So, what's your Linux week been like?

587

Umm, so as to make matters worse (in this aforementioned Seeed router), there’s sort of no escape from opening it, and accessing the eMMC in attached-storage-mode (using a jumper, and Raspberry Pi’s rpiboot utility). Why? Because the factory-installed OpwnWRT has no magical first-boot scripting goodness which resizes the 2GB root partition to occupy the rest of the 32GB eMMC. You have to do that yourself, manually (using, say, gparted).

That’s right, 30 of the 32GB of the eMMC just sits there unallocated, until you discover one day all your disk space is full. Gong show!

589

Can you post a screenshot + what proton version you are using in this thread :

Games working on Linux on the first try

590

I’m playing with OpenWRT’s adblocking features. OpenWRT doesn’t jive nicely with Pi-hole, but there are a large number of “Domain Blocklist Sources” you can enable using their adblock + luci-app-adblock packages. I turned on many, many of them (which is time consuming, as there is no button for “just turn them all on”). No noticeable RAM got consumed to speak of (I’m only using 227MB of RAM, out the 4GB which comes on my CM4, and it hardly twitched when turning on almost all these blocklists).

While testing this adblocking “goodness”:

  • on my laptop, no noticeable ads were getting blocked in Firefox, if I turned off my uBlock Origin.
  • on my phone, I’m not able to find any ads actually getting blocked yet either.

So I guess there’s no substitute for the real deal, which is Pi-hole (from what I hear), and uBlock Origin, IMHO.

PS: There is a Pi-hole equivalent called “Adguard Home” which can be installed in OpenWRT, but it looked like too much of a hassle to set up and maintain. This one would use 100MB of RAM apparently.

591

Someone at my house thought my internet was broken the other day. They said ‘I can’t open anything!’

They were clicking on the Google Ad search results at the top, and PiHole was blocking all of them. Sounds like everything is working just the way it should!

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592

I did a few little fun Linux things this week. One thing I did is I took a Raspberry Pi I had set up as a “SNES mini” that I haven’t really used in a while and decided to install Raspbian and pi-hole as to get some use out of the thing. The other thing I did was install vanilla arch on a laptop I have just because I haven’t installed arch in a long time and I feel like it is a great way to remind you of the parts of Linux operating systems.

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593

I caved in to the pressure and downloaded, just downloaded, Fedora 35 Cinnamon spin last week. Intending to test it on a small partition that had Void for a little while.

Coincidentally, for whatever reason I started having weird issues with my Linux Mint installation. Weird in a way that I don’t blame Mint at all, it’s definitely brought on by the things I’ve done over the last few years to this install. (could have been that I recently swapped the whole MOBO out from under it without doing any reinstallation)

I had an online D&D session to attend this evening and without a reliable system to use, I booted up Fedora 35 off the USB to give it a try. Threw on the Fusion repo, installed Discord and everything was peachy. So I’ve installed it to the disk that needed a reinstallation anyways and I’ll see how it goes. Should be fun! I think the installer is really great, I like the non-linear way you can configure the installation. The built-in “partitioner” or space reclaimer didn’t want to do anything with my disk and I had to use an external tool but that’s hardly anything to complain about. My one complaint is how long it takes to refresh the repos. A simple repoquery takes way longer than an apt search and similarly dnfdragora takes probably twice as long as synaptic to open, refresh and become usable. I could be doing something wrong though…

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594

The fedora docs include a setting for parallel downloads while updating. Maybe this is useful.

595

I have that same problem with Fedora or better said with dnf. But as @gemmakaru said I think you can tweak that.

596

I think the problem was between the chair and keyboard. Initially dnf search returned nothing, no output at all, so I thought I had to use repoquery. Well that started giving me a line about “last metadata expiration check blah blah blah” but no search results. I discovered today that dnf search is working as expected and is quite fast actually, I believe the problem was initially there was no metadata cache to search through. If I had manually made the cache with dnf makecache I think it would have worked. I don’t know if this is automatic on apt based systems or if I’m so used to running apt update that this never had a chance to happen.

Also, I was expecting dnf repoquery to be like apt search but it is not. repoquery searches for exact name matches and occasionally refreshes the repos when it does so. Which is why I thought it was so slow and explains why I wasn’t getting search results half the time haha! I sure feel like a new user all over again.

dnfdragora still feels slow but only when it decides the metadata cache is too old and needs to fetch from the repos again. It’s pretty quick on subsequent launches. The main issue is that as the package list gets populated the Name and Summary columns get expanded way bigger than necessary to show their data and it pushes all the other columns off the screen. I was getting an error installing a certain package because I was choosing the wrong architecture, not realizing the Arch column was 4 miles in the distance and I didn’t see the scroll bar.

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597

My Linux week has been full of learning and customising. I only recently got a computer again as I gave my last one to the kids when I got fed up with Windows a few years back. A friend of mine had a laptop they didn’t need and offered it to me. I gladly accepted and have been getting back into Linux again and loving every moment of it.

This past week in particular I have decided to learn tiling window managers and jumped in head first. Installed ArcoLinuxB Qtile edition with no other desktop environment. It was slow going at first trying to figure out the keybinds and such but I am starting to get the hang of it after a solid week now. I have customized just about everything in some way. Changed some of the default keybinds, created my own alias’, custom bash prompt, custom terminal theme, customized Qtile and Conky. It has been a week of learning and a lot of reading/research.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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598

The standard weekly maintenance, updating my Virtual Machines:

Screenshot from 2021-12-18 11-46-35
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Note that Windows 11 is still running, updating two windows VMs takes more time than updating the twelve displayed Linux VMs :slight_smile:

Screenshot from 2021-12-18 10-41-44
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The update of Windows 10 and 2 Arch based distros; Garuda Linux and Manjaro. Memory and CPU are fully used :slight_smile:

Screenshot from 2021-12-18 12-39-54
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The backup-server my 2003 Pentium 4 HT, build from left-over parts, the display is from Remmina through the Remote Desktop Protocol.

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599

Still enjoying my Fedora 35 Workstation with the KDE plasma group installed on top, installed when it first came out in early November. I tried to use GNOME for the first week but fell back to my favorite DE, Plasma, after that. Fedora is my least used of the major distributions and you can consider me a distro hopper, but it’s giving me no reason to leave after a month and a half. Messing with Emacs Lisp to create some functions for a few of my more common tasks, still no expert :stuck_out_tongue:

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600

I’m playing with Shotcut and really appreciating its stability. It has many useful features, which took a little while to understand why they were there. Those “Eureka” moments were well worth spending the time.

At first I used it in the most basic way, dreading getting mired in a bunch of ugly particularities, but now I’m appreciating it for the power and flexibility it has. It’s very sensibly designed, and I don’t find myself fighting against its workflow.

It’s not crashed on me even once since I can remember.

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601

In my honest opinion, Shotcut is FAR BETTER than KDEnlive at the moment. The amount of bugs currently in KDEnlive is overwhelming. I understand there is a call for help for those with time and skill, but for me, which have edited hundereds of videos in Shotcut can fairly say that people still recommending the KDEnlive project as the “BEST” are sorely missing out on Shotcut.

I hope things get better for KDEnlive in the future, their call for help hasn’t been met with too much enthusiasm, but the YouTube community could do some good to get the word out. They have praised it in the past without regard of the problems, bugs, but not recommending an alternative like Shotcut is negligent as well.

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602

Got a few days off? Time to hop hop hoppity hop. :rofl:

Ended up on Manjaro this time. Was shooting for Fedora, but apparently my stool game wasn’t strong enough to fool MichaelAI.

Actually, I ran into some serious display problems, that I suspect are related to Wayland, since I had no issues with several other distros. (well, not display issues at least)

Been awhile since I’ve been on Manjaro. I’d forgotten about some of the cool stuff they do. Really like the kernel picker options and their update news widget.

Decided I was going to lean more heavily on Flatpak this time around, just for giggles, and immediately backtracked on that with Code - OSS, but otherwise I’m running mostly flatpak applications. Works oK so far.

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603

What do you actually do while distro hopping ?

I have been a strong proponent of staying away from distro hopping. I have worked for years as a QA/QC Analyst, and the thought of coming home to a broken machine or a machine I have to QA/QC is horrifying… It makes work/home seperation a big point for me. Also, learning a new package manager and possibly a new DE?! I just don’t see much in it for me personally.

Unless you are hopping to help the Distro with releases.

604

Depends on the distro. Sometimes it’s just to check out something new, in this case I was on Garuda because I wanted to see what it was all about. I hadn’t intended to end up there permanently, but I screwed up boot sector and lost the ability to boot into my previous distro. I decided to roll with it, and it was fine for several months.

I wanted to move back to Fedora, because I really like Fedora, and my machine was a bit of a mess after some Garuda update issues. Leftover Timeshift boot remnants and half an SSD with an old Fedora install on it, and little stuff like that. Nothing broken, just messy. So fresh new install. Fedora didn’t work, so I decided on Manjaro, mostly because it was on my Ventoy USB. Clean full install on the entire SSD, and everything is all cleaned up.

Well, that’s a thing for sure. I don’t really stray from KDE. It’s what I prefer, so really if a distro doesn’t have a KDE option, the odds are it’s not going to be my daily driver. So learning a new DE isn’t a concern.

As for package managers……I spend a lot of time in WSL on my work machine, that has to be Ubuntu for REASONS, personally I don’t like Apt or most Debian distros. Having said that, the spare laptop that lives in the living room is on POP underscore exclamation point OS because that’s the only distro I tried that would work with the stupid WiFi card on that machine. So apt is something I’m familiar with, I’ve used several arch based distros on my daily machine, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time with pacman/pamac. I also spend a bit of time dealing with RHEL at work (why can’t I use Fedora on my WSL instance? Couldn’t tell you. Thanks Enterprise IT!!) so I’ve got a good bit of experience with yum, and most of my home servers run Fedora currently, which uses DNF. So, I’ve spent a bunch of time with all the different package mangers. Of course with KDE, I can use discover for most everything, which makes life pretty easy too.

I totally get that. It’s a perfectly valid opinion. There’s tons of reasons to stay put. If it works for you it works for you. I like seeing what’s around the next corner, what the next distro offers that the last one didn’t. Even in similar distros, Garuda and Manjaro for instance. Both Arch based, but each has their own goals, and design and UX aesthetic, even though both of them default to KDE on an Arch base. It’s pretty cool to see how they each solve the basic problems,and what user base they cater to.

Ideally I’d have a big server setup with Proxmox or something and live on virtual boxes, so I could have a simple stable box for work, and boxes for playing with.

But where’s the fun in that?

605

I think I’ve figured out why my emails were getting flagged as spam:

Of course Gmail gets to insidiously raise the bar another few notches tomorrow if they like, being elusive snobs again, in receiving messages from my artisinal email server.

606

This week I played with OBS, and Shotcut, to make some desktop recordings of a LibreOffice Presentation, to view these prezzies on a TV (driven by an Rpi4 with LibreElec/Kodi) in the living room here.

But I ran into a bug with LibreElec/Kodi, which is that seeking around in these files worked poorly.

Edit: I gave up my need to see my prezzies on the TV in the living room, thinking: what other video playback gadget do I have, where my OSMC remote control works? Really what I want is one-handed video playback (my coffee mug goes in the other hand), including pausing, skipping ahead and back in 10-second increments, perhaps rapidly. So where did I get the best experience with the remote? VLC, SMPlayer, Totem, or MPV in Ubuntu 20.04? Sadly, none of those came anywhere close to cutting the mustard. The best playback experience was surprisingly in VLC on Android 11 (on a spare phone of mine), with the remote’s USB dongle plugged into the phone’s USB-C socket (using an adapter). Alas, I gave (non-Android) Linux every chance to solve this problem for me, hassle free.

607

Why not just export the presentation as a PDF or something, instead of a video?

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