I still wish the Solus team all the success, but this has genuinely been exhausting. First they plan a switch to Qt6, then abandon it for GTK. Then that became too opinionated, so they switched plans for Enlightment and their stack. I’d rather see them commit to something, and just finish it, but Josh doesn’t like to do business like that
May have been. Point is that Solus and Budgie, whether separate or united again, are in a perpetually unfinished and undecided upon state, to the point where Solus almost died entirely recently
Really trying to understand what “meh” means in terms of office software.
They all are kinda meh. I dont get overly excited with office stuff do you?
Over the years I have used both Libre and ms office. Some use cases were so much better with Libre. Now days it’s kind of a wash really. You write words or you calculate cells. If you are calculating any large amount of cells do your self a favor and get it into a database.
And if it’s a presentation, reveal.js is miles better than PowerPoint.
The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn't Windows. Don't expect things to works the same.
Don't try too hard to re-configure things that don't match the way things are on Windows. If there isn't an easy way to get a certain behavior, there's probably a reason for it.
Why don’t you install flatpak on Ubuntu, make the packaging migration before doing the OS migration so you can evaluate your workflow with the new packaging system? Afer you’re used and confident with flatpak, backup and restore the flatpak folder into fedora and you transition should be smoother (don’t need to worry with 2 stuff at the same time)
Why not use a live ISO version of something and boot it from a USB, if you need a full set of network troubleshooting tools, the Kali Linux Everything ISO for example will definitely have everything.
Don’t forget your passwords and bookmarks stored in browser when doing the copy over.
Personally, I’d use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) because it’s a default option on the Fedora installer and is more secure, and well-tested, and easier to configure.
For your planned installables, I’d keep a list of apps you regularly install in a file somewhere (even better would be a script which installs them all) then when you distro-hop it’s easier as you can just change your script for whatever package manager.
Some of your apps will store their configuration in your home directory in a dot file, you might be able to copy these over one-by-one for each app.
Have you decided on Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue? Each have their merits and demerits, and its worth investigating.
Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.
I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.
I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak
Mint Cinnamon user praising it in the comments, on the case!
I switched to Linux in the earlier days of Windows 8.1. Mint was the second distro I tried out after Ubuntu Unity, and it’s still my daily driver ten years later. Cinnamon felt more familiar to me An XP-Vista-7 veteran, than Win 8.1 and 10. Mint feels like someone sat down and designed the whole thing, rather than slapping layer after layer of new crap on top of the same code from the late 90’s.
Out of the box Mint is very usable, the customization I do to it is stuff like change the wallpaper and default color scheme.
The Cinnamon team just gets me. They make software for people like me.
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.
It’s a bit of an unpopular opinion, but if you pick a mainstream distro there isn’t a lot of difference between them. Especially to somebody who is new to linux.
With most any distro you can use KDE, gnome and other desktop environments. You can pick which one you want to use when you login. So don’t think you’re tying yourself to KDE if you install kubuntu or something.
If you want an easy way to switch to a new distro make sure you create a separate partition for /home. Then if/when you want to install something new you can have it overwrite everything except your home directory. So all your steam configs and games will be left untouched (for example). Alternatively just backup /home somewhere and restore as you need.
Is a home directory similar to the users folder in windows, or like the program files folder? Is it ‘everything but the OS’? I’m still trying to get a grasp on how the OS operates conceptually.
Yeah - the home directory in Linux pre-dates the windows Users directory by a long time. You’ll see the multi-user nature of your OS exposed much more in Linux than you will in Windows.
Every user will have a /home/username directory on Linux (often referenced by “~” or by the environment variable “$HOME”). By default this is the only directory that user will have any permissions to create things (with some exceptions like /tmp which is used for temporary file creation - but nothing long-term). So all of your configuration, user-created files, etc. will be created there.
Configurations are often stored in ‘dot-files’ or in directories that begin with a period. These are “hidden” by default with most file-browsing tools (it’s just a tradition - there’s nothing otherwise special about files or directories that begin with a period). So you’ll have a .bashrc which is the script that runs when you start a bash shell for example. Or .local which is where you will find a lot of application configurations these days.
So if you copy /home/username somewhere you will copy all of your configurations.
Some applications will install there as well. Steam, for example, will install your programs under $HOME/.steam.
Things you install “system-wide” will be installed to /usr/bin or /bin. This will typically be things that you use a package manager to install. So the steam application may be /usr/bin/steam but then all of its configurations, installed apps, etc. go in your home dir.
If you’re curious where a command lives you can use which cmd or type cmd from the command-line and it will show you (something I often wish Windows had).
NOTE: There are exceptions to everything I’ve said above. But those are the “general” guidelines. In short - if you installed it without needing root permissions it’s likely somewhere in $HOME.
If you’re curious where a command lives you can use which cmd or type cmd from the command-line and it will show you (something I often wish Windows had).
A command can ‘live’ in different places? And this might be a dumb question…but what is a command in this context?
This is the actually the thing same as Windows - in Linux you’ve got the which command, and it’s equivalent is where in Windows. Both do the same thing - find out where a program lives.
OP meant a “program” in this context. Both Linux and Windows have specific paths where programs typically lives. For example, in Windows, if you type “notepad” in a command prompt or the ‘Run’ dialog, it’ll search for it in known system paths such as C:Windows, C:Windowssystem32 etc. These paths are declared in the PATH environment variable - which you may have encountered when certain applications try to (or ask you to) add their program folder to the PATH, such as say Java or Python. If a program is added to the PATH, typing ‘java’ or ‘python’ from anywhere will automatically launch it, so you don’t need to specify the full path or the program.
Now whilst this is convenient, sometimes it can cause unwanted issues. For example, say you installed some other program that uses a specific version of Java or Python, and it installed that version in your system, and added that folder to the PATH - now when you type java or python in a command prompt, you wouldn’t know which version you’re executing. This is what OP meant by a program living in multiple places. As you can imagine, this can now cause issues, and can even break some scripts expecting a particular version of Java/Python etc and some other version is being picked up. This is where the where command in Windows comes in handy, as it tells you where exactly that program is located. And it’s Linux equivalent is which.
So at least in this department, the behavior of Windows and Linux is virtually identical. :)
The home directory is like the Windows users directory, yes.
In the shell/terminal it’s represented by ~ or $HOME, it’s path is likely /home/$USER/
First / = Root $USER = current user account you’re using.
You should check out this Arch Wiki page & this Arch man page.
Don’t worry it’s pretty distro agnostic.
Essentially, yeah. Most programs will install to your root directory, but all your personal configs and personal files will be in your home directory.
What I’d personally recommend is using Timeshift to automatically keep backups if your home directory on a separate partition, then if you want to switch distros or if you need to reinstall for whatever reason you can use Timeshift to restore your home directory pretty easily, as long as your new install uses the same file system.
Timeshift was designed for system snapshots not home files. You can force it to cover home but it’s better to use BackInTime which was designed specifically for home snapshots.
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is an awesome distro with up to date packages. KDE is also a great choice, especially with Plasma 6.0 around the corner.
I wouldn’t worry too much about Nvidia drivers, just follow OpenSUSE’s guide [1]. The remaining issues of Nvidia with KDE Wayland are getting fixed over the coming months.
Edit: OpenSUSE can’t ship some codecs by default for legal reasons (like RedHat, Fedora), but makes it simple to enable them (optionally through graphical YaST) [2].
I’m currently using LMDE on Thinkpad W530 for work. Pretty much stationary, with second monitor and all. I got a more mobile X230 with 9 cell battery (same OS) for when I need to be on the move.
That i7 on the W540 would be very useful if you want to have good compilation time for your system.
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