Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now’s your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893
No question here, just wanted to highlight that I use arch btw
Real talk, I want to try Guix but I have not successfully installed it on any hardware, including VMs. This includes with nonguix for proprietary drivers and stuff. I can never get past install, it always just craps out on some substitution thing. Am I just stupid?
I’m always too afraid to ask… Is this year finally the year of Desktop Linux? Is next year the year of Mobile Linux?
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I kid, this year has been the year of Desktop Linux for well over two decades for me. Obviously! And I think this megathread is great idea :)
What is something Linux related that you’ve learned recently?
As a meta question, could this work as an additional (or alternate) recurring discussion question? It felt similar in intent, to encourage people to keep learning / asking questions and chances are that if someone learned something then others will benefit from the information (or correct them)
After 26 years of using Linux, I did my first baremetal “immutable” distro install last week.
My youngest son is starting school and instead of the Chromebooks that they recommend, I took a chance and installed Fedora Silverblue on a $200 Lenovo “student-rugged” class laptop. Everything works and he hasn’t had any issues so far. He gets access to the same student platform as the other students through Chrome, but then I can install Minetest and Tux Paint and GCompris as well.
The older kids run Debian stable for years now, but if this works out, I might transition them over next semester.
I learned how a kernel actually loads a program and switches between them by using timer interrupts and interrupt vectors that point to specific locations in memory to resume execution from. Not specifically Linux related, but I’m trying to learn more computer science, and it just clicked for me two weeks ago. I’ve been programming microcontrollers for ten years, but those are monolithic programs, and while I knew what interrupts were and have used them, I never understood how an OS actually runs multiple things while staying in control. Now I do. About time I understood a core concept of these machines that have been here all 42 years of my life.
It’s one of those “aha!” moments like when I realized classes and structs are just data types like any other in C++ when I was starting off programming and can be used like them. OOP became fun after that.
The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it’s one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk… whether a file inode points to it or not.
Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It’s not reliable, but when you delete a file, it’s usually not truly gone yet… With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don’t even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.
Alright, absolute noob here, I’m not particularly interested in computer science or an OS I have to obsessively research. First, how is gaming on Linux nowadays? I play a lot of games, most of which are not triple-A, so I wonder how accessible this is. Second, what distributions are accessible and still customizable? I have all kinds of peripherals I’d like to be able to use, speaker systems, midi controllers, etc.
Fellow Linux noob, just started using it earlier this year so if someone with more experience wants to weigh in, please do.
That said, gaming on Linux is pretty good. Steam’s proton makes most games playable out of the box, although it’s still a good idea to check Proton DB to see if any particular game you want to play is playable.
As for your other question, I’m not totally sure what you mean by accessible and customizable, but I don’t think any of your peripherals are going to be distro locked. The Arch Wiki is a pretty good resource for, well, everything, but most relevant to you for your peripherals (it also usually gives good information for any distro, not just arch)
About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.
As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.
I may be misunderstanding here and feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but I was of the understanding that Mint wasn’t a good gaming platform because of the fact it’s not bleeding edge
To my knowledge, besides the newest updates not necessarily being as stable, but also, other softwares that interact with it would need time to adapt themselves to be sure they’re as compatible as they were before. In a situation of constant updates, other software would always be on a situation of catching up, whereas updates that take a bit longer to land allow “for the dust to set down”.
Q1: Pretty good! Use ProtonDB to check what games work, and if you need to apply any fixes.
Q2: Linux Mint is the most popular choice for beginners, and it’s extremely easy to use. Other people choose Pop!_OS because it’s apparently better for gaming (I haven’t tried it). However, I think the best distro for gaming, while still being extremely stable, is Nobara (a distro based on Fedora Linux).
Also, practically all Linux distros are customizable, don’t worry about which one’s the best.
P.S: You can browse through the most popular distros here: DistroWatch
(Background: I’ve been obsessively using Linux for four years.)
It used to be that someone with midi controllers could be assumed to be technical enough to say “you’ll be fine, everything will work”, but most of the time nowadays software just automatically figures out stuff and you don’t have to go looking at the implementation chart and using midiox to see where you’re screwing up,
So,
I’ve never seen an interface that didn’t work, but if you’re not comfortable troubleshooting midi signals then give it a shot and see.
What are you using midi for, a daw?
I have an old (2017) Windows 10 box that is ineligible for Windows 11. Originally purchased to run my Oculus Rift, it now just streams YouTube and Twitch and plays some old Steam games and occasionally school related stuff (Lexia, Scratch, stuff like that).
I started thinking that, rather than worrying about an unsupported Windows OS on my network, I might upgrade to Mint or Ubuntu.
So, my question(s) is/are, how much of a hassle will such an upgrade be? Will I need to wipe the drive, or can I keep my files without having to back them up first? Can I run Windows games on Steam with Wine? Are there good 3D card drivers nowadays?
I’m reasonably versed in using Linux as a user, less so as an admin, in case that affects the way you answer.
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Depends on how much crap you’re willing to put up with. It’ll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)
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I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.
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Have you heard of Valve’s Steam Deck? It’s a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don’t work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won’t accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!
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If you have AMD, you don’t even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn’t mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won’t need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).
If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It’s easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.
There would be no hassle in wiping the drive, you can do it as part of the super easy installation process for any Linux distro. Ideally you would back up any important files and drop them into your fancy new file system once the install is finished. And you can pretty much launch almost any game directly out of steam and it will run. There are a few exceptions for some of those games with anti cheats that rootkit your system, but the majority just work out of the box. Drivers included, but Nvidia might be ever so slightly annoying
Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.
I’d be interested to see what people have to say regarding VR setup, but the Oculus gets little use anymore. I have a few games that were never ported to the newer, self-contained systems (I have a Quest 3), and we’ve downloaded a bunch of custom Beat Saber levels that I might feel bad about, but the sensors are a big enough pain to set up that I don’t know that I’d feel that bad.
I myself have a Quest 3. I use Air Light VR as a streamer, which only worked after I added something to do with a vrmonitor.sh to the SteamVR command line. Half Life: Alyx runs natively and works just as well, but I’ve had bad luck with most other games, primarily because Steam Cloud didn’t synchronize the Windows saves to my Linux machine. VR even on Windows is already a PITA to set up, and I just don’t have the willpower to get it working properly on Linux. This is the only reason why I even keep the waste of space that is my Windows partition.
To install at minimum you’ll need to likely shrink existing partitions and create new ones for linux if you don’t want to wipe the drive, that would be a dual-boot setup with Windows still installed along side. Or you can just wipe the drive entirely and have only Linux.
Regarding the files you should already have backups of anything important, if you don’t, set it up ASAP.
Messing with partitions can easily cause data loss if something goes wrong.
You also never know when hardware failure, malware, power surges, lightning strikes, or whatever other disaster will happen and cause data loss. 1 copy of files might as well be 0 copies.
I’m pretty sure anything of value is already backed up to my NAS. I’m just paranoid that my kids might freak out that I destroyed their state fair winning Scratch project or something.
I just do full system images for that reason, easier than trying to pick and choose what should be backed up. Used to use Veeam, currently using Synology Active Backup.
For online backups I don’t due to size, but for local backups it’s just way easier.
That was half the reason I upgraded. I don’t know if my old box would’ve been compatible (probably was), but I wanted it off Microsoft territory so bad and heating about Copilot sent shivers all over my spine.
I’ve never heard of installing any new OS without having to back stuff up. That’s just wishful lazy thinking lol.
You probably won’t have to do anything manually about Wine. Steam has Proton built in and it works great. As others always mention, check ProtonDB.com for user reports on how a specific game will work out.
I haven’t run into any problems in my library, but I honestly haven’t installed a ton of games.
I’ve used Heroic Games Launcher and Lutris for some other launchers (like Battle.net or Epic Games), and those have been a little hit or miss, but I think the main problem is something I’m missing. Not a huge priority but I’m still working on it occasionally.
I haven’t heard anyone call or 3D card since the 90s. They’re video cards or GPUs these days man. AMD has open source drivers that work just fine with Linux and should work just the same as the Windows version I believe.
Nvidia has open source ones, but they seem to be pretty terrible compared to the closed source ones. I had one issue with them last week but I think that was more related to KDE than it was the drivers’ fault.
I don’t really have any fancy hardware to describe how easy that was to get to work. Just a mouse, kb, headset(with mic) all of which worked fine without doing anything. I have a physical dongle for the controller, so I had to get a driver for that so I didn’t have to use a Bluetooth connection (pretty shitty comparatively speaking) or gasp plug it in. Had a few issues with it for a while, there was an updated version under a new name and such but it all works now. Just turn the controller on and it’s working instantly (unless I forget to charge it lol).
