Hi everyone, looking to make the switch from windows. I’m reasonably technically apt but not a programmer by any means. I’ve been doing some homework on which distro I would like to use and pop_os kinda feels like the right direction. I’m running an Nvidia 3060TI on a Ryzen 5600 chip set on an Asus tuf motherboard. Any other distros I should be looking at, and does somebody have a link for a comprehensive guide to installing? I’m looking to continue running windows on the side until such a time as I am comfortable enough with linux that I don’t need it.
IT’S DONE! Went and got myself a new SSD this afternoon and put POP!_OS on it. Looks like I got it all right but I can only boot into my Windows11 side through the BIOS. I tried all the GRUB commands but apparently after more reading GRUB isn’t used in pop 22.04. Any other ways to have a selection screen of some sort for the OS I want to boot rather than having to wait for the splash and frantically hit “F2” at the right time?
get flatseal, stick with flatpaks from your app manager. use keepass for your passcodes and syncthing to sync everything. have fun!
Avoid Flatpaks for some things, eg eMacs, vscode etc
Look into distrobox
This is perfectly fixable, but take the win and leave well enough alone imo.
If you’re on ext4, you could also simply refind.
I’m taking the win and leaving well enough alone for now.
POP!_OS apparently uses systemd-boot (not to be confused with systemd). It apparently adds a Windows entry automatically if Windows is installed on the same disk. When Windows is installed on a different disk, it looks like booting the windows boot manager EFI program is still possible with systemd-boot. The instructions given in that link are a bit vague, though.
This page has a different, simpler approach and more specific steps. Apparently you can just copy the Microsoft EFI folder to a specific directory in your Linux drive’s ESP partition. I’d be a little bit concerned about Windows not being able to update its EFI bootloader, but I also don’t know if Windows ever updates that. The page also has instructions on how to interact with the systemd-boot menu during boot.
You could also install grub yourself, but I can’t guarantee that’ll be easy. Mashing F2 might be the sanest solution, unless you plan on booting into Windows every day.
Go to Bios settings and make the efi entry of Popo-OS the first. But if you honestly use the same drive dont. Or simply never do a Windows update again, which is also insane
oh uhhh, not sure OP sorry. hope someone knows. youd be best editing the body of the post
Did you encrypt your whole drive during Pop installation? If so, I’ve never found a good way to dual boot with an encrypted drive other than refind.
PopOS is a solid choice. Other good choices are Mint or Zorin. But don’t sweat it too much. Just pick something and go with it. Once you get into it more, you’ll either know exactly what you want or you’ll stop caring.
Once you get comfortable arch is a good choice too.
It’s not that complex and it’s a good way to learn.
Then of course is Gentoo which is a bit more complex.
Yeah go with Pop. You’ll have a much easier time with the transition using it. Be sure you get the Nvidia version.
Welcome aboard! There is no need to be a programmer to work on Linux. I’m no programmer either and have been enjoying Linux for many years.
About the distro, it’s a conversation ad old as the first fork lol. It depends in part what you want to do with it. I’ve used many in 20+ years. I’ve settled eith endeavourOS for my desktop (after a few years of Linux Mint) and debian on the servers. I play and work on it without any problems (although I have a radeon rx580 card).
I’ve never used popOS, but all major distros have a fairly simple install process, especially if you use the whole hd and don’t need fancy config. Or you can start relatively hard and use gentoo. It will take a while (and thanks the fact that stage1 is not the default anymore) but you’ll learn a lot of how linux works.
Feel free to ask if you want to know more.
It’s more important to make the swap in the first place than it is to pick the right distro, unless you dive straight into LFS or Gentoo or something. You’ll eventually find what you want and can swap easily enough, or you’ll find that you’re happy with what you have!
I’ve had serious trouble with pop and usb devices waking up from sleep. Tried for weeks. Also had trouble with many flatpacks. Most help pages and tutorials were outdated or plain wrong, too.
Changed to arch eventually. Never regretted it. Mostly coding and gaming. Eventually deleted windows, because, well, everything just worked. I must have reinstalled pop like eight times. Am still sporting the first arch installation. Well. EndeavourOS, really.
Does endeavoros automatically generate BTRFS snapshots before every update? If not, do not use Arch.
A broken system sucks. Use Fedora or Opensuse.
I had to look that up. Never became an issue for me on any distro. How do you get a broken system when updating? Does it really happen that often? I might just have been lucky.
It happens sometimes. Same as with security, you dont realize it until you would have needed it
I back up my homedir and data with regular tools. I am trying to come up with a reason why my whole system might need one. 95% of that is basically the standard stuff.
I guess I believe that backups and file systems should be separate things.
If an Update breaks stuff you can go back
What are people’s experiences with dual booting windows and one of the Linux distros from the same SSD (different partitions) as opposed to having two physically separate SSDs? I unfortunately don’t have another M.2 slot on my mobo
It’s pretty easy, I installed Mint on my laptop and the installer took care of the partition and everything. On my desktop, I just installed an m.2 expansion slot.
Suggested reading to avoid future pain: https://lemmy.world/comment/6584073
I’m getting “The server returned this error: couldnt_find_post.” - what was the comment about?
Here’s the comment:
I would advise you get Debian + GNOME and install all software via flatpack/flathub. This way you’ll have a very solid and stable system and all the latest software that can be installed, updated and removed without polluting your base system. The other option obviously is to with those hipster of a systems like pop, mint and x-ubuntu.
Now I’m gonna tell you what nobody talks about when moving to Linux:
- The “what you go for it’s entirely your choice” mantra when it comes to DE is total BS. What happens is that you’ll find out while you can use any DE in fact GNOME will provide a better experience because most applications on Linux are design / depend on its components. Using KDE/XFCE is fun until you run into some GTK/libadwaita application and small issues start to pop here and there, windows that don’t pick on your theme or you just created a frankenstein of a system composed by KDE + a bunch of GTK components;
- I hope you don’t require “professional” software such as MS Office, Adobe Apps, Autodesk, NI Circuit Design and whatnot. The alternatives wont cut it if you require serious collaboration and virtualization, emulation (wine) may work but won’t be nice. Going for Linux kinda adds the same pains of going macOS but 10x. Once you open the virtualization door your productivity suffers greatly, your CPU/RAM requirements are higher and suddenly you’ve to deal with issues in two operating systems instead of just one. And… let’s face it, nothing with GPU acceleration will ever run decently unless big companies start fixing things - GPU passthroughs and getting video back into the main system are a pain and add delays;
- Proprietary/non-Linux apps provide good features, support and have tons of hours of dev time and continuous updates that the FOSS alternatives can’t just match.
- Linux was the worst track ever of supporting old software, even worse than Apple;
- Half of the success of Windows and macOS is the fact that they provide solid and stable APIs and development tools that “make it easy” to develop for those platforms and Linux is very bad at that. The major pieces of Linux are constantly and ever changing requiring large and frequent re-works of apps. There aren’t distribution “sponsored” IDEs (like Visual Studio or Xcode), userland API documentation, frameworks etc.;
- The beautiful desktop you see online are bullshit with a very few exceptions. Most are just carefully designed screenshots but once you install the theme you’ll find out visual inconsistencies all over the place, missing icons and all kinds of crap that makes Microsoft look good;
- Be ready to spend A LOT of time to make basic things work. Have coffee and alcohol (preferably strong) at your disposal all the time.
(Wine for all the greatness it delivers still sucks and it hurts because it’s true).
Another day another post about switching on /c/Linux. We need a separate community for all of these blog style posts.
