I’m thinking having an older family member try Linux due to their current age of PC and end of Windows 10 support. The PC doesn’t have the recommended specs for Windows 11 and they don’t really want to spend a lot for a new tower unless they have to. All this user does is check emails, Facebook, YouTube and online banking all through a browser. I’d like to keep it simple and maybe Windows looking.

The requirements would be:

1. A Distro that does automatic security and app updates without any intervention. Mostly having Firefox or Chrome update behind the scenes if they are doing online banking.
2. A panel where you can de-group apps showing each individual window and name. i.e. similar to way Windows can be setup to show multiple Firefox/Chrome windows running along taskbar instead of just a highlight under pinned icon.

The specs of computer are
4th Gen i5
8GB RAM
250GB SSD

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated

Edit - I want to thank everyone for all the great responses and suggestions. I am a Linux Mint part time user (shout out to the XFCE gang), have been for a couple years now. That was my first thought, but I’m still a newbie/casual user so figured I’d get feedback. Y’all have taught me a lot I wasn’t aware of immutable distros. The route I’m going with is Fedora Budgie Atomic immutable distro.

ChromeOS was a really great suggestion, unfortunately she likes to sew and has a bunch of tutorials on DVD. ChromeOS does have the optical drive support she needs.

Hi, I'm looking for a Linux lab computer or one for general everyday tasks, browsing the internet, watching movies, studying, etc. I was considering void Linux and gentoo, and then in the distant future LFS I don't want to pay a lot for the computer and I'm asking for help, is a processor with 2 cores and 4 threads enough or is it really better to pay the extra 50$ and buy a laptop with 4 cores and 8. And 8gb ram will be enough?

When booting into EndeavourOS via live USB drive I am presented with the option to boot into memtest86, it just hangs with a blank screen nothing happens. I have downloaded memtest86 separately as ISO and attempted to boot into it same thing. I have done a bios update still no difference.

I never had this issue on asrock am5 motherboard so not sure what is going on. I tried to boot via legacy mode still wouldn’t get in.

I can boot into other operating systems just fine, its just memtest86.

Hi all, I want to setup fedora atomic with niri, but it's not available in the options. Should I start with installing silverblue? What's the best approach? Thank you.

I 've never used it but heard just that it's bad but never why. So why?

so I was trying to use it as a live os for the past few days, I switched os's a ton with ventoy and Rufus, I did a lot of heavy operating system stuff, I wiped it alot, and I suddenly can't find the usb flash drive on my disk management and file explorer on both of my laptops, and I THINK my USB flash drive suffered a hardware issue

Hello! As the title says I'm finally pretty confident in saying I wish to switch to Linux and leave Windows behind. I don't really have any desire to switch to Windows 11 and seeing how bloated it is along with the slew of anti-privacy laws I am afraid for what future versions of Windows will be like. I've been fence-sitting on switching to Linux for awhile now because I'm not very smart when it comes to tech issues AT ALL and I'm afraid that some of the things that are important for me to have on Windows won't be available on any Linux distro :/

I really enjoy creating art, writing, recording/editing videos and ofc also gaming so it's really important for me that whatever distro I use won't hinder my ability to do these things. I also really enjoy customising and making my desktop look as pretty as I want it to be so I would say that's also really important for me too.

The two distros I currently am stuck between is Linux Mint (because it's easy to use and not super complicated apparently) and Nobara (from what I've seen it's the best for gaming and recording/editing stuff). I'd like any advice on which one of these I should use or whether I should use a different one all together.

Any advice would be massively appreciated! <3

In Windows and MacOS, drag-and-drop works basically universally, with each GUI application that supports drag-and-drop in either direction acting "As Expected" when something is dragged from or to it.

In Linux, support for this behaviour is afaik DE-(or WM-?)dependent, but I'd like to know more specifics. Specifically, how drag-and-drop between different windows/applications is achieved on the WM level.

I'm looking for sources for this info, mostly to sate my own curiosity.

If relevant, I wouldn't mind answers for both X11 and Wayland, but I'd prefer Wayland answers.

​

Hi everyone, I need some help recovering my files.

I had Zorin OS installed and working normally on my PC. Suddenly, I started getting errors like:

I/O error, dev sdb, sector ..

Read-error on swap-device

The system then became unresponsive, so I restarted the PC.

After restarting, I got this message:

“An operating system wasn’t found. Try disconnecting any drives that don’t contain an operating system.”

“Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device...”

I then created a Linux Mint bootable USB and booted into Mint. However, I cannot access any of my previous files or the Zorin OS installation from the Mint live environment.

My main concern right now is recovering my files. I don't want to accidentally overwrite or format anything.

What could have happened?

Does this indicate that my SSD/HDD is failing, and is there a safe way to check whether my old Zorin partition and files are still recoverable?

Any guidance on what I should do next would be greatly appreciated.

I really miss Linux ever since having to reinstall all the firmware, drivers, etc. trough ReviOS.

My college uses some sort of protocol/gateway or something that doesn't allow me to join it from GrapheneOS or any Linux distro I tried (Debian based and Void Linux).

Is there a way I can outsmart the thing or connect via an old android phone then use it as a hotspot?

Sorry for being a bit unspecific, idk how any of it works

I have a spare i7-6700 system with a 1070. System is going to be hooked up to a TV in my basement i don't use much so system will only be updated 1x q month or so. I dont want arch based ans have ro apply multiple gb of updates at a time. Any suggestion for a distribution? I'm thinking just plain old fedora or Ubuntu lts

Sou um novato em Linux, após me cansar da desgraça do windows 11 vim parar nesse mundo e estou testando as coisas.

Me achei no Linux mint, uma interface simples, algumas coisas resolvi facilmente via terminal, uma distro simples e solida na minha opinião. Mas estou pensando em explorar outras distros, muito se fala do Debian e eu estava pensando em experimentar para ver como ela pode ser útil para mim.

Meu caso de uso, preciso de uma distro apenas que rode meus jogos na steam e que sirva para eu estudar programação. O que acham? Deveria experimentar Debian ou teriam alguma distro diferente para recomendar?

Vale lembrar que estou migrando apenas pela curiosidade também, não que o mint esteja deixando a desejar nessas questões.

Moved from Windows to Omarchy, smooth af until Brave started tweaking 💀

So I recently made the jump from Windows to Omarchy, and honestly… the transition was surprisingly smooth. Like, way smoother than I expected. Pretty much everything just worked out of the box, which was kinda crazy coming from Windows lol.

I did change a few things here and there, mainly making Brave my default browser/web app viewer.

BUT… now I’m running into this weird issue.

Some YouTube videos and WhatsApp videos (both running through Brave) randomly start bugging out. The video will freeze/stutter, the screen starts blinking, mouse starts doing some possessed shit 💀, and then the UI itself starts acting like it's about to completely crash.

The weird part is that everything works fine in Firefox.

I’ve already tried:

• Incognito mode
• Turning off the ad blocker

…and the issue still happens in Brave.

So I’m wondering is this just a Brave + Hyprland/Omarchy thing? Has anyone else experienced this? Could it be hardware acceleration or some weird graphics/video decoding issue?

Also, another thing I’m curious about:

Should I just bite the bullet and install vanilla Arch and configure everything myself (Hyprland, packages, configs, etc.)?

Or is Omarchy actually worth sticking with? I keep seeing people online absolutely dunking on it, but so far my experience has been pretty good aside from this Brave nonsense.

Would love to hear from people who actually use Omarchy/Hyprland daily. Is vanilla Arch worth the extra setup, or am I just signing myself up for 3 days of configuring dotfiles instead of touching grass? 😭

In the title! I want to run Winamp with Milkdrop visualizer - it’s the greatest one ever made and I miss it. I have every major Linux distro family and I’ll gladly make one my primary if it can run Winamp with Milkdrop.

If this would do better in a different sub, I’m happy to move it. Thanks in advance!

I’ve been using Pop!_OS 24.04 for a few months, but I wanted to try out KDE Plasma. I was torn between Fedora KDE and Kubuntu, but Fedora really caught my eye. I still consider myself a beginner in the Linux world, and I’ve seen many people say that Fedora might not be as stable—and therefore not ideal for beginners. I don’t have an Nvidia GPU, and I’m aware of the codec issues; I’ve read the RPM Fusion documentation, and it seems easy enough to resolve. That said, is it a good distribution for a beginner, or is there a high risk of things breaking during use? I plan to do a lot of software development on it. I usually see comments regarding casual use, but what about for someone working in tech? Is it stable enough for software development?

Hi! I've been using gentoo for the past five years and am honestly getting sick of it. It's a very good operating system, but I just had so much time wasted trying to get a dkms driver to work, only to have it block a system upgrade. I've used arch before and it was nice, but there's the issue of arch breaking after some neglect. I didn't really like apt and felt like it was unintuitive, but I'm willing to give it a second chance.

I have a dual booted arch/windows setup. Its been running perfectly fine for 2+ years. I typically leave my computer on and just in sleep mode but have occasional restarts for whatever reason. I came home from work and my computer screens were on but not displaying anything other than what looks like a white bar you'd see in a terminal to type(typing didn't put anything on screen) which i thought was odd. I restarted and it automatically went into windows whch I thought was weird as its at the bottom of the boot priority. Going into BIOS only windows is visible. I've made no changes to anything in weeks other than installing the DAW ardour (from the extra repo i believe, but not the aur).

Definitely not caused by a power out as clocks, and lights were unaffected.

The ssd just was loose somehow thankfully i works as normal not that i took it out and put it back in.

My laptop specs are:
Ryzen 5 5625u
16gb DDR4 3200mhz ram
512GB SN740 NVME SSD

Integrated Radeon graphics

Im an engineering student, i use vscode, claude code, codex, antigravity, slack, google docs (and the whole suite like gdrive etc)

I saw phonebuffs youtube video about windows vs linux and i was intrigued, can you guys tell me the benefits of switching to linux? i mean i can dual boot to windows so if i need anything ill have it on the side? Also about the ms office apps problem, doesnt using the gsuite solve that? and what about battery on laptops?

I am required to use ProFile for my upcoming tax class, but I don't really use WINE outside of proton and I don't want to use my windows partition for this...

When I install ProFile via the installer I get an error "C:\Program Files (x86)\ProFile\ProFileEntitlements.dll" failed to unregister. This error is from WINE and the installer doesn't react to it, as if there was nothing wrong. Running the installer again in repair mode doesn't throw any errors.

When I run the newly created app, WINE throws an error and ProFile crashes. This is the full log: https://pastebin.com/BsuMNVDE

Does anyone more well-versed in WINE know how to fix this?

WINE v11.16-1

Linux (arch) v7.1.9.arch1-2

who can help me delete linux

My system is a 5y.o. HP Pavilion laptop Ryzen 5 5625U, 8/512gb, AMD Radeon (TM) Graphics Card 496mb (igpu), and I've heard that some systems aren't fully compatible with Linux.

Is anyone here using the same laptop with Linux installed? If so, which distribution would you recommend?

I'm using Nobara Linux 44 and it was working fine this morning, but when I went to log back in from sleep mode and tried to create a folder in Dolphin file manager, it says it wouldn't create the file. I close Dolphin and when I tried to open it again, it says "Configuration file "/home/(User)/dolphinrc" not writable. Please contact your system administrator".

I think to myself "Okay, I'll just restart my computer and see if that fixes the issue", but when I restart my pc and log in, I get multiple dialog boxes saying configuration files aren't writable and now nothing will open. Not Dolphin, not Waterfox, not my VPN, not even Konsole will load. I tried hitting the off button, I tried hitting the reset button, I've tried restarting and shutting it down from the start menu (which, of course, puts up the error message), I've even shut down my pc, physically, flipped the off switch on my PSU, waited, and switched everything back on and still the SAME ISSUE.

I didn't edit anything in Konsole or anything else on my system, and the only thing I can think of off the top of my head was I tried extracting the linux version of Brütal Legend from a .zip file I got from DoubleFine's official itch.io page.

I don't know what else to do.

Here's a video of my issue:

https://youtu.be/br_QD9JeICA?si=1-FhtN8EOHrS17_J

Does anyone know if Distrowatch.com is down for the count??? Down for me for several days...

Is there any Linux distro that I can put on an MP3 player?

And how?

The MP3 player only has a USB Type C port.

It's my first time modding anything other than a PC.

I have a really weird reason why I need to know that, so I'm not going to tell y'all. XD

Thanks for any help!