Linux

cross posted from: https://programming.dev/post/19937352

cross-posted from: https://ani.social/post/6217644

This is a really great article about how to use BTRFS snapshots with examples.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1167059

COSMIC’s Alpha 2 release builds upon that work with functionality built out for Files, additional Settings pages, considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support+, and some highly requested window management features. System76 is ecstatic at the level of excitement and collaboration so far with alpha testers and early app & applet developers, and we look forward to seeing what comes from these new additions.

...

The second COSMIC alpha will be released on September 26th. Those participating in Alpha 1 on Pop!_OS can simply update through the COSMIC App Store to transition. This alpha will be followed by monthly alpha releases until all core features have been built out.

More coverage:

• COSMIC DE Alpha 2 Released, This is What’s New

• COSMIC Alpha 2 Released with Bluetooth Settings, Much-Improved File Manager

• Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2: BIG PROGRESS for a month of work!

One day, Wayland will truly take over the Linux world, but it's not quite there yet with plenty still using X11 due to various problems some of which the new Frog Protocols aim to solve.

Announced by misyl, who does various work for Valve (like Gamescope), it certainly sounds like a good idea to give Wayland Protocols a swift kick to get into gear to improve things for users. Writing on their social media post :

Wayland Protocols has long had a problem with new protocols sitting for months, to years at a time for even basic functionality.

This is hugely problematic when some protocols implement very primitive and basic functionality such as frog-fifo-v1, which is needed for VSync to not cause GPU starvation under Wayland and also fix the dreaded application freezing when windows are occluded with FIFO/VSync enabled.

We need to get protocols into end-users hands quicker! The main reason many users are still using X11 is because of missing functionality that we can be shipping today, but is blocked for one reason or another.

Install instructions for OpenSuse Tumbleweed/ MicroOs using Full Disk Encryption secured by a TPM2 chip and measured boot or a FIDO2 key.

Nice to see OpenSuse pushing forward on securing the Linux Desktop with FDE and measured boot. Hope to see other distros following.

I have this collection of mp3s from the 90s-2000s from before the streaming services era. Back when people used Winamp or XMMS to listen to their music. I backed up my music files in two places and they're both organized differently.

I need a tool to go through the whole thousands of files, find out what each track is (artist, album, track title, track number all that meta data), rename the file accordingly and apply all the metadata, then move the file in a certain directory structure.

Are there any music organizers out there that can do this? Or do I have to implement my own script?

Would their owners even notice?

Inspired by Kaspersky deletes itself, installs UltraAV antivirus without warning

An already working reimplementation of libfprint in Rust, supposedly easier to use.

What hacks they needed, where they get MacOS binaries, how the boot works etc.

Very interesting talk.

Btw they have a regular Function touchbar ;)

So why did I even want to do this? Because the front panel of my PC has a 3 1/2" drive hole and I wanted to populate it.

Fine, real reason is because I have a few legacy machine lying around and having a floppy drive accessible is nice to have.

How does it work? Well I have a Floppy to USB adapter inside my rig, and since my motherboard has an unused set of USB 2 headers, I just plugged it into that.

Otherwise, it was just plug and play... almost.

Why the drive works as Plug and Play, linux mint pokes the USB to see if it's still there, so I have a small script at boot that disables it for that internal header.

I am just socked that it works, and while it sucks that I need to be root to read the disks, I am just happy that the whole setup works at all.

SPIR-V is the intermediate shader target used by Vulkan as well, so it sounds like this may indirectly make DirectX on Linux smoother.

After 20 years, Real-Time Linux (PREEMPT_RT) is finally -- finally -- in the mainline kernel. Linus Torvalds blessed the code while he was at Open Source Summit Europe. [...] The real-time Linux code is now baked into all Linux distros as of the forthcoming Linux 6.12 kernel. This means Linux will soon start appearing in more mission-critical devices and industrial hardware. But it took its sweet time getting here. An RTOS is a specialized operating system designed to handle time-critical tasks with precision and reliability. Unlike general-purpose operating systems like Windows or macOS, an RTOS is built to respond to events and process data within strict time constraints, often measured in milliseconds or microseconds. As Steven Rostedt, a prominent real-time Linux developer and Google engineer, put it, "Real-time is the fastest worst-case scenario." He means that the essential characteristic of an RTOS is its deterministic behavior. An RTOS guarantees that critical tasks will be completed within specified deadlines. [...]

So, why is Real-Time Linux only now completely blessed in the kernel? "We actually would not push something up unless we thought it was ready," Rostedt explained. "Almost everything was usually rewritten at least three times before it went into mainline because we had such a high bar for what would go in." In addition, the path to the mainline wasn't just about technical challenges. Politics and perception also played a role. "In the beginning, we couldn't even mention real-time," Rostedt recalled. "Everyone said, 'Oh, we don't care about real-time.'" Another problem was money. For many years funding for real-time Linux was erratic. In 2015, the Linux Foundation established the Real-Time Linux (RTL) collaborative project to coordinate efforts around mainlining PREEMPT_RT.

The final hurdle for full integration was reworking the kernel's print_k function, a critical debugging tool dating back to 1991. Torvalds was particularly protective of print_k --He wrote the original code and still uses it for debugging. However, print_k also puts a hard delay in a Linux program whenever it's called. That kind of slowdown is unacceptable in real-time systems. Rostedt explained: "Print_k has a thousand hacks to handle a thousand different situations. Whenever we modified print_k to do something, it would break one of these cases. The thing about print_k that's great about debugging is you can know exactly where you were when a process crashed. When I would be hammering the system really, really hard, and the latency was mostly around maybe 30 microseconds, and then suddenly it would jump to five milliseconds." That delay was the print_k message. After much work, many heated discussions, and several rejected proposals, a compromise was reached earlier this year. Torvalds is happy, the real-time Linux developers are happy, print_K users are happy, and, at long last, real-time Linux is real.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/28037255

Hey hey people. Relatively new Arch user here, but not new to Linux in general. I've been using Arch with KDE Plasma on this HP laptop from 2013, and I've been enjoying it a lot after spending a long time on Mint/Cinnamon.

But, I've noted that KDE is a bit slow on this machine, and is probably a bit too much. Earlier today, I decided to try out something lighter, and installed LXQt on it as a second DE. The experience was okay, with much improved responsiveness, a nice customizable retro look, and overall simpleness that still did the job mostly. But I also ran into a few issues that probably had to do with having two different DEs on the same machine and user. One thing in particular ended up annoying me so much I went back to KDE: The Discover app would just refuse to play nice with setting a dark theme on the rest of the environment, even when I tried setting it up with qt6ct.

So now I'm considering going to XFCE instead, as I probably should have done from the beginning. I just wish it had Wayland support already (I know it's being worked on). Do you have any suggestions or tips for me in regards to this? I'm sure a lot of people will recommend their favorite tiling WM which I'm not sure I want to get into.

Also, other than that, upon returning to KDE, I found that my Discover would crash when trying to update Flatpaks (the only thing I install through it) and started thinking this experiment somehow broke it.... but it's Flatpak itself that seems to have an issue today. Might have to do with the latest curl update? Dunno if I should make a separate thread for that. https://discuss.kde.org/t/kde-discover-broken-with-latest-curl-update/21475