…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·
    18 hours 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.

  • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
    10·
    3 days ago

    Welcome aboard!

    Linux has it’s tradeoffs, you must accept that sometimes, in some cases, you may get somewhat inconvenienced, but in exchange, your computer is truly yours now, with time you learn to deeply appreciate that, also, people who develop desktop, usually want to do it so people who are normal, can use it, I’m not a technical person and have never had a problem I couldn’t fix, you just need to keep trying!.. or find your way around it, contrary to popular beliefs, a big chunk of the Linux community is eager to help new people, for sure there are people who are elitists and gatekeepers, but are a loud, obnoxious minority.

    Enjoy Linux!

    • The Picard Maneuver@piefed.worldOPEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      Thanks! I think I’m willing to make that tradeoff. I also wouldn’t consider myself techy (as in, not a tech professional or anything), but I am pretty confident in my ability to google and figure stuff out.

      I’ve even run into my first issue now: It turns out that Realtek wifi USB devices don’t play well with Linux.

      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        To save yourself some headache on the wifi front, I recommend - at least for non-Laptops - getting a repeater and hooking your computer up via Ethernet cable. Yes, WiFi does work, but it can be a major PITA.

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

          I might do that in the end, but I’ve already ordered a different one that is supposed to be more Linux friendly. The other one was falling apart anyway - I had to sort of bend it back together.

          • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
            2·
            3 days ago

            I had two different ones for a while and was suffering from occasional network dropouts that would force me to restart networking, and would sometimes take minutes to recover (DHCP discover) - eventually I had enough and bought a repeater + connected via cable. Interestingly enough, the “dropouts” would not allow new connections, but existing connections would remain active mostly. So it was definitely a driver issue.

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

              Well I might be going down that route if this new one doesn’t work. My PC isn’t in a good spot to connect directly, but a repeater is an alternative I hadn’t considered.

      • A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl
        3·
        3 days ago

        Googling is all you need (maybe change the search engine for a more privacy respecting one, like brave search or kagi, but still the same)

  • shittydwarf@sh.itjust.works
    69·
    4 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
      61·
      4 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
        6·
        4 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 :)

  • Squiddork@lemmy.world
    6·
    3 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
      4·
      2 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.

  • Deflated0ne@lemmy.worldEnglish
    19·
    4 days ago

    My biggest hangup (so far) is modding games.

    Nexus is built for Windows. CDPR’s RedMod is too.

    It’s probably not that big a deal. I’m just shit at all this stuff. I’m not a coder. I don’t even know what the fuck sudo means. But I have a very loose grasp on using it. With a moderate amount of help from the internet. Usually.

    • JunglisticFunkateer@lemmy.world
      18·
      4 days ago

      Nexus is building a new version of its app, and the new one has Linux support (native app).

      It’s not yet a full replacement, and at the moment only supports a few select games, but eventually it’ll expand to the full catalogue.

    • ExhibiCat@lemmynsfw.com
      1·
      2 days ago

      I just game on windows to be honest. For that it’s not bad. I do a ton of VR and the Linux support for that is minimal anyway.

    • Statick@programming.dev
      8·
      4 days ago

      Closest comparison I can give of it is… It’s like clicking “Yes” when the User Account Control (UAC) popup appears on Windows when you’re installing stuff. That’s you, as an admin, confirming you want to perform whatever action is being performed.

      sudo ... is perform an action/command as an admin.

      As for the mods. A lot of the time it’s a matter of taking the files you downloaded, and dropping them in the game directory (or a directory within the game directory).

      Once you do it manually once, you’ll see it’s pretty straight forward and you don’t really need the mod managers.

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
        2·
        3 days ago

        “I heard them say we’ve reached Morrowind. I’m sure they’ll let us go.”

        Morrowind will always be wonderful to return to. I miss all the imaginative player house mods. OpenMW has been so AWESOME.

        Also:

        YoU wOuLdN’t StEaL a LiMeWaRe pLatTeR

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        21·
        4 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·
          4 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.

          • v01dworks@piefed.socialEnglish
            3·
            4 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

          • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            3·
            4 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)

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
            2·
            4 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·
              3 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·
          4 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·
            4 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·
          4 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·
          4 days ago

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

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
            3·
            4 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·
              4 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·
                4 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·
          4 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.