I think the teams that are responsible for bringing proper HDR support are moving slow and waiting for HDR to get its shit together, as right now it’s a poorly standardized dumpster fire of various protocols and definitions and implementations. It’s still a bit of a pain in windows and macos despite the fact that official support exists already.
I had been trying out Linux and finally decided to install it to my ssd. The timing ended up such that I got the wifi issues on the new install but not my old one, and they basically make the OS unusable. I didn’t realise any of this and am new so did heaps of reinstalling and searching trying to figure out what had gone wrong since it was all fine when it was installed on my HDD.
I finally found some forum posts and bug reports about this after wasting a day assuming it was something I’d done wrong 😂.
Gonna stick to lts kernel from now on I think. 6.6.6 seemed pretty fitting to me, even if it was 6.6.5 that actually broke it.
And again, a distro chooser guide that completely fails to mention OpenSUSE, despite being a full-featured desktop OS supported by the second biggest corporation in the Linux world (behind Red Hat), with a history that goes back longer than Debian’s.
They didn’t include my distro of choice (Gentoo) or my desktop environment (TDE) . . . but I’m not surprised. Lists like this aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and they always reflect the author’s biases and what they’ve been exposed to. Not including someone else’s favourites doesn’t make them bad lists for the purpose they’re intended to serve.
Probably the best way to deal with newbie choice paralysis is a big flowchart, or a questionaire: "Which of these are important to you: ‘just works’ - stability - customizability - organizational transparency - keeping up with the bleeding edge - . . . "
Gentoo is a bad choice for a generic newb, yes, but I would say that Arch is too.
TDE wouldn’t necessarily be a bad choice for first-timers if any distro of significance preinstalled it, but the extra installation work pretty much wipes out the user-friendliness it might offer, alas.
For me, the fact that Chris Titus basically said “the opensuse installer is better” is, I think, more praise than OpenSUSE has receive in years , but far less than it deserves. Honestly, the only issue I had with Tumbleweed was the notoriously slow package manager. I think it’s the only package manager slower than dnf, and even installing apps by appending them to configuration.nix (if you so choose) on NixOS felt far faster than using zypper. I really like Yast, though.
Sorry, the goal here was to offer a few sensible alternatives, not overwhelm the reader with choices. The gist here is “start with something solid, reputable and popular, branch out later”.
Too much choices lead to analysis paralysis, and to goal here is to learn how to swim first. There are dozens of great distros, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list, as there are dozens of great DEs, probably more than half of that worthy to be on this list.
Then why even mention arch? Especially a guide claiming to be for beginners? Using your own metaphor, that’s like teaching someone to swim by tossing them into a shark infested reef.
Because most people getting interested in Linux have heard of Arch, and might think “well there is a very vocal community of Arch users, this might be a great place to start”.
Starting a new business is hard enough as it is - please do not complicated it by adding in something that brings limited tangible benefits to the company, whilst making it unnecessarily harder than what it will be anyway.
Either get fluent now, and then start your business - or start your business with Windows and move on when you’re profitable and can afford the reduction in productively while you learn the ropes.
Do not go anywhere near MacOS - you can’t afford it.
First off, I love Linux. It’s my daily driver and I wouldn’t want to use anything else.
But in my past career I was the CIO at a very large firm. Lawyers need Microsoft Office and Windows. If you hire a good assistant or paralegal with word processing experience, they are going to need Microsoft Word. LibreOffice is good, but it’s not a replacement in this scenario. Good word processors are like wizards and will save you hours. It’s not worth it to make them learn something else.
Then there’s drafting software, templating, practice-specific tools, etc. Anything geared for legal is going to run on Windows. What are you using for time entry? What about accounting?
Not to mention, you have some information security obligations under the model rules and you don’t want to mess with that. Although Linux has security advantages over Windows, you still have to take measures to secure it. Maybe that’s easy enough for you to do on your own laptop, but your practice will grow to at least a few staff and an associate. Somebody has to do IT because you’re sure as hell not going to waste billable hours on it.
I had to use Windows in that old gig and it really wasn’t bad. It’s stable, reliable, easy to support. Everyone you hire will have used it before. It’s an unpopular opinion around here, but it’s a quality operating system that’s affordable. I guarantee your cost of ownership will be lower on Windows in your particular situation.
You can use Fuse to encrypt files on the fly using a wide assortment of schemas. The trick is to make it available at the right time to all the desktop apps (as the environment is starting up).
All of this is available already, for example I’m encrypting the files I sync to Dropbox and I mount the decrypted version to a dir on my desktop on startup. It’s not the entire home dir but you get the idea. It’s just gonna need some polish to become really smooth and user friendly.
Im most interested in encrypted homedirs for servers. Since all my collegues are to lazy to use encrypted ssh keys, i hoped that systemd-homed makes it possible to secure them from the root user.
Is systemd-homed already useable for such usecase? If gnome will do the same for desktops, that would be a big plus, thinking about firefox profiles and such. Hopefully also using pam or kerberos for decryption.
Lenovo/Thinkpad will certify certain models for use with Linux, other brands sell Linux laptops. Those are obviously good indicators that those models should be safe to choose. More generally, the more popular a model is, and the longer it’s been on the market the more likely they are to be compatible, just because they are in people’s hands and people tinker with them and add stuff to the Linux Kernel. So stay away from the latest model that is uncertified, and don’t choose the flashy, overpriced model that will see poor sales.
I second this. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad Carbon X1 for work after the Dell I had originally got straight up refused to sleep. I would put it to sleep manually, close the screen and when fully closed the screen would turn back on. Also, it refused to charge properly so I just left it plugged in 24/7. One day it became unplugged and then refused to turn on at all.
I’ve been running Fedora for about 2 years on it and the only issue I’ve had that I can’t fix is the fingerprint reader doesn’t work in SDDM/KDE for unlocking stuff. Fprintd recognizes it and I can enroll fingerprints, it just doesn’t work with KDE for some reason.
The fingerprint reader on mine doesn’t work either. I’ve read up on solutions for that regards Debian but I haven’t tried any yet. I have a yubikey and that works fine as an extra layer of login security.
I wanted the fingerprint reader to work just because it’s easier than typing a password, using something like a YubiKey is the complete opposite unless you keep it plugged into the device 24/7, and then it really no longer serves its original purpose.
Yeah, unfortunately it looks like the reader on the X1 is a special case. Thankfully, this isn’t an issue with my Z13 - the reader itself worked out-of-the-box, just had to enroll my fingerprint from the Settings menu and then added fprintd to my pam.d rules.
Wonderful to know! thanks alot. I have heard alot of good about linux and thinkpads but only up to a certain generation I think? What about HP? my computer repair guy swears by HP but I honestly know nothing about HP and never hear people talk about HP either.
HP consumer products are literal garbage. The only good thing that comes out of HP is their commercial server equipment.
Lenovo won’t let you down for Linux. I’ve run Linux on thinkpads for years, multiple generations. I used to work at IBM, so I had em for work. Rock solid machines, I still run with them today (just the newer generations).
What about HP business grade stuff? thats what ive heard good about. Also any idea on other IBM equipment than their old thinkpads? I have no clue about nowaday IBM but am curious.
I have a lenovo thinkbook (cheapy thinkpad) for work with AMD chip and gpu. It wasn’t one of their models certified for linux but everything runs flawlessly for a lean debian build for me. I’ve had linux on several laptops and this is my second machine with AMD chips, and I’ll say that what you hear is true; There are way more, and better, drivers available for AMD if you go with linux.
I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.
Unless its NixOS or something like silver blue or QubesOS they’re all basically the same. If you want to mess about try some different ones in a VM or on a live CD or USB. That way you still have your daily driver working when you need it
I started with linux begin 2019. I just use xorg so I don’t know about wayland problems. I think a long time ago nvidia broke once and I switched to nvidia-dkms and it has worked fine since until recently where a mesa update broke xorg but I don’t think that has to do with nvidia. Getting CUDA to work might be trouble though (I think I briefly tried once).
Another problem is that most manufacturers of laptops directed at the Linux crowd, for some reason I will never understand, insist on punching Nvidia hardware instead of AMD/ATI. How does that help?
Unfortunately for those of us that use Cuda features, AMD just really isn’t that viable of an alternative. Anyone who’s had to deal with ROCM can attest to this…
linux
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.