I switched in June 2021. I was a fan of libre software before the switch (I still am! Love me Krita, Kdenlive, LibreOffice, VS Code if you can count that…), and I saw that many people in that community, plus programming communities, use Linux. I heard that there were lightweight distros (my computer was fairly low-end), and a lot of customization options. I also wanted to try something new, so I ended up dual-booting W10 and Linux Mint, after trying LM in a virtual machine!
Now I have a new computer. It’s dual-booting W11 and LM 21.1 Cinnamon. I rarely boot into the Windows partition.
A lot of the things i was doing on my pc were either done using wsl or a linux vm at some point, using windows mostly for gaming reasons. When i tried linux on bare metal again i had no issues running the games that i care about using proton or wine so i just stuck with it.
I have shity low end laptop. It was fine for w10 at first but each update made it worse. I tryed cleaning, reinstall… But then I installed Mint. It was amazing from unusable to snappy. I still use it and it is enough computing for me (browsing, office, watching movies…)
I’d been tinkering with Linux for years and never using it properly when I saw how Windows Vista performed on my new fairly high end PC and formatted and installed Ubuntu and never looked back. Of course it wasn’t an entirely smooth experience, setting up X properly was fun in those days but the performance was so much better.
The things I was using my computer to do were becoming increasingly technical - I work in science, and I’m also a massive nerd outside of that. Many of the programs I was using were on both Windows and Linux, but often I was unable to find troubleshooting help for the Windows versions. I knew enough of Linux that I could jiggle things around and make the Linux advice fit into my Windows situation, but it was awkward and added another layer of uncertainty to the stressful troubleshooting.
At a certain point, it felt like a case of “you can’t find Windows specific advice because who in their right mind would actually be using Windows to do this stuff?”
Who indeed
(That last part is hyperbolic, but it sort of does feel like I was trying to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver sometimes. Combine that with Windows being annoying and stressful in the personal use context too and I wasn’t having a good time. Things got very messy.
I suggest trying out Bottles. You can easily install it with one command through flatpak. I’ve had luck running a lot of windows only software used in hardware engineering.
Distro won’t matter so much as Desktop Environment. KDE Plasma and MATE are both sensible choices, both very popular, and good for anyone who wants a familiar mouse and window kind of experience.
If it were me, I’d probably just download something like Debian and then set up one of those two DEs (which might even be possible directly from the installer; I can’t remember).
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.
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