It’s obviously not representative of the overall Linux experience but I recently realised that messing around on the Linux bits in ChromeOS would be a pretty good way to learn Terminal things, at least for Debian. It’s sandboxed so it doesn’t matter if you screw up and if you do it’s like two or three clicks to start afresh, way simpler than setting up and resetting a standard VM for the inexperienced. It, of course, means using a ChromeOS device but maybe that can be a secondary lesson on having megacorps profit from your data.
I used to use xfce quite a lot (very lightweight and great for anything virtual, especially). I recently installed the latest Ubuntu with gnome. It’s actually pretty good, but… Oh man do I ever wish that top notification bar could be merged with the task bar (and relocated to the bottom). Also, the extensions designed to auto-hide it no longer work!
My reflex action to close a window is to mouse up to the corner of the screen and click. This is ineffective if there’s an immovable top bar there in the way and taking up limited screen real estate.
I’d switch to KDE (or Sway, or…?) , but they don’t have a Wayland RDP server… yet. (I use this.)
Anyway, give it a try. Gnome is okay when you get used to it, but my impression is that it seems to resist flexibility for its users, and this is quite sad, actually. (I’m still using it, and I’m eager to be wrong here.)
My kids only know Linux and have never seen Windows in their life before. They know their way around KDE just fine and get the stuff done they need. For gaming, it is steam with proton but mostly they game on consoles.
I preordered on announcement day, I expect it’ll arrive December. I am excited for it to replace my 12" iPad pro. The 3:2 screen is perfect for reading and office app work.
Some stuff related to madaidan I wrote and compiled a couple years ago.
i.imgur.com/FiYhbkk.jpg: madaidan being very 4chan-y in terms of blaming the computer language for problems in particular software code (in this case Linux kernel), while dismissing everything when it comes to Windows. His blog page about Linux is a massive piece of “toilet paper” repeatedly debunked at this point. If you think the phrase “toilet paper” is mine, come, have a look.
TL;DR his blog has been dismissed enough at this point to consider it nothing more than digital rag. Security zealots are dangerous to FOSS community, like Brad Spengler/grsecurity, madaidan, GrapheneOS and so on. You can identify them as Big Tech security evangelists trying to shit on FOSS with arguments I would say do not end up being very intelligent and academic, and more reactionary and flakey.
Also a little note on security. You do not need as much security as much as you need privacy, freedom and anonymity. Security is variable, it only buys you the time against attacker, and is the least priority among these 4 things in computing.
You could likely use dd or clonezilla to create a duplicate of your boot drive and boot your laptop right from that, but that’s not quite what you’re after.
There are some distros lately that use a declarative config file to set the whole thing up that I think is much more what you have in mind. The big ones that come up a lot are nixOS and Fedora Silverblue. Maybe one of those systems would be to your liking.
dd duplicates directories. It’s a terminal app. Built into all Linux distros. For more details, do a man dd in a terminal session. Clonezilla is a distro that runs a live system from USB or DVD which lets you backup and restore entire systems. Both are powerful, but have a learning curve.
I’m not an expert in Linux, but I’ve been using it for more than 20 years. I used to be plagued by this issue, but since online services have matured, I’ve got most of my stuff synced up. That, and my NAS and an external drive for backups. I do have a few thoughts, though.
One, I believe you can simply copy your /home directory and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install. This strikes me as a limiting option, as it doesn’t allow you to distro hop, at least not seamlessly. Also, get an external drive for backups. I use Deja Dup for simple, easy backups and restorations.
Two, I would suggest you investigate either Fedora (getfedora.org) or Pop_OS! (pop.system76.com) as an alternative. Fedora is based on Red Hat, which is very mature, but strikes a nice balance between the latest software and reliability. Pop_OS! is Debian-based, which is also a very well matured OS, though System76 has made some major improvements. I use their Pop Shell extension for GNOME on Fedora 39 for window tiling, easily the best I’ve used on any Linux distro. Regardless, almost any other distro should be easier to get going over Arch. Sorry, Arch users ;)
Three, if you really don’t want to leave Arch, check out Manjaro. It’s Arch-based, but it’s quite a bit easier to set up.
Four, if you’d still like to try borking things, but without facing consequences, I’d set up a local VM using Boxes for GNOME or VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org). That way you can test stuff without risking your functional system. Boxes is better, IMO, since it can install distros from the app itself. The list has at least 100 distros of all types to choose from, including Haiku and FreeBSD. It would be good, however, if you have at least 16GBs of RAM, though I generally run VMs with 4GBs of RAM, Linux can run fine with 2GBs.
tbh I bearly have experience in any distro, but Arch didn’t pose that much of a challange. I might switch, but I really don’t see the advantage I’d get. Maybe to Debian, I used it’s terminal. But, great Idea to mess around in VMs first!
Can you explain this step:
and restore your OS settings by restoring it to a new install.
I’m utterly useless with base arch 🤣 If it works for you, who’m I to complain 👍
I guess I should have made that clear. Your /home directory is where everything user-related is stored in invisible folders. All your settings for the OS and applications are kept in there. So, if you copy that directory and restore it to a fresh install of the same distro, all of your settings will be restored. It’s been years, but I’ve done it a few times.
The only thing you’ll really need to do after that is re-install all of the apps you installed. Once you have, however, every apps settings are restored.
Thank you. You wrote so much that I checked out your profile, I just wanna say: Enjoy your time on Lemmy! And that I am honored to have more then half of your all time comments be answers to me.
I love Linux Mint, and always used cinnamon. I Loath the gnome experience, and XFCE has always struck me as too old feeling and sparse. Currently I use EndeavourOS with KDE Plasma and I couldn’t be happier.
If you’d like to try out KDE but don’t want to move away from a more stable experience to an Arch based distro, I can recommend MX Linux. It’s based on Debian stable instead of Ubuntu, and has a KDE plasma spin.
Then it should be easy to create a script that install all that automaticcally. If your are cautious you should have a backup of your home anyway on some storage device .
.config stores many apps settings. But unfortunately some apps stores that directly in ~ as hidden files and directories. Personnally I make a backup of my whole home.
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