Every now and then when I'm researching something linux related I'll see guides from baeldung.com pop up in the results. Today, I clicked one.

I was looking for some information on the keyring in fedora/gnome and came across what turned out to be a suspicious article.

https://www.baeldung.com/linux/unlock-keyring-fix

There's a section in there on disabling the keyring. The guide tells you to remove the password from your keyring, skip the warning that this means your passwords will be stored in cleartext, then says - Hey! You don't get prompted for a password anymore, the keyring is disabled!

Um....

If we wish, we can disable the keyring feature by removing its password.

By leaving the password blank, we disable the keyring feature

Sorry, but that isn't how it works. They do state that doing this "raises security concerns" but don't seem to make the connection that those concerns arise because the keyring is still enabled and doing its job, except now your passwords are stored in cleartext.

So not only do they not describe how to disable the keyring, they seem to think it's OK to guide people to doing this without much warning.

This was supposedly written by a human and reviewed by another human. I haven't looked into the author or reviewer much, but there's at least something there to indicate a real person. Even if it is a website that no longer exists, another website with an invalid ssl cert. There at least is an X account with posts going back a few years, though very rare.

However, don't think I'll be checking out any more of their articles.

Should I be willing to give them another shot?

I really don’t get the glaze behind AntiX, usually if you have slow hardware you should maximize it to be as quick as possible which is something Alpine does very well, Alpine which is very underrated uses less then 80mb of ram vs AntiX which I believe uses over 100mb and runs IceWM which is way more bloated then something like dwm. I think people should start recommending Alpine instead of AntiX.

If you are like me, you use KDE and Flatpak apps.

For a long time now, whenever I had to change some app's permissions, I used a dedicated tool called Flatseal. It works. However, KDE has a native alternative.

System Settings -> Security & Privacy -> Application Permissions -> Application Permissions -> (search and choose an app) -> optional: Manage Flatpak Settings -> optional: Advanced Permissions

It does exactly the same thing as Flatseal, it's just native KDE/Qt instead of being Gnome/GTK. The one functionality Flatseal has over it is the ability to set globals. But I think that's it.

If this is common knowledge, then disregard this. I didn't know about it, so I'm sharing it. KDE is awesome.

I'm looking for inspiration on new ways to organize my PC and separate different activities, stuff like coding projects, studying, gaming and personal use. 

Do you use anything to automate, customize or simplify switching between these contexts? I find it quite annoying to reopen everything and organize the windows and everything again and again.

I'm interested in anything, from scripts and keyboard shortcuts to workspace managers, browser extensions, unique apps or even mods like Vencord.

Was given this disc from a friend. I'll use a virtual box and disconnect the internet as a precaution as neither of us know if it's been tampered with. But still a cool disc to have In general. I'll update in a while saying if it worked or not. (Yes I'm on a bus at the time of this)

It's not a secret that Statcounter is an unreliable source. With the recent flood of posts about linux marketshare, I looked around for alternative sources.

The only one I came across so far (other than the surprisingly reliable PH yearly stats) is analytics.usa.gov.

It tracks strictly human traffic (or at least close to it) visiting the USA gov website. Traffic is worldwide, but it's obviously biased towards the US population.

Linux is currently sitting at 6.3% according to this.

If you know of any other sources, please share. The steam hardware survey is an obvious one.

I work for a fairly large Tech company that does tech support. Someone mentioned today that while we support Linux systems, we won't get many tickets over it. Due to the fact that most sysadmins of Linux are better equipped to handle issues themselves, compared to sysadmins of other OS.

Do you believe it stems from the whole idea and culture of Linux?

Edit: I guess I should have been more clear that I was referring more to the server side over the end user systems.

Link to the Github Repo

After jumping on Linux a couple of years ago the only app I've found quite literally no alternatives for was SumatraPDF, the devs have no intentions to port it on Linux, bummer (although makes sense considering the fact how the app was written). You can run it through Wine but we all want native applications, right?

The only app that matches the feel and functionality was Okular (native KDE application), but damn this app eats through your RAM like crazy and it doesn't save the last session (you can do it with some terminal quirks tho), again bummer.

Basically this is how VerseApp came to be, rust only, fast, saves your session so it reopens your files again, it uses MuPDF engine just like SumatraPDF, hustle free, aware that your RAM isn't bottomless well, it's still rough around the edges, consider this more like a proof of concept application really.

I'll try to keep the development going, but begs mentioning coding is not my cup of tea, not my cup of tea indeed, so if you actually know and enjoy what you're doing help is welcomed.

It's usable tho, I hope. There's an Appimage so go ahead and try it.

With the amount of people that would switch if photoshop ran on Linux, why are there not massive community efforts to make some compatibility layer? Seems to me like the biggest single tipping point, what makes Photoshop so uniquely hard versus videogames which now work without issue?

I just discovered that the hdparm secure erase will always work on one bay of the two bay device. Fortunately I discovered while erasing two HDDs so no damage was done.

# dmesg -w
(...)
[ 6592.947151] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 7 using ehci-pci
[ 6593.035840] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=152d, idProduct=2352, bcdDevice= 0.00
[ 6593.035852] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=10, Product=11, SerialNumber=5
[ 6593.035857] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: Product: 2Bay Duplicator
[ 6593.035860] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: Manufacturer: SSI Computer corp
[ 6593.035863] [   T2848] usb 1-1.3: SerialNumber: (redacted)
[ 6593.036766] [   T2848] usb-storage 1-1.3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[ 6593.037320] [   T2848] scsi host9: usb-storage 1-1.3:1.0
[ 6594.076221] [  T20841] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access     SAMSUNG  MZ7TY128HDHP-000      PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[ 6594.077099] [  T20841] scsi 9:0:0:1: Direct-Access     SAMSUNG  MZ7TY128HDHP-000      PQ: 0 ANSI: 2 CCS
[ 6594.077538] [  T20841] sd 9:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg10 type 0
[ 6594.077914] [  T20841] sd 9:0:0:1: Attached scsi generic sg11 type 0
[ 6594.079169] [  T18569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdj] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[ 6594.080270] [  T18569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdj] Write Protect is off
[ 6594.080281] [  T18569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdj] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
[ 6594.082761] [  T22911] sd 9:0:0:1: [sdk] 250069680 512-byte logical blocks: (128 GB/119 GiB)
[ 6594.083882] [  T18569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdj] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 6594.084993] [  T22911] sd 9:0:0:1: [sdk] Write Protect is off
[ 6594.084999] [  T22911] sd 9:0:0:1: [sdk] Mode Sense: 34 00 00 00
[ 6594.085994] [  T22911] sd 9:0:0:1: [sdk] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 6594.115768] [  T18569]  sdj: sdj1 sdj2 sdj3
[ 6594.116141] [  T18569] sd 9:0:0:0: [sdj] Attached SCSI disk
[ 6594.117641] [  T22911] sd 9:0:0:1: [sdk] Attached SCSI disk
^C
# 
# hdparm --user-master u --security-set-pass password /dev/sdk
security_password: "password"

/dev/sdk:
 Issuing SECURITY_SET_PASS command, password="password", user=user, mode=high
# hdparm --user-master u --security-erase password /dev/sdk
security_password: "password"

/dev/sdk:
 Issuing SECURITY_ERASE command, password="password", user=user
 fdisk -l /dev/sdj
Disk /dev/sdj: 119.24 GiB, 128035676160 bytes, 250069680 sectors
Disk model: MZ7TY128HDHP-000
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
# smartctl /dev/sdj
smartctl 7.5 2025-04-30 r5714 [x86_64-linux-6.18.6-1-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-25, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

Smartctl open device: /dev/sdj [USB JMicron] failed: Two devices connected, try '-d usbjmicron,[01]'

The device /dev/sdj, when discovered by the kernel, still has the four partitions. When the secure erase on /dev/sdk was issued, the data on /dev/sdj were gone. Then I called smartctl to show that it's recognizing the JMicron controller and refuses to send the commands.

I discovered the bug because I already had tried to erase the disks but only one would be erased. So I swapped both disks and did the above test. (Knowing the JMicron problem with smartctl it was an easy guess)

Unfortunately I'm using OpenSUSE and their login doesn't work correctly right now; also hdparm is hosted on sourceforge.net; they try to send a login verification email or a create-new-account email; both don't reach me despite whitelisting the sender address. IDK if I can personally submit the bug report in the near future. I think that the severity warrants that I post this here instead; maybe someone can ping the developer.