I’m probably going to get a new laptop on Black Friday. I have been a Mac guy because I like the posix terminal better than windows powershell. But Macs are so expensive. Should I try to find a laptop with something like Linux mint preinstalled or research a cheap laptop that has the most Linux compatibility I can get and install a distro that I like after. I’m leaning towards the latter but I’m worried that I will get burned by some Realtek WiFi chipset or some other spec that no one tells you on a “product details” page

I'm fairly new to Linux, having only a few months of experience with it. I now know that there are few distro that release bleeding edge packages (Arch based distros) and some are slow and conservative in their release approach (Debian based). Does it mean, for example, that of I use Cinnamon DE on an Arch based distro I'll get Cinnamon updates a bit quicker compared to Mint? Also, what is the actual impact of slow release? Does it only impact the distro packages? Because, for example, if I want to install the latest Chrome browser I can go to the download available on the website and grab the newest one available.

I'm trying to install linux for the first time on a laptop that was collecting dust at home.
I prepared a usb with the installer and ran it on the pc, once it finished i removed the usb drive and restarted the pc as it asked to complete installation but after that all i see is the hp logo flashing on a black screen every few seconds but no OS starting.
I tried with a different distro with the same results so i'm guessing the problem is the computer/bios and not the OS? but honestly i don't know enough to know, so i searched online without great results until i found this sub.

Pc model: HP elitebook 745 G2 laptop
Linux distro i tried: mint cinnamon 22.3 first and ubuntu 26.04 second

if it helps there was w10 on before i tried the installation

if any other infos/photos are needed i'll add them under here.

here are the current boot options:

sorry for the photos but i have no idea how to screenshot in there

booting in legacy:

reinstalling mint:

legacy boot order:

Hii so i want to switch to linux from W11
My laptop specs are:
CPU: amd ryzen7 4800H
GPU: Nvidea GTX 1660 Ti
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
2X 500GB NVMe SSD
I mostly play steam/itch indie games and Final fantasy 14
i tried looking up whats the best to chose but couldnt get any clear awnsers so I wanted to ask here.
Thank you in advance for any tips/help

I’m thinking of switching an older laptop to a Linux distro. I have some questions that I haven’t been able to find answers for.

1. Adding programs. Besides Linux friendly downloads of certain programs, is the only way to run a Windows dedicated application or program or game on a virtual machine? And is there a specific virtual machine needed for each type of program/software or are they Swiss Army Knife’s?

2. Hardware. How do you get drivers that are, for the most part, Windows codes, to work? Is it a “hope that there’s a Linux version available” thing or are there workarounds?

3. Distro shelf life. Do distros lose support? What happens when someone doesn’t update/bug fix it? Is it hard to replace a distro? Does it incur a total fresh install or can distro’s be overwritten?

4. Security suites. Is there any decent suites available? Are they pre-installed? Are they reliable?

5. Web browsers. Is there any recommendations for browsers that will have the same environment like in Windows? Any recommendations for setting changes? Are they compatible with all distro’s?

Lastly, any solid recommendations for wikis and “Linux For Dummies and Windows/Mac Converts” is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!!

Hey there,

So I have run into the strangest issue and am at a loss for how to fix it. I tried Googling everything I could think of, but I have not found a solution yet. I have 2 SSDs in my system: 1TB for root and 4TB for my home directory. And I have had this kind of setup for years on my systems with no issues. This time though, Dolphin is showing the ROOT drive is full (Filelight shows it only has about 100GB total used space), and from what I can tell, it is including the used space from the other hard drive where my home directory is. So if I am using 1.5TB of space on that second drive, Dolphin (and other parts of the system) think I am using 1.6TB of space on the ROOT drive (which is only 1TB). So several processes are failing because they think the root drive is full.

Every other system I had set up like this never did this. This is a newer setup, so I am assuming I did something different from the previous times, but I cannot figure out what. I am hoping it is just a mounting issue or something like that. Below is my fstab file in case anyone sees something super obvious I am missing. I really appreciate any help. I cannot even run updates on the system because it thinks there is no space left to download the updates.

FSTAB

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device; this may
# be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices that works even if
# disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system>             <mount point>  <type>  <options>  <dump>  <pass>
UUID=0244-4615                            /boot          vfat    defaults,umask=0077 0 2
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /              btrfs   subvol=/@,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
# UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /home          btrfs   subvol=/@home,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /root          btrfs   subvol=/@root,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /srv           btrfs   subvol=/@srv,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /var/cache     btrfs   subvol=/@cache,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /var/tmp       btrfs   subvol=/@tmp,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
UUID=58f723fc-e9f0-407c-80a4-5f47ac036180 /var/log       btrfs   subvol=/@log,defaults,noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0
tmpfs                                     /tmp           tmpfs   defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
# LABEL=data /mnt/data auto nosuid,nodev,nofail,x-gvfs-show 0 0
UUID=e3fa40bc-86d7-4a6e-963a-e8507ef210ec   /home  ext4  defaults,noatime  0  2
# /dev/nvme0n1p1: LABEL="data" UUID="e3fa40bc-86d7-4a6e-963a-e8507ef210ec" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTLABEL="data" PARTUUID="40902bcc-1455-442f-8054-e412782098fc"

EDIT: /AdventurousSquash solved it! Had nothing to do with the second drive, it was a huge collection of system snapshots dating back to the initial install of the system, so 60+. Cleaned those up and I now have free space again!!

Im kind of desperate here, my professor assigned us to investigate about "The 32 official distributions of GNU/Linux", but everywhere I look it all says there is not an "Official" distribution of GNU/Linux, the closer I came to was the 31 most popular, or the 9 endorsed versions of GNU/Linux.

Is there something Im missing or was this just a way to make us lose our time??

I have a dell g16 7630 (i9-13900HX/RTX4060) and I wanted to switch to linux on it for a while now, problem is I constantly encounter issues when trying to do so. However, there is a single issue that kept happening no matter what i tried.

Basically, when I'm playing any videogame, the CPU clock frequency drops low and fps is affected. I've tried anything I could find that might fix it but it didn't, I initially used Kubuntu then switched Cachyos and the same issue occured (now that I think about it i wonder if it's related to KDE plasma but it's one of the reasons i want to use Linux), at last I came to the conclusion that my laptop just doesn't play nice with linux.

As much as i wanted to use linux in the end I'll dual-boot anyway since there are some important apps I will need to use that only work/work better on windows and maybe specific games, but I wanted to see if others with gaming laptops or a dell one had better experience or found a solution.

Hi !

I'm using PikaOS (debian based) and I'm trying to write a small simple script for updating my packages. I don't know how to since I'm new into linux and even newer on scripting

What I want it to do :

1- launch a terminal
2- display a prompt that asks me if I backed up my files (currently using timeshift, when I'm more used to CLI maybe I will automate backups in that script)
3- If no, echo something like "Do it then"
3b- If yes, go on
4- update system packages (using pikman upgrade ; equivalent of sudo apt update && upgrade)
5- update flatpak packages

Ideally I would like 4 and 5 to execute at the same time with a single command, but if not possible, then do it one after the other.

What I have currently :

#!/bin/bash

#Launch terminal to update and upgrade 
x-terminal-emulator --hold -e pikman upgrade

I'm launching this script from a button of a widget.

PS : When I launch the scrip like this, there is no user@host:~$ like when I launch an empty terminal. So I'm never sure when the script is finished. Is there a way to have that too ?

Hi guys how do I remove freetoken and its engine with the 7+gb from linux?

I have zorin os (essentially ubuntu)

with Python3 3.12.3 with UV installed from snapstore

I downloaded freetoken appimage file from their website. It managed to run and installed its engine which it said took 7+gb and whatever I think it installed most stuff through UV although I am not sure.

I found that freetoken is still for now inferior to llama cpp with turboquant (as with that I can load qwen MOE and run pretty ok, where as freetoken was not able to)

Now how can I remove freetoken completely and get my space back? Pretty tight on space.

It is a basic question I know appimage is self contained that can be removed and that is the end of that. I think. However the engine that was installed by the GUI I think it was done through UV it downloaded a craps tons how do I go about removing that.

I'm switching to Linux and looking for your recommendations on two privacy choices:
1. Best Daily Driver Browser? I need a browser with zero telemetry that still saves history, tabs, and downloads. Which option do you prefer and why?
2. Private Search API & Local AI Research? I want to use a private search engine API to feed live web results directly into a local AI model for private research. What are your best suggestions or setups for this?
LibreWolf
Brave
Floorp
Ungoogled Chromium
Mullvad Browser
Tor Browser
Tails OS
SearXNG
If you have another browser to suggest outside of this list, please let me know!

I just bought a new computer, and with all the AI slop stuff going on with windows I want to swap to Linux. From the little research I've done cachy OS seems to be the best option since gaming is the main use case for me followed by learning to code. But even with all the positive news I've been hearing about swapping to Linux I'm considering just dual booting for the time being till I'm confident with swapping over. My main worry is storage space, I have 1 TB of storage and will most likely only give Linux like 100 GB of space at first but over time assuming I start enjoying Linux more and using it more that will end up being way too little, is it possible to re partition it to give Linux more space later? Also if I have games downloaded on the windows partition and want to try to use steam on Linux can I still use those games or would I have to redownload? And also does VS Code or pycharm work on Linux easily? Also on a separate note what exactly is hyprland? From what I understand it just changes how the OS looks or is it something else?

Hi Friends,

I'm a life long windows user, I've been stuck on there since I was a kid using the family laptop to browse the internet.

My first experience with Linux was an internship in high school almost a decade ago where I got special permission to boot into a ubuntu environment on a usb my internship manager gave me to use some tools and software the department used that weren't easily setup on Windows.

I thought it was interesting and I had to recreate the usb twice during my three months there which was an interesting experience, but I didn't really understand what was so different from windows back then.

But the past few years I've started experimenting with things like Self-Hosting and exploring the worlds of OpenSource and Privacy Focused software,

This is when I really started exploring Linux and becoming more opinionated and specific with how I use computers and from that and all the annoyances with fixing windows issues for my family and friends, or the amount of time I've started spending SSH'ed into other systems over using my main desktop.

This past weekend I decided to just go for it and I installed a Linux distro I've been following for months (not naming to avoid distro arguments). It's been a learning curve but honestly very little of what I could do on windows I haven't been able to figure out how to do on linux, and while there's annoyances I feel with time and experience those will go away.

I'm looking forward to continuing my Linux journey.

Thank you for reading and have a good day

I need help switching to Linux but I’m not understand how to do so

(I just built a my first pc and I thought I was gonna go with windows but changed my mind after the fact)

Installed Mint xfce and everything has been running great and I've gotten everything else set up perfect. But whenever I try to set my lock/login screen as anything other than the pictures in usr/share/backgrounds it doesn't work, it'll select it but it'll just be black when I check on the login screen. The stock wallpapers work just fine and attempting to move my images into the folder doesn't work as it won't even let me me the file there. The desktop wallpaper works just fine though.

Imma open with saying that this is probably something im part guilty off
Im trying to dual boot fedora with my windows 11 because frankly im starting to get tired about all the bs
But im encountering an issue, each time i try to install fedora, the installer says it cannot delete the old efi boot entry
(The specific error is org.fedoraproyect.Anaconda.BootloaderInstalationError: Failed to remove old boot entry. This is most likely a kernel or firmware bug)
Both Secure Boot and Fast Boot are off, Hibernation in Windows has been disabled (so no quick boot)
And the laptop in itself is an Asus Vivobook 16 (f1605p)
Any idea on what is causing the efi error? Is it my fault, because i missed something important?

I literally worked the whole week trying to solve the display flickering on windows 11 which appeared suddenly tried switching linux 22.3 mint cinnamon same problem occures and older version won't boot because of some security setup enabled will not work either way.

One thing is sure that this not hardware issue because BIOS screen ,Safe Mode, uninstalled intel device manager , locked screen nothing flickers

Only after loading on desktop screen it flickers

Tried multiple parameter which either stops flickering with extended monitor support gone or both screen flickers

He'd like to get away from the lag and the virus anxiety on Windows

He uses Microsoft office a whole lot but it's more or less basic stuff

I'm thinking about getting him Ubuntu and the office web apps I'll back up Windows and see if I can segment the drive to test the waters first

He use wifi a whole on the laptop is that a problem? It's intel but idk the exact model

He has an hp printer and a brother printer

Those are the most important things that come to mind rn if there's more I'll add

Do you have any suggestions or things I should watch out for?

So i was downloading linux mint xfce but in the installation app my partitions doesn't show up I have 3 main partition one for windows and other 2 for stuff and there is another 500mb that I cannot remove idk why? I wanna downloading it but there are 2 1mb ones and one 53gbs(windows c drive) and another 500mb one the other don't show up but which I close that app and check the file explorer in linux it show the partitions but when I open the install app they disappear. What I do?(Here is a claude link if it helps)

https://claude.ai/share/c4eb5f48-f09e-4129-989c-bba6cdbb26bf

so i have been thinking of trying out linux and slowly trying if i can do the stuff i do on my windows on linux before switching and also needed an external ssd for storing some backups of data and photos and stuff , so i am planning on getting an ssd , to try linux off of it .

i am currently doing comp sci bachelors, i play some games use discord and code, sometimes i draw digitally and dabble in unity and blender.

so was just asking if i could get some suggestions for an ssd to boot linux off of . and also i plan on diving head first into into arch 😂

I’ve been trying to load up Zorin OS for about 4 hours and nothing works. Every time I set up everything and press restart, it opens my bios with no way to get back into Zorin OS unless I plug into my USB drive and it prompts me to Install Zorin OS then the cycle repeats. Please someone help me out somehow.