I’m going to test the Fedora 43 Linux distribution in its “immutable” “atomic” shape, Silverblue. Fedora Silverblue is Fedora’s atomic, GNOME-based desktop built around an image-based, mostly read-only system rather than a traditional mutable Linux install. As an atomic desktop: the base OS is image-based, updates are applied as a new deployment, and you switch […]
If you use a Wayland compositor like Sway or Hyprland, mako is a great lightweight notification daemon. Many distros make it “start automatically” via a systemd user service, so you don’t need to add exec mako to your compositor config. I’m experimenting with a setup with KDE, Sway, and Hyprland installed on the same machine […]
If you use KDE and Sway (or Hyprland) on the same machine with the same user (something I’m experimenting with), when you launch Chrome and log in with your user in KDE, and then switch to Sway, you’ll see that your account is marked as “Paused”: you have to log in again. The same holds […]
I’ll show how I installed Linux (EndeavourOS, i.e., Arch) on a Dell Pro Max Tower T2. This is quite a powerful computer! Here are a few screenshots taken from Windows 11: Before installing Linux on this computer, I had to change the SSD SATA mode from RAID to AHCI, as documented in a previous blog […]
A small blog post on how to install EndeavourOS with LUKS disk encryption. The installation starts and proceeds as usual (see, e.g., my older post). I’m using KDE for this installation. When you get to disk partitioning, choose manual: If you start from a fresh disk, create a new partition table and choose GPT: If […]
Remembering every Sway shortcut is tough. I wrote a small script that parses your Sway config, displays all bindsym shortcuts in a clean, searchable list via Rofi, and executes the command associated with whichever one you select. It’s fast, keyboard-friendly, and great for discovery: “What did I bind to Mod + Shift + P again?” Now you […]
If you’ve installed Linux on your MacBook Air, you’ve probably discovered that while most hardware works out of the box, the built-in FaceTime HD camera is notably absent from your video applications. Don’t worry—you’re not alone, and there’s a solution that doesn’t involve external USB webcams or complicated workarounds. The issue stems from Apple’s use […]
I have already blogged about managing KDE dotfiles with chezmoi and chezmoi_modify_manager. But what about maintaining them? For example, one of the KDE configuration files changes, and you want to update the version managed by chezmoi. Here’s an example where the Kate configuration file changed on the system and chezmoi detects that:
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❯ chezmoi status MM .config/katerc |
You can […]
Let’s install Ubuntu 25.04 on Apple Silicon (M1) in a virtual machine using UTM. We must first download an Ubuntu ISO for ARM. Go to https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop and search for “ARM 64-bit architecture”; if not available for the specific version you want to install, then you’ll have to install the Ubuntu Server and then install the “ubuntu-desktop” […]
On some computers, such as the new Dell Pro Max Tower T2 and the older XPS 13, the SATA operation mode for the SSD is set to RAID by default. Linux will not recognize the SSD in RAID mode; you need to change it to AHCI. If you just change it to AHCI in BIOS, […]
If you’re a KDE user who wants to keep your desktop configuration under version control, you’ve probably discovered that KDE’s configuration files can be quite challenging to manage with traditional dotfile tools. KDE stores settings in complex INI files that frequently change, contain system-specific data, and include sections you may not want to track. This […]
Let’s see what Eclipse looks like in Wayland in 2025. I report some screenshots of a few Wayland Window Managers and Desktop Environments. Sway Eclipse looks good in Sway: Hyprland The same can be said for Hyprland, especially now that the infamous bug has been solved: GNOME No problems on GNOME either; I’d expect that […]
I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light. However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore. I previously blogged on installing Ubuntu on my old MacBook Air. Everything mainly went smoothly, except for the WiFi, which was not working during and after the […]
Zram, https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/blockdev/zram.html, is a Linux kernel module that creates a compressed block device in RAM. This device can be used as swap space or a general-purpose RAM disk. By compressing data in memory, zram allows your system to store more data in RAM, reducing the need to swap to slower disk storage and improving overall […]
Using “pip” is the supported installation method for Ansible and Molecule. Let’s install Python libraries and applications (in this case, Ansible and Molecule) in a Python virtual environment. (This post is similar to the one about Ubuntu.) First, install the required packages, including the Python virtual environment package:
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sudo pacman -S python-pip python-virtualenv |
Create a virtual environment somewhere (in […]
Using “pip” is the supported installation method for Ansible and Molecule. In Ubuntu, just using “pip” will lead to the error “externally-managed-environment” because of the Python environment that is “externally managed” by the package manager (this prevents direct use of pip for system-wide installations to avoid conflicts or issues). (This post is similar to the one […]
I bought this laptop in late 2016. It’s still a good laptop (8 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD) and very light. However, I cannot use it with macOS anymore. Let’s put Ubuntu Linux on the laptop! I’ll write the installation instructions and the configurations for a fully functional Ubuntu on this MacBook Air, which runs […]
I like the tracker service in Gnome, which indexes files so that you can easily search for them from the Activity view or the file manager. However, I don’t like tracker-extract, which also indexes the file contents: I use Recoll for such a service, and tracker-extract uses too much CPU (it indexes new or modified […]
Updated on 26 March 2025 with more screenshots about the new font. GNOME 48 has just been released on Arch Linux! (And thus, also on EndeavourOS). Unfortunately, many extensions have been turned off because they are not yet compatible (that’s quite usual with new versions of GNOME): The most critical one is the first one […]
I have always liked Amarok, the (initially) default KDE media player. It’s very feature-rich, nothing compared to Elisa. Moreover, it has two crucial features that I haven’t found in any other players: it saves statistics (play count and stars) directly into the music file it synchronizes statistics with the iPod. I have always liked Amarok, […]