I personally do not think it is conflicting, especially when you consider how hard or impractical it is to completely avoid the non-free/proprietary software. Services like Gmail, YouTube, and Facebook, to name a few, have been around for a long time, and they have become so entrenched in our daily lives and social circles that avoiding them completely and all at once may be too disruptive. I’ve been using Facebook since I was in high school, and that’s also the platform I use to communicate with my closest friends. To suddenly jump away from that and expect my closest friends to follow me to the next major platform (e.g. Mastodon) is going to take a lot of effort and convincing, especially if my friends have people they connect with on Facebook and are not likely to move to another platform.
The same can be said for YouTube, even with their ridiculous anti-adblocker stance. People have become so invested in it that completely breaking away from YouTube would be almost impossible. Thankfully, that’s where services like Piped and PeerTube come into play.
I think what really matters is that people at least make the effort to utilize FOSS whenever and wherever possible. Whether that be a Linux distribution over Windows and Mac, or a FOSS alternative to one of Google’s or Microsoft’s products, or a federated platform like Lemmy and Mastodon, there are so many ways we can demonstrate our love and support for FOSS, and utilizing a non-free/proprietary service does not make us any less committed to FOSS.
@BroBot9000 cool. Thanks @alt for the link to Jovian, this might an opportunity to tinker with NixOS... Do you know how nvidia cards is supported ? (nouveau driver is ok for my kind of use).
@flashgnash thanks for reminding me the Pop_OS option... do you know if you can configure Steam to start on big picture mode to start on boot ?
I don’t own any devices with an Nvidia GPU. Therefore, I can’t share my own experiences but only the ones from the community. If my memory serves me right, it should work. However, as usual, expect some strange behavior at times. Thankfully, getting back to a working system shouldn’t cause you any troubles on Jovian-NixOS. Nonetheless, it’s something to keep in mind.
I’m on NixOS using the beta drivers and it does everything as far as I can tell. DLSS, ray tracing all work and performance is the same as windows with the same settings. I don’t think I ever need to go back to windows.
Yeah, I was about to say when I read the first part. Adding windows manually is quite an old thing. Modern linux setups with grub2 will "find" the EFI loader for windows and add it automatically.
I lost my grub loader when I upgraded hardware recently. But, I just booted into a linux USB, chroot (remembering to mount /boot/efi) and re-run grub install/grub update. That didn't find windows. But, it was fine because I just properly booted into linux and ran grub-update again there, and it found it fine.
Yeah this isn’t really much of an issue with EFI now. You can change boot order in the BIOS and things are way less likely to get overwritten or broken. You can even have 2 EFI partitions if it’s something your concerned about.
The only time I got my grub overwritten was when I have to update bios/firmware from Windows. After bios/firmware update, the update app always restore windows boot manager and I need to reinstall grub from live environment.
If your main concern is UI distro doesn’t really matter, the thing you need to think about is desktop environment, most big distros let you choose from a few
TL;Dr I would suggest looking for a distro with kde plasma as it’s quite customisable and looks quite clean out of the box. Personally I prefer gnome out of the two but you definitely hit a wall eventually customising it
Gnome is what Ubuntu and fedora use by default I believe and looks somewhat like Mac (but is fairly distinct from everything else, you kinda have to see for yourself)
KDE Plasma is what the steam deck uses in desktop mode and looks kinda like modern windows.
Cinnamon is what Linux mint uses which also looks like windows 10 and is designed to appeal to windows users
Pop!os recently released their own DE called cosmic, but they were originally using their own customised version of gnome
I’m also looking for general tips and advice for beginners if anyone has some to share.
The only thing that is stopping a Windows user from becoming a Linux user is the package manager – learn how to use it in the cli. Then the "rest’ should be an obvious, flat curve (which “package” goes for video card, audio, etcetc).
Windows’s package managers are MS only (ish). msiexec is a bit of a convoluted pain compared to apt, yum, pacman or even portage.
When you update a Linux box, everything is updated not just the OS. That is not the case on Windows where each browser, pdf viewer etc has its own updater service or not.
I’ve been doing IT software monkeying for several decades for many companies, some of which you will have heard of. Trust me: the Windows model is not the best. It certainly should not be a reason to fear Linux.
Most distros have a “Politely notify that some updates are available, would you mind awfully if I install them?” … cracks on in the background and then suggests a reboot only if the kernel was updated.
I have done something similar following this post - loads of others have created similar scripted installers for Arch for their specific use cases and this guide takes it one step further with custom arch meta packages that hold deps and system wide config.
You can also do similar things with tools like ansible or saltstack or similar tools. Though these all take the approach of define your configs and system to automate the setting up of a system approach rather than the backup or clone an existing system. So are more effort initially but are able to keep multiple system in sync with system configs with far less effort then trying to create a backup/restore system for organically created configs.
that wouldn’t work (I think) because my laptop has vastly different hardware
Should not matter, you can install all the packages all your system need - such as both nvidia, amd and intel graphics drivers and the kernel will only load the ones for the hardware you have booted with. Or if you really need different configs or packages for different systems the various approaches have ways to do that.
Most done with the latter. But the nice thing is once you have done it once it is much easier to keep things up to date and in sync from then on words. You can also peace meal it - setup one application at a time and migrate things one by one over to it.
painstakingly manually code every unique facet
That makes it sound a lot worst then it actually it. It is only a bit more effort then setting something up for the first time manually. And pays its self back many times over when you next need to reinstall or install a new system. Assuming you keep up with making changes to the code and not directly to your system each time.
This is basically the reason why I wanted to ask early. Two problems.
Already kinda late… And, idk how to configurate Firefox addons from the terminal. Even if I did, there’re a bunch of other apps too. I’d need to do so much research.
For general usage, it doesn’t really matter. Distrobox is inspired on toolbox and provides some added functionality and configurability, like init scripts and the ability to run different distros, as well as creating desktop shortcuts on your host system. If you don’t need all of that, I’d stick with toolbox, as it’s preinstalled and works well.
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