You're about to take your first steps in the wonderful world of Linux, but you're overwhelmed by the amount of choices? Welcome to this (I hope) very simple guide :)
The aim of this guide is to provide simple, clear information to ease your transition as a beginner. This is not a be-all-end-all guide nor an advanced guide. Because there is a lot of info and explanations everywhere, I will often (over-)simplify so as to keep the information accessible and digestible. Please refrain from asking to add your favorite distro/DE in the comments, I feel there is too much choice already ;)
Preamble
Make sure your hardware is compatible
Nowadays most relatively recent hardware works perfectly fine on Linux, but there are some edge cases still. If you don't use niche hardware and your wifi card is supported, chances are you're golden. Please note that nVidia is a bad faith player in the Linux world, so if you have a GeForce GPU, expect some trouble.
Make sure your favourite apps are either available or have a good replacement on Linux
If some proprietary app is essential to your workflow and is irreplaceable, consider running it in a VM, keeping a Windows partition for it or try and run it through Wine (this is advanced stuff though).
Be aware that Linux is not Windows/MacOS
Things work differently, and this is normal. You will probably struggle at the beginning while adjusting to a new paradigm. You may have to troubleshoot some things. You may break some things in the process. You will probably get frustrated at some point or another. It's okay. You're learning something new, and it can be hard to shed old habits forged by years on another system.
When in doubt, search for documentation
Arch Wiki is one of the greatest knowledge bases about Linux. Despite being heavily tied to Arch, most of its content is readily usable to troubleshoot most modern distros, as the building blocks (Kernel, systemd, core system apps, XOrg/Wayland, your DE of choice etc.) are the same. Most distros also maintain their own knowledge base.
Understanding the Linux world
What is Linux?
Linux, in the strictest definition, is the kernel, ie. the core component that, among other things, orchestrates and handles all interactions between hardware and software, of a large family of operating systems that, by metonymy, are called "Linux". In general understanding, Linux is any one of these operating systems, called distros.
What is a distro?
A distro, short for "Software Distribution", is a cohesive ensemble of software, providing a full operating system, maintained by a single team. Generally, all of them tend to provide almost the same software and work in a very similar way, but there are major philosophical differences that may influence your choice.
What are the main differences between distros?
As said above, there are a lot of philosophical differences between distros that lead to practical differences. There are a lot of very different ways the same software can be distributed.
- "Point Release" (OpenSUSE Leap) vs. "Rolling Release" (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed): Point release distros are like traditional software. They have numbered releases, and between each one no feature updates take place, only security updates and bug fixes. Rolling Release distros package and distribute software as soon as it's available upstream (the software developer's repos), meaning that there are no versions and no specific schedule.
- "Stable" (Debian Stable) vs. "Bleeding edge" (Arch): Stable distros are generally point release, and focus on fixing bugs and security flaws at the expense of new features. Each version goes through a lenghty period of feature freeze, testing and bug fixing before release. Stability here not only means trouble-free operation, but more importantly consistent behavior over time. Things won't evolve, but things won't break. At least until the next release. Bleeding edge distros, which often follow the rolling release model (there are outliers like Fedora which are mostly bleeding edge yet have point releases), on the other hand, are permanently evolving. By constantly pushing the latest version of each software package, new features, new bugs, bug fixes, security updates and sometimes breaking changes are released continuously. Note that this is not a binary, there is a very large continuum between the stablest and the most bleeding edge distro.
- "Community" (Fedora) vs. "Commercial" (RHEL): Despite the name, Community distros are not only maintained by volunteers, but can also be developed by some company's employees and can be sponsored by commercial entities. However, the main difference with Commercial distros is that they're not a product destined to be sold. Commercial distros like Red Hat's RHEL, SuSE Linux Enterprise or Ubuntu Pro are (supposed to be) fully maintained by their company's employees and target businesses with paid support, maintenance, fixes, deployment, training etc.
- "x package manager" vs. "y package manager", "x package format" vs. "y package format": It doesn't matter. Seriously.
apt,dnforpacman, to name a few, all have the exact same purpose: install and update software on your system and manage dependencies. - "general purpose" (Linux Mint) vs. "niche" (Kali Linux): General purpose distros are just that: distros that can do pretty much anything. Some are truly general purpose (like Debian), and have no bias towards any potential use, be it for a server, a desktop/laptop PC, some IOT or embedded devices, containers etc., some have various flavors depending on intended use (like Fedora Workstation for desktops and Fedora Server for, you guessed it, servers) but are still considered general purpose. They aim for maximum hardware compatibility and broad use cases. At the opposite end, niche distros are created for very specific and unique use cases, like pentesting (Kali), gaming (Nobara), music production (AV Linux) etc. They tend to have a lot of specific tools preinstalled, nonstandard defaults or modified kernels that may or may not work properly outside of their inteded use case.
- "team" (Any major distro) vs. "single maintainer" (Nobara): Pretty self explanatory. Some distros are maintained by a single person or a very small group of people. These distros do not usually last very long.
- "traditional" (Fedora Workstation) vs. "atomic" (Fedora Silverblue): In traditional distros, everything comes from a package. Every single component is individually installable, upgradeable, and deletable. Updating a package means deleting its previous version and replacing it with a new one. A power failure during an update lead to a partial upgrade and can make a system unbootable. Maybe a new package was bad and breaks something. Almost nothing prevents an unsuspecting user from destroying a core component. To mitigate risks and ensure a coherent system at each boot, atomic (also called transactional or immutable) distros, pioneered by Fedora Silverblue and Valve's SteamOS, were born. Like mobile phone OSes, the base system is a single image, that gets installed, alongside the current running version and without modifying it, and becomes active at the next reboot. As updates are isolated from one another, if the new version doesn't work the user can easily revert to a previous, functional version. Users are expected to install Flatpaks or use Distrobox, as installing (layering) packages is not as straightforward as with standard distros.
- "OG" (Debian) vs. "derivative" (Ubuntu): Original distros are directly downstream of their components' source code repositories, and do most of the heavy lifting. Because of the tremendous amount of work it represents, only a few distros like Debian, Arch, Slackware or Fedora have the history, massive community and sometimes corporate financial backing to do this. Other distros reuse most packages from those original distros and add, replace or modify some of them for differenciation. For example, Debian is the parent of almost all deb-based distros like Ubuntu, which itself is the parent of distros like Mint or Pop!_OS.
What are the main components of a distro, ie. a Linux-based operating system?
All distros provide, install and maintain, among other things, the following components:
- Boot and core system components (these are generally out-of-scope for beginners, unless you need to fix something, but you should at least know they exist):
- A boot manager (GRUB, systemd_init, etc.): Boots the computer after the motherboard POSTs, lets you choose what to start
- An init system (systemd, etc.): Starts everything needed to run the computer, including the kernel
- A kernel (Linux): Has control over everything, main interface for software to discuss with hardware
- Command-line environment, to interact with he computer in text mode:
- A shell (bash, zsh, fish etc.): The main interface for command-line stuff
- Command-line tools (GNU, etc.): Standard suite of command-line tools + default tools chosen by the distro maintainers
- User-installable command-line tools and shells
- Graphical stack for desktop/laptop computers:
- Display servers (X11, Wayland compositors): Handle drawing stuff on screens
- A Desktop environment (Plasma, Gnome, XFCE etc.): The main graphical interface you'll interact with everyday.
- User-facing applications (browsers, text processors, drawing software etc.): Some are generally installed by default and/or are part of a desktop environment's suite of software, most are user-installable.
- A package manager (apt, dnf, pacman, yast etc.): Installs, deletes, updates and manages dependencies of all software installed on the machine.
Which are the main Desktop Environments and which one should I choose?
As a new user, this is basically the only thing you should concern yourself about: choosing a first Desktop environment. After all, it will be your main interface for the weeks/years to come. It's almost as important as choosing your first distro. These are a few common choices that cater to different tastes:
- Gnome: Full featured yet very minimalist, Gnome is a great DE that eschews the traditional Desktop metaphor. Like MacOS, out of the box, it provides its strongly opinionated developers' vision of a user experience. Fortunately, unlike MacOS, there are thousands of extensions to tweak and extend the looks and behaviour of the DE. Dash-to-dock or Dash-to-panel are great if you want a more MacOS-like or Windows-like experience, Blur My Shell is great if you love blurry transparent things, Appindicator is a must, and everything else is up to you. Gnome's development cycle is highly regular and all core components and apps follow the same release schedule, which explains why a lot of distros choose it as their default DE.
- KDE Plasma: Full featured and maximalist, Plasma does not cater to a single design philosophy, is very flexible and can be tweaked almost ad infinitum. This may be an advantage for people who like to spend hours making the perfect environment, or a disadvantage as the possibilities can be overwhelming, and the added complexity may compromise stability, bugginess or completeness. There is not yet a single development cycle for core components and apps, which makes it a bit more difficult for distro maintainers and explains why there are so few distros with Plasma as the flagship DE. The KDE team is however evolving towards a more regular update cycle.
- Cinnamon: Forked from Gnome 3 by the Linux Mint team who disliked the extreme change of user experience it introduced, Cinammon provides a very traditional, "windows-like", desktop-metaphor experience in a more modern software stack than the older DEs it takes inspiration from. Cinnamon still keeps a lot in common with Gnome by being simple and easy to use, yet heavily modifiable with themes, applets and extensions.
- Lightweight DEs for old or underpowered machines: The likes of XFCE, LXDE, LXQt are great if you want to ressurect an old machine, but lack the bells and whistles of the aforementioned DEs. If your machine is super old, extremely underpowered and has less than a few Gb of RAM, don't expect miracles though. A single browser tab can easily dwarf the RAM usage and processing power of your entire system.
As for which one you should choose, this is entirely up to you, and depends on your preferences. FYI, you are not married to your distro's default desktop environment. It's just what comes preinstalled. You can install alternative DEs on any distro, no need to reinstall and/or distro-hop.
How do I install stuff on Linux?
Forget what you're used to do on Windows of MacOS: searching for your software in a seach engine, finding a big "Download" button on a random website and running an installer with administator privileges. Your package manager not only keeps you system up to date, but also lets you install any software that's available in your distro's repositories. You don't even need to know the command line, Gnome's Software or Plasma's Discover are nice graphical "App Stores" that let you find and install new software.
Flatpak are a great and more recent recent alternative to distro packages that's gaining a lot of traction, and is increasingly integrated by default to the aforementioned App Stores. It's basically a "universal" package manager system thet sits next to your system, that lets software developers directly distribute their own apps instead of offloading the packaging and distribution to distro maintainers.
Choosing a first distro
As discussed before, there is a metric fuckload (or 1.112 imperial fucktons) of distros out there. I advise you to keep it as mainstream as possible for your first steps. A distro with a large user base, backed by a decently large community of maintainers and contributors and aimed at being as fuss-free as possible is always better than a one-person effort tailored to a specific use-case. Choose a distro that implements well the DE of your choice.
What are great distros for beginners?
The following are great distros for beginners as well as more advanced users who just want to have a system that needs almost no configuration out of the box, just works and stays out of the way. Always read the installation documentation thoroughly before attempting anything, and follow any post-install requirements (for example, installing restricted-licence drivers on Fedora).
- Fedora Workstation: Clean, sensible, modern and very up to date and should work out of the box for most hardware. Despite being sponsored by Red Hat (who are getting a lot of justified hate for moving RHEL away from open-source), this is a great community distro for both beginners and very advanced users (including the Linus Torvalds). Fedora is the flagship distro for the Gnome Desktop Environment, but also has a fantastic Plasma version. Keywords: Point Release, close to Bleeding Edge, Community, dnf/rpm, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
- Linux Mint: Mint is an Ubuntu (or Debian for the LMDE variant) derivative for beginners and advanced users alike, that keeps Ubuntu's hardware support and ease of use while reverting its shenanigans and is Cinammon's flagship distro. Its main goal is to be a "just works" distro. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, Community, apt/deb, smallish maintainer team but lots of contributors, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu or Debian).
- Pop!_OS: Backed by hardware Linux vendor System76, this is another Ubuntu derivative that removes Snaps in favor or Flatpaks. Its heavily modified Gnome DE looks and feels nice. In a few months/years, it will be the flagship distro for the -promising but still in development- Cosmic DE. Keywords: Point Release, halfway between Stable and Bleeding Edge, commercially-backed Community, apt/deb, employee's maintainer team, traditional, derivative (Ubuntu).
- If you want something (advertised as) zero-maintenance, why not go the Atomic way? They are still very new and there isn't a lot of support yet because they do things very differently than regular distros, but if they wort OOTB on your system, they should work reliably forever. Sensible choices are uBlue's Aurora (Plasma), Bluefin (Gnome) or Bazzite (gaming-ready), which are basically identical to Fedora's atomic variants but include (among other things) restricted-licence codecs and QOL improvements by default, or OpenSUSE's Aeon (Gnome). Keywords: Point Release, Bleeding Edge, Community, rpm-ostree, large maintainer team, Atomic, sub-project (Fedora/OpenSUSE).
Which power-user distros should I avoid as a beginner, unless I reaaaally need to understand everything instead of being productive day one?
These are amongst the very best but should not be installed as your first distro, unless you like extremely steep learning curves and being overwhelmed.
- Debian Stable: as one of the oldest, still maintained distros and the granddaddy of probably half of the distros out there, Debian is built like a tank. A very stringent policy of focusing on bug and security fixes over new features makes Debian extremely stable and predictable, but it can also feel quite outdated. Still a rock-solid experience, with a lot to tinker with despite very sensible defaults. It is an incredible learning tool and is as "Standard Linux" as can be. Debian almost made the cut to "beginner" distros because of its incredible reliability and massive amount of documentation available, but it might be a bit too involved for an absolute beginner to configure to perfection. Keywords: Point Release, Stable as fuck, Community, apt/deb, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
- Arch: The opposite of Debian in philosophy, packages often come to Arch almost as soon as the source code is released. Expect a lot of manual installation and configuration, daily updates, and regularly fixing stuff. An incredible learning tool too, that will make you intimate with the inner workings of Linux. The "Arch btw" meme of having to perform every single install step by hand has taken a hit since Arch has had a basic but functional installer for a few years now, which is honestly a good thing. I work in sofware. A software engineer who does every single tedious task manually instead of automating it is a shit software engineer. A software engineer who prides themself from doing every single tedious task manually should seriously reconsider their career choices. Arch's other main appeal is the Arch User Repository or AUR, a massive collection of user-created, automated install scripts for pretty much anything. Keywords: Rolling Release, Bleeding-edge, Community, pacman/pkg, large maintainer team, traditional, original.
Which distro should I avoid, period?
- Ubuntu: despite having a huge mind-share as the beginner distro, Ubuntu suffers from it's parent company's policy to make Ubuntu kinda-Linux-but-not-really and a second-rate citizen compared to their Ubuntu Pro commercial product. Some of the worst takes in recent years have been pushing Snaps super agressively in order to get some "vendor-lock-in", proprietary walled-garden ecosystem with exclusive commercial apps, forcibly installing snaps even when explicitely asking for a .deb package through
apt, baking ads and nags into major software or only delivering critical security patches to Pro customers. Fortunately, there are some great derivatives like Mint or Pop!_OS cited above that work equally well but revert some of the most controversial decisions made by Canonical. - Manjaro: Manjaro might seem appealing as a "user-friendlier" Arch derivative and some of its tools are fantastic to remove some configuration burden, but ongoing mismanagement issues and the fact that it needs Arch-style regular maintenance as updates often break stuff prevent it from being a truly beginner distro. Manjaro also has a highly irregular update schedule that's weeks behind Arch, making using the AUR extremely dangerous, as it always expects a fully up-to-date Arch system.
- Any single-maintainer or tiny team distros like Nobara or CachyOS. They might be fantastic distros made by exceptional people (I have mad respect for Nobara's maintainer Glorious Eggroll and his work on Proton-GE), they are most often derivatives so the heavy lifting is already done by their parent distro's maitainers, but there is too much risk involved. Sometimes life happens, sometimes people move on to other projects, and dozens of small distros get abandonned every year, leaving their users dead in the water. Trusting larger teams is a much safer bet in the long term.
- Anything that refuse to use standards for ideological reasons like Alpine Linux, Devuan or Artix. Don't get me wrong, not using any GNU tools or systemd is a cool technological feat and developing alternatives to the current consensus is how things evolve. However, these standard tools have a long history, hundreds if not thousands of maintainers and are used by millions, meaning there's a huge chance your specific issue is already solved. Refusing to use them should be reserved to very advanced users who perfectly understand what they're gaining and losing. As a beginner to intermediate level, it will at best make most of the documentation out there irrelevant, at worst make your life a miserable hell if you need to troubleshoot anything.
Philosophical questions, or "I've seen people arguing over the Internet and now I'm scared"
You've done your research, you're almost ready to take the plunge, you even read a lot of stuff on this very community or on the other website that starts with a "R", but people seem very passionately for or against stuff. What should you do?
Shoud I learn the command line?
Yes, eventually. To be honest, nowadays a lot of things can be configured on the fly graphically, through your DE's settings. But sometimes, it's much more efficient to work on the command line, and sometimes it's the only way to fix something. It's not that difficult, and you can be reasonably productive by understanding just about a dozen very simple commands.
I have a very old laptop/desktop, should I use a distro from its era?
Noooo!. Contrary to Windows and MacOS which only work correctly on period-correct computers, Linux runs perfectly well on any hardware from the last 20 to 30 years. You will not gain performance by using an old distro, but you will gain hundreds of critical security flaws that have been since corrected. If you need to squeeze performance out of an old computer, use a lightweight graphical environment or repurpose it as a headless home server. If it's possible, one of the best ways to breathe new life into an old machine is to add some RAM, as even lightweight modern sofware will struggle with less than a few Gb.
Should I be concerned about systemd?
No. In short, systemd is fine and all major distros have switched to systemd years ago. Even the extremely cautious people behind Debian have used systemd as default since 2015. Not wanting to use systemd is a niche more rooted in philosophical and ideological rather than practical or technical reasons, and leads to much deeper issues than you should concern yourself with as a beginner.
Should I be concerned about XOrg/Wayland?
Yes and No, but mostly No. First off, most distros install both Wayland and XOrg by default, so if one is not satisfying to you, try the other. Remember in the preamble when I said nVidia was a bad actor? Well, most of people's complaints about Wayland are because of nVidia and their shitty drivers, so GTX/RTX users should stay on XOrg for now. But like it or not, XOrg is dead and unmaintained, and Wayland is the present and future. XOrg did too many things, carried too many features from the 80's and 90's and its codebase is a barely maintainable mess. X11 was born in a time when mainframes did most of the heavy lifting and windows were forwarded over a local network to dumb clients. X11 predates the Internet and has basically no security model. Wayland solves that by being a much simpler display protocol with a much smaller feature set adapted to modern computing and security. The only downside is that some very specific functionalities based on decades of X11 hacking and absolute lack of security can be lost.
I want to play some games, should I look for a gaming distro?
No. General purpose distros are perfectly fine for gaming. You can install Steam, Lutris, Heroic, Itch etc. and use Proton just fine on almost anything. Even Debian. In short, yes, you can game on Linux, there are great tutorials on the internet.
Should I be concerned about Flatpaks and/or Snaps vs. native packages?
Not really. Flatpaks are great, and more and more developers package their apps directly in Flatpak format. As a rule of thumb, for user facing applications, if your app store gives you the choice between Flatpak and your native package manager version, choose the most recent stable version and/or the one packaged by the developer themselves (which should often be the Flatpak anyway). Snaps however are kinda bad. They are a Canonical/Ubuntu thing, so as long as you avoid Ubuntu, its spins and its derivatives that still include Snaps, you should be fine. They tend to take a lot longer to startup than regular apps or Flatpaks, the snap store is proprietary, centralized and Canonical controls every part of it. Also, Canonical is very aggressive in pushing snaps to their users, even forcing them even when they want to install an apt package. If you don't care, have fun.
I need/want program "x", but it is only available on distro "y" and not on mine. I've been told to ditch my beloved distro and install the other one, should I?
No. Generally, most software is intallable from your distro's package manager and/or Flatpak. But sometimes, your distro doesn't package this program you need, or an inconsiderate developer only distributes a random .deb on their Github release page. Enter Distrobox. It is a very simple, easy to use command line tool that automates the creation of other Linux distros containers using Docker or Podman (basically, tiny, semi-independant Linuxes that live inside your regular Linux), and lets you "export" programs installed inside these containers to you main system so you can run them as easily and with almost the same performance as native programs. Some atomic distros like uBlue's variants even include it by default. That .deb we've talked about before? Spin a Debian container and dpkg install the shit out of it. Absolutely need the AUR? Spin an Arch container and go to town.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who helped improve this guide: @GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml, @tkn@startrek.website, @throwaway2@lemmy.today, @cerement@slrpnk.net, @kzhe@lemm.ee, @freijon@feddit.ch, @aarroyoc@lemuria.es, @SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org, @Plopp@lemmy.world, @bsergay@discuss.online ...and many others who chimed in in the comments <3
Link to version 1: https://lemm.ee/post/15895051
Which distros are energy efficient? I have a capable desktop, and I mean to push it, but I don't want to be using energy if it's not necessary. I'm not looking to rescue an old laptop, for example.
I hear CachyOS is fast. Does that translate to energy efficient?
(Does the OS even matter that much for efficiency?)
Hello there
I want to reduce the consumption of my server and so, to reduce access to hard drives
But I suspect mdadm to access the drives frequently and wake them up.
Because even when the drives are not mounted, they wake up frequently and I can't find the reason.
Because the are not mounted, it's not due to a process.
I've temporarily disabled smartd so it's not that.
remains the software raid, who can potentially do regular checks, if that's the case how to fix it?
?
ps: I know spin down/up isn't good
Hello people,
I have been experiencing some trouble with my keyboard lately since moving from Windows to Linux and have yet to find a proper solution. I'm running Fedora 44 (KDE Plasma Desktop), specifically:
Operating System: Fedora Linux 44
KDE Plasma Version: 6.7.1
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.27.0
Qt Version: 6.11.1
Kernel Version: 7.0.13-200.fc44.x86_64 (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
The keyboard is a NuPhy Halo75 (ANSI-US layout). It has a toggle to switch between Windows and Mac mode/layout and media keys on the function row; I want the function keys to be function keys by default and media keys when pressing Fn. On Windows, I was using the "US International" layout (primarily for Ä/Ö/Ü on Alt+Q/Y/P and € on Alt+5).
Now, sadly, on Linux, with the keyboard toggle set to Windows and either the "English (US, intl., with dead keys)" or "English (US, intl., AltGr. Unicode combining)" layout enabled, I can type my precious umlauts etc. perfectly fine, but the function keys always act like media keys, no matter what else I press, and I have not found any way to change that behavior. With the toggle set to Mac, the function keys work fine (as do the media keys with Fn), but I can no longer type umlauts (and what even am I without my umlauts). I enabled the "Alt is swapped with Win" keyboard option, since those are swapped on the Mac layout. From the keyboard preview, the key presses seem to be mapped correctly (left and right alt show up as "Meta L/Alt L" and "Meta R/Alt R", respectively, the Windows key shows up as "Super L").
I'm probably just missing some option or something, but I've looked everywhere I could think of (and, considering I am quite new to Linux/KDE, that isn't too many places) without luck. My web searches didn't really turn up anything useful either. So, if anyone has an idea or knows where to look and what to change, that would be highly appreciated! I hope my description of what I'm looking for is understandable.
I apologize for the somewhat long-ish post, but if you read this far, thank you :)
so I'm trying to setup binds for Hyprland so that I can resize windows w/o having to use my mouse. the default config comes with mouse resizing (which works). and as my config is based off the default, I copied it and adjusted accordingly to my binds and the wiki.
hl.bind(mainMod .. " + ALT + left",
hl.dsp.window.resize({20,0}))
but it does not work and instead gives me 2 error msgs.
Your config has errors:
=[C]:-1: hl.window.resize: 'x' and 'y' are required
hyprland.lua:327: hl.bind: dispatcher must be a dispatcher (e.g. hl.dsp.window.close()) or a lua function
under hl.dsp.window the wiki contains the resize({ x, y, relative?, window? }) "method". I can't figure out if I'm doing smth wrong or just this specific thing is broken.
I asked our benevolent AI mistress but it was too busy bickering and giving me pre 0.55 Hyprlang configs. after I informed the clanker that Hyprland stopped using Hyprlang, it confidentally gave me the wrong Lua config and again w confidence told me to use it. it did not work.
Runtime error in lua:
=[C]:-1: hl.window.resize: 'x' and 'y' are required
EDIT: thanks to @sparkle_matrix_x0x@lemmy.ml and @Maiq@piefed.social, finally figured it out because of them.
here's my updated config
--Resize windows
hl.bind(altMod .. " + left", hl.dsp.window.resize({x = -20,y = 0, relative = 1}))
hl.bind(altMod .. "+ right", hl.dsp.window.resize({x = 20,y = 0, relative = 1}))
hl.bind(altMod .. "+ up", hl.dsp.window.resize({x = 0,y = -20, relative = 1}))
hl.bind(altMod .. "+ down", hl.dsp.window.resize({x = 0,y = 20, relative = 1}))
btw altMod is a variable I set up which's basically SUPER+ALT
local altMod = mainMod .. " + ALT"
Some DEs are focused on resource efficiency, but don't look fancy. Others are fancy, but require a fairly modern setup. I have KDE (Fedora) installed on my laptop, I love its look and options. But it is not always snappy, some little freezes occur as well, even in basic situations (opening Firefox and v2rayN simultaneously was one of the cases). The most problematic thing is almost every app taking around 2-3 secs to open its window.
Many people would just tell me to install Xfce, but I still want a fancy desktop, I believe it is something I can afford on my setup. First I thought of GNOME, but it is controversial: some sources report GNOME as well optimized even for low-end machines, other claim it is much heavier than KDE.
What it your experience with desktop environments and their performance? Perhaps you have compared various DEs within the same distro and setup? How performant GNOME actually is compared to KDE? What are the balanced options to explore?
Summary
- The Linux Foundation, joined by leading organizations, today announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software.
- Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
- Founding members commit engineering talent, security expertise and funding to harden the shared open source software that banks, hospitals, power grids, telecoms, governments, and AI labs depend on.
- Organizations that contribute engineering resources or funding to the security of critical open source are invited to participate and can learn more at https://akrites.org/.
I need a real-time filesystem watcher that detects when any file in ~/.hermes/config/ changes, then immediately git add -A && git commit -m "auto: ..." && git push.
Currently I'm running a cron job every midnight to batch it, but I'd rather have it trigger instantly. On Arch (btw) what's the cleanest approach?
I've looked at:
- incron — old, seems barely maintained
- systemd path units — native, but feels heavyweight for one small folder
- inotifywait in a loop — simple but fragile
- entr — neat but needs something to kick off the initial watch
What would you actually use for a setup that needs to survive reboots and not eat CPU?
Solution: There never was a second drive. It must have been a partition that got wiped with the install, but there's only the NVME in there. Sorry, guys. I dig around in my innards very frequently and just thought I was mounting a second drive this entire time. Hooray for backups.
reinstalled Mint and my second drive is absolutely invisible to everything. I can't mount what I can't see. I'm thinking of unplugging it and plugging it back in just because I'm out of ideas.
What could have caused a drive to become invisible after a reinstall?
Edit: Checked bios. All security disabled. Using AHCI and UEFI (tried CSM). I don't really know what these things mean, I just know things were working properly before I reinstalled mint so I'm puzzled why it could be a BIOS issue.
Current lsblk:
Hello all.
I have been lurking on lemmy.ml for a while and learning about the fediverse and recently decided to jump in. I wanted to come here to share my story on switching to linux, effectively switching my mindset in the process.
TL;DR: Around october 2025 I was going to update a system to windows 11 and opened a can of worms regarding the privacy eroding, invasive nature of it. Freaked me out for a while thanks to big techs horrible recommendation systems only making this worse but gradually learnt to escape its grasp. Learnt linux was the answer, learnt to research, aiding in escaping big techs control over me. Went with linux mint with full disk encryption, migrated to open source cross platform software on windows 10 to prepare, migrated my data. I am 90% of the way there and could not be happier with the results. Now all that remains is to convince friends and family members of the need to switch and to be confident enough in my capabilities to help. Oh, and I am a privacy advocate now.
I have recently made the switch from windows 10 to linux mint. It was around the time windows 10 support ended in october 2025 that I started looking into things.
I was looking to upgrade to windows 11 on an old system and began researching how to upgrade to windows 11 with a system that did not meet the required spec (inc tpm, cpu etc). Then I opened a can of worms. I started to learn about the privacy eroding, invasive nature of windows 11. I’ll be honest it freaked me out for a while. I struggled with it deeply. I could not believe how invasive windows had become in this new os. Youtube videos were freaking me out on this subject (thanks youtube recommendation system), and like I said, it really messed with my head.
I’d like to say at this point my journey, over time, my research led me outside of big techs grasp and I began to take back control of the content I consumed rather than being fed negative swill that kept me coming back for more out of terror. In hindsight, a terrible, addictive, negative habit that I formed. They damn well know what they are doing, to prey on the vulnerable just to make more money and I was victim to it.
Anyway, I started to learn about how linux was the way out of this thanks in part to the content creator https://odysee.com/@switchedtolinux:0. His videos did scare me at the time but they were also very helpful and informative. I finally found a good, reputable, reliable source of information whose aim was to help you regain your digital freedom. He was there to guide you from his own experience, especially his earlier videos discussing why you should consider switching. I highly recommend his content for those facing this situation and are looking for guidance. Switchedtolinux if you are reading this, thank you, you are a credit to society.
His recommendation was linux mint, so off I went to do some research. Again, at the start I was in the big tech bubble so there was much fear mongering, but I learnt over time to escape this, mainly fuelled to help maintain sanity as most content was negative screaming about how every inch of privacy will be lost, not in a decade, not in a year, nor month nor week but tomorrow. I’m sure you know the type of content.
But I eventually maintained composure and continued to look into linux mint. The more I read and watched the more appealing it became. I started to learn about open source, free as in freedom and the more I learnt the more I realised I had found something quite special. A digital life designed by the people for the people. I realised it was quite beautiful and wanted to be part of it.
It was around this time, due to the research, I started to exist outside of big techs control and started to research and control the content I was consuming. I went back to big tech to consume content such as youtube, but I had specifically done my research and come to the conclusion that I wanted to consume the content instead of just being fed it.
I decided to buy a new desktop computer however during that time I was unfortunately still under big techs influence, it was done in haste as it was around the time component prices started going through the roof and all the content was “buy it now before you can no longer afford to”, it was unknown how high the prices were going to go and what component was next. In hindsight more research should have been done to ensure linux compatibility but at the time I was freaked out with windows 11 et all and pressured by component prices going to unknown heights. Thankfully I did enough research to get an AMD gpu over NVIDIA. Very glad I figured out that much at the time. I am ashamed to say it but it was the result of a hasty AI query, but I am glad I knew enough to pose the question.
So, I got the new computer and because I’d had no experience of linux I wanted to test the components so installed windows 10 but kept it offline along with disabling TPM in the bios as I had learnt about how microsoft were using that as a unique identifier if ever it were to go online. I used my existing windows 10 system for drivers and stress testing software etc to transfer over. I eventually settled on OCCT and hwinfo for stress testing the system which I did for several hours at a time along with h2testw for testing storage. Also ran memtest86+ overnight a few times. All looked good so, time for linux.
I grabbed the latest version of linux mint cinnamon 22.3 , verified its checksum and got it installed. Everything just worked out of the box, colour me impressed. The first thing I did now as I was very much becoming privacy conscious was to install protonvpn. I did not know exactly what I was doing in the terminal but the instructions were coming from a trusted source, proton themselves, so I paid attention, followed the instructions to the letter and it all sprang into life. There were specific instructions not to install the system tray app on mint as it would install the entire gnome desktop environment. I knew enough about linux to know that this would be a bad thing for a beginner. However I was pleased to see that whist avoiding that installation step, I still got a tray icon.
So with protonvpn installed I was online and ready to go. I had researched open source disk imaging tools and settled on rescuezilla as I wanted an option to revert if I did something catastrophic that I did not know how to undo. This was a completely foreign OS and wanted to take precautions. At an early point I tested a system image backup and restore and it worked perfectly, even with full disk encryption. One issue was that the screen would go black during the backup process. I thought there was a hardware fault but it turned out it was just a power saving feature but it sometimes would not come back when jostling the mouse. I think I worked around this by booting rescuzilla in basic graphics mode which prevented the screen going black. I cannot be absolutely sure of this but I think that did the trick. It was a shame there was not an option to disable this power saving feature in the software that I could find but there we are.
I should mention that whilst learning about open source and my desire to move to linux I started switching to open source cross platform applications whilst still on windows to make the transition easier. Some of which I was already using, firefox (eventually to librewolf), joplin, keepassxc, libreoffice, freefilesync, virtualbox, vlc, veracrypt to name the main few. I should mention I did test linux mint in a virtualbox vm under windows 10 just to see what I was getting into before installing.
When I had the basics, an internet connection and a browser, I began actually using the linux computer. I was so pleased everything was just working. I started to spend more and more time on the linux system, and I know it may sound silly, I still did not trust it with credentials. But the more I learnt with research and the more I got things working, the more I came to trust it and started logging in to things. It took a while before I even opened my password database on it.
My data had not even come over at this point, I was still testing the waters. Is this something I could really trust? But over about a month linux mint earnt that trust and this is when after years of using macrium reflect for a one button blind faith backup I decided to use freefilesync to migrate data to the linux system and maintain a linux system backup. I spent a long time noting down every location my data could be on the windows system including appdata, portable apps, default user data folders, program files, different drives and other obscure locations. I still want to do a full system image with macrium at some point, not incremental but full, on two separate backup drives just in case I missed anything. I plan to wipe the windows computer completely. I’ll probably re-install with windows 10 iot ltsc as I’d like to have a windows system around still but the main thing is to get my data off of it going forwards, not just deleting it but a full re-install so there is not even a reference. The fact I used minecraft with a microsoft account I wonder if that and my data could ever be linked. Never has the OS been signed into microsoft account but I’d not put it past them to say “hey, you used minecraft with this micorosft account so we’ve logged your OS in and uploaded all your files to the cloud”. This is why I was switching to linux, I wanted control over my computer and its data. I do not want it uploaded to your cloud where any tom, dick and harry can nose around and have your AI systems use it for training. Hell, it seems that data does not even need to be in their cloud for this to occur now. No thank you.
Now, I had started to take data security seriously and contemplated what would happen if my equipment was stolen. During the mint setup I configured full disk encryption, very easy to setup and worked well. The only option was to use KVM which to be honest it is still something I need to research more, ext4 fair enough but this KVM thing sounds more intimidating. But it worked. I also booted into a linux mint live usb and verified I could access my data on from the full disk encryption system which I could, a big relief as it was something I was so unfamiliar with and wondered how I could get at my data if the system no longer booted after a kernal update or something. I was being cautious.
I used veracrypt for the backup drives, thankfully I have had experience with this software before and it was my first experience of an appimage (that I was very careful about running), I knew to verify checksums and found the gui tool gtkhash very useful for this but gpg was new to me (still is really) and required terminal work. But the main thing was knowing to verify that I downloaded from the official domain, like with windows. Once I learnt how to make it executable it was off, the gui was a little bugged and took a bit of a long time to dismount after a backup but later versions fixed that. Also, when playing around with appimages I learnt how to make them run in portable mode as this is something I like from windows using this documentation: https://docs.appimage.org/user-guide/portable-mode.html.
I was getting well underway and using the linux system more and more. I have yet to log into sites that use payment systems switching back to the windows system for this as I have been quite nervous about this part. No anti-virus, going off of only that I had done things correctly based on the research I had done and not contracted anything in the process. I think it is sensible until I am sure I have done everything in the correct manner, others may disagree. But this is a completely foreign system to me, it is taking a while to earn my trust, but it is most certainly coming slowly over time. It is not too far off now I think.
I have yet to get into gaming as I want to limit closed source applications on this system. The only closed source application I think I have run on here thus far was OCCT. I think it had some telemetry but this was literally one of my first experiences with software after installing mint as I wanted to check hardware stability under linux and for me, it was the only option at the time as I was familiar with it from testing in windows and GUI stress testing applications appeared to be more complicated than just firing up OCCT and I wanted to test my hardware under linux as soon as possible. In hindsight, I could have handled this better but there we are.
Steam has closed sourced components, as do games. This is something I plan to learn more about. For now I dabbled with hedgewars and luanti to test some open source games for system stability.
So I am in the position now where apart from online payment systems and gaming, I am fully migrated over and loving every minute of it. Just getting everything setup so I can use it for 90% of what I need at the moment, even down to rhythmbox handling my music, adjusting the GUI to my needs. Tweaking things to my liking within the main confines of mint and the cinnamon desktop environment but at the moment that is more than enough. Also, finally having some freedom, true freedom. I am almost free of windows, I’ll not be completely satisfied until I wipe the old windows 10 system along with my data on it in the process to fully get it out of microsofts reach. Yes windows 10 iot ltsc will likely go on but my data will not.
However, with the new encryption systems at play on linux it is taking a little getting used to in order to fully trust them from a reliability standpoint but I am getting there the more times I actually use the full disk encryption and veracrypt for backups. Trusting the encryption software to always work when I present the password, reliably. It is taking some getting used to the fact that I’ll never be able to access that data if the password is forgotten. But at least I am in control and not having windows 11 lock the system drive after a bad update and find I have no recourse. I know the passwords here, it is under my control as to how I remember those. No surprises.
I hope to learn more leveraging this platform to ask for help on the newer more complicated stuff that I struggle to understand with just research alone. Something I have not done thus far, just taught myself everything. I’m not really a very social person so even online I struggle with this, but lemmy.ml looks like a good, caring community that shares my values and I think I will be happy to be a part of.
I hope to be able to convince friends and family that moving to linux is something they should seriously consider. I have a multitude of reasons and am already finding much resistance because windows works for them and they do not care enough about privacy and/or do not really understand that their privacy is at risk and the implications / future ramifications of that. I am being called paranoid etc and and am at a bit of a loss as to how to help convince the majority of them.
For those that want to make the switch I hope to learn enough to be able to aid them in the transition but at the same time do not want the responsibility of being blamed if something goes wrong or does not work as expected. For example I plan to help with locating their data and how to make backups following the 3-2-1 rule but make it unmistakeably clear it is their responsibility. If they loose anything / forget some data it is on them. I must make this so very clear.
So, to end on a high note I am so thankful the open source community exists, it is truly a beautiful thing, a system built by the people, for the people. One day I hope to contribute however that may be, and I think it will simply be in helping others transition and use the software as I learn how to do so myself.
This is my first post on lemmy.ml, my first post on the fediverse. I thought I’d detail my experience not only of switching to linux but a switch in the way I think now. Woken up to the sobering truth of that state of things. I am now, most certainly, a privacy advocate.
Thanks for taking the time to read. I hope it was informative, maybe helpful to others, and I look forward to your responses.
I you've got an old piece of hardware with nvidia hardware you know the pain. Nvidia stopped supporting 390 drivers back in 2022. Meaning that a few years later, as new kernels rolled in people will start being unable to install those drivers. Now in 2026 AFAIK there isn't any maintained distro that keeps supporting a kernel old enough to work with those drivers. So good bye old nvidia gpus.
People here had several paths:
1.- If you got iGPU you could use that, less performance, but usually still works. 2.- Use nouveau drivers. Nouveau it's not very performant now, with old hardware is even worse. This should be just the last resource as the experience would be miserable, my gpu even struggled with some desktop environments using nouveau, while igpu worked just fine. 3. Switch to windows. Windows usually keeps better retrocompatibility, and while the drivers are still unsuported, you can install them no problem in windows.
I decided to move to windows 10 ioT LTSC, with support until 2032. Because I had an old laptop that I still liked to use for some lightweight gaming. Nouveau was completely unable to perform good enough for any game. iGPU worked better, I was able to play some games, but still I was missing the extra performance the dGPU gave to me. So I, sadly, moved to Microsoft OS.
But lately I've been thinking, what if there were a solution? And keep looking deeper. And I found it. Te DKMS for the drivers could be patched to work with modern Linux Kernels. But it was DIY. There used to be some maintained projects and repos, but most are now archived. The only thing I found still maintained is this AUR repo:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nvidia-390xx-utils
Great, some people managed to get it working! My day was saved! But.. it was AUR, which means Arch or derivatives. And I really didn't want to go that route. This laptop is just for media and playing, all through GUI from my couch, I don't want to be messing with the keyboard. And I knew that with Arch, specially using AUR patches that was unlikely to go smooth.
I had always use linux mint on this laptop and I was very happy, so I though. why no replicate whatever AUR is doing in linux mint? And I got to it. I installed mint, and lock the kernel to 6.8 (with support until 2029) and starting following the AUR to patch the nvidia drivers manually. But the kernel expected in arch is not exactly the same as is it's in Mint (which uses a Ubuntu kernel with backported security patches). So I hit a wall, it didn't work. Then is when I found the second most useful resource in this journey:
https://github.com/earldodd/nvidia-390-kernel68-patches
A guide on how to manually patch the DKMS, specifically made for linux Mint. It didn't include any ready to go binaries or scripts, but it was very well explained. Following that I managed to make what I thought it was impossible. And I finally got to see my old laptop running the nvidia proprietary drivers again (I almost cried here).
So yes, it is possible. On linux forum most people said it was not possible. That it could not be done. But it is. And if you want to do it I found those two resources the better path to achieve it.
Now we arrive to the bitter end. I think while possible I won't finally keep this config, and I probably just keep windows 10 ltsc and after that loses support switch back to linux mint and just disable the dGPU. why? Because the process to patch the driver was painful, hard to replicate, fragile, and led to a lot of missconfigurations and broken things. I spent two full days on this. I don't want to do it again each time an update messes something up. Maybe in the future I would try to create some installation script once I figure it out who to fix all the secondary issues that emerged with this Frankenstein, but by that time probably kernel 6.8 would be discontinue and I would need to start again for the next Ubuntu LTS kernel, a little discouraging, but who knows.
I just wanted to share this penguin journey with all of you. And share those resources for anyone in need of them.
UPDATE: Finally I decided just ditch the gpu all together. Installed my old good reliable mint and blacklisted nouveau. A little lost in performance in some games, but I think it will be worth it.
i am been using spectacle to take screenshots but in a way where i get the rectangle selection right away and afterwards the image gets immediately sent to the clipboard.
but since the last update to Kubuntu 26.04 LTS i am having trouble pasting the picture. it is there in the clipboard history, i can see it but it doesn't paste. i have to select another image from the history first and then the screenshot i just took again to be able to paste it. this behavior is only present with pictures, the clipboard functions normally with text.
is there a way to fix this?
edit: i just did some testing as i had the feeling it has something to do with the size of my selection. when i take only a smaller selection the pasting works without issues but if i use a larger selection it doesn't paste again without the workaround mentioned above. i use a 1440p display and smaller is maybe 1/10th of the screen and larger is maybe 1/4th of the screen.
I came to understand the philosophy and the kind of user, and specially workflow, most desktop environments try to appeal
however, I don’t fully understand Budgie, have you used it? what can you tell me about it?
I do know, that the open nature of GNU/Linux makes not everything having to “fill a gap”, there can be more than one project with similar goals and that’s okay I just want to know it better
cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/52544724
I wrote a dead simple file canary tool that will install an eBPF program that drops all outgoing packets if a canary is touched. I wrote this in response to the current trend of supply chain attacks that try to harvest credentials
Heya :D
So i finally figured out how to install Custom Cursors and decided to install this one :P
https://www.xfce-look.org/p/2347781
Sadly it only works with certain Applications like Firefox and such but for example uses the Stock Cursor on KeePassXC and STeam as well as some Video Games :(\
Does anyone by CHance have an Idea how to fix it? O.o
Or should i just try rebooting my Machine after applying the Cursor? >.>
Im on ARch Linux with Latest XFCE4 if that matters :P
Also Anyone got a Nyan Cat Cursor for Linux? >.>
Wouldve loved tp use this one but Cursors arent simple PNG Files you just apply to a Cursor it seems :(
https://www.cursors-4u.com/cursor/animated-nyan-cat-rainbow
I've discovered Akonadi, a KDE service. As far as I could understand, Akonadi provides "personal information management" and is responsible for some interaction between apps within the KDE ecosystem. To me, it seems to be bloatware. Somebody may use the functions it provides, but I do not. It is just running in background all the time with no use.
- How do I completely disable it forever?
- Have you ever met something else in Linux or it's ecosystem, that appeared to be bloatware to you (and how did you disable it)?
I am currently running Xubuntu on all my systems but there are so many things that feel rather unstable/buggy - I am sure it is not all Xubuntus/Xfce's fault, but my knowledge is limited so I just attribute it to that.
Therefore, I am currently considering switching to Fedora. I feel like it is time trying out a new desktop (KDE) and a more up to date kernel. I am not entirely sure what I am hoping from this post, but maybe a "yea, it is worth it" would ease my mind a bit.
Also, I am a bit unsure how to easily move between them (programs and data).
To name a few of the bugs I encountered in the past:
- When connecting screens, quite often the created profile is ignored, screens get disabled, overlapped, ... By applying the profile multiple times eventually you can overcome this issue
- Dell specific: Webcam does not work, system sometimes freezes after closing the laptop lid even if sleep mode is deactivated
- Certain shortcuts are bugged (WIN+Left works, WIN+Right doesn't. When you reset WIN+Right, it works until the next restart)
As the maintainer of Plank Reloaded, the most common bug report I get is "this app has the wrong icon." It's almost never the dock - it's a broken StartupWMClass in the app's .desktop file. So I wrote up how to find the right value on X11, Wayland, and KDE, and why deleting the line often fixes it.
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/62361303
Hello good people.
Is no one afraid of Bazzites auto updating nature?
I am myself worried about the potential for well timed supply chain attacks from wherever they build their OS images, which somehow build malicious images or just gets itself into the normal image builds and we auto update to.
Is this an unfounded worry? Does anyone know of the security measures in place to prevent attacks?
Auto update just feels weird to me, especially for something like my OS. I'm asking because I went and installed it and realised auto updating seems to be their philosophy... which is scary?
p.s. i couldnt find anyone online discussing this
Thonks
We are not Adobe scumbags. We actually care about your input.
Please share your ideas:
👉 https://blogs.kde.org/2026/06/20/kde-goals-call-for-submissions/
Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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