If you use BTRFS, there are also some people in Fedora Discuss that may know more about that.
Those tools probably all work with BTRFS. PhotoRec is btw related to the bigger Testdisk.
All these tools seem hardly maintained, but also kinda limited in what they need to do do its okay. Not with BTRFS, bcachefs, f2fs etc though as these may have new fancy tricks.
I was looking for an NTFS restore tool, and used photorec, testdisk, recuva (which very likely just uses testdisk or has cloned its code) and not yet scalpel.
I used Clonezilla where these tools are all preinstalled, it loads to RAM and just works really well.
Testdisk gave me tons of corrupted files with missing headers, but likely the correct ones. PhotoRec gave nothing useful, only stuff from the cache that was likely in the “trash” and not actually deleted. It seems it only recovers intact files, which are nearly never the needed ones.
I need a tool to restore the headers of common file types, as Windows stores them seperately afaik.
I guess a dedicated BTRFS tool could help a lot, as there are likely more ways to recover. But testdisk should work fine.
I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa....
Yes Debian and use Flatpak for any app you need with a recent version. You can also use a Distrobox with Fedora or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed or Debian Testing if you need system packages that are more modern.
I dont know if Debian Testing is rolling, but Distrobox basically doesnt work with release distros if they need to system upgrade via a reboot, like Fedora. So Fedora Rawhide (dont) or Tumbleweed, Arch etc. are best.
I had no idea about this, but listen to the talk, it is really informative.
Being upstream of RHEL, instead of Downstream, they have way more freedom. They can test things out, and be more like Fedora.
But yes, CI/CD means Stream will not have long supported stable point releases, but continuous fixes.
I think it is so stable that these should just work, and small updates are not as breaking as bigger ones.
Meta uses CentOS Stream extensively, and even the completely hacked together Hyperscaling version of it, being more close to Fedora server, while improving performance through a dedicated set of packages that are well maintained, selected and branched off Fedora.
CentOS Stream is still really stable. It has 5 years of support, which is not 10, but that amount of support is extreme work. Imagine backporting security fixes to a 10 year old kernel.
The normal Linux LTS kernel has 2 years of support now. CentOS is already really old in comparison.
Paying for Software is okay, and RedHat doesnt seem to waste money.
I want to start learning android dev and I understand that I’ll need the android sdk and cli tools. I want to try it in a kvm because even though it is open source, I would like to keep it separate from my main system. Which distro and vm settings do you suggest I use? Any other tips or your experience with android development...
I’d like to install linux mint xfce 21.3 and xubuntu 24.04 alongside the already present debian 12.5, but I don’t know if I have to create the partitions before installing or if I’m guided to create the partitions while installing....
(Some years, Childhood), Windows XP laptop with games on it, Windows 7 on some Minecraft PC lol. (3 years) Windows 10 on a Thinkpad T430, really nice laptop, but the OS was boring and kinda bad
(3 days) Linux Mint, secondary drive. Had random blackout crashes that were not hardware related (still use that SSD today). Also wasnt impressed by the UI, but a very interesting experience of “the Linux”
(Few weeks) Manjaro, awesome KDE experience and theme, really really nice. But had a bad reputation, so went looking for other KDE Distros
(Few months) MX Linux, damn Distrowatch rankings. Got an error and my University IT people told me my Nextcloud client was too old, but the conky manager was awesome.
(Half a year) Kubuntu, with Backports, then switched to KDE Neon. Began nice, then went more and more unstable and broke
(Few weeks) Fedora KDE, finally dared the move to a “less known OS”, but it broke too. I guess that Plasma 5.2x phase was just messy
(Over a year) Fedora Kinoite, uBlue, secureblue, Aurora. Tried the Kinoite prerelease for Plasma 6 and now for 6.1, finding some bugs.
Now happy part of the Fedora Community, rpm-ostree is just so good and makes Linux usable for me.
Also experimenting with GNOME, COSMIC, Kinoite-prerelease and CentOS-Stream in VMs or external drives. Also experimenting with minimal, bloat-free KDE Plasma, as it is actually really light and simply the best supported modular desktop environment.
The question is, do they change the remote or just hide the apps?
I currently use 2 flathub remotes, the verified (named flathub-v) and the unfiltered one. When installing from CLI I can see if it is verified (2 possible remotes show up). I hope COSMIC store and KDE Discover will show the verification check soon.
But a few popular ones are not, like VLC (developers dont know Flatpak, should get an introduction by the current maintainer), Inkscape, Spotify, Steam, Bitwarden, Signal, Torbrowser launcher, Blender, Calibre, and more (excluding Chromium Browsers, use the native versions for security reasons) are all missing.
Important things to consider:
distro packages are nearly always unverified i.e. maintained by distro packagers instead of upstream
spotify flatpak is not verified, but the flatpak is securely packaged. Mint has a deb repo, and that proprietary piece of malware could do whatever they like with your entire system
flatpaks are very often more secure, at least they have some security mechanism that can be easily manually hardened. Unlike firejail or bubblejail, which are very complex.
The Flathub security rating is useful but too cautious (so many “false alarms” that people ignore it). It is completely independent from the verification though.
Mixing these up makes no sense.
But for sure, officially supported Libreoffice may be more secure than distro-packaged Libreoffice.
Is any of these applications dangerous or a security risk to the system / user?
Likely not more than Distro packages. They pull in dependencies, and code, just like any other app.
Flatpaks are too pain tolerant regarding EOL runtimes. These may have security risks, and many badly maintained apps are using them, and at least KDE Discover doesnt show a warning here.
Create a fork of an app and verify your website with the fork in Flatpak. The system is already broken
True
By doing so, it undermines a reason why we use GPL and Open Source.
Very good points. It is a good security practice to stay close to a trusted upstream though. Browsers for example may have delayed security patches.
And what about apps where the original author does not care, but was brought to Flatpak by a community member?
Same here, if the upstream tests the Flatpak BEFORE shipping the release, it will work and be fast. If they dont, they ship the update, the flatpak is updated some time after that, it may have an issue, the packagers may need to patch something, solve the issue upstream etc.
The thing is that packagers should join upstream, as only integrated packaging gives this inherent stability and speed.
This is not relevant in many scenarios though. Flatpaks allow to securely sandbox random apps, so they are very often more secure.
Especially as many Flatpaks are already working better than Ubuntu apps. I had this with SciDAVis, where the Ubuntu version was just broken and gave me tons of troubles.
This assumes that distro packages would be more secure. Which are not “verified” most of the time, by design. And which are installed to the system, can do whatever they want.
A system package can edit /etc, autostart itself, write to all your devices and /home.
Flatpaks MAY do that, but these will have an “insecure” rating on Flathub. And they can still not write a lot of areas, for example other Flatpaks internal storage, even if they have home permission.
These are Ubuntu Packages. The external Spotify repo are binaries shipped by Spotify. I dont think there is any testing before users get that package, it is an external repo.
Yes but this was just an example of the hypocrisy of this action.
Apps that are FOSS are possible to trust. Proprietary apps are simply liability, and proprietary software is constantly spying anyways. Flathub has –subset=floss for that
"Verification" i.e. upstream support is not the case with a majority of Distro packages. Flathub has –subset=verified for this very nice ability (but this does not mean that unverified apps are worse than distro packages!)
Flatpaks are isolated using Bubblewrap. Firejail, a common alternative for native app sandboxing, had a root binary and thus you need to trust it a lot. Bubblejail is a predecessor of it, but it is not easy to use at all and in early stages. So Flatpak offers stupid simple app isolation similar to Android, Distro packages dont have this.
Flatpak is really good. You can look at the permissions, any app with the “safe” rating is probably safe, even if it is malware.
Btw the safety rating would be a good filter, once they solve the false negatives of stuff like ProtonPro/pupGui.
Note that NVIDIA ships proprietary, out of tree drivers.
No Linux Distro really supports NVIDIA as they cannot fix the drivers, as they are proprietary.
Manjaro is weird semi-rolling with a criticised mechanism of holding back packages without real testing (which might be outdated info).
PopOS is based off Ubuntu LTS, a stable distro and the most common Linux variant.
Stable distros will not break the NVIDIA stuff. NVIDIA doesnt care about rolling release etc, and Distros need to not break it, as they can package them but not fix them.
Yes, Bazzite using Fedora Atomic is very nice through the inherent stability of the OS distribution model.
But they rely on rpmfusion, an external repo packaging the proprietary NVIDIA stuff for Fedora. The repo is not supported by Fedora, and the drivers cannot be fixed by anyone.
allows automatic fixes to be applied to a broken driver without requiring any manual intervention from its user.
If you get an update, and after that update your system doesnt graphically boot anymore or something, you can use sudo ostree admin pin 1 and rpm-ostree rollback to switch back to the working version and make sure it never disappears.
Then you can wait for a next update (still no good update info mechanism afaik) to fix it, try it, unpin the saved version and go on.
But there is no automatic repair voodoo anywhere, on any distro. That driver is proprietary, only NVIDIA can fix it. rpmfusion packages it to work on Fedora, Fedora Atomic helps making this very unstable mechanism more failsafe.
But you are still relying on 3 entities (NVIDIA, rpmfusion, Fedora, (uBlue)), with NVIDIA not caring about Linux that much, instead of 1 (Fedora) like with AMD, where drivers are FOSS and can be adapted for Fedora specifically.
AMD does not opensource a lot, and ROCM or the entire amdgpu-pro driver is a similar situation. But at least the basics work.
uBlue does not repair anything, they dont automatically detect a broken driver on your system and block an update.
This would be possible, but slow down boot (running some GPU benchmark on every boot via a systemd service, if it fails run the commands that I mentioned).
rpm-ostree is awesome, and has the potential to do that.
you don’t get the broken update ever on your device in the first place.
In theory yes, but this would mean uBlue is some kind of stable distro. I dont know, at least their base images just get updates.
Their big advantage is that they dont have the legal restrictions, so they can ship 1:1 the system you run. I dont know if they do, but having some automated benchmark tests on real hardware with these devices would be useful.
But that costs a lot of money. uBlues trick is that they can run their whole huge project for free on Github.
But for sure, the dependency issues will not occur. But this does not guarantees that there are no issues on bare metal.
Or a stable branch, Bazzite was longer on F39 for example. I use the :latest branch which automatically gets upgraded to the latest version, which they determine. So having an :testing branch that is up to date, and slowing down the releases of the latest branch, could help.
“Traditional” / “package based” / “messy” distros suck a bit. The big issue is doing insane stuff like the kernel mod stuff on the user side, which leads to sooo much pain.
But as far as I know, NVIDIA just supports enterprise distros. The community distros build the packages, but the binaries are not compiled for newer distros. So using non-LTS Ubuntu etc may result in breakages. Especially when using newer kernels.
I dont know a lot of how drivers depend on userspace programs, it is likely only dependend on the Kernel.
I also look forward to CentOS-bootc, which is a bootable OCI container for CentOS-stream. Like the uBlue Containers or the OCI containers for Fedora built on Gitlab, used by uBlue.
I didnt know that, but uBlue uses random OCI container builds by Fedora for all their stuff, that Fedora doesnt even officially use themselves.
I tried looking this up, but to no avail. Got any proof to back this up?
Interesting, I only found a different site that offered the download specifically for developers to embed in their distros.
It was AMDGPUPro that only supports enterprise Linux.
Could you provide a link
I didnt find it. Search in the Atomic issue tracker, siosm wrote somewhere that the images are built on Gitlab and are the foundation of uBlue.
While Gitlab is not the official distribution method, and this was an issue about adapting these images for the main Fedora variants. So they arent even used, but built.
That upstream unused images are taken as the base for uBlue is pretty funny. But they have a future, and will likely become the main way of shipping Fedora Atomic.
Then it is also truly image-based, unlike the OSTree repo currently.
there’s been a lot of concern that Snapdragon X-based PCs might be locked down to Windows, and while it remains unclear just how easy it will be to install a GNU/Linux distribution on a Snapdragon X PC that ships with Windows, it’s nice to know that at least one company is looking to release a model that will come with Linux pre-installed.
What does that mean? Are they not using UEFI?
I just hope they use Coreboot.
Btw are there any FOSS Coreboot compatible ARM Chromebooks worth looking at?
I wrote a simple script in order to help someone in a recent reply from me, to make running Flatpak applications from terminal easier. After that I worked a little bit on it further and now ended up with 2 completely different approaches....
List of useful BTRFS tools
Hi, I want to do an “awesome things” list with BTRFS tools...
Do you have your favorite Linux restoring / data craving tools for Linux?
I found these: Scalpel - but no longer maintaned. PhotoRec - but I don’t know how well it works with Btrfs....
RustDesk (FOSS easy to use TeamViewer alternative) has experimental Wayland support that needs testing! (github.com)
Current prerelease is 1.2.5...
What’s the best ad blocker for you? - Firefox Add-ons Blog (addons.mozilla.org)
Gaming vs Regular Distros
TL;DR: Is there really a performance benefit to a gaming distro over a regular distro? Or is it more of a “this is the least work” to get setup?...
Setting up a swap file on top of using swap-to-zram for Hibernation purposes? (Fedora 40)
So here’s my situation:...
Linux admin with 20 years experience, looking for "beginner" distro [Solved, the real beginner distro was the Debian I've used along the way]
I’m over tinkering with my OS. So I’m looking for a distro that “just works” out of the box for my laptop. Also I want to test an “easy” distro I can install for my grandpa....
CentOS Stream & Hyperscale SIG showcase (aka. "how to make Enterprise Linux suck less") (www.youtube.com)
I found the talk really interesting, especially how CentOS-Stream means SIGs can fork the hell out of it....
Looking to get into android development
I want to start learning android dev and I understand that I’ll need the android sdk and cli tools. I want to try it in a kvm because even though it is open source, I would like to keep it separate from my main system. Which distro and vm settings do you suggest I use? Any other tips or your experience with android development...
How do I create partitions on debian 12.5 to install other distros in the same M.2 SSD?
I’d like to install linux mint xfce 21.3 and xubuntu 24.04 alongside the already present debian 12.5, but I don’t know if I have to create the partitions before installing or if I’m guided to create the partitions while installing....
What is/was your distrohopping journey?
For me it was:...
Linux Mint Will Hide Unverified Flatpaks in Software Manager (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
Security considerations between Xen vs KVM?
publication croisée depuis : lemmy.world/post/16156662...
Manjaro or Pop!_OS for (Nvidia) gaming on Steam?
cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/16149785...
Schenker shows off a Linux laptop prototype with Snapdragon X Elite at Computex 2024 (liliputing.com)
Kaspersky releases free tool that scans Linux for known threats (www.bleepingcomputer.com)
Run Flatpak apps by search filter or through fuzzy finder menu (gist.github.com)
I wrote a simple script in order to help someone in a recent reply from me, to make running Flatpak applications from terminal easier. After that I worked a little bit on it further and now ended up with 2 completely different approaches....