RAM is the kind of thing you’re better off having too much than not enough. Worst case the OS ends up with a very healthy and large file cache, which frees up your storage and makes things a bit faster/lets it spend the CPU on other things. If anything, your machine is future proofed against the ever increasing RAM hungriness of web apps. But if you run out of it, you get apps killed, hangs or major slowdowns as it hits the swap.
The thing with RAM is that it’s easy for 99% of your workload to fit comfortably, and then there’s one thing you temporarily need a bit more and you’re screwed. My machine usually uses 8-12/32GB of RAM but yet I still ended up needing to add swap to my machine. Just opening up the Lemmy source code and spinning up the Rust LSP can use a solid 8+GB alone. I’ve compiled some AUR packages that needed more than 16GB of RAM. I have 16 cores so compiling anything with -j32 can very quickly bring down a machine to its knees even if each compile thread is only using like 256-512MB each.
Another example: my netbook has 8GB. 99% of the time it’s fine, because it’s a web browsing machine, and I probably average on 4GB usage on a heavy day with lots of tabs open. But if I open up VSCode and use any LSP be it TypeScript or Rust, the machine immediately starts swapping aggressively. I had to log out of my graphical session to compile Lemmy, barely.
RAM is cheap enough these days it’s nice to have more than you need to not ever have to worry about it.
I have 64GB as future proofing (ITX board, two slots, can’t address any more). Normally I probably use 8 to 10 of those doing things like gaming and hoarding internet tabs like they’re a nonrenewable resource. I actually managed to crash my machine with an out of memory condition compiling something a while back. I don’t remember what and I’m sure it doesn’t count as regular use but I installed ZRAM to prevent it from happening again.
Heh. “Guy” has some interesting history. It originally referred to Guy Fawkes, because that was his name. Then it came to mean any person, gender neutral, then it became any man, now gendered, but the neutral definition never went away, so we have both meanings floating around still, but the original meaning, an effigy of Guy Fawkes, died.
(I skipped a few steps in there because they’re not relevant between guy Fawkes and any person)
I genuinely tried Gnome and started to like it but a very minor update broke all of my QoL extensions and only 1/8th of them were updated. It’s lacking so many features that it’s just a bad DE all around : snapping windows in quarters anyone ? Why isn’t it already an option ? GNOME devs need to touch grass and listen to the actual users.
Gnome devs will never listen to criticism. Even if you do a MR it might get denied because it contraricts with the “Gnome way”. Just use KDE and live an happy life. KDE can be easily modified to look like Gnome and have all the QOLs you need.
GNOME devs need to touch grass and listen to the actual users.
I totally agree. However, interacting with any gnome devs is like pulling teeth. They keep making bad decisions to be ‘different’ and make their jobs easier, then when those decisions turn out to be bad they have to walk them back but never admit fault.
Being able to move the dock is fine example of this.
It’s like they want Apple’s lack of customization but can’t provide a competitive default (because they suck at their jobs.)
Lol, how does this change the fact their work stinks? Maybe if they didn’t suck at designing the hate would stop? Nah, guilt trip the users instead, that’ll fix it. Free crap is still crap, and pointing it out isn’t a sin. If the devs can’t deal with that, maybe they should go home and cry about it instead of further shitting up the code.
Devs don’t owe users anything? Guess what, users don’t owe devs shit either. If they don’t like criticism, tough tittys, cause shit code will be criticized, which is why Gnome is still considered a joke.
To be fair the extension developers were given quite a while to update their extensions to use JavaScript modules instead of the custom GNOME solution. This was actually a change for the better and unlikely to happen again which should make extension development easier. As for better tiling look up their mosaic thing which was announced a while ago, though I’m unsure as to how soon that will come out.
Also try to remember that GNOME is developed mostly by volunteers who frankly owe you nothing
why does that make you concerned?? I hope you are ok!! I like all software and I love Linux but in the end I love technology and what matters is that I promote software friendship!! Available for everyone!!
Oh you’re young, sorry for the offensive wording. I saw you’re programming and trying technology out - good on you! I hope you’ll never lose your excitement about technology.
It’s quite a political thing, but I am sure you’ll find your way around it.
I know everything about the current status of open source, I’ve read about Richard Stallman, about how he dislikes the word open source, but what we need to understand is that all software can be nice, nya!! And it’s ok I forgive you meow.
My big question would be why are you starting with a dual boot? I would recommend trying each one with a liveUSB or in a virtual machine and simply do a single boot with the one you like better. There’s likely little need for you to actually maintain two distros unless you have a very niche use case that one distro can’t solve.
My advice would be to just relax and realize that the underlying OS is 90% the same regardless of what distro you choose. All the discussion you see on different distros, package managers, snaps, wayland, etc. are all the other 10%. It really doesn’t matter what distro you start on as long as it’s a general purpose distro (both of the ones in your OP are): once you learn the first 90% of linux, you’ll develop your own tastes, and then you’ll be able to decide on the remaining 10%.
That’s an even worse idea imo. If you’re not very familiar with bcd and grub you will find it hard to boot into Linux once windows decides to “fix the boot issue”.
Better to have a separate drive so you can select by picking boot device on startup.
I know it’s possible to dual boot, but it will be some issues at some point
I have an SSD I’m using for windows and a separate one that I want to install Linux on. I want the ability to remove one of them and keep using the other. From what I understand I can set the BIOS boot order to load Linux first and use the Grub to select which OS to boot?
I realize now I should have been way more specific with how I worded things in the beginning.
Yeah that’s exactly how I do it. Never had a problem with dual booting Windows, just make sure your Linux drive is the default boot drive and then you can select Linux or Windows in GRUB/systemd-boot
I want to maintain my Windows 10 install for now as a sort of fallback. I have a lot of random software installed for my university classes, and I don’t know about all the compatibility issues I might face with those. And letting it sit there in the background in case I need it for something feels safer than jumping head first into a new OS.
Trying out liveUSB or VM stuff seemed like it would be an extra hurdle in transitioning to Linux. Like, I want to get settled in and actually use it as a daily thing, not just browse the internet a bit here and there. If I don’t like the distro I choose, I can always just install another one, right?
You can indeed always install another distro. You can also run many distros in “live cd” mode, just boot from the install media and choose the live option without installing. It’s actually a great way to see if a distro will play nice with your hardware and LAN and peripherals out of the box.
Oh, my misunderstanding, I thought you wanted to dual boot OpenSuse and KDE Plasma. Dual booting Windows 10 and one of those makes way more sense, especially if you have niche university software that was probably written 20 years ago for Windows XP service pack 2, is already barely compatible with Windows 10, and almost certainly never had a linux version. You definitely don’t want to gamble on abandoning Windows completely until after you graduate.
And yes, once you get comfortable installing a distro, it gets pretty easy to just install a new one.
Can you easily switch drives in your system? I’ll often do that on my computer because little m.2 SSDs are so darn cheap now. It’s easier and cheaper to pick up a little 64GB drive for one off projects than it is to do a proper backup and restore.
Also, I’d just go with Tumbleweed. I don’t distro hop like I used to, but that’s because as everyone else is saying, most of the distros have gotten really good. Most of the time, my little projects are trying out specific features of a different distros. So I’ll just pop a new drive in, test drive it, then either switch back or not.
A live USB would let you play around in a desktop environment for a bit to see if you like it before jumping in the deep end with it. But if you’ve already tried out KDE plasma and know you’ll like it, then you’re probably fine. I agree that you won’t become familiar with a full distro without data persistence and repeated use.
Maybe at least live boot gnome if you haven’t tried that one yet. Gnome and KDE are the most fully featured desktop environments, so they’re natural choices for users coming from win/mac.
Yeah, you can always install another, but if you are going to do that every day or two before settling on one, maybe consider installing virtual box and trying out the distros like that first. Of course, if you’re in a VM, it can be a challenge to get proper hardware acceleration if you’re going to try out gaming.
At the end of the day, I think dual booting is a good idea, as long as you only use windows when it’s your only option. That’s what I do. It’s easy enough to reboot if I need to play a game or use a windows specific app. More consistent than dealing with QEMU or something.
This is the sensible thing to do. Try a bunch of distros using either USB or as Virtual Machines.
It’ll save you a lot of heartache when you eventually kill the bootloader, the display driver or both (and you will, it is part or the learning process).
I don’t understand the issue here. Does that mean I can kill my BIOS bootloader somehow? Or the display driver? And how would screwing up drivers on one SSD with Linux affect my other SSD with Windows? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I’m just trying to get my head around as much of this as I can.
Windows likes to pretend it’s the only OS in the world so it can overwrite the bootloader and you lose access to the Linux install.
But if you use separate disks for each there’s a simple solution if your BIOS has a quick boot selection: install each bootloader on its respective disk and use the BIOS selector at boot.
Alternatively, install the Linux bootloader on the Linux disk; it will autodetect Windows and offer it as a boot option, but Windows won’t be aware of Linux. In BIOS you set Linux as permanent boot disk in this case.
Many distros do their own packaging on their repos, adding dependencies and custom-builds with custom configurations, and this often breaks my OS. On arch, this doesn’t happen to me. What’s your experience?
However you are right that Arch tries to stay as close as possible to the source. This is fondamentally different than the debian (and thus all debian-derived distros) way of packaging where they aim for a fully integrated OS at the expense of applying their own patches to many packages.
The patches can sometimes bring issues since they can bring unexpected behaviour if you come from Arch and sometimes will help the end user tremendously since they won’t have to configure every piece of software to work on their computer.
This is really two way of looking at the issue: Arch is make your own OS and Debian has a more hands off approach.
Custom configs is for people who might not want to tinker as much so maybe it’s not for you if you prefer Arch.
To answer the question you asked previously, yes I had issues with custom configs from Debian. One I remember is mupdf being launched by a bash script and thus not understanding why did I have two PIDs (one for bash, one for the mupdf binary) when starting.
For context this was important because I needed to know the PID of mupdf to send a SIGHUP to update the view.
I was very sad when KDE reintroduced the concept of “primary screen”.
It used to just be the current screen, which meant that when I wanted to game or watch something on my projector, I just dragged steam or the folder with movies to the projector screen, then launched whatever I wanted, and it appeared on the screen I wanted it on.
Now I have to jerryrig kwin and a custom steam-in-gamescope Launcher to have games launch there. As a side effect, steam thinks my PC is a steam deck and therefore can’t be exited from inside of it, I have to right click the tray icon.
Horribly kludgy compared to “click launch game button on screen x, game opens on screen x”
Gamescope is a microcompositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:
-Spoofing resolutions -turning off VSync on Wayland desktops -using HDR -Upscaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling -Limiting framerates
In particular, gamescope is rendered seperately to your entire desktop, meaning that certain problem games that may have issues when rendered by your normal compositor (wayland or X11) may work fine under gamescope. For instance: certain games may have jerky mouse input or frequent crashes when running under wayland, but those issue may disappear when running within gamescope.
(this is also why we call gamescope a micro-compositor, as it runs seperately to your main compositor that handles your desktop e.g. Wayland or X11)
Here’s some creative software that replace the functionalities of Adobe software & more.
photo editing: GIMP
vector images: Inkscape
drawing/painting: Krita (GIMP also fine for this)
video editing: kdenlive
3d modelling, animating, etc.: Blender
audio editing: Tenacity (Audacity fork made after the buyout without telemetry)
DAW: LMMS
media player: VLC or mpv
if there’s any other specific software you’re looking for a FOSS alternative to, don’t hesitate to ask. You always have more options on Linux than you’d think.
I’ll assume that was meant to be WiFi. It’s indeed one of the few components that’s easy to swap (a new one is about 30€), as long as it’s accessible (it usually is).
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