I recently learned about Sysrq + f to kill running processes making the computer hang. Before finding about this I had to manually restart the PC via power button. I wonder if KDE should make it easier to enable this feature considering they have something to kill processes already but it’s less powerful than Sysrq.
I've been using it for a long time. I've personally found that there is essentially no impact on gaming performance--or if there is, it's so slight that it's totally negligible on midrange hardware, especially with feral gamemode. It might be more impactful on low spec PCs, I would assume, but I'm not sure of that. In my case, it's plenty lightweight and offers lots of customizability.
Can confirm. Used it early on (around Suse 7.3) and it took ages to compile and was bloated and buggy as heck. I switched to WindowMaker and never really looked back. Recently gave it a whirl on steamdeck and was pretty shocked at how polished and nice it is. If you haven’t given it a fair shake recently, you might be surprised.
Yeah, seems like it is preferring the ALSA backend. Sound initially worked for me because I had pipewire-alsa installed, but I couldn’t do anything to change the volume.
If you need bleeding edge gaming support, is Arch (using Arch-install)or an Arch based distro like Garuda. I believe OpenSUSE Tumbleweed could also be alternative to Arch.
The next best thing is a Fedora based distro like Nobara.
Well, then try flatpak light be a good option, check if flatpak is installed with flatpak list, it it is, would should see a list of applications and runtimes, if thou don’t see steam there, you can easily install it with flatpak install steam
If possible, maybe try dual booting a Windows install just to test if the games run better there. If they do, it’s probably a problem with your system or your configuration, but if not, it’s likely your hardware. Might also want to look at your BIOS settings and see if something somehow got reset there, like your RAM clock.
Start with something generic. Maybe not Ubuntu because of their recent hijinks. But something like Debian or Linux Mint. Just because it makes troubleshooting so much easier when because you can Google problems more easily.
The major tip I always give is: Linux is different from Windows, this means things are done differently and if you try to do things the windows way you’re going to have a bad time.
As for distro hoping forget about this, you’ll experience it but it shouldn’t start for a while, pick something you’re comfortable with (maybe the same you use on your server) and a DE that looks good to you (personally I like KDE Plasma, but this is a very personal choice, and I don’t even use KDE but I’m not going to recommend i3 for someone who’s just starting now). Distro hoping will start whenever you see something that picks your interest on a different distro, and you decide to give it a try, but that should only come into place after you’re comfortable with the one you’re using. But I always also recommend keeping /home in a different partition just so it’s easier to switch or reinstall the system if needed.
I’ve had the desire to leave for a while, that’s why I thought creating a linux server to self host apps with my former gaming PC would be a great way to get started with Linux and learn the basics while still relying on Windows for my main stuff for a while.
Games were my last point of resistance, but I don’t play as much anymore so I think I should just take the plunge.
Can you elaborate the /home on a different partition part? How do you split your partition and does it mean you can switch distro and still have your stuff laying around as if you plugged an external disk?
Gaming is actually really good on Linux now. Proton is friggin amazing!
Putting all your files on one partition is fine and simple. The only downside is that if you go to install another distro, you’ll have to back up and restore those files after you wipe.
Welcome to greener pastures, it’s good to have you 🙂
I personally keep /home on a completely separate drive; I have an NVMe SSD for / (root partition, where the OS is installed) and /home lives on a SATA SSD. There’s a page in the install process that lets you do this, create partitions on various devices, or select existing ones.
Having /home on a different partition means that you can swap out the root partition from around it to repair or replace the OS and you don’t have to move your files around. It makes the process of recovering from certain kinds of calamities and the process of distrohopping a lot faster.
Having them on a completely separate drive like mine does a couple things, the main one is it adds “drive failure” to the list of “certain kinds of calamities” I can quickly recover from. I can swap out a dead system drive for a new one, reinstall the OS in about 15 minutes, and then just run a little utility to reinstall all my software automatically. My files and settings are all still there.
Here’s the thing no one tells beginners: You’re familiar with hidden files on Windows? How you can right click a file and click “Hide” and it disappears from the list unless you go up to View > Show Hidden Files then it reappears and its icon is blurry? Linux has a similar system for hiding files. To hide a file in Linux, you put a period at the beginning of the file name. In a GUI file manager you can show them similarly to how you do it in Windows, in the terminal you ls -a (dash a for “all”). The Linux ecosystem uses this heavily for app config files. If you ever uninstall software, reinstall it, then notice your settings are still there…this is why. It’s stored in a hidden file somewhere in your /home directory, probably inside of ~/.config.
When I was a beginner, I specifically backed up my Documents, Downloads, Music, Videos etc. folders. And when I had to occasionally restore something from a backup, not only did I have to reinstall everything, but I had to reconfigure all my apps from scratch. Understanding the above paragraph, I backup or maintain my entire /home drive, and when I install a new OS all my settings are already there, including my preferred theme and wallpaper.
I’ll try to tell a shorter version of this story: My father bought his most recent computer, a Dell XPS tower. He got it set up, and the process of moving out of his old one and into his new one, just transferring files, installing software and configuring everything took him a solid two weeks of manual work. In that same time, I ordered the parts for my computer, waited for them to be shipped, assembled the machine, installed the OS on bare metal, restored a backup of my /home folder from my old computer, ran this utility which took a list of all the software I had on my laptop and then installed it all from the package manager automatically, and I was up and running. What he did in two weeks of hands-on work I did in three hours of mostly doing something else while the computer transferred data from an HDD or the internet.
TL;DR of the /home partition is this: One partition is gonna be the bootloader, typically a small /boot folder. This thing starts the booting process from efi, boot the kernel, this will mount the root partition (/). then, according to the File System TABle, typically a text file in /etc/fstab, you can mount whatever drives (and more!) Anywhere in the file system tree. A common setup is to partition your drive into a smallish / partition and a bigger /home partition. Under /home will be your /home/username folder, roughly the equivalent of C:\Users\username on windows, but even more of your install lives there now: any userspace application (usually a flatpak, which works crossdistro), ideally all user configuration, as well as of course your files. So, once you either need or want to switch distro, you leave the home partition untouched, format / and make a new user with the same username and home folder and bam, most if not all of your configuration and at least some of your apps will be there from the start You should probably do this, it’s not too complicated and it may save the ou a headache in the future.
On Windows you have drives C, D, etc, on Linux everything is inside the root folder (i.e. /), and you can mount different partitions or even disks anywhere, so / can be the second partition on your M.2, /boot be the first partition formatted as vfat, /home be on an SSD and /home/nibodhika/hdd be an internal HDD. After you set it up (which you can do during most of the distros graphical installation) it will feel as if those are all just folders, but the important part is that if you ever format one of them the other remain intact. So for example if you have the setup I described above and you format and change your entire Linux distribution, that should only affect the M.2 disk, so the home and HDD are intact, which means that if you set the new distro to mount things in the same place you’ll have all of your configurations and media in place (all you need to do is reinstall the programs you use)
The only thing that is stopping a Windows user from becoming an average Linux user is the package manager. Just ask Duckduckgo about “(Your distro name here) package manager cheat sheet”, memorize it, and thats it.
The next step would be installing a minimal installation of your distro – which is (also) really easy as well. All you have to do is to install (either Xorg or sway or Hyprland) with the --install-recommends flag (or similar), edit a specific file (.bash_profile) inside your home directory (cd ~), add the binary file of your chosen package (same name as its package name – sway or Hyprland, etc.) and thats it.
Friendly reminder that this is a “very short resumée” of what you have to do. But it will (definitely) get you sorted.
That’d be true if Windows users were a some sort of “excluded humans from society” kinda thing where the English language was entirely new to em. Or like Linux users used some “exclusive-never-heard-anywhere-else” terms. Which thankfully, both are a fallacy.
I’m linux user for years and, while I can understand what he say I cannot get what he means wtf. Why would a new user install the graphic server manually? You only would do this on arch.
I would also add on that saying “Just ask Duckduckgo” further obfuscates everything. Yes, it is a generally good search engine choice. But “Google” is the verb people use. Even us sickos who use Bing will say “google that”.
Which more or less highlights one of the biggest problems for further adoption of linux among sane users. The current users.
Because the entirety of that post can be rewritten as “The big difference between Windows and Linux is the approach to installing software. There have been improvements on the Windows side over the years, but the idea is still that you search the internet for installers. On Linux, you use a ‘package manager’ that is sort of like a phone app store for your computer”. And since I actually have recent windows experience i would add on “If you ever used ‘winget’ or ‘chocolatey’, it is like that but it actually works and the entire system is built around it”
But nah, gotta get that greybeard on and gatekeep as many people as possible. Its like people see “hey, I am a newbie and want to try this out” and decide that means they need to big league everyone to prove how smart they think they are.
Agreed. Personally I never found getting almost any distro up and running difficult but I’ve been coding since the 80s in a variety of systems so the cli is second nature to me. Hell, I even know how to exit vi.
I disagree with the minimal install, especially for new users. It’s probably easier to get going when everything you need is installed and configured. Once you know the tools and what you want, then go for the customization.
I’ve been using Linux for over 20 years and I still prefer a full install (EndeavourOS is my choice). I’d just rather spend my time doing anything else than manually installing every package.
Welcome! I think a big thing is to realize it is a bit different and try to stick with it a while you get comfortable.
I usually keep a copy if the original system file when I edit something. Basically things in /etc.
The Arch wiki is a great resource even if you’re not using Arch.
For gaming and the occasional Windows app, if I’m not using Proton through Steam I like Lutris. Over the last several years I’ve found Windows to be far less necessary though.
Also don’t be afraid to mix things installed from your distro’s repository with Flatpaks or AppImages. I use all three types of apps with no issues. I would avoid snaps if possible though. The last few times I tried them things just didn’t work well.
I think I have a fairly good idea of where I’m going. I’ve been using my old gaming rig as a Linux self hosting server for a few months now, I’m confortable with the Terminal and SSH. Kind of understand the file structure, but not as instinctively as Windows for sure.
I’m more worried about the friction of not having every software I wish for instantly available.
For instance, I use MusicBee to listen to my music library. It’s been the case for over a decade, so I’m not sure where I’ll go.
I have to use Windows at work, and I’ve found that just about everything I use on Windows has an equal or better equivalent on Linux. I find most of the time on my work computer I miss having Linux.
Except for music management… MusicBee is really great and apparently it doesn’t work too well with wine. There are a few applications that do manage a library but I’ve found they all fall a bit short when compared to MusicBee. I’ve taken to just and old time approach of managing music with the filesystem. I also use Audacious for a touch of nostalgia since it works with Winamp 2.x skins :)
First? If you linux “correctly”, distro hopping is almost a non issue. The key is that you want as little as possible installed on your OS drive/partition. Because you have a package manager with any distro (that you should consider for a desktop) so installing software is really easy.
Aside from that: There are a lot of youtubes out there that mostly boil down to evaluating popular distros. But… the reality is that mostly you are looking at desktop environments with those. Sure you sometimes have different ideologies in what can be in a package manager (such as closed source nvidia drivers), but there are almost always workarounds for any consumer oriented desktop distro. I recommend just watching one and then realizing that KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong) and then picking a distro from there.
Personally? I mostly like (K)Ubuntu for my desktop. Most of the servers I work on for my day job are either rhel or debian so apt install is built into my brain at this point. And while I don’t like the ever increasing focus on snaps and flatpaks, I know enough to work around them when I need to and adding a new ppa is pretty trivial. And I have absolutely zero qualms about using the functional nvidia drivers so having that trivially built in is nice.
Although, funny enough: I am currently looking at other distros to maybe switch away from ubuntu. Mostly because I need to better understand exactly what the esm-apps are because right now it feels like Canonical is actively holding back package updates because they want people to pay for Pro and… fuck that noise.
Which, getting back to making distro hopping easy: My documents are already backed up to my NAS. Steam wise, I just need to copy the install library in my /data/nvme00 directory to a different drive (or redownload/reinstall). And then everything else on my OS drive is trivially replaceable and I just need to write a usb stick. … Or I use this as an excuse to buy an even bigger nvme drive and then use a usb adapter to transfer shit.
What I will say is this: if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them. We all get VERY tribal and one of my best friends only slightly ironically encourages people to use gentoo. I am pretty sure even gentoo’s maintainers discourage people from using gentoo :)
Okay so I’m slightly confused and I haven’t experimented with that on my server because it’s only one single drive. If I have several drives and partition one for the distro, the other drives as storage partitions. Are the data storage drives compatible between distro?
Would that mean that I could go pick a new distro, nuke the “distro drive”, but leave the others disk intact and just log in the new distro with my drives as they were?
As long as you aren’t encrypting those drives it mostly “just works” with maybe the occasional chown/chgrp. With the more “eclectic” distros you might run into a mess with unsupported filesystem formats but generally with any “friendly” distro you support the same general range of filesystems and don’t have to care.
I wouldn’t assume you can recover life critical data but all of that should be backed up with something other than “it is in a folder on an ssd” anyway. But for steam games and TotallyNotPorn.mkv? Zero issues.
But yeah. Distro partition(s) or distro drive gets nuked. Rest stays the same.
Yeah I’m not worried about encryption, it’s more about convenience to not start from scratch every time, but whatever is critical is duplicated in several places and wouldn’t be lost if I were to lose the entire machine. It’s more me being lazy and wiling to avoid transferring games and music again if possible.
Basically yes. You also don’t need more than one disk, you can just partition a single one.
One common way to do this is to have a separate partition for /home, so anything there will survive nuking your root partition. You can also do /var; not something I’ve done but that’s where system-wide data is kept. And finally you can use something like etckeeper to manage your system-wide config alongside whatever your distros are doing.
Cool! And how do you proceed to switch distro then? Let’s say I have done as described above and separated the distro in its own partition. I plug a new USB distro, go through the setup and at the partitioner screen, I reassociate the new distro to where the old one was, and /home to where /home was, etc? And it just picks up that there are files there?
Yep. Most installers will let you specify mount points for partitions, and it will have an option for if you want to format the partition (obviously don’t select this for /home!). So you’d have one partition for the root, and one partition for home. You’d set the mount point of the root partition to /, tell it to format that, and set the mount point of the home partition to /home, and tell it to not format that, and it’ll work as you described.
See also the other reply to my earlier comment; this is just one way, and maybe not the best way, to handle this.
Personally? Unless I am going from one version of a distro to another (and even then), I have always found enough gotchas and issues with preserving /home and /var that it just never seemed worth the hassle. Much prefer to take the approach that any documents and media are backed up to a NAS (or even just google/apple/whatever drive), config files are part of a private git repo, and any development I am doing is regularly pushed anyway.
Can see the benefits for managing a lot of users (and I do get stuck doing that in my day job) but… you aren’t distro hopping under those circumstances.
KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)
and then...
if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.
lol. I love it. :P
To OP though, if you really don't want to "distro-hop", you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won't get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the "look and feel" which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.
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