• tetris11@feddit.ukEnglish
      751·
      3 days ago

      “my friend recommended I use Ubuntu”

      me (screaming internally, about canonical, about snaps, about bloat): “That… that’s good. Good choice.”

      • tungah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        36·
        3 days ago

        I say better for them to make the jump now to Ubuntu and figure out a distro better suited for their needs later on than to remain on Windows while having choice paralysis about what distro to chose.

      • luciferofastora@feddit.org
        25·
        3 days ago

        I still think it’s a decent entry choice. I won’t touch it myself anymore, personally, but Canonical is still better than Microslop. That bar is set so low that even snap can clear it.

      • robocall@lemmy.world
        161·
        3 days ago

        I’ve been using Ubuntu for years with no desire to switch or learn more. I’ve heard the comments about canonical and snaps, which I barely comprehend. But there’s a chance one day I’ll grow an interest in what you’re talking about, and I know you’ll be there to explain it.

        • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
          4·
          3 days ago

          I’m in the same boat. I started with Ubuntu partly because I wanted to start learning ROS (robot operating system) and the documentation for that at the time mentioned Ubuntu. I’ve heard great things about Mint, which I’ll probably try soon, and when I “upgrade” my gaming desktop to Win 11 I’m partly expecting it to try and fuck with Grub and my Ubuntu partition so I’m going to probably install Bazzite once Win 11 is set up. Hopefully Bazzite is good enough for gaming that I rarely will have a need to use Windows. Sadly there is windows-only software I need. I tried Wine once and it didn’t work.

      • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
        8·
        3 days ago

        Yeah, a guy recently said that they’d jump into Mint and I could’ve said that I started on that, too (a fucking decade ago, apparently), but I was considering to tell them they could start with $BETTER_DISTRO right away for so long, that I didn’t end up saying much at all. 🫠

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        6·
        3 days ago

        Posting this from Kubuntu Studio and … it’s not bad, really. Everything works fine. I even have a couple Snap packages installed … on purpose. (Though, generally, I do try to avoid snaps.) The bloat might be relevant in lighter systems (which is why I have a different distro on my shitty old chromebook), but this is a massive workstation PC that could handle 10x the bloat without noticeably slowing down, so who cares?

        (The reason I’m using Ubuntu is because after trying several distros, Ubuntu is for some reason the only one where my stupid, insane, 6-monitor multi-GPU setup worked properly, right out of the box. I eventually intend to go to 4 huge monitors instead of 6 smaller ones, which means I’ll be able to drop down to a reasonable, rational choice of using only one GPU instead of two different ones. At that point, maybe I’ll try distro-hopping again. Though, honestly, “exactly like Ubuntu, but without Canonical and without Snaps” would be what I’m looking for. Would definitely prefer to stick with apt package management, since that’s what I’m used to at this point. Maybe I’ll try straight-up Debian? But I don’t really like the way Debian splits its repositories, where you basically have to choose between “extremely outdated” and “bleeding edge” with no “as up to date as possible, while still being well-tested and stable” option in between. For all of Ubuntu’s faults, I think they actually do a pretty good job of maintaining that balance between stability and being up-to-date.)

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          Isn’t Mint still effectively Ubuntu with no Canonical, and less worried about open soirce purity? Could be wrong, been a long while.

          • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
            5·
            3 days ago

            Mint is actually one of the ones I tried before. It did not like my multi-GPU setup, though. Could only use one GPU at a time, which means I could only use a maximum of 4 monitors.

            Maybe I’ll try it again, though, when I upgrade to a more sensible monitor/GPU setup.

  • Alvaro@lemmy.world
    111·
    2 days ago

    That excitement is real 😂 Switching can be refreshing, but I always tell people to try it on a spare drive first. The best OS is the one that actually fits your workflow.

  • MrShankles@reddthat.com
    41·
    3 days ago

    I mentioned to my dad how much windows 11 sucks to use and he agreed that he can’t stand it

    So naturally, I told him about Linux, which he literally had never heard of before. I told him I’ll show him how to restore one of his old laptops with it, and he can go from there. Knowing him, I can’t wait to see “how cool” he thinks it is that he can just “fix” his own computer

    And I’ve already converted my wife, instead of buying a new MacBook cause hers is showing it’s age. She keeps her Mac for backup, but the main computer is Linux Mint. She’s even started to understand the terminal a little, even though she doesn’t really have to

    Slowly converting family and friends, simply because computers are expensive and windows sucks so hard now

  • juipeltje@lemmy.world
    11·
    2 days ago

    Me when my friend started talking about how he wanted to buy a steam machine as his first entry into pc gaming, and considered installing linux on his laptop cause windows ran like ass on it.

    • ohshit604@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      32·
      3 days ago

      As another person had suggested, test with a live image first before installing it to an SSD/HDD, however Linux is very well maintained by the community and even if there aren’t native drivers from your hardwares manufacturer, for example Corsair Keyboard Drivers, there usually is Open Sourced alternatives for these things like CKB-Next.

      I say this to everyone, once you get a grasp on BASH (Bourne Again Shell) and package managers & repositories you’ll essentially be able to use any Linux distro, it just comes down to the nitty gritty of things.

      • Hupf@feddit.org
        3·
        3 days ago

        I’d say that downloading drivers from the manufacturer is the absolute outlier and things working better with integrated open source drivers out of the box is the norm.

        Try before you buy download proprietary cruft.

      • Tonava@sopuli.xyz
        1·
        2 days ago

        edit: and the filesystem structure

        This is what I’ve definitely struggled the most with mint so far. It’s extremely difficult to find anything and I’ve needed to manually search for the file paths multiple times already, since I always manage to do something I need them for, and I haven’t gotten locate to work etc… Though this is probably just me being stoopid since I never find anything on windows either lmao

    • Illecors@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      15·
      3 days ago

      Yes. In general - it’s called live cd. Some distros ship with that in their installed image. {K,X,}ubuntu come to mind. Mint might do as well. You can boot into it and look around, see if basic stuff - network, audio, etc - works.

  • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
    35·
    3 days ago

    Just have a friend who finally decided switching yesterday. She picked my distro recommendation too which makes me feel all validated.

      • DaddleDew@lemmy.world
        24·
        3 days ago

        She wanted something that was an easy transition from Windows without having to learn a new interface. She is competent enough to install her own OS but wants to spend what little spare time she has on the computer gaming and not troubleshooting and maintaining. So I recommended she tries a few but primarily Bazzite with KDE and she liked it.

        Heck, I’m running Fedora KDE right now but if I ever had to change I’d probably pick Bazzite too. Immutable sounds great for my purposes. I have zero intentions of messing around with my kernel.

  • jaschen306@sh.itjust.works
    21·
    2 days ago

    Cool, does anyone know how to hack it so my HDMI connector can actually hit 240hz? Apparently HDMI is a closed standard and only Windows/Mac has the license to go that high using HDMI.

    • humanamerican@lemmy.zip
      201·
      3 days ago

      Windows is the worst setup you could imagine and they’re ditching that. Sounds like a win to me.

      • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.todayEnglish
        1·
        3 days ago

        That setup is working fairly well these days though, NVIDIA Optimus configurations have been doing fine for at least a year now. Granted, my laptop is AMD + NVIDIA not Intel, but I don’t think that matters.

        • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
          1·
          2 days ago

          seriously how. I have no idea where the fucking profile configs go, I followed the instructions on the debian wiki and duplicated my login screen in a shittier resolution.

          The best “solution” I have is dumping this into the games command line on steam, but it STILL uses the intel grfx card as well as the nvidia one. playing videos for more than 5 mins overheats the intel processor while the nvidia one does fucking nothing

          __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD_PROVIDER=NVIDIA-G0 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only

          How the fuck do I use this?

          EDIT : The below doesn’t work.

          I’m thinking about following these instructions to disable a pci device, but i’m scared of bricking this fucking computer (again) and wasting another weekend re-installing the os instead of working on projects

          https://gist.github.com/pjobson/9e5f7349cf4f28bc82f82ea980047778

          I get two fucking folders presented when I scan for the PCI folder :

          lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v6/7th Gen Core Processor Host Bridge/DRAM Registers (rev 05)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 6th-10th Gen Core Processor PCIe Controller (x16) (rev 05)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 (rev 04)


           ls -la /sys/bus/pci/devices | grep 00:02.0 
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Feb 18 02:53 0000:00:02.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 Feb 18 02:53 0000:02:00.0 -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:02:00.0

          EDIT :

           00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 100 Series/C230 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port #4 (rev f1)
          • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.todayEnglish
            2·
            3 days ago

            Oh, you have NVIDIA 10 series, the worst generation of NVIDIA card. Too old to support GSP, too new for nouveau reclocking, abandoned by NVIDIA’s current drivers and stuck in boot clock hell due to signed firmware. Unfortunately the 10 series cards are just going to suck on Linux and that situation won’t improve unless a miracle happens. NVIDIA’s usefulness on modern Linux begins with the 20 series and GSP firmware. I had a 1080Ti, it was not a good experience.

          • cecilkorik@piefed.caEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            Especially for Nvidia/Gaming stuff I’d recommend a distro other than Debian. I love Debian, but it’s got a very uncomfortable and tenuous relationship with the very non-free nature of Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, and Nvidia is absolute garbage at compatibility and documentation on Linux (try and install their Cuda/AI shit on the first attempt by strictly following their documentation, I dare you, and good luck even picking which version of their documentation to use because there’s about 3 different processes and they’re all wrong)

            PikaOS is a gaming distro based heavily on Debian, but part of a community with all the other gaming distros like Bazzite, Nobara, etc so they share most of the latest updates and configurations, they have tools to install various versions of drivers and other performance configurations you can play with. I know “just reinstall your OS!” is probably not the thing you want to hear, but honestly, Stock, out of the box Debian is pretty close to one of the most wrong tools you can choose for this particular job. And again, that’s not Debian’s fault, Debian is wonderful, it’s just … an extremely important and powerful tool for different jobs. Taking full advantage of modern Nvidia GPU hardware and gaming on it is one of the few that it is rather poor and frustrating at.

          • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.todayEnglish
            0·
            3 days ago

            I’m not sure on Debian, as Debian tends to sit on old releases of stuff for a long time. On Arch with KDE Plasma Wayland or GNOME Wayland, I just install nvidia-open-dkms and let it do its thing. Vulkan automatically uses the NVIDIA RTX 3070 in my Razer Blade 14 2021, no weird hacks or command line arguments required. Also, NVK is also quite usable, so I have set up rEFInd configs to boot with either NVIDIA driver loaded or nouveau. NVIDIA Settings is an antiquated tool and pretty useless if you’re using Wayland.

            • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
              1·
              2 days ago

              this laptop is from 2017/8 so it’s also old AF. I’m not using wayland for as long as I can, as wayland breaks my shit and leaves me mad. X11 on plasma until I upgrade the plasma package… and then we’ll see.

              • CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.todayEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                Wayland works much better than X11 on all of my systems, it works better for render offloading due to better synchronization and it allows for variable refresh rate and HDR. It did take NVIDIA way too long to implement decent Wayland support though.