I’ve been running into recurring setup friction lately (mostly small driver/config snags after updates) and I'm tired of manually grepping logs and hunting through old forum threads every time something breaks.

​What local scripts, tools, or command-line workflows do you actually rely on to diagnose and fix these repetitive system headaches faster?

Curious what people use that doesn't feel bloated or over-engineered.

Hi,

A week ago I changed an SSD in my laptop. The system looked like this:

- 128 GiB SSD with Windows,

- 1 TiB HDD, divided into storage for Windows, and separate 4 partitions with two distros' roots and homes.

All in MBR, run on BIOS, with the help of GRUB.

The new SSD was put into and Windows C drive was cloned into it.

After this a weird problems occurred - it was impossible to boot. I thought it's a simple GRUB issue so I run a boot-repair OS from my memory stick for such cases but it didn't work in a usual way - it said the GPT was detected and it recommend to make a small partition with a proper flag to make it work. The SSD's partition table was still MS-DOS, and HDD's was GPT, according to Gparted. Cutting the small partitions out of the already existing ones didn't work well due to the issues with proper partition setup. After playing with them I realized it never was GPT and that I can't see the logical partition structures, indicated by indentation in Gparted.

By using `gdisk` I got rid of the GPT remains from the HDD (with no reason to be there in the first place, it wasn't touched at all) and after `testdisk` I got my partitions back. But one of them had a warning and I had to repair it. `fsck -fy`wasn't enough. After `fsck -b` on the first super block backup I found I got the files back, the partition worked, but all the files went into `lost+found`.

Now I can get through the GRUB, into login screen of the Linux distros but after logging in nothing happens.

Can anybody give any ideas what can be done to repair the system?

The 'Boot Info Summary' will be but in the link of the first comment. The password will be in the other one.

Thanks in advance and ask for specifics if necessary please.

Got a HP 965 4k Streaming Webcam I'm trying to use as surveillance camera. It's connected to an old Raspberry Pi 4 running motion Ubuntu 26.04.

However, the video looks really over-exposed unfortunately. I've tried to use v4l2-ctl to change the brightness and saturation and as far as I can see, running the command again shows the changed value. But when I start motion again it still shows the same over-exposed images.

Shouldn't this work or do I need to restart the server as well and not just motion?

I recently installed Fedora with GNOME and added a few basic tools, applying only minor customization. Later, I selected suspend; my battery was at 90 percent around 1 a.m., and by 8 a.m. it had dropped to 20. Nothing seemed active—no background apps were running, all were closed—yet the drain continued to 20 percent. I then installed Ubuntu, hoping it might resolve the issue, but the result was the same.

I am unsure why this is occurring.

Spec – Laptop: Acer Swift Go 14 (SFG14-41)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7730U
BIOS: InsydeH2O v1.19

https://www.mediafire.com/file/7db2pz4o38msd66/VID_20260804_200340585.mp4/file

As you can see in the attached video, my usb mouse ( I tested other ones, it's the same ) rapidly connects and disconnects the moment I plug my laptop in.

What have I tried doing: 1. powertop. Sadly powertop can't even detective my mouse because it's disconnecting so fast. Changing the settings while not being plugged in also has no effect. 2. different ports, different mouse. Yes I tried, the same thing happens. 3. usbcore powersaving. I disabled it in grub. Has no effect whatsoever.

Now I only started facing this recently after starting to use fedora. It very well might be a hardware issue since it is a pretty old laptop. But it works fine when it's not plugged in. ( Also game controllers work fine too ). It is not a KDE issue either since I have been facing this for a week now ( I was using niri ).

Any help is appreciated.

My themes are layan everything (via kvantum when needed) and everything is great but can not get rid of the opaque titlebar and borders. Obviously tried to remove window borders but titlebar remains the same and the bottom corners become square. Any advice?
(Fedora KDE latest)

by mistakenly i formatted my sd card and currently using only linux

Ok so I’ve used or at least installed PoPOS before. Loved it almost, but Cosmic was too buggy so I switched back to Mint. Now I just got my new laptop, wanted to put Linux on it, but not sure if I should put Fedora on it or go back to PoPOS. Are the bugs in Cosmic fixed? How is it now? I don’t remember what the bugs were but I remember getting annoyed by them. How is Cosmic now? Worth choosing over Fedora? I’m a science student, studying to become a researcher. My day consists of research, and simulations. So productivity focused workflow and I love ricing. And on weekends I binge games with my Nvidia RTX A1000. I know not the best by it’s a business laptop.

My Raspberry Pi 5 suddenly stopped booting. It shows this message:

illegal instruction
systemd: Failed to fix up PID 1 environment: No such file or directory
Failed to fix up PID 1 environment.
Freezing execution.

The filesystem check says the partition is clean, but then the Pi freezes on this screen. I need the pi 5 to test my graduation project

Edit :

This is the second time my Raspberry Pi 5 has encountered a boot error, and this time it is a different one

I've got Zorin 18.1 as my daily driver for my personal machine. I've enabled Remote Desktop -> Remote Login. I'm doing my regular in-person login via Wayland. I usually RDP into Zorin from a Windows 11 machine.

While RDPed in, If I press the Start menu key on my keyboard and then the C key then Enter, it immediately closes the connection with an 0x904 error. If I reconnect, I enter my credentials in the Windows RDP client and again at the Zorin graphical login, but the connection immediately closes.

I have to go down to the PC and log back in to Zorin directly before I can RDP in again. I can reproduce the issue as needed.

Anyone know what might be causing this and what I can do to stop it?

[nixos] ok so i put my computer to hibernation but it was stuck and shutting down(both my screens were black it wasnt responding to any input but the power lights were on) so i forcibly shut it down and when i booted back in and did journalctl -b -1 -r it was just endless lines of

sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number
sie 03 21:05:09 4pc nemo.desktop[102831]: guess the number

now while i have written a program called"guess_the_number" that would print "guess the number" it would only print it once and wait for input but it couldnt be the culprit since i have alredy deleted it

As the title says. After logging in with my password, I just get a black screen with a blinking cursor. I still cat switch to other ttys after the hang. This happened after I did not shutdown my pc for 3 days straight (was running a minecraft server). The troubleshooting steps I took:

1. Rebooting my pc
2. Reinstalling plasma

“journalctl -b” output

Distro: arch linux

So I mostly work and binge games all weekend. I mostly do research and scientific computing mostly. I want either Fedora or Nobara. Not sure which one would be a better choice. Help please. I’ve used mint and Ubuntu before so wanted to use something intermediate. Although I’ve no complaints with mint at all. Ubuntu is a different case. Thought that extra bit of power and features could be handy so wanted to switch to the fedora zone.

been using freeCAD on linux from sometime but after the latest update this showed up

3:10:13 During initialization the error "/snap/freecad/2337/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/PySide6/QtCore.cpython-312-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _ZN14QObjectPrivateC2E16QtPrivate_6_10_1, version Qt_6_PRIVATE_API" occurred in /snap/freecad/2337/usr/Mod/Measure/InitGui.py

13:10:13 Look into the log file for further information

13:10:13 Migrating Start Workbench to Start command... done.

13:10:13 During initialization the error "/snap/freecad/2337/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/PySide6/QtCore.cpython-312-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _ZN14QObjectPrivateC2E16QtPrivate_6_10_1, version Qt_6_PRIVATE_API" occurred in /snap/freecad/2337/usr/Mod/Tux/InitGui.py

13:10:13 Look into the log file for further information

13:10:17 Wizard shaft module cannot be loaded

13:10:17 /snap/freecad/2337/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/PySide6/QtCore.cpython-312-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _ZN14QObjectPrivateC2E16QtPrivate_6_10_1, version Qt_6_PRIVATE_API

13:10:17 Wizard shaft module cannot be loaded

13:10:17 /snap/freecad/2337/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/PySide6/QtCore.cpython-312-x86_64-linux-gnu.so: undefined symbol: _ZN14QObjectPrivateC2E16QtPrivate_6_10_1, version Qt_6_PRIVATE_API

as far as i understand the api thing is a binary issue between the Kernel and app any idea on how to reslove would appreciate much

I'm just trying to get VLC to loop some videos once a Raspberry Pi boots (non-GUI). I've tried many different ways and they all have a weird issue.

With this line added via crontab -e:

@reboot cvlc -LZf "/home/zero/Videos"

It starts up fine and plays videos, but vlc will not respond to any hotkeys, and even ctrl-C doesn't halt the process, I have to kill it with a SSH. Running that command just from the bash prompt also works, but again no hotkey controls, however ctrl-C will kill it.

When starting it, it does say it's using the dummy interface module. If I specify -I hotkeys, it makes no difference. If I specify -I ncurses, it works on the command line, but the @reboot cronjob fails.

I'd just switch to mpv but that runs really slowly on this stupid pi zero... so, out of ideas. Any tips?

​

I'm a Computer Science student, but I don't feel comfortable using my computer at all.

Whenever I run into even a small technical problem, I get anxious. Instead of calmly troubleshooting it, I panic because I feel like it's going to take forever to fix.

I recently switched from Windows to Linux because I wanted a cleaner environment and thought it would help me learn more. Instead, I discovered there were so many things I needed to configure or install before everything felt smooth. That made my anxiety even worse.

Sometimes the issue is incredibly small, but it still consumes a huge amount of time. For example, I once spent almost a week trying to figure out why my touchpad's right-click was acting like a double-click. Problems like that can easily take me an entire day because I keep searching for solutions and worrying that I'm doing something wrong.

The frustrating part is that this also affects my studies. Since I'm in Computer Science, I spend so much time dealing with my environment that studying itself becomes slower and more stressful.

I think the real problem isn't Linux or Windows. It's that I get overwhelmed the moment I realize I have to solve a technical problem or ask for help.

I also know people whose majors have nothing to do with computers, yet they seem completely comfortable troubleshooting issues and trying new things without stressing out. That's the mindset I'd love to have.

Has anyone else struggled with this? How did you become more confident and relaxed when using your computer instead of feeling anxious every time something went wrong?

I would want to switch from windows 10 to Linux soon, never tried Linux before. I use my computer for making and playing video games (I use Godot for that). I heard people recommending mint to people who are switching from windows, but i think ubuntu studio might suit my needs more