If you have a spare solid state drive or a portable HDD (most USB sticks are a bit too slow for a proper install), maybe install a Linux distribution onto that portable device, then you can just boot from that, then you only need to boot switch in Bios to Windows when you need to use it again. This has the advantage of you not needing to setup a complicated dual boot setup. When you are settled in with Linux, open your drive where Windows is located from Linux, copy your files over (don’t forget your bookmarks and saved passwords) and then you can clone your linux install from your portable drive over your old Windows install using a tool such as dd.
Thanks for the advice. I plan on adding another internal SSD and installing Linux on that. I should have been more specific in my original post.
You’re saying I can access the filesystem on my windows drive from Linux? So I could directly copy files back and forth? I thought I’d have to copy them onto an external drive, reboot, and then copy to the Linux drive.
The response you got above is the best advice. Get a second internal drive of any type and size, and install distros on that. You totally can partition your existing windows drive and install linux alongside it, but… you’ll probably screw something up along the way and bork your windows install. Use another drive and it’s much harder to do. If you want to be super safe, you can unplug your windows drive during installs and then it’s literally impossible to break your windows drive.
The other advantage is that nobody knows what distro will be right for you. That means you’ll want to distro hop - and that’s so much easier when you have another drive you can just format and start over with (and not worry about your boot loader).
To your follow up question, yes, linux can read and write to the contents of your windows drive. If you mount that drive, then you can do whatever you want to it, including deleting things that break your windows installation.
I am not wild about any of them, but center left, bottom left are my least annoying. I’ll just change it to something else when i go to Plasma 6 (which I started testing, and while overall it looks great, and is pretty snappy, the Neon Testing is seriously unstable in other areas – but they warn you about that, so that’s on me).
I’d rather avoid a Linux distro that’s implementing something like ads or telemetry…if that’s even a thing that’s happening?
Fedora has some telemetry, but as far as I know, you can turn it off during the installation. Some desktop environments like KDE Plasma also have options for telemetry but it’s disabled by default. If you want it, you manually have to enable it in the settings.
Should I avoid OpenSUSE
Some software might not be available on openSUSE
or KDE Plasma
Not really, Plasma has a shitload of features and customization options, if many options tend to overwhelm you, you might be better of with a different desktop environment, if you are fine with customization options, Plasma is great for you.
Are there any ‘10 things to do first when installing Linux for the first time’ recommendations?
Why would some software not be available on OpenSUSE? Would it be available on other distros due to a different way they handle packages, or do you mean in comparison to Windows?
openSUSE is rather small, not everything is packaged for it. Arch is the best in terms of software availability, thanks to the AUR.
The only distro that even comes close is NixOS, but I really wouldn’t recommend it for beginners. You can explore it in a VM though or maybe at some point actually try it out. It’s very very different than other distros though.
If something is packaged for a disto, then I can download it using the package manager and it should theoretically be compatible with the distro and the other packages available through the package manager. But if something isn’t available via the package manager, I could still find it online and download and install it, but it might cause issues because it hasn’t been verified by the people who maintain the distro’s package manager accessible repositories. Or I could still install it with flatpaks or snaps and something something container and it should still work? Or might cause compatibility issues?
And you’re saying that AUR has more packages that have been verified for arch than OpenSUSE has with Yast?
But if something isn’t available via the package manager, I could still find it online and download and install it, but it might cause issues because it hasn’t been verified by the people who maintain the distro’s package manager accessible repositories.
Correct. The usual issues that you’d find is missing libraries or other package dependencies, because the versions/packages on your OS may not match what the developer complied their generic release package with. Which is why you normally don’t download random apps from the web like you’d do on Windows, becuse there’s no guarantee that it’d work on your distro (not to mention the security concerns).
Or I could still install it with flatpaks or snaps and something something container and it should still work? Or might cause compatibility issues?
Correct, Flatpak/Snap was invented for this very reason, to solve the library mismatch and dependency issues you might get. Flatpak/Snap works by bundling all the necessary dependencies a program might need, so it doesn’t matter what your OS has. There are some issues with Flatpaks/Snaps, but these are rare and usually they come about due to the sandboxing (Flatpak/Snaps typically don’t have full system access, but “just enough” to get things working. You can manually configure the permissions though if you need to give an app more/specific permissions).
AUR has more packages that have been verified for arch than OpenSUSE has with Yast?
“packaged”, not “verified”, but yes being packaged for a particular distro usually implies that it works, but that’s not always the case. Btw, YaST is just a system config tool, not a repo. OpenSUSE’s default repos do indeed have fewer packages compared to AUR, but that’s an unfair comparison since the AUR isn’t even enabled by default on Arch, it’s something you’ll manually need to enable and even get a third-party package manager like yay/paru etc to access it. OpenSUSE also has third-party repos like Packman, and even an online Software Portal that can be used to search for and install package from several official and unofficial repos. So technically speaking you could probably find everything you need on OpenSUSE (it’s hard to get an exact package count to compare), but I guess it’s not as easy/convenient as simply using the AUR on Arch.
Nix (Nixpkgs) actually exceeds the AUR in the number of packages, according to this page.
And the nice thing about it is that you don’t even have to be on NixOS to use it - in fact, NixOS came much later. Nix started out as a distro-independent package manager, and can still be used that way, because Nix packages do not interfere with your system’s packages.
I’ve been using openSUSE for a while now and haven’t come across any software that was not available for it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a pretty good OS in my opinion.
Preferably for some kind of esoteric hardware that you own but no-one else has, but it’d also be a valuable experience to do it for some commonly used piece of hardware for which good Linux drivers already exist.
For any moderately talented programmer this should be a reasonably difficult exercise, which will teach you very valuable lessons about Linux (and be quite fun at the same time).
Debugging a kernel panic is not what most people consider “fun”. Especially with a non-zero chance of bricking your machine on bare metal if you mess up somewhere. I’ve done driver development for both Windows and Linux in both hobbyist and professional capacities and it’s not a fun experience to say the least.
I don’t think any distro supports the X1 Carbon better than Fedora. My previous work machine was a 6th gen, and Fedora worked great on there, including power management and suspend. The only thing that didn’t work was the fingerprint reader, but that has been resolved in more recent models. Starting with the 8th gen, Lenovo sells them with Fedora pre-installed.Lenovo works directly with the Fedora project to ensure their hardware works correctly. As others have mentioned, the most likely problem is something misconfigured that is stopping you from suspending. You could try updating the firmware and possibly resetting it to the defaults (although check through each setting to make sure nothing is set to be Windows-specific). You might also try a fresh install of Fedora to see if it was an OS-level misconfiguration.
P.S. There is no such thing as Fedora 38.5. The project only has major versions, not minor versions.
It would be the OS (in this context) that you use most often on a daily basis. When the OP logs onto their computer, they would be using Linux as opposed to Windows.
I think it’s a bleedover from car culture - you keep your fun car in the garage and have a second car that you’re okay with driving daily. Especially so during winter.
Even I wasn’t cruel enough to banish my mother to arch. She uses fedora on her desktop (because she liked gnome) and Linux mint on her laptop because I wanted her to make sure she still wanted to switch after trying it for about a month.
She wanted to jump head first but it would have been a pain to go through four installs if she didn’t like it.
I finally tried out Linux Mint this year at work (we use Fedora for some of our different tasks). It arms like such a nice experience out of the box, and I’d put it on a family computer in a second.
Indeed, besides most linux distributions are fairly equally lightweight and can be customized. I tried 4-5 distros this past January (Arch being one) when I got my new gaming laptop and they all booted in ~9.5 sec for example, and perform equally well in general, they had fairly similar RAM load with the same desktop environment.
Arch is about managing the system as a hobby, which is fine.
One problem here is that new users install Endeavour/Garuda but don't know how to manage updates safely about pacnew/pacsave/etc. So the system might slowly "rot" without them knowing about it because new components use old configs, etc..
I also recommend Mint to new users. I don't use Mint, nor do I use Arch.
Tbf I don’t think many people know about pacdiff. The way I found out about it was by looking up a warning about pacnew/pacsave during an upgrade, because I was bored. Very random.
As a Gentoo user currently vacationing in Arch-land I'm not sure whether to feel insulted or affirmed. Imean, it is but some might say that to disparage it or its users 😅
For me: Gentoo is a meta distro, you are the distro maintainer then the power user of that specific distro you created for yourself which can definitely be fun. Arch is more like: let’s give you one instance of a Gentoo distro when you are tired of being the distro maintainer.
As a seasoned distrohopper, can confirm. When I try something new, I always ask myself: Would a noob be ok with the fact that in this distro you have to do things this way. In Fedora, Debian, Manjaro and so many other I always end up saying “no” more than a few times. With Mint, you just don’t bump into these situations very often. IMO, Mint is the best starter distro for most users. If you know your friend is very technical, you can recommend something else.
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