liliumstar

Been working on this the past couple months as an exercise in learning Rust. Just wanted to share how it's come so far!

torrentz2 (tz2) is an advanced, experimental utility for working with .torrent metadata files. It supports a wide array of BEPs and v1/v2/hybrid formats.

Features

• Create, Edit, or Verify torrent files
• Convenient config file to define default options and trackers
• Multithreaded hashing
• Include/exclude files based on globs and if they are symlinks
• Create a single torrent file from disparate input paths, provided they share a common root
• Intelligent automatic piece size selection with support for up to 64 MiB
• Digitally sign/verify embedded signatures with standard X.509 certificates utilizing RSA or EC signatures
  • Includes utility command to generate an appropriate root CA and leaf cert
• Optionally include md5 or sha1 sums per-file with v1 torrents

Optional Features

• CPU hardware accelerated hashing (on by default)
• GPU accelerated hashing (coming soon, maybe hopefully)
• Compile to a static binary

Why another utility like this? Well, there wasn't one that met my requirements. That is, feature rich, oriented towards PT users, and supporting the v2 format. It's also, as far as I can tell, the only modern utility supporting the draft BEP 0035 (Torrent Signing). I intend to make use of this in a future project.

Right now all the main features are implemented, except the planned GPU hashing. Once I've had some more time to polish it up and write documentation, I intend to publish on crates.io. For now, if you'd like to try it out you can build from source, or I have some builds for x86_64 Linux available in the repo.

This will be a bit long, so feel free to skip to the end tl;dr.

I've been a long time user of Linux. Back in the day I would burn live CDs like Slackware and Mandrake to try out. There was even that one distro that fit on a floppy, Damn Small Linux. More recently, I manage several Debian-based servers and a Raspbian system. However, I felt stuck daily-driving Windows due to game support. Thankfully, that is no longer the case, so I decided to make the switch. Just wanted to share some observations I've made in the course of that.

A little while ago, I setup a laptop for a family member with Mint, primarily based on popularity and community recommendation. At the same time, I installed Mint on a laptop and used it for a bit. It's basically a backup laptop, so the intention was to have something stable and easy to use/update. I found Mint nice at first, but some cracks started showing after a bit, and eventually I became frustrated with Cinnamon. Since I am familiar with Arch, and it allows for choice of DE (if any), I decided to stick with it for the foreseeable future.

Current Setups

• Desktop: Arch, BTRFS, KDE, Wayland
• Laptop: Arch, FDE, BTRFS, Hyprland
• Home "server": Arch, Gnome, Wayland (mainly run headless, for AI workloads)

KDE

I hadn't used KDE since the days when Plasma was in beta. It was a complete mess then. Things have matured quite a bit since then, so I decided to give a shot again for the desktop. I think, mainly, I wanted to familiarity of tray icons and such.

KDE has been great! I love the amount of pointless eye-candy I can enable, and the things that can be customized. Over the last few months, I've experienced a couple crashes which seem to be related to kwin. There's also a weird issue where powerdevil (or something related to it) is resetting one or more of my monitor's brightness when it shouldn't be.

Hyprland

Since I don't recall using a tiling WM seriously, I thought it'd be fun to try out Hyprland. It also fits well with the laptop, a Thinkpad X390, having an older intel processor and constrained thermal/power situation. Because I'm lazy, I chose a mostly pre-configured setup from JaKooLit. I like the look of it, and the other ones I considered require Network-Manager, so they were a no go.

Like with KDE, Hyprland has been great! It took less time than I expected to get accustomed to it, and everything mostly just works as expected. The main hiccups seem to come from software which renders in a fixed size, which isn't surprising. I also like there is a tree-sitter plugin for the DSL.

Gnome

I hadn't used Gnome much since the old days. It was a lot different then. It's hanging out on the so-called server, but I've only used it enough to get everything setup the way I like. GDM is disabled on startup.

My experience with Gnome is mixed. I like how "sleek" it is, but not that I need to install extensions for everything. If I were to use it daily, I'm sure I'd get used to it. Even then, GSettings/dconf sucks. I really don't get the design decision to create what is essentially the Windows registry, but on Linux.

BTRFS

Previously, I mainly stuck ext2/3/4, because it was familiar and easy. In this recent switch, I was looking for some more advanced features. After looking into ZFS a bit, I decided it wasn't for me. Too complicated, not in mainline kernel. So, BTRFS it is.

After some initial confusion, I'm really happy with BTRFS. I have automated snapshots with yabsnap, which has already proven helpful when I may have clobbered a system library and everything was messed up. The transparent compression is great as well.

nvim

Having used vim for several years, it seemed fitting to migrate to nvim. I quite like the support for Lua, and the wealth of themes, plugins and so forth. Using Lazy means I can pretty much just copy over a config and be up and running on a new/remote system with no fuss.

Lutris

Lutris is what I'm using to help facilitate running Windows-only games. Ultimately, it's a very nice piece of software, but is lacking in detailed documentation and sometimes requires reviewing logs to see what might be going wrong. Something I really like is the ability to wine/proton runtimes if the default isn't working. The simple GUI layout with box art is refreshing as well.

systemd

Some people really dislike systemd, and I get it. But I like it. I've fully embraced it alongside extras like networkd, timesyncd, and resolved. Need to do something on a schedule? Write a quick service and timer, then check on it once in a while. It's not quite as succinct as cron, but I prefer the consistent declarative syntax. I was very happy to discover wg2nd, which allowed me to convert my wireguard config files into networkd configs.

Backups

I'm using borgmatic, which automates borg, for backups. This is done daily, for all important files and the system partitions. Really couldn't be easier. In contrast, there are not a lot of advanced FOSS backup solutions for Windows, so I would manually run system partition backups there.

Hardware Support

I was pleasantly surprised to find my printer, an older Canon AIO, was supported by Gutenprint. My plan was to buy a new Brother laser printer, but I managed to get the existing one to work both via USB and wireless. This is great, as the Canon still technically works and I can get random "re-manufactured" cartridges on the cheap. I say technically because it's getting more noisy over time, squeaking, and really seeming to struggle. We'll see if it holds up.

All the other stuff, aside from fingerprint reader, work as expected. This is a far cry from 10-20 years ago. Great to see.

Overall Thoughts

Linux Desktop 2025 Edition has been awesome. Basically everything works better than I expected. Crashes less than the competition in my experience. I have the freedom, as a power user, to customize the experience. There are also no ads.

That said, I still have a Windows laptop for school, because they require it. I'm hating it more every day. There is one particular piece of software that only exists for Mac/Windows which means I can't retire that system, yet. This particular school has recently bought even more into MS. I'd drop them if I knew of any alternatives that weren't caught up in the same thing.

Should you switch to daily driving Linux? Yes, especially if you have some prior experience.

tl;dr

Linux has come quite a ways in the past couple decades and now is a great experience outside of some very specialized software/hardware.

I've been working on this subtitle archive project for some time. It is a Postgres database along with a CLI and API application allowing you to easily extract the subs you want. It is primarily intended for encoders or people with large libraries, but anyone can use it!

PGSub is composed from three dumps:

• opensubtitles.org.Actually.Open.Edition.2022.07.25
• Subscene V2 (prior to shutdown)
• Gnome's Hut of Subs (as of 2024-04)

As such, it is a good resource for films and series up to around 2022.

Some stats (copied from README):

• Out of 9,503,730 files originally obtained from dumps, 9,500,355 (99.96%) were inserted into the database.
• Out of the 9,500,355 inserted, 8,389,369 (88.31%) are matched with a film or series.
• There are 154,737 unique films or series represented, though note the lines get a bit hazy when considering TV movies, specials, and so forth. 133,780 are films, 20,957 are series.
• 93 languages are represented, with a special '00' language indicating a .mks file with multiple languages present.
• 55% of matched items have a FPS value present.

Once imported, the recommended way to access it is via the CLI application. The CLI and API can be compiled on Windows and Linux (and maybe Mac), and there also pre-built binaries available.

The database dump is distributed via torrent (if it doesn't work for you, let me know), which you can find in the repo. It is ~243 GiB compressed, and uses a little under 300 GiB of table space once imported.

For a limited time I will devote some resources to bug-fixing the applications, or perhaps adding some small QoL improvements. But, of course, you can always fork them or make or own if they don't suit you.