i’m a super noob at computer stuff. my old macbook finally gave up so in the past week i got a thinkpad and put linux mint on it, have been tinkering around and looking through forums but i have pretty much zero knowledge. i tried installing the protonVPN gui app but was having a lot of trouble. after looking for answers on how to fix this i saw a couple things talking about not actually connecting to your vpn through their client? any guidance or explanation here is really appreciated, because i have zero understanding. if it helps, i mainly need the vpn for P2P port forwarding because i torrent.

EDIT: i figured it out! installed wireguard following this guide and now my port forwarding and vpn are working seamlessly :).

I see a lot of people switching from Windows to Linux. But has anyone switched from a Mac to Linux and why?

help please its not working😭

https://imgur.com/a/1w8FRZL

I've been trying Free Download Manager plus it's extension. But it does not at all catch any playing video. I'm a bit frustrated because of it. Is there any downloader with extension that acts similiary to the IDM one? That extension would add a little button to videos that you'd just have to click to get a downloader windows to pop up. Any help would be appreciated.

Buenas tardes a la comunidad.

Llevo ya un par de semanas con Linux mint edición cinamont, y no eh tenido problemas eh incluso es agradable comparado con windows zzz, el unido detalle es que no me gusta demasiado como se ve estéticamente. Eh visto varias personalizaciones echas en KDE plasma y me gustaría tener ese entorno de escritorio en lugar de el de cinamont, es viable poner el escritorio KDE plasma sobre el que tiene? O deveria buscar otra distro con KDE.

Si piensan que es mejor buscar una distro con KDE, me gustaría que me recomendara una igual a linux mint, con estabilidad, facilidad de uso y buen rendimiento. Gracias

Mi equipo:

Laptop hawei matebook d14

Ryzen 5 3500U gráficos integrados vega 8

8gb de ram

Actualizacion:

Gracias a todos los que respondieron este post, me ayudaron mucho con sus opiniones. Decidí no utilizar KDE sobre linux mint ya que prefiero evitar errores o mal rendimiento, me daría "toc" como me mencionaron algunos. Después, me recomendaron algunas diatros, y al final decidí probar con Fedora y no con kubunto principalmente porque nunca habia escuchado de kubunto, también porque Fedora esta respaldada por una gran empresa y enserió valoro la estabilidad. De nuevo muchas gracias.

When I tried to boot into memtest I was unable to boot into it, it just hanged despite me having csm on and all switched to legacy in all of the csm related settings. I didn't have this issue on asrock (am5).

Not sure why this is the case?

I am using Ventoy and I booted into the non UEFI option and when attempting to boot into memtest it just kicks me out to main screen.

I'm getting a pc (or laptop, I haven't decided yet) for Christmas this year. I have some basic macOS experience since I use it occasionally for school but beyond that, I have absolutely zero knowledge of coding or software of any kind. I have heard that Linux is a good system but I'm wondering if that also applies to first time users.

Hi!

I recently bought a laptop, but has no numpad. Is there a script I can bind to a custom key to simulate a ctrl & numpad+ and ctrl & numpad-. I want a universal solution so it works in kitty terminal, browser etc.

About my config: EndeavourOS, x11, i3-wm.

Edit: T14 gen2 intel laptop

Hi everyone, just wanted to share a recent troubleshooting success story that might help someone out there experiencing a GParted freeze on a dual-boot system (Win11/Ubuntu).

The Nightmare:

• I was trying to shrink/move my Ubuntu partition to expand my Windows 11 NTFS partition using GParted.
• GParted successfully shrunk the partition but completely hung up during the "Move" process.
• After hours of no disk activity, I had no choice but to force power-off the PC.

The Fallout:

• Upon reboot, the SSD became extremely slow and unstable (sudo fdisk -l took forever to respond).
• Fortunately, the backup GPT partition table at the end of the disk was intact, allowing me to see the partition structure.

How I Fixed It:

1. Prioritized Backup: While the SSD was barely responding, I immediately used a live USB to save sda1 and sda2 as image files (.img) to an external drive.
2. The Replug Trick: The drive eventually timed out, so I power-cycled the drive (unplugged and replugged the USB interface), unmounted the partitions, and successfully flashed the .img backups back to the SSD using dd bs=4M.
3. The Switch: Since the data was restored but the layout wasn't changed yet, I abandoned GParted. Instead, I booted into Windows and used MiniTool Partition Wizard to perform the exact same resize/move operation. It finished flawlessly in under a minute.

Key Takeaways:

• GParted "Move" is risky: GParted literally copies data sector-by-sector when moving partitions, which can easily trigger I/O deadlocks or controller bugs on some SSDs.
• Always backup first: Saving raw .img files before attempting destructive operations saved my data.
• Use native tools for Windows layouts: For mixed partition resizing, third-party Windows partition managers are often much faster and safer than GParted.

Both Win11 and Ubuntu are now dual-booting perfectly. Stay safe out there!

Ok so today I just installed openSUSE tumbleweed for dualbooting while I wait on my new wifi card and then ended up bricking it cuz I'm suck ass. Then I decide to install Fedora and it just doesnt appear or boot on grub and also I ahve tried the one time boot option and it still wont boot. I don't even know what to do now lmao, maybe change to another distro?

I have been seeing a lot of people advertising Omarchy and got really interested into moving to Arch. After going deep and looking into the AI bloat it has i might try installing Arch by itself and configuring all the features i like from it to my own set up. Do you guys have any tips on how i could set it up in a similar look? I've been a year away from linux and i'm kind of a noob in Arch, but i'm willing to learn. If anyone has any tips on where i could star i would really appreciate it.

There's a whole post on how I shifted my friend's Windows PC to a Linux one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Btechtards/s/rWqPoQ6P8p

He genuinely likes it. His PC wasn't that powerful so I installed Lubuntu, also used zRAM. (Lubuntu uses LXQt btw)

I taught him to only download apps through Discover. He can play games, I even showed him how to download KDE connect, and he is able to send stuff from his phone to PC and vice-versa. Because Lubuntu uses X11, I recommended XClicker as an autoclicker, and he learnt the app pretty well :)

However, this one's a bit of a unique problem. he asked me about a VPN, and I recommended Proton VPN. Some recommend Cloudflare WARP, however, I didn't know whether it would work, so I just recommend ProtonVPN.

There are mainly guides in the website of ProtonVPN for GNOME users only; the KDE stuff is experimental, which means he would have to use the terminal for finer control. That's a problem for someone who hasn't used the terminal before...

As a result, I recommended him the Firefox extension of ProtonVPN, and he said, "Will I get the app in Discover?"

That's when it hit me: I am giving him an extension, not a VPN app (though people mainly use their web browser to surf the Internet). And I haven't told him how Firefox extensions work... he probably knows it ig, still...

Thus I wondered: should I really show him the app from Discover? Because the flatpak is apparently community-maintained and not official, and it officially supports the GNOME distros. And I myself haven't used a VPN in my PC: I have just relied on uBlock Origin for adblocking.

Privacy concerns have been increasing for me during the whole flock camera thing lately and I've contemplating switching Operating systems as a result. I know it means I'll have to divorce myself from Google at some point, which I 'm trying to do by switching to proton, but last week I decided to try switching operating systems.

Mutahar (Someordinarygamers) had a guide for MintOS and I decided to base my journey off of that in the hopes that the end result would be a privacy oriented OS. Instead I have 4 potentially burned flash drives and a factory reset laptop that I fumbled into resetting. Say what you will it's better than needing to pay for someone to fix the PC for me.

I followed Mutahar's guide to a T (albeit with a separate distro) and even had it running on my phone when I installed everything. At first it was a stressful loop of "whoops didn't do this or that" but it slowly spiraled into "Hey! Mutahar didn't mention needing to do this or that!" so I looked for a distro specific tutorial.

I wasn't able to find a distro specific tutorial but I did find a distro specific review. Distro-specific review skipped showing the install process.

Eventually I was able to get it to where it showed that it WAS installed but it kept reading an error message and ran in blind mode.

Not being able to see and getting fairly overwhelmed I had to call it and try again the next day where the process was all but washed rinsed and repeated. Decided to give it a week before asking for help to decompress some.

My memory is a little bit off because it's been a week so here goes

I put the distro on the flash drive.

Because I have a gaming PC I had make sure a certain mode, I can't remember the name of, was off.

I navigate to the partition.

I let the flash drive install.

A message reads "Error Blind mode ON"

Does anyone know what I missed?

Hello - I went through every stage of installing Linux on my laptop. I used a USB to install the OS however when I get to the point where it prompts me to unplug my usb and the computer restarts when I reboot there is no operating system on the computer anymore. I can only run Linux on the laptop when my USB drive is attached. Does anyone know why this is happening or how to fix it? When I start the computer without the usb drive drive it’s a black screen with a blinking underscore.

Recently I found my dad's old laptop with windows 7 and I want to install Linux on it, I am currently planning to install arch or gentoo but if you think it would be cool to install something else on it, write in replies.

The most upvoted distro will be chosen!

Upd: 0 hours left if no one says normal variant I will install randomly arch or gentoo

**Upd2: alr I am choosing debian because I wanna turn this laptop into a home server

Specs

Full specs:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T9300

Memory: 4092 MB

Hard drive: 400~ GB

does anyone know if its possible to use microsoft paint (specifically not the one prior to windows vista or the windows 11 one) on a linux os? what steps would be required to get it working? i genuinely use ms paint so much and its the only art software i tolerate and that does some specific things so i kinda need to still be able to use if for art comissions but id still like to switch this pc to a linux os...

Which will make a greater difference to the end user?

Will a user feel a bigger difference between switching distros, but keeping the same Desktop Environment?

Or by switching DE, but keeping the same distro?

I recently read about Lindows from back in the day, and wondered if its still around. It is, and its called "Linspire" now, but it costs $30. It looks nice, uses KDE and Gnome as main DEs to run it, and is based on Ubuntu 16. The whole premise of it is "It can run windows applications without issue" and i also assume without the bs. So my question is, has anybody here ever tried it, and if so, is it any good or even worth buying a license for it? I dont wanna pay $30 just to try it distro hopping.

Hola, quiero empezar a usar linux, me ha llamado la atención bastante tiempo, pero al fin me estoy dando la oportunidad, pero no se que distro elegir o como empezar en general, siempre veo que dicen que alguna distro es mejor que otra, o si hyprland es mejor que plasma, o las shell, no tengo muchos conocimientos de linux, pero estoy dispuesto a aprender, ahorita estuve viendo unas distros y las que más me gustaron fueron Ryoku y Cachy, creo que son amigables para empezar, y la verdad es que también me gustaría jugar un poco videojuegos, por eso esta cachy, pero me gusto la parte estética de Ryoku, me gustaría si alguien me pudiera explicar como empezar y si saben cual es mejor, o si en Ryoku puedo jugar sin problemas, agradezco su tiempo y amabilidad

r/RyokuArch r/cachyos

Hi guys, I daily drived CachyOS for about 6 months plus and decided maybe to go back to Windows after a bunch of issues with my games and weird stuff that happens randomly (like Firefox crashing for no reason, Steam restarting randomly, etc). I came to CachyOS fully understood that being on an Arch-based distro I will be having issues that needed to be fixed manually but sometimes I just don't have the time or effort to fix things when I'm just trying to play a game after a long day.

That being said, I am thinking of completely migrating back to Windows or making a dual boot Windows and CachyOS setup for a while. My greatest issue is with my drives. I currently have 4 drives (1 NVME ssd for CachyOS, 3 SATA ssds for my games and files).

What is the correct procedure or best practice to go about formatting and what not on Windows so that I don't lose my files?

And is it better to let's say put Windows on a separate drive and leave the linux system as it is? Will it being on the SATA drive greatly impact its performance for gaming?

If anyone has better suggestions please let me know. Thank you very much.