https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/

My story with mobile linux started a decade ago when i was roughly 18, and I was getting into linux and mentioned to my friend that "I wish I had linux on a phone", and they mentioned SailfishOS. Back then I didn't even know english, had no money, and the only SFOS (sailfishos shortened) available was released year ago Jolla Phone.

So how do I get my hand on SFOS? Well the only option was to port it to my phone. Action of porting is adjusting OS to a device so that every feature works, unlike desktop, where thanks to ACPI and drivers and generalized hardware stuff generally just works. Phones are not really generalized hardware and each has its quirks so it needs a wee bit of work.

So I've acquired, then vastly uninteresting Motorola Moto G2, back when Motorola was under Google. And with my trash english in hand and my motorola in other I went to #sailfishos-porters on freenode IRC.

Now up till this point I've had quite an experience flashing custom ROMs on my old htc explorer. So I went to IRC and started porting sfos with help of very nice and very helpful people there.

Now fast forward cause I don't want this to be too long, I've ported g2, then went to port nexus 7, moto x2, moto x force, huawei p8 lite, moto z, moto x, moto x play, moto x pro, moto g2 LTE, moto g3, fxtec pro1 asus zenfone 5z, 8, and recently oneplus 6 and xiaomi pad 6. Yeah, I've been busy.

Beside doing more ports than Jolla (SailfishOS owner) at the time, I've been studying software engineering and decided to make an app, then another, and another. Currently I've developed 10 apps, and as of today I'm supporting 6 devices, including Motorola moto G2 from a decade ago. Yes its still alive. Yes I'm still using it daily. Some of my apps worth noting are youtube client and telegram client. Youtube client people praise to be better than android/ios ones.

People when talking about mobile linux just tend to flat out ignore the biggest alternative to android/IOS we have to date like it never even existed which is very weird, and tad annoying. Some people say that "SailfishOS is proprietary" but no, no it's not. I couldn't have contributed to it if it was closed source don't you think? Yes, it's partially proprietary but in places you wouldn't even notice. All the OS part and hardware adaptation is *opensource, thanks to that, other OSs like ubuntu touch or mobian or halium could exist, because people forgot where libhybris comes from, and it comes from Sailfishos. The only closed source parts is the gui and in very small amount because all libraries surrounding it are opensource. It's quite difficult to come across something closed source.

Now I said "biggest alternative to android/IOS to date", this is true. People who have been in this space for as long as I've been know that. SailfishOS is the oldest one, and has the most amount of apps, AND they're most polished. Second place on the podium would've been taken by ubuntu touch, as its also using libhybris and it has many apps but ecosystem is not as great as SailfishOS. Then is the rest of small fries but pmos as a project to port mainline kernel would probably take a third spot. But libhybris is way faster and way easier to achieve compatibility.

So ye, if you read all that, thanks, now AMA. I'll be here all day (+- next 12h)

To whatever subreddit's reading this, i'd like to give a thank you to the community behind it. In a few hours, it'll be my 20th birthday, and within the course of just a month, even though the world feels like it's started to go to shit more so than ever, the things i've done in that short period of time have not only kept me sane but have genuinely made me the most happy i've been in fucking years.

Thank you Linux, for lifting me away from Windows. I already kinda knew what to expect due to SteamOS nurturing me initially, but there has not been a single moment while i've been using Linux that hasn't made me feel a sense of excitement i didn't know i was missing in my life.

Thank you Garry's Mod, for letting me move away from using Roblox as my main source for animation, on top of making the move away from it as a whole a thousand times easier. You've scratched an itch i've been trying to scratch for 7 years now.

Thank you BitView for accepting me into your community with open arms and being a far more user friendly experience than YouTube could ever dream to be.

There's more people i have to thank, but those are the big three. Considering the state of the world right now, i'd probably be an emotional wreck had it not been for all of this happening in one month, but in dire times, we adapt. I genuinely haven't felt this free in fucking years.

Nearly everytime I vist websites which have google captch or the cloudflare equivalant enabled my linux machine gets flagged and I have to check the box or complete some other challenge, but if I visit the same websites on Windows I just get let through. Does this only happen to me or is everyone targeted because most webscrapers use linux or is there another reason?

I managed to get my Canon printer to work with CUPS. It was a fairly easy process and no need to download proprietary software from Canon to get it to work. I tried to use the system-config-printer GUI and that kept giving me a CUPS server error, so I went to the port hosted by CUPS and added the printer under administrator via IPP.

Hi team. So a few years ago I decided to jump into Linux and I decided it was best to force myself. Hence I made my office daily DELL laptop a Debian built. Learnt a lot over this last few years wrt. getting things to work and configuration etc. I then focused on Vim, bash, my workflow, notes system and some programming stuff etc.

Truth be told this machine has been so stable and my workflow is flowing so well etc. That I am even scared to fiddle with it incase I intentionally break something and have deliverables etc. I actually had a close call in the last week, so it made me think that I better do an upgrade from bullseye and before I even think of that... I better back up all my hardwork so that I dont risk an outage/downtime and loosing any of my custom setup thats already so bound to my muscle memory etc..

Anyways, what\where can you guys reccomend I go read up on in terms of learning from scratch the best practice for reliabe and trusted backup, restore and upgrade startegies that I could apply in my laptops case ?

Hey fellow Indian Linux users,

StatCounter data for India shows our market share is dropping while the "Unknown" category is spiking. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm curious if this could be related to privacy tools or ad-blockers that might be obscuring your OS info.

Are you using anything that would do this?

Edit: Blue and Yellow line are almost Mirrored.

Nothing feels good like seeing a near 4:1 compression ratio on lightly used memory.

zramctl 
NAME       ALGORITHM DISKSIZE  DATA  COMPR  TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT
/dev/zram0 zstd          7.5G  1.6G 441.2M 452.5M         [SWAP]

A few weeks ago I was destroying my machine. It was becoming near unresponsive. We're talking music skipping, window manager chugging levels of thrash. With RustAnalyzer analyzing, Nix building containers, and my dev server watching and rebuilding, it was disruptive to the point that I was turning things off just to get a prototype shipped.

I hadn't really done much tuning on this machine. My Gentoo days were in the past. Well, it was becoming unavoidable. Overall changes that stacked up:

• zramswap
• tuned kernel (a particular process launch went from 0.27 to 0.2s)
• preemptable kernel
• tuned disk parameters to get rid of atime etc
• automatic trimming
• synchronized all my nixpkgs versions so that my disk use is about 30GB

And for non-Linux things, I switched out my terminal for vterm (Emacs) and am currently running some FDO/PLO on Emacs after getting almost a 30% speed bump from just recompiling it with -march and -mtune flags on LLVM.

I also split up my Rust crates, which was a massive benefit for some of them regardless of full vs incremental rebuild.

And as a result, I just built two Nix containers at the same time while developing and the system was buttery smooth the whole time. My Rust web dev is back to near real-time.

I wish I had benchmarks at each step along the way, but in any case, the end, I was able to build everything quickly, enabling me to find that logins were completely broken on PrizeForge and that I need to fix the error logging to debug it, so I have to crash before my brain liquifies from lack of sleep.

I made a Window Decoration. I was kinda going for a mix between the Windows 7 aero style and the Windows XP captions. The style is made up of pixmaps and can be ported anywhere. Right now the theme shown is using emerald (since I use compiz) and because it is nice and easy to implement. This is really just a demo, however if anyone is interested I could provide downloads, and perhaps port it to other things such as metacity, kwin, etc.

Mods: Let me know if this sounds too self-promotion-like, I could always change it, but my goal is to just see if anyone cares. If you don't like this, remove it.

Reddit crops the image so it may need to be expanded to see the whole thing.

Should I worry about the safety of software in mainstream repositories (like Ubuntu or Debian)? For example, if I install a password manager from the official repository, is that as safe as downloading it directly from the developer’s website? Or could a repository ever be hacked or host a tampered version of the software?

I just changed my file system from a combination of LVM/EXT4 to BTRFS mostly for root volumes. My backup server and media volumes which span disks are still LVM/EXT4. The servers however have their root volumes as BTRFS now. I upgraded the root volumes with a fresh install of Debian Trixie when it was released. I think they went back to Debian 10 and I also wanted to increase the EFI volume size on each for use with systemd-boot so it became an upgrade opportunity. So once the server root volumes were upgraded I decided to do the same thing with my workstation.

My workstation root volume was LVM/EXT4 with a half dozen different Linux distributions with their own root partitions and a separate data volume which they all link to. I basically recreated that with a subvolume for each root partition labeled "@Debian" or "@Mint" or whatever the distribution was. The Data volume was "@Data". I use rsync scripts for backup and restore and know that they work because that's how I moved everything from my old partitions to new BTRFS partitions. One thing that I believe BTRFS will give me is the ability to do a read-only snapshot and rsync it rather than having to boot to a different Linux distro to do the same since it would otherwise be mounted/changing.

I do know that BTRFS has the ability to make backup/restores easier between common BTRFS systems with BTRFS send/receive but am not ready to change my EXT4 backup volumes yet so will continue to use rsync. I think there's some value in using different file systems in case an issue comes up with the file system itself. I do like the look of btrbk though so may come back to something like this in the future.

I use systemd-boot for my boot manager and am comfortable making modifications to it and the /etc/fstab to accommodate most scenarios. I don't intend to go back to Grub for something like grub-btrfs. If I make a snapshot and want to boot off from it, I'll manually make the changes to the files.

Since I just duplicated what I was doing with LVM, I probably don't have things configured optimally for BTRFS. I see people mentioning subvolumes for "@var", "@cache", "@tmp", "@log". What do I gain by using them? I also haven't used any compression attributes yet for the data volume. Is it worth enabling? What about on the root volumes? Any other things I should consider? Obviously BTRFS is new to me since I haven't been using it except in a basic test environment.

And while the experience has been great, I can’t help but think what the fuss is all about.

Granted I still haven’t been able to get exchange online working with evolution, I’m still yearning for a polished application experience. I think the only consistent experience I’ve had is Firefox being the same.

I know you shouldn’t have the “I did it like this in windows/macos so it should transfer to Linux” mindset but that’s exactly where I’m coming from.

Here’s hoping that I can get m365 applications working using wine or its derivative of some kind.

Help a brother out.

What do you do after installing Linux? Are apps only built using snap/flatpak or are native applications still a thing?