I'm ready to install Linux, but I'd like your opinion first

cetvrti_magi, 4 months ago

1. I never used Wayland but Xorg works really well.
2. Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do. Also, try new things just to try them. That’s how I started using many things that now make the core of my computer experience. Even if something looks scary I recommend giving it a go because in most cases it is much easier than it looks (at least when you have some experience with Linux).
3. YouTube can be a good resource at the start.
4. Switching to Linux was very smooth experience for me because I wanted to inform myself about Linux before switching just to know what I’m getting into. If you go prepared you probably won’t experience many problems.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do.

Very important. Don’t run arbitrary commands on the internet, but don’t paste sysctls and config too.

YouTube can be a good resource at the start.

Linux lacks much documentation. Man pages, tutorials from arch and gentoo wiki should be considered.

that’s my feedback

bravemonkey, 4 months ago

One thing I would recommend is using a note taking app to create snippets of fixes or personalization changes for your OS that you’ve made. For me that includes things like how to add my laptop’s webcam to the blacklist and other things that I’d need to spend time looking up since I don’t do them that often.

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

One suggestion I haven’t seen addressed: use a filesystem with snapshots such as Btrfs and combine it with Timeshift.

With Timeshift you’ll be able to roll back in time on your disk and undo stuff. It can take advantage of the lightning fast snapshots of Btrfs to do that.

On Btrfs, separate your /home into a subvolume @home so that, when you do roll back, your personal files aren’t affected.

Configure policies for daily and weekly snapshots on Timeshift. Don’t worry about space, they’re basically free.

That way you can feel better experimenting with your setup, as long as the system is Bootable.

bravemonkey, 4 months ago

This is one of the reasons I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been a solid distro for me.

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

Heard great things about it. Mint doesn’t suggest it as default, but if you choose Btrfs during install, it will configure @home subvolume and snapshots for you, which is nice.

JustUseMint, 4 months ago

Can you elaborate on the don’t worry about space thing? Half of my disks are timeshift snapshots.

possiblylinux127, 4 months ago

Snapshots on btrfs are at the filesystem level and only really are a list of steps to get back to the old state. They are not a complete backup and you can’t move them out of the filesystem.

JustUseMint, 4 months ago

Thanks

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

Sure. So a snapshot in itself doesn’t consume more than a few KB. The filesystem has a Copy On Write (COW) behavior, meaning it doesn’t overwrite edits on files by default. It moves the pointer to the file to a new location and writes the new version there. If there is nothing still pointing to the old data, that space is now considered free and can be overwritten.

A snapshot basically keeps pointers to data in the past. So it’s not entirely free, in the sense that older versions of files will remain and therefore not free up disk space as long as that snapshot exists. But it’s free in the sense that no data is copied to create a snapshot. Your filesystem is always only writing the difference to the last snapshot.

If you configure snapshots at small intervals and configure them not to be erased, you’ll compile the history for all the changes in all your files since ever. And that will definitely cost you space.

Typical scenarios are a daily snapshot that you keep for a week and a weekly snapshot that you keep for a month. That will cost you very little space (again in typical desktop use cases). If you have a streaming folder, a COW filesystem might not be the best idea. Or at least create a subvolume that doesn’t get snapshots.

Snapshots don’t replace backups and if you need older data that a month, that’s what backups are for.

JustUseMint, 4 months ago

Thank you

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

Split the filesystem to more partition.

have a 1G /, 500M for /boot, have partitions for /usr, /usr/local (this isn’t used on linux so keep it small), /var, /home, and /tmp if you have little ram. Otherwise use memory-based filesystem (tmpfs), for /tmp I allocate less than 1/4 of my RAM.

For partition size, refer to man.openbsd.org/disklabel.8#AUTOMATIC_DISK_ALLOCA…

Remember to keep /usr/local small on most distro (perhaps I will allocate 5G), and increase /usr, create /opt too to prevent the disaster and allocate it the size for /usr/local. Don’t allocate all disk space, a 200G home is enough for most people and leave the rest unallocated. the formatting and fsck would be faster on smaller filesystem.

And if you find other “cache” location, try log out and rm -rf the location, if login doesn’t break, I would mount tmpfs on that cache location too.

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

I actively discourage neophytes from fiddling with multiple partitions. It’s a layer of complexity that is unwarranted for them, and most users. Newbies can use a volume for home and another for the rest. Experienced users can split the system volume for the use cases you mentioned. And I don’t think having separate fixed size partitions like you suggested is a good idea for anyone on a desktop.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

In my opinion newbies should learn what is called sane defaults. It’s a pity that almost every installer in the word except OpenBSD’s disklabel(8) cannot properly do automatic partitioning.

And I don’t think having separate fixed size partitions like you suggested is a good idea for anyone on a desktop.

UNIX’s removable filesystem is a BENEFIT, not a BUG. DOS and then Windows’ A: B: C: D: are BUGS.

Why not take advantage of it. Microsoft always wanted a removable filesystem like UNIX. But they simply can’t get it.

I would link another article that discuss about using a huge root partition for all: www.bsdhowto.ch/hugeroot.html

marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=154054091026039&w=3

Avoid corrupting newbies’ partition is a way to keep them with Linux.

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

Agree to disagree.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

I’ve updated:

new:

UNIX’s removable filesystem is a BENEFIT, not a BUG. DOS and then Windows’ A: B: C: D: are BUG.

Why not take advantage of it. Microsoft always wanted a removable filesystem like UNIX. But they simply can’t get it.

(Those can’t admit this advantage often say “Linux and Windows are almost identical”…)

acockworkorange, 4 months ago

Dude, that has nothing to do with logical volumes vs physical partitions. You’re tilting at the wrong windmill.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

You can create either logical volume or physical partition, but make sure you have different partition for different mount point: /, /usr, /usr/local (keep small on linux), /var, /opt (if you use), /tmp (if you have little ram or don’t want to use memory filesystem).

What do you mean by your comment.

I haven’t said something about logical volumes vs physical partitions.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

What is bloat. If I recall correctly fedora or RHEL (or both) enable the cups daemon even if you will not print anything. If I recall correctly Ubuntu enable openvpn service even you will never use it.

But it seems neither of them have tmux installed by default.

Feel free to test and correct me because I won’t bother those distro anymore.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

arch wiki is a tutorial.

Manual pages are best, and if GNU hells put the documentation in info pages, you can install info.

If the manual page is unreadable and the program is part of the base system (on BSD all 3rd party “packages” are installed on /usr/local and base system is installed on / and /usr), try reading the BSD (OpenBSD) maintained documentation. They are also provided on-line.

What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?

The first is to drop all the things you learned in Windows. Many have no value, many are flawed and create bad habits, many are disposed.

New linux user often prefer GUI or menu instead of command line tool (what I mean is different, see the next sentence). They prefer to browser chromium and chat and typing this comment instead of taking time reading manual page, books, learn how to maintenance their system, even you need to learn how to INSTALL YOUR SYSTEM CORRECTLY!! You use ‘a’ huge a partition (sorry, root / partition) with an EFI partition and a /boot partition (and perhaps a /home partition too, and that’s the end?). No /usr, no /usr/local (this hierarchy is not used in Linux so keep it small), no /var, neither the /opt hell?

To keep your system organized and manageable, you first need KNOWLEDGE.

What to learn:

install and maintenance the system: partitioning, use your package manager (I hope you won’t read websites that have to teach you to use your package manager but the main topic is to use some software). Example: Absolute FreeBSD; Absolute OpenBSD (Michael W Lucas, although this is for FreeBSD and OpenBSD).

Learn not to wine (don’t run windows software on other operating system since it will need much kernel modification, OpenBSD explicitly refuse to do; I think running windows software on linux is unstable and insecure; I’m hostile with wine.)

UNIX programming: The UNIX programming environment; select some (like sed, awk) in the UNIX 7th edition manual pages, volume 2 which are tutorials that are still valid these day; manual page.

useful addition: get on tmux,

Enough for a regular user?

my personal habit:

I think I’m so lucky that I never do neofetch; once tried to decorate LXQt with the arc theme and then never used LXQt (since I switched to sway), if decorating the graphical interface make no sense to convenience I wouldn’t do (I myself hostile with unixporn or something like that, mean I never care about such community) and never created a colorful github’s myname/myname repo readme. (of course at the time I didn’t do learning since I’m chatting and being an discord terrorist)

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

I wish I could know what books to read

But when I know it’s too late (wasted 2 year using linux and learned almost nothing), and I have already switched to BSD. “Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng.” (Near the ink you get darker, near the light you get brighter, that’s my poor translation.)

0485919158191, 4 months ago

This would’ve saved me a headache!

From what I’ve heard. I’ve you have an Nvidia GPU the easiest thing you can do is to run Ubuntu. They have partnered up with nvidia and they provide you will all drivers you need right out the box.

It can be a hassle to sort out nvidia cards with certain distros.

BingBong, 4 months ago

Ubuntu broke with my Nvidia card. I went to PopOS and the problems stopped.

0485919158191, 4 months ago

Sorry to hear that! PopOs is cool though!

ikidd, 4 months ago

Ubuntu is no magic bullet when it comes to nVidia. A lot of derivative distros like PopOS do it better anyway. And non-ubuntu OSs seem to have less problems anyway, IME. Manjaro and Nobara seem to get a long very well with nVidia cards.

0485919158191, 4 months ago

That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing!

BCsven, 4 months ago

nVidia hosts its own repo for fedora and openSUSE. So on those you get direct driver from manufacturer. i found it made everything juat work, and the nVidia app has many config options

0485919158191, 4 months ago

That sounds great to be honest!

BCsven, 4 months ago

It has been helpful for onboarding to linux. Everyone complaining about issues on other distros, and one OpenSUSE leap you just add a repo and check which card category you have. For openSUSE newbies here are some links.

For Leap zypper addrepo --refresh ‘https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/$releasever’ NVIDIAand if for some reason you don’t want to type in a url you can add to the repos this way zypper install openSUSE-repos-NVIDIA

Tumbleweed is zypper addrepo --refresh https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/tumbleweed NVIDIA

And if you wanted to Auto-detect and install driver per your card is zypper install-new-recommends --repo NVIDIA

possiblylinux127, 4 months ago

I would avoid Ubuntu personally as it tends to complicate things unnecessarily

oo1, 4 months ago

on wayland vs Xorg.
i've found a few things that demand it (e.g. Waydroid - an android emulator)

So I've started using KDE plasma recently (previously I was XFCE due to speed and lightweightness).

KDE plasma gives a choice of wayland or xorg on the gui login screen,

Assuming the K in kinote stands for KDE plasma, becuase that's how these things go - then you should be abe to choose - so you don't need worry about wayland, just log back in and pick the one you need, or the one that works for the task at hand.

russjr08, 4 months ago

Kinoite is the KDE plasma version of the Fedora atomic (previously known as immutable) spins yeah. However, as far as I’ve heard Fedora KDE is explicitly removing Xorg support in Fedora 40, due for release this spring.

Right now the latest release is 39 which still supports both, and for me personally when I still had an Nvidia card up until right after the 545 driver release in October, Wayland (in both GNOME and KDE) was too buggy for me to use it as a daily driver, since Xwayland apps kept displaying previous frames, as if the application was time-jumping in random parts of it.

Speaking of Nvidia, I wouldn’t recommend going with Kinoite directly since AFAIK it doesn’t have the Nvidia drivers built in, rather I’d go with the KDE version of Universal Blue since all of their images have a dedicated Nvidia image that has the driver built in, so that you don’t have to mess around to get it up and running. It’s effectively Kinoite, with a few extra nice things baked-in on top.

rtxn, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Is Wayland worth using?

For a first dive into the Linux ecosystem, I recommend Xorg. I use Wayland myself (Hyprland), and that’s why I know that it’s simply not ready for general adoption. There are many features that are missing, won’t be implemented, or are done much differently compared to X. Some say Xorg is old and bloated - I say it’s a mature technology.

There are also some applications that need root privileges to work (Veyon Configurator is one that I struggled a lot with) and you have to do some weird pkexec hackery to launch them.

Wayland’s development has more drama and bickering than an average sitcom - I recommend Brodie Robertson’s channel if you’re interested.

advantages/improvements to using Wayland

Wayland is better for gaming. It has a noticeably lower latency because the entire Wayland stack is implemented in a single program (what they call the compositor) as opposed to several in the X11 stack (X server, compositor, window manager) that need to communicate with each other. Unfortunately Steam and some other applications often produce graphical artifacts on Wayland+Nvidia.

Does bloat actually matter

Compared to Windows, it is insignificant. My work laptop is a Macbook Air from 2015 running Linux Mint on just 4G RAM without issues.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

Install the tldr program. It’s a bit like man but lists practical examples of a command instead of a full documentation.

What are some habits I should practice

Make use of your home directory. Most user applications will have a config file in several places - usually in ~/.config (user config) and /etc (systemwide config). You should only edit the systemwide config when it makes sense, and always prioritize the user config.

A common practice is to have your /home directory on a different partition, or a different physical device. If the system breaks or you decide to distrohop, you can unmount/disconnect /home and only wipe the root partition while retaining your user files.

I also recommend using Timeshift to back up your system. It’s even better if your root partition uses btrfs since it natively supports snapshots.

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux

I needed to leave the Windows ways behind me. On Windows, I had a hard drive mounted as F: and an external HDD mounted as H:. Moving to Linux (Manjaro at the time) was basically a snap decision since Windows had obliterated the boot partition during an update and then broke itself, and I had no idea how to properly set up the filesystem didn’t consider how I wanted to set up the filesystem, so I mounted them to /mnt/f and /mnt/h on a whim. It caused me many hours of headache later.

GigglyBobble, 4 months ago

I had no idea how to properly set up the filesystem, so I mounted them to /mnt/f and /mnt/h. It caused me many hours of headache later.

Can you elaborate? What kind of headaches? How would you set it up now? While I've been using Linux quite a while I don't have multiple hard drives and am always interested in best practices.

ruckblack, 4 months ago

Also curious. I’ve had a couple drives on my server machine mounted to /mnt/data and /mnt/data1 for years now (ignore my lazy naming conventions) and I’ve had zero problems.

rtxn, 4 months ago

Check my other reply - it’s not an incorrect solution, but I came to regret it when I had to change the HDD’s mount point.

rtxn, 4 months ago

I should correct myself - it wasn’t a bad way to mount my drives, but it was a very Windowsy solution that I came to regret anyways.

I used that HDD as basically my home directory on Windows. It had all of my projects on it (mainly C# and Blender). When I installed Manjaro on my 240G SSD, I decided to leave my /home directory on the root partition, but it soon filled up. I later wanted to move it to the HDD, which meant that the mount point had changed, which meant that I had to relink all external files in my projects to the new mount point.

I could’ve just used a symlink that pointed /home to /mnt/f, but /mnt is generally used for manually mounted filesystems, and I wanted to at least have that and /home done properly.

Right now I have a 2T NVMe SSD, one 200G partition mounted as root, the rest mounted as /data/games (and it really only has Windows games and my Steam library), a separate 1T SSD mounted as /home, and a 3T HDD on /data/hdd that contains my backups, disk images, and large media files, each symlinked to appropriate places.

atzanteol, 4 months ago

Don’t know if you saw this but you can mount devices multiple times in Linux. And you can mount directories in different locations as well (bind mounts). These can also be helpful in moving around where things are mounted since both the old and new paths will work. But symlinks are probably simpler.

StoicLime, 4 months ago

I don’t know what you mean by Wayland not being ready for general adoption. I’ve been using it on Fedora for a year now with no issues whatsoever.

Might be a Hyprland issue instead of Wayland, as I remember from the time I tried out Hyprland.

rtxn, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Wayland itself has lots of missing features. There are applications that need absolute window positioning to move sub-windows together with the main window. It’s not an issue on Windows, Mac, or X11, but Wayland doesn’t have a protocol that would allow this (it’s still just a proposal, and there is A LOT of drama surrounding it). Wayland also doesn’t have color management, and support for drawing tablets is rudimentary, which is a deal-breaker for artists and designers. It doesn’t have a standardized way to capture windows either (for streaming or recording), which is why Hyprland’s maintainer made his own xdg-desktop-portal implementation with blackjack and hookers.

Wayland is great for my use-cases, and I’m willing to work around its issues (mainly related to portals), but there are use-cases where it’s completely unusable. Nvidia support is also sketchy - lots of visual artifacts and flickering windows.

atzanteol, 4 months ago

Wayland is better for gaming. It has a noticeably lower latency because the entire Wayland stack is implemented in a single program (what they call the compositor) as opposed to several in the X11 stack (X server, compositor, window manager) that need to communicate with each other.

Games under X11 use DRI just like with Wayland. Beyond “create a window and handle resize events” they don’t really interact with X11 or your window manager.

We should expect similar performance and indeed that’s what we find:

www.phoronix.com/review/wayland-nv-amd-2023

rtxn, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Performance is not the only factor. Running a compositor on X11 introduces a significant input latency, but turning it off caused massive screen tearing on my 60Hz monitor (I guess it’s less of an issue with a higher refresh rate). I experienced it both with Picom (on Qtile and Awesome) and Kwin. I’ve had a far better experience on Sway, Hyprland, and Plasma-wayland.

atzanteol, 4 months ago

We’re talking about gaming though?

rtxn, 4 months ago

Yes. Both screen tearing and input latency can ruin the experience. Please elaborate, I don’t know why you’re asking that question.

atzanteol, 4 months ago

As somebody who games with X11 I’d love to know what “significant input latency” I’m supposed to be experiencing?

rtxn, 4 months ago

YMMV, I’m talking about what I experienced.

I was mainly playing Cyberpunk and FFXIV at the time. In both games, camera movement was sluggish with a compositor running. It took about a tenth of a second for the game to respond to both keypresses and mouse movements (I’m not counting gamepad inputs since bluetooth has its own latency). On the same computer, on the same 60Hz monitor, with the same GPU, using the same graphics settings, nothing like that happened with the compositor off, nor after switching to Wayland.

atzanteol, 4 months ago

I’m talking about what I experienced.

Not when you say “Wayland is better for gaming” you’re not. It may be - but it also may not be. It’s not clearly better and in some cases it may be clearly worse.

savvywolf, 4 months ago

I wouldn’t worry about wayland vs xorg at this point. There are reasons to prefer one over the other but, as a new user, if it works it works. And if something is broken, it’s easy to switch between them (I assume it’s an option in the login screen?).

I’d just recommend whatever your distro defaults to, because that’s what they think works best.

Same as systemd if you stumble upon an argument about that at some point. It’s something the distro has made a decision about and taken care of, so it’s not something you have to choose.

As for a tip: On Linux, the “app store” (I think it’s called “Discover” in KDE?) is actually pretty good compared to Windows. If possible, applications should be downloaded from there rather than directly from websites.

possiblylinux127, 4 months ago

You should never download software off of websites. That is really bad practice and will break things sooner or later.

kittykittycatboys, 4 months ago

the gentoo wiki is also a great resource !!

wayland seems to be the way desktop linux is going, personally i like it and am migrating over w plasma 6, but ymmv mrowz

velox_vulnus, 4 months ago

It’s not as big as Arch, but that wiki is what gave me big brains. Tried Gentoo, later Arch on a VM in Fedora, and finally moved to NixOS on bare metal. The information about partition setup is simply amazing.

tiredofsametab, 4 months ago

Does Gentoo still have a "download the minimum thing and compile everything from the ground up" type of thing? That taught me a TON back in the day. I had used old late-90s Linux distros and could do some basic things, but that really made the difference for me. I always think it might be worth doing for someone with a bit of time on a second machine (or maybe even vm)

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

Arch wiki and Gentoo wiki are both great tutorials

but the thing you need to read is manual pages

koncertejo, 4 months ago

1) Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card. Are there any real noticeable advantages/improvements to using Wayland over Xorg.
If you have an Nvidia card you’re probably best sticking to Xorg for now. I’m currently running Xorg with Gnome 45 since I have a GTX 1060. As I understand it Wayland is better at handling refresh rates across multiple monitors, as well as DPI scaling. These are minor issues compared to having everything working smoothly. I do feel like Xorg is on the way out now however, and I expect to switch off of it in a year or two.

2) Does bloat actually have a noticeable negative impact on your system or are people just over reacting/joking.
It’s mostly just a meme. It certainly won’t slow you down. What it does do is take up space on your hard drive and in your menus. I do understand taking pleasure in ensuring that your system is trimmed down to only what you really need. But don’t worry about it at all.

3) What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
The same habits you have on Windows. Keep your files and folders in order. Beyond that there’s not much you need to worry about, especially with Kinoite.

4) Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?
Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Most important is leaning to RTFM, meaning go read the documentation for your distro (or just look at the Arch wiki) when you have an issue. If you run into a problem and need to ask for help, make sure you don’t do the XY problem.

5) Any other resources besides the AUR that I should be aware of?
I don’t think Fedora Kinoite supports AUR, that’s an Arch Linux thing. You’ll be getting 99% of your apps from Flatpak.

6) What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
A long time ago I made a thread that got shared around a bit about how I thought the command line was pushed by Linux anoraks who didn’t understand the needs of the common user. I’ve used Linux a lot since then and I’ve changed my perspective: the command line is your best friend. It lets you do exactly what you want to do very quickly. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s beautiful. If you learn it a whole world of additional tools command line tools will open to you (ssh, grep, etc). There’s a reason that places like /c/unixporn love pictures of open terminals with neofetch loaded up.

Doctor_Rex, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

Thank you for answering.

spoilerJust to be clear the AUR thing was just a typo, I meant to type arch wiki mb.

I’d like to ask you some clarifying question.

3. Linux uses the File System Hierarchy which Windows does not use. How do I keep my system organized while keeping to the FSH.
4. This isn’t really a question but my thoughts on your answer.

I really like the command line. I enjoy using it more than GUIs, but I don’t think the terminal should be pushed to the common user for mass adoption. Many of my friends don’t own desktop computers, some don’t own any other computer besides their phone. When I introduced them to my desktop, they were typing at less than 20 wpm with 2 fingers. No matter how great of a product Linux becomes in the future, It won’t see mass adoption as long as

A) non consumer friendly UX gets pushed and

B) There is no marketing force behind it

I really only learned of and got into Linux because SomeOrdinaryGamer and r/Unixporn. These were my first positive introductions to Linux. On my marketing point, Android, for example, has side loading, Fdroid, and lots of options for customizability, yet iOS is still the dominant market share and is continuing to grow.

If Linux want true mass adoption then there must be a real effort to make the command line as optional as possible, or the linux community must start trying to appeal to the types of people that would give Linux a shot if they new it existed. Returning to SomeOrdinaryGamer, that man gets millions of views per month and I seriously doubt most of them are Linux users.

koncertejo, 4 months ago

Linux uses the File System Hierarchy which Windows does not use. How do I keep my system organized while keeping to the FSH.
Altogether it’s actually not that different from Windows, it’s just shuffled around a bit. You’ll have your /home/yourusername/ folder, which is where you’ll put most of your files. If you have more than one hard drive in your machine you can mount it under /mnt/ and then store the files on it as you would normally. You don’t have to worry about where your programs are stored (your package manager will take care of that for you).

re: the command line
For the most part I agree, but I also think it’s a solved problem. A linux install with Gnome is on par with Mac OS when it comes to user friendliness, with no need to ever look at a terminal in order to do things. The UX here is nearly a solved issue. However I also feel that “growth” or “mainstream success” is no longer something I feel like I need linux to achieve. When I started using Linux in 2009 half of the programs I tried were pale copies of proprietary software. WINE barely worked. Game support was almost non-existant. WiFi drivers were genuinely almost always broken. Flash forward fifteen years and all of these issues are fixed. Using Linux on a day to day basis makes me happy, I no longer feel like I’m missing out on anything by using it. That is such an incredible leap to take. The key takeaway is that all of these problems were solved without Linux becoming “mainstream”. It and the community around it have just kept moving along and making it better over time. It’s been lovely to watch it grow like that. A fully-featured and powerful terminal is just one part of this fantastic, open computing environment that I love.

As an additional note to this, I do think that Linux is poised to really take off among one particular demographic: PC gamers that build their own machines and can now finally see a good alternative to forking over $150 to Microsoft for their OS. The Steam Deck has definitely turned heads here. I don’t think the legions of people buying laptops to take notes during university lectures and browse Facebook (the “20 wpm typers” out there) will be very interested in Linux machines no matter what we do, so let’s focus the energy where it counts.

subtext, 4 months ago

Not something that you asked, but please remember that most of the distribution managers know FAR more about the system than you do. If at all possible, be sure to follow the recommendations at DontBreakDebian (adapted to your system of course), to make sure you have a stable system.

That means things like avoiding whenever possible installing from random sources or changing settings that you don’t really understand. Whatever you do, don’t try to change anything about the kernel, graphics drivers, or standard libraries / shared packages unless you’re absolutely certain you know what you’re doing.

Eldritch, 4 months ago

Windows has a filesystem hierarchy. It’s super similar to the *nix filesystem hierarchy because that’s what Microsoft mimicked with nominal differences.

/home/username is the same as \users\username

/bin is similarly what \windows is.

/sbin is \ProgramFiles

/etc is your windows registry. Only you can easily edit it with nearly anything. And it’s generally hyper documented. Unlike the windows registry.

Gnome and KDE both provide fairly polished GUI for 80% or more of what an average user is likely to need to encounter. There is generally no need to sideload. In fact, the concept doesn’t really exist. You are the system admin. You are root. There is no one to circumvent on your system but yourself. 90% of the software you could ever want will be within a distros repository. But these days you can download app images, flat packs, etc. That allow programs to be run on multiple different systems as long as they’re binary compatible. Because those containers pull along all dependencies needed to run said applications. But even then depending upon the app etc you can still pull from other distribution, repositories etc sometimes . Under Arch. I have had things installed from the aur that turned out to be Deb files that it downloaded extracted and then dropped the files in the right place. However, that can only be done when required libraries are met. If the versions differ by too much. Which can easily happen between different versions of the same distribution, let alone other distributions. That won’t work. It’s like the missing dll files under Windows.

The Wayland xorg issues. If you need “just works” that’s going to still be Xorg for a while to come. Though many distributions are moving to Wayland being a first class choice since it has come far enough. I have only had Wayland issues with two programs ATM. And only one of those is common, and the issue mostly cosmetic. Window decorations missing on Firefox. And that may be down to my chosen window decorations. The other is an obscure 3d game primarily made for Windows since 2004. That does have a Linux version. But under Wayland currently it goes seizure mode.

Linux already has mass adoption. (Servers) Desktop adoption is only a hurdle because of monopolistic anti competitive practices from Microsoft and Apple. A lot of that specifically due to momentum from Microsoft. They actively punished integrators that attempted to ship any OS but windows. And it’s largely stuck around that way. A lot of the first party SI that still exists offer zero non windows solutions to home users to this day because of it. There are SI that do provide it. But they are often rather niche and fairly unknown. System 76 being one of them. It’s very little to do with command line etc. Only when system integrators all start offering it as a general choice will the home user see much change.

GigglyBobble, 4 months ago

make sure you don’t do the XY problem.

Thanks for the link. That's funny because translating Y to X is basically the core task when developing client-specific solutions.

greedytacothief, 4 months ago

Bloat is just a meme, it comes from a time when sysadmins would need to optimize every aspect of a system to get the most out of it (like not using vi, because it took up too much space/memory). You will never need to get that much performance out of your machine.

I try not to install programs all willy nilly. If I want to try something new, I’ll fire it up in a vm. I mean this about programs from 3rd party sources, and compiling from source. Anything in the repos is good and will uninstall cleanly too.

On fedora you get more programs through RPMfusion. It’s sort of official, but also not. And you can also check out the copr repository, this is more like fedora’s aur. Opensuse’s open build service also sometimes has packages that work for red hat systems.

When I first started I wanted Linux to work just like Windows. It took me a while to shift my perspective to the way Linux people do things. I don’t know how to speed up that process though.

Fecundpossum, 4 months ago

I think it’s also worth noting that windows bloat and Linux bloat are not even in the same category. Even the heavier Linux distros are so light on system resources that installing a plethora of tools, games and assorted software isn’t going to effect your machine as negatively as it would in windows.

scratchandgame, 4 months ago

Some distro install and enable services that you would never use. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and Fedora?) enable the cups printing daemon (I never do printing on Linux and I use a canon lbp 3300, I have to install drivers on windows). Ubuntu enable the openvpn service which “newbies” would never use.

But none of them have tmux installed by default, while OpenBSD have tmux, if I recall correctly NetBSD too

Kidplayer_666, 4 months ago

Wayland has proper scaling and should be the way of the future. Many apps are starting to properly support it, which should bring a few advantages.

Regarding NVIDIA, what I’ve heard is that with the latest proprietary drivers, there are very few issues (although I can’t promise you anything, currently using fedora KDE on a Mac of all things).

Bloat is relative. It all depends on what your hardware is, and as such, on how many resources you’re willing to “waste” for convenience.

The arch wiki is a really decent resource.

And I wish I knew that NVIDIA proprietary drivers don’t get installed by default in a lot of distro, but they’re usually well maintained by most distro maintainers