is there something better now?

I set up a laptop with linux mint cinnamon within the last two weeks, and while trying to install The Sims 4 today I got a message that the hard drive was out of space. I have installed nothing so far except for Steam, and tools to get The Sims 4 running. I see that 131gb is taken up by .ecryptfs and a web search turned up this thread however I used the utility that was suggested with the same result. Then OP says multiple reboots have cleared up the issue. I am on reboot 4 now with no such luck.

Is it safe to delete this? Is it something with timeshifted?

i’ve been using a USB 2.0 drive to run a live linux OS for the past couple of years, mostly for storing linux ISOs, installing linux on laptops and live persistence. lately, i’ve noticed a huge drop in write speed, currently around 1.8 MB/s, which is pretty slow for the tasks i do. i'm planning to replace it with a USB 3.0 drive in the future, but i wanted to ask:

• how long have you typically used a USB drive for live linux systems, including for live persistence??
• do you still use USB 2.0, or did you upgrade to a 3.0 or higher?
• any tips to extend the lifespan of a USB drive when using it for live linux systems?

i'm mainly looking for advice and insights on how others manage their USB drives for similar use cases. thanks in advance for sharing!

EDIT: it's a usb stick. forgot to tell.