FOSS News Big Show 2
Special Guest: Connor Needling of Needling Worldwide
Distro News
Top 15 Rolling Distros
Alpine 3.18
RHEL 9.2
FOSS News
How to Delete a Directory with 1000’s of Files in it
QEMU 8.1
Plasma 5.27.5
FOSS Fun
No More Roblox on Linux
Steam Deck Competitor?
Arcane Wilds
Distro News
DN 1 – 16 Rolling Distros to Consider
This is a listicle of rolling release distros you might want to look at if you’re curious about having more frequent updates. I’ll comment on each one, similar to how I did with the privacy listicle last week.
1) Vanilla Arch
a) Had to be #1 on the list. It is the quintessential rolling release distro, and serves as the base for many of the options later in the list. This is not, however, for the faint of heart. It uses a script-based installer (or you just have a list of all the packages you want to install, in the correct order, and you handle it all yourself. It gives you a level of control over your system that is otherwise more or less unheard of. However, you can break it by looking at it in a way that it doesn’t like. (https://archlinux.org)
2) Solus Linux
a) Much more user-friendly than Arch, independent, though in the process of merging with SerpentOS, which is headed up by the original developer on the Solus project. This is the team that brought us Budgie. I’ve poked at Solus a little, but was not taken by it. (https://getsol.us)
3) Manjaro
a) Loosely based on Arch, quasi-rolling, but also has a semi-point release cadence. Every few months, they roll a fresh ISO version with the latest stable packages. It is like Arch with training wheels. I’ve used it for years, where I’ve yet to successfully install Arch on even a VM, to be quite honest. (https://manjaro.org) It is easy to install, easy to use, but still has the customizability of Arch at the core. Solid distro.
4) Void Linux
a) Another indie distro like Arch, only more focused on raw performance and security than Arch is. It is ultra-customizable. Did I mention fast? I’ve never tried it, but have friends who have sworn by it in the past. (https://voidlinux.org)
5) openSUSE Tumbleweed
a) I have a friend who ran it in a production environment while trying to get Alpine to work for his purposes. He enjoyed it and was surprised by the volume of updates that sometimes came in hourly, but also at the fact that it was rock stable. The thing that turned him off about it was that it has some systemd quirks that drove him up the wall and made it harder for him to do what he needed to do. I had Tumbleweed on a flashdrive and tried it once, but was not happy with it then (a couple of years ago). Give it a shot if you want to learn a new distro, you may be surprised at the outcome. (https://get.opensuse.com/tumbleweed)
6) Fedora
a) Community-based upstream for Red Hat and RHEL. This puts it in close proximity to IBM, who is one of the major contributors to Red Hat. They also lead development for GNOME, as well as systemd. I could go off on systemd, but feel like I’d be wasting my breath. It more or less controls your system from behind the scenes. They recently made a change to the way it handles DNS such that you can no longer control which DNS servers your system uses. That feels like a big deal to me. (https://fedora.org)
7) NixOS
a) I did a piece on NixOS over on the Altha Tech blog ( https://althatech.com/it-work/nixos-and-altha-tech/ ) last month, as it is the primary OS they use in their server infrastructure. It is more or less just an indie package manager which provides a high degree of reliability and reproducibility due to the fact that all configurations are resident in a single file, so once you commit changes there, if you have a whole fleet of machines or server running NixOS, they all get that change automagically. (https://nixos.org)
8) Debian Testing
a) Yes, there is a branch of that venerable distro which is rolling release. If you know Linux, you are probably familiar, at least in passing, with grandaddy Debian. It is the base of Ubuntu, after all, so all of the Ubuntu flavors and derivatives owe their existence to Debian. Debian is not terribly exciting, but it is stable once down-stream from Testing. (https://wiki.debian.org/DebianTesting)
9) Sparky Linux
a) Been around for a while, based on Debian Testing. Stable and simple. Haven’t tried it, so I can’t speak to how good it is, personally. (https://sparkylinux.org/)
10) EndeavourOS
a) NASA-themed Arch derivative which is relatively light, fast, and certainly rolling. It comes with the latest Calamares installer and most of what you need in order to make your system run well out of the box. One thing you have to keep in mind with this distro is it will require you to become much more comfortable with the terminal than others will, as it does not ship with a GUI package manager, so you have to use CLI pacman to get that done, at least until you install something like Octopi (which feels a bit like aptitude in Debian distros). (https://endeavouros.com)
11) Ka OS
a) Indie distro which only ships with the latest versions of all things KDE Plasma. Think of it as an indie version of KDE Neon (which is based on Ubuntu… It is basically Kubuntu unstable, where much of the KDE package testing happens). Ka OS is intentionally limited in scope, as their focus is on quality not quantity. It is a great option for those of us who are hardcore KDE fans. I’ve not tried it, but have talked about it quite a bit over the last year (I typically cover each new ISO release). (https://kaosx.us)
12) Gentoo Linux
a) Another indie distro, but not one that is intentionally user-friendly. This one is built by developers and system admins for developers and system admins. It has its own package manager, and actually serves as the base on which ChromeOS is built. But Gentoo, on its own, is about as easy to use and maintain as Arch is. Not for anyone who doesn’t enjoy building packages from source. (https://gentoo.org)
13) Chakra Linux
a) Arch-based hybrid distro which offers rolling for non system-critical packages, but periodic updates for core system packages. I’d never heard of this one, and it is no longer being developed, so don’t bother with this one, boys and girls. Doesn’t even have its own webiste.
14) Sabayon became Mocacchino OS
a) It is more or less Gentoo + containers and layers and all sorts of other current buzz words. I don’t have the desire to try this one, but if containerization sounds beneficial in your usecase, add this to the container-driver distro list. (https://www.mocaccino.org/)
15) Rolling Rhino Remix
a) Ubuntu, only rolling. I covered this distro briefly when it was announced several months back they track all of the devel series updates and roll them out to users. I’m not clear as to whether it is really daily driver ready or not, so take your chances if you wish. It looks interesting, is all I’m going to say. (https://rollingrhino.org/)
https://www.geeksveda.com/rolling-release-linux-distributions/
#distronews #FOSSNews #rollingrelease
DN 2 – Alpine Linux 3.18
A new version from this minimal, OpenRC, MUSL based distro. This will matter more to you if you are aware of just how much control you lose of your system to run systemd. Systemd used to simply be an init system, but in the last 5 years, especially, it has ballooned out into controlling most aspects of your system behind the scenes. It is still technically FOSS, but very few people who are not developers even have the desire to look at release notes and the like to see what kind of feature creep has invaded that stack of protocols and firmware hooks. One thing that was recently brought to my attention, courtesy of friend of the channel, Connor Needling, is that systemd has now been rewritten in such a way that we no longer have control over what DNS servers our systems use. Let’s start to migrate away from systemd-based distributions. Alpine is one, but it is not particularly user friendly on the front end, unfortunately. Connor is a huge fan of Alpine, and I am testing it on my kids’ machine, as it is very lightweight and performant, and their machine is over 10 years old, so it seems like a match made in heaven, to a certain extent. Devuan, MX Linux, Salix, Artix, and AntiX are a few other non-systemd options out there that might be a bit more user friendly (MX is excellent in that respect, if you are ok with Debian based distros. Check this list for even more options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_distributions_without_systemd
There of course were some key updates in 3.18, such as moving up to the Linux 61 LTS series, musl libc 1.2.4, Python 3.11, Ruby 3.2, Node.js 20.1, Go 1.20, and Rust 1.69. Remember, this is a lightweight distro. Don’t expect a ton of bells & whistles. You’ll even need to install and configure networking for your machine. Beware the install script, though. It will try to force you to set up WiFi, when your system may not be 100% supported. I suggest plugging in hardline, via a lan cable. Worry about WiFi later. You’ll also need to use their setup-desktop script to pick your DE poison, so to speak. You’ll also need to wrap your head around doas vs sudo, at least until you install and configure sudo (which I suggest you do quickly), as well as their package manager (Alpine Package Keeper, or APK). 3.18 does ship with support for GNOME 44 and Plasma 5.27LTS, just need to pick which one you want, but you also have the option of Xfce. The bottom line when installing Alpine is that the wiki is your best friend, unless you have a friend who has done it and is good at explaining things.
https://9to5linux.com/alpine-linux-3-18-is-out-with-linux-6-1-lts-experimental-support-for-unattended-installs
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DN 3 – RHEL 9.2 Out Now with Some Interesting Goodies
Last week, we talked about a couple of distros which are based on RHEL, but now we’re gonna talk about the main source for those distros, RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). This is the preeminent enterprise distro in the world. Red Hat is trusted because it has always enjoyed a close relationship with Big Blue (IBM), who have supplied funding and software contributions to the organization and its products for many years. Fedora is somewhat clean, as it is community driven, as far as I know. RHEL and CentOS Stream are decidedly less so than Fedora is, in my opinion, but take that with a grain of salt, as this is pure opinion based on circumstantial evidence at best. I went off about systemd earlier, so I won’t harp on that, but GNOME is also developed by teams at Red Hat. Anyway, back to RHEL and why I am sharing this article in the first place… RHEL got an update. Podman got a huge leg up (podman is a container management tool) in that now, it doesn’t require so much CLI knowledge to operate and take care of your container needs in your fleet. It seems to be geared more and more for automation, which is a welcome piece of news for network admins everywhere. So much more besides that, but you’ll have to read the article in the description if you care to see all of that.
FOSS News
FN 1 – Ever Wondered How to Delete Files in Linux?
Well, if you’ve been around for a minute, you’re probably yelling at your screen about the trusty old rm command. If you are, you’re right. If you were wondering if I’ll mention stat or ls –i or find, you won’t be disappointed, my friend. If you are completely at a loss as to what I’m talking about, that’s ok, too. This is a brief rundown of how to use these commands to get rid of files in the Linux command line interface/terminal. Say you have a huge directory that is simply stuffed with files and perhaps sub-directories, etc, and you need to free up some space on your computer, then you may try to simply select the directory in question in your file manager of choice (Dolphin, Nemo, Nautilus, etc…) and hit the delete key. This MAY work for you, but will only move your directory and its contents to the Trash bin (assuming it isn’t too big, as there is a file size limit placed on the Trash Bin). If it is too big, you can expect an error stating as much. Deleting in Linux does not work the same way as it does in Windows. When you delete a file in Linux, you are simply removing a link to the file from your computer, then later on, when you aren’t using the file you just unlinked to, the contents get cleaned up. In Windows, due to the way the FAT partitioning system used to work, one must make entirely separate copies of a file in order to have it in multiple places, as FAT is kind of dumb that way. At any rate, time to talk commands, yeah?
Everybody’s favorite is rm. It quickly and relatively painlessly removes the link to the file or directory in question. Here’s the basic syntax for rm:
rm -<options> <name of file or directory> —<flag>
For example, if I wanted to delete the pacman lock file ( a frequent enough scenario in Arch based distros) it would go: sudo rm –f /etc/pacman/db.lck the –f option will force it to delete the file, and adding sudo in front will elevate your privileges so that you can take out that system file.
If you want to get rid of a whole directory, though, how would you do that? That is what the –r option is for. –r stands for recursive, so it will get rid of the directory and all that is in it (files, sub-directories, etc). Say you had a directory called Test in your Documents directory, and it has a whole bunch of random junk in there that you don’t need to have around anymore. You would run an rm command like this: rm –r /Documents/Test, and that will get rid of the directory and anything that was inside of it. You experienced users might be wondering if I’ll mention rmdir, well, don’t worry. There’s your mention. It isn’t terribly useful in this case, as it is only capable of removing said directories if they are empty.
Next, we turn to find. Find is a bit more complex than rm, so is probably used less. So here’s the situation: you have a directory called “Test 2” in your Downloads directory, and you don’t want to use rm. What do you do? Find to the rescue! Here’s the command you need: find /Downloads/Test 2 –delete
You could also use find in concert with ls –li or stat to find the inode number (the unique file number for each file or directory in Linux), then write something like this:
find /path/to/file -inum INODE_NUM -exec rm -i {} + (where you would plug in the inode number you found by running either stat or ls –li beforehand for the file in question where it says INODE_NUM), then hit y to confirm the action. This seems extremely specific, which is good, but at the same time, if you know the name of the file or directory anyway, then why bother with the inode thing anyway?
https://www.tecmint.com/delete-large-directory-linux/
FN 2 –QEMU 8.1 Announced
Though 8.0 just shipped, here is a sneak peek at what is coming in the next version of this crucial emulation back end for handling things like running your classic Nintendo or PlayStation games on your Linux PC. It is also useful for more important things, such as testing ARM or RISC-V compatibility for a piece of software. It can also help you to run regular x86 software on an ARM or RISC-V based system. This is incredibly useful for developers so that they can make 100% sure that their software will work on any platform, so the changes made in 8.1 will make it that much more pleasant to use. They added better pipewire support for audio and video backends, as well as a handful more chips that it can emulate for both ARM and RISC-V. It is unlikely that most of you will need this, but I thought I’d cover it, because it will likely indirectly effect you in the future. Lots of good stuff with this release, so if you want to know more, read the article and the announcements, down below.
https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu
https://9to5linux.com/qemu-8-1-promises-pipewire-audio-backend-improved-risc-v-support
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FN 3 – Another KDE Maintenance Update
Here’s KDE Plasma 5.27.5, with a bevy of useful changes and bug squashings, as usual. 5 weeks after the release of 5.27.4, we have the next maintenace update, so what’s new here?
• Even more better flatpak support
◦ No more broken configs
◦ New flatpak permissions page in system settings
◦ And more
• Task Manager can now do better with text for windows which do not have text in the titlebar
• Emoji selector window invokes more quickly from kb shortcut
• Scrolling in Task Manager and Pager widgets works better
• Touchscreen
◦ Long press on system tray icons for context menus works now
• Bug fixes
◦ Plasma Discover
▪ Correctly applies firmware updates
▪ Many flatpak issues
• Crash when dealing with a missing .flatpakref file
◦ Plasma Wayland
▪ no longer crash the KWin window and composite manager when hovering the cursor over Task Manager icons or when closing windows (that was annoying)
▪ System Settings app should no longer crash during startup if the Activities database is corrupted
▪ Plasma should no longer crash due to excessive memory usage when searching for unusual things with KRunner (how do they define an unusual search term?)
◦ Multimonitor Support
▪ No more screens-overlapping-by-one-pixel issue
▪ Many other random issues were fixed as well
◦ Random bits
▪ fixes Plasma Calendar’s “Months” views
▪ updates the mouse acceleration profiles to work properly with libinput 1.3 or later
▪ fixes long notification title text in the Notifications history
▪ improves the Bluetooth connection experience
▪ improves importing of VPN configurations
▪ plugs a major memory leak when plugging in an external display
▪ addresses a recently discovered regression in the size and sharpness of GTK CSD windows’ minimize, maximize, and close buttons when not using a scale factor
▪ improves the centered arrangement of Plasma widgets between two flexible Panel spacers places on vertical panels
As usual, the KDE team have been hard at work to make Plasma that much better, even as they have been devoting many resources to KDE 6, which is due to drop later this year. When 2-in-1 touchscreen support is closer to GNOME level, I very well may go back to KDE on my surface, but not until then. It’s funny, since I put GNOME on my Surface, It almost feels jarring to go back to KDE, though I know I could make it behave similarly. If you want a clearer picture of what this update did, take a look at the announcement page in the description below. (https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.27.5/)
https://9to5linux.com/kde-plasma-5-27-5-improves-flatpak-permissions-page-system-settings-and-more
#FOSSnews #bigshow #KDE #updates #fixes #TechFreedom
FF 1 – Roblox h8s Penguins
The Roblox developers have hammered the last nail into the coffin for compatibility and support on Linux. They are adopting Hyperion anti-cheat, as the Roblox team bought the company behind Hyperion last October. Their logic for blocking WINE usage is tenuous at best, in my view. They also refuse to countenance the concept of a Linux port, claiming that the gaming community on Linux is neither large nor cohesive enough to bother devoting company resources to developing or supporting. Will this affect Linux adoption rates? I don’t know. I know that Roblox is nearly as popular as Minecraft, particularly with the younger set, however, as this article states, we have Heroic and the Steam Deck, as well as Proton which still enable us to play many games, and those tools are only getting better. I don’t see this as a huge detractor from the appeal of getting away from Windoesn’t and MacOS, if for nothing other than privacy and security reasons. For that matter, Linux is stable, now, particularly if you choose a point release distro like Pop!OS or Mint. It pretty much “just works” for most things, these days. Are there exceptions to the rule? Of course, just like anything else in life. I do not see this making that much of a difference for people who are motivated to make the change anyway.
https://news.itsfoss.com/roblox-linux-end/
FF 2 – ASUS ROG Ally Formally Announced
Well, we have more information about this Steamdeck competitor now, from specs to pricing. It will indeed be running AMD’s new Z1 chips, but it ships with Windoesn’t 11. *throws up in mouth* Why are they inflicting that privacy nightmare on their customers? Oh wait, massive subsidies from MSFT, no doubt. That, and running Windoesn’t entails fewer compatibility issues. Let’s keep an eye on this gear and see about perhaps getting it working on Linux, shall we? So, here are the specs for this piece of kit: AMD Z1 capable of up to 2.8 TFlops for the base model, both ship with a .5 TB Gen4 SSD, 16 GB DDR5 RAM, a 7” FHD touchscreen display capable of 500 nits brightness, and dual cooling fans. Raw power, this thing sounds promising, and it will cost $599. The upgraded model comes with the Z1 Extreme chip, which is about 3x more powerful than the regular Z1, capable of pushing 8.6 TFlops (you might be wondering what a TFlop is: a teraflop, 1 Trillion FLoating point OPerations. A FLOP is a measure of computing performance which gives a more accurate picture of the capabilities of a chip than simple instructions per second). The extreme version is comparable with the processor in the PlayStation 5, clocking in less than half a TFlop/s lower than the P5 in a smaller package that is also more efficient. By the way, the more capable version is slated to sell at $699. To put it into perspective, the top spec Steam Deck sells for $649, and has the same size ssd, and a AMD Zen 2 chip, and 16 GB RAM, with a 1280*800 resolution 7” screen. Its processor can only manage ~1/2 TFlop/s and its integrated GPU can only manage up to 1.6 TFlop/s. That is pretty weak in comparison to the Z1, but it does natively run SteamOS, which is based on Arch Linux. Here’s a link for the Steam Deck: (https://store.steampowered.com/steamdeck)
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FF 3 – What’s Arcane Wilds?
A Western-themed fantasy RTS game that is cross-platform and currently in beta testing. It has
3 factions which each have their unique features, strengths and weaknesses, Army (a Civil War era US Army-alike), Colony (wild west-style gunslingers and the like), and Tribes (similar to native Americans). Who vie for resources and territory. The difference here is that two of the key resources (Supplies and Essence) are actual physical things which need to be transported and can even be stolen. That is novel to me. I like that idea, it makes the whole thing much more realistic and potentially engaging. The combat system sounds like it should be really fun, as it is designed to be very fast-paced, but not at the expense of strategy. Units get ordered via the port, which is where you start every game. In order to order certain units, you do need to build certain buildings, but units are not directly produced by their associated buildings, but those buildings do allow you to order them at the port. Interesting mechanics, y’all. Not just build base, harvest resources, make units, and attack your enemies. We’ll see what shape this game finally realizes once it is out of beta.
I will take a look at it and see if my system can handle it and stream & record the whole thing or not. If it can, I will test it out on the Weekend Edition.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/arcane-wilds-kicks-off-with-some-refreshing-rts-ideas/
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