cyborganism

Is there an equivalent to Google Drive in Windows for KDE?

I'm talking full synchronization of my Google Drive files into a local folder.

I know there's the KDE KIO Worker that can integrate with Dolphin, but according to itsfoss.com:

Each time you try to modify a file, it is copied to a local cache directory. Once you finish modifying a file, it prompts for uploading the modified file to GDrive.

There's RClone that can do that I think, but I'm not certain. And it looks a bit complicated to set up.

What are you recommendations?

I am using TimeShift on my Kubuntu PC with BTRFS snapshots and I have to say that it's the most wonderfully easy and practical backup tool I've ever used. I recommend it to anyone using any distro, especially if you're using one that's less stable like rolling release, or bleeding edge ones. The cost of storage is minimal to a point you can make snapshots everyday and there are other tools you can install to update your Grub to allow you to boot into any snapshots and recover your filesystem in case of problems. But beware! TimeShift was implemented with Ubuntu's way of configuring BTRFS volumes in mind.

I was testing out Debian in a VM and trying to set up Timeshift to see if I can make snapshots and Timeshift didn’t work because of how Debian sets up volumes with BTRFS.

Since Timeshift uses Ubuntu’s way of setting up volumes and nothing else. Check this video to find out how to install Debian (or any other distro) on BTRFS so it works with Timeshift.

A really great and easy to understand article about BTRFS snapshots.

This is a really great article about how to use BTRFS snapshots with examples.

I have this collection of mp3s from the 90s-2000s from before the streaming services era. Back when people used Winamp or XMMS to listen to their music. I backed up my music files in two places and they're both organized differently.

I need a tool to go through the whole thousands of files, find out what each track is (artist, album, track title, track number all that meta data), rename the file accordingly and apply all the metadata, then move the file in a certain directory structure.

Are there any music organizers out there that can do this? Or do I have to implement my own script?

For context:

I've been using Linux since 2000. Started with Mandrake Linux (Helios?), then I moved to Ubuntu in 2004 and alternated between Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE for a time until I settled with Kubuntu for the last few years.

Ubuntu has been rock solid for me for the past 20 years and I'm used to the APT package management and Ubuntu/Debian environment overall with all the various services and configs, setups and release cycles, etc. The stability allows me to enjoy my spare time playing games and doing other important tasks instead of troubleshooting my system and figuring out how to make something work. Ubuntu has been awesome in that regard.

I've also been dual-booting this whole time with Windows. Gaming on Linux simply wasn't up to snuff up until very recently with Steam working on Wine and Proton for the Steam Deck and Bottles, which makes running Windows games on Linux almost comparable to Windows.

Windows 10 was a great OS, except for a few flaws and privacy issues with the introduction of mandatory Microsoft accounts and One Drive integration. But you could work around those things. It was supposed to be the last Windows we would have to install with perpetual rolling releases, but apparently they changed their minds about that. Windows 11 was released and reading about it gives me nightmares. Using it for work also has been an incredibly buggy and frustrating experience. The invasion of privacy, data collection, screen monitoring and AI integration plus the additional advertisement are all reasons for which I will never install this OS on my personal computer. And some of these features have started to leak into Windows 10.

So I've made up my mind. I'm wiping Windows from my PC and will be running Linux only. I believe it's become good enough to use as a daily driver for a home gaming desktop and for productivity. But... Which distribution should I choose?

The dilemma:

There's been a whole slew of new Linux distributions that have come out lately. Some have been early in the Linux gaming aspect such as POP! OS. Others have tried to become a solid replacement for the default immutable Steam OS such as Bazzite. And there are now some pretty awesome sounding gaming-focused distros such as Nobara. And that's on top of the various existing Ubuntu flavors, Fedora's spins, OpenSuse and the many Arch variants that almost seem to pop up monthly.

I've been shopping around for a distribution to become my daily driver from now until who knows when. I'm expecting to stick to that distro as long as possible. Here's some of the things that I am looking for:

• Not immutable : I find this to be adapted for devices like tablets, IoT devices and handhelds instead of an actual PC. I'll need to be able to change my system configs as I please and an Immutable distro seems like a pain in the butt to deal with that.
• Rock solid : This is the most important aspect and is why a lot of the Arch or other bleeding edge distros won't do. (With some exceptions)
• Hardware support : The second most important aspect. I think that's pretty much covered by most popular distros, but some have better support than others. Especially for ease of getting the right drivers. (Especially for NVidia GPUs, or gaming controllers and devices.)
• Performance : Most popular distros offer ok performance, but some have been enhanced to provide improved performance according to the hardware. This is a very big nice to have, especially for gaming.
• Desktop choice : I'm really not a big fan of Gnome 3. It seems nobody really is. Many Gnome based distros come with quality of life extensions out of the box to fix that. Not a big fan of GTK apps' UI ergonomics either. That's why I prefer KDE over Gnome or Cinnamon. Budgie seems like a great alternative as well. Also having a PowerToys-style FancyZones tiling system is a big big plus (KDE has that OOTB)
• Applications : The thing I love about Ubuntu is the amount of available applications in their repos. I'm hoping to have the same availability in my next distribution.
• Online community/support : Having a great online support community is very important. The more users, the larger the knowledge base and the easier you can find answers to questions to troubleshoot problems.
• Online services integration : Optional but a very nice to have would be to have integration with Google apps like GMail, Calendar, Keep and Google Drive to name a few.
• Customization : As funny as this sounds, I want to use the desktop in its most vanilla form as possible with as few customisations as possible. Over time I found that having extra customisations like extensions, applets, etc tends to break things because of lack of support over time. It's also more difficult to troubleshoot when very few people are using them.

The distributions that ended up meeting my requirements are the following in order of preferences :

• Kubuntu : So far its been working great for gaming but I think there could be some performance improvements. It's my first choice because I'm just so comfortable with it already. Zero effort, but with some compromises in performance.
• Nobara with KDE Plasma : This looks solid and ticks all the requirements. I think there's some amount of learning to do for using YUM/RPM packages and to understand some of the customisations, but I think this effort will be minimal. I am concerned about long term support however since this is a fairly new distro supported by individuals.
• Ubuntu Budgie : I really like this DE, very simple but elegant. But, like Kubuntu, I don't know how it's going to fare performance wise. And I don't know what kind of tools there are to configure gaming controllers, etc.
• Ubuntu (I'm willing to deal with Gnome 3 for simplicity's sake)
• Fedora KDE Plasma spin : Everybody is raving about Fedora so maybe I'll give it a shot as an Ubuntu replacement.
• ~~Manjaro~~ Endeavour OS with KDE desktop :Possibly the only Arch distro I'm willing to install because they focus on stability, however learning about the packaging system and configs/environment feels like a drag. But with the great community and documentation I'm willing to make an effort for this one.

What are your thoughts on this? What are your recommendations based on my requirements?

EDIT:

Thank you very much for everyone's input. I've spent a good part of the day installing distros in a VM to check out some of your suggestions and reading more about my choices.

I can't believe I am saying this, but I am reevaluating my choice of using Kubuntu. After some reading I have found out that Ubuntu and it's flavors will not be supporting flatpaks starting in 23.04. And there are several known problems with snap, such as serious performance issues. A task that would take 1-5s as a regular .deb installed app, would take up to 10 times that time to complete. Canonical is also working to modify apt to use snaps instead of installed .deb packages. They are aggressively pushing snaps to a point where they'll want to replace the majority of the software with snaps eventually.

Yeah there's security features built-in and all, which flatpaks don't necessarily have. And the security is tighter around Canonical's snap repos compared to flathub for example. But I don't know if I'm ready to move to that new way of doing things. And Canonical is going against what the community wants.

I don't know. I think I'm more confused now that I was when I started...

Anyone tried Lubuntu with LXQT desktop lately? Especially for Linux gaming using Steam/Proton/Bottles, etc?

What's your opinion about adding chicory to coffee? I know there's a few places, like Café du Monde in New Orleans that offers coffee with chicory. It's also sold as a mix in grocery stores in France.

I started trying it recently by adding a small teaspoon to my coffee in my French press and it gives a really smooth brew.

What do you think? Are you a purist? Have you tried it? What's your opinion?

Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.

After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.

I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????

Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?

What the actual fuck???

I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.

And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?

It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.

I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.

Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.

I'm done.

Fuck this.

I've lost thousands these past couple of weeks thanks to agent orange here who's been threatening Taiwan with all sorts of bullshit. This has affected the whole chip market, which in turn affected the EV market and other computer hardware manufacturers.

Already, the EV market wasn't doing so well due to lack of enthusiasm from consumers who can barely afford a shelter over their head, let alone a good damn electric car at the price they're selling them. This also affect the EV battery industry and everything related.

My ETFs we performing poorly already, so on to of this with the chip industry stocks tanking, I decided to sell everything.

Instead I'm going to invest in SAP which seems to be doing well and I think they announced they were going to enter the travel industry with a new platform? And their stocks are going strong.

Hi y'all,

So I read recently that the latest NVidia drivers (550 I think) had some big performance and compatibility improvements to work with Wayland. So I went and gave it a shot. I went ahead and upgraded my drivers to the aforementioned version, installed plasma-workspace-wayland and rebooted.

For your info, I have a 1440p 144Hz monitor and a NVidia GeForce RTX 3070. My CPU is a AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and I got 32GB of RAM.

I tried Mullet MadJack and GhostRunner, which are running fine using X11 on current drivers btw. The performance was awful. I was getting no more than 10 FPS. I did a bit of searching and found I was missing the libnvidia-egl-wayland1 package. Installed it, rebooted just in case and tried again. The FPS was much better. 144FPS for Mullet Madjack and in the 100+ FPS for GhostRunner.The problem I noticed however was how BAD the shearing was in the image in both games. Even if it had no problem running the game.

I went ahead and upgraded the NVidia driver to 555 since some other Reddit post recommended it. But I ran into a slew of other issues. The Plasma compositor crashed all the time, and if my PC went to sleep, my desktop and windows, menu, everything wouldn't get drawn completely and the mouse cursor left a trail everywhere. I had to eyeball click through my menu to log out and go back to X11.

It looks like there's still some improvements that need to be made. Until then I'll stick with X11.