I remember coming across a tool for Linux which works somewhat similar, Iirc called AutoKey (I remember the name confusing both me and Google, so that’s probably it). However, AutoHotKey uses its own language and as is more popular, it has more materials available, while AutoKey uses Python but last I checked, it was hard finding anything, so raw Python knowledge may be needed.
From Linux, mind sharing the full command log, or at least the full libicu67 line? Sounds like missing dependencies (similar to missing DLLs on Windows), but want to be sure.
Also for installation, it’s pretty much the same, you plug the boot device, enter BIOS, select it to load first, exit and follow the instruction on the screen.
Hardware seems powerful enough that Ubuntu will run fine.
On software side, if you must use a Windows program, Wine usually solves it. If it doesn’t, Virtualbox does. If it doesn’t, some times you can find per-case solutions. If you can’t, we’d be working with extremely edge cases that maybe you could solve by swapping the SSD for one with Windows installed or getting a cheap second hand computer just for that.
I’d need to read through their docs to sift how they do their alleged decentralization. But if those sites work as portals where you create an account and use through there, then I don’t think they’d be much different from ActivityPub.
Now, if there’s a way for you to have a site-less instance (IP, hash or signature-based, maybe?), then I could see how it becomes more decentralized. Or if they’d do, from what I could understand, as PieFed, where you can apparently change ownership of communities across instances, which despite not being as decentralized as the previous proposal as I understand, it would still be more than it usually is in ActivityPub.
Windows was becoming increasingly bad for people that use mainly keyboards, and my laptop’s HDD nearly dying and me having to use a Linux distro to recover files I couldn’t lose gave me an window and interest to try out a distro closer in UX as Android, thus I found Ubuntu almost 5 years ago.
As others have said, Linux Mint would be a good starting point. For UI and UX, it’s pretty unaggressive, specially for those coming from Windows, but it still doesn’t hide the technical part of the system.
Also its installation is pretty simple and without tricks. And if your boyfriend doesn’t care about removing the previous system, you don’t even need to tinker with partitions and the sort.
(Fixed the bolding issue)
From a file I keep since I started using Linux near 5 years ago:
Display the RAM usage:
watch -n 5 free -m
Useful if you open way too much stuff and/or you’re running on budget processing power, and don’t want your computer freezing from 3 hours.
Also useful if you use KDE’s Konsole integrated into the Dolphin file manager and you must for some reason not close the Dolphin window. You’d just need to open Dolphin’s integrated Konsole (F4), run the command and without closing it, press F4 again to hide the Konsole.
Terminal-based file browser that sorts by total size:
ncdu
why is the cache folder 50 GB big?
Mass-check MD5 hashes for all files in the path, including subfolders:
find -type f \( -not -name "md5sum.txt" \) -exec md5sum '{}' \; > md5sum.txt
Change md5sum (and optionally the output file’s name) for your favorite/needed hash calculator command.
For mounting ISOs and similar formats:
sudo mount -o loop path/to/iso/file/YOUR_ISO_FILE.ISO /mnt/iso
And unmounting the file:
sudo umount /mnt/iso
Beware there’s no N in the umount command
For creating an ISO from a mounted disc:
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=image_name.iso
And for a folder and its files and subfolders:
mkisofs -o /path/to/output/disc.iso /path/from/input/folder
Compress and split files:
7z -v100m a output_base_file.7z input_file_or_folder
Changes the capslock key into shiftlock on Linux Mint (not tested in other distros):
setxkbmap -option caps:shiftlock
Was useful when the shift key from a previous computer broke and I didn’t have a spare keyboard.
If you want to run Japanese programs on Wine, you can use:
LC_ALL=ja_JP wine /path/to/the/executable.exe
There are other options but this is one that worked the better for me so I kinda forgor to take note of them.
List all files in a given path and its subfolders:
find path_to_check -type f
Tip: add > output.txt or output.txt if you’d rather have the list in a TXT file.
Running a program in Wine in a virtual desktop:
wine explorer /desktop=session_name,screen_size /path/to/the/executable.exe
E.g.:
wine explorer /desktop=MyDesktop,1920x1080 Game.exe
Useful if you don’t want to use the whole screen, there are integration issues between Linux, Wine and the program, or the program itself has issues when alt-tabbing or similar (looking at you, 2000’s Windows games)
Download package installers from with all their dependencies:
apt download package_name
Asks for sudo password even when not running as sudo. Downloaded files come with normal user permissions thankfully. Also comes with an installation script but if you want to run it offline, iirc you need to change apt install in the script for dpkg -i.
If you use a program you’d rather not connect to the internet but without killing the whole system’s connection, try:
firejail --net=none the_command_you_want_to_run
Or if you want to run an appimage:
firejail --net=none --appimage the_command_you_want_to_run
If you want to make aliases (similar to commands from Windows’ PATH) and your system uses bash, edit the file $HOME/.bashrc (e.g. with Nano) and make the system use the updated file by either logging out and in, or running . ~/.bashrc
Python/Pip have some nifty tools, like Cutlet (outputs Japanese text as Romaji), gogrepoc (for downloading stuff from your account using GOG’s API), itch-dl (same as gogrepoc but for Itch.io), etc. If you lack the coding skills and doesn’t mind using LLMs, you could even ask one to make some simpler Python scripts (key word though: simpler).
If you want to run a video whose codec isn’t supported by your system (e.g. Raspberrian which only supports H.264, up to 1080p):
ffmpeg -i input_video.mkv -map 0 -c:v libx264 -preset medium -crf 23 -vf scale=1920:1080 -c:a copy -c:s copy output_video.mkv
deleted by creator
Remember to keep Hannah Montana Linux too!
Iirc the maintainer of the wiki has a sister group in Steam’s forums, so people could ask him to migrate the wiki.
Maybe can ask also on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works?
There’s also games without DRM on Steam if you’d rather not spend more that what’s been gifted. As Steam itself doesn’t track those, there’s those two wikis keep track of it if you want:
https://steam.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
Alternatively, maybe just making a new folder on the USB’s root and putting stuff in there would suffice?
Also if the OP uses Ventoy, from my tests you can put whatever in the partition for the ISOs without interfering in Ventoy’s functionalities.
Cynical as I have become in recent years, I can’t help but to think it’d be due to a VM seldom carrying interesting data for data brokers - your real machine is usually where the “good stuff” is.
Depending on what you work on, maybe there’s an alternative FOSS or at least paid DRM free software?
Or, if you work for a company and it demands this tool, maybe you could ask them to provide the software for you?
On a 3rd point, I’ve seen official softwares detect when they’re being run in VMs or similar, so maybe that’s what happened.
On a 4th point, if you must use a crack, maybe do so on a less usual Linux system, so if it’s a functional one but packaged with virus, the virus breaks either because it runs under Wine or similar, or because the less usual system lacks some needed dependency for the virus if it can run on Linux as well?
Found a few candidate tools though can test neither now, mutool (part of the mupdf tools), PDFtk, qpdf, pdf2txt (name sounds familiar though it might be memory playing tricks).
If any of those could be found as a single portable exe around 2020, chances are it is the tool I used for it.
Iirc, tested it out quite a few years ago, and I had to use a software that would both decompile and recompile the PDF, and while it was decompiled, I had to remove the repeating pattern I didn’t want with something like Notepad++. File got recompiled a bit over 50% bigger iirc, maybe different compression methods, but the pages themselves didn’t seem affected.
Sadly can’t remember the name of the program I used for compiling and recompiling, only that it’d do both and that I looked for how to remove watermarks from PDFs. Also the program was certainly offline.
Old post, but in case it’s useful in the future, also a third option is to follow someone whose instance has communities and boosts at the same time, and follow him/her. Whenever the post is boosted, it gets propagated to the Mastodon instance of the follower.
Mbin does this, PieFed early on said they wanted to implement a similar hybrid system as Kbin/Mbin but dunno how it’s going, and with how overarching Misskey seems to be for text/image posts, I wouldn’t be surprised if one there could follow communities too.
Never tested Grayjay on an as old of a system, but maybe try it with the community-made Jellyfin plugin?