Whatever you know best. My personal choice of distro is Gentoo, my gaming pc and my carry laptop both run it. My games run great in gentoo, and because I understand it best, I deal with few issues. For a long time it was Arch, and before that Ubuntu. I used Ubuntu for only maybe 2 months before moving onto Arch then Gentoo. My games always worked, but once I really understood Linux, they ran great.
To anyone wondering why, it is because it is Arch linux with pre-configured drivers and also it is one of the few distros that are on the bleeding edge of updates and features. Bleeding edge because one update might cut you and break everything for no reason. That being said, I've used Arch for almost a decade for my gaming PC and never had huge issues that reverting to the previous kernel at reboot did not fix.
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.
I mean in theory someone else might know the answer… I don’t want to bother the developers with every little problem. They are already busy making the software. I try to treat the developers with respect by reaching out to others for something like this. I do not know if there is a problem with the application. If someone else who uses the software would mention if they have this problem, or a different work style, or make a workaround. Possibly running the text through a script could do it? Maybe it is buried in one of the ambiguously named plugins.
I can’t speak for all developers, but personally I’d rather have a bug report that isn’t actually a bug, but rather a user error over nothing at all. Because that means that my expectation of how others might use a feature could be incorrect which is a bug to me - just not a programmatic bug.
Some developers may of course not be as of appreciative of it, but I’d say so long as you have a cursory look at their issue tracker and no one else has reported it, then I’d say its worth it.
OK I went to their tracker. Which jogs my memory even further on why I gave up on it and am unmotivated to open issues in this case.
Here is a similar but not exactly the same issue: Tool to Comentent lines fail and can be more elegant · Issue #3554 · geany/geany. I suspect my issue is probably related to theirs. The developer response is:
Since nobody has asked for this formatting before (@osergioabreu you did search for existing open or closed issues before you raised this didn’t you? 😁) users either don’t care because they only use it to temporarily comment out code and will remove it quickly, or they like it like that.
So if “somebody” made a pull request which made the formatting an option it likely would be accepted so both tastes are accommodated.
Or it was put in a plugin (if it isn’t in one already?)
If my request is unique they are not interested because if it was important someone would already have posed it. If it isn’t unique than it would be a duplicate anyway. Unlike my problem, this issue #3554 is a real bug. The feature simply fails to work even on its own logic because it produces comments in such a way that the application itself does not recognize as comments. So impossible to later uncomment!
They are basically open to PRs rather than suggestions. It isn’t just this particular case; it is the project as a a whole. It is a tool with a primary user base of developers so it is expected that many users will have the ability to do this. So-called “do-ocracy” I’ve heard described elsewhere. Which, fair enough, it is a FLOSS project and they have no responsibility to cater to me. I always am grateful for FLOSS developers and respect the right to runt heir project as they see fit. However I have no capacity to make a PR.
Like me this dev wonders if it is a plugin. Also like me doesn’t have a way of finding out because the plugins are poorly described.
Obviously we do not know each other but I will say that I have opened lots of issues like this in the past and will do so in the future. I don’t need a push to do it. That said, I appreciate the encouragement because for a long time I would never open issues and lots of people feel intimidated to do so. As I got more into FLOSS I came to understand that there is a sort of responsibility from users to give useful and constructive feedback to developers. And I have been blown away at how receptive developers are to my feedback, especially knowing that 90% of them are doing it on their own time. It really changes the way I look at commercial software when I have to use it at work. :) Where the relationship is transactional between my employer and the developers, rather than reciprocal between myself and the developers. My expectations are now so high based on FLOSS that commercial software seems so deficient. All that to say I understand what you are getting at.
However I have also learned to evaluate the project prior to engaging with it to determine if my contribution would be welcome. When I am not the target user of the project, I find I am often wasting everyone’s time. The target user of this project is programmers.
So in this case a forum post is more appropriate because the odds of a solution from the devs are like 1%. Maybe I will make an issue next time I’m logged in to github idk.
A forum is a good place to learn from other users about undocumented features, or maybe there is a plugin someone knows about. That would actually be helpful.
That’s plenty fair enough, and I apologize for not looking into their issues to see what their receptiveness was like - I originally replied while I was at work and my break was unfortunately coming to an end or else I probably would’ve caught that and not mentioned it, whoops!
In retrospect I should’ve known, I forgot that Geany is a GNOME project and… well, they have a bit of a reputation for uh… let’s just say that I myself am always hesitant to submit bug reports myself. It’s a tough one, because I try to play devil’s advocate on why they tend to be like that and had even commented yesterday on a video about GNOME devs always getting a lot of hostility. On one hand, there’s certainly a reason why they tend to have that response, but it’s still a bad sign when it starts to color their whole team since I know there are plenty of devs there who don’t have that sort of response.
Either way, I apologize if it came off pushy - it was definitely intended to be more on the encouragement side of things rather than a firm “you must do it!” so I hope that’s not how it translated to everyone else.
For what it’s worth, I still believe that what you’ve run into is a bug based on my own guidelines of “it doesn’t have to be a programatic bug and can wholly be a UX/expectation bug” - it doesn’t seem that this dev has the same methodology which don’t get me wrong, that’s plenty fair enough - but they could’ve replied a bit more gracefully because otherwise it causes this exact problem, not only for Geany, but the entire open source world.
Hi that is kind of you to reconsider. No offense taken or intended. :) It’s just that 3 people commented to tell me to make an issue as though asking a question about linux software was inappropriate. Whereas 0 people commented with anything about my question. I still wonder if I am doing commenting wrong somehow.
I am pretty sure I opened some kind of issue with these folks in the past and it was closed because I couldn’t submit a PR. I thought it was some sort of policy but I can’t find anything about it; either I am misremembering or whatever I read before is gone.
I really truly do not begrudge any devs for running their FLOSS projects how they feel is best for them. It takes all types to make up the world. I think on the whole it is better for the FLOSS community to be open to feedback even from those who aren’t able to provide a solution, in order that the needs of non-developers can be met. But when it comes to a project which is explicitly aimed at developers, idk what can I say? It’s probably better that people who prefer issues be in the form of PRs be creating tools for other developers rather than normy end users.
Plenty fair enough! I haven’t used Geany in a long time, and never actually ended up trying it as a code editor (rather than just the every once in a while one-off-quick-texr-editor) unfortunately, otherwise I’d have tried to answer your question directly.
I do think that it’s alright to only accept PRs, just so long as it’s made a bit more clear. If I ever ran into a problem with Geany, I’d be completely unable to do anything as I have very little experience with C, let alone GTK and all of the other libraries along with it. I could learn right to effectively flip a few values or even maybe try to correct a basic logic issue - but that’s about it.
That all being said, I hope someone is able to answer your question one way or another! Normally I’d recommend trying to reach out to the project’s chat since they usually have an IRC channel, Matrix channel, or some other place - but in this specific case after seeing the issues you mentioned I’d definitely be hesitant to do that sadly…
I can’t figure out how to setup flatpak. Everything seems to be working fine until I enter the last line in the terminal:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
Hard to help without logs or error messages. Maybe you could run the command with --verbose flag to see if it prints out something that might help?
I somehow set it up so that my username is not the super user, so I have to type a password in the terminal every time I want to use sudo. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
This is default behavior and probably shouldn't be changed. It's a good idea to set up your normal user without root privileges and it's a good idea to ask for authentication credentials whenever you need to elevate privileges.
I somehow set up the hard drive partitions so that the OS is on an encrypted partition, so I have to put in a password for the BIOS to boot up. Is there a way to fix this without a clean install?
Again, if you want encrypted disk, then this is actually good behavior, but in case you want to decrypt the disk without reinstall - it's possible, but not entirely simple or newbie friendly procedure, you need to know a bit about disk devices and mounting drives, for reference, see: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/60971/how-to-remove-luks-encryption
I’m used to a desktop interface with a toolbar/start menu that I can pin frequently-used programs to, but with Debian it seems like I need to click “Activities” to do anything. Is there a way to set up the interface so it’s more like Windows in that regard?
You can also tweak and change Gnome with addons and extensions to suit your needs - see https://extensions.gnome.org/
Is there any reason why I should stick with Debian? I’ve heard some people trashing Ubuntu but I’m not sure why. Is Debian better for older hardware?
The same linux kernel (in various versions) is running underneath all the distributions, so it's really just a matter of preference. Since you're new, hop around - try Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!, Fedora, Arch and everything else to see what you prefer.
I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that’s actually good advice.
The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.
Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.
I’m sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.
There is a way to recover it. You can use a root shell aka recovery shell (usually available through your GRUB menu) to change the permissions on your home directory. But just reinstalling was probably easier anyway.
Appreciate the good humor on your part! I’m just being a bit tongue in cheek but PSA: everyone should follow 3-2-1 backup protocol! You’ll never lose your data again!
3 backups
2 formats
1 off-site
So I recommend everyone get 2 decent HDD’s (2nd is clone of 1st) and 1TB of cloud storage. Most services are under $100/yr and let me tell you, you’ll want to spend 5x that to save half of what you lose without it. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to follow this system.
I may or may not have a OneDrive account that I was paying 2 bucks for but cancelled when it charged full price. I may actually have a lot of the important stuff on there!
Alas, none of the newer stuff like my upated password manager key and anything else after I ended my brief return to Windows.
c2d era laptop. first step if you haven't yet, swap the hdd for a low-cost sata ssd if you can. if you have some homeless sodimms, up the ram, too, if it won't cost anything to do it.
if you're going with mx, you want the fluxbox spin; or opt for antix with icewm instead.
otherwise start with a debian base install (no de or extra sw at install), then add only what you need. peppermint is another option--a basic debian with xfce out-of-the-box and little else. it's what i've been using lately on similar hardware.
for something 'different', you could look at slax.
It already has most of the Google stuff stripped out and any remaining parts will be easy to replace in comparison to rebuilding and maintaining a much larger software stack while also simultaneously retaining compatibility with all the android apps already on their app store.
They want to throw this OS on smart home/automative/IoT type things. Android works in these situations, but it’s not necessarily ideal. Thing was designed for phones. It’s likely the only phone firmware in history that’s also been put in cars, espresso makers, washer/dryers, microwaves, and TV’s.
I completely get why the first waves of smart devices tended to just use Android – it’s easy to develop on and “lightweight enough” that the tradeoffs involved were generally acceptable. But those qualities only take you so far. Companies moving on to develop their own in-house OS’s for all these devices was the obvious next step.
My desktop would crash back to login screen after playing mass effect legendary edition. After exiting the game, if the desktop idle for a while, the moment the automatic screen off kick in, the CPU fan would whirl and if I wiggle the mouse, the desktop would immediately crash back to the login screen. Not sure whose fault it is, nvidia 545, EA, wayland or gnome.
It won’t matter that much UNLESS a specific setting you might want is disabled such as virtualization.
Consider checking now if virtualization is enabled or disabled. If your BIOS settings are fairly permissive it isn’t that big of a deal. But if they are restrictive it can make it a pain in the ass to work around.
IMO, Honestly, at this point you probably arent going to miss much.
Youve presumably booted from an external device and installed an OS. I assume the time amd date are right.
Only question really is are you using efi or mbr boot method. If efi, you are probably fine and future proofed unless you want secure boot (windows) you may face an issue then. Thats not to say you will, just you might.
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Do you actually want to switch distros? Or just interested in what’s out there?
If Fedora 39 didn’t satisfy you, then what exactly is bothering you?
What is it that you seek from your distro? Being out of the way? Freedom? Polish? Blank slate? Security? Privacy? Ease-of-use? Up-to-date? Big repos? etc
I have distro-hopped before so i don’t mind switching
I need a distro which is package-agnostic since i use a lot of old ooen source academic software and they alternate between being only supported on RHEL or Ubuntu
Fedora 39 is great except when i need to build the above mentioned software from source and i spend 2 hrs failing to match the dependencies from Ubuntu
Also want to improvey laptop’s battery life, but i think i can’t get it much better than in Fedora
I need a distro which is package-agnostic since i use a lot of old ooen source academic software and they alternate between being only supported on RHEL or Ubuntu
Perhaps you should look into container solutions like e.g. Distrobox. You can basically install/run any package; just ensure usage of the correct container environment.
Fedora 39 is great except when i need to build the above mentioned software from source and i spend 2 hrs failing to match the dependencies from Ubuntu
If you’re otherwise content with Fedora, then perhaps consider installing the aforementioned Distrobox; which happens to be found within Fedora’s repos and thus one sudo dnf install distrobox away from being installed on your machine.
Also want to improvey laptop’s battery life, but i think i can’t get it much better than in Fedora
I’d argue that Fedora is not best for battery life, though. Minimalist distros tend to be a lot better at this. Installing auto-cpufreq in Fedora Silverblue on my AMD-powered laptop did come with significant improvements, so perhaps you could prolong your battery life by utilizing it or similar programs; think of TLP, thermald etc to name a few.
I looked into distrobox and checks all the boxes but there is the issue of my lack of storage space(currently only 130 GB left out of 240)
It can definitely fill up space if you’re not careful. Just ensure that only the minimal amount of containers and their respective images are on the system.
I would assume one container each for Ubuntu and Arch should suffice for most people. Sure; this will likely take up to 10 GB of extra storage in total (eventually), but foregoing this solution means that you’d likely have to settle for Arch (because of the AUR) or something like Gentoo (because no other distro does compiling and building from source like Gentoo does).
If you feel particularly adventurous, you could also consider Nix and/or NixOS; though you’d have to ensure that said packages are available as a nixpkg. Nix can also be installed on Fedora; consider Determinate Systems’ installer for that*.
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