I want to make the move to Mint at the end of Win10 in a week or so, but I've heard some horror stories about how tough it can be to get Nvidia GPUs working with them. As it is I have a 4060TI and no money for an AMD GPU. If I can't get my GPU working with Linux I'm probably gonna end up having to stick with Windows untim I can afford an AMD GPU, the thought of which doesn't exactly excite me.
No, it should work out of the box through the open source driver. But, for most people the Nvidia driver (closed) works without issues, you need to install it through driver manager app.
I've used Nvidia GPUs with Linux with not many problems. These "horror stories" typically come from people who try to install a driver exactly the same way they would on Windows (by going to the Nvidia website and downloading something) whereas on most Linux distros it's actually much easier.
On Mint, you basically just have to open the "driver manager" and click on the recommended Nvidia driver. Then reboot. 😀
Struggling with Nvidia and Linux Mint? Here's a detailed beginner's guide that explains plenty of things around installing Nvidia drivers on Linux Mint.
Not true. Ubuntu's official nvidia driver installation broke twice for my husband's PC, one other time they removed a version completely from their list (while we had installed it), and then it had orphaned packages and apt was constantly complaining, while every time we put nvidia as the main card (instead of the integrated intel), the PC does not wake up from sleep under Wayland (while it does under X11, so we know it's not a BIOS issue).
Also, the Mint forum is full of problems with nvidia drivers, despite running under X11, which is the "easier" environment for its drivers.
Overall, it's a nightmare, and that's why we now use the integrated intel as the main gpu, and the nvidia for compute only (for blender and resolve).
Maybe it's better implemented under Arch-land and Fedora-land, but under Ubuntu/Mint/Debian-land, it's still a nightmare.
Mint runs X11 so it's quite easier. Under wayland all hell breaks lose on our PC. And that's with the latest version available by ubuntu too, not some old version.
I've run Nvidia with Wayland for years and never encountered a single issue. This sounds like it's probably just an Ubuntu issue (go figure, there's a reason the Linux community despises Canonical). It's worked perfectly fine for me in Fedora and Arch in Wayland, and my distro of choice nowadays is Bazzite, which is based on Fedora.
Is it possible that the driver that was installed was at some point so old that it was removed from the repos?
I can't speak about the exact implementation on Ubuntu, but on Fedora (which I am using) the driver usually gets updated to the latest version automatically. If that's not the case on Ubuntu or Mint, it may be worth going to the device drivers menu every few months, checking if there's a new one available and selecting the new one if there is one.
no, it was the 565 or 575 i can't remember, there were older options there too. But regardless, even if removed, it shouldn't have left apt in a state of panic.
I have been dual-booting Arch and Debian with an NVidua Gforce-759 Ti since say, 2015 and had several problems, in spite of having an otherwise totally vanilla PC system:
in Arch, automatic compile of kernel module on update not working
updates breaking grub because of missing kernel modules
Arch no longer booting after an Debian upgrade
Wayland in Debian not working properly.
Provlems with running Arch in VMs.
Guix System not supported.
Yes, all that was solvable with some effort, and with experience from 25 years of using Linux.
So, in sum it was perhaps costing one full week, or ten days time.
But I decided that all that hassle and breakage was simply not worth my time, and swapped the card for an AMD Radeon.
No problems since.
The morale is: If you want to use Linux, make sure you use fully supported hardware, with open source drivers from the main kernel. Including laptops.
Not sure why you would have so much trouble with a DKMS module in Arch. But having to manage out-of-tree modules is an issue. Thankfully NVIDIA does not have that issue anymore as they now use in-tree modules (as of driver release 580). Arch is shipping those drivers now so others will not experience your pain.
Debian ships really old drivers. So NVDiA problems should still be expected on Debian, especially on Wayland.
problems with running Arch in VMs
I do not see what that has to do with NVIDIA. Sounds like you may have just had issues with Arch.
Nvidia GPU can be troublesome on Linux indeed. Mint might not be the best option in that case. If you are flexible, distro-wise, I cannot recommend Bazzite enough.
You can get an image with all the needed Nvidia drivers and configs, that should bring you the smoothest possible experience with your hardware, especially for gaming!
At their heart, most distros are approximately "made of the same stuff". There's differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the "software centre" works), but essentially the difference between a "gaming distro", "normal distro" and "creative distro" is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.
Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.
That depends on what that other stuff is. Bazzite is a desktop OS first, gaming second. But it us atomic, so installing apps that aren't available as a flatpak is somewhat more complicated.
Mint is a great start though, I seriously doubt that you will have problems. Just don't be afraid to experiment.
No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it's based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use "sudo rpm-ostree install" to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.
Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.
Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.
Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it's available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it's buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn't need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I'm not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It's possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.
I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn't constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won't work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won't work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it's pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.
The learning curve for Linux isn't quite a cliff now, it's still steep, but with bazzite it's much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn't really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.
It depends on the distro. Bazzite might get in the way since it's a more closed distro if you want to do docker stuff. I personally managed but setting up extra hard drives that docker (podman) uses, but it was tricky. You'll not have issue browsing the Web or installing most apps though.
Nobara might be a good choice although the user base is not that big so you might have to migrate in a couple of years.
Otherwise I'd stick to regular distros since they have great support and will stick around for a long time such as Fedora or Kubuntu. I've also heard Endavour is really good these days.
You should consider choosing a distro based on the Wayland integration since you can get HDR fractional scaling and variable refresh rate with them.
Got Pop OS with Nvidia's driver packages and it worked like a charm. And of course updating can be done through the package manager. No problems whatsoever, at least for me.
I just had to install the NVIDIA proprietor drivers from Software on Fedora and reboot and it worked no problem. NVIDIA also has better software support for ML, so you're fortunate to have an NVIDIA card.
On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you'll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn't do it automatically.
Honestly it isn't much of a problem anymore, whether you choose a gaming specific OS or not. Here's how to get good Nvidia support on Fedora 43:
For the driver: sudo dnf update sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia For CUDA support: sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda Then reboot and you're done. - github.com/devangshekhawat/Fed…
I can also vouch for PoP_OS!, get the .iso with baked-in nVidia drivers and you will have no problems. The biggest issue I've had so far is that sometimes, after updating graphics drivers, FPS get stuck at like ~10 and I need to reboot. But happens rarely, and it takes ten seconds to fix
the ONLY issues I've ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.
and when I say "issues" with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with "sway --unsupported-gpu" since the Sway devs aren't fans of proprietary stuff at all.
for Mint...just didn't work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.
On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.
(Not mint)* On arch i used the arch install script, selected the nvidia drivers, and it just worked. I did have to spend some time making sure sure my nvidia gpu was my primary gpu and not my integrated graphics (cpu), but that was the biggest hurdle
I recently installed Mint on my PC with my 4090, it works fine, just use the driver manager to install the latest proprietary driver for your gpu and reboot 😀
The main difference is your mileage may vary with Nvidia, whereas it's pretty much always just going to work with AMD. But give it a shot and see how it goes. Make sure to choose a distro that specifically supports Nvidia.
I imagine a 4060TI is a relatively valuable card that you could trade for AMD if you really wanted to.
If the recommendations for Mint do not work, I'd try a different distribution with an easier path to install nvidia drivers, namely one that has the open nvidia drivers included in the ISO.
PopOS and Ubuntu do this.
I'd avoid CachyOS for Linux newbs as it is bleeding edge and can be difficult to manage.
Don't use the open Nvidia drivers they are not as good. Most people's problems with Nvidia probably come from this. I recommend bazzite for a Linux newbie, because it installs the best driver automatically and is very easy to use. Just get the distro that's made for Nvidia with KDE.
On Nvidia it doesn't support game mode, so it just boots into the desktop, and also you can download a version that boots directly into the desktop or just tweak the files to make it the default.
Check my history but basically no. It's not so hard.
I'm on Debian stable yet place the latest games, from VR to flat ones, from AAA to indies, and it just works.
Maybe I spent 30min wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphics… months ago (years now? time flies) when I did my install and since then smooth sailing. I have minor issues, e.g. suspend sometimes hang. Sometimes coming back from sustain some visual glitches in the browser via WebGL, but that's it.
Edit: I sometimes also use the GPU for CUDA for local AI/LLM (mostly to make sure it's bullshit, and it is but at least I can say I tried) and that also went well, just followed instructions.
It's not, today it works flawlessly, every distro has a simple way to install the proprietary drivers. It's just stories from people repeating a very old song that has no anchor in today's reality.
On Nixos haven’t had any issues. I did have issues getting the dynamic GPU thing going through. That’s a bit of a technical challenge at-least on Nixos
On a desktop I might use the integrated graphics as well if I could use its HDMI/DP port for an additional monitor. Since you mentioned a laptop battery, I am guessing that you are choosing to drive the built in display with either the integrated graphics or the Nvidia graphics card built in. Have I misunderstood?
So it actually works by process for my PC. Some memory mapping shenanigans for sure. Basically you set some environment variables when you launch a process and it will run of the dedicated gpu instead. Either port will show the same image
I have multiple linux computers, from servers to a surface tablet, i am able to use all different generations of all nvidia, both permanently installed, and eGPU. It is not without any issue, but it works and is usable.
For me issues stem from x11 vs wayland (work computer is ubuntu due to company policy), or egpu shenanigans which I feel is platform agnostic
The issues with Nvidia GPU's has been blown up way to much in the last few years in my opinion.
The potential problems you "might" face are:
Not backing up your system before updating
Using too old or too new a kernel version (Older versions may break or cause issue with newer drivers and bleeding edge kernels may introduce issues that weren't caught during QA) * Always have a LTS kernel installed as well as a newer supported kernel
Using brand new hardware too soon (aka don't expect a newly released card to work perfectly day one)
Trying to use GPU's in edge case uses or pushing the envelope without knowing what you are doing
Not backing up your system
Trying to use the wrong kind of card for your needs (A Quadro card isn't going to work well as a RTX card)
Not updating your system (Nvidia drivers get regular updates)
For most major distros now a days you either select the Nvidia option when installing (like Manjaro) or install the drivers afterwards (Ubuntu based) and be off to the races.
Set up and use Timeshift, make a backup before installing updates and you can roll back if there is an issue.
The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.
My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.
The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.
There should be no trouble getting it to work, there may however be a slight chance of it breaking on an update, at least with some rolling distros, if you use the proprietary drivers, which you'll want to use it you care about performance.
The drivers need to be compatible with the kernel. In rare cases a kernel update will not be compatible with the nvidia driver and could get installed before the nvidia update has dropped. This is possible for openSUSE Tumbleweed for example because the nvidia drivers come from an nvidia managed repo that can get behind the official repos. Just being conservative about waiting a few days before applying kernel updates, especially for a significant version change, and checking the forums for people having problem is enough to avoid this problem.
Older graphics cards (like mine in a laptop bought in 2014) were not supported by Nvidia except through the open source one. So the performance would be sub par.
NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.
To be clear, these are game problems, not NVDIA GPU problems. Some games only work on Windows and need to use a translation wrapper, which has overhead.
If you just want to do pedestrian activities like gaming and desktop stuff, you're fine with the average nvidia driver install tutorial, and it's pretty trivial.
If you want more niche or advanced features like HDR tuning in Wayland or using cuda applications, you may want to consider that amd drivers are actually open and allow you to get into those kinds of tunables.
That said, there are still features and performance kept away from the user with nvidia, despite their never-ending promises of making drivers open, and nvidia has been rewarded for being not open on Linux, which a lot of us don't like. I personally am one of those and my stance with nvidia is partly one of principle.
It will work. Under Linux mint for example you can use the firmware installer to install the correct Nvidia driver.
Too bad nvidia drivers are proprietary, so it's not part the default kernel drivers. That is why I like AMD so much more, it has open sourcer drivers. Fk nvidia 😁
No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.
But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.
I had a 1060 for a good few years that I used primarily with Arch and never really had an issue. At the time it didn't play nicely with Wayland, so I was still using Xorg instead, but I think that's a solved issue by now. Nvidia just doesn't support newer features as readily as AMD does it seems. It really should have no bearing on your ability to play games.
I've had a couple of computers with Nvidia cards and all I ever had to do was install the driver from the package manager and reboot. I always had screen tearing issues with them, but that was with cards from 2011 & 2013. I would hope that they've fixed that by now.
Nvidia historically didn't invest in Linux drivers.
Things have gotten a bit better, but there are still plenty of issues with Wayland compatibility specifically.
Install the proprietary driver and it will work, but under Wayland you may have issues with resuming from sleep, stacked transparency, fractional resolution scaling, and HDR compatibility.
It's easy to install nVidia drivers nowadays. The real issues will be using them. Maybe I just got a bad card, but maybe nVidia is actual garbage. I don't know.
Im using a 3080, nobara and bazzite have worked flawlessly for me so far though im semi active in the bazzite community and a few people have varying issues with nvidia from what ive seen. Usually the issues are a little more edge case like game streaming but with a particular set up
Yes if you want to do anything non-trivial. I switched to AMD because of how much of a pain it is to use nvidia in Linux. IIRC Wayland literally has a hidden option that says --my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia.
My main workstation runs Debian and has a 3090. No issues that I'm aware of. When I used to use Mint, I think I remember Mint having a GUI to easily select the Nvidia driver you want to use, so it was very easy. In Debian, you just have to run ~10 commands in shell to install the proprietary Nvidia driver. I have an older laptop with an Nvidia GPU too; that one is more annoying because I don't think any distro supports integrated/dedicated GPU auto-switching (I just have it set to use the Nvidia GPU all the time).
I've been trying different flavors on my machines with Nvidia cards. It usually just works well enough for me. Did Garuda for a microsecond, mint for a moment, Ubuntu for a few, and am now trying Debian and Endeavour. I've honestly had more issues coming from arch peculiarities than from nvidia. Just give it a go if you have the drive space. It seems like there's more of a question of how well your chosen flavor meshes with your chosen hardware than one of 'can I even get this working?'
If you want the easiest experience possible with Nvidia, I'd recommend Bazzite (and go with the KDE Plasma version). It comes with everything preinstalled and consistent across installations. Plus, it's a tank when it comes to stability; very hard to break it due to the atomic nature. Just install everything through the built in store and you'll be fine. Installing programs is much easier than Windows in Linux due to easy software stores. Bazzite currently uses Bazaar as its software store.
It sorta depends. I've personally had some issues with certain software (mainly Firefox) running in Wayland on my Nvidia card. There are environment variables and flags to remedy some issues, but I'd still get the occasional application crash.
What worked well for me was setting up prime offloading so basically all of the system runs on the integrated GPU and only games run on Nvidia.
On modern versions of common distros, it'll probably work just fine if you install the driver from your distro's repos. Don't touch NVIDIA's downloadable .run installer.
It's getting better for Nvidia support on Linux, but there's more edge case problems than with AMD or Intel graphics.
I was going to say you'll probably be fine, but if you're considering Mint you'll definitely be fine.
Terminology you don't need to know: Mint is still using x11, which Nvidia works fine with. I assume mint won't switch to Wayland until it works smoothly on Nvidia too.
My partner is using mint on a 3080. I think she had one graphical bug in one game one time after an update. Mint has a program specifically used to roll back to a past Nvidia driver. She chose the driver from before the update, rebooted, and the bug was gone. Just gotta remember to switch back to using latest later when a new driver comes out.
Most distros do not require the extra repos. For Debian though, you do. The ones shipped with the distro, even Debian 13, are too old and have problems.
I used Linux Mint and GTX 2070 for over a half a year without any major problems. Installation was incredibly easy as there was a dialog box asking to install drivers and everything just worked. I have 4 monitor setup even.
Ultimately I switched to AMD (last week) because of the tiny problems that I experienced but mostly because I wanted to support AMD and could reason for an GPU upgrade.
A few years ago when I went to actually use the GPU in my laptop I realized I never installed the drivers. I think it was a 3050 or something pretty low end.
It took maybe 20 minutes, most of that time was waiting for things to install. I've heard the horror stories so I wasn't excepting it to work and was ready to give up at the first sign on resistance but there really wasn't any. That was on Fedora, a bit later I switched to Debian and I remember running into an issue getting it to work but it was small enough that I don't remember what the issue was.
Currently have 2 machines on MX with nvidia cards. One was flawless from the get go the other took some trail and error by installing some extra packages but I got there.
(Through the package manager I might add, no files edited or anything)
Mint has a somewhat similar user experience. Chances are you’ll be just fine. Try out a live usb.
RTX 2080 Ti and CachyOS (Arch-based distro with an emphasis on gaming performance), most everything that should works out-of-the-box. I wouldn't stress it, try a live USB first. Edit: also I'm using Wayland, which has been worse with NVIDIA than X11 that Mint apparently uses. So I'm pretty confident you'll be alright.
RTX5070 works almost straight out from the box on Kubuntu stable. Had to try few of the drivers from the built-in utility to find which worked, but the latest version and open one did the trick. So no, it wasn't hard to get it working properly 😀
European SMEs have united to direct a strong open letter to urge ministers of EU member states to oppose Chat Control and to defend privacy and a strong European tech industry.
I recently got my hands on a Dell Latitude E7470 and installed Fedora Workstation. Even though I enabled two finger scroll (and disabled touchpad edge scroll), the right side of the touchpad still has a dead zone of considerable size. So, when I start a mouse movement too far on the right side, it wont register.
I tried a few things, like adding quirk configs, but the zone is still there. Bios had no option to disable. (I reinstalled with UEFI, prior installation was legacy uefi / bios, so I have to give it a look again).
Does someone have a way to disable the dead zone?
Also, the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. From what I could research, it is a broadcom device with officials drivers for MS and Ubuntu. I tried some stuff to get this thing running, but it didn't work out. I still have to try a bios update after the reinstall. Is there a way to get this thing running under Fedora? It's not a crucial feature, but a nice to have for sure.
I don't think so. If the movement starts outside the "dead zone", the touchpad works fine even within the "dead zone". Only if the movement starts in the dead zone, it's actually dead and its exactly the size of the "edge scroll zone", when the option is enabled.
I had a Dell Latitude at work a few years ago, I don't know if it was this exact model number, but the same series. And iirc on there was a driver option to disable the "dead zone" under microsoft.
This sounds similar to one we had at work recently. on a new model Dell Latitude, however all we are Windows so I cant provide much assistance and Win11 has changed our whole touch pad config experience. None of the devices we have have the advanced component manufacturer settings windows anymore. Only the generic Windows settings options.
Try Linux Mint or Ubuntu live usb and see if it has the issue fixed for you. If yes, check if they have a different config and copy it over. If not, but it still works better, you might want to move to a debian-based distro. If it also doesn't work, maybe not much you can do, might be one of these weird dell touchpads that don't work correctly -- i have one of these...
The Ubuntu live USB made no difference. Same problem plus Ubuntu kept crashing stuff all the time, so I guess I will stay on Fedora and just live with it.
yeah, it's just not fully compatible that touchpad it seems.
However, there's a trick.
These DELL laptops have an ubuntu equivalent usually. They used to sell them with either Windows or Ubuntu -- in cooperation with Canonical. And Canonical had SPECIAL repos for these laptops (different for each model), where you could find special driver versions for some hardware. This meant that you were stuck in the version of ubuntu LTS the laptop came with. You couldn't upgrade it to a newer version or to another distro. So I'd suggest you check if that model has an ubuntu equivalent, and then find their repo and see what kind of drivers they have for it. ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?v…
If it's not there, it just means that this hardware piece is not compatible with linux period... It happens, Linux can't support absolutely everything out there, especially since they have been developing for Windows and not for linux.
So it looks like the touchpad problem is a known issue with that particular model. A web search turned up an Arch Linux forum post from 2017 with the same issue. Unfortunately, there was no solution posted.
Your touchpad shows up as a PS/2 device, right? I have a ThinkPad A475 with a PS/2 trackpad that won’t function at all in Linux unless I add i8042.reset as a GRUB argument.
I am not an expert with GRUB at all. For some reason, this sounds very aggressive and with a high chance of side effects. Theres nothing of worth on the device though, so I guess I'll give it a try.
maybe playing around some values in synclient can fix it. that's how i created a dead zone in my panasonic laptop. (some area is keep touched while using keyboard so)
A vote is due to take place later this year to decide whether Israel should remain part of the Eurovision Song Contest, with some countries threatening to withdraw if they stay.
Clearly the feds are onto us. They actively monitor this place and will put forth as much effort as possible to shut sites down.
Hold on, let me update this. Why are you stupid people/mods ok with such a shit list of garbage that doesn't work? Why do you condone giving free media a bad name? Holy shit, have some fucking standards. Don't just accept everything that's shoved into your idiot face.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Post could also be titled "Oh, Smurfette™, baby, come to Papa . . ."
Of course, Papa Smurf must've shaved off his beard, tossed the goofy red hat, and put on some Just for Men hair coloring . . .
Or they could be merfolk, and all this is really happening underwater—who can say for certain?
Or even—how bout this: Andorians with really great tans who both used Just for Men hair coloring and had their horns surgically removed?
If I stare at this long enough, I kind of think that Ms. Blue Ladyperson, whether Andorian, mermaid, or Smurf, might actually be strangling the guy and saying something like "Give me back my bra, goddammit! It's fucking freezing in the garden of earthly delights this time of year!"
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
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Microsoft is making changes to crack down on local Windows 11 accounts. You’ll need an internet connection and a Microsoft account to setup a new Windows PC.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) sent a letter to the nonprofit operator of Wikipedia alleging a pattern of liberal bias in articles on the collaborative encyclopedia.
"I write to request information about ideological bias on the Wikipedia platform and at the Wikimedia Foundation," Cruz wrote to Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander in a letter dated October 3. "Wikipedia began with a noble concept: crowdsource human knowledge using verifiable sources and make it free to the public. That's what makes reports of Wikipedia's systemic bias especially troubling."
Citing research from the conservative Manhattan Institute, Cruz wrote that "researchers have found that articles on the site often reflect a left-wing bias." Cruz alleged that "bias is particularly evident in Wikipedia's reliable sources/perennial sources list" because it describes "MSNBC and CNN as 'generally reliable' sources, while listing Fox News as a 'generally unreliable' source for politics and science. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center gets a top rating, but the Heritage Foundation, a prominent conservative think tank, is a 'blacklisted' and 'deprecated' source that Wikipedia's editors have determined 'promotes disinformation.'"
Developing countries, especially China, led the clean energy charge but richer nations including the US and EU relied more than before on planet-warming fossil fuels for electricity generation.
China remains way ahead in clean energy growth [...]
India experienced slower electricity demand growth and also added significant new solar and wind capacity, meaning it too cut back on coal and gas.
In contrast, developed nations like the US, and also the EU, saw the opposite trend.
I've not read a single BBC rag article for a while now, are they usually this sloppy nowadays with how they portray the West in the best light LOL.. Looks like they gave up trying mid-way. Very poetic.
Renewables make so much sense for a poor country, the only barrier is and has been initial setup cost - but a ton of solar panels, over their thirty year lifespan, will be much cheaper and far more reliable than an equivalent amount of coal or gas in generators.
Exactly. China took the leap of the century by investing in renewables, and it paid off big time. Other Global South countries are slowly following suit. Energy, digital and cultural sovereignty should be actively sought out for lest of being beholden to Western imperialism and hegemony.
I think the way we should view this is that "developed nations" means nations that have peaked in their development and are no longer capable of developing further. Meanwhile, "developing nations" are the ones where progress is happening. Everything makes a lot more sense framing it that way.
The country’s grid operator says shifting from coal to clean power is not only possible but inevitable. The work there could provide a road map for other…
“Australians have an absolute love affair with rooftop solar,” he said. “We have the highest rooftop PV penetration in the world, and it’s one of the driving forces of our energy transition.”
I wonder how this trend will continue now that Feed In tariffs have been significantly cut. Seems like more and more people are focused on installation of home batteries.
My parents installed a new PV system and it's been limited to 1.5kW peak export, or about 1/10th the systems total output. Seems a shame to have so much energy going to waste. Hard limits seem like a blunt instrument to ensure grid stability, when a more intelligent system / community battery could have utilized this energy.
Batteries help a lot when you have a surplus of solar power during the middle of the day, and want to distribute it to evening use. For example, here in California, where the sun is just coming up, utility-scale batteries charged during yesterday's sunshine are now supplying about 10% of the state's electricity.
Terminals do make more sense, if you know all the commands. And I must admit, "say the magic words and the computer does the thing" is pretty neat and makes me feel powerful.
it also means that there's a smooth transition between doing a thing once and doing it a 1000 times (or otherwise automating it), because you've got a programming language right there already. no need to look for a "mass-x gui tool" for each x.
oh, and i think (though i have no actual experience with this) that it's a lot easier to make terminals friendly for disabled people (blind, etc)
The CLI is also a much more reliable environment to provide instructions on how to do something.
Instructing people to click on "this button > tab > menu > submenu > item" is very exhausting for both instructor and reader, it's language-dependant and less future-proof. Also sometimes the location of some graphic elements isn't immediately obvious and there are cases where the only way to make sure people understand it is with a video tutorial of sorts. Which is annoying both to make and to have to sit and watch through.
This also makes the CLI better at reporting/diagnosing problems.. for a GUI app, if you want to report a bug you have to write down a bible of steps on what things you clicked on, etc. (again, a video ultimately is needed to make things clear). Whereas a CLI app has all that information already in the parameters so you can just provide that as the report (along with any input/output data). Or simply copy the contents of your terminal.
Amusingly, I can see a future where LLMs become the default interface most people use making GUIs as we know them obsolete. Each app could provide MCP services, and then you UI would just be a text prompt and a canvas where whatever information you're looking for is visualized in whatever way you need. The model would take care of coordinating the functionality from different available services and rendering the output on the fly.
mm yes, i'd love to have a UI for the computer where the same input will produce different results each time (and makes half of it up on the spot) and you can never ever trust anything it outputs but have to check literally every single pixel carefully.
as opposed to entering a cli command you're familiar with and checking just the little bit of the output that is relevant to you, because you are familiar with the output format and it's stable.
Yeep. I don't need a hallucination machine between me and my computer. I hate having to use the CLI, but that's still better than a fucking chatbot getting in my way.
You wouldn't be the target audience for this. Vast majority of people using computers aren't technical, and they very much would prefer just being able to use natural language. The whole hallucination thing is also much less of a problem when the model is simply used as an interface to access services, pull data from them, and present it. In fact, you can already try this sort of functionality with DeepSeek right now, where it has a canvas, and you can ask it to pull some data from the internet and render it. I'm always amazed how technical people are utterly unable to step out of their shoes and imagine what a non technical person might prefer to use.
I dunno. I still think the types of graphical tools we have today are better than a chatbot for an interface. I often struggle with explaining what I want in a way that such a tool would actually return anything useful. I might try it once or twice, but I'd probably go back to a standard graphical interface pretty quick. I'm not a "terminal junkie" or particularly technical, but I absolutely hate the idea of a computer you have to talk to like it's a person, I suck at dealing with people.
Sure, different people like different things. My original point was that just being able to use natural language would be a benefit for non technical users. Most people struggle with complex UIs or achieving tasks where they have to engage multiple apps. Being able to just explain what you want the way you would to another person would lower the barrier significantly. For technical users, we already have tools that we can leverage, but if MCP services started becoming a common way to build apps, then we'd get benefits from that as well.
People who keep parroting this clearly never bothered actually seeing how these tools work in practice. Go play with DeepSeek canvas and look at how it can render the data you give it. Meanwhile, what you as a technical user prefer is vastly different from what an average person wants.
yeah sure i'll probably check it out one of these days, but i've never yet seen this technology do the same thing twice when you give it the same input twice....
I haven't seen this to be a problem when you're using it to pull data from existing sources with tools like MCPs. Specifically, the content stays stable even if there are minor presentation variations. That's sufficient to be useful in most scenarios. Like if you get it to pull some JSON from a service and render a table or graph it, the content of the presentation will not change.
That seems extremely frustrating to use. I don't want or need that compared to what's currently available.
And of course, there will always be people who want direct access to the underlying command line. Which is unsurprising now and will still be unsurprising in another 20 years.
I don't think the underlying command line will go away, but if things moved in this direction that would be a benefit for people who use command line directly as well. The big disadvantage of GUI apps the way they work currently is that the UI is tightly coupled to the business logic. This makes it impossible to make scripts that combine functionality from different apps the way you can do with shell utils. In my opinion, this was the wrong direction all along. It would be much better if GUI apps were developed using client/server architecture. The service could then be used headless, and you could use it for MCPs for LLMs or to drive these services directly by hand.
Tbf, that is one thing about GUIs that certainly frustrates a lot of people. And I do quite like the concept of programs and utilities that can be used from a separate graphical interface that you only have to install if you want it, or via a command line, those are neat and an excellent example of a tool that can be used by the completely non-technical and also still provide useful functionality to power-users.
Tbh, I don't hate CLI utilities or MC type "terminal interface" stuff. Honestly, if they are well documented and user friendly, I sometimes actually prefer them over a complex GUI cluttered with 20 options that aren't the one thing I need. This isn't about people using/recommending well documented, simple CLI tools that make complete computer idiots like me feel powerful and really don't need a graphical frontend anyway. This is about people who insist on doing everything in a terminal window or in the TTY (and not even having a window manager installed), just for the sake of it, even when it comes to tasks where using the terminal really makes no sense.
That really sounds like hardware designers being very mean to programmers and terminal junkies, for sure.
I've never really understood the appeal of having a terminal app on your phone, for this reason - I get the cool factor, Android is based on Linux so being able to get deep into things and have terminal access to stuff on your handheld device, that follows the same conventions and standards as any more traditional computer you use at home does, is neat, sure, but actually seriously using a CLI with a phone keyboard sounds very frustrating.
I have a terminal app in my phone, but I don't normally use it from the touch keyboard..
The main reason I have it is because from it I can install an ssh server (and a few other services, like privoxy and so) and then connect to the phone through ssh and access that CLI from other locations, even places where the internet is restricted/monitored or there isn't a wifi access point (I can create a hotspot from the phone instead). If you are using a work laptop with restricted access, or are traveling and using a computer in your remote location, carrying around with you, in your pocket, a set of CLI / TUI tools and apps that you are familiar with can come in handy.
Also, nowadays you can plug a keyboard directly to your phone (a monitor too) and have it work as a portable terminal device. Of course it would be better if you were able to have a Desktop-grade OS in your phone for this.. but things like termux work if you are a "terminal junkie".
I suppose that would be good for emergencies or less than ideal situations, for all you "terminal junkies" out there, but... I tend to avoid the terminal in the first place, so I wouldn't really have a need for such a thing or understand what people would use it for.
I got through phases of games, and right now I'm in the one I like to think of everything-modern-is-making-me-angry-so-I'll-turn-back-to-vintage-games - and that's in the form of PCSX2 on my Steam Deck.
Playing the PS2 generation on the Steam Deck is kinda the 'perfect' generation: I can upscale the resolution without a performance hit, I can apply HD texture packs, Retro Achievements and I can drop the TDP to extend the battery life.
Anyway, I never had a PS2 (it was just a touch before my time), so there's so many games I'm yet to discover there. I'd love to hear any suggestions you might have for what I can play on there:
Just a couple notes:
No GTA games because they're better with the PC versions. While I've bought the games, the account that Rockstar demands people have to play their games makes me angry on principle (a single-player game forcing an online check each week to be able to play it? No thanks), so I've got cracked versions to play.
No Final Fantasy because I'm not even sure where to start!
So if anyone was around back in the PS2 era, and has some recommendations for games they've loved, I'm all ears. I've been having such a fun time playing these.
Some big thanks to my friends who made and run RetroDECK (my choice for emulating on the Steam Deck), and to the PCSX2 team (who I'm chatting to right now actually, so keep an eye out and in a week or so I'll share that chat with them all about creating and maintaining the PS2 emulator!)
Also, if you do have a Steam Deck, and want to play with the HD texture packs I do, then it's really simple. Just download the pack, and name then according to their game's I.D. code - SLUS-20743 for example, then place it in the texture_packs folder:
From there, go into PCSX2, then right-click the game, select properties, graphics, texture replacement and tick the two boxes I have:
Then you've got the games looking the best they can be!
I love Magic Pengel and Graffiti Kingdom. First is a turn-based JRPG, second is an action platformer. Both share the same gimmick where you collect materials to make the characters you play with the clunky in-game 3D modeler.
On October 6, after several US citizens had been detained for days by Israeli forces after attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza, US ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee took to X to accuse these activists of taking “a carbon-spewing Hamas-funded boat ride in violation of [international] law intruding into war zone to stand [with] terrorists.”
Last week, Israeli forces detained over 435 activists who were taking part in the Global Sumud Flotilla, the largest civilian-led humanitarian mission of its kind. While dozens are still being held by Israel, those who have been deported and released, allege mistreatment by Israeli forces.
The flotilla saw participation from delegates from 57 countries – but following the seizing of ships by Israeli forces, the US government has taken a unique position in both ignoring the plight of its own citizens and open condemnation of its own citizens by diplomatic personnel.
British parliamentarian Zarah Sultana demanded the United Kingdom call for the freedom of detained US citizen and activist David Adler, writing, “the US won’t act so it’s on us to demand justice.”
According to Laura Colston, mother of detained activist and journalist Alex Colston who alleges her son is being mistreated by Israeli forces, “calls/messages to US Gov’t officials are ignored.”
“When else has a US journalist been unlawfully detained abroad and the State Department has done essentially nothing about it?” wrote Freedom of the Press Foundation on X, in relation to Colston’s detention.
Progressive lawmakers pressure executive branch
Some US lawmakers have challenged the indifference of the executive branch.
Lawmakers have urged Secretary of State Marco Rubio to protect the US citizens aboard the flotilla even before they were detained. In a letter sent on September 29, a group of congressional representatives, led by Representative Rashida Tlaib, argued that “the 24 American citizens on board these ships cannot afford another failure of American leadership.”
On Monday, California representative Ro Khanna said he plans to put pressure on Rubio and Huckabee for Adler’s release, writing, “Our government must stand up for an American citizen’s fair treatment and release.”
Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen posted a video of him speaking directly with the relatives of US flotilla activists detained by Israel, and called on Huckabee to “do his job.”
“The siege on Gaza is breaking”
The 24 US citizens aboard the flotilla who were captured by Israel include Adler, Colston, anti-imperialist veteran activist Greg Stoker, musicians Leila Hegazy and Carsie Blanton, and others.
“My sister is a New Yorker,” said Hegazy’s twin sister, Omnia, in an October 1 press conference after the flotilla was terrorized by Israeli attacks. “She is being openly threatened by the Israeli government, while our senators are sending money to Israel,” Hegazy said, denouncing her Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand for not speaking out for her sister.
The day after songwriter Carsie Blanton was detained by Israeli forces, her brother, Elijah, spoke at a pro-Palestine rally. Blanton said, that, although he does not know his sister’s current whereabouts, or where she is being detained, he knows that she is “not afraid,” because “they can see what we can see,” that “the siege on Gaza is breaking.”
The CWTS Leiden Ranking 2024 offers important insights into the scientific performance of over 1500 major universities worldwide. Select your preferred indicators, generate results, and explore the performance of universities.
I'm self employed. I need to record how much time I spend on whatever task for whatever client.
Sounds simple, but I'm terrible at it. I always get to the end of the day without having recorded anything and not knowing what I've actually done.
Basically, I'd like to create a text log of the active window title, and take a screen cap.
I'd like to do this periodically as in every 15 minutes or so.
For the text log I just haven't been able to achieve this at all.
For the screen caps I can use flameshot to take a screenshot from the CLI, but it makes a sound and shows an animation which is sub-optimal.
Any suggestions of where to look much appreciated.
Edit: I'm not asking for a time tracking app. I want something to log the active window title and take a screen cap so I can figure out what I was doing and write it in my time tracking app.
Edit: I'm narrowing in on a solution.
Firstly, a lot of previously available solutions don't work because of recently implemented security features in gnome.
You need to enter unsafe mode by entering the following in the looking glass tool (which you can access by running lg in the alt + f2 dialog):
global.context.unsafe_mode = true
thereafter, this can grab the active window title for you:
Trivial example: Under Ubuntu 20.04, the following command:
gdbus call -e -d org.gnome.Shell -o /org/gnome/Shell -m org.gnome.Shell.Eval true
produces this output:
(true, 'true')
but under 22.04...
OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft's Windows Recall. With OpenRecall, you can easily access your digital history, enhancing you...
Kinda cool, interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.
It's not really suitable for me though. This kinda takes periodic screenshots and makes them searchable.
I need to know what I was doing at different times. So really it's just the periodic screenshots that I need and the search functionality isn't useful to me.
"searchable" in the sense that you can ask an AI what you were doing at certain times.
I am pretty sure you could ask it to generate per project timetables from that.
Or at the very least, you can use the codebase to see how they take continuous screenshots. Especially since all the wayland code is clearly seperated in the fork.
Yeah there's a video on the upstream project page that shows how it works. It's notreally "AI" so much as OCR. Like if you search "wayland" it will show you the times at which that word was visible on the screen.
I don't think it accepts a "prompt" like "make a list of activities for me".
I did have a quick look at how they're doing it. It's just a different python lib.
I did however discover, from looking at this project, that the sound and animation from taking a screenshot originates from gnome, not the thing taking the screen shot. There's some notes in this project explaining how to disable that.
With this in mind, other screenshot apps like flameshot will be fine.
I don’t think it accepts a “prompt” like “make a list of activities for me”.
Ah I see, my bad.
Another idea that might or might not work is filming a video at 0.0011 fps (1 frame every 15 min). Not sure if it accepts values that low or handles them correctly.
Chatgt says build a scrip using a few tools. xdotool and scrot. I don't know if this code is good or not. And some hashes are making markdown headers. How do we paste code on here?
while true; do # Get timestamp TS=$(date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S")
# Get active window title
TITLE=$(xdotool getactivewindow getwindowname 2>/dev/null)
# Fallback if title is empty
if [ -z "$TITLE" ]; then
TITLE="(No active window)"
fi
# Take screenshot
IMG_FILE="$IMG_DIR/snap_$TS.png"
scrot "$IMG_FILE"
# Log entry
echo "$TS | $TITLE" >> "$LOG_FILE"
# Wait before next iteration
sleep $INTERVAL
Sure, seemed OP wasn't a google searcher so I tried to show an example of two programs coming together. The code seems plausible, but its there as an example of steps. I find LMM is typically trash, but can get you started. But your etiquette note is noted
This might shock you but... I have actually spent some time looking into this.
The tools you've suggested aren't compatible with Wayland. It seems that alternatives don't really exist, or cause the problems I mentioned in my post.
Additionally, I have a few decades experience with Linux and while I'm not some amazing Linux guru I do know what a bash script is and how to "link two programs together".
Finally, like everyone on the planet I also know what chatgpt is and might even consider using it to create a bash script if I knew what tools were compatible with Wayland.
Lol, this is why the Linux community gets a bad rap. Somebody tries to be helpful and the community gets hostile. Hope you have a good rest of your week dude.
It's funny you say that. I was thinking exactly the same thing about your comments.
I've asked for help, you posted a chatgpt response, and now you've claimed eleventy times that I seem like I don't know where to start or don't seem like the type to search things.
"OP should've googled it first" is one of the hallmarks of toxic communities.
@BCsven This is so much less helpful than just posting "I don't know" or "beats me".
First, if you're gonna post code, put it in a code block. And nevermind you not knowing if the ""code is good"", it doesn't even adhere to the question that was asked; the two programs you suggested are not even wayland compatible tools. @null_dot
OP seemed like they didn't know where to start, so linking programs together was my suggestion. With a rough example. If thats against etiquette the noted.
As for helpfulness, where are the code block entries. I have preview, hyperlink, inage, bold, italic,quotes,lists and spoilers across the bottom, and no codeblock.
As for Wayland compatible this is where, somebody reads between the lines. If those two aren't Wayland compatible search for Wayland compatible tool like "xxxxxx".
Wayland - How Best to Log My Own Desktop Activities
@null_dot Haven't ever done this in wayland, but in X, I always used to xdotool to grab the title of the active window. I'd guess you could do the same using one of the wayland alternatives like ydotool, wlrctl, dotool, or whatever else is out there. And something like grim to grab an image of the window.
I think xdotool kinda does "gnome magic" including simulating key presses to gnome.
It looks like ydotool and dotool only simulate key presses to gnome, which can't achieve my aims.
I couldn't figure out how to install wlrctl, but other attempts with other avenues have led me to believe that anything that starts with wlr is wlroots and gnome doesn't implement those endpoints of the wayland api.
grim also doesn't work with debian / gnome / mutter / wayland it appears.
I keep my desktop muted so I am not sure if it makes a sound or not. If you wrap the commands into a timer loop it will do what you’re looking for.
For the window title you can likely use your window manager’s IPC calls to get the active window title or list of windows on a workspace. My wayland experience is limited to hyprland and if you haven’t found a solution when I get home from work I can post the jank utility I made in rust to output the data I needed for my Eww bar.
I'm using a default debian / gnome setup, so that's mutter + wayland.
Grim seems to error with compositor doesn't support wlr-screencopy-unstable-v1 which I don't really understand. Searching that term suggests that gnome will never support wlr-anything.
There's nothing like you ask. Most time tracker apps are just a calendar where you write manually how much time you spent on something. So you can use something like Kimai, or use a paper calendar and write on it.
But text log of the active window and a screencap, that's the stuff of Microsoft Recall AI nightmares that Linux developers wouldn't be keen to implement. What you're asking is intrusive AI for others. Maybe you need to actually learn to be punctual and write down your activities, or simply, buy a Snapdragon laptop with Windows AI on it. And even then, that info stays with the AI, I don't think it's shared much with the user.
OpenRecall is a fully open-source, privacy-first alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft's Windows Recall. With OpenRecall, you can easily access your digital history, enhancing you...
It's been a while since I looked into details of wayland, but one thing I recall is that a lot of things depend on the specific compositor / desktop environment you are using.
X is very open: you can easily query open windows etc, while on wayland things are less standardized / more hidden.
I haven't done this myself but maybe you can script something with OBS? It is made for screencapturing and it seems to work with Wayland according to the Arch Wiki.
I had a play around with this. Thanks for the suggestion.
It seems to use pipewire to capture the desktop. I can't get pipewire to watch more than one monitor at a time. On this basis it's a non-starter unfortunately. Screen cap tools can get the entire desktop.
I wrote software to do þis, but in X, so it wouldn't help you. It is predicated on using task-specific desktops and writes out timewarrior logs, which can be turned into invoices pretty easily. It doesn't work at þe window level, and it doesn't do screen caps.
Alþough it won't help you because it isn't Wayland, it is all just scripts. Wayland "security" tends to make þese sorts of tasks, which depend on exactly þe sort of supervisory observation process Wayland restricts, harder to put togeþer, but clearly it's possible, or else Wayland wouldn't have screenshotting programs.
that's easy. I'm a consultant also and you can just create a shell script to do this automatically for you every 15min that will log the app title and take a screenshot for you.
Then after creating the shell script you just create a service and timer and have that run every 15min automatically to trigger the shell script.
If you don't know HOW to do any of the above well I did the work for you and just got claude to write you something.
I appreciate that you've made an attempt to help, but sadly this answer is like the other gen AI answers in this thread in that it just plain doesn't work.
My question is something like "what is the command to do X" and your answer is really "here's a script that could run a command if you knew what command to run".
In this case claude has chosen gnome-screenshot for the screenshot, which hasn't been part of gnome for many years.
I will acknowledge however that the gdbus call claud selected is actually the best way to get the active window title, it's just that it doesn't work unless you disable gnome shell security manually, each time you log in.
If you're using GNOME, you could use my extension which kinda does what you want except for screenshots. Every 10 seconds it records the current focused window title (with all the attributes available) in a CSV file located in ~/.local/share/activitytracket/log. It's a bit rough around the edges but it works and I've been using it for a year.
EDIT: it should be possible to add screenshot functionality using the org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot dbus api for taking screenshots without any animations or sounds. It should not be that difficult to add to my extension
\#!/usr/bin/env bash
# get hyprland event socket path
HIS=$HYPRLAND_INSTANCE_SIGNATURE
EVENT_SOCK="$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/hypr/$HIS/.socket2.sock"
# fallback / error check
if [ -z "$HIS" ] || [ ! -S "$EVENT_SOCK" ]; then
echo "Error: cannot locate Hyprland event socket at $EVENT_SOCK" >&2
exit 1
fi
logfile="${HOME}/hypr_focus.log"
# function to handle a line from the event stream
handle_event() {
local line="$1"
# check for activewindow event
if [[ $line == activewindow* ]]; then
# format: activewindow>>CLASS,TITLE
# strip prefix
local payload=${line#activewindow>>}
# split on comma (first comma)
local cls="${payload%%,*}"
local title="${payload#*,}"
local ts
ts=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
echo "$ts — $title (class: $cls)" >> "$logfile"
fi
# optionally handle activewindowv2 if you want address instead
# if [[ $line == activewindowv2* ]]; then
# ...
# fi
}
# listen to the socket
socat -u "UNIX-CONNECT:$EVENT_SOCK" - | while IFS= read -r line; do
handle_event "$line"
done
honestly if you're willing to do some work you can make hyprland do almost anything
**disclaimer i did not test this much
edit: forgot about the screenshot part, should be easy to add though, just add screenshotting everytime focus changes with grim or whatever
I mean, yeah, I don’t trust a single word out of his mouth. He’s a fossil fuel stan. I think we should assume that anything this administration says, the opposite is true
❝ We developed the Living Wage Calculator to… estimate the local wage rate that a full-time worker requires to cover the costs of their family’s basic needs where they live…❞
in Manhattan, a living wage should be $33/hour.
the purpose of a capitalist is to keep us in debt & poverty
We actually need to cut the use of fossil fuels to zero to make it stop getting worse — but this is an indication that something like that is actually possible.
Microsoft is making changes to crack down on local Windows 11 accounts. You’ll need an internet connection and a Microsoft account to setup a new Windows PC.
Technically it possible with using windows server edition ,clean no bloatware ,minimum processes Legally cost a lot not available for usual users only in crack way
Honestly I’m using Windows Enterprise. Local accounts, GPOs to get rid of all the telemetry and other bullshit. Never seen an ad in the start menu or any other place. Just nice clean windows. Basically it’s what companies use so that Microsoft doesn’t piss them off.
I wish the IT company we work with used enterprise edition, instead I have to deal with a ton of fuckery that is professional edition in an org with 50 employees, and I do not have the schooling necessary to take over fully.
Really wish we could just ditch windows altogether every time I find another computer that is using a local login instead of an AD login because they couldn't be bothered to set shit up properly
Well I tried exactly server edition and for me it would be the best one edition comparing with all modern windows very few network requests only security updates ,predictable behavior of system,start up and shut down of system during 6 seconds.I tested on thinkpad t430 windown server 2025 ,CPU literally chilling 0-5% usage in idle
The Enterprise/IoT SKUs, which of course include LTSC, still let you use a local account, for now...
I won't be surprised if they plug that at some point way down the line too though given they're already playing with Windows on the Cloud in the enterprise sector.
I would be surprised if they force the requirement on LTSC.
I could believe they force it into enterprise licensing, but LTSC's whole deal is that the environment doesn't change and only gets security patches. It's made to be used in kiosks, CNC controllers and the like. Machines that are supposed perform one task reliably.
This is also the reason it's the best version of Windows for the desktop, and why Microsoft makes it so challenging to acquire licences.
In OOBE, go through MS account creation. Tell it you were born today. It'll let you set a password for the MS account before rejecting you due to COPA requirements. At this point, you can make an offline account without having even created an MS account, let alone having to use one.
This will not go away - it's a legal thing. MS doesn't want to deal with COPA stuff for very young kids, so this flow exists. Enjoy.
If that actually becomes a thing people do, that could prompt MS to start to require either submitting to a face scan or showing some government ID just to install Windows, though, if the way Google's handling KYC on YT if your account gets flagged as underage, and soon Android app dev, as well as KYC going out across other sites, is any indication.
I'm pretty sure having to KYC just to install an OS is the last thing people want right now.
Let them. The entire world is slowly migrating to Mac and Linux. I haven't even had the option of windows at my last 3 jobs. (To be fair, I've never had the option of desktop Linux, but this last one said pick a computer—I'm not positive that they would've balked at Linux.) That said, idk what's so great about Mac over Linux, but I guess it's not corporate friendly.
I'm trying to think of which MS products we even have in our ecosystem. Office, I guess. Corporate world will never wean themselves off of Excel.
There are plenty that will boot/install Linux just fine but won't do a nice clean install of Windows 11.
Modern Thinkpad E16 (AMD) is one of them, a clean USB won't work, it will always stick at not finding required drivers.
You need to inevitably create a USB install from the MS USB Media Creation tool, running on the machine itself from the included crapware Windows - to get an installer USB that will work.
Different if you're just pushing a wim over the network from endpoint/scm, but it's basically broken for local users.
Do you have more info regarding that ThinkPad E16? I'm mostly working with T series laptops and haven't had the problem, but always good to know if or when an E16 shows up.
Usually all ThinkPads work mostly the same regarding Linux support (bar the usual Nvidia driver shenanigans if you ever trip that), but I'd be concerned about the E-series themselves. If you want a cheaper than T-series ThinkPad you should get an L-series one. Not as expensive as the T-ones, but still retains some usable chassis durability, double replaceable memory slots, replaceable keyboard, etc. I've started calling the E-series as E-waste.
I had this issue at work, I was able to fix it by using the windows media creation tool instead of just writing the iso to the drive. Not sure why that worked, but it has every time so far.
Just install it in a VM. I've done this before to force Windows 10 to install on a USB stick, you can pass a VM an entire physical drive to use instead of a virtual hard disk and install to that SSD directly from the VM (just kill the VM and reboot into the windows partition when the VM tries to reboot to the windows installation). I'm sure if you passed the VM a USB created with Rufus you could install from that as well.
This is the rule for any account or mobile game, too - if it asks your age before asking for consent to farm, put any age below 13. It'll either not farm you because it's illegal or it'll kick you out. If the latter, good riddance really
My go to is to pop open the console and run "ipconfig /release" right before you create an account. Win 11 will have you set up a local account if you don't have a network connection.
OOBE\BYPASSNRO has been off and on for me, but so far nuking the network connection has always worked for me. I'm setting up a few new computers tomorrow, it will be interesting to see what tricks still work.
Inconclusive. Re-used machines instead of new computers. Systems did have Windows 11 on them. OOBE\BypassNRO worked, but they may have pending updates.
Edit: one machine would not let me skip MS account sign in with OOBE\BypassNRO. IPConfig /Release immediately let me set up a local account.
Edit: I have only been using Linux for less than a year now, and right now, really is the perfect time to switch. I only held onto windows for gaming, and now I use bazzite. There are some games that don't have steam backup, but with the games that do, I can play the same save between my steamdeck and bazzite.
There is so much more you can do with linux and all it's distros. I've messed around with linux in the past, but never was patient enough to deal with it. Now it's really that easy.
“While these mechanisms were often used to bypass Microsoft account setup, they also inadvertently skip critical setup screens, potentially causing users to exit OOBE with a device that is not fully configured for use.”
Lol sure. If that was the real reason they'd simply let you create a local account. The audacious lying is just insulting.
It's not lying if what they mean by "not fully configured for use" is that the private data being captured and sent to their servers is not fully matched to a personal identity in their systems.
After all, they didn't say whose "use" that device would not be configured for.
Still, if they were actually being honest, this would be easily solved if they showed those "critical setup screens" BEFORE asking to create the account, and based on what the user selected then they would allow (or not) the creation of a local account...
In theory Pluton enforcement platform-wide, which also includes forced SecureBoot without the ability to install user-signed keys, as well as OTA updates for that super-TPM, could block alt OSes on PC though.
Fortunately, Pluton never caught on and that hasn't happened so far.
I'm gonna need an explanation how anything could prevent me from just formatting the drive and doing what I want, barring the use of proprietary hardware.
Forced SecureBoot with only MS keys and no way to install user-signed keys and no Linux shim would block non-Windows OSes from booting.
Basically, Pluton functions similar to how mobile devices function in terms of locked bootloaders.
AFAIK the only devices currently produced which actually use Pluton are Surface devices though, and if it's not being implemented as intended, it's just seen as a generic TPM by other OSes.
Proprietary hardware, like opaque bioses that can only be updated with signed, proprietary blobs? The bios that's in charge of picking something to boot from from storage? The bios that can decide which bootloader is allowed through digital signatures? The signatures that are only valid if their public key is registered in the bios? The proprietary, opaque bios that decide which bootloader's signature is valid through keys it can restrict?
Yeah, it's all coming together. Always has been. Joking aside, I'm still surprised this whole "fully locked bios" didn't take off. And I'm glad for it.
Fortunately, Pluton never caught on and that hasn't happened so far.
I'm confused. don't all recent AMD and intel CPUs have pluton included? I remember such an AMD announcement from ryzen 6000 and onwards, and for intel too
In a few years If authoritarian shitholes keep fucking getting their way I can see using an "unverified/ untraceable OS" to be a "national security violation"
What classes require windows? You can run most things in Linux. And for the cases where my classes had instructions on how to set up something on Windows, for Linux and MacOS they just had a foot note saying "You are on your own". But nothing was mandatory.
Same, I made the switch about 9 years ago when I was self-employed. Then I took a job with a small company running windows and it sucked. Now I'm 6 years in with my current, a mega corp, and they are all in on Microsoft. I've been so aggravated with the limitations of Microsoft products when I could get things done with a FOSS product in no time. Of course IT blocks FOSS installs because of corporate policy....🤬
I despise that I have to use this OS at work. I would never run windows on my own computer again. Its just insanity. Next they'll require a credit card to make a Microsoft account.
I could see them requiring government-issued ID. The age verification laws coming into effect in various states and countries make this a logical step for Microsoft. They might even start their own age verification service where you give them your ID and they vouch for your age with the sites you visit in Edge. Of course it would have the totally accidental side effect that everything you do on your computer could be monitored and legally tied to your identity.
I can add that in my experience, switching to Linux tends to have a positive impact on performance and keep the laptop usable for longer, I highly recommend you try it with your current laptop.
I've got an old desktop with a Core I7 with a 3 digit model number and 12GB of DDR3 RAM, it's running Mint Cinnamon. I've got a Lenovo x86 tablet thing with 8GB of RAM and a Pentium processor, it's currently running Fedora GNOME. I've run Ubuntu MATE on a Pi 4 as a desktop PC for about a year.
Most distros of Linux will run very well on a machine that ever ran Windows 7 acceptably. Prior to that, you start running into the "we're discontinuing 32-bit support" problem.
well I assumed your devices have 4 and such GB of RAM, but yeah at 8 GB memory efficiency is not a pressing problem.
like I have a laptop with 2 GB that runs windows 10 acceptably, there was a time when that was my main on-the-go setup. that memory is almost completely used up by just logging in to kde plasma. memory compression is of course not a choice with the cpu it has though
Im running cosmic desktop on arch, its actually very good! I have enabled automatic tiling of windows and its just super convenient. Like a tiling window manager but with all the stuff most people want built-in (top bar, notifications, screenshots, screen sharing etc).
You cant customize it as much as a real tiling window manager but if all you want is for your windows to tile, its awesome.
Not OP, but I have to keep one Windows PC around. My favorite mod for my favorite 20 year old 4x game will not run on Linux, even though the game itself will.
The rest of my PCs are running either Mint or Xubuntu.
Proton not virtual machine. Virtual machine emulate hardware for os to run like on pc. That also cause performance loss, but for 20 yo game probably not important.
I'm waiting for actual fire to start in my laptop before switching. I've had to do so many tricks to keep Win 7 going that I'm invested in keeping this thing going as long as possible. Plus all my porn is on it.
I installed windows 11 a dozen time at work (never at home) and I just click on "domain login", it just creates a local account and then after the install I have to manually join the domain. No Microsoft account enforcement at all.
It's regular Windows 11, not Enterprise, we are a small company.
But I'm wondering, this bypass is too easy, is it because it sees that the DNS server is also an active directory server, so it allows that, or the trick is that you tell him you want to join a domain?
Or maybe it's a domain enrollment bug because we're using samba 4 under Debian as active directory server and not Windows server/entra id/whatever they call it this month?
I don't think they ever said they plan to require it for Windows Pro or above skus. It's only home (you know the one business shouldn't be using anyway) that they said they wanted to enforce it on.
They actually did a lot of mess with Pro as well. There has been a "watering down" of Pro since Windows 10 to make sure that they can still do their anticonsumer crap to users. I imagine they also are trying to push businesses to get Enterprise instead of picking up relatively easy/inexpensive Pro licenses.
You need to have 11 Pro or better to domain join a computer.
Your computer would also need to be joined to your domain to allow the login, so there is definitely some config going on that is not available to the typical home user.
This "subscription" mentality is ruining value for a lot of society but, holy shit, do you ever rake in those huge amounts of monthly cash, for very little work.
Sometimes it's free trade as a carrot and embargo as a stick, like with, well, one can try to nail it to Napoleonic wars, but as old as life. Sometimes it's mass production and standardization and ergonomics and scientific industrial design, one can try to nail these to WWII, but also as old as life. And sometimes it's controlled escalation as a way to reach your goals without triggering nuclear response, which one can nail to the Cold War.
American strategy of the Cold War is being used against world markets, ladies and gentlemen. Together with the previous two strategies mentioned.
The Soviet one was the opposite, to try to make even the smallest transgression cause firmly the same response, so that controlled escalation wouldn't work, but unfortunately one is founded in human psychology (plus game theory) and the other in rational knowledge (just game theory), the latter always loses. It was called scientific-technical revolution and meant literally its name - instead of gradual escalation, which favors the stronger side, you should create technical means to punch a fatal wound, nothing gradual.
So - the subscriptions themselves matter very little, they are just slowly transitioning everything big to dependence upon remote components available over the Internet.
It's funny, actually, so much gradual work, and in the end it'll be just wasted time - even making computers is not magic. State of the art processes could as well be that for most of humanity, but for many purposes Pentium MMX is a good enough computer, and such are not magic.
And especially making computer software of the kind that's being "metropolized" like this is not magic. Most of it is complex simply because of legacy, backwards compatibility and as a barrier for competitors making alternative implementations.
I am horrified by what computers have become, from expensive magical tools to solve real problems, to ubiquitous shit-shoveling malware appliances controlled by some of the worst elements of society.
I've never been more appreciative than I am now of the decades of effort that have gone into building this free and open-source operating system.
Imagine if we were here in 2025, with all the incumbent operating systems going to shit, but in a world where Linux didn't exist and there was no alternative that wasn't owned by a tech giant.
The alternative alternative existed before Linux and still exists today: BSD
In a world without Linus Torvalds, all those people who have devoted time and effort into Linux might well have found themselves working / hobbying in the BSD ecosystems instead.
I think it's almost certain that Linux's niche would have been taken by it. It worked for Apple, after all.
Or, who knows, maybe GNU Hurd might have become viable.
I find this alternate timeline incredibly likely. I had a friend in college who was all about SCO Unix back before they went evil, even when Slackware was the go-to distro. We would have a lot more BSD forks out here now, although NextStep (and maybe even OSX) would probably still emerge as one of the better commercial ones.
As an aside: what I find amusing is that Homebrew is basically BSD Ports, served from a git repo. In 2025, it's a completely insane way to ship OS software to a single platform, but it does work.
Sure, if it wasn't Linux then another project may have got the love and attention.
I'm not glad it was Linux specifically, just glad there is a credible FOSS alternative of some kind, and in our universe that's Linux.
You might think there's no such world where we wouldn't have had some credible alternative, and as reasonable as that is - because freedom and independence are things people intrinsically want - I'm sure if you flap the butterfly wings enough times there'd be a universe where we all just collectively decided that commercial operating systems were the answer.
Yeah. Look at the shitheap we had to settle with when Reddit enshittified beyond redemption. We're really lucky to have such a well-polished alternative to Windows right now, and I think a lot of it boils down to the fact that Windows was awful from the beginning. If a halfway-decent operating system like OS/2 had become the default then we might be really scrambling right now.
Well I paid for what I have, and no one is allowed to rob me of what I pay for so I'm good. Sorry Microsoft you don't get to rob people any more than the rest of us. All it does is send people elsewhere.
But honestly I'm happy for the final push to Linux. I've been telling myself to make the change for a few years now but what's happening with AI training and side-loading / complete loss of privacy / general horrible vibes in the closed-source tech-sector..... Linux it is. I'm even ready for the learning curve. I grew up on dos, I'm sure I can find my way around it.
Lol it's been great getting off of Windows over the last few months.
I thought I would miss it, but Proton in Steam has been amazing on Ubuntu, with some exceptions (Stupid EA crap from skate. 2025).
Dual booting for now is OK, but gaming is pretty garbage anyway, so I will probably abandon Windows entirely soon. Definitely my last version of it. Feel so liberated having hobbies off computer anyway, and now using my computers with Ubuntu is actually enjoyable again instead of driving an expensive spy machine.
It shows as installable on Ubuntu in Steam, so I hilariously found out after installing Ubuntu and skate on my gf’s computer only to not be able to play it 😆
upgraded to 11 for free from win2k? dual boot linux and just running updates and rebooting the win11 every few months. paid $100 for win2k a long time ago. stupid giant passkey license, no thanks. got a free account and switched to digital at some point.
The workarounds people come up with to not make an MS account seem crazy to me. What difference does it really make if its a local account or not? You are still using windows so clearly you are ok with everything else, but the account is too much?
Using a Microsoft cloud account to log into my local computer means Microsoft owns credentials to a device in my house, and if they get hacked (which they do, all the fucking time), my device is less secure because of it and my data is less secure because of it.
There's absolutely no need for my copy of Windows to require me to login using a cloud-based account.
You can use all manner of apps to disable the telemetry and privacy nonsense that people have issues with Windows about (and I similarly find Microsoft's privacy-last approach to be tedious), but if your computer requires you to use a cloud account to log in, then your computer is susceptible to that cloud account being hijacked or hacked and Microsoft has given absolutely no good reason for this to be the case.
Logging in to a Microsoft account doesn't provide any real benefit to the user at all, the best you can say is that you're not prompted to log in again if you run the Microsoft Store or the Xbox app, and that's not a compelling benefit.
Well, at least in 10, the username is something dumb and you can't change it during creation (or everywhere easily after creation) when doing an online account. But linking after you create your account let you set it to whatever. So there may be people who are fine with online accounts but just want to set their usernames to whatever.
I don't have a personal Microsoft account, and have no desire to create one more account, but am required by my organisation to use 1 Windows-only software for 2 hours every week. As such, I run that in a Windows VM on my computer, and this doesn't seem like it'd be worth the effort of making a MS account
ChrisTitusTech's latest video on it... You're welcome. He has a curl you can use at any point in the installer to bypass the whole thing and land on desktop in a local account named admin
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Syria has published the results of its first parliamentary election since the government of former President Bashar al-Assad was toppled, revealing that most new members of the revamped People’s Assembly are Sunni Muslim and male.
Electoral commission spokesperson Nawar Najmeh told a press conference on Monday that only four percent of the 119 members selected in the indirect vote were women and only two Christians were among the winners, sparking concerns about inclusivity and fairness.
Sunday’s vote saw around 6,000 members of regional electoral colleges choose candidates from preapproved lists, part of a process to produce nearly two-thirds of the new 210-seat body. President Ahmed al-Sharaa will later select the remaining third.
Citing security and political reasons, authorities postponed the vote in areas outside government control, including Kurdish-held parts of Syria’s north and northeast, as well as the province of Suwayda, held by the Druze minority. Those suspensions left 21 seats empty.
In late 1973, five members of the Black September Palestinian militant group were arrested thanks to a tipoff from the Mossad, which claimed they were preparing to shoot down an Israeli commercial airliner at Rome’s largest airport with ground-to-air missiles. However, Moro arranged for them to be released a month later, then transported to Libya.
The Black September members were first flown to Malta on an Italian transport plane known as Argo 16 — which was routinely used to ferry Operation Gladio operatives to a secret training base in Sardinia, and deliver CIA/MI6 weapons to secret depots dotted around the country. When Mossad observed the Palestinians there and realized they’d been freed, they became “very annoyed,” according to Rome’s then counterespionage chief, Ambrogio Viviani.
On November 23 1973, Argo 16 crashed shortly after taking off from Venice Airport, killing the entire veteran crew.
An initial probe concluded the tragedy was an accident, but the case was reopened by the Venice prosecutor’s office in 1986. That investigation faltered as well, when security and intelligence officials refused to testify, and began withholding evidence. However, the judge overseeing the case, Carlo Mastelloni, told Salerno there was no doubt, based on “objective evidence,” that the plane’s downing was Israel’s dirty work.
“It’s all tied to the famous ‘Moro agreement,’” Mastelloni asserted. Argo 16’s sabotage was not only “retaliation” for the release of the arrested Palestinians, but a “warning” over Italy’s “concessions” to “Tel Aviv’s enemies,” he stated. Still, Lodo Moro continued to hold despite the implicit threat of violence, which raises the question of whether Mossad felt the need to up the ante.
Unsure if it's so much as degrowth but to alter our approach. Quite trying to scale up 1800 and 1900s tech and science and modernize our society and infrastructure. Creating loop systems rather than coal power and other poor energy sources.
Well yeah any potential solution is going to mean reduced potential profit, which you could describe as degrowth, but that would be the worst possible way to describe it.
The reason why we haven't gotten anywhere with carbon reduction is because wealthy people block any efforts.
Telling them that degrowth is the solution is unlikely to motivate them.
The first step would be to educate people with anarchist literature. It would be a process dismantling hierarchies without destroying our society of connectivity but I believe its possible. I believe people are, and are becoming more, altruistic on average otherwise civilization would not have been an emergent property of our collectivism.
If you feel you can't educate others, assist those who can. You'll never stop bad people from existing, but you can remove the ladders they seize to lord over us.
custard_swollower
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •wolre
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •I've used Nvidia GPUs with Linux with not many problems. These "horror stories" typically come from people who try to install a driver exactly the same way they would on Windows (by going to the Nvidia website and downloading something) whereas on most Linux distros it's actually much easier.
On Mint, you basically just have to open the "driver manager" and click on the recommended Nvidia driver. Then reboot. 😀
There is also a guide available on It's FOSS.
Install Nvidia Drivers on Linux Mint [Beginner's Guide]
Ankush Das (It's FOSS)Eugenia
in reply to wolre • • •Not true. Ubuntu's official nvidia driver installation broke twice for my husband's PC, one other time they removed a version completely from their list (while we had installed it), and then it had orphaned packages and apt was constantly complaining, while every time we put nvidia as the main card (instead of the integrated intel), the PC does not wake up from sleep under Wayland (while it does under X11, so we know it's not a BIOS issue).
Also, the Mint forum is full of problems with nvidia drivers, despite running under X11, which is the "easier" environment for its drivers.
Overall, it's a nightmare, and that's why we now use the integrated intel as the main gpu, and the nvidia for compute only (for blender and resolve).
Maybe it's better implemented under Arch-land and Fedora-land, but under Ubuntu/Mint/Debian-land, it's still a nightmare.
SmokeInFog
in reply to Eugenia • • •Idk, I've run mint for a decade or more. Until the last couple of years all of my machines have had nvidia gpus. I never had an issue with drivers.
So, yes, you are more likely to run into issues if you have an nvidia gpu but it's still pretty unlikely
Eugenia
in reply to SmokeInFog • • •Sophienomenal
in reply to Eugenia • • •wolre
in reply to Eugenia • • •Is it possible that the driver that was installed was at some point so old that it was removed from the repos?
I can't speak about the exact implementation on Ubuntu, but on Fedora (which I am using) the driver usually gets updated to the latest version automatically. If that's not the case on Ubuntu or Mint, it may be worth going to the device drivers menu every few months, checking if there's a new one available and selecting the new one if there is one.
Eugenia
in reply to wolre • • •HaraldvonBlauzahn
in reply to wolre • • •I have been dual-booting Arch and Debian with an NVidua Gforce-759 Ti since say, 2015 and had several problems, in spite of having an otherwise totally vanilla PC system:
Yes, all that was solvable with some effort, and with experience from 25 years of using Linux.
So, in sum it was perhaps costing one full week, or ten days time.
But I decided that all that hassle and breakage was simply not worth my time, and swapped the card for an AMD Radeon.
No problems since.
The morale is: If you want to use Linux, make sure you use fully supported hardware, with open source drivers from the main kernel. Including laptops.
Everything else is probably not worth the time.
.
LeFantome
in reply to HaraldvonBlauzahn • • •Not sure why you would have so much trouble with a DKMS module in Arch. But having to manage out-of-tree modules is an issue. Thankfully NVIDIA does not have that issue anymore as they now use in-tree modules (as of driver release 580). Arch is shipping those drivers now so others will not experience your pain.
Debian ships really old drivers. So NVDiA problems should still be expected on Debian, especially on Wayland.
I do not see what that has to do with NVIDIA. Sounds like you may have just had issues with Arch.
Sunoc
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Nvidia GPU can be troublesome on Linux indeed. Mint might not be the best option in that case. If you are flexible, distro-wise, I cannot recommend Bazzite enough.
You can get an image with all the needed Nvidia drivers and configs, that should bring you the smoothest possible experience with your hardware, especially for gaming!
Good luck!
Bazzite - The next generation of Linux gaming
bazzite.gganon5621
in reply to Sunoc • • •Jeena
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •UNY0N
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •The horror stories often come from years ago, when Linux wasn't as under-friendly as it is now. You shouldn't have any problems with this.
And if Mint does give you problems (which I doubt), consider trying a plug-and-play gaming distro like bazzite. It supports nvidia GPUs right away.
bazzite.gg/
Bazzite - The next generation of Linux gaming
bazzite.ggssillyssadass
in reply to UNY0N • • •fakeman_pretendname
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •At their heart, most distros are approximately "made of the same stuff". There's differences in package management in the background (e.g. how the "software centre" works), but essentially the difference between a "gaming distro", "normal distro" and "creative distro" is just what programs are installed by default, and how a few things are set up by default.
Nothing stops me playing games on Mint (and historically, Ubuntu and Ubuntu Studio) - and likewise, nothing will stop you installing office programs, audio/video/graphics programs etc on something presented as a gaming distro.
UNY0N
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •That depends on what that other stuff is. Bazzite is a desktop OS first, gaming second. But it us atomic, so installing apps that aren't available as a flatpak is somewhat more complicated.
Mint is a great start though, I seriously doubt that you will have problems. Just don't be afraid to experiment.
DarkAri
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •No you can pretty much do everything the same. The biggest difference is the distro it's based on, bazzite is based on fedora, you use "sudo rpm-ostree install" to install packages. Fedora has a system where it layers packages onto an ostree so if you have an issue you can boot from an old one.
Rpm is only needed for system packages, most packages can just be installed via a flatpack in the package store, which is all free and open source software.
Bazzite is a great starting point. It is pretty much turn key, while having the best performance and proprietary drivers. It already has everything installed to get emulating windows apps working easily out of the box. Wine, proton, steam, the proprietary drivers. These are all things you are going to want probably and this will save you a headache and several days of trying to get the system setup.
Make sure you disable UEFI and choose legacy boot in your bios if it's available and also disable the TPM in the bios if available. It will work with those enabled, but it's buggier and the TPM causes performance issues. Linux doesn't need these and they are artificially imposed by Microsoft and the big corporate OSes, but they suck compared to the original simple standards for bootstrapping. I'm not 100% sure how well this works on everything. It's possible some newer cards might require UEFI boot, but you can just turn it back on before you install.
I recommend KDE as the desktop environment, especially if you are used to windows. It will feel the most natural and familiar to you. I also recommend asking chatGPT to help you with basic tasks like installing system level software. Make sure you specify that you are using bazzite. Once you learn to use Linux its so much better than Windows. The performance is much better in nearly every regard. You can do anything you want with Linux, where windows is extremely locked down nowadays. It also prolongs the life of your hardware, especially drives, since windows spyware isn't constantly scanning your files and stuff. With proton you will likely see a 5-15% performance jump over gaming on windows natively. The downside is that many popular games won't work in multiplayer because of the anti heat, and also some trash software like Photoshop won't work, but the vast majority of windows apps will work just fine, even multiplayer. The developers have to go out of their way to make multiplayer games not work on Linux, so it's pretty rare, even if many of the bigger studios do it. You can dual boot windows for this if you really want to, but windows will constantly try to screw up your boot and stuff so you have to be careful. I would say just not support those companies which go out of their way to not support Linux. They are anticompetitive and anti consumer.
The learning curve for Linux isn't quite a cliff now, it's still steep, but with bazzite it's much easier then it ever has been. It mostly just works from a simple gui install, and there isn't really anything you need outside of this base install. Perhaps you want to install, protonup-qt so you can install proton GE, which has better support for some games that rely heavily on .net code, like space engineers.
Caveman
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •It depends on the distro. Bazzite might get in the way since it's a more closed distro if you want to do docker stuff. I personally managed but setting up extra hard drives that docker (podman) uses, but it was tricky. You'll not have issue browsing the Web or installing most apps though.
Nobara might be a good choice although the user base is not that big so you might have to migrate in a couple of years.
Otherwise I'd stick to regular distros since they have great support and will stick around for a long time such as Fedora or Kubuntu. I've also heard Endavour is really good these days.
You should consider choosing a distro based on the Wayland integration since you can get HDR fractional scaling and variable refresh rate with them.
QuentinCallaghan
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •TheLeadenSea
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •MyNameIsRichard
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •On EndeavourOS, you just have to run nvidia-inst. Mint has the driver manager, and other distros have ways of handling it. For your card, you'll want the Nvidia Open driver if it doesn't do it automatically.
TLDR: These days it's easy.
anamethatisnt
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Honestly it isn't much of a problem anymore, whether you choose a gaming specific OS or not.
Here's how to get good Nvidia support on Fedora 43:
GitHub - devangshekhawat/Fedora-43-Post-Install-Guide: Things to do after installing Fedora 43
GitHubEk-Hou-Van-Braai
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Best you can so is test it for yourself.
I switched to Linux Mint in February and my 4070 has given me no issues.
I just had to set some configs in steam so that it defaults to using my 4070 and not my iGPU, and the rest just worked
mumei
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •rozodru
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •the ONLY issues I've ever had with my Nvidia GPU were with A. Sway and B. Mint.
and when I say "issues" with Sway it was simply not being able to use a DM to login to it and having to login via TTY with "sway --unsupported-gpu" since the Sway devs aren't fans of proprietary stuff at all.
for Mint...just didn't work well for gaming. Crashing, slow downs, etc. That could either be a Distro issue or a Me issue as Mint was my first linux distro and I only stuck with it for a couple weeks before moving on to CachyOS.
On every distro since then? zero issues. it just works. Best experience with it was probably via CachyOS or NixOS. Runs smooth as silk on NixOS.
starshipwinepineapple
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •TimeSquirrel likes this.
mrbutterscotch
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •artyom
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •The main difference is your mileage may vary with Nvidia, whereas it's pretty much always just going to work with AMD. But give it a shot and see how it goes. Make sure to choose a distro that specifically supports Nvidia.
I imagine a 4060TI is a relatively valuable card that you could trade for AMD if you really wanted to.
apfelwoiSchoppen
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •If the recommendations for Mint do not work, I'd try a different distribution with an easier path to install nvidia drivers, namely one that has the open nvidia drivers included in the ISO.
PopOS and Ubuntu do this.
I'd avoid CachyOS for Linux newbs as it is bleeding edge and can be difficult to manage.
DarkAri
in reply to apfelwoiSchoppen • • •apfelwoiSchoppen
in reply to DarkAri • • •DarkAri
in reply to apfelwoiSchoppen • • •apfelwoiSchoppen
in reply to DarkAri • • •utopiah
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Check my history but basically no. It's not so hard.
I'm on Debian stable yet place the latest games, from VR to flat ones, from AAA to indies, and it just works.
Maybe I spent 30min wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphics… months ago (years now? time flies) when I did my install and since then smooth sailing. I have minor issues, e.g. suspend sometimes hang. Sometimes coming back from sustain some visual glitches in the browser via WebGL, but that's it.
Edit: I sometimes also use the GPU for CUDA for local AI/LLM (mostly to make sure it's bullshit, and it is but at least I can say I tried) and that also went well, just followed instructions.
NvidiaGraphicsDrivers - Debian Wiki
wiki.debian.orgLeny
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •It's just stories from people repeating a very old song that has no anchor in today's reality.
thedeadwalking4242
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Clay_pidgin
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •What's a dynamic GPU?
Yeah it was dead simple on Nixos. I just grabbed the Nvidia section of the wiki. wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NVIDIA
NVIDIA - NixOS Wiki
wiki.nixos.orgthedeadwalking4242
in reply to Clay_pidgin • • •Clay_pidgin
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •thedeadwalking4242
in reply to Clay_pidgin • • •Clay_pidgin
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •thedeadwalking4242
in reply to Clay_pidgin • • •Clay_pidgin
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •thedeadwalking4242
in reply to Clay_pidgin • • •Clay_pidgin
in reply to thedeadwalking4242 • • •jake_jake_jake_
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •I have multiple linux computers, from servers to a surface tablet, i am able to use all different generations of all nvidia, both permanently installed, and eGPU. It is not without any issue, but it works and is usable.
For me issues stem from x11 vs wayland (work computer is ubuntu due to company policy), or egpu shenanigans which I feel is platform agnostic
Dr Jekell
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •The issues with Nvidia GPU's has been blown up way to much in the last few years in my opinion.
The potential problems you "might" face are:
For most major distros now a days you either select the Nvidia option when installing (like Manjaro) or install the drivers afterwards (Ubuntu based) and be off to the races.
Set up and use Timeshift, make a backup before installing updates and you can roll back if there is an issue.
nagaram
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •A 4060ti has been out long enough that you're fine with basically any main stream distro.
I think even the 50 series is fine now with most mainstream distros as well.
I still prefer arch based distros now for Nvidia cards and honestly, Fedora is great!
HumanPenguin
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •The complaints are more about lack of support for OS drivers. If using proprietary drivers is not a worry. Then they are fine. Often the OS stuff works if your set up is simple.
My advice. Do not upgrade to quickly. They tend to have errors in their new proprietary drivers. Watch and see how others have done. Before upgrading essential machines.
The other issue. For non rendering. Their latest models performance to £$ etc is getting very bad. But blender still has major speed advantages on Nvidia. But that is looking more and more short term as blender grows.
blackbrook
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •There should be no trouble getting it to work, there may however be a slight chance of it breaking on an update, at least with some rolling distros, if you use the proprietary drivers, which you'll want to use it you care about performance.
The drivers need to be compatible with the kernel. In rare cases a kernel update will not be compatible with the nvidia driver and could get installed before the nvidia update has dropped. This is possible for openSUSE Tumbleweed for example because the nvidia drivers come from an nvidia managed repo that can get behind the official repos. Just being conservative about waiting a few days before applying kernel updates, especially for a significant version change, and checking the forums for people having problem is enough to avoid this problem.
Admetus
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •typhoon
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •This is the biggest hurdle nowadays with Nvidia:
NVIDIA GPUs generally experience a performance penalty when running DirectX 12 games on Linux, with reports indicating a drop of 15-30% compared to Windows. This is largely attributed to driver optimizations and the overhead from using translation layers like Proton and Wine.
aaravchen
in reply to typhoon • • •typhoon
in reply to aaravchen • • •To be clear, AMD has much less performance loss if any. In some cases surpassing the performance in Windows on those same games.
So is it the game's fault?
Mostly no. The performance gap is not due to poorly written games, it's about:
Games that are poorly optimized on Windows will also mostly likely perform badly on Linux.
non_burglar
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •If you just want to do pedestrian activities like gaming and desktop stuff, you're fine with the average nvidia driver install tutorial, and it's pretty trivial.
If you want more niche or advanced features like HDR tuning in Wayland or using cuda applications, you may want to consider that amd drivers are actually open and allow you to get into those kinds of tunables.
That said, there are still features and performance kept away from the user with nvidia, despite their never-ending promises of making drivers open, and nvidia has been rewarded for being not open on Linux, which a lot of us don't like. I personally am one of those and my stance with nvidia is partly one of principle.
n3m37h
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Lofs of distros such as Bazzite, Nobara, CachyOS all have premade nvidia ISOs avaliable making it easy to jump ship.
Nobara has a fantastic driver manager and system updater
melroy
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •It will work. Under Linux mint for example you can use the firmware installer to install the correct Nvidia driver.
Too bad nvidia drivers are proprietary, so it's not part the default kernel drivers. That is why I like AMD so much more, it has open sourcer drivers. Fk nvidia 😁
melroy
in reply to melroy • • •Then playing games you will of course need wine or Proton in case of windows games.
For native Linux games it's the best thing. Ideally have a game that supports vulkan for the best performance. Or opengl.
PragmaticOne
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •cyberwolfie
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •No. I have a RTX 3050 Ti Laptop which I have not had many issues with. The biggest issue I have experienced was that a game completely froze at the same point every time. This was due to a regression in their drivers. They spent their sweet time fixing it to, and following the issue thread highlights one of the main issues with their drivers being non-free: extremely competent users providing logs and effort to troubleshoot, but unable to work on the fix themselves. And what seemed to be summer interns replying once in a while and nothing happening for a long while.
But that said, I find the hate overblown. You could get tge impression that running Linux on a machine with an Nvidia-GPU will instantly burn down your house or spawn a portal to hell. It will not. I will get an AMD card at the next crossroads, but I am not ditching my card now just because it is Nvidia. It works fine enough.
juliebean
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Riley
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •☂️-
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •cmnybo
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •skibidi
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Nvidia historically didn't invest in Linux drivers.
Things have gotten a bit better, but there are still plenty of issues with Wayland compatibility specifically.
Install the proprietary driver and it will work, but under Wayland you may have issues with resuming from sleep, stacked transparency, fractional resolution scaling, and HDR compatibility.
Ramen 🍜(she/her)
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Thteven
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Nindelofocho
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Mactan
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •tabular
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •I thought the title was "Why is it so hard to get Nvidia working with Linux" but I was mistaken. That's the answer.
[Linus_Saying_FU_Nvidia.mkv]
lemmalamma
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia.sobchak
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Sunsofold
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Sophienomenal
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Kaigyo
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •It sorta depends. I've personally had some issues with certain software (mainly Firefox) running in Wayland on my Nvidia card. There are environment variables and flags to remedy some issues, but I'd still get the occasional application crash.
What worked well for me was setting up prime offloading so basically all of the system runs on the integrated GPU and only games run on Nvidia.
monovergent
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •On modern versions of common distros, it'll probably work just fine if you install the driver from your distro's repos. Don't touch NVIDIA's downloadable .run installer.
It's getting better for Nvidia support on Linux, but there's more edge case problems than with AMD or Intel graphics.
teawrecks
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •I was going to say you'll probably be fine, but if you're considering Mint you'll definitely be fine.
Terminology you don't need to know: Mint is still using x11, which Nvidia works fine with. I assume mint won't switch to Wayland until it works smoothly on Nvidia too.
My partner is using mint on a 3080. I think she had one graphical bug in one game one time after an update. Mint has a program specifically used to roll back to a past Nvidia driver. She chose the driver from before the update, rebooted, and the bug was gone. Just gotta remember to switch back to using latest later when a new driver comes out.
🧟♂️ Cadaver
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •beeng
in reply to 🧟♂️ Cadaver • • •golden_zealot
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •LeFantome
in reply to golden_zealot • • •Kruulos
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •I used Linux Mint and GTX 2070 for over a half a year without any major problems. Installation was incredibly easy as there was a dialog box asking to install drivers and everything just worked. I have 4 monitor setup even.
Ultimately I switched to AMD (last week) because of the tiny problems that I experienced but mostly because I wanted to support AMD and could reason for an GPU upgrade.
neomachino
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •A few years ago when I went to actually use the GPU in my laptop I realized I never installed the drivers. I think it was a 3050 or something pretty low end.
It took maybe 20 minutes, most of that time was waiting for things to install. I've heard the horror stories so I wasn't excepting it to work and was ready to give up at the first sign on resistance but there really wasn't any. That was on Fedora, a bit later I switched to Debian and I remember running into an issue getting it to work but it was small enough that I don't remember what the issue was.
vi21
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Holytimes
in reply to vi21 • • •Any distro in the last decade even worth the time to use it's easy.
The only expectation is if it's a distro purely built to only use Foss software with out expections.
LeFantome
in reply to Holytimes • • •Broken
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •sonekate
in reply to Broken • • •Broken
in reply to sonekate • • •rapchee
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •but just dual boot, have a fallback windows install
FreddiesLantern
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Currently have 2 machines on MX with nvidia cards. One was flawless from the get go the other took some trail and error by installing some extra packages but I got there.
(Through the package manager I might add, no files edited or anything)
Mint has a somewhat similar user experience. Chances are you’ll be just fine. Try out a live usb.
Narri N.
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •Edit: also I'm using Wayland, which has been worse with NVIDIA than X11 that Mint apparently uses. So I'm pretty confident you'll be alright.
kuneho
in reply to ssillyssadass • • •