qwesx

Red Hat's source code for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) was previously publicly accessible, even if you were not a customer. Now only customers may get access to the source code (which is allowed by the GPL since source code only has to be delivered to those who have received binaries generated from it). But there are Linux distributions who use Red Hat's publicly available sources to create RHEL "clones" (in quotation marks because they obviously don't pretend to be RHEL), except without providing the corporate support one would receive for being a RHEL customer. They do have community forums though.

The superficial issue is that those "clone"-distros would have to either purchase a RHEL license or apply to one of Red Hat's other programs to access the sources for their own distro. The actual issue is that Red Hat's terms for being a customer are that they'll kick you out if you use that code to redistribute your own versions of it (or, god forbid, even create a full distro from it).

Since CentOS proper was killed off years ago, many people who wanted a Red Hat compatible server distro but didn't want or need commercial support shifted their systems to the aforementioned other "clone"-distros, which are now in danger of disappearing because of that change.

Is Red Hat legally able to do it? Yes. Is it a dick move? Absolutely. Will it help spread the popularity of RHEL or other Red Hat distros? Absolutely not.

That means every time a new Kernel version is installed, the Nvidia driver DKMS has to be installed too. And that is basically the slowest part.

ZFS users: "First time?"

A crash in the window manager takes down all running applications: Yes, because the compositor IS the server, window manager AND compositor at the same time.

Maybe not anymore in the future: https://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/qt6\_wayland\_robustness/

Wayland is biased towards Linux and breaks BSD

FreeBSD already has working Wayland compositors by the way.

So that people can't easily track how much time is spent on getting round window corners compared to how much time is spent not implementing thumbnails in a file chooser dialog?

18 years, by the way.

I don't know about the creators of this project, but in general: So that they can use the stuff in their closed source applications while finding enough contributors to write software for them for free.

You're supposed to use hplip for HP printers. There's a Debian package for it in the main repositories.
edit: You can look up the printers and supported features with hplip here. Looks like your printer is perfectly supported (as long as you let hplip's tray program install their proprietary driver plugin).

In current versions of Firefox you hover your mouse over a non-active tab [...] to see (after a small delay) a tooltip containing the web page title.

Uh... what is the point of that? If I am looking for a specific tab then:

• I probably want to switch to the tab that I am looking for, so staying on the current one is not required
• if there are a few tabs from different pages from the same domain the difference might be hard to see on a thumbnail (similar page headings with logos)
• and most importantly: opening the tab is faster than waiting for the delay anyway

This sounds like a "cool" feature that's looking for an actual problem to solve.

I'll answer what I can in good conscience.

Is that a good idea?

If you keep in mind that it won't 100 % behave like a "proper" installation when things go weird it's fine.

Do different distributions work better or worse on VMs?

VirtualBox comes with some pre-made profile for some distributions but I've never been able to tell what those actually do, other than by default selecting virtual hardware that is supported.

Are there any major differences when using linux in a VM compared to a bare metal installation?

VM "hardware" is well supported, but anything requiring proper hardware acceleration (of any kind) will either perform terribly or fall back to a software-based backend. I.e. desktop compositing or hardware video decoding may or may not work as well as a native installation. Video games likely won't work in a usable way at all, unless it's Solitaire. Also the hard disks are decoupled from the VM to the host system and you need to manually forward USB devices to the VM or the system might not be able to detect them.

Is there any [dis]advantage to “Linux VM on Windows” VS “Windows VM on Linux”?

That entirely depends on what you want to use both systems for. If you already have Windows installed then I'd like to suggest the following path:

• run some live USB to figure out whether your hardware is supported (graphics, sound, network, printers - especially the latter two)
• if so, install Linux in a VM first (install multiple desktops and try them out, because why not)
• figure out what programs are available that do the things that you usually do on Windows - keep in mind that just because $PROGRAM is written by GNOME/KDE/LXQT/... people that doesn't mean that it won't run perfectly fine on other desktops. Also: distributions may not ship all software, don't forget to check Flatpak/Flathub if your distribution is missing some software.
• try them out in the VM to see if they meet your basic requirements
• install the Windows version of those programs on Windows
• over time, replace the Windows programs that you used to use for the ones that are also available on Linux
• if after a few months there are no non-Linux programs left: Congrats, back up your data and just use Linux
• otherwise: figure out whether the programs that you need will run well enough with Wine or in a Windows-VM

If it turns out that there's just too much Windows-only software that you can't part with then you can just delete the VM and that's it. On the flip side you can find software that may just happen to be better than what you used previously. Also trying out various distributions is much, much easier this way - installing the tenth distribution on bare metal because you weren't happy with the previous nine isn't particularly fun.

X11 and Wayland are just protocols. These protocols are used to abstract the window drawing from the actual hardware and runtime environment as much as reasonably possible - because nobody wants to maintain 3215 versions of their app for different runtime environments. So in order to be shown on the screen an app needs to implement either the X11 or the Wayland protocol (or both!).

The piece of software that is on the other side depends on whether the app is using X11 or Wayland. For the sake of simplicity let's assume that the app does only support one of those. If the app supports Wayland then it will try to connect to a Wayland compositor. The compositor implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app. If the app supports X11 then it will try to connect to a X server and take the role of an X client. This is (on Linux, essentially) always X.org*. X.org also implements every part of the protocol and makes sure that the window is rendered on the screen and that user input is forwarded to the app.

* Unless you're running a Wayland compositor, then it will connect to XWayland which passes through the window to your compositor.

Wayland compositors have full control over the apps while the abilities of apps are purposefully restricted.
A window manager is just another regular, boring, old X client connecting to the X server. It doesn't actually abstract anything. It can move windows because the X11 protocol allows it to, but any other X client could just as well move all other windows around, read all user input to all other windows and even move the mouse around as it pleases.

So, to be specific, there is no mouse pointer bug in Virtualbox while using Wayland. There is a mouse pointer bug affecting specific Wayland compositors, likely because they enforce GPU hardware acceleration that is lacking in either your VM or the Linux kernel because of missing drivers. Try using a different compositor, (re)installing Virtualbox Guest Additions with the correct version on the guest system and/or check whether hardware acceleration is enabled for the VM and has enough video memory.

It's never going to happen on Wayland level. It's absolutely no problem to implement this on a compositor level.

Even disregarding the trust issues with Flatpak packages made by random people: Packages often contain versions of some libraries in order to not depend on the distro's. If there are security vulnerabilities in a library then the distro maintainers usually fix it very quickly (if not go find a better distro) and it's fixed for all packages on your system that depend on it. But this doesn't apply to Flatpak where the package providers have to update the libraries in their own package - and the track record isn't great. Sandboxing doesn't help if that vulnerability leads to wiping your home directory.

X12 actually exists. That said, it never went further than an extremely rough draft and was abandoned at some point, ultimately in favor of Wayland.

I like how the majority of the list is "stuff that doesn't exists on Linux can't be properly used on Linux". Yeah, no fucking shit, Sherlock.
I also like how it's supposed to be about the "average user" and then lists a ton of stuff that's only used in niche applications when put in relation to the entire desktop market.

Additionally:

People that run old software / games because not even those will run properly on Wine;

A good amount of old games won't run properly on Windows anymore, either.

I can't see any of the downvotes that DerisionConsulting mentioned, possibly because I'm on kbin, but I can absolutely understand why people would downvote this completely braindead article that doesn't mention a lot of the actual issues (i.e. hardware compatibility on laptops, friction from the slow transition from X to Wayland, inconsistent user interfaces, updates breaking stuff on some distros, ...).

Thank you for explaining what Wayland really is: a protocol. I see way too many people in forums going "Wayland constantly crashes" or "this doesn't work with Wayland" but what they actually mean is that their compositor of choice crashes or lacks a feature. There are a few things that Wayland doesn't support (like multiple-main-window-apps that want to put their children relative to each other (i.e. multi-window Gimp)), but that's usually not what's being discussed.

But please allow me to correct you on a few details:

• X is not a server. X.org is the single remaining "big" X server in use which replaced XFree86 a long long time ago. X is commonly available as a shortcut to start the main X server installation though.
• X11 is not "an unmaintainable mess". X11 isn't as simple anymore as it used to be, but certainly not in an unmaintainable manner. But writing a new X server from scratch is about as much work as untangling the unmaintainable mess that is X.org

far more efficient than with X11

In theory. The issue is that, at this point in time, the vast majority of software that actually needs this efficiency (read: video games) run on XWayland, which adds a bit of overhead which ultimately causes them to run slightly slower on Wayland compositors compared to X.org. Maybe this will change at some point as devs patch their native games to check for a Wayland compositor by default and the big set of Wayland-support-patches makes its way into wine (and hopefully proton).

In the vast overwhelming amount of cases tooltips show additional information that you cannot see from clicking on something or provide an explanation to an option that isn't available without scrounging through a manual. None of those apply here.

dpkg-reconfigure sysvinit

I don't remember what I was trying to achieve, but it was a bad idea. I also didn't (and still don't) know how to fix the outcome of this, so - since my home was on a separate partition anyway - I just reinstalled Debian since that was much quicker anyway.

This is generally good advice. Would you run the program without a sandbox? No? Then you probably shouldn't run it inside a sandbox either.
You can never be sure that the program isn't using a flaw in the sandbox to break out or is just piggybacking onto a whitelisted action that is required for the program's basic functionality.

And if some program requires r/w for your entire home directory and network access then you might as well not use a sandbox in the first place because it can already do everything useful that it needs to do.

Correct, Java is only needed for (letter) templates and macros.
I used it for years without any JVM installed... until I wanted to use a template. :(

Have a separate home partition and just keep using it across distributions?

And then there's the installation options that look and behave exactly like a regularly themed Qt application (which it probably is). Wonderful!
Okay, I'm coming from Gentoo and Debian, cut me some slack, I'm easy to please regarding installers :-P

Unfortunately this is not a time lapse of random developers in pajamas sitting in front of their computers, typing in text, googling stuff on StackOverflow, occasionally scratching their heads and occasionally shouting "fucking Akonadi!!!".
Very disappointed!

/s in case it wasn't obvious

Gentoo 😉

Do you mount the drives using their /dev/sdX entries or via UUID? Because it sounds like you're using /dev/sdX entries (which you really shouldn't, because their names can randomly change, by design). Use /dev/disk/by-id/... directly for mounting or, alternatively, fill /etc/zfs/vdev_id.conf (see example below) and define the pool using their aliases.

alias Bay1 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX1-YYYYY1_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX2-YYYYY2_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay3 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX3-YYYYY3_ZZZZZZZ4
alias Bay4 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-XXXXXXXXXXX4-YYYYY3_ZZZZZZZ4

Gentoo.
Everything just works and I can configure everything the way I want.

If you're using Snapper does that mean that you're using btrfs? If so, you can use btrfs send and btrfs receive to respectively save or restore a snapshot to/from a file. Well copied from zfs ;-)

Ed is the standard text editor.

try KiCad it’s not Eagle

And that's a good thing, according to my MSc. in Electronics colleague. We replaced EAGLE with KiCad a few years ago because it's just a better product ever since CERN essentially took over development.

That's my personal experience, as well.

I liked Sabayon back in the da.....

Latest release: (Rolling release) 19.03 / 31 March 2019; 4 years ago

Oh.

Screwed up fonts in GTK software, even though the xdg-portal app for KDE is installed. At some point I just gave up. I see no reason to install any Flatpak if the software in question is already in the distro's repository and current enough anyway. Maybe except OBS, because the Flatpak version comes with Youtube integration which, to my understanding, needs to remain closed source and won't make it into a FOSS repository.

It’s probably impossible to list all the possible differences, but do you know what are the most common ones?

The ones that I mentioned regarding direct hardware access of any sort.

That something entirely different than the protocol being biased towards Linux. It's like complaining that TCP/IP is biased towards Linux because the Linux kernel's networking module can't be used in BSD kernels.

I hope Microsoft will never go with the subscription based OS approach that is being rumored about. I seriously can't afford that much popcorn.

This should work on Jolla's Sailfish OS phones as they're running a legit Android in a sandbox. Unfortunately their hardware support is pretty abysmal if you want all features working - and since it's legit Android it's also not free (monetary) and Sailfish OS's UI toolkit is also not free (freedom).

edit: also, last time I checked, Bluetooth support for Android apps is terrible, basically only audio work(s|ed).

Or at the very least partition ~ as btrfs/zfs and do regular snapshots. The downside is, of course, that a rollback won't just roll back the dotfiles. But I guess if the scenario is "nuking [the] home directory" then that's probably not an issue.

Maybe you should actually have read OP's post.

I use boring old zfs snapshot + zfs send -i.
It's not pretty, but it's reliable.

What settings app? hp-toolbox is the program to use (which might in your applications menu as "HP Device Manager"), alternatively hp-setup to set it up from the CLI.

Have you installed the plugin within hplip, or rather, the hplip-GUI program? Have you removed the old printer from CUPS before trying?

In that case just use qpwgraph and wire the outputs to both the stereo and s/pdif outputs.
If either of the outputs is not available then the driver doesn't support them, which is not uncommon for Creative devices, to put it mildly.