The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice

[Betonhaus]

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

 

[Slav Power]

Ventoy is a solid choice. Nowadays when a 64GB USB stick costs pennies, would you rather:
-wipe it clean
-prep it to be bootable
-unzip a 4GB ISO onto it
-have 60GB of space left unused
-do it all over again once you want to boot a different ISO

or:
-wipe it clean
-prep it with Ventoy
-copy a 4GB ISO on it
-have 60GB of space to be used for more ISO's
-copy another file to have multiple ISO's bootable from a GRUB menu

The last time I had a serious issue with Ventoy refusing to cooperate was on some dodgy old laptop I tried putting some lightweight Linux distro on just so that it could browse web, but the fucker would refuse to see the damn thing even if I used Rufus so that was a lost cause. Otherwise the fucker's been reliable in booting up on a wide variety of hardware. Not to mention it can do more advanced shit like booting into VHD images so you could have multiple OS instances on something like a SATA/NVMe SSD in a USB enclosure to fuck around with.

Ventoy is especially good for distrohopping, booting into EndeavourOS just to test something real quick took nothing. Download the ISO, pop it on the stick, reboot, change boot device, select ISO, boom. Though I guess if you find masochistic pleasure in excessive purism then you can do the entire dd chain every time you want to try a different distro.

The Linux-running computer I'm on is about 5 years old now. The TBW to the SSD is now almost 20 TB.

Don't be so fucking squeamish about SSD wear. My previous system SATA SSD had like 80 something % of life and it's still fine. The reason I stopped using it was because the OS on it shat itself and I reused a different SSD just to get things going again, and guess what, same thing will happen to you sooner than the SSD wearing out: your OS shitting the bed in one way or another. Don't forget that most consumers will rape these SSD's not only with stock Windows, but also modern browsers that constantly do write operations in the background, yet they don't fail. And if you really care about your data, back it the fuck up.

 

[Miller]

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

Do you have the packages "gst-libav" and "ffmpegthumbnailer" installed? That should make the proper thumbnails automatically.
edit: check the post below

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

Do you have the packages "gst-libav" and "ffmpegthumbnailer" installed? That should make the proper thumbnails automatically.

Since he mentioned using KDE, the correct package is the annoyingly similar "ffmpegthumbs".

"ffmpegthumbnailer" is for GTK stuff like Thunar.
I would double check that the video previews are enabled in Dolphins settings (Under Interface -> Previews like the image above)

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

Try clearing the thumbnail cache folder, which is located at "~/.cache/thumbnails"
Delete everything in the folder (but not the folder itself) and restart Dolphin. Had this issue before and that fixed it.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Gonna post here cause I don't wanna bump another thread. I recently did a fresh install of EndevourOS on my PC and I noticed that the thumbnails for my video files are fucked.

View attachment 7559522

Sometimes a file will have a proper thumbnail, but it seems like they only look proper if they were manually set and not the auto-generated ones.

View attachment 7559523

Is this because I switched to using MPV as my player? I thought this would be something with the Dolphin file manager since I had a similar issue with no image thumbnails before but that was a setting about file sizes and for video files it doesn't seem to be a thing. And yes I do have the ffmpg or whatever that is meant to generate thumbnails.

I don't know much about dolphin. But generally with other file managers they use an external program to general thumbnails. You probably want to look into how dolphin does it. You might be missing a dependency.

Is it normal for that jbd2 process to be running nonstop? Shouldn't it finish at some point?


No need to be a dick about it. I haven't disabled journaling (jbd2 is still running), I keep backups, and all that constant writing did make me "autistically care" because I didn't know that much about SSDs. Having to replace a drive or reinstall an OS is a pain. Also I still think it's not a dumb idea to minimize writing to flash memory anyway.


That's a lot of torrenting.

They are probably right though. Its likely not worth caring, or paying attention to at least. Unless it's spending a lot of CPU cycles writing. That is noticably degrading performance. Which I doubt it is.

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

Probably depends on the specifics of your system. I've had some long syncs while using some stuff. But generally at least with how I have my schedulers, and filesystems now. After the program is done. The sync is pretty much instant. Though obviously the actual copying part is a little longer.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

Does anyone know of a way to make it work like Windows (where once its done in the file copy dialog its just done, and doesn't lie to you that its done and still copying in the background)?
Its been one of my biggest pet peeves with Linux and I've used it for several years.
I couldn't find a way to fix this other then manually writing udev rules for every device, which I would rather not do.

 

[prollyanotherlurker]

Does anyone know of a way to make it work like Windows (where once its done in the file copy dialog its just done, and doesn't lie to you that its copying in the background)?
Its been one of my biggest pet peeves with Linux and I've used it for several years.
I couldn't find a way to fix this other then manually writing udev rules for every device, which I would rather not do.

At least Gentoo has a package called something like

Nvme-schuduler-udev-rules.

Or SSD. I can't remember. Anyway. It makes it easy. It just has a config file in /etc/default you edit and it takes care of that for you.

Also in general I find using fast file system with good defaults helps. For me I like xfs. And if you don't have to worry about other operating systems for usb's f2fs is pretty good actually. But if you need compatibility it's not the best.

 

[General Emílio Médici]

Try clearing the thumbnail cache folder, which is located at "~/.cache/thumbnails"
Delete everything in the folder (but not the folder itself) and restart Dolphin. Had this issue before and that fixed it.

It worked flawlessly! Took a little bit of time to delete all of it sure, but once I started Dolphin again and went to the folder it was all looking normal now, thanks!

 

[ToroidalBoat]

hey @Darkholme's Dungeon

Found out that leaving System Monitor open is what's causing the issue with the systemd journal. The cause, rather than the symptom. There was an endlessly recurring "gnome-system-monitor.desktop[2583]: glibtop(c=2583): [WARNING] statvfs '/run/user/1000/doc' failed: Operation not permitted" message. With System Monitor closed, it is more quiet.

Another recurrent thing: opening that "more items" thingy in that dock makes repeated "Couldn't find child [[hex code] Gjs_ui_windowPreview_WindowPreview ([file or tab])] in window slots" for some reason. Any and all open tabs in Firefox (and any and all open images in Image Viewer) get listed with every use of that in that systemd-journal text.

hey @Slav Power

squeamish about SSD wear

Couldn't help it. I also tend to worry in general more than average, so that doesn't help much.

My previous system SATA SSD had like 80 something % of life and it's still fine.

So 20% or 80% remaining?

The reason I stopped using it was because the OS on it shat itself

What happened and how long did it take to happen?

back it the fuck up

I've been backing stuff up since I got my first computer almost a quarter of a century ago.

(can't quote post even by selecting text for some reason)

 

[AnOminous]

But at this point, I'm comfortable with Grub, and making a Grub bootloader USB isn't a headache to me.

The last time I had to do a major rescue was because I'm a GRUB retard (well GRUB2) and shitter-shattered my entire boot.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

It is a kernel service. It runs so long as you're using ext4 journaling.

So I take it the about 1GB per day for OS operations is normal?

 

[Slav Power]

So 20% or 80% remaining?

80-something % remaining, 10-something % burned through. Mind you it was an SSD I got back in 2019 and daily drove Windows on it. I abused it for years and it wasn't even 1/3rd through it's lifespan, so that should tell you how resilient SSD's are.

What happened and how long did it take to happen?

One evening after years of doing shit that should've broken it but didn't. Started off at like LTSC 2019, then upped it to LTSC 2021, then changed it back to GAC Pro, and the fucker would refuse to break. Then there was a global issue of Windows Update failing due to the recovery partition getting filled up, so I decided to remove the old one after making the new one with gparted to recover those 500MB of disk space. The result was that Windows would BSoD at boot, I couldn't fix it so I did a fresh install on a spare SSD.

The funniest bit is that later on I've put that SSD into my old ThinkPad, and Windows would boot. It would readjust for the ThinkPad and it would land me on the desktop. I then replugged it into my main rig and it would once again boot normally. I don't have the heart to format that SSD to reuse, it's like a testament to my luck and retardation. Besides, I've recently, finally upgraded to an NVMe drive for the OS and I just copied that emergency install with Macrium Reflect. Works just fine so I don't really need to reuse that old SATA SSD drive. I reused the one I used for the emergency install as an external storage drive though, which was my initial intent with it.

 

[teriyakiburns]

In Linux, it's not. Boot a kernel with init=/bin/bash then dd if=/dev/olddrive of=/dev/newdrive. Next, tune2fs /dev/newdrive -U $(uuidgen). Next Grub run, change root=UUID=[whatever uuid uuidgen created], boot, run update-grub. Windows is way more irritating.

I will point you here:

Post in thread 'The Linux Thread'

May 24, 2025

I would think it's just a gui front end for the command.

Sudo dd if=whatever.iso of=/dev/whatever

That is literally the command I use to "burn" all my iso's to a USB. I run

sudo dd if=HannahMontanaLinux.iso of=/dev/sdb bs=1M status=progress

The belief in dd as the way™ to copy raw disk images is pure superstition. You can literally almost always just use cat or cp.

See articles:

Useless Use Of dd

The Cult of DD

• WhiteNight

• 
• 
• 

DD is not a magic special tool for cloning disks . /dev/sda is a file. You can cat it.

 

[daffodils]

I'm just annoyed how Linux lies about how long copying a file to a USB drive takes. You think it's done it you have to run sync to see it takes another ten minutes or so to complete

You can avoid that with mount -o sync, but it is slower than mounting async and doing a sync at the end. An extra 7-13s for an 8GB file in my half-assed tests. The manpage also claims it may be bad for flash drives.

 

[analrapist]

DD is not a magic special tool for cloning disks . /dev/sda is a file. You can cat it.

Yeah, yeah. I use pv often. Issue is that if you're working as an unprivileged user, as you ought, you need to boost privilege to actually write to /dev/whatever. sudo dd privileges the output write. None of your articles addresses this, so by all means, let's see you write a cat-centered write command that works from unprivileged space that uses sudo for privilege escalation.

 

[teriyakiburns]

so by all means, let's see you write a cat-centered write command that works from unprivileged space that uses sudo for privilege escalation.

sudo sh -c 'cat mystupidimage.img > /dev/sda'

 

[Slav Power]

Reminder that if you don't have Solitaire installed on your computer, you're a cocksucking niggerfaggot.

And if you don't want to be a cocksucking niggerfaggot: https://pysolfc.sourceforge.io/

 

[ZMOT]

OpenSUSE is to SUSE what Fedora is to Red Hat, but SUSE is worse than Red Hat, with OpenSUSE calling conservatives rotten flesh. Fedora is a rolling release distro like Arch and is known for being easy to use (even if they like to push things before they're ready so Red Hat can test them), which is why I recommended it.

depends how you define "worse". some open source faggot being retarded on the internet is nothing new, and even if he wants to smear his libshit all over the distro, suse isn't nearly as big and influential enough to get far with it. if the more levelheaded people haven't already told him to STFU and get back to work.
meanwhile fedora is redhat, the same guys that try to force me become a footfag and pozz any (even your) distro's neghole (and silently holding the same opinion, if they don't tunnel vision on the tangerine terror while drinking one of their shaman's "home-made" medicine...)

I can ignore the former knowing karma is a bitch and that kraut retard will probably contract aids sooner or later fucking troon cock at a pride afterparty (if he hasn't already), while the latter has a much more direct effect on me and linux.
not to mention the real "fight the system!" sugarrush putting a swastika as my opensuse background. what's he gonna do about it, cry some more on bluesky like the pathetic tard he is?

 

[volatile puar]

not to mention the real "fight the system!" sugarrush putting a swastika as my opensuse background. what's he gonna do about it, cry some more on bluesky like the pathetic tard he is?

As an OpenSUSE user you are legally subject to German laws, so they're gonna sick interpol on you and throw you in Guantanamo Bay.

 

[ZMOT]

As an OpenSUSE user you are legally subject to German laws, so they're gonna sick interpol on you and throw you in Guantanamo Bay.

given past statements I wouldn't put it past him and his ilk to race to the police (remember, ACAB!) because there are "nazi opensuse users".
imagine behaving like moby with all to show for being some "who?" distribution leadership.