there are things called gnome extensions that change things up.
it’s just that a lot of laptops are potatoes with wierd hardware and drivers aren’t always available. If you have a popular laptop you’ll have better luck. Can’t predict how it’ll go other than goggling your laptop and seeing if you can find a post saying what worked and didn’t. Can’t hurt to try either way…
yes. There are plenty with installed apps. Hard to believe you didn’t find any music or video players. Either way - doesn’t matter. Install VLC and it plays everything.
most Linux distributions will let you delete Linux itself if you’re so inclined. My vote is to just leave the default programs that install with the distro unless you’re in need of an absolute bare bones system/size (which it doesn’t sound like you are)
root is a user, nothing more. If you don’t know why you’re using root, then don’t. Based on your questions, I’d say you can do everything you need as a normal user with sudo privileges.
to be honest I’ve never actually done this. I believe you can even install multiples at once and switch between them. Most distros come with a choice of DE during install. Check them out in a vm and just install the one you want. If you’re hell bent on swapping on an existing install, best read a guide on how to do it for your distro.
this isn’t exactly right, but docker is kind of like virtual machines. Not quite full on VMs, but rather they are called containers. You can download a docker image, and fire up say, a pihole server. Or in my case, I run a preconfigured ubiquity WiFi controller. Don’t worry about these for now - it’s a later thing. Wayland is replacing X. Some distros use it, some don’t. X is very old - it’s stable and doesn’t get updates and just works. Until it doesn’t because it’s old and doesn’t get updates. Enter Wayland. New things of that complexity are hard to make so there’s bugs with it. Works for some people, not for others. Go watch some YouTube videos on the topic - it’s interesting.
Are there any distributions that come with the minimum pre-installed apps ? … I mean not even a video or music player
You would not believe the obsession the Linux community has with minimal distros. Yes, there are many variants of “nothing” pre-installed.
Problem is, that many of the minimal distributions are more difficult to use, because they might not have a GUI, for example. Or they don’t have handling for Bluetooth out of the box. Things like that.
For someone new to Linux, I would not recommend jumping straight to a minimal distro. The pre-installed apps are typically decent on Linux (like a recommendation by the folks who create the distro) and if you don’t know much of the ecosystem yet, it’s a good way to start learning about it.
If you do find, you really just don’t need any video or music player, you can also separately uninstall them. Which, again, is easier than installing missing things that you never heard of.
Like someone else said, try MATE, it is more like windows and even though I’m not a windows user, I find it less confusing than gnome.
to some extent though maybe not as bad as before. Solution seems to be buy a Thinkpad since that’s what more devs tend to use. I’ve stayed with that plan and haven’t had much trouble, though at work I had an Acer laptop that also worked fine.
Yes, I generally run Debian, including on small servers where there is not even a window manager (because no screen), much less a browser, music player, or anything like that.
Generally stuff like that requires root, but root just means admin privs. It’s normally protected by a password that you yourself choose when you install the OS. That is, the idea is that you own your computer and can do what you want with it, so of course you have root and can use it when needed. Android is the weird exception that breaks that model, transferring ownership of your phone to app vendors and keeping you out of the application data.
No
DE=desktop environment? Ermmm… maybe not so easy. Simplest might be separate user accounts for different DE’s? Idk, I just use MATE though I’ve played with XMonad n the past.
Wayland = relatively new window system (API through which applications show stuff on the screen), intended to replace X (older system). Docker = container system for wrapping an application and its dependencies in one package, to prevent the Linux version of “DLL hell”. This is mostly used on servers as Linux’s packaging systems tend to be better than Windows’s and not get you into too much trouble, as long as you don’t try to mix approaches on a single machine.
O wise teacher, are you able to get OTPs for services that require phone numbers with this solution?
I have a phone but no SIM, and I can’t use a lot of the Internet because soooo many services require a phone number. How much do you pay for this per year?
I worked at a niche factory some 20 years ago. We had a tape robot with 8 tapes at some 200GB each. It’d do a full backup of everyone’s home directories and mailboxes every week, and incremental backups nightly.
We’d keep the weekly backups on-site in a safe. Once a month I’d do a run to another plant one town over with a full backup.
I guess at most we’d need five tapes. If they still use it, and with modern tapes, it should scale nicely. Today’s LTO-tapes are 18TB. Driving five tapes half an hour would give a nice bandwidth of 50GB/s. The bottleneck would be the write speed to tape at 400MB/s.
#3 as an example is you installed OpenSUSE, there is a summary screen to review before commiting to the install, instead of Next/OK click software text, it brings you to pattern install check boxes (for installing entire sets of packages) but you can click details and brings you to all packages. Uncheck all, and just check the packages you do want (dependencies with get auto added) . Install the minimal setup.
1.Theres dash to dock extentions to make it have a task bar like windows or mac, aswell as wigets for the top bar.
It is mostly true, some obscure laptops dont have everything working out of the box for alot of distros. And require lots of tinkering with drivers and kernel modules.
3.if you want to go ultra bear bones, theres alpine linux thats alot like android, but doesnt run android and is usally used for network appliances. Aswell as arch linux which installs base packages and is completely bare bones.
Then theres the manual side of linux There gentoo which is a source distro, meaning everything is built from source code and must be manually enabled and setup. Its great for low power hardware but you need to read alot of documents on the wiki.
Then theres the F all Linux from scratch, It is what you think.
Usually you need root to uninstall, packages unless its flatpak.
5.No root is the first account made on your system without root being made nothing would work its the equivalent of system 32 for windows.
Switching DE is super simple. Find which one you want in your package manager and install that package. After that when you get to the login page it should show up in the sessions tab or gear icon for gnome. And simple select your DE and login.
Wayland is a new display protocal that fixes and improves on previous technology such as x11 and xorg. Docker is Containerization The best way to explain it is. Your main distro is a truck and a docker container is having a linux distribution in a box. Docker containers are usually purpose built for services which run a preconfigured distribution for that purpose.
Also no problem helping out other, we all gotta start somewhere!
Conky widgets allow you to put some dynamic info on your desktop like hardware info, weather, RSS, etc. Also, Dash to Dock gives you a macOS like dock. Oh, and Gnome Tweaks allows you to customise your own Windows-like taskbar on the bottom, with application names and desktops.
Only problem I’ve experienced is that the fingerprint reader didn’t work on some laptops while it did on others. YMVM, just try a Live USB, I’d say.
In my opinion they’re not worth it, and you can uninstall anything you don’t like, anyway.
Rooting in Android means you’re always logged in as root (admin), often without password. This is unsafe. In Linux tasks can get rooted individually. This is safe (just don’t give a bad task like a virus root-access) In a DE, like Gnome, some pop-up window will ask for your password if a task needs root. In a terminal, just add sudo in front of a command that needs root, and enter your password if the terminal asks.
Yes, you can uninstall any pre-installed app, just right-click it on the menu, Gnome will ask for your password so it can root that one uninstall task! Or type sudo apt remove followed by that app’s internal name, like sudo apt remove firefox!
Not at all, it’s the opposite! Since updates concern the whole system, system updates always require to run as root underwater!
This depends on your login screen, but assuming Debian or Ubuntu: Install the other DE, usually you just need to sudo apt install some things. Then on the login screen, there’s a button with an icon on the top-right of where you enter your password, just click that and choose the other DE. You can now switch DE anytime you log in!
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