I feel similarly especially about remmina, though as I understand it this is not necessarily the fault of Wayland but of the various applications and drivers not offering or having been developed to support wayland yet (I’m quite sure this is the case of Remmina anyway).

It’s too bad because on Debian 13 here wayland actually speeds up the general interface for me - if it weren’t for these shortcomings in-app then I would be running it for sure.

I would hope plasma’s decision pushes the application developers to catch up a bit.

Final straw?

So it was contradicting itself and would not update no matter how many times I would hit “check for updates” over the course of a week.

So not only was the system not functioning correctly, but I could no longer trust it was going to be secure from third parties.

I had intended to switch for some time before then for a litany of reasons but this definitely convinced me to stop wasting any more time and I moved myself and family over less than a week later.

Under ~ I usually make ~/Application for flatpaks/appimages etc, ~/Script for any kind of script I write in bash, python, or whatever else, ~/Audio for audio/music production stuff, and ~/Games for emulators and such. ~/Documents is reserved for actual documents containing text data usually.

Go use actual Debian, I game just fine on it.

Thanks, I’ll try when I have a moment and let you know how it went. I appreciate it.

My search doesn’t seem to return good instruction on how to do so. Very glad to try and appreciate the suggestion, but do you have guidance on how to do so? Thanks!

Primarily my aforementioned issue with Remmina not being able to span multiple monitors while running under wayland.

I think when I looked it up I saw the Remmina devs have been aware of this problem for a couple years now, but the problem is surprisingly difficult for them to fix for a few reasons I can’t recall at the moment.

Ahh I see. Doesn’t quite solve all of my problems then, but at least it’s doing some heavy lifting already without me knowing. Thanks!

I honestly don’t know a tonne about the topic. If you happen to know, what exactly is xwayland and how would I go about implementing it (on debian 13). Curious if it would have ramifications for my system for better or worse, might be interested in trying it out until other software can get caught up with wayland proper.

I did earlier and it bugged out for me for some reason and was unusable. Possibly a config problem, will try later on when I have a bit more time.

The problem isn’t really with Wayland not working though, it’s with other software not being caught up to work fully with wayland.

For example, in X, I can have my single screen windows work laptop display to my multi-monitor linux machine with remmina and be able to interact with the laptop as if it had multiple monitors.

Remmina cannot do this with Wayland as far as I have been able to determine.

Clearly not the fault of Wayland, but also kind of a pain in the ass that there are issues like this since some other maintainers/devs haven’t implemented what is required in their software yet.

Well shit. I would like this better if more things played nicely with wayland, as wayland itself seems pretty great. Remmina for example can’t do multi-monitor outside of x for example and this is breaking for me when i remote into my work computer.

I realize that this is the fault of remmina and not wayland. Any RDP client recommendations that work on wayland for this?

It’s the same reason I like TUI utilities like tiv, the terminal image viewer.

Sometimes I don’t want to have my workflow broken just to quickly check the contents or layout of what the file contains, I just need to glance at it and continue with what I’m doing.

Well you’ll be glad to know that NTFS drivers are available these days on Linux!

I need to be able to “RDP” into remote machines

Remmina, do this every day for work from my Debian system.

I also need to be able to setup a Hyper-V equivalent, to run other machines from my main laptop

Virtual box or QEMU + KVM. I use QEMU + KVM, works really well.

And for my media server (Plex), I need to understand the best way to setup a RAID5 or better across multiple drives.

Recommend Jellyfin over Plex but in either case - if you want software RAID then use mdadm, this is how the RAID5 array on my jellyfin server works. Otherwise, there are compatible drivers for some hardware with actual hardware RAID5 arrays you can look up if you have such hardware.

For reference, all my machines whether client or server run either Debian 12 or Debian 13.

Most people’s reasons in my experience demonstrate to me that they have a perception of Linux as it was 15+ years ago.

I discussed switching to Linux with a group of friends in a voice chat some time ago, most were fairly open to it, and one or two have switched since, but mainly their reasons were time constraints, not wanting to go through the process of backing up files, and finding alternative software.

One guy in particular brought up gaming, MS office, and some other particular software they used. I showed them protondb and every game they looked up was gold or higher, showed them libre office which they could not complain about since it generally works a lot nicer, and it turned out that other software was available as a .deb. After all of this, the reason they gave me was “but I like Windows”.

Fair enough I guess, though they couldn’t really produce the reason as to why.

Generally, people just don’t like any kind of change, even if it has the potential to make them a lot happier.

If you are coming from Windows, I would say Mint for sure. I have friends that are 20 using it and my parents in their 70’s use it. Both seem to like it and even find it easier to use in quite a few respects.

Oh for sure - I think that this method has more efficacy in production environments ran by small businesses anyway, since best practices are rarely followed in many of them (until something happens that changes their mind on what they budget for haha), and even at that it is still a rare attack to see.

I am unaware of this type of attack ever occurring on a persons personal network, most likely because so few end users make backups, there is no need to go through the trouble of doing this, making this method useful only in highly targeted attacks.

We are definitely in agreement on proper backups still being the best method to recover from the vast majority of problems - even this one, depending on the backup solution.

They usually embed themselves in within the system files and have some scheduled job that basically checks for the criteria - if you are only backing up and restoring user data then it’s a non-issue, but if you do a full recovery including the system files/the system scheduler etc, then it can happen, and it is often necessary to backup executable and system files for production environments (true, not so much for individual users and their systems).

When I was working in an IT shop, one of our clients was ransomwared with this method. The saving grace for us in that instance is that our backups were going to a product that allowed you to easily break open and dissect the compressed backups pre-recovery, so we were able to determine where the malicious files were and kill them before pushing the backups. Of course we only noticed that it was in the backups after we had tried to push the backups once already, so it was quite the timely process - I think I worked for something like 18 hours that day.

You can read about such malware if you search for “timebomb malware” or “malware does not execute until date” etc.

The attack is not super common anymore, but still happens.

For example, here is an article discussing time bomb methods on linkedin.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/time-bombs-malware-delayed-execution-any-run

Another on the knowbe4 blog:

https://blog.knowbe4.com/ransomware-can-destroy-backups-in-four-ways

There are viruses that are time-bombs. They specifically don’t do really do anything until some criteria is met in the future, such as the current date being beyond a specific date, at which point they proc. They do this in order to make sure they are in your backups when you restore them so that they immediately run when recovery is completed and the system is booted.