Amateur Linux Hour

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Absolutego said:
I really like Fedora as a daily driver and would recommend it to most newbies. It does what it's supposed to without throwing you into the absolute swamp that is Ubuntu/Debian troubleshooting.
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With the changes to Alma/Rocky on the horizon I’m thinking of changing a couple of vms I have (torrent box and another for miscellaneous use) from Alma over to Fedora. My concern is that due to regular release schedule the last time I daily drove Fedora I wound up filling the hard disk with stuff from the old versions. It could be me being stupid but is there a simple way to purge old releases you have upgraded from?
 
For now I've settled on Kubuntu for my home server/htpc. the GUI opens up deep level settings so it's more flexible then Zorin OS or Linux Mint, which is good thanks to the nonstandard setup i have. I just have to see if I can finally get the damn smartboard drivers to work properly because the company that made the drivers require older versions of libboost and libtiff then what can be installed normally.
 
I started using Mint on my laptop ages ago and it mostly just worked. But when it didn't it was a real pain to deal with.
It didn't really teach me anything other than some of the more obvious stuff like the file system structure and basic terminal use.

Now I prefer arch / arch based because the arch repos, arch wiki and AUR are extremely useful.
It does not always just work though. You have to make sure to update it continuously, maybe once a week (this is pretty straightforward compared to the nightmare that is windows updates)
or it can break everything. However there is the wiki and the forums which generally have solutions on them.

Arch is also kind of DIY. It doesn't come with much and has a comparatively complicated install procedure.
I think it is worth it though because it will teach you more about how your computer works, giving you more control over it.
 
Almighty Space Duck said:
With the changes to Alma/Rocky on the horizon I’m thinking of changing a couple of vms I have (torrent box and another for miscellaneous use) from Alma over to Fedora. My concern is that due to regular release schedule the last time I daily drove Fedora I wound up filling the hard disk with stuff from the old versions. It could be me being stupid but is there a simple way to purge old releases you have upgraded from?
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What changes to Alma and Rocky are you referring to? I thought they were simply doing what CentOS did before RHEL cucked them with their CentOS stream bullshit.

I trialled Alma in a VM only to find out that it imposes an EULA onto its users, so it was right out.
 
Libertarian Wario said:
What changes to Alma and Rocky are you referring to? I thought they were simply doing what CentOS did before RHEL cucked them with their CentOS stream bullshit.

I trialled Alma in a VM only to find out that it imposes an EULA onto its users, so it was right out.
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Red Hat recently took the repos for RHEL closed/paid source, it remains to be seen how that will impact the forks since it's what they were mirroring in order to be "RHEL binary compatible" (CentOS is upstream of RHEL now). Both Alma and Rocky have put out a statement on it though.
 
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Stoneheart said:
So has anybody tried gaming? there is a red number ticking down in my steam and no way that i will get windows 10 or 11.
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I tossed Manjaro on my spare SSD a while ago - 5900X/32GB/2700 Super. After installing proprietary drivers throught he GUI I was able to play Apex Legends on Steam - multiplayer with anticheat enabled with only one issue. Shaders while compiled on first launch still required you to see them involving a ton of studders (but after this is was cached). There is a reddit thread or some shit where the community has a big compilation file of all the shaders so you don't have to go through it. Performance was - I'd say - hmm 90-95% of my experience on Winderps. Likely due to not having my GPU overclock however. I'd give that a solid 10%. Anyways when M$ pulls the plug and goes cloud only I'll be Linux full time.
 
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Almighty Space Duck said:
With the changes to Alma/Rocky on the horizon I’m thinking of changing a couple of vms I have (torrent box and another for miscellaneous use) from Alma over to Fedora. My concern is that due to regular release schedule the last time I daily drove Fedora I wound up filling the hard disk with stuff from the old versions. It could be me being stupid but is there a simple way to purge old releases you have upgraded from?
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dnf repoquery --unneeded will give you a list of all packages that aren't depended on by another package. I'm sure someone has written a bash script to parse that and go erase them all.

To be honest though I'd just do a fresh install whenever you want to upgrade. Fedora is notoriously kinda sketchy when it comes to upgrading to a new release. I don't think they test it much.
 
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Going to throw my hat in the ring and recommend Mint for Desktop and Debian for servers if you're a new user. The stability you would expect from Ubuntu but it lacks in practice. Debian can be a bit more manual to setup than a newbie is used to, but I think on the server side of things that's probably a good way to get acquainted. Mint is very straightforward, free from BS like snaps, and has a more familiar desktop for anyone trying to hop from windows.
 
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I would recommend Debian more-so now than back with Bullseye. I started my journey with Debian, so it's a two for two of bias and experience. Linux Mint is fine, but Linux Mint Debian Edition is going to be the most grounded for those who just can't be bothered with trying multiple different desktops.
 
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Trans Fat 41g said:
I would recommend Debian more-so now than back with Bullseye. I started my journey with Debian, so it's a two for two of bias and experience. Linux Mint is fine, but Linux Mint Debian Edition is going to be the most grounded for those who just can't be bothered with trying multiple different desktops.
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...is that just Debian with Cinnamon?
 
...Ah, it seems I misunderstood the relationship between the OS distribution and the desktop environment.

I was assuming that using Debian would be like using an older version of Windows where things look mostly the same but there are strange differences or omissions, but the underlying system has little bearing on the GUI interface. I'm betting that as long as I run the same version of KDE I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Debian, RHEL, or Arch Linux distribution.
 
Betonhaus said:
...Ah, it seems I misunderstood the relationship between the OS distribution and the desktop environment.

I was assuming that using Debian would be like using an older version of Windows where things look mostly the same but there are strange differences or omissions, but the underlying system has little bearing on the GUI interface. I'm betting that as long as I run the same version of KDE I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a Debian, RHEL, or Arch Linux distribution.
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You got it pretty much, yeah. Desktop environments are vaguely like Windows themes (just the GUI you interact with) and with the exception of maybe some file locations based on how it was compiled for a distro (and whatever defaults they set), will pretty much be the same across distros. You can also install multiple of them and just pick which one you want at the login screen, Arch has a good list of the various ones here. The other thing that's going to vary is going to be the display manager, which manages what your login window looks like. Some look like ass, last I used Debian whatever one they used fell into this, others (like gnome display manager) generally look pretty good. Arch has a list of those too. Sometimes distros get bugs up their ass and decide to make their own but that doesn't happen often, see: Canonical/Ubuntu and Unity.

You can forgo a display manager entirely as well and then launch Xorg/X server/X11 or Wayland after logging in at the command line which will start your DE. Similarly you could install a window manager instead of a DE (like i3) and just have GUI windows and some functions associated with it instead of the whole toolbox. Pretty much the order of operations is: windowing system (Xorg orWayland) -> display manager -> window manager (I think Wayland calls them compositors) -> desktop environment.

Wayland has been trying to be a replacement for Xorg for a while but there's not been a big adoption of it. Fedora recently added it as the default if you use gnome but you'd have to be a fag to do that. I don't have much experience with Wayland since I mainly use i3 and that doesn't exist for it. Technically there's sway which is similar but last I used it dmenu (think Windows search but useful, amongst other things) didn't work right and I couldn't be bothered.
 
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I still generally prefer Arch when I'm setting up a daily driver box. PKGBUILDs are really straightforward and I usually end up just writing a bunch for myself so I can manage external software through the package manager.
std::string said:
Because this is not how Arch works.

In Arch the basic assumption is that you are, at all times, fully updated. You cannot pin packages with pacman for obvious reasons. The more you diverge from their assumption the more breakage will occur. If you run into a regression just switch to the LTS kernel. If both the current kernel and the LTS kernel are broken for your hardware well fuck you I guess?

Arch is heavily opinionated about doing this. It is what it is.
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The way around this is to never clean your local package cache and to pacman -U an earlier version of the kernel package if you need to downgrade. It's extremely gay and I wish they'd change this since kernel regressions have become much more common lately (at least I feel like they have) but also apparently the Arch project is chronically understaffed - they talked about rolling out architecture levels for x86_64 last year but we haven't had any updates since.

Anyway, I'm currently sitting out the Linux scene because the wayland transition has been gay, trannies control everything, and Red Hat is now evil. I'll come back in 2025 or something.
 
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...what is the Wayland transition? I've heard bits and pieces but haven't really researched it. KDE is Wayland based now, right?
 
I did end up setting up a dual boot with KDE Neon on my computer to try things out. Generally I can mostly make the switch pretty easily, but there would have to be some changes I would have to make to adapt.
One is that I have no OneDrive access. There seems to be a few solutions cobbled together to get OneDrive working, but none offer the hybrid approach (some folders online only, some always downloaded) I've been using, and I no longer have access to filevault
OpenRGB doesn't seem to support Stellseries. That's largely fine as I just keep the lighting set to red for now, but I need to boot to windows to make the change unless I want to grab a spare keyboard to feed the main one to a VM directly.
I haven't been able to get gaming to work, but seems the games I tried don't like running off a NTFS drive. I should be able to fix that problem by migrating the drive to ext4
A couple of the apps I was using had a weird glitch when the background color and the text color was the same. That seems to be a glitch with gtk and dark mode but I wasn't able to figure out how to fix it.
PulseAudio sorts outputs by driver and not device, which is annoying because I use one monitor for speakers and when the other monitor is connected (as it doesn't turn on with the system) it resets the audio output device.
I miss pin unlock. I don't get why Linux doesn't offer it.
 
Betonhaus said:
I haven't been able to get gaming to work, but seems the games I tried don't like running off a NTFS drive. I should be able to fix that problem by migrating the drive to ext4
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You can do it, although in the long term it's recommended to switch FS. Valve has a page on it: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

Also if you're dualbooting you should definitely turn off Windows Fast Boot, it flags NTFS drives as dirty.
 
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