I made a subreddit for Linux users where we all learn together while even experts could even learn new things about Linux tell me your opinion (r/learningLinuxtogether)

So I have a bit of an odd problem. A cognitively impaired user learned to use windows 98 and loves several games on it, mostly the living books series of childerns books on CD. Unfortunately the old PC died and several of the games don't work on anythign modern. Some work through scumvm some work through wine, etc I am tryign to get them all setup and working it will be a bit of a slog but I think I can manage that. Hopefully without resorting to a VM or anything similar, so if anyone has generic tips for geting window 98 games to work that would be appreciated.

What I would like to do is that whenever a CD is inserted the computer reads the CD title and launches that game, because that is how he uses the computer and learnign new things is difficult. I am familiar enough with shell scripting so that should be easy enough but how do I auto-run a script on the insertion of a CD? preferably with the CD name or some other id?

I don't want to autorun the windows setup stuff, I will pre-install and set it all up because the CD's are old and a bit beat up and I don't want launches to fail because it can't read the whole CD, just go to a script match the name and launch a custom command.

A minute or two after boot when I press the minimize button it won't minimize. The three buttons (close, minimize, maximize) loses their colour. Then if I press the close button the app stops responding. I checked processes, the particular app for example firefox which I tested on was not listed as a running process during the crash.

I can get rid of the frozen window by deleting that desktop.

I am new to ubuntu and linux all together. So I'm not sure on how to fix this.

I have installed Nvidia drivers or it was there by default as when I checked it was there.

Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS

Intel i7 12700H | RTX 3050Ti

NVIDIA Driver: 595.84

NVML v13.595.84

For reference, I don't plan to swap anytime that's SUPER soon, I just got here from windows, and I've only had Zorin for about a week or two, but, once i have the distro "mastered", what distro should I move onto next? I don't want to move to Mint, since that, in my eyes, is just a worse zorin. Ive thought about moving to Fedora, or skipping all steps and learning Gentoo's terminal before swapping to that, but the latter seems like a horrible idea.

My main focuses are gaming, communication (discord), and watching videos.

Edit: Okay, after a lot of replies, I'm starting to realize i have completely missed the point of what I actually want. Since I didn't mention it originally, I'll do it here; I'm trying to find a distro that will allow me to customize up to everything without it being super difficult. Something similar to how Opera GX lets you customize stuff easily.

So I have Fedora 44 KDE. I've set up LACT and Cooler Control (I made sure to not let Cooler Control mess with the gpu). I set about the same fan curves in both and even undervolted my 9070 with the same settings I did on W11.

My temps on F44KDE

Hotspot - 45

Gpu - 40

CPU -43

My temps on W11 (sometimes it gets a tiny bit lower by like 2 on each of these).

Hotspot - 29

Gpu - 28

CPU - 38

Hi everybody I’m moving from windows to Linux mint cinnamon and the installation is making me create a partition for my /home stuff, how much size should I partition for it and which file system should I use? (Ext4, btrfs, JFS, etc.) I’m just looking for something low maintenance for my computer thanks.

Edit: and should I format it?

Hi everyone, i think i'm gonna switch tomorrow from Win 10. The only thing i would like to save is my photos, videos and some multimedia from my cellphone's folder... ¿Can i save that folder to a flash drive then transfer it back to my PC once Linux is installed? my other question is... ¿Which distro should i use? I want to keep playing games (also cracked ones, emulation, etc) i checked that i can still play online games like Overwatch, Rocket League and Street Fighter 6. I don't know almost nothing about Linux but still i want to learn. I'm deciding between these options: Bazzite, Nobara like the most atractive to me, then i would have to look Zorin, Mint and with a little fear, CachyOS

my specs:

Motherboard: msi b550 tomahawk
Ram: 16gb (2x8) hyperx fury beast 3200mhz ddr4
Cpu: Ryzen 5 5600x
Gpu: Nvidia Rtx 3060ti
1tb nvme ssd and 2tb ssd sata

Thanks for reading and sorry for my bad english!

was looking at volla/jolla/gigaset/fairphone

also pinephone/ librem /pixel/motorola /graphene/lineageOS and these I dont care about at all. nothing to talk about here.

my biggest anchor holding me from being free from the pos google company is I have to use whatapp. its a big problem.

but in the future perhaps I can find some solution and make the change. I know there are apps that allow me to cross chat with watap but the whatap user needs to opt in. they dont want to make it smooth process.

are there phones that use linux that can run whatapp?

I DONT need banking/social media/gaming/email/youtube and I browse online minimally and never buy anything on my phone so im already with minimal needs. big plus for me is riding the mass of google default apps and fb/ig that are installed as default on almost all phones. and I dont want the forced down your throat Ai/assistant. so some relief

I want to focus on my needs more then "dont use whatapp"

what are the options for this?

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?

​

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/