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2022 Zero SR/S 0-124mph (top speed)Custom Ride Mode with all 100%Traction Control OffABS on69% starting and 67% after on battery.Road is a slight uphill with...
Loud engine noise is like listening to music on speaker on public transport - kind of good for the device's owner, extremely annoying for everyone else.
I never really see hardware lacking Linux support mentioned, which got me caught by surprise when a computer with a Broadcom network card couldn't use the card. What other hardware don't work with Linux?
Many cheap chinese web cameras from non know brands,really problematic to make work printers which older from 2015 for example canon ,Lexmark cause they use proprietary communication protocols and thus drivers for inux or exist in shitty state which would not work on modern system but worked on Ubuntu from 2012 or not driver not exist at all and so on other very specific type of devices
I remember the old ADSL modems where effectively winmodems. I had to keep a Windows ME machine as my household router until the point the community had reversed engineered them enough to get them working on Linux.
At least they where usb based rather than some random card. I think the whole driver could work in user space.
I started thinking "Oh I wish I could transition to Linux, away from Windows, but what about the latest hardware or random gadget?"
The trick is to flip the question around, namely not "Does my current hardware work with Linux?" but rather "Am I sure my next hardware work well with Linux BEFORE I buy it?" then this remove 99% of headaches. It's typically 1 Web search away from either a lot of complaints or positive feedback... or not much, and then it's up to you to see if you are ready for an adventure. If there is not much but there is some standard interface, e.g. Bluetooth, and no need for a proprietary application, it's nearly sure the main features will work. If a proprietary application is needed, then safer to avoid.
So.... yes maybe surprisingly a LOT of hardware does work well with Linux!
What does not work for me, to give a random example, is the LED controller of my desktop case, which I bought several years ago while Windows was still my main OS. I didn't put a lot of effort into it, cf gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/Opeā¦ but the recent article posted on this instance, namely lemmy.ml/post/32389687 makes me want to give it another go at some point!
Broadcom, as you've discovered. That's the one brand that I've always had trouble with; they go out of their way to be closed source: never publishing specs, never responding to developers. They're horrible to the point where I will not buy any product that uses Broadcom chips. Which used to be a PITA because they were also common.
Fingerprint readers, in general, also widely seem to be poorly supported.
One of my computers has a MediaTek wireless chip where WiFi isn't supported but Bluetooth does.
A lot of people have problems with NVidia cards; I've not had trouble with either AMD or Intel GPUs (although, I think all Intel GPUs are CPU integrated?).
Multifunction printers are still iffy, and even just plain printers can give grief; I've come to believe that this is simply because CUPS is ancient and due for a completely new, modern printing service. It's an awful piece of software to have to work with.
My experience with Brother was also good, until it got tipped during a move and came out simply covered in toner. We don't really need a new printer, but I'd buy another Brother LaserJet in a heartbeat.
I bought a new one recently. Apparently they're doing a subscription thing now, so look closely at which model you're buying. But other than that, it works just the same as my old one.
We have a wireless Brother laser MFP from 2-3 years ago that just works. I needed to scan something for the first time a few weeks ago and started to go down to rabbit hole of the official driver package but then I decided to give "scanimage" a try and it just found the scanner.
Hmm, I run an Arc GPU at work without any issues. Just using plain mesa on NixOS. The Intel devs were quite responsive when we ran into issues as well.
I've run AMD, Intel, and Nvidia on linux and I would say my intel experience was by far the best. I use an a380 in my server for transcoding, and I had an a750 in my desktop but switched to a b580. AMD gets the graphics stuff right, but intel does the graphics and compute right on linux where AMD ROCM is a major pain in the ass. It may not be great if you do tons of gaming, but it works quite well for me.
I have spent literal hours of my life trying to get the fingerprint reader on a latitude 7400 to work and i just gave up lol. Passwords are underrated anyway.
Cups is so much better then everything printer related that is available for Windows and it works so good that even Apple was not able or willing to create something on their own and are using it their OS on all devices. Yes, the web interface is dated but nearly every Desktop comes with a modern integrated interface for printer setup and configuration. It is ages that I had to use the web interface. Cups comes with a boatload of printer drivers out of the box. And if not then there are often PPD files on the homepage of the printer manufacturer.
Multifunction printers are a special case and if they are supported or not depends either on how the device is build (are the parts addressable Independently as printer, scanner, modem/Fax) or is it all a integrated mashup that needs special software or drivers from the manufacturer. In the first case can the printer part often be used with cups and the scanner with sane. Well in the second case there is not much that Linux developers can do without support and goodwill from the manufacturer.
I think that's because Yubikey handles the fingerprint reader part, not Linux, right? As far as Linux goes, it's a black box security fob - but I might be wrong about that.
Indeed hence my warning. I'm only sharing this alternative because in practice it works and it's secure (AFAIK).
Edit :
black box security fob
IMHO that's a feature, namely I do not want to OS to mess with this specific part of my setup. I do also have NitroKeys and FPGAs to tinker with but that's different. FWIW if there is an OSHW&FLOSS alternative to the YubiKey Bio please do share.
Yeah, I wasn't saying it was bad; I meant only that Linux didn't have to worry about device drivers for it, because the fob handles reading the fingerprint chip.
I have been fine with both Canon and Lexmark and also a Brother unit that someone in my family owns that their new Win11 machine refused to talk to; I opened up my ASUS t-pad with Ubuntu and printed in five seconds.
But yeah CUPS has actually caused many a headache to the point that Iāve disabled it on some units.
CUPs is simply ancient. It's due for an overhaul; I keep expecting someone to come along and Poettering it, only I'd hope without also making it take over cron jobs and logging.
Iām not Linux-savvy enough to understand everything you said lol. But Iām glad at least that I donāt have to rely on CUPS I just have two printers with static IPs so itās easy-breezy George and 'Weezy.
On the peripheral end, ElGato. You can usually get their stuff to work but they provide little to no support, usually have issues to work out, and you'll always be relying on third party replacements for their software.
I got a stream deck plus with the xlr dock, since even though I quit content creation I like what it provides and have no reason to downgrade my mic, but the thing has been a headache and a half ever since I switched to cachyOS.
If you mean interoperability there is libimobiledevice.org/ but honestly compared to what KDE Connect can offer with Android phones it's just ... lame.
libimobiledevice is a software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Apple TV devices running iOS on Linux without the need for jailbreaking.
If you have a GTX 10xx card or later, their are virtually no issue with Wayland anymore. I have two PC with nvidia cards and had almost 0 issue with gnome plasma and hyprland in the last two years.
I've had mixed experiences myself. Sometimes it works, sometimes it randomly breaks. I just wouldn't recommend it to someone who wants it to "just work" and be stable and not do maintenance. For me, I'm someone who's happy to do maintenance, but I don't want that to extend to my graphics card, which in this day and age ought to just work.
The touchpad in the Lenovo 300e is not supported; although the touchscreen does work. I use mouse which is fine most of the time, but it would be nice if the touchpad would be supported one day.
I had an issue with an old Lenovo X260 laptop. The onboard bluetooth device was showing as not being present if the wireless device was loaded. I could have one or the other, but not both. BT/Wifi was being supplied by the same M.2 card, so as soon as a module loaded (the wireless loaded first I guess) it prevented it from being used by another module. I'm not sure if there was an actual fix to that, though. I had a spare USB bluetooth dongle so I just ran that instead.
There's this printer that I wanna use for my job but when I went through the process of connecting it the driver wasn't listed among the massive amount of options. So I gotta print using a work computer instead of my laptop šŖ
Probably not the kind of hardware you're thinking of but I have an old Roland synthesizer, an Edirol SD-90, that did not work on Linux. Now, I didn't expect it to given the hoops I had to jump through just to get it to work on modern windows. So Linux seemed out of the question already. But can be a big deal depending on what you use your computer for.
Ah I see, haven't been on "stable" distros for a long time so I wasn't affected. I've enjoyed the good support and the video stuff is definitely nice. On the AMD side, still no idea how to encode or decode anything on my Framework 16, meanwhile Intel is acing it.
So far I've been playing with Linux on my old work laptop and they've been playing together nicely. Almost everything else about the laptop? No. But hey at least graphics works.
A common issue with those hybrid graphics is that it simply doesn't switch and only uses one. Are you sure you're not just using either integrated graphics or your dedicated GPU all the time?
That was a nightmare I'll never recover from. That laptop is now running windows 11. It's what made me promise myself to never ever touch Nvidia ever again. I'm now all Red on my desktop and life is so much better.
Similar story here. I had a laptop running nVidia/Intel dual graphics for a few years and it was so fucking finicky. Primusrun this, optirun that. Ugh. Once upon a time, whenever I heard the word Optimus, I thought of transforming trucks with laser guns. Hearing that same word now puts me in a fetal position.
To any GeForce owners that are considering going Linux full time: do a test run first and see how it works out, because nVidia support on Linux is spotty at best.
Internal HDMI capture cards are barely supported, there are some professional brands like blackmagic that have support but nearly all consumer grade capture cards are not supported at all, because the companies who make them don't care about Linux.
USB based capture cards often work because they use the same standard protocols as USB cameras.
Yeah I got a USB wifi dongle that's a bit tricky. It doesn't work out of the box in most distros but there is drivers for it that do work, fairly well.
I replaced a Realtek one because it constantly dropped connections. Luckily, this was one of the type of fixes that actually turned out to be easier than it looked.
Anybody ever get Winmodems to work or did they all give up on it?
Back in the day, it was hard enough getting dialup internet working on Linux (especially before you had internet in your pocket, so you had to print out HowTos or write down a bunch of notes before you tried to do it).
But it was downright impossible with a class of modems that was designed essentially as a softmodem, heavily reliant on closed-source firmware and drivers, making them practically impossible to work on Linux.
voice actor, artist, and musician. My main concern is recording software and to a lesser extent, art software
Even if you are not based in Brussels where we have resonance-mao.be/ you might have a local equivalent, namely open source and open hardware music enthusiast and profesisonals who meet monthly at least to learn and jam. They know this domain a lot more than I do. There are a LOT of software for all that but I wouldn't go as far as advising you. That said yes it mostly likely will require a bit of re-training. Still IMHO you have done the hardest, namely you understand the concepts behind what the tools do. The interface will be different but how it is actually done should be the same. My advice is to find "your people" and discover together.
Regarding hardware Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. I have an NVIDIA GPU and I play (and work) with it daily. Sometimes sleep/resume is buggy but pretty much never ever while actually working or playing. Regarding the Webcam, it's not super convenient but until it gets supported (hopefully) you might have to rely on an external camera.
external cam haha. I use the laptop cam daily to video call family
I actually did that on desktop recently and I enjoy being able to unplug and physically remove it as I don't use it daily. Same for the large external microphone, it's only on my desk when I'll have meetings planed. Maybe you could also use a mobile phone as camera.
Anyway kudos on leaving Google! It's a great step.
My two biggest issues have been HDR and simulation hardware.
It's been a good few years since I've tried it but every time I've tried HDR my saturation just gets cranked to 11 and it looks like those nature photos that are edited to hell and back. Not sure why, and I've heard other people got it working so idk. I think it's just the Nvidia drivers doing their thing and not working.
But controllers for flight and racing Sims are the biggest headache to get working. And then when you do get them working you'll have issues with games running well and detecting them (I think this is actually due to proton/lutris), issues with force feedback, issues with the various buttons and sliders that aren't the primary axis. And then, after you spend hours getting them to work, it'll just break again the next time you want to play. My sims and FPS games are the only reasons I still have a windows install.
About 10% of the hardware in my 2016 MacBook Pro. Twice I've tried to install Debian on that Satan spawn using various gists online, and each time I ended up deciding it wasn't worth the time
Every other piece of hardware I've tried in the past works without fail, that MacBook irks me.
Depends. If you have a 32bit CPU, app support is surprisingly much worse on Linux than on Windows. While the kernel and core systems still support 32bit, there are a ton of apps that are only offered for 64bit Linux while 32bit Windows support is still available. One example: Anything running on Electron.
Racing wheels lacks Linux support. It's the biggest, actually only, reason why I'm dualbooting with Windows.
I've been trying to get my Thrustmaster TX to work on Linux Mint but no success so far. I'm still a little bit newbie with Linux so that might be the reason why my wheel doesn't work (yet).
Hardware # NVIDIA WIRED VR ISSUES: Nvidia proprietary drivers currently have a critical issue with DRM lease causing substantial presentation latency for wired VR headsets, resulting in a delayed viewport effect that makes VR uncomfortable.
FWIW because you do so professionally I'd factor in the time you spend too versus buying hardware (e.g. USB dongles) or even laptop, ideally reselling the old one. I don't know your rate or how much you can buy VAT free or your income at the moment, only that in your context this is also a business decision so you have to consider the ROI of "just" moving on with another hardware, selling the old one and with the time earned (if work is available) get another paid task instead of tinkering.
Often the hotkeys on laptops for screen brightness, mute, etc will either not work or be wonky, on my HP Elitebook on Debian distros the brightness keys both mute the speakers instead, they work fine on Fedora though.
My question is basically the title, but here are some more details.
My computer is used about 75% for work, 20% for personal use (almost entirely web), and 5% for gaming. ~2 y.o. midrange rig w/ Intel CPU, AMD graphics, 32GB DDR4 RAM.
For work, I need lots of straightforward things: video conferencing on Teams (web is fine), Zoom, Word document editing (web is fine), a bunch of other web apps, some light database stuff, etc.
Plus two things that are a bit trickier: OneDrive professional/SharePoint (so I'll need abraunegg's onedrive) and Excel 2024 desktop (web isn't good enough) for which I'll need to run Windows (10? Ameliorated, maybe?) in a VM.
But I also want to do gaming. I wouldn't install a kernel-level rootkit anyway (and I boycott Denuvo), so SteamOS-level compatibility should work great for my needs. I also have a Quest 3, so I'll want to do PCVR, which apparently works great (with Bazzite).
But I don't really grok what Bazzite being immutable means for using it as a daily driver for work/productivity. Under the hood, it's just Fedora 42, right? For immutable distros, you use flatpaks instead of apt install, and they're basically just "apps" that should "just work", right? Do I care about kernel modification?
Or, more to the point, I don't know what I don't know. After preliminary research on this all, I think my plan of going for Bazzite then adding abraunegg's onedrive and a Windows VM with Office 2024 will hit all my needs, but can anyone "sanity check" that plan, or compare the pros/cons with a non-Ubuntu-based alternative?
I'm good enough with computers that I should be able to tinker through the inevitable small challenges that will come up, but I don't really have enough time to do it twice if my initial plan is terrible. (I connect to a Debian server remotely using the terminal, so I have some backgroundābut I needed to install a bunch of packages to get web app software running, and idk if I'll need that as a desktop user.)
Any advice much appreciated! And thanks for reading this far, even if you don't comment. š
Edit: thanks for the input so far! I'm turning in, but I'll read everything and reply to stuff tomorrow.
Pro of running an immutable distro is that it is much harder to break during daily use. The con is that you're pretty much setup to only use flatpaks and some things like abraunegg's onedrive aren't available as a flatpak.
Have you considered making the ~~Win10~~ Win11 VM a complete work jail? If you do all things work in there then you get a nice separation of private and work and won't have to worry about work apps linux compatibility. edit: Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025
Windows 10 support ends on October 14, 2025. Upgrade to Windows 11 now to ensure continued security and feature updates. Learn more about the transition.
I was thinking Win 10 EOL won't matter if the VM has no Internet access. Linux would sync the files for me, so the Windows VM can just run Excel (and maybe Word, since I'm setting up Office 2024 anyway) using the files synced by abraunegg's onedrive, so it doesn't need internet access. (Assuming there's a partition format that works well for both Windows and Linux that I can use for onedrive, which I assume is a "solved" problem by nowāi remember this being hard 20 years ago.)
And his package apparently works in Fedora 42 with docker, which I assume should work fine.
But yeah; maybe what you're suggesting makes more sense. And that VM definitely would need web access, then, so Win 10 is a non-starter. The database work I do is likely easier in Linux, but that's likely easy enough to get data files out of the VM for just that work, I would expect.
Another question now comes to mind; I'm going to look this up now; how hard is it to copy/paste between Linux and a VM? Edit: As I'd hoped, this is also apparently a solved problem and sounds easy to configure.
Just something to consider as you're thinking about using a virtual machine for windows; you have enough RAM to comfortably run a linux host with Windows 11 + Debian Stable VMs for work + work db server. I'm allergic to mixing private stuff with work stuff and there's a great thing to be able to shut work down at the end of the day. (Freeing up all your hardware for your private fun at the same time)
Iām by no means an expert on this, but I have used both Bazzite and Fedora workstation as my exclusive operating systems.
What I would say is that theyāre both perfectly adequate for the tasks you described.
Personally, Iād say unless you prefer things handed to you, choose Fedora. I donāt have a problem with flatpacks, but I missed being able to easily use dnf. At the end of the day, though, there are ways around everything; you can still get what you need done on Bazzite.
In terms of kernel tweaks, etc. I barely noticed any difference in performance between the 2. Keep in mind that this was a relatively modern pc so performance wasnāt really an issue that I was looking out for.
Overall though, youāll be fine whatever you choose. I also had to use MS office for work and itās pretty much the one thing you canāt get working on Linux. Youāll have to explore your options for that, I ended moving back to a Mac because of Ableton live š
The main issue you'll run into is nicher proprietary software being hard to install, but that's what containers are for. The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoying, but since you'll be running a VM anyway you can do some network trickery. My work's antivirus only works on Ubuntu and RHEL, proprietary kernel modules so it's got to be at least one of those kernels.
Linux is Linux, nothing's impossible to solve even with Bazzite's immutability. Worst comes to worst you make your own images and it's not that hard, you basically just fork it on GitHub and let the CI do its thing.
But do you have time to fiddle to make it work and take the risk, or do you want to play it safe? How confident are you with Bazzite's more advanced topics?
The main one I see is if you need to install some proprietary VPN client it gets annoyingf
You're right. I have a crappy work-supplied Windows laptop that has exactly that installed. It would be nice not to need to boot into that when I need to work on the server from home, but it's not a deal breaker.
No other specific non-web-based software is needed for work, aside from the aforementioned OneDrive and Excel 2024.
Edit: Your last paragraph is exactly what I'm asking about; I'm capable of doing slightly involved tinkering, but it would need to be something that I can Google Fu through each step of someone walking through most of the steps. I don't know it at all well enough to go completely "off script" and just tinker with confidence.
It sounds like you're suggesting that going for something mainstream and getting it to work for games is likely a better option, particularly for someone with limited Limits experience?
Debian is far from being a mainstream workstation distro.
Debian is/was a very good server distro but there are lots of good alternatives to debian nowadays which may be much better for someones usecase. Debian is not the ultima ratio.
Good to know! I use it at work for a server; ngl, my non-Bazzite distro search hasn't been extensive, except getting to the point that I think I don't want anything Ubuntu-based.
For me, I personally just run my workplace stuff in a VM (Debian 12) using KVM.
For excel desktop, OnlyOffice has a Desktop application that you can use to edit local files, which has pretty good compatibility with Microsoft products.
ONLYOFFICE offers a secure online office suite highly compatible with MS Office formats. Connect it to your web platform for document editing and collaboration or use as a part of ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
Just something to bear in mind regarding OneDrive; the unofficial clients donāt have access to certain APIs that the official clients use meaning that it only syncs every 5 minutes at best. As far as I know thereās nothing you can do about it.
Would it be possible to use a "thin" Windows VM as "client" for One Drive? Meaning that the client would be responsible for synchronization of mounted directories which are actually used on the host machine.
Mir sind an meinen Telefonen immer die Klinkenbuchsen kaputtgegangen, das Problem habe ich mit Blauzahn nicht. Und Blauzahn-Kopfhƶrer halten bei mir bisher auch lƤnger, die bekommen nƤmlich keinen Kabelbruch.
Ich finde das Konzept "kabelloser Kopfhƶrer" eigentlich auch kacke, aber es funktioniert bei mir extrem viel besser.
Mƶglicherweise bei einigen Zuhausis unbeliebte Meinung: Blauzahn ist allein deswegen um LƤngen besser, weil ich mich nicht stƤndig mir irgendwelchen blƶden Kabeln rumƤrgern muss.
Kabel gehen vor allem auch gerne mal kaputt, zumindest bei der Sorte Kopfhƶrer die man im allgemeinen unterwegs benutzt (solange man nicht auch unterwegs zu den dicken MickymƤusen greift, die haben ja viel dickere Kabel).
Die britischen Ćbersee-Kolonien mit mehrheitlich europƤisch-stƤmmiger Bevƶlkerung (USA, Kanada, Australien usw.) sind nur deswegen keine Kolonien mehr, weil sie irgendwann unabhƤngig geworden sind. Der kolonisierten Bevƶlkerung hat das nicht wirklich geholfen.
Wer sind eigentlich diese "Linksliberalen" in der heutigen Parteienlandschaft? Bei GrĆ¼nen-WƤhlern rennt man damit ja eher offene TĆ¼ren ein (und den ParteifĆ¼hrungen ist das Thema in der Regel zumindest bekannt), und rechts davon sehe ich nur autoritƤre Parteien die bestenfalls wirtschaftsliberal sind.
Die ganze Israel PalƤstina Situation ist so fickend kompliziert, dass sie sich nicht in einem Mem abbilden lƤsst. Und Israel als monoethnischen jĆ¼dischen Staat darzustellen ist Quatsch.
Ćndere meinen Verstand
(Womit ich die scheiĆe die die israelische Regierung baut auf keinen Fall entschuldigen will)
Israel ist ein Ethnostaat und zudem auch als jĆ¼discher Staat (nicht sƤkularer Staat) definiert.
Es ist Ƥhnlich wie in Apartheid SĆ¼dafrika, wo die Macht einzig von einer eingewanderten Ethnie gehalten wird und die native Bevƶlkerung als Menschen zweiter Klasse mit weniger Rechten existieren.
Judentum ist halt eine Ethnoreligion und soweit ich weiĆ sehen die meisten Juden das auch so - Konvertiten gibt es extrem selten und Missionierung in irgendeiner Form ist auch nicht wirklich vorgesehen. Ich kann mir auch schlecht vorstellen, dass PalƤstinenser mit Kusshand aufgenommen wĆ¼rden, wenn sie massenhaft zum Judentum Ć¼bertreten wĆ¼rden.
āWeird Alā Yankovic breaks down his most iconic tracks including āMy Bologna,ā āWhite And Nerdy,ā āAnother One Rides The Bus,ā āEat It,ā āAmish Paraside,ā āI...
It never made sense to me to put password managers in the cloud. Regards to what you intend it to do, youāre making it accessible to a wider audience than necessary. And yet, Iām using iCloud. Itās time for a change.
Iām thinking of just running a locally hosted password manager on my home server and letting my devices sync with it somehow when Iām at home. I have a VPN into my home network when Iām away that automatically triggers when I leave the house, so even thatās not that big an issue, but Iām really not familiar with whatās gonna cleanly integrate with all my stuff and be easy to use. All I know is I wanna kill the cloud functionality of my setup.
I already have a jellyfish server so I figured I would just throw this onto that. Any suggestions?
If youāre happy with how Apple Password works for you, I can recommend StrongBox. It keeps all data in a KeePass2 database and integrates into Appleās AutoFill API. That means it feels almost native when using it. No browser plugin needed. (At least not for Safari.) And you can decide how you sync the database file.
I'm not sure what I think about the white on white background though, I might one day open it up and use a black marker to color in the Roman Numerals for better contrast.
Sorry for potato quality, Lemmy kept timing out so I had to reduce photo quality to knock the image size down.
also for example i want to argue with maiq here lemmy.world/post/32190755/1794ā¦ about their ban but i got banned from blahaj for my free speech so i cant comment there and even though im being silenced by the deepstate gays and that makes my blood boil i have to respect adas right to ban me so im not a hypocrite for banning maiq
Im trying to figure out how online search funkcion works.. Didnt have much luck for now. And also general discusion about the app would be wery helpfull for eweryone.
This will probably help anyone unfamiliar with it, since the first search result for Alpaca AI is another online paid AI service which does something entirely different than this. It's used for AI image generation.
The main question I have is since Ollama is optional... If you optionally use it, is it still sharing data with ~~Facebook~~ Meta?
Didnt know that ollama is sharing data with facebook.. Why would it do something like that? Wouldnt that be oposite of what it was created for and that is privacy.. Where did you get that info?
It looked like from comments that's why he made the Ollama integration optional, because some people were concerned since Ollama was built by Meta. It can run without Ollama, it seems.
EDIT: Doing more research on Ollama itself, I'm unconvinced that it's sharing any data, despite being built by Meta.
Yeah in that case you probably want something else. So far i've only ever used it for text based questions. I think i remember seeing that there is also a webui out there but i don't remember the name.
AnythingLLM is the AI application you've been seeking. Use any LLM to chat with your documents, enhance your productivity, and run the latest state-of-the-art LLMs completely privately with no technical setup.
This is offtopic, but I switched from Alpaca to duck.ai. I try not to use AI too often and even though I like the idea to run it locally, duck.ai is way easier to use.
I use it also some times but that is online ai and everything you use it for goes to someones servers so its not private. Alpaca is using ollama to run ai localy on your machine so everything you use it for is private. So those two are completly diferent and are not for comparing which one is easier to use because ease of use is not the point here. Privacy is.
Every day, without fail, I think of three things for which I am grateful. A reminder fires on all my devices. I donāt dismiss it until Iāve completed the task, whether thatās early in the day or not until the evening. Keeps my outlook healthy cause Iām a pretty cynical person.
Before committing to doing a thing youāre conflicted about, brainstorm about it twice. Once when sober. And once when not. If it seems like a good idea in both states, it will typically lead to having no regrets on the matter even if it doesnāt work out like you hoped.
We planted both raspberries and strawberries over the last few years and are getting so many we can't eat them all. We give them away, but is there something better we can do with them?
Edit: thanks for all the great responses. I think we're going to freeze them.
You can just freeze them for smoothies. Everyone is saying jam and thatās a good idea but itās a whole process and has to be sanitary. Itās not super hard, obviously, and itās worth learning how to do but the first time can be a bit daunting and you really have to follow every step. A smoothie is easy.
Another pretty easy thing is to make ice cream and freeze it. A restaurant I cooked at had fig trees that would go nuts once a year and weād have buckets of figs. We basically made vanilla ice cream and added figs. That was delicious and ice cream obviously freezes well.
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A new version of fontconfig release recently with the added option to disable bitmap fonts. If you're using a rolling release distro, this might break bitmap fonts for you. It definitely does on Arch (and likely Arch-based distros) because they opted to disable them by default for some reason (AFAICT upstream gives the choice but does not recommend one way or the other).
This'll cause fontconfig to skip bitmap fonts, your apps won't be able to access them.
I'd recommend a user-level fontconfig file. Create $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fontconfig/fonts.conf with below contents and you get your bitmap fonts back. This negates the file in /etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf. This is the first time I'm configuring fontconfig so there may be a better way ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
This should've definitely been news imo especially because this is not the default behavior of upstream. I shouldn't have to read fontconfig PRs to figure out why my fonts broke, even on Arch.
To allow users to choose one of 70-yes-bitmaps.conf, 70-no-bitmaps-and-emoji.conf, or 70-no-bitmaps-except-emoji.conf for default installation. Fixes https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/fontconfig/fontconfig/-/issues/474 Changelog: added
There's a powerful search for filtering by country, language or software (#Mastodon, #Flipboard, #Threads, #Ghost, #Bluesky...) & you can easily export the results for batch-following (in Mastodon at least).
I'm always searching for (verified!) accounts, that I missed. If you know some, please send them to @mho@social.heise.de
I muted the entire Flipboard instance. They were just annoying. If I need any of those, I use RSS.
AP is supposed to be interactive but I'm pretty sure none of them are looking at those. And the ones that are already have accounts so these are just redundant anyway.
We (@heiseonline@social.heise.de) have federated accounts on #Flipboard: The problem is, you still can only see the interactions in the app. But there you can't easily switch between two accounts. So I have my private one activated ā and won't see the interactions.
And you're right: For accounts from organizations, that are in the #Fediverse a federated account on Flipboard is not of much use. But there are some, that aren't otherwise reachable from the Fediverse. (RSS is another story, that's true)
Thanks for the answer. This might be a dumb question but what does that mean exactly? Is Flipboard approaching the different media outlets and offering to share their content on Flipboard's instance? If so, what do the media outlets get out of using flipboard versus their own instance or a more generic instance like mastadon.social?
Iāve been using VirtualBox for a year now and Iām getting pretty ticked every time I have to start a new Ubuntu VM. I speed more time going to root shell prompt to add myself to sudoers file, add myself to groups, the addons, shared folder and storage not mounting right awayā¦.. etc etc. Iām sure I might be not using VirtualBox to its full potential to avoid long setup times but I feel like I shouldnāt have to deal with this. It should act is it being installed on a bare metal machine. Is there a more modern approach? Something more streamlined? FYI Iām learning containers and miniKube so Iām not jumping in the deep end quite yet.
Fedora Silverblue -- a very good balance of immutable distro and user friendliness. Stability and reliability of being immutable without low-level hacking like in Nix / Guix.
I use immutable distros for the stability, and the nixOS approach isnāt for me.
You can install whatever you like using a tool called distrobox, which allows you to run containers easily.
I have an arch Linux container, and I have access to the entire AUR if I so please. I use that container to run Steam, and performance was the same as on Bazzite using the natively installed Steam.
This is not entirely true. Is there overhead? Sure. But, if the distro used for the container provides (somehow) faster or more performative packages to begin with, then running software within a fast container can be faster that running it natively on the slower host. Link to the comment in which the link to the above benchmark can be found as proof. As can be seen, the Clear Linux container performs better in 90% of the benchmarks. And, the Fedora container is only negligibly (so within margin of error) less performative than the Fedora host.
Hi all,
after I've added support for Clear Linux containers to distrobox (http://github.com/89luca89/distrobox), I thought that it would be a nice experiment to show the performance benefits of Clear Linux even on non-Clear distributions.
Q: Would a normal system (read: I'm not talking about Guix System or NixOS) allow you to install multiple branches/versions of the same software natively without introducing a lot of headaches?
A: No. This is literally unsupported.
Then, if using containers (or any other similar platform) allows one to breach that limitation, would it be fair to call containers (and their like) to be strictly limited/limiting in customization?
Sure fam. This is actually a situation that might come up a lot. Basically any instance of dependency hell caused by conflicting dependencies would be resolved if two different versions of the same software could coexist. - Peeps that are maintaining packages probably have to deal with this every once in a while as well. Especially if the packaged software relies on some very niche (and possibly questionable) dependencies*. To point towards one of the most openly discussed cases of this, consider watching by Brodie in which the takedown of the unofficial packages of Bottles is being discussed. - E.g. whenever one tries to compile software themselves OR install/use them as/from binaries/tarballs. - E.g. installing packages as PPAs or other third party repositories (like e.g. the AUR) can also come with dependency hell and are often the reason why breakage occurs.
Bottles and it's developers are very much in favour of upstream packaging and flatpaks especially after the situation they dealt with because of broken outda...
Excellent choice fam! However, as much as I adore Fedora Kinoite, it might not provide the best onboarding š . If you're fine with that, then please feel free to go ahead and embark on your journey. However, I would suggest you to at least look into uBlue's offerings:
All operate within the paradigm of providing a so-called "batteries-included" product. So, going through the whole mumbo jumbo of RPM Fusion's Howtos to see what's relevant for you to apply and painstakingly waiting for them to be applied can be skipped.
Furthermore, based on your precise needs, you can choose to adopt more opinionated variants:
Bazzite, on the other hand, is their game ready variant that defaults to KDE
Or, if you prefer a minimal installation, you can choose to install their base images instead. These basically offer Fedora's images (including Kinoite) with the absolute minimal of hardware enablement and other essential uBlue goodies.
If you are a system crafter at heart, then perhaps you're more attracted towards creating your own bootc image. This can be achieved by uBlue's own image-template OR through the community-effort in BlueBuild.
Regardless, fam, enjoy! And please consider to report back on your findings š! I would love to read your adventures of venturing the exotic waters of Fedora Atomic š!
Apologies for the 'spam', but I was afraid editing my previous message would be in vain. If you desire/crave for decent documentation, then Bazzite deserves another endorsement. While its documentation isn't as expansive as the excellent ArchWiki, it should be more than able to answer your questions.
Secondly, if you happen to come across an issue that has been painstakingly difficult to resolve, then please consider consulting its many community channels for support. There's a Discourse, a Discord and an AnswerOverflow. So pick your poison š. FWIW, I've always had great experiences on their Discord.
İƧimden, "Bunca lafın Ć¼zerine kankim asaletine yakıÅanı yapar da bir teÅekkĆ¼rĆ¼ esirgemez herhalde," diye dĆ¼ÅĆ¼nmĆ¼ÅtĆ¼m. Ama maalesef, TĆ¼rkiyeli olması hasebiyle daha level atlayamamıŠš. Olsun, demek ki henĆ¼z kalkınma vakti gelmemiÅ š¤£.
Tekte tĆ¼rkƧe konuÅtuÄumu bildin. Aferin. Neyse, dediÄim gibi; Immutable daÄıtımlardan birini Åu an ki Fedora KDE ile dualboot edeceÄim. Ona gƶre Immutable daÄıtımlara geƧebilirim. (GRUB sayesinde kolay olur.)
::: spoiler alakasız bir rastgele dĆ¼ÅĆ¼nce yoksa beni bir yerden tanıyor musun? :::
Bazzite has been working so well that even the wife has converted over. It cured my distro hopping so I haven't played much attention to how other distros have been doing.
A question - can I use Bazzite for uses other than gaming? I game on my laptop, but most of the time I'm writing code. Could I use it for that or should I go for something like Fedora, Debian or Arch?
I would say that development is the one thing that can get very annoying on immutable distros.
Flatpaks can only get you so far (as seen by the VS Code Flatpak's limitations that have to be worked around). I don't even use VS Code, so I can get around that pretty comfortably, but I have to use Distrobox for a lot of miscellaneous developer tools, and even then, I still run into problems and I can't install container tools inside of the containers that I'm already working in.
Not to discourage you from trying. I can still get by with some dev work on Bazzite, but it's waaay easier to do the same dev work on CachyOS (Arch-derivative) because I can just install shit normally and it will work.
The whole of Fedora atomic distros are interesting in an exercise in getting good with layering and distrobox. Pop_os 24.04 just to see if a third pillar of Linux frontends with GTK and Qt is viable. People are always pissy about Manjaro but they seem to have an interesting present being pre installed on the Orange Pi Neo handheld
The Arch derivatives, CachyOS and EndeavourOS. Theyāve really done a good job with Arch and cultivating their own communities. Itās paid off for them and Arch isnāt really seen as just a hobby distro like 15 years ago, or a meme like the last 5 years.
Bazzite, for both general desktop use or dedicated for gaming. Just strength to strength from the project. I hope Fedoraās proposal to remove 32-bit libs doesnāt hurt them. By far the best, just untouchable, atomic distro.
Linux Mint for the first time in about 10 years is being seriously recommended to new users and not laughed off as a Linux Windows clone. That team has never stopped putting in the effort and deserve it. I donāt know how theyāre going with/plans for Wayland, but I hope smoothly.
Fedora. Iāve never used it personally. But since starting with Linux in 2006 Iāve only ever seen or heard of it as kind of ābeing thereā but not really talked about much. People are talking about it now as being a reliable and solid choice for new users and intermediate users.
Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years. I think people generally are becoming more satisfied with the idea of a stable OS, ages not writing it off as being left behind, constantly out of date, canāt run latest AMD graphics, etc. In my mind, flatpak helps that a lot, since you donāt need to wait years to get the latest versions of programs, but I donāt know for sure that is helping this current wave of success.
On the other hand:
Tumbleweed seems to be stagnating. Theyāve made some changes and moving away from yast for the first in forever. The switch to selinux has affected proton usage in a way that itās not super ānew user friendlyā. Even amongst people wanting to try out Opensuse, you often see āIāll give Slowroll a try.ā
PopOsā cosmic desktop is still in early stages, and you do hear good things, but popos seems even less talked about now. They might have hit their peak 3-5 years ago, or maybe it will come around again for them like some of the distros above.
Nobara was massively talked up a few years back. But not so much now. And you do see discussions like āNobara had too many problems on this machine, I just went straight-up Fedoraā.
The other main hobby/enthusiast distros that were getting discussed more in the last few years - NixOS, Void Linux, Alpine. Not so much anymore. NixOS definitely did take off a lot more than the others, but it still just doesnāt come up as often as a couple years ago.
Debian. I do see Debian mentioned now a lot more than it has been in years.
I haven't noticed much difference, Debian has always been the go to distro if you wanted reliability and repositories that cover almost everything. Debian has always been an excellent choice for productivity. It's not by accident that Debian for more than 20 years has been the distro with by far the most derivatives.
By that standard Arch is the only distro that has achieved something similar, and it may be somewhat telling that SteamOS switched from Debian based to Arch based. Arch is way smaller in scope, and more nimble and easier to maintain. But AFAIK they do not have the democratic process Debian has, so I'm not sure it can really be called community based distro like Debian. Arch has more of a top leadership. Debian is probably the most true to the Free and Open Source ideals among the big distros.
Oh yeah, thereās a big difference now in distro conversations.
Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping, discussions around ābest distro for meā, starter for new users, etc. Just an occasional; āof youāre going to choose Ubuntu, just pick Debian and go straight to the sourceā.
But it was often pointed out that Debians pros is what made it not recommended for general end-user. Itās strong for servers and productivity. But its stability meant kernel and mesa updates were slow, many programs lagged. Gaming performance suffers and new hardware support is weaker. It was recognised that Ubuntu and Mint would add convenience for everyday use cases on top of Debian.
Especially the early to mid 2010s was all about ābleeding edge/rolling release is too likely to break, Debian is too stable to get updates, pick something in betweenā
Now, this problem is being lessened, at the same time people are liking the stability for general desktop use. Bleeding edge became highly recommended 5 - 8 years ago, and now in 2025 people care less about that and itās easy to make stable distros work for your needs just as well.
Now people will regularly say āuse Debian, itās solid and reliableā and not follow up with āyouāll have to deal with old packages thoughā
That's the thing though you really don't have to deal with old packages. The ones that count are in the backports repo and for everything else there's is flatpak. Plus I think the reason steamos switched from Debian to arch was the methodology changed from being mutable to immutable and making it more for a handheld vs installed on many systems. It had nothing to do with the quality of the distro.
Iām not discussing quality of distro here, but peopleās changing perception of Debian over the years. The way that people currently use/suggest/recommend distros has put Debian more in favour than say 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
Itās always been good depending on use case, but people currently are recommending it more for general use than has been typical before. And I think it is, as you said, that some of those past limiting factors are not a big problem anymore. I did suggest that in my first post.
Debian was never talked about as a serious contender in distro hopping
Back in 2005 when Ubuntu was all the rage, the first alternative to Ubuntu was almost always Debian. Only later when Mint became a thing, that was also an obvious alternative, because it was similarly focused on being easy to use.
And also PCLinuxOS and Mandriva, those were the big recommendations as well. But weāre pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions I think we had in mind by going back that far too.
But weāre pre-dating the common distro hopping discussions
No we aren't, Linux fora were full of them even before Ubuntu more than 20 years ago. Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandrake, Mepis, PCLinux. Distro hopping was always a thing people debated.
The rest of that sentence is a bit confusing, who are we? And how am I supposed to read minds? And going back was kind of where we started, because you claimed it was a new thing for Debian. Debian was definitely recommended to general users, for many good reasons. Stability and huge repository among them, but also user friendly install procedure, and good package manager, that handled dependencies way better than Suse and Fedora.
Fedora has gotten much more stable and reliable in the past decade. 15+ years ago it was generally regarded as nice but unstable. I'd say nowadays for a moderately technical user it offers a better experience overall than Ubuntu or Mint. There are still unfortunately some pitfalls for new users (media codecs come to mind). In fact, the only issues i've had in most of those 10 years have been related to GNOME plugins or the Plasma 6 transition, problems that also occured on Ubuntu.
I have 2 computers: one running Ubuntu, one Fedora. This has been my setup for over a decade. I have lately been finding Ubuntu more and more cumbersome to use, with less of the "just works" experience i remember having in the past. Perhaps the focus on cloud computing has caused the desktop to languish a bit.
I would like to try Pop!_OS, but i haven't had a free evening for a while to do a backup and reinstall on one of my computers. It's also been a while since i used Mint, so my impression could be out of date.
The nice thing about Linux overall (compared to macOS and Windows) is that each update generally improves on the experience. On commercial platforms the experience gets worse as often as it gets better, usually both at the same time. GNOME and Plasma are both overall much better than they were a decade ago (despite a few regressions) while macOS and Windows are both worse in general.
I started my Linux journey with Ubuntu, then switched to Linux Mint for a while and dabbled with Manjaro for a hot minute, and ultimately found my home on Fedora Workstation for the past several years. Once set up with rpmfusion and 3rd party codecs it's a very solid and reliable distribution. The new atomic projects (and derivatives) look very interesting too.
While Void isn't exactly under rated ( it is very highly rated on distro watch for one ), for someone looking for a systemd free distro or a light weight one in general, it is a decent choice. The repos aren't as broad based as Arch but they do have newer versions of the software that they host.
I could be wrong, but aren't Linux Mint and Pop OS ultimately based on Debian? (Mint is based on Ubuntu which in return has a Debian base). Debian was my main entry way to the Linux world and there is a reason why so many distros are built on it. Very old as well (not as old as Slack ware but Slack ware isn't exactly noob friendly).
All those packages, but terrible/lacking documentation and LSP support š And, yes, I've tried nixd and nil, and they're not even close.
I've tried to learn Nix multiple times, and even got by okay running NixOS for a year or so, but doing almost anything that isn't just adding a package to a list in a nix file or flake was like pulling teeth because everything is documented so poorly (or not at all). It would take me hours to do what I could have done in seconds with any other package management tool or configuration management because I'd have to scour hundreds of search results to find someone that did the thing I'm trying to do because there was little-to-no documentation for it.
Nix is a tool with amazing promise that could solve so many problems if they could get their documentation and LSP support up to the standard of something like Rust.
I discovered they have a Matrix server where people will literally debug your config for you and help you solve issues. But you are right, if you try doing it yourself without help you'll be pulling your hair out
Love Fedora with KDE, my new daily driver. Tested Endeavour, Manjaro and also Mint and openSuSE but finally went with Fedora. Debian (on the other side) is my preferred base for servers and services.
Ton of comments, and I havent read them all, but I wanted to ask if you really meant popular or if you wanted something for a specific reason. Easy for new ppl to linux, good for desktops, etc etc.
I dont really use GUIs on linux, except for when I want to have a fancy pants riced network monitor type situation. I am a big fan of NixOS except for python Dev stuff. Big fan of being able to clone a machine or recover a machine with a single conf file.
If the only thing holding you back from NixOS is my python comment, my issue was with Numpy, which really really demands that you install it globally. Pretty sure you can make it work by using a dev-shell, installing it globally in that shell, then doing everything else in that dev environment normally. I was newish to nixos at the time.
Otherwise I tend to fall back to ubuntu server, but only because it was something I knew. I prefered Centos7 back in the day before RedHat killed Centos. NixOS was my move from there. Been using Alpine as the os in my docker images, but havent really explored a lot of other recent linux os's at the moment.
We don't know and, let us be frank, due to the nature of the community, it is impossible to know... Distros could report the downloads but if it became a KPI, it will be abused right away.
Fedora is well funded and probably the best overall. Now, its ties to US and IBM/Red Hat will keep it constrain in growth.
OpenSUSE is a second contender in funding and best overall, but German branding has taken a deep these last years... I know the government actions should be separate but, in reality, is that SUSE as a company will be constrained in growth too, therefore OpenSUSE. Its community need to be more global too.
Debian is king still. Much of development depends on the previous 2. However, in spite of huge progress lately, still not the best for new Linux users. That is why Linux Mint, Ubuntus, TuxedoOS still exist, but their growth won't be much as Debian gets better and better, but always a step behind the corporate funded ones. For today
The Chinese Linux offerings are becoming well funded are very interesting... but there is a bridge to cross that most of the world still not ready to cross... partly, because there are reasons to be skeptical since the community developing it is highly regional, partly is just plain racism. It is a pity, because these would have the biggest potential for a mayor breakthrough with all that money and human capital pouring from different companies, but I don't see it capable of breaching that regional aspect.
Finally we have Arch. I see it better positioned for future than Debian TBH, but we are talking 5 years down the line. It won't be Arch though, it will be some new variant like CachyOS is doing today that brings Arch to the public... maybe KDE's new bet?!
I haven't play much with them but this is my take:
Deepin. (Just released v25) Based on Debian. Community distro. Very well done and very modern look. It is heavy though and the beta I tried had glitches. Being primarily developed in Chinese though one can tell English was added later. If they only dedicated a bit more effort on languages it would be amazing. It is as much different from Linux Mint as it gets... for better or for worse, but I like their take.
Ubuntu Kylin. Institutional cooperation with Canonical. Haven't tried it. It is just Ubuntu catering their offer to the Chinese market. If you like Ubuntu's or Mint and you language is Chinese, this is for you.
OpenKylin. Fully Independent (No Debian, Arch...). Community distro. Its usage for now seems to be more for institutions though.
There are others but for niches.
China, of course, it want to get independent from MS and Apple so in the next years is going to push heavily for alternative OS so it will be interesting to see what, and for sure, our FOSS community will benefit from that as DeepSeek benefited the AI.
Garuda absolutely nails it with their helper app that sets you up with a choice of popular software, handles updates, and gives you easy access to common settings.
It makes it very approachable for people new to Linux.
Whats the purpose of gentoo over arch and when do you draw the line of diminishing returns? It sounds like gentoo is a lot harder for not much more reward.
Tried Manjaro and Opensuse for a presentation machine lately: issues over issues, that just shouldn't exist on new installation (problems with USB disks, input). Came back to Debian asap because Debian, weirdly, "just works (tm) now.
I daily drive Fedora and I think it has the best Gnome desktop.
But in terms of "best at what they do" I'm blown away by Mint as an apporoachable easy to use "just works" OS. It instantly became my recommendation to new linux converts. Everything is easy to set up. It's remarkably user friendlly. Good software store, flatpack support out of the box. Brilliant hardware support. I like the aesthetics as well.
I have an old Core 2 machine and I tried to get every potato grade distro running on it. I tried Puppy, and Linux Lite, and AntiX and all the "this will run on your toaster" type distros and had problems with every one of them. Mint XFCE installed no problem. It ran beautifully. I pressed my luck and installed a Quadro K620 and an old firewire card (trying to back up old Mini-DV videos). It handled ancient hardware perfectly. Butter smooth 1440p desktop computing and light video editing on an 18 year old machine.
I've started using Nobara recently, and I like it a LOT. Makes it really easy for a noob like me to both play games and edit videos. I actually made a Monster Hunter video entirely in Linux with Davinci Resolve, and it worked really well. I've been an adobe tool my entire editing life, but I really like the switch I recently made š
NixOS is amazing, but it's also got a crazy learning curve. Once you grok it though, it really changes the way you configure your computer.
Fedora is always my favorite big name distro, they're constantly pushing the envelope and adopting new features that need some stability and exposure to mature.
I'm currently using Pop!_OS, which is a great desktop distro.
I was using MX Linux a lot which is amazing for both times when you need a portable distro with lots of features and when you need something that will still run well on older machines.
4 likes, 0 comments - livetimefe on June 28, 2025: "When you accidentally discovere your favourite band has a song that is hella relevant. @tvg_turisas
I do not own any of the videos used in this reel
Clip Credits: @eye.on.
I think it's excellent that we have a new bogeyman to take over from Lennart Poettering, Hans Reiser (before the murder) and everyone that came before them. To be honest, the Pottering thing was getting old.
Plus Ƨa change.
Is there an audition process or do people just make themselves available via secret Santa or that game when your role is given to you (and everyone else) in an envelope at a party?
The world sadly needs some of the stuff only antisocial nutters can provide. If the said nutter's gift to the world is good enough, the drama and discord that the nutter bequeaths will be forgotten and they will be given a free pass.
I highly disagree with the attitude of this comment (after all Linus allowed BCacheFS in and now complains about it) but necessary evil in itself is a valid thing for most people unfortunately.
I haven't had a proper game console since the PS3.
I would like to get one, mostly to play with my family (wife, 7yo kid). I had been waiting for the Switch 2 for a while now (I really resisted the urge to get a Switch OLED back when it was released...).
On the plus side:
it's really geared towards family/party gaming
it's Nintendo, so you get the whole usual games (Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.)
like most consoles, it's plug and play and can be enjoyed in the living room (I kind of gave up trying to set up a proper gaming experience with my Linux PCs, given that I don't have the hardware for it)
On the minus side:
the battery life is not great to say the least (2.5 hours takes me back of the Game Gear in early 90s!)
the screen seems to be pretty bad too (at least it's a step back from the OLED one of the Switch)
the joycons are still not using a Hall effect sensor, meaning they might still be prone to drifting
most of the games will not be sold as proper cartridges but as download codes
the whole thing (console, additional gamepads, games) is quite pricey
it's Nintendo, famous for their anti-everything (anti-homebrew, anti-emulation, anti-piracy)
Should IāÆstill go with it, or is there a better option? (I hope the better option is not to wait 4 more years for Nintendo to release a newer Switch 2 that would fix the shitty hardware).
I personally don't recommend anyone get the Switch 2. The new price points are frankly ridiculous, and I'd hate to see that shit get justified by sales.
Personally, I'd recommend looking into handheld PCs. I haven't looked into them much myself due to lack of money, but they're generally much more worth the cost from what I've heard.
All that said, I missed that you were looking for something to play with your 7 year old child. Switch might be better, but any handheld would be... notably destructible, so that's a factor to keep in mind.
We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasnāt changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence ā based on the data itās been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance ā nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real āthinkingā AI likely impossible? Because itās bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesnāt hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition ā not a shred ā thereās a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the āhard problem of consciousnessā. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to āhappenā, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasnāt changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence ā based on the data itās been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance ā nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real āthinkingā AI likely impossible? Because itās bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesnāt hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition ā not a shred ā thereās a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the āhard problem of consciousnessā. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to āhappenā, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
I installed Linux Mint on my Lenovo Yoga 7 laptop and it's been great, with the one exception of not really having a tablet mode when I flip the screen. Its not a huge deal, but I watch shows that way and sometimes miss an on-screen keyboard.
The actual keyboard stays active when flipped, which is fine until I pick it up or have it on my lap and accidentally hit some random key.
It seems from some looking around that Mint doesn't do great with this and I'm open to a different distro that's fairly beginner friendly, but even better if there are some options I'm missing to keep what I have.
I use archlinux with KDE and I had to tinker with it for hours if not days for it to properly have an automatic on screen keyboard that is not complete bullcrap. But since then it works. Even on LUKS decrypt during boot.
mint uses X11 which should be considered legacy at this point. wayland (Gnome, Plasma) has all the touch and dock/undock and rotate and pen etc goodies. try it out from a liveUSB and decide for yourself.
Why is mint even recommended to new users at this point. Cinnamon is nowhere near Gnome or Plasma and both of these provide much simpler and more unified experience in things like settings
Muss mir das nochmal ansehen, die Serie habe ich auch seit meiner Kindheit nicht mehr gesehen und ich bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass ich die letzte Folge nie gesehen habe.
Hello, in the recent years I find myself willing to spend much less time and energy on games, but I do still enjoy them. Oftentimes I end up quitting a new game I tried out relatively early on, because I'm encountering some block, grind, non-optional boring side quest, empty open world, uninteresting clutter or details that I have to manage, or similar. Like, I just wanna play the actual game play, see how the story continues, and visit those areas that were designed with care. Not worry where on the map I can sell the glimbrunses I collected so I can buy a 37% stronger glarpidifice that I'll need to beat the next glutrey after which I'm allowed to continue the main story.
Sorry if this turned into some kind of a rant, but I hope it's understandable what I'm looking for and what I meant by fluff. Some games that have fulfilled this for me during the last years:
Stray
Skyrim (there's a lot of fluff you can worry about in Skyrim, but the thing is you don't have to worry about it, you can also just walk in any direction and see what situation you wind up in, at least for the first 10-20h of a playthrough, which IMO is enough time for a game anyway)
Looking forward to hear your suggestions š Games where there is some fluff but you're allowed to just ignore it are also fine, but not having any fluff is preferred. Bonus points for anything on the Xbox game pass.
I usually have a good time with isometric fantasy rpgs in the vein of Baldur's Gate. They don't really have grind, the world is generally well-filled with a relatively dense story and interesting quests (denser than Skyrim at least), and if the game becomes too hard you can turn down the difficulty. Though you do need to actually be interested in the combat mechanics (which are much more complicated than e.g. in Elder Scrolls games) to really enjoy these games, IMO. One downside is that these types of games are usually really long; I've dropped a couple of them halfway because they overstayed their welcome.
Some examples:
Baldur's Gate 3 (don't really need to have played 1+2 to enjoy this one, though they're still very good)
Divinity: Original Sin 1+2
Pillars of Eternity 1+2 (2 has much better combat, but the first one is pretty important to understand the world)
Tyranny (this is a relatively short one)
Pathfinder: Kingmaker 1+2
For more Skyrim-style games, I really enjoyed the Gothic series. I think their level of grind is about the same as Skyrim (probably a little less, but it's been a while), and if you can get past the outdated graphics of the early titles they're quite fun. Especially the dialogues, they aren't as serious as Skyrim's.
I've been using Pop!_OS for a few years now, and it's worked like a dream. Everything works out-of-the-box, and gaming on Linux has never been easier. But it almost works a little too well. Learning Linux as opposed to Windows for all my games was a fun challenge.
But, now that I'm familiar with how to set up any game that needs a little help besides Proton, I'm starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize, and I think picking a new distro with slightly different architechture will be very nice.
Don't get me wrong, I still want something that works by itself more often than not. But I would love to have something a little more cutting-edge that gives me a little more control.
I started with Linux by installing Kubuntu, and I really miss KDE Plasma. I know Kubuntu is still on Plasma 5, and I've been wanting to find a distro that lets me use Plasma 6.
I've narrowed my choices down to three distros: Nobara, Garuda, and Bazzite.
So far, I've confirmed that Nobara and Garuda come with Plasma 6, but I haven't found that information for Bazzite yet.
So, what do you think about these distros? What are the pros and cons for you?
I'm leaning the most toward Garuda - but I'm worried Arch may be TOO big of a leap. I really just learned that Fedora is not Arch-based, so I know Garuda will be a bit of the odd one out of the three.
TL;DR: Nobara, Garuda, Bazzite - which one is good and do any suck?
EDIT:
Thanks, everyone, for the insightful and helpful comments! From what everyone has said, I've come to find that either CachyOS or Solus will fit my needs best.
CachyOS seems optimized for gaming, while Solus' curated rolling releases seem (to my untrained eye at least) to be somewhat of a step between the way Debian-based distros upgrade and the way Arch-based distros upgrade.
I'd love to hear people's experiences with both of these! I think I'm going to try to dual-boot them and see what setup looks like for both.š
Bazzite has the latest KDE, yeah, currently reading 6.4 on the latest version. Nobara broke on upgrades for me (I did nothing crazy, basic install and basic upgrade process), bazzite is rock solid and built on a good base (fedora atomic). In general, I fully recommend immutable atomic distros for noobies it all just works and it helps teach you important lessons on data security and containerization
The best thing about atomic linux images like Bazzite is if for whatever reason Bazzite stops releasing new versions you can rebase to a different "distro" and itll have all of your user data and configs intact with a single simple command. With things like Nobara or Garuda, if there is a problem you essentially have to do a clean install.
edit:
And as for Arch, Linux mint, etc., I personally find these distros and advice to be outdated. Upgrades can often break in many smaller linux distros and it is very important to have a strong and reproducible method of upgrading, especially for new users. VanillaOS and Fedora Atomic are currently the most user friendly ways to achieve flawless upgrades.
Is the rebase feature the main thing that sets atomic desktops apart?
Atomic and immutable distros essentially attempt to make each version on every computer act exactly the same to help devs with debugging. This means they shut down a lot of easy access to core system files, instead you have to use special commands to layer new changes onto your distro. These are automatically re-applied every time you upgrade, reducing the chance of breakage.
Rebasing is a fun consequence of this. Fedora Atomic images (re: things like Bazzite, Secureblue, Kinoite, etc) can be swapped out with a simple command or two. If a dev does something you don't like, you can easily swap to a different image without having to do a full migration.
Iām not too worried about having to troubleshoot. Nobara has been appealing to me because itās developed by the Proton guy.
Most of the kernel mods from nobara are applied on Bazzite. Bazzite and CachyOS afaik contribute to the same set of code there.
How does an atomic distro help teach containerization and data security as compared to a traditional distro?
Since you cannot easily modify system files, you need to use containers to make certain very technical (and often insecure) things work. DistroBox is the main method for this, and as a plus side, it lets you install programs with commands from any distro. I can use the AUR (an arch linux feature) on Bazzite (Fedora atomic) with DistroBox if i want, for example. There are some other things that come preinstalled on Bazzite that help with this, such as flathub and brew.sh
Correct. Atomic distros donāt apply the update, unless it is ready to be applied successfully all together, usually with an option to restore the previous state, without the need of something like btrfs snapshots.
With Nix(-OS) as an example - your bootloader entry is just a reference a giant list of what you need to get out of the Nix store, to achieve the config you want. Many of those can coexist in the same system as a result, including different versions of the same package
This setup wonāt really teach you anything different in relation to containers though.
If you want to play with Atomic distros I'd recommend you do that in a virtual machine in KVM first. They are quite restricting which is good for the distro developers to make consistent releases and experiences for users, and secure, but not necessarily the best option for tech savvy users.
There are ways around the restrictions but you can reach points where the compromises you have to make are too frustrating. If you find that out late down the line after setting up your desktop it can be very annoying. Also I do use Flatpak, but it's not the most efficient way to run software. Atomic distros have more overhead due to the need to use flatpaks or distrobox and the like to get everything you might want.
Atomic distros are a neat idea but I personally love tweaking every element of my install and optimising or customising it. So I use a rolling release distro, have my home folder on a separate partition, and back up regularly.
I use Garuda on my daily driver and I love it. I distro hopped for years and I'm finally home. It's not hard like trying to do your own Arch from scratch. It's like some super geek setup Linux for me with all the bells and whistles just the way I want it. I had to ditch the dragon theme and then it was perfect. And snapper is so well setup and integrated with Garuda, there's rarely a case where a clean install is warranted. I highly recommend it.
Hmm, that's a serious downside for me ngl. I tried to set up Mod Organizer 2 when I had Steam installed through Flatpak on Pop!, and I had to switch to the Ubuntu repository to get it to recognize my Steam install.
Kubuntu 24.10 is on plasma 6.1; not sure why you thought it was on plasma 5? Maybe you were thinking of the Long Term Support release which has a much longer release cycle and favours stability over cutting edge; that probably is still on 5? But personally I stay away from Ubuntu distros due to snap.
If you really want to learn Linux and game, maybe pick a distro that is not optimised by default for gaming and optimise it yourself?
I'm on OpenSuSE Tunbleweed and have optimised it myself to game how I want. It's rolling release so I'm on KDE Plasma 6.4. It's not difficult to do although I haven't gone quite as far as kernel patching that the gaming focused distros offer.
Another challenge is Arch - it's really not as difficult as people think and even just setting it up in a virtual machine helps you learn alot about Linux fundamentals without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I've learnt alot using KVM to create virtual machines, and even have a Win 11 machine set up just because I can.
Another route to consider which I also do is get a SBC like a Raspberry 5 and look into setting up self hosting of services like Home Assistant etc. Again you learn Alot about how Linux works in the process and you can keep your main PC running for games without having to move. There is a whole self hosting community on Lemmy with loads of different routes to go, and lots of different manufacturers these days.
There are lots of options beyond changing distros. But also changing distros can be fun and a nice way to reset and make something new.
I think those three will be completely fine, but also I think base Arch would be completely fine for you. I have no idea why it's a meme that Arch is so "hard". I wouldn't recommend it for someone coming from Windows or Mac who has no idea what they're doing and had no poweruser tendencies on Windows/Mac either. But for someone who's used Linux for a few years, I think doing a base Arch install is no biggie at all. It's got a very annoying meme reputation but I think it's completely inaccurate.
That's an aside, and I'm not saying you should use base Arch, just that I don't think there's anything wrong with it if that's something you're interested in. Although if you're coming from a "beginner" distro and your intent is to learn, I do think doing a base Arch install (even if you don't stick with it) is a good idea. You'll be entirely capable of the install process and probably get a better understanding of how your system works. Then after you install it you can switch to some other distro you prefer.
Like OP said, you can get Plasma on Bazzite, as well as install it right on a SteamDeck if you have one. It's constantly being updated, and if gaming is your main driver, Bazzite goes out of its way to make things work. In theory you wouldn't have to do any tinkering to get games running, with the added bonus that you won't be messing up or introducing any entropy to your system files. If something does go wrong, you can reboot into the previous release and it'll be back to where you just came from.
There's still plenty to learn if you want to, it's just not the traditional Linux distro setup.
So, Bazzite does have a KDE 6 variant, and works very, very well, especially on a handheld PC.
It takes the approach of sandboxing off the core OS, but giving you a bunch of tools for running flatpaks and other things, set up DistroBox to semi-sort of have multiple linux os's simultaneously if you want to say, compile something from source that only has proper dependencies figured out in... not Arch, what SteamOS is based on...
I run it on my SteamDeck because it offers more ability to use it as an actual PC, while still being rock solid in gaming mode.
But uh... for more discussion... I'm going to kind of not answer your question and suggest something else:
Basically, much like Nobara is a 'gaming-tuned', optimized, cutting/bleeding-edge version of Fedora...
PikaOS basically is that, but for Debian.
If you're used to using PopOS!, well, that's ultimately Debian based, so there may be less of a learning curve now that you're broadly familiar with the Debian environment.
PikaOS works with GNOME, KDE, Hyprland if you want an even lighter weight DE.
They are also working on a Handheld PC capable out of the box distro, but its not ready yet.
From what I've seen from various youtubers... PikaOS is trading blows with Cachy and Nobara for getting the highest frame rate out of a game, on a same hardware / same setting FPS comparison... sometimes it is actually beating them.
Uh also, yeah, look into CachyOS, it seems to be the latest hotness for an Arch based, gaming optimized, but widely functional for 'whatever' OS, if you're curious about trying out Arch, and of course thus being able to constantly let every one know you use Arch, actually.
But, now that Iām familiar with how to set up any game that needs a little help besides Proton, Iām starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize, and I think picking a new distro with slightly different architechture will be very nice.
Donāt get me wrong, I still want something that works by itself more often than not. But I would love to have something a little more cutting-edge that gives me a little more control.
Fam, did I understand you correctly that you want to tinker/tweak/customize the system to your heart's content? Yet, you also wish that the system "just works". At least, mostly. Is that right? Or..., like could you perhaps be more clear on what it is you'd like to tinker/tweak/customize in the first place? Please, if possible, be explicit.
After I got a better idea on what it actually is that you seek, I'll try to answer your other(/remaining) questions.
I suppose that's fine, and please feel free to act however way you wish.
The fact remains, however, that no one actually delved into the essence of the matter.
Furthermore, I find it rather troublesome that you deflected the question rather than answering it head-on. Perhaps you didn't think it through yet, and are just waiting to be swayed by whoever advertises best.
To illustrate my point, would you (at least) be so kind to explain me where/why Fedora has lost your favor? While, on the other hand, what Solus provides (in contrast) to justify your interest in it?
Do you think I am using this thread and this thread alone as my only source of information on these distros? I'm crowdsourcing opinions and checking them against the documentation for the distros and my personal preferences.
I feel as though this thread has delved into the essence of the matter perfectly well. That matter being, of course, people's opinions on the three distros I laid out. I deflected your question because you are looking to pick my brain and start an in-depth discussion, but I've reached a point in my research where I'm comfortable making a choice without any more guidance.
And, well, idk, I feel like my statements indicated I was looking for a good middle ground between a stable system that works smoothly and something I can crack open and break while tweaking - for the learning experience. I suppose that would really just boil down to fixed vs rolling release distros.
Fedora has lost my favor due to being a fixed release distro. After CachyOS was brought to my attention, and I researched it a little bit, it seemed to fit my desires pretty well. It's optimized for speed, which is perfect for games, and it's rolling release so I still get to feel like an uber haxx0r. Nothing against Fedora, it seems great. I want something a little further from my comfort zone.
Solus is appealing to me because it isn't based on anything else, and I love that it's a small team. Plus, the weekly updates thing they do felt like a good middle ground between how Debian-based and Arch-based distros work in terms of updating. But, I think I'll stick with CachyOS for now, I'm excited to use Arch btw.
Do you think I am using this thread and this thread alone as my only source of information on these distros?
No, I don't think that. I'd even challenge that notion as your query didn't start with a simple "What's best?" but instead asked for a comparison between three distros that were (somehow) selected by you. Please feel free to enlighten me on what made you even consider the premise of your above question. Though, as this is not that important to begin with, it's also perfectly fine to ignore that š.
I feel as though this thread has delved into the essence of the matter perfectly well. That matter being, of course, peopleās opinions on the three distros I laid out.
If you lay it out like that, then; yeah, surely. However, it seems we fundamentally differ on what the essence of the matter is. And, perhaps I'm at fault for thinking this is a beneficial exercise to begin with. Regardless, I feel I at least owe you an explanation that goes over where I'm coming from:
Fundamentally, literally none of your original three distros serve you well for the purposes of "Iām starting to want to delve into my OS more to see what I can customize". Each one is pretty opinionated (by default^[Garuda is exempted from this through its KDE Lite offering.]) and -heck- both Bazzite and Nobara come with (highly) specialized tools required for system maintenance. This is because they've identified that there's a very serious disconnect between the freedom they'd like to allow their users and the (otherwise almost insurmountable) complexity this adds to how upgrades are managed. Bazzite trusts Fedora Atomic's tooling for this, while .
Being (highly) opinionated isn't necessarily bad. But it's undeniably easier to tweak/tinker/configure a more minimal system. Hence, you're better served by a lean install (with sane defaults). Thankfully, community members either recognized this and tried to sway you towards other options. With success*. Or, you were able to discern distros that better serve you from the communities' input. However it may be, both CachyOS and Solus are definitely better in that regard. Though, crucially, if the community strictly kept to discussing the original three distros and didn't go out of their way to venture into unexplored waters, then you wouldn't have arrived where you are right now.
Anyhow, all of the above could as well be disregarded the very moment you (hypothetically) state that your idea of customization is limited to the avenues KDE Plasma offers. Because, the original three are perfectly suited for that. So, your ideas on what tweaking/tinkering/customization entails is fundamentally linked to the distro that's most fit for the job.
And thus, I would distill the essence of the matter to be a clear idea on what kind of balance between "stability" and "customization" is envisioned as desirable by you. And, while at it, proper delineations of what is and isn't understood as stability and customization. Is the requirement of stability only satisfied if you can easily rollback to a proper working state? Or, is borking on a random update simply unforgivable? On the other hand, do you really want to compile your own kernel and install it? Or were you merely interested in KDE's knobs? Etc. etc.
and start an in-depth discussion
Not necessarily, answering "Orā¦, like could you perhaps be more clear on what it is youād like to tinker/tweak/customize in the first place?" would probably have been sufficient.
something I can crack open and break while tweaking - for the learning experience
There's so much we could go over in the paragraph the above text is found, but I'll instead limit myself to just the above text. I find myself in a conundrum when you present that the above was implied and that (somehow) you came to consider Bazzite. While Bazzite is a lot more customizable than people give it credit for, I would not describe any part of the experience as "cracking it open". So, when met with an oxymoron as such, I literally have to ask for a clarification.
Fedora has lost my favor due to being a fixed release distro.
You've stated somewhere that you "Love the idea of rolling releases". So, if Solus passes as a rolling release distro ^[To be clear, technically, it absolutely does.], but has less uptodate packages than Fedora's previous release^[So I'm not even comparing it to Fedora 42 or Fedora Rawhide (i.e. its rolling release branch).]. Then, what is it intrinsically that makes it favorable as a rolling release? And I haven't even delved into why Fedora's release cadence is referred to as semi-rolling or how the latest updates to packages like GNOME arrive earlier in Fedora compared to even Arch. Btw, this is not meant as one big advertisement for Fedora. Instead, I want to point out the many many nuances that exist within the Linux landscape.
After CachyOS was brought to my attention, and I researched it a little bit, it seemed to fit my desires pretty well. Itās optimized for speed, which is perfect for games, and itās rolling release so I still get to feel like an uber haxx0r.
But, I think Iāll stick with CachyOS for now, Iām excited to use Arch btw.
I agree that CachyOS is one of the better fits. And if you're not interested to check out Arch, EndeavourOS or openSUSE Tumbleweed(/Slowroll), then I can't even think of another rolling release worth considering for you.
I love that itās a small team.
I don't know why this would be preferred over a big team š¤. Mind helping me understand this?
Btw, to be clear, Solus, as a project, is currently not very healthy. While it could compete with Fedora and openSUSE in the past, the last couple of years haven't been very kind to it. I'd propose the idea that the departure of its founder (i.e. Ikey Doherty) from the project has left it (relatively) visionless. And the turbulent times that followed made nurturing its community a great challenge. One, I'd argue, they weren't able to handle gracefully. Regardless, it's undoubtedly a shell of its former glory. This is also reflected by how relatively bare-bones its repository is. Or how absent it is within the discourse. Hopefully it will be able to bounce back after goodies from Doherty's latest project (i.e. AerynOS) trinkle down to benefit Solus. But, until then, it would be very irresponsible of me if I didn't discourage you from daily-driving it...
Some basic usage tips for users new to NobaraNotes/Edits:1, Ignore the mouse cursor graphical glitch, its due to the recording desktop capture, not present o...
See, this is what I meant. I deflected because my phrasing gave everyone else enough information that they could just suggest a distro.
I appreciate that you've clearly put thought into the recommendation you want to give, and I appreciate that you'd like to really understand what I'm looking for. But at the time of your original comment, CachyOS was baremetal on my machine. So, I've already picked what I want, and you're insisting I must explain in greater detail so that you may answer my question (already been answered).
Please feel free to enlighten me on what made you even consider the premise of your above question.
The fact that you were insistent no one "delved into the essence of the matter." I didn't need them to, I was researching every OS that anyone mentioned.
but instead asked for a comparison between three distros that were (somehow) selected by you.
They're all gaming distros, dude. I felt like that was evident.
I'm sorry this whole post discussion has not gone the way you wanted, but it's gone the way I wanted. And I believe I've found something that works for me.
But, in the end, it ain't Sophie's Choice. I have my important files on a thumb drive and a backup thumb drive with Pop!_OS in case I need to start fresh again. NBD.
Fam, with all due respect, and please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think you've 'properly' engaged with my previous reply. Don't get me wrong, it's your absolute prerogative to disregard/move-on/disengage/let-go especially if you're already moved on. The daunting task to read a wall of text concerning a subject you've internally closed/'solved' ain't everyone's cup of tea anyways. The reason I've brought this up, is because most of how I would respond to your latest reply is already contained within my previous reply š . As such, I will refrain from reiterating what I've said before for the sake of brevity. Instead, I'll try to strictly address the unaddressed. I'll also take the liberty to assume that you're not a fan of consuming long-form content. This will also be reflected in the remainder of this reply.
my phrasing gave everyone else enough information that they could just suggest a distro
Suggesting a distro ain't hard; CTRL + click here consecutively to get a random stream of distros. Even if we would limit it to the union of gaming distros with (semi-)rolling release distros, there's a lot to choose from. As such, mentioning what's out there ain't impressive. But expertly navigating between them sure as hell is.
Granted, suggesting a (new) distro wasn't even the objective. You wanted comparisons... Or, rather, I assumed you did.
CachyOS was baremetal on my machine.
It would probably have saved us both a bunch of trouble if you had been transparent/explicit about this. I can't read your mind nor do I like to assume stuff.
but instead asked for a comparison between three distros that were (somehow) selected by you.
They're all gaming distros, dude. I felt like that was evident.
Please allow me to clarify that it wasn't entirely clear why these gaming distros were specifically selected, while others like CachyOS, ChimeraOS, DraugerOS, Jovian-NixOS, PikaOS and Regata OS were not.
I'm sorry this whole post discussion has not gone the way you wanted
Fam, I got literally no stakes in this discussion. Apologies if I made you uncomfortable (or something) by making you think otherwise. I was merely in it to help/assist/support/aid you to the best of my abilities. For this, I required more input so that I wouldn't have to succumb you under multiple walls of text. I didn't think asking you to answer "could you perhaps be more clear on what it is youād like to tinker/tweak/customize in the first place? Please, if possible, be explicit." was unreasonable. But perhaps I was wrong.
but it's gone the way I wanted. And I believe I've found something that works for me.
I sure hope so, fam. I wouldn't want to see you return with your tail between your legs.
I used Solus for years, it was actually my first long time Linux distro, and I have fond memories from that time and deep appreciation of the project. Note that I say used, because I have moved on (to EndeavourOS and later NixOS).
The reason why I moved on is the same as why I would recommend against Solus: the project have lost a lot of its core contributors. At the time I left there were no package updates for quite some time (used to be weekly).
I am not quite sure Solus really got a future. There are talks about converging it with AerynOS, former SerpentOS, which is innovative but still experimental software built by the original team, i.e. those that left Solus in the first place. Though they are really proficient in making the software, I do not think they have the same skillset for securing longevity through contributions.
In the end you should not care too much what people think. You will get the popular options for the intersection of Lemmy and Linux users, but popular is not always good nor what is right for you. Just try stuff and be ready to move a little through rigorous backups, you do have backups?
Hmm, thank you for your point about Solus. I was interested because it seemed the most interested in the desktop experience. But it does seem they're updating and getting back on track. I love the idea of a weekly rolling release for beginners who still need the idea to click.
Solus is a great choise for desktop. The Solus team is doing well lately. š They have even weekly updates on updates. Really great comminication towards users.
I ended up going with CachyOS because I feel confident enough to try Arch now, but I think Solus is going to be my go-to when recommending for beginners, once I try it a bit more. I think it's a good blend between stable and cutting-edge, plus getting to tell people that you won't have to replace it with Solus 2 eventually is kinda a big selling point.
I tried Endeavor and in classic fashion installed something that lead to a bunch of issues down the line. Not sure exactly what I did, swapped to Bazzite and have been enjoying learning the way it works.
Neonazistische Jugendbanden wie Deutsche Jugend Voran verbreiten immer mehr Angst und Schrecken. Nun weist der Verfassungsschutz sehr deutlich auf die Risiken fĆ¼r bestimmte Gruppen hin.
Mit etwas Interpretation kann man einen makaberen Witz daraus machen. Den Kommentaren nach scheint das primƤr nicht so gemeint zu sein.
Benjamin, ein Elefant im Zoo, der, zwinker zwinker, sprechen kann und den Zoo verlassen kann, also nicht wirklich eingesperrt ist.
Bibbi, die Hexenkraft nutzen muss, um ihre Probleme in der kapitalistischen Welt lƶsen zu kƶnnen und dabei ihr Hexensein nicht offen ausleben kann.
Peter, der den bourgeoisen Traum der freistehenden Villa im Bauwagen auslebt und sich dabei in einem schwelenden Streit mit seinem Nachbarn befindet.
Ernsthaft gefragt mangels Erinnerung: warum sind Benjamin und Bibbi sozialistisch? Bei Peter kann ich das Ć¼ber das Vorleben von Konsumkritik nachvollziehen.
The only comparable I was able to find is Bitwig Studio, but it's quite expensive and I wasn't doing so much music so I stopped making electronic music instead.
Not too long ago I broke down a the costs between Ableton and bitwig, and they are quite similar over time.
Ableton has the big #'rd updates where as bitwig you get all updates within a year from license activation.
Since BW will still run after the license runs out (you just cant update to any new versions) I don't always update until there is a new feature that I want to work with drops in an update.
I also limit purchasing licenses to sale periods as a license can sit on the shelf until you're ready to activate it - this significantly reduced the cost for me.
I think there are other ways to go about this though on the vast sea of the net if your sails catch the wind right ;). If you're making stuff for fun and not for profit I think everyone should have access to creative tools.
If you make money than it's worth considering sending some. money their way. ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
I haven't personally used Ableton ever but am a hobbying musician, and pro-audio is possible on Linux as well as running non-native applications via Wine. I found this just searching, there's apparently a Discord group also dedicated to this project.
Usually doing a web search like "xyz windows program+linux" will produce results, and putting in your distro name will produce better. Anyway, good luck on your journey!
A Repository for All Things Related to Running Ableton Live on Linux, part of the newly formed Ableton on Linux Discord Group. - BEEFY-JOE/AbletonLiveOnLinux
I always seem to run into roadblocks I can't figure out when I try to use wine and windows virtual machines. Dual booting is a hassle but afaik it's the least difficult way to go.
I am a hobbyist and was using ableton live before. As mentioned by others, unless you dual boot - try bitwig studio for similar experience. It is from people who worked in ableton. Have a trial, pirate if can't afford now.
Foss alternative - ardour is great, but you will have to bring your own plug in suit.
Yabridge tool can help you to run windows vsts on Linux, but not everything works. And beware - it does not work with flatpak version Bitwig, at least it did not.
I suspect a VM would introduce latency (big no no for music production), and I can't imagine getting ASIO working would be easy (though I've never tried it).
According to WineHQ, Ableton's compatibility with wine isn't stellar. FL Studio works quite well in it, but switching DAWs can be a pretty major undertaking.
For Linux native DAWs, Reaper and Bitwig are the two best options. Reaper is the most affordable at 60 bucks, with an infinite free trial.
Itās frustrating, considering that abletonās push runs on Linux, but I never had a satisfactory, or comparable experience running it on a Linux desktop. To be honest, this was the dealbreaker that kept me using a Mac.
I personally reckon they're working on something YAbridge-esque to allow people to bring their VSTs to the push in standalone mode. If they can actually nail that, it's an absolute no brainer to then release a full Linux version of the DAW and finally allow people like me to make the switch
Every time I've tried to run Ableton on Linux over the years (most recently about Christmas last year), it's the VST support that lets me down. I've got hundreds of VSTs I've used in various projects over the past couple of decades and I can't switch unless I know they all work properlyāprojects not loading or sounding different is unacceptable. I need to be able to open anything I've worked on over the years and be able to get right into the creativity without tinkering, as that is what I already have today.
Until that day, I've got to begrudgingly keep windows around.
Yeah that sounds about right - VST is such an awful standard, and is only made worse by all the copy protection nonsense that companies pile on top of it. I wish there was an open standard that was cross-platform, portable and used PGP encryption for standard licencing, but alas, it's too late for that.
I can greatly recommend Reaper to you, in case Ableton + Wine doesn't work out.
I only recently got into music making as a hobby so my overall perspective might be limited, but other DAWs I tried included: * Ardour * Bitwig * LMMS * Zrythm
I settled with Reaper bc of it's customizability, freedom in workflow and cheap price without compromising in pro features. It's actually completely free as long as you are evaluating buying it, which is up to you for how long. And the customizability is off the charts compared to any other DAW.
But what really sold Reaper to me was the lack of hurdles that got into my way of learning to make music.
I started on abelton and moved to bitwig around 3.X and have been with it ever since.
I love all the different modules and the grid which has give me a lot more expressive control over my sounds.
they are similar yet different; I believe the core bitwig team were ex ableton devs who wanted to take things in a different direction.
I know it's silly but one of the biggest things that I like about bitwig is customizable shortcuts; this is especially good if you're coming from ableton because if your a shortcut key wizard you can easily remap similar functions.
if you've got an extensive VST collection you can run them with wine + yabridge.
Bitwig is not the only option, but coming from ableton if you want to run single boot it is the most similar (IMO) to Ableton.
Happy to answer any questions you may have about it as well.
There are several commercial options for Linux. The most-Ableton software out there is Bitwig Studio that has a Linux port. However, it's expensive. The cheapest commercial solution, with a bit of learning curve but powerful nonetheless, is Reaper.
However, if you want to go 100% open source, there's Ardour and LMMS (which is a lot like FL Studio). Ardour 9, which is expected by the end of the year, will be more MIDI-friendly than it used to be. LMMS latest git version (offered as binary on their site) has some good new features compared to their stable version, however, there's still no vst3 support.
I'm an visual artist and I used Photoshop for years to edit my hand-painted scanned paintings. When I moved to Linux, and Gimp3 was out, I was finally ready to leave Photoshop behind. Some features of Photoshop aren't there, but I was ready to leave them behind. Same with video, I used to have a rather popular blog about color grading with Resolve. I moved to kdenlive, which has none of these tools or plugins. It's a decision that I simply had to make. I wanted to use foss tools, and that was the price to pay. I'm cool with my decision.
If you gotta go commercial, go with Reaper. The people (a small team of 3 or 4 I believe) behind it are really cool, and they're doing it for the love of it, their profit is very small.
Yes, but you said you were using Resolve for color grading. My understanding is you should still be able to use that on Linux, but I havenāt tried it yet myself.
If you want to use Ableton, then Install it with wine, if you sandbox the prefix copy the VSTs inside the prefix and use them thru Ableton.
Some VSTs may not work or could have some graphical glitches. For example with Serum sometimes some widgets gets black until I pass hover with cursor. There is a fix for this which didn't work for me that's about disabling "d2d1.dll" and installing "gdiplus".
Otherwise you can use a Linux native DAW and use VSTs with wine. Check yabridge and LinVst.
I'd suggest no-one ever dual-boot Windows with anything. There are to many mishaps when Windows takes it into their head to fuck the bootloader.
Put the OS into a VM. If you only use Windows for one app put Windows into the VM. Otherwise put Linux into the VM until you find you're mostly using Linux.
I have set up a good hand full of dual booted Windows/ Linux machines. Never had any major issues. However, I also noticed that I only use Linux except for games and that's slowly changing, too, so I would suggest trying the dual boot if it makes you more comfortable to realize yourself that you don't need it.
Few weeks ago I have noticed that my Presonus account is offering me to download Studio One Pro 7, in deb or flatpak format. I use Linux desktop for everything except audio work (still use Windows machine for that) so when I checked my Presonus account from Linux box I was quite shocked.
Sadly, attempt to upload the image from the phone (using Boost app) doesn't work so I can't upload and can't be bothered to upload elsewhere then share URL, etc.
I couldn't get bothered to try installing it earlier since I don't want to run S1 on this box.
But just for the sake of it, I have now tried installing flatpak file and it completed.
I don't use flatpak much but trying to do...
flatpak run com.presonus.studioapp7
... failed with "Failed to connect to Wayland display".
I spent 0 seconds on reading about S1 Pro for Linux and have no intention to bother with it further but if you do use S1 on Windows you might have Linux download available as well. Give it a try if you are interested.
What exactly it requires to run, I have no idea.
But it is really surprising development.
Edit: hah, after i removed that flatpak i just installed, a notification popped up saying "Studio One is a Wayland application and won't run in X11 session."
The .wav format is actually very simple. You should be able to write a bash script to produce wavs without too much trouble. If you'd rather not work that low-level you can always use the DAW features in emacs.
I recently started playing around with Reaper on Linux. It's no different from it's windows counterpart. You can use something like yabridge to use third party VSTs. All I had to do was point it to my VST folder and viola, almost all of them work. The only problem I have is that none of them work graphically. The sound works and they render just fine but for some reason clicking on a knob or button is waaaay off. For example in Pro-Q, if I put the mouse by the top of the plugin the frequency knob will highlight like the mouse is on top of knob. Nothing happens if the mouse is actually on top. This may be a yabridge issue. Their GitHub does say Wine versions greater than 9.22 don't work. I'm on the latest Wine and haven't fucked with different versions yet. If the fix is that simple then the experience is no different for me at least. Otherwise I just have to use the UI-less mode where Reaper turns the plugins into a series of sliders you can adjust instead.
Like many others have suggested, you may want to try Bitwig. I understand that it's the alternative DAW that is the most similar to Ableton. The company was started by a group of ex-Ableton employees, so it's not a coincidence. Many people online feel that it's in general a better DAW than Ableton, so you may end up liking it. It supports Linux natively, even provides an official flatpak (or Ubuntu installer?)
It's not as expensive as some make it out to be, and it's on sale right now for a few more days. I just yesterday bought Bitwig Studio Essentials. They have 3 editions and Studio Essentials is the starter version, currently $79 (reg. $99). The next level up is Studio Producer, currently $149 (reg. $199), and the top level is just Studio, currently $299 (reg. $399). They also offer rent to own for $16/month for 25 months on Splice.
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
Every week we cover the highlights of whatās happening in the world of KDE Plasma and its associated apps like Discover, System Monitor, and more.
I've never understood our societies obsession with when men lose their virginity. You see it in media all the time like in 'The 42 year Old Virgin' and 'Last American Virgin'. It seems to be a bigger thing with men then women. Can any men here confirm?
Why does it matter when someone loses their virginity? If you ask me it's no one's business to when someone loses their v-card. People should lose it when they feel comfortable to. I hate our societies insistence that men lose it before the age of 18. Like if your an adult virgin our society sees it as a personal failing that makes you a loser. I never understood it myself. It's frankly ridiculous.
The thing is that for most men, it's not voluntary when they don't 'lose their v-card' for a long time, it's that they can't find a partner. Someone who never managed to find a partner despite trying typically doesn't exactly feel like a winner, so they tend to at least somewhat agree with the popular sentiment that older virgins are 'losers'.
It's true that this isn't really other people's business, especially not if they're only using it to put people down instead of trying to improve things. Though this is certainly an issue on a societal level.
So who is the one supposedly having "tall poppy syndrome" - is it the people who critize/put down the "tall poppies", or the "tall poppies" themselves? Or perhaps society itself?
This is such an odd way to pathologize a social phenomenon.
Spotify, the worldās leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ekās announcement of a ā¬600m ($702m) investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones and military software.
The move, announced on 17 June, has sparked widespread outrage from musicians, activists and social media users who accuse Ek of funnelling profits from music streaming into the military industry.
Many have started calling on users to cancel their subscriptions to the service.
āFinally cancelling my Spotify subscription ā why am I paying for a fuckass app that works worse than it did 10 years ago, while their CEO spends all my money on technofascist military fantasies?ā said one user on X.
Spotify, the worldās leading music streaming platform, is facing intense criticism and boycott calls following CEO Daniel Ekās announcement of a ā¬600m ($702m)Ā investment in Helsing, a German defence startup specialising in AI-powered combat drones anā¦
System is Fedora KDE, graphics card is an Asrock Radeon 5900GRE, display is a Gigabyte M34WQ (1440p ultrawide 144Hz refresh rate) attached via DisplayPort.
Despite being on a UPS (which...we're also going to have to talk about) my system was apparently shut down by a thunderstorm. I booted it up, and the display was acting glitchy. I would get two mouse cursors, and below the mouse cursor the screen would go a solid color, as if it was glitching on a pixel and then displaying that from there down.
Switching to a lower refresh rate made the problem go away, I've switched back up and it seems to be alright. A second 1080p60 monitor attached via HDMI didn't show any problem.
Some googling didn't turn up exactly what I was experiencing. Can anyone help troubleshoot this? It seems okay for the moment but I'm hoping I don't have a wounded GPU.
Probably surge damage, honestly. Was your monitor plugged into the UPS or another surge protector, or just into a wall? Do you have any other cables connecting to your machine that aren't on the UPS or a surge protector? Also, a power strip is not equal to a surge protector.
As far as the cause, if you're seeing artifacts on screen past a certain position on the screen, that's the screen or cable, not the GPU. Your display adapter sends fully rendered frames to the display and wouldn't have a specific part of the frame that is corrupted if damaged. Anecdotally speaking, if a GPU has damage, it just won't work.
Also, you may want to check the capacitors on your card and motherboard to make sure they're all still flat and not bulging. If bulging, you took took surge damage and need to redo your cabling to make sure everything is protected.
Everything is attached to the UPS, both the computer and the main monitor are on the battery side. Why the computer was shut off on this UPS, I don't know. I might be switching brands of UPS.
If I switch it down to 60 or 100 Hz, the problem goes away entirely, so I don't think it's a hardware damage issue at this point. Like, I did a software update, I wonder if it's booted up with a slightly newer version of mesa or wayland or something that isn't playing nice.
Check your package manager logs to find out. Also check dmesg just in case.
Edit: you know what...try changing the outlet the monitor is plugged into and see if anything changes. Curious if the signal is weird or the rectifier got damaged by a surge. Maybe try the wall as well to find out if it still does it.
Switched the socket on the GPU the DP cable is plugged into, I think I see the same problem. It's only been a few seconds, I haven't seen the "lower portion of the screen from about the mouse down goes one color" thing yet but I have been seeing a double mouse cursor. This goes away completely when setting the frame rate down to 100 (says 99.98 in the KDE settings menu).
Not sure what I'm looking for in package manager logs or dmesg.
Right now, if I set KDE's settings to 100 Hz, everything looks fine. If I set it to 144 Hz, sometimes I see a double mouse cursor. I get a second cursor about an inch to the right of what seems to be the actual cursor.
Explain how a problem with the UPS will cause that symptom.
When you increase your resolution, your monitor switches power modes. At a higher refresh rate, a dirty power signal can cause artifacts on the screen. Usually this means that you'd see bit crawl on the edges of the screen, but it could show display artifacts like you describe depending on the panel controller.
If your UPS took a hit during a thunderstorm, you could easily have a damaged rectifier in the UPS. That rectifier is responsible for smoothing the power signal coming out the ports on your UPS. A dirty signal can do the above as I mentioned.
You wouldn't notice a problem on your machine because it's own PSU smooths those signals out, but a monitor doesn't have that.
I'm still skeptical that it would cause problems that minor, prior experience tells me it would do something like work fine at low resolution and show no picture or boot loop or something at higher resolution, but for the sake of troubleshooting when there's less convective activity on the radar I'll try plugging it straight into the wall.
I have an AOC AG272FG4 which has started to show artifacts like this and this, the image also becomes choppy and unresponsive but only what it's displayed not the pc itself. It started happening...
Apparently the power failure just happened to coincide with a kernel update that causes a bug with AMD firmware; people are reporting the issue with higher end Radeon 7000 series cards using high refresh monitors attached via DP with kernel 6.15.
My uname -r output: 6.15.3-200.fc42.x86_64
So I can either learn how to revert to kernel 6.14 on Fedora, I've never messed with it before, or live with 100Hz like a bronze age slum rat until they push a fix.
The further mystery is why a momentary power loss took down a PC plugged into a UPS. It has one job, that it apparently didn't do.
I had this same issue, as others have stated it seems to be related to higher refresh rates, as the highest I can go without this issue is 99.95Hz. Operating System: Fedora Linux 41 KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.15.
Call the UPS manufacturer for coverage, if that fails then call your renters or homeowners insurance, and if that fails I hope you bought an umbrella policy.
Most humans with two ears have a pretty good sense of directional hearing. However, you can build equipment to localize audio sources, too. Thatās precisely what [Sam], [Ezra], and [Ari] did for their final project for the ECE4760 class at Cornell this past Spring. Itās an audio localizer!
The project is a real-time audio localizer built on a Raspberry Pi Pico. The Pico is hooked up to three MEMS microphones which are continuously sampled at a rate of 50 kHz thanks to the Picoās nifty DMA features. Data from each microphone is streamed into a rolling buffer, with peaks triggering the software on the Pico to run correlations between channels to determine the time differences between the signal hitting each microphone. Based on this, itās possible to estimate the location of the sound source relative to the three microphones.
The team goes into great deal on the projectās development, and does a grand job of explaining the mathematics and digital signal processing involved in this feat. Particularly nice is the heatmap output from the device which gives a clear visual indication of how the sound is being localized with the three microphones.
The Bluetooth chipset installed in popular models from major manufacturers is vulnerable. Hackers could use it to initiate calls and eavesdrop on devices.
Sometimes my entire screen will turn green requiring a reboot. This has happened while gaming but also while watching videos in browser. I'm trying out undervolting/underclocking using LACTL. Have you experienced this? What was the cause and how did you fix it?
Seems to be a common issue. Lots of posts point to the PSU as the issue. Do a search on your card and green screen + linux and see all the results. Good luck.
I've experienced random stuff like that in past - not exactly the same though and not that chip.
I'd suspect power issue, either cpu and/or gpu causing a spike that results in some voltage rail to go unstable. More likely GPU, unless your applications are really thrashing all cpu cores.
How old PSU? how much headroom? how good brand of PSU? Might also be a motherboard power management issue.
Also - it might not hurt just to unplug and reseat every power cable.
Please excuse me dropping off the face of the Earth for a few days. Power supply is Corsair 750 W. Linux 6.14.6-109.bazzite.fc42.x86_64 AMD Ryzen 7 9700X (16) @ 5.58 GHz
Could be worth a motherboard firmware update? and i would double check all the power cables.
It looks ike mangohud is an application to monitor stuff. I've never used it but you could give that a go - see if you're ever getting close to the 750W.
Thank you for your reply! I'll check it out. I need to try remounting and double checking cables still, I've just been putting it on the back burner. Oddly enough I experience this problem much less often when using Gnome rather than KDE.
Couple weeks ago I was at a bachelor's party, to which a number of people had brought Magic decks. I knew nothing about the game (never even watched a video), made this clear, and said that I just wanted to watch everyone else play.
Someone handed me a deck and said, "no buddy, you're playing!" I protested, but it was fruitless. I'd been roped in; and I was excited! A group of people excited to show a new player their hobby.
The guy that handed me the deck then proceeded to explain nothing and get increasingly frustrated when I had no idea what he meant when he'd say "uh, no you have to UNTAP your cards first.. ok now tap them.. yeah I know you just untapped them but tap them š š" (I still do not know what the point of turning my cards sideways for two seconds was but I guess it's super important?)
The other two players were fairly intoxicated and probably didn't pick up on the toxicity, but the whole table was frustrated with how God awfully slow the game was taking since the new guy just wasn't getting it. I just wanted to watch.
Up until now I thought homeboy had just oversimplified a few rules in his head and forgot a thing or two, but seeing that the actual instruction manual is 500+ pages, I'm furious that he had the audacity to forcibly rope a drunk person with zero interest in playing into the game, just to treat them like a moron for not instantly getting it.
It's honestly a really fun game, but you have to teach people way slower than that. I have a couple training decks without all the card types to teach the basic concepts before ever getting into the complex stuff. Throwing someone in at the deep end like that just seems like a good way to make sure they never wanna play again.
So I've been using rootless podman-compose to run my arr stack forever, and I've never had this issue. What seems to be happening is that sometimes, but not always, when a new folder is created or an existing folder's contents are modified, it seems to be setting the files and their folder's owner to "52587" which does not exist. This causes it to then not be able to access those files. I can manually change them back, of course, but the container just overwrites it again. If I specify the user in the compose.yml, it seems to ignore it. It is happening with a few different containers (all in the same compose.yml), as I've seen it now with Radarr and NZBget. The files are on a 12TB drive, and the container mounts and compose.yml are on the same drive, but the OS (Bazzite) is on a separate drive.
My thoughts so far for possibilities: 1. The podman install is fucked somehow 2. The drive itself is fucked 3. Bazzite's weirdness is causing an issue
For #1, podman comes with Bazzite by default so I'm not entirely sure if I can rpm-ostree remove and reinstall, though that might be the next step I try. I'm not terribly good with podman to begin with so I'm not sure how to go about troubleshooting it much otherwise.
For #2, this is entirely a possibility, the drive is pretty old, but I'm not seeing any errors or anything in the SMART stuff and outside of this specific issue I have seen no other problems there.
For #3, this issue did start to happen maybe a month after switching from Arch to Bazzite, mostly because I also wanted to use this machine for Sunshine streaming and my arch install was a mess anyway. I know Arch, though, and this immutable stuff has tripped me up before, so maybe I go back. Feels like admitting defeat though, lol.
Any ideas to point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Yeah, I've tried the user mapping and doesn't seem to do anything. Haven't put them in the env since this started happening though I can try that, thanks for the reminder.
The real trick is set the ":Z" flag for the volume. This usually solves most problems, but will not allow that same volume to be used with other running containers.
when a new folder is created or an existing folderās contents are modified, it seems to be setting the files and their folderās owner to ā52587ā
Rootless Docker and Podman run their applications within a user namespace. This means most of the user IDs within the container are mapped to a different uid range on the host, often called a subuid. It's part of how "rootless" mode can allow an unprivileged user to run software that expects to have privileged IDs.
Are you sure it doesn't exist? Have you looked at the ranges defined in /etc/subuid on the host?
My first thought is that the uid numbers you see might be some of your host user's subuids. If so, they will appear as different uids (perhaps with usernames) within the container. Try launching a shell within the container and examining the same files, to see what their owners appear as there.
If this is what's happening, it's normal. As long as the software trying to access the files and the software creating the files are both in the same container, it should be fine. If it doesn't work, there's probably another problem in play.
By the way, Podman almost certainly has a way to map certain container uids to host uids of your choice, which can be convenient when you want to share files between containers or between a container and the host.
Out of curiosity, are the containers that are having issues using non-root users internally? Podman maps your user to root inside the container, so a non-root user can have strange effects.
I had this issue when an image inherited a non-root user upstream.
I'm not really good at self promotion, and I'm aware that it's probably a wasted endeavour. I do enjoy making videos though, and I like the idea of entertaining people. While I'm aware this post will probably be down vored or ignored, I do want to say thank you if you do take time out of your day to watch, and I hope you enjoy.
Spot anomalies and uncover hidden clues to escape an office where overwork turns strange and experiments happen more often than coffee breaks!Ahoy-hoy! Welco...
Can also be isochronic or monoaural beats. They are sounds that entrain to certain frequency ranges, those being (from lowest Hz to highest Hz ranges) delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma
I tend to prefer monoaural because I dont want to have to wear headphones if possible and monoaural works that way if I understand it correctly
Want to listen to this Binaural Beat offline and without interruption of ads? Get the full audio in high quality here: https://samuelschuepbach.com/shop/A Bi...
Public schools in Maryland must allow parents with religious objections to withdraw their children from classes in which storybooks with L.G.B.T.Q. themes are discussed, the Supreme Court ruled on Friday.
The vote was 6 to 3, with the courtās liberal members in dissent.
The case extended a winning streak for claims of religious freedom at the court, gains that have often come at the expense of other values, notably gay rights.
The case concerned a new curriculum adopted in 2022 for prekindergarten through the fifth grade by the Montgomery County Public Schools, Marylandās largest school system.
The storybooks included āPride Puppy,ā an alphabet primer about a family whose puppy gets lost at a Pride parade; āLove, Violet,ā about a girl who develops a crush on her female classmate; āBorn Ready,ā about a transgender boy; and āUncle Bobbyās Wedding,ā about a same-sex union.
At first, the school system gave parents notice when the storybooks were to be discussed, along with the opportunity to have their children excused. But school administrators soon eliminated the advance notice and opt-out policy, saying it was hard to administer, led to absenteeism and risked āexposing students who believe the storybooks represent them and their families to social stigma and isolation.ā
You need to change a setting in windows for remmina to work. I don't remember which one it was but I think it was some where in the remotedesktop settings.
Have you tried gnome connections? It's more on the "quick and easy" rather than "professional" side, but maybe it does the job.
Tho I wonder whether it's more of a windows-side issue... maybe windows 11 requires some kind of online authentication that cannot be implemented by other clients, and maybe this authentication can be turned off. I'm merely speculating here, but I know that remmina works for windows 10 so it's suspicious.
View and use other desktops ā
Connections allows you to connect to and use other desktops. This can be a great way to access content or software on a different desktop operating system. It can also be used as a way to provide...
I would like to reiterate freerdp - i had to use it because my customer (i am an it consultant) uses a Windows vdi. Had to use openconnect-sso(aur) vpn to log in with the Microsoft account they gave me, in case someone is also desperately trying to avoid having to install windows.
The answer is simple: They don't want people to take care of their communities; to them that tax money should be going to billionaires and corporations (and, by extension, themselves). The actions of the DNC make a lot more sense if you assume they don't stand for any of the things they claim to stand for.
Same reason they picked Harris: they're drinking their own kool-aid on identity politics. Just like how because Harris is a black woman they tried to sell her as a progressive feminist and not the bootlicking prosecutor she actually is, they assumed that because Walz was an old white guy he was only pretending to use progressive rhetoric and shat their pants when they realized he was genuine about it.
Sarah J. Frick, Deborah Fletcher, Austin C. Smith, Pirate and chill: The effect of netflix on illegal streaming, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 209, 2023, Pages 334-347, ISSN 0167-2681, doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.03ā¦ (sciencedirect.com/science/artiā¦) Abstract: Over 188 million people in the United States use a subscription video streaming service, yet digital piracy remains prevalent and costs the U.S. economy an estimated $29.2 billion annually. This paper investigates the relationship between a movie's availability on Netflix, the largest video subscription service, and intent to illegally stream the movie. We leverage a contract dispute that caused Epix (a cable network company) to move all its movies from Netflix to Hulu, representing a substantial decrease in the legal streaming availability of these movies. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that reducing legal streaming access via the removal of Epix movies from Netflix results in a 20% increase in piracy intent relative to movies that remained on Netflix, as measured by Google search volume. This study contributes to the understanding of the substitution between legal streaming services and movie piracy and has implications for content owners deciding what platform to offer their movie on. Keywords: Piracy; Online streaming; Digital goods; Netflix; Google searches
Sign up for our FREE newsletter! - https://www.compoundeddaily.com/Books we recommend - https://www.howmoneyworkslibrary.com/Listen on Spotify - https://open...
Same. I've never been much of a tv/movie person in general, but netflix in its prime was fantastic. But nowadays there are like 30 different streaming services, every single one is egregiously priced, and everything has their own exclusive libraries. Hell I'm surprised they're not streaming genAI slop "movies" yet at the rate they're all going (or maybe they already are, who knows). Fuck all of that noise.
Spotify did the same thing for me years ago. Went from a hand-maintained local library to Spotify, held on to that for like 10 years, ditched them at the start of this year when they were overwhelmingly supporting fascists with political donations. Switched to Tidal for a bit since it has higher quality and better artist payouts, but today I'm right back to hosting a local library (which is better than ever these days), buying what I can directly from artists to support them rather than subscription fees.
If your library is on steam, then there's nothing to worry about! Works natively on Linux. If your library is on other platforms, I'd honestly think twice about switching full time. Dual booting might be a better option. My library is split amongst multiple platforms and I decided that it wasn't working well enough for me. Steam games will work great though!
Many distros are easy enough to install and navigate as a newbie. My go to for years now has been Linux Mint! It's based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian.
oh that's cool. nope, whole library is on windows on one PC right now.
I was thinking about trying out dual booting to get a feel for it. my understanding was that many programs wont work with linux or require complicated fixes to get them running. so id hate to be left downstream without a paddle, so to speak
For testing try the live USB sticks Just flash them to an empty stick with programs like etcher, then power dowb and select the stick in your bios (usually reachable by hammering f1, f2 or Del while starting
(Remember that performance will be much better when installing it for real compared tusing running it from a stick though)
Dual boot will work and is not that hard to setup, but you should back up all your data before trying it.
Also when dual booting to avoid duplicates etc I have all my documents and stuff on a USB stick, so I don't have a version in my win and a version iny linux. Cloud works as well
They mean other platforms like GOG or Epic, not stuff like consoles.
Steam games mostly work, with some exceptions. You can check out ProtonDB to see more precisely what games work, which ones straight up don't, and which ones need a fix. ProtonDB will usually also tell you what that fix is, which is handy.
But most of the time, you can just hit play and not worry about it.
A note on dualbooting. Linux uses different filesystems from windows. It can access windows NTFS partitions, but it's not a smooth experience.
A common pitfall is trying use your game library while it is still on a windows filesystem, from linux. Since you can see the folders, and even add them in steam, it'll seem like it should work. But you'll run into issues actually running the games. It's technically possible, but not worth the hassle.
Generally you really want to either format your storage and redownload your games, or if you have the space, copy them over to a fully supported file system.
thank you for that tip. I currently run all my games and docs from external HDs. (my pc itself only has a small amount of SSD storage used only for booting etc, and i dont know how to install a new hard drive yet...) I would have definitely tried to just plug in my HD and tried to run it through steam lol
Depends which programs. Also, it's very possible that there are open source alternatives
But if you are dead set on using exactly the same program, appdb.winehq.org/ is a database of if and how to make them run on Linux. Wine's core focus is games, but many programs are covered there too
One thing to keep in mind is that dual booting can work to highlight what youāre missing because generally all of the games that run on Linux will run on Windows, but the reverse is not true. It becomes easy to just default to windows so you donāt have to reboot to play something that doesnāt work in Linux and that can undermine the attempt to switch the OS.
Very few programs require anything complicated to get them working. A lot of productivity programs don't support Linux though, like anything from Adobe, but there are usually alternatives, and if not can often be run in a VM. This probably doesn't matter for you though, since you don't seem to be particularly technical (not an insult). You probably know what programs you need that may not work. If there's nothing like that then you'll be fine.
Yeah, anything Adobe won't work, but there are plenty of PDF viewers that do. Also, yes, Steam, VLC, and Firefox all work perfectly fine on Linux. You shouldn't have any issues.
If your library is on other platform like gog, epic, amazon or off platform .exe you can use heroic launcher and for most stuff it works just as well.
For some games there is a little more learning curve because you have to translate custom steam configurations found on protondb to do the same thing in heroic but overall you actually have way more control then steam.
The only reason āid think twiceā is if you play lots of games with anticheat which does not work on every distro (like arch btw).
Yes, ez one (if you have installed operating systems before and know how to paste an error passage into google ) -4hours and your done start to finish. (Given you have standard hardware and don't want to set up something crazy like dual boot with raid and nas)
Moderate complexity if you have never done anything like that, plan 2-6 evenings to get it fully working with everything you need
Also: consider your scopes. For most cases Linux will just work, you just have to get used to some different interfaces.
BUT: some things will not run under linux no matter how hard you try --> google if stuff you can't live without will work
(for me I still have a dual boot windows for playing league of legends and running my vive wireless adapter, as those will not run under Linux.
For games use protonDB
I may be oldschool, but for people not comfortable around terminals I would suggest Debian KDE as it never breaks and the transition from windows is easy. You can do everything from GUI (clicky button interfaces)
For the installation of steam you might need a terminal, but there are good guides online (and you really dont need to be a wizard for that) from where you can just copy paste (when searching just add your distro e.g. "install steam Debian", and once you've got that running you can just run every game from within steam.
Since Steam has done a lot of work with proton, most games just run under Linux. In steam: Install-->play
For nearly all games not directly running, you can just force them to run with proton. It will say: "Game not compatible" in steam, you just click the gear icon on the right to open settings, go to "compatibilty" and tick "force use of compatibility layer" and select the newest proton from the drop down
The button where steam previously said "not compatible" magically turns into the blue "install" button we all know and love. And nearly all games run with only minor inconveniences (like showing keyboard hotkeys even when playing with a gamepad) or no issues at all.
You need to be aware that some games using kernel level anticheat (e.g. league of legends, valorant) can not and will never run on Linux, if the developers of the games don't add the possibility.
EDIT: for programs not related to gaming its often easier to use an alternative, if the program is not available for Linux. Most times its also more privacy foccused, open source and free
I was you 18 months ago. It's certainly achievable, even with a crazy busy schedule. Highly recommended that you go for it.
Here are the unpopular opinions that attract downvotes: * adopting Linux is painful. Stuff breaks. Stuff doesnt work. You will be battling uphill, but hopefully you'll find it worthwhile in the end. * moving to Linux permanently wouldn't have been possible for me without AI. Now you can ask AI and it will almost always solve the problem for you. In the old days, you'd just have forum posts saying "just compile the driver and do a 10 step process with terminal that you need to figure out from the wiki....noob". But now, these previously system breaking problems are now easily solvable without spending the whole weekend on a single issue. * don't let go of Windows to start with. Put Linux on a secondary machine. Do not dual boot, you will break your installation and won't be able to troubleshoot it and will have to do a full wipe (along with the time and data loss that comes with that). * Don't get caught up in the distro wars. Pick Linux Mint, or a similar very beginner friendly distro. I prefer KDE desktop so I would recommend something else..... But don't go for anything with even moderate difficulty. * Check protondB.com for the games you play. Some don't work on Linux (e.g. Apex Legends).
Yeah, this. In fact, going with hardware that's too-too new can lead to a different problem on Linux.
OP, if you're buying hardware, it's worth web searching to make sure people have tried it on Linux and are having good experiences with it. Since most manufacturers only care if their stuff works on Windows, it can take a little while for Linux devs to write drivers and get them shipped in Linux distros.
Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don't have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.
AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn't Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt. You shouldn't really need to do much if you can get through the install anyways.
I am really curious what "system breaking problems" you have? My latest laptop over the last 2+ years has been so uneventful and boring. Never used a command line on it, but don't forget when you see people share command line fixes, it is because it is the easiest way to directly share information. Not the only way to do something. My desktop has had a few hiccups over the last 5, but that is what I get for running Arch on it.
I'm glad it worked smoothly for you and it sometimes is a smooth effortless experience for some people; but if you want to "convert" people then you've got to be honest about the fact that people commonly face difficulties. I've commented about my Linux issues before and I can paste the comment again here to give an example:
One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.
A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out (AMD GPU).
I installed VMware Horizon for my job's remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn't bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.
I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies. Update: I'm using CachyOS now and the Brother website says Arch plainly isn't supported. When I install the driver from AUR that's specific to my printer, then it doesnt print and just spews out endless blank pages.
I still can't get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I've stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.
I still can't find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute. I still can't figure out how to use this to auto-mount my Synology NAS.
Plasma added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can't figure out why. It reappears intermittently, but then disappears when it feels like.
My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can't figure out why they've decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. Update: this seems to have fixed itself (maybe through am update?).
Flatpak Steam app wouldn't pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.
My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn't supported.
Trying to set up dual boot kept destroying (I.e. making unbootable) either the Linux install or the Windows install. I have up eventually as I couldn't figure out how to fix GRUB from the command line.
I've been trying to find a solution for keeping a downloaded synchronised copy of my online storage (Mailbox.org). Can't figure out rsync. I get an error with Celeste and it doesn't sync after the initial file install. Having a 2 way sync for online storage could be considered a pretty basic requirement these days and something Mailbox can easily suggest an app for in Windows.
People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn't include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS's when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows. I know we all love Linux, but allow people to be honest rather than being dismissive. I had over 2 decades of experience with Windows and it had its quirks and problems, but my preexisting familiarity with it made it much easier to use and troubleshoot.
Sure I know I'm a noob and not doing this right. But that's the point.....can someone with limited knowleddge still work this OS?
I agree that computers can have issues. But none of these are linux only. Windows does all this stupid shit too. My printer wont work with windows, only linux (how the hell this can be true is beyond me). Bluetooth drops in windows, works fine in linux. The latest nvidia update on windows broke all games making it black screen until I used some regedit fixes. A windows update broke my firmware on a video card for a while, almost got RMA'd. I could go on, talk about Jankiness. I don't use windows as my main computer due to it being so all over the place. I say this as a MSDN dev and windows server and azure dev and support person. I remote entirely from Linux, I need to have an OS that works.
My point is windows does this shit too.
But: That is your issues are a long list that seems to have a repeating theme: OpenSuse.
You don't need to edit FSTAB to add a drive, there is a gui for that, for whatever that's worth.
I have not had any of these issues on the 5 or so linux computers I use daily. I have had a few upgrades in Arch cause me to update grub or roll back, but that is about it.
Over the last two years I have found Fedora KDE has been amazingly easy to use and update.
I still canāt find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
That one has me curious: what is that? (I mean by definition - scroll - that can't be a thing, lol) But I am sure it is, got examples?
OpenSUSE is what helped me get past even more basic problems with getting my PC up and running, that's why I stuck with it because I couldn't even get this far on other distros. I'm on CachyOS now and can manage better now that I've learnt to troubleshoot some of the main issues.
Horizontal page scrolling. I want to be able to read massive documents by scrolling through side-by-side pages rather than scrolling up/down.
Okular can be set to do that, but it doesnt have a scroll bar, which you might not like. Firefox can do that as well, but I concede that browser PDF viewers are not ideal.
Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don't have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.
I've been trying to adapt to Linux Mint/Cinnamon as my daily driver and yes, stuff breaks. My sata and nvme connected drives kept disappearing every time I started my computer so I had to learn about mounting and auto mount (they are just there on Windows). My game and program installs on Bottles and Lutris kept going "missing" and losing their .exe's. I downloaded 70gb of Guild Wars 2 files at least 8 times because I thought each time I had fixed the "files missing" problem only to have them disappear on reboot. I still didn't figure out what was happening and am only able to play now because I found out how to use the provider portal on Steam. I can't make launcher short cuts from the actual executable, I have to go to the desktop and do it and when I do, it won't let me drag it to my panel for some reason. When I thought I had found a solution, I reactivated some launcher applets and ended up with three different instances of my panel launcher icons and still no ability to add new ones. My systems connected to the same ethernet used to show up in my network panel and I was able to access my shared folders and media files but they all stopped showing up a few days ago and I had to learn all about Samba share and minimum and maximum server protocols and still am trying to find a solution.
Yes, Windows breaks stuff too, but Linux is NOT a perfect product that works flawlessly for everyone and [@cRazi_man@europe.pub is right. All of their points are things I've been struggling with and would warn a Linux noob about. I personally would rather trust those random forum posts than LLM summaries (and have solved some issues that way) but otherwise I agree with each of their bullet points.
Yes mounting is different, but that is not a Linux issue. Same as when you boot into windows, but an EXT formatted drive will not appear AND it will never mount. Windows helpful choice is "unknown" and offer to format. These are just OS differences, not breakages.
Cinnamon might be part of your problem with shortcuts.....
Yeah SMB shares can be tricky. I have issues with them in Windows as well, not linux specifically.
I am not saying linux is perfect. All computers rely on a person being able to deal with them. I just find it much more stable then windows ever was. You add bottles and Lutris into the mix, and now it is a third party software issue: just like plenty of software in windows as well.
I think there's a difference in personal interpretation of what a "Linux issue" is, here. It sounds like you might be interpreting "Linux issue" as problems with the software itself, or its capabilities, features and processes etc. Personally, I am using "issues with Linux" to mean the entire user experience from start up to using the GUI and whether or not I can do the things I want and need to do on a daily basis easily and intuitively. Certainly, Linux as a software plays into it, but the things you are brushing off as 3rd party incompatibilities are absolutely part of the Linux experience in my opinion. I'm not trying to throw blame, but when introducing new people to Linux it's best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.
when introducing new people to Linux itās best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.
Depends on what "should" means. My printer for example will not work with windows. It works fine with linux. So.... that really is a printer driver issue. No matter which one it works with.
As for the OS out of the box, everything works on a fresh install of either - although linux is far more loaded with ready to go software, and windows requires you to add it. And any of the software you add to either can cause breakages, that is computing.
I noticed over the years that Linux works fairly well for people who did not start with windows first. Both have learning curves, but habits are habits.
I am going to take my linux laptop for an example: 2 years. No tinkering. There is nothing to do, it just works.
My other laptop (windows): damn thing need tinkering all the time: turn off this, regedit that, just to get the nagware and crap out. Won't allow remote desktop with the license, needs drivers to be updated, software that came with it is bloatware garbage.
I've been tinkering with my Linux machine for the past 8 months or so, and having random issues like the ones I listed and more besides that I've already solved. Meanwhile my old Windows 7 machine has been working flawlessly for about 8 years, no regedits or crap software issues. I think I had a driver issue with my mouse a couple years ago that I clicked a button and it fixed it. My laptop running Windows 7 also has been working flawlessly since about 2014 beyond prompting me to format media that I connect to it, but I press a button and that goes away. Recently I've been having compatibility issues with software because it's such an old OS but as you said, that's a 3rd party software issue, not a problem with Windows 7.
Glad your Linux experience is so smooth though. Must be nice!
Two desktops and three laptops, they all work great. My biggest ongoing issue, and it is fair to say it is a problem, is VR. I have not tried recently, but that is one area that was smooth to set up in windows and I havent had luck in Linux.
This is a pointless conversation man. There are clearly plenty of Linux zealots on Lemmy. Noobs like me have had a hard time with Linux. I've never understood the argument that "my experience was different, so your experience is invalid". Once someone learns about something, they forget what it's like to have no knowledge of the thing.
The Linux community was reacting like this when Linus (from LTT) installed PopOS and tried to install Steam and it somehow wiped his desktop environment. Shit happens in Linux and the noob experience is brushed aside, while touting "the year of Linux". I really don't get it.
I agree with your overall point, as a long time Linux, Windows and Mac poweruser who has shepherded many into a new OS in the past. People who don't like to explore new/different technologies as a hobby get quite comfortable with whatever they're used to and the way that it works and then quickly lose empathy for those that are earlier in their journeys.
Just to clarify on the Linus Pop!_OS thing, he didn't read the prompt that said he was about to uninstall his desktop environment and then typed in "yes I understand this can break my system" or something like that, which had been added as a prompt to keep people from not reading the warning. Anyways people got mad that he did that because he literally ignored the warning and *the meaning of the words he had to type* that had been added to idiot proof the thing.
AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasnāt Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt.
I have the same experience but sometimes it was even worse; Sometimes the AI would confidently recommend doing things that might lead to breakage. Personally I recommend against using AI to learn Linux. It's just not worth it and will only give new users a false impression of how things work on Linux. People are much better off reading documentation (actual documentation, not SEO slop on random websites) or asking for help in forums.
I just switched and, yeah, the learning curve can be tough. This month I've learned two dozen abbreviations just because I've had to install, fix things, and customize. No way the average users would want to go through that.
The results can be cool though. Terminal opens as a matrix window and then neofetches an ascii art image of my face. Makes it all worth it haha. Also, fuck Microsoft.
Yes. Steam is available on Linux, pretty easy to install and it comes with a compatibility layer (Proton) which works quite well.
Linux is a bit different than Windows. But I'd say just using it is about as complicated as using Windows. You'll just have to try and see whether you like it. And if it's hard or easy for you to relearn a few things. I mean if you're in the Browser and Steam all day, those will be the same applications and also look and work the same way. Other than that you could face some issues with gaming hardware and you have to fiddle with things, or everything works out of the box. You can't tell beforehand.
Consider your library: most games will be able to run fine on Linux. However, if you predominantly play online multiplayer games which require anticheat you should check compatibility on ProtonDB.
Second, consider your hardware: if your GPU is AMD you're good to go. Nvidia might have issues (not sure if this has been resolved since I last had to look into it).
Finally, choose a distro: I'd recommend Ubuntu or anything Ubuntu-based. There's a lot of mixed answers in the Linux community and definitely a ton of hate for Ubuntu. However, as someone who has been running Linux for nearly a decade at this point, there are a few key points:
Ubuntu is debian based, so it's extremely stable(but not as slow to update)
Ubuntu is very beginner friendly, and you won't need to touch the terminal if you don't want to
Everyone hates on snaps, but for you I don't think you'll run into an issue with it.
Personally, I steer towards debian based distros for my devices as well because I'd rather spend time messing with the software I'm running or other things NOT debugging why my config is suddenly shitting the bed
Distro: short for distribution. Linux is not an operating system. It's a piece of technology (specifically something called a kernel) you can use to create an OS. Those Linux based OSs are referred to as distros. We are usually not calling them "Versions" because the Linux Kernel is also frequently seeing updates and that would just cause confusion.
Debian and Ubuntu: Popular distros. Ubuntu tends to be a bit more user friendly than Debian and was the default recommendation for new user for a long time. In recent years its popularity among enthusiasts declined because of a series of unpopular decisions, mainly the adaptation of something called snaps which is not completely open source and takes a bit more time to launch apps than alternatives. Debian on the other hand really values stability. Updates arrive less frequently than on other distros but undergo really rigorose testing.
Not necessarily. Both have their drawbacks. It takes longer for new hardware to be supported on Debian and setting up a Nvidia grafics card is more complicated
The other commenter covered the terminology so to your point about being on Nvidia:
I know we don't like Reddit but here. Seems to be YMMV and you'll never know if you don't try. Also possible that the things that are buggy aren't things you use/care about
Oh boi, for gaming Ubuntu and it's family is... Iffy at best. You tend to end up with weird problems cause of the older software frequently. Not a problem till it VERY much is.
Modern gaming basically requires you to be really close to cutting edge if you want remotely reliable performance and timely bug fixes. Which you just do not and will never get on Ubuntu.
It's why valve choose arch for steam OS. It's why cachyOS exists. It's why the big popular alterative is fedora based.
Tho suggesting bazzite is iffy with how fedora likes to break things with dumb changes.
FWIW I run Ubuntu and do some gaming. Haven't hit any issues, and I've run multiple AAA games on release (TLOU, Indiana Jones, Hogwarts Legacy, GoW 2018) as well as other, lighter, titles like Cities Skylines 2, Asetto Corsa, Project Cars, American Truck Simulator
I'm sure there are bugs that I haven't experienced, and my system is probably newer/higher performance than the average person + i chose parts with Linux in mind. But based on my experience, I wouldn't tell someone to jump into a less user friendly distro because of problems I myself haven't run into. Much better to try one, see if you hit an issue, then jump rather than doing the hard one up front
There's tons of youtube videos / tutorials on how to create a live usb of a distro, such as linux mint. This will allow you to boot into linux and play around without installing anything and get a feel for linux. It's nowhere as tech wizardry as you think.
And if all your games are on steam and don't have anti cheat things, they'll probably just all work with proton (linux compatibility tool in steam).
Linux is way easier than it was even 10 years ago and many games run better on Linux than they do on Windows. Thereās gaming distros but Iām not sure what the benefit is other than the built-in NVIDIA drivers. I just game on Fedora. You need to enable Proton stuff in the settings and youāre off.
Unless the Steamdeck flew under your radar you should know that you can absolutly play games on Linux. Most of the exceptions are big online games with crazy anti-cheats (yeah in that case no luck).
As for hope : migrating to another OS (be it Linux, MacOS or whatever) can be disorienting at first, wich tend to repel some people (it's like learning how to use a pc for the first time), that's actually the most important thing to keep in mind for everything to go smoothly, you don't need to be a tech wizzard, just to be patient.
As long as you don't rush things, don't expect everything to behave as somekind of windows clone and learn how it works a bit you should be fine.
Before you try anything I'd also suggest you check if all the software you are using are available on Linux and if not what alternative you can use : alternativeto.net can help. To check if the games you play work you can also go to protondb.com. Preparing as much as you can before install is a huge plus, and it's really not that hard.
As an exemple I've helped a curious friend who wanted to try Linux, they're the most tech illiterate person I've ever known..like even worse than some old people. It took them two hard month to be fully acclimated, like as fine as they were doing on windows if not better. Never even asked me for help ever since. (My eyes still bleed when I see how they're using their pc but they clearly have no issue doing whatever they're doing) So if they can I'm sure anyone can.
I'm not sure what you mean by flew under my radar but I don't really even know what steamdeck is. some kind of handheld console? how's it relevant here?
It's because it's quite popular so alot of people know it exists, but yes it's a handheld console made by steam and it's using linux, it's basicly a Linux console.
Itās been a big factor in Linux now having extremely strong support for windows games, as it runs Steam on Linux, uses PC hardware to play PC games, and itās built/supported by Valve who did a lot of the heavy lifting on improving the existing Linux windows compatibility layer to where it is now. What that means for you is basically anything in Steam will run well in Linux even if itās not a native Linux game (which most arenāt).
Otherwise, Protonās the name of Valve/Steamās compatibility layer project, and you can look up game-specific user reports on playability here: protondb.com/
The two distros I recommend for beginners, these helped me start using Linux:
1) Kubuntu
Kubuntu uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which is the closest experience to Windows 10 imo. Very good for easing you in. Plus, it's based on Ubuntu - the most commonly used distro. So if you have issues, just google "(problem) Ubuntu" and you'll find a fix.
2) Pop!_OS
Pop!_OS is preconfigured for gaming. If you have anything Nvidia in your PC, just start with this one. Nvidia doesn't play nice with Linux, and the company that develops Pop!_OS has a specific version with Nvidia drivers. Driver configuration can be annoying, you don't have to worry about it with Pop!_OS.
Both of these distros will work for gaming out of the box pretty much (provided you use AMD products). Steam's Proton tool is insanely useful, and it's not too hard to figure out how to tweak games that are still having issues after it works its magic.
Basically, your choice boils down to:
Kubuntu - an easier time with the PC side of things
Pop!_OS - an easier time with the gaming side of things
As for being a tech wizard, don't worry about it. If you know how to look up your problems, there's always some guy on a forum with some commands you can copy/paste into the terminal and fix everything.
I started with popOS but now recommend bazzite if you mainly use your machine for gaming, I just setup a pc for someone and gave them bazzite and now I see them on steam playing games and no complaints. bazzite or maybe fedora, the issues I had with PopOS was just apps being outdated in the app store, like darktable came out with an update and like a month passed and the update still wasnt showing in the app store so I had to use the appimage from the darktable site
See, I haven't had any issues with Pop!_OS, but I also don't use apps outside of Steam and LibreOffice much. To add to your point, I will say that for how much they hype up the Pop! Shop, it kinda works terribly.
I haven't tried Bazzite, but Fedora-based distros are starting to pique my interest.
yeah I started with popOS, used it for about a year, then tried Fedora for a week but figured if Im moving distro to get the latest and dive deeper might as well go with Arch, that lasted like two months with hyprland then decided to try bazzite and its been solid, everything I need is just there already, shortcuts working just like windows so its easy to transition from work laptop to personal, screen shots, lock, mounting network shares etc
I have a relatively easy and nice setup on PopOS currently and I don't want you switch just because I don't want to lose my files and setup.
Is there a process you recommend to transfer UI, etc. to another distro as an experiment? I know how to transfer my video files, for example, just don't know how or if other programs can transfer easily between distros.
I think there are ways to just mount your home directly that has your files but I haven't done that, not sure if it had to be setup separate from the beginning or something, I keep my files on a local nas so its easier for me to just wipe my desktop
even my parents and grandparents are on bazzite which massively reduced my family tech support work, but it seems like fedora is indeed being fedora again and discussions are for dropping 32 bit which would be troubling for gamers still.
Honestly that's kind of the dream (I already have raspi theater plans).
It's sad how much technology has changed since what we thought it was gonna be in the 80s. we HAVE the capacity to do all those things, but we get locked out of modifying our own devices!
If a computer is a car, then Linux(the Kernal) is the chassis. Mint (the distro) is the motor, and Cinnamon (the desktop environment) is the fancy interior.
KDE plasma is a fancy interior that works with tons of different motors.
Cinnamon is designed for mint and works best with it.
DISCLAIMER: All of this is analogy and isn't technically correct in a pedantic sense, but it works well enough for me. I'm sorry if my analogy isn't exactly accurate.
I'd say Linux (the kernel) is the motor/engine and Mint (the distro) is the chassis. The chassis defines the shape of the vehicle and its size class, for instance.
The desktop environment is all the stuff like the taskbar, the settings menus, the application launcher, the login screen, that kind of thing. Itās the system level user interface.
You choose which one by which distro you download. Linux mint uses cinnamon, Ubuntu and fedora use gnome. There are āflavorsā of Ubuntu and fedora that use KDE. Thatās why I suggested ventoy: you can download a few different ones and boot into them without making a new thumb drive.
If you donāt feel like bothering with any of that, just use Linux mint. Itās good.
Okay, so the Linux ecosystem is more modular than Windows. Windows is synonymous with its Graphical User Interface (GUI) for reasons I'll get into later.
With Linux, there are several GUIs available to choose from. These tend to fall into two main categories: Tiling Window Managers, and Desktop Environments.
Tiling Window Managers have minimal on-screen UI elements, usually they're meant to be used with keyboard combos with little usage of the mouse. A major feature is everything that is running is visible on the screen, when you open a new window, another window divides in half to give it room, "tiling" the screen. Some examples of TWMs include i3 and Awesome.
Desktop Environments are going to be more familiar to newcomers from Windows or MacOS. They're made more for mouse control, several have what you would recognize as a taskbar, start menu and system tray. Windows can be stacked on top of each other like papers on a desktop, exactly like MS Windows does. Some more closely resemble MacOS though none behave exactly the same way. Some examples of DEs include Gnome, KDE, MATE, and Cinnamon.
Cinnamon is a DE made by the Linux Mint development community, and the default/flagship DE for Linux Mint. It is designed to be familiar and easy to use for Windows users. KDE's Plasma DE is similar in many ways to Mint although it's based on different tech; KDE is based on qt, Cinnamon is a distant fork of Gnome and based on GTK. Some are designed to be more minimal so they take up less system resources, like xfce and LXDE, others are trying mostly to resemble MacOS, like ElementaryOS' Pantheon DE. Then there's Gnome, which I goddamn hate.
For a beginner, the choice of DE is going to present most of the differences you'll notice when trying out distros. It can be instructive to try, say, Kubuntu and Fedora KDE. Both ship with the KDE Plasma desktop, but the underlying OSes are different. Then try out, say, Fedora Workstation (with the Gnome desktop) and Fedora KDE. That exercise will give you a good understanding of distro vs DE.
Edit to add: It's kind of like launchers on Android. You can go in the Google Play store and install a different launcher on your phone, you can make a Samsung Galaxy look like a Google Pixel. Linux DEs work the same way, you can install KDE or Cinnamon the same way you'd install a normal app, you can have multiple and switch between them. It's not a great idea but you can.
All of those are Linux Mint, they use pretty much the same core tools under the hood, but the desktop environments change how you engage with them. Mostly the way things look, the way you organize programs on your screen, and the default apps (like which text editor it comes with by default). This can change your experience a lot, I think Cinnamon looks nice and is smooth, while MATE and XFCE are more lightweight and might be better for older computers or if you don't like something about Cinnamon.
Now, those are all somewhat similar, they have a program start menu in the bottom left, a taskbar on the bottom, the basics are familiar. There are some (not officially supported by Mint) which are more different, like GNOME (Ubuntu's desktop default) which has a different app launcher instead of a start menu and a different way of switching between programs. Then, as others mentioned, some people choose to not even install a pre-designed Desktop Environment and only install some of the more core components of a DE, like the Window Manager. People who really love the keyboard might use a tiling window manager, these tend to make you think "wow, this person's a hacker", where they'll rapidly switch between programs using keyboard controls, with the window manager automatically shifting and dividing new windows so that they tile together to fill the screen. Loosely speaking, the opposite of a tiling window manager is a floating window manager, where windows just float and you move them around with your mouse, just like Windows (well, apart from the tiling options in more recent Windows versions when you can drag a window into the corner and it tiles to fill the screen.) I think the "best of both worlds" midpoint is a dynamic WM? I'm not sure. hyprland is an example of that.
TL;DR: Try installing some on virtual box, by all means try Linux mint cinnamon but also try Ubuntu and Fedora KDE.
Linux has some jargon and since you want to learn I'll give you a quick rundown of how a variation of Linux is composed.
"Kernel" is what makes Linux Linux. It's a way of interacting with the hardware.
A "distribution" or "distro" is a one of the many flavors of Linux.
They are usually "based" on a common foundation like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Nix and whatever. These also work like an onion where Mint is based on Ubuntu which in turn is based on Debian, all of which use some version of the Linux kernel.
A that's just a base will just get you a terminal (also called a shell or console) and is very useful to make a server for example.
What most people think of as an OS is the user interface (i.e. clickable shit). The terminology in Linux for that is "desktop environment" (DE).
You'll see a lot of distributions mix and watch between a base and a desktop environment such as Fedora with KDE, Ubuntu (Ubuntu with Gnome), Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE), Bazzite (Fedora silverblue base with either gnome, KDE or deck DE).
You mentioned Cinnamon. Cinnamon is a desktop environment for Mint so a Linux Mint Cinnamon contains the code of the following:
Linux kernel, Debian, Ubuntu and Mint as a base and Cinnamon to interact with it by using a mouse and keyboard.
There are currently three bases that are really popular right now, Ubuntu, Fedora and Arch. In the DE there are currently two that are most advanced, namely KDE and Gnome but Cinnamon is not far behind.
In all honestly, none of this matters all too much, just install a couple of popular distros on a virtual machine like Virtual Bok and do a vibe check.
Take a couple of these, install some programs and fuck around with the settings for a bit, install themes and whatever or watch a quick YouTube video on it: * Ubuntu (gets hate for being corporate but is solid, uses Gnome) * Linux mint Cinnamon * Fedora KDE * EndavourOS (an arch based distro that's supposedly easy, haven't tried it) * Bazzite (weird way to install programs through the package manager but hard to fuck up beyond repair) * Something with the Xfce DE just to see the "lightweight" look.
This is what I did. I narrowed down the distros I was looking at to about 5 that I thought might meet my needs, and made a live usb for each one, then used it as I would my regular system for a couple days. Anything that didn't work right got eliminated, and I picked the one I liked best out of the ones where everything worked.
Lots of good advice here. Iāll add a bit about dual booting.
1) the problem with dual booting is when you use the same physical hard drive. Windows doesnāt play nice sometimes on the same drive. Just do yourself a favor and buy a second ssd. Then you can break linux six ways to Sunday and always have a windows backup. (And if you want to be extra safe - you can just unplug your windows drive during Linux install and you canāt f up and pick the wrong drive by accident)
2) dual booting is nice just in case something doesnāt work - you can easily switch back to windows.
3) dual booting sucks because thereās very few things that donāt work in Linux - it just requires a little elbow grease to figure out. But having a windows partition right there leads to many people giving up way too early with fixing their issues.
My recommendation is always to have more than one drive in your computer. Itās YOUR computer. Regardless of what you pick as your āmainā OS, you always have another spot to screw around in. Distro hop, extra storage, set up a hiveos miner, whatever. Its flexibility and screwing around with other things helps you understand whatās YOUR computer vs what is Microsoftās OS.
I say unplug the windows drive always, even if you don't fuck up your Linux install may nuke your windows boot partition and it's massive PITA to get it back
Yes, first time when I installed Nobara, then second time when I installed Fedora. Both times windows was in another drive, both times I picked the right drive. I asked around and people recommend unplugging your windows drive, I agree.
I'm gonna have to figure out how to install another SSD I guess... hope my motherboard is compatible with whatever is on the Market. I bought it all in asia and apparently the motherboard is an issue
There is a way built into windows to deploy and use Linux from inside windows.
It's not the most pure experience, but it's a way to make sure you have something like a feel for how some parts work before jumping in any deeper.
A bootable USB stick is another way to try before you commit. Only reason I might suggest starting with trying it the other way first is in case you run into issues connecting to the Internet or something you won't feel totally lost. Having to keep rebooting back into windows if you have a problem can be frustrating, so getting a little familiarity with a safety line can help feel more confident.
Issues with a USB boot are increasingly uncommon, as an aside. Biggest issue is likely to be that USB is slow, so things might take a few moments longer to start.
From there, you should be pretty comfortable doing basic stuff after a little playing around. Not deep mastery, but a sense of "here are my settings", "my files go here", "here's how I fiddle with wifi", "here's how I change my desktop stuff". At that point a dual boot should work out, since you'll be able to use the system to find out how to do new things with the system, and also use it for whatever, in a general sense.
If it's working out, you should find yourself popping back into windows less and less.
Install Windows Subsystem for Linux with the command, wsl --install. Use a Bash terminal on your Windows machine run by your preferred Linux distribution - Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE, Kali, Fedora, Pengwin, Alpine, and more are available.
What I'll say is, I've got no comp sci degree, and when I started, I had no idea how the terminal worked. But... My mindset was the following:
1) I really don't like windows, I'm not going back 2) I don't like paying others to "do it for me", I want to do it myself 3) I want the freedom to be able to change anything to make the machine fit me, even if that means I need to learn things along the way.
If you're the type of person where this general philosophy, you're going to crush it.
But if you're more along the lines of "I just use this computer as a tool to do the things I want, I just need the computer out of the way, and working consistently so I can get on with my actual goals", you probably will hate it. Becuase all your troubleshooting experiences will be "why doesn't this thing just work, like it does on Windows?"
You don't need a high level of technical skill. You can learn everything you need to get started in a few minutes of tutorials or walk throughs. The rest you learn as you go.
Bear in mind no every linux user has memorized every terminal command and the whole file structure. Lots of people are just casual users who learn what they need.
One of the things I wish someone had told me at the start of using linux is that initially your desktop environment will effect how you feel about linux more than the distribution or specific architecture of the OS.
The good news is they're all free. Try a few things and see what you like. IMO Fedora is a great, beginner friendly Gnome or KDE experience. Mint has an excellent Cinnamon and XFCE desktop either of which will feel somewhat familiar to a windows user. Mint will also run on just about anything.
Also, it's not binary. You can dual boot. If there's something you need windows for you can use it. Over time you'll eventually find that you don't really need windows anymore.
One thing I'll say is that for a lot of distros these days you shouldn't really need to use the terminal much if ever. That being said don't be scared of the terminal. It's just another way to tell the computer what to do. It takes some learning but if you want to learn things with the terminal you might eventually find it easier/faster than using the mouse for some things. Go through some tutorials and you'll probably find out that the terminal is not that actually all that scary.
Most distros allow you to try them out before you install them. You can run them from a USB stick to let you try a few out before you settle on one. You won't be able to install any programs this way but you'll at least be able to get an idea of the interface and see if there are any you like more than others. Even still you can dual boot your PC with Windows + Linux and switch back and forth whenever you need. It's not an all or nothing ordeal. I still have windows 10 on my machine but I rarely use it now.
Gaming on Linux is better than it's ever been thanks to Steam coming with proton out of the box. protondb.com is your friend for figuring out what games you can run. That being said there are occasionally some rough edges that I have run into personally. I can run most games I want just fine but occasionally I have some issues. I'm just telling you this so you know it's not like a flawless experience. Then again I've also spent plenty of time trying to get games running on my windows PC in the past too so...
My recommendation for a first Linux OS is Ubuntu because in general it's the most popular and has the most support.
If you don't know what a command does you can read the manual running the "man" command. Run "man" followed by the command you want to read about. It also works for some system files too!
Also if you fix something like a driver issue for a game that took a lot of research. WRITE IT DOWN. It WILL come in handy in the future.
As others have said, it's possible to play most steam games, but not all. You have to decide if you like those games more than you dislike MS and Goo. I find there's so many great games out there that I'll never get to all of them, so I'm ok with dropping some bangers that usually want too much access to my system.
Here's a useful resource if you need to understand slightly technical linux foundations linuxjourney.com/ It might not be necessary but it does help to have a foundational understanding, and honestly, the command line is awesome, powerful, and one of my favorite things about linux. Beyond having a basic understanding (and maybe having one of the books the site recommends on hand), before going to an LLM as others have suggested, have official sources of various components bookmarked and go there first. There's so much BS out there now, I actually like the fact that I can read technical documentation, test it out, and know if it's true.
one other tip: I'd recommend some kind of personal knowledge management (PKM) system to take notes. Linux gives you a lot of freedom-- that's what's great about it-- it can be complex and have a learning curve at times. It's absolutely worth it though. It's a totally different paradigm than windows. After a while you can really start crafting the whole system to your needs as an individual. I'm 3 years in and was using my first setup that whole time, i didn't realize how customized I had made it until trying to set it up exactly on a new workstation. Now I'm writing a script so to automate my setup (os settings, program installs, configs) by running a single command. Then I can really start experimenting.
Everybody's different and with a little basic knowledge, everyone's setup can be tweaked to their individual needs a little better than other "user friendly/polished" operating systems. I hope you find as much joy and freedom in it as I do.
I use Obsidian. Stores everything in markdown and has a nice sql-query-like plugin, dataview, that I've built a nice workflow around. Obsidian isn't FOSS, which has become more important for me, so I'm looking to migrate over to markdown oxide in helix. If I were starting from scratch I might try logseq or similar. Whatever you choose, I think it's helpful that it's stored in a portable format like md so you can change programs if you need.
That's a big question, but I'll try my best to answer without getting too deep in the weeds.
I'll probably sound like a fanatic, but I use my PKMS for notes, logs, journaling, project and task management, snippets, and documentation. They all have their own structure and flow. It's a Gall's Law kind of situation where I started simple and it worked, so it was extended and slowly evolved to reach it's current complexity.
The beauty of PKMS over a notepad is the loose set of basic features (Wiki-links, tags, templates, etc) that be used in a personalized way to quickly capture, organize, and retrieve info that works best for you and no one else.
As a simple, but detailed example, in the context of learning linux, i might make a "linux" note and dump info there. I put everything in my own words unless I use md quotes (> quoted text) and I add useful links that I also bookmarked in my browser. When the "linux" page gets bloated, I migrate clusters of info into new notes, wiki-linked in the "linux" note. For example a "distros," note which might have some high level comparisons. I favor making new notes over md headers so it's easier to find and open notes by name (a "quick switcher" hotkey as it's called in obsidian). When I settle on a distro I might make a note for it to contain wiki-links of default components EG "apt (package manager)," "gnome (desktop environment)," "x (windowing system)" and dump relevant notes there. If I try wayland, I'd make a "wayland" note but also a "windowing system" note that both wiki-links "x (window system)" and "wayland," and is wiki-linked in each of those notes.
It could get very meticulous, and some folks setup is too much for me, and I'm sure mine is too much for others, but start simple, experiment, find what works, and add to it. In the beginning I had dedicated time just to developing my PKMS. The important thing is quickly recording and retrieving info.
Sometime i do have crazy scrawlings where i just need a notepad to dump info during a deep dive. That would be loosely zettelkasten style with a time-stamped name, sometime with a few extra works for context/search. Sections could be extracted into their own note later. The note itself could be linked to more organized, related notes.
As a more complex, but shorter example, to show how similar tools can be used in a different manner: I'll make a note for a command line program, for example, cat. I have a CLI template with a Useful Flags (options) section. Kind of like a personalized tldr. I'll also have specific notes for complex snippets (AKA one-liners. Real note example: "list-and-sum-all-audio-file-durations") and if it uses cat, i'll tag it #cmd/cat. The CLI template also has a Snippets section that uses dataview to automatically list, in this case, all notes with the #cmd/cat tag. I also have a "command line programs" note that uses a dataview query to list all notes that used the CLI template. Also, a Snippets note using dataview to list all pages created with the snippets template.
There are tools specifically for snippets and personalized tldr, and I may migrate to those eventually-- especially after I have my install script up and running with linked configs-- but the simple tools in PKMSs are really adaptable and make it easy to customize and integrate. Plus it's all md files in a folder, so it's easy to sync and access on multiple machines, including mobile.
I hope that's not TMI. Starting linux can feel overwhelming and I don't want to add to that. Quiet the contrary. I started my PKMS right before my last, permanent switch linux and I think it helped it stick, and 3+ years later I still use [my PKMS] all the time. As I said before, the simple tools that turn a notepad into a PKMS can add a personalized structure to the insane scrawings, making it quick and easy to navigate, find, edit, and add info. You just have to start simple and take your time. I hope that helps. Good luck with the switch!
The only games in my library that don't work are entirely the publisher's fault for blacklisting Linux in their anticheat, and it's very few games even then.
Linux folks used to be much worse about gatekeeping, but even 20+ years ago when I was first starting out, there were always decent folks among the techie dumbfucks.
Maybe the decent folks have moved to derivative OSes? So the techie absolutists stayed at Debian/Arch/RHEL, while the commons folks have gone to Linux Mint/Cachy OS/Fedora?
There are around three Linux families to choose a derivative Linux OS from, some are more obscure ones and then some really obscure ones. Choose one of the Linux family OSes and choose the most popular derivative of that one. So for example Aurora is a derivative of Fedora, which is a derivative of RHEL (derivative-(in)ception).
The reasons to choose derative OSes and not one of the basic main three is that:
The Linux derative OSes have bells and whistles build on top of the parent OS. This is especially true for the extremely bare bones Arch Linux, that will throw you back into 1985.
And this is most important... community support! You will at some point have issues and a forum where developers and experienced users can help you out are a godsend. Derivatives tend to have better community support than the bare bone ones. I've experienced this with the Arch Linux community. I'm not sure if Debian or RHEL communities would haved fared better, but to me this community felt like having a conversation with a real life Sheldon Cooper. I am really thankful for the excellent expert level help I did get there, but I will not go there back again. And I don't know if I even can, because the last time I was there, I got banned for a third time. I've had great experiences on the Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Manjaro communities. Other communities from less popular Linux OSes have been too small in my experience to get help on time.
For Debian, the most popular one right now is Linux Mint, a derivative of Ubuntu (derivative-(in)ception). It used to be Ubuntu, but Ubuntu tends to take big moves and risks that don't always pay off. Linux Mint I consider to be the safe option for beginners. Debian is known for stability.
For Redhat it's Fedora. I haven't used it that much. Redhat is known for good security.
For Arch it's Endeavour OS and recently Cachy OS. It used to be Manjaro, but they fumbled a lot on security issues. Arch is known for having the best documentation, and the largest amount of software available, especially made by fellow users, and if I may add myself, having the best package manager.
I still use Manjaro myself, because I don't feel enough need to switch to a new one, and I like the community there.
"I want to copy my root, home, and boot partition contents into a bigger drive I formatted with in terminal. Let's boot from it and see what breaks."
::: spoiler spoiler /etc/fstab partition UUIDs needed to be fixed by hand. GRUB config needed to be updated to launch straight into bash and I needed to remount the root directly as R/W because GRUB was trying to protect me from myself. :::
A lot of people here have already given good advice. I shall add my experience, recommendation and some tips (may incidentally repeat some of them).
If you play some games with kernel level anti-cheat (like Rainbow Six Siege, Apex, Valorant, LoL, Fortnite, Battlefield games, Destiny 2 among others), you will have to stick to dual-boot. Check on ProtonDB for compatibility of games. I have 500+ games on Steam and pretty much everything I've played has worked so far. In terms of other software you use, make sure you have alternatives that work on Linux.
For Photoshop, there's Krita/GIMP.
For Video editing, there's Kdenlive, DaVinci Resolve, etc.
For browsing and office apps, there's LibreWolf and LibreOffice.
If you happen to have any software that you don't have a good alternative or that only runs on Windows, then you'll have to stick to dual booting.
If you do end up dual booting, DO NOT use your external HDD in NTFS to run games on linux. It will work for a while, but you'll constantly have to 'chkdsk' or check disk on Windows every time your HDD is found corrupted. Also, NTFS is Windows' proprietary filesystem. So, I've heard that using ntfs-fix (chkdsk equivalent on linux) might cause data loss. Not sure how far it's true, but be cautious of using that too. But otherwise, I believe that just reading files from NTFS drive usually is not a problem.
If you are NOT dual booting however, you won't have to face this mess. You can backup the data on your HDD somewhere, format it in 'ext4' filesystem for Linux-only use ('Exfat' if you want to share any data with others on Windows/Mac) and restore all your files back to this HDD in ext4. Hope you have extra HDD with enough free space to move your files while you convert disks to ext4. You can also probably use cloud services for backup.
I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Arch and Fedora.
- Had faced a lot of issues with Ubuntu back in the day, and Snap Steam is a mess. So, avoid it. - Mint is easy to use, removes snap from Ubuntu and just uses apt, has a great Desktop Environment called Cinnamon, and I'd usually recommend this to someone new, but I wanted to shift from X-11 to Wayland for security reasons and HDR support among others. If Wayland worked well with Mint, I'd still be using it today, but that was the only reason I moved away from it. - While Arch is nice, it's certainly not for someone new. - That leaves us with Fedora KDE, which would be my recommendation. It has good security features like SE-Linux out of the box. The reason I suggest KDE over Gnome is so that you might have an easier transition from Windows to Linux. Once you have a hang of this, you can later use a pen drive to load other distro with other DE like Gnome, XFCE, Cinnamon, Cosmic, etc and test them out by live booting.
Speaking of pendrives, make sure to always have one with Ventoy installed and the distribution you're using. This will be handy if you want to troubleshoot your system anytime. And I say Ventoy over others because it makes loading distro easier. You can just drag and drop the ISO files instead of having to burn with Balena Etcher or Rufus everytime.
Rufus is great, but if you're moving out of Windows, you don't need it.
And I have seen a lot of people have trouble with using Balena Etcher. So, avoid it.
Turn off Secure Boot in BIOS. (And maybe also fast boot).
- And if your disk is on RAID instead of AHCI, you might have trouble installing. So, you might want to set your SATA configuration to AHCI mode in BIOS if you face issues.
If you end up choosing Fedora, you may want to follow this.
Fedora only comes with FOSS by default. So, you'll have to install Nvidia driver and proprietary multimedia Codecs separately by including RPMFusion repo. - You can download the free and non-free repo files from the RPM-Fusion site(Graphical Setup) and install them through the Software Center. After adding the repo, you might have to enable them in the Settings of Discover Software Center. Enable all of them except those containing the words 'testing', 'Test', 'Source', 'Debug' and 'google chrome'.
After that, it's just a few lines you type in the terminal (Konsole by default) for installing driver and codecs. Make sure to update the system and restart first before doing these.
Steam is also included in the non-free repo. You may install it by typing:
sudo dnf install steam
Other than these, most applications can now be installed directly from the store as a Flatpak. You can select them in the store between Flatpaks, Fedora managed Flatpaks and Fedora Linux app for a particular one.
- For flatpak apps, you'll see a tick next to the developer if they are verified. So, you can look out for that if necessary. - Make sure 'Flathub' repo is enabled in the Settings of Discover Software Center for the Flatpak apps to appear.
NOTE: Every time the video driver updates, you will have to do a follow-on update for flatpak runtimes. You might see a bunch of 'Application platform' and 'Freedesktop' stuff which you'll have to install. If you fail to do this, you might suddenly find flatpak applications not working properly.
Troubleshooting tips:
If Steam doesn't launch the first time, type:
__GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_RATE_HINT=3 steam
If your system is frozen, try switching to TTY by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F3) and going back to GUI by pressing (Ctrl+Alt+F2)*. *Could be F1 in some cases.
To check what errors you got during the recent boot,
journalctl -b 0 -p err
Apart from the driver installation and some troubleshooting, you generally won't have to use the terminal if you're averse to it.
In terms of deGoogling, I'd recommend the following:
Buy a pixel and install Graphene OS.
Switch to - Tuta/Proton Mail for email, - Proton/Tresorit Drive for storage, - Mullvad (or i, proton) VPN or (Rethink DNS for firewall) I am not sure if you can use both Rethink and VPN at the same time. I assume there is a way.
Can't forget Zen Browser for best productivity browser. Also Ungoogled Chromium
OP if you want to use AI locally but privately then use Ollama with Open Web UI
Also HuggingChat is an AI Chatbot that can do all kinds of stuff with the 1-tap community extensions, models, and assistants avilable. Website is free with an account. Use as a web app for it to be even better experience
When you are more advanced learn distrobox to add apps only available on other distros natively to your laptop
If you have any questions feel free to ask me whenever
While Zen and ungoogled chromium are fine, I'd suggest to stay away from Brave for any serious purposes 'cause you never know what shady things they might be doing. Case in point, they had previously been changing regular URLs to include affiliate links on their own. They also have that crypto bloat.
Well, it's just 4-5 lines that you're going to have to type and it's just a one-time thing. Surely, it's not that intimidating.
Bazzite seems to be based on Fedora Kinoite, an atomic desktop. Now, I haven't used atomic desktops. Although I wanted to, I ended up not doing that for the following reason.
From what I understand, you can't easily alter the base image of the system and everything else is a flatpak. This seems fine, but if you end up having to install an application for which there is no Flatpak, how would a non-tech savvy user do that? Still have to use the terminal at that point, I'd bet.
Case in point, even the other day, I came across this application called 'syncplay' for which there's no flatpak alternative and thankfully, Fedora repo had it.
I also hear that if you end up installing apps this way(Layering as it's called?), the update times become slower. You may shed some light on this.
Also, while it may not be as good as a snapshot system of the atomic desktops, the regular Fedora nonetheless shows the last two kernel installations on every boot so you could revert back to one if an update goes wrong.
I also have to mention that I always have my important files backed up on HDD or cloud that in the worst case scenario of losing my files on any update, (which hasn't happened so far btw), I can always restore them. In case of Steam games, it shouldn't be a problem if you have a fast internet connection. You should download them back in no-time. That is another reason I can still live without having to use a stable atomic desktop.
New users find the terminal very intimidating, I've seen that come up time and again. It's kind of the whole point of Bazzite.
If you're already learning terminal to install software though, at that point you can use a distrobox, install whatever you want in it, and then export the application to your usual application menu. It'll launch the container in the background when you start the application, and shut it down automatically too. It's a little slower than a usual launch but it's still just a stripped down container so it's fine.
I tried two distros in the past week after your recommendation - Bazzite and Nobara. Bazzite is just like you say and all's good most of the time and I'm getting used to an atomic distro too. The only problem I seem to be having is that my GPU Freezes very often even while just browsing and I have to force-restart to recover.
journalctl shows me this error. [drm:nv_drm_gem_alloc_nvkms_memory_ioctl [nvidia_drm]] ERROR [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID ....] Failed to allocate NVKMS memory for GEM object
I don't know if this is because Bazzite uses a slightly older Nvidia (open) driver(570.64) and kernel(6.14.6) or because of something else.
However, I don't have this issue on Nobara and it uses the latest 6.15.4 and Nvidia (proprietary? akmod) driver (570.153). Correlation is not probably causation, but this might be one thing to consider.
And I've had issues with nvidia-open drivers in the past, but surely a lot of them seem to have gone now.
I believe if you tell the downloader you have a Nvidia 10-series card then it'll give you proprietary drivers that still work on newer cards. I have a 10-series and haven't had these issued fwiw.
Thanks. The downloader gives me an option to rebase, which I find easier to use. It shows me an option to download from ostree-unverified-registry, but I chose to do it from ostree-image-signed:docker instead. Don't know why the signed image is not shown on the downloader by default. That said, after switching to nvidia from nvidia-open, the driver version still remains the same. Let's see if I get freezes again in the upcoming days.
Also, there are two applications that I use outside of flatpak - a firewall(Safing Portmaster) and another password manager, for which I have to install using the rpm installer. The password manager has no problem installing using the rpm-ostree install <name.rpm> command. However, Portmaster installs, but won't work because of the following error which I found from journalctl.
<br />Jul 05 16:28:23 bazzite systemd[1]: Started portmaster.service - Portmaster by Safing.
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5786]: Error: failed to exec lock: open /opt/safing/portmaster/core-lock.pid: read-only file system
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite portmaster-start[5860]: Error: please set the data directory using --data=/path/to/data/dir
Jul 05 16:28:29 bazzite systemd[1]: portmaster.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.
Someone has supposedly a work in-progress script to make this work, but I don't think I'm qualified to scrutinize if doing this brings down the security of the system in any way.
And I don't know if many other rpm installers have the same trouble installing in atomic distros because it's a read-only file system. For now, I'll have to live without my favorite firewall.
Okay, I keep getting the same freeze again with the proprietary nvidia driver too. My suspicion is now heavily on Secureboot being enabled. Some Arch people kept warning me about this back in the day.
I'm going to use Bazzite without it and probably rebase again to open driver if there is no more freezes.
Unfortunately, even with secureboot disabled, I kept getting freezes. Got 3 freezes and I felt done with this. Replaced Bazzite with Nobara again.
Nvidia driver worked for a while. But, after I temporarily switched back to another atomic distro I'm dual booting on a completely separate drive(which requires secure boot for nvidia driver to work and it did work), Nobara stopped loading nvidia driver despite clearing all secure boot keys and installing the default one in UEFI/BIOS and turning off SecureBoot.
Apparently, the efi also has to be modified again. I didn't bother doing it and reinstalled Nobara again since that will reset the efi anyway. Now, the driver is working again. I swear to any seemingly non-existent higher power that I'll never use any distro that requires secure boot. Lol. I'm gonna reinstall Arch on my second drive now.
That said, I'd probably recommend Bazzite to anyone not having Nvidia GPU and it's a pretty impressive project. It even comes with Wallpaper Engine baked in. My friend and I were having a hard time making it work on their system. We were trying some solutions we found on github and some C++ file didn't have a particular header or something. Took a while to get it work and it was kinda messy later on too with the plasma shell crashing cause of it. Having additions like this would surely make life easier for regular users who would not want to deal with that mess.
Being intimidated by the terminal is fine, but the sooner you learn it, the better. Terminal is your friend, not your enemy. Take baby steps if you need to, but you're really doing yourself a disservice by staying away from the terminal.
This isn't how you get non-tech gamers to* switch to Linux and honestly, this attitude needs to die. Do you want Windows to always dominate? Because this is how you get Windows to always dominate.
People are afraid of the terminal because Windows has a shitty, unfriendly terminal. One of the things that brought me back to Linux was the cool-looking terminals. They make me feel like I'm Hackerman.
Linux isn't just a different operating system. It's a paradigm shift. Windows is always going to dominate as long as people are trapped in a Windows mindset.
Not so much help but hope: I got rid of Windows 11 and switched fully to Linux Mint a few weeks ago. I had no idea what I was doing but I tested things on USB and also on a very old laptop I had laying around before I made it my daily driver.
I'm not particularly a tech person. I own a small creative business and have a toddler, but I figured out what I needed to quickly. I don't game and didnt use Winsows exclusive software so have no opinions about that.
What I didn't expect: to actually be genuinely interested in my computer again for the first time since I was a teenager (which was not recent...). I love customizing my desktop. I love discovering new open source software. I'm learning more than I expected and it's just a totally different relationship with the tech I use every day, in a nice way. And no more BS ads / bloat when I'm just trying to exist on my computer.
If you want real gaming performance then arch all the way with archinstall. Trust, it's insanely good and you can get double of what you get on windows in terms of performance. Boot times are also insane. I have used so many distros and I can tell you that arch is king for performance.
If you really wanna learn how to tinker and become tech savvy you can always try manually installing arch or get an easier distro and learn from there.
I agree. Arch has been my current favorite distribution for several years now, but it's almost impossible to maintain without having to drop into the shell occasionally. I have EndeavourOS installed on my wife's laptop and she's been happily using it for nearly a year; bauh helps with software installs, but I still generally drop into a shell for the full -Syu upgrades, and you have to use the shell at least once just to install bauh as it's not a core package.
You might be able to avoid the shell to use bauh if you use the AppImage; I haven't tried that. bauh can apparently do system upgrades, but I haven't tried that yet and I need to see how it handles news; Arch is fairly cavalier about pushing out breaking changes that require extra user steps which need to be discovered by reading the news posts.
I agree that Arch isn't the best "first linux" distribution.
Graphical user interface for managing your Linux applications. Supports AppImage, Debian and Arch packages (including AUR), Flatpak, Snap and native Web applications - vinifmor/bauh
There is hope lots of YouTube channels, articles by bloggers such as Its Foss, and guides to Linux all over
Especially for Linux Mint (Similar to Windows), Pop!_OS (Similar to MacOS), and Bazzite (Gaming-Productivity Distro, Similar to SteamOS)
The latter 2 work out of the box for gaming if that's your thing
You got this. Learn little by little each day and engage with community as much as you can. Maybe join some Voyager for Lemmy, Bluesky, Discord, etc communities
I'd say try Kubuntu. It's like Ubuntu but with KDE (Windows-like user interface) instead of GNOME (shitty Mac clone turned tablet like interface). It's well-supported and is easy to use. Also supports new technologies like HDR which Mint is lacking. Though you can install KDE on pretty much any distro (Mint included) but it's a good starting place.
Note to fellow Linux veterans: Yes, I know snaps suck but it is not something new users need concearn themselves with. Kubuntu is a great distro except for snaps which aren't going to affect OP's use-case (or most use-cases. Also sorry for shitting on GNOME so much. If you like it that's cool, I just don't think we should be recomending it to people coming from Windows.
Garuda is actually my daily driver these days, and I quite enjoy it. It does mostly just work, and I also like their desktop theming. The GUI installer is great for easy hardware detection and setup. But, that's coming from a more experienced old tinkerer who was initially looking for some lazy troubleshooting with NVIDIA graphics on a new gaming laptop, and liked the distro enough to end up switching over.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend any rolling release to someone completely new to Linux. The devs have done a pretty good job at making some things more user friendly, but we are talking about Arch with some extra tools bolted on. You'd better be prepared for things to break occasionally, and to need to do some tinkering around under the hood.
On the plus side, you ARE dealing with Arch with all the info resources/user community built up around that, plus the Garuda community tends to be pretty helpful from what I've seen. You are going to periodically need to figure out how to fix stuff, however--and better to be aware of that going in. Some people are going to be more fine with the idea than others, but it is liable to provide a steeper learning curve for someone just getting started with Linux.
I agree with everything you said. If someone is new and wants to have a rock solid experience, then it might make sense to get a long term support version of the distribution that's chosen. It's a trade-off of shiny new upgrades for almost guaranteed stability.
I have 15 years of experience and do free infinite troubleshooting on matrix, feel free to add me. I recommend you go with aurora, because it is immutable, kde based, and well documented.
immutable means the base system is read only and updates are applied ontop of it, meaning you can easily roll back an update that went bad, and the apps are separate from the core operating system and thus can never break them (unless you try really hard).
kde is a desktop environment, it is most similar to windows and the rate of development dwarfs almost everything else, please whatever you do for your first system use kde.
aurora is a slightly modified fedora and fedora is one of the most commonly used options, the reason not to use base fedora is that aurora includes some QoL features, for example because of issues with patents twitch doesn't work on fedora but does on aurora.
I started on Mint and liked it so much that I never distro-hopped. Every now and then I think about trying an immutable distro. But then I remember how much learning I had switching from Windows to Mint and I get scared of losing so much time to learn about Aurora. What would your say to me?
Not who you asked, jumping in until they reply: Windows and most GNU/Linux distros are much further apart than most GNU/Linux distros are to each other. Unless you're doing a lot of manual meddling or using hacky tools, the biggest change between Mint (Ubuntu/Debian-based) and a Fedora-based distro, in my experience, was that apt is replaced by dnf, so if you install apps from the command line instead of a prettier software manager (I did lots of programming so this was normal for me) then the names of programs and libraries were a bit different. I'd also make a list of things you've installed (VPN software, chat apps, etc.) and look them up in the Fedora packages site or their own website and make sure they're all available. I would assume they would be, Fedora is popular enough.
The desktop environment (Cinnamon vs. KDE) will be an initial change, but they're both familiar enough with a program menu, task bar, like how Mint lets you carry over some of that same basic surface-level intuition that Windows taught.
That the worst linux distro would be vastly better than windows (not that mint is the worst, that'd be manjaro)
honestly it isn't much to learn but the returns are very diminished if you're already on a linux distro, I mostly make this recommendation if you're just starting out, if you're perfectly happy there isn't much need to switch, but more up to date software, kde over cinnamon, and immutability are huge advantages for many people.
like, just for an idea of why kde is better for beginners, the kde text editor alone gets more code changes than all of cinnamon combined per month, and by a lot. Kde is always rapidly improving.
basically on aurora you just use discover for all software and updates and don't even need the cli, it's pretty easy to learn honestly, and if something goes wrong that a simple google can't fix feel free to message me I do free infinite linux troubleshooting.
here's a copypasted post I made on mint and beginners "A lot of people are going to recommend you mint, I honestly think mint is an outdated suggestion for beginners, I think immutability is extremely important for someone who is just starting out, as well as starting on KDE since itās by far the most developed DE that isnāt gnome and theirā¦ design decisions are unfortunate for people coming from windows.
I donāt think we should be recommending mint to beginners anymore, if mint makes an immutable, up to date KDE distro, thatāll change, but until then, I think bazzite is objectively a better starting place for beginners.
The mere fact that bazzite and other immutables generate a new system for you on update and let you switch between and rollback automatically is enough for me to say itās better, but it also has more up to date software, and tons of guides (fedora is one of the most popular distros, and bazzite is essentially identical except with some QoL upgrades).
How common is the story of āI was new to linux and completely broke itā? thatās not a good user experience for someone whoās just starting, itās intimidating, scary, and I just donāt think itās the best in the modern era. Thereās something to be said about learning from these mistakes, but bazzite essentially makes these mistakes impossible.
Furthermore because of the way bazzite works, package management is completely graphical and requires essentially no intervention on the users part, flathub and immutability pair excellently for this reason.
Cinnamon (the default mint environment) doesnāt and wonāt support HDR, the security/performance improvements from wayland, mixed refresh rate displays, mixed DPI displays, fractional scaling, and many other things for a very very long time if at all. I donāt understand the usecase for cinnamon tbh, xfce is great if you need performance but donāt want to make major sacrifices, lxqt is great if you need A LOT of performance, cinnamon isnāt particularly performant and just a strictly worse version of kde in my eyes from the perspective of a beginner, anyway.
I have 15 years of linux experience and am willing to infinitely troubleshoot if you add me on matrix."
you are going to be fine! linux has better compat than windows now unless you use a ton of proprietary, locked software. your average linux distro can do steam gaming pretty well, and there are distros like bazzite and garuda and popos that do some or all of the configuration for you (based on your hardware and usage).
This is the book that got me on the train. I have so many tech books but they all started with this. I'm a terminal afficianado now; this got me started. Anyway, good luck and I hope you have a good time.
I just want to add that the drm modeset is enabled by default ever since the 560 drivers. You only need to do that for the older ones, if I'm right.
Previously, you also had to disable nouveau yourself and Nvidia driver installation used to be a headache. Things have gotten better over the ages. I'm sure this multi-monitor issue will also be fixed soon as well.
As others have mentioned, use Mint. Since you game, some games wonāt run on Linux because of their anticheat, and to that I decided to use a dual boot system. I gave 500gb to windows, the rest to Linux. Anything that wonāt run on Linux (some early access games, COD, Tarkov) goes on the windows partition. 500gb doesnāt seem like much when COD takes about 1/2 of that, but everything else Iāve played runs fine on Linux.
I also like the smaller partition because it makes me be choose what I leave installed, and if Iām not playing, I just uninstall whatever game needs to go
Absolutely. I likewise moved to Linux more out of frustration with Windows than any of my own tech ability. It needn't be a concerted effort either. I had it on a separate SSD (for a more stable dual-boot) and dabbled for a couple of years until I found myself gradually booting into Linux instead of Windows more and more.
Yep, if you have the means, I recommend having two SSDs until you feel confident using one of them full-time. The only downside is that if your computer is so small/cheap/old like mine was all those years ago and doesn't have enough cables to keep both drives plugged in, switching between them can be annoying for a while.
I started using Zorin OS just to get out of Windows. Ngl I work in IT and the last thing I wanna do when I'm off work is to go home and do more tech-related stuff, so I just picked it for ease of use. Happy with it though!
Honestly there is nothing to learn, unless you pick arch which is annoying to install, otherwise everything is pretty simple and for the most part just works.
Just remember to turn steam play on for all titles in Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility.
As others have said, Mint is a great starting option. It looks familiar when coming from Windows, and almost everything works without having to touch a terminal.
AAA games with anti-cheat may not work, but just about everything else will. Check Proton DB for each game's compatibility. You can add non-Steam games to Steam to take advantage of Proton. Lutris can also work for some Windows games.
If you want to try Linux distributions to see what they're like before committing, VirtualBox or other virtual machine programs can give you a risk-free preview.
Another option is a live preview. Install Linux Mint on a USB using Rufus or a similar program, then boot your computer from the USB. So long as you don't access your computer's hard drive (under devices on the left of the file manager) or run the installer, no changes should be made from your computer. You can simply reboot and remove the USB to go back to your usual OS.
If you are going to dual-boot, install Windows first. Windows has a habit of overriding or deleting Linux if it's installed second. If you just want to shrink your Windows partition to allow room for Linux, shrink it from Windows. Linux can move "unmovable" Windows files resulting in Windows not booting.
Always have a backup of everything you are not prepared to lose before you play with installing operating systems (and make sure it's disconnected from that computer). Data loss from software issues is rare, but mistakes are difficult (sometimes impossible) to reverse, particularly as a beginner.
You have received tons of useful responses, so I will not add more, except to tell you that the change is extremely worth it, easier than it seems and extremely entertaining.
I personally use Kubuntu (I love the KDE environment) and sometimes play Steam games by using Proton.
thanks! right now the primary obstacle is arranging adequate backup before maling my first attempt.
I have a laptop with Win 11 for troubleshooting so I'm not worried about that. and I have most of my stuff on externals, so there's not much to backup. I just gotta figure out a good way to back up my C drive and a plan for reverting if necessary!
oh yea? I'm wondering if the program I already have will work. ever heard of a program called Macrium reflect? I installed it and never used it lol. adventure time
I've only heard recommendations for Macrium Reflect, but I've never used it myself. Never heard anything bad about it either, should be good if it's what you are most comfortable with.
I've just saw someone in my timeline coming from www.minds.com.
I've known minds.com, which was at the start since it was annouced a few years back and even joined, but soon realised it was not for me and too few people... So I left.
It was just a social media with a weird crypto associated to it. But I remember liking their UI and design a lot back in the days.
But now it seems they activated ActivityPub support, doed anyone knows anything about this? Is this recent and we missed something or am I out of touch with Fediverse news? š
Minds can interoperate (federate) with other networks that implement the ActivityPub protocol, allowing members to communicate with each other; much like email, where you can mail other providers, so long as you know their email address.
Gardiner Bryant had conversation with Manjaros lead, Phillip Muller and was told that Valve has the Orange Pi Neo in-hand and theyāre testing it, probably to bring SteamOS support for the handheld
Launch prices of the OrangePi Neo-01 will be: Base Model 7840u 16GB/512GB will be 450 $ or 3699 CNY Base Model 8840u 32GB/512GB will be 550 $ or 4499 CNY
The Jervis Bay Territory (/ĖdŹÉĖrvÉŖs, ĖdŹÉĖr-/; "JBT") is an internal territory of Australia. It was established in 1915 by the transfer of jurisdiction from the state of New South Wales to the federal Commonwealth of Australia, in order to give the federal government control of a port in the vicinity of the landlocked Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
I am 45 and did not know this until today when for some reason Jervis Bay Territory was printed in a select option along with the other Australian states and territories.
What are they (or were they) actually doing with that port, though? Kinda impractical to have a federal government port so far away from the capital ...
It's pretty close to the capital, really. It's directly due east of the ACT. Maybe somewhere like Bateman's Bay would be a little closer, but not a huge amount, and I assume other practicalities (including existing uses) took priority.
I think ar might be a dead dream in its current state, I always thought wed have proper ar glasses by now because I fell for Magic Leaps Marketting, not sure if it'll come anytime soon.
What I do believe is coming is the resurgence of computers through mobile phones. Everyone has a powerful computer in their pockets but isn't able to use them to their full potential. I wouldn't be suprised if android pushed out a proper android desktop experience letting android users get the full linux desktop experience when plugged into a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.
Phone performance is stronger than the average laptops/netbooks from 10 years age and they run linux fine for everyday use. Feels like a missed opportunity if someone doesn't drop a phone or os that lets you take advantage of modern hardwares capability. They could advertise it to families, mo more buying a pc for school, just get them hardware for their existing device, it can already do everything. Schools could use lapdocks, or tabletdocks, that could force school parental controls on devices while at school and still let them use it for their education while in class.
(obviously not everyone has a phone but that frees up resources for the kids that dont, if the kids that do can use cheaper docks with their exisitnt hardware)
@bees Actually the UV creams have shown to be themselves carcinogenic, so it's not about to have cancer or not, but how to get it. All things in moderation, including sun, your body does need vitamin d3 which it produces in the presence of UV.
@Railcar8095 With respect to vaccines and autism, there is a correlation but as the old saying goes casuality is not causality until it is. In my view it warrants research. And I've got no doubt that the number of vaccines they are giving toddlers and children these days is overloading their immune systems.
Autist here who loves to read research about autism.
There is absolutely no correlation between autism and vaccines. Neurodivergence cannot be caused by immune system problems.
People are born autistic with a brain programmed by their DNA to form alternative neurological connections compared to neurotypicals. A neurotypical cannot be turned/mutated into being autistic and vice versa.
The only correlation that exists is that people who are neurodivergent are prone to develop some unhealthy habits (from extra stress, sleep schedules, and being a picky eater etc) which in turn can lower your immune system.
Feels weird that i have to explain this, but not all Research is funded by big pharma.
The majority of research on autism is not about Vaccins either but about understanding the many properties from which it emerges.
By understanding what autism actually is, which is often studied by autistic researchers who are motivated to understand themselves better it becomes self evident that we are far from reaching a technological point where we can create a drug to cause or even simulate the complex nature of it.
You could just aswell claim that vaccins cause people to shapeshift into cats, if you understand the subject matter thats just as non-realistic
If you want to bash vaccines you could state that an experimental accidental wrong mixed variant could cause death. Which would still be an incredibly unlikely freak accident but at least reality allows the technical possibility for such a mistake.
@webghost0101 Here are the facts. 100 years ago, Autism rate is 1-in-40000, today it is 1-in-16. The increase in autism has paralleled the increase in vaccines. And the autism rates parallels the vaccination rates in various regions. As I previously stated, this is a casual not a causal relationship, but given the seriousness of the disease and how many it is affecting, it is worth researching the relationship. Only people who could possibly be opposed to that are those whose profits are threatened.
Thats a cute observation but real facts are the following:
Autism was only formally recognized in the 1940s - thereās no reliable data before that, though historical evidence suggests autistic people have always existed. For decades, people deemed āmentally illā were institutionalized and hidden from society.
The majority of autistic people can mask their traits and present as neurotypical - they had strong incentives to do so given the historical stigma.
Diagnosis happens more frequently in areas with accessible healthcare, which naturally are also areas with higher vaccination rates.
We now have better diagnostic tools and a less punitive society for people with neurological differences. The diagnostic criteria have expanded significantly - many people (especially women) who wouldnāt have qualified under older definitions now do.
And if we want to include the more modern research done by the autistic community we learn that autism is a part of a bigger phenomenon called neurodivergence which includes adhd and many others. Who also used to be completely excluded by the dogmatic labeling of neurotypicals.
Also you referring to autism as a serious disease shows how little you actually know about it. Just like anyone else neurodivergent people can have psychological disabilities but because they are neurodivergent those disabilities are often different from neurotypical ones. In āāhigh functioningāā autism disabilities are subjective in context of living in a neurotypical world and are increasingly less disabling with social acceptance and understanding.
My 15+ years of research on the topic is solid tyvm.
My understanding of both biochemistry, psychology and autism itself is also advanced enough to form an educational opinion on any research i read.
The facts i give you can easily be verified and have absolutely nothing to do with big pharma.
I have to question your ability to perform research because it seems to be āEverything that disagrees with my initial belief is conspiracyā
I am very anti big pharma btw, some of the drugs they give neurodivergent kids are incredibly dangerous. They simply dont have annything to do with causing autism.
Oh FFS this isn't the benzene thing again, is it? Benzene is a trace contaminant in everything from the air you breathe to the water you drink. The highest number Valisure came up with was 6 ppm in a sunscreen sample, that's 0.0006%. Even if you decided to inject the whole bottle of sunscreen directly into your veins it would be a fraction of your total exposure for the day.
Using people's fear of cancer to scare them away from effective cancer prevention measures is fucking shameful, do better.
@GingerGoodness Benzene in trace amount is an issue, but also Oxybenzone: Some studies suggest it may be an endocrine disruptor, meaning it could interfere with hormones, and research in animals has raised questions about potential cancer risk, but it's important to note these were high-dose studies not directly relevant to typical human use. Other UV Filters: Ingredients like octinoxate and homosalate have also raised concerns about potential endocrine disruption, and some are banned in certain regions due to their impact on marine life
Look, if you want to smear yourself with chemicals, inject yourself with artificial DNA, etc, go for it, just don't require it of me and my offspring.
@bees There have been some recent studies that have solidified the relationship between autism and the MMR vaccine in particular. Gates live Polio vaccine has killed around 500,000 Africans, who knows how many it's maimed, and not to say Polio isn't worth vaccinating against, I have friends who were partially parallelized by it, but if you're killing 500,000 people something is wrong, and one of my children got heart issues after covid vax, further, he at 40 had two vaccines, damage done on the second, had three incidents of covid and the third involved a 102.9 fever, I by contrast got no covid vax, got covid twice, both times it was your average head cold, and the highest fever I had was 99.1, never went down into my lungs, same for my wife and my other son who did not get vaccinated. Vaccines are immensely profitable to the pharmaceutical industry, and just like profit in the military complex keeps wars going even if it means killing and maiming people, so to the pharma profits force unnecessary and dangerous medical interventions.
I'm planning on getting a laptop within the next month which will be my daily driver for university, and it has a RTX 5060. I know people have lots of issues with NVIDIA on Linux, but I don't know of any specific issues. What issues can I expect running Fedora 42 (KDE) on this device?
I am not responding to most comments here, but I am silently taking them into account.
I had some weird issues with my 3080 Ti on Fedora 41 and 42 and have recently switched to a 9070 XT.
Most games ran fine, but other programs acted strange while games were open. Space Engineers, Escape from Tarkov, and a couple other titles wouldn't allow me to use other programs. The cursor would stay the same as in-game, even when alt-tabbed, and the Discord UI would become unresponsive.
I had several strange issues with my monitor flickering that didn't resolve until I uninstalled and reinstalled my drivers.
I had a horrible issue with Minecraft and other OpenGL games that caused a strobing white screen while playing. I forgot how I resolved that one.
I had to reinstall drivers several times. I don't know how much of it was self-inflicted or just how it goes on Linux.
None of these issues have come up while on my 9070 XT.
Yeah I have a 3070 and have experienced similar sorts of minor annoyances when using Wayland. When I see reports that issues are fixed I try a Wayland session and still find various oddities or issues.
They may be marginal useages but for me I have a dual screen set up and I might game on one and have a video open on another, or even have two video streams open, one on each screen. I find videos slow down and lag, or have artefacts. Issues I don't get on X11 or when I was in windows.
I'm in the same position of looking to upgrade my graphics card and I'm looking at AMD to avoid any more Nvidia related issues. I love using Linux but I don't want to be dealing with Nvidia drivers after past experience.
I use Prismlauncher, it's great for managing multiple versions with different mod lists, Java versions, etc. Nice, clean interface, and you get a background cat!
The Nvidia issue is overblown IMO. Yes, it used to be petty bad a couple of years ago with bugs and glitches all over the place, especially with Wayland. These days not so much. Just use the proprietary Nvidia drivers and you will have a solid experience. It's honestly been over a year since I last had an issue that I could narrow down to Nvidia hardware.
Just make sure to read some reports from people with the same model of laptop. Laptops with very specific hardware can have compatibility issues.
I get what you're saying but I don't think it's overblown having put up with issues myself with a mainstream 3070 card. A year really isn't very long and it's been a series of issues for me. When I've seen reports that the issues are fixed I have tried Wayland sessions and still find basic problems like video lag on my dual 4k set up without any clear solution. I have an Nvidia GPU and I avoid Wayland as a result.
My feeling is that they've fixed the issues perhaps for most useage cases but not all, and it can be enough for just 1 unfixed issue to ruin your experience.
I have a 3070 and am Linux only now; I'm currently looking at an upgrade for my GPU and genuinely I'm not even looking at an Nvidia GPU such have the annoyances been with Nvidia and wayland support. Many people who want specific features of Nvidia cards may not be so lucky
Even if Wayland support is fixed, I'm in the category of once bite twice shy with Nvidia on linux.
I definitely had issues with my 3070. I ran it in Linux for 4 years before recently switching back to AMD. It was usually only minor issues like it not playing well with certain DEs, but sometimes certain driver versions would make my system unusable/unbootable until I could roll them back. I am glad some people never had it happen, but pretending like it wasn't a thing just makes you ignorant.
I don't know about that man. Installed Fedora 42 and GNOME to run with my RTX3080 and GNOME froze and crashed at random constantly. Installed KDE Plasma instead and it runs just fine.
I've been using Aurora which is an immutable distro based on Fedora. It's from the same guys who do Bazzite. I use it on my work laptop with a discrete Nvidia card. I've had zero issues with the video driver. (I use Bazzite on two desktop and a laptop at home, all with Nvidia cards).
I really like these universal blue distro because on the odd occasion that I have an issue after an update, I can reboot into a pinned working version of the system. There are only a couple of CLI commands to learn to pin and unpin the different systems. All currently available systems appear on the grub menu. It's kind of brilliant IMO.
Only downside is that installing RPM packages isn't recommended, but I've found pretty much everything I need through flathub. I have one RPM package installed for VeraCrypt (no flatpak and it doesn't work right in a container) but it hasn't caused any issues for me.
Edit: I should say I can't speak to the ongoing driver issues on the 50 series cards. The newest card I own is an RTX 3080 LHR 12 GB.
Yeah, can't recommend Aurora enough. It's awesome to have literally 0 driver issues, since the system image already contains the drivers pre-installed.
@Interstellar_1 This is the issues I've run into with nVidia gpus. The open source drive, nouveau is incomplete at best and can't take full advantage of features, the drivers provided by nvidia are never up to date with the most recent kernel so you are FORCED to run kernels a few issue old unless no changes to the driver interface has been made in recent history AND if your card is older than eight years and sometimes not even that, nVidia abandons it so you are back to only nouveau drivers. I have not had these issues with Intel graphics or AMD.
I have a 3070 and generally I have no issues with gaming or working in X11.
I have previously had major issues with Nvidia and Wayland and I don't use Wayland as a result on that machine . Many of those issues may have been resolved now but at present there isn't a need to be using Wayland although it is being increasingly pushed. Problems I had were laggyness in the desktop, and videos becoming choppy if I had more than one major process running on the GPU (eg game and video in browser, or two browser windows both with video). I believe such issues have been fixed in the past 12-18m but I'm now in the habit of using X11 on the machine with no incentive to try Wayland again for now.
It is very easy to avoid Wayland - as simple as ensuring X11 is installed and then logging out of a Wayland desktop session and logging into an X11 session once and keeping with that as the default.
I do have a separate AMD machine with integrated GPU and that has been running Wayland from the get go. On that machine I've never even had to think about this issue and have just let my fedora based distro (Nobara) default to Wayland. It's been very much an Nvidia issue.
As long as you're using modern drivers, such as 570 or later (preferably 575), your experience should generally be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux, but over the last year or two they've put a ton of work into improving it, specifically in wayland support.
One of the last major open issues is DX12 performance. DX12 performance is kinda all over the place depending on your hardware, game, and game settings, but you can generally expect around a 20% performance hit to DX12 games compared to windows. DX11, opengl, and vulkan games perform about as well as windows. Dx12 performance on Nvidia has been a known issue for years and Nvidia was silent on it, but just a few months ago they finally publically acknowledged it and claimed they were working on it. In my experience, Nvidia typically pretends problems don't exist until they actually decide to fix them, so we can probably start expecting improvements to DX12 performance soon.
I've been exclusively gaming with Nvidia on linux (CachyOS) for about a year now and my experience has been satisfactory, so you should be fine.
Nvidia rightfully earned their bad reputation on linux,
Really? IMO not with GPUs. They have released linux drivers for decades, and always in time for new kernel versions. ATI was typically way behind and buggy as hell. I would likely not have switched to Linux on the desktop in 2006 if it wasn't for my GPU "just working", without any fiddling. Performance was always equal to Windows and stuff like multimonitoring just worked. They even had their nice setup utility to configure Xorg for you.
Could they have handled the transition to Wayland better? Maybe. But claiming they earned a bad reputation in regards to GPU when they are the one big vendor that had extremely active linux support for ages is dishonest and unwarranted, IMO.
They dragged their feet on wayland and tried to force EGLStreams for years, causing a ton of work for open source devs. Their drivers on linux are still significantly more annoying to install than AMD or Intel and still use proprietary userspace drivers. This all and more is the definition of earning their bad reputation.
You know what's dishonest and unwarranted? You trying to twist my words and imply I compared them to other manufacturers when I didn't. More than one company can rightfully earn a bad reputation, and ATI definitely did as well. Nvidia was indeed better for a long while, and then earned their bad reputation over the later 2010s and early 2020s.
Just use the newest driver and you'll be completely fine. Even with very recent hardware, everything works as expected for me.
People like to shit on Nvidia, which is deserved for their business practices and relationship with Linux in the past, however most who claim that there are issues clearly haven't used an Nvidia GPU under Linux in a long time.
It should work. The only practical issues are: - Usually, you will have to manually install the proprietary drivers (I think Fedora makes this relatively easy) - Wayland (the protocol most desktop environmentss use nowadays) support may be hit-and-miss at times (it will mostly work but it's not as polished as with Intel/AMD), and Proton (the thing that lets you play Windows games) may not play well either.
The ideological issue (which you probably don't care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The ideological issue (which you probably donāt care about) is that it pretty much requires proprietary (non-FOSS) drivers which run in kernel space and so in theory have complete access to all data on your computer (but then so does Intel ME). This is the main reason I personally will never use NVidia cards.
The only meltdown I've had with Linux occurred on a minor rev-level update to Debian that plugged some hole in the kernel the NVidia proprietary driver was crawling through. I had used Debian and an NVidia proprietary driver for years on an ancient motherboard. Then suddenly that "solution" disappeared. I had to replace the whole machine. Yeah, it was time. No, I wasn't ready. I don't know whether I should have been more pissed at Debian or NVidia, but I'm still on Debian. After the kernel update, X11 reverted to a default driver, and no install, uninstall, reinstall combination of the proprietary drivers seemed efficacious. I'm sorry I don't remember the exact software rev-levels and drivers involved. All notes I took at the time, if any, were lost in the subsequent crash and recovery from incompetently trying to roll back the kernel update.
I have used both AMD and Nvidia cards on Linux for a long time and with Nvidia it's mostly fine now days, but their driver situation tends to be fine until the rare time that it isn't. I switched back to AMD last year due to the occasional driver issue that left me dead in the water. And by occasional I mean like once every year or so, not something common. It is entirely possible that you'll never have much of an issue, but I started to take note of my Nvidia driver versions and and especially noted when GPU drivers were updated so that I had some notion of where to try to roll back to if I ran into issues. I haven't had any issues like that with my AMD cards for a long, long time in Linux (with Windows obvious the situation was more of the reverse of this).
As long as the graphics isn't that hybrid Nvidia Optimus or whatever the hell they call it, you're good. That hybrid shit was a nightmare to get working, and it never worked right either.
I had to switch back to Windows for now since game performance was noticeably worse with my Nvidia card on Fedora vs Windows. Something running at around 130-144fps cutting down to 80-9fos as an example. So be prepared for that. From what I gather it's unique to Nvidia.
I couldn't game on Wayland for about 20% of my games (very frustrating), couldn't use specific Window Managers like Sway, experience constant screen tearing on X11 (which I often had to use, because the game would crash on Wayland) when gaming, and had a significant performance hit in some games.
CS:GO ran like a dream and actually better than on Windows, but with the release of CS2 my performance on Linux was about 20% worse than on Windows. My 1% lows were also crazy on Linux (median=190fps, %1=80fps). This meant, among others things, that I just couldn't play death match anymore ā my FPS would make it unplayable. This was largely an optimization issue and I think some of the 2025 Nvidia driver updates of improved the situation a little for CS2 specifically. The screen tearing on X and the buggyness on Wayland were enough for me to switch though, even if eventual improvements might come.
I am now extremely happy with my 7900 XT, which I got for less than any available 9070 XT (in my region) and which amusingly actually has better performance in CS2 then then the 9070 XT on Linux. It's massively overkill though, I could have just as well gotten a 7800 XT or 9070 (non-XT).
I am still very, very pleased. Hopefully this will last me a few years, unlike the gosh darn 3060 Ti.
Alright, I'm done with my huge block of text. Hopefully this was helpful.
A lot of the info here reads as outdated to me, I have a 40 series card and on bazzite with open drivers it works with zero issues on major titles like Cyberpunk, Horizon, etc. The open drivers have come a long way. It took maybe 5 months post 40 series release for it to work 100% with no glaring issues for me, but 40 series was also the first cards to be launched with the open drivers so it makes sense there'd be hiccups
The only issues I've had on Wayland are color related.
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I was actually kinda wondering the other day why super large content creators with good cash flow from what they already do, don't ditch Google and Patreon or anything else that takes a cut to be nothing more than a middleman to accessing the content? They don't need to host on the same level as YouTube; they could probably make more money hosting their videos on their own website, where they can control what is free or paid for, and can work directly with advertisers themselves.
And how do they get big? How do they get discovered? SEO ?
They're getting huge because of the platform.
I'm not saying google is not evil but it literally gives them their audience.
I watch YT more than anything else by a mile, and if my top subscription moved to their website, and I had to jump through hoops to watch them on my TV device, by installing a browser or something I probably would stop watching them or watch them way less. Another TV friendly app sure that wouldn't be a problem, but I don't see many doing that.
I'm talking about those who have already gotten big, like PewDiePie or Good Mythical Morning (the latter of which started on their own website before youtube even existed, btw). Not the dude who just started a channel last week and has nothing to do shit with.
I pickled/canned about four pounds each of jalapenos and carrots. But I had some peppers left over. Also I had shredded cheese leftover from yesterday's burritos, and half a pound of bacon from yesterday's dinner.
Well that sounds like the start of a wonderful dinner. Poppers would have been too much work. I have a bag of potatoes... Oh. Let's do this. Jalapeno bacon potatoes au gratin.
Cost for pickled peppers: $1.30 per pint Cost per person for dinner: $3.40 (realistically I ate two full servings so this should really be $1.70 each for four people.)
Man, the struggle is real! I often wonder is this just like...a E Asian thing or what? Cause SE Asians can chill with tigers and not have allergic reactions.
The amount in some flu vaccines is roughly equivalent to the amount of mercury found in a three-ounce can of tuna fish.
...
overall, autism rates did not decline after thimerosal was removed from the vaccines, as many anti-vaccine groups suggested it would. Instead, the rates increased.
It is likely akin to sunk-cost. They have already spent so much of their life having a thing to point at, that they don't want it to have been wrong the whole time. Even though it was known to be wrong pretty much right away, that was already too late for some.
Some mindsets require assigning blame to an external locus in order to move on. There has to be no chance it was "their fault" even though it's hard to really describe genetics as such...
There hasn't really been anything else to suggest a fixed external potential source. So if this one is proven wrong, they are out of options. Ignoring, of course, that it has already been proven wrong. But, that is the reason why they feel it hasn't. Because it's so very important to them that it is right.
And of course barring all that, even the most profoundly affected individuals with Autism rarely blame their condition for the lowered quality of life, if any, they blame their surroundings or surrounders incapability of adjusting to their needs. With proper surroundings and surrounders, even at it's worst, the downsides are manageable and the upsides can be really nice/useful.
I donāt think Iāve seen anyone on Lemmy make the distinction between Netanyahu and the people of Israel, so im not gonna name the distinction between you and Trump. And thatās just the more recent example. You guys treated all my people like the enemy when it was time to use us as the excuse for war. I got to suffer because of your country, and which of you supported it is irrelevant if thatās how weāre gonna look at it
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So, I did a thing - accidentally selected my 5TB external NTFS hard drive (encrypted with VeraCrypt) as the target for writing an ISO. The moment I noticed that "Impression" had switched the drive letter, I immediately killed the process. But yeahā¦ damage done.
Now, the situation: - Currently shows up as: - 6 MB FAT - 4.3 GB - 2 TB unallocated - 2.6TB unallocated - The VeraCrypt volume obviously no longer mounts. - Drive was somewhat crucial - lots of structured data Iād really prefer to recover with the original file system intact.
I know chances are slim, especially with encrypted volumes, but has anyone had luck recovering from something like this? Iām open to commercial recovery tools or command-line wizardry. Would love to hear from anyone whoās been down this road.
I think you need to go commercial recovery. If it was a file you accidentally deleted, that can easily be recovered, but you wrote directly to the device.
If you have your encryption key backed up, you have a chance to decrypt it still. It's also possible, but unlikely, the key somehow survived the ISO write and it was written elsewhere on the drive, allowing the key to be recovered. I would only trust such with a professional. (There is basically a smaller encrypted section that your typed-in password decrypts, that section contains the encryption key the rest of the drive uses.)
Honestly though, if you have your stuff backed up (you do have your stuff backed up elsewhere?!?), just restore from your backup and call this a loss.
If you don't have a backup, this was your wakeup call. Always have a backup going forward.
Arenāt encryption keys, typically in the partition header? Wouldnāt that be one of the first things overwritten? Even if it was in the FAT or in the GUID, it would have been overwritten when a the ISO was written.
Each VeraCrypt volume contains an embedded backup header, located at the end of the volume (see above). The header backup is not a copy of the volume header because it is encrypted with a different header key derived using a different salt (see the section Header Key Derivation, Salt, and Iteration Count).
It may be possible to recover the encryption key. You might try asking on VeraCrypt forums/mailing lists or contacting a commercial data recovery service which understands VeraCrypt. Though Iām not familiar with VeraCrypt so I may be misunderstanding the cited documentation.
VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In case an attacker forces you to reveal the password, VeraCrypt provides plausible deniability.
Of course, OP should create an exact duplicate of the disk to another drive before making any changes to it.
As an aside, I know that GPT partition tables likewise come with a backup header at the end of the disk. Whether LUKS encrypted devices also have backup headers, I don't know, but it doesn't seem so. So, my fellow LUKS users, perhaps you would like to run the following:
VeraCrypt is free open-source disk encryption software for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In case an attacker forces you to reveal the password, VeraCrypt provides plausible deniability.
I guess it's a question of how much hassle it's worth. I did a messy data recovery of a crashed database for a work client once, but it involved a lot of trial and error and writing special purpose code, plus considerable luck that some things worked better than I had a right to expect. Cost of something like that would be in the multi kilobucks, maybe low 5 figures. We got almost all the data back, though not 100%.
Maybe just put that HDD aside and replace it with a new one, and deal slowly with recovering the data as you get the time to mess with it. Also don't do any write operations on the old drive. Maybe copy it entirely to someplace and work on the copy. In fact better do that anyway, HD's physically crash all the time.
Veracrypt has back-up headers located elsewhere in the volume that are unlikely to have been overwritten.
First thing's first I would strongly recommend copying the drive as it currently exists bit for bit to another drive of equal or larger size. Don't work on the original if you can help it.
Now with this copy, you should try to check the option to use the backup header when mounting and try again. If the partition is gone and veracrypt doesn't see it you'll need to try using something that recovers partitions and doesn't mind encrypted partitions or partitions or file system types it doesn't understand and use that to ON THE COPY recover and recreate the partition (this will write data and can cause the possibility of further loss or worsen your ability to recover which is why it is important to perform it on a copy). Testdesk may work for this but there are other options that probably are better.
See this list: old.reddit.com/r/datarecovery/ā¦ and choose something from there if this data is truly important. Again only work on a copy on another drive. Some of these software examples actually work against the original drive and make a copy elsewhere and should be safe to use on the original drive so long as they have you select a target drive to push the recovered data to but read the documentation. Testdisk absolutely must be used on a copy.
You will incur data loss and likely should run one of the file recovery software mentioned on the drive once successfully mounted in veracrypt to attempt to recover as much as possible.
I have a slightly different issue where I have several VeraCrypt vaults on an external that seem corrupted and don't recognize the correct passwords anymore. I'm making note of your advice to work on mine too. Is there anything particularly different you would recommend?
The only thing I would note is -IF- your volumes are not partition or disk based BUT -files- based there is the possibility that corruption of the host file system of the disk the files containing the volumes are on could result in pieces of those files being marked unreadable by the disk and itās POSSIBLE one way to solve this would be a file system check utility.
HOWEVER such activities carry a -large- risk of data loss so I would advise a bit for bit copy of the disk and doing the repair on that so if it goes wrong youāre not worse off. -IF- you cannot make a copy then I would advise at least trying to mount using backup headers before doing that and copying off anything you can salvage as file system checks can really mess up data recovery and should only be used in certain circumstances.
Youāre much better off trying the recovery software I linked in fact than doing a file system check as it will tend to have better results.
You can also use the option to mount as read only in VC to prevent writes to a suspected failing disk.
This case is due to a logical problem. Cleanrooms are only necessary for physical repairs, like swapping the Head Stack Assembly.
DriveSaversā cost of entry for a successful recovery is about $2,000. Theyāve even given that quote to an iPhone user who needed nothing more than a screen replacement.
Their āstate of the art facilityā is appropriate for hardware cases where money is no object and you need the best of the best to deliver results no matter the cost.
Realistically, most regular people will be well taken care of using a reasonably priced service like 300 Dollar Data Recovery.
Considering switching to Linux, but I have many questions.
Gaming - I enjoy gaming and want a Distro that will let me play most games. I have read that keeping nVidia drivers up to date can be (was?) a problem. I currently use steam for 99% of my gaming, Iām aware steam is porting a lot for SteamOS, but what are the limitations of this? Will I have to wait for a port before I can play a new game? Are there stability issues?
Iāve developed a lot of pretty basic macros for excel in Visual Basic, Iām not a programmer by any means, but I can write some algorithms to do QoL coding. Is making the switch to open office seamless? Will my .xlsx docs incur formatting issues? Will my macros translate to whatever editor is used in open office? Does open office use the same codes for cell functions? Are there statistic package add-ons like with excel? Essentially, Iām asking how much work is ahead of me if I make this switch?
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoftās IDE?
Steam has a compatibility layer called Proton, when enabled you can play games designed to run on Windows. You can check ProtonDB to see if a game runs or you can just check by yourself.
Games that use anticheat are the most prone to not work on Linux.
Also, you don't have to move to Linux cold turkey. You can try dual boot and adapt your workflow at your own pace. GL š
I can tell you macros in Excel will more than likely not transfer. As for formatting, 50/50 depending on how in-depth it is. I would advise dual booting/vm for Excel. There just is no other program as powerful. I'm not saying Libre or others can't do what your looking to do, but more than likely would need a rebuild to get there.
Agree for Excel. An alternative can be to use winapps which allow to run excel via docker (or podman) and open windows app same as if there were natively installed.
Gaming on Linux is great, steam isn't porting games for SteamOS, instead they released Proton which allows you to play just about every Windows game without issue.
I don't know about LibreOffice supporting Excel Macros, I'd assume not.
There are many good mail programs, but I think only one that properly integrates with Microsoft's cloud stuff.
Visual Studio straight up runs on Linux, it should be familiar.
Try it out and see if you get your system how you want it š
Gaming - I enjoy gaming and want a Distro that will let me play most games. I have read that keeping nVidia drivers up to date can be (was?) a problem. I currently use steam for 99% of my gaming, Iām aware steam is porting a lot for SteamOS, but what are the limitations of this? Will I have to wait for a port before I can play a new game? Are there stability issues?
For gaming you should keep in mind that you want a distro with decently new packages to avoid issues with Nvidia & also to have the correct drivers for some titles: fedora is good for a strong base, although I heard they are doing away with there x86 libraries... I prefer endeavor os, but you will at very least need to learn to use pacman and yay, but they aren't hard to understand if you have basic programming experience. You should also know that almost all games that are not supported on Linux nowadays are either really new, like launch day new, or they rely on an invasive anti cheat: are we anti cheat yet & proton db should give you a decent idea if your library is compatible.
Iāve developed a lot of pretty basic macros for excel in Visual Basic, Iām not a programmer by any means, but I can write some algorithms to do QoL coding. Is making the switch to open office seamless? Will my .xlsx docs incur formatting issues? Will my macros translate to whatever editor is used in open office? Does open office use the same codes for cell functions? Are there statistic package add-ons like with excel? Essentially, Iām asking how much work is ahead of me if I make this switch?
I don't have nearly enough experience with your second point, my only thoughts are that you should be looking into libre office - it's the most mature in my eyes, and open office has made a lot of questionable decisions recently. Also as a general rule, I would say there is about an equivalent amount of compatibility between the oss alternatives and the different versions of the Ms office suite, it will be noticeable, but so long as you don't live and die by formatting, it will just be mildly inconvenient.
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I believe you are looking for proton, they are the oss answer to the Ms and Google suites, I don't know if you will have quite the amount of compatibility you want between people, but if that's important just use the web versions of your preferred suite.
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoftās IDE?
Vs code is almost entirely open source, as such, there is a project called vs codium which takes the publicly available vs code source code and keeps it fully open source, if you like the visual studio program you will hardly notice a difference.
The thing with Office is Microsoft has worked hard to keep it's monopoly. Office is it's cash cow and so they avoid standards deliberately to make it harder to move off. There are plenty of alternatives, lots of email software, etc. It's just about taking your time and moving bit by bit. You can install LibreOffice and Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows to try them out. LibreOffice being what replaced open office.
Protondb - info about current state and playability of almost any game on Steam driven by community.
AFAIK many calendar apps use CalDAV protocol which is quite universal. So basically any compatible with CavDAV protocol app (Thunderbird, Evolution) will work just fine.
VS Code + some extensions - yes, I know that it is not an IDE. I use it for game development on Unity (C#) and it makes job done.
I would say, instead of trying to 100% switch over, instead dip a toe in. Dual boot, or run a seperate system as linux first. Slowly grow into it, and then if in a few years, it feels feasible, put it on as your main and have your windows system as the back up. Then maybe eventually you won't need/want a back up at some point.
I can speak to a few of your questions. I've been fully on Linux, both my laptop and gaming PC for two years now.
Gaming - I use Steam for all of my games, and have had few issues. Steam uses Proton to allow non-native games to run, and it happens all within the Steam client. New Proton versions update within Steam just like your games. I've run across a few games that wouldn't launch or would CTD, but those are few and far between and similar to my experience in Windows.
Sample of games I've played without issue: * Star Wars Jedi: Survivor * Horizon: Forbidden West * Helldivers 2 * Red Dead Redemption 2 * Dwarf Fortress * Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 * Fallout: New Vegas * Deep Rock Galactic * Sea of Stars * Factorio
I have an Nvidia 3080Ti and use the proprietary Nvidia drivers. From what I recall, the install was painless and I haven't had driver issues.
OpenOffice - I use LibreOffice, because to my understanding it is actively maintained unlike OpenOffice, and I haven't had any issues casually using it to view documents.
I use Thunderbird for my mail client and haven't had any issues setting it up or using basic functionality. It works just as well as it did under Windows.
I installed VS Code or one of the foss alternatives, can't remember which, and haven't had issues with it.
TL;DR that's really my experience with everything in Linux. Some things are a learning curve, but most stuff just works. I'm also not a tinkerer. I just wanted an OS that works and stays out of my way and Linux has been great for that.
Gaming on Linux is nearly effortless within the Steam ecosystem. Outside if that, it requires a little more technical proficiency and a willingness or excitement for learning. Lutris, Heroic, and Bottles are all tools that can help you run non-Steam Windows software on Linux. Your mileage WILL vary depending on what you want to run. Non-games are very hit-and-miss.
Use LibreOffice, not OpenOffice. Formulas should work natively, but macros may need to be reimplemented since LibreOffice Calc uses a different āBasicā than Excel.
That depends on what you mean by āOutlookā. Iād wager most Linux users automatically pick Thunderbird, which is a fairly basic mail client compared to the MS Office version of Outlook. It is comparable to the lightweight built-in Windows Outlook, though. I prefer Evolution as my mail client, which is closer to Apple Mail or Windows Outlook. Try some things out and see what you like.
VSCode and VSCodium are readily available FOSS editors. There is also Kate, which comes with many KDE-based distros. Jetbrains IDEs work very well on Linux, whether you use free community, free non-commercial, or paid versions.
Gaming - go to protondb.com and look for the games you at regularly. If something g you at isn't supported (mostly specific online multiplayer games) then you're out of luck. Most games work seamlessly.
Watch some YouTube videos about people showing how to install Nvidia drivers to get an idea of how complicated it is.
I do enjoy the old version of outlook and work with many people who use outlook calendars for scheduling. Is there a similar program that will work with the same functionality on their end? (E.g. a mail client that will allow me to accept calendar invites from others and confirm it on both ends?).
I believe Thunderbird is still the most widely supported local mail client. (Corrections welcome, but last time I used a non-webmail email client, it seemed the most popular.) I have found Thunderbird is more stable and reliable on Linux than on Windows or Mac. And thunderbird seems to intentionally mimic older versions of outlook.
For any non-mircrosoft email provider, Thunderbird seems to usually be what the mail provider tests with, if they support non-web email access.
If using Microsoft as your email provider, I think Microsoft occasionally sabotages Thunderbird intentionally. I have not had a good experience, with this combination.
But Outlook(.com) works fine and is fully featured, in a browser on any version of Linux.
I am familiar with Visual Studio and use it as my IDE for very basic programming (I like to tinker with automating certain tasks in games, again by no means a programmer). Is there an equivalent FOSS version that would have a low learning curve coming from Microsoftās IDE?
VSCode is the heir-apparent to Visual Studio.
It is FOSS (mostly). To get the pure FOSS version, look for VSCodium, instead. Both run natively on Linux, were destined to mimic Visual Studio, but applying some usability lessons learned.
In my opinion, the feature set is equivalent, except some cases VSCode/VSCodium is dramatically better.
I used to run Visual Studio and VSCodium side by side, but I haven't been tempted to open Visual Studio in several years.
Lots of folks mentioning VSCode as the alternate to VS, but it is very much not that. VS is an IDE, VSCode is a text editor that just has a big plugin community. Do not expect a low learning curve. The VS alternative that's an actual IDE, and does have a low learning curve, is JetBrains Rider. Unfortunately it is neither F nor OSS.
On the machine I used Nvidia on, I ran Linux Mint and used that distro's driver manager. It was fairly straightforward. I found an appropriate time to build a new machine and I'm now a Ryzen/Radeon kind of guy.
In broad strokes, what Valve has done for Linux gaming is build a compatibility layer that translates the game's calls for Windows systems into those that Linux can understand, especially translating DirectX API calls to Vulkan. So, for the most part, Windows games now "just run." You do not need to wait for a game to be ported to Linux, and in fact many just simply aren't anymore; Valve's instructions are to target Windows and let Proton handle Linux gamers. The one place you'll find issues are some games that use kernel level anti-cheat, a technology that can work on Linux, but many studios choose not to let it.
I don't know if a conversion to a FOSS office suite (I would recommend LibreOffice or possibly OnlyOffice) will be 100% seamless, the most trouble I had with LibreOffice was collaborating with others. An MLA formatted essay made in LOWriter may translate fine, powerpoint presentations and spreadsheets might be a little wonky.
The cool thing about FOSS apps is you don't have to have Linux to give them a try. You can install LibreOffice in Windows and try it out yourself.
I don't think VisualStudio is available for Linux; their text editor VSCode and a "we built the parts they opened" called VSCodium are.
Linux is an extremely programmer friendly environment; you'll find a lot of IDEs available. Your typical Linux distro ships with Python and Perl interpreters among others just built right in, along with GCC of course. I've messed around with the Godot game engine, along with Arduino, though these days if I'm going to do much programming I'm going to do it in Python, including for microcontrollers. These days I've somewhat standardized on ESP32s running MicroPython.
OpenOffice has seen essentially no development since 2011, when the trademark got transferred to Oracle after they bought Sun Microsystems.
The project got forked into LibreOffice to dodge the trademark issue, but it's the same devs, practically the same project, but now under a non-profit organization. Well, and with 14 more years of development.
So, use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice. It will most likely come pre-installed on whichever Linux distro you go with. But you can also try it out on Windows beforehand, if you have concerns.
Just a headsup incase you try it on windows 11 before you do on linux:
LibreOffice, out of the box, is slow and buggy sometimes on windows 11 and the user interface doesn't look as smooth as on linux. You might have to tweak some graphics settings to bearable.
LibreOffice looks and works significantly better on Linux.
Ive personally not encountered any of the issues listed above for Libreoffice on Windows, it runs just as well on my win10 system as it does my Linux system (dual boot). That said, I have yet to try it out on Win11 amd if I do, it will be virtualized vs running on bare metal.
To me it looks you are pretty deep in MS ecosystem. The easiest to switch to Linux are developers because development on Windows sucks and casual users because they depend only on their web browser. Since you are both a gamer and deep in MS office suite it will be very hard because its completley different ecosystem.
My proposal: recreate your environment in VM and switch on linux host with that same setup. And then try get step by step over a year outside of that VM.
That randomly reminds me of a random post I saw on that other site years ago, goes something like this...
'Get 4 pigs, and paint them with numbers 1, 2, 3, and 5. Then let them loose in Walmart, and after they catch those 4, sit back and watch them look for #4...'
I miss working the pit. No customer interaction, I knew what filter and where as the car rolled in, and it was smooth. I do not miss the little burns, and being covered in oil and sweat, and the occasional smashed hand from the diff plate bolt suddenly coming loose.
Teaches a bunch of subjects and helps develop problem-solving skills; its soundtrack has zero right to be so bitchin' but it is
Was asking about this today because I couldnt remember the name or franchise and Lemmy came thru, reuniting me with yet another thing I could remember sound of but not the content or name, long thought lost to the sands of time
cheese_greater
in reply to tostos • • •