Hello I’m Doctor_Rex I’m the OP of this post:
My Windows 10 install broke, but I’m hesitant to switch to Linux.
I’d like to start by thanking everybody who responded to my questions. Your answers have helped a lot when it came to my worries on switching to Linux.
I’ve taken in a lot of your recommendations: Fedora, Fedora Kinoite, Nobara, Bazzite Linux, VanillaOS,
I’ve decided on Fedora Kinoite, as it has everything I want from a distro.
It was very kind of you all to answer my questions but after making that post and reading your answers new questions propped up.
These questions are a little more opinionated than the last ones, and a little better thought out, but please take some time to answer them.
Questions:
- Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.
Are there any real noticeable advantages/improvements to using Wayland over Xorg.
- Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
Does bloat actually have a noticeable negative impact on your system or are people just over reacting/joking.
- What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?
- Any other resources besides the AUR that I should be aware of?
Self explanatory.
- What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
I’m not referring to some skill but instead something pertaining to Linux itself. Feel free to skip this question.
I’ll be going to sleep soon, so apologies if I don’t reply but please take a moment answer any questions you think you can.
Thank You!
You might find something that works better or worse in Wayland, it’s not really a big deal
Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
Both, the little things don’t matter but you can fill up your resources with bloat if you wanted.
Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?
Update unless you have a reason not to
What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
Sym-links
I highly recommend timeshift. It makes it easy to make system snapshots (think system restore points) at regular intervals so that if you try something and it breaks your system, you can restore it to a working state. It has saved me hours of work from all of the reinstalls that I didn’t have to do. I wish I had something like this when I first started out with Linux. It would have saved me dozens of Linux installs.
This would’ve saved me a headache!
From what I’ve heard. I’ve you have an Nvidia GPU the easiest thing you can do is to run Ubuntu. They have partnered up with nvidia and they provide you will all drivers you need right out the box.
It can be a hassle to sort out nvidia cards with certain distros.
I would avoid Ubuntu personally as it tends to complicate things unnecessarily
Ubuntu broke with my Nvidia card. I went to PopOS and the problems stopped.
Sorry to hear that! PopOs is cool though!
nVidia hosts its own repo for fedora and openSUSE. So on those you get direct driver from manufacturer. i found it made everything juat work, and the nVidia app has many config options
That sounds great to be honest!
It has been helpful for onboarding to linux. Everyone complaining about issues on other distros, and one OpenSUSE leap you just add a repo and check which card category you have. For openSUSE newbies here are some links.
For Leap
zypper addrepo --refresh 'https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/leap/$releasever' NVIDIAand if for some reason you don’t want to type in a url you can add to the repos this wayzypper install openSUSE-repos-NVIDIATumbleweed is
zypper addrepo --refresh https://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/tumbleweed NVIDIAAnd if you wanted to Auto-detect and install driver per your card is
zypper install-new-recommends --repo NVIDIA
Ubuntu is no magic bullet when it comes to nVidia. A lot of derivative distros like PopOS do it better anyway. And non-ubuntu OSs seem to have less problems anyway, IME. Manjaro and Nobara seem to get a long very well with nVidia cards.
That’s awesome! Thanks for sharing!
- Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.
Short answer, no. There are advantages, but not worth it on an nvidia card. Wayland will replace Xorg very soon is a saying for over a decade, there’s reasons it hasn’t happened yet, nvidia is one of them.
- Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
For starting up, just a meme, on the long run it’s nice to have a small system, but not that important i£ you have the disk to spare.
- What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
Yes, the main one is “use the package manager”. The second one is keep your /home in a different partition.
- Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?
I would say that any community is also a good resource, since people are usually helpful.
- What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
Set your /home to a different partition, I know I already mentioned this but it will save your ass the first t*me you break your system and have to reinstall.
Set your /home to a different partition, I know I already mentioned this but it will save your ass the first t*me you break your system and have to reinstall.
Also back up your fstab so you know what partition/disk UUID is what.
Or you know, just backup your system entirely.
I don’t believe in backing up anything that is not user files. Pets vs cattle and all that.
Unless you have a very clearly predefined and unchanging use case, I think a personal computer will always be a pet and trying to enforce a cattle paradigm on it is a mistake.
Furthermore I find it a waste of time sorting out “user files” from “system files”, not to mention that it is error prone, when I can easily just back up everything and be sure. I don’t ever intend to restore “everything” as a whole, but being able to refer to previous versions of random files (like your
/etc/fstab), even if it’s just for troubleshooting, has already proven to be invaluable for me.
I’d say avoid Wayland for now. There’s no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.
Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn’t have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it’s easy to remove them if you don’t and use the app you want. If it’s a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn’t recommend using alot of those as you’ll be pressed for disk space
Linux doesn’t require maintenance. It typically just works. It’s not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don’t work about it.
What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don’t like canonical.
It’s been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.
- “Is Wayland worth using, especially with Nvidia” I have no personal first-hand experience with Wayland; I run Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition, which is still X11 for the moment. MY personal philosophy is I’ll adopt Wayland when Mint does. Basically don’t worry about it.
- “Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?” It is 93.3% just a meme. The most extravagant diamond encrusted froie gras kitchen sink apocalypse bunker mega yacht Linux distro you can find is going to be slim and trim compared to any currently supported edition of Windows. You will legitimately find some folks in the community who would just rather go edit a config file than have a GUI that edits it for you, and you’ll find some woodworkers who prefer to use hand planes and chisels. A hobby’s a hobby.
- “What are some habits/standards to keep my system organized and manageable?” Mainly, learn how the file system works, learn what /opt and such are for. Otherwise your skills for managing your files on WIndows should suffice.
- “Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki to be aware of?” Man pages. You can read the documentation for any command in the terminal by typing “man commandname.” For example, to learn more about the change directory command, cd, type “man cd” and it will tell you all about it. It even has its own man page, you can type “man man”. All of this is stored on your system locally, so you don’t even need an internet connection for this.
- “What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux?” What middle click does. There’s a thing called the primary buffer which allows you to highlight and paste text simply by highlighting text, then middle clicking somewhere else. It’s separate from the Ctrl+C Ctrl+V feature. Also, what dotfiles are. Short answer is, hidden files on Unix-like systems start with a dot (.) and there’s a ton of them in your home folder. These often hold things like configuration files for applications, so backing up your entire home folder including hidden files will catch all your preferences. Plus, there are directories like .fonts where you can put TTF font files and they’ll be available to applications. It’s something you don’t often get shown during onboarding but it’s there.
No, no, none, no, learn vim.
One suggestion I haven’t seen addressed: use a filesystem with snapshots such as Btrfs and combine it with Timeshift.
With Timeshift you’ll be able to roll back in time on your disk and undo stuff. It can take advantage of the lightning fast snapshots of Btrfs to do that.
On Btrfs, separate your /home into a subvolume @home so that, when you do roll back, your personal files aren’t affected.
Configure policies for daily and weekly snapshots on Timeshift. Don’t worry about space, they’re basically free.
That way you can feel better experimenting with your setup, as long as the system is Bootable.
Split the filesystem to more partition.
have a 1G /, 500M for /boot, have partitions for /usr, /usr/local (this isn’t used on linux so keep it small), /var, /home, and /tmp if you have little ram. Otherwise use memory-based filesystem (tmpfs), for /tmp I allocate less than 1/4 of my RAM.
For partition size, refer to https://man.openbsd.org/disklabel.8#AUTOMATIC_DISK_ALLOCATION
Remember to keep /usr/local small on most distro (perhaps I will allocate 5G), and increase /usr, create /opt too to prevent the disaster and allocate it the size for /usr/local. Don’t allocate all disk space, a 200G home is enough for most people and leave the rest unallocated. the formatting and fsck would be faster on smaller filesystem.
And if you find other “cache” location, try log out and rm -rf the location, if login doesn’t break, I would mount tmpfs on that cache location too.
I actively discourage neophytes from fiddling with multiple partitions. It’s a layer of complexity that is unwarranted for them, and most users. Newbies can use a volume for home and another for the rest. Experienced users can split the system volume for the use cases you mentioned. And I don’t think having separate fixed size partitions like you suggested is a good idea for anyone on a desktop.
In my opinion newbies should learn what is called sane defaults. It’s a pity that almost every installer in the word except OpenBSD’s disklabel(8) cannot properly do automatic partitioning.
And I don’t think having separate fixed size partitions like you suggested is a good idea for anyone on a desktop.
I would link another article that discuss about using a huge root partition for all: https://www.bsdhowto.ch/hugeroot.html
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=154054091026039&w=3
Avoid corrupting newbies’ partition is a way to keep them with Linux.
Agree to disagree.
I’ve updated:
new:
UNIX’s removable filesystem is a BENEFIT, not a BUG. DOS and then Windows’ A: B: C: D: are BUG.
Why not take advantage of it. Microsoft always wanted a removable filesystem like UNIX. But they simply can’t get it.
(Those can’t admit this advantage often say “Linux and Windows are almost identical”…)
Dude, that has nothing to do with logical volumes vs physical partitions. You’re tilting at the wrong windmill.
You can create either logical volume or physical partition, but make sure you have different partition for different mount point: /, /usr, /usr/local (keep small on linux), /var, /opt (if you use), /tmp (if you have little ram or don’t want to use memory filesystem).
What do you mean by your comment.
I haven’t said something about logical volumes vs physical partitions.
This is one of the reasons I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been a solid distro for me.
Heard great things about it. Mint doesn’t suggest it as default, but if you choose Btrfs during install, it will configure @home subvolume and snapshots for you, which is nice.
Can you elaborate on the don’t worry about space thing? Half of my disks are timeshift snapshots.
Snapshots on btrfs are at the filesystem level and only really are a list of steps to get back to the old state. They are not a complete backup and you can’t move them out of the filesystem.
Sure. So a snapshot in itself doesn’t consume more than a few KB. The filesystem has a Copy On Write (COW) behavior, meaning it doesn’t overwrite edits on files by default. It moves the pointer to the file to a new location and writes the new version there. If there is nothing still pointing to the old data, that space is now considered free and can be overwritten.
A snapshot basically keeps pointers to data in the past. So it’s not entirely free, in the sense that older versions of files will remain and therefore not free up disk space as long as that snapshot exists. But it’s free in the sense that no data is copied to create a snapshot. Your filesystem is always only writing the difference to the last snapshot.
If you configure snapshots at small intervals and configure them not to be erased, you’ll compile the history for all the changes in all your files since ever. And that will definitely cost you space.
Typical scenarios are a daily snapshot that you keep for a week and a weekly snapshot that you keep for a month. That will cost you very little space (again in typical desktop use cases). If you have a streaming folder, a COW filesystem might not be the best idea. Or at least create a subvolume that doesn’t get snapshots.
Snapshots don’t replace backups and if you need older data that a month, that’s what backups are for.
Thank you
One thing I would recommend is using a note taking app to create snippets of fixes or personalization changes for your OS that you’ve made. For me that includes things like how to add my laptop’s webcam to the blacklist and other things that I’d need to spend time looking up since I don’t do them that often.
Don’t listen to the trolls please, you have to think long term, how will you grow in the next 2 to 5 (or even 10) years, because without a doubt you will grow and have a learning curve which alters the way you will use your machine. There are tons and tons of solutions and people pitching it from their Linux ricer power user perspective.
Don’t make yourself regret and/or spent countless hours switching back and forth, solving issues, looking through help articles, etc etc
I know it’s hard but trust me, you literally cannot make a good choice now with your current state. Just install Ubuntu and get a hang of it, use it, do your stuff you want to do and when you are comfortable with Ubuntu, then throw that piece of junk in the trash and switch to Debian Stable - no, not SID, no you won’t miss out on all the cool bleeding edge AUR packages.
When you take this path I described you will grow with the system and you will be able to make the decision based on your needs, wants and use cases. Trust me or suffer, I am sorry new guy.
I’m downvoting this comment specifically because you decided that you had to make your long comment in a larger font just to stand out from the crowd. Very spammy, dude. I’m sure your opinions are just as worth reading without you having to put flashing lights on them.
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I never used Wayland but Xorg works really well.
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Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do. Also, try new things just to try them. That’s how I started using many things that now make the core of my computer experience. Even if something looks scary I recommend giving it a go because in most cases it is much easier than it looks (at least when you have some experience with Linux).
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YouTube can be a good resource at the start.
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Switching to Linux was very smooth experience for me because I wanted to inform myself about Linux before switching just to know what I’m getting into. If you go prepared you probably won’t experience many problems.
Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do.
Very important. Don’t run arbitrary commands on the internet, but don’t paste sysctls and config too.
YouTube can be a good resource at the start.
Linux lacks much documentation. Man pages, tutorials from arch and gentoo wiki should be considered.
that’s my feedback
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Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
What is bloat. If I recall correctly fedora or RHEL (or both) enable the cups daemon even if you will not print anything. If I recall correctly Ubuntu enable openvpn service even you will never use it.
But it seems neither of them have tmux installed by default.
Feel free to test and correct me because I won’t bother those distro anymore.
Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?
arch wiki is a tutorial.
Manual pages are best, and if GNU hells put the documentation in info pages, you can install info.
If the manual page is unreadable and the program is part of the base system (on BSD all 3rd party “packages” are installed on /usr/local and base system is installed on / and /usr), try reading the BSD (OpenBSD) maintained documentation. They are also provided on-line.
What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
The first is to drop all the things you learned in Windows. Many have no value, many are flawed and create bad habits, many are disposed.
New linux user often prefer GUI or menu instead of command line tool (what I mean is different, see the next sentence). They prefer to browser chromium and chat and typing this comment instead of taking time reading manual page, books, learn how to maintenance their system, even you need to learn how to INSTALL YOUR SYSTEM CORRECTLY!! You use ‘a’ huge a partition (sorry, root / partition) with an EFI partition and a /boot partition (and perhaps a /home partition too, and that’s the end?). No /usr, no /usr/local (this hierarchy is not used in Linux so keep it small), no /var, neither the /opt hell?
To keep your system organized and manageable, you first need KNOWLEDGE.
What to learn:
install and maintenance the system: partitioning, use your package manager (I hope you won’t read websites that have to teach you to use your package manager but the main topic is to use some software). Example: Absolute FreeBSD; Absolute OpenBSD (Michael W Lucas, although this is for FreeBSD and OpenBSD).
Learn not to wine (don’t run windows software on other operating system since it will need much kernel modification, OpenBSD explicitly refuse to do; I think running windows software on linux is unstable and insecure; I’m hostile with wine.)
UNIX programming: The UNIX programming environment; select some (like sed, awk) in the UNIX 7th edition manual pages, volume 2 which are tutorials that are still valid these day; manual page.
useful addition: get on tmux,
Enough for a regular user?
my personal habit:
I think I’m so lucky that I never do neofetch; once tried to decorate LXQt with the arc theme and then never used LXQt (since I switched to sway), if decorating the graphical interface make no sense to convenience I wouldn’t do (I myself hostile with unixporn or something like that, mean I never care about such community) and never created a colorful github’s myname/myname repo readme. (of course at the time I didn’t do learning since I’m chatting and being an discord terrorist)
What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
I wish I could know what books to read
But when I know it’s too late (wasted 2 year using linux and learned almost nothing), and I already switched to BSD. “Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng.” (Near the ink you get darker, near the light you get brighter, that’s my poor translation.)
I’ve been using linux exclusively for about 5 years, hopped a bit for the first 1-2 years (mint, mx, lite, debian, manjaro, artix), settled on Arch. I think Mint is the best one for ppl coming from windows.
Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.
IMO no, i have a 1060, tried about 1 year ago and it had lots of issues on KDE, gnome seemed usable but it’s gnome so no, and i use LXQt so if it gets good support or if i like plasma 6 i might try again.
Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?
If by bloat u mean installing lots of packages, the “problems” would be disk space and longer updates, and if it’s a service it will depend on the distro, i think debian/ubuntu and derivatives will usually enable the service after install, so they will use some cpu/ram too. Shouldn’t be too much of an issue but it’s a good idea to only install what u need and remove stuff when u don’t need anymore.
What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
Just don’t sudo install anything outside the package manager, like node/python packages or downloaded stuff (u can usually install them somewhere in $HOME)
Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?
No, whatever search engine u use should be enough.
What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
Nothing i can think at the moment, i used mint in dual boot for a while, just “switched” (deleted the windows partition) when i realized i didn’t boot it for a few months, so i was already pretty comfortable with it.
Using NVIDIA please use the image from ublue.it, the official Fedora one can work but noveau is not ready. You can install Kinoite from Fedora though and give it a try, report your experience with noveau (should work and proprietary drivers are pretty scary) and then rebase to ublue (unsigned, reboot, signed, reboot)
Wayland is worth it, Plasma 6 will come out soon and primarily target it. It just works for me, always, I have like no problem with it. Flathub flatpaks always worked because they have loose permissions.
Xorg is an insecure mess and it is not maintained.
Also, give the Plasma 6 preview a try! and report bugs. Its like 99% ready.
Bloat: yes of course. Fedora Kinoite has none. If you install a few flatpaks, dont be scared by duplicate Libraries, they use deduplication to actually need less space.
Bloat matters as a huge LUKS drive is notably slower, but only a matter of seconds on an NVME/ any SSD. And yeah, please use LUKS, encrypting afterwards is not easy. Also use a Password that can be written in US QWERTY too, a bug in current Fedora Atomic, it doesnt use your native keyboard layout. Seems to be fixed on 40 (rawhide, Plasma 6 prerelease Version of Kinoite)
Habits:
- install huge apps like RStudio, an IDE, a programming environment etc. in a Distrobox. If you program hardware it needs to be a root distrobox, otherwise no USB access.
- if you git clone stuff, create a “Git” folder in your home, put that there. Guides never mention that.
- if you use Appimages, compiled apps, binaries; create a “Programs” folder in your home
- use Czkawka to find duplicate files
Resources:
What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
- Fedora Kinoite (Ubuntu broke, stable Distros suck, …)
- use Flathub Flatpaks, they are often better
Immutable distros are great
Wayland is nice, can suck in weird and wacky ways with Nvidia though. Only reason I’m using it is because my favourite WM is Wayland only
Mind sharing?
- Wayland is the new standard and X11 is the old standard. NVIDIA support is getting better. The advantages are mainly under the hood, the most relevant for most users is in security and compatibility with newer hardware. If your distro comes with Wayland, use it. If it doesn’t, then don’t worry about it.
- Bloat’s subjective and mostly a matter of taste. Unless you’re trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of a 10 year old potato, the bloatiness of your default desktop install will not meaningfully impact your performance. Even the most bloated linux install runs lighter than Windows 10.
- Keep up to date, especially security updates. Don’t work in root unless you have to, don’t use sudo if you don’t need it, and configure permissions properly rather than 777ing everything. Be careful adding package repositories: don’t add from other distros or other versions of your distro as that can screw up dependencies. Check your package manager or flatpak before resorting downloading random files and trying to install them manually.
- Yes: linux subreddits/communities, Fedora’s own documentation and forums
- How easy it is to make a mistake that’s very hard to fix. Also, understanding what “everything is a file,” the filesystem in general, and what a desktop environment even is.
“even the most bloated Linux install runs lighter than windows”
I raise you my Linux machine with a windows VM
windows
There’s your problem right there.
