I highly recommend timeshift. It makes it easy to make system snapshots (think system restore points) at regular intervals so that if you try something and it breaks your system, you can restore it to a working state. It has saved me hours of work from all of the reinstalls that I didn’t have to do. I wish I had something like this when I first started out with Linux. It would have saved me dozens of Linux installs.

No, no, none, no, learn vim.

1) Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card. Are there any real noticeable advantages/improvements to using Wayland over Xorg.
If you have an Nvidia card you’re probably best sticking to Xorg for now. I’m currently running Xorg with Gnome 45 since I have a GTX 1060. As I understand it Wayland is better at handling refresh rates across multiple monitors, as well as DPI scaling. These are minor issues compared to having everything working smoothly. I do feel like Xorg is on the way out now however, and I expect to switch off of it in a year or two.

2) Does bloat actually have a noticeable negative impact on your system or are people just over reacting/joking.
It’s mostly just a meme. It certainly won’t slow you down. What it does do is take up space on your hard drive and in your menus. I do understand taking pleasure in ensuring that your system is trimmed down to only what you really need. But don’t worry about it at all.

3) What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?
The same habits you have on Windows. Keep your files and folders in order. Beyond that there’s not much you need to worry about, especially with Kinoite.

4) Any habits or standards that I should abide by in order to save myself headaches in the future?
Not that I can think of off the top of my head. Most important is leaning to RTFM, meaning go read the documentation for your distro (or just look at the Arch wiki) when you have an issue. If you run into a problem and need to ask for help, make sure you don’t do the XY problem.

5) Any other resources besides the AUR that I should be aware of?
I don’t think Fedora Kinoite supports AUR, that’s an Arch Linux thing. You’ll be getting 99% of your apps from Flatpak.

6) What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?
A long time ago I made a thread that got shared around a bit about how I thought the command line was pushed by Linux anoraks who didn’t understand the needs of the common user. I’ve used Linux a lot since then and I’ve changed my perspective: the command line is your best friend. It lets you do exactly what you want to do very quickly. It’s fast, it’s efficient, it’s beautiful. If you learn it a whole world of additional tools command line tools will open to you (ssh, grep, etc). There’s a reason that places like /c/unixporn love pictures of open terminals with neofetch loaded up.

1. I never used Wayland but Xorg works really well.

2. Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do. Also, try new things just to try them. That’s how I started using many things that now make the core of my computer experience. Even if something looks scary I recommend giving it a go because in most cases it is much easier than it looks (at least when you have some experience with Linux).

3. YouTube can be a good resource at the start.

4. Switching to Linux was very smooth experience for me because I wanted to inform myself about Linux before switching just to know what I’m getting into. If you go prepared you probably won’t experience many problems.

Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

What is bloat. If I recall correctly fedora or RHEL (or both) enable the cups daemon even if you will not print anything. If I recall correctly Ubuntu enable openvpn service even you will never use it.

But it seems neither of them have tmux installed by default.

Feel free to test and correct me because I won’t bother those distro anymore.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

arch wiki is a tutorial.

Manual pages are best, and if GNU hells put the documentation in info pages, you can install info.

If the manual page is unreadable and the program is part of the base system (on BSD all 3rd party “packages” are installed on /usr/local and base system is installed on / and /usr), try reading the BSD (OpenBSD) maintained documentation. They are also provided on-line.

What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?

The first is to drop all the things you learned in Windows. Many have no value, many are flawed and create bad habits, many are disposed.

New linux user often prefer GUI or menu instead of command line tool (what I mean is different, see the next sentence). They prefer to browser chromium and chat and typing this comment instead of taking time reading manual page, books, learn how to maintenance their system, even you need to learn how to INSTALL YOUR SYSTEM CORRECTLY!! You use ‘a’ huge a partition (sorry, root / partition) with an EFI partition and a /boot partition (and perhaps a /home partition too, and that’s the end?). No /usr, no /usr/local (this hierarchy is not used in Linux so keep it small), no /var, neither the /opt hell?

To keep your system organized and manageable, you first need KNOWLEDGE.

What to learn:

install and maintenance the system: partitioning, use your package manager (I hope you won’t read websites that have to teach you to use your package manager but the main topic is to use some software). Example: Absolute FreeBSD; Absolute OpenBSD (Michael W Lucas, although this is for FreeBSD and OpenBSD).

Learn not to wine (don’t run windows software on other operating system since it will need much kernel modification, OpenBSD explicitly refuse to do; I think running windows software on linux is unstable and insecure; I’m hostile with wine.)

UNIX programming: The UNIX programming environment; select some (like sed, awk) in the UNIX 7th edition manual pages, volume 2 which are tutorials that are still valid these day; manual page.

useful addition: get on tmux,

Enough for a regular user?

my personal habit:

I think I’m so lucky that I never do neofetch; once tried to decorate LXQt with the arc theme and then never used LXQt (since I switched to sway), if decorating the graphical interface make no sense to convenience I wouldn’t do (I myself hostile with unixporn or something like that, mean I never care about such community) and never created a colorful github’s myname/myname repo readme. (of course at the time I didn’t do learning since I’m chatting and being an discord terrorist)

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

I wish I could know what books to read

But when I know it’s too late (wasted 2 year using linux and learned almost nothing), and I already switched to BSD. “Gần mực thì đen, gần đèn thì sáng.” (Near the ink you get darker, near the light you get brighter, that’s my poor translation.)

Bloat is just a meme, it comes from a time when sysadmins would need to optimize every aspect of a system to get the most out of it (like not using vi, because it took up too much space/memory). You will never need to get that much performance out of your machine.

I try not to install programs all willy nilly. If I want to try something new, I’ll fire it up in a vm. I mean this about programs from 3rd party sources, and compiling from source. Anything in the repos is good and will uninstall cleanly too.

On fedora you get more programs through RPMfusion. It’s sort of official, but also not. And you can also check out the copr repository, this is more like fedora’s aur. Opensuse’s open build service also sometimes has packages that work for red hat systems.

When I first started I wanted Linux to work just like Windows. It took me a while to shift my perspective to the way Linux people do things. I don’t know how to speed up that process though.

One suggestion I haven’t seen addressed: use a filesystem with snapshots such as Btrfs and combine it with Timeshift.

With Timeshift you’ll be able to roll back in time on your disk and undo stuff. It can take advantage of the lightning fast snapshots of Btrfs to do that.

On Btrfs, separate your /home into a subvolume @home so that, when you do roll back, your personal files aren’t affected.

Configure policies for daily and weekly snapshots on Timeshift. Don’t worry about space, they’re basically free.

That way you can feel better experimenting with your setup, as long as the system is Bootable.

This would’ve saved me a headache!

From what I’ve heard. I’ve you have an Nvidia GPU the easiest thing you can do is to run Ubuntu. They have partnered up with nvidia and they provide you will all drivers you need right out the box.

It can be a hassle to sort out nvidia cards with certain distros.

If you’re going to use nvidia, don’t even touch wayland. Truly an awful experience.

Bloat does matter it is extremely important, not because having a bunch of apps slows anything down or has any tangible impact in that regard. Because it isn’t as sexy as somebody’s hyper specific gentoo install compiled without some specific module.

The reason bloat is such a big deal, particularly if you’re new to it, is because it’s confusing. if you’re trying to fix a problem that you have run into / possibly contributed to, a dozen different programs running in the background that you didn’t put there is going leave you frustrated and disenfranchised.

Pick a modular distribution like Arch, take the loss that is your weekend putting it together and develop an understanding of how the pieces fit together. If you really don’t have time choose something like eg endeavourOS. ( or even Void is quite nice (but non systemd so less conventional))

I would personally recommend avoiding something like fedora or Debian. They are both fantastic distributions that work very well. They are not good at teaching new users how to fix problems and that should be your primary goal here.

LearnLinuxTV is a pretty good YT channel for noobs

I recommend getting familiar with the following software:

• Quickemu (and quickgui) - super easy way to setup a Windows (or Linux or Mac) virtual machine
• Distrobox - easily run a different linux distro within your current linux distro. It’s useful for running ubuntu containers because of “PPAs” which are unofficial repositories which allow you to install some obscure software with a single command.
• Timeshift - someone else already mentioned it. I actually don’t know whether it would be a problem on an atomic distro like Kionite but I had Kubuntu break after a major update. Timeshift would have been useful at that time.

Wayland: I would (and do) stick to xorg for now. Wayland isnt quite at the level where it can fully replace xorg yet.

Bloat matters, but not to a worrysome extent. Most users probably won’t notice it outside of specialized customization, and I’m sure you won’t either.

Not so much on the managerial or organizational side, but I highly recommend getting used to and comfortable with the shell. Start with the easy stuff: file operations such as mv, cp, chmod and so forth, and use a text editor of your choice to edit text files. The memes would have you use vim, and while that is my preferred editor, more beginner friendly ones, such as nano, will do just fine.

Resources: I find that most of the time that I need input, either asking somewhere relevant (such as here), or looking it up on stackexchange will give me the result I’m after.

Things I wish I knew: When you can achieve what you want via the package manager, do it. Installing and removing stuff without it tends to gradually change your OS into a state where every library requirement is in conflict with some other requirement.

• Is Wayland worth using? Especially when you consider all the issues that may come from using an NVIDIA card.

Short answer, no. There are advantages, but not worth it on an nvidia card. Wayland will replace Xorg very soon is a saying for over a decade, there’s reasons it hasn’t happened yet, nvidia is one of them.

• Does bloat actually matter or is it just a meme?

For starting up, just a meme, on the long run it’s nice to have a small system, but not that important i£ you have the disk to spare.

• What are some habits I should practice in order to keep my system organized and manageable?

Yes, the main one is “use the package manager”. The second one is keep your /home in a different partition.

• Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

I would say that any community is also a good resource, since people are usually helpful.

• What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux that would have saved you a headache in the future?

Set your /home to a different partition, I know I already mentioned this but it will save your ass the first t*me you break your system and have to reinstall.

I’d say avoid Wayland for now. There’s no real benefit to it at the moment and at least your card works with X11. If the Linux Mint team are happy to wait and just test it out at the moment, that tells me that is the way to go.

Not sure what bloat people mentioned but Linux doesn’t have bloat. The distro chooses their preferred apps which they hope everyone will like but it’s easy to remove them if you don’t and use the app you want. If it’s a system app (.deb, rpm etc) it will barely take up any space anyway. Only flatpaks and snaps take up huge amount of space. I wouldn’t recommend using alot of those as you’ll be pressed for disk space

Linux doesn’t require maintenance. It typically just works. It’s not like Windows where you run a cleaner every so often. Just just use it normally and don’t work about it.

What I wish I knew at the start: Linux Mint is the best distro. I wasted a lot of time distro hopping only to realise I just want a stable distro that gets out of the way but is thoughtfully put together with nice touches. Mint is that. I use Linux Mint Debian Edition because I don’t like canonical.

It’s been rock solid except for when the kernel broke my WiFi, but I had a time shift backup so in 5 minutes I had my pre-update system back and working.

Is Wayland worth using?

For a first dive into the Linux ecosystem, I recommend Xorg. I use Wayland myself (Hyprland), and that’s why I know that it’s simply not ready for general adoption. There are many features that are missing, won’t be implemented, or are done much differently compared to X. Some say Xorg is old and bloated - I say it’s a mature technology.

There are also some applications that need root privileges to work (Veyon Configurator is one that I struggled a lot with) and you have to do some weird pkexec hackery to launch them.

Wayland’s development has more drama and bickering than an average sitcom - I recommend Brodie Robertson’s channel if you’re interested.

advantages/improvements to using Wayland

Wayland is better for gaming. It has a noticeably lower latency because the entire Wayland stack is implemented in a single program (what they call the compositor) as opposed to several in the X11 stack (X server, compositor, window manager) that need to communicate with each other. Unfortunately Steam and some other applications often produce graphical artifacts on Wayland+Nvidia.

Does bloat actually matter

Compared to Windows, it is insignificant. My work laptop is a Macbook Air from 2015 running Linux Mint on just 4G RAM without issues.

Any other resources besides the Arch Wiki that I should be aware of?

Install the tldr program. It’s a bit like man but lists practical examples of a command instead of a full documentation.

What are some habits I should practice

Make use of your home directory. Most user applications will have a config file in several places - usually in ~/.config (user config) and /etc (systemwide config). You should only edit the systemwide config when it makes sense, and always prioritize the user config.

A common practice is to have your /home directory on a different partition, or a different physical device. If the system breaks or you decide to distrohop, you can unmount/disconnect /home and only wipe the root partition while retaining your user files.

I also recommend using Timeshift to back up your system. It’s even better if your root partition uses btrfs since it natively supports snapshots.

What do you wish you knew when you first started using Linux

I needed to leave the Windows ways behind me. On Windows, I had a hard drive mounted as F: and an external HDD mounted as H:. Moving to Linux (Manjaro at the time) was basically a snap decision since Windows had obliterated the boot partition during an update and then broke itself, and I had no idea how to properly set up the filesystem, so I mounted them to /mnt/f and /mnt/h. It caused me many hours of headache later.