This doesn’t really say much; this could be legitimate software thinking it crashed, or it could be malware trying to hide itself.
Try seeing if sudo find / -type f -name windows tells you anything about where it’s installed. This command searches through / (all files) to find a file (-type f) that is named windows (the same as the process name).
Assuming this is malware, depending on the complexity it might be really hard to remove. The best course of action is much like on Windows; Backup your personal files, figure out how the malware got on your PC (so you can avoid it next time), then reinstall the operating system.
For backing up personal files, stick to documents, media, etc. Do not include executables (like installed games), and be very careful with config files (and system files), basically only back these up if you know what’s in them is legitimate.
You can find more about the process in the /proc/4212/ directory (this is the number on the left in top). By running ls -l, you should be able to see where the exe symlink points to, which tells you where the program is installed. This might give you a clue as to where it came from (or it might not, depending on how the malware is made). If you suspect it is not malware, due to information on your system, look it up online before trusting it. I have personally never seen a root-owned ““windows”” process, which is why I’m heavily leaning towards this being malware.
If you feel like you know where the malware came from, or you’re stuck and are struggling to find out more, you should reinstall your operating system to get rid of the malware. Malware can have different levels of complexity, what you’re seeing on the surface might be the whole thing, or it could have more complex systems to reinstall itself after removal. Which is why reinstalling your operating system is the safer option.
Iirc, the XZ backdoor was specifically targeting RH and Debian, which for some reason link libsystemd into OpenSSH. Afaik even upstream Arch was unaffected, not just Artix. The exploit code, though non-functional, still made its way onto your system (assuming you updated when it was in a release version).
I’m not defending systemd though, it’s clear that Poettering’s goals do not align with the rest of the Linux community. I’m saying that Artix not being affected by the XZ backdoor is not a good argument for why to use Artix or avoid systemd.
It’s like saying “Linux doesn’t get malware” because most desktop malware targets the OS with the largest desktop userbase, Windows. This alone doesn’t suddenly make Linux “better”. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other reasons to avoid Windows.
The smaller/newer distros have no evidence of staying around for years, so it’s hard to judge whether they’ll be around in another couple years. Distros like Bazzite are definitely interesting, but you can’t reliably predict whether it’ll get updates in 10 years. There are stable community-led distros that have been around for a long time, like Debian.
Personally, I have nothing against crawlers and bots
If they’re implemented reasonably, web crawlers aren’t the issue. The problems with them mostly stem from laziness and cost cutting. Web crawlers by AI comapnies frequently DDoS entire services, especially Git forges like Gitlab or Forgejo. Not “intentionally”, but because these crawlers will blindly request every URL on a service, no matter the actual content. This is cheaper for the AI company to implement this way, and scan through the data later. But this also leads to the service having to render and serve tens of thousands of times as much content as is actually present. They are made to try and hide themselves doing so, which is the biggest reason we see “modern” PoW CAPTCHAs everywhere, like Anubis or go-away.
Robots.txt used to work, because search engines needed there to be an “internet” to provide their services. Web crawlers pre-AI were made knowing that taking down a service made another website go down, which lessened the overall quality of search results.
I’ve had LLM webcrawlers take down my whole server by DDoSing it several times. Pre-LLMs, a git forge would take maybe a couple hundred MB of RAM and be mostly idle while not in use. Nowadays, without a PoW CAPTCHA in front, there are often over 10.000 active concurrent connections to a small, single person Git forge. This makes hosting costs go through the roof for any smaller entity.
Is the video player application itself muted in pipewire? What’s the output device set to?
You can check these things with an application like pavucontrol. Pipewire (and pulse) have a default audio device, but individual applications can set a different audio device if they want to.
Another great category of utilities for pipewire is virtual patchbays. If you’re looking for something simple, helvum or qpwgraph are geat. For all the technical details in a GUI, coppwr provides a good experience.
Arch isn’t exactly intended for beginners, and the “windows is more bloated than Linux” thing applies for pretty much every Linux distro.
If you’re willing to spend a significant amount of time learning and tinkering, a distro like Arch could provide what you need. However, if you’re just starting out, you might want to start with something easier. Distros like Linux Mint or Fedora are plenty lightweight compared to Windows, and they require much less learning to get started actually using your computer.
As for “which distro allows you to use the cheapest PC”, this mainly comes down to how much effort you’re willing to put in, not necessarily the distro you use. At a certain point, a desktop computer will “just work” for basic desktop tasks, the distro doesn’t change much there.
If I had to pick one, Arch. I already use it a lot, so it’s familiar. I know my way around the package manager and how to create packages, so even when things aren’t available for Arch out of the box, I can make it work.
It’d be kind of a hassle trying to keep anywhere close to 100% server uptime, but for my own personal stuff that shouldn’t be that big of an issue, as I can fix it when I have the time.
For desktop, I basically can’t do stable release. I frequently mess with new projects requiring the latest versions of everything, which is a near impossible task on stable-release distros.
It’s the task of your CPU scheduler to ensure your system doensn’t freeze, even over 100% CPU usage. If it’s completely unresponsive, it’s more likely you’re running out of memory instead.
In my experience, the Debian installer is just confusing. Once you’re past that, the userbase is smaller than Ubuntu’s. Their repos are different too, meaning software packaged for Ubuntu isn’t guaranteed to work on Debian. Ubuntu itself is pretty terrible for its own reasons, so when asked for a desktop Linux distribution “close to Ubuntu” I’d put Mint first. (For general recommendation, I’d probably say Fedora now.)
Debian 13 is still relatively new, so the problems of it being out of date aren’t showing yet. Debian 12 just before 13 released had tons of these issues, like glibc being too old for some binary programs, or the kernel not being new enough for some “gaming” features.
For reference, I am on Arch Linux. I feel I have a good understanding of how to manually install Linux. The Debian installer confused me in many ways, the main one being that “language and region” are closely tied, and selecting en_US “language” forces you to choose an American timezone later in the installer. In general it was a slow install process too. This is something other “user friendly” distros handle much better. A default live environment, a quick installation, and options being there, but having the defaults automatically correct (like timezone).
Like (almost) every other distro, Debian has its own benefits and downsides. These make it a good fit on desktop for slightly more experienced users, or users familiar with apt. This means it isn’t in the list of distros I’d generally recommend to people when they’re not familiar with Linux.
CachyOS has a structure that’s much closer to Arch than Manjaro, but they still replace the majority of Arch repos with their own. I’ve seen both their repos and the optimizations they apply being the root cause of issues on some friends installs.
Use whatever you’re comfortable with, and what you know works.
On that note, Manjaro and CachyOS don’t work. You should avoid them. They both make changes that harm reliability, and both frequently make avoidable mistakes (especially Manjaro). If you need something like those two, EndeavourOS is a better option, or just base Arch Linux.
Arch Linux itself is a good distro, but made for a specific target audience. If you want to tinker with your system and learn along the way, it may be a good option for you. If you want to “set and forget” your media center PC, a stable-release distro like Debian or Rocky might be better options for you.
This website has some good resources for Linux VR and links some support channels: https://lvra.gitlab.io/
A device driver needs access to the system to control a device. There’s a couple ways of going about it, but GPUs are effectively required to use a kernel driver. A kernel driver runs as part of your system, and crashes have different effects from normal programs. If a normal program crashes, the system handles that, the program closes, too bad. If the kernel crashes, nothing can catch that, and your whole computer crashes.
That being said, with this little info on the crash there’s nothing anyone can do except speculate on the cause. It could be hardware, it could be the kernel. Whatever it is, you’d need more information (journalctl -b -1 after a crash and reboot) to diagnose this issue.
Though important to note; if holding the power button for an extended period of time (30s) doesn’t shut down the computer, it is most likely a hardware fault.
It depends heavily on headset. From what I hear, standalones with WiVRN or Steam Link work fine ootb, not much different than desktop gaming with Proton. I have a Valve Index, a PCVR headset. Getting it to run (properly) is a pain. Monado is making it easier, but it’s not 1 to 1 the same experience as on Windows.
Been using it for a couple years, my main ones currently are:
libadwaita and GNOME’s awful design.On the note of Wayland, I have switched, and for good reason. Besides unimplemented features, things “just work” a lot better than X11. Still wish I could have effectively bspwm window management with kwin featureset though. (Plugins for tiling are not the same experience)
Most likely yes, and if it works, this is one of the easier options (without needing to develop anything or change workflow). However, not all devices work properly with this. iPhones on iTunes are particularly difficult, as (iirc) they sometimes change device ID immediately after connecting/initializing. If you pass through a specific “USB Host Device”, an iPhone connected to a Windows VM with iTunes may not work.
If you pass through an entire USB controller, like an extra PCIe card or one from your motherboard (if it has multiple), this method should work on any USB device with any Windows tools/drivers.
If a Linux native method exists (which it does according to other comments), that is usually easier to set up than a VM with USB passthrough, but it might change the workflow.
It’s an old blog post, but this doesn’t look very good for System76. At the same time, GNOME (and GTK) is refusing to implement basic features. Stuff like server side window decorations, because they can’t “tolerate” SSD. The hard enforcing of Adwaita theming might make sense in GNOME, but on devices not 100% in the GNOME ecosystem, libadwaita apps have awful UX. I do not want shit like Zenity to take up 50% of my screen space for 3 words and 2 buttons, yet libadwaita enforces it.
As long as you use an AUR helper to update your system (replace pacman -Syu with yay -Syu), and keep the kernel EOLs in your calendar, it shouldn’t be constant babysitting. Updating a (non -bin) kernel from the AUR requires compiling the kernel, which makes updates take way longer, but doesn’t require extra manual maintenance.
You can find when a kernel is EOL on kernel.org. When your chosen LTS goes out of support, you should update (for security reasons). You’ll have to hope the 580 nvidia drivers still support the newer kernel version you move to.
This path allows you to run your setup for as long as possible on Arch, when you run into issues with nvidia support, so does every other distro.
Heavily leaning towards malware; normal software tends to name itself the same on disk and in ram, this seems to be it trying to hide itself.
Since there’s now nothing to go off of for how this got on your system, the best course of action is to back up your documents and reinstall your system fresh. To avoid malware in the future, stick to the built-in app store and system repositories where possible.