Linux

Windows refugee here. I'm planning to move to Linux Mint but want to make sure I don't do something stupid, as I'm unfamiliar with the Linux operating system.

I found this link with 10 tips to secure Mint.

Is this a good list? Anything else I should do to secure a Mint install?

Thanks for helping a noob!

I still like the look and feel of GNOME a lot so I spent a little time putting it together that way. I want a simple desktop with small elements to maximize real estate for windows. I also use the small taskbar on my work computer for the same reason. But with my work computer, I do show window titles because I usually have at least 5 workbooks open at once so it's nice to see which is which when I need to switch between them.

I love KDE's application launcher. It feels very Windows XP with the way it sorts things. It just makes complete sense.

Century Gothic may not be the most readable font in the world, but I think it has an old school charm to it.

I have 2 directories which both have stuff in them:

• /home/user/folderApple

• /mnt/drive/folderBanana

I want to mount folderBanana onto folderApple like this:

sudo mount --bind "/mnt/drive/folderBanana" "/home/user/folderApple"

But I still want to be able to access the contents of folderApple while this is activated. From what I am reading, binding the original directory to a new location should make it available, like this:

mkdir "/home/user/folderApple-original"
sudo mount --bind  "/home/user/folderApple" "/home/user/folderApple-original"

But this just binds /mnt/drive/folderBanana to /home/user/folderApple-original as well. I tried reversing the order and result is the same.

How do I tell mount to look for the underlying directory?

I am happy to use symlinks or something else if it'll reliably get the job done, I am not wedded to this mechanism.

(The purpose of all this is that when an external drive is connected, I can have the storage conveniently available, but when it is not connected, the system will fallback to internal storage. But then I will want to move files between the fallback and external locations when both are available. So I need to see both locations at once.)

Hi.

I'm using Fedora KDE spin since last year, and have a need for the commands / a script to change power management and lock screen settings via the console (instead of manually going through the GUI).

I tried googling the commands, but feel like I didn't even get into the right direction.

If anyone could point me into the correct direction, that'd be greatly appreciated. A ready solution is nice, but I'd also like to know how to find such things by myself in the future.

Sorry if I use the wrong terminology, I used Windows until I switched last year.

(I posted this weeks ago in the /c/Fedora, but unfortunately didn't get any replies.)

Hello, I've been hearing a lot about this new DeepSeek LLM, and was wondering, would it be possible to get the 600+ billion parameter model running on my GPU? I've heard something about people have got it to run on their MacBooks. I have i7 4790K, 32GB DDR3, and 7900 XTX 24GB VRAM. I'm running Arch Linux, this computer is just for AI stuff really, not gaming as much. I did tried running the distilled 14B parameter model, but it didn't work for me, I was using GPT4All to run it. I'm thinking about getting one of the NVIDIA 5090s in the future. Thanks in advance!

Hello, I'm wondering if I should use the Linux-libre kernel or if I should stay with the stock Linux kernel. I do want to remain 100% FOSS and have Libreboot installed, but, does it really matter if I use the stock kernel or not? Can the blobs from the stock kernel be a vulnerbility? My only reason for wanting to stay with the stock kernel is because its better maintained and gets audited more. But I'm really just worried about the blobs, can they do anything?

Back again with another question thread looking for alternatives for my two most important apps that'll make me switch to Linux+Android:

Is there anything like PastePal on Linux with an Android app? The biggest thing about PastePal is that it lets me create a catalogue of text/images snippets that I can call up at any time on MacOS with CMD + Shift + V

The best part about it is that on iOS, I can use their custom keyboard and paste anything from my snippets library from the keyboard in places that don't usually allow you to paste text.

The app will sync everything I've copied on my Mac and make it available on my phone/iPad via either the app snippet library or the keyboard.

This is probably functionality that would be right up KDE Connect's alley to implement if it doesn't already exist.

Sooo there's free software (“Everyone should be able to write open source software!”) and there's open source software (people programming their own computers for their own communities). Ideally, Neima should be able to program her computer to help her kids do their homework or for their sports club. So there's open source software that's written for the developers community, and there's open source software that's written for the GNOME community, which is polished and truly a delightful experience for new users: if for example you installed Linux Mint with Cinnamon, you'd connect to the wifi and probably be immediately greeted with a notification telling you that your printer has been added and is ready to go.

I'm not saying that Linux users should learn programming, especially if they don't know about e.g. GNU Guix, Skribe/Skribilo/Haunt, or SICP (that's directly referenced by the Haunt info pages – I promise you, starting a blog as an English speaker with a Skribe implementation and reading SICP once you get comfortable enough could get you started in months); but that of course, learning any field on such a platform as Stack Overflow would provide an absolutely stupid experience, whereas the ideal learning medium is books.

It isn't enough for Google to insert far-right suggestions in YouTube shorts; they've deliberately sabotaged features in their search engine to get us to generate more ads, and Google Scholar results are, by the way, the bottom of the barrel too. Compare queries results to "sex work" or "borderline disorder transgender" with those of HAL and wonder why there's a public distrust in science. More broadly, Google hinders our relationship to information, and we're both trading it for a far-right agenda.

The same is just as true for LaTeX: it's a great, intuitive language, provided that you read some good introduction on the topic. As a matter of fact, Maïeul Rouquette's French-speaking book is available for free on HAL.

I'm more and more fed up as I write that and I'm pretty sure it shows. You may totally use open source software, meant for the non-technical community of a graphical library, desktop environment, Linux distribution, and so forth. But if you really wanted to "learn Linux", please install any distro you're comfortable with and read some good book on whatever topic you want to work on.

UPDATE: Resolved by deleting all files in /var and ~/.local that are related to bottles. It did not work until I deleted them from the repos directory too.

I tried to install bottles via flatpak, but I get the error:

Error: Error pulling from repo: While pulling app/com.usebottles.bottles/x86_64/stable from remote flathub: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Couldn't find file object 'fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038'
error: Failed to install com.usebottles.bottles: Error pulling from repo: While pulling app/com.usebottles.bottles/x86_64/stable from remote flathub: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Opening content object fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038: Couldn't find file object 'fdb9f1f85b66889bd0dcced24c4fda571f2fcbddfe0af7176fa33a46953d2038'

I have received such an error before, and usually running flatpak repair fixes it. But that is not working right now.

What else I tried?

flatpak uninstall --unused flatpak update flatpak update --appstream running all the commands as root

More about my system: I am using gentoo, but I did not think it would matter since the point of flatpak is this separation layer it has.

Also here: https://distrowatch.com/weekly-mobile.php?issue=20250127#sitenews

I'm on KDE Plasma using wayland, and I'm annoyed with KDE's emoji picker. Well, the interface is fine, I just want emojis to immediately be pasted into the text field that was in focus when I used the shortcut to launch the emoji picker. Basically I want the behavior to be as close to the Windows emoji picker as possible.

Does anyone know of an alternative that allows me to quickly type 2 different emojis in succession? Bonus points when it's easily available on arch.

Announcement: https://hyprland.org/news/update47/

Having spent many hours wrestling with systemd units I am ecstatic to use this going forward :D

A few weeks a go discord on linux had an update that enabled you to do screensharing on wayland even with audio.

There are a few bugs. For example, you can not change the window and sometimes have to reactivate the audio check box to have the audio work. Sadly the flatpak could not shit that update, because the chromium version shipped has to major bugs in flatpaks (issue).

But the stable .deb has now working screen sharing with audio. That is something that x11 does not have.

We are happy, very happy, that you have joined the light side of the force, but here you are preaching to the choir. Go knock on doors and help others see the light. Oh, and sending some money to one of the thousands of FOSS projects that keep this running would be nice too.

Anyway, welcome again.

/Not_a_Rant

have you ever wanted to change your config in dwl but were afraid of losing all your open windows and the entire session? fear no more!