I tried several gaming oriented Linux distributions and found them all to be… well, to be frank, bloated and unstable. I seek the most minimal experience, secure, up to date, with comfy desktop environment for a small screen. Most distributions are full of preinstalled stuff that you will never use, some of which often runs in the background, quietly eating away on your battery life. I also really like the ability to “tab out” of my game and have discord, browser, or anything else immediately available, without unreliable 3rd party plugin managers for steam that are broken every single time you want to play a game (yes I’m looking at you deckyloader). Simply I want my handheld to be ready to game, no matter how often I use it. Daily, or once a year, without having to deal with mandatory updates breaking everything.

YouTube: My GPD Win4 with Fedora Minimal (niri+noctalia) is better than SteamOS!

For the longest of time I used Fedora KDE that would boot straight into the gamescope steam. Relatively recently I acquired a new mini laptop where I went with Fedora minimal + Niri + Noctalia and I love this setup. This article describes my configuration that can be applied to any laptop, or a handheld gaming console, with small differences. And I’ll be writing it as I apply it to my GPD Win4. Please note that this configuration is not for a beginner windows-refugee. You’d be better off with KDE if you need a lot of floating windows on many displays, or if you’re a beginner.

You can easily run any Windows game on Linux nowadays without too much work. Let’s look at an example - Arknights: Endfield - using only Steam + Proton.

2026 revision, up to date kernel modules!

I tried other gaming oriented Linux distributions and found them all to be… well, to be frank, bloated. I don’t need Lutris preinstalled, I don’t use it. Just like I don’t need 20 other tools or launchers or managers installed, with services running and draining my battery. Furthermore, I love the ability to simply “tab out” of my steam gamescope and enjoy full desktop environment.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion, that the best thing I can do is to simply start from scratch. I’ve got a little video showcasing what my install looks like, the below is the minimum you’d need to take care of to get something similar.

Note that this is about standard rpm based Fedora - NOT Atomic Fedora (NOT Silverblue/Kinoite/etc)

You can easily run any Windows game on Linux nowadays without too much work. Let’s look at an example - many Ubisoft games are exclusive to their launcher for at least a few months after release, if you have any of them on their Connect launcher, you might be interested in installing it on Linux, on your Steam Deck, or other gaming hardware.

You can easily run any Windows game on Linux nowadays without too much work. Let’s look at an example - gacha games - you won’t find those on Steam. How would you go about installing it on Linux, on your Steam Deck, or other gaming hardware? You don’t even need Lutris, but that is certainly an option if you use it. We’re gonna look at using Steam’s own functionality alone.

After the summer 2020 has ended I got entangled in VR (pun intended,) as the weather got unbearably disgusting for mountain biking, and covid still ruled over the world. At the time of writing this blog post, this is still true on both counts.

Previously in our little PC building series of being bored during the human malware pandemic, we learned about Ryzen PBO, OC, and undervolting. This time around, let’s deal with the heat that these things can produce!

Let’s preface this with a disclaimer of what hardware I’ve built in the past. I went from AIO (All in one) liquid cooling about a decade ago, through custom loops back to AIO two years ago, and most recently went all-in with air cooling and as such I had to brush off some math, basics of thermodynamics and I’ve done a fair bit of real world experimenting to min-max the cooling of my various Ryzen chips. I’m also a big fan of Noctua

Previously in what’s becoming a Ryzen (3rd gen) min-maxing series, we learned about memory limitations. This time around I’d like to introduce you to three different things that you can do with the clock and voltage. Tweaking PBO for gaming/workstation use, undervolting for server workloads, or overclocking to (not) destroy your processor.

No matter what you read here, go and enable XMP for your memory :D BAM 10% free performance right there.

I spent too much money on AMD chips in the past few months. I built 4 new AMD based computers - 2600, 3600x, 3900x and 3950x. In this blog post I will focus on the last one, 3950x, which is in our home server. We run various open-source projects, hosting a few libvirt VMs for others, our nextcloud, but most of the resources are consumed by Valkyrja and it’s MariaDB database. We also run a few game servers - Minecraft, 7 Days to Die and more in the future. Feel free to join us on discord.gg/fedora =)

If you have read my blog post about devconf.cz 2019, you know that I was a fair bit upset and physically destroyed. Well, this time around I took it easy - my responsibility was to take care of the communication with hotels and speakers, you know, no need to walk a hundred miles and thousands of stairs.

The story of hard work, blood and tears at devconf.cz 2019

The task was to organize booths at the venue.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? In fact it’s a lot of physical work and a lot of preparation. And in my case, it ended up being several hours of tears and quite literally decent amount of pain and suffering…

This guide not only demonstrates the creation of a RAID5 array in Fedora, but also explains everything we need to know to master LVM.

What is LVM?

LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager, and it is the default way of partitioning storage space in Fedora. LVM provides the tools to create virtual block devices from the physical ones, and much more.

My name is Radka and I’m an addict.
“Hello Radka!”

How?

I’ve mentioned some of my unpleasant experiences of the last month In my previous post, and my lightning talk in the one before that. The idea behind the lightning talk is that anyone, as an individual, can contribute towards the better future and more equal society by protecting their children, and the children around them, from the pressure of the current society. By simply buying “boy toys” for the girls, and vice versa. The idea is that the children should choose what they like, what would they like to do in the future, not the society.

The last week…

I was talking about my experience at devconf this year in my previous post, which also included a few words about the CommOps FAD. I did not mention this because I didn’t think that it was significant, but the more time passed, the more weight it seems to have on me.

I was walking from the office to the nearby bike shop before we went for a dinner on Thursday afternoon, because I had my bike there. I managed to bend the derailleur hanger tiny bit. They fixed it and did the warranty maintenance thing as well, since it’s pushing close towards half a year since I got the bike. Well, while crossing the road in front of the shop, a man physically attacked me from behind.

Friday

Good morning, git! It’s 4:00 in the morning and I’m awake, I would like to write a bunch of scss code to improve the looks of our fedoraloves.net portal. It’s a PR! Or in actual words a pull request with my changes, very basic table formatting that I will improve on with different kramdown styles after all them conferences. Speaking of, I should get ready for devconf and my quite busy day to come. An hour in bathroom and I’ll run… 7:45

The last year was probably the most busy, chaotic, and yet interesting year in my life so far, both personally and professionally. Will 2018 beat it?

What is it?

The Fedora Women’s Day aims to inspire, educate and connect women and people from underrepresented communities interested in open source software, including Fedora Project. Join us for presentations; information and discussions about contributing to open source and Fedora, career opportunities in open source and how to pursue them; and networking opportunities including connecting with female contributors in open source communities.

I’ve sold my car half a year ago. I bought an awesome mountain bike (cross-country) for more monies than I got for that car. I managed to destroy my suspension fork. No biggie, it has warranty. I want something that will be more suitable for the type of riding I sometimes do and will do more often. I would like a new Trail bike, built for it.

So it’s my birthday now and I’ve been wearing my Red Hat for a little over a year, it was an interesting journey so far, so I thought that I would think back and write down the story.

Upgrading Linux workstation to a new version? Everything is going to break!!! O_O
…oh don’t worry, it will be fine with Fedora =)

So here I am, upgrading my Fedora to 26 a month late again. I did not want to risk screwing it up just before my talks. I’m finally free of anything stressful and have just regular work on my plate, I can do it now!

Another talk at another conference type of thing. Everything ready, including myself...

In the morning.

This time around I was actually prepared with everything in github for interested people to check out after the talk and i was wearing my new Red Hat loves .NET shirt, what else would I need?

I was talking about setting up RAID1 and deploying Nextcloud on Fedora server, in my previous post. This time around I wanted to make it eat less power, since I’m gonna be running it 24/7. I used to shut it down when I knew I wasn’t going to need it for longer time, especially in summer. So, here is what I did to make my home server eat less power, and generate less heat as well.

I spent the last few weeks slowly setting up a Fedora server with OpenShift on my old unRAID machine. It’s an overclocked, watercooled i7 with 16GB memory, and a bunch of HDDs. One very old 500GB drive that is irrelevant to me right now, as it is too small. One 2TB and one 3TB, which is what I would like to migrate into this new Fedora server. It has one unRAID share on these two drives, using up just under 3TBs total, split evenly. I will need to think really hard about what of that data am I going to keep, there is some sentimental value to it… Oh and I used the formerly cache drive, 120GB SSD, as the system drive for the new setup. One simple 100g root partition and a bunch for swap space if I would happen to need it (currently disabled.)

The problem

How to move the data that I want to keep, from two drives, into one RAID1, where I will be formatting these drives and setting up that raid on top of them. I don’t have a few TBs of a drive laying around!

How welcoming is the Open Source community? And I’m talking about Linux specifically. I would like to tell you a little bit about my experiences in last year or so. I already touched on this topic at the end of my previous post, but I would like to fully explain the problem and hopefully spark some hope. I will be saying “you” a lot, but I may not mean you. Don’t take it personally please.

Interview

It was about two months ago, when I was approached by Charles Profitt, author of the “How do you Fedora” series and Editor of the Fedora Magazine. He noticed my contributions to Fedora project and wanted to do a little interview with me and write an article about how do I use Fedora. “Sure, why not,” I replied with a smiley as usual =)

  My previous article On the topic of moderation was very Discord-specific. In this one I aim to address wider audience and focus on inclusion. What does that mean? I would like to express my Idea about moderating a large and diverse community, whether it’s in an IRC chat, forum or mailing lists, in a way that will create safe environment for members of all shapes and colours. This is an important task especially in open source communities, such as the most important one to me, the Fedora community. I will be talking to you assuming that you are the Community Manager (CM) responsible for setting the moderation guidelines in your community.

The day before…

I spent the last few days preparing for my upcoming “Writing C# code on Linux” talk. I’m pretty confident that it’s a good one, time to pack up my notebook and get ready for tomorrow. It’s a few minutes past midnight and i need to get some sleep! Oh… if I do not use synergy from my desktop, my Logitech MX Anywhere2 mouse doesn’t have the PageUp and PageDown buttons bound to its two extra buttons. I have to fix that, I want to use the mouse to flip slides…

  "Kirea, open channel to Baynes naval command," I instruct my ship as I'm undressing. As much as I would like to fly wearing a short skirt, the combat suit does provide additional degree of G-force protection. "Commander Romeo Hotel Echo Alpha requesting last known location of the terrorist racers." I'm going after them for real this time.

  "Kirea, full power to engines, retract landing gear." All kinds of noise comes out of the insides of the ship. "You ready?" - "Yep," Eric is all strapped in, in the other seat. He said last night that he would like to know more about my life. This would be the first demonstration of my life I suppose. "Hehe," I chuckle as I slam the throttle forward and hit the full boost.

I’ve seen many sad stories and struggles when it comes to upgrading Fedora 24 to 25. I did not want to risk this while I had all kinds of conferences and responsibilities, however, today my synergy decided to not quite work properly. Funny enough, only half of my keyboard was working, some keys did not spawn the delicate letters. For this reason, I decided to upgrade to Fedora 25 now. I was thinking “It’s already broken, can’t be worse right?”

  "Kirea re-enable comms and open channel to the Baynes naval command." *bleep* "Commander Rhea, Fer deLance Romeo Hotel Echo Alpha, Elite. Reporting shots fired in the sector G14..."

Everything cloudy, everyone gloomy.
Everything white, everyone looking.
All so bright, all so sudden.
Blindfolds shutting, all eyes crying.

It eased away, behind the milky.
Above fluffy snowflakes, under creamy milk.
Stretching to the horizon, sunrays melt red.
Everyone smiling, kids cheery.

All so white again, all so sad again.
Everything cloudy here, everyone gloomy here.

There are only very few mature gaming communities. One such example is the Elite Dangerous, for the most part anyway. Of course there are a few “special flowers.”

On the other hand we have the majority of gaming communities. Very disgusting and childish ones, where people, even adults, are really disgusting towards one another. Let me give you an example of Overwatch.

I’m currently in long-distance relationship. It is neither easy, nor too hard or annoying, love will always find its way, right? My boyfriend, Eric, was coming over for Christmas, or rather, we were traveling to visit my family together. It didn’t go well in the beginning…

How to correctly set up Discord server and channel permissions?
This guide assumes at least basic knowledge of Discord and server configuration.

You can watch a video guide here ² or continue reading this written guide.
(Edit: I now have another video guide with complete basics that you should go through first, before going through this one, if you’ve never created a server before. Check this playlist ²)

Feeling bad about yourself won’t help you,
feeling bad about crappy life won’t help you.
I’ll offer a shoulder to cry on,
but I will also encourage you to fight and carry on.

My mum died a few years ago, just before Christmas… I cried.
Then I stood up and I fought.

My sister died last Christmas… I cried again.
I got fired when I called for a day off, for the funeral.
I was half a year without any income… I cried a lot.
Then I stood up and I fought.

I almost died in a surgery… I was scared and I cried.
I stood up and insisted on another, to fix me.

Fuck you life. I’ll beat you in the end.

 
It’s okay to cry, as long as you get up afterwards.
Try to use your own will-power to change your life, don’t wait for someone else to do it for you. Gather your strength and do it! Imagine Shia LaBeouf :p
Let me know if you need a hug =]

Question

As you may know I’m kind of a Community Manager, running a few Discord communities and also an author of Community Management bot ¹

Several people asked me the following question over the last 24 hours: What do you think about audit logs?
(Discord announced ² a bunch of upcoming features and this is one of them.)

Moderation is very important part of community management. Let me begin by explaining these terms, so we understand what do I mean by what.

• Community manager is the one who makes the rules, who lights the path and guides the rest of the team. All the responsibility in any community falls onto the CM, whether it is responsibility for the moderation team, administrators, or even the state of the community and how happy the members are.
• Moderators are the footsoldiers of the community team, the first line of defense against bullies, trolls, spammers and alike. They are also the first point of contact of a member with the authority, and as such are responsible to relay the ideology to members and if necessary, they have to enforce the rules.
• Admin is often mis-used term in gaming communities, and people labeled admin are often playing the role of the community manager. Admin merely provides the hardware/software for the community, and tools for the team, to make their job easier. I often use Elite Dangerous Discord server as an example, and I'll use it in this case as well. I am an "admin" of the ED Discord, however, I am not only providing the tools (setting up permissions, roles and channels, keeping it running, and the Botwinder, but I also laid down the rules, the moderation ideology, and I handle the worst cases - these are tasks of a CM, not that of an admin.

  I open my eyes, still sleepy, but I've got job to do. "Kirea, any messages?" - "One new message, from Lieutenant Antoine Dubois." - "Play the message." Getting dressed while listening to it... that suicide ship was another Eagle, and it would seem that it had modified thrusters, just like the rest of them. Well, time to visit Felicity and talk about some business. I'm docked in one of the outside bays, I'll take one of those trains. It's pretty fast mag-lev transport, it would be rather long walk to the control tower otherwise.

  *BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP* - "...what's going on?! Kirea shut it off!" Why is the impact warning waking me up in the middle of the night?! I better run to the bridge. "Status?" - "All systems functioning within specified parameters." I notice an incoming ship on the scanner as I jump into the seat.. It's heading right for me. "Engage thrusters, maximum power!" I'm betting on the speed rather than shield strength right now. Boosting off of the landing pad with thrusters full vertical up, slamming the throttle forward really hard, just to hear an explosion behind me and alarm go off... "Under attack." she said. Shrapnel from the explosion I guess. What on earth was that, anyway?

  I'm still sleepy, but it's already light outside... I'll just keep laying here in bed, it's so... beautiful. I'm happy, last night was awesome. We found each other by the terminal entrance, and then he took me to nice little restaurant by the river. I just went with whatever he suggested, and it was a good meal. After we've eaten, he took my hand and lead me to the river. You could see the bridge from there, it has beautiful lights. It was somewhat calm even though we are in a busy city.

  The day passed, my ship is in a hangar with repair bots working around the clock. I'm laying on the bed in low gravity of a Coriolis station. I can't stop thinking about him. It's almost noon, i'm surprised that it's taking so long to fix the armor plating on my Fer deLance. There wasn't any hull integrity damage, it shouldn't be that big of a deal.
  "Incoming encoded transmission." Daydreaming will have to wait...

  I wake up, take a deep breath, and upon smelling the fresh natural air, I realise where I am... I find myself in a tent... covered by a blanket, on a soft foam mat, with a man laying next to me. He is turned away from me. He looks like he's cold, without blanket, and laying only on the cold ground. The tent was small, obviously intended only for one person. The young man laying next to me was Eric, the blond driver who made the yummy piece of food for me. I covered him with the blanket, but he woke up and looked at me. "Good morning," he said. "Thank you" was my reply, i felt... i felt happy, someone took care of me after all.. I've not felt like this since... since ever. Since I lost my family in the Scion massacre nearly ten years ago. I think that this was the moment when I realised that I'm in love.

  "Warning, ship under attack!"