What are some things you wish you had known when switching to Linux?
I start: the most important thing is not the desktop, it's the package manager.
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Comments131View original on lemmy.blahaj.zone
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.
Once you go FOSS, you never go back.
How to quit vim.
Just read this book:
Used to use gedit, the found nano and it was awesome. Then found Vim... I RAN back to nano haha
Try micro.
It's much better and quite easy if not easier to use than nano. It should really be the default simple editor.
This looks cool! Thanks!
I hear you 😁. For whatever reason I stuck with the Vim tutorial and did it a few times over the years. Now I'm using the IdeaVIM extension in IntelliJ - that mode system is just sooo powerful. It has a horrible learning curve, yes, but if you manage to stick with it, it pays huge dividends. I probably know, like, 18% of all commands, and it completely changed how I edit files (mostly for coding, but also text).
Alright alright. You win haha seriously, you've convinced me to give vim another chance.
Use vimtutor. It comes with vim and teaches you to the basic vim commands from within vim.
And don't worry about exiting vim, that's lesson 1.2 :)
Hahaha!!! I actually know how to exit Vim. Had to learn it when setting up a server config on a server that only had Vim installed. Once set up, nano got installed.
This vimtutor looks pretty awesome, and I can't wait to get learning on it. In all honesty, vim does looks super helpful. It's just that I usually use text editors to quickly setup configs, when gui won't do or I'm just done with gui for the moment. During those times, my patience is usually low, and searching how to save or quit or open or do any other basic functionality, reduces that patience further. But vimtutor makes it a point to learn vim when I'm not trying to get in, get it done, and get out. This may work for me. I may actually learn vim!
I remember, back in the day, I asked on IRC how to edit a file in Linux. Someone said vi. Little did I know that in chat someone said, the next question is how do I quit. I asked that exact question. Yes chat erupted.
I vaguely remember pressing Alt+F4 while trying to close vim in a terminal once. It did switch to me login prompt so I thought it worked.
Either by making it segfault or you don’t.
I got a whole software developer career going out of my attempts to exit vim.
For people who actually don't know this, yet: Type
:x.This means “eXit, save any changes”
If you want to leave and discard your changes, type
:q!The
:qmeans “Quit”, without any other instructions. This will warn you if you changed anything, adding!means “force this command”.I guess the main things would be:
I never had a problem dual booting, even as a beginner. I always kept everything on two separate drives, though, each with their own EFI partition.
I kept them on the same drive, different EFI partitions.
I've also always done dual boot on one drive, no real problems other than when I know I caused the problem.
Also... What's up with that user name?
I did the opposite, have always dual booted my laptops and had win on my PC until quite recently now that I'm comfortable enough not to need a safety net anymore
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?
No, i think he means the idea that Linux is supposed to substitute Windows 1:1
That I could put /home on a different drive
That I would never boot into Windows again so having partitions for it was a waste of time
That mounting drives with their uuid as the mount location is insane
Why tho? Kernel sometimes can index drives in different order (if you have multiple drives), screwing your mount locations. But UUID is always the same
You can give your partitions labels and mount by label. Labels are persistent, like UUIDs, but are also easier to remember and copy.
But why would I even try to remember them? Just look them up. Nowadays I don't even see them since I use Gnome Disk Utility or KDE partition manager to automount them (they both just write to your /etc/fstab)
For me, I used labels when setting up those volumes manually. Creating a LUKS container, setting up LVM groups and volumes, configuring my bootloader to decrypt the correct encrypted disk, etc. It was just easier to remember which device label was my encrypted container, which was the group, and what the different volumes were. And once the labels were made, well, I just used them.
It's just really long is all. I wish I had given it something shorter but descriptive.
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.
This 100%! After using Linux for the past few years I've realized a lot of the crap windows has by default is stuffed in there to have something to market.
Nowadays there's a lot of good alternatives for everything, including windows hello for any password prompt
Linux is pretty easy to use nowadays. The only thing I would check before switching is driver compatibility.
"20 years from now, people are still discussing moving to Linux!"
People who wanted Linux on the desktop to be so user-friendly their grandma could use it are now grandparents.
And 20 more years there will still be people switching
There will be dozens more people switching. Dozens!
a real og
I've been fuckin with btrfs so far haven't tried zfs yet. Anything cool compared to btrfs?
In contrast to btrfs it doesn't break your data. Everyone learns the hard way not to use btrfs...
Btrfs was the best filesystem I had used up until it corrupted my data.
Not breaking your data, that is a pretty cool feature
I gave up on btrfs when Icouldn't recover from a full disk situation (years ago, may be better nwo). But zfs tooling is so good, reliable and intuitive, I'd not want to switch anyway.
Distrobox exists, so one is not bound to use a specific distro just because it packages some of the apps/binaries they require.
Installed distrobox on NixOS because I was worried being limited to only nixpkgs and have not touched it once lol
Same goes for the windows VM except for the time I needed to run excel macros for work
Worried about being limited to only the biggest selection of packages available. Does not compute.
I'd never heard of nixpkgs before so thought it was some small niche thing
I did on my Nix, there was a package in Nixpkgs that was outdated, so I had the opportunity to use distrobox for that, at leqst temporarily until they update the package.
Thats been a fear of mine moving to nixos. Glad to know it'll cover most of my software needs.
Here's a graph, it should be fine for your package needs: Graph
This is not totally accurate because nixpkgs also packages some packages that wouldn't be in the system package manager like Python and Haskell packages. Excluding those it's pretty much the same as the AUR
So enjoying immutable fedora with AUR support. Cannot be overstated...
Am I reading the readme correctly in that I can run apt-get within distrobox on Fedora, and not be limited to dnf packages?
You can install Distrobox on Fedora (or any of the distros that support it), create a Debian distrobox on your Fedora install, and within the Debian distrobox you can use
apt-getto install whichever Debian package you like. Or..., you could make an Arch distrobox and even install stuff from the AUR. Or really any package from any of your favorite distros as long as it's supported.Awesome! And it'll be segregated from the base system and from other containers, like toolbox installs are?
Exactly. It's even possible to segregate it beyond what Toolbx has been able to do (at least since the last time I checked) in that you can define another folder/directory as your HOME directory within the distrobox.
Amazing!! Yup. Looks like this is getting installed on my Fedora tonight. Thanks!!
Glad to be of help 💙 ! Feel free to inquire if you so desire 😉 .
I appreciate that!
Yes!
Rasberry Pi or other NUC is a great way to begin.
By the time you've dressed out an Rpi to be halfway usable, you've spent about as much as a decent NUC. And all you have to show for it is a slow-as-mud sd card, hardly any video acceleration, a USB stack that only crashes sometimes, a busy OOM killer, and no software.
Get an N95 based nuc. A Beelink with 8/256 runs about $150, and it just works. (Well, you might need pcie_aspm=off).
yeah, RPI is just 'cookbooked' due to fixed hw
To start sooner.
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:
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.
Or just
syncbefore pulling it.Really? I've literally never done this but I suppose I really only use my USB for dd'ing a distro.
It was ~20 years ago so my advice to myself then would be pretty irrelevant now. I messed up my laptop, and my advice then would have been don't start with a laptop (because laptop compatibility was lacking back then compared to desktop, different times).
Skill issue
Nah but seriously Nvidia loves to make it difficult and Linux doesn't make it any easier. It's like an unstoppable force meets an unmoving object
Don't get an Nvidia gpu
@flamingo_pinyata
This is such an underrated comment. Linux hates, hates, hates NVidia. I've spent ~24 hours trying to get two applications running, both of which consistently complain about my GPU and Hardware Acceleration.
@elfahor
Can confirm. Don't do it guys. Hardware acceleration for video decoding just doesn't work for me.
That I shouldn't care as much about installed packages I no longer use. Sure, going through installed programs and cleaning up from time to time is ok, but no need to panic if something sticks around.
Especially when I installed something manually needing dependencies for programming, I tend to write down names of installed packages and then managing it manually, because I wasn't yet aware what their names mean. Now using same OS for over a year, heavly testing stuff, having multiple desktop enviroments and not cleaning it up my system partition is taking less than 30GB, compared to 1TB disk it's nothing.
TIL there's tab completion lol
Tab completion, history, history search, you name it
When you're just trying to get work done: pick a solid, well-tested high-profile distribution like Fedora, Pop!_OS, or Debian (or Ubuntu). Don't look for the most beautiful, or most up-to-date, or most light-weight (e.g. low CPU usage, RAM, etc.). Don't distro hop just to see what you're missing.
Of course, do those things if you want to mess around, have fun, or learn! But not when you're trying to get work done.
Is Pop!_OS really that popular? I started using Linux about 10 years ago and it wasn't around then, so I never tried it in my distro hopping days. I see it's developed by System76 so I can see why you'd choose it on their hardware, but is there any point doing that on other hardware?
The System76 engineers are culturally very aligned with the core values of freedom of choice, customization, etc. They build software with the larger ecosystem in mind, and in fact, I've never seen them build something only for their own hardware (even things that could have been just for their own hardware, like the system76 power management system, has extensibility built in).
That said, they also balance this freedom with a set of "opinionated" good choices that they test and support. If you care a lot about stability, it's easy to go along with the "happy path" and get a solid, up-to-date system delivered frequently. Every time they upgrade new features or kernel, they go through a systematic quality assurance process on multiple machines--including machines not of their own brand. (I've contributed software/PRs to their codebase, and they've always sent it through a code review and QA process).
Idk, it seems to be picking up steam. It's what I use unless I'm trying to use something super lightweight.
For me it has the stability of Ubuntu without having to use Ubuntu.
Haven't tried Debian yet though.
I'm cirious about what you dislike about Ubuntu?
There's a small amount of telemetry going on.
Also, Pop_OS makes running an Nvidia GPU less painful.
Snaps are basically Ubuntu's private app store, and flatpaks (the supported method of app distribution by almost every other distro are not supported); there's no tiling WM built-in for large monitors; the kernel is not kept up to date (i.e. improved hardware coverage and support); some things like streaming with OBS studio and Steam don't work out of the box (this may have changed, but it was the case for me about a year ago).
Interesting, thanks. I had a feeling snaps would be in the list!
When you're just trying to get work done: pick Windows.
That even though you are running an LTS version of Ubuntu (e.g. Ubuntu 22.04), some packages that have arrived over a year ago on e.g. 23.10 will never arrive on 22.04.
Example: i3-wm 4.22 or up (https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=i3&searchon=names&suite=jammy§ion=all).
This is mine. This is fine for my server, where I want it to be mega stable and always up. I can always add other repos for the few packages that I need to be up to date for whatever reason (podman for me recently). But my daily driver needs quicker updates than that.
That's the whole point of an LTS distro. And it's why non-rolling distros for desktop OSes make no sense
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.
After switching to Linux I wish I knew how to report bugs. I'm a qa tester and I notice so many little things that can be replicated and fixing them would polish the user experience. But there are so many layers I don't know who to report the issue to. My first thought wasto report it to the distro forum and have the more technical people there take a look at the issue then escalate it to the distro maintainers or the actual software devs.
Another thing I wish I knew, was how to get my 2nd hdd to mount automatically. I fucked to my system 4 times(and recovered it) trying and then had to get my sys admin friend to do it for me.
Reporting KDE bugs is still extremely inconvenient.
There should be a 1-click option just to submit an automatically collected data dump, maybe with an optional text field we can write. Just to help providing some data, without all the hassle of creating an account, answering N questions, and following up with answers - sometimes I do care about the issue, most times I don't, but still want to flag that something wrong happened so they're aware of it.
I have the impression that a lot of bugs and random crashes go unnoticed because users don't bother to go through the process of opening a bug report - and they shouldn't need to, nor know how to.
My first time I was presented with the bug reporter I thought it was cool, but then it said I had to have all the debug symbols installed so it could unwind the call stack. Ok I thought, and searched apt for a little. But I couldn't find them all as there is not a standard naming scheme, so that effort was wasted. I wish their bug reporter would auto download all debug symbols needed.
Bugs? We call those features around here!
That you can use any DE on any distro
Isn't it? I'm fairly sure I've flashed a windows iso a couple times from Linux before
Just install BIOS updates from within the BIOS like a normal person.
Gnome is better on 1920 than in 1366. XFCE is better on 1366...
And Ubuntu sucks..
tab completion
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.
That just like windows and Mac if it doesn't support that platform prepare for headaches. Unlike windows and Mac you can get things that aren't supposed to run on Linux to run thanks to great tools like wine, proton, and even waydroid. But if you wanna avoid headaches just stick with what's supported for the most part.
If you switch to Linux you'll probably have to learn at some point to use the terminal but with some recent developments (new fonts, ligatures etc..) console applications evolved to be more and more ... Graphical! And this is awesome: check out btop, neovim/nvchad, lsd etc...
I've learnt how to use Linux in preparation for the day when Windows finally goes to far.
Ctrl + R in the terminal. I never used it until I got a job using Linux, now it's probably my most used command at work and at home.
It was so long ago there was nothing to know, really. Most pages looked fine in links, you had irssi for your social networks, mplayer for your movies (still great), mutt for email, vim for programming... It kind of just worked.
That's pretty much where I've landed. Except I use firefox.
I still use mplayer but now it's neovim will lots of plugins. Modern IDEs are much different today. Mutt is hard to use in the time of HTML emials. I also use lots of graphical apps like signal, Spotify, steam or libre office that didn't exist 20 years ago. I think getting it all to work is a bit more complicated now. Maybe I just use computer for a lot more things.
Don't use linux with the expectation that it works like windows. If you want to use linux, be open to new ways of doing things, and you will likely have a great time, try the old methods and you will run into impassable walls.
Though I enjoy and am currently using #LinuxMint, I wish I learned about #Wayland sooner. I didn't understand why game performance felt so off with my dual monitor setup for several months. I have since dabbled with an #Ubuntu #Gnome DE for some gaming, and Wayland support has alleviated those problems. However, I plan to look into other options when I've organized my data a bit more and establish proper backups. Learning #Bash, #scripting, #aliases, #workspaces and tweaking #hotkeys were also useful for making my workflow into what it is. Also, I wish I knew how bad #ProtonVPN and #ProtonDrive #Linux support would be. Despite getting used to their #CLI applications, the absence of feature parity is immensely disappointing.
That everything you need will work out of the box and you wouldn't boot into windows for 2 months. Would have done a full installing instead of dual-booting. Windows did have a matrix backup I needed though.
There isn't a hardware panel nor a proper task manager nor a GUI registery editor.
There is no registry in Linux so there can't be a registry editor.
Hardware panels and task managers do exist (and they come in more windows-like distros), they're just different to Windows ones. I do concede that hardware management in Windows is much easier.
Task manager for Windows absolutely blows though. It doesn't show real data, just estimates that sometimes are wildly wrong.
I disagree on the task manager. I like the KDE Plasma monitor application for instance. Very convenient way to sigterm or sigkill.
Well Linux doesn't have a registry, so an editor would also not exist, to be fair.
dconf editor is kinda like regedit for GNOME apps ig?
In a hand wavy way, yes. You are just editing the settings of one suite of software, not really an OS "registry". Closest to that in Linux is editing /etc, but even then, not all software is configured there.
True
Not for long if Lennart has anything to say about it, I'm sure.
htop
Or even better, btop
@elfahor How I was fucked up by trade-based society. Linux is cheap( not free), but is fun and enjoyable. It us fun to interact, support and be brave to act.
that: aptitude >>>>>>> apt-get and apt
It's a better foot-gun, that's for sure
Nah; just takes time to get used to it! Awesome tool to solve dependencies problems!
No