I’ll parrot the others. I have a Windows PC issued by my employer. The only way to have some Linux is WSL. I use it to sync notes with server at home, python stuff, and w3m when I want to Google something without looking conspicuous in the office.
General Linux tools also help. I needed to make video half the speed - one liner ffmpeg solves it in a jiffy. On Windows I need to install some hive software.
Bcachefs still misses major features, so it’s possible to expect that performance will change over time. Just because bcachefs is upstreamed to Linux doesn’t mean it’s finished.
WSL has replaced my use of the command prompt in Windows for anything (and I used it more than most, I think).
In my job, I develop Linux applications to support industrial automation, and WSL is capable of building and running most of what I make. It isn’t a full Linux machine, and can behave unexpectedly when trying to do things like changing certain network configurations.
So it’s great for what it’s for, really. But if you want a full VM, this isn’t really for that.
WSL in Windows Terminal is not much different from opening Konsole on any regular desktop Linux distribution. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed on WSL and I think it’s great.
Personally I’m excited to see Flatpak become more widespread and usable, fixing some “rough around the edges” aspects of it. I’ve been using it quite a bit this past few months and I think it presents a really coherent, simple vision for how to do package distribution that solves a lot of pain points. The sandboxing functionality is critical and easy to use, I don’t need every app to have access to everything in my home directory.
I didn’t realise this option existed - and it’s an interesting one, perhaps giving the ease-of-use of Mate/Cinnamon/Gnome 2, without sticking with the older code.
Is that nvidia card old, do you need very fast performance? You could use the nouveau drivers which are mostly FOSS.
If you need the proprietary drivers though, I advise against updated Distros except ublue.it
Debian might be an exception as it upgrages so slowly, but I also wouldnt recommend Debian really. Debian + GNOME is probably very fine, even though also here you will miss a lot of cool new updates, but Debian + KDE is simply not ready and all those bugs are now only fixed in Plasma 6.
So my recommendation is a ublue-nvidia image, no matter what desktop you like
A GPU is used for a lot more than just gaming these days. It’s used to render videos, accelerate normal 2D programs (like some terminal emulators), accelerate some websites/webapps (those which use WebGL for eg); also modern DEs like Gnome and KDE also make use of it very heavily, for instance for animations and window transitions. Those smooth animations that you see when you activate the workspace switcher or window overview? That’s your GPU at work there. Are your animations jittery/laggy? That means your setup is less than ideal. Of course, you could ignore all that and just go for a simple DE like XFCE or Mate which is fully CPU-driven, but then the issue of video acceleration still remains (unless you don’t plan on watching HD videos).
Without the right drivers (typically NOT nouveau, unless you’re on a very old card), you may find your overall experience less than ideal. As you can see in their official feature matrix , only the NV40 series card fully supports video acceleration - these are cards which were launched between 2004-2006 - that’s practically ancient in computer terms and I highly doubt your PC uses one of those. Now recent-ish cards do support video acceleration, but you’ll need to extract the firmware blobs from the proprietary drivers (which can be a PITA on normal Debian as it’s a manual process), plus, even after that, the drivers won’t support some features that may be required by normal programs, as you can see from the matrix.
The natural solution of course would be to install the proprietary nVidia drivers, but you do NOT want to do that (unless you’re a desperate gamer) as there’s a high possibility of running into issues like not being about to use Wayland properly, or breaking your system when you update it - just Google “Linux update black screen nVidia” and you’ll see what I mean.
You’ll be avoiding a lot of headache if you just went with AMD; or even just onboard graphics like Intel iGPUs (if your CPU has it) would be a much better option - because in either case, you’ll be using fully capable and stable opensource drivers and you won’t face any issues with that.
I did not use virt-manager for a while, but probably it allocates the whole virtual disk by default (i don’t remember for sure). Try to create it manually and ensure that checkbox “allocate the whole volume” is disabled. You can also do this with qemu-img create command (see man qemu-img for options).
BTW it is possible to compress existing qcow2 images. Before that I recommend to run fstrim -a inside the VM. Then shut it down and execute qemu-img convert -cp old_image.qcow2 new_image.qcow2 && mv -f new_image.qcow2 old_image.qcow2.
May I ask why you, as a beginner, specifically chose one of those distros instead of more “mainstream” ones?
Puppy Linux’s main use-case is to be a live ISO, that doesn’t need to be installed to run. It doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea to install it, but I think if you want to use an Ubuntu derivative, there are better options for a beginner like Pop or Mint that would let you install a lightweight desktop environment like XFCE, LXDE, LXQt and so on.
Alpine Linux is specifically designed to avoid all the core system tools that are pretty much universal on most other distros like glibc, systemd or GNU tools and libraries, which will make your life hell as a beginner if you need to troubleshoot anything as most “universal” documentation like the Arch wiki would be at best partially relevant, at worst useless.
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