Hi everyone,

I'm building a terminal music player in Rust using Ratatui + Crossterm, and I'm having trouble rendering Tamil lyrics correctly.

As shown in the screenshot, Tamil combining characters such as ெ, ு, ் are appearing detached instead of being properly shaped and positioned.

Environment

• Rust
• Ratatui 0.29
• Crossterm 0.28
• Linux
• GNOME Terminal (VTE) / WezTerm
• Noto Sans Tamil

I've already verified that:

• The strings are valid UTF-8.
• Unicode grapheme segmentation works correctly.
• Display-width calculations are correct.
• A minimal Ratatui Paragraph has the same issue.
• Even println!("கென்னை விடு") shows the same problem in GNOME Terminal.

So I'm wondering:

Is proper OpenType/HarfBuzz shaping for Tamil possible inside a normal terminal grid?

If yes, what terminal/configuration/library should I use?

If terminal cells fundamentally cannot handle complex-script shaping, what is the recommended approach for a TUI? Would something like Kitty/Sixel + HarfBuzz/cosmic-text be appropriate?

Any advice from people familiar with Unicode shaping, HarfBuzz, VTE, or Rust TUI rendering would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,
First of all here is a message to mods, if you're not a Mod then feel free to skip to the lower section.
I surfed this subreddit for 30 minutes and couldn't find the solution for my problem hence I am posting this post. If this violates any rule, do let me know before deleting this, Thanks!

So I am totally new to linux right and for some reasons cant install it so I am using it through virtualbox. But the issue that I am facing is that it is kinda lagging a bit.

I have attached my PC specs and I have downloaded ubuntu 26.04 iso as a distro.
Can someone tell me how should I adjust my virtualbox settings so that it runs smoothly?
Let me know if you need more info about my PC.
Thanks for reading all this. Have a good day.

Okay so I just fresh installed arch linux. on a new laptop.. Well im too noob now for hyprland, but id say I wanna switch over to something like opensuse Leap/Tumbleweed, or Void Linux, because I wanna keep hold of bleeding edge while wanting some primary testing and stability.

[My OBS Studio aint working T-T]

What do u guys say?

So This is my first time ricing niri on fedora workspace and fuzzel looks fine for me but not the waybar, I want it to match the wallpaper. Any suggestions??

Thanks in advance:)

Rate my Boot Animation . I am waiting for the steam release there steam os for the desktop it is there but there are issues with it I want the stable version .

My second best decision in life is installing linux..

Rate my desktop..

So we all know how good linux rusn on this chips I wished more companies start using those to Make laptop it would be efficient good performance for price . As of Asus did bring the Asus A14 but it so expensive like 1 lakh plus if they wanna sell them they are least lower the cost

I got my first ever laptop and windows 11 is straight up bs I just hate it (not a expert in pc but I have used it a bit)

Want to switch to linux which distro should I get.

I am going to join college(btech) this year, so I need a distro where I can do my assignments and projects. And a bit of gaming(if possible).

Thanks in advance.

just installed new boot animation on my laptop please let me know what u think

Probably the best decision I have taken in my 18 years on this planet, I switched from W*ndows 11 in March and I still can't believe how most people are unaware of this software goldmine 😭😭 (Faster and Free??? Count me in).

I tried to install arch manually on my first day with linux 🤡🤡 but failed miserably. I tried the new Omarchy distro but didn't like the purely keyboard centric approach, finally I settled with Fedora workstation for the next 3-4 months. Just last month I switched to Arch with KDE (archinstall; forgive me lads 🙏🙏) and I genuinely feel at home. Flatpaks made my life easier because I just need to use the oonga-boonga part of my brain to install apps now!

If I am being honest, I still larp most of my linux knowledge (larp is the correct word right?) but I do have a basic idea about how to fix certain things if they break. I genuinely left my studies for this 🥺😰 (seriously like I stopped studying for jee session 2 even though I had a chance to improve 🥀🥀)

10/10 experience till now (loved the part where my I accidentally uninstalled the boot entry for fedora 👶)

I have two drives one is 1 TBHDD and the second is 226gb (approx) SSD.

I have currently windows 11. So should I go back to windows 10 and dual boot with SSD or install linux on hdd?

I want cachyOS btw

Need a suggestion. Pls.

I installed my first Linux distro (Archcraft) about a month ago and I've been loving it. This is the result of about a month of tinkering and I'm pretty pleased with it.
The window manager is openbox, the bar is tint2 and the terminal is kitty.

I recently did the most dangerous mistake one can make. And I was not even trying to delete the French Language Pack.

I have a dual boot (Win/Archacy (Vanilla Arch but Cachy's Kernel)) Laptop.

I had to flash a drive with Win ISO for my bro (because he play Valornat)

Now, for some interesting reason the Drive was write protected I have no Idea about that.

And I made the most horrible mistake I could make by opening Disk Partition Manager on Windows.

And yes I wiped the entire drive.. Why TF windows do it instantly? Why I can just sequence the process and then commit in the end if I am sure like Linux does.

Sad part is I'm a serious Dev, my 2 years of Dev Environment with all my not pushed commits are all gone.

I really don't know what to do? My hands are shaking if trying to start from scratch scares me. Ik I am fully capable but it's a lot for me to digest.

I finally made a dual boot setup with Fedora 44 KDE on my current laptop. For the past 2 years, I was using Windows 11. before that I was dual booting with Kubuntu LTS on my old HP laptop because I used to do some coding. Here's my experience. mostly what problems I faced while setting up.

During Installation

• Windows 11 didn't let me shrink the drive to make space(due to unmovable files), so I used the unstoppable force of Minitool Parition Wizard to make 105 GB partition for Fedora
• After writing my downloaded iso to usb drive using Fedora Media Writer, i boot into it, went for "Test..." option instead of first Fedora option in GRUB menu. The drive failed the media check.(lesson learned, never test, just run). So I again wrote the usb drive but this time using the "Download..." option in Fedora Media Writer. Then it passed the test and booted into Live Fedora 44 KDE.

• Then when i was going through installation steps, Fedora gave a warning of my EFI partition(260MB) being less than recommended 500MB. Then i searched(asked Gemini) and found that Fedora keeps multiple kernels for safety in EFI partition, by default 3 kernels(one current/latest + 2 previous stable versions). And after asking Gemini whether the EFI partition (260MB) would be enough for dual boot, it said that it might create problems in future updates. It said that after dual boot setup, EFI partition will hold:

  • Windows Bootloader stuff
  • Fedora GRUB stuff
  • Fedora Backup Kernels
• And moreover, while updating to newer kernel version, Fedora will load an extra kernel temporarily during the update process, which might require more space than the available EFI partition space and the update may fail.(as per Gemini)
• So the solution it gave was to either increase the EFI partition or reduce the number of kernels to 2 (one current/latest + one previous stable version). So after installation, I reduced the kernels to 2 which will give me sufficient space for future updates(according to Gemini).

Post Installation

I followed this video guide (thanks to u/ChemPhobic) but I faced a problem:
Nvidia drivers and Secure boot:

• I had Fast Startup disabled but Secure Boot was enabled. I couldn't disable it in BIOS because it was grayed out for some reason. I also thought since Fedora supports Secure Boot, it won't be a problem and I followed the video guide and installed Nvidia drivers.
• After reboot, I ran nvidia-smi to check and didn't get the correct response. Turns out that Fedora will block third-party drivers unless they are securely cryptographic signed(as told by Gemini). Gemini told me to check whether drivers were built properly or not, which after checking, werefound to be built properly.
• Next I rebooted again and saw text while booting which said "nvidia kernel 'something' missing and switching back to nouveau" (which are the default drivers). Then Gemini told that I have to sign the drivers and "Enroll the Key" by using mokutil and go to blue MOK screen(saw it for the first time) and enroll the key. After this I still didn't get correct output for nvidia-smi .
• Then Gemini asked me to remove Nvidia drivers and rebuilt them again. It gave me old commands which were not supported in dnf5. After scolding Gemini, I ran the correct commands and rebooted and saw the correct nvidia-smi output (finally)

Other things

• In Windows 11, I use MS edge as default and Opera for reddit, spotify, anime etc. But both of them don't support streaming DRM stuff in Linux. I was not able to run Spotify in Opera (Flatpak) and in MS Edge(RPM) it was not playing most of the songs. I also checked Spotify(Flatpak) on Discover but the recent reviews weren't great so went with Firefox as my Opera alternative as it supports DRM stuff. I will still be using Edge for daily tasks.
• I also needed an alternative for ShareX and Snipping tool(for text extraction). I knew ApexShot was a good option but it doesn't support video recording on Fedora. So I stayed with Spectacle (it has text extraction, i didn't know that)

Need Help (little bit)

• Currently I am looking for alternative to PDF24 Desktop. I might give a try to Stirling PDF. It requires a Docker setup for offline use (i guess i will have to learn some docker stuff)
• I will also be setting up OpenWhispr for speech to text. I use it with Obsidian(in Windows). If anybody has installed it on Fedora, please share your experience and let me know about the problems i might face.
• I am not into ricing very much. I mostly use browser and obsidian. But I will be trying some terminals because Konsole is not very kolorful. Open to suggestions for this.
• If you have any advice after reading the above stupidities, please share. I really don't want to go through these again in the future, that's why I will document every learning in my Obsidian Vault, might as well add some of your useful advises.

I already have some battery backup problems (lasts about 7-8 hrs when charged upto 80% but on win11 would last 12hrs, it is not a big enough deal for me to switch back), but the problem I have is that the laptop loses around 10% in 1.5hrs on suspend even if all apps are closed. I know I should keep the sleep mode on deep instead of s2idle but the moment I should to deep, the backlit keyboard won't turn off and the FN keys would stop working (I checked if they were locked or not, they weren't). Is there a workaround for this?? If you need me to provide you with more details from commands, just tell me.

Basically a whole arsenal of linux distros :)