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Joined
3 yr. ago

Here to follow content related to Star Trek, Linux, open-source software, and anything else I like that happens to have a substantial Lemmy community for it.

Main fediverse account: @f00fc7c8@woem.space

  • I was dualbooting 2 Linuxes for a long time. All that you need is to install GRUB once on one of the distros, but having two or more bootloaders in the same EFI System partition is generally harmless, and might happen due to how some distros' installers are written. In that case the BIOS boot order will decide which one to use. Either way, you only need one boot partition.

    It is safe to delete all partitions on your hard drive if and only if you have backed up any important data on them. It's basically the same as installing a new hard drive. The installer for your distro will be able to re-create all of them.

    I have personally never used a shared /home between multiple distros, but based on my experience switching desktop environments, there are likely to be conflicts between files that lead to bugs. Arch and Pop!_OS will have vastly different versions of most software, and it's possible that changes to a config file in one distro may break the program in the other. Shared /home is better for if you have just one OS installed, and reinstall it occasionally.

  • If you're using Debian stable, hopefully you fully expect and want not to get major software updates until long after they release, in exchange for a more predictable system.

    I'm excited for Plasma 6 but I'm very willing to wait for it, and stick to 5.27 as a daily driver for the next year.

  • And because of that, custom configurations are wonderfully easy to make, technical issues are rare, and the few issues you do experience are quite possible to solve. Which is why I settled on Debian.

  • It's a good thing that KDE 6 is coming out soon because holy cow, that's a big secondary version number.

  • Stop using gitlab.com for projects - Credit card info required for new registrations

    Jump
  • I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they're only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.

    Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.

  • Debian needs a better installer. It'd be awesome if it had something more akin to Fedora/RHEL's Anaconda, or even just made Calamares the default (so long as it didn't install every single locale available like their live inages currently do).

  • No, but I do remember using the autism(at)a.gup.pe group. Not sure it still exists but I had some nice interactions there.

  • Used to, left recently. But the autistic community there was easily one of the best parts.

  • I really liked the simplicity of GNOME To Do when it was around. The successor seems to be GNOME Endeavor, which I haven't tried extensively.

  • Another commenter suggested Tiny Core Linux and DSL2024, which are indeed as light as it gets, but you might find yourself limited in what you can do with them, and it's not necessary for those specs.

    The next step up would be Q4OS Trinity and antiX. You should be able to get the Spotify app and your preferred web server running on either of those.

  • Looking online, there are some suggestions to either (re)install xapp:

    sudo apt install --reinstall xapp

    or a related library:

    sudo apt install --reinstall gir1.2-xapp-1.0

    However, usually I find that errors like this mean nothing, so I wouldn't be surprised if these steps change nothing.

  • Definitely flatpak related then. Try running one of your flatpak apps from the terminal, and post the output here; might help pinpoint the issue. You can list the ones you have installed with flatpak list, then flatpak run .

  • /dev/nvme0 is probably your SSD. But if it passed you probably have nothing to worry about

  • It still sounds to me like something's up with the disk. Can't think of any solutions to suggest but I would run a SMART health check on it:

     
        
    sudo apt install smartmontools  
    sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
    
      

    If you prefer a graphical tool, you can do the same thing with GNOME Disks, which also has options for disk benchmarking.

    In the resulting report, the overall health state should be "PASSED", the "Type" column should show "Pre-fail" and "Old age" values, and the "Media-Wearout-Indicator" should be close to 100. If the overall health state is "FAILED", then you will want to back up your files immediately and consider getting a new SSD.

  • GNOME and Plasma are so far separated that a merger would be impossible, without either eliminating one of the two or completely rewriting both, and I think they cover different niches. GNOME is for people who want a tightly integrated experience, and KDE is for people who want to customize their system. (I would also argue that it's not possible for there to be only one distro or DE, so long as all the components are open-source. Savvy users will always make their own stuff if they're allowed to.)

    There's already plenty of cooperation between GNOME and KDE devs on common standards, support for each other's apps, etc. I hope this continues, and makes both desktops better. A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff, like Wayland extensions, could definitely become shared between the two desktops.

  • I suspect Plasma 6 will remove it. Though I'm liking this desktop setup so much I might just keep it for the rest of Debian Bookworm's lifespan.

  • This is nice but there are already tons of "how/why to start using Linux" websites. Not sure if we need another one.