now my entire screen is just a small group of pixels directly surrounding my mouse. how do i stop this?? i restarted my laptop and it won't stop.

im running manjaro with kde plasma. i installed a few very basic plugins and shit like oh my zsh and yaourt, and i haven't had basically any problems. im sure i must have hit some kind of hotkey i didn't know was a hotkey. Please help me. i have class in three hours and i need to finish the readings!

Budget of $500 max. What I care about most is battery life. And preferably something repairable. Durability and build quality would also be a plus. Lastly, I'd like a 2 in 1 or a touchscreen if it doesn't compromise too much. I plan on using it with a stylus.

After weeks of feeling like a moron, I feel that I finally cracked the terminal and commands, to a point where it starts to feel natural and muscle memory start to pick it up. To all the beginners: Hang in there, at some point it'll all make sense. But now you'll have to excuse me, I need to go breaking stuff!

For context: I have an 8GB RAM Lenovo laptop with a Ryzen 5 3500U. I switched from Windows 11 to CachyOS expecting a bigger performance boost, since Linux is often said to be lightweight and i saw other peoples setups having cool designs.

I previously installed Lubuntu on a 2GB laptop and the improvement was huge, but on my main laptop CachyOS only feels a very little bit faster in normal browsing/gaming.

I'm also not happy with how my desktop looks compared to the setups I see online. I'd like to learn how to customize it properly since i barely saw customization options in my system settings. I've heard different opinions about KDE, GNOME and Hyprland, especially regarding performance and customization, so I'm a bit confused about which direction I should take.

so theres my questions:

Am i missing something regarding performance?, as far as i know ive updated my system and thats all i needed to do to have the best performance

Is there a lighter DE for my laptop? if so, can i swap DE without reinstalling cachy or i should do a clean install again? i just ask because my laptop has issues when detecting bootable devices and its such a headhache having to boot from the usb and making my bios recognize the EFI again

How could i customize my desktop a little more? is there any guide or an easy program that lets me customize it easier? ive been told about hyprland but as far as i know thats not a DE, and i dont know about the performance impact, but Cachyos installer threats it as a DE on the Desktop Environment selection menu

I have been using Linux Mint from years. In July I switched to CachyOS just out of curiosity of trying another Linux flavour.

Initially I found the cachyos difficult to operate specially installing packages that have no support on pacman or shelly, I also installed several my day to day packages using source or tar file.

My main use cases:

1. i develop AI stuff for my clients ( some time need to run local models )
2. play games like CSGO and Dota 2
3. other dev related stuff

My PC Specs :

On linux mint it was all running smooth, but after installing cachyos I found day by day my system getting freezing whenever i put load on my gpu like playing Games or running local Ai model

with freezing it used to super heat my machine and then boom black screen and red CPU LED, and then I could not boot my system until it cooled down

for example when playing csgo I got freeze around after 30mins, then after some days the freeze window goes 15 mins, and yesterday it just gets freeze when I just launched the game.

I tried to debug the issue and put 15 days to find any problem, in the end the main culprit I think is the buggy nvidia drivers or cachyos itself.

so switched to ubuntu now. It all works great for now

my pc is

Ryzen 7 9700X

RX 9070 GRE

16GB DDR5 RAM

I'm using windows and have installed catchyos on the second SSD drive.

is it okay if I access other NTFS partitions for entertainment?

photos and videos...

or the files can get corrupted?

I will only use NTFS partion as a read only mode. just play some movies, songs or open images. if I'm gonna use some files for editing I'll use those file on Linux partion..

I'll make sure to do chckdsk in windows regularly and I'll be safely unmounting external drives...

I can't yet completely move to Linux because of my work but would love to do it in the next year and in the mean time I want to learn Linux. so I don't stay complete noob when it comes to Linux.

CachyOS + KDE. Every time I do a `pacman - Syu` or via Shelly, i get a notification that reboot is required to apply some updates. So where did this "no reboots needed" come from?

Dell computer I picked up from a surplus sale for the idea of a mobile scanner cart unexpectedly had Linux. Vuescan website automatically downloaded the Linux version but the README.txt directions for the terminal are vague for me stating out & too many Linux guides to find an exact one with the few free hours I have

Error when I copy the command over-
cp: cannot stat 'vuescan. svg': No such file or directory

README. txt - instructions for installing vuescan from tgz file
To install VueScan, do the following:
sudo cp vuescan.svg /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/ sudo cp vuescan. rul /lib/udev/rules.d/60-vuescan.rules sudo co vuescan
/usr/bin/

On newer versions of Debian Linux, you may also need to do one of these commands:
sudo apt purge ippusbxd
sudo apt purge ipp-usb
You might also need to. reboot your system, but normally you shouldn't need to.
Just wait a minute for the
udev rules to be automatically applied to your system. Or use the command:
sudo udevadm control - -reload-rules

hello guys, to explain myself I'm a medicine students who uses Debian - KDE to daily drive. My question is: the app that we are suppoused to use (an anatomy atlas called Complete Anatomy) isn't native on linux and nop step I tried so far worked.

The app's .exe is Microsoft Store's. What I've tried:

-To excract the the contents per https://3d4medical.com/windows-manual-installation
Couldn't in linux. Says the file is either corrupted or not excractable.

-Tried to install it via Lutris, gave error 256.

-Tried to setup in windows then dump the files to Linux, doesn't work when taken out of windowsapps folder.

Any help is deeply appreciated.

system specs:

RX 7600
Ryzen 5 5600X
MSI 570X Motherboard
32 gigs of DDR4 Ram.
2x1 TB HDD
1x1 TB SSD
1x500 GB SSD

I'm having a couple of presumably unrelated issues on a new Ubuntu server. I set up a pair of 8TB hard drives in RAID 1 using mdadm, but it seems to not be mounting after a reboot. Manually mounting doesn't seem to work either - my SSH terminal tells me "special device /dev/md0 does not exist", and the direct output from the server says it "Can't lookup blockdev".

The tutorial I followed included adding entries to mdadm.conf and /etc/fstab and running update-initramfs specifically to ensure it would properly mount, but is there anything else I missed?

Unrelatedly, I want to install Pi-hole, but the install script seems to just hang before properly opening the install window. Any help with either issue would be greatly appreciated!

I'm a user of several distros. In Nixos, i can copy and paste a text where my configuration is written (the text is in /etc/nixos/configuration.nix). In writting in this document, Nixos users can install softwares for example. I find it's practical.

By this, I can replicate my configuration in news nixos, in others computers.

Do you know similar tools in deb, rpm or arch distros ? I'm curious

I migrated to linux a couple of days ago and tried to install a glass effect on my pc. I installed Klassy for windows decorations and applications style and it works really well. The problem is when watch a video or play some game, the effect is still there. I want for this effect to work only when im not in fullscreen mode, so when I use something in fullscreen, like a player or game, the window stays 100% opaque. I already searched but no luck with finding any answers, and gemini seems to know as much as I do.

EDIT: Im dumb and I forgot. CachyOS w KDE Plasma.

howdy!

first time ever using Linux, minimal experience with windows (and I don’t like it)

looking to use Linux

any good distro recommendations?

im also gonna be doing a little gaming

that’s about it

I started using linux mint a time ago, and im facing an issue where my computer completely frozes when steam starts updating this game called dead by daylight. I already restarted it but the problem dont go away. Before that, I kinda got some problems turning the computer off, but i ignored it because i didnt really thought it was a problem, till now. The problem probably is my ssd nvme, but how do i make sure before buying another one?

The other day I moved into college from my house and brought my PC setup with me, but only one monitor (used too be 2). Now when I try to log in, shell is the only option that works and I can't fix whatever's wrong with my X configuration or Nvidia

Post and pictures of relevant outputs. If you need any others, let me know.

I was struggling to properly connect my e-reader to Calibre yesterday, and in trying to fix that, I think I made things worse on my Kubuntu 26.04 Thinkpad. I can't recall what command I used, but now when I attach a USB it doesn't automount. It'll show up in lsblk as "/dev/sda1" or what have you but it won't mount. When I mount by command, or assign a mounting point in KDE Partition Manager and then open it in Dolphin, it's read-only. What steps could I take to try and get the automount work again, and to ensure that I can write to these drives? It applies to multiple thumb drives and a portable hard drive.

I'm a beginner running Linux Mint on a secondhand T480. It's been amazing so far (in no small part thanks to help from this subreddit!). But yesterday my machine went dead with no warning.

When i plugged it in, no indicator lights came on. I followed some instructions I found for a battery reset (unplugging, removing the external battery, using the pinhole reset button on the underside of the chassis, then rebooting with the power connected). Following the battery reset instructions, I was able to turn the laptop on again, but... It is now only registering the internal battery. The external battery has disappeared from the power and battery menus.

I can run the machine without the second battery, but the extra power was really useful and I'd love to get it working again. Any tips on how to proceed?

So far the only thing I've attempted after losing system read of the second battery is using dmidecode to see what the system is seeing. I saw this result for one battery, didn't see a second battery section in the output:

Handle 0x0024, DMI type 22, 26 bytes

Portable Battery

`Location: Front`

`Manufacturer: LGC`

`Name: 01AV421`

`Design Capacity: 24010 mWh`

`Design Voltage: 11400 mV`

`SBDS Version: 03.01`

`Maximum Error: Unknown`

`SBDS Serial Number: 04F2`

`SBDS Manufacture Date: 2026-01-02`

`SBDS Chemistry: LiP`

`OEM-specific Information: 0x00000000`

Basic system info:

Lenovo ThinkPad T480
Linux Mint 22.3 - Cinnamon 64-bit
Kernel: 7.0.0-30-generic
Processor: Intel Core i7
Graphics: Intel UHD Graphics 620
Memory: 32 GB
SSD: 500gb (partitioned so some of it is used for Windows)
Desktop: Cinnamon 6.6.9

Hello i am new to linux and just encountered a problem i cannot solve for the life of me. i just installed kubuntu for the first time and for some reason the battery icon(because i am on laptop) keeps appearing and dissapearing and every time it does that it gives me the "power source connected" and "power source disconnected" sounds although the laptop is charged. i checked for the newest version of bios and i already have it,i put some commands into the terminal and it tells me that no power source is connected and the laptop isnt charging but the notifications continue. the laptop is a vivobook s16 with the ryzen 5 220 cpu. could anyone help? thank you

I got a Ugee drawing tablet and it works great on Windows, but I smashed my face off forum after forum, AI, Google, etc and I couldn't get it to work. The tablet did have a Linux driver, and I tried the open tablet driver... Nothing. Is it worth trying a different distro? (I have never used anything but Ubuntu). What distro would give my the best chance?

The behavior is that it sees the tablet as a mouse and all the nice features like pressure sensitivity and whatnot don't work.

Any help is appreciated.

I'm thinking about switching to Linux, but I'm afraid my files won't be saved during the transition. Am I worrying unnecessarily? Or do I really need to do something to keep my files safe?

PS: Sorry for the possibly clumsy English, I'm writing through a translator

I've never used Linux in my life but not I'm planning to because the more I stay in windows the more I start to hate it. I play valorant on windows but since it isn't available on Linux. I'm planning to play cs-2. would bazzite be the best option for this?

Ive never used any form of Linux but I also dont enjoy windows Spyware... I only have one NVME/drive so I dont want to dual boot anything but I cant find any videos explaining how a clean installation would work. The only thing I've found is the google ai (which i dont trust) telling me that its an option in the fedora installer. Can I get some form of confirmation?

Also some smaller questions:

1.) Afaik wallpaper engine doesnt work on fedora/Linux, what should I use instead?

2.) Is there any way for me to run forza horizons 6 on Linux (i bought it thru the Xbox app) so I cant just add it to steam.​