Hello people, just switched to Alpine and it would be great if some of the Apine users could share some dotfiles that are running Wayland compositors. I have not figured out to make swayidle work and some other stuff. By the way I am running River but this happened aswell on a fresh install with the Sway option of setup-desktop script.

I get some errors of unknown session with swayidle and conky, but I have set the corresponding environment variables and launching with dbus-run-session -- river

River init file:

export XDG_SESSION_DESKTOP=river
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=river
dbus-update-activation-environment WAYLAND_DISPLAY XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=river

Shell env file:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR="$(mkrundir)"
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
export _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1

If you encountered some quirks of your own please let me know. Thanks in advance!

Sounds like a good way to make use of old eMachines, at a large discount too.

Finally, the year of the Linux Desktop! (eMachine edition)

Gemini version: gemini://ploum.net/2025-07-23-linux_desktop4.gmi

Okay so I found this old MacBook (I mean OLD, it even has a hot-swappable battery and an optical drive) and I have no idea if it’s even worth the effort of installing anything on it. What do you guys think I could do with it?

Edit: note that this is just from a live usb, it has 120GB storage

I am sure to upset a lot of purists with this, but as a hobby "sysadmin" of my own linux server at home, an AI built into the shell would do wonders to me.

I found bash-ai, but that seems to me like little more than a wrapper for ChatGPT queries.

In an ideal scenario, I'd like to employ a pre-trained, locally run AI that has access to all files, including config files and the list of installed packages, so it can, for example, tell me what specific lines in config files do or if a package I have already installed is good for a task I want to do or what the merge conflict between configs during an upgrade is about.

Is there such a built-in AI?

I can't find some lightweight dm compression layer. Only one i found is VDO and for some reason it uses a lot of memory to operate (on the order of 500 MiB). Why is that? My idea was to use it on a normal laptop/pc that does not have a lot of memory to waste. Only other alternative is btrfs, but it is already slow by itself (compared to other fs like ext4). Idealy what i would want is something like ext4 on VDO (only compression with VDO, and of course there would be LVM in there), only problem with this is that VDO is heavy on memory.

I have an old Laptop (MSI MS1721) that I want to repurpose as a media player on my TV. I have installed an old SSD on with Linux Mint XFCE.

Almost everything works well, with only one exception. The laptop's graphics card (ATI HD3850) requires proprietary drivers that haven't been supported since Kernel 3.4. The replacement open-source drivers cause stuttering while playing videos, which makes it useless for my purposes.

Are there Linux distribution options out there that would fit my needs?

Edit After trying a wide array of distros including Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Lite, Linux MX, Bohdi, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Nobara, Debian XFCE and CachyOS, I was pleasantly surprised to see that CachyOS performed very well and still feels like a modern OS and runs surprisingly smoothly with KDE. It looks like the open source drivers do work decently after all depending on the distro you're running and how well optimized they are for your CPU.

The most depressing news of the week: Intel is ending their performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution. Over the past decade the Clear Linux operating system has shown what's possible with out-of-the-box performance on x86_64 hardware... Not just for Intel platforms but even showing extremely great performance results on AMD x86_64 too. But with the cost-cutting going on at Intel, Clear Linux is now being sunset.

A friend of mine had purchased all of the Sims games and wanted to see if they could play it on Linux and if so they'd switch to it. The issue is that while the Sims games work on steam, they had purchased it through the EA app, which does not have a native Linux version. It turns out that if you purchase it in the EA app, it won't let you transfer it to Steam even though they bought and owned the damn game. Very ridiculous policy.

This is copied from a Reddit post that I found. I figured this solution should be archived in a non-Reddit place in text format so that other people would know how to fix this.

In this video, I cover how to install and use the EA App on Linux using Lutris, a universal launcher that supports many game launcher services.

https://youtu.be/cLZw8hiu25o

This video will cover the standalone installation of the EA App on Linux, and not when it is launched separately by a game purchased in Steam.

Step 1. Install Wine.

https://github.com/lutris/docs/blob/master/WineDependencies.md

The installation of Wine will differ slightly depending on your Linux distribution, but in all cases, you will be installing it using a package manager.

Although Lutris does uses its own Wine builds, it is still recommended to install all of Wine dependencies to ensure a working installation.

On the Wine Dependencies page on the Lutris Wiki, scroll down to find your distribution’s family and then follow the instructions.

Step 2. Install Lutris.

https://lutris.net/

To download Lutris, click on the Download link at the top of the main page, and then follow the installation instructions for your distribution.

Again, much like Wine, it is likely you will use your distribution’s package manager to install Lutris. Once installation is finished, launch Lutris using your application launcher.

Step 3. Install EA App.

To install the EA App using Lutris, click on the + button at the top left corner, and choose the Search the Lutris website for installers option.

In search bar, type in EA App.

You will need to scroll down to find it, but the option you want is the EA App, 2022, Windows entry.

Click on it, and you should be presented by two options, choose the Standard option by clicking the Install button.

From here, specify an installation location, review the files, and click Continue to start the installation process.

If you get asked to install any dependencies, click Yes.

Eventually, you will be presented with the installation wizard for the EA App, so click Let us Go to proceed.

Shortly after, you will be greeted by a blue screen, but you can close this, and the installation process will finish successfully.

Step 4. Launch EA App.

Now that the EA App is installed, double click the entry in Lutris to launch and you will be asked to sign in with your credentials.

Once signed in, the process is identical to Windows, you can browse through all available games to purchase or install ones already in your library.

Once a game is installed, double click to launch.

One final thing to note, I recommend disabling the In-Game overlay as this can prevent older games from launching, something that also happens on Windows.

To do that, click on the hamburger menu at the top left, navigate to Settings, Application, and toggle off the In-Game overlay.

And it's crap across the OSes. On Linux laptops don't wake up from sleep, on Windows they keep waking up when nobody asks for it.

In our home office room there's three laptops. My private one running Fedora, my work PC that sadly runs Windows and my wife's laptop also running Windows.

My work laptop and my wife's laptop keep waking up wasting electricity, and my private laptop needs a hard reset to wake it up every second time.

That feature should be stupid simple, yet it doesn't work across the board.

Rant over.

https://www.linuxeasy.org/arch-linux-e-il-problema-di-linux-firmware-nvidia-risulta-gia-nel-filesystem/

cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/45525722

What's new in this release:

• Optional EGL backend in the X11 driver.
• Support for Bluetooth Low Energy services.
• Moreover support for generating Windows Runtime metadata in WIDL.
• ARM64 builds enabled in Gitlab CI.
• Various bug fixes.

The source is available at https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/10.x/wine-10.12.tar.xz

Binary packages for various distributions will be available from the respective download sites.

You will find documentation here.

Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS for the complete list.

(I'm not rawdogging it. I do not know enough about linux to install one of the rawest forms of it.)

Edit: I fixed it, I think :)

I believe I incorrectly turned my PC off yesterday, possibly resulting in some kind of corruption of my btrfs partition on my boot drive. I managed to boot into a USB with a live image of EndeavourOS I had, then used:
sudo btrfs rescue super-recover /dev/nvme0n1p3 and
sudo btrfs rescue zero-log /dev/nvme0n1p3

This instantly allowed me to mount my boot drive and btrfs partition and access my files. Rebooted, PC came up fine. This has certainly been an experience in patience and Linux in general. Now I can't stop saying btrfs.

Original Post:

Hey gang, hope you're well. I desperately need some Linux help. I was using my desktop (Bazzite w KDE Plasma) just fine, attempting to open some HTML files in Dolphin. It freezes, I physically turn off my desktop and it boots me into a terminal window with the following:

Failed to connect to system scope bus via local transport: No such file or directory  
[363.200643] BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1p3) in btrfs_replay_log:2100: errno=-5 IO failure (Failed to recover log tree)  

Generating "/run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt"  

Entering emergency mode. Exit the shell to continue.  
Type "journalctl" to view system logs.  
You might want to save "/run/initramfs/rdsosreport.txt" to a USB stick or /boot after mounting them and attach it to a bug report.  

Press enter for maintenance (or press Control-D to continue)  

Admittedly my knowledge of Linux is incredibly limited. I have a feeling it has something to do with being unable find my M.2 drive? But the rest may be foreign to me. I figured out how to output 'rdsosreport.txt' and it spat out about a thousand lines that I couldn't scroll up to see. Pressing 'enter' just prompts the terminal as :/var/roothome#, waiting for commands. 'Control-D' just brings me back to that initial message.

There is a line in journalctl that may give us some clues:

BTRFS error (device nvme0n1p3 state E): open_ctree failed: -5  
sysroot.mount: Mount process exited, code=exited, status=32/n/a  
sysroot.mount: Failed with result 'exit-code'  
Failed to mount sysroot.mount - /sysroot.  

Further down there's:
BTRFS: error (device nvme0n1p3) in btrfs_replay_log:2100: error=-5 IO failure (Failed to recover log tree)

I greatly appreciate any time and help you smart folks can offer!

Update: I have Bazzite on a flash drive, and I have the install wizard pulled up on my desktop. Interestingly, and perhaps worryingly, it's taking an abnormally long time to probe my drives. I have two m.2 drives in my desktop, the primary (Samsung EVO 990 2Tb) where Bazzite is installed, and the secondary (WD, I think, 1Tb split into two partitions). The installer has the "install destination" option grayed out, still attempting to locate the drives. It's been about 10 minutes... Could both of the drives be bad? I sincerely hope not...

Hello everyone, I have I guess a bit tricky situation on hand

I have 4 devices (2 computers, 2 cellphones) on my home network, they're all connected on the same LAN, and additionally, all are also running Tailscale (rather out of the box configuration except specific IPv4 addresses given by me)

When going out of home, I normally take up to 2 devices with me and connect to the ones at home through the Tailscale IP

Usually I do this by typing the IP address manually on either scenario, if I'm home I connect typing the LAN IP Addresses for the devices, otherwise I manually type the Tailscale IP addresses

I would like to now optimize this process using Host Names; I would like to type in say, SSH pc1 and that connect via LAN IP if available, and otherwise fallback to Tailscale IP if not

Result being I can just type the one singular host name, and connect successfully regardless if I'm home or not, also using the best possible connection (LAN preferred over Tailscale)

I am aware Tailscale has a feature that it does this out of the box using the Tailscale IP on the same LAN, but this doesn't seem to work on all devices (the phones) and additionally that generates some noticeable overhead given their age too

I have been reading about Avahi and thinking of using it on each device, advertising the same host name with both it's IPs, which I am yet to try but figured I could use more input on solutions if anyone has experience with it, I'd appreciate any

Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a nice day

I'm looking for something in the low hundreds range, mostly to do Visual Studio Code, pretty light html editing, general purpose stuff like Netflix and web browsing.

I'd kind of just like a decent tablet with a keyboard cover. The Pixel tablet might be an option, even if I have to go with something like this.

https://store.google.com/us/product/pixel_tablet $280

https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/p/k480-multi-device-wireless $35

I'd of course prefer to run Linux over Android if it works. Is there anything in a similar form factor and function for price in the Linux world?