I recently flashed my Thinkpad W541 bios to remove the wifi whitelist so I can use any replacement wifi card. I learned a lot doing this, but essentially I was just following someone else's tutorial. What I'd like to know is, what does it take to comprehend the contents of a bios and how should one get started learning about what is contained in a bios? I'd like to eventually be able to read/download a bios and understand what is there, what it enables or disables, be able to modify it and apply my own improvements. What background is needed and where do I learn the basics? I know this isn't strictly a Linux topic per se, but maybe you guys can point me in the right direction.

I'm looking for dumb, useless and fun cli tools like cowsay or Hollywood

Maybe some that are actually useful, who knows?

Check out my review of this large screen linux based handheld from Aliexpress. Does size matter?

I test this handheld out with a few emulators and run it through its paces.

https://youtu.be/1IWKULnyO9s

https://preview.redd.it/d9a0v5e9hp5c1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=869cd5002333c6ac3a00191ad6e419770f72f511

I'm stuck in Xubuntu 18.04 LTS timeline as I find that distro to be stable, fast and utilitarian. I haven't upgraded to newer LTS of 20.04 or 22.04 yet. After trying them briefly, I soon found that those versions didn't add any utility to the XFCE Desktop but still made the whole system slower and less snappier. And yeah, third party package systems like snaps and flatpaks is something I strongly dislike with a passion!

Now, KDE Desktop is something that I never took seriously. I always thought it's a great experiment but all its bugs and eccentricities meant that it could never become a stable daily driver, right?

But these days, I'm seeing a renewed interest in KDE from folks.

• Has there been any drastic progress or something in that lately?
• Is it really as snappy as XFCE these days?
• If I want to give KDE a shot on my laptop, should I do it with KUbuntu or Debian or Fedora or something else?

I have replied to a least a dozen "what OS for low spec laptop" posts with a suggestion of Q4OS. Never got any interest at all. IMO, Q4OS is much more performant on low spec metal than Puppy, Linux Lite, Bodhi, etc. and I wonder why it has so little traction in that niche. Is it just that no one knows about it or something else?

What's new

Summary of what's new in Linux Mint 21.3:

• Cinnamon 6.0 desktop, with some new "spices" add-ons, very early and experimental work on Wayland support, 75% scaling support, gesture improvements, and various other desktop refinements.
• Apps: Hypnotix TV viewing application now allows setting channels as "favorites" for easier access, support for custom TV channels within Hypnotix, Warpinator adds support for connecting to another device manually, artwork improvements, and more.

Linux Mint 21.3 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and it will receive security updates until 2027.

I mean everybody can check open source theoretically but who actually does that ? Everybody trusts others and only few c/c++/rust guys world wide have the time and knowledge too really check the full source code of a whole operating system. Its also easy to hide some code snippets that is obfuscatored and minimized.
They have full acess to ur pc.

Even every simple software, every desktop enviroment etc u install could be theoretically a malware and its over with security then ur open source operating system is useless. then why not directly trust windows / macos and share normal data where it would came out if the employers notice something really malicious / illegal / unethical. U can hate windows but iam sure they dont want ur nudes on ur pc and try to black mail u.

The only thing u could notice this is to watch some network stuff, if the linux distro is sending sus stuff arround.

Would be nice if anyone can explain or prove wromg, dont get me wrong i like linux and use it mainly because it is fully customizeable etc.

Something I noticed many years ago scientists at CERN and other facilities often ended up use KDE on their Linux systems:

https://kde.org/for/scientists/

Could it be because KDE uses Plasma and these organizations often work with plasma as well in their science experiments thus had little bit of an affinity towards KDE ?

The public school i started working on early this year, has lots of ~10yo PCs, and they had only Win7 available, don´t need to say how useless and slow they were, kids were having a hard time. So i decided to try out linux on them, tried some popular distros but i was not happy... I wanted something with hands off install and configure of everything; I wanted all PCs to have the same PKG versions and apps; I wanted configurations based on profiles of were the PC were going to, and what use it would have; I wanted the be able to login using the current Active Directory users; I wanted to be able to deploy changes, updates, and stable releases to all PCs at once; I wanted something that would make the kids feel it was build for them and "with" them; I wanted easy to use since most students are poor and some never touched a PC before; And i wanted to learn more Linux stuff... yeah, i wanted a lot! ^_^

Since i was going deep, decided to go hardcore with Arch (LOL). This is what i came up with so far:

1 - Got an install script just like i wanted, it will format, install and configure the base system, it has my profiles, and some options for the hardwares we have (eg. ssd or hdd; intel or amd), and it takes about 5 - 10 min for a full system install and config.

2 - Created Config PKGs that do the heavy configuration work, and makes it easy to update. Some stuff are still bugged (eg. AD users have no sound), As i fix and add new stuff, is a simple matter of realeasing PKG updates since it runs an auto update script on every boot.

3 - Meta packages have the apps i want for each profile as deppendencies, and will install custom config files to set them up the way i want.

4 - Since arch is rolling release and i wanted full version control, all PCs are only connected to a local repo on my server, were all PKGs needed are with the specific version i want. (Also have a dev repo, that i use to update and test the next release)

5 - Lots of customizations and some PKGs are recompiled. PKGs like lightdm were recompiled to eg. change texts to make it easy for users to now they have to use student ID for login. Custom plasma theme, desktop icons with our local services, random wallpapers of students art work, custom wellcome app with info about apps, student news, etc.

6 - Some other small stuff...

(FYI, i am far from a linux "expert", been only a "normal user" for about 3 years, and been working on this for about 6 months and learning as i go, would't be surprised if there was an easier way to do all this ^_^)

Have i made my own distro? LOL ^_^

​

Just for fun, some other stuff Linux made possible here with the old hardware:

1 - Using AzuraCast, studets now have they'r own webradio server, that they manage and play all day on the school.

2 - Using Jellyfin, students now have a Video Streaming server were they can showcase the work they do on the Cinema course.

​

ps. Sorry for bad english X)

​

I am a graduate student in computer science. The reason for coming to linux was seeing the different meme about linux being better than windows in various reasons. I decided to dual boot. I researched and saw tons of youtube videos and read enormous amount of guide articals on internet.
Here I are the things I did before booting.

• I installed the ram and the extra SSD on my laptop
• I made a USB installation drive through Rufus.(Fedora)
• I made sure the laptop was pluged.

Mistakes I made while doing the dual boot.

• I didn't know the key to start system bios. Struggled on that.
• I repeated the to boot again and again.After missing something in previous

The horror starts now

• I deleted the wrong windows partition which was my C drive
• In panic I decided that fuck linux lets get back on windows
• So here, Make another mistake I use the gparted wipe out all of my drive
• Realizing that I have made blunder.
• I try to reboot the windows using my friends laptop making a usb windows stick
• It took me weeks to setup the whole to reinstall windows because turn out that I was using the wrong usb port for installing the windows and the errors of drivers not found kept coming, I tried searching for the correct drivers trying the rebooting with them turns out I didn't had to do that because the UEFI motherboards have inbuilt drivers installed on them.
• Another mistake which was leading to the drivers not found error was because I was trying to install the windows on the second ssd drive which was displaying as DRIVE 1

it turn out that on my mother board the drivers are programmed to support windows on only if it is DRIVE 0

• This total chaos took me weeks to resolve and the best part was it working after that.
• The lesson I learned that try to fully grasp the problem I have and fully understand the consequences of each command execute on the computer if they booting related.

If you don't understand what your are doing then don't do it.

Their is a famous saying in computer science world but I don't

know who said it.

Shoot yourself in leg and blow your whole leg off.

I was the one who really depicted that saying in real life.

Regards
You can mentions your mess ups. It will motivate me to learn more by making stupid mistakes.
Making mistakes are allowed until you kill some one or harm some other than your self.

Hello everyone.

I use Linux because I am completely in favour of the philosophy of free software, knowledge sharing, mutual help between users and data privacy protection.

I'd like to do my bit, but what can I do as I don't know how to code? I don't really have time to learn either.

Is there a need for other skills in our community? How can we provide them?

Systemd v255 was released recently (https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/18cemz0/systemd_v255_released/). It adds a new systemd-bsod daemon to display a blue screen of death if a critical error occurs. I haven't been able to find any pictures of what that looks like, so here's how you can trigger a BSOD and an image of the result.

​

https://preview.redd.it/1w8eof7uk75c1.jpg?width=4080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b6de5ba4904d1a4e3e69a6190481ffae7d0ef257

The QR code reads "foo." To reproduce:

sudo /usr/lib/systemd/systemd-bsod --continuous

sudo systemd-cat -p emerg echo "foo"

Of course, to do this you'll need a system with an up-to-date systemd package installed. v255 is already in the Arch repos.

Also see: https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-bsod.service.html

Edit: If you press any key to continue, the BSOD disappears and reveals whatever was present on the screen behind it. In my case, since I ran those commands from a graphical Konsole terminal, it went back to the Wayland session. This shouldn't stop you from looking at a kernel panic.

Ok, ok, I know you're gonna downvote me anyway, but please hear me out.

One of the main problems of the Linux desktop is the low market share - apps you may use for work are not available, and WINE does not always help and may require additional configuration.

Now let's look at things from the developer's perspective. Normally, you have to build a separate package for every distro there is, you have to rely on the distro maintainers to update your application, which might take weeks, you cannot support the previous versions of your app because the dependencies it uses are not in the repos anymore.

Now here comes Flatpak and Flathub. Now you only have to build one package and it will work almost everywhere, all the dependencies are included and you don't have to worry about them, you can publish updates at any time you want. All of that comes with a nice GUI for the user.

So the development and distribution problem is now solved, but commercial products are made to make money - that's their business model. Not all programmers are enthusiasts who work for free; building software is how they get paid.

The usual argument against paid Flatpaks is "if there is no closed source paid software, everyone will switch to free alternatives and that's a net win" - except that it's not. If there is no closed source paid software, every professional will continue using Windows or macOS, like they do now. Many closed source apps have no true free alternatives, so professionals and even normal people will continue to use them.

Closed source paid software will continue to exist in at least the foreseeable future since that's a profitable business. If you allow paid Flatpaks, commercial companies may say "hey, look, we can now easily sell our stuff to Linux users", so they will have an incentive to make Linux builds of their apps. This, in turn, will allow more people to switch to Linux since their apps now work, and that is a net win.

Here's another win for you: most Linux software is FOSS, so even if the new users switch only because their paid proprietary apps started working, they will see all the free alternatives and will be able to try them, maybe even switch to them.

Now, you may think current open source users will switch to closed source software. Here's the point: they already can. They already can switch to Windows and macOS, but they don't - it's their choice to support FOSS and they are doing it now.

Also, consider user privacy. Currently, Flathub allows apps whose business model is to track users and show them ads but doesn't allow apps whose business model is to get a one-time payment.

So, if you want to get new users onboard, you will have to allow paid Flatpaks

Edit: I see in the comments that there's work on that, which is great. I'll leave this post anyway for those who don't currently support monetization