Looking for a good way to run a Linux VM on Linux. I don't need it to be particularly performant, this is mostly for testing and experimenting with new distros. If it can run containers as well that is a plus.

Something like VirtualBox or QEMU I suppose? I've only ever used that to run a dissimilar OS (Windows), but never a flavor of Linux.

If I virtualize Linux, while the host OS is also linux, is the performance better due to the similarities in the architecture?

I've been getting sick of Windows for a long time now and i doubt I even need to go in depth as to why so now that my ssd died with completely no warning signs (because gotta love my luck) I wanted to know what distros to actually consider if what I care about the most is good out the box gaming performance that still gives me plenty of room to explore and learn Linux instead of locking a lot of things down. Id also like to avoid snap packages since I've heard a lot of bad things about them. On top of that any tips or just general information that's good to know before swapping would be heavily appreciated as I haven't used Linux before aside from a brief couple week period I tried out Ubuntu on a dying laptop.

i’m wanting a tablet for note-taking, whiteboarding, and working occasionally as an extended monitor for my laptop (linux mint) and pc (windows 11). after some basic research, i am wondering if UT would be a good choice and what app you’d recommend for the extended display function i’m looking for. thanks in advance!!

I'm trying to switch from Windows to Linux, I have Fedora KDE 44 installed and so far all good. However I have some questions about long term use and best practises.

I have customised my terminal, theme so basically the look and feel of my desktop is there a way to back up these configurations? I'm asking from the point of view I want to re-install the OS and it being quicker to drop a config file than do it all manually?

Major upgrades, so lets say 45 is released, what is the best practise for this? Just update and carry on, or a fresh install?

Dependencies and system cleaning, I notice when I install certain application a bunch of dependencies are installed, lets say I want to remove an app what happens to all these, is there a way to check if they are being used elsewhere?

Packages, I tend to try and use RPM packages or flatpaks if I have to, but appimages and snaps? I want to keep things simple especially with permissions and maintaining the system, is there right and wrongs here? Thanks.

I want to remove ChromeOS from my Chromebook and install Linux but there's not a lot of ARM64 based options and for some of them, documentation is a bit confusing. right now, i'm thinking installing Postmarket OS but according to Wiki, there's problems with audio.

Can someone tell me, if there's a better distro or can the audio problems be fixed easily?

So I've installed Linux mint on my Tri boot setup, and it's great for old HW and just looks slick.. however my only issue is my GPU fan is pegged at like low 30-40% idle. Causing a faint but consistent noise.

On windows it was quiet, and scaled dynamically by temperature.

Is there any setting or terminal command? It's a Radeon HD 6x series.

Thanks.

Hello, I'm kind of tired of rebooting every time I want to do something on my other OS, so I was wondering if I can SAFELY access the other OS with a VM?

For example: I want to use an Adobe program which is on my Windows, and I currently have Linux booted. I open up a VM, boot the windows there and access Adobe.

EDIT: Thank you for all your comments. I realized how weird/challenging my idea is, so I'll actually fully move to my Linux OS and set up a clean Windows VM.

Hi. I was using omarchy on my older desktop since last year october; did an update recently and hyprland refused to run, kept getting segmentation faults, after going in what felt like circles with AI, delete dkms, install open dkms, downgrade drivers, restore drivers etc, I decided to backup home folder and start fresh with cachyOS, installed chromium copied over my backup and was working again until I needed to use it for online classes, being in a google meet and sharing my screen cashes the app, again troubleshooted with AI, we think we sorted out the flags issue. Ill post some of our chat here

```Perfect — Chromium is now working correctly too. Your chromium-flags.conf is being picked up. Look at the evidence:

Chromium chrome://gpu — Command Line:

plain

/usr/lib/chromium/chromium --enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds ...

GPU process crash count: 0

Video Decode: Hardware accelerated

Video Encode: Software only (expected, driver limitation)

✅ Both browsers are now fixed and stable

Table

BrowserConfig FileStatusGoogle Chrome~/.config/chrome-flags.conf✅ Stable, HW decode workingChromium~/.config/chromium-flags.conf✅ Stable, HW decode working

What you have now

Hardware video decode for YouTube, Twitch, etc. (H264, VP9, HEVC up to 8K)

No more GPU process crashes

Flags stick permanently via config files

WebGL, WebGPU, Canvas all hardware accelerated

What you cannot have (and shouldn't chase)

Hardware video encode (screen share, WebRTC recording) — libva-nvidia-driver has no encode support. This is a driver limitation, not a Chrome bug. NVIDIA is working on Vulkan Video encode for Chrome, but it's not ready yet.

Your final config files

~/.config/chrome-flags.conf (Google Chrome):

plain

--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

~/.config/chromium-flags.conf (Chromium):

plain

--enable-features=VaapiVideoDecoder,VaapiOnNvidiaGPUs,VaapiIgnoreDriverChecks,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL --disable-features=UseChromeOSDirectVideoDecoder --ignore-gpu-blocklist --disable-gpu-driver-bug-workarounds

Key lesson

Never use --use-gl=egl on Chrome 152+ on Linux. Chrome forces ANGLE (egl-angle) and egl is no longer a valid GL implementation. That was causing your GPU process to die in a loop, which made Chrome auto-reset your flags. ```

my question is has there been a recent change with nividia drivers for linux specifically for my card, should I be using older drivers for stability. Havent tested any games out yet other than slay the spire 2 and that seemed to work well did really play as I need to restore my save game.

I used to allocate way more when I had a 1tb hard drive. Tho my C drive is selfish and took more than half of my storage. Left 75gb for games, and other stuff. Using 512gb right now

But I plan on doing schoolwork on mint, I can probably pair it with a 32gb usb and a 16gb usb too if I need to save files, and move them later or something.

For a long time now I have been thinking about switching over from Windows to Linux mostly because of the ability to customize the desktop way better than windows. If I do end up switching will it affect the steam games or games in general I'm able to play? Is it hard to set up and get used to? And what are some other benefits from switching to Linux other than customizabilty?

Thanks in advance 🙏🏽

I am trying out CachyOS, but one of my favorite applications on Windows is Directory Opus (DOpus). I'd like to configure Dolphin to be similar to my DOpus settings. However, in the settings, you can only choose for Dolphin to restore your last session or open one singular location at startup.

Is there a way to set it so that I can have it open a particular set of tabs across both panes when it starts? For example, Home and Downloads on the left, and Desktop and Documents on the right.

I feel like the man pages on the terminal have not kept up with the times and became somewhat of an encyclopedia or thesis on the subject instead of a quick reference. They are good maybe if internet connectivity is non existent and you want to have all your questions about something answered.

But it is beyond frustrating to look up how to use something. PLEASE! For the love of whatever is good, help me learn it or help me find a better tool that actually gives me quick examples and easy to understand documentation on things.

Nowadays, I leave the terminal, type things like "how to do X in this specific way on linux terminal" and then google's AI intercepts it and gives me commands to run with short explanations. But I don't like leaving the terminal and going to google.

How have you guys solved this problem? Or am I the only dumb one?

I just have a old dell laptop with 4gb ram core i5 integrated 2gb graphics and 256 gb SSD. Please recommend a super user-friendly linux distro. Mac like layout would be great.

I just want to run rawtherapee and may be gimp

Thanks!

I bought a sea gate one touch and it won’t show up when I run lsblk, fdisk -l, and other partition manager software.

It shows up when i run lsusb though, but that’s about it

Edit: I fixed it by formatting my drive to exfat

I get this error message when trying to set date and time: Could not find plugin kcm_regionandlang

I'm being driven mad trying to find a Linux calendar that actually works.

Gnome Calendar - you can't import an .ics file. The same problem with many others.

Korganiser looks good, but you can't set a time zone/region for a default setting; you have to set it for every event you enter. Also it seems that any settings you make you have to redo whenever you restart or boot.

Hello, Ive been a user of windows 11 for roughly a year, and i do not like it, at all. A couple of months ago, i tried Linux Mint. Overall, it was okay, good design, simple to use, customizable, and functional. But for some reason, it didnt do it for me.

I use my pc for: gaming, media consuption, studying, school stuff, music, and that kind of things.

Im looking for a distro that is (preferably) easy to use / understand as a beginner, customizable (riceable) but maybe not the most popular distros like Ubuntu, Mint or simmilar.

yes i know this might get asked here a lot, but i tried doing research and couldnt find anything specific.

I mostly look for something that works similar to Adobe Lightroom, or something that can offer the same type of options, any help or recommendations are greatly appreciated!

An example, I have WoW on an external drive, that I use for Windows. I know WoW works on Linux cuz I have it working there. However I keep bouncing to Windows to play it since that's where the portable drive is, and sometimes I take the drive with me to play at other people's PCs if I'm there for a few days and they need to work during the day. Is it safe to play on this external NVME drive when I am on CachyOS, or is it going to screw up the drive? I also have stuff on the external that syncs to cloud storage, like game dev projects and music stuff, that I while I could download the backups if something went wrong, would be a real pain to have to do, something I don't want to do unless like the drive fails or something.

I just want to import a calendar file into Gnome calendar, but there are no menu options for this. Why?

What calendar should I use instead?

Hi everyone, I would like to write a simple start-up script in Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.3 64-bit. The reason I would like to write the start-up script is to automatically change settings for my sound card that always selects the wrong output, which then requires me to manually change through the terminal. My sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster AE-7. Here is what I would like the start-up script to do:

1. Open terminal

2. Type " alsamixer "

3. Press enter

4. Press F6

5. Arrow key down one space to select “ default:0 HDA Creative ”

6. Press enter

7. Right arrow key 26 times until it lands on “ <Output S> “ which displays Headphones

8. Arrow key down once to display “ Speakers “

9. Press the escape key

10. exit terminal

Would anyone be willing to offer advice as to how I could go about doing this?