linux4noobs

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linux4noobs

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What tips for initial setup? (lemmy.world)

submitted 4 days ago by Ep1cFac3pa1m@lemmy.world to c/linux4noobs@programming.dev

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I installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS about a year ago. Now that 26.04 is out, I was planning to upgrade, but instead I think I'm going to wipe and re-install from scratch. Does anyone have any tips or tweaks they recommend for new installs? Things like, do or don't encrypt the drive during the install process, make an administrator account separate from your regular user account? I already plan to install the Flatpak repo and the Gnome Software Center.

Thanks!

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[–] NightFantom@slrpnk.net 3 points 4 days ago

I'm a big fan of occasionally starting over just because I can, and distro hopping.

Personally I run Kubuntu on my daily driver, but I'm experimenting with kde linux (the people behind kde plasma made their own immutable Linux distro instead of hitching it on Ubuntu) on an old laptop and I'm loving it so far.It's very experimental though, so frequent big downloads for updates and things that might not work as expected, though apart from my laptop being configured in BIOS to do RAID for the single disk it has (???) and kde linux breaking specifically for RAID I haven't run into any issues.

I definitely recommend backups of all things you consider important, if possible the whole disk perhaps, just for ease.

Then if you have a big enough disk I would recommend partitioning it into:

linux installation (~50 gb)
(swap probably, though not relevant here, however amount of gb you need for that)
data (the rest, here you save files, documents, photos, videos, steam games, etc etc)

This way, assuming your data partition isn't entirely filled, when the next distrohop comes around you can just shrink the data partition for a new linux partition, install linux on that one, and you can dual boot for however long you need to verify that the new one works.

Then what I do is symlink my home folder and keep it on the data partition. The benefit is that it doesn't get wiped if you wipe the linux installation partition. The downside is that some programs (notably anything in snap's sandbox) have issues with this, due to what I think is either intentional and I missed a config somewhere, or a bug in apparmor. It doesn't hinder me a lot so I haven't looked into it enough to fix it yet.