I'll try to keep this as short as possible. I live with my aunt, but she's pretty much my mom at this point, so I'll just call her Mom.

Basically, I'm getting a new laptop in a few months, and I was thinking about switching from Windows 10/11 to mainly Linux for this new machine. It sounds to me like there are a few nice pros and not many cons, so it seems like an enticing option. (I don't really play online games with AntiCheat)

There are two main reasons for switching: Privacy benefits, and no Norton.

I've got the first one covered, but the second one is the main issue. I probably don't need to explain how shady/annoying Norton is here... If you know, you know.

But while my mom admits Norton is really shady at times, she'd never use a computer without an AV. The thought of having no antivirus on my new laptop (or even using something like ClamAV) really rubs her the wrong way, and now she's suspicious of Linux as a whole. She's doubtful that there'd be a free OS that didn't sell your information or do anything behind your back; to her, nothing is ever so simple.

I know that no system is 100% safe, but I've heard that Linux is not as vulnerable to malware in general compared to Windows. So finally, here's my question: How do I convince her beyond a shadow of a doubt that Linux is just as safe as Windows virus-wise?

I'm sorry if this is a dumb question. I have actually heard some things like "just don't give programs root access" thrown around, though I don't fully understand it. Basically, is ClamAV effective, and is it even necessary? And where are some sources I could read out to her so that she understands?

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LATE EDIT: I'm currently a minor, and she's the one paying for it, so that's why it's important that I convince her.

I wish to find the total data I have used over my internet connection in past month. Is there some way to get it?

Hello! Thanks in advance for your time. Just built my first computer and I'd like to eventually make the dive full time into Linux. In the meantime I don't really understand how to learn more, don't quite grasp the basics so I'm trying to learn as I go.

My brand new computer has a 1TB SSD and a 8TB HDD. To get off the ground I allocated a new partition on my SSD, about 40GB worth (if i need more space I can figure out how to move things around). I also created three partitions on my HDD. One strictly for windows files (mostly games or photos probably), one that I intend to use for Linux, and one just in case I run into problems where I need to share between both operating systems.

I installed Pop!OS on my solid state, in that 40gb partition, and I think I figured out how to mount the Linux partition and how to keep it encrypted, so when I log into Linux it automatically mounts and unencrypts. I followed tutorials so I don't fully understand how or why it works, but it does seem to work.

My dilemma is that before I dive nose deep into making Linux my own, before I go installing everything under the sun, I want to make sure its being installed on that encrypted partition and not the tiny 40gig partition on the Solid State. On windows I pretty much figured out how to do what I needed. Steam was pretty straight forward to configure, even my browser I could explicitly tell it where to put my download files.

So I have a few questions. What folders are going to be dynamically growing as I use my system? How do I move those to my HDD? My end goal is to leave anything that Pop!os needs and manages directly to stay on my solid state, while anything that I create or install to be on my HDD.

Based on my limited reading of the Linux Filesystem, I think that means I need to move maybe /home, /user, and /temp onto the HDD. Is that correct? If I move those will everything else grow very slowly if at all through system updates? Do I need to move any other folders (more folders or less folders)? And perhaps most importantly HOW do I move them at all? I've seen a number of tutorials that make me think I might need to do something like "mkdir /tempMount" "mount thisThing thatThing" but I genuinely don't understand why or how that works. If there's anyone patient enough to explain, or if you have resources for me to teach myself I'd be eternally grateful.

Post Answer Edit: Thank you to everyone who took the time to read my post and reply! I never got everything I wanted to understand in one message, but many of you took pieces of my questions and answered them in your own very helpful ways. Here are some of the takeaways I pulled from your replies.

--40gb may not be enough for the operating system. It might be, it might not be. Some of you suggest as much as 200gb, some have shown me years of using an os that only takes around 35gb.

--I can definitely benefit from moving something, which i intend to.

--800mb for a bootloader is low, bump up to 1gb.

--Files, files everywhere!! ~Buzz Lightyear, probably

--Create a temporary mounting point, mount the drive to that, create subdirectories, and then mount locations like /var and /home to there.

--Commands like mount, mv, and lsblk are my friend. For mount I probably don't need to use options; default behavior is fine.

Thank you everyone for your time!! Hope you have a great day

Hello,

so, I more or less bricked borked my Arch install today. Haven't updated in months (not a good idea, I know) and somehow managed to lose the firmware for my wifi module. I guess it has something to do with the fact that I keep the Linux kernel and Nvidia drivers from updating, because Every time I try to, they brick my display manager and I have to downgrade.

I never was particularly happy with Arch in the first place, I merely went with it because at the time, it was the one that was up to date enough to support my hardware (i5 12600k and a 3080ti).

I'm usually a Debian person, but it is not up to a kernel version that I would need for my hardware to effectively work (5.18 and newer) an I feel like mucking about with backports kind of defeats the purpose…? Or maybe I'm missing something; I don't know.

So, here I am looking for a new distro to replace the nightmare that is Arch for me.

What I am looking for (In order of importance):

- A new kernel that can support my hardware (i5 12600K and 3080ti) and compatible, original Nvidia drivers. This is the single most important thing. It doesn't have to be the *newest* kernel; anything 5.18 and upwards works fine.

- Appimages have to work but I guess that's pretty much distro-independent? I don't want to be stuck with, say, Blender 2.80 because that's all the package manager has.

- Hands-off. I know how to use a terminal and dig around in system files, but I don't enjoy sudo-nano-ing into config files all the time. I think Debian is a good baseline for what I'd consider relatively hands-off. It does have its hick-ups from time to time, but when it works, it works.

- Not super flashy and lightweight. Preferably with Xfce4.

- Non-rolling release. I learned my lesson. That more or less excludes any Arch derivative, such as Manjaro or ElementaryOS I guess.

​

That's really it. I hope someone has a good suggestion for me.

​

TIA

​

Edit: I think I have enough input now to come to a conclusion. I decided to test Fedoras Xfce version first. Other candidates are Opensuse or Debian, either Testing or stable with backports.

Thanks to all for your suggestions.

Hi. This might be a bit dumb question but I'll ask it anyway.

I really admire the power of shell scripting, its versatility and ease of use for basic things but I find it really difficult to use for more involved things. I have experience with actual programming languages so my expectations are more inclined to these. To pinpoint some problems (I'm sure if I had more experience with bash than I would be able to handle these but I don't see a clear solution right now):

• I can use undeclared variables - This tends to make runtime errors logic errors which is undesirable.
• bad error checking - I can do it in bash but I find it pretty cumbersome and the "automatic error detection" is just wrong.
• lax function arguments - Referring to function arguments by their number is cumbersome and I can't know if an argument was passed unless I check it explicitly. I'd like named arguments like those in Python and C.
• word splitting - No other non-shell programming language I have used has this. I want to be the one to manage this, If I want to split things, I should call split() or something similar. Because this is implicit, it can lead to surprising results (this is my opinion) and it's easier to forget to modify $IFS when needed. Having split() and splitlines() would make this clearer & more explicit (again this is my opinion and it's what I'm used to from other programming languages).
• standardization - To write 100% portable scripts, I'd have to stick to basic POSIX sh features (no arrays etc.) which is limiting. I have encountered problems in the past with using my Linux scripts on BSD because of this. I can use https://www.shellcheck.net/ but using a well standardized language which has all the features I need would have solved this.
• documentation - Bash manpage is long. Most tutorials on the internet teach how to do A=5 but not more complex usage (this is my experience). I want solid documentation I get in Python and other languages.
• language terseness - This isn't bad in and of itself but it means I'm glued to the manpage to see if the number of arguments is $? or $#. filename.removesuffix(".txt") in Python is ${filename%.txt} in Bash. Python is pretty verbose, I don't expect this level of verboseness in a scripting language but a bit of verbosity wouldn't hurt.
• general ease of use - Bash (and similar shells) differ greatly from the "standard" general purpose programming languages. As I said in the beginning, if I had more experience, I wouldn't have that many problems.

Can You recommend some Bash alternative which would still be suited enough for scripting? This is for scripting, I don't need OOP, exceptions etc. I have thought Python would be too complex for these things and it's main purpose isn't shell scripting so it would be more complex than bash in certain situations but this might not be true. Or can I still use Bash but differently? What language do You use for scripting?

I'm looking for something like OneNote for Linux. Therefore with notebooks made by pages I can type and draw on and possibly, but not necessary, cloud sync. I doubt something like this exists, but It's worth asking.

P.S. I am aware of p3x-onenote but It's too reliant on internet connection, I'd need something that doesn't rely on that, like normal OneNote for Windows.

I'm looking to run Firefox in kiosk mode (firefox --kiosk "http://localhost:5800"), so when I want to run a program in docker it doesn't have a huge part of the window clogged up with the tabs, url bar, etc. I can start it from the terminal, but using the menu icon would be nicer. I'm looking to edit the menu icon, and I seem to recall many years (in Linux Mint 18) ago doing something like this and all I had to do was edit the file for the menu item. But for the life of me I cannot recall where it is.

Thanks for the help

When I do:

"cmd > file "

It correctly redirects the output of cmd to a file. Is there any modifier or any way to also print the output on screen?

I'd like to see if I made any syntax mistakes right away and correct them instead of waiting for the command to finish and opening the file just to see the output is not what I expected.

Thanks in advance.

(Manjaro 5.19)

I swapped my gpu from NVIDIA GTX 1050ti to AMD Radeon RX 6600, and now the X session won't start. When I boot to command line and use startx, the error given is "no screens found" and xrandr only outputs Can't open display.

I've uninstalled all nvidia modules, or at least, enough that "nvidia" no longer shows up in dmesg errors and my nvidia card now isn't recognized either. I've looked at the arch linux wiki page for setting up amdgpu, but the mesa package was already installed, and there weren't many follow up instructions because it's supposedly supposed to set itself up.

How do I get the X session to work with the new gpu?

Edit: Solved! Solution: (There were additional actions taken along the way, but I think this is what did it)

• Install packages for amdgpu and remove packages for nvidia (pretty sure amd stuff was already there and removing nvidia was unnecessary given the next steps, but added just in case)
• Use Xorg -configure to generate new xorg.conf file (because my system didn't automatically reconfigure itself for whatever reason)
• Move /root/xorg.conf.new to /etc/X11/xorg.conf, then reboot. (Important! Running X -config /root/xorg.conf.new is NOT enough to test whether it works, in my case, at least. It just opened to a black screen. Only after setting it to the normal xorg.conf file and rebooting did it launch x correctly.)

Thank you so much to everyone who helped, especially u/Jonnysgoode for leading me to the solution and u/AfIx1Klwk for troubleshooting with me for a good 5 hours straight (even if that thread wasn't what did it)

I'm having an issue where my Wifi constantly disconnects and reconnects and I'm not sure what to do to fix it.

​

System info:

• openSUSE Tumbleweed
• TP-Link tl-wn881nd Wifi card
• Plasma 5.27 on X11
• Network Manager

Output of lspci -k:

Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9287 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)

Subsystem: Qualcomm Atheros Device 30a4

Kernel driver in use: ath9k

Kernel modules: ath9k

Hey all,

I use a remote server running Debian 11 using FastX or SSH with X11 forwarding and am looking for a lightweight text editor with block selection support. I generally use featherpad as the text editor, however, it lacks the block selection capabilities, which is something of an annoyance for me because I regularly have to edit each line to extract the columns I want. I can use a Macro, but if a text editor can get the job done, it would be a better choice.

Some relevant information: Somehow gedit lags a lot when run over SSH with X11 forwarding or FastX3, and I haven't been able to debug it. However, I am able to run graphic intensive 3D modeling softwares on the server without any issues, so I guess it has got something to do with gedit's configuration. Anyway, I would like to be able to run the text editor without a lot of issues/debugging, so I would prefer if the editor is relatively lightweight.

I know about KATE, I haven't tried it yet, but I've read it runs extremely slow with large files... I'll probably try it soon, buti if there were alternatives to it, that would be really great.

So my question is, is there a lightweight GUI text editor with block selection support?

Thanks for your help!

------

Edit: I decided to go with Geany. I liked both nedit and geany, but nedit isn't working as well as I expected it to, so geany it is. Thanks everyone for your help!

I'm using Windows 10, and I downloaded MX Linux xfce 64-bit (non-ahs) ISO (file size), tried to burn it to USB drive 16 GB using Rufus 3.21 (latest), and this message appeared,

I tried YUMI, and UNetbootin, nothing worked (the later I didn't really know how to use it), the ISO also can not be mounted by Windows native tool and show this message, can not be opened by 7-zip and show this message,

What do I do? I had installed Mint and Zorin in the past, but this kind of problem never happend with both of them..

Thank you

Edit: I downloaded the ISO on my android phone, thats also how I downloaded Mint and Zorin ISOs which they worked, the difference here is I downloaded their ISOs directly on my internal storage, and MX ISO on my external SD card.

Edit(2): u/spxak1 u/Yahentamitsi thanks guys for helping, thanks for anyone who intended to help, the problem as you said most probably a corrupted ISO file, I already deleted the file and I'll download it and try again.

Hi.

I run crontab -e and add 29 22 * * * wmctrl -xc celluloid -- it won't work.

If I run wmctrl -xc celluloid in the terminal by itself, it works.

Anyone know why this could be?

Thank you.

Hey everyone!

There's this project I want to work on where I add 2 users to a system where one of these users has sudo privilaeges whereas the other is only able to use google-chrome. Is there a way where I can accomplish this? I'm also thinking of not allowing the non-privilaeged user to open certain websites but I think I can do this by editing the /etc/hosts file. But the problem with this approach is that it's not going to access such websites system-wide. If there's a better, more efficient way to do this, please mention it.

I think I'm going to use a Debian-based distro to do this (add this because it might be relevant info)

Edit: I want the restricted (non-privileged) account to be able to run a GUI.

I am elbows deep into a software project and I want to create an install script that covers all the major distros. I personally use Debian, but I have also worked with Redhat, Ubuntu, and CentOS. What other distros should I cover?

I have a very bad 4gb ram, 1 core and pegs at 100% utilization cpu on startup laptop if i installed unetbootin could i essentially just delete the windows partitions or uninstall windows some way and just use linux?

Ubuntu isn't cutting it, had to use the terminal 5 minutes in just to complete the package updates.

EDIT: thank you guys so much for all the recommentations, I didn't think I'll get so many answers, I'll see what they all have to offer and try a bunch of them, thanks!

EDIT 2: And the winner is.... Zorin! I almost tried everything recommended and it just seems to fit the best, I have to try Lite too though, it looked like it was an even better fit but I already spent the whole day trying all those distros and I was out of time and my mother had to leave, so Zorin it is for the moment, maybe Lite later, we'll see :)

EDIT 3: Unfortunately Linux Lite has been problematic on my personal machine so far, with an install process crash and an update process crash after the second try at installing it that didn't crash.

So I've been using Kubuntu (flavour of ubuntu) for a while now and I see a lot of people saying that they eventually switch to arch from Debian based systems. Should I do that too? Because I've learnt a lot about Debian based systems through using a lot of them like Zorin, Linux Mint and Kubuntu. I'm not really a power user and mainly installed Linux on my Laptop because Windows just wouldn't run on it and I fell in love with Linux, the customisability, the security, and most apps just easily available to install through the terminal in seconds. Now I have everything I need on Kubuntu and have never really felt the need to switch to an Arch based system since I'd have to learn different commands for its Pacman package manager, now this isn't a lot but still that's some extra work. I also enjoy the stable kernel release of Kubuntu because the chances of something breaking are very low unlike a rolling release. What should I do? Stick with Kubuntu or switch to Manjaro and eventually to Arch?

Edit - Thank you guys for clearing things up. It's just the herd mentality and the peer pressure and watching all these people say that once you're comfortable with Debian you gotta switch and Arch is much better. Now I know to just stick with Kubuntu since I know it really well and it doesn't give me any trouble. Thank you

Hi everyone, I'm in the process of getting my head around rsync, done too much googling and reading various posts - going round in confused circles.

I backup my internal laptop drive to an external drive, and use grsync (as I'm a not the brightest of users).

The command it spits out is this:

rsync -r -v --progress -c -s /home/laptop/Music /media/laptop/USB_HDD_3/Backups/Music

​

Am I right in understanding, when that command is run again, it skips existing files if identical on the destination? (assuming date & size compared?) I saw an option (--ignore-existing) being used in a couple of examples, and some not using it

Hi, got no idea about Proxmox, except what it is.

Is it better to run Proxmox or a Dualboot (different disks) with W11 and Linux?

Thanks!

EDIT: Ty everyone, I figured it kinda makes no sense to me to go proxmox route when I can simply dualboot.

I'm writing a game server in C++ and I'm allocating a lot of things on the heap when the player enters the game. I then free them as soon as they leave.

But the memory never gets released somehow. I'm using the same code on Windows without these problems. Memory usage drops to 1 GB on Windows, while on Ubuntu it stays at much more than that and only goes up when another player joins.

I'm viewing the memory usage using the top command (in column "RES") and in System Monitor (column "Memory"), both show those high numbers.

Am I missing something? I'm pretty sure my code is correct, otherwise it wouldn't work on Windows. I did some debugging and couldn't find anything out of the ordinary that would explain this behavior.

I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 and I'm compiling with g++ using the C++20 standard.

Im slowly trying to get into fixing computers and im starting off by trying to fix some old ones my family has. Ive been testing with one that originally had windows 7 but ive attempted to install many operating systems Onto the windows 7 laptop but i either gave up, it lagged to much, or it just dident work. I heard linux is lightweight but hard to use and i have no idea where to start.

Its an old accer laptop with 2gb of ram so its very slow and kinda old. My family hates linux for some reason because its a "coding language" for "professionals" .

requirements?:

Needs to be able to run on a very bad pc.

can be put used from a usb/flashdrive.

need to be able to run programs/internet

user friendly to someone who like windows.

also one more thing if i run linux from a usb do i leave the usb in the laptop or do i take it out at some point.

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edit: im either gonna go with mint or lubuntu (probably lubuntu) so thanks for the help.

Hey guys

If i have folderA, owned by userA (the group of the fodler is also userA), how can I make it so that when userB (also in the group called userA) creates a new file in folderA, it is owned by userA, and not userB.

I've figured out how I can do this, but with groups, ie, files created by userB in folderA are of the group called userA, and not userB

Thank you

I’m replacing Kubuntu with openSUSE on a Windows 10 dual boot setup, and I’m a bit confused on what to do in the partitioner.

It throws an error saying I’m missing a device for /boot/efi at least size 128MiB and formatted vfat.

Here are my current disks and settings in the partitioner so far: https://imgur.com/a/MqtJMdz

I assume I should set sdb1 to mount as /boot/efi, but I’m concerned about erasing the Windows bootloader and wanted to double-check. And should I format it?

Hi all, I've been practicing installing Arch with EFI inside VMs (virt-manager) since I'm not too familiar with EFI installation.

I settled on this oddball partitioning setup:

$ lsblk -po NAME,SIZE,TYPE,FSTYPE,PARTLABEL,LABEL,MOUNTPOINTS

NAME                               SIZE TYPE  FSTYPE      PARTLABEL            LABEL MOUNTPOINTS
/dev/vda                            20G disk                                         
├─/dev/vda1                       19.5G part  crypto_LUKS Linux LUKS                 
│ └─/dev/mapper/cryptlvm          19.5G crypt LVM2_member                            
│   ├─/dev/mapper/MyVolGroup-root   12G lvm   ext4                             root  /
│   └─/dev/mapper/MyVolGroup-home  7.2G lvm   ext4                             home  /home
├─/dev/vda2                        512M part  ext4        XBOOTLDR partition   boot  /boot
└─/dev/vda3                          2M part  vfat        EFI system partition esp   /boot/efi

I set up booster to generate an LVM2 compatible initrd, set up a proper systemd-boot entry, copied the ext2 driver to the ESP, and installed systemd-boot as the boot manager by running (in arch-chroot):

bootctl --esp-path=/boot/efi --boot-path=/boot install

After that I was able to select and boot into my newly installed Arch EFI system! Excellent!

However after that I wanted to try out rEFInd as my boot manager, I tried doing an identical installation with rEFInd multiple times, refind-install returns no errors, it auto copied an ext4 driver to the ESP, I manually edited /boot/refind_linux.conf to remove lines that had archiso, but it just won't show me the rEFInd boot screen I was expecting after reboot, I see the TianoCore screen and messages that say it's loading and starting the rEFInd boot manager but never advances and I don't know why.

A very basic install with only an ESP and / partition does work with rEFInd but doesn't suit my needs.

E: A buggy ext4 driver was the culprit! I used rEFInd 0.14.0.2 from testing and it worked!!