Feels like good practice to have /home mounted on a separate partition if you want to install a different distro or reinstall but I’ve never had to test the theory.
This. For home use having a separate / and /home (and maybe a swap) formated as ext4 is solid and allows you to distro hop with ease. As you get more comfortable with Linux, you’ll learn about the luxury of LVM volumes and more exotic filesystems with compression and other features. What is important is to always keep fresh backups. BorgBackup is your friend, you can find a few graphical front ends for it to simplify things.
Works well for distrohopping too, I usually would rename my home to oldhome or something and then just move my files to the new one to prevent dotfiles from potentially causing issues.
Also beware Debian installer with a luks encrypted drive. Where most things will unlock a previously-encrypted drive and use it, Debian installer will (or would, it’s been a while) reformat the encryption before it confirms any potential partition layout changes and you can end up with an empty drive before you know it.
Just add a new user when you install a new distro, then you can have a fresh start. If you want to try your old one, just useradd you old user and try it out.
Also because every time you are rebuilding your system it saves every iteration so if you totally fuck up your system you can just boot an earlier build and away you go
As far as I’ve used it pretty much everything on NixOS “just works” as long as you’ve got the right config (which can be searched on search.nixos.org or just googled
I like and use NixOS, but if this is the first time OP is using Linux, I’d recommend sticking with something like Pop. When something goes wrong, there’s a pretty good chance that there will already be a SO post for Pop or Ubuntu on how to fix it.
For basic stuff is pretty easy, but once you try to go outside of what’s in option, you might find yourself in a deep rabbit hole. Definitely not a beginner distro.
I’ve yet to find anything particularly difficult to do, 99% of things have options/packages and you can still install stuff with snap/flatpak/appimage if not
If you’re arch-curious but want something more opinionated and out-of-the-box, you could have a look at manjaro. It gets much shit thrown its way because its both try-hard (being arch based) and simultaneously “just works”, but that’s mostly memes
Yeah. Lots of people give it shit, but it does really “just work”. I’m using endeavor right now and considering swapping back to Manjaro, mostly because I cannot for the life of me figure out why SMB won’t work. Manjaro is the only distro I’ve had it work properly with little to no effort.
If you have little Linux experience it makes no sense to use a niche distribution. You have a lot less people to ask for help, you will find less documentation and support and you will be frustrated really fast, because your niche distribution is doing something different than everyone else, which will break something and you cannot repair it. If you are a beginner go with one of the big ones.
Are other subvolumes of those volumes mounted somewhere else, with other btrfs options? The btrfs options, including compress, are not applicable per subvolume.
I do game dev, and I’ve been loving VSCode. I used to use a mishmash of stuff, but VSCode can do kinda everything. Working on retro-dev C/asm for NES or Genesis? Lua projects? Shaders? Debugging a native Linux/SDL game? Doing some math in a Julia notebook? Unity3D development? Working on Windows/Mac? The answer is VSCode to all! I still use vim for some light stuff or working on remote machines, but meh… VSCode has nice defaults for me without having to fiddle.
For my native Linux gamedev, I’ve just been using the MS Cmake and Cpp-tools extensions. They work great, and you can script up the rest with actions. The debugger isn’t great, but it’s convenient and good enough for simple crashes. I switch to GDB when things get interesting though. I suppose I have an extension for shaders too, but it’s just syntax highlighting.
I have, but it doesn’t show the MS extensions like the C or CMake tools which is kind of a dealbreaker. None of the alternatives really work well enough in my experience. I’m fine with opting out of the telemetry.
I use vis to write code, ^Z and make/mk to build the project. Most of the debugging is done with valgrind and eventually gdb though my use is very limited.
When I work on manpages, I use wendy to automatically preview manpages everytime the source file changes.
I mostly program in Rust and my main editor is VSCodium with the NeoVim extension but lately I’ve been experimenting with Alacritty + Tmux + Helix and I’m starting to like it quite a bit.
Happy user of this for FPV footage, but it’s also worth appreciating more abstractly as a really well done cross platform GUI application. It’s powerful, GPU accelerated, and looks pretty good while doing it.
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