Source: https://akko.isabelroses.com/notice/AjV6vmHrvDp6k3V2pc

Linux Mint 22 BETA is out based on the most recent Ubuntu LTS 24.04.

Important Changes:

• Linux Mint currently ships with the Linux 6.8 kernel. More importantly, Mint will now follow Ubuntu's Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel series so Mint can work on the latest machines. This also removes the confusion of the "Edge ISO" as this affects all Mint 22 users.
• Linux Mint uses Pipewire as its audio stack.
• The Linux Mint team along with other communities in the "we forked off of GNOME when it became GNOME 3" have started the Xapp project which plans to continue GTK desktop app development sans libadwaita and GNOME specific technologies.
• Mint now uses Matrix for community coordination and includes the Element webapp client preinstalled.
• Cinnamon 6.2 and various UX improvements.

Windows 10 goes End of Life in October 2025.

Are there any distributions that offer benefits post-installation?

I am aware of Arch (and some other relevant distributions) having access to the AUR, and would like to know if other distributions can offer anything other than a quicker set-up.

Dropping this recommendation because I’ve been looking for a reasonably good iOS Lemmy app for a year. They’ve all been bad (IMO), but this is so far the closest to how good Apollo for Reddit was, in terms of features and polish. It is also FOSS which is great. I haven’t tried the Android version, but since the apps seem to just be containers for the web app (vger.app), I imagine it’s just as good over there.

The one feature I noticed missing is user avatars.

I don’t know the developer or anything. Just glad to not have to use the browser to use Hexbear.

This thing just keeps on trucking. Closes in three hours. Of course I'm already drowning in technical books & manuals but setting up my own email server is like the ultimate federated social media thing to do, especially in conjunction with open source development using git. Included books:

• Run Your Own Mail Server, in your chosen format
• Networking for Systems Administrators
• Ed Mastery
• $ git commit murder (fiction novel)
• PAM Mastery
• Sudo Mastery, 2nd Edition
• SSH Mastery

If it reaches $85k (unlikely) then Tarsnap Mastery will be included.

What's the point of this post?

We all love to dunk on M$ for repeatedly fucking up Windows, and we all love to recommend installing the superior OS, but there hasn’t been a guide on how to actually do so. My aim is to create a guide on how to actually install Linux so that every time M$ fucks up, people can link to this guide (or any other successive guide) on top of the usual dunking.

Note: This guide is tailored towards people who are using Windows devices.

Why Linux Mint?

• Linux Mint has a well-deserved reputation as the “newbie distro for people who came from Windows.”
• Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, and all three distros combined have a wealth of information online owning to their popularity, meaning that there’s less obstacles in troubleshooting.
• Linux Mint owning to its Debian heritage isn’t cutting edge or bleeding edge, meaning there’s a greater focus on using what currently works.

Which version of Linux Mint?

https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

Linux Mint comes in three main editions:

• Cinnamon (←pick this one)
• MATE
• Xfce

Pick Cinnamon since this edition is more modern and closely imitates the Windows desktop environment (DE) the most. The other two use DEs that consume less resources, but don’t mimic the look of Windows as much.

How to create a USB boot drive?

There are various ways of creating a USB boot drive:

• Rufus (easy and fooproof): https://rufus.ie/en/
• Ventoy (takes more work but you can add multiple ISO images to the boot drive): https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

Live session:

After creating your USB boot disk with Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, you need to boot from your flash drive. The exact steps vary, but you essentially have to go to your BIOS and either change the boot order or specifically boot from your flash drive. Once there, you’ll come across a couple of screens before arriving at the Linux Mint desktop.

There’s a desktop icon that tells you to install Linux Mint, but you don’t have to do it yet. In fact, nothing’s stopping you from just running Linux Mint like this through the flash drive (there are entire Linux distro designed to be run from a flash drive like, but Linux Mint isn’t one of those). The live session is also good to catch any hardware issues like your wifi not working.

Actually installing Linux Mint:

It’s honestly pretty straightforward.

Pick the language you want, which will mostly likely be English.

Pick the keyboard, which will mostly be what you’re already using.

Connect online so Linux Mint will install the latest programs. You can skip connecting online, and Linux Mint will install the version of the programs that are in the iso image, but you’ll have to upgrade all those programs at once later.

Check Install multimedia codecs. The codecs allow you to watch videos.

Unless you have some weird logical partition set up for your drive, just choose Erase disk and install Linux Mint, and let Linux Mint handle the partitioning. If your PC has multiple drives, I would suggest physically disconnecting the drives that you don’t want the installation to touch as a precaution. Obviously, do this while the PC is off.

Pick the time zone you live in.

Set up your username, hostname, and password. It doesn’t have annoying password complexity restrictions on what password you want to use. Just pick any password.

This is a slideshow while installation is taking place.

Once installation is complete, Linux Mint will prompt you to reboot your PC. When you reboot your PC through that window, you will eventually get to a black screen with a prompt asking you to remove the USB boot drive and press Enter. Do so, and your PC will reboot to a fresh installation of Linux Mint.

NixOS is a GNU/Linux distribution based on declarative builds using the functional Nix package manager. It boasts the most amount of available software on any Linux distribution as well as configuration options for various programs. There are more than 100,000 packages on nixpkgs as well as more than 10,000 options for system configuration.

Nix resources:

• Vimjoyer's video series on Nix hosted on YouTube (invidious proxy)
• No Boilerplate on NixOS (invidious proxy)

NixOS is a great way to learn how GNU/Linux works as well as to build a system configuration that you can take anywhere, anytime.

Not affiliated with her or anything I just absolutely love these zines, they are the single greatest learning resource for all skill levels I've come across in tech. Her reputation is well deserved. Having great git skills (more than just clone/commit/push/pull) is critically important for participating in FOSS so I'll be picking this one up.

I just tried out the COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) created and engineered by System76 (people who are behind POP!_OS). It was an incredible experience even though it was just a pre-alpha.

COSMIC was engineered virtually from the ground-up to be System76's solution to move away from GNOME and onto their own tech stack. The entire DE is written in the Rust programming language utilizing the iced application framework with their in-house application library libcosmic (similar to how KDE uses Qt+Breeze+Frameworks or GNOME uses GTK + Libadwaita).

Impressions

If you're familiar with POP!_OS 22.04's take on GNOME, then the workflow is no different here with emphasis on features such as tiling, application dock, application launcher, universal search launcher and of course: auto-tiling.

One of the exclusive features of COSMIC is its 1st class support for custom theming on the fly. You're allowed to theme the desktop in almost any way you can (even with nauseating colors) and the DE will adapt to your preferences.

It can even theme gnome apps! (I read other books dw)

Auto-tiling is also great to use, you can toggle specific windows to be floating or tiled.

Theme integration with Qt apps are a work in progress + some quirks of running COSMIC in a container with KDE. So far, I really enjoy how buttery smooth everything is (besides some pre-alpha stuttering), the entire desktop feels like a really cohesive experience. It has the efficiency of a tiling window manager but the convenience of a DE.

It has an overview!!! (super+w)

You can also stack windows on top of each other

Not everything is implemented (obviously) but just the promise of a DE that does tiling and window management like this has me sold.

How to try out COSMIC?

NixOS

There's a flake

Fedora Atomic Desktop

You can use a universal blue image and rebase to that, it even includes options for having a fallback desktop environment of either GNOME or KDE as well.

Other

• Arch has an AUR package
• Fedora has a COPR repository
• Compile from source (instructions)

Note that this cannot be used in production: cosmic is pre-alpha software as well as needing to turn off SELinux.

Or wait until POP!_OS 24.04 is released with a stable version of COSMIC this summer. This has been my first time running COSMIC but when the stable version drops you bet I'm switching over (though no one can take away my Fedora atomic distro).

Switch to GNU/Linux or pay the ultimate price

Death to Amerikkka

Breaking News: Person who claims to only care about code gets banned from one of the largest FOSS development projects due to toxicity and harassment.

CW: Transphobia, ableism, misgendering

I wonder why this happens so much. They said that they only care about code and commit quality yet they get banned for violating a code of conduct due to bigotry. Can someone help connect the dots here?

freedesktop CoC Moderators (slightly concerned) : "We noticed that you've cultivate an unhealthy community and that toxicity is not allowed here."

Vaxry : "This is all a plot by Red Hat to target me for being a WHITE MAN and not a privileged minority."

TL;DR: System76's COSMIC first alpha is going to be in late May with new COSMIC desktop apps. The planned stable release will still be in late summer with POP!_OS 24.04.

I've been following this since it started like 2 years ago so it's unbelievable that an alpha is going to be upon us so soon. This is largely the most ambitious undertaking that any libre software group has taken in a long while (apart from Asahi Linux and graphics work).

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2006806

In response to a post made by @actual_patience@programming.dev about a month ago, asking if anybody has tried Bcachefs.

I recently got around to giving Bcachefs a shot. I am currently running a Gentoo system with Bcachefs as the root filesystem. The filesystem consists of a 1.5TB NVMe volume backed by a conventional 6TB hard disk drive.

Getting it set up was no picnic. I might be missing something, but as far as I can tell a lot of standard tooling lacks support for filesystems spanning multiple block devices (single-partition Bcachefs seems to work like any other FS, but that defeats the point of using Bcachefs). It seems most of them assume you are going to use LVM for a use case like this, while Bcachefs sidesteps the device-mapper interface (and everything built on top, like LUKS and LVM) completely.

At the moment, Bcachefs uses a colon-separated list to specify these block devices. From things like the initramfs generated by dracut or mkinitcpio to utilities included in util-linux, this syntax is not widely supported. A multi-device Bcachefs filesystem can be mounted with mount. The command looks something along the lines of mount -t bcachefs /dev/nvme0n1p1:/dev/sda1 /mnt. These multi-device lists only work if you specify the filesystem type explicitly, and I had to roll my own initramfs from scratch in order to take this input from the kernel command line and handle it specially. Though mount works, libraries like libblkid (and probably others) report suspicious results about the volume / constituent partitions (i.e. that only one of the constituent partitons is mounted). That said, I am not running bleeding versions of Linux, util-linux, or bcachefs. Unstable maybe, but provided by versioned ebuilds in Gentoo. It is also worth noting, it is not currently possible to mount Bcachefs subvolumes the way you can Btrfs subvolumes. The only way this can be done currently is via bind mounts. There is an issue open to implement this feature, but it is not currently a high priority.

The filesystem itself appears to be working smoothly, though there are several rough edges (for instance, I don't think you can currently change a filesystem label after formatting it. Also it struggles when there is not enough space available to reach the replicas_required target. I didn't get an error, it just got super slow).

Before trying this out, I used to run Btrfs in a multi-disk LVM which performed ssd caching at the block layer. Performance on Bcachefs isn't noticeably worse or better IMO, but I haven't done any remotely empirical side-by-side benchmarks. I just got this running yesterday and will need more time to assess performance. I will need to put a lot more data into this filesystem before it starts missing cache on the hot drive, for instance.

Bcachefs is certainly in an experimental state (as the Linux menuconfig tool will remind you), but it aims to do exactly what I am looking for in a filesystem so I had to try it out. I plan on sticking with it unless a catastrophe occurs.

I heard the last update for the 3DS fucked peoples homebrew consoles, so I haven't even connected to the internet since then.

But now I want to transfer a bunch of my old Pokemon to Pokemon Bank so I can get them onto Home and then my Switch, but Pokemon Bank needs an update...

Whats the safest way to do this? Can I just update it or will that fuck my homebrew?

I deleted my only copy of Windows and reinstalled OpenBSD on my big PC. It's way better in almost every respect but I miss video games lol. I'll probably install Linux somewhere and boot that to play video games eventually but games on your native operating system are pretty convenient

Edit: thanks for all your recs, I am crashing from caffeine rn and have to log off lol, will check them all later

If you own a Steam Deck (either OLED or LCD) or have used one in the past, what are your thoughts? Did you find it easy to use? What is your opinion on the "Desktop mode" with KDE? Do you think it helps or hurts Linux adoption? What are your opinions on Steam as a whole and Valve's business practices beyond the technical stuff like Proton.

For me, I've been looking into Lapce and lite-xl a lot recently. I really like the idea of extremely lightweight text editors that try to compete with Codium (libre binary of VScode).

What text/code editors do y'all use? I want to try them out.

I'd like to share a fun page from the GNU Project's essays on free software in other languages. It's always good to remember that the free software movement was and is always an international effort to defend our freedoms. Free software will always aid leftist organizations in breaking away from surveillance and creating our own technological independence.

You should always advocate for breaking away from proprietary software in your advocacy. For example, if you're in a leftist Discord chatroom, try building a bridge to Matrix or even moving to chatroom entirely to Matrix. If you talk to your friends using Messenger, Whatsapp or Zoom, try suggesting that y'all use something like Signal, GNU Jami, Jitsi Meet etc.

Free software is praxis! Never take your computing for granted!

day 6 of libreposting

TL;DR

RSS doesn't actually stand for "Really Simple Software", it stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and is an internet standard dating back to 1999. It allows websites to create RSS feeds that users can copy into their RSS Feed Reader to avoid connecting to the website over and over again just to see updates.

Why you should use RSS

RSS allows one to organize their internet activity into one cohesive, accessible program. Instead of leaving large digital footprints like subscribing to a newsletter via email or using a social media site, RSS allows one to safely preview web content right as it is updated. If you're creating a blog, making an RSS feed will greatly benefit your readers.

Using RSS is as simple as looking for the RSS Icon and copying the link into your feed reader, no extra steps required. Many feed readers also come with the ability to tag and organize your feeds into different sections for different topics. Invidious instances also come with RSS built in so you can replicate a YouTube subscriptions page without the stinging you'd usually get from Alphabet Inc for example.

In less eloquent terms: The modern web browser is bloat and you want to avoid using it as much as possible. RSS helps you do that.

Libre RSS Feed Readers

On Linux distributions with Flathub enabled, you have these options:

• GNOME: NewsFlash,
• KDE: Akgregator
• QT: RSS Guard
• Flutter: Fluent Reader
• GNU Emacs: Elfeed
• Terminal: Newsboat

Most web browsers either have extensions for RSS or have RSS built into them, I have only used one called Smart RSS. I don't recommend using web application RSS feed readers that require an account to use.

Examples

NewsFlash

Now I can enjoy all my JT content right as it's hot off the press (using invidious)

Lemmy

RSS Feeds are available at every comm. (little rightmost rss icon)

Day 5 of libreposting

i tried piped for a while, but many times i tried to watch videos and they didn't start loading until i reloaded it what felt like hundreds of times. any reccomendations?

edit: Dear comrades reading this, i am not sure if it will work the same for people outside of amerikkka, but puffyan.us worked really well for me. i decided not to go with yewtu.be, as i wanted to be able to find content using my subscriptions rather than searching for topics. if that doesn't bother you, go with yewtube but puffyan worked well for me. thank you for all of the advice!

A libre program is a program that fulfills these 4 basic freedoms.

• The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

• Bonus points if it is cross-platform (can run on Windows or MacOS) or replaces a proprietary program

Jitsi Meet

Jitsi Meet is a free software program that allows users to create video calls with each other. Licensed under Apache 2.0, anyone is able to launch their own Jitsi Meet instance and be able to talk to their friends and family without having their freedoms revoked.

This application can be used to replace proprietary video conferencing apps like Zoom and Google Meets which in addition to being nonfree, un-auditable programs have also shown time and time again to disrespect its users even further such as forcefully integrating AI anti features and forcing users to be trapped in their cultivated video conferencing garden of stings.

• Read more about the security of Jitsi if you're interested.

Jitsi Meet can be run on any operating system that has access to a web browser. There is also offline binaries for Linux distributions from Flathub. It's also available on mobile operating systems in both F-Droid and proprietary app stores.

How can I use it?

Jitsi Meet can be used gratis on the behalf of Jitsi here, however it requires the user to sign in with either Google, Facebook, or Github; all proprietary platforms.

Luckily, Framasoft still has a fully gratis Jitsi Meet service at Framatalk which does not require a third-party login.

Stop Zoomin' and use Jitsi Meet, self host one if you can to further ensure your freedom and your community.

Share your favorite Free software program here and help others!

Day 4 of libreposting :-)

Context

In 2013, Edward Snowden leaked highly classified information on global surveillance ring that the NSA had been building for more than a decade since the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001 as a reaction to 9/11.

The leaks demonstrate that the NSA and other federal agencies have been routinely violating the people's right to privacy via the cooperation of US telecommunications companies. They were able to wiretap people's calls, collect metadata on all sorts of things, and be able to fetch any companies' databases at will.

This is still true today. Anything you put on US servers can be pulled by 3 letter agencies in a variety of ways, none of them taking very long. The 4th amendment is Not For Sale bill demonstrates the fact that these agencies can literally just buy this data from data brokers without any judicial oversight.

And remember They kill even with just metadata

So why does what I mentioned above matter? Well it's because email by itself is a hilariously insecure messaging platform. This is because, by default, emails are sent without End-to-End Encryption (E2EE), meaning that they can be snooped on at will by your email domain provider (which in turn will mean the government). Email are also notorious for being the hotbed of fraud and scamming activity as by default, you can't actually verify the emails you receive (the "from:" section can be spoofed).

EDIT: This article from latacora is a good source on the flaws of email that you should know about. Email has its use case, but encrypting your emails isn't a fix all, having a PGP key is very useful though!

Email Encryption

I highly recommend reading the article linked with this post. It goes over step by step on how to obtain a personal key for your email and how to send encrypted messages to others. If you're looking to sign up for an email account from a company not in PRISM then I recommend this article which lists some email services that you can use. I personally use Runbox btw.

• Webmail systems

Other than encryption, your personal key can be used to digitally sign messages which shows that the email you sent belonged to you and your key. This is especially important when you want to verify the authenticity of something, it's also a great way to show others that you have a PGP key. I also recommend reading up more on GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) in general as it appears a lot especially when you're downloading software over the internet.

Helpful Vocabulary

• "Public Key" is the key you share with others so that they can contact you. Think of it as your phone number.
• "Private Key" is the one you want to keep to yourself at all times. If this key gets compromised or lost, then you have to get a new one and tell others that your old one can't be trusted.
• "Personal Key" is a synonym for private key. It also can reference the private key and your public key together.
• "IMAP" stands for Internet Message Access Protocol and is how one chooses to receive messages from a remote email server.
• "POP3" stands for Post Office Protocol 3 which allows you store all your emails locally on a device.
• "SMTP" stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and is how you send emails to others through your email server.
• "Keyserver" is a server whose duty is to host people's public keys. However, the best way to get someone's public key is to simply ask it from them as sometimes key servers can have spoofed public keys.
• "GPG" stands for GNU Privacy Guard and is a free software implementation of PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). GPG is a must learn program as it is instrumental to any Linux operating system. Frontends to GPG do exist however.
• "Thunderbird" is an email client developed by Mozilla. It's has a lot of a features including a frontend to GPG (it will even let you generate a key for yourself). This is the email client to use on Linux.

Remember! GPG isn't just for emails, but for any file that you want to encrypt!

Day 3 of libreposting hehehe

Context

The JavaScript Trap is the idea that webpages have the ability to transmit programs to the user in the form of uncompressed or compressed JavaScript ("ECMAscript") code. Nearly all web browsers with the exception of GNU Icecat will silently evaluate all of this code by default. Not all JavaScript code is malicious or noteworthy to the user, but much of a JavaScript code run today on the client side is nonfree and therefore creates an uneven relationship between the user and the program. Even if the JS code is intended to be Free, only a proof of license and documentation can ensure it will be Free for its users.

LibreJS

Therefore, the LibreJS extension was created for Firefox derived browsers to be able to dynamically block nonfree JavaScript while also permitting free or otherwise trivial JavaScript to be run.

LibreJS can be obtained directly from the GNU Project here, it can also be installed automatically from the Mozilla Addons page here as well as several workaround scripts for some websites here

LibreJS should not be confused with extensions like NoScript which is used to block any and all JavaScript for security purposes (mostly used when browsing the Tor network). LibreJS is concerned with blocking JavaScript on the basis of software freedom, not security (though many security benefits can be achieved by blocking nonfree JS).

LibreJS should also not be confused with something like Greasemonkey which allows users to create and run their own JavaScript or modify existing ones. Greasemonkey is an example of how users can control their own computing in their web browsers by being able to create their own scripts. Websites that block Greasemonkey (websites which will also include proprietary JS) are therefore unjust.

Hexbear

Lemmy itself is released on the AGPLv3 license, therefore all the JavaScript code from the project is Free. However, that doesn't mean that the code sent by hexbear.net to its users is Free. In fact, this code is unique to hexbear.net specifically.

In fact, LibreJS blocks two scripts from Hexbear that gets run when users connect and render the site in their web browser.

• The hexbear.net script is uncompressed JavaScript code that sets meta tags, styles, themes, and a custom script to presumably do something important (I am not a web engineer evidently).

• When it's done, it defers to the client.js script. This script is compacted JavaScript code which is unreadable to humans. It starts with this however:

/*! For license information please see client.js.LICENSE.txt */

LibreJS does not recognize this as free JS code, therefore it is blocked as well. This renders the site unusable as users cannot login nor see posts. They can see the site tagline so at least that code is trivial/free. The only solution is to whitelist the site completely.

Request

I ask the web admins of hexbear.net to liberate their JavaScript code so that it passes the LibreJS check. The resources on how to do that can be found below. LibreJS compliance will demonstrate that hexbear.net stands with creating a freer and more inclusive web for all and with the goals of libre software.

• Setting Your JavaScript Free
• An example of the web label system being used to declare licenses
• GNU documentation of LibreJS

¡Viva software libre!

Errata

• the client.js code is autogenerated by lemmy and has a free license. It has to do more with Lemmy itself rather than being an instance issue. Perhaps a feature request is in order?
• you can view the client.js license through LibreJS as well, so there's no issue with whitelisting.

We should have a comm profile picture for c/libre. I'm thinking of several candidates for this role.

GNU - seems the most simple, the GNU Project was the start of the Free software movement and its sister movement, the Open Source Initiative. It helps distinguish us from being a "/Linux" tech support comm/news aggregator. The problem being is that we are not affiliated with the FSF nor the GNU Project so using this symbol might not be appropriate. (Also I don't want to discuss RMS in any shape or form anymore on the internet)

Tux - No question the most recognizable icon in the public mainstream regarding Free software. Chubby cute penguin that just wants to hack and share software fairly and joyfully. This will make the comm click quickly with users but also has the downside of just making this strongly resemble a "linux" comm rather than an all encompassing libre software comm.

Xenia - The trans foxgirl alternative mascot you never heard about. I personally want this one to be the mascot because it's the most "hexbeary" icon (looking at c/games) you could pick and the most unique. It would pique curiosity while also not bringing a whole set of expectations to the comm like GNU or Tux.

I want to breathe life back into this comm and I think a profile pic would be a cool way to do it . This is also my first post btw of many to come. Viva software libre!