I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it’s the package manager.
When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.
Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn’t around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it’s developed by System76 so I can see why you’d choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?
The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I’ve never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).
That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of “opinionated” good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it’s easy to go along with the “happy path” and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines–including machines not of their own brand. (I’ve contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they’ve always sent it through a code review and QA process).
Idk, it seems to be picking up steam. It’s what I use unless I’m trying to use something super lightweight.
For me it has the stability of Ubuntu without having to use Ubuntu.
Haven’t tried Debian yet though.
I’m cirious about what you dislike about Ubuntu?
There’s a small amount of telemetry going on.
Also, Pop_OS makes running an Nvidia GPU less painful.
Snaps are basically Ubuntu’s private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there’s no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don’t work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).
Interesting, thanks. I had a feeling snaps would be in the list!
@elfahor How I was fucked up by trade-based society. Linux is cheap( not free), but is fun and enjoyable. It us fun to interact, support and be brave to act.
Ctrl + R in the terminal. I never used it until I got a job using Linux, now it’s probably my most used command at work and at home.
Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.
Installed distrobox on NixOS because I was worried being limited to only nixpkgs and have not touched it once lol
Same goes for the windows VM except for the time I needed to run excel macros for work
Worried about being limited to only the biggest selection of packages available. Does not compute.
I’d never heard of nixpkgs before so thought it was some small niche thing
Thats been a fear of mine moving to nixos. Glad to know it’ll cover most of my software needs.
Here’s a graph, it should be fine for your package needs: Graph
This is not totally accurate because nixpkgs also packages some packages that wouldn’t be in the system package manager like Python and Haskell packages. Excluding those it’s pretty much the same as the AUR
I did on my Nix, there was a package in Nixpkgs that was outdated, so I had the opportunity to use distrobox for that, at leqst temporarily until they update the package.
Yes!
You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use
apt-getto install whichever Debian package you like. Or…, you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it’s supported.And it’ll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?
Exactly. It’s even possible to segregate it beyond what Toolbx has been able to do (at least since the last time I checked) in that you can define another folder/directory as your HOME directory within the distrobox.
Glad to be of help 💙 ! Feel free to inquire if you so desire 😉 .
So enjoying immutable fedora with AUR support. Cannot be overstated…
Yeah, Arch Linux is beautiful as a container OS. I use it all the time.
After switching to Linux I wish I knew how to report bugs. I’m a qa tester and I notice so many little things that can be replicated and fixing them would polish the user experience. But there are so many layers I don’t know who to report the issue to. My first thought wasto report it to the distro forum and have the more technical people there take a look at the issue then escalate it to the distro maintainers or the actual software devs.
Another thing I wish I knew, was how to get my 2nd hdd to mount automatically. I fucked to my system 4 times(and recovered it) trying and then had to get my sys admin friend to do it for me.
Reporting KDE bugs is still extremely inconvenient.
There should be a 1-click option just to submit an automatically collected data dump, maybe with an optional text field we can write. Just to help providing some data, without all the hassle of creating an account, answering N questions, and following up with answers - sometimes I do care about the issue, most times I don’t, but still want to flag that something wrong happened so they’re aware of it.
I have the impression that a lot of bugs and random crashes go unnoticed because users don’t bother to go through the process of opening a bug report - and they shouldn’t need to, nor know how to.
My first time I was presented with the bug reporter I thought it was cool, but then it said I had to have all the debug symbols installed so it could unwind the call stack. Ok I thought, and searched apt for a little. But I couldn’t find them all as there is not a standard naming scheme, so that effort was wasted. I wish their bug reporter would auto download all debug symbols needed.
Bugs? We call those features around here!
Isn’t it? I’m fairly sure I’ve flashed a windows iso a couple times from Linux before
yes but a windows to go installation specifically needs to be done from rufus.io unfortunately, which allows you to have a wendoze install as portable as Linux that only loads the drivers it needs at runtime. I can install firmware and BIOS updates on all 3 of my Linux rigs wth the same pen drive.
Just install BIOS updates from within the BIOS like a normal person.
That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insane
Why tho? Kernel sometimes can index drives in different order (if you have multiple drives), screwing your mount locations. But UUID is always the same
You can give your partitions labels and mount by label. Labels are persistent, like UUIDs, but are also easier to remember and copy.
But why would I even try to remember them? Just look them up. Nowadays I don’t even see them since I use Gnome Disk Utility or KDE partition manager to automount them (they both just write to your /etc/fstab)
But why would I even try to remember them? Just look them up.
For me, I used labels when setting up those volumes manually. Creating a LUKS container, setting up LVM groups and volumes, configuring my bootloader to decrypt the correct encrypted disk, etc. It was just easier to remember which device label was my encrypted container, which was the group, and what the different volumes were. And once the labels were made, well, I just used them.
Linux is pretty easy to use nowadays. The only thing I would check before switching is driver compatibility.
That even though you are running an LTS version of Ubuntu (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), some packages that have arrived over a year ago on e.g. 23.10 will never arrive on 22.04.
Example: i3-wm 4.22 or up (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=i3&searchon=names&suite=jammy§ion=all).
That’s the whole point of an LTS distro. And it’s why non-rolling distros for desktop OSes make no sense
It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don’t start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).
Laptop compatibility still sucks at times, especially with weird configurations of amd apu and nvidia gpu laptops… or maybe it’s just my skill issue.
NVIDIA’s contempt for the Linux community is legendary. Definitely not a skill issue.
Skill issue
Nah but seriously Nvidia loves to make it difficult and Linux doesn’t make it any easier. It’s like an unstoppable force meets an unmoving object
I learned to never settle. If you don’t like the default workflow of Gnome, try some extensions, or even a different DE. Same with Package Managers. If you don’t like the syntax, make an alias. Don’t just “deal with it”. Windows has brainwashed people into thinking that there is only one way to do a thing.
This is kinda funny to me because I hadn’t realized how terrible the Windows workflow was for me until Gnome 3 came out.
Ever since, while I’ll use extensions for stuff like alphabetical app grid and Caffeine, I never do anything that changes the Gnome workflow. It’s not for everyone, but it absolutely is for me.
Its why I always find it funny when people complain about changes to the start bar, because surely there isnt a bunch of 3rd party options in existance that change it, and can mimic 7’s start bar.
I have heard that shell replacements are often very buggy on Windows.
Ive been using classic(then open) shell since moving off of 7 for consistency. for the most part, there haven’t been any serious bugs that im aware of. Because the app works between windows versions, start bar for me at least has been pretty much consistent since windows 7 existed, and the stuff id adjust to would be changes in some apps (e.g control panel > settings) that happened overtime.
The problem of some users is they want the vanilla experience to be what they want when there are options to not make something vanilla. Similar to debates on linux distros on whether you want a very specific UI design vs having a distro that is personalizable and customizable based on preference.
See I’ve run into an issue now where I like and am used to GNOME, but I also want to try a tiling WM and doesn’t seem like there’s really a good way to do that in gnome
You can install the tiling WM and try it seperately. Might even be possible to combine them too, but that might get pretty involved and hacky since Gnome doesn’t like it when you stray from “the path” that they deem correct.
I’d probably just do one or the other, don’t want to be using nonstandard stuff within my non-standard stuff
I know XFCE is a popular choice for people who want to add a tiling WM. That was a combo that I heard about quite a bit in the past if that’s something you’d wanna try. XFCE + i3 might be nice.
Oh you poor soul. :(
I guess the main things would be:
- As a beginner, don’t bother trying to dual boot – If you still need a Windows box, get some cheap hardware to do your Linux work on. It’s too easy to screw up both systems otherwise.
- Don’t get too hung up on a specific distro, the better you are at dealing with different configurations, the better prepared you will be for whatever comes. Once you’ve gotten one set up, don’t be afraid to just try a different one.
I did the opposite, have always dual booted my laptops and had win on my PC until quite recently now that I’m comfortable enough not to need a safety net anymore
I’ve also always done dual boot on one drive, no real problems other than when I know I caused the problem.
Also… What’s up with that user name?
Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.
By the time you’ve dressed out an Rpi to be halfway usable, you’ve spent about as much as a decent NUC. And all you have to show for it is a slow-as-mud sd card, hardly any video acceleration, a USB stack that only crashes sometimes, a busy OOM killer, and no software.
Get an N95 based nuc. A Beelink with 8/256 runs about $150, and it just works. (Well, you might need pcie_aspm=off).
yeah, RPI is just ‘cookbooked’ due to fixed hw
Though I enjoy and am currently using #LinuxMint, I wish I learned about #Wayland sooner. I didn’t understand why game performance felt so off with my dual monitor setup for several months. I have since dabbled with an #Ubuntu #Gnome DE for some gaming, and Wayland support has alleviated those problems. However, I plan to look into other options when I’ve organized my data a bit more and establish proper backups. Learning #Bash, #scripting, #aliases, #workspaces and tweaking #hotkeys were also useful for making my workflow into what it is. Also, I wish I knew how bad #ProtonVPN and #ProtonDrive #Linux support would be. Despite getting used to their #CLI applications, the absence of feature parity is immensely disappointing.
