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.
That removes the package, and your personal stored config and cache of the browser. NOTE: rm -rf is permanent without a backup or snapshot to restore from. Don’t delete these unless you are certain you want to.
There were a few reasons I wanted to switch, but nothing pushed me much, until a lot of things culminated at once.
I’d been using Linux on servers for a long time, and a Linux desktop in an old job, and I much prefer the usability of it over Windows (I really like the command line options on Linux over CMD or Powershell, and kept having issues with Git Bash, whereas stuff would just work on Linux), as well as the customisablity, and it is more friendly for developing (at least in my opinion, web development for me specifically) so I’d been contemplating it and occasionally trying out distros in VMs. Then I found out my PC isn’t compatible with Windows 11, and it had me thinking it was dumb that I couldn’t upgrade because my PC meets all the specifications but there’s some specific thing Microsoft didn’t like and didn’t think was “secure enough” or whatever. It got me thinking that it’s dumb that a company can decide what I’m allowed to install on my PC. Even if my PC was vastly underpowered for the OS, it should be up to me to decide what I can and can’t install on my computer that I built with my money.
I looked into installing Windows 11 and bypassing the check, and it seemed like too much hassle, so I was going to stay on Windows 10, but at some point after, a Windows update completely broke my installation - which wasn’t the first time - and after hours of trying to fix it, it pushed me over the edge. I decided to completely scrap Windows at that point, because I was just fed up and preferred Linux anyway, and justified it further because of the fact Windows is essentially spyware on top of that. I nuked my OS drive and installed the distro I liked the most at that point (KDE neon) over it and never looked back.
I also have Valve to thank for that impulse too, because at the time I’d been looking at their work on Proton because I wanted to know how well gaming worked on Linux, and from what I saw, pretty much my entire library would work mostly without issues thanks to the info on ProtonDB. If I hadn’t seen this info, I might have hesitated to switch, but knowing most - if not all - of my games would work (even if I had to do a bit of tweaking) made the decision very easy.
The main thing that surprised me is just how polished it feels. At least with KDE as my desktop environment, it feels like everything has a purpose and they belong together. So many things in Windows felt tacked on and like it was an afterthought, with vastly different designs. The biggest thing I love is being able to fully (and I mean fully) customise the taskbar, window decorations, colours, animations, everything. I love being able to make things my own, and I couldn’t do that on Windows. Windows was more “Microsoft with a bit of my touches” whereas using KDE neon it feels like my computer.
Also, software repositories are fantastic. Instead of having to download an exe for each thing you install and each having their own way of updating, with package managers I can just search in a central place, install it, and the package manager itself will keep it updated for me. It’s just so much more user friendly. Although one thing that threw me off with package managers is seeing a notification that I had updates and it was like “you have 200 updates” and it shocked me, but obviously each piece of software has their own individual update, including system packages, instead of Windows update where you get a single package with a bunch of updates in it that you can’t customise, and possibly a few driver updates.
One obstacle I hit however was graphics drivers. I have an nvidia GPU and nvidia really doesn’t want to play nice with Linux for some reason, but to get a decent gaming performance you need their proprietary drivers. I had quite a few issues trying to get them properly installed, so unless you have an AMD GPU or are fine spending a bit of time possibly troubleshooting, take this as a warning (or if you don’t care about gaming, because the open drivers would probably be fine for just a basic PC)
I was having issues with windows, and hate the look of windows 11 so I decided If I was going to have to re-install and deal with a new OS’s problems I might as well deal with linux issues and learn something new.
I duel booted, and two months later thought back and found I hadn’t gone into windows since the install.
A year and a half later and I can say that the issues I’ve had on linux have been easier to fix than windows. Two separate problems I’ve had on both. Linux was easy and took about ten minutes, windows took a day, and a month each.
with windows I get esoteric error codes that mean something generic like “failed to update windows” when it stops at 3% for two hours and crashes. The solutions for it including two magic fix all commands (didn’t fix it), restarting it ‘correctly’ (nope), and copying a regedit value from another computer (did work). This all coming from the end of a random windows 7 forum post. My computer was on windows 10.
On linux it told me my arch keyring corrupted. When I googled the error I got an explination and the arch-update-keyring command. This worked.
With a swap file (167gb for some reason on windows) I got a greyed out GUI and twelve re-starts, 4 to get the screen up, 8 to make the change happen. On linux, I copy pasted a few commands.
Apologies for the rant, jt’s early, but this is why I switched and stayed. I also like customization, alot
Point is, if you work for some big corp, when you buy something, you want proper warranties meaning people to blame if it breaks down. I have seen corps want to pay for stuff available free just so they can point at someone if there’s a problem. Ubuntu is mostly fine, Canonical does offer support, but “nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM”.
The enterprise support also means security updates, which is a huge requirement for government contract work (not just US, anything military really). I’ve also seen requirements for use of DISA approved products. I think at the time RHEL and maybe SUSE were the only ones on the list - I’m a few years removed from having to care about this.
We’ve got over two hundred Rocky/Centos vms. all of them ‘pets’ that would require manual migration of lots of very different services, many of them bespoke. That’s quite a lot of work.
Professional applications (e.g. CAD,…) generally don’t support many distributions. In my field, RHEL and SLES are widely supported and a few tools also support Ubuntu.
Well, the year was 2006 and I had a tank of a Dell D610. Never failed me — until it did.
One day it did the BSOD thing. I thought it was neat. After having used computers for more than a decade I finally saw the infamous BSOD. So, reinstalled Windows and got everything set up jus… BSOD.
Curious.
Another BSOD.
So, I reinstalled (for the second time) and very cautiously rebooted…BSOD.
Well, fuck.
I happened to have a Knoppix LiveCD laying around. I got that up and running and managed to download Ubuntu and burn that and installed Ubuntu and never looked back.
I didn’t stay with Ubuntu for long, though.
I don’t have a technical job either. I am just a teacher. Linux serves me well.
NixOS is as mature as arch, I’d say, but because of its nature it has issues here and there, but rarely so.
That said, the learning curve for nix/nixos is very very very steep, so good luck learning. It took me a while for me to use it nicely, and even then, I’m nothing more than a beginner. Even so, I’m quite comfortable and pretty much can’t use any other linux distro.
Fair enough to be honest when I jumped in I dual booted with windows so always had a safety net (also was experimenting on my laptop before moving to my PC)
Tbh same, I only ever went back to windows when I absolutely needed something to work immediately for something work related (my manager does not have much patience for my antics with technology when it doesn’t go 100% smoothly)
My PC which is now purely for personal use I just completely wiped and replaced, didn’t even keep the old disk contents because it was full of years worth of windows usage detrius
That’s true for the configuration.nix. I still cannot fully wrap my head around using Nix Flakes for managing my nixos configuration, home manager and overlaying or creating packages. My setup so far works, but I still don’t feel like I fully understand it.
I wish I knew. I learned of it and started playing with it last year, with me using it full time since Feb of 2023, with a couple of hopping and then coming back to NixOS
Documentation is crap, but has been getting much better recently. Companies are also starting to use NixOS in production and are making contributions. The low friction ARM development process becomes more relevant every day.
Why was my comment deleted? I certainly didn’t delete it and it was a perfectly legitimate question I think asking about why NixOS is only getting popular now
Recommended distribution coming from Windows: Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. linuxmint.com Why? Very consistent over many versions, no experiments, comfortable, very classic Windows-like desktop. Actually amazingly designed and very helpful “welcome” tool after installation, to help new users set up the system well. The Mint team develops and maintains useful and cool applications. Based on Ubuntu, so most problems you can web-search for both Mint or Ubuntu and find solutions. It’s based on the long-term-support version of Ubuntu, so it gets 5 years of security updates for each version. It has Flatpak enabled by default, which is a modern, widely accepted software container format, so programs can run independently of the distribution. Flatpaks are more up to date than traditional packages from a distribution’s software repositories. With things like gaming, you want the latest software to benefit from new features, enhancements and compatibiliy, so make use of Flatpak for your applications where possible.
Easy tool to write a .ISO or .IMG file to a USB stick in order to boot Linux from it: Balena Etcher or Fedora Media Writer (it can write other images than Fedora too and lets you format / restore the USB stick with a single button, great tool).
Definitely back up all your files on at least a large USB stick, but better an external HDD or SSD (USB sticks might at some point become corrupt or break, they are not as reliable). Having your pictures, documents, videos, etc. always on an external disk means you can easily reinstall any OS and just copy your stuff over. Update this backup from time to time. This will give you the safety net to confidently discover and experiment.- If you have only one computer, prepare a Windows installation USB stick before your Linux adventures, just in case something breaks and you want to repair it or go back to Windows.- Dual boot can be annoying, and sometimes one OS may ruin the bootloader of another. I recommend a separate machine, or at the very least a separate physical SSD per OS.- Don’t try to make Windows applications work on Linux unless you absolutely have no other alternative and choice but to use them. Pretty much anything you may be used to is either available as a Flatpak, a traditional package in the distro’s repository or has great open source or Linux-compatible alternatives. Learn to web-search for those alternatives and install them from the software center app that comes with your distro. On Linux, you don’t have to go to websites and download setup files. Everything sits inside a giant software repository and gets updated along with your OS when you look for updates. A Linux Distribution has a repository for its own packages, and Flatpak containers come from a separate repository, most commonly flathub.org. On desktop-centric distributions, you get appstore-like graphical tools to search, install, remove and update everything from one place.- If you absolutely have to make a Windows app work on Linux, have a look at “Bottles”. It’s a UI that makes it a bit easier and more comfortable to work with the Windows compatibility layer called WINE.- Don’t try to search for driver setups on websites unless something really doesn’t work. Most common hardware is supported out of the box, as a ton of general purpose drivers are shipped with the distro as kernel modules already. If you have a Nvidia GPU, expect some issues and consider buying AMD graphics in the future. AMD drivers are inside the Linux kernel these days and open source, whereas Nvidia has a history of not cooperating with the open source crowd, so the open drivers are reverse-engineered, hacky, not-so-great solutions. Desktop-focused distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Pop! OS have built-in tools to easily enable / select proprietary Nvidia drivers. For gaming, they are pretty much required. On other distros that don’t offer this comfort, you’ll have to manually install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and that is a nightmare, likely to brick your system on your first few attempts. With AMD or Intel graphics, you don’t have to do anything, they just work.
If you’re a German reader, you’re in luck. There is an amazing, free online book if you really want to dive deep into Linux: openbook.rheinwerk-verlag.de/linux/Unfortunately, I don’t know an english equivalent, if you know one, please link it to me.
In case you might be a PC gamer, you’ll likely have a Steam account. Valve does an amazing job, they take the Windows compatibility layer WINE, add some magic to it, the result is called Proton. To enable it, you just have to go to the Steam settings - Compatibility - Enable Steam Play for all other titles. You can now simply install and run Windows games, thousands of them just work and the list grows continously. See protondb.com to check which game works or might have issues and how to fix them. For other places like GOG, Epic, Ubisoft, etc. check out Lutris. It’s a very cool launcher that helps you set up all these accounts in one place. Advanced tip: a guy called Glorious Eggroll patches things into Proton that Valve can’t add for licensing reasons and offers improved, unofficial Proton versions called GE-Proton. If you have issues getting a game to run with the normal Proton versions, GE-Proton might make a difference. A neat little tool to install GE-Proton is “ProtonUp-Qt”: flathub.org/de/apps/net.davidotek.pupgui2
Epic post, really good advice, MInt is the way to go IMO as well, the Xfce version is perfect for my needs and really stable, indeed having dabbled with linux for years this is the only version I have used for more than a year, actually just checked and I have been on mint now since 2020 with just the one upgraded installation. I actually duel boot but never actually boot into window for anything other than occasional work needs.
I forgot to mention in the “Why Mint” section that they also are very clever and maintain Linux Mint Debian Edition. It’s the same thing, just based on Debian, which is the foundation that Ubuntu is built on. So in case anything happens with Ubuntu as their technological foundation, (and let’s be honest, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu has had some bad moments in the past) there still is a nearly identical Linux Mint, unaffected, based on Debian. So it’s an additional safety, that you don’t have to learn and migrate to something new again. Even if Ubuntu would fail and completely vanish over night, people still have Linux Mint as they know and love it.
Yes, Ubuntu as a foundation offers a few advantages. It’s nothing you can’t live without, but useful details that make it a bit more flexible and suited for a wider audience. I found an already pretty great answer, so let me just link it to you: forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?p=2297907#p229…
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