I can’t say I’m a huge fan of btrfs, in my limited sample size of one I had several episodes of esoteric errors and data loss. It’s anecdotal but filesystems have never been something to give me trouble in any other scenario to date. They just exist and do their job silently in my experience, except for btrfs.
This is what I thought too, but in my case it turned out my drive was busted and btrfs detected an error and went read only… which was super annoying and my initial reaction was “ugh, piece of shit filesystem!” But ultimately I’m grateful it noticed something was wrong with the drive. If I was just using ext4 I just would have had silent data corruption. In that sense other filesystems do silently do their jobs… but they also potentially fail silently which is a little scary. Checksums are nice.
Sorry I’m new to the networky world of things, could someone explain what TLS and DNS (seen it in settings here and there) are, and the differences between them.
Yeah dot files are config files, and usually apps have one. And yes, you would have to explore each program to see what the settings do.
You picked Debian now, just be aware that all software is very old and when you read docs for programs, you probably have to read about older versions instead of the current one.
The standard is to have dotfiles in your ~/.config folder, however not all apps follow that.
Some apps dump their config files in your home, others only have files in /etc or /usr and you have to copy them yourself to modify them
If you’re not doing anything crazy, there’s no reason linux should be any harder to use than Windows.
Once you’re up and running, daily life will be pretty straightforward.
Plenty of great advice in the other posts that I won’t rehash. One thing I didn’t see mentioned is using a live boot to try out linux. You can basically run it off a USB stick before you install it to get a feel for what it’s like. Most “beginner friendly” distros will have tutorials on how to create the live disk. Example for Pop!_OS: support.system76.com/articles/live-disk/
.bashrc in your home folder is pretty universal. It’s basically just stuff that gets run when you log into your shell, very useful. Set up some aliases and bash customization.
Assuming your laptop has hardware that has Linux support—wifi cards manufactured by certain companies are what typically make things difficult—a just works distribution like Ubuntu, Mint, and Pop!_OS will have a gentle learning curve for doing things that you want.
Mint is almost purpose made for people new to Linux or for people who just want to use their computer. It also has a large and friendly community around it, so there is community support, if you get stuck or confused on something. My parents, who are no tech people, have been happily using Mint for a couple of years now, with far less headache compared to Windows.
As others have said, the installation of whatever distribution you chose will probably be the most intimidating aspect of switching to Linux. It doesn’t require being technically savy, just a willingness to learn and follow the procedures. It will be helpful to have your phone handy when you are doing the installation, so you can look things up incase there is something you don’t understand.
If there is anything on the laptop that is important to you, back it up. The simplest way to install Linux will make whatever on the drive inaccessible. Additionally, find and record your Windows product key, just incase you want tk go back to Windows.
Most people forget you can also run a Linux VM inside Windows if all the other options don’t work for you.
It protects your private data from virusses, doesn’t let Microsoft’s telemetry spy on your usage and browsing, and gives you more control.
Just limit what you do in Windows to what needs it running natively and do everything else inside the VM.
This generally works for people who only need command-line or headless access though. I’ve been waiting for proper GPU virtualization and partitioning to actually work on consumer gpus for so long now that I’m doubtful it will ever be a thing. And the hardware industry has gradually transitioned to single GPU setups now so PCIe lanes for multi-GPU setups are harder to come by, especially with recent motherboards dedicating more and more PCIe lanes to NVMe slots. Still, even GPU pass-through with VFIO is not a trivial thing at all to get up and running. Its a travesty that CPU virtualization is so mature and far along in the consumer space, juxtaposed with a seemingly absolute big fat zero on the GPU virtualization front.
You could get away with using VMWare for their proprietary GPU virtualization feature but besides simple sandboxes for testing, I will not personally get too far into it as the experience is not great.
Proper vGPU would be so much better if nvidia weren’t twats. Anyways if you use proxmox you can unlock vGPU support for most consumers GPUs using this script
Great find! Thanks, this is new to me. I would have taken this out for a whirl immediately but I just read the docs and sadly it doesn’t support my 3000 series nvidia card. Team Green is seriously getting on my nerves for their anti consumer practices, enough for me to go all in into Team Red or Intel for my next GPU.
At this point, Intel (if you’re listening), the single most important feature you can implement to get an immediate buy from me, is SR-IOV on your Arc cards. I will probably buy a few of them for each of my PCs as well.
linux
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.