Ever had a question about Linux but felt too afraid to ask? Well now’s your chance, ask any question about Linux, no matter how noob or repeated it is, and I and others will help answer them.
Previous noob question thread: https://lemmy.ml/post/14261893
Is OpenRC meant to be faster than systemD as a process system? I’ve been thinking of spinning up some non systemD distros like Artix on a VM on a mini DELL tinbox.
I will say though, I am not an advanced Linux user as the distros I’ve used were :
Ubuntu Endeavour OS SpiralLinux (Easy Mode Debian)
Would I need to make configurations in openrc or can it just run without messing with it like systemD?
Thank you
I have read that it is faster, though I have not tested it myself. Personally, my initial reason to use it was just to try something new and explore the unix world. My reason for staying is that it is a very simple init system that is pleasant to work with. It made me understand what an init system is and use it a lot more.
Systemd is good if you just want something invisible and you do not want to mess too much with an init system unless you have to. Everything integrates with it
OpenRC is nicer if you want to write your own init scripts. It is very well documented also.
I’m on Linux mint 22 and my audio outputs don’t change automatically. When I plug in USB headphones, audio won’t output to them unless I manually change it in settings.
Also, why can’t I interact with the panel applets (on the right side) while I’m in game? For example: I’m playing a game, I plug in my headphones, I have to manually change the audio output so I hit the “windows” key to bring up the panel, but I can’t interact with any of the applets on the right side of the panel (I can’t select the audio icon and change settings from there). I have to search audio settings in the panel then alt tab to it. It’s really cumbersome
I have an old (2017) Windows 10 box that is ineligible for Windows 11. Originally purchased to run my Oculus Rift, it now just streams YouTube and Twitch and plays some old Steam games and occasionally school related stuff (Lexia, Scratch, stuff like that).
I started thinking that, rather than worrying about an unsupported Windows OS on my network, I might upgrade to Mint or Ubuntu.
So, my question(s) is/are, how much of a hassle will such an upgrade be? Will I need to wipe the drive, or can I keep my files without having to back them up first? Can I run Windows games on Steam with Wine? Are there good 3D card drivers nowadays?
I’m reasonably versed in using Linux as a user, less so as an admin, in case that affects the way you answer.
Everything people are saying here checks out, but you might struggle with VR. I haven’t tried VR on Linux yet, but I’ve heard some things about support being pretty janky. Maybe others with experience can weigh in.
I’d be interested to see what people have to say regarding VR setup, but the Oculus gets little use anymore. I have a few games that were never ported to the newer, self-contained systems (I have a Quest 3), and we’ve downloaded a bunch of custom Beat Saber levels that I might feel bad about, but the sensors are a big enough pain to set up that I don’t know that I’d feel that bad.
I myself have a Quest 3. I use Air Light VR as a streamer, which only worked after I added something to do with a vrmonitor.sh to the SteamVR command line. Half Life: Alyx runs natively and works just as well, but I’ve had bad luck with most other games, primarily because Steam Cloud didn’t synchronize the Windows saves to my Linux machine. VR even on Windows is already a PITA to set up, and I just don’t have the willpower to get it working properly on Linux. This is the only reason why I even keep the waste of space that is my Windows partition.
Yeah, I’ve considered VR for a long while, but between the already existing headaches, and the Linux related headaches I’ve heard of, I’ll just wait until I’m retired for VR space games, VR racing, and VR porn. Hopefully it’ll get better before I’m dead.
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Depends on how much crap you’re willing to put up with. It’ll all be worth it in the end! (Pro tip: disable secure boot in BIOS)
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I wrote a whole guide on the two options, but then accidentally deleted my comment. You can either install Linux on another drive, or shrink your NTFS partition and install Linux alongside it. You can always access NTFS from Linux, but not the other way around (by default). If you don’t understand what I’m talking about, you should really look it all up. I would personally just backup and wipe, you can always reinstall Windows if you want to.
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Have you heard of Valve’s Steam Deck? It’s a handheld gaming device that can play nearly every PC game, and it runs Linux! Valve made gaming on Linux an absolute breeze thanks to Proton. There are some popular games that don’t work, either because Tim Sweeney hates Linux (yes, really) or because the anti-cheat won’t accept Linux, but I only know about Destiny 2 and Rust that have that problem. Easy Anticheat works just fine, I play Apex Legends and Deep Rock Galactic with no issues!
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If you have AMD, you don’t even have to think about it. Their drivers are part of the Linux kernel. Nvidia is not impossible to use, but you might have some issues. I experience random desktop environment crashes that I can only attribute to their drivers, but it only happens on startup sometimes, which is the least annoying it could be. If you choose a distro that doesn’t mind automatically installing non-free software, you probably won’t need to think about it either. The open source driver, Nouveau, works fine but performs awfully in games (or at least it did a year ago).
If you just want some clear instructions: backup your files, wipe your disk and install Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. It’s easy peasy to use and getting the proprietary graphics drivers is only a few clicks away. Just configure your Steam games to run through Proton and you might not even tell the difference.
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
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With the recent Microsoft garbage, I’m giving Linux another try. I’ve been running a laptop for a while, no issues. My main rig, however can’t read all of my um…?hard drives
A live USB of Mint 21 reads 2 of 5 drives fine. The rest are recognized from GParted, but can’t access them. It looks like NTFS-3G is installed.
I’ve duck duck go’d (which apparently is just Bing) for a solution, but haven’t succeeded. Long term, I can probably pick up another drive, copy, and reformat everything to something Linux friendly. For now, I just want access.
I’m lazy and burned out. I don’t want to use the terminal- which I did try. I just want to make a few clicks and have access to all of my files.
If it matters, the drives (roughly) show up as: 500 gb, 4 TB NTFS (readable) 3, 12, 16 TB unknown (not readable)
Windows says they’re all NTFS.
Is there an easy way to easily mount my drives?
If you can boot back into windows, turn off quick startup/shutdown, run chkdsk or whatever on the drives, reboot back into windows then boot back into Linux and you’ll be okay.
Quick startup is a kind of weird sleep/hibernate mutant that leaves drives in an unclean state when it turns off, so the Linux drivers for ntfs say “I’m not gonna touch that possibly damaged drive”.
It was a good theory, but no luck. I’m perplexed on this one.
Can a windows boot usb also not read them? If so and if you have the space to do so, it’s worthwhile to backup, reformat and repopulate the unreadable drives.
I got one!
What constrains access to an rpc socket in the file system? Is it just the permissions of the socket or is there more to the whole process?
E: I originally wrote port instead of socket because it was early lol.
I’ve got one progam that I need for work that I cannot get to run on Linux. I’ve tried WINE on both Ubuntu and Zorin (and winlator for android). I have the installer exe file and try to launch with WINE but then nothing happens. Is that a program problem, WINE limitation, or something else? Is there a different program I should try to launch it?
How are you launching the exe with WINE? Try doing it via the command line if you aren’t already. That way you may get some more information about why it isn’t working. Its as simple as
wine path/to/your/exeYou could also try something like Bottles, which will let you use possibly newer versions of WINE without modifying your system’s WINE.
Is plasma big screen really an option? Id like to install it on a desktop to act as a android tv. Launch Stremio, YT and maybe one or two other apps/websites. Easy big tile navigation with remote (flirc).
It’s in dev since 2020. The images hosted on the site are bit for any of my hardware. It says theres a Debian package. Installed that though LMDE but it was horrible. Somone mentioned Kububtu can install it with apt, but its not listed. Think I’ll give up.
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Is it that much better to have a Desktoo Environment, on my desktop computer? I’m still halving it with Windows trying to get my games to run on arch lol
I’m familiar with Proxmox, virtualbox, and KVM/KVM manager.
If I want to set up a PC to virtualize multiple operating systems, but with the feel of a multiboot system, what virtualization software would you suggest?
My goal is for the closest I can get to a multiboot system (windows, Debian, fedora) but virtualized so I can make snapshots. It should feel like I’m on baremetal when inside the VM.
Virtualbox is clunky with lots of pesky UI cluttering the screen and Proxmox doesn’t seem great for this use case.
Is there a way to assess which packages on my linux distribution aren’t open source? I’m planning on having a secondary machine which is exclusively open source, but not sure how I would go about ensuring that is the case.
The language you want is “nonfree” in Debian derivatives.
Depends on the distribution, many package managers can filter by license. So you can find anything that doesn’t have an open source license.
I wanna install Linux on my Desktop as main OS after years of windows, last time I tried desktop was Fedora and Ubuntu back in the late 00s, back then all I remember is playing around with Gnome and KDE and compiz…
Most of what I know about Linux distros today is from memes…
How can I quickly learn about the best distro for my needs, (general use, some development, and some gaming, easy hardware support). With a toddler and demanding job, I don’t have too much time to just experiment with different distros and draw my own conclusions.
Thanks in advance.
Ubuntu and Linux Mint are ideal for people who just want to ignore the OS and get work done.
If you are a Dev you should be clear of such problem, unless you need a very specific tool, but, many people can’t switch because the programs they work with are not supported on Linux. Take a look into that, and in the worst case scenario you can dual boot windows.
Gaming wise proton is a bless and let’s you play most games, check protonDB for compability. Major portion of the games that don’t work are due to crappy anticheat solutions.
Good luck, any other questions feel free to ask.
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Will it blend?
Depends on the hardware, but generally, yeah.
(It’s a joke)
