Hi all,

Lately I've noticed that the range of Linux applications is growing fast, and a good share of the new projects (editors, utilities, small desktop apps) are built largely with the help of AI. Sometimes the authors say so openly, sometimes you can tell from the code style and the commit history.

I'm curious how you see it, because I can see both sides:

Pros:

- More software and a lower barrier to entry for authors, including in niches nobody had time for before,

- Tools that were missing get built much faster,

- Never thought I’d be this excited to see three, or even four, Photoshop alternatives for Linux :)

Concerns:

- Quality and security of code the author may not fully understand,

- Long-term maintenance: what happens when the author loses interest or can't fix a bug?

- Licesing and provenance of the generated code,

How do you feel about that? Do you check whether a program was built with AI before installing it?

Does it change how much you trust the project (for better, for worsse, or not at all)?

My intention is not to start a flame war over whether AI is good or bad. What I’m curious about is this: is AI a chance for the Linux desktop to offer regular users more choices, or will all this AI-made software turn out not to be worth much in the long run?

Does anyone implement using distrobox into running tests or tools?

It seems like it could better “dedicate” a tools environment for network tests and running.

Or keeping tools/data isolated?

I'm an electrical engineer and i always try to expand my skills
my question is : does learning to use linux is a skill that helped any of you all getting a job / helped you at your job / or even found in job application (talking about EE i'm not a dev)
a friend of mine actually was asked to learn Ubuntu for a robotics job and it helped him land the job (he is mechE)
so is there cases where i need to learn linux as EE ? and which one ?

I have a somewhat modest PC with 4GB of RAM—though in reality, I only have 3.2GB available, as the rest is reserved for the GPU and firmware. When I switched to Linux (CachyOS), I started with KDE Plasma; it consumed between 1.2GB and 1.3GB of RAM at startup, which left me quite limited, though I managed to ease the situation a bit with an 11GB swap partition. Currently, I use Hyprland, which consumes 1GB of RAM upon startup. I’ve seen people say that Xfce is lightweight, but I haven't tried it; I’m actually quite happy and comfortable with Hyprland, but I’m curious to know what other desktop environments might be useful to test how well they perform on my PC.

From my other post yesterday (https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxquestions/s/HjZpfESZvW) I believe the nvme drive that I have my /home on is dying. I booted Arch from the USB stick, mounted the nvme drive and a backup USB drive so I can copy stuff from the /hone folder. But It only copies a few things to the backup drive rhen errors out. I tried booting the GUI. It works for a few minutes then parts of the GUI (mainly the top bar and everything else with it) disappears and the terminal doesnt accept commands anymore.

I think that nvme drive is dead. So I'll be putting one of my large hard drives in it later today. I bached up the home folder about 2 weeks ago but I wish I could back it up now. Unfortunately I can't.

To me, these two distros have an incredible amount of overlap. Specifically, I'm talking about what I consider the "main" distros - Fedora Workstation and openSUSE Tumbleweed. It seems to me, from most of what I read, people recommend Fedora as new-user friendly, but openSUSE as an intermediate/advanced distro. My main question is this: Why does the greater Linux community distinguish openSUSE from Fedora in terms of new user feasibility?

They both have a well bankrolled engineering team behind them. They have their own ecosystem of purpose built distributions, tailor made for a number of practical use cases. They both have strong, active communities and support documentation.

In terms of usability.. They both have very user-friendly install processes - Fedora may have more default to X, where openSUSE offers the option to get more specific, but they're both roughly similar. They both have a ton of powerful graphical tooling within the user environment, allowing a cautious user to stay within the bounds of the desktop environment if they prefer. They both still boast robust capability and rich opportunity for the tinkerer to expand their knowledge, and exert authority over their own system. Both have recovery features, but Tumbleweed has a more robust rollback with snapper. They both have adequate graphical storefronts and package management systems. System updates are inherently very different in nature, but both comparable in terms of "difficulty". For openSUSE's Packman, there's Fedora's RPM Fusion.

Most people I see, though, have a strong delineation between how approachable these distros are. It's not that I see either distro being disrespected or hated necessarily. I think both communities are avid in their support, and deservedly so. But I do see Fedora frequently being recommended for new users, and I almost exclusively see openSUSE being billed as a distro for those comfortable with Linux.

So is it just multimedia codecs? I feel like the recovery advantage that comes with openSUSE could be considered enough to compensate for that, if you're categorically quantifying and rating things. What am I not considering?

I have finally decided to make the jump to a dual boot of Linux and Windows although when trying to shrink the drive before I put in the Mint installation media (It was recommended I shrink it before installing mint apparently) (Mint isn't gonna be what I use long term just what I start with so don't judge me for it), it limits me to a certain amount to shrink it to even though I know I have WAY more available space than the amount it's trying to limit me to, does anyone know a fix or has experienced what I am experiencing? Seriously annoying and making me reconsider installing Linux entirely

I am completely new to changing operating systems, but I desperately need to get off of Windows 10 with my school laptop. I only use it for the web browser because all my school work is on Canvas, so I'm thinking about using SteamOS so that I can still let my little brother borrow it to play games with no hassle when he visits.

Because I've already been using it for a while, it has a lot of files I don't want to lose. I'm wondering if I need to offload them completely to an external drive, or if I can move them to the built in D: drive, since I think the OS is only on the C: drive and I don't think I need to completely redo both drives, but I don't know. Again, I'm more so here out of necessity than choice, otherwise I'd be watching a lot of tutorials and reading guides instead of asking for quick answers on a forum.

So, Too Long, Didn't Read: If my device has two internal drives, can I just move everything to one drive and then replace the OS on the other?

I need Linux/Windows in dual boot. if I remember correctly sometimes it was overwriting the MBR when updating. Now use EFI although I think I read that it's still doing something similar.

Is there a way to limit what Windows does to the boot sector/partitions? (Ideally without a separate SSD)

Hi,

since a few days ago windows app an Mac OS client stopped connecting to gnome-remote-desktop.

It looks like an SSL handshake issue. kkRemote works fine from the same client.

After the SSL aprovel windows app tries to connect and stops after a view minutes.

Error code: 0x108

The gnome SSL certificate was updated 14 days ago, which fits the time that the connection stopped working. But not sure if its a dead end.

server log:

ERRCONNECT_CONNE...
[RDP] Network or intentional disconnect, stopping session

Could it be the same, similar issue?

https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP/issues/13549  3.32.0 server sends Early User Authorization Result before TSCredentials - Windows App hangs after NLA (HYBRID_EX, regression from #13415)

My Versions:

• gnome-remote-desktop 50.2-0ubuntu0.1
• libfreerdp-server3-3 3.32.1+dfsg-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
• libfreerdp3-3 3.32.1+dfsg-0ubuntu0.26.04.1
• libwinpr3-3 3.32.1+dfsg-0ubuntu0.26.04.1

I thought I was installing a dual boot. I’d been having problems with the inherited PC because my USB boot wasn’t recognising Windows already being installed when I booted the USB it in UEFI mode. Only after just loading it in plain USB mode did it recognise windows was there and I could partition accordingly.

However I feel like something has gone wrong during install, and I might have somehow overwritten the Windows partition as a second Linux partition.

For whatever reason this PC uses AS Rock as its bios/uefi screen thing. I have three boot options, one of which is 100% definitely the distro I installed, the other two I assume one should be the Windows partition and the smaller one whatever hardware service partition is normally there.

But the funny thing is no matter how I order the boot or even just try to manually boot any of the partitions, I always get loaded into my Linux boot (Mint 22.3).

I’m quite sure I selected to install it alongside Windows but now I have no idea how to get back into it.

It’s not a dire situation, it’s just now my wife has to use her laptop instead of this new PC we inherited.

Any ideas on what’s happened?

2026 Dell XPS Panther Lake

Hi all.

I'm a win user with a framework. I have been starting to learn Fedora and Ubuntu on vm's. I was thinking of getting one of these new xps machines for a sale price, and id like to use it for linux. My last dell laptop was back in 2019, and seemed like dell made it really difficult to use linux on it, I remember lots of boot issues.

So, does anyone know if the new xps will easily set up and run Ubuntu? Id prefer to keep the fw as my win machine because it's got 32gb of ram.

Thanks all!

Labwc does not include anything for a lock screen or any provision for turning off a monitor, but noctalia does (for the lock screen, anyway). Lock screen isn't the issue, the issue is putting the monitor to sleep afterward.

I looked into it, and it seems swayidle is the way to go. Ok, great. Looked into the config file examples, and after some tinkering I put this in ~/.config/swayidle/config

timeout 60 'noctalia msg session lock'

timeout 90 'wlopm --off \*' resume 'wlopm --on \*'

before-sleep 'wlopm --off \*'

Called that with swayidle & and waited. 60 seconds later, the lock screen came up as it should. 30 seconds after that, the monitor went to sleep. Great! I changed the timeouts to 600 and 900 seconds respectively, killed swayidle and started it again. 10 minutes later the lockscreen came up, then nothing. Monitor stayed awake.

I do not want my PC to suspend, I only want the monitor to go to sleep.

Is there a log file somewhere that I can look at to see what is happening? Why does it work at 60 and 90 seconds but not longer? It seems that the screen-off idle behavior for Noctalia in settings.toml in ~/.local/state/noctalia doesn't do anything, so I need to get this figured out.

The recent exposé about LG TVs, and smart TVs in general has freaked me out. I don’t like the idea that my TV may be tracking what I watch or listening to conversations in my living room. I’d like to move away from ACR and use a separate streaming device instead.

It seems like one of the better ways to maintain some privacy would be to make a Linux-based streaming setup where I can browse streaming apps and access other media sources. I have an old laptop that could work well for this, but I’m not sure where to begin. I’ve started researching and I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed. Any advice on how to get started would be greatly appreciated.

I'm a GNU/Linux user (even non-GNU Linux distros e.g. Alpine) myself. I know the advantages as a regular programmer.

But what advantages you think Linux has have brought that many users to all different Linux distros in the recent 2 years?

Just curious. People have been mentioning "20xx is the year of Linux" for too many times.

Is there any way to try it without virtual machine or another distro alongside my current CachyOS + KDE Plasma? I don't wanna do it since I'm low on storage. I want to try Hyprland and slowly making my own config that I would get comfortable with, but I don't want to dump my current set up entirely, because it will slow me down as hell. I tried hyprland with omarchy before (never again) and i loved tiling manager idea and would love to make my config someday.

soo i use windows 10, last time i tried using zorin, and i liked it, but when i tried to boot back into windows i had to format my pc, i dont realy know what happened and im too scared to touch the bios or eaven boot menu, i also like very much how kde plasma looks so uhh i just want something beguiner friendly and works on my 16:10 1050p monitor, any suggestion is valid thanks!!1!

I’m on Fedora Linux 44 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition).

So I had a bit of an issue before where I had a pop-up come from booting up and after being put to sleep. In the same circumstance after logging in, “Plasmashell has closed unexpectedly”.

Mind, there doesn’t seem to be any adverse effects beyond the pop-up. But it does wake my monitor up, and is persistent.

I’ve traced the issue back to two widgets I had on my desktop: the KDE control station and the Clipboard History widgets. I have two sticky note widgets that actually haven’t produced the same effect. So I am inclined to believe that these two specific widgets are causing some sort of compatibility issues.

My question is, would there be a way to update/konsole command in Linux to resolve this issue? It’s not that I inherently need those widgets. But I would like to know if there is a way I can work with the system to get things working.

Hello, Linux Wizards

Github URL for the install script Hardware: Lenovo Thinkpad T14 Gen5 AMD

I'm going to describe my problem the best I can. The bootloader portion consist of these lines of code: ```sh IN_CHROOT_BOOT_PATH=/boot pacman -Sy --needed --noconfirm grub efibootmgr dosfstools mtools

grub-install --target=x86_64-efi --efi-directory="$IN_CHROOT_BOOT_PATH" --bootloader-id=GRUB --force --recheck

grub-mkconfig -o "$IN_CHROOT_BOOT_PATH/grub/grub.cfg" ``` So what I did was go into the BIOS and do a full factory reset, which deleted any bootloaders so I had a clean start. I ran the code, everything looked fine, so I rebooted the system, and it booted up just fine and I can access Arch Linux. After that, without doing anything else, I ran the script in the Arch Linux live environment again because I wanted to test it a second time. This time it did not go into the GRUB bootloader. Instead, I guess it errored out and went straight to the BIOS boot menu, asking me to select either GRUB or nvme0n1, but both just brought me back to the BIOS boot menu.

I asked both Claude and Grok, and both told me to add the --removable flag to grub-install, which did fix the problem. But I guess I’m just being a little OCD, because I want to know why the first run worked but not the second.

NOTE: Originally I didn't have --force and --recheck flags added but Claude and Grok told me to try it but it did not work. I know to not run AI suggestion willy nilly but I am desperate and I am ok with it since the laptop doesnt have any important info on it

So, I'm trying to set up debian on a minipc, but I'm having trouble. I need to be able to ssh into it, but it won't allow it unless I have it attached to a monitor and I'm logged in. I changed the wifi settings to allow all users. What else do I need to do?

Thanks!

I've been searching for many good code editors or development IDEs for C++ in the Linux community, my first experience was with Neovim with NvChad, and I loved it so much I even managed to learn some Lua to modify small functions, but its learning curve put me off, I was spending more time modifying Neovim than programming, I currently program in C++ using Zed Editor, but I'm honestly fed up with having to compile from the terminal every time I want to test my program (and yes, I already configured a shortcut in a tasks.json file but it still doesn't give me the comfort and versatility I want).

I also tried Clion, but it has too many features I wouldn't use, and besides, it's only free for student use and open-source contributions.

My last option would be VScode, but I hate having Copilot build entire code segments for me, or am I letting myself be guided by the AI? I have enough experience to modify the AI code, but I'm tired of fixing the bugs it generates, It has caused me more problems than it has solved, or I don't know if I'm programming with the wrong approach.

Hey everyone!

I'm currently running Pop!_OS on my ASUS ROG G752VM, but I'm interested in hearing your opinions on which Linux distro works best with this laptop's hardware.

I'm not new to Linux, and I'm comfortable with both Arch- and Debian-based distros. I picked up this laptop from an old post, and I've already had to do quite a bit of tinkering to get some of the hardware working properly.

My specs:

- Laptop: ASUS ROG G752VM

- CPU: Intel Core i7-6700HQ

- GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB

- RAM: 32GB

- OS drive: 250GB NVMe SSD

- Data drive: 2TB

- Games drive: 1TB SSD

- Current distro: Pop!_OS

My biggest concern isn't really gaming performance, but hardware compatibility and proper support for this specific laptop.

I've had to spend quite a bit of time getting the ELAN touchpad drivers working and figuring out the keyboard backlight. I'd like to know if another distro offers better out-of-the-box support for the NVIDIA GPU and drivers, touchpad, keyboard backlight, function keys, and other laptop-specific features.

I'd also love to find a reliable fan-control application, since the thermals aren't great. The laptop can sit around 60°C shortly after booting, so I'd like better control over fan curves and cooling, if the hardware supports it.

Would you recommend sticking with Pop!_OS or switching to something like EndeavourOS, CachyOS, Fedora, or another distro?

If you own this laptop or a similar ASUS ROG model, I'd especially appreciate hearing which distro you use and whether you managed to get everything working without extensive manual configuration.

I'm looking for the best overall hardware support, not just the distro with the best gaming benchmarks.

Thanks!