Tuxedo Computers can get you a very good dev laptop for ~1500€ (64GB RAM, AMD/Intel CPU, NVIDIA/AMD graphics card). If you will be working in AI, I imagine you’ll need CUDA (?) aka NVIDIA.
If you don’t go for anything on linuxpreloaded (which I wouldn’t recommend), it’s good to check whether what you’re buying has linux hardware support by checking the Linux Hardware DB. Even if you don’t look, it’ll probably work, but better safe than sorry if you’re going to dump 1/3 or 1/2 of your months salary into something (depending on where you are).
For a distro, I dunno what level you are, but Distro Chooser can help you out with making a choice. My recommendations:
linux beginner
Linux mint. nice desktop environment, looks like a mashup between windows and mac, still missing advanced options, but quite customisable. comes with suitable standard software and cloud integrations (you can connect to a bunch of clouds), relatively up to date
Ubuntu is well-known, some proprietary companies even consider it “the linux” and only make linux versions for it. It’s quite stable. However, it isn’t my first recommendation anymore as they are going down a proprietary route. I’m not sure if they have ads yet, but wouldn’t surprise me if they started.
desktop environment
This is the desktop suite, a bundle of packages that work well together on any distro, with its own look and feel. There are basically 3 camps:
windows look n feel
KDE: is the most known, is very customisable, has an abundant amount of themes, icon sets, login screens, fonts, and a well-sized userbase. They prefix many app names with “K”. Ubuntu even has a distro version called “Kubuntu” with KDE on it
Cinnamon: main user is Linux Mint
LXDE and XFCE: look closer to windows 95 and windows XP, consume minimal resources. configuration is through the interface, advanced configuration through files
mac look n feel
Gnome: they are well known and source of flame wars (gnome vs KDE). windows don’t have title bars, things are very rounded, not very configurable, heavily mac inspired
tiling window managers
these aren’t desktop environments, but sit more in the middle, they manage windows. best to watch a video about tiling window managers. they are very geeky and perfect if you love using nothing but your keyboard
Being real, why DON'T distros just have the ability to do the installation if you double-click whatever file is downloaded?
I feel like we should have either option - download and double-click or just use the command line.
I mean, what else would double-clicking a .tar.gz file or an appimage do than install it (yes, I know, look into the archive, but really - how often is that the desired thing to do)? So, therefore, why don't we just have it install the files that are downloaded?
This is a legit question btw, I really don't know the answer
How would the distro tell if the tar.gz is a program or just a bunch of compressed files? I tend to use tar files for compression rather than for distributing or installing software
Yes, but the header of the file says it’s a binary, that is why it gives you the option to run as a program or open as a file. Because the OS knows that you can do either with binaries.
Some file managers might add the +x automatically if you choose to run the binary through the desktop environment (not the terminal)… or ask you if you’d like to mark the file as an executable (i.e. add +x to permissions).
You can’t do it the same way with tar, what are you gonna execute, tar is neither a script or an ELF binary. It’s like asking for a zip file to be executable, doesn’t make sense. You can change the extension to .exe, but it won’t run, it’s not an exe, no MZ header, nothing 🤷.
I mean, what else would double-clicking a .tar.gz file or an appimage do than install it (yes, I know, look into the archive, but really - how often is that the desired thing to do)?
Personally, I open tarballs quite often. Why? Just wanna know what’s inside them.
Double click translating to install on tar.gz is not wise since anything can be packed in a tarball, a gzip archive or a gzipped tarball.
And then you have a similar problem with tar.xz (it’s becoming more and more popular from what I can see). It doesn’t use gzip to compress the archive, it uses LZMA, so you have to use xz instead of gzip to decompress the tarball.
Basically, it boils down to how UNIX used to work. Mind you, back in the day there were no package managers, it was all done with .tar.zip or make install. This really was hell to be honest… keeping track of what app installed what libraries and versions of it… yes it really was a PITA. This is the real reason why package managers were invented (thank god!) and why having only one package manager on a system is the preferred way to handle apps/software. Otherwise, you’ll soon be in dependency hell. Shared libraries are at the core of any UNIX based OS. Yes, Flatpaks/Snaps/AppImages and package managers like nix circumvent this problem, but in no way is the problem gone. It’s still there, we just don’t mess around with it.
So, basically the idea of having an “installer” came quite late into the game. Plus, having to check on all dependencies and making an install script that worked on every single distro out there was just so complicated, that no one would ever want to go through with it. Sure, there are install.sh scripts in some pacakges out there, but they basically check nothig, it’s more or less “copy this here, that there” which of course could be done by hand anyway… and then run the app and pray it has all of the dependencies it needs 😬… which it never does 😂.
A .tar.gz is a regular archive, the file manager shouldn’t assume it’s a program. Also, how do you expect it to work? There’s no general rule for archives. As for appimages, one of their selling points is that you can run them portably, so it shouldn’t install by default, but run. However, a right click install option would be nice.
Cause .tar.gz is not an executable binary in itself. It is more like a zip of the binary and its support files. Since it would be really difficult to distribute and maintain native binaries for every type of distro, application publishers used to just distribute for distros that has a larger userbase, like a .deb for Debian/Ubuntu and a .rpm for Fedora/RHEL/Suse, and then they would provide a tarball for any other distro. Flatpak and Snap have been introduced to eliminate this overhead from application developers, but they still offer tarballs as the newer solutions are still far from standardization.
I 100% get that (and I know it's an archive), but I'm just saying why doesn't double-clicking a .tar.gz just run "tar xf file.tar.gz | sh" on that file? Or check if there's an executable in the extracted files and then run it if there is, and if it's just an archive of files then open the extracted folder?
What if I don’t want to install it, even if there is a binary in there? What if I just wanna open the archive and see it’s content?
The OS does the smart thing. The header says it’s an archive, so we treat it as just that, an archive. Commercial OSes like Windows and MacOS are the oddballs out, not Linux. It just interprets the cold hard truth - this is an archive, I have no idea what’s in it, you tell me what to do with it, end of story.
In an effort to relieve her PC of constantly deluge of virus and malware, I switched my Mom over to Ubuntu in the 2000’s. She lasted a month.
The experiment ended when she called me in tears because of her silent 4 week struggle with the OS.
She couldn’t get her scanner to work reliably, and none of her “print shop” software was compatible.
I know more now than I did then, and the distros have come a long way since, but I don’t have the time to retrain her and at 70 years old, I just want her to use what she’s comfortable with, even if that means I have to occasionally scrub her PC.
Wow this article perfectly captures the early 2000s experience of trying to teach parents how to use the internet. Internet access wasn’t very widespread in Australia yet, and my parents weren’t really interested in it and thought it was too difficult to use.
Things from that article that really stuck out to me:
Not being able to type searches directly into the address bar. This confused me as a child, and I was really excited when browsers started to incorporate the feature
Mentioning the use of a pager
Knowing that all the photos in the article are of real people and not AI because it’s from 2002
No no no no. I love the pinebook pro. But please don’t suggest it to anyone as a newbie hardware choice trying to get anything done. There are so many little quirks on hardware this slow and moreso having to deal with arm repos and all of the incompatible software/workarounds.
A few examples.
If you want to watch YouTube you basically have one browser option. Chromium. Additionally if you want to watch any drm content then you need to install a docker container that runs chromium that has drm enabled.
App images and flatpak software repos are nowhere near complete which can be not great for someone who is just trying to get some work done. Really not great when some devs are exclusively distributing via flatpak.
No virtualization. It just doesn’t have the capability. Sure there are docker containers but that isn’t exactly virtualization.
I love my pinebook. It’s a great machine for just have a very cheap low spec thin client with a decent keyboard and screen but I would never ever recommend it to a newbie.
I use an asus rog g15 from 2021. It actually has pretty great linux support with asus-ctl but I can’t recommend it in good concience for professional purposes, it is decked out with rgb also asus has a pretty bad reputation of customer support.
Knowing that steamdeck uses Linux does give me hope. I’m rocking a 3080ti though, how’s that Nvidia support coming along these days?
Next build will likely be AMD, but unfortunately I build PCs to last.
My first PC had dual 660s SLI, which was over 16 years ago and can still handle most AAA games. Baldurs Gate 3 was the first to make it run in low graphics.
My second PC was built when the 1080ti came out and that’s still running my VR room.
This PC I just built is similarly designed to last upwards of a decade, and still will be a contender after that. So maybe another 7 to 10 years before I build a Linux PC .
I’m old enough to remember when wine came out and how excited everyone was we were finally going to have games in Linux lol.
Seriously? Hmmmmm well I guess we’ll try linux for the umpteenth time again. I’m seeing some new program names and processes here since last time I tried, so who knows? It may actually be up to the task for my day to day. That’d be nice, I’m not a fan of cloud based Operating systems. I bought my hardware, I like to own it, not give it to whatever software corp is installed on it.
Yeah it was honestly weird for me too bc I had always heard that you need to go team red if you want to use Linux but i don’t know if it’s that everyone else is lying or I’m amazing but I’ll just assume I’m goated with the sauce
The Nvidia driver has very good performance, and for most usecases it’s… Fine. But it does bring extra hoops and issues. There’s a reason many distros have started to ship the “normal ISO” and the “nVidia ISO”.
The nVidia driver also uses kernel modules, which can interfere with secure boot.
And many modern features are developed for Wayland-only: Mixed refresh rate, mixed fractional scaling, HDR etc. And nVidia is behind on Wayland support, since they only recently decided to cave on and use the same pipeline as AMD/Intel instead of their own.
so I decided to try linux. After reading a bit I decided that Fedora sounded like the distro for me with the top ‘spin’.
Black screen. Not Nvidea compatible out of the box. Booted into ‘basic graphics’. Looks like total ass on 800x600. Tried to follow a tutorial to get it running, but it didn’t want to make changes to the USB version and wanted me to full boot. I didn’t want to full wipe my windows just yet, but we’re getting there. Found a tutorial about using some semi-auto process to do it, so wish me luck.
I bet this goes like last time though, given that I already can’t even run Linux out of the goddamn box on what is one of the most popular graphics card series ever. I bet I get frustrated trying to make half my shit work like an xbox controller because nothing, and I repeat nothing on this trash OS works without some level of headache.
For giggles I tried nobara linux which bills itself as a fully configured gaming version of fedora. Unsurprisingly it had a kernel error when booting from USB off the rip lol.
“Few and far issues between” = completely doesn’t work at all on the what is arguably the top linux distro today, sounds about right.
Sounds like you’ve been very unlucky. Even the open-source Nvidia driver should work out of the box and look OK. Performance is ass, but it’s good enough for a usable desktop experience (usable enough to install the proprietary nVidia driver, which at least on Ubuntu’s are just a few clicks in the GUI)
Instead of going Fedora, try PopOS. PopOS has a special ISO for nVidia graphics. Trying to “install” the Nvidia driver yourself on a live USB boot is not the way to go. I doubt it’s even possible.
I’ve been on (K)Ubuntu, and XBox controllers have literally just been plug and play. I could even use the KDE game controller settings page to compensate for the drift in my left joystick.
Another option is Bazzite, which is a version of Fedora Immutable (“Silverblue”) that comes with all the bells and whistles for gaming, including Nvidia drivers. However the immutable part may or may not be to your taste.
Second this. System76 themselves sell multiple machines with Nvidia cards, so they have at least some incentive to make it work.
I see Fedora recommended quite a bit, but setting it up on my younger family member’s laptop was bot exactly simple, and setting up his game library proved near impossible.
PopOS just worked. I try not to be too pushy about Linux, but as someone who was pushed into (and now loves) using Linux, I’d suggest giving it one more shot. (I still dual-boot: keep a small Windows partition for the occasional need).
Yeah #Fedora is nontrivial when dealing with proprietary drivers. It doesn't just work out of the box. Your best bet if you want to use Fedora and have an easier gaming experience is #Nobara.
I don’t tend to recommend Ubuntu anymore: mainly because of snaps.
I had a weird start with Linux, using it on my Pi and then eventually just installing NixOS as my first distro. A weird first choice, but honestly it makes even advanced tasks trivial(I can switch my WM/DE in one line!)
@dukk My first Linux experience was with Ubuntu, as my old laptop couldn't handle Windows anymore. Then I also got a RPI but by that time I already bought a better PC and left Linux. After some years tinkering with the rpi I finally became confident enough to dual boot Kubuntu. Now I only have Linux on my computers ( arch in both pc and laptop )
No, this is my Linux experience since I first installed ubuntu in 2005. I’ve tried at least 5 times to pick up this hot garbage and it ends the same way every time. With admission of defeat and an eventual return to an OS that works, which would be windows or mac.
I tried dual booting for a while but eventually I just stopped using the Linux side. Didn’t really have a reason to switch over when everything worked fine on Windows. Id just keep using windows after I used whatever software or game only worked on windows cause it was just more convenient. I did really like Linux and there were a lot of really cool things about it but until Linux reaches a point where all the big games, both on and off steam, work on Linux without having to follow some guide I just don’t think it’s for me.
Ya that makes sense. I find a lot of my work is mostly stuff that’s easier to use on Linux, like spinning up VMs or just programming in general. What programs do you use that aren’t compatible or dont have an alternative on Linux?
It was mostly games (mainly Microsoft ones, no surprise there) and the fact that at the time I was going to college for game programming, so needed to use stuff like Unity and Unreal Engine. Which I think I saw with Unreal Engine you can make it work on Linux but you had to like compile it yourself and I didn’t want to deal with running into problems with that since I was using it for my classes. Although now that I’ve graduated I might give it a try, see if anything has changed since I last gave Linux a shot. Just seems like in general a lot of game development stuff is done more on Windows unless you’re not using a commercial engine.
Omg yeah that makes sense. I have the same thing but with excel, one of my classes it’s like a must have so I just pop open a VM to get it running bc I don’t want to figure out how to wine it. I’m using PopOS rn and it’s really easy to use and install drivers, so if you’re gonna get back into a Linux distro I’d def recommend that.
Exact same thing here. Once I needed to reboot multiple times per day to use my computer I’m just angry and unhappy with the tool that’s no longer doing the job I need it to.
Since the games I play are primarily windows only, I stuck with the side I spend most of my time in.
I’ve been trying for 3 hours to get fedora installed with working Nvidia drivers. Fuck Linux users and their bullshit elitist attitude, this OS is nowhere near user friendly
I may eventually check that out. I was hoping to use a basic version of Linux then configure it for gaming myself to learn a bit, but am quickly realizing that Linux is still as absolutely unfriendly and unusable as it was 20 years ago.
@Phanlix@Holzkohlen Sorry but I can't agree with you on the user friendly side. KDE and Gnome ( to name a few ) have made incredible advancements on that side. While its true some commands are still required, once you get used GNU/Linux imo is better than Windows ( I love being able to install lots of software from one single place, the package manager ).
You should take small steps, dont try to rush your learning experience, enjoy it. If you want to become proficient with a completly different ideology of an OS as Linux is compared to Windows.. dont even try Linux, you are going to suffer
How do you map a network drive? I’ve literally put 8 hours of my fucking life trying to figure it out and I can’t get it to work. It’s a must have thing for me to stay in Linux.
@Phanlix I guess you want to mount it so it can be accessed. In that case you need to know what type of protocol its using. Im going to make a guess and say samba.
In that case you need to search for samba documentation for your distro, funny right? Many steps.. but not complex.
I believe you said you were using Fedora, then once again Im guessing, you are using Gnome.
Gnome means Nautilus is your file explorer's name.
The following link is about how to add it on Nautilus, for the smbclient package you should search whats the Fedora equivalent.
@Phanlix Hope it does ^^
And don't get frustrated, take this as a way to learn new things. You always have Windows or MacOS, but at least give Linux a try, there are some incredible people who make guides from which you can learn lots of things in the Linux community.
The Arch Wiki is a very good source, even if its for Arch you can apply some of its knowledge to other distros
@Phanlix Well thats sad. Probably if you could show the error someone more experienced than me in gnome or fedora could help.
Can I recommend you to switch to another distro ( for what I just read from other user, PopOS seems to be good for newbies ) or DE? KDE is a DE which look very similar to Windows and I had 0 problem mounting my samba and nfs drives.
Did download PopOS though, it already beats the hell out of Fedora because off the rip Nvidia just works.
However I still cannot connect to my network drive. I can see it fine in +other locations, but when I open it it says “unable to access location: failed to mount windows share: software caused connection abort”
Holy crap I got it to work. smbv1 is not enabled by default on Linux.
Once I went through the tutorial and added
client min protocol = NT1 server min protocol = NT1
to smb.conf, it worked and I could connect!
Sadly it still wouldn’t accept my username and password, but I set it to allow anon login and that’s working 100% right now. So… just need to figure out why it won’t accept username and password. Moment of truth comes when I test VLC again too.
Thanks lol, stream is working great too, much better than Fedora. Way less choppy and it doesn’t crash when you seek on VLC, so Pop!OS is clearly the superior distro here.
I do need to figure out the login eventually. I need read/write access and as anon I can’t write, but I’ll come back to that. I’m getting a ton of stuff set up now.
“Nvidia” and “Linux” in the same message is the problem I am seeing here.
Long story short be mad at Nvidia for not having properly supported drivers, they only just allowed opensource drivers but its very much still alpha software.
They’re literally releasing official versions for Linux. I’m not going to be mad at Nvidia, I’m going to be mad at the Linux community at this point for saying in another thread where I was asking about Nvidia support, and they responded 'nah shouldn’t be an issue, there are only rarely Nvidia issues. Fucking. Liars.
Official versions sure, but proprietary and they only work with X11 which is essentially deprecated.
Wayland is replacing X11, Nvidia has made no serious attempts to support Wayland in their proprietary drivers. Fedora, Ubuntu, and now Debian (the core three) have all moved to Wayland by default.
I only had a driver issue with Nvidia once in more than 10 years running Linux with Nvidia exclusively (need Nvidia for Cuda (and Cuda for work)) and that was fixed by temporarily downgrading
I’ve been tested Linux since 2005 every time I have to reinstall windows and I’ve never once been able to get Nvidia to work easily. I’ve done it but it’s always been a bitch and a half.
I wish I had that experience. I’ve had issues on every machine/distro I’ve tried to get NVidia working on. Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, you name it, there’s been driver issues.
Apparently newer cars (20 series or newer) have a lot more problems
Currently I’ve a 3090 before that I had a 1060 and the 3090 I bought almost at release. I genuinely never had a problem.
I hate saying this because of the all the toxic attitudes around but I ran gentoo and now arch Linux. Maybe they package the proprietary driver better?
I’ve had literally one instance of linux not playing well with nvidia drivers, and I was running a version of ubuntu more than a year out of updates. Switched to popOS and everything works out the box.
There’s distros confirmed to work for just about every setup, just find one of them to start with rather than troubleshooting yourself in the foot.
I wouldn’t say elitist, when most Linux users are trying to get more people to use it. Most are just trying to help show there are better ways, and you have options, instead of just taking whatever shit Microsoft gives you.
If you are perfectly happy with Windows, by all means stick to it. It’s a fine operating system. However, if you can get through the learning curve and accept not all hardware manufacturers will support Linux well. It opens up a lot of power and capabilities.
It can’t even do basic shit like mount a network drive. Trash OS is trash. I adapted to Mac just fine and android just fine. This bullshit OS will never be made easy to use, that much is apparent.
You can use the file manager program or the disk utility for a permanent mount. It works a bit differently than windows. However, it sounds like you are not willing to learn. So I would recommend sticking to Windows.
You should check out my submissions. I’m on day 3 of documenting my linux experience.
It wasn’t a simple fix. The drive was off an ASUS router which uses samba v1 and the fix was reenabling it via editing the text files, then the specific mount command in fstab required a ‘ver=1’ argument to be manually placed in there.
So no my assessment that this is not an easy process is spot on, and I’ve spent 3 days setting up and configuring linux at this point, all of which I could have done in an hour in Windows.
Yeah, for sure, complex things like that require jumping into config files such as the fstab. Very nice you figured it out! I’ve been there too.
I don’t doubt it would be faster and easier to do in Windows when the router manufacturer intended for users to be using Windows. You are going against the grain sometimes when using Linux, but it is ever so much more satisfying when you do get it working :)
…there’s a faq on the router itself that told me how to do it in windows. That was show I got on the right path for Linux. So yes definitely easier when the manufacturer includes instructions for one but not the other. Granted the windows process is significantly easier to get it enabled.
Just use Bottles or Heroic Launcher to play the pirated games on your computer. Most of the games I tried have worked.
The only exceptions are Multiplayer games like Apex and valorant. Apex is not smooth enough to play competitively (last I checked was a few months ago) and Valorant doesnt work on Linux because of it’s rootkit anti cheat. If you only play single player games Linux is definitely worth a shot.
If it weren’t for a few Multiplayer games and my crappy epson printer I’d have completely wiped windows off of my computer.
What tinkering do you think a framework laptop requires? Even the diy option is basically just install RAM, put case together. It’s an hour of work max if you’re being REALLY meticulous
I typically end up installing chrome for the odd website that does require it. Firefox is still my daily driver on all platforms though, not sure what Mozilla is thinking with their future plans.
No, Chrome. Specifically for the DRM stuff to access streaming services and casting, things that don’t quite work well with Firefox (by design). I use libre stuff when I can, but I make exceptions, I know not everyone uses Linux that way.
have you tried switching useragent? The websites I’ve been to have either been solved by useragent or chromium (just one site didn’t work with firefox and useragent)
Switching user agents isn’t going to get around DRM implementations. Anyway, that was for specific streaming services I’m not using any more, so I haven’t needed to use Chrome in months.
I’ve heard great things about system76, never had one of their laptops myself but still have the desktop I got in 2011 (Wild Dog Pro). I personally use the frame.work 13, and it has been working great with Arch installed. I do not recommend Arch, use something like PopOS, or LinuxMint.
2 type c’s and 2 type A USB are in it 99% of the time. I have the HDMI, and display port modules but have rarely used them. I also keep the 2.5Gb Ethernet for when I break the WiFi to get back into the router, and a microsd for when I reflash my raspberry pi’s .
Other than they fit nicely into a pocket in my backpack…no. The main reason I love their product is the reparability aspect, allowing me to swap ports is just a neat feature.
I guess that makes sense, I can still just put the dongle I already have for edge cases like plugging into a DisplayPort monitor, needing Ethernet, etc. Also I didn’t realize until someone else commented that they have extra storage ones, that would probably be one for me
Oh man that’s the same as me! I’ve been having all sorts of issues with reliability with mine so I was curious if it was different generations. I guess I’m unlucky?
I was typing up a reply and realized this said most of what I was saying. The only thing I’d add is that support matters, popularity matters. Supported or popular HW platforms are less likely to have small random niggles than an off the shelf dell laptop. System 76 or tuxedo lines are ideal supported platforms. Think pads area super popular.
PopOS or Mint are as easy to use as ubuntu, but without being chained to snaps, which everyone is moving towards flatpaks except canonical
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