Personally if it were me and gaming was my primary focus, I’d go to the place that’s doing the most with gaming and Linux, SteamOS.
There are lots of sites that go through the process of building a Linux gaming machine using SteamOS.
Here’s just one random video I found (not affiliated with this at all) about using an old optiplex from eBay, some ram upgrades, and a RX580 GPU. Apparently they did this for $150 but take that with a grain of salt. Hope this helps.
I know I am reviving an old thread, but my philosophy is that posts are timeless and age should not be a reason not to respond.
Currently I am in the project of learning Rust and Raku, because I am interested in becoming a better systems programmer and I want to be able to do things for my computer without hitting a wall when a solution does not exist, or simply to master my second home.
This is a mindset issue. There is a lot of legacy opinions on how to use your computer, but never forget it is YOUR computer. I say never worry about something being portable to others. What you make will be portable to you, and that is all that matters. Make your computer yours. If someone wants to use your computer but can’t, isn’t that a win?
Libertinus Serif (much nicer Times New Roman-ish serif text font. Huge amount of glyphs, open source font license, great to read on display and on print)
Lato (Sans font which imo compliments Libertinus Serif really good. More for short texts, headlines etc. I wouldn’t recommend it as a UI font. Also permissive font license.)
I have Ubuntu, inter and IBM Plex installed on my kde plasma install, but somehow I keep forgetting to set any of them and just keep the noto sans that comes default with KDE. lol
Engineering is very popular in India and computer programming is one of the courses that is common to all disciplines. Our professors recommended installing Linux.
A few years back, Dell would sell budget laptops with Ubuntu preloaded instead of Windows. Although I can’t find any right now.
Back around 2010s, in my state edu. board, we were taught about Ubuntu in high school and had Linux Mint installed in our school computers. Although the material was very shallow and designed short-shortsightedly, it helped introduce Linux and FOSS to lots of us.
Government departments are slowly ditching windows because everything they need to do can be done on Linux without malware attacks and every application screaming “buy me!” every time you open it.
Also educational institutions (at least in my State) do give basic Ubuntu training. I learned Gimp ,Inkscape and Libre office as part of my curriculum.
There is also the reduction of dependencies on non-democratic institutions for the government to function! The America first policy held by the US for a few years triggered a lot of planning from governments to increase their ability to sovereign from the states.
Because they are smarter than the West and less likely to use the biggest “scam” called Windows. Linux is also suitable for less modern computers and useful with excellent FOSS software.
India is a country with a huge population India is also a third world country where people. 1 computer is probably an years wages for most Indians. And alot of linux distros run well on older hardware same goes for eastern europe and africa or so I hear plus engineering is very popular over there as embed put it himself
Because it’s free. That’s the beauty of FOSS software. But only is it user freedom respecting but also often free of charge.
In third world countries like India where only a small percentage can afford a Windows licence, Linux can thrive. And once people see it can do anything that Windows can, and far better with no security concerns, plus they can modify and build upon Linux, they tend to adopt it with passion.
If you’re starting a business in India and have little money but need an OS to run your business, Linux can do that for you for free.
I suspect it is a combination of its being free, working well on older hardware, and the tech literacy in India.
Software development and engineering are important aspects of the Indian economy. Linux is arguably the best platform for that kind of work, especially in the cloud. Tech support of those kinds of systems require the same skills.
Given how well Linux runs on older machines, I consider low Linux penetration a hallmark of rich countries.
In my own household, Linux goes on all the older hardware ( including Macs ). That has really extended the length of time before hardware needs to be replaced. It also means that, over time, the percentage of active equipment using Linux has increased.
Linux is about protecting your freedom as a pc user. It means the software should always work for you, never against you, and you should have the right to inspect the code, modify it at will, and even sell it on or give it away for free
There are no licence fees, no tie in, and it runs faster on your pc then windows. It doesn’t spy on your nor force updates on you.
It should run on most computers but occasionally you may have to install additional WiFi or graphics card drivers but it’s not that common anymore.
You should definitely test it first, and try do everything you do on Windows, on Linux. To do this you can either install it alongside Windows or on a separate test pc or Intel it in a virtual machine on your pc
You can also use a live usb which lets you see it in action running off a usb stick but you can’t install additional software so it’s a limited experience.
I unequivocally recommend Linux Mint over any other Linux. I’ve seen the other comments but this is by far the best best Linux distro and the one you’ll feel most comfortable on. There are other advantages as well but you’ll learn that.
In both cases you’ll need to download the deb file to install it. Deb files are like exe but for Debian and Ubuntu based Linux, think Mint is. They are the most widely available format.
I wouldn’t bother with the built in Libre Office as it’s not quite there yet. OnlyOffice can also do some PDF handling as well. You typically won’t find free PDF software for Linux as it’s proprietary software and companies like OnlyOffice likely pay Adobe some licencing fees to offer PDF edit functionality.
It might sound difficult but it’s not, especially if you enjoy computers. If not, ask an IT or nerd friend you might have for help.
Upgrading/tinkering doesn’t void your warranty. Explicitly.
And their customer service is top notch. I thought I bricked my gazelle when I upgraded the memory, but their customer service walked me through how to fix it - didn’t even bat an eye.
Upgrading/tinkering doesn’t void your warranty. Explicitly.
This is generally true with everything in the USA (covered by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act) even though companies are sketchy about it and try to convince people that it’ll void their warranty. The manufacturer has to prove that your upgraded part was the direct cause of the issue you’re trying to claim under warranty.
I did not know that - my point is that system76 is not at all sketchy about it. They actively encourage tinkering, make it clear that you won’t void your warranty, and have extensive technical documentation to explain how to do upgrades etc
i can’t get over how much more they cost than a similarly spec’ed mac with macs being superior in every single benchmark (except privacy and customizability)
Mac are only competitive on the smallest configuration, as you start to add the same options to each the Mac pricing goes through the roof while this one’s price will only increase by a bit.
I’m curious. What do you prefer, some larger res with resolution scaling? How’s the scaling situation on DEs/WMs nowadays? Last I tried it, it was pretty abysmal. Admittedly it was years ago, but it used to be that mixed scaling wasn’t possible, so if my laptop was higher DPI and needed scaling, I’d need to run any external monitor with display scaling as well. I’ve avoided high DPI/display scaling on purpose for a while at this point because of it, and tend to prioritize usable pixel real estate.
That’s the odd part. I run Pop!_OS on a ThinkPad with a 4K touch screen at 175% scaling and it looks beautiful. The scaling on the DE is superb. I don’t understand why they don’t offer a HiDPI option on their laptops.
And it works fine with multiple monitors at different scaling ratios, or does it scale them all the same? That’s the actual part that didn’t work correctly for me, back then.
Also a great way to get more performance and increase battery life. On a laptop, most folks would be hard pressed to see the difference between 1080p and a higher resolution.
I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on a Dell XPS 13 9360 with a 3300x1800 13" screen and Wayland, and it works fine. There was one application (Sublime Merge) where I had to edit some scaling configuration settings, and there’s one tray-based tool (Jetbrains Toolbox) that comes up tiny, but for everything else the global scaling setting in KDE has done a fine job. It also handles dual monitors with different resolutions.
I don’t like 1080 screens because small text becomes unreadable more quickly on them. It’s less of an issue with a small screen, but it still counts against a machine for me.
Whatever works for you haha. Admittedly, I’m the kind of guy that’s running a 34" ultra wide + two 22" monitors on top, and is looking at replacing them with a single 42-43" 4k monitor right now just to have the equivalent of a bezelless 2x2 grid of 21" monitors lol. And they’re all budget/business monitors. So I may not be a reference on display quality… I’m obsessed with having tons of things on screen at once. The ADHD object permanence issues (“out of sight, out of mind” is my default state) might have something to do with it…
I’ll have to check it out again then, if display scaling got better since.
The awful screen is one big reason I don’t use my System76 laptop more often. It’s the worst laptop screen I’ve ever seen, has terrible light bleed, and has a pink tint. And this is the warranty replacement they tried to charge me for. The first one had the same awful screen, but kept freezing on me randomly.
And the damn thing STILL has hardware features that only work on Windows 10, five years later (like multi-finger trackpad gestures). I’ll take System76 seriously when they start putting good screens in their laptops and get rid of nvidia.
Great. I’m not using a Dell. I have a laptop from a company that supposedly supports Linux first. A company I will not be buying anything from in the future either.
I’d always argue for Linux Mint Debian Edition, especially for noobs. Regular Mint is fine too, but they have not announced its future as far as I know. What with Ubuntu going all in on snaps and all that. Personally I think they should just make LMDE the default Mint and call it a day. Let Mint 21.3 be the last version and then go all in on the debian base.
Thanks for the reply. What’s weird is that I’ve done what the endeavouros forums said (and, looking through them, they did similar steps as the ones outlined on the archwiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#Preserve_video_memory_after_suspend and I still get that black frozen screen with just a cursor. I’m guessing this is exclusively NVIDIA’s fault… or KDE’s as I never had this problem on GNOME. Thanks anyhow
I've noticed a lot number of questions on reddit/etc. suddenly gets asked in that way ("why" in front of a statement). As an ESL I was confused for a while because I've been drilled in asking questions using auxiliary verbs.
I blame explanatory headlines. If you searched “why does [blank] happen?” you’d get articles like “why [blank] happens.” ESL speakers (and under-educated native speakers) bungle the difference. (They’re already trying to solve some technical crap. Their [blank] stopped working.) As this spreads, reddit and Stack Overflow start displacing tech-support blogs, and suddenly the headlines themselves are wrong.
From a recovering distro-hopping addict, there’s two ways to dip your toes in to the various Linux experiences:
When you install your distro, partition a separate /home folder that is distinct from your root and boot partitions. There are many good walkthroughs on YouTube on doing this process, it’s fairly simple. Once you do that you can keep your home folder intact as you install different distros over the top. Just make sure to mark you /home folder each time and don’t format it during install.
Like another commenter said, try distrobox. It will allow you to test out the various distro bases pretty conveniently. Another similar option is learning how to set up virtual machines. Again, sounds more difficult than it is. There’s many good videos that walk you through the process.
Aside from the mechanics of testing out different options, I would recommend KDE as a desktop environment. Cinnamon and Gnome are both flexible, but do feel more restricting than I like. You can customize nearly every element of KDE, I really like it.
Really, most distros are fairly similar, aside from using different package managers and having different sets of software pre-installed. The desktop environment is where you’ll experience the most user facing differences.
If you like to tinker, make your way over to an arch based distro at some point. I’ve really enjoyed endeavourOS, but you will need to mess with config files to get your printer working and things like that.
This screenshot is the only metric where btrfs is incredibly slow.
Bcachefs random and sequential writes and reads are much slower than other filesystems in this benchmark.
I have no idea how the actual real world performance will be. Bcachefs still misses a lot of features so I’ll continue to follow the development, hopefully including performance improvements.
Bcachefs sequential write performance in this out-of-the-box comparison was coming in at around half the speed of Btrfs while XFS, F2FS, and EXT4 were the fastest.
Wait, so the benchmarks mostly contradict claims that bcachefs is almost as fast as ext4 except in application startup time? What kind of test performed for that application startup time benchmark?
Note that in this benchmark, bcachefs had a debug variable turned on that allegedly severely hampered performance. Bcachefs has released an update to disable this variable but Phoronix hasn’t redone benchmarks yet. I wouldn’t put much value into any bcachefs-related comparisons from this current benchmark.
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