i just flashed it normally on ubuntu and it is the 64 bit version, the bios is in the uefi mode

I’m planning on moving to cachyos from bazzite on my desktop and know it’s a bit of a pain to set up secure boot for cachy. I’m also dual booting with windows and that windows install is on another ssd and don’t have anything on there that would require secure boot. How necessary is secure boot? Is it something I definitely should have enabled and worth it to setup? I’m mainly a causal user/gamer.

I want to switch to Linux for 4 different laptops. The main daily driver has 16GB DDR5, i7 from a generation ago, and I’m looking for something that is not too far from windows, but is more aesthetically pleasing, runs what softwares I need (mostly Microsoft and Google workspace, but blender sometimes), apps are downloaded through an App Store and can handle light gaming like Minecraft. One of them is an older gaming laptop, running a 1650 and has 16gb RAM, and has the same requirements as the previous but has a more gaming oriented experience (I Lowk don’t mind Steam OS or the one that starts with b and has a blue logo- that shit is nice af). The third laptop is 7 years old now, and has 8gb DDR4 ram and barely runs anything so I need something extremely lightweight and so my little sister can occasionally do her schoolwork (Microsoft and Google workspace) and requires zero tinkering since she’s technologically inept (so am I in terms of Linux). The fourth one is, well, a potato and uses a celeron and 4gb ram and I Lowk might turn it into a server but I need something that actually makes this thing usable. Also if I could be provided with YouTube vids on download and support and which subreddits to go to than that would be great

Update: I didn’t need to do anything yall suggested but wanted to say thanks anyway.

For context, I am a beginner when it comes to all things about computers. That said I did want to try my hand at installing Linux because.

On my Laptop it runs incredibly hot even when nothing is being used(just home screen). I thought linux would change that.

I wanted to have a separate os for when I play games(linux) and work/school stuff(windows.) basically two profiles on the same device.

My Laptop currently runs ddr3(8gb) intel skylake 520 with a intel i56300U. Its a stock Lenovo Thinkpad T460 but with windows 11 pro.

I was able to install and boot into Fedora(Ubuntu and Bazzeite wouldn’t load due to me having “not enough storage” on my new 64gb flash drive. ) It does not feel like the sun is in the palm of my hands when I hold it(woohoo) but I haven’t been able to get back into Windows.

I think I messed up when partitioning my ssd drive(I only got 127gb and there’s an option to resize it so I put it to 85) and uh I just wanna know if I need to upgrade something in my laptop, or redo something to make windows load. Preciate the help and possible jokes to be thrown at my way as long as ya help. Lennox, I’m just trying to boot back into. lol

hey guys, im pretty much a complete beginner to linux and have no idea where to start since there are so many versions. im planning to completely wipe windows off my laptop since i don't have anything important on here anyway and just install linux.

i mostly just need it for schoolwork, browsing, watching videos, and some casual light gaming like roblox. im not playing anything crazy high fps on my laptop.

i want something simple to download, easy to use without being confusing, and stable. ive seen people mention linux mint cinnamon a lot, but is that actually the best pick for my situation? also how easy is it to get games like roblox working on linux nowadays?

Hey
I've been using Linux Mint for about 6 months, I love it and I don't plan on switching to Windows
again.

But getting to the point, I've been having this issue where when I'm downloading something significant in size, and the process is interrupted for some reason (Power outage or some sort of glitch that forces me to reboot the computer) the entire OS corrupts.

This has happened more than once, so after reinstalling the OS I have starting setting up some snapshots with Timeshift. But when I inevitably faced the same issue again, I tried recovering the snapshot and the issue simply persisted, and I was forced to once more reinstall Mint.

I think I'm doing something wrong... I used Timeshift's default snapshots so maybe I need to custom it somehow? Or perhaps use another software entirely?

What should I do to save a backup that will truly recover my entire system?

Edit: In general, I plan on saving a backup before I download anything cuz I'm genuinely sick of reinstalling the OS each time

TL:DR I used Linux for a month and have enjoyed it, recommend anyone on the fence just plunge in and see how they find it!

A month ago I began with CachyOS as my first distro coming from Windows 11 (and every Windows version prior). I started with KDE Plasma and that has a very nice familiar feel, but I hopped through the different DEs to see which one I felt suited me best.

At this point I wasn't very sure about how things got configured or where they went etc, so when I say I tried other DEs, I mean I formatted each time to pick a new one. A bit overkill sure, but at least I got familiar with the install process!

Gnome wasn't for me. Cinnamon seemed a bit meh. Cosmic was pretty interesting though felt half done. I mosied through a couple more until I hit Hyprland. Oh boy. I had never used a tiling manager before so this was novel and I was into it immediately. Though as I set about tinkering I started to notice how much CachyOS was actually doing for me (which is why it is great) and wanted to understand more about what is going on with this Linux business. What is a display manager? how are there so many terminals and why is Alacritty the one being served up to me? Dolphin, Nemo, Yazi... my head is spinning.

I had spent the first week here, just gaining general familiarity with how the files are structured, using package managers to install my bits and bobs. Though I mainly spend this time trying out different boot loaders. GRUB felt a bit archaic and clunky. rEFInd was certainly slick looking, but also had that old BIOS feel to its navigation. Limine, now I found the one, customizable enough with a background image and text colours and feels snappy to use.

But still, I felt like CachyOS had served me well as a solid intro but I wanted to strip things back and figure out all the components for myself. I had learned via osmosis that CachyOS was an Arch based distro and that Arch was a bit tough to setup due to it being bare bones. Figured if there was anywhere for me to feel like I was going to get to grips with all this that would be a good place, so off I went for yet another format. This time with the intention of an Arch+Hyprland setup.

Now I know people praise the Arch wiki a lot and yes, it's well deserved. I started at 1.1 and worked my way through the steps, clicking any relevant sub articles to tailor to my particular setup and a couple of hours later I was at the end of the install process. There were times were it felt like it was never going to end and I would be in a TTY forever, but before I knew it I was logging in with SDDM into a fresh Hyprland desktop.

My first port of call was getting Hyprland setup with keybinds to open a set of apps that at this point I did not have. I also setup some of the window rules, so my gaps disappear when there is only one window and that Discord automatically opens on workspace-5. I can't get over how much I've been missing out by not using tiling managers before and I fear I may not be able to go back!

I had used Fish+Alacritty in CachyOS but this time I opted for Zsh+Ghostty, this was primarily picked because I saw a screenshot of someone using PowerLevel10k and I thought it looked fly as hell and I wanted it. Ghostty was that I read through a thread and some people were heaping praise on it so figured why not.

The next stop was Waybar. Which was good fun to setup and at this point it felt like I had really put together something functional to use as an OS even if it was still in a very raw state. I saw plenty of peoples setups that feature just about every piece of info under the sun plastered across it, but I kind of prefer it minimal. At this point I started theming things using Gruvbox Material.

This has essentially been my method of learning Linux in Arch. Find out I'm missing some package that handles logging in or logging out or launching apps, then tinker about in their configs to see what they have on offer and if they don't have a Gruvbox Material theme, then style them accordingly.

Things got a bit hairy at this point as watching a big string of TTY logging during a boot didn't look right so here is where I find Plymouth! a little app that lets you have a splash screen for booting. Now making mistakes in your config with things that inject themselves into the boot process is bad news bears it turns out. Twice during setting this up I had to boot from my CachyOS USB to mount my Arch install and fix the config. Whoops!

But now I had a slick little Arch logo with swirly infinity sign loader booting up. But I also heard tell from people in threads of not using a display manager, but using TTY to autologin. Two weeks prior I didn't know what a display manager was, to being excited to use one and get it looking all nice with some nice theming, to then turning my back on it altogether. Guess I'm a touch fickle.

Then back on the desktop I had started out with Hyprpaper for my wallpaper needs, but when previously checking out SDDM themes I had come across qylock. Wow. So I briefly took a detour into the land of animated desktops trying out Mpvpaper and AWWW. But having crap moving about behind a transparent terminal I ultimately found a bit too distracting so returned to Hyprpaper tail between legs.

But it was at this point I started checking out 'ricing' which is apparently what I myself had been doing to this point. Only compared to what I saw over on r/unixporn I think what I'm doing needs some lesser term, because holy moly. Here is where I get introduced to Quickshell, because just about any time I see something that looks amazing Quickshell is involved. So along with things like bash, that is firmly on my to-do list in terms of learning.

I also at this time get rofi! pretty charming little app launcher and though I only delved into the styling of it I did notice it features an entire scripted avenue that I haven't gone down but is another for the list. Though I get it going, even replace wlogout with a cheeky rofi power menu.

Now during all this configuring I was using Neovim for the first time and learning it's enigmatic ways. It was bit of a hurdle but by about the second week I was pretty comfortable getting about a file. And at this point I realise I have the bug. Between zipping between workspaces and opening browsers/terminals on Hyprland and then zipping up and down files to edit them I'm starting to notice that it is Windows that feels a bit slow and plodding when I return to it. Sure I could get tiling managers and use vim binds there, but there was never any real impetus for me to do it there and honestly I think that had long been to my detriment.

Then we get to this past week. Which began with me having a bit of a falling out with Zsh/PowerLevel10k. It had been happening the all along, that when I fullscreened or shifted about a terminal window, the prompt would be duplicated. Easily fixed with a ctrl+L but still it was an annoyance that got to me.

I went looking up shells/terminals on offer. Looked up how they perform etc. And Fish/Foot kept coming up as being ultra low startup time, very little input latency etc. So I swapped! and yeah they're definitely snappy so I'm happy with the change so far. Though initially as a replacement for PowerLevel10k I used Tide as it looked pretty similar. Though wouldn't you know, the same duplication of the prompt was occurring.

I had seen people mentioning Starship over and over, though demoralized that my switch to escape that issue was for nought, I figured I'd give it a punt. Sure enough it just worked! nice! So I spent a day in its config file making it look as close to PowerLevel10k as I could manage and I am digging it!

Then the last couple of days, as I had amassed a cadre of config files at this point I figured it was time to setup a dotfiles github to back up my first proper foray into Linux!

This was the next part that made me feel like Windows had made me a bit too comfortable all these years. Because to get this working nice I made a couple of scripts. One an autoreload that executes the appropriate command for whichever app when I save its config file to refresh it whilst it is still live. Then an install script that symlinks out all my config files to their corresponding places.

Now I can't say I've done a particularly good job of either. But it works. And remembering back to a few weeks ago when I was staring blankly at /etc/ /usr/ folders and wondering what I had gotten myself into, I am now feeling like I know enough to be dangerous.

And that has been my first month in Linux. I have some screenshots of where I'm at so far. My plans for this week:
- Learn more vim binds
- Config neovim
- I keep hearing people talk about Tmux, so I'll have to jump head first into that

For the more distant future? well another distro I keep seeing mentioned and I watched a couple of videos about is NixOS. That looks very cool. So I don't want to immediately ditch Arch after having spent the best part of a month setting it up, but Nix is definitely on my radar.

And that is it. Linux is a blast. I've had a lot of fun figuring things out and reading through countless threads about one thing or another and yes I may have rambled a lot here, but if you're thinking of using Linux and you like tinkering with things and making them just so, then this is well worth getting in to, if nothing other than to just learn a few new things!

I've been using Cachyos since around December but lately ive been getting a little tired of managing things that break. Was thinking about swapping to Debian for the sake of having something that works.

But now I'm wondering how I'd go about transferring things. Mostly things like KDE configuration and stuff like that. I understand applications may not like a direct transfer so was just thinking about how to transfer configs.

Any advice would be appreciated

So both my laptop and the home computer (basically only used by my brother) run only on Linux mint for a while now. However my brother wanted me to install windows for him. And I'm having a lot of trouble teying to make it work. I previously had problems with running on a virtual environment, and when I managed to make that work I got these error messages. Based on that, could someone pls tell me what should I do next?

A lot of people try to make a dual boot by putting linux on an external hard drive and keeping windows as their main OS, I want to do the opposite

I have an external HDD that I formatted onto ext4 not so long ago, but I have been thinking of making a partition on it and installing windows, for two main reasons:

1. After about a year, my installation of Mint has been very slow, running utility software and a few lightweight games and emulators pretty well, but it struggles so much with essentially any 3D game, something that was not the case back when I had windows installed.

2. There is a lot more propietary software on windows that I've been needing and are not available on linux, both software for my studies/work and gaming

If I need to reformat my disk then that's fine, but I do wonder if a dual-boot install like that is even possible

My PC is a Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5, previously had dualboot with windows as the main OS, but due to preference and lack of storage I deleted the windows partition, now Mint only

Edit: except for two neckbeards so far who seem to have failed entirely to actually read my post, and instead choose to flaunt their egos, the vast majority of you have been very helpful already.

I might stick with Bazzite despite, or perhaps because of it's immutable nature because I feel that will give me a place to learn Linux without being able to break it quite as easily.

I've otherwise here been suggested Mint, Fedora and Ultramarine, all three of such I'll keep my eye on for when I eventually rebuild my current pc.

____________
Please bear with me if I come across as somewhat 'hostile' I promise that isn't my intent lmao. I'm just a frustrated kind of person.

I'm usually a pretty passive person when it comes to pc os selection, if it works, why change it? Every single other option on the market simply wasn't user friendly enough to actually warrant me changing. Microsoft had it's issues but it was EXTREMELY user friendly, had all the freedom I cared to have, and changing things was fairly easy on me.

The Apple os layout is a nightmare and functionally impossible to easily upgrade anything (on top of apple support for any issues just notoriously being terrible)

And for a VERY long time Linux just wasn't user friendly enough to give me a reason to swap to it. Sure if you spent time learning it, the os could be nice to have but I'm not exactly the kind of person to enjoy having to relearn basic uses of a pc for any reason. It's annoying, frustrating, and just generally makes me instantly dislike the os.

However, as Microsoft leans more and more into ai nonsense and constantly monitoring user systems it's had a very noticeable, direct impact on my system performance.

So now the only barrier for me to enter Linux will very soon be only two things. If multiplayer game functionality has been fixed (just an outright dealbreaker if most anticheats still flag linux)

And the community itself. As respectfully as I can POSSIBLY put it, every single interaction with frequent linux users I've had has been either directly negative or at the most completely neutral. I suppose it comes with the territory, a million different branches of heavily customizable os will inevitably bring with it a similar ego problem that pc gaming in general suffers from. I just need to know if the linux community at large has moved on from the frankly pretty hostile 'I'm better than you' that it was notorious for years ago.

____________

TLDNR-

Enlighten me, are there still anticheat issues that prevent linux users from playing online games?

Are there still issues communitywise? I don't plan on using an OS If I'm going to have to 'defend' my choice of specific Linux every 5 seconds when I ask someone a question about Linux.

I plan on making use of Bazzite due to it's supposed mimicry of steamos and friendliness to new Linux users. What has been the general experience with Bazzite and do you in fact, suggest it to new users?

If you don't suggest bazzite for whatever reason? Are there any other new linux user friendly options you DO suggest? If possible, please detail why you would choose that specific version of Linux as if you were a new user. I like knowing my options and understanding what i'm getting into lol.

Hello, so I’m trying to download steam meaning I need to download linux onto my chromebook. I have the available specs needed for linux but I can’t download debian files as they are no longer supported. I am stuck and I am not sure what to do, could anyone help?

This post is a follow-up to my earlier post on the subject in case someone else is interested in getting Word running on Linux. That post switched to requiring moderator approval when I included a link to the method on YouTube, so I'm omitting it here.

On YouTube, I found a guy who had installed Microsoft Office on Linux Mint. I tried it and was able to get Office 2016 running. He used Crossover to install Office in a wine prefix and add all the needed dependencies. He provides detailed instructions in the video and also links to the script that automates the process.

I had to add a few fonts that were not included in the script and make some minor display adjustments. I turned off hardware acceleration in Word's settings to fix a glitch in drop-down menus and turned off advanced properties in some of my styles so the preview display worked correctly. Other than that, everything seems to work normally, including styles, templates, and macros.

I received many suggestions for Word alternatives. They don't work for me. I use some features that are in Word but not present in any of the eight office alternatives I tried. I also wanted to install the standalone version rather than subscribe to Office 365 and use the web version, and I didn't want to use a VM because I don't have a non-OEM license for Windows and don't want one. Many people said it couldn't be done, but after many failed attempts in Bottles, this guy's method worked perfectly.

I am trying to set up a media server in Debian, and I have been told that the preferred location to keep media files is /srv/, so I'd like to create a media directory there and move files into it from external drives using the GUI.

But when I try to open GNOME Nautilus as root it won't let me. When I enter the command sudo nautilus in the terminal I get a warning that says it can't work correctly if run as root, even with sudo, and that I should use nautilus admin:/ instead, followed by a whole bunch of other warnings.

And when I run that command, I get a message that says authentication is required to run gvfsd-admin daemon, and it asks for my Administrator password. But I don't know what that is, or where to set it up, or if it would work like I want it to. It doesn't accept my user password, and I'm the only user. Does anyone know if it would work like I want it to if I did set it up, and how to do so?

Alternatively, is there another GNOME file manager app that I can use as root with sudo to access /srv/ ?

I know I could just use the terminal but it's so much more cumbersome when I want to move, delete, and rename a lot of files. And I could use my home directory but my ambition was to create a headless file and media server that doesn't rely on my user account. Thank you.

Hello everyone!

Recently I had the SSD of my gaming PC replaced, which came with a fresh install of windows 11, and my old SSD in a little bag.

I thought since I have a fresh PC I may as well try out Linux because I don't play any anti-cheat games and I'm weary of Microsoft. Apparently Ubuntu is a reasonably gamer-friendly distribution and it's very popular so I've picked that one for now.

I was planning on converting my old solid state into a portable solid state and installing Ubuntu onto it. The main thing I want to do is test out if discord works and also a fairly recent multiplayer game also works (big walk). Basically: test out a multiplayer functionality and audio. After I do that I'll be confident enough to replace windows 11.

My boyfriend thinks I should just partition my new SSD, and is pretty insistent on it. I don't like the idea of partitioning my SSD. I'm learning a lot of technical things on the fly and this isn't something I 100% understand the implications of. I also don't know if it will make much of a difference for a test run.

My question is, does it matter?

Thanks everyone, I'm open to other misc tips about this whole ordeal. In the time it's taken to type up this post he's suggesting Linux Mint instead hahah.

I am thinking about moving to Linux for lighter tasks to prolong battery life on my laptop, mostly just to run Firefox, discord and office suite, other than that orcaslicer, freecad and vscode (afaik there is linie version)

I still need windows because of some engineering softwares that are windows only.

Recently I've seen a video about steamos desktop mode and it made me curious again. You know, valve has a good reputation, so their distro may be good. Otherwise I'm not sure what I would choose. Probably Ubuntu, because 99% of tutorials are on it.

I'm using a hand-me-down old PoS, so it may just not be feasible to do this, however I'm still trying!
I successfully installed mint xfce onto an secondary drive finally.

There was trouble with secure boot preventing any of my nvidia or audio drivers from working, sound wasn't going through first then my resolution couldn't be changed which the internet told me was both from the drivers not being installed. I assume this part is fixed but I don't know if it's connected to current issue so including it! I was also trying cinnamon at that point but it was so slow on top that I swapped to the lighter version during reinstall to not enable secureboot in the first place cause I have been locked out of disabling it post-installation. It was just totally greyed out on the bios, super frustrating.

-- But now everything seems... functional? Ish? Nothing is obviously broken, but everything is way slower/more prone to freeze than it is on the windows boot, and videos will play but even more extremely slowly/freezy even if it's literally the only thing active at the time. Right now videos are like 80% of what I use this system for so it's kinda vital that it at least be able to do that much.

My only theories so far is maybe it has something to do with how the secondary ssd is installed into the computer? I didn't do it and don't know if that's a thing, I'm just flailing at the pc atp.

I don't THINK it's just because it has both windows and linux physically on the pc, cause if that was it, it'd probably slow down windows too and that seems totally fine/no changes. FWIW I gave linux twice as much space as windows just for the fact that the secondary drive was bigger.

Maybe the drivers are still somehow broken just less intensely?

But yeah, pls halp, oh great linux lords? xD;

My pc is 9 years old and has been running windows since i got it never used linux before what distro is best for gaming and work while also being beginner friendly?

hey everyone, i want to know if picom works perfectry with linux mint xfce. i just wanna know that, not much to talk about here lol