…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!

  • TrueStoryBob@lemmy.world
    10·
    5 days ago

    Me too! Just replaced my eight year old (and beat to crap) Chromebook with a corporate hand-me-down laptop that I stole got when they ordered new laptops! Just played around with both Mint and Ubuntu for a couple weeks and I’ve seriously loved it.

  • Squiddork@lemmy.world
    6·
    7 days ago

    I hope you find it a suitable replacement, I haven’t used Windows in years thanks to Linux.

    My advice, the good documentation on parts of Linux is quite literal it’s best not to skim over sections. Sometimes the authors choice of words will infer answers to questions you might have.

    A bit of competency in the shell/command line will go a long way, being able to view hardware (lsblk, lspci) mount drives, traverse the filesystem (ls, cp, mv, chmod etc) and a few of the basic commands for example

    This should give you the ability to:

    1. Back up all your important data from a live environment in the event that your distro is completely borked before reformatting

    2. Gives you solid foundations to learn more in-depth parts of Linux if needed, access to internal documentation (man pages etc) from the shell itself is useful too.

    Don’t be afraid to dive in, it’s hard to break things learning the basics if you’re not root.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      5·
      6 days ago

      I am looking forward to getting more comfortable in terminal. At the very least, I know how to navigate around the file system, use SSH, and some other basic stuff. I find it hard to retain this info unless I’m learning it for a specific need/purpose, so I’ll probably slowly pick it up in a random order as I have problems to solve.

  • shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works
    71·
    8 days ago

    Glad you decided to give it a try. It really shines on older hardware and really shows how much bloat windows actually has. I’ve been using Linux since the 90s, it’s incredible how far it’s come. Show us your socks. Especially in relation to gaming in the last few years, there’s almost no reason to deal with microsoft any longer!

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      62·
      8 days ago

      The bloat is real! I really thought this old PC was just chugging along because of the hardware, but it seems perfectly content to run Linux.

      • ButteryMonkey@piefed.socialEnglish
        7·
        8 days ago

        I was expecting this on a pos enterprise system that barely managed win 10 (but has 12 usb ports!!!). For context, the replacement drive I got for it from the IT department that “disposed of” the tower had windows 7 installed on it, they said that was the best it could probably do, which is why they were obsoleted years ago.

        There must have been something really wrong with other components because even with antixlinux, which doesn’t even have seem to have sound support out of the box, and is meant to be used off a usb (keeps a persistent state on the USB so you can take your OS and data with you), it was slow as molasses. (I also tried mint and raw Debian and a couple other things and they all sucked hard)

        So I threw Ubuntu back on and use it only for the Plex desktop app in my bedroom where I try not to watch too much tv. Is the only thing that runs on it without issues as long as I never close it. Reboots take 10 min tho. Not even remotely worth troubleshooting (that’s pc#4 in my house… I live alone. I have other options.)

        This all to say, if it doesn’t respond well to Linux, there might be something else going on :)

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        21·
        8 days ago

        Pop_OS I s a great first “it just works” experience.

        But also, don’t be af aid to be a bit of a distro slut. I’ve been distro hopping lately and it’s very liberating.

        If you want to try another, “it just works” experience, I highly recommend bazzite. It doesn’t exactly work for me because of the immutability, and I run high end hardware in weird configurations, Ill need to hop in and wrench on things from time to time. But I installed it in my exploration last week and found it immensely pleasurable.

        If anyone wants to provide some guidance for how to overcome some of the issues immutability creates (I need specific versions of ollama and rocm), I could really use the help.

        • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
          11·
          8 days ago

          Pop_OS I s a great first “it just works” experience.

          This is my hope. I figure I’ll use this until I find some niche reason to need something else.

          I saw a lot of positive talk about Bazzite too.

          • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            8 days ago

            Of course never an issue with just sticking with Pop. It’s a great distro to start with but also a great distro to die with after many years of love.

            Most distro are the same just with different defaults anyhow. Bazzite would be the exception though lol (also a great choice to be clear)

          • v01dworks@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            8 days ago

            Bazzite looks pretty cool, I’m setting up a computer for my friend’s from my old PC parts and might set up either that or Pop_OS on it

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
            2·
            8 days ago

            I’ll give it a shot, but tbh, it’s been a bit of a slog. I’m on the new Z13, the 128gb variant.

            I can’t find an “it just works” variant where both ollama and rocm play nice on the hardware AND the mediatek card works correctly. It’s either I’m able to self host fullsize llms (and do the rest of my ml work) OR I get fully functional wifi.

            I’ve got the whole install process for ollama + rocm + openwebui all set on Ubuntu, but the wifi card is barely getting 20 mbps. But access to rocm (and I assume it will be the same in pytorch) is buttery smooth and I can run medium models in the range of hundreds of tokens per second locally.

            When I throw on bazzite I’m hitting 350 mbps down but it doesn’t seem like it’s got the right rocm/ driver/ kernel/ ollama combo because I’m not even able to get 5 tps.

            • Pencilnoob@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              7 days ago

              It’s worth a try, you should be able to run an Ubuntu image in distrobox to install the ollama tools

        • Pencilnoob@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          I concur, I went with bazzite for my daily driver and it’s been the best yet, I prefer it over the others I’ve tried: Arch, SteamOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, and OpenSuse.

          It’s got downsides, but I just really like it.

          • themadcodger@kbin.earth
            2·
            8 days ago

            I’m using its non-gaming sister, Bluefin, and same. While I’m pretty decent at the CLI and have laboriously figured out how to make things work in the past, that’s not where I want to put my energy. I like that it just works and I’m not going to mess anything up on the system level. Containerization and rollbacks are fine by me if I don’t have to figure out how to un-bork something.

        • boboliosisjones@feddit.nu
          1·
          8 days ago

          I was on on Pop, but after going to CachyOS I have not looked back. The fact Pop was kind of dated snd the new DE seemingly taking forever to finish made me want to try something else. CachyOS so far has been entirely trouble free and worked better than Pop, which was struggling with stuff like hibernation on my machine

        • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
          13·
          8 days ago

          As someone who tries manjaro first, don’t. Endeavouros has been a much better experience overall for me.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
            3·
            8 days ago

            Are there any things you could mention specifically?
            I’m using Manjaro with KDE, and I find it extremely easy to maintain, which I like.
            I use mostly Steam for games, and it runs very well out of the box, even better than I ever managed with Arch.
            I used Antergos for a couple of years, and that was also great, but it quickly fell apart when it was discontinued although I tried to remove the Antergos dependencies, I don’t want to experience that again with EndeavourOS which was started by the same people.

            Why should I trust EndeavourOS when I couldn’t trust Antergos?

            • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
              4·
              8 days ago

              Someone else could (and has in other threads where manjaro came up) answer better than me for general reasons, but for reasons that personally affected me - version mismatches due to them holding back releases, driver issues (with an amd card), general app installation/updating issues.

              Audio issues due to poor defaults, which as a beginner (at the time) user was difficult enough to diagnose I uninstalled plasma (twice) trying to fix (yes, that part is my fault for not understanding what pacman -Rcns actually does).

              The installer is using a very incomplete timezone list that does not include any GMT -8 timezones at all (which isn’t manjaro specific, but makes me leery of a dev’s attention to detail when they use this list).

              For the general comments I have seen others mention, they have accidentally ddos’d the AUR on more than one occasion, they let certs expire regularly, they hold back updates without actually doing anything to confirm the updates are stable when they do push the updates…

              As for endeavouros devs being part of a discontinued project, I can’t say anything that would bring back your trust as I am not part of that team, but they did do a write up about this on the endeavouros website.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
                1·
                8 days ago

                Thanks for your very thorough answer. 👍😀
                I haven’t had any of those issues myself, I also use AMD and have for many years, everything always worked fine with the default setup.
                Some years back I too changed Pulse audio settings, not because the defaults were bad, as I remember it, it was pretty much Pulse audio default settings they used.
                But in early days there could be problems with Wine that required higher priority for Pulse audio, and some fine tuning of buffer settings that may be hardware specific.

                There is however one thing that annoys me with Manjaro, and that is that updates sometimes overwrite config settings I have manually made changes to. Arch generally didn’t do that as I recall, but made a notice about the config file from the update being copied with a different name to preserve manual settings, which is excellent.

                I’ll check out what they write about discontinuing Antergos. But for now it’s kind of a “if it works don’t fix it” situation for me.

        • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          7·
          8 days ago

          Please don’t use manjaro. Their devs are incompetant, rarely change after fucking up, it teaches bad behaviors, and they detriment the broader ecosystem constantly.

          Too tired to go through with the entire list of constant fuck ups but they’re really awful. I rarely say that any distro is a poor choice but manjaro is just awful.

          If you want a semi-stable rolling release opensuse tumbleweed is a good option.

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      41·
      8 days ago

      About 15 years ago, I installed Ubuntu for a few months for fun, but not being able to game on it very easily was a major drawback for me, so I bounced back to windows.

      Now that gaming on Linux seems to have come a long way (and Windows is annoying me way more than it used to), I’m feeling motivated.

      • Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org
        16·
        8 days ago

        I wish you luck with it. I was turned off Linux until recently just because of base functionality. But hey, wifi is working, and my USB HID stuff is all working too. I’m not a hardcore gamer so that doesn’t affect me. If anything, I’ll trade any 3d functions for faster and more efficient 2d and text.

        • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
          8·
          8 days ago

          Same. I’ve been saying for years that basic functionality is keeping people from switching to Linux, and nobody wanted to listen. It’s definitely gotten better, but still not rock solid.

            • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
              91·
              8 days ago

              Hardware, mostly. Most times I’ve tried Linux something like Wi-Fi or the touchpad was broken out of the box.

              Basically, a user who only needs a web browser and maybe Libre office should not experience any friction or touch a CLI. That’s what Windows has and what Linux needs to become mainstream.

              • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
                81·
                8 days ago

                Never had touchpad troubles on Linux - as long as the device follows standard HID protocols, it’ll just work. WiFi was dicey in the 2000s; the technology was still new and every chip vendor had their own idea of how shit should work, making it difficult to get support merged for every possible device, but that really hasn’t been an issue for quite a while in my experience.

                Everyone’s forgotten the olden days where you’d have to dig through a box of diskettes for all the drivers.

                • salacious_coaster@infosec.pubEnglish
                  41·
                  8 days ago

                  I was hesitant to engage because I kind of figured you’d prove my point about nobody wanting to hear about basic functionality not working. I tend to get responses like this along the lines of “it works on my machine” and “you spoiled kids, back in my day etc etc”.

                  Hardware issues are well documented. I still have to manually restart the touchpad module after waking from sleep intermittently. As long as Linux people are dismissive about problems like this, it’ll never be mainstream.

              • felsiq@piefed.zipEnglish
                4·
                8 days ago

                Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.

                I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.

      • woelkchen@lemmy.world
        4·
        8 days ago

        Do you have an Nvidia graphics card or why did you pick one of the few distributions that doesn’t ship the latest Radeon and Intel drivers?

          • woelkchen@lemmy.world
            2·
            8 days ago

            Wishing you luck and that Nvidia and their legacy drivers don’t fuck you over. Should you experience weird problems, not necessarily related to graphics output but maybe broken power management or so, it’s most likely the fault of Nvidia. Just saying, in case something like that happens and you feel the need to shout at Linux.

            • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              Thanks, at least that gives me a place to start if something acts up. I haven’t had any issues yet, but I also haven’t tried any games on it.

      • DarkSirrush@lemmy.ca
        52·
        8 days ago

        Man, I did the same thing 15 years ago, and between gaming and Ubuntu itself being honestly fairly user hostile at that point (regardless of what the cult said) , it turned me off of trying Linux again for a looong while

        • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          8 days ago

          There’s been a lot of progress in 15 years. This would be a good time to give it another go. Mint is stupid easy to install along side windows.

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    24·
    8 days ago

    I find this funny because I’ve been aware of, and even using, Linux for a lot longer than I have been using Lemmy (or Lemmy or even ActivityPub has even existed). Are many people really becoming more aware of Linux because they are moving from Reddit to Lemmy and then noticing people talking about Linux here?

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      35·
      8 days ago

      I’ve always been aware of it, but I guess I just needed the extra push. Being on Lemmy has been like having one of those Civ missionaries in my base spamming “spread religion” for 2 years, and I think they’ve successfully converted me.

      • apftwb@lemmy.world
        3·
        7 days ago

        I swear Lemmy just turns everyone in a variation of the same person. Its bizarre. We all subconsciously end up watching the same YouTube channels and read the same books.

      • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
        2·
        7 days ago

        I hate them, wish I could go all Mao on their asses. But yeah, Linux rocks. Heard great things about Pop. Looking forward for your meme posts asking for help here.

        • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          7 days ago

          I subscribed to a bunch of Linux communities today with that in mind, but I haven’t drilled down to figure out which are the most active or are open to random questions.

          • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
            2·
            7 days ago

            If you make a meme out of it, this is one of the most helpful and active. Otherwise the others are good too, some perhaps not as active.

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
      19·
      8 days ago

      I’ve known about Linux since the late ’90s; I haven’t been around any significant concentration of people talking about it and how to use it until I joined Lemmy.

    • woelkchen@lemmy.world
      16·
      8 days ago

      The open source nature of Lemmy attracts the same people who are also attracted by the open source nature of Linux.

      Lemmy is a bit of an echo chamber because of that.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zipEnglish
      10·
      8 days ago

      I was generally planning on switching once windows 10 died but being on Lemmy helped convince me to not only switch earlier, but also I just dove right in with arch. I’d say it was like 2/3 Lemmy and 1/3 Proton that made me switch not because I felt I needed to but because I was actually excited to

  • v01dworks@piefed.socialEnglish
    21·
    8 days ago

    I mostly use Linux but I dual-boot windows just for VR and every time I have to use windows it feels sluggish in comparison

    • rapchee@lemmy.world
      8·
      8 days ago

      i do the same thing but i think it’s kind of on us - when you only boot windows once in a while it tries to do a bunch of things (updates, scanning everything for more data on your advertisement profile, virus scan, etc) at the same time
      it was similar when i was running linux less frequently, i was annoyed like
      ugh again bunch of updates, kernel update as well ugh now i have to reboot too

      • v01dworks@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        6 days ago

        Yeah, it’s a little of both, but at least if I don’t use Linux for a while I don’t feel the same problem happening usually

        In my experience, if I don’t touch my gaming PC for a month or two and then go boot up Linux it means I just have a long update, but I can also opt to ignore it and deal with it later. On Windows, I don’t really have that choice as much, and updating is extra annoying because it reboots itself multiple times so I have to babysit it otherwise it boots back into Linux after a few seconds on the bootloader

      • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.org
        8·
        8 days ago

        Just that linux does not force them on you. You decide when and if you even install those updates. Windows does it all in the background without telling you. I hate that behavior so much. This damn machine is under my command and yet on Windows it does whatever Microsoft wants instead of what I want.

      • v01dworks@piefed.socialEnglish
        2·
        7 days ago

        ALVR is so frustratingly close to working for me with the Quest 2 on Linux

        Some games actually work flawlessly with it for me now, but recently I wanted to get back into Into The Radius 2 since they updated it a lot, and because it only supports a specific VR framework that I can’t seem to get my system to use, the game itself doesn’t connect to my headset, so I had to boot back into windows for that