Check whether your BIOS settings show the system clock UTC or adjusted to your timezone.

Windows stores hardware clock time in your local timezone. Other operating systems usually store it in UTC. If you’re dual booting, this could cause issues.

It’s also possible that saving the current time to the hardware clock in silverblue/secureblue is misonfigured in some way.

Ubuntu Pro requires users (both individuals and enterprises) to register with Canonical to receive security updates.

Consoles have really been getting closer to more standard hardware over the last years. The WiiU was a mostly custom PowerPC box, with a proprietary version of wifi for the gamepad, and including hardware specifically to run Wii games. The Switch was a barely modified nvidia shield, with bluetooth wireless controllers. The PS3 had a fully custom CPU, and old models included PS2 hardware for backwards compatibility, the PS4 is x86_64 with a custom AMD GPU.

For the PS4/PS5, the majority of effort on running Linux is in getting it to boot in the first place. While some hardware does require patches to existing drivers (like mesa on PS4), or sometimes fully custom drivers (like the CPU fan on PS4), other hardware is completely standard, over a standard interface. Like the HDD and Blu-Ray drives on the PS4.

The big difference is that a game console is “allowed” to deviate from standards, as it does not need to be compatible with anything outside the control of the manufacturer. This results in often small differences that require changes to a kernel which wouldn’t work on any other device.

The biggest reason why emulation is hard, is often no longer the custom hardware like it used to be, but the OS and other fully custom standards like a graphics API. The structure of games is completely different too. The old “ship the drivers on the game disc” like on the Wii no longer holds true on modern consoles, and emulators don’t need to ensure the exact timing of an optical drive matches to get a game to work.

There have been some attempts to get modern console games to work through kernel patches and translation layers, see horizon-linux and fpPS4, proving just how close modern console hardware is to standard PCs.

All that being said, I don’t think SteamOS on PS5 would work for multiple reasons. It’s extremely difficult to get the process simple enough for the average consumer, especially with Sony quickly patching any exploits required to boot it. It’s also not in Valve’s business interest to make it easier and explicitly supported to buy a cheaper and more powerful standardized machine. As they would just be creating a direct competitor to the Steam Machine.

Not OP but a couple things:

• It’s a full controller, no “only one joystick” like the 2015 model.
• The quality of the IO is great, like the TMR joysticks, good trackpads, gyro, and nice haptics.
• If a PC runs Steam, it supports all the controllers features (in Steam). This isn’t always the case on DS5/xbox controllers.
• The “puck”, despite looking insignificant, makes the experience much better. Unlike Xbox with AA batteries or DS5 with USB-C charging, and both of those with Bluetooth wireless connectivity (by default). The Steam Controller (2026) is fully “pick up and start playing”.

Whether it’s worth the price depends on what you value in a game controller, and how much. For me, the “extra” inputs (mainly back pedals, touchpads, gyro) and accurate sticks (TMR instead of potentiometers) are worth it.

This is an absolutely bottom of the barrel machine nowadays. You’ll be able to run Linux on it, but nothing is going to run “fast”. Especially not a webbrowser with modern websites.

If you’re actually considering using this machine, the two most important upgrades you can make are SSD instead of HDD, and a bit more RAM (8GB if possible). With the ~2011-2012 CPU (judging by the release date of the iGPU listed) and the mentioned upgrades, you should have a usable (although slow) workstation for light tasks. Without the upgrades, be prepared to wait for things to load.

Individual AppImages still highly depend on system libraries, I’ve seen them often fail to run on older distros, for example due to an out of date system glibc.

Flatpak is not owned by RedHat or systemd. You can use flatpak while avoiding systemd components.

a solution to a problem most people don’t have

I’d say the timeless problem of “I just want to run this app, why doesn’t it work” is solved with Flatpak. People who can compile software themselves are the exception, not the norm. For an average user, an app store that “just works” is great. And for a developer, only being required to target one common runtime simplifies things.

For me it was the inappropriate description on the last post. This is not an NSFW community and I didn’t want to read that.

The point is how expensive it is. For your 1 request, you wait 2 seconds, and the power draw is a minor inconvenience. For the massive botfarm, it adds up to days of CPU time and a significant portion of the electricity bill.

Lets ignore the “is it possible” and imagine what would happen if it was. Whatever entity forks AOSP would start off with (next to) no userbase. The platform “Android” will remain Google’s AOSP, including some proprietary components. Whenever Google decides, they can enforce apps on the Google Play Store to use a new version of the Android system API. This is often a breaking change; apps that update won’t work on older Android. There is nothing stopping Google from creating complex breaking changes that tie into their proprietary components, killing off any attempt at running Google Play Store apps on older or “fully FOSS” Android. Even if a hard fork of AOSP existed, it would not remain compatible with the vast majority of applications.

So even if this could happen, it won’t. Nobody is going to invest in hard forking a project that is going to be killed off by Google’s monopoly.

The much better (long term) option is to stay completely outside AOSP, like with mobile Linux distros such as postmarketOS. Right now, it is underdeveloped and not an option as a daily driver for most. But over time, this is the only feasible option that can give control back to the user.

Heavily leaning towards malware; normal software tends to name itself the same on disk and in ram, this seems to be it trying to hide itself.

Since there’s now nothing to go off of for how this got on your system, the best course of action is to back up your documents and reinstall your system fresh. To avoid malware in the future, stick to the built-in app store and system repositories where possible.

This doesn’t really say much; this could be legitimate software thinking it crashed, or it could be malware trying to hide itself.

Try seeing if sudo find / -type f -name windows tells you anything about where it’s installed. This command searches through / (all files) to find a file (-type f) that is named windows (the same as the process name).

Assuming this is malware, depending on the complexity it might be really hard to remove. The best course of action is much like on Windows; Backup your personal files, figure out how the malware got on your PC (so you can avoid it next time), then reinstall the operating system.

For backing up personal files, stick to documents, media, etc. Do not include executables (like installed games), and be very careful with config files (and system files), basically only back these up if you know what’s in them is legitimate.

You can find more about the process in the /proc/4212/ directory (this is the number on the left in top). By running ls -l, you should be able to see where the exe symlink points to, which tells you where the program is installed. This might give you a clue as to where it came from (or it might not, depending on how the malware is made). If you suspect it is not malware, due to information on your system, look it up online before trusting it. I have personally never seen a root-owned ““windows”” process, which is why I’m heavily leaning towards this being malware.

If you feel like you know where the malware came from, or you’re stuck and are struggling to find out more, you should reinstall your operating system to get rid of the malware. Malware can have different levels of complexity, what you’re seeing on the surface might be the whole thing, or it could have more complex systems to reinstall itself after removal. Which is why reinstalling your operating system is the safer option.

Poettering only very recently left microslop

Not much of a newsletter but Dolphin Emu progress reports.

Lots of things wrong with this but one I haven’t seen yet is that CachyOS literally depends on ArchLinux, yet is more “independent” than it?

These are terrible axis to try and plot operating systems, and limiting yourself to such low resolution with no overlap doesn’t help.

Iirc, the XZ backdoor was specifically targeting RH and Debian, which for some reason link libsystemd into OpenSSH. Afaik even upstream Arch was unaffected, not just Artix. The exploit code, though non-functional, still made its way onto your system (assuming you updated when it was in a release version).

I’m not defending systemd though, it’s clear that Poettering’s goals do not align with the rest of the Linux community. I’m saying that Artix not being affected by the XZ backdoor is not a good argument for why to use Artix or avoid systemd.

It’s like saying “Linux doesn’t get malware” because most desktop malware targets the OS with the largest desktop userbase, Windows. This alone doesn’t suddenly make Linux “better”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other reasons to avoid Windows.

The smaller/newer distros have no evidence of staying around for years, so it’s hard to judge whether they’ll be around in another couple years. Distros like Bazzite are definitely interesting, but you can’t reliably predict whether it’ll get updates in 10 years. There are stable community-led distros that have been around for a long time, like Debian.

Is the video player application itself muted in pipewire? What’s the output device set to?

You can check these things with an application like pavucontrol. Pipewire (and pulse) have a default audio device, but individual applications can set a different audio device if they want to.

Another great category of utilities for pipewire is virtual patchbays. If you’re looking for something simple, helvum or qpwgraph are geat. For all the technical details in a GUI, coppwr provides a good experience.

Arch isn’t exactly intended for beginners, and the “windows is more bloated than Linux” thing applies for pretty much every Linux distro.

If you’re willing to spend a significant amount of time learning and tinkering, a distro like Arch could provide what you need. However, if you’re just starting out, you might want to start with something easier. Distros like Linux Mint or Fedora are plenty lightweight compared to Windows, and they require much less learning to get started actually using your computer.

As for “which distro allows you to use the cheapest PC”, this mainly comes down to how much effort you’re willing to put in, not necessarily the distro you use. At a certain point, a desktop computer will “just work” for basic desktop tasks, the distro doesn’t change much there.