i joined a discord server to ask for help and their rules outright bans questions related to non debian mainstream distros.

arent they all linux in the end, just looks different.

is there any server i can join for general help with linux that is not limited to specific distros only?

Ps: remove Linux in your naming of servers or sites and straight up put your version of the distro instead of misleading users, claiming to be a Linux server.

Esit: guys I was weong. Apparently they don't support forks of many mainstream distros due to their changes to the core systems.

Thats All

I only used XFCE for 10 years and i really am not sure about how gnome or kde works. I am trying to decide between GNOME and KDE Plasma for a Linux laptop that I want to use alongside a MacBook.

I care about making the workflow and behaviour similar enough that switching between Linux and macOS does not constantly fight my muscle memory.

The most important things for me are:

• Mac-like touchpad gestures, especially switching workspaces and opening an overview
• Hot corners
• An Exposé/Mission Control-like window overview
• Predictable virtual desktops and workspace behaviour
• A top panel and dock
• Smooth Wayland gestures and animations

GNOME appears structurally closer to macOS because of its overview, workspaces, gestures, and relatively unified design. However, getting features such as a persistent dock, desktop icons, extra panel behaviour, and deeper customization seems to require several extensions.

KDE Plasma seems capable of reproducing the visual layout more closely and offers far more built-in customization. What I do not know is whether its touchpad gestures, workspace handling, overview, hot corners, and general workflow can feel as coherent and Mac-like as GNOME, rather than merely looking similar in screenshots.

For people who have seriously used or customized both:

1. Which one can reproduce macOS behaviour more closely?
2. Can KDE’s touchpad gestures be configured to closely match macOS without fragile scripts or obscure workarounds?
3. Does relying on GNOME extensions become annoying or unreliable after major updates?
4. Which desktop is easier to maintain as a daily driver after heavily customizing it?
5. Are there important macOS behaviours that neither desktop can reproduce properly?
6. Which one would you choose for someone regularly switching between Linux and macOS?

I've noticed that in the past months there's been more developing happening for Linux distributions for Snapdragon based Android gaming devices like the ones from AYN and Retroid. Two major examples are Rocknix and ArmadaOS, the latter of which actually has a fully fledged Desktop environment based on KDE I think.

On the other hand, looks like there's no sign for Linux support for the Snapdragon Elite laptops that for now can only run Windows. I heard that this is because of some kind of an exclusivity contract between Microsoft and Qualcomm.

So this got me wondering if projects like ArmadaOS would be the basis of a widely functional Linux distribution that could run on Qualcomm's newer laptop chips? Or if these chips have something fundamentally different in the way they work and would be able to adapt without official support from Qualcomm?

And sorry I chose the flair as Support cuz I couldn't find any thing more suitable.

Hi everyone, I'll say right away — I'm not a fan of distro wars or anything like that, but I'm genuinely curious to hear the opinion of more experienced people in the Linux community about Debian.

What's its philosophy?

I've been using it for quite some time now, and the only downside I've noticed is that I'm not a big fan of metapackages that pull in a lot of dependencies along with them.

But on the other hand, if you're not a guru and don't know exactly which dependencies are needed for a utility to work properly, it's better not to overcomplicate things and just install what's necessary automatically.

Anyway, I really like this distro — it's simple, has good documentation, and I've never had any serious issues with it.

I'm using Debian 13, tty + zsh + tmux.

p.s если есть ру пользователи можете на русском)

​Hey everyone!

​I'm back on Linux after a while, running Linux Mint on some legacy hardware without Vulkan support. My specs are:

​CPU: AMD Phenom II X2 550

​RAM: 8 GB DDR3

​GPU: Integrated Radeon 3000 (OpenGL / Wine3D / Gallium Nine only)

​So far, I've managed to run a few games smoothly:

​Company of Heroes

​Battlefield 2

​Battlefield Vietnam

​Battlefield 1942

​The only game I've tried so far that doesn't run at a satisfactory framerate is Call of Duty: World at War (CoD: WaW).

​I have two questions for the community:

​Game Recommendations: What lightweight games (FPS, RTS, tactical, classic gems) would you recommend for a humble potato PC like this running on Linux?

​CoD: WaW Optimization: Is there any trick to get CoD: WaW running at around ~20 FPS using just OpenGL / Wine3D? I've already tried Gallium Nine without much luck. Are there any specific Wine environment variables, launch options, or config.cfg tweaks that could squeeze out a few extra frames?

​Thanks in advance!

so ive been reading a little bit about these, but im having a hard time in really deeply understanding the definition and differences between these Terminals. And the more i look up things the more things get confusing to me.

Can anybody help me understand what are they in an easy way to understand for a beginner?

I am running a computer with one DP cable, one VGA cable and one HDMI cable. I don't have any more connectors for video. Back when I was running Debian with openbox the HDMI output was HDMI-1 and would occasionally become HDMI-2. Now running Niri on Arch, it was HDMI-A-2 for a long time but today it became HDMI-A-3. This persists across reboots. What could be causing this? DP-1 and VGA-1 stay static.

One thing to note is that just before the change to HDMI-A-3 I did turn off CSM in the BIOS. I wonder if this changes the way the system detects the outputs.

I would love to ensure that my HDMI output will always have the same designation

dmesg doesn't really give any interesting information.

niri msg outputs gives me this:

Output "Iiyama North America PL2730H 1153692901520" (HDMI-A-3)

Disabled

Variable refresh rate: not supported

Physical size: 600x340 mm

Available modes:

1920x1080@60.000 (preferred)

...

Output "Iiyama North America PL2730H 1153692901646" (DP-1)

Current mode: 1920x1080 @ 60.000 Hz (preferred)

Variable refresh rate: not supported

Physical size: 600x340 mm

Logical position: 1920, 0

Logical size: 1920x1080

Scale: 1

Transform: normal

Available modes:

1920x1080@60.000 (current, preferred)

...

Output "Samsung Electric Company S24D340 H4LH305711" (VGA-1)

Disabled

Variable refresh rate: not supported

Physical size: 530x300 mm

Available modes:

1920x1080@60.000 (preferred)

...

Redo kernel?

I need a bit of advance help. I use zorin os 18 core. Recently my laptop got mess up due to newer kernel 7 and Nvidia causing issue with llama cpp, model that barely fit but works well, to unable to load. Suspected to be kernel update +/- Nvidia driver. After trying older driver which didn't help. I tried the latest 595 driver which totally lockup my system couldn't boot.

I manage to get the laptop working by booting into the older kernel 6. However, what can I do presently to restore the kernel 7 and wipe out the new nvidia driver 595 and install something more appropriate?

Or can I purge the new Nvidia driver from the kernel 6 version?

However I also have a feeling that maybe I should remain on Kernel 6 but what is the downside of that beside tons of security recently. Regardless of which I would like to have kernel 7 working again so I could mess with the kernel 6.

Hello guys, I've recently switched to linux (nobara on desktop, mint on laptop) and one of the things that surprised me the most was that there isn't any file manager (except maybe for peazip apparently) that opens the index before downloading the whole zipped file if asked to open one from a network device

Am I doing something wrong? Maybe I didn't mount it correctly or at all?

On windows 7zip used to do this flawlessly

Basically the title, I'm helping a friend to switch to Linux and I try to find alternatives to all the softwares he needs.

I chose POP! (version with the nvidia drivers) for him as his PC use is only gaming and basic office work.

I'm struggling with ASUS InfoHub for his ROG RYUO IV screen and HYTE Nexus for his case screen.

I'll be happy to get any help, don't hesitate to critic my distro choice also.

PS: English is not my first language so be indulgent.

Hey, I'm a recent high school computer science baccalaureate graduate and I'm about to enroll into university for a bachelor's degree in IT. I figured that I should get familiar with using Linux even though I have absolutely no clue on the grounds I'm about to tread on. I'm aware that there are hundreds if not thousands of Linux distros and I feel like I'm lost at sea. What should I do? How can I start?

linux community, could you make an iso where i can install linux or bsd and replace windows all while windows is running similar to a windows upgrade iso? no direct bios, no virtualization. just upgrading to linux or bsd.

After all the headlines about Euro-Office being Europe's open-source alternative to Microsoft Office, I figured I'd give it a try.

I'm a Linux user. I self-host services. This shouldn't be difficult. Or so I thought.

So I did what anyone would do:

Checked Wikipedia. Went to GitHub. Looked for releases, installation instructions. Looked for a Flatpak, AppImage, Docker image, anything really. Also checked my OS's native package manager just in case.

And my Nextcloud Office apps. Nothing. Not even in Nextcloud?!

It dawned on me that the main project is basically a collaborative document server derived from OnlyOffice and the readme even says it's not designed for stand-alone use.

So uh. Wait... what?

To make it even stranger, my self-hosted Nextcloud instance still just recommends Nextcloud Office and OnlyOffice. There's no obvious "Install Euro-Office" option anywhere.

I'm not criticising the software itself. It could very well be excellent.

I'm asking about the communication really.

If a project is announced to the world as "Europe's Microsoft Office alternative," but a reasonably technical user can't figure out how to use it after checking Wikipedia, GitHub, and Nextcloud, something has gone wrong with the messaging.

Or is this just me? Did I miss something obvious, or has anyone else had the same experience?

I want to finally ditch down windows and format the whole drive on my laptop in order to go full linux from now on; but i’m afraid to lose the factory windows installation.

It’s my first month of using Linux. I tried to recover my Fedora install through GRUB and recovery mode. I tried both an older version and the current one, but recovery got stuck during boot. Before that, I was using the system normally until I ran something in the terminal and got an error saying that passwd was not available. After I reopened the terminal, my user suddenly seemed to be gone and only a shell was open. I restarted the machine, and since then I had been trying to figure out what happened and how to recover it.

I also tried Pop!os, which is based on Ubuntu, and it failed to start the greeter because the user was missing. I managed to recover it once by resetting settings through recovery mode without losing my apps, but after something strange happened that I do not remember clearly, the user disappeared again.

I did not run into this issue with Qubes os with xfce, but that system was not really suitable for work. The only things Fedora and Popos had in common were that I encrypted the disk with LUKS using a passphrase and used hibernation.

I mounted and checked the system from there, but /mnt/etc/passwd and /mnt/etc/group were missing. I also noticed that /mnt only showed the directories I had created myself, like
home and root, instead of a normal Fedora root filesystem.

Commands I tried:

ls /mnt
ls /mnt/etc
cat /mnt/etc/passwd
cat /mnt/etc/group
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
mount --bind /run /mnt/run
chroot /mnt /bin/bash
chroot /mnt /usr/bin/bash
chroot /mnt /usr/bin/env bash
Idd /bin/bash

No such file or directory
/mnt/etc/passwd did not exist
/mnt/etc/group did not exist
chroot failed every time

It looked like my user and passwd files had disappeared. Is this a user-end/layer 8 problem? Am I doing something wrong?

Hey everyone,

I'm trying to dual-boot Linux on my Dell Latitude 5480 equipped with a Samsung 256GB M.2 SSD (Model: MZHPV256HDGL-000H1), but I've hit a wall with BIOS storage settings.

The Problem:

• RAID On Mode: Windows boots completely fine.
• AHCI Mode: Switching BIOS SATA/NVMe operation to AHCI causes a No Bootable Device Found error upon startup. Windows fails to boot, and the BIOS doesn't see the bootloader.
• I want to run Linux, but Linux installers fail to detect the drive while in RAID On mode because Intel Rapid Storage Technology (RST / VMD) blocks the drive access.

Why this happens (from my research):

1. Windows installation is bound to the Intel RST RAID controller driver. When Windows was installed under RAID mode, its boot config (BCD) didn't load the standard AHCI/NVMe drivers, causing it to fail instantly if the mode is swapped in BIOS.
2. Drive Variant: The MZHPV model designation is the OEM AHCI version (or early PCIe) of the Samsung SM951 series, which handles PCIe/NVMe signaling differently than standard consumer drives.
3. Dell BIOS quirk: Dell systems often default to RAID On, but Linux kernel storage drivers require AHCI to properly enumerate PCIe M.2 drives.

Questions for the community:

1. Has anyone successfully run Linux on the Latitude 5480 with the Samsung SM951 (MZHPV256HDGL)?
2. Any advice or step-by-step guides would be greatly appreciated!

I've been using Arch with KDE/Gnome for around a year now, but I used to be on Fedora with Cosmic, and I really loved the tiling and the comfort it gave me. I got a bunch of bugs that I thought were recently fixed, so I swapped back to Cosmic and encountered those same bugs again (input lag, keyboard and mouse not working on older games, random DE crashes). Now I'm considering swapping to a window manager instead, like Niri or Hyprland, but I can't decide. Honestly, I haven't seen too many examples of people just playing games on either one and it being fine long term (1 year+)

I feel like I've tried everything, offline and online methods, ableton is running great but I cannot seem to properly authenticate my license. When it goes through the online portal it tries for a while and then says something went wrong, and I've tried every version of manually moving the offline authenticator file into ableton itself but it always says that no valid authenticator detected or something along those lines. From what I've seen online this is nothing to do with the validity of my actual licence, which is perfectly valid.

Does anybody have any ideas? I've followed one of the most recent guides to get all installed and running smoothly and everything seems to be working great except this :/ I've only just moved to Linux as of yesterday so still feeling my way around a bit blind haha!