What are some things you wish you had known when switching to Linux?


I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it's the package manager.
in reply to elfahor

Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.

insomniac doesn't like this.

in reply to 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘

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-get to 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.
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘

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.

in reply to elfahor

After switching to Linux I wish I knew how to report bugs. I'm a qa tester and I notice so many little things that can be replicated and fixing them would polish the user experience. But there are so many layers I don't know who to report the issue to. My first thought wasto report it to the distro forum and have the more technical people there take a look at the issue then escalate it to the distro maintainers or the actual software devs.

Another thing I wish I knew, was how to get my 2nd hdd to mount automatically. I fucked to my system 4 times(and recovered it) trying and then had to get my sys admin friend to do it for me.

in reply to Fizz

Reporting KDE bugs is still extremely inconvenient.

There should be a 1-click option just to submit an automatically collected data dump, maybe with an optional text field we can write. Just to help providing some data, without all the hassle of creating an account, answering N questions, and following up with answers - sometimes I do care about the issue, most times I don't, but still want to flag that something wrong happened so they're aware of it.

I have the impression that a lot of bugs and random crashes go unnoticed because users don't bother to go through the process of opening a bug report - and they shouldn't need to, nor know how to.

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to Eager Eagle

My first time I was presented with the bug reporter I thought it was cool, but then it said I had to have all the debug symbols installed so it could unwind the call stack. Ok I thought, and searched apt for a little. But I couldn't find them all as there is not a standard naming scheme, so that effort was wasted. I wish their bug reporter would auto download all debug symbols needed.
in reply to elfahor

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 insane
in reply to Holzkohlen

But why would I even try to remember them? Just look them up.


For me, I used labels when setting up those volumes manually. Creating a LUKS container, setting up LVM groups and volumes, configuring my bootloader to decrypt the correct encrypted disk, etc. It was just easier to remember which device label was my encrypted container, which was the group, and what the different volumes were. And once the labels were made, well, I just used them.

in reply to elfahor

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.
in reply to lud

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.

in reply to elfahor

I guess the main things would be:

  • As a beginner, don't bother trying to dual boot -- If you still need a Windows box, get some cheap hardware to do your Linux work on. It's too easy to screw up both systems otherwise.
  • Don't get too hung up on a specific distro, the better you are at dealing with different configurations, the better prepared you will be for whatever comes. Once you've gotten one set up, don't be afraid to just try a different one.

Züri doesn't like this.

in reply to elfahor

Though I enjoy and am currently using Linux Mint, I wish I learned about Wayland sooner. I didn't understand why game performance felt so off with my dual monitor setup for several months. I have since dabbled with an Ubuntu Gnome DE for some gaming, but plan to look into other options when I've organized my data a bit more and establish proper backups.

don't like this

in reply to elfahor

in reply to Zoop

(something is wrong with the replies, it shows me yours two times so idk whats happening right now, i also replied to the wrong thing just now)
i dont see much kindness here, just something i have heard way too much about (not like anybody here knows), but ill stand by the point of the post, if id known the pain going through trying to make things work (and often failing) id have never bothered
in reply to Mandy

Sure.

What i don't follow is why you're having this experience, when for the average user is click to install and play out if the box for many many games.

If it's not the game, because you've checked protondb, and it's not the software, because you've installed multiple distros i feel like you've either got some super unique hardware challenge or you're making a unlikely mistake. Heaven forbid people ask you if you've done things that are obvious, we're just trying to help. Nothing sucks more than sinking time into getting a game to work for it to fail.

Regardless, based on highly emotional responses to many posts my guess is that you're the root cause of your own problems.

in reply to Holzkohlen

jerk? sure (cause i have heard that "advice just as often as things havent worked, to me its about the same as "have you tried turning it off and on again?", could i have been nicer about it? sure but at this point im so over it) but cocky? i know a dumb bitch and run of the mill advise, while good intentioned doesn’t make it helpful, granted i also havent shared more than it just not working (which is really all there is to it)
in reply to Mandy

I used to have this problem but not since the Steam Deck is out.

Before, I was always frustrated fiddling with Lutris, winetricks, etc. But now it's only been plug and play for me, just let Steam take care of it. Zero compatibility issues. In fact, recently I've had more issues with native games than Proton.

in reply to elfahor

Trying not to make it windows.

There's a lot of conveniences that Windows comes default with.

When I switched to Linux, my immediate goal was to find alternatives for EVERYTHING. That lead to being disappointed by a lot.

Understanding Linux and also recognizing there's a lot of shit I don't need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.

in reply to Potatos_are_not_friends

Understanding Linux and also recognizing there's a lot of shit I don't need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.


This 100%! After using Linux for the past few years I've realized a lot of the crap windows has by default is stuffed in there to have something to market.

Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

rotopenguin

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).

in reply to guillermohs9

in reply to its_pizza

Read/write operations can happen in the background at any moment as long as the drive is mounted, so that's not terribly comforting.

Anyway, Windows has always avoided deferring writes on removable media, for as long as it's been capable of deferring writes at all. That's not new in Windows 10.

Linux has a mount option, sync, to do the same thing. Dunno if any desktop environments actually use it, but they could. Besides being slower, though, it has the downside of causing more write operations (since they can't be batched together into fewer, larger writes), so flash drives will wear out faster. I imagine Windows' behavior has the same problem, although with Windows users accustomed to pulling out their drives without unmounting, I suppose that's the lesser of two evils.

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
Unknown parent

lemmy - Link to source

Mandy

i stopped counting how often i got the useless "must be your hardware or your config!!!", cant be that the software steam is trying to peddle and the software its based on are fundamentally broken, and when something goes wrong you might as well shoot yourself cause youd be hard pressed to find any reasonable help

no, my hardware is fine, it works perfectly and doesnt have any issues anywhere else

no, my config is fine, cause im not stupid enough to go anywhere near any kind of config that could break anything, i dont touch that stuff, cause there is no reason

don't like this

in reply to elfahor

That just like windows and Mac if it doesn't support that platform prepare for headaches. Unlike windows and Mac you can get things that aren't supposed to run on Linux to run thanks to great tools like wine, proton, and even waydroid. But if you wanna avoid headaches just stick with what's supported for the most part.
in reply to mtchristo

There is no registry in Linux so there can't be a registry editor.

Hardware panels and task managers do exist (and they come in more windows-like distros), they're just different to Windows ones. I do concede that hardware management in Windows is much easier.

Task manager for Windows absolutely blows though. It doesn't show real data, just estimates that sometimes are wildly wrong.

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to elfahor

The 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
in reply to elfahor

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.

in reply to AlpacaChariot

Snaps are basically Ubuntu's private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro) are not supported; there's no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don't work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to AlpacaChariot

The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I've never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).

That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of "opinionated" good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it's easy to go along with the "happy path" and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines--including machines not of their own brand. (I've contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they've always sent it through a code review and QA process).

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to elfahor

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.

This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to 𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘

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).
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
in reply to JaxNakamura

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!