I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it’s the package manager.
That after getting used to Linux I will hate to be forced to use less free operating systems.
This so much. I absolutely cannot stand Windows anymore.
Windows is so bad
I could but I always get a feeling like I’m being monitored constantly. Like imagine being at work and if you don’t move your mouse for a few minutes you’d get a warning or something. Or remember using a computer at school where the teacher could literally see the screen of every student, yeah like that.
I guess the main things would be:
- As a beginner, don’t bother trying to dual boot – If you still need a Windows box, get some cheap hardware to do your Linux work on. It’s too easy to screw up both systems otherwise.
- Don’t get too hung up on a specific distro, the better you are at dealing with different configurations, the better prepared you will be for whatever comes. Once you’ve gotten one set up, don’t be afraid to just try a different one.
If you have the space for a spare I much prefer hot swapping hard drives. it’s a little physical inconvenience but much harder to screw anything up. plus, full disk encryption is still an option
The 1:1 windows:Linux replacement is just a means to keep you on Windows. Once you learn Linux, you’ll come to understand how much of a farce it is and how it’s designed to keep you away
Linux is a farce and designed to keep you away? Could you elaborate?
How to quit vim.
Trying not to make it windows.
There’s a lot of conveniences that Windows comes default with.
When I switched to Linux, my immediate goal was to find alternatives for EVERYTHING. That lead to being disappointed by a lot.
Understanding Linux and also recognizing there’s a lot of shit I don’t need (that windows was giving me for the sake of VALUE) was a game changer.
Nowadays there’s a lot of good alternatives for everything, including windows hello for any password prompt
Unmounting removable drives after writing to then is crucially more important than on Windows
How so?
On Windows, I often simply took out the USB drive without “safely removing” it. The data was there 99% of the time. On Linux, if I’m not mistaken, unmounting the drive before disconnecting is what actually writes data to it.
I don’t think Linux literally waits for you to unmount the drive before it decides to write to it. It looks like that because the buffering is completely hidden from the user.
For example say you want to transfer a few GB from your SSD to a slow USB drive. Let’s say:
- it takes about half a minute to read the data from the SSD
- it takes ten minutes to write it to the USB
- the data fits in the spare room you have in RAM at the moment
In this scenario, the kernel will take half a minute to read the data into the RAM and then report that the file transfer is complete. Whatever program is being used will also report to the user that the transfer is complete. The kernel should have already started writing to the drive as soon as the data started being read into the RAM, so it should take another nine and a half minutes to complete the transfer in the background.
So if you unmount at that point, you will have to wait nine and a half minutes. But if you leave it running and try to unmount ten minutes later it should be close to instant. That’s because the kernel kept on writing in the background and was not waiting for you to unmount the drive in order to commit the writes.
I’m not sure but I think on Windows the file manager is aware of the buffering so this doesn’t happen, at least not for so long. But I think you can still end up with corrupted files if you don’t safely remove it.
That can be configured with the
syncoption ofmount.Or just
syncbefore pulling it.I do not think this is the case. You can disable on GNOME Disks active disk write caching for removable storages, exactly the same way as on Windows.
Also, Thunar File Manager has an option to partially write files when copying/moving and when moving, only remove the file from source directory when the copy is successful. I find it remarkable against data corruption for large file transfers.
Yeah, but you just describe 2 features on specific apps that don’t need to be enabled by default.
I mean, even the SATA over UAS is a pain with Linux, since the new implementation sacrifices SMART data for faster RW speeds on Linux, and you have to fallback manually on the old driver to read SMART data on external HDDs. On Windows, you just use CrystalDiskMark and it works.
Linux needs you to do a little work here and there for such things. I do not really eject everything safely on Linux. The feature on Thunar is handy.
Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.
Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.
TIL there’s tab completion lol
Always put your filesystems in an LVM volume (and in general, partition disks with LVM rather than partition tables)! You never know when you might need to combine multiple disks, make a snapshot, add redundancy, or transfer to another disk without unmounting. But it’s very difficult to format a block device as LVM once you can’t erase its contents.
Make your /boot partition at least 500MiB.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk. You never know when you might need to add EFI and boot partitions to that disk. And again, it’s very difficult to do after the fact.
Leave at least 1GiB of free space at the beginning of every disk.
Shouldn’t be needed these days. With GPT/UEFI you can just make more partitions at the end of the disk if needed. Back in MBR days that wasn’t possible, as BIOS often needed things to be at the start of the disk to be found.
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to keep a pendrive version of windows-to-go around for installing firmware and BIOS updates. It’s impossible to create one without windows already installed. Hopefully the open firmware updater in Pop OS! catches on or more manufacturers release Linux updates.
Just install BIOS updates from within the BIOS like a normal person.
my ROG rig lets me do that but the others are .exe files for some dumbass reason
Proper drive mounting process. When I finally learned, it was a life changer.
Please explain. You make me wonder if I’m doing it wrong.
I’ve learnt how to use Linux in preparation for the day when Windows finally goes to far.
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The most important thing is DE, then package manager.
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Contrary to all basement cultists’ claims, GNOME is the benchmark for DEs and has the best UX and workflow across all OSes. GNOME with its extensions is the reason I no longer find Windows to be as efficient, even though Windows can be pretty solid, and even though I have been a Windows user all my life, until 6 years ago when I hopped to Linux.
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Flatpak and Snap are revolutionary compared to Windows’ method of installing software.
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Linux is NOT Windows. You can use cross platform programs, but STOP trying to make Linux a shoe in replacement. Learn and adapt a little bit.
I like gnome but it doesn’t support variable refresh rate (freesync). But I’ve made KDE look quite nice and works ok. It bring Linux there is almost always an option for your needs
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