this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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The longer i spend on lemmy the more curious i become about running linux.
Dive in!
I don't like the idea of such charts, they take stereotypes about distros and squash together. Distro is just a package manager, software repository, preinstalled software and community doing additional patches. Better idea is just case by case basic.
When we're talking about setting someone up with a OS & DE that 'just works', all of those are extremely relevant - some of the most relevant aspects to start off, I'd argue.
I'm a cool grandpa with old hardware.
Definitely mint!
Where can I read about dual booting with EFI? My motherboard is ancient and my next build will be EFI. With BIOS you install Windows then Linux because Windows will fuck the MBR. What's the process for EFI?
Mostly the same. It's unnecessary, but I highly recommend having a separate Windows and Linux drive if you can. I've seen friends have both their Windows and Linux installs fucked up by dual booting, although my friends are idiots so ymmv. It's definitely doable and can be done safely on the same drive, but Windows doesn't like to play nice. Honestly, it should be considered anti-competitive behaviour as I don't know very many people who gave Windows permission to delete their data but it goes ahead and does so anyways.
When I built my PC the "meta" (lol) was to have an SSD for the OS and a separate HDD for games. With NVME drives it seems easy to get massive and fast drives for cheap. So yeah, I think two should be easy.
It's a lot easier because you don't have to play around with EFI stuff at all. Windows gets its drive and it's EFI partition, Linux gets its own pair. Et voila, much less crossover and issues.
Is the way it boots into grub and you can select Linux or Windows the same?
I haven't personally done it, but I believe so based on my friend's experience. I'd read the arch wiki, they surely have a guide on it for EFI.
Just try it. Resize your Windows partition with the live USB you are going to use to install Linux and install it to there. Make it your default in your boot manager for a while and see how it goes. You can always have Windows as backup. If you decide to try it, don't forget that you are going to learn a new OS, not something tries to replace Windows as it is. Just an alternative tool.
Just make sure your windows drive is not bitlocker encrypted, in which case, you want to resize it using windows.
And make sure to backup important files since resizing filesystems can go wrong.
Never went wrong with me, but I have also not used it more than 2 times.
Well, actually it did go wrong once, but that was due to bitlocker. Ubuntu 18 doesn't detect Windows bitlocker. 22 does.
And please ask us questions! We are always here to help!
Mint it
Are you old enough to remember how Windows was? In the good old days of 95, 98, or XP?
Linux is kinda like that. Except way more capable.
If you actually will be going to, i could personally recommend EndeavourOS. Don't fall for "Ubuntu is best for noobs", it isn't, and in my experience it lacks stability.
Also, if you're not quite a mouse person, you could try tiling wms on your journey, like i3 or awesomewm. For me i3 is one of the major reasons to never return back. The ability to actually be able to do all you need with just a keyboard is huge for me, and something I was looking for even before switching to linux. Now floating wms and especially Windows itself seem so unhandy and irritating
Maybe Linux mint, I love archlinux as much as the next guy but jumping head first into a glass of water takes practice. Unless you revel in the challenge of jumping in the deep end just so you can learn how to swim like I do!
I'm just glad I chose arch instead of Gentoo. I got plenty of will power to learn something new but waiting hours or even days for a bunch of software to compile was too much for me.
EndeavourOS is as simply installed as Ubuntu, even better, considering last time i tried, ubuntu installer gave me some weird errors few times. I think EndeavourOS is actually the best for noobs because of AUR and yay. AUR is supperior to all that PPA stuff. Not to mention the great ArchWiki. All Ubuntu has is forums, not so comprehensive. Mint has even less comprehensive answers on its forum, and they're a lot often outdated. And not all answers from the ubuntu ones are relevant for mint. Opposing to them, what's relevant for Arch is relevant for endeavourOS. Also, it comes in nice flavours, offered during the install process. Not to mention the "welcome" utility helping you make some initial tweaks.
AUR was super confusing to me as a new user when I was running Manjaro for a few months. It still donent really make sense since it seems like it throws every advantage of a package manager out the window
As far as I've heard, manjaro is notorious for its AUR "support" so no wonders. For me on my EndeavourOS setup its as easy as running "yay -S *package name*" to install one or just "yay" to update everything and then everything just works.
Just started on EOS this week after running Manjaro a few years back and then running Debian derivatives for a few years. I really like it, everything has been so smooth (well, other than some minor issues with upgrading to Plasma 6 yesterday I suppose, but that's not in EOS I suppose). I was a little bit lazy about learning the ins and outs of pacman and yay, but I immediately found pacseek, which has been a pretty nice TUI package manager
I love seeing people enjoy arch and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying it. Ubuntu kinda sucks but most people coming from windows don't feel comfortable doing anything in the terminal. Debian drivitaives and fedora are probably a safer bet.
If it wasn't for the CLI first approach for arch and the dangers using potentially unstable or malicious packages in the aur I'd recommend arch derivatives to everyone. It's exceedingly rare but I have been left with broken packages a couple times in my first year of using arch. The aur isn't vetted or controlled to the degree the official arch repositories and could leave them open to downloading malicious code if they don't check the package first. Literally anyone can put whatever they want on the aur until someone notices.
With Debian derivatives I find the Debian wiki along with the forms of your distro a 1 2 punch that can be almost as good as archlinux wiki and communities. I do agree with you the information for issues you might have on arch is everywhere. That comes from a crowd of enthusiast and they typically, understandably expect a level of understanding and independence that you don't find with average users (sorry average user).
But the documentation is really good and I like the simplicity of OpenRC. Give Void or Alpine a go if you want to dip your toes into something similar, but without all the compiling.
How's the init script management access? I had a friend try to switch to openrc on Arch (I know) and he had a terrible experience, most likely because it's Arch and not Arco which is designed for alternative init systems. Do you have to write and maintain your own init scripts, or is that created during installation?
Packages should come with the necessary scripts (on Gentoo and Alpine they do), but if they don't for some reason then writing them is pretty simple. I think the updated layout really only needs dependencies and a couple variables defined.
Void uses Runit which is even simpler, you have one directory per service and at least a script called "run" in there which gets executed by the supervisor. The is usually just one line, that's all it takes to make a service work. It also has the supervisor take care of handling logging, similar to what Systemd does. I think it's a very clean, modern take on classic init, except that dependency/ordering doesn't exist - it just retries until things fall into place. Works well though.
i wonder if you can do a waterfall init where you can have an entry point that defines what services to run next. then you services can continue to pass on the next to run, or if it encounters one with a service that isn't running, it looks at what services that one requires and traverses up to start the root unstarted service. Easy way to define dependencies without much hassle. The former case handles system services, the latter handles application services.
I like OpenRC! I never really measured it but it feels like a much faster boot time than systemd. I'd have to get used to the syntax and writing my own scripts but if the majority of Linux distros switched to it tomorrow I'd enjoy it.
Big and small projects alike typically have poor documentation for alternative init systems and what they depend on in the aystemd ecosystem so I'll probably stick to systemd for now. The poor documentation on alternative init systems is probably one of the biggest reasons Gentoo doesn't move fast on getting new projects in their repos.
I don't think I wrote more than one or two init scripts during my years of using Gentoo, the packages usually come with them. The newer syntax looks like you can get by with just a few variables and a dependency definition, not that different from a unit file I think.
It’s always a pain in the ass for me but I enjoy it. Prefer the ease of use with windows and macOS for my daily driving though. I only use Linux for my home assistant and Plex servers
For me it is the other way around.
I love open source stuff, but the rabid fanbase full of elite snobs worshipping a piece of software while claiming any other popular OS is the devil makes me want to stay far away from it.
It has become a cult at this point. And one of the major reason for the low adoption rate of their favourite OS.