I had several drives in my PC, so I wiped a small one and just installed a few different distros and figured out what I liked. I ended up sticking with nobara with KDE.
I feel like every larger open source project that doesn’t have a Tyson Tan designed mascot doesn’t have one because they refused to let him make one for them.
I agree that this is a sad thing, but I guess not everyone in the Linux world is into furry waifus.
wait really?? So Tyson Tan designs a lot of mascots?? I think his characters are very cute!!! I will not allow him to make my mascot, not because I dislike his art, but because I like to make everything.
I can tell you how not to choose a distro: what its screenshots look like or what its default desktop environment is. Many begin shopping around for a distro that suits them best, which means visiting a website like DistroWatch.com, looking at the various screen shots, and picking one that looks nice. But any Linux distro can be made to look like any other distro without too much effort, what you see in the screen shots is just the default look. Really, the the screen shots should be the least of your concerns.
So don’t worry about Xfce, KDE, Gnome, LXDE, LXQt or whatever else right now, you can try all of those in good time. First, just get Linux and, worry about figuring out which apps that you can get that work best for your work flow. Almost none of the apps you use now are available in Linux, the hardest part is figuring out how to replace the apps you use daily right now.
You should choose the distribution with the best web service, and the best apps.
Is the service reliable? Do they have a good team of people making sure the packages are always online, and making sure they are providing timely security updates?
Do they have corporate, or non-profit, sources of funding? Do you trust the people who are running it?
Do they have the apps you want, are the apps up to date? Do they have things you need, like word processing, presentation software, photo scrap booking, file sharing, video editing, music editing, personal organizers, video conferencing (can you install Zoom, for example?). Can you easily install Flatpaks or AppImages?
Many of the really big Linux distros all provide completely reliable service, which satisfy the above requirements, but I recommend any of the following four:
Mint
Fedora
Ubuntu
Pop!_OS
Mint and Fedora are community-run with backing from various sponsors, Ubuntu is run by the Canonical corporation, Pop!_OS is developed by the System 76 company (a medium sized US-based business that sells laptops and PCs).
If it ends up being Optimus, I’ve found optimus-manager-qt from the aur to be great. You don’t have to mess around with configs and you can make switching or setting to Nvidia permanently really easy with it
Fedora is a good base and comes with most DEs as spins so you don’t have to swap live.
Choose the one you like the most.
Personally, XFCE for all around customization amd performance, KDE for out of box solid functionality (and wayland if you care).
Once you feel comfortable, then go ahead and install or dual boot.
Silverblue is okay but kinda overrated because Flatpaks are not a silver bullet and will break or have basic FS dependency issues. Plus, it’s not a great intro to Linux experience because you can’t shoot yourself in the foot easily most tutorials on Linux will be for a regular system.
As for the distros themselves:
spoilerArch: Bleeding edge and you want to actually suffer every time you boot. Manjaro: Arch but supposed to work out of box. Debian: The King of stability at the cost of slower package updates Fedora: Cutting edge and works out of box unlike Arch Ubuntu: Useless Canonical distro that is heavily dated Pop! OS and ElementaryOS: user friendly downstream of Ubuntu that suffer the same issues as Ubuntu. Linux Mint: Ubuntu if it was actually good except it’s still a downstream so still has aforementioned Ubuntu issues. Gentoo: You want something completely custom Slackware: You want a classic Unix like machine but with Linux RHEL/CentOS/Rocky/Oracle/Etc: Enterprise Linux (server usage and desktop usage) OpenSUSE: The RPM equivalent of Arch & Debian (comes in rolling and stable releases). So you can choose bleeding edge or stability.
Personally, I have stuck with Fedora for a long time. Debian or OpenSUSE would be second choice. Arch only if I’m forced to like the steam deck lol.
Also ArchWiki is your friend. Even if you’re on any other distro, it has a wealth of the latest information and tutorials for whatever you want or need.
Are you sure S3 sleep is enabled in the bios? On most machines it’s one or the other, not both at the same time. On some Intel machines you can still enable S3 standby, but I know AMD killed it a lot sooner than Intel did.
Windows has powercfg /availablesleepstates to show what states are supported. I’m sure there’s something like that for linux but I’m not 100% sure. You could try dmesg | grep -i “acpi: (supports”
Microsoft says it’s more secure. and that since it stays on its 100% the OSes control which is supposed to be much more secure”reliable” than S3 standby.
Nevermind that S0 standby is so incredibly buggy and awful on windows where it’s supposed to be best. My i9 Thinkpad drops 20% battery in 15 minutes, then goes into hibernation. It has a 50% chance of overheating in my bag and crashing when trying to get in to hibernation.
I’ve got a bit of experience with NVIDIA Optimus laptops on Linux so here’s some questions:
What exactly is the problem?
Are games not running on NVIDIA?
In this case you need to add an environment variable to the launch options in steam, the name of which has escaped me (should be on OPTIMUS page of Arch wiki)
Or is the driver not working at all?
What desktop environment/wm are they using?
For example if you’re using GNOME in the settings program in the about the system section (the last one) and in the System information dialog check to make sure it says something like “NVIDIA GTX 1050 Mobile”. Also make sure the NVIDIA driver program shows up with the other apps
If I remember correctly, you can define the modifier key in KDE. Not sure though, you might have to test it out.
That would be the fastest way. Apart from that, it’s very much possible by binding every possible action to different keypresses. That would be long and stenuous.
However, it should be said that these will only apply within KDE applications. If you’re using third-party stuff, like Firefox, GIMP, VLC etc., they won’t apply.
If you really want to go hard on rebinding all kinds of keys for any application, you can also do things like these:
As cool as both of these are, and as much as I would still generally recommend picking KDE for these kind of customization possibilities, I wouldn’t recommend overdoing either. You won’t be able to use other PCs anymore…
I actually went through and customized all the Plasma keybindings to be more like Mac a couple days ago. It works pretty well, but yeah unfortunately only in KDE applications. And there’s still some stuff you can’t change such as the “extend selection to start/end of word” shortcuts always being set to ctrl+shift+left/right even if you set the “move to start/end of word” keys to option+left/right.
I approached Fedora workstation with little knowledge of Linux, as a former windows and Mac user. My workflows involved graphic, print, UX design, DFP, front end web dev, and some light 3D modelling. Getting acquainted with alternatives to certain apps (namely adobe suite) took some getting used to, but it’s wonderful to no longer feel as if your industrial skill set is beholden to a massive, shitty company.
It was surprisingly easy to get along with. I feel like your experience in will mostly depend on your desktop environment rather than the distro itself, bear in mind that you can use any DE with any distro.
You don’t really need to touch the command line anymore to get going, though I got familiar with it as I found it faster for certain tasks.
KDE plasma is probably more familiar for Windows users. I use the GNOME desktop with some plugins.
As a bonus, Fedora 39 is more performant for me in AAA gaming than windows 10/11.
Is it supposed to replace the % with %%? Because that is what it seemed like it should do from the code.
If this is the bug you are alluding to then i will report the bug or else please tell me what the bug you referring to so i can report the correct thing
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