You certainly want to test out what you expect to use before moving. The advantage would also be finding apps that run natively on Linux. There certainly are some such DAW apps.
I’m using Manjaro KDE and my games are running fine under Proton on Steam Games. But I play Snowrunner, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc.
A tip on Windows VMs as I do keep one. I discovered that running one with it’s Windows files rather on a separate partition formatted at NTFS, really works quite well for me (versus the VM sitting on one massive VM file on the Linux partition. Can see Chris’ video about this at youtu.be/6KqqNsnkDlQ.
Nice thing for just testing Linux, is install it on an external drive, and boot with that. Then your existing machine is completely left as it is, and you can test Linux as it would really run on your computer.
Thanks a lot for the Hint about the vm solution, i will defenitely Look further into it. The only problem with actually running Linux on my Hardware i can think of would be secure Boot. But this can be turned off (i needed it for Windows 11 and some docker stuff i played around with). Years ago i had a dual Boot solution with win 7 and Ubuntu. But in the end i was more on Windows (gaming on Linux was way worse bock then) and eventually kicked Ubuntu off my harddrive.
It isnt even that i have actual Problems with win11, in fact i have to say it runs well and very stable, at least on my System. Its more like an “ideological” Thing. I just want to have As little big corpo stuff as possible.
Why did I switch to Linux ? I pushed Windows XP as far as it could go (skipped Vista altogether), and after that I became so frustrated with Windows 7 being so bad that I switched to Linux and never looked back since.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s usefull for others. Write it for yourself and learn from it. I myself wrote copying script for terminal and I am sure no one else going to use it just me and thats fine.
It would be easier for me to understand if you can explain how this is different from the various other methods of installing software onto a computer.
How is this different from a package manager, or something like FlatPak or AppImage, where you can find scripts (not necessarily bash scripts) to install whole packages from a binary repository?
Is there an advantage to your solution over something like OhMyZsh, which provides a repository of Zsh functions you can install to configure the Zsh user interface.
Is there a reason why, if someone does not want to use a package manager, or Nix/Guix, they would prefer to use your solution rather than just go to the website and find the script there to install the software they need?
it isn’t platform specific because you can add scripts for any distro or architecture.
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it just stores and runs bash scripts to install stuff
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to remove once installed, or automated ways to update.
Well, any Linux distro has a package manager which you can use to install, update, or remove software. So can Nix, Guix, AppImage, and FlatPak. And Nix and Guix allows you to build from source code.
So I guess my question is, if I were thinking about using your app to install software, and update and remove it, how is it more convenient than using my ordinary package manager? If it is more convenient for building software from source, how is it more convenient than Nix or Guix?
Appimages are like MacOS .app programs. You download a random executable from a random website, that contains everything it needs to run. It’s the antithesis of the Linux way. Great for portability, awful for everything else. There are no automatic updates unless the developer explicitly bothers to implement them.
Snaps are like docker containers. Each snap also contains everything it needs to run, but at least there is a centralized update system.
Flatpaks are like another package manager layered over your OS. It manages its own dependency system isolated from your main dependency management. It updates its stuff pretty much like apt/dnf/pacman.
Native are managed through your distro’s package manager, obviously.
From a feature/version point of view:
If you have a bleeding edge or quickly moving distro, native packages are fine if you want/need up to date software. Arch users shouldn’t need Flatpaks for example. The downside is that those packages are made by the distro’s maintainers so can be anywhere from untested pre-release software (happened in Manjaro) to extremely outdated (like in Debian oldstable).
Flatpaks/Snaps/Appimages are more and more maintained and packaged by their developers. It’s great for them as you only need to package once, all bug reports are on versions you control, and you don’t need to depend on a distro’s maintainer time and will to push updates to users. For stable distros users, this is theoretically the best of both worlds: a stable, tested OS with up to date user facing applications.
From a philosophical point of view:
Appimages and Flatpaks are fully FOSS. Flathub is the dominant ways of distributing Flatpaks but anyone can create a competitor.
Snaps are distributed through Canonical’s Snap Store, which is not FOSS and is vulnerable to Canonical’s corporate meddling.
My personal preference:
Flatpaks for GUI apps, native for CLI tools
Appimages as a last resort if it’s the only way to get a specific app.
When I was 5/6 years old, I loved computers, but I wasn’t necessarily a hobbyist. I learned almost everything on my own. I used to heavily modify my Windows desktop back then with skins and Stardock programs to make my desktop look like Mac OS X. I was a big fan of Apple’s user interface (iOS/iPad as well, both the skeuomorphism and, well, the flat design a little bit).
So when I was 9, I saw Linux. I decided to use wubi and Ubuntu, tried this brand new OS.
It was awesome. I could modify it as I wanted to. I slept on my primary school classes. Ricing at the time felt great, you had so much control over your own desktop.
I have no idea why I stopped at that point. I think Windows 8 looked cool enough to me, but now I think it’s one of the worst OS I’ve ever used. But games just worked there, honestly. Linux felt more like a toy, while Windows was my comfort zone.
Eventually a few years away from a decade later, I did use Debian 7 for hosting stuff like my bots in GCP. Having used Linux to customize the DE and the exposure to the terminal really helped a lot in making things more familiar to me.
Then I thought why don’t I just use Linux desktop again. I started distro hopping. I finally found home in KDE Arch Linux, Proton-GE, the AUR, and Arch Wiki. I rarely do ricing if at all, only because I finally found the setup I’d rather be comfortable with than changing it frequently for no good reason.
I still use W11 to this day on my laptop but only because of school requiring me to use Visual Studio among other things. That’s where Docker, WSL2, scoop, MSYS2, and several open source projects to improve QOL comes in. I can be comfortable with Windows and continue to use Linux without any annoying differences in my workflow. I also just use Vim on everything, and the CLI when I want to do productive work.
I’ve rarely held my mouse on the computer and neither did I work hard to memorize anything. You’d start getting intuitive with everything the moment you start to try understanding the rationale of how stuff is designed to be.
I normally use timeshift only to snapshot the system on a daily basis, and if I am not certain what my “fiddling” will do with my operating system, I make a manual snapshot on timeshift before I proceed with what I will do.
In your case I’ll copy anything that is important you have, and restore to a earlier version you know it works and call it a truce, after that, I’ll suggest just to snapshot your system and not home folder
A wiped ssd, damn… what os were you running? Maybe you have to go to the linux mint forum. They are maintaining the timeshift app, maybe you can get advice from them. Good luck
Something is very wrong here, I’ve literally restored dozens of times with timeshift and never had it go wrong like this.
Restart the timeshift restore sequence checking very carefully the parameters (you dont have to complete, just go back into it). It should show you a list of what it wants to restore (on the second screen iirc) have a look at that for anything strange (like there not being any files listed to restore for example)
It seems I looked too coarsly. It showed all the files to restore. Then it show the same files…but to delete. So I ran it again but cancelled as soon as it began deleting. Now I have a system that boots at leasr into tty and can try to restore /home with duplicacy from there.
Still the question remains why everything was set to be deleted after restoring.
I have an arguably bad piece of advice, but one I hadn’t seen in skimming the replies.
You could always install Windows in a VM. Libvirt and virt-manager offer a pleasant GUI experience so it’s easy to do. If you give the VM a heavy resource allotment (while leaving a reasonable amount for the host) it should still perform well. The VM video driver is the only place you take a not insignificant performance hit, but for A/V manipulation I don’t think it’ll matter. Unless you use GPU based video encoding. In which case it’ll be CPU bound now so slower. You can potentially do PCI pass through to your GPU but that adds complexity.
A big downside here is that as far as Windows is concerned, this is different “hardware” so it won’t activate based on your physical device. As I recall, it only allows the use of one core while unactivated which is pretty much unusable. So a pretty hefty expense relative to a personal VM, I think. But it is an option.
“A big downside here is that as far as Windows is concerned, this is different “hardware” so it won’t activate based on your physical device.”
You can transfer a Windows licence from another installation, so in OP’s situation, from the original installation. During Windows setup, select the ‘I don’t have a license key’ option, then once Windows is installed, go into settings, click the Windows isn’t activated option, and go through the activation troubleshooter.
I can’t remember exactly where, but somewhere in there is the option to transfer the license from another installation. It has to be the same version of Windows.
The license transfer also depends what edition was being used. OEM may be stuck with the hardware, traditionally you could take a retail license to a new install.
So, these statistics apparently come from StatCounter, a web analytics company. I know that this is probably the best way of collecting usage metrics for the entire Internet, but I think this is less efficient for counting Linux users - after all, I would say that the proportion of Linux users who also use content blockers is pretty high. Even if it weren’t the case, most distributions ship with Firefox pre-installed, which automatically blocks trackers out-of-the-box.
Also, wouldn’t this also count an embedded device with a WebView as a “Linux user”? For example, smart TVs have a web browser, and typically identify themselves with a “Generic Linux” user-agent.
I was writing just writing some code one day. I then realised something, I needed to press " key twice. I thought my keyboard had died, but the behaviour was consistent so that’s unlikely. Then I realised what happened. Windows had installed and set English international as the default layout, and I was unable to switch it out in settings. Even if I manually switch to English us, it would eventually go back. And editing the registry to remove it just made all windows system apps shit themselves.
Now at the same time, I had a laptop. It had an update pending for a few weeks, but the update kept failing and hence I had not allowed it to update this time. But as I open up my laptop to code on there with the right keyboard layout, I see the update screen. THE LAPTOP WAS NEVER TURNED OFF, and it was plugged in. I waited and waited till it finally failed yet again.
Also shortly after one more of these attempts was made my windows which wiped my encryption keys and made my system unbootable or recoverable.
I had used Linux on a Chromebook before with custom firmware, all my dev work happend in wsl, and I had did a lot of projects on the raspberry pi, so for me the logical step was to completely wipe my SSD and install Linux mint. That happened about 4 years ago and I have not ever thought of leaving Linux. I did switch to arch though, so I use arch btw.
It’s not exactly a gaming mouse, but I recently got a Glorious Model O and it works just fine on Linux, wired or wireless. OpenRGB works with it too. The mouse itself is lightweight, comfortable, and accurate, which is all I need. I thought I would miss having a bunch of thumb buttons (this one has two) but I don’t.
The scroll wheel is fine, but honestly the one feature I do miss from my old Logitech was a button I could click that put the scroll wheel into free wheel mode where it would spin instead of ratcheting. If Glorious made a mouse with that I would probably buy it tomorrow
I also have a Glorious, in my case a Model I (because I have small hands on long fingers). Love the shape, its very comfortable, and how light weight it is. I like it more than my previous Logitech mouse. And the Glorious just works.
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