Linux

The best one I've ever heard is they like the Microsoft wallpapers. Yes i told them you can use them on linux too. But they argued with me that they wouldn't be compatible.

OQB @lordnikon@lemmy.world

Windows is getting worse, while gaming on Linux is getting better. I’m gonna move my desktop to CachyOS. Wish me luck.

This is extremely encouraging to me. I am not affiliated with the project but here is what I've gathered. Run by Mike.

• Nix (with the functional declarative design)
• Cinnamon (DE mostly used by Linux Mint, Mike and I think Cinnamon doesn't get enough respect)
• Two versions, main and "lite".
• zero config auto update is a huge selling point imo
• flatpak is a nice touch

Main:

• "4 core and 4GB of ram" target
• Flatpak integrated and auto-updates
• Zoom flatpak
• Chrome flatpak and Firefox
• Libreoffice flatpak

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    git
    firefox
    libnotify
    gawk
    gnugrep
    sudo
    dconf
    gnome-software
    gnome-calculator
    gnome-calendar
    gnome-screenshot
    flatpak
    xdg-desktop-portal
    xdg-desktop-portal-gtk
    xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
    system-config-printer

Lite:

• "2 core and 2 GB of RAM" target
• no flatpak
• firefox

  zramSwap.memoryPercent = 100;
MemoryHigh = "500M";
environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
    git
    firefox
    libnotify
    gawk
    sudo
    gnome-calculator
    gnome-calendar
    gnome-screenshot
    system-config-printer
  ];

Github

Installing

boot the special ISO and connect to wifi via the system settings via the start menu (rough edges here). install.

secure boot is not first-class supported in nix but it 'can' be done.

Does the market need this?

It feels like yes. See what do you install on other people's computers?. A zero-support OS that isn't tied into ChromeOS is a tall order. There are a lot of distros that are "semi" friendly but which are strong enough to give to a stranger and never hear from them again?

The pitch is compelling enough that I put it on my small laptop. I used it for about 20 minutes. That laptop is not a project laptop, and if I could just browse and do basic linux stuff and never think about maintaining it again I'd be happy. I can report back (and contribute to nixbook) if it serves my needs. If it passes my tests I may transition the family Win10 PC to nixbook. I'm getting spooked at how many more threats target Windows than Linux.

tweaking

I'm an ultra noob with nix but you should be able to edit this and have it work. Mike has a post about which config file to edit but I can't find it. https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nixos-rebuild

$ # Edit your configuration
$ sudo nano /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
$ # Rebuild your system
$ sudo nixos-rebuild switch

I added silversearcher tldr tilde and seemed to work.

Cool tweet

https://fosstodon.org/@codemonkeymike/115582530036847888

OC by @BigHeadMode@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz

Max 16 Plus laptop with a Qualcomm discrete NPU is now shipping... That is if you are running Ubuntu Linux while the Windows 11 pre-load option is expected in early 2026. An exciting twist with the Linux version of the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus shipping before Microsoft Windows.

The new Dell Pro Max 16 Plus features a Qualcomm AI 100 PC inference accelerator. The Dell Pro Max 16 Plus makes it the first mobile workstation with such an "enterprise grade" discrete NPu.

They are a warm and welcoming community. You can attend or present at no cost. LinuxFest Northwest (est. 2000) is an annual, free-to-attend F/LOSS conference co-produced by Bellingham Linux Users Group, Information Technology department at BTC, Jupiter Broadcasting, and Cascade STEAM.

LFNW features presentations and exhibits on free/libre and open source topics, as well as Linux distributions & applications, licensing, InfoSec, DevOps, AI/ML, creative software, hardware, and privacy; something for everyone from the novice to the professional!

Zorin OS 18 was released on October 14. Just 48 hours later, the team announced it had already been downloaded 100K times. Now, a month later, they’re reporting an even bigger milestone: Zorin OS 18 has surpassed 1M downloads in its first month.

“We’re thrilled to announce that Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release, breaking all previous records.”

In fact, it would be great to see more Linux distributions adopt this practice and share their download numbers. That alone would give us a much clearer sense of how widely each one is used, since the Linux community still doesn’t have a reliable way to measure the popularity of individual distros.

"If you ask me, Microsoft has been one of the biggest driving forces behind Linux adoption in recent years. The way they've been handling Windows, with its forced updates, aggressive telemetry, and questionable AI features, has sent more people to Linux than any marketing campaign ever could. And they are at it again with a new AI feature that could be tricked into installing malware on your system. ... Microsoft admits that features like Copilot Actions introduce "novel security risks." They warn about cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content in documents or UI elements can override the AI's instructions. ..."

When talking about recording studios, you can’t avoid two operating systems. One of them comes preinstalled on most PCs and laptops, you can buy the hardware for a few euros at any grocery store, and its name is basically synonymous with “PC”: Windows. The other comes from Apple, is tied to comparatively expensive hardware, and is built on a Unix-like kernel. Usually, producers start out on a Windows PC, then professionalize at some point and switch to Mac. The reason is pretty simple: Mac is stable and doesn’t force updates on you while you’re rendering your 64-track audio.

Mainly because of its widespread use, Windows is the quasi-standard in every smaller studio — and definitely among bedroom producers. But let’s be honest: Is Windows even up to date for studio work anymore?

I used Linux in the studio for many years. Now, as part of becoming more professional as a musician, I had to switch back to Windows. Not because my DAW isn’t available for Linux, but because I rely on plugins that simply don’t work on Linux, even with Wine. This text is a call to Native Instruments, Orchestral Tools, Musio, and all the other brilliant developers who make plugins for Mac and Windows — but neglect Linux.

Does anyone have any experience with HuggingFace TTS models in Firefox? I know that there is a mobile application that allows you to change your default TTS engine to one of the models. I also know of an old method to get different, better-sounding TTS to work in Firefox. I think I was also able to get the Microsoft voices working through the same method with some workarounds, but I'm unable to provide a link. Any advice would be much appreciated.

Rusticl as a modern OpenCL implementation for Mesa Gallium3D drivers has turned out remarkably well. Rusticl performance has evolved quite well for this Rust-based OpenCL driver and it continues tacking on new features / OpenCL extensions as well as working gracefully with more Mesa drivers. Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst presented on some of the recent accomplishments for this driver back at XDC2025.

At the X.Org Developers Conference in Vienna, Karol Herbst of Red Hat presented on some of the milestones achieved this year for this driver that has worked out much better than the former Mesa "Clover" OpenCL driver. A lot has happened in the past number of months for Rusticl from Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) finally getting into place, SPIR-V 1.6 features, async and parallel program compilation, and supporting a wide variety of additional OpenCL extensions.

Linux and Git inventor Linus Torvalds discussed AI in software development in an interview earlier this month, describing himself as "fairly positive" about vibe coding, but as a way into computing, not for production coding where it would likely be horrible to maintain.

Torvalds was interviewed by Dirk Hohndel, head of open source at Verizon, at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit in Seoul, South Korea, earlier this month.

Torvalds is technical lead and maintainer of the Linux kernel, but said that "for the last almost 20 years, I've not been a programmer." As for Git, which he invented, "I really just look at it from the side."

The team behind vkd3d has announced the release of version 1.18. Developed and maintained by the Wine project, it’s an open-source library that translates Microsoft’s Direct3D graphics calls to Vulkan, thus allowing Windows applications and games that use Direct3D 12 to run on systems where only Vulkan is available.

One highlight is the addition of CreateCommandList1() from the ID3D12Device4 interface, extending coverage of newer D3D12 features used by modern Windows titles.

The shader compiler sees the biggest set of changes. vkd3d 1.18 improves HLSL handling by performing more constant folding, simplifying math expressions, and flattening if/else branches when older shader models require it. Plus, it also expands support for older Shader Model 1–3 code, adds StructuredBuffer loads, and implements several widely used HLSL intrinsics.

A set of Linux kernel patches posted back in October for rewriting the kernel's memory-mapped concurrency ID code for some nice performance wins looks like it will land for Linux 6.19. This is the code that prominent Intel engineer Thomas Gleixner found to yield up to an 18% improvement for the PostgreSQL database. My testing of this "mm/cid" code has also shown some nice performance wins too.

Intel Fellow Thomas Gleixner overhauled the CID management code after finding the existing complex code introduced significant overhead into the kernel scheduler's hot code paths. This new code is simpler and lower-overhead.

There have been several recent announcements about Linux distributions changing the list of architectures they support, or adjusting how they build binaries for some versions of those architectures. Ubuntu introduced architecture variants, Fedora considered dropping support for i686 but reversed course after some pushback, and Debian developers have discussed raising its architecture baseline for the upcoming Debian 14 ("forky"). Linux supports a large number of architectures, and it's not always clear where or by whom they are used. With increasing concerns about diminishing support for legacy architectures, it's a good time to look at the overall state of architecture support on Linux.

A note on LWN: I was posting subscriber "free links" for a bit from lwn, but was asked to significantly reduce the frequency of that. But I would like to encourage you all to subscribe if you can, a lot of us around here are Linux nerds and they are a great ad free publication with some very indepth and technical articles

Along with new functionality, systemd is broadening its distro support even further, which will surely delight members of the wider Linux community.

Systemd v259-rc1 is the first preview release of what will be the next version of the most widely used system and service manager in the Linux world. It is also, of course, the most controversial, and some of the changes in this version further widen systemd's scope – which we suspect will provoke some push-back, but probably won't slow down its adoption or growth.

Linux hardware vendor Slimbook announced today the launch of the KDE Slimbook VII laptop to celebrate 8 years of collaboration with the KDE project in creating the best Plasma-powered Linux notebooks.

Designed for KDE Plasma users and optimized for the Linux ecosystem, the KDE Slimbook VII laptop features a premium aluminum chassis in a sophisticated slate-blue color, an AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 processor with integrated AMD Radeon 880M graphics, up to 128 GB DDR5 RAM, and up to 8 TB NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD storage.

The KDE Slimbook VII Linux laptop also features a 16-inch WQXGA display with 2560×1600 resolution, 100% sRGB, 16:10 aspect ratio, 400 nits brightness, and 165 Hz refresh rate, a multi-language backlit keyboard, and a cooling system with dual fans and dedicated keys to switch between power modes.

As Snowden told us, video and audio recording capabilities of your devices are NSA spying vectors. OSS/Linux is a safeguard against such capabilities. The massive datacenter investments in US will be used to classify us all into a patriotic (for Israel)/Oligarchist social credit score, and every mega tech company can increase profits through NSA cooperation, and are legally obligated to cooperate with all government orders.

Speech to text and speech automation are useful tech, though always listening state sponsored terrorists is a non-NSA targeted path for sweeping future social credit classifications of your past life.

Some small LLMs that can be used for speech to text: https://modal.com/blog/open-source-stt

As per FSF only these linux distributions are 100% free:

Dragora
Dyne
Guix
Hyperbola
Parabola
PureOS
Trisquel
Ututo
libreCMC
ProteanOS

Do you agree or not?

I see a lot of people that want to switch from windows to a linux distro or a open os. But from what i see they tend to migrate to another black boxed/closed os.

What is a trully free os that doesnt included any closed code/binary blobs/closed drivers etc.

Just 100% free open code, no traps.

What are the options and what should one go with if they want fully free os that rejects any closed code?

OQB @pie@piefed.social

Right, so Racknerd doesn't offer Arch image:

As for custom ISO installers, that requires opening a ticket with tech support, giving them a link to the ISO, and asking them to mount it.
Well, I am not doing all that.

So, there's also this outdated (will become important later) "rescue environment":

Linux Kernel 4.x is Debian 9 and 3.x is Debian 8. I don't know why they couldn't just say that.

So, the recovery environment has some RAM (but seems to be less than the VPS), and some storage (around 1GiB). The free storage is around 350MiB.
The recovery environment can be accessed over SSH. OpenSSH 1:6.7p1-5+deb8u4, on that older thing, if someone is curious. Modern OpenSSH client just complains about old key exchange (quantum-resistance), but connects.

Welp, Arch Linux bootstrap is 138MiB compressed, so let's go.
But not so quickly.
There's no wget, nor curl. So let's install them.
Well, apt no longer works. Old minimal environment without package installer. Cool.
I found some trick for HTTP on stackexchange using telnet. No telnet.
No lynx either.
So I downloaded it onto my PC. I first got the idea of unpacking it directly from different server, but yeah, right, no sshfs. That would have been useful for directly dd-ing images.
So I try to use rsync. Of course there's no rsync. scp saves the day.
Let's unpack the bootstrap now, shall we? We shall not, there's no zstd to decompress the archive.
The bootstrap won't fit uncompressed, and anyway, I am uploading over mobile data.
LET'S FUCKING GO! Gzip is installed.
I created a temporary 1.5GiB partition for the bootstrap, this later becomes swap space. And then I can more or less follow installation with Arch Wiki. There's also this wiki page, but it's mostly just regular Arch Install.

That's a very healthy memory usage. RAM nearly full when something else is running, swap typically above half. But their RAID-10 SSD setup seems to be doing well for that.
Speedtest, or really anything is mostly limited by that single virtual core.
I don't know what their shutdown, reboot, change root password, and reconfigure networking would do or screw up in this case. I haven't tried them yet.
The VNC cuts out with Cloudflare captcha every so often, by the way.