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Any experience with teaching kids Linux?
  • I don't think this was too strict, maybe I made it sound that way, but it was not like he forbid him using windows, it was just that he's using Linux, his son got his old laptop that was running Linux and they didn't have a windows license, so his son was running Linux as well. He's also doing fine on Linux and doesn't dislike it or anything, the only "problem" was that he wanted to play Fortnite which does not work on Linux. He's also getting along fine with Linux, especially on fedora where he doesn't need the Terminal.

    What I wanted to say with that comment is that you can't make your kids to learn and use Linux like most of us probably do. For most people an operating system is still just some black magic on their computer that makes the browser or their games run, they don't care how it works or if it is secure or using the latest software. Most people just don't know and don't care what an OS even is and the same thing goes for kids imo

  • Any experience with teaching kids Linux?
  • A friend of mine got his son to use Linux by just not providing an alternative, he installed Debian edu (don't know if that's the name, but basically a Debian spin for kids with parental restrictions and stuff) on an old laptop for him and that's what he used. Once he got his own PC it was over though since he wanted to play Fortnite so bad that he bought windows for that. He still dual boots Fedora, but I don't think he has used it since the windows partition is there.

    I think the thing is you can't really get kids (or people in general for that matter) into Linux the way you are probably into it and interested in it. At least not if they're not already interested in it on their own. They will learn how to use it sure, but not the way we're used to using Linux, understanding the intricacies of the system, keeping the system safe,... They'll probably find a way to do what they already do on windows and ignore that the OS is different.

  • I've gone with super terminal heavy setups for years. If I want to dip my toes into a more GUI oriented setup what's your rec?
  • Not really sure anymore tbh, I think kde had a decent tiling plugin and gnome not and kde felt like more control and options on contrary to gnomes streamlined Mac like interface. Nowadays I'm on i3/sway though, haven't really tried any DEs in a while

  • I've gone with super terminal heavy setups for years. If I want to dip my toes into a more GUI oriented setup what's your rec?
  • I've used KDE on my convertible during uni and it worked pretty good. I mean for a GUI oriented setup your options are pretty much KDE, gnome, cinnamon, xfce (don't know how good that is with touch though) or cosmic (is that out yet? Idk tbh).

    Afaik gnome and kde both have good touchscreen support, maybe you'll need to do some slight modifications, so I'd say just try them out and see what you like.

  • What do you think about this?
  • DE is desktop environment (like gnome, kde, xfce,...) And WM is window manager (like i3, sway, xmonad,...) Which is just a slim version of a de, they usually don't include things like guis for settings, file managers, ... and you just pick what you like and use that. The window manager is responsible for placing the windows in your workspace and most standalone wms are tiling, so they use your monitor space efficiently instead of putting floating windows all over the place. Basically the DE (or WM) is what you interact with most on your PC and a lot of beginners distrohop just to use a different DE when in reality you can just install the other de on your existing system, log out and select the new DE in your login screen.

    The biggest differences between distros nowadays are their release cycles and their package managers (and the tepos they're using, like Ubuntu and Debian both use apt, but have separate repos)

    And no you can't really change distro without reinstalling, you can change kernels tho, every distro will update their kernels from time to time and it's just a matter of install the new package and reboot into the new kernel.

    With separate directories you probably mean partitions, which I'd also say it's advisable to have your /home partition separated from your / partition. That way if you ever have to reinstall or want to change distro you can just install into the root partition and afterwards add your old/home partition to /etc/fstab and keep all you're user data and configuration

  • What do you think about this?
  • It's just clickbait like most of his videos, I never really liked Chriss' videos, the tip of the iceberg was when he told people to disable kernel mitigation for a presumable performance boost (I tested it with disconnected network, it was like 2% on my machine), which is just plain dumb.

    Use whatever distro you like, just know that you don't have to distrohop for some program (DE or WM or whatever). I personally use endeavour, simply because I've used arch (and derivatives) for a while now and endeavour is just arch with sensible defaults and a lot of the configuration one would do anyway already done.

  • (help-solved)monitor 1 with workspace 1 and monitor 2 with workspace 2, how pls?
  • Afaik the X11 standard says that this shouldn't be done and that workspaces should span all monitors (or something along the lines of that), thus most DEs don't do this (I've read this in the gnome issue tracker), don't ask me why cause I also hate this behaviour. Most window managers will do that however and luckily it's super easy to replace xfwm with another window manager. I use i3 inside xfce on my work laptop, this guide describes how to set it up with ease

  • Linux on a 2in1 for Uni
  • I used an acer switch 12 convertible during uni until the battery started bloating up and I put it out of order. The pen wasn't great, especially the palm rejection was pretty bad, but that wasn't a Linux issue it wasn't great on windows either, overall it was pretty much the same. Linux ran great though, given that it only had 3 or 4 gigs of ram and a low tier i3 (I think 3rd or 4th gen) processor. I ran mint with KDE and I'd recommend running something with KDE (or gnome haven't tried that since I prefer kde if it has to be a full DE and not a lightweight WM) as well.

  • What dotfiles manager do you use?
  • git.

    In all honesty, I'd just write a bash script, potentially reading from a file listing all the dotfiles you want to back up, copy them into some directory and pushing to a git repo. Run that script on a systemd timer (or manually) and write another script deploying them into the correct locations

  • AwesomeWM Help
  • This is waybar not awesome no? Afaik awesome does not ship its own bar. So I'd look through waybar documentation or a waybar config file in the awesome examples. Also this is probably just naming a desktop with a unicode icon so that it shows the icon in waybar

  • Do you think it is safe and secure to disable Mitigation in Fedora for the sake of performance?
  • The short answer, as a ton of people already said in the comments of the video, is "hell no" it is not and it is most likely also not worth it. Back when the video came out I tested it (with unplugged network) on my system and the performance gain was ~1% which I'd consider well within the margin of error

  • OpenSuse + Hyprland = ?
  • Hyprland is decent, it's one of the better Wayland window managers, that being said it's still in beta and not complete. Also be aware, it's a window manager, not a desktop environment. It won't do much besides well managing windows, taskbar, start menu, notification demon,... have to all be installed and setup by you and the config is done in text files, not some gui.

    Also the community is rather toxic, I've made similar experiences to this in the past when trying it out.

  • Do I need a firewall for my fedora 38?
  • Unless you mess around with firewall commands/settings you don't understand firewalld should be sufficient.

    That being said you might have to allow certain services at some point (openvpn) for example

  • Is there a repository of shortcuts that no major website will use / no major distro uses?
  • Alt/Ctrl+___ are usually used by applications and shortcuts containing Super+___ are usually "reserved" (it's no rule or anything but basically no application uses Super) for the DE. That's why Super is probably the best mod key for shortcuts. You can ofc use Alt+___ as well, in that case your DE/WM will just take preference over the application and the shortcut will be handled by the DE/WM instead of the application

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    CaptainJack42 @discuss.tchncs.de
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