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…
Apparently ChatGPT is really good as a personal tutor. You can ask it specific questions and it will answer with detailed tutorials and step-by-step guides.
I didn’t see this mentioned, but by far the thing I depend on tmux for the most is being able to quickly copy and paste text from the terminal. e.g. grabbing a file name from the output of git diff. How does everyone else do this?
Another cool one is being able to attach to a session on my phone to check on something, and have it automatically resize without disconnecting my desktop.
I suspect what they meant was copy and paste from the console and not a terminal.
I don’t know how else somebody could do copy and paste at the console. And I don’t necessarily know that tmux can do this (I still haven’t graduated from ‘screen’), but this interpretation makes the most sense.
If it can do this, presumably with just the keyboard, that’s a pretty decent feature.
I’m not familiar with the terminology. What’s the distinction between a terminal and a console?
Tmux does let you copy from a shell to your system clipboard using the keyboard, which is nice. But many terminal emulators like mobaxterm on windows let you copy as well.
The console is the virtual terminal (VT) seen initially at boot before the desktop login starts up, or where you land if there is no desktop, and where the kernel spits its raw output. It could even be configured to be a physical serial port.
I’m using the term in a similar manner to describe the virtual terminals spawned at boot (typically 7 of them) and occupied either by a login prompt (getty) or the desktop session, and switchable with Alt-Left/Right or using the chvt command. These are analogous to the real terminals of old such as VT100 or even typewriters.
This is in contrast to what we normally call a terminal like xterm or Konsole which runs in the GUI where it is resizable, zoomable, etc. The console, and virtual terminals, are pretty limited in the interactivity they have. For instance, there’s no mouse interaction or copy-paste functionality, at least not without some exotic setup.
Yeah, doing it with the keyboard is key. I know some terminals have a way to do it, but it’s so ingrained in my muscle memory that I struggle without it, and having something that works everywhere (including try) is nice.
If you can, find another old computer that still works, maybe replace the mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive and install Linux Mint or even the new Debian 12. I have Debian running on an old computer with an Intel i5-2500k processor and it is rock solid. As far as learning linux, I recommend www.learnlinux.tv as a starting point. Jay is very good at explaining.
+1 for fish shell. The lack of POSIX compliance really doesn’t matter at all day-to-day, but all the qol features that the shell has absolutely do matter and they are so worth it.
As for DNS Benchmarking: I used a Shell Script to check the performance of my pi hole. I got that from github, just look for “dns benchmark github” and you’ll find tons of script in all languages people wrote.
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