Year of mobile linux

[ astronauts meme ]

Always has been

Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.

That was half the reason I upgraded. I don’t know if my old box would’ve been compatible (probably was), but I wanted it off Microsoft territory so bad and heating about Copilot sent shivers all over my spine.

I’ve never heard of installing any new OS without having to back stuff up. That’s just wishful lazy thinking lol.

You probably won’t have to do anything manually about Wine. Steam has Proton built in and it works great. As others always mention, check ProtonDB.com for user reports on how a specific game will work out.

I haven’t run into any problems in my library, but I honestly haven’t installed a ton of games.

I’ve used Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris for some other launchers (like Battle.net or Epic Games), and those have been a little hit or miss, but I think the main problem is something I’m missing. Not a huge priority but I’m still working on it occasionally.

I haven’t heard anyone call or 3D card since the 90s. They’re video cards or GPUs these days man. AMD has open source drivers that work just fine with Linux and should work just the same as the Windows version I believe.

Nvidia has open source ones, but they seem to be pretty terrible compared to the closed source ones. I had one issue with them last week but I think that was more related to KDE than it was the drivers’ fault.

I don’t really have any fancy hardware to describe how easy that was to get to work. Just a mouse, kb, headset(with mic) all of which worked fine without doing anything. I have a physical dongle for the controller, so I had to get a driver for that so I didn’t have to use a Bluetooth connection (pretty shitty comparatively speaking) or gasp plug it in. Had a few issues with it for a while, there was an updated version under a new name and such but it all works now. Just turn the controller on and it’s working instantly (unless I forget to charge it lol).

Can you try "pactl load-module module-switch-on-connect"?

I think the disks could be Dynamic Disks on which it would not be a good idea to install a linux distro.

Unfortunately Microsoft’s own advice to change it to a basic disk (since it considers dynamic deprecated) WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS.

Since you only want to access them it seem to be possible with ldmtool. While it is a cli tool there is a corresponding service that at least according to some askubuntu posts and arcwiki should make them behave like normal filesystems.

If you can boot back into windows, turn off quick startup/shutdown, run chkdsk or whatever on the drives, reboot back into windows then boot back into Linux and you’ll be okay.

Quick startup is a kind of weird sleep/hibernate mutant that leaves drives in an unclean state when it turns off, so the Linux drivers for ntfs say “I’m not gonna touch that possibly damaged drive”.

This would depend on the distro you use. Most distros will require you to enable a non-free repository before you can install anything that isn’t Foss or open source from the official repos. You could also use an FSF approved distro. Keep in mind, the FSF will only approve distros that don’t include any non-free anything in the official repos. Besides that, you just have to know the licensing before you install it.

The language you want is “nonfree” in Debian derivatives.

Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn’t have an open source license.

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

Depends what your goals are. With Arch, you will need to closely follow a guide to get it installed, if anything goes wrong you will need to search through the Arch Wiki for answers. Arch has an insane amount of customisation options, you will spend a lot of time in the Arch Wiki learning about them. By installing Arch you will learn a lot about Linux. Is that your goal?

You will spend more time reading and learning, but come out further ahead than someone who first installs Ubuntu or Mint.

However if your goal is to simply install Linux on your PC to try it out, (if you don’t even know if you will like it, and don’t know if you want to learn it’s mechanics) then Arch wouldn’t be my first choice.

First time Linux user you mean?

I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you can navigate the terminal well. When you install arch, it installs no desktop environment, only the ability to talk to a terminal.

It’s technically possible and very doable with some googling, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

No

I’m using Arch, I love it. What’s absolutely bonkers is that the system belongs to you.

However, if you have never used Linux, it’s insane to try to install Arch. The online wiki is tailored for people with at least a decent amount of Linux knowledge.

As a noob, it will result in data loss, except if you’re already very familiar with terminals or are very fluent in IT.

You might want to try something more user friendly, as Zorin then come back to Arch when you want more power.

This is what I did. If you generally know what you’re doing around computers it just requires patience and a willingness to “Read the (Friendly) Manual.”

If you’re running intel, nVidia, dual GPU setup, and some other things, your installation will be more involved.

But the great part is that once you’ve set all that up, things just generally work and the Arch wiki is an amazing resource.

The arch wiki is difficult to use for beginners. Each page is single topic. It is not a guide. Using it daily, it takes at least a month to understand it well enough to “build your own guides”. If you want to do that kind of deep dive, jump on in. If not, you’ll have a better time using just about any distro other than arch.

BTW. If you do decide to take that route. Don’t become one of those miscreants who “uses arch btw” It’s a red flag for someone who doesn’t know wtf they are talking about.

What’s an rpc port anyway? Do you mean DBus? Then FS perms of the socket. Perhaps also something in the protocol itself.

1. I usually stick with distros that have large userbases. I’ve tried smaller and niche distros before, and inevitably they stop being maintained, or move in a direction I don’t like. The larger distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, have more resources (people, time, money) to spend on testing updates, and have reliable update schedules. When I was younger I didn’t care about that kind of thing, but these days I use my PC almost exclusively for work 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, I need my PC to not break when I update it.

Another technique I use is to go to the vendor site for software I use and look at which Linux distros they officially support. Usually they will publish at least an Ubuntu package, sometimes a universal deb file that works on Ubuntu, Debian or Mint. Sometimes an RPM package for Fedora/CentOS too. This is getting less relevant these days with Appimage files and Flapak images that work the same across all distros.

It’s natural to get bored or frustrated with one distro and want to try out others. Imagine if Microsoft made many different flavours of Windows that each look and operate differently, everyone who is bored and frustrated with default Windows would be trying them all out, comparing them, debating the pros and cons, communities would form around common favourites.

I have a small gaming PC that I use to test out other distros, I’m currently on Nobara, that I actually highly recommend for a gaming-focused distro.

2. This one is really hard to say. It depends on so many factors like what hardware you are running, what software you plan to run, how tech savvy you are, even your definition of what is an issue. Mint is very stable and easy to use, you may run into zero issues getting it installed, running VSCode, playing some Factorio. Or you might run into a small incompatibility between your GPU and the bundled kernel drivers and run into a whole world of hurt spending days tinkering on the command line with no usable graphics driver.

3. I believe Mint still comes with the Cinnamon Desktop, that is specifically designed to be familiar and easy for users transitioning from Windows. It’s not super customisable, but I think it can do what you described. I’m not the best person to answer, I haven’t used Mint or Cinnamon since 2012.

4. File extensions are optional in Linux for some kinds of files. Linux usually tries to identify a file type using a “Magic string”, meaning it will read the first 8 to 16 bytes of the start of a file and will be able to tell with a great deal of accuracy what kind of file it is. Executables, drivers, shell scripts, and many others use this method and do not need a file extension. You can definitely still use extensions though. Eg, libre Office will still save documents with a doc extension (.odt). Often Linux will use a combination of both the magic string and the file extension to determine the file type. Eg, the magic string identifies it as an open office file, and the extension tells you it’s a document kind of office file.

Your Linux photo editor will still save images with a .png or .jpeg extension, because these are the convention (and may be required if you will be opening those files on a different OS). Similarly, your project files created on Windows will still work fine on Linux (if the equivalent Linux app supports that file format).

For #1, I’ve made the realization that most distros are lightweight skins or addons on top of another distro. Most of the time, if you start with the base distro, all you have to do is install some apps, change some configurations, and suddenly you have that other distro. It is much easier than doing a reinstallation.

If you filter out all of these distros that only do a little on top of an existing, you’re left with a quite small number actually. I’d bet it’s less than 10 that are not super niche. Fedora, Arch, debian, gentoo, nixos are the big ones. There’s some niche ones, like void Linux and Alpine.

So I’d say if you try all of those, you don’t need to try any more 😁

1. I rarely distro hop. I used Linux Mint for a solid decade. I’ve made the jump to Fedora KDE pretty much entirely because Wayland support is the farthest along here, and that enables me to use more features of my hardware such as two monitors at different refresh rates, Freesync, etc. I did come to the conclusion awhile back that there’s a lot of pointless distros out there, a lot of them are just “I want this particular permutation of default software.”

2. Assuming you’re currently a Windows user, I think the main issue you’re going to face using Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition for “programming” is going to be general culture shocks. Using a package manager instead of heading to the browser, stuff like that. “Light gaming” depending on what you mean by that could be no trouble at all or dealing with some hiccups involving Nvidia’s imperfect support. There are some games that require proprietary anti-cheat that doesn’t support Linux, Valorant is one of those that springs to mind.

3. Difficult question to concisely answer; Mint has a system they call “Spices” which include a series of applets and widgets you can add to the UI, choose them from a menu and then configure them. One of these is “Cinnemenu” which replaces the default Menu with a somewhat more customizable one, though you might struggle to exactly replicate the WIndows look and feel. Beyond that, you might look at Conky for your desktop customizing needs.

4. File extensions do exist in the Linux world but they’re not as important for making things work as it is on Windows. Some files, particularly executable binaries, won’t have extensions at all. A text editor might not automatically append .txt to a plaintext file, because it doesn’t want to assume you’re not writing a bash script or config file or something. But if you record a sound clip with Audacity or something it’ll add a .wav or whatever extension as appropriate.

Bonus: You probably mean Neofetch (or whatever we’re using since the developer of Neofetch has “gone farming”). Those are hard-coded into Neofetch by its developer.

For #2,

For gaming, if you use steam, you may not face more than the following:

• game does not work with no well known way to resolve. You can find this out by checking protonDB
• game does not work because it needs to enable some options. Very easy to fix, and you can find the options on proton db for each game.
• does not work because you didn’t setup steam right. You often need to enable proton, which in short is steam’s emulator or windows
• does not work because your gpu drivers did not install. This depends on distro and they should all have a guide on how to do it, but usually it is just a matter of installing something.

For programming, you will love your life because everything programming is way easier on Linux.

1. I don’t distrohop. Instead I just use what works for me and what I find comfortable.

2. You will eventually need to use the terminal. And it will be overwhelming at first. But eventually the learning curve flattens a little when you get more comfortable not breaking your system ;þ

3. Can’t comment

4. File extensions are, in essence, nothing but a convention. You don’t even need them in Windows, really (You can open a file with any program, for example, you will just not get anything useful from it). So it’s far from a big deal.

Depends on the hardware, but generally, yeah.

(It’s a joke)

Ubuntu and Linux Mint are ideal for people who just want to ignore the OS and get work done.

If you are a Dev you should be clear of such problem, unless you need a very specific tool, but, many people can’t switch because the programs they work with are not supported on Linux. Take a look into that, and in the worst case scenario you can dual boot windows.

Gaming wise proton is a bless and let’s you play most games, check protonDB for compability. Major portion of the games that don’t work are due to crappy anticheat solutions.

Good luck, any other questions feel free to ask.

I agree with Mint. I think Ubuntu has kind of devolved though, and PopOS is the better way to go. Fedora’s good too these days.

My recommendation is to try out a few distros in VirtualBox before switching - this was my process, and it can be very gradual.

I have read that it is faster, though I have not tested it myself. Personally, my initial reason to use it was just to try something new and explore the unix world. My reason for staying is that it is a very simple init system that is pleasant to work with. It made me understand what an init system is and use it a lot more.

Systemd is good if you just want something invisible and you do not want to mess too much with an init system unless you have to. Everything integrates with it

OpenRC is nicer if you want to write your own init scripts. It is very well documented also.