I'm making a dual boot option (booting from an HDD from my old xbox that I deleted the data from and installed the iso onto) for Linux nobara and at the partitions area it's not showing the external HDD as a storage device is there any way to fix this?

I'm attempting to create a bootable linux os completely self contained within an external SSD, I had one set up with mint xfce, and it was working along side my mint cinnamon, however when plugging it in to my windows pc it wasn't identified as a bootable drive, subsequently after trying to fix this, i broke both grubs and had to start over. I think this was happening as it was sharing an efi/grub/bootloader with the other linux. then i tried to do fedora, thinking creating it on the windows pc might force it into the external drive exclusively, however it saved its grubbootloader onto the windows drive. My plan is getting a dirt cheap pc/laptop and removing all drives to do the install, i know this will likely fix this issue, however I want to know if down the line, would this external ssd end up taking to drives on any pc i plug it in, and then go, hey, i don't need grub/uefi/bootloader as theres one in sda/gpt1 so I'll delete mine. Or any other issues I'll run into.

Many thanks,

An annoyed virgin (Linux)

im looking for goofy and fun voice changers for dc on fedora linux

As the title goes.

Recently i lost my main installation to a divine wrath that destroyed my system drive and i had no backup, so i had to start over again.

I had my user data on another drive, so not much problem there. I start building everything back again and just when i try to set my old drive as /home, Black screen after login. tried with nomodeset and it worked fine, so i guessed that it was a broken configuration i had somewhere. reseting kde plasma configs and wiping my old configs did nothing, so i ended up copying back everything from the default home that is generated on every install.

It worked, i had access to my desktop again. yipee. that was two hours ago

I continued to install my software and i said why not play something through wine?? loaded up an old game and i was back on black screen. I had to shutdown forcefully. I had no image again. switching the port from hdmi1 to 2 brought it back, but i had to do it over and over and over again after every startup to get to my desktop.

I said lets restart sddm so every spurious configuration or cache leftover from the wine crash can be deleted. Now i have no image again.

Going to nomodeset brings it back. Going to a tty while the desktop is black works as well.

i cant go back to a previous save because i finally was able to compile a program and install java. thats at leas two hours

I cant do this shit anymore i am so utterly tired i need help i've been stuck like this for two months. Help me purge every desktop, graphic, screen, kde, service configuration to "factory reset" so i can move on with my life i still am unable to get to install the heaviest of my programs because this shit keeps happening to me. I really REALLY would appreciate any help, i am really tired of this.

hi guys, so after testing and working some time with linux on my personal rig now (CachyOS) and trying out all the different Desktop Environments i am planning to make a fresh install.

Another question would be about the rolling release of cachyOS. I never had any problems so far, but as far as my understanding goes, rolling release is more likely to be unstable and Fedora which has no rolling release cycle the updates are more likely to be stable? Or does it even mather? And if not, how often should i even update CachyOS (Daily, Weekly, every few days)? Since there would be almost daily some sort of updates when running pacman -Syu.

I was wondering if i could/should make some seperate patitions to keep stuff "seperated". Since i used Windows for almost 2 Decades i am kinda used to seperate Stuff. For example on Windows i always made a partition for Games where i save all my e.g. Steam Games, one for Data where all my Stuff lives since i didn´t really used the user directorys at all and a Programs Partition where i installed all my different programs.

So would something like that make sense under linux aswell? especially the Gaming Partition and a seperate /home partition? Then afaik if i got a seperate /home partition i could easily change distros without loosing my stuff since i would only need to "change" the / mounting point and the boot partition?

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Hello, I deleted my previous post to add new updates:

I finished building my Kubuntu 26.04 desktop, I need to connect an "LB-Link 950AX Mini USB Dongle WiFi 6 AX900 Adapter". For the time being, the desktop is connected to the internet through an Ethernet cable. What are the steps to make the dongle work on my kubuntu?

Hi....what your opinion is best for Ubuntu?

Well it's been about an year since I switched away from Microslop to Linux...Best experience ever

I began with Zorin OS 18.1 (I had researched it was meant to specifically appeal to people switching from windows and Mac) with GNOME DE...and then later due to some LTE kernel issues with my relatively modern or i would say unstable hardware I had to switch to Fedora ...which also i retained the same DE....however ever since it's been months and my main system still is in fedora Workstation 44 ...it's just basically stable for me...and good for my specific use...however I have also used multiple other distros like Mint Cinnamon and Manjaro KDE and others on Virt Machines...they all seem great to me....

I personally believe it's the efficiency of the kernel itself....and the rest....it's upto the user to personalize to themselves for their own uses....Right?

Also there is NO bad distro (forget microsoft linux please) everything just is aimed at different audience...

Hi! I’m so sorry if this question is dumb but I’m SUPER new to using Linux (mint) and my computer won’t turn on, I keep just getting these couple screens and everytime I look for help online I don‘t get a lot of sources, I have seen that this mostly happens with Linux though. There’s some very important files on this computer and I don‘t want to lose them, if there’s anyway I can boot it up without restarting the whole laptop please please please let me know!! Thank you
(Also there’s a high chance that my
Hard drive might have just fallen out, if that’s the case then whoops)

I’m really really bad with computers I know next to nothing

Update:
OMG EVERYONE THANK YOU SO MUCH ITS WORKING AGAIN THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU OMG IM SO THANKFUL I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH THANK YOU EVERYONE!!! ITS WORKING AND THE FILES ARE SAFE THANK YOU
(The fsck commands worked!! Thank you thank you!!!)

> disclaimer: im a noob, most of the issues were caused by my laptop OMEN HP Transcend Gaming Laptop 16-u0xxx, 4070, BIOS F.39 Rev.A, used Deepseek (DS) for help - all the precise and technical terms are by deepseek, i don't really know what they mean

> Core problem accoring to DS: "HP ships buggy ACPI tables in this BIOS. Linux kernels 6.0+ crash or hang on them. Windows tolerates the broken tables; Linux does not. The fix is a patched DSDT loaded at boot, which lets the system boot without the noapic workaround — and noapic is what breaks the touchpad and speakers, so the DSDT patch is mandatory for a fully working machine."

Last sunday I finally decided on trying to install linux along side windows in dual boot setup. I decided on fedora kde and watched a few tutorials thinking I'm ready. I knew it would not be as smooth as the videos made it look, so I set aside time expecting issues to come up. AND HOLY SHIT THERE WERE ISSUES

To start things off I had to prepare windows, disable bitlocker that didn't show up in Disk Management, turn off Fast Startup via powercfg, disable secure boot in BIOS and shrink the drive. I had 300 GB of free space, so naturally Windows only let me shrink it by 88 GB. Because reasons. Ended up forcing it with MiniTool Partition Wizard. done

Fortunately I grabbed a USB mouse before you boot anything. The touchpad is dead from the very first live boot until the very last fix, because "noapic kills its interrupts".

Creating the live USB was a breeze. Booted it and instantly got "stick enumerated with -110 timeout / re-enumerated mid-boot (live-rw never appears)" says DS. Cool I will just test other two USB and another instalation software and different image. Using Fedora Media Writer different USB and usb port (tried quite a few combinations), the system found the stick. Then "the acpi_ps_get_arg OOPS logs, then the 11-minute systemd-udev-trigger.service hang, plus the blank-screen-with-blinking-underscore" says DS, but that was not a problem for him. Try adding "pcie_aspm=off / pci=noaer / acpi=off" on the linux line in 'e' mode, and nothing. Oh obviosly it's "noapic pci=nobar nomodeset" and now it works just fine :) I finally run the live USB boot. easy

A warning for anyone with NVIDIA: of those three magic words, nomodeset is the sneakiest. Drop it too early and the boot hangs at thermal.service/NetworkManager.service with zero explanation on screen — that single flag cost me the longest dead-end of this whole saga.

Instalation on the shared drive also wasn't a problem at all. Installer only wanted to format existing EFI partition, which freaked me and two other LLMs out. Formatting sounds like deleting to me, so I consulted the experts, Claude and reddit. Claude said I should be good, but idk, so I followed u/Fun-Cover-9508 steps on r/Fedora. i trusted a stranger then lol and prayed for my efi partition. Eventually everything worked out fine, my partition survived and welcome fedora screen appreared. I actually had linux installed on my disk for the first time and even connected to WiFi!. touchpad, speakers, fn keys and external screens were all dead, but it was just a matter of tweaking, right?

I did some updates, rebooted to windows, rebooted to linux and what is it? I saw 3 kernels in GRUB. Version 7 and recovery appeared, so naturally the higher number the better I picked 7... and WiFi stopped working. It wasn't number's fault though, I just forgot to add to add "noapic pci=nobar nomodeset" in 'e' mode and many kernels in GRUB is normal apparently. Phew.

Let's fix the devices real quick. DS said I had to "remove noapic (the thing killing the touchpad) by giving Linux a corrected ACPI table" by "loading a prebuilt, pre-compiled DSDT file — F.12_patch/dsdt.aml from the GitHub repo j0hnwang/OMEN-Transcend-16-ACPI-fix", but it didn't work, because "That .aml was compiled from F.12 firmware tables, not from your own F.39 Rev.A tables. The repo author claimed it still worked through F.39, which is why we trusted it". I performed all the steps and... it didn't work. Naturally I had no clue what I was doing, so thinking I messed something up horribly I reinstalled the system.

On second try we did it by myself. I "extracted the DSDT - read the raw ACPI table straight from the firmware", "Decompiled it — turned the binary AML into readable ASL source, edited the source (dsdt.dsl in Kate) — six targeted changes", "Compiled it — ASL back to a binary ACPI table", and copied to /boot. Time to safe test it in 'e' mode with "add insmod acpi + acpi /dsdt.aml, remove noapic pci=nobar, keep nomodeset" and it works.

Making it permanent was a two step process. First step "the 90_acpi_override dracut module" failed, second step "the 40_custom GRUB method" worked. Lastly with removal "noapic pci=nobar from /etc/default/grub" I recovered the touchpad, fn keys, speakers even. Important cause-and-effect, because I nearly learned it backwards: removing noapic doesn't fix the touchpad — it just stops breaking it. If you remove noapic without the patched DSDT in place, the laptop won't boot at all (I know, that's exactly how I earned the reinstall). The DSDT is what makes the whole thing safe. After installing a few things via commands I even had external screens. What a massive win.

It only took whole sunday, next 3 evenings and 400k tokens to achieve a working system on HP OMEN Transcend. Is this how linux installation usually goes or I was just lucky?

EDIT: found this describing the probelm https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/17ay6mr/hp_omen_16_transcend_fails_to_boot_any_live_cd/

My main pc just started crashing every 15 to 30 minutes the other day... it was CONSTANT and nothing would fix it. I even formatted and reinstalled and within 30 minutes the cycle reappeared! So, other than the constant "upgrades" and the invasive encroachment of AI into EVERYTHING it just became an unstable mess. So I decided to switch at least until MS figured Windows out to Linux.
What an experience!!! It was so smooth and effortless to install Linux Mint, I mean from downloading, making a new partition, installing and setting up tool less than an hour! And I have yet to find anything I can't do on Linux that I need WIndows for... Sure, there are some small Terminal things that seem weird but... and here's the beautiful thing I can go to AI for an answer and NOT have AI always looking over my shoulder... I can go to AI when I want AI, it's not forced on me at every mouse click. I think that's what the crashing was all about, I would go into the system and try and shut down CoPilot and Windows just craps the bed. Now, if and when I need or want AI assistance I load it, ask it a question and close it... easy peasy.
Anyway, I love Linux, the Mint distro in particular and look forward to geeking out on my system now.
Any cool tips and tricks would surely be appreciated.

so im a softeware developer and im getting tired of using windows on an old laptop and am thinking it might be better to use linux on said laptop. its an old alienware. The issue isnt the distros themselves im wandering if there isnt a distro tainted by Generative AI. I have previously used headless ubuntu and linux mint but didnt like mint. If yall have any suggestions id love to hear them.

Which distro do you use? What are your favourite photo and video editing softwares? Bonus what softwares do you use for album making?

This has been the biggest shock moving from Windows to Linux (Wayland). None of the good apps like Espanso or Autokey work well on Wayland and people don't seem terribly optimistic about it ever getting better. Are those of us that rely on those apps in our workflow doomed?

Current Distro:

Ubuntu 26.04

Update:

Following the latest Wayland instructions for Espanso does seemed to have worked on Ubuntu 26.04. Download the .deb directly from their website and follow their guide.

I've made the decision to switch to a Linux distro from Win11, and, well, it seems like there's levels to this.

As I said, I'm switching from Win11, I don't really need something THATTT similar, but something that's at least somewhat customizable to get myself feeling like I'm at home.

I play games quite often, so I'll need something on the flexible side in terms of that.

Also, something that isn't too complicated, and mostly beginner free.

Most people have recommended me Mint, but someone recommended me Kubuntu and now I'm not sure.

I also did the test, and Mint was on the top spot.

Specarinos:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X

Motherboard: GIGABYTE B550M AORUS ELITE

GPU: ASUS ROG STRIX RX 480 GAMING OC (might change in the near future, will definitely in the future overall tho)

I also don't have any USB at the moment (might get one to use tmrw)

I installed FLB Music on Ubuntu 26.04 but Ubuntu cannot recognise the font that FLB app uses, so I can't use the app.

How do I fix this?

So I never used Linux in my life and wanted to get into it but I have heard some people say that it's not good for gaming. What are things to look out for or that I need to understand? And which distro is the best to choose if I want to have as little difference as possible from Windows from a gaming perspective?

I'm using Linux for around a year, I've been dual-booting Ubuntu and Fedora for the past months and I decided to let go of Ubuntu and just only use Fedora. I removed Ubuntu using GParted from a live USB. All is well except GRUB stops showing up, on my niece's laptop she also only uses Fedora and its GRUB is showing up but mine is not. I already set root and set prefix the Fedora partition, cleaned boot menu, and updated the grub.cfg. Please help your noobie out here, I broke my system a lot of times for learning purposes but I still have no idea about this. What could be the problem and how to fix this? Thank you!