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How can I convince the GF to switch? She only plays The Sims and the occasional hentai game; her Skylake i5 and 1050ti are more than adequate for those tasks. Yet she refuses to try Linux; won’t even let me install LTSC to buy some time.
I think she just wants an excuse to buy a new laptop. She’s the kind of person who replaces her shower curtain every six months, rather than do the sane thing and simply wash it. I’ll never understand such a wasteful mentality.
Bazzite and don’t tell her it’s Linux?
She’s not stupid
She uses windows.
As do I. Sorry, but KDE’s HDR support is trash; half implemented at best (and it doesn’t even support AutoHDR nor RTX HDR). Until that changes, I will continue to dual-boot Win11 and Arch.
Linux makes more sense for the GF than me, because her laptop has a basic 60Hz SDR display. It’s the perfect OS if you don’t have modern hardware.
Hdr? I barely know her!
Then she can run Linux.
This isn’t helpful at all.
My gf is on win 11 and doesn’t uses it mainly for very light gaming and work. I offered it to her once and she doesn’t care.
Her windows is already having fun problems people think only linux has like her not being able to pay except using edge and other small annoyances. I just say “weird, if it works flawless on linux why doesn’t it on windows” every once in a while.
There is nothing wrong if someone doesn’t want to switch to a new OS. That being said, isn’t her buying a new computer better? Old one becomes unused then.
Putting lightweight linux on an unused old computer and seeing it become better is like the standard procedure. You could even make a custom rice for her.
the copilot nonsense really irked me, but it was then they had the gumption to force this absurd recall bullshit on everyone–that’s when i said i’m done, no more windows, no more M$
it’s obviously a “feature” they sold to senior executive board members so that middle managers could spy on their cubicle drones, but to have the gumption to try and convince the world that this was something we wanted? get fucked microsoft
It’s more than that. They want training data for their LLMs. With enough training data, they can train these models to do office knowledge work themselves, removing the need to employ cubicle drones at all.
I wonder what will win out, the sociopathic need of managers and execs to gaze over heads in cubes like it’s their kingdom - e.g. “return to office” mandates that saved no money and made no sense other than to control people - or the sociopathic need of the business to cut costs so low that the stability of the entire company teeters on a house of cards, be it AI or something else.
That’s what free software advocates have been telling everyone for decades. When you use proprietary software licensed to you, you have no agency in what becomes of it, they can force you to accept changes that you don’t agree with, violate your privacy, take what you thought you owned from you.
People give up freedom for convenience and treat those that don’t as crazy misguided idealists, thinking they’re fools for using less convenient and sometimes powerful fools for pointless principles only they care about… Meanwhile, if everyone was just a tiny bit like the crazy idealists, these companies wouldn’t be able to abuse their position because a modicum of resistance from everyone would be an overwhelming force for them.
Some will say it’s dumb being idealist about computer software, but aside from computer software being serious fucking business, the practices of these companies are what birthed disposable, unrepairable electronics, privacy erosion, robber AIs and so on. Do you think a tech industry dominated by free software supporters would have allowed the rise of people like Bezos, Zuckerberg or Musk?
Download a new OS // Download the operating system you want to install. Search for Linux distributions for beginners to get some suggestions.
I feel like it’s better to actually list/suggest a few beginner distros than to tell people to look it up.
Linux Mint (XFCE desktop) is the best for beginners coming from Windows, in my opinion. Linux enthusiasts will fawn over KDE because of customization, but they ignore that the vast majority of people don’t want to spend months tweaking pixels, widgets and animations, they just want to use the computer.
As a newer Linux user I think the priority in communication should be use Mint and then have some general information about how Linux isn’t Windows, with some key differences and how to do things. I know that’s more complicated than just saying it, but a “simple” get started guide would ease transition a lot.
I have gnome and KDE fedoras on my two pcs. Gnome is a lot more work to tweak it and add some basic functionality(lmao at enabling right click to create new file). KDE is just fine out of the box. Nobody is forced to tweak KDE, you can if you want to.
KDE also has fun stuff like kde connect that lets you connect your phone to your pc and receive and answer to texts and other notifications, send clipboards and files. Something that is a ridiculous upgrade in QOL and its insane windows does not have it. Gnome also gets it but you need to install extension manager and search for it.
Realistically, the best distro for a Windows user is one that runs all their existing Windows software (both applications and games) right out of the box.
Does any distro even come close to doing that?
I’ve had no problems running practically everything I want using fedora. I would reccomend mint, popOS or endeavourOS instead as fedora is far out man and might be too cutting edge with some updates. (meaning you may break something and have to use the inbuilt system of linux to boot to the last working version for a few days)
I cant use autodesk softwares but whatever maya is replaced by blender anyway in gaming industry(I was a professional 3d artist for games), theres myriad of cad software but I switched to freecad (I design parts for cars and 3d print stuff). Clip studio and photoshop was replaced by krita which is insane that it is free as it is the best painting software out there. Photoshop was replaced by gnome and illustrator by inkscape. My racecars datalogger and ECU software runs on wine, if I need to run it. Otherwise its old ass software that I run on an old ass win7 laptop that still has the required connection ports and is portable.
Only thing you might miss are some games that specifically banned all linux users but its not like they are the only games to exist. Even tarkov can be played using spt mod which gives you a better experience anyway.
TL;DR: There are better alternatives that fill the same functionality and there are only a few edge cases where there arent. As more people switch to linux that means more donations, more developers making the missing software and more people finding and reporting issues and oversights that need fixing. Its a snowball effect.
I need autodesk for work so I’m setting up a 2nd box I can remote into. I looked into virtual cloud environments but they are too expensive
That is a very clever solution. As far as cads go, freecad is powerful but the ux only makes sense to the people who programmed it. Thankdully there is a fork that is working on improving the ux and making it easy and logical to use.
Not that I’m aware of. Wine only goes so far before programs misbehave. It didn’t work well with heroes of might and magic 5 for me in 2022, for instance, terrible framerate
Mint looks pretty dated tho. I would go with Kubuntu because it looks pretty similar to Windows and is sleek and modern even without any customizations
Why do you suggest Mint over Ubuntu?
Snaps probably 😆
Mint in any of its default offerings feels significantly more familiar to a Windows environment than default Ubuntu, Lubuntu (LXDE desktop) or Xubuntu (XFCE desktop), making the migration “less painful”;
The ISO image is ~1GB smaller \Because fuck snaps
Ubuntu is developed and controlled by a corporation (canonical) and they have some non ideal practices (like pushing snaps heavily instead of the more open flatpaks or native apps). Mint takes what’s good in Ubuntu and cleans it up a lot.
My point is that the site should be recommending a few newbie distros, instead of telling the newbie to search it. Specially because the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run, but newbies struggle picking one.
That said I agree Mint would be a good choice. Not sure on Xfce; I’d probably recommend Cinnamon instead, as it looks a bit more modern (even if myself would rather use MATE or Xfce than Cinnamon).
I like https://distrochooser.de/
While your endorsement is definitely well-intentioned, I’m unsure if it correctly reflects the project’s health[1]. I’d argue we’ve got (a lot) better resources on the fediverse. Like, e.g. this excellent guide: Understanding Linux and choosing your first Linux distro, v2.0
That’s excellent, I found the distrochooser recently while coming back to linux and was happy when it recommended the same distro I used years back
While that’s a good read for someone more technical, the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While that’s a good read for someone more technical
I would perhaps put more importance to eagerness to learn. But (I think) I understand where you’re hinting at.
the distro chooser brings it to people of lower technical prowess.
While the distrochooser definitely has a lower entry barrier, I’d argue that if one isn’t willing to read the above guide, then they might as well roll a die and choose between Bazzite, Fedora, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, TUXEDO OS and Zorin OS accordingly.
I’m not really hinting at anything. I’m saying that not everyone that comes to look at Linux will have technical info to understand why that guide matters, nor will they want to invest in learning beyond meeting their needs. Having supported windows and mac users alike, the overwhelming majority really just wanted something that wasn’t a hassle. And they favor which ever OS gives them that in the way they find least onerous.
And so the distro chooser helps the ones of those willing to put in a tiny bit of effort to try something new, but don’t want to go read extensively to do it. It’s better than rolling a die when it comes to meeting their needs.
Trying to force people to see linux the way you want them to see it will never work. It hasn’t worked for decades now. All the factions with their different ideological principles get in the way of Linux more than help it. The guide you linked is mostly removed from that thankfully and to its credit. It is also a lot of info a basic user doesn’t need to know in the end. They want “OS go brrrr”, not to understand the nuances of flatpak and snap, or why atomic might be beneficial to them. Even though knowing all of that is definitely in their best interest. I fully agree they’d be better off knowing. But they still don’t want it. You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink. And since Linux people won’t generally come meet them at their level (or worse you get two people trying to ‘help’ arguing with each other instead of helping), a tool that does something like the distro chooser has to come meet them. It’s only a benefit in Linux adoption at the end of the day.
Windows user: I’m thinking about switching to Linux, mind helping me out Linux User?
Linux user: ok, so what you want to do is just figure it out yourself.
Windows user: finds debian and fucks everything up wow Linux is terrible, I’ll stick to using Windows 11.
Speaking on that: a lot of people act as if promoting Linux means simply “to get others to install it”. And they ignore that the newbie will need help the first days, weeks, even months. Then the newbie gets burned out and switches back to Windows.
That probably explains why some people manage to retain even tech illiterate people using Linux, while others struggle to convince even tech literate ones to switch.
Funny that Debian and Fedora were the only two distros that worked on my laptop. (dual GPU, others booted to black screen after install.) Debian hasn’t grenaded itself yet :)
I recommend Gentoo for a beginner.
What better way to understand your new OS than by compiling it from scratch?
Yeah, I agree. Especially since there’s SO much information out there that’ll come up if they try to search, and lots of it isn’t good, and tons of it is conflicting with each other. It’s best to make it as easy and simple as possible. Like just suggest Mint or something.
I went fedora which is not a beginner system and even fedora is easier than windows.
Common suggestions are: mint, pop os, endeavourOS. But it doesn’t matter, they are all functional OS that let you do everything.
I think it doesn’t actually matter what distro you use.
It’s like whether you’re wearing red socks or blue socks. As long as you’re wearing socks, so you don’t get cold.
Myself mentioned a bit below that the choice of a distribution isn’t that meaningful in the long run. But I still think that some distros should be recommended - otherwise the newbie simply says “Hannah Montana Linux, Justin Bieber Linux, Ubuntu Satanic Edition… bleeergh I can’t choose, I give up”.
damn Ubuntu Satanic Edition sounds cool.
A shame the project was discontinued, the visuals were fucking cool. (Yup, it was a real distro.)
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Zorin OS is going to be the best for windows refugees. It is so far ahead in this area that it isn’t even remotely close.
I don’t know why people keep trotting out mint. Mint has far too many issues to be a serious suggestion.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates. It happened again to a coworker of mine a week ago when he decided to give nix a go (we are both systems engineers/network engineers).
That and mint’s GUI elements are a thin veneer. There is still a lot of legacy garbage. It isn’t made with the premise of “this GUI needs to be rock solid”. It seems to be built upon the old tired bullshit that nix users always trot out e.g. “most users only log into x y z site and make a document once in a while” or some shit. It simply isn’t true.
Most users do a variety of things. Some may be complicated, some may not be. The reason I tell people that Zorin is the distro of choice for refugees is that Zorin understood the assignment (although there are some very specific areas where it offers too much choice to the user, but those are exceedingly minor) and realized that the GUI and UX centered around that GUI is everything. Especially when you are trying to court windows users.
It should be noted that I am quite familiar with *nix, and he is to some degree familiar with it. Another guy we work with switched to popos on a whim a little over a week ago. He said he’s really enjoying it.
Thank you for the answer! Much appreciated.
Mint has a common issue of destroying itself on updates.
Could you be more explicit? Like, I don’t think it literally deletes itself from your drive. Right? So, what is it then?
I was just on Zorin OS web page and I like what I am seeing.
Have to set some time aside this weekend to seeing dual booting it
With no Adobe CC on Linux, I’m stuck on W10 for the foreseeable future. Otherwise I’d have already switched.
As you can’t ditch it for alternatives, I suggest:
- KVM, kernel-based VM for better performance. See this vid about setting it up: https://youtu.be/BgZHbCDFODk Licenses (and cr=cks) should work, judging by the Adobe forums, but you’d have an overhead with Windows running, so you’d greatly win by stripping everything off from it, up to disabling system services or even their Explorer DE (like some gamers did with Win Aero in W7 times, killing it while the game was running).
- Wine (Proton) directly or via Bottles\Lutris\Steam increased it’s emulation capabilities and performance in the previous years. It works for highly demanding games, talks OK with my various discrete v-cards, skips the Win10 overhead, shows CC apps not unlike other programs, but it can cause random bugs, apps not communicating right to each other, and activating it may be not as straightforward. Before starting to rely on that, it’s better to test your exact worklfow, tools you use, etc.
You’d be probably drown in a question of what Linux distro to choose, considering there’s stuff like AV Linux or Pop_OS being recomended for media design. But you’d easily hop from one to another as you go, so it’s better to install something as simple as Mint first, and try Adobe workarounds there before moving next.
If you have specific hardware, I’d say that Wacom-like graphic tablets work like they should (tried several pieces, adapted some touchscreen devices, nearly out-of-the-box on modern Linux), but for something else, like controllers that need to talk to your programms in some special way, you’d better google their compatibility or try it yourself. Making a passthru of inputs to VM or taking it’s inputs by Wine wouldn’t usually be a problem, problems start when this piece needs a specific Win\Mac-only driver, and they can, especially if they are old, have a temper of a feral ghoul. I know that there are a lot of linuxoids creating in different kinds of media, so I’m pretty sure there are some answers on the web, at least for the same manufacturer, series or kind of hardware.
With no Adobe CC on Linux
How’s this?
Nice, that’s big. Thanks for the link.
It has been my pleasure! Hope it’ll work out for ya!
Are you able to run windows in a VM for your software?
Tried using Alma on my rig at home (since I’m using it on my servers), and I’m already going to be looking for a new distro. Went back to it after a week or so not having the energy to deal with it and apps like Firefox and steam wouldn’t launch.
Need to find a decent OS to run in its place so I can stop booting to Win10
Fedora is the obvious answer for you. It’s upstream from your upstream. It has the same tooling you’re used to, but newer packages. A less obvious answer is to embrace the atomic/immutable future and look at Fedora Silverblue or the stuff that the Universal Blue community is putting out. I switched from Silverblue to Aurora-dx and I’ve been extremely happy with it.
Funny you mention that, Silver blue was the first thing I tried (because I’ve used fedora off and on for over a decade) and something about it just didn’t work for me, but I don’t remember what. Didn’t try the regular version tho.
In the end, I want something I can game on and dev with (which is the easy part, since VSCodium is multiplatform). If Steam doesn’t work, the install is getting torched (which is why Alma is getting the boot).
I’m a sys admin by trade, so the OS should require minimal troubleshooting because I’m sick of doing that by the end of the day.
It’s a different family then what you have been playing with, but if you want “just works and not fancy” - Debian.
It won’t have the latest and greatest software (security patches sure but nothing else). You trade that for stability.
That might be a good selling point of Debian, if you never try anything advanced with it. I wanted to get GPU passthrough working on Debian with qemu, and it was such a pain trying to get the packages that Debian didn’t come with. Had to add new apt repositories, started messing up the boot cycle, and I eventually just gave up.
Any reason to go vanilla Debian and not a Debian based system like Ubuntu? I’m not looking to do much advanced on my desktop other than maybe some docker/bash/Powershell development, gaming, and basic browsing.
I definitely am attracted to ‘it just works’, but I also want to make sure I’m not handcuffing myself with an os that makes it hard to play with it as well. I know those are at two ends of a spectrum, but worst case I have plenty of VMs to use to play if necessary.
“It just works” is why Linus Torvalds uses Fedora and not Debian. Just saying… Debian does a lot of weird hand holding and many packages come with pre-configured pieces rather than what the developer pushed. They’re usually sensible, but if you don’t know it’s doing that it can be strange. For example, fail2ban on Debian will come with an SSH jail pre-configured. That is what most people use it for, but IMO it’s kind of weird that someone made that decision for you on an app that isn’t pre-installed.
In the defense of Debian vs Ubuntu, Debian won’t force snaps on you.
And to be clear. I’m not going to say Debian is not without it’s flaws. It is the system you choose if all you care about is stability. Case in point, I work with Linux day in and day out for my job, the absolute last thing I want to do is tinker with my laptop when I’m not at work - so I picked Debian. For me, the absolute stability is the most important thing - for others the fact that software can come preconfigured or is just old will be deal breakers.
As for Ubuntu vs Debian - ultimately they are similar. However Ubuntu has made some (IMO) choices I dislike (eg snaps).
If all you care about is stability, check my other comments about the Fedora Atomic family. Hard to be more stable than immutable with built-in rollback capabilities. That’s why I currently run Aurora DX.
Silverblue is a totally different beast than what you’re used to. The filesystem is immutable with the exception of /var and /etc. Even /home is moved into /var/home, although a bind mount exists so /home still appears to be there. You are expected to use flatpaks for applications, toolbox for rpms that don’t have a flatpak, and very last resort you can overlay an rpm on the base image. I absolutely think this is the direction linux as a whole is moving. OpenSUSE has MicroOS that does a similar thing and Leap 16 will default to being immutable. Debian has an immutable variant, and SteamOS is built on an immutable flavor of Arch. The Fedora Atomic family specifically supports bootc. You are essentially booting a container as your OS. That’s why it has so much community buy in. You could try looking at the Universal Blue images I mentioned. Bazzite is gaming focused with the option to boot straight into gaming mode, Aurora is a general workstation with KDE, and Bluefin is a general workstation based on GNOME. Each image has a DX version that includes developer tools like VScode and Virtual Machine Manager included.
I’m also a sysad by trade. A consultant for Red Hat. I personally switched to Aurora DX and the only overlayed package I have installed is
clevis-dracutso network based disk encryption with tang works. Other than that I have the built-in stuff, flatpaks (Steam is installed this way), and a couple of utilities installed with brew (btop, nvtop). I also don’t want to manage the OS. Getting the OS updates as an atomic image is very appealing. OStree also allows you to rollback if an update does fail for some reason… Doing it this way makes your OS kind of an appliance that you run applications on top of instead of alongside.I’ve layered zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-syntax-highlighting and syncthing. The first three because the version from homebrew behaved weird, syncthing because I’ve got two users on this computer and
systemctl enable syncthing@useris easier than dealing with podman containers right now.systemctl enable syncthing@useris easier than dealing with podman containers right now.You should check out podman quadlets. It turns your containers into systemd services.
Damn, that’s a hell of a high effort response, thank you for the info!
I’ll try another SilverBlue install, probably a bluefin variant you mentioned. It definitely sounds like I need to unlearn a lot of the info I’ve picked up over the years, including avoiding flat packs (or was that snap?). Not sure what toolbox is, but I expect I’ll have to look into that in due time.
The biggest downside to Flatpaks is that they’re kind of containers. That’s obviously also they’re biggest upside. But with that isolation comes some bloat compared to rpms directly installed, some don’t integrate as cleanly with the host OS, etc… The Universal Blue images ship with Flatseal and Warehouse which help manage those Flatpaks. For example, if you want to add an external library to the Steam Flatpak, you can use Flatseal to allow the Steam Flatpak to access that directory. By default Steam sandboxes itself to just its own ~/.var area.
A word on toolbox. It’s really cool and it comes with Fedora Atomic spins. However, it was forked and the fork is called distrobox and is miles better. So much better that it’s my opinion that we at Red Hat should deprecate toolbox and just embrace distrobox. What is it? It’s really just a wrapper for podman. It sets up containers to act kind of, sort of like VMs or LXC system containers, but it mounts your home directory inside the container. You can share apps between the distrobox and the host. The idea is that you can create a distrobox for whatever thing you’re doing, install all of that thing’s dependencies, and work from your home directory, but never actually touch your host installation. Kind of like a devcontainer for your system.
Snap is the one we poo poo. Canonical is always going to Canonical. Just like when they tried to make the Unity desktop (which I actually preferred) and the Mir compositor, the community had already settled on GNOME 3 and Wayland. This is sort of snap vs flatpak. Last I knew snap used a proprietary, hosted by Canonical, backend. That’s a big no from me. I’m not staunchly open source or nothing, but there is just no reason for Canonical to be making proprietary anything.
If you can’t tell, I’m stoked about the immutable future of Linux.
Zorin OS is the distro for windows refugees. Nothing else even comes close.
Why? Never hear of it. What makes it better conpared to other popular distros? And how does it serve the need of Windoofs refugees better?
UI/UX is head and shoulders above the other distros, especially mint.
Every time someone recommends mint to a new user I cringe. Mint has a ton of issues. Not the least of which the fact that it commonly completely breaks itself on an update.
But Zorin is so much better because everything has a GUI element. All settings, absolutely everything. On my bare metal Linux machine with my quite complicated setup I didn’t have to touch terminal once. It was a wonderful experience.
I did end up having to set an env var for Wayland eventually (via terminal), but I blame that on AMD graphics and sdl being stupid.
The UX provided by Zorin is so far ahead of the other distros it isn’t even a contest.
Zorin OS has done great work with making GNOME more usable/accessible.
KDE was fairly seamless for me, my workflow basically didn’t change from Windows. It’s still a bit messy, but they are getting there.
Dabbled with Linux over the years but have finally made the jump to using it as my primary OS. I tried a bunch of distros and settled on the elegant simplicity of Mint. Every game has worked just… fine.
It feels genuinely refreshing to know nothing will change without my consent, I know I will not login one day to find a surprise cortana/copilot/clippy icon in the taskbar or an ad for Avowed waiting for me. I can’t believe that is even considered a ‘pro’, but here we are.
AMD or NVIDIA user?
AMD. I think if I had nvidia I might’ve gone for Pop OS, I heard that has good support for them out the box.
Good to know. I’m NVIDIA myself
I’m running pop on 3 machines. One is an old Dell core 2 duo, and I’m amazed how quick it runs and never freezes (10g ram, 120gb ssd). Only issue issue have is the pop shop freezes up sometimes, even on my higher power machine. Otherwise, solid.
Peppermint is always left out. That is the perfect on for just working, stable and easy to move to from windows. It’s also lightweight and fast.
Ive been seriously looking into making the switch. After some reading I decided Mint would be the easiest transition and downloaded the ISO to try it out with a USB boot. Im sure its a fluke, but since I have dual monitors the display was messed up and whenever I tried to fix it the entire GUI went away on both monitors and wouldn’t recover. I had to force power off the machine and ive been hesitant since then to make the actual switch. Id hate to brick my machine right off the bat, just trying to swap display sources.
I had a bit of trouble like that too… Tried Ubuntu and my 2nd display would have static bursts going through the middle horizontally. Couldn’t figure out a fix, tried out Fedora and had no problems.
As a long time Fedora user, it’s difficult to convince other Linux users of how reliable it is. I’ve used it on multiple computers for I think about a decade and I’ve rarely had problems, certainly fewer than I had with Windows.
Last week I finally parted with standard Fedora to try out an immutable version, right now it’s Bazzite… I’ve got to say it’s very cool, for some things it may be better for beginners, but for most I’d say it’s better to stick to the normal ones.
I think it’s better with KDE, though, especially if you’ve got multiple monitors with different pixel densities.
I had some gaming issues on Gnome, the mouse wouldn’t lock to my main window and it caused all kinds of problems.
Could not find a fix, swapped to KDE Plasma and the issue was gone, I’ve been liking KDE a lot more since, haha.
I flip flopped a bit over the years on my laptop, right now I’m on KDE as I feel it’s the better DE at this time.
On the desktop I’d always go with KDE, no question.
Please give it another go. I think you’re right, thrt was a fluke.
I’ve heard that happen with mint before. Try a bit more modern distro like fedora or openSUSE maybe?
Mint is the one everyone touts, but mint is pretty shit tbh. Check out Zorin OS. I have a funky triple display setup and it handled it like a champ. Also UX/UI on Zorin is fantastic. There is GUI for everything.
Switched to Mint recently. So far it’s been smoother than I expected, but still had some crazy rough patches. Luckily, helping me through this junk seems to be one of the things AI excels at. I’m set up mostly how I want to be and it’s been mostly working well enough so far. Mostly.
Mint’s popularity is unfortunate because it (the last time I checked) defaults to X11, which gives you a desktop built on technology from 1984.
It’s actually comments like this which will scare people the hell away from trying Linux.
My comment wouldn’t exist if some distros didn’t cling to X11.
I’d be more worried about the lack of HDR support. Shame they killed off the Plasma edition. To anyone considering using Mint you can install Plasma on top of it with ease and get a modern desktop that supports HDR. If you don’t have an HDR monitor then Cinnamon is great.
I am trying Linux but it’s not going well. I still might stick with it but it’s more because of Windows getting worse than Linux being better. Right now it’s come down to an evaluation of which things I want to not be able to do anymore because Linux doesn’t support everything I currently do or the alternative is ass or will require an inordinate amount of research to get set back up.
I used to have the same issue, and booted up a Windows VM for anything I couldn’t get working on Linux, like syncing my Polar watch. Now I’m down to only using the VM when doing a firmware update of my Gardena robotic lawn mower, which is like once every second year.
Using mint or ?
I’ve used both Mint and Bazzite. Bazzite I’m attempting as a daily driver now because it has all the gaming shit baked in already and I don’t know wtf I’m doing with that so it gave me a head start. However, Freecad runs like absolute dog shit on it, as well as every other system I’ve tried it on, so I need to keep windows around for Fusion360, I also can’t figure out how to program my G602 from it even though according to the docs I found Solaar supports it. I’m almost certain my headset won’t work on it. When I did my taxes it wouldn’t open PDFs from my network share because the PDF program doesn’t understand SMB. It already lost my Secure boot key once and I had to reinstall the OS to fix that even after turning Secure Boot off. I still need to figure out the best way to run VMs on it and I have numerous other peripherals that I haven’t even tried yet because it’s honestly exhausting to keep running into problems when I’m already stressed out from work and every other fucking thing going on in my life… I was able to get my media downloading stuff all running in Mint with only one issue that took me a couple hours due to gpodder not just having a fucking setting for the download directory and the documentation couldn’t just SAY how to export the path you want but over all that was pretty painless.
Ah yes I tried bazzite too and it wouldn’t even boot for me so I went mint since I had it years ago. It can be annoying if you don’t have the time or don’t enjoy troubleshooting. I’m unsure why freecad is running poor. Nvidia card?
It is an Nvidia card. Looked for a laptop option with AMD but there wasn’t one available locally and I’m not buying a laptop I haven’t laid hands on first to make sure it isn’t a piece of crap. Honestly though for Linux to be viable that shouldn’t be something you have to think about.
Alright, I need to move my main desktop to linux. Help me decide which distribution. Note that I already run a desktop-less server on Debian, a raspi on their flavor of deb and have a laptop I rarely use on fedora (installed it to test the waters, but Mint would probably suit its use case more).
My main desktop PC is on windows and I wanna switch but im not sure which distro to switch to. The thing needs to be gaming ready for 2024 hardware. Debian is too slow to update for such a use case, I dont jive with Ubuntu philosophy, Arch is… im just not that kind of guy… so Im leaning on Fedora but I kinda dont like that it has 100 updates every time I boot it up. Is there any in between? Stable and quick with updates, but not when updates can crash the thing?
Edit: thanks for the recommendations, I’ll probably check em all out!
I have fedora. It is fast with updates and it just works. You aren’t pestered constantly with popups to install the updates and then your pc will randomly force restart to do the updates, you are in control. You just get a small popup that there are updates and you can decide what to install and when.
The only Issue I have is sometimes the updates break nvidia drivers. Thankfully linux keeps spare images of the working OS ready. What it means in practise when your games run like ass. I hard reset pc using power button while its booting and select another version and use that for a few days.
EndeavourOS should be fedora without those problems and iirc the nvidia driver distribution system is in the appstore by default (saves you from running like 3 commands).
Bear in mind if you do not disable secureboot, for every big kernel expansion you descide to add, you need to manually sign keys. This involves running a console command and restarting. I just disabled secureboot.
Peppermint is worth checking out. I don’t game but Debian and some extra on top. Lightweight
I know you said you’re not an Arch kinda guy…but I highly recommend Garuda.
Takes away most of the rough parts of running Arch, and comes in more flavours than you can shake a stick at. The forums are highly active, and Devs/admins/mods are very quick to respond to question/issue posts.
Edit: I’ve only had one single update related fuckery in the 3ish years I’ve been running it, and it was through personal error.
Switched to CachyOS a couple months ago and haven’t looked back. Everything works right out the box including NVIDIA cards. Recommended it to a coworker to check out and he switched from Windows a month ago.
Might want to have some people a hit more coherent on which version of Linux so they don’t get frustrated. Some people are jumping to distros that I’ve never heard of and getting annoyed it’s not windows. Like yea no kidding Justin Bieber OS isn’t getting updates. And your 3k series Nvidia isn’t working. Switch to Hanna Montana DE like the rest of us.
As a 15 years old pc user who likes to play games with a 15 years old nvidia graphics card. The only thing that’s preventing me from fully migrating to linux is the fact that nvidia doesn’t support my gpu anymore, so no proprietary driver, unless, I use a 6 years old kernel version.
The only choice I have for modren distros is the nouveau drivers, which lacks behind alot specially when it comes to gaming. I now have a dual boot setup running Popos and windows, but still I can’t be fully free from Windows, having to reboot every time I feel like playing something. I hope in the near future I get less broke to buy a new computer or maybe the new nvk drivers will supports my gpu which is unlikely.Dualbooting is great. Whole idea of linux is “you can tinker in any way you see fit” and putting multiple OS on a single computer is one example.
Fact that you did this at 15 is impressive btw. Willing to mess around with computers is a real skill. Half the CS students in my college had hard time setting up a fedora VM by themselves for UNIX class.
You are already ahead of actual college students in this field lol. You learnt more about computers thanks to old GPU.
Which graphics card?
Quadro 2000M, it’s a miracle that it support dx12 games.
That’s a workstation card, significantly higher grade than the consumer cards at the time. How did you even get your hands on it?
I have a 8570w hp elitebook laptop which i bought back in 2016 from an aftermarket sales shop, you rarely see a new laptop in stock here in Iraq and if there’s any they would be ridiculously over priced.
I’m used to saying pc as a general term, that might created som sort of confusion? Sorry if that’s the case.Ok that’s even crazier, I had no idea they made the quattro in a mobile format. Yeah the HP website calls it a ‘portable workstation’.
I mean compared to modern cards it’s a little old but back in the day that was mainly used by data scientists and field statisticians that needed ridiculous amount of simulation math
Also, the designator ‘workstation’ back then was more than just ‘A place to work’, but a specific class of PC that was designed for high end tasks like rendering video or CAD, and they were ridiculously expensive. Fitting all that power in a laptop is really mind blowing to me
You found a treasure there
🤔
