Distro hoping is fine. But there is a certain feeling you get when you can fix your own problems by reading the arch wiki
I love fixing arch by reading the arch wiki, or fixing ubuntu by reading the arch wiki
I set up my login manager for fedora and my grub for fedora using the arch wiki…
I tried to find a solution for my failing marriage in the arch wiki. The arch wiki instructed me that the problem was consulting the arch wiki. Thanks for saving my marriage, arch wiki!
or fixing windows by only using WSL and reading the arch wiki
How to enter arch wiki if no internet
Well, shit. Got 2 tebibytes to transfer, guess I’d better start now, hey?
Good thing transferring 2 tebibytes is no slower than 2 kibibytes
Just attach two of these bad boys
Instead of a bird can I just use my station wagon full of tapes?
For shit and giggles, it should be on Arch Wiki too.
On your other Arch laptop, obviously. You need multiple pre-owned ThinkPads loaded with Arch at any given time to maintain workable redundancy, just like you need several clean pairs of programming socks.
…“clean”? Well shit, I have some work to do then!:-P
Phone or use an offline copy
Going to save this link just in case the Internet goes down one day.
I saved the comment so I can download the wiki if I ever lose internet.
Not sure that’ll work, I’ll paste the Wiki here
Beginning with Part 1 of 1,204:
I downloaded all your comments so I could read them in case the Internet stops existing.
I’ve still got a backup copy of The Internet from back in the day when you could install The Internet on your computer using a cd which arrived in the post. I also have a backup pile of optical drives so if necessary I can burn you a copy of The Internet and post it to you? Though I haven’t got a copy of the postal service.
Whenever I have a Linux box without Internet I just USB tether an Android phone—if the phone is on WiFi then it uses that (not cell), so it’s basically just a WiFi adapter that’s almost universally supported. (I think it NATs, so in some circumstances won’t work, but good enough for most emergency use cases.)
With some apple laptops, you have to do something like that in order to get the firmware for the wifi chip in 90% of distros, I think endeavourOS was the only one snacking the correct AUR package right at installation 😇
you can download the arch wiki on kiwix (for android), it’s like 30 megabytes
Another option that’s available is hosting your own Kiwix instance and downloading the Arch Wiki .zim file.
I have a few other .zim’s from the Kiwix library including Alpine Wiki, Stack Overflow, Man pages and a full copy of Wikipedia. There’s a lot available at that Kiwix library which can make for a good offline digital library.
Distro hoping is fine.
Yeah. I hope my distro keeps working as smooth as always. I really hope.
Honestly. Arch has taught me a lot.
I won‘t lie the Arch Wiki has not helped me once. Odd threads in the forums or 2 minute long Youtube videos, though? Couldn‘t make it without those.
Total oposite experience for me.
Me: Btw how old are your packages?
Mint: Its rude to ask the age of a distro
Me: well are they maintained properly?
Mint: uhhhh… Some of them are
That’s a big part of why I switched to OpenSuse XD
Mint us absolutely perfect for folks like me. I want to use my computer, not work on it. I have Blender, a couple of slicers, GIMP, a couple of DAW type programs and a few other things. Perfect computer. I have no interest in the bleeding edge. Now granted, I don’t game, which saves me some grief but I guess kinda marginalizes me these days, and I’m not even hobbyist level savvy in the console, but I do hate both Microsoft and Apple, ta-da!, Mint. If there’s a better distro for me, I don’t care, I like mint.
Mint us absolutely perfect for folks like me. I want to use my computer, not work on it.
I know you’re not going to believe me, because you sound like the type of person who is “set in their ways”, but the only thing that makes Mint better for you than some other distro is that it happens to already be installed on your computer. That’s it. Mint is not the perfect choice for anyone, because it’s not particularly good at anything.
Keep using it. If it works for you, great. I don’t care what you use. But we shouldn’t be misleading people new to Linux into installing a distro that might not work for them.
Ok, good for you I wasn’t arguing
Am I the only MF that prefers Fedora over the other distros?
linus torvalds does too
And his attitude toward distros is that he wants one he can completely ignore
Nope. I bounced through about 5 distros before settling on Fedora. I’ve been on a little over a year and no real complains from me.
Nope, there are dozens of us. Dozens!
I’ve been using Fedora for a long time because it’s actually up to date and tends to have the best of what the open source community has to offer, while still having some opinionated defaults to make things run smoothly.
Never had a problem with WIFI drivers. NVIDIA on Wayland however… (not Fedora’s fault the proprietary drivers are garbage, its done what it can by at least making them easy to install)
If Arch didn’t exist, I’d probably be a Fedora user
My experience has been the opposite. I built a new PC last year, and only Fedora and Arch recognized the Radeon GPU and the Intel Wi-Fi. Mint was shipping a kernel that was too old to recognize either one.
Agreed. Out of all the distributions I have tried, Fedora (and its various spins and derivatives) are what tend to have everything actually work out of the box.
My first distro has been Nobara after swapping off windows.
It really is dummy proof.
For those on the edge. Just do it. Windows 11 is free to go back to. You risk nothing by giving Linux a try.
The guy behind Nobara does a LOT of important work to make Linux usable at home, especially when it comes to gaming. And in case anyone doesn’t know, he is a software engineer at Red Hat, the company sponsoring Fedora, the distro that Nobara is based on.
On new hardware it’s generally easier to use a rolling release distro in my experience.
You’re more likely to have a newer kernel and drivers that support things like wifi cards.
IMO, you shouldn’t have to learn Arch just to be able to get a new PC. Eventually, people who like Ubuntu and Mint are going to want to upgrade to a new computer, and they might be in for a shock once they do. That kind of thing is what pushes people back to Windows.
If you can’t install something like EndeavourOS or tumble weed then you likely were not going to be able to reload an os anyway.
Installing vanilla arch is a very useful activity to do at least once so you know how the system works but don’t have to use vanilla Arch and can use any of the derivatives so long as it has the latest kernel / drivers for your hardware.
And IMO, that needs to change. Mint has released ISOs with updated kernels which does help. But expecting everybody to eventually graduate to a rolling release distro by the time they want to buy a new PC is just going to send people back to Windows.
Honestly, for a grandma distro, I’d use Fedora Silverblue nowadays. Very up to date, and you might as well uninstall the terminal for how useless it is.
Yeah when I first booted up, fedora didn’t see my ethernet port, but I was able to connect via wifi no problem. And then, after updating, when I returned to figure out how to get it working, I saw it already was.
Audio was similar. I use the digital optical out for my main audio device, and at first it wasn’t working. I could get audio via other ports (and temporarily plugged my soundbar in via USB, but didn’t like how that unified the system volume and device volume instead of being able to control each independently). I go back later to debug it only to find it just works now.
Or more recently, I switched to KDE and the first time I enabled my TV output to watch something, it wouldn’t enable the HDMI audio for that port. Fiddled around with it for a bit but gave up because I was in the middle of making dinner and just turned up my PC soundbar. Go back to have another look the next time I enable the TV display and it just works.
Though I did discover bluetooth doesn’t work while trying to connect to my TV’s sound system that way. It can see other devices but won’t connect with them stably. Not a big deal to me because I don’t rely on BT normally, but hoping it also just works when I next go to debug it specifically instead of just checking if it will work around another issue.
Sounds a bit janky but I’ve also had multiple windows laptops suddenly just lose the ability to connect via the connection method that was previously working. Sometimes disabling and enabling the adapter fixed it, sometimes enabling then disabling airplane mode did it, sometimes I’d have to switch between ethernet and wifi, sometimes it wouldn’t resolve without a reboot.
Also, just yesterday, I was trying to use a USB external drive to move a file from my old windows box to my fedora box, but windows wouldn’t recognize the hdd anymore. A USB stick worked (on the same port I was plugging the drive into) and fedore recognizes both of them no issue.
I tried basically every distro on my laptop and fedora worked all hardware 100% out of the box + printer + fingerprint reader + all day battery life
Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring
Linux being boring is a good thing. I want my OS to be boring. I use Mint, BTW
The enterprise-adjacent distros are pretty good for that, I’ve found
e.g. RedHat→Fedora or Suse→OpenSuse
Unless there is an update and you have to wait for a couple of months to get all the extensions back
And then you just go to extensions.gnome.org and tell to run the extensions anyway by ignoring the GNOME version
Don’t have much experience but I run extensions designed for 45 on 49 without any problem
Unfortunately for me GNOME without extensions it’s unusable and I don’t have the patience to stay 3-4 versions behind to ensure compatibility
Edit: I wrote the wrong URL, it was .org and not .com
I didn’t know that. I’ll check it our asap, thx!!!
Fedora gnome is so good it makes Linux boring
Is this a workflow thing? I was looking at Fedora last week and I’m interested to hear what you like about it.
I’m on Cinnamon and made everything look like OSX, but it seemed like gnome would have a learning curve. And as much as KDE looks like Windows NT, something a touch more modern does seem nice.
Lol KDE looks like windows NT? Uh… No.
Wobbly windows is best thing ever by the way.
KDE looks like whatever you want.
I used to use KDE but so many small visual inconsistencies and oddities would annoy me that I was definitely already feeling like trying something else. Also I really like fingerprint login which kde had trouble with.
Switched to gnome just to try and once I setup my extensions it just felt right. (Extension manager downloaded from regular App Store)
Fedora has a great gnome implementation that is preconfigured much better than any other distro I tried. Fractional scaling was available without configuration and gnome’s online account login + fingerprint login also worked out of the box.
Everything just works but my thinkpad is also linux certified which could explain why everything is so easy. Still, other distros required more gnome configuration work and I’d have random problems with sleep mode, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.
Also, it brings me a little personal peace of mind knowing the distro is supported by fedora and red hat. That is serious institutional support and I think is just a good thing for Linux generally but also could explain why fedora has an edge to me
Interesting, my experience was the opposite. I tried multiple gnome based distros, but I always hated it. Was ready to try and accept it to use Linux, but then I finally tried KDE and it felt like such a breath of fresh air. Granted, I haven’t used it much yet, but from the little I did, I love it so much more than gnome in every way.
“btw can you please install the latest nvidia drivers?”
“latest?”
switches back to Fedora
Why do I need latest? Why do I need even know version of a driver for my hardware?
NVIDIA drivers still suck on Linux, but each new update has been bringing massive usability improvements lately.
Since the drivers continue to be worked on after the release of the hardware. Some new functionality for new games may be developed. Or bugs may be fixed.
Seems like a dishonest question. Unless you are only using GPU compute professionally with out of date software.
Honestly…
You’d figure people who go out of their way to buy a nice GPU would understand this.
Someone I personally knew almost gave up on Linux because their mint install would have screen tearing issues due to an outdated driver module and kernel, since Mint follows close to Ubuntu’s kernel releases which are slow.
Cutting edge and bleeding edge kernels is one of Linux’s biggest strengths because 99% of driver modules are in the kernel, so keeping it up to date will significantly reduce the chances of issues with your hardware, especially if its anything new.
You dont need to know the version, but knowing that your updates are based on cutting edge latest stable is what can save you from driver headaches.
It’s useful to have updated drivers if a game or something isn’t working, otherwise it’s hardly a big deal, just need to keep the sysyem as up to date as it needs to run your sysyem, i’m on mint since October and never uad any headaches, even updates drivers recently to try to resolve an issue.
I’m still kinda surprised to hear that people are still having trouble with Nvidia drivers. I would have thought that Nvidia would have decided to improve that because of the AI boom. I wonder why they continue being so bad at this 🤔
That is because nearly all of nvidia’s revenue comes from AI datacenter hardware now, and before that from crypto miners. As long as CUDA works without issue, their main clients by dollar volume are happy
Have 2 Monitors with different screen resolutions. It crashes more often than windows 95 when I try to alt tab between applications.
Computers have a personality and preference of distro based on their hardware
This juxtaposition.
Leaving aside Arch and Nix for the moment… imagine rating Ubuntu over Mint. The depravity of the human mind know no limits.
I don’t think this is a rating, but a diagram showing how tall the socks of the users of each distro are
I tried Ubuntu first and my laptop didn’t like it, and I wasn’t even a little interested in fighting with my computer just to get to use it. The sock scale is probably fair in representing how deep the user wants to get in just to operate. As a Mint user i can say I just dip my feet in Linux to feel the not Windows.
Damn, I need to buy longer socks.
You really do not. You’re all good.
as a debian user, i can confirm :)
As a badminton player, we have the same length socks.
unrelated, but what on green earth happened in the inbox?
They’ll never see your question
sometimes lemmy doesn’t mark messages you’ve read and replied to as read, so voyager continues to show as red. the real question isn’t “do i have the notification number” it’s “has the notification number changed”
for me, inbox zero will remain 105 until i decide to empty the whole thing
OP is the femboy in the picture
I wonder where RHEL would fall in that scale?
probably around the Fedora level, they’re fairly equivalent.
The REAL question is, where does Hanna Montana OS fall on the scale?
in 2010
EDIT: FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Try to install Fedora 43 everything goes perfectly installation finished without any problems. Restart and bam I’m in my bios. Restart thinking it’a fluke, bam back to bios. Try again with a different setup USB bam bios… Ask around try what people are saying bam back to bios… This happened to me on old MSI laptop from 2015 and the new Asus from 2024… I’m beginning to think Fedora is allergic to me.
That’s a weird-un. I moved to Fedora specifically because I wanted a no-nonsense distro, and for the last 7 years it’s delivered on various desk- and laptops, knock-on-wood.
Yeah it’s very weird, but that’s my luck. Weird problems finds me. I’m happy with my cachyOS setup so, can’t complain much.
It’s probably a bootloader issue. Either grub got misconfigured, or uegi/msdos shenanigans.
Tried almost everything about it. Nothing worked. I spend a good amount of time to solve it. Fun fact Nobara was also doing the same bios trick. I asked around their discord as well and they couldn’t help me either.
This sounds very odd. I have tinkered with countless of systems (since 15+ years), I never had an unresolved issue with installing a distro. What is usually the issue? It installs fine by doesn’t boot? Do you make it till the grub menu?
Yes it’s odd and people whom I talked to told me they also hear about it first time. I download the iso verify put it on the USB, boot into USB setup comes no problems partition or other wise no error, no messages. Everything install normally. There is no grub nothing, restart the laptop and boot directly into bios.
It sounds like bios shenanigans, secure boot or Legacy mode enabled or so. If grub doesn’t show up, I would try to go into bios, and override the boot choice to see it would work. Disable legacy and make sure the compatibility. But indeed, sounds very niche.
I’ve been there done that. Tried all the bios settings. Nothing worked.
Me: Oh and Mint, could you also add my old printer that I can’t get to work on any other OS I’ve tried?
Mint: Sure thing.
me: hey mint, suspend automatically.
mint: no.
me: suspend manually then.
mint: no.
me: shutdown
mint: no.
…
sudo shutdown nowsudo shutdown now
No.
For your case…
Alt + SysRq + O
My cat’s favorite key combo
Ha. On Windows I had this ancient Ethernet Canon IP printer. Windows hated it, even with the supplied Canon drivers and network Utility. It always needed messing with every time to get it to show up as a printer on the network.
When I moved to OpenSUSE I went into YAST2 printer discovery. It found the printer right away, and suggested a model, and asked if I wanted to install the GutenPrint driver for it. Yes please. And do you want to announce this printer to others on your network (via CUPS) Yes. Done. Worked 100% with no Canon utilities.
Mint: It’s already set up
Usual suspect, the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card. Milk spoils? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Card! Freshly divorced? Wi-Fi/Bluetooth card!
Not true, sometimes it’s DNS.
Nah, it’s not DNS
Narrator: But it was DNS.
I use mint, btw
Been using Fedora on several laptops and desktops, and haven’t had issues with wifi. Or with anything else for that matter. For me, everything in Fedora just works and never breaks.
The first bug I’ve seen was recently. Apparently an update broke the ‘shutdown and update’ function in Fedora Workstation. So now when you press it, nothing happens. Then when you try shutting down, the PC will shut down without updating. It’ll update and shutdown upon next boot. Can confirm Fedora KDE is unaffected though.
For me, everything in Fedora just works and never breaks.
Apparently an update broke the ‘shutdown and update’ function in Fedora Workstation.
Hmmmmmmm
I remember this sort of stuff a long time ago. There were wifi drivers that were either linux, but closed source, or horror of horrors having to resort to ndiswrapper…
Of course, the Ubuntu derivatives made this easy enough by just including it, but Fedora was much more purist about open source and so wouldn’t even tell you about rpm-fusion, let alone enable proprietary drivers for basic network access.
Now Fedora has edged a bit more practical and proactively let’s users know about how to add proprietary stuff and the wifi industry takes Linux seriously, if not for desktop use then for all the embedded use cases they would be left out of without good Linux support. Fedora is still a bit far on the ‘purist’ side still (try to play a lot of media using dnf provided software, it will tend to break), but not as hard as it used to be)
I used to had linux mint in an old computer and for some reason the wifi didn’t work. I asked a couple of times how to fix it but was ignored everytime. I didn’t care because I used it connected it with the network cable, but my wife was really frustrated because she can’t take it around the house to listen to music and so. After a while of me telling her that I would fix it, she got really mad and told me that if in 2 weeks the wifi of that wasn’t working she would pay a technician to install windows on it. So I came back, not asking for a fix for the wifi bit for other distro easy to use like Mint and talked about the reason why I was leaving mint. And now, of course, people was willing to help me fix the wifi and even wrote me a script to execute on start to fix it.
When I first started using Linux, I was told that if I had a problem, I shouldn’t give a well-reasoned, well-documented description of what’s wrong and what steps I’ve tried, because everyone will ignore it. Instead, I was told to say that Linux sucks because I’m having this problem and I’d get 3.8 million angry fixes within 10 minutes.
This is true of nearly every topic.
If you’re like me and you work with computers for a living and you don’t really want to put in the hard work of fixing computers at home, you can do what I did. Which is to download an abliterated local AI and tell it what the problem is and what specs you’re working with and it will almost always fix it for you in like five minutes.
And when it doesn’t fix it in five minutes, it will destroy your operating system with whatever commands it tells you to paste in a terminal, and you were going to be wiping and reinstalling it anyway, so nothing lost.
This is how Microsoft develops Azure, except they don’t have the option of starting from scratch.
Mfs can’t fix a wifi and are asked to install a maintain a local llm server.
If I put my Mint computer to sleep, the wifi adapter stops working completely. 🤡
First thing to do on most linux distros, but especially mint, is turn off everything sleep-related forever.
I feel like no OS can get sleep to work properly lol
Sadly, MacOS is leading the pack with sleep working as expected. This is the most cursed timeline.
If I had to guess it’s because Apple controls both hard- and software. Sleep is a delicate business where both the OS and the hardware have to work together to get it right. Linux and Windows run on an endless combination of different hardware components whereas Apple knows exactly on what hardware their OS will run.
And in true macOS fashion it only works if you stay within the Apple ecosystem.
Applications and sleep are intimately tied to native macOS workspaces, which are themselves cursed af.
If you use an alternative manager, like Aerospace (which reimplemented workspace/tiling), then applications cannot sleep properly, leading to severe battery drain.
My openSUSE works without issues on my ThinkPad, including sleep. Back when I used EndeavourOS on a 2015 MacBook Pro putting it to sleep caused various problems (don’t really remember what).
