If youre new to linux, then I’d say Linux Mint is the place to start. Use it with XFCE if light weight is what you want.

Not having cutting edge packages is a red herring - you really dont want bleeding edge as thats where the errors and breakages happen. Mint is reliable and secure which is what you need when starting out. You dont want to be a beta tester. Dont confuse latest packages for most secure on linux - plenty of packages have stable older versions which get security patches.

Mint is also very popular, with a huge range of easy to find resources to help set it up the way you want it.

Wayland is also a red herring - its the future but its just not really ready yet. Yes its more secure due to how its built but the scenario you’re using linux in the particular security benefits you’re hearing about are not really going to impact you day to day. And the trade off is that Wayland is still buggy, with many apps still not working seamlessly. Most apps are designed for X11 and x-wayland is an imperfect bridge between the two. I’m not saying Wayland is bad - it’s actually good and is the future. But you dont want to be problem solving Wayland issues as a linux newbie. Dont see Wayland as essentialnfor an good stable and secure linux install.

Personally I wouldn’t recommend Fedora - it has a short update cycle and tends to favour newer bleeding edge tech and paclages. Thats not a bad thing but if what you want is a stable, reliable low footprint system and to learn the basics, in wouldn’t stray into Fedora just yet. It has a 13 month cycle of complete distro upgrades and distro upgrades are the times when there are big package changes and the biggest chances of something breaking. The previous version loses support after a month so you do need to upgrade to stay secure. Most people won’t have issues between upgrades but with any distro when you do a big upgrade things can easily break of you’ve customised things and set up things differently to the base. It can be annoying having to fix thongs and get them back how you want them, and worse can lead to reinstalls. Thats nor a uniquely Fedora problem, but the risk is higher woth faster updating and bleeding edge distros. And in fairness there are lots of fedora spins that might mitigate that - but then you risk being on more niche setups so support can be harder to find when you need it.

For comparison the latest version of Mint supported through til 2029, and major releases also get security patches and support for years even after newer versions are released. There is much less pressure to upgrade.

If the EU were concerned about the US jurisdiction of Linux projects it could pick:

• OpenSuSE (org based in Germany)
• Mint (org based in Ireland)
• Manjaro (org based in France/Germany, and based of Arch)
• Ubuntu (org based in UK)

However if they didn’t care, then they could just use Fedora or other US based distros.

I think it would be a good idea for the EU to adopt linux officially, and maybe even have it’s own distro, but I’m not sure this Fedora base makes sense. Ironically this may also be breaching EU trademarks as it’s masquerading as an official project by calling itself EU OS.

How is it misleading? Plex Pass is a subscription? It would be confusing to many people if it said “Plex pass” instead of “Subscription” as not everyone would necessarily even know what that is. Subscription is very clear.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

You can convert using Evernote as an intermediary: https://github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Onenote

You’d need to hunt down a copy but there are mirrors since Evernote ended legacy version, and it’d need to be set up in wine to run in linux but it should do the job.

It doesn’t mean they are pushing flatpaks, but rather for whatever reason they decided to package their own flatpaks.

Flatpak can support different repos, so of course fedora can host its own. The strange bit is why bother repackaging and hosting software that is already packaged by the project itself on flathub?

One argument might me the security risk of poorly packaged flatpaks relying on eol of dependencies. Fedora may feel it is better to have a version that it packages in line with what it packages in its own repos?

I have some sympathy for that position. But it makes sense that it is causing confusion of its broken, and worse it sounds like things got very petty fast. I think OBS request that fedora flag this up as being different from the flathub version wasn’t unreasonable - but not sure what went down for it to get to thepoint of threatening legal action under misuse of the branding.

Yeah I have a Ser5 as a living room PC, wiped windows and have Nobara running on it. Linux is great - browse the web, play games, stream videos, and all with interfaces that actually work on a TV. I don’t miss Windows at all.

Yes: Five has four letters. Nine has four letters.

There are no more.

If you meant to ask if there are any more whole numbers with the same number of letters in the name as the number, then the answer is no. It is fairly simple to check - you only have to look at the numbers 0-30 before it becomes clear no other number will fit this pattern.

If you went into fractions like 20.12325 then there will be many numbers where all the letters added would get close but the fraction itself would mean you couldn’t quite reach the exact number as you can’t have fractions of letters.

If you included negative numbers then “minus eleven” has 11 letters. Minus thirteen has 13 letters. It seems to again break down once you go beyond 13, and its dodgy to include negative numbers as you can’t have negative letters.

So, no.

I’m not aware of an alternative TV App for android tv. On my android TV live tv is also wrapped within the android interface but other sources like HDMI inputs are not.

If you can switch to HDMI sources outside the android apps then maybe the best thing to do is get a separate basic satellite tuner device?

It seems shitty that google are effectively hiding your inbuilt tv tuner behind an app with all their advertising and other crap.

For your second question, a window manager is the specific system that controls the placement of windows on an X11 desktop.

On a X11 based system, X11 is the windowing system (interacting with the video card) and a window manager is a system sitting on top of that laying out the windows and interacting with the user and other programmes. It is a separate programme on top of the X11 system, and communicates with X11, and X11 is the programme that communicates with the graphics card.

On Wayland, instead of 2 separate systems there can be 1 combined windowing systen that is both the window manager but also directly communicates with the hardware in a standardised way using the Wayland protocols. This is called a Wayland compositor.

Meanwhile a desktop environment is the whole desktop - that includes a window manager or compositor but also lots of other tools and software that together make a full desktop experience.

An example is KDE - KDE is a full desktop environment. It uses its own x11 window manger called kwin (and also able to be a wayland compositor), but it also uses a whole range of other tools alongside that to give you panels, widgets, desktop icons, a clock, menus, settings etc collectively forming Plasma desktop. And then on top of Plasma there is a whole range of bespoke programmes that form the full deskop experience - like Dolphin (file manager), Kate (text editor) and so on. All that software is designed to work seamlessly with the KDE family of tools and systems. The window manager, the desktop tools and the other programmes together form the whole desktop environment. But other desktop environments software will also work - for example Gnome based software can also run with KDE without issue and vice versa.

Gnome has its own window manager/compositor, and it’s own widgets and tools to make a desktop, and it’s own bespoke software to make a whole desktop environment.

And there are many others.

So in summary:

• Window Manager - the specific system that controls the placment and look of the individual windows talking to X11 which then talks to the hardware

• Wayland Compositor - the system that controls the placement and look of windows, using wayland protocols to speak to the hardware

• Desktop Environment - the whole desktop including the Window manager but also lots of other programmes and tools that form the basic desktop (such as a panel, menus, desktop icons) and the whole environment (other software like a file manager, text editor, calculator etc). KDE and Gnome are examples of popular desktop environments

Yeah but if you had to search for it you’d have a trouble spelling it. Flowmarked would be how English speakers would hear that I think.

It probably needs an English brand name for outside the germano-sphere - fedimarket?

KDE config files can be changed on the command line using:

kwriteconfig

And viewed using

kreadconfig

Power management is in:

~/.config/powermanagementprofilesrc

And

~/.config/powerdevilrc

You can feed changes to the file via kwriteconfig via the command line OR create a duplicate file with different settings and use rename commands in a script file to switch back and forth.

E.g. rename the file to “powermanagementprofilesrc.backup” and create and rename a custom file with the settings you want like “powermanagmentprofilesrc.one” to “powermanagementprofilesrc”. Rename them back and forth via a bash script to switch “profiles”

To apply changes you’d need to then run qdbus:

qdbus org.freedesktop.powermanagement /org/kde/Solid/PowerManagement org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.reparseConfiguration

And then to load the new config in your current session:

qdbus org.freedesktop.powermanagement /org/kde/Solid/PowerManagement org.kde.Solid.PowerManagement.refreshStatus

So either use kwriteconfig and qdbus in a script OR make duplicate config files and a bash script to copy or rename the configs as needed plus qdbus to apply the changes to the current session.

There may be a much simpler way of switching profiles already actually defined within the exisiting config files (e.g. battery saver vs performance) using qdbus but I’m not sure how to do that myself. Possibly using:

org/kde/Solid/PowerManagement/Actions/PowerProfile

EDIT2: Sorry this is a very long post! Just to say if you’re new to linux and want to understand a bit: qdbus is a tool for QT based applications (including almost all of KDE which is build in QT) to interact with DBUS which is basically the messaging system in linux between processes.

So when you run qdbus on it’s own you’ll see a tree of processes that are interacting with QT processes. Then if you run qdbus & the name of a process like “org.freedesktop.powermanagement” you’ll see what QT processes are running with/under it. Then if you run dqbus and add that connected process like “/org/kde/Solid/PowerManagement” you can see what strings and options are available. Then you can run qdbus to see more detail or change a setting/string.

Hope that make sense!

Kbin was forked to Mbin which is community run. Kbin seems to have stopped development while Mbin continues. Most kbin sites have moved over to Mbin I think.

Not sure what’s happened woth kbin.social though. Maybe its moving to Mbin? Still seems yo be running kbin currently judging by the landing page?

Is there enough space on your filesystem? That includes your home folder and main root file system?

If so then i’d deletenor rename folders associated with bottles and try again. If its a user level install check ~/.local/share/Flatpak/app and ~/.var/app and deleteor rename the bottles folder. If its a system wide install look in /var/lib/Flatpak/app

Then try and install it again. It will create a new set of folders.

I’m guessing it’s automated stupidity. Meta has cut staff and we’re seeing the results.

Much of the big tech companies have done this over the past year or two, and also been pushing “AI” to replace roles like moderation. I think we’re seeing the results of over relying on AI and cutting staff to boost share prices.

Lets face it, Meta is dying; Facebook is declining, and Instagram seems to be in decline too, the pivot to VR failed and the pivot to AI will fail. It’s best chance seems to be trying to get its hands on TikTok in the US and even that is hardly going to drive the company forward.

I have a linux desktop with dual 4K screens and I don’t have problems with high DPI? The only problems I’ve come across is with Wine which is easly fixed within the winecfg.

I’m on OpenSuSE, using KDE in X11. I DID have scaling problems with Wayland which I avoid until it is fit for daily use.

Of course 4k is 4 times 1080p (or twice in X and Y dimensions) so maybe it’s much easier to scale to? 2K on the Framework is an odd resolution so maybe scaling would be more troublesome? 1080p to 1440p would be 1.3x scaling.

Yeah I think this is a very important point.

I think people will need to learn to accept that there is no such thing as “free”. The current social media sells you to advertisers, taking every bit of data they can get.

So for independent and privacy focused social media, we’re going to have to accept we have to pay for it.

I’ve moved to paying for my email, my file storage, my VPN and my password manager - all for privacy and security. I pay for subscriptions for streaming to avoid advertising. So I would pay for social media.

In the early days of the internet, people accepted paying for things but then the “free” model came along. The fediverse will need to persuade people to pay for it. That may limit it from being the big everyone social medial, but it could be able to become the high quality version of social media that people pay for.

You can read NTFS drives; I still have shared drives from my Windows install despite barely using Windows at all.

You can generally import steam libraries, and then steam can do the proton work.

And you can sometimes run other programmes in Linux from the windows install - i.e. it can have it’s own Wine prefix in Linux and use the installed files on the NTFS. But this doesn’t always work - if the programme’s or game’s installer makes significant system changes or installs other software then they won’t exist in the Wine prefix and the game may not work. It’s better to install windows games fresh so everything is installed into the wine prefix.

And Lutris is well set up with scripts for installing a wide range of games from their installers; it will avoid problems reinstalling games fresh.

This is very good advice

My advice having made the move (but with a fair bit of linux tinkering before hand):

• Don’t rush to delete Windows; you’re doing the right thing keeping it about while you adjust to a new OS and in case there are some things you just can’t do in Linux
• If you want to understand your OS and enjoy tinkering / learning, think about using a virtual machine to play with a linux system to get used to it. As you’re on Fedora, you can install KVM and Virt-Manager, make a virtual machine and inside it install another Linux OS which you can practice with. It can even be Fedora - and this can let you make changes in a disposable environment before you do them for real in your whole OS or just to see “what happens if”. I’ve even built an Arch system within a VM just so I can understand more of how linux works
• Back up your home folder before making really big changes - this is where everything that belongs to you is kept, and even contains all your personal config files. Back up and restoring the Home folder can make things much faster to fix if you accidentally mess things up