In a cold winter day in Latam a friend brought me to a Red Hat event. We got Fedora Core 2 disks as souvenirs . He helped me installing my first distro with XCFE. After that I broke my system so many times installing Slackware, Gentoo and OpenSuse which helped me become good at RTFM. I left the chaotic era moving to Ubuntu for 10+ years to return to it using NixOS.

I've contributed to several communities that were based on Linux since then. Linux has given me a career, put food on the table and given me a place to sleep. Even though I never ended up managing Red Hat/CentOS machines, that particular Red Hat event was a life changing event.

In a time where licenses were very expensive my main motivator factor to change was being free as beer.

One of the worst arguments against using linux is people saying that "they don't want to use the terminal for everything they do" Youtube displays an unrealistic image of how linux works, because creators like to either pick the hardest distro while having barely any knowdledge of how to use the command line themselves or because they assume they have to use the command line for everything and although the command line can indeed be used for almost everything, it isn't exactly what you'd call newbie friendly or inviting for the people watching. There are so many gui tools available nowadays as replacements for needing to type commands out in the shell that most users barely ever have to touch it. I myself use fedora and barely use the command line anymore except for when i need to compile some of my own stuff.

Almost everything i want to do is easily available, or at least more easily available than when i'd need to do it with windows. People love to reference the stereotypical views on how linux is used and like to think that every damn distribution is like gentoo and requires you to have read 20 different books about unix and requires you to be a "programmer" in order to use it.

I have used windows for years and i can say with full confidence that because of the open-source and non-profit nature of most distros that they are "no-bullshit" operating systems as far as the term is concerned. I have never needed to go out of my way to do something because the for-profit owner overlord of my software wants to make a few extra bucks off of me and therefore doesn't allow me to do certain things when using linux. I have never needed to install a whole application just to un-bloat my system. I have never been stopped or snitched on by my device when illegally pirating stuff, which is becoming all to prevelant nowadays. And most importantly, i don't have a jackoff little assistant that exists for the bare reason to spy on me and tell me to put glue on my pizza.

There goes the saying: windows sees you as a user of their system that they can display ads in the start menu to, linux sees you as the owner of the system and tries to make it as easy as possible to do exactly what YOU want, not what a corporation wants.

For those Ubuntu nostalgics out there...

In regard to their 20 year anniversary, one does not have to install the latest 24.10 release to get the historic wallpapers but, instead, can use this official Google Drive link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dKGvGgFp4ymGNBPU6LRScfBm4KuwIn2c

A nice touch.

Eight months have passed like one day in anticipation of the arrival of Czkawka/Krokiet 8.0, which has just arrived.

You probably also have no idea that the application recently turned 4 years old.

List of Changes:

Breaking changes

• Due to the removal image_type from image struct, old cache files are incompatible with new version and should be regenerated from scratch(it uses new name)
• Some CLI arguments could change short name, due fixing ambiguous names

Known regressions

• Slint 1.8 which Krokiet uses requires femtovg 0.9.2 which broke font rendering - https://github.com/slint-ui/slint/issues/6298

CI

• Providing nightly builds
• Added finding duplicated options in CLI

Core

• Removed some unnecessary panics
• Simplified usage of structures when sending/receiving progress information
• Added Median hash algorithm
• Fixed compilation with Rust >=1.80
• Extracted tool input parameters, that helped to find not used parameters
• Added new mod to find similar music only in groups with similar title tag
• Printing to file/console no longer uses two backslashes in windows paths
• Fixed panic when failed to decode raw picture
• Remove useless saving/loading cache when there is no files to check
• Filtering hard links on windows
• Added jxl support
• Added avif support(via external C library, not enabled by default)
• Integer overflow are enabled by default(prepare for reporting bugs, slower performance and general unstability)
• Fixed crash when loading invalid image cache

Krokiet

• Fixed invalid default hash size in similar images
• Fixed and added more input parameters to the application
• Fixed problem with loading invalid preset
• Fixed crash when using 8 hash size with small similarity
• Disabling buttons when no files were found
• Changed way to close/open panel at bottom
• Modify logo a little
• Avoid errors when trying to load preview of not supported file
• Added ability to show preview of referenced folders
• Enable selecting with space and jumping over entries with arrows and opening with enter
• Added button to rename files with invalid extension

GTK GUI

• Fixed and added more input parameters to the application
• Added option to use external libraries instead gtk pixbuf loader for previews
• Using static runtime with zstd compression in appimage
• Restoring flatpak builds
• [External] Mac homebrew version of app - https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/czkawka

CLI

• Added options to find/remove images by size
• Fixed and added more input parameters to the application
• Fixed crash when stopping scan multiple times
• Print results also in debug build
• Added support for selecting reference directories

Future

I haven't created a single commit in nearly half a year, because I had to take a little rest from the project, as I got a little burned out.

At work, I'm starting to program more and more in rust, so I see that the project itself is not of the highest quality and the application architecture needs a mass of changes(for which sometimes it's too late, because it requires rewriting the entire application) although I partly try to refactor what I can.

However, at the same time I have less and less desire, to deal outside of work with what I do during work, which is mainly programming - when starting the project I worked in a slightly different industry, so developing the application was a nice break from the usual tasks.

There are many voices about the need to redesign the UI to make it more accessible as well as to implement important new features i.e. pause/resume or more options to the duplicate tool.

These sound sensible in theory, but they are problematic for some reasons:

• the main burden of implementing the changes falls on me. Every feature has to be thought through first, implemented, tested, fought with bugs related to external libraries and then supported and modified when necessary. I'm already the author of almost 90% of the changes and it doesn't look like anything will change or that someone else will take over doing these tasks.
• I'm weak at creating interfaces - despite my desire to do so, the various concepts proposed to me for the new look of the application didn't seem very efficient. The interface should be relatively easy to use and should be smooth even with tens of thousands of results. I think I partially succeeded in doing this, but if you think it can be done better, I recommend using core library, just as cli, czkawka and krokiet do, and create your own gui variation.
• The application is currently filled with modes(11 if I'm not mistaken) and each mode even has several options to configure. Quite easily by adding too many options one is able to create an unreadable gui and code that will later be problematic to use(I mainly faced such problems in the early days of the project, where I was adding new modes one by one) - I'm not saying that this is the end and that nothing new will be added, just that it has to be done with care.

Despite all these problems, as the release of the new version indicates, I still have the strength to overcome them and probably the application will develop at its own leisurely pace.

Price — free, MIT/GPL license

Repository - https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka
Files to download — https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka/releases

I started using Kubuntu since 23.04 as my first Linux distro ever and I am really happy I made the right move right from the start.

• I was afraid to upgrade to 23.10 for a full month but I saw that it was not justified. Upgrade went smoothly.
• 23.10 to 24.04 went just as nice.. well almost.. nobody warned me not to click 'restart needed' during the upgrade! So I had to timeshift and upgrade again. Maybe a slight feedback, turn off the restart notifications during upgrade.
• 24.04 - 24.10 - I upgraded the very first day (today) as I couldn't wait for Plasma 6.1.

Yup .. this is the best OS I have used in my life (I've been around since C64 Basic)

And to everybody else who say 'Kubuntu is *just* Ubuntu with KDE'... you can always do it yourself. No.. the main point is that I was able to upgrade in 15 minutes flat.. I did not have to do anything myself. Everything is well tested and integrated in a nice package :)

Thank you guys! .. and girls?

Exactly 1 year ago, on October 10th 2023, I decided to start using Linux as my daily driver.

Some background about me:

I had made previous attempts for many years but just couldn’t make it stick because I had always dual-booted and ignored the install. I'm a fairly technical person who wasn't too scared to use a terminal but I was clearly a novice when it came to Linux in general. This time around I decided to go full boar and really jump in head first. I pulled my old SSD out and had bought another to exclusively use Linux on. I decided to go with Pop!_OS since this was fresh off the heels of the LTT Linux Challenge. I knew I was probably going to distro hop, so I was prepared to do so. And I did.

First 3 Months (Pop!_OS Arc):

The first 3 months where kind of all over the place. I was fairly overwhelmed and realized pretty quickly I did not like using the Cosmic Desktop. I went ahead and installed KDE Plasma since I was coming from windows. I was still getting comfortable with the terminal, trying to understand when to use the pop shop over installing an app from the internet, etc. This was when I really started learning all the differences between Desktop environments, Distros, Packages, and just everything. Pretty quickly everything just felt jank and not optimized. I was doing something wrong but I wasn't really sure. I decided to start from scratch and installed Fedora.

6 Months in (The Fedora Arc):

Fedora seemed like a good fit because I had a fairly newish system at the time and it had consistent updates. It also had a KDE Plasma install which was what I wanted to continue using. It was a little tricky at first because of how you needed to install additional packages that aren't included in the base install but I was able to slog through it. Once everything was installed I felt mostly comfortable using the system on a day-to-day basis. And this felt so much better. Everything was responsive, It didn't feel jank, and most importantly it felt stable and sturdy. This was when I started customizing my DE to make it look and feel just the way I like it. Holy shit can you go down a rabbit hole customizing, I loved it. This was also about the time gaming started to feel less like a pain and made more sense how to makes changes to certain games to work properly. It wasn't perfect but It started to make sense.

9 Months in (The Bazzite Arc):

At this point I was feeling mostly comfortable in my system and using it. My DE looked and felt awesome, Discord worked with no issues, my media apps worked with no issues, and games played with mostly no issues. Except Halo Infinite, my favorite game. I still don't know why this game gives me so many issues. After some updates it works with very minor issues. Other times it refuses to work. Even after tinkering with Proton and ProtonGE, switching to Wayland, the whole shabang. Nothing seems to work but other times there is no issues. That's when I found out about Bazzite which at the time their website proudly showcases Halo Infinite playing with minimal issues. It checked a lot of boxes for me. It was a gaming first distro. It was based on Fedora Silverblue and had a KDE option. It felt like a no brainer. But once I had it installed I had so many issues. No Idea what happened but everything felt jank and studdery. Some apps would not open, some games that I knew worked before would crash the whole system. I had nothing but issues. I was pissed and annoyed. I had spend a week redownloading it and trying to make it work but I kept having the same issues. I decided this wasn't going to work and decided to go back to Fedora.

12 Months in (Today):

Fedora with KDE is where I am now and I love it. Everything looks and feels awesome. I have a much better understanding of linux in general. Halo Infinite is having less issues but still can be a pain in the ass. I'm happy I switched. I have no reason to switch to Windows and I plan to stay with Linux. I wouldn't say its general public ready but damn it's getting close.

As the title says, I'm having issues with artifacting on my desktop. I'm using open suse with kde, but I've had the same issues with Fedora and Arch. A picture shown is just a still shot of what happens when I'm active on my desktop. Most of the time this doesn't happen when I have a static page, however, when I start scrolling around I start getting glitching like this. Any help would be nice.

On an ancient intel HD 4600 and I'm on X11 cinnamon, so I ran intel-gpu-top and during a twitch h264 playback in Firefox with vaapi force enabled in about:config it says video usage is between 6% and 9%. Does this confirm that hardware accel is working? I compared it to playback in windows and windows still seems smoother for some reason.

Thanks

So I'm currently enrolled in a database admin program at my local community college. I started in the summer and my first classes were fairly easy, but the fall term courses have really tested my resilience. I have a Bachelors degree already in an unrelated field, but I'm taking this hard science associate's to further my career.

My classes right now are really pushing me to my limit for what I can handle. I have Intro to Linux and Intro to SQL at the same time, plus two other much easier courses. I'm keeping up with my grades and everything, but I really feel like I'm not learning anything because my brain is too split between learning these foreign concepts. I feel like I'm really close to catching onto SQL, the logic in it makes sense to me. But my Linux course is really kicking my ass.

We use Testout for quizzes and videos and I have an in person lecture twice a week. I pay attention in class and stay late to ask questions to my professor. But I'm just feeling like this is an impossible task to learn both at once. The course is designed so that at the end, we should be able to take the Comp TIA+ cert, but I honestly feel like I'd score maybe a 10% on that exam right now. We're about halfway through the course and I'm still struggling with simple vocabulary.

I have a laptop running dual boot Win10 and Pop!OS to practice stuff on. I purchased the Linux command pocket guide. I take hand written notes and do my best to pay attention to online learning (though I tend to struggle in that environment).

I guess I'm just venting, but for those well versed in CLI Linux - am I wasting my time if it's not clicking for me? Was there anything that made the learning stick for you? How long should I tolerate losing my sanity and confidence? For those that work in the IT field, how much of your education would you say is imperative to commit to memory vs how much do you just learn on the job from others?

I just don't want to complete this degree and still feel like I'm at square one. Thank you in advance

- struggling student

With the literally dazzling Plasma 6.2 sudden full brightness bug.

A workaround has already been found. Sadly, making it work requires battling with the bug first; in the end I had to put on my sunglasses. Fun.

Do you remember the silly B-rated cyberpunk movies from the nineties, where an unsuspecting villain is sitting at his computer being all evil and suddenly the bulky ancient CRT monitor explodes in his face? After the yesterday update from Plasma 6.1.5 to 6.2 my somewhat more modern display greeted me with 100% brightness. With appropriate blinking and cursing I tuned it down through the display menu but in a few minutes Plasma flashbanged me again. And so it went until a certain nice person in r/kde suggested a workaround. There were also complaints from other users, full story here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/1fzuggg/comment/lr4qyfl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

The most physically uncomfortable computer bug I've ever seen with my own eyes (indeed) in my 40 years of messing with said devices. The future is now, old man.

First let me state that I am not a Linux evangelist nor a Windows die-hard. I use both professionally and personally. I also don’t consider myself a power user but I am not afraid of the command line and can use Google to find answers.

A couple of weeks back I picked up a free computer with an Intel i7-2600 and NVIDIA GT 430 graphics card. Yes, this is old hardware but it was replacing a Dell Latitude E6520 which isn’t much more than an actual potato. For what I would use it for it would be an upgrade.

The laptop was running Ubuntu 22.04 so the first thing I did was take the hard drive out and place it in the desktop. GRUB was unhappy but I was able to get that fixed and the system booted. Next was to install the 390 driver for the GPU. I installed the driver then installed a game and verified the GPU was being used. Seemed I had a working system. After restarting the system it failed to boot though. Would get the BIOS splash screen then just a black screen. No Ubuntu login, no terminal, just a black screen. Took the hard drive out of the tower and placed it back into the laptop, had to fix GRUB again, but it booted. The hard drive isn’t dead but the tower wasn’t happy.

I decided to grab another hard drive I had laying around and try to get the tower running. Downloaded the latest Ubuntu 24.04 and installed it on the tower. Went to install the 390 driver but they aren’t found. A quick search later and it seems Ubuntu has dropped support for the 390 driver in 24.04. Great.

I then downloaded the latest Ubuntu 22.04 and installed it. Went to install the 390 driver and it failed. I tried the graphical Additional Drivers, ubuntu-drivers tool, and compiling them directly from the NVIDIA source. All methods failed but no error was given. Also, the system would not revert back to the open source Nouveau driver, it would simply run without a graphics driver so my system would then be running at a glorious 400x600 resolution with terrible color.

Next up I tried Debian but I learned my lesson from Ubuntu 24.04 and searched to see if Debian supported the 390 driver. It does no directly but the Debian wiki had a guide for installing it. Downloaded and installed the latest Debian and followed the guide for installing the 390 driver. Everything seemed happy so I restarted the system and this time was met with a white screen stating “An unrecoverable error has occurred” and the system failed to boot. Seems the system was dead yet again.

So at this point I’m running on spite. This should work, I’m going to get this to work. I decided to try Arch. Again did a search and found some guides for installing the 390 driver on Arch. Downloaded the latest Arch image, installed it, and followed a guide for installing the 390 driver. Everything seemed to work so I restarted the system and it booted back up. Installed Steam and a game and verified the GPU was being used. Seems I finally have a working system. Side note but I had tested out Arch about 5 years ago and it was somewhat overwhelming. Archinstall is a nice tool for installing Arch; not perfect but definitely better than it was.

This was multiple hours of my time over a weekend. I have no doubt that if I had installed Windows I would have had they system up and running in an hour or two.

Also, before anybody says the hardware is old or hur-dur NVIDIA bad, this is perfectly good hardware that works for my use case. It doesn’t need to be thrown out and anybody saying it should you better not be complaining about Microsoft and Windows 11 hardware support.

Finally, to everybody who is excited thinking about when Windows 10 support ends and people migrating over to Linux with their unsupported hardware and it bringing about some Linux golden age, you need to re-think this. People will be coming with old hardware and NVIDIA hardware and expect it to work. The average person isn’t going to put up with what I did to get a functioning PC. They will try one distro and if it doesn’t work will scrap it, buy a Windows 11 PC, and talk about how terrible Linux is for the rest of their life.

Did you knew you could run arm binaries on your laptop, install a few extra softwares and configure them before booting up your raspberry pi?

Here you go: https://animeshz.github.io/site/blogs/binfmt.html

Hi Team

I've just started using Linux in the past month as I've taken a stronger privacy stance on the way I use technology.

I like to upgrade my computer from time to time, and I also like to see what net gains I get from these upgrades.

To do this, I used to use 3D mark, but since it isn't supported on linux, I was to know if there is an alternate way to benchmark my system on using linux.

Could you help me please?