I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it’s the package manager.
I learned to never settle. If you don’t like the default workflow of Gnome, try some extensions, or even a different DE. Same with Package Managers. If you don’t like the syntax, make an alias. Don’t just “deal with it”. Windows has brainwashed people into thinking that there is only one way to do a thing.
This is kinda funny to me because I hadn’t realized how terrible the Windows workflow was for me until Gnome 3 came out.
Ever since, while I’ll use extensions for stuff like alphabetical app grid and Caffeine, I never do anything that changes the Gnome workflow. It’s not for everyone, but it absolutely is for me.
Its why I always find it funny when people complain about changes to the start bar, because surely there isnt a bunch of 3rd party options in existance that change it, and can mimic 7’s start bar.
I have heard that shell replacements are often very buggy on Windows.
Ive been using classic(then open) shell since moving off of 7 for consistency. for the most part, there haven’t been any serious bugs that im aware of. Because the app works between windows versions, start bar for me at least has been pretty much consistent since windows 7 existed, and the stuff id adjust to would be changes in some apps (e.g control panel > settings) that happened overtime.
The problem of some users is they want the vanilla experience to be what they want when there are options to not make something vanilla. Similar to debates on linux distros on whether you want a very specific UI design vs having a distro that is personalizable and customizable based on preference.
See I’ve run into an issue now where I like and am used to GNOME, but I also want to try a tiling WM and doesn’t seem like there’s really a good way to do that in gnome
You can install the tiling WM and try it seperately. Might even be possible to combine them too, but that might get pretty involved and hacky since Gnome doesn’t like it when you stray from “the path” that they deem correct.
I’d probably just do one or the other, don’t want to be using nonstandard stuff within my non-standard stuff
I know XFCE is a popular choice for people who want to add a tiling WM. That was a combo that I heard about quite a bit in the past if that’s something you’d wanna try. XFCE + i3 might be nice.
How to quit vim.
Just read this book:
Used to use gedit, the found nano and it was awesome. Then found Vim… I RAN back to nano haha
Try micro.
It’s much better and quite easy if not easier to use than nano. It should really be the default simple editor.
This looks cool! Thanks!
I hear you 😁. For whatever reason I stuck with the Vim tutorial and did it a few times over the years. Now I’m using the IdeaVIM extension in IntelliJ - that mode system is just sooo powerful. It has a horrible learning curve, yes, but if you manage to stick with it, it pays huge dividends. I probably know, like, 18% of all commands, and it completely changed how I edit files (mostly for coding, but also text).
Alright alright. You win haha seriously, you’ve convinced me to give vim another chance.
Use vimtutor. It comes with vim and teaches you to the basic vim commands from within vim.
And don’t worry about exiting vim, that’s lesson 1.2 :)
Hahaha!!! I actually know how to exit Vim. Had to learn it when setting up a server config on a server that only had Vim installed. Once set up, nano got installed.
This vimtutor looks pretty awesome, and I can’t wait to get learning on it. In all honesty, vim does looks super helpful. It’s just that I usually use text editors to quickly setup configs, when gui won’t do or I’m just done with gui for the moment. During those times, my patience is usually low, and searching how to save or quit or open or do any other basic functionality, reduces that patience further. But vimtutor makes it a point to learn vim when I’m not trying to get in, get it done, and get out. This may work for me. I may actually learn vim!
I remember, back in the day, I asked on IRC how to edit a file in Linux. Someone said vi. Little did I know that in chat someone said, the next question is how do I quit. I asked that exact question. Yes chat erupted.
I vaguely remember pressing Alt+F4 while trying to close vim in a terminal once. It did switch to me login prompt so I thought it worked.
Either by making it segfault or you don’t.
I got a whole software developer career going out of my attempts to exit vim.
For people who actually don’t know this, yet: Type
:x.
This means “eXit, save any changes”If you want to leave and discard your changes, type
:q!
The:qmeans “Quit”, without any other instructions. This will warn you if you changed anything, adding!means “force this command”.
It was free, I could not afford a Sun workstation and Minix had problems, so when this Finnish guy wrote in Usenet that he was working on a free kernel/OS, it was cool!
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 2•1 year ago
386BSD was a thing back then too, but there was the AT&T lawsuit that scared everyone away. That gave Linux an opportunity.
That I could put /home on a different drive
That I would never boot into Windows again so having partitions for it was a waste of time
That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insaneThe 1:1 windows:Linux replacement is just a means to keep you on Windows. Once you learn Linux, you’ll come to understand how much of a farce it is and how it’s designed to keep you away
Linux is a farce and designed to keep you away? Could you elaborate?
No, i think he means the idea that Linux is supposed to substitute Windows 1:1
Linux is pretty easy to use nowadays. The only thing I would check before switching is driver compatibility.
I wish I’d known how much of a pain in the ass having an NVIDIA card would be. I would have gotten a different computer.
Same. I bought my GPU at like 170% of its MSRP. I regret it now, should have went the amd way
VA-API trouble intensifies
Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.
Installed distrobox on NixOS because I was worried being limited to only nixpkgs and have not touched it once lol
Same goes for the windows VM except for the time I needed to run excel macros for work
Worried about being limited to only the biggest selection of packages available. Does not compute.
I’d never heard of nixpkgs before so thought it was some small niche thing
I did on my Nix, there was a package in Nixpkgs that was outdated, so I had the opportunity to use distrobox for that, at leqst temporarily until they update the package.
Thats been a fear of mine moving to nixos. Glad to know it’ll cover most of my software needs.
So enjoying immutable fedora with AUR support. Cannot be overstated…
Yeah, Arch Linux is beautiful as a container OS. I use it all the time.
Am I reading the readme correctly in that I can run apt-get within distrobox on Fedora, and not be limited to dnf packages?
You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use
apt-getto install whichever Debian package you like. Or…, you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it’s supported.Awesome! And it’ll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?
And it’ll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?
Exactly. It’s even possible to segregate it beyond what Toolbx has been able to do (at least since the last time I checked) in that you can define another folder/directory as your HOME directory within the distrobox.
Amazing!! Yup. Looks like this is getting installed on my Fedora tonight. Thanks!!
Glad to be of help 💙 ! Feel free to inquire if you so desire 😉 .
I appreciate that!
“20 years from now, people are still discussing moving to Linux!”
- tab completion in bash
- vim
- zfs
- git (though it didn’t exist then)
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
I wouldn’t use ZFS. Too risky. If a new kernel comes along and ZFS fails to build or something, my system will be unbootable.
Btrfs scratches my copy-on-write/checksum/integrated RAID itch well enough anyway.
Nix and ubuntu have in kernel support. Void’s module build system also prevents this situation. I use nix and void, so have never faced this problem.
It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don’t start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).
Laptop compatibility still sucks at times, especially with weird configurations of amd apu and nvidia gpu laptops… or maybe it’s just my skill issue.
- argv_minus_one ( @argv_minus_one@beehaw.org ) 3•1 year ago
NVIDIA’s contempt for the Linux community is legendary. Definitely not a skill issue.
Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.
By the time you’ve dressed out an Rpi to be halfway usable, you’ve spent about as much as a decent NUC. And all you have to show for it is a slow-as-mud sd card, hardly any video acceleration, a USB stack that only crashes sometimes, a busy OOM killer, and no software.
Get an N95 based nuc. A Beelink with 8/256 runs about $150, and it just works. (Well, you might need pcie_aspm=off).
yeah, RPI is just ‘cookbooked’ due to fixed hw
When you’re just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don’t look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don’t distro hop just to see what you’re missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you’re trying to get work done.
When you’re just trying to get work done: pick Windows.
I’ve gone Arch for this year’s linux adventure. It has been the most stable I’ve ever tried.
Don’t get an Nvidia gpu
Can confirm. Don’t do it guys. Hardware acceleration for video decoding just doesn’t work for me.
This is such an underrated comment. Linux hates, hates, hates NVidia. I’ve spent ~24 hours trying to get two applications running, both of which consistently complain about my GPU and Hardware Acceleration.
Always put your filesystems in an LVM volume (and in general, partition disks with LVM rather than partition tables)! You never know when you might need to combine multiple disks, make a snapshot, add redundancy, or transfer to another disk without unmounting. But it’s very difficult to format a block device as LVM once you can’t erase its contents.
Make your /boot partition at least 500MiB.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk. You never know when you might need to add EFI and boot partitions to that disk. And again, it’s very difficult to do after the fact.
