Para_lyzed @ Para_lyzed @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

@Senseless I'd just like to add that there are GUI frontends to tesseract that make things a lot easier. I particularly like gImageReader, but there are plenty of different GUIs for people with different tastes!

Last I heard, Nvidia was planning to release support in their drivers for explicit sync in Wayland in May in their 555 beta driver release actually it looks like it might not be merged until Nvidia's 560 driver. I wouldn't expect full support until at least then. Maybe we'll have some support in Fedora by June? You'll hear about it in the Linux and Linux Gaming communities on Lemmy, so look for it there. Fedora will be pretty early adopters, so it shouldn't be long after the changes are merged until you'll see support in Fedora. Do note that it isn't as bleeding edge as Arch though, so expect it to lag a week behind Arch support (maybe a little more?).

Also, if you're between KDE and COSMIC, go with KDE. COSMIC isn't even in alpha yet, and there are no distros that support it yet. KDE has great support and just merged a lot of performance and bug fixes in the last mega release (Plasma 6). Fedora has a KDE spin, and Plasma 6 will come with Fedora 40's KDE spin when it releases on the 16th of this month. That will be before explicit sync support though, so I'd say there's no rush unless you're really interested in Linux. Nvidia on Wayland is still pretty good without explicit sync support, but explicit sync is essentially the last thing that most people are waiting on. It's kind of like the last nail in X's coffin before Wayland is 100% viable on Nvidia. It will fix a lot of little annoyances (flickering, stuttering, etc). KDE has VRR support and a lot of great gaming support, so it's a good choice.

Facebook has been selling your data to ad companies since the day you created your account. This only changes what you visually see on the website. It makes absolutely zero difference from a data collection standpoint. Just consent so you can delete your accounts with less hassle. Filing GDPR complaints through email is a pain, takes a long time, and has no guarantee that they'll actually accept it. Plus, some sites (likely including Facebook) will ask for a government ID to verify you live in an area where the GDPR applies. It isn't worth the trouble when there are easier methods. Once you're able to log in, you should be able to access a GDPR portal somewhere in case you still want to file a report before deleting your account, but it's up to you if you want to go through the trouble. At the very least that saves you from having to write a letter and either email or mail it to them. With Facebook's consistent history of violating GDPR, I honestly don't even feel like it's worth it to try. Chances are that your data will still be sold regardless. Just look at all the lawsuits against Facebook for GDPR violations in the past years.

I'd argue SimpleX does it better, they're even modifying the Signal protocol to support post-quantum encryption. No phone number, uses the Signal protocol, and has no user identifiers at all (no usernames, no account numbers, no account at all; everything is stored locally on your device).

Oh also, before the reply that Signal is post-quantum already, here's an excerpt from the blog post I linked detailing why SimpleX's implementation is better:

unlike Signal design that only added quantum resistance to the initial key exchange by replacing X3DH key agreement scheme with post-quantum PQXDH, but did not improve Signal algorithm itself, our design added quantum-resistant key agreements inside double algorithm, making its break-in recovery property also quantum resistant.

There is much more detail in the blog post if you're interested. SimpleX also has an incredible whitepaper

The best options for you are going to be SimpleX Chat or Jami, depending on your use case. If you only need to make video calls, probably Jami is the easier option, but if you'd like to have a chat app with video call support, SimpleX is the right choice. SimpleX is also just a really good messaging app, because it has no user identifiers or accounts. They have a wonderful explanation of their method for two-way communication in their whitepaper if you're interested.

Also, video calling in a "secure environment", as you've stated, is not difficult in the slightest, and absolutely not impossible. There are plenty of options available. Others beyond the ones I gave are Jitsi (but it's gone way downhill; don't use it), Signal, Element (you do NOT have to self-host for it, you can use the main instance or any other instance), and the options open up to basically everything if you make a new user profile and install sandboxed Google Play Services in the new user profile (from the "Apps" app). With sandboxed Google Play, you can use apps like Zoom if you really wanted, but I'd strongly encourage you not to for the sake of privacy. You can download apps without signing into a Google account via the Aurora Store.

Yes, of course GrapheneOS can run SimpleX! SimpleX has no dependence on the Google Services Framework, and even for apps that do have GSF dependence, they can be run with sandboxed GSF. The only apps that don't work on GrapheneOS are apps that try to use the SafetyNet, which is mostly banking apps, or those that require GSF to have deep root privilege to operate.

Fedora Kiosk does not appear to be in active development, and there is nowhere available to download it.

University. Cyberethics is a required course where I graduated from, and it goes deep into open source licensing and the free software movement. I can tell you from experience presenting on open source licensing and the free software movement during that class that almost no one in the class gave a shit about it. It was quite sad to see so many people uninterested in a topic I'm so passionate about, especially because these are the types of people who would go on to be my coworkers.

The fact of the matter is that most people (including programmers) will never care about it, simply because they refuse to understand how important it is or how they can make money from it. It seems to me that people just want to conform to the systems that already exist (copyright and proprietary software) instead of challenging and changing the way we view, write, and interact with software.

But of course, that only really applies to students who graduate with a Bachelor's in CS, and likely doesn't apply to every university. The layperson still has absolutely no idea what "open source" even means or why it is important. In fact, the layperson is often brainwashed into thinking that the best thing for enterprises is the best thing for them, so in all likelihood most people would rather fight for copyright than against it, even if they had been informed on open source licensing and the free software movement. US businesses do a damn good job of brainwashing their consumers into echoing their views.

Since I run Fedora, the repos are very up to date. Not as bleeding edge as Arch may be, but plenty fine for learning and development. There are a lot of issues you can run into during manual installation/uninstallation, so I always use distro package managers. Plus, that ensures that software has a much greater chance of running in an environment similar to an end user, so it's just ideal overall. I can certainly understand frustrations with Debian packages being out of date, but that's an ideological choice, and the user should have been aware of that before choosing Debian. All I usually have to do is install the compiler/runtime, a language server for neovim, and some minor configuration for IntelliSense, then I can be up and running with a new language.

The other side to this is that you don't necessarily need to be using the latest version of the language to learn or develop in it. It's often a good idea to stick with the latest LTS release of the language so that it's most available and compatible with the runtime/environment that the end user has access to. Utilizing features only available on bleeding edge versions of the language can make it difficult for others to use your software, as they'd have to go through the hassle of manually installing the latest version, and can lead to breakage if the language changes before the next stable version is released.

It seems you've chosen a DE that is not particularly well-suited to this task. Cinnamon is meant to be simplistic, and offer an easy transition from Windows with its Windows-like layout. It is purposefully less customizable than many other DEs. I second the recommendation of KDE Plasma, as this is actually available as a shortcut without any extensions, but if you wish to customize your DE deeply like this, KDE is incredibly customizable. You can do essentially anything you want in it and get it to look however you want.

Since you said that you're trying out Mint, now would be a good time to switch distro so you don't get attached to something that doesn't suit your needs. Switching desktop environments can cause lots of issues, so it's often best to just pick a distro with the DE you want. My personal recommendation is Fedora's KDE spin (though there are discussions of Fedora's default workstation switching to KDE in the future). If you're invested into Debian, then I don't really have any experience with Debian-based KDE distros, but I'm sure someone else could recommend you something. To be clear, the benefit of recommending Mint as a starter distro has gradually diminished as other distros have become more user-friendly. Fedora is a perfectly fine distro for someone new to desktop Linux (especially since you're already experienced on the command line); you'll just have to look up how to install Nvidia drivers if you have an Nvidia graphics card. AMD commits their driver to the Linux kernel, so no need to do anything if you have an AMD card. Try out some distros in a VM before you commit to anything though; it's much less commitment than installing so it's far easier to test distros out and see what best suits you.

You should really just use a browser, but I'll at least try to answer the question.

I've never tried any of them myself, as I'd just prefer using the website on desktop, but here's a list of mobile and desktop apps for Lemmy (just look at the right column to see which ones are desktop clients).

It looks like neonmodem is available in the AUR, though it's a CLI utility. If you're looking for a GUI, there's lemoa, but it's currently unmaintained, or lemonade which appears to be pretty minimal.

Your options are pretty sparse, so you're probably best off just using a browser if you're looking for a GUI. I hate to be one of those guys, but you don't need an app for everything; the browser can sometimes provide the best experience.

The Fedora Project currently maintains 10 desktop-oriented spins (excluding GNOME since it's the default), so they're not going to be abandoning one of the most popular DEs in use. GNOME is going to be maintained regardless of their default choice of DE.

Red Hat doesn't have influence over the development of Fedora, that's the job of FESCo. Red Hat owns the trademark and is one of the sponsors of the Fedora Project, but their interest is solely in enterprise applications (a task that is not suitable for Fedora), not in consumer desktop platforms. I've already discussed this at length here and here if you'd like more detail; there's no point in rewriting it.

The port of Little Snitch to Linux is called OpenSnitch. I've never used Glass Wire, so I have no idea if that's what you're looking for.

Rufus is open source, and you can view its source code here. If you have any reason not to trust it, you can audit the source code yourself. All things said, it's bot a very complex program. Auditing it yourself wouldn't take a ridiculous amount of time.

Linux distros are not going to distribute .exe files. First off, those are binary files and you cannot verify the integrity of the binaries the same way you can verify the integrity of an ISO. An ISO has all of the files packaged in a readable format, and you can view and verify them manually. Second, compiling a .exe would require the use of Windows, which is non-free software, going against the ideology of open source practices. It is unnecessary and quite frankly ridiculous. A Linux distro is complicated and difficult to maintain as is; each distro being required to maintain their own Windows version of the installer adds a significant amount of work to developers that (for the most part) already aren't getting paid. The developers working on Linux distros do not have Windows installed, and thus will have greater limitations to testing the installers in Windows. Binary files will work differently on different versions of Windows, which will only introduce more complexity and difficulty to maintaining such an option. Additionally, it would add compilation time to create the .exe files, which will cost money and time over the long run. There are already open source and well trusted softwares to create liveUSBs from ISOs in Windows, it's just impractical and unnecessary for distros to maintain and distribute those tools themselves. Besides, as far as your "trust" situation goes, that just shifts trust to another entity; it's zero sum anyway. Just use a tool that already exists like Rufus, Balena Etcher, or Ventoy (all of which are open source).

As far as answering the rest of your question, all you need to do is download the ISO from your distro's website, download and install Rufus, Balena Etcher, or Ventoy (your choice, doesn't matter which), plug in a USB device with at least 8GB that you can use for the liveUSB, run Rufus/Etcher/Ventoy, select the USB device, select the ISO file, hit confirm, and you have a liveUSB. Now all you need to do is reboot your computer and (for most systems), it will automatically boot into the live OS where you can install through a GUI installer. In some systems, you'll need to boot into the BIOS/UEFI settings and enable or move USB boot up in the boot order, or manually boot from USB in the boot selection menu (the button to enter the boot selection screen varies by manufacturer). Then it will boot into the live OS and you can click the install button when it pops up. It's actually almost the exact same process you'd use to make installation media for Windows and install it to another device, except Microsoft also has their own installation media creator that asks for the same stuff as Rufus if you don't want to use the ISO from Microsoft for whatever reason. You could also just use Rufus with the Windows ISO though, it's essentially the exact same thing.

It's actually exactly the opposite case. Any method to copy data from one location to another will work, such as by using dd, or cat, or even just formatting the drive and using cp. If you don't want to deal with command line tools, there are many GUI tools that are literally just a couple buttons to press on all major operating systems. My personal preference for GUI liveUSB tools is Balena Etcher, or Fedora Media Writer. Both are incredibly easy to use and feature intuitive GUIs. There is no "mystery" or "arbitrariness" surrounding it at all, it's a pretty straightforward process. Copy data from one place to another and you're done. The only differences between the methods, as the previous comment said, is the speed of the transfer and some minor things that the end user has basically no reason to think about.

As far as its ease of installation and use goes, my tech illiterate father was able to install and use Linux Mint with zero problems and has been using it for years, so I'd say it does a pretty damn good job overall.

To check if you deleted a boot partition, use a liveUSB with GParted to verify your partitioning. The Fedora default partitioning scheme should have a FAT32 EFI partition followed by an ext4 boot partition, then the data partition following those. In modern Fedora, that is a BTRFS partition with the subvolumes / and /home, but it is possible you chose to use a different filesystem, such as ext4, xfs, or such. If you are missing either of these boot-related partitions, follow the steps below to recover them.

If you deleted a boot partition, the easiest option is to use testdisk on a liveUSB to restore the partition. Here is a video tutorial for it (despite it being old, it should all still work exactly the same). Just don't follow the instructions for installing testdisk (it's for Ubuntu and very, very outdated) or deleting any partition (as the deletion is to demonstrate recovery). On Fedora, you can install testdisk with sudo dnf install testdisk, and I'll let you look it up yourself if you use another distro for it. If you are unsure of what partition table type you use (GPT or MBR), you can view that in GParted, but testdisk will likely be able to detect it automatically (as is stated in the video). It should be pretty straightforward and easy.

Another method you could choose would be to run testdisk on a liveUSB to find the boundaries of that deleted partition (here's an article from RedHat about that), and then restore the partition map with GParted. In all reality, it achieves the same result, but requires more work, so try the other method first. I'm only really including this for the sake of completeness in case testdisk for some reason doesn't want to restore the partition for you itself. Again, if you use the Fedora liveUSB image, you can install testdisk with sudo dnf install testdisk, but if you use anything else you can look that up yourself.

As described in the article, you can find the boundaries of the deleted partition, and then use those in GParted to create a new partition at the same start and end points and with the same filesystem type. With Fedora's default partitioning scheme, the first partition (EFI partition) is formatted as FAT32 and the second partition (boot partition) is formatted as ext4.

Unless you moved/resized partitions into the space created by your deleted partition, then this should just work with no problem.

Take this as a learning experience not to delete partitions randomly; you'll end up breaking things by doing that. Be absolutely sure that all of your GParted queue is doing what you want to the partitions you want before selecting apply, and never do anything to a partition if you don't know what it does. The only cases you should be deleting partitions are if you know what the partition is for, and no longer need it, or if you are deleting everything and reinstalling (which you can do by simply creating a new partition table instead of deleting partitions manually, or do through a GUI installer on a liveUSB).

The Fedora 40 KDE spin and Fedora Atomic KDE will be shipping with KDE Plasma 6 in April, not KDE Plasma 5. Plasma 5 was released 10 years ago, and Debian won't be shipping Plasma 6 until at least Debian 13, which is probably sometime in 2025.

GNOME is basically nothing like Windows, in fact KDE Plasma is much closer. Cinnamon isn't in OP's list of DEs, though it should be available as a pre-installed option for Debian based on what I see in their live ISO list. At that point, it would probably be better to go with Linux Mint though, given the target user. I assume OP would have their reasons for choosing Debian over Mint if they wanted to use Cinnamon, though.

First off, the HLS+ partition is for MacOS, not Linux, and could be for OCLP if you use that (which I assume you do based on having MacOS 14 on a 2014 Macbook). I would highly recommend you try new distros in a VM instead of installing them. It's much faster and will reduce the work you need to do dramatically. You can just pick whatever distro you seem to like the most (or whichever is first in partition order because it doesn't matter which distro you use for this), extend that partition for more space, then try everything in a VM. It seems that 2014 Macbook Pros come with a dual core processor, so you can assign one core to the host OS and one to the VM, as well as about half your memory (so 4GB of the 8GB that comes by default). Once you settle on one, you can delete the partition with the OS you used for VMs and install that (or keep that OS if you decide you like that best and just delete the VMs). Installing too many operating systems could also bloat your EFI boot manager list (stored in NVRAM, not on disk), and you may have to manually delete EFI entries if it gets too full with something like efibootmgr.

I'd also like to clarify that Fedora can be configured for EXT4 during installation, but it uses BTRFS by default. The be clear, BTRFS has many advantages, and I'd recommend that over EXT4 any day of the week. Fedora adopts new technologies before most other major distros, and while BTRFS was initially released over 15 years ago, it wasn't very "proven" or ready for major distros until maybe 5 or so years ago, and Fedora 33 was among the first distros to start using BTRFS by default (late 2020). You were able to manually partition BTRFS before Fedora 33, but it was not the default. You can feel free to look up any additional info on the differences yourself, as it's fairly off topic to your question.

After you decide what you want, you can delete other partitions and move/resize partitions from a liveUSB (so you aren't running an OS from a partition that you're moving). It should be fine to use the liveUSB for whatever OS you plan to install, but be aware that you may have to install GParted since it doesn't always come by default on the liveUSB. By moving and resizing partitions, you can eliminate unallocated gaps. You don't generally have to delete all the partitions/reformat a drive to install a new OS unless you're having issues with the drive itself (which is likely to be a hardware issue anyway).

Technically, GPT is capable of up to 128 physical partitions, but you can also extend that with LVM to create virtual partitions (which I believe you can have a max of 65,536 virtual partitions in an LVM physical partition, so you can see that the numbers get pretty absurd). The main limiting factor is space and utilization. If you have 128 partitions on a 256GB drive, each partition would only be 2GB, so it would be fairly useless. Generally, you want to give each partition room to grow to a specified size that you believe is reasonable. For instance, it would be irrational to size your EFI partition at 64GB, because it could never be expected to grow to that size, and takes away space from partitions that could utilize it (such as your main operating system). Additionally, it would be unreasonable to size your OS partition at 20GB on a 256GB drive because it can be expected to grow far beyond that in normal use (downloading/storing media, for instance).

A little off topic, but I'd also generally recommend you use a single distro at a time if using Linux, as for the most part, you can do basically anything in one distro you can do in any others. If you use your laptop for work, you can use a different OS for work and personal use, but often it makes more sense to just set up multiple users. Managing and maintaining multiple installations takes much more time, and has very few benefits unless there's a very specific reason for doing so. Most of the differences you should care about will have to do with the package manager and repos, as your desktop environment can be changed if absolutely necessary. If you want to change your desktop environment though, I'd recommend seeing if there is a spin of the distro of your preferred DE available first, as that's going to be much smoother and less prone to breakage than changing it yourself. For instance, Fedora Workstation comes with GNOME by default, but has spins with KDE Plasma, XFCE, Cinnamon, MATE, i3, LXQt, LXDE, SOAS, Sway, Budgie, and soon will have COSMIC available (you can view the spins here). Since I'm already going off topic, Fedora is my #1 personal recommendation for distro, especially for new users who aren't sure what they want yet. It's fairly mainstream (so lots of forums and support available), has a semi-rolling release (so it gets updates and features quickly, but is still stable and has discrete releases), and generally has a good user experience. If one prefers the release schedule of Debian or Arch, then at the very least Fedora sits in between the two (fixed vs rolling) so it is generally agreeable with most.

TL;DR: You aren't going to be limited by the amount of partitions you have, but you can fill up your EFI boot manager list in NVRAM if you install too many operating systems (you have to manually clear that list, uninstalling/deleting partitions won't do it). Generally, the use of VMs is easier and involves much less work than installing distros to your disk, and allows you to distro hop much faster to find your preferred distro.