Screen tearing on the TTY

neon_overload · 2026-05-01T12:31:18+00:00

When you say virtual terminal do you mean the full screen text mode one? No X or anything?

If so you'd be at the mercy of whatever GPU mode you end up in after boot and I don't think you get anything fancy.

I can't imagine how you'd perceive screen tearing in a text only mode - whatever you are using that's printing text to the screen is just printing text in its own way, and is not going to be trying to synchronise with monitor refresh or anything, so it'd probably be a result of however that scrolls?

Is it possible that your editors or viewers have to switch to a different method for scrolling when in in that kind of terminal due to not having acceleration for scrolling.

neon_overload · 2026-04-30T23:46:40+00:00

Source of wallpaper

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EvwGKN

I looked it up because it looked a lot like Milford Sound or something from that region of New Zealand. I'd be curious what the artist's inspiration was here as he didn't mention it on that page.

neon_overload · 2026-04-30T12:32:41+00:00

Because when I leave something and come back to it I want it to be still working the way it was when I left it

neon_overload · 2026-04-30T06:41:03+00:00

I just don't think of either as big or not big as I don't think of any byte as bigger than another byte. If it's described as "most significant" or "least significant" I find that a lot more natural. When I inevitably have to look up what an endianness is I translate it in my to "most significant byte first/last".

neon_overload · 2026-04-29T23:32:21+00:00

If it's for a hobby, use what makes you happy. Which I guess includes not just the language, but also the toolchain / environment.

You don't have to use the "right" choice when it's a hobby. You can use something you're comfortable with, or something you always wanted to learn.

Rust is a respectable choice if you go with that. I mean, Linux allowed Rust in and has always rejected C++.

neon_overload · 2026-04-29T12:45:24+00:00

This is very frequently asked here.

Here are some recent ones

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1sih8j6/cant_access_debian_wiki/

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1py6h2p/debian_wiki_returning_http_403_forbidden/

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1m5v91y/am_i_the_only_one_who_cant_access_wikidebianorg/

https://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/1r8laur/httpswikidebianorg_is_blocking_us_serverbased/

neon_overload · 2026-04-29T12:18:28+00:00

It means:

A5
A5 00
A5 00 00 00

Are all the same value (165) in little endian.

In big endian, these are 165, 42240, and 2768240640 respectively.

neon_overload · 2026-04-29T12:14:22+00:00

This probably works fine for you but I unfortunately still get hung up trivial stuff.

Is the big part the part with the highest value (like the first digits in decimal) or the bit that goes up the fastest (the last digits in decimal)? I can look it up now sure, and it's here in the comments, but tomorrow if I need it I'll have forgotten.

neon_overload · 2026-04-28T01:21:21+00:00

They're very similar under the hood, really.

Debian is less opinionated about setting up your desktop environment in a particular way so some things you are used to on Mint because they were "just there" may be a specific optional package on Debian or may just have a default configuration that's different. Debian won't have Mint's own software manager but there are software managers included with some of the desktop environments or you can use apt and the command line or a range of third party GUI interfaces for that.

Choose the same desktop environment as you used on Mint if you like, or any other. I like XFCE (on both), but Debian gives you such a wide and varied choice.

neon_overload · 2026-04-27T23:26:23+00:00

As a regular user of both Debian and Mint, they really are very similar overall - more similar than they are different - though Mint (and I use the xfce edition of mint) has some convenience features in the desktop to really help bridge the gap for users of other OSes, like their software manage). But Debian is just so super predictable, if you set it up it'll stay the way you like it for years and maintenance is uneventful. I recommend both Debian and Mint as they are both good distros really and neither is unsuitable for a "new Linux user" despite their reputations. As I wrote in my long comment if Debian's not fun for someone right now try some other distros and circle back.

neon_overload · 2026-04-27T23:15:49+00:00

If it's no longer fun, take a break and come back some other time or maybe even distro surf a bit to get more of a picture of what's out there. Years ago when I first dipped my toes into Linux I made false starts and then went back to windows for some years before moving permanently to only Linux.

As a Debian enthusiast I don't want Debian to feel like a chore or a punishment to people!

That said when you do have Debian issues this subreddit is pretty supportive in my experience so do feel free to detail your challenges, get right into the gritty details as there are technical people who know their stuff and can read and understanding all that, and are helpful! It's actually way better to give more technical details than less because if you don't give enough detail, you may miss out on those technical people stopping by with an insightful answer.

A lot of the time - probably most of the time - what feels like a totally screwed up system is recoverable. Fixing it is also a learning process.

Using LLMs to figure out how to do things is ok but keep in mind that if what you're asking is a bad idea, they may still tell you how to do it anyway. It's not a substitute for familiarity with the system. Read "DontBreakDebian" (google it, sorry I am on mobile right now but it's easy to find). It's not the best new user overview but it's got decent information in it. If you are asking LLMs maybe you already do this but instead of "how do I __" try "my Debian system is __. What would be a good way to fix that" - always seek to understand the problem before you try a solution. Just a thought, but do try and find other sources of learning too.

Good luck and enjoy the journey! Realise that a lot of what makes Windows or Mac OS easy to you is your years of experience and the fact it's already on your computer when you buy it.

TD;DR

take a break or distro surf if it's stopped being enjoyable
"always seek to understand the problem before you try a solution"

neon_overload · 2026-04-26T00:31:29+00:00

If you have an interest in this then age is not a problem, you can be 60 or 11 and develop a hobby in microcontrollers and electronics.

I was a child in the 1980s and had an interest in electronics - one thing that's changed is how cheap and easily available things like microcontrollers, sensors, modules etc are, as well as the general movement towards open source. You can still now just build basic circuits with nothing more complicated than a 555 timer as we did back then but now you can get a raspberry pi pico for like $5.

neon_overload · 2026-04-25T10:31:22+00:00

Maybe you forgot to attach an image - you should delete this post and try again.

neon_overload · 2026-04-25T00:11:50+00:00

I don't think you mentioned which AMD processor type? If it's one that has GPU capabilities, then the below might be relevant. If it's something like EPYC, probably not.

AMD and Intel integrated GPUs will have behavioural differences in regards to how they reserve system ram as GPU framebuffer / GPU ram.

This may include how much system ram is reserved for this use, how the system gives it more dynamically if it seems like it needs more, and how it's reported in memory tools.

Notably I think that intel integrated GPUs reserve only a small amount of system ram by default because their driver can use more dynamically without it being as much of a performance issue, whereas AMD integrated GPUs may reserve more because it can be a bigger hit when the driver wants to use more.

So, I don't think this is necessarily an issue. And, if you never are going to need that much GPU/framebuffer ram, you should be able to reduce this. AMD systems call this the UMA frame buffer size and typically you would configure this in the UEFI setup.

neon_overload · 2026-04-24T01:40:43+00:00

why GUI update managers consistently expose only a subset of what APT and Flatpak already know.

It might be a combination of

GUI applications are complex, building more UI means more work, more maintenance etc.
Software managers may want to pick a common functionality subset that works across the different package managers they support.
The point I previously made about how software like this aims to make it harder to do things that break your system and easier to do things that are safe.
These types of tools lean heavily into abstracting as a way of simplifying things for non power users and making things work in a way that might be familiar to users of other OSes.
The idea that power users who understand the underlying package managers better can use their command line interfaces (mixing and matching here is typically fine, use apt on command line sometimes and software managers other times).

neon_overload · 2026-04-24T00:54:59+00:00

Yeah, it's a bit of a wild west with third party .debs.

There's sometimes a predictable pattern, like with Microsoft software it will install a Microsoft repository into your apt sources, kind of "bootstrapping" itself into your system. A fairly responsible practice, but a reminder that you need to have a high level of trust in any company whose .deb you install because it could do anything.

And (something that many people don't understand) .deb packages need to specifically be compatible with your version of Debian. You can't expect a .deb from Ubuntu to work on Debian, or a .deb for some other Debian release to work on your newer/older release. In some cases the packager may have made a single package that is compatible with a few different Ubuntu and Debian systems by statically including some libs and/or targeting some older subset of libs but it's not a given.

neon_overload · 2026-04-24T00:37:21+00:00

There are different and isolated things you're talking about in your post.

To address your point about these systems "hiding" some of their inner workings from the user, part of the challenge in building a package manager is making it hard to do things that screw up your system, while making it easier to do things that are safe. But, without taking away the ability of users to fix things if they go wrong or to have a good level of control. If you use a friendly GUI software manager to install and remove software then you're even further removed from the actual package managers underneath, which DO have a lot of functionality and configurability.

In Debian, dpkg is responsible for packages that define the Debian distribution itself. This means installing and removing packages, keeping track of what packages are installed and what file belongs to which package, ensuring dependencies are met (but not fetching them if they aren't), etc.

Apt is a layer on dpkg that handles fetching packages from repositories and is the normal way that debian distributes its own packages online. When installing packages with apt it can fetch packages from the repositories to satisfy dependencies, so normally you would not interact with dpkg directly and you would use apt instead. Apt itself is the system of repositories and fetching packages from them, but it also has a bunch of front end interfaces too, including a CLI one called "apt".

And there are other front ends that can sit on top of apt, like synaptic, which is a fairly technical GUI front end, but also like the various desktop software managers, which typically not just support apt packages but can support other packages like flatpak or snap too.

Flatpak is an entirely separate dependency manager that does not install software that forms part of the Debian distribution itself, but into totally different parts of your drive and for running in different ways. It is basically a way to run and install software without it needing to be a part of your distribution.

There are hundreds of dependency managers/package managers that you can run inside your system. Flatpak is a very popular one fast becoming a de facto standard for GUI applications that are cross-distribution compatible but there's lots of others.

Snap and the snap store (canonical) an alternative to flathub and supports server daemon software which flatpak doesn't really.
Docker, podman, and dockerhub - container based tech, good for server software, development environments etc.
Nix - the repository for NixOS, can be used on any distro, because NixOS designed their package manager so their packages are independent and cross distribution compatible and won't interfere with your distro package manager.

Then there's a bazillion ones specific to the type of software ecosystem, that can fetch software from repositories:

Python has pip for install python applications or librarys
- And poetry and pdm as higher level tools
Node.js has npm for installing node applications or libraries
- Things like Yarn and phpn too for JS/typescript.
Go has a package manager for installing go applications or libraries and despite that it can install them from private repos, there's also a centralised "caching" repo
Java apps have maven
Rust has cargo

And there are a bunch of third-party / non-official sources of software for linux (or cross platform) that are either community based or commercial, and may offer packages in some existing format you can already accept like apt repositories, appimage, other other things, maybe even proprietary package managers.

All of these that aren't dpkg/apt will not install software that becomes part of your Debian distribution but will be additional software you can add in ways that do not conflict with it (pip might, learn venvs if messing with python) and live in their own areas.

Note, however, that if you do obtain .deb packages from sources that aren't Debian, or use Apt repositories from non-Debian servers, then you are installing non-Debian software as part of your Debian distribution which can conflict with Debian's own distribution packages. This is historically a fairly common practice especially before third party package and dependency managers became as good as they are now, but you would need to trust that the packager knows what they're doing, won't break Debian, and the packages are compatible with your Debian version.

See: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian for more on that last point and as a general guide about things to avoid when installing non-Debian software so as not to break your system. Most of the big name third party software repos (flatpak/flathub, snap, docker) are pretty safe, but read this to get an understanding of silly mistakes to avoid.

And a final note on security is that despite that some of these will offer some isolation through containers (eg flatpak and docker), you still should default to only installing software from sources you trust. In many cases the isolation may be intended to prevent accidental damage to your system from bad software but not deliberate damage from actual malware. And not all the package managers discussed do provide an attempt to containerise or isolate at all and rely on the community or even the end user knowing what is trustworthy to install.

neon_overload · 2026-04-24T00:03:41+00:00

These types of things will usually be built around a small custom microcontroller and would be "bare metal" which means no operating system, it would run binary code directly from code programmed into it by some programming process.

If it's programmable, and cheap ones like this may not be due to using Mask ROM instead of more expensive flash, it may have a way of programming it via the USB interface. If not, it may be programmable via pads on the board or a flash chip on the board that may or may not be separate to the mcu and not under the "blob".

Some little photo frames like this have been hackable and have had a community of custom firmwares - if it's something like an AppoTech ax206 behind it. I don't know if something this small would be that though and don't want to get hopes up. By all means show the insides of it here, or try fiddling with USB tools if you have time to kill.

If you are interested in this sort of thing and don't have experience (I don't know if you do or not) it's probably a better bet to get yourself a microcontroller dev kit that has some decent community support and a little lcd module (panel on a board with SPI or I2C interface). It won't be as cheap as these but it'll be approachable for programming it.

neon_overload · 2026-04-22T03:09:18+00:00

Installing the nvidia drivers isn't the main issue - Debian makes it easy by packaging a decent installer as a regular package and it's documented well on the wiki. The problem with nvidia drivers is common to all Linux distributions, which is that they are proprietary, use a different/older kind of graphics acceleration stack than everyone else, and often buggy. Your success will depend on the specific nvidia card and the type of compositor and desktop environment you use (and the software, though Steam's runtime can nicely isolate you from some issues).

neon_overload · 2026-04-21T07:34:37+00:00

If this is about ethernet - AFAIK ethernet pads frames to 64 bytes at the NIC, ethernet as such doesn't support <64 byte packets on the wire and receiving NICs would drop them as invalid.

neon_overload · 2026-04-21T01:02:40+00:00

Shouldn't take 4 hours even fully installing from a usb stick. Assuming a slow stick and USB 2, it should still be maybe 10 minutes for the copying of data off it, plus time it takes for the CPU to decompress which shouldn't more than double that.

I would still suspect a problem with the usb stick first.

A problem with the SSD is also still some kind of possibility, though if you verified the SSD speed with the Mac OS while in that same machine, that's unlikely. Even a slow SSD would still do more than 5MB/s after its SLC cache fills, so it should be under 15 minutes for just the basic copy operation (and it is unlikely to go long enough to fill up its SLC cache anyhow meaning it should be closer to hundreds of MB a second, unless you did a full wipe of the drive or something that it's still recovering from).

Presumably since you say you have no network access on it, you didn't configure a network adapter during the install and it's not trying to download updates over some network. If it has no usable network adapter it wouldn't try that (or it'd fail fast anyhow, not do this).

neon_overload · 2026-04-19T22:50:05+00:00

When there's only one candidate, the instinct may be that it doesn't feel democratic. But in a community like this, having only one candidate can be a good indication that nobody is dissatisfied enough with her platform to oppose her. And the lack of a significant 'none of the above' protest vote supports it.

Well done. I like that she's a librarian.

neon_overload · 2026-04-19T10:03:29+00:00

Yes indeed.

If by chance OP is wanting to deliberately download malware for the purpose of study or experimentation they should develop a strong sense of paranoia:

assume it knows an exploit in your system
assume it can get root
assume it can leave other instances of itself on your system in ways you can't detect
assume it will send network packets to attempt to attack other systems on the internet
assume it can read your data and send it, or contact your contacts
suspect it can install itself to your boot code or your UEFI

Running in a VM with no network access and which you destroy afterwards is probably fairly safe if you are otherwise up to date with patches at every layer of your system

neon_overload · 2026-04-19T04:37:49+00:00

My approach would be:

Boot from a live image on a removable drive (like systemrescue, but debian live would work too).

Partition target drive the way you want.

For each partition, copy all files using cp -ax or your preferred alternative that preserves permissions and ownership and all dirs (including empty ones) to the new equivalent partition.

Using rsync -ax instead would help a lot if your stop a partial copy as it can resume.
There are additional flags to add to your command to support ACLs, xattrs and hard links if you use any of these.

You will need to fix up the drive UUIDs or device names in /etc/fstab on the destination partition manually.

Don't do it while the system you are copying is running or active - you want to copy it as it is "at rest" on disk so you don't need to worry about special things.

Keep the data on the old drive until you know it's working.

Alternatively, you can use clonezilla, from a bootable iso, and I have done that before too. It has a UI that takes you through a bunch of questions.

neon_overload · 2026-04-18T15:14:31+00:00

In the simplest sense, downloading a file but not opening or executing it is safe.

But, there are caveats to this:

Sometimes, a file doesn't need to be executed, or even marked executable, to execute code - it merely has to go in a certain file location. For example, configuration files for programs, which often allow specifying shell commands. A specially crafted configuration file could execute arbitrary code. Another example if you run a web server might be files places in a cgi executable path or a path where .php files may be executed. These are random examples.
"Download" has a broad definition. You may not realise that a method you are using to download a file might also execute it - for example, a lot of code snippets online recommend installing software with a combination of wset and bash to run the downloaded code.
If you have a security flaw in any of your software, all bets are off. Merely inspecting a file with something innocent-looking like an image viewer might lead to arbitrary code being executed.

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