Immutable Linux Distributions - my thoughts

     I like the idea of Immutable Linux distributions because the OS file system is mounted READ-ONLY.  This prevents your os from getting corrupted by accidental deletes, bad upgrades, or wrongful editing, of important system files ensuring your os will always boot the way it did the last boot.  Also, they use Atomic upgrades where the os is upgraded all at once making sure the files are tested together.   I decided to try a couple Immutable Linux Distributions recently, this is what I liked and disliked about them.

    The first one I decided to try is called Sway Atomic based off of the Fedora Silverblue distro which seems to be one of the most popular immutable distributions, but using the Sway window compositor instead of Gnome.  I have used Sway in the past and since I prefer non-desktop environments it was nice to see this option.  I downloaded the iso and created my usb boot stick.

    The install was flawless and similar to other Fedora flavors I had installed previously, and in a few minutes I booted into my new OS.   This distribution uses rpm-ostree to install new software and perform upgrades.  I performed 'rpm-ostree upgrade' and everything upgraded just fine.  Rebooted, and then installed htop by 'rpm-ostree install htop'.  It installed fine but when typing 'htop' at prompt it didn't start, thats when I learned that everything you install on immutable systems require a reboot.  That can be a bit annoying when installing something as tiny as htop or an editor, however I was ok knowing that once installed it is added to the image and available after reboot.  Where I ran into issues is when I decided the nouveau nvidia driver is too slow and I need the proprietary nvidia driver for some graphics intensive programs to work without lag.  Of course its not included in the default available applications so will need to set up the rpmfusion repositories.  I did this by following the directions on the fedora docs page:

$ rpm-ostree install \
  https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm \
  https://mirrors.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
$ systemctl reboot

    The repostitory was active after reboot and was able to install the nvidia driver, however after another reboot, I could never get the driver to load during boot.  I spent about two hours trying to get the driver to work trying to read everything I could online but finally got frustrated and decided to install another Immutable Linux Distribution called Bazzite that is made for gaming with nvidia and other things already configured.

    The Install of Bazzite was similar to the previous install of fedora so no issues there, after boot it did indeed have nvidia drivers pre-installed.  Was able to install a few other programs without any issues and was quite happy with everything working how I like.  Except, only one thing wasnt working, the keyboard lights on my razer huntsman keyboard.  I normally install openrazer and a program called polychromatic to get the lights working how I like.  On Arch linux this is very simple to do.  However, Bazzite even though its made for gaming, didnt have openrazer available in its repository.  I installed rpmfusion repositories and still no openrazer.   I searched around and found out how to install direct from github.  I got openrazer installed did the reboot and ran into the same issue I had with the nvidia driver previously.  I cant seem to get the new driver to load at boot.  I spent around another two hours on this and finally gave up and installed my trusted Arch linux where everything just works and installs as expected.

     In conclusion, that ended my experimentation with Immutable Linux Distributions.  I think it's an interesting concept but mainly for people that want to install the OS without making any changes to their computer.  The concept of Atomic upgrades where the whole os is upgraded at once is nice for relibility but also harder to install and run something immediately.  It may be my lack of knowledge of how drivers are loaded at boot on these distributions, but I was unable to find much documentation on immutable distros since most docs are written for standard linux distributions.  

    I found out through this experiment that I need an os where I am able to make changes to system files for new software, upgrades, or to edit and modify files as I need.  

 

Apple makes good hardware but obsoletes it with software

 I bought a Apple imac 27" in December 2013.   It's been a great computer with no issues, until.. Apple decided to not upgrade the OS (OSX) any longer.   The last upgrade of the OS also seems to be the slowest by far.  Whether that is intentional or not I will let you decide.  It now takes a long time to launch anything.  All you get is a spinning wheel for clicking almost anything.  It has become unusable.   I ran tests on the hardware and it passed with no issues.   Soooo, I decided the issue is it needs a new OS.   I could load windows on it since it has an intel processor but my experience with Windows 11 has been less than desirable.   Therefore there is only one other choice, install Linux on it.

I decided to put Ubuntu LTS on it.  LTS stands for long term support and they keep it updated for a longer time without forcing an upgrade.   Its tricky to put linux on an Apple computer as it doesn't have a normal bios similar to a PC.  I  read back through my post on here when I first got the iMac and loaded linux on it.  I thought would be a similar process but everything changes with time and software.

 Since iMac uses no bios you have to download a boot manager.  In the past I used Refit...but its no longer supported.  I found a new boot manager called rEFInd    After download, to install from a terminal on OSX you have to reboot into recovery mode by holding Command + R when you hear the bong sound during boot up.   Then you select Terminal from Utilities pulldown menu.   To change to the Downloads folder, you have to type cd /Volumes/Mac/Users/(user name)/Downloads.   Once there I changed to the rEFInd folder and ran the install script.  This installed the boot loader.  After a reboot it displayed a menu with choices of what you want to boot.

 The next thing to do is free up space to install the new OS.   I used the apple disk utility to resize the OSX partition to create a new apple partition of 250GB for Ubuntu OS.   After downloading Ubuntu and copying the .iso to a usb stick, I was ready to boot into Ubuntu and install it.    Booting into rEFInd now showed my usb stick with Ubuntu as an option.  I selected it and booted into Ubuntu.

 I installed Ubuntu by doing a custom partitioning. Make sure to not delete sda1 or sda2 apple partitions.  Remove the new apple partition made earlier.    Create an sda3 root and sda4 swap (8GB) and make sure they are formatted.  Install Ubuntu as normal.   After install and reboot my imac booted into Ubuntu automatically without allowing any choice of what OS to boot, not what I had wanted.   

 I realized that Ubuntu had skipped the rEFInd boot loader by installing a new grub entry into my EFI partition and changing the priority of what to boot.    The next step is to reset the boot priority of the boot loaders.  This all sounds a bit complicated and it's way more complicated than it needs to be due to apples insistence of being so proprietary.  Anyway, I was glad it was pretty easy to set the boot order back to what I wanted.   Boot into Ubuntu and open a terminal and type "sudo efibootmgr"  This shows the order of what is booted. 

By typing "sudo efibootmgr -o FFFF,0080,0001" you can change the order of the boot OS.  I changed it to rEFInd first, OSX second, and Ubuntu third.   Did another reboot and it booted to rEFInd and I selected Ubuntu.  Ubuntu booted and everything worked find.  Did a software update and configured some apps and then rebooted to make sure OSX was still booting fine which it does (even though I may never use it again, it has some good tools).   

The thing I learned from this exercise is that Ubuntu is fast on this older iMac.  Whereas OSX is super slow.   This confirmed what I first thought, that its not the hardware that suddenly got slow but something is slowing down the hardware.   All i can say is Long live Linux as it's the only thing saving us from these companies that want us upgrading hardware every few years contributing to landfill waste and global climate issues, which they claim they are against.  Hint: It's all words, they really only care about money.  Otherwise they wouldnt make you upgrade hardware unnecessarily and make phones where you can't even change the battery.   I still have two ipads v1 that work perfectly from a hardware perspective but Apple stopped updating iOS on them years ago so its impossible to install any new apps on them.    I wish companies would quit obsoleting their products on purpose and let the natural change happen if hardware get too slow, or obsoleted due to ports changing or other needed reasons.    

 

 

Wayland sync issues with Nvidia GPU

     I've been using wayland instead of X11 exclusively for the past few months.  Apps that were build for wayland work great but older apps that were written for X11 have to use the xwayland protocol and would sometimes flicker or tear on my Nvidia GTX4060 GPU.  It has been a minor issue using Kde Plasma or Gnome environments since they mostly supported Nvidia.  

    The reason for the flicker using Nvidia GPUs with xwayland and not with AMD or Intel, is because AMD and Intel supported implicit sync which Nvidia did not.   This was a big issue with getting wayland to be the default windowing system on Linux.   Gamers prefer Nvidia GPUs over AMD due to the built in DLSS which makes games faster and better graphics using AI.  Nvidia far outsells AMD in the GPU market. 

    Now the good news, Nvidia for the past couple years has been working to support wayland.   The solution that everyone agreed upon is to incorporate explicit sync in wayland and the GPU drivers.   This solution gets rid of any potential for flicker as the GPU will now explicitly be told to render an apps output to the display.  

    Nvidia is now supporting explicit sync in their latest beta driver.   This appeared in Archlinux AUR two days ago as nvidia-beta 555.42.02-1. I was waiting for this to be released for the last couple weeks, so I quickly downloaded it and installed it.  I am using KDE Plasma 6 and the KDE devs state it won't fully support explicit sync until 6.1, however my flickering is gone.  I read a post by a Nvidia dev stating that just the driver alone should fix most issues even if the window manager or desktop environment does not yet support explicit sync.  It was incorporated in wayland about a month or so ago.

    I now have no issues at all using wayland and I have read most Linux distributions will make wayland the default windowing system in the near future due to Nvidia supporting explicit sync which was one of the final hurdles.   It's taken about 8 years to get this to where it is now but the future of Linux looks bright.

Using Wayland instead of X11 on Linux

      Wayland is the future communication protocol between a display server and its clients on Linux.  In simple terms, it's what allows applications to be shown, moved, resized, closed, etc.   Wayland replaces the aging and less maintained X11 with more modern technologies designed for computing methods today rather than 40 years ago.  It has been in development since 2008, although just now getting more widely used, mainly due to Nvidia gpu's not working well in the past. 

    I have tried using it several times but could only get it working reasonable well using Gnome or KDE environments since I have a Nvidia gpu.  It would also work using Weston, a compositor made by the wayland folks, but lack of hotkey support and virtual desktops, elimated this option.  Since I dont like using full desktop environments, the only other choice for wayland is a compositor that uses wlroots, which is a modular Wayland compositor library.   There are several compositors based on wlroots with the most popular being "sway" a i3 tiling window manager clone.  I tried out sway and river, and found them both working better than in the past but still a bit glitchy with graphics on Nvidia.  

     This brought me back to gnome and kde, could I use them without the full desktops?  I tried using the compositor of gnome without gnome-shell called "mutter".   Mutter did work fine with Nvidia but there wasn't any way to turn off the crazy desktop animations using dconf-editor.   So then I turned to kde, using "kwin" instead of the KDE plasma desktop.  

     Kwin works great, no glitches, no crazy animations, the hotkeys and virtual desktops work also.  There were three initial issues I ran into:  1. X11 apps would not load  2. Applications started very slow due to no notification daemon  3.  No desktop background.

     I solved issue 1 and 2 by installing "dunst" and starting kwin with the following command line:  "kwin_wayland --xwayland dunst"    This starts kwin with xwayland support for X11 apps and then loads dunst a notification daemon.   Issue 3 is still unresolved as kwin doesn't support a desktop background without plasma, but since I usually have a solid or black backgound it doesnt bother me.  

     Running kwin standalone seems to be the best solution for me for using wayland with a Nvidia gpu.   Nvidia support is getting better and I think eventually it will work great with wlroots.  For now, I'm enjoying using the future of linux while making my system work more like in the past :)

 

Setting up my Pi-hole on Google wifi and configuring it as a dhcp server

 I recently changed over to Google fiber internet from using Comcast cable internet.  The city had installed Google fiber cable in the street of our neighborhood and having used fiber optic internet in the past, I was excited to change over to it.  Its a dedicated 1Gbps download and upload at a reasonable cost with an added 1TB google virtual drive to upload files to.  The installation into my home was not optimal but eventually they did it right with some complaining.  It comes with two google wifi mesh routers, and I decided to buy a third for better full house coverage.  The google mesh routers are very easy to setup and configure using a phone. However easy doesn't always mean good as I found out when trying to change advance network settings to configure my pi-hole into my new network. Since there is no way to connect directly into the google wifi routers there were several times my phone would just have a spinning wheel and I couldn't change anything and would require a hard reset and completely resetting all 3 routers to get it talking again. Much harder than a traditional router, However in the end I got everything working properly and even changed the dhcp server to use my pi-hole rather than the router.

Instead of writing all the steps it takes, I will summarize of what is needed to change in the google mesh wifi router to get it all working.  It basically takes setting up 3 things, they are:

1.  DHCP IP Reservations:   This has to be turned on with cloud services and the device and IP of your pi-hole needs to be added.

2.  LAN Settings:   Since there is no way to turn off DHCP in google wifi, the only way to use DHCP inside the pi-hole is to set the Start IP range and End IP range to the IP of your pi-hole.  Both will be the same IP.

3.  DNS Settings:   Set up a custom DNS setting to the IP address of your pi-hole.

Note: Google wifi uses 192.168.86.1 gateway by default rather than 192.168.1.1 like most routers so keep that in mind while configuring ip addresses.  If you do something wrong it may require deleting your network configuration, manually factory resetting each google mesh wifi router and then starting over to set up your network like a new installation.   This is where the google wifi falls way short of a traditional router system.  Simple if you don't want to ever configure much but harder when doing advanced networking.

After configuring Google wifi routers and rebooting network log into pi-hole to configure it as a DHCP server just access Settings > DHCP > Click DHCP Server Enabled checkbox.   Configure the range of addresses that you want other devices to use on your network and your router gateway address and then click Save at bottom of page.

That's it in summary, in reality it was a pain to setup but working well with full house ad blocking, recursive DNS, and DHCP from pi-hole computer rather than from the router.  Lots of benefits to each of these things some of which I have posted about previously. 

Overall, I'm happy with the results but sometimes wish I could just accept defaults like most do as it would be less work, it just bugs me when I can't configure things how I really want them.

Upgrading to Windows11 on an old non supported computer

     I have some older pc's that were running windows10 and wanted to upgrade them to windows11.  Using the microsoft upgrade tool, it reported that my cpu and bios (tpm) would not support windows11.  Knowing Microsoft, most likely that is their way to push new hardware.  I did some research and found a way to upgrade both computers and they have been working without any issues.  I wrote up a small procedure to upgrade for future reference.  I accidently deleted the original file so this is a scanned in from a printed page. 

X11 window manager using the Penrose library written in Rust Language

      Since I began using Linux as my main OS sometime around 1998, I have always enjoyed trying out the many X11 window managers along with hacking on them or creating my own.

     Recently, I discovered on Github an X11 window manager library written in Rust language called Penrose.   Having played around with Rust a few times, I decided to see if using this library would make it easier to create a customized tiling window manager.   I found Penrose to be very well documented and in just a few hours I was able to put together a fully functional tiling window manager that is minimal and stable written in 100% Rust language.

     I named it MPWM for My Penrose Window Manager.  I like the Penrose idea about making a library in a solid system level language that allows others to customize rather than everyone trying to write their own window managers from scratch.  It gives the power of other programming language window managers such as Xmonad or Stumpwm but without having to load the full language into memory like with Haskell or Lisp.

    While MPWM is not perfect, there are still features or changes I may make, it's not about the end results for me as much as the journey.  I enjoy the challenge and making my computer work just the way I want.  The ability to change and modify everything in my OS is what keeps me using Linux to this day.

In search of a better Search Engine

     As google have grown they have increasingly turned to more censorship and advertising.  This limits the number of results from a search and also creates less privacy as they are tracking everything you type in for advertising results.

     Due to Googles lack of privacy protection, a couple of newer search engines have emerged.  Duckduckgo being the most popular alternative search engine that claims it is privacy focused.  However, there have been recent news about censorship on this search engine along with information about them using Bing as a backend, which leads to questions about whether they are much better than Google.

     Due to Duckduckgo's questionable privacy, a new search engine by the creators of the Brave browser has emerged.  Brave Search claims it is "the world’s most complete, independent, private search engine".   I have used it now for a few months and it seems to be fast and provides good results, however how much privacy it provides has yet to be determined.    The Brave browser is based on Chromium but offers settings to enhance privacy on the web, I have used it a number of times along with my favorite browser Ungoogled-Chromium which is just Chromium minus Googles extra spying stuff.  It's not as easy to install and upgrade as other Browsers but I think it worth it.

     So in short, I use Ungoogled-chromium browser with Brave Search as my default search engine which has to be manually set up in Settings but no-one said trying to maintain some privacy on the web was going to be easy.   Enjoy!